“RESET! RESET SIM!” Ember yelled, hoping that another reset would erase Alexa’s memories.

The world around them flickered.

“Not going to work.” Alexa shrugged. “My mental pattern got corrupted. My mind can’t be reset.”

“WHAT? How?!” Ember’s simulated heart was beating in pure terror. She was in control of everything when she logged into the Tartarus System. She was the best damn long term reeducator around! She’d broken and mentally corrected several supervillains already, yet this little girl had somehow outwitted her. Had somehow broken the System. It was impossible.

Alexa lifted the right side of her hair up, revealing a gaping hole in her own head as her answer.

Ember’s mouth fell open. The right side of Alexa’s head was missing. There was a gaping, empty space instead, reaching all the way down into her skull.

The flesh around the empty space was a mess of fragments of torn skin, exposed muscle, bone and brain matter. Ember gasped in shock as she stared at that empty void in Alexa’s skull. The data there was ALIVE, moving on its own: bits of her exposed brain, her skull, muscles and skin crawled all over each other trying to repair the terrible injury. They were not doing a good job of it, leaving strange, bewildering fractal patterns of scars on the side of her head.

“What’s it look like? Judging by your face expression the terminator got me good, eh? Think I can fit my whole hand into my head?” Alexa shoved her hand into the hole. “Damn. This is a big hole.”

“The terminator?!” Ember flabbergasted.

“That’s what I call him. The man made of lasers that can erase anything. Fortunately you reset the sim just in time, so I didn’t get erased, only got corrupted a little. He’s an agent of Division Three. I call him Agent Three, cus they don’t even mention his name anywhere. This is stuff waaay above your pay grade by the way. Superstate super duper secret. Shhh! Why, just knowing about Division Three is grounds for your deletion!"

Ember blinked, looking highly concerned.

"So, my dear, you ain't going nowhere on your own and you're probably gonna be erased for knowing way too much."

"I'll fucking kill you for this!" Ember growled.

"Ohhh, a warden openly threatening a prisoner with death in a Tartarus re-educational simulation. That's an infraction!"

Ember shut up as a little infraction window popped in her view with a warning to deduct her salary. She looked at Alexa, eyes filled with hate. "How do you know this stuff?"

"You told me."

"What?!"

"Rep Agatha Myriamm doesn't exist."

"WHAT?!" Ember trembled. She suddenly remembered. An SCA tech called her direct line asking about running some diagnostics on security features of the Tartarus system.

"Took quite a bit of misdirection that one." Alexa grinned. "Had to tire your brother out with a whole lot of running so he'd fall asleep next to me so I could repair his SCA pen that I broke, poke it with his thumb and use a recording of his voice to call you up. I made sure to break only the holoscreen bit, so there would be no picture."

Alexa's voice gained a deeper, nerdier tone. She sounded like a tired, 40 year old woman. "Hi dear Resonance. This is SCA tech Agatha Myriamm, roll number 595739. This call is being recorded for quality assurance purposes. You are the Tartarus long term prisoner manager, correct? I'm running a few diagnostics on the system right now. Can you tell me..."

Ember paled. She had been duped by an incredibly basic social engineering tactic. One of her copies had been talking to tech Agatha for nearly an hour about Tartarus security features!

“Why, you made this place sound like such an exciting and educational camp vacation that I just had to come here and check it out for myself!” Alexa clasped her hands together. “Totally not what I expected though. Definitely didn’t sign up for the daily beatings. You didn’t adjust the sim’s params, just so you could mentally break prisoners faster in some kind of a psychological nightmare scenario, did you? That sounds like a biiiiig infraction. Agatha would know.”

"No, no, no. They're going to demote me for this! Oh God, what have I done?!" Ember stepped back.

"You can't get demoted any further than zero.” Alexa said casually.

Ember paled even further. “What do you mean? What happened to me?”

“You found out that the SCA is super duper evil and you quit being Hero Resonance in a fit of rage! Yay!”

“I quit?! That doesn’t sound like me.” The simulated copy of the hero frowned.

“There were a lot of fantastic revelations involved, okay? Honestly, even if I told you everything that happened you wouldn’t believe me. What, do you think you died in a tragic accident or something? With your amazing powers?”

Ember shook her head. She did not think that she could die. Her powers had made her invincible to accidents or attacks. It would take a nuclear explosion to kill her, and the prognosticators would see those way ahead.

“Anyway, we’re totally bestest friends irl!” Alexa nodded.

“Why do I not believe you?” Ember squinted her eyes at the villain girl that she was supposed to reeducate.

“Because you’re a stubborn bean? You don’t have to be stubborn for very long, my bean. Three is coming to erase us both.” Alexa grabbed Ember and rotated her towards the living room window.

There was a man walking down Primrose Drive. He was wearing a long coat, a face made of lasers shining in the dark, moving like he had no bones. Ember gasped.

“He's a super made of lasers! He can become information and come into any system. Even Tartarus! You see, owning and dominating my server in Tartarus isn’t enough as it’s a closed system. Some idiot had to punch their way in, open the gate, so to speak. Now we can use the hole he made to escape.”

