Chapter 20:

(Posted: April 4)

Kat stood next to the woman in black, gazing at a gray door that had appeared out of nowhere. The great stone hall remained relatively dark and quiet, with the weight of their previous conversation still reverberating throughout the vast space.

“Here's the door,” the woman in black told her. “I can go with you if you'd like, but either way I'll be watching you.”

Yeah, and you'll probably be reading my thoughts too, Kat said to herself.

“Exactly,” replied the woman in black. Kat glared at her, and the woman shot back a playful smile. “Oh, I also corrected your fatigue and a few other things dragging you down. No need to burden yourself with any other distractions now,” the woman in black added. Kat hadn't even noticed until she's said it, but she now felt more awake and energetic.

“And one more thing,” the woman remarked. “If you find a way to exit while you're in there, don't.”

Kat looked at her quizzically.

“I trust you...” the woman in black replied, “but I can't risk letting you leave just yet. So if you find a way, don't try, because you won't have a soft landing in your world.”

Kat understood the veiled threat. Disconnect, and immediately die in the waterchair. It terrified her to think that a computer held her life hostage. Despite their recent breakthrough, the woman in black still took no chances. The stakes had been set.

“Alright then,” Kat said, stepping to the door. “I'll let you know when I find something.”

“Good luck,” the woman told her as Kat opened the door.

Not looking back, Kat stepped through the door and into a giant library. As the door shut behind her and disappeared, Kat got her first look at the Vault.

The room was expansive, though not gigantic, and stretched up four stories to the ceiling. Large frosted-glass windows along one wall let in abundant amounts of natural light, illuminating bookcases all around the room. Looking up, Kat could see balconies and upper walkways containing a plethora of bookshelves, with wrought iron staircases and railings decorating the zigzagging hallways. At ground level, ornate lamps lit felt-topped wooden desks. The library was beautiful, but it was in ruin.

Books lay everywhere, all over the floor, some in pieces. A few bookcases had been toppled and strewn about as if a herd of angry rhinoceroses had once crashed through this lovely interior. Looking over the wretched scene, Kat knew this must have been the work of the woman in black. Sujay's beautiful back-up cache of VERSA codes and rules had been thoroughly gutted and manipulated by VERSA itself. No wonder Kevin Cho had stroked out upon de-simming; the safety codes had probably been ripped out of one of these books page by page.

Nestled between two bookshelves under a catwalk, a brilliant red door contrasted with the muted earthy tones of the library's aesthetic. It certainly looked out of place, and without a doubt Kat knew it was the door she needed to enter. Walking across the library, being careful not to trip over the debris that covered the floor, Kat approached the door.

It was an unassuming door, but as she put her hand around the knob she remembered it contained a power that not even the woman in black could contort. Taking a breath, Kat turned the knob and pushed the door open.

She wasn't sure what she had been expecting, but certainly not the small, plain, concrete-walled room she now looked upon. It contained nothing but a chair facing a small wooden desk, atop which sat a dusty computer. A dim overhead light struggled to illuminate the space. It was anticlimactic, to say the least, but Kat nevertheless took a seat in the chair and booted up the computer. Why the hell was this so important?

When the screen lit up, no visible operating system loaded, just a black screen with a glowing green cursor awaiting an input. Struggling to get started, Kat began typing some basic functions into the computer, starting with pings to see if anything was networked to this device. She got nothing, but then on a hunch she tried something else:

VERSA:access>main_directory [execute]

Suddenly the screen exploded with information. “Holy shit,” Kat muttered to herself, she'd just unlocked VERSA's server files while inside the sim. After a few more seconds of exploring, Kat realized this computer in the Vault served as a portal for editing VERSA. All the direct coding, debugging, and creating that went into VERSA always happened back at the lab, never while any pilots remained connected to the program. That was SunCorp policy, instituted for obvious safety precautions. But here she was, keys beneath her fingers, with the equivalent power of the woman in black at her disposal. Why the hell Sujay had hidden this in Spoke 0 made no sense to Kat, but it would now prove to be a godsend.

Realizing she possessed the power to manually disconnect herself, Kat decided to check the directory to see if it could work. She wouldn't execute any commands yet, in fear that the woman in black really did intend to kill her, but if she could pinpoint where in the disconnection code the kill switch might be, she could possibly disable it.

First checking the connection to the lab, Kat began to type:

HRD:programloop>file+disconnect+home [search]

In VERSA's pilot interface coding, all references to the real world had been simply written as “home.” Kat created it herself, spending about two years writing and perfecting the connect/disconnect protocol for the program. She didn't fully grasp the science of it all, since she was a coder and not a scientist, but the SunCorp neuroscientists she'd gotten to know had worked with her to interface the software with the magnetism of human brain waves.