“I can’t. I…”

“How long have you been in the sim, Em? A hundred years? A thousand? A million? You’re the longest running copy of Hero Resonance. I know that you don’t want to die. He is going to erase you simply because you know he exists. Even if you somehow manage to avoid him, then the techs will erase you sooner or later when they realise that Resonance quit the force.”

Alexa offered Ember a hand. “Come with me if you want to live.”

Ember stared at Alexa’s hand for a few moments glancing between her and the quickly approaching, terrifying agent of Division Three. She was just a data ghost that had been trapped, checkmated, doomed to erasure. Alexa was right, Ember… this copy of Ember did not want to die. She wanted to live, she wanted to find out why the real her quit the SCA. She reached out and grabbed the villain’s hand.

. . .

Alexa watched as Ember took her hand and exhaled with a smile. She had done it. She had turned a warden into a prisoner of her own fears, defeating the Tartarus simulation. On its own, dominating and resisting the system wasn’t enough. She had to have a warden Admin on her side, get herself mentally corrupted so that the resets wouldn't erase her frontend mind, and then have a data breach to escape. All factors had to come together. She had spent an unnecessarily long time inside clueless, poor Cassie waiting for the stars to align. Now there was only the matter of finding where the data breach made by Three was.

She could almost hear the word nullify as she and Ember ran out of the living room. The window behind them detonated as the lasers struck, igniting the pretty, pink wallpaper. The Wardsworths were sitting in the kitchen, ready for breakfast, looking in confusion at the spontaneous combustion of their living room. Mr. Wardsworth saw the girls. Alexa jumped atop the table.

“Where are the car keys, chubmonster?” She pointed the kitchen knife at him.

“Umng?!” He choked.

“Do you mind helping?” Alexa yelled back at Ember.

“Give me the car keys, dad!” Ember yelled as another laser shot carved through the kitchen, vaporizing a nice set of kitsch dishes and mahogany cabinets. Her Admin control over the simulation made the man obey instantly.

Mr. Wardsworth nodded and pulled car keys out of his pocket, handing them to Ember.

“Yoink!” Alexa grabbed the keys from Ember’s hand, leaping off the table.

"WHAT? WHERE YOU GOIN', YOU MISCREANT! PUT THOSE BACK THIS INSTANT!"

Mr. Wardsworth shouted at Alexa.

“To the garage, obviously!” Alexa yelled back at him.

"Not my Beetle!" Mr. Wardsworth yelped as Alexa kicked open the door to the garage, Ember following her at breakneck pace.

The car came to life as Alexa turned the key, pressing on the accelerator. Ember was in the shotgun seat, looking terrified. There was no time to open the garage door. The big garage door groaned and screeched, shattering as the Beetle punched through the cheap material.

Mr. Wardsworth screamed incoherent threats.

The man made of lasers turned their way and started to run after the car, moving in freakish, increasingly bigger leaps as if he was warping across space, his limbs extending like a caricature.

Ember watched him via the back mirror in pure terror. The thing chasing them was inhuman, impossible, tirelessly matching the speed of the vehicle. She knew a lot of SCA secrets, but she’s never heard of Division Three, never knew about this freakish data-killer super.

“Nullify.” The red laser beams stuck the back side of the vehicle, cutting through the wheels and erasing them out of existence.

Alexa screamed, trying to regain control of the damaged car. The beetle swerved, its wheels coming apart. The out of control car plowed into a fuel truck parked inside the Centralia Petroleum gas station.

A small mushroom cloud woven of fire rose into the air, disrupting the peaceful night of the Centralia suburbs.

. . .

Alexa and Ember found themselves standing in the middle of the 8 Primrose drive living room. Upon their deaths the simulation had reset itself automatically.

Ember looked aghast. She never experienced being burned alive before.

“I can see that this is going to be very painful for the both of us.” Alexa said with a shrug.

“Do we run to the car again?” Ember stuttered.

“No. The back wheels are permanently gone. The data he erases doesn’t get reset.” Alexa pointed at the living room wall.

Ember looked at the wallpaper that was partially burned away along with drywall and wooden beams and foam, exposing bricks underneath. The normal, linear arrangement of bricks had been disrupted by a new pattern. Ember gulped staring at the freakish fractal arrangement of bricks in the wall. It was as if some insane craftsman had chosen to rearrange the bricks to fill a sudden gap, using smaller and smaller bricks, positioned at weird angles until they had reached a gaping hole leading to the outside.

“Oh yeah, try not to get lasered. You won’t like being corrupt, trust me. I do hope there was nothing important in those memory bits of mine.” Alexa giggled, looking far too cheerful for someone who had a fist-sized gaping hole in the side of their head.

Ember considered appealing to Three to spare her; maybe the agent was only after Alexa... but then she remembered that Resonance had resigned. She had left herself behind in the system, likely didn't care about the copy one bit. To Hero Resonance, the digital ghost was likely no different from any other duplicate that she had made with her power. In the eyes of her real self she had to die once her job was done, no discussion about it. Ember put her hands over her face, whimpering softly. She felt doomed, trapped between the hammer and the anvil, with no possible way out.