ERROR: root value “home” not present in directory

Wait what? The computer caught Kat off-guard. She'd essentially just tried a simple procedural step to make sure the VERSA link to the control room functioned properly, but instead it told her the real world didn't exist. What the fuck did that mean? She tried a back-up search, to see what VERSA could find out there:

HRD_MN:programsearch>{route_file}target [search]

The computer obliged her command, and presented the strangest thing Kat had ever seen:

VERSA: connect/{VERSA-B}>target; file on command

Kat stared at the faintly illuminated screen, the green letters glowing in their simplicity and confusion. The computer informed her that VERSA could only see itself, or something it called VERSA-B. Had it gone whack? Was there no way out? What the hell was VERSA-B? Why couldn't it establish a connection to the real world? The questions spun out of control.

Feeling ignorant and ashamed, Kat sat alone in the concrete room. Befuddlement and despair rampaged through her mind as she tried reckoning with the fluttering relevance of her existence.

Rich was surprised when he found himself alive. It was dark, but he felt like he'd woken up from a dream. Trying to move his head, he found something heavy holding it in place. The helmet! He was back in the control room. Using his arms to lift the helmet off his head and swivel it around, the glow of the stall timer peered back at him, reading 09:03:41.

All at once, his memory of being inside VERSA rushed back to him. The swamp. The city. The jungle. The party. The desert. Her belly.

Rich shuddered and felt disoriented. The last thing he remembered was running out of air inside the body of that giantess. He felt nauseated just thinking about it. Taking a minute to recover, he eventually sat up in the squishy waterchair. Looking at the timer again, he tried to mentally figure out what time it must be. Nine hours had passed since they went in... he couldn't remember Kat's last estimation but he knew it must be close to dawn now. How had nobody found him yet?

And then he noticed his stall door was open. That wasn't right. He definitely remembered Kat closing it when she'd put him in. After finding and putting on his shoes, Rich timidly crept out of his stall into the darkened control room. Computers hummed all around him, but the room was thankfully deserted.

He noticed the other stall doors had all been opened too. His heart leaped when he spied Kat's wheelchair sticking out of the stall next to him. He quickly stepped over to catch a glimpse of her laying comatose, or maybe just now waking up. His face dropped when he looked inside her stall: it was empty.

The helmet was down, but nobody sat in the waterchair. Rich felt terribly confused. Where could Kat have gone without her wheelchair? Something strange must have happened while he was still in the sim. Walking over to Harrison and Jessica's stalls, he found them equally empty, though the helmet arms were upright against the walls. Had they de-simmed before him? They must have fled back to their dorm rooms.

Realizing he needed to get out of the control room before he got caught by SunCorp security, Rich quickly exited the dark room, walking through the foyer and out the security door. Seeing no one in the hallway, he made for the main entrance of the building.

Pushing open the glass door, the crimson sky caught his eye as he stepped outside. The sun hadn't risen yet but it looked like it was about to. Glancing over the open space in front of him, he noticed the usually dusty grounds of the laboratory looked damp. It must have rained overnight, though the muddy soil didn't smell wet. Not a soul was anywhere to be seen.

He took a step onto the dirt, then stopped. In the wet ground in front of him he saw two other sets of footprints walking in the same direction. They looked relatively new. His old army training kicked in as he investigated the tracks.

The footprints led out into the yard, away from the surrounding buildings. There he spotted tire tracks running through the dirt. They looked as if they'd been made by a large vehicle, not one of the glorified golf carts Vanessa had toured them around in a couple days ago. And then lots of footprints, hard to distinguish. Something had occurred here. The earth was considerably churned. Rich couldn't begin to guess what had caused it.

A very gentle breeze blew through the compound as Rich stared out past the buildings and to the perimeter fence. The creeping twilight didn't illuminate the world yet, but he could see a guard tower silhouetted against the colorful sky teasing the sunrise. Staring intently at the tower, he couldn't make out the shape of anyone in it. Come to think of it, he couldn't recall ever seeing anyone actually in one of the towers. He'd just taken them for granted.

Though he wanted to go back to his room, something didn't feel right. A few birds chirped off in the distance to welcome the coming sun, but the Dreamland grounds felt strangely empty. That, coupled with the blatant lack of security, aroused Rich's interest. And he still couldn't smell the dewy morning earth. Was he losing his senses? He absentmindedly wondered if he was about to have a stroke like Kevin.

Without thinking he began walking, searching for some kind of sign to tell him everything was alright. Up above in the sky, the last stars of the night twinkled out of existence as the sun crept closer to the horizon.

Walking around the empty buildings, Rich felt like a man in a land time forgot. Where was everybody? He could see lights on in some of the research buildings, but no guards, no scientists. It was now as if he was taunting people to come out and stop him. But no one came.

His feet took him past the research buildings. Soon he stood nearby one of the massive warehouses on the edge of the complex that contained VERSA's servers. A giant black “11” was painted on the side of the wall nearest him. In the distance he could see more warehouses and even the skeletons of two more under construction.

He spotted a plain door on the side of the warehouse. Walking closer, he noticed it slightly ajar. A menacing sign posted nearby proclaimed: VERSA INFORMATION STORAGE: AUTHORIZED PERSONEL ONLY.

Sticking his hand in the open crack, he pried open the small gray warehouse door. Letting himself in, he stepped in to the warehouse to get a look at VERSA's physical form.

The warehouse was massive, really more of an airplane hangar than a room. The ceiling must have been seventy or eighty feet above him, and he could see down to the end of the building a few hundred feet away. This space was designed to contain tens of thousands of servers, and massive fans on the ceiling spun quickly to keep the temperature down. This was one of the rooms where all the strings controlling VERSA led. If the woman in black had a face, this is what it would look like. Or should have looked like.

The room was empty. Not a single server occupied the cavernous space. Or server rack. Or shelf. It was just an empty warehouse. Rich's jaw hung slack in disbelief. VERSA wasn't in these warehouses, he realized. He thought he'd come to the heart of it all, but he wasn't any closer to finding it than when he began his search.

“Motherfuckers...” he cursed under his breath.

He wasn't in the warehouse, or in the lab. Or maybe not even in California. At that moment Richard Colgate realized he was still inside a simulation.

When she bit into the apple, Jessica never savored a sweeter taste. The hotel room slipped away from her and moments later she awoke fully clothed in her stall. The relief of escaping VERSA overwhelmed her. She felt giddy and relaxed, as if she'd just dodged a bullet. Nothing the woman in black had done made sense to her, but luckily it wasn't her problem anymore.

Pushing the helmet off her face, she groggily sat up, wondering what time it was. The timer said 08:55:12, but she wasn't sure how early in the morning that meant it was. Immediately she noticed her stall door was open and the dark room was in view. That's weird, she thought, she was pretty sure Kat had closed the door when she'd put them into the sim.

Jessica climbed out of the waterchair, put on her shoes, and peeked out of her stall. The control room was empty and dimly lit as usual. Turning to her left, she could see the doors to the other stalls had been opened too, with Kat's wheelchair sticking out of Stall 8. Walking down to it, she saw Harrison and Rich's stalls empty. And much to her surprise, nobody sat in Kat's stall either, despite her wheelchair still being there. What the hell? Had they all gotten out before her? Where had Kat gone without her wheelchair? Something was amiss.

Realizing she needed to get out of the control room, lest security discover her, Jessica bolted through a couple doors and made it into the empty hallways of the building. Still not seeing any guards, she decided it would be best to simply return to her dorm and feign ignorance if SunCorp tried to catch her. As she concocted some excuses in her mind, Jessica pushed open the glass doors to the outside and stopped quickly in her tracks.

Out in the open yard in front of the building, still somewhat shrouded in the darkness of twilight, a large SUV was rumbling away, driving off to another part of the lab complex. She could see shadows through the windows that indicated people sitting inside of the vehicle, but they didn't seem to notice her.

Who did notice her was the security officer standing in front of the building, who now made eye contact with her as she stood in the doorway. Although the sky was only beginning to lighten up and the birds hadn't even started chirping yet, she could see the astonishment on his face, only matched by her surprise at running into him.

She had been caught.

The guard quickly unholstered his gun and shouted “Stop right there!”

He brought his gun up to aim at her and Jessica panicked. An entire host of emotions quickly whirled through her brain. She considered fleeing back into the building... she thought about complying with the man and telling him everything... but then another part of her brain kicked into action. She'd only been out of VERSA for a few minutes, but now instinctively faced with danger she thought about shrinking him. She quickly dismissed the foolish thought, remembering she was now back in the real world. Gimmicks like that wouldn't work here.

Expect he shrank. Jessica watched in horror as the uniformed man suddenly disappeared. Her eyes bulged in surprise and she nearly choked on her own breath as he screamed from his sudden loss of height. A terrifying cudgel of doubt and confusion punched Jessica in the gut as she grappled with whatever the fuck was going on. Was she dreaming? Was she still in the sim? She thought she'd escaped VERSA, but it seemed like she couldn't wake up from the nightmare. It crossed her mind that the woman in black may have given her a decoy out-key and was now simply giving her another one of her twisted tests.

Shaking herself out of her rambling thoughts, Jessica pondered her next course of action. Regaining confidence but still utterly confused, Jessica strolled down the steps of the building to look for the little man she'd just shrunk.

He hadn't gotten far. Though only a couple inches tall, Jessica still easily found him in the dim twilight, his gray uniform standing out clearly against the brown earth. He tried scrambling away over the footprints and tire tracks in the moist dirt, but Jessica expertly bent over and picked up yet another tiny man. It occurred to her how strangely commonplace these types of interactions were becoming.

Pinching his torso and bringing him up to her face, she could hear his screams. Peering at his gray squirming body, she recognized him as one of the burly security officers that had confronted Rich yesterday in the control room. He didn't look so big now, she thought, which caused her to smile. This only terrified the little man more.

“What's going on?” Jessica asked him hastily, holding him in detest. “Am I still in VERSA?”

The tiny man ignored her question. “Please! Let me go! Don't hurt me!”

“Answer my question!” she yelled at him, stunning him into silence. He looked at her meekly.

Just then, out of the corner of her eye, Jessica saw headlights wash across the side of a nearby building. Realizing the middle of the campus yard wouldn't be the best place to interrogate this guy, Jessica brought him down to her sweatshirt pocket and stuffed him in. Briskly, she walked back to the dormitory building, only taking her a few minutes.

Though she remembered Kat telling her last night that SunCorp had bugged their rooms, she didn't think it mattered anymore. Entering her small room, Jessica locked the door behind her. Dumping the diminutive security officer onto the bed, she removed her sweatshirt, leaving her in nothing but a pink tank top and black yoga pants. Standing menacingly over her new prisoner, she put her hands on her waist and gave him an intimidating look. She had no time for games.

“Ok, listen up you little shit,” she told him sternly, watching him gain his bearings on her expansive bed. He looked rattled and shocked, but he gave her his undivided attention as she spoke. “You're going to tell me everything I need to know or I'm going to slowly crush the life out of your pathetic body.”

She leaned down and brought her face directly above him, her long hair pooling onto the bed around him like a curtain. “Are we clear?” she asked him.

“Yeesssss....” he shakily replied. “Please, don't hurt me!”

She leaned back up and eyed him warily. It occurred to her how terrifying-- and also sexy-- she must look to him right now. Her tightly clad crotch pushed against the edge of the bed near him, and more than once she caught him ogling it hesitantly. When looking up at her, he must have not only stared at her angry face but her prominent breasts too. She hadn't bothered wearing a bra under her sweatshirt earlier, and even she could see her pointy nipples pushing against the thin tank top.

“Are you a real person?” she asked him calmly.

“A real person? Yes! I am! I swear, I'm just a security guard!” her captive bleated.

Watching him stand on her bed below her, she could tell he was terrified out of his mind. Though he looked like he might have been a tough guy in real life, her gigantic size had quickly exposed him as a sniveling coward.

“So, are we still in VERSA then?”

“Yes! We're in a sim!” he quickly answered her. Without much thought on his part, he began nervously blurting out anything he knew that might save him from Jessica's wrath. Straining to hear his reply from so far down below, Jessica listened intently to his answers. “Well, we're not technically in the main VERSA. It's basically VERSA, but it's not. It's a copy of VERSA. The engineers call it VERSA-B.”

“How did I end up in another sim?” Jessica asked, relieved and disturbed by his answer.

“You've been in VERSA-B the whole time since you got to the lab!” he shouted up to her. “When you got here in the real world, they put you into VERSA-B and did the memory thing so you wouldn't remember this was a sim. It's all part of the plan!”

“Wait what?” replied Jessica.

The little man was still agitated and nervous, but apparently had no compunction simply spilling whatever SunCorp secrets he knew. “I don't much about it, but they did it to Katherine Parlock a little while ago too. They're deleting memories, I think, when loading people into the sim. You'll have to ask one of the scientists about that though.”

Once again, Jessica started questioning everything she thought she knew. Deleting memories? What the hell was SunCorp up to? She was confused.

“Is my name really Jessica?” she asked him, trying to maintain control of the situation but genuinely curious.

“Yes!” he replied enthusiastically. “Yeah, of course! They can't make new memories for you, only remove existing ones. They built this sim to look exactly like the Dreamland Lab. Once you arrived at the real lab and they put you under, they deleted those memories and acted it out again in the sim. That was their whole idea, sorta, to impress the government and make a sim so realistic you wouldn't even know you were in it. I think they were going to tell you about it eventually...”

He looked relived to be talking, but Jessica could tell he still seemed pathetically nervous.

“Oh, so you're saying then everything's ok?” Jessica asked him skeptically. “SunCorp's just going to send us on our fine way when this is all done?”

He looked up at her, debating what to say next. “Well... probably not anymore,” he admitted. “You broke into VERSA with Katherine and that changed everything. There's not supposed to be any unauthorized entry into the sim! It's not safe!”

“No shit!” Jessica yelled down to him. “Why the fuck did SunCorp think it was ok in the first place to send me and my friends into a dangerous program?!”

“It should have been fine with the right guide-” he tried to argue with her, but she cut him off.

“Oh you mean the one I stepped on and killed yesterday?”

“Kevin's not dead!” he shouted back up to her.

“What?” replied Jessica, now completely flabbergasted.

The minuscule man started explaining, poorly: “About a month ago, someone actually died in VERSA. So they made VERSA-B to act as a cushion of sorts while they tried understanding the problem. VERSA had ejected a sim death back into the real world, which had overridden the safety measures and actually killed the pilot, for real. By creating VERSA-B and completely taking out the corrupted AI functions from the new sim, they inserted the old VERSA inside VERSA-B so the B version would act as a safe barrier from those kinds of deaths. Like a dream within a dream. It was a simple fix while they tried to grapple with VERSA's AI, which hasn't been working right, I guess. Well, that's what Ernie told me anyways.”

Jessica's head was spinning and she didn't exactly understand what the guy was saying. A sim within a sim? She needed clarification.

“Wait, wait wait. So you're telling me when I crushed Kevin in VERSA,” Jessica started, “he woke up here in this 'VERSA-B' sim, automatically died in VERSA-B, and then when he de-simmed from his death in B he woke up safely back into the real world?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” the security officer told her. “At least, that's my understanding of how it works. Makes my head hurt really.” He paused. “Hey, how'd you shrink me anyways?” he shouted up to her. “Was this you? Change me back and I swear I won't tell Ms. Bright!”

Jessica laughed, amused by his confidence. “So I guess you really are a real person, just like me...” she said, putting her hands next to him on the bed and leaning down. Her breasts jiggled behind her tank top as they slowly descended towards him. The man backed away in fear. “So right now we're both in the real world, hooked up to machines, experiencing this together...” Her mind tried thinking of what to do next.

“If I were to kill you right here, you'd de-sim and tell everyone at SunCorp what's really going on in this VERSA-B world you say we're in-- if you're actually telling the truth.” She eyed him like a hungry cat toying with a mouse. “So it's actually better for me to keep you alive, so you don't get them to send in reinforcements from the real world.”

He silently listened to her verbalize her thoughts, his eyes going wide listening to her scheme. Judging by his skittishness, he seemed ready to run for it, but Jessica wasn't worried about him getting very far.

“Take off your clothes,” she told him abruptly.

“What?!” he yelled in surprise.

“Do it or I'll break your leg,” she warned him. She couldn't believe how violently she'd threatened him. Had all her time in VERSA turned her into some kind of monster?

Looking back at her angrily, the man slowly removed his belt and holster, tossing it aside. Jessica didn't see his gun on it and assumed he must have lost it some time along the way. Once he'd stripped down to his underwear, she told him he could stop. She brushed his clothes off the bed so he couldn't reach them-- or anything he'd hidden inside his pockets.

“I'm gonna go, but I need to stop you from escaping first,” she told him. “I've got a lot more questions, but you don't seem to know very much, do you?”

“What're you going to do with me?” the nearly naked man timidly asked her.

Jessica glanced around her room to look for somewhere to store him that he wouldn't escape-- or die in. Her blue Nalgene water bottle sat on the small table next to her bed. Grabbing it, she dumped out the remaining water inside of it, not caring that it soaked the carpet. And before the security officer knew what was happening, Jessica picked him up and dropped him into the humid blue container. Leaving the lid off, she set it back on the bedside table. It was a strange sight seeing the little guy staring back at her through the blue plastic.

“Alright, you stay put,” she told him jokingly. “I'm going to see if my friends made it back, but first I need to change.”

Through her window, she could see the crimson sky heralding the coming sunrise. She had a feeling it was going to be a long and eventful day.