It's just like they say. Just like you'd expect.

At first, death is terrifying. Ava overflows with panic. This isn't just a game, anymore – she's finally sure of it. She's a real, living girl.

But not for much longer.

It doesn't happen all at once. It's incremental. One moment she's aware of her surroundings, knows for certain she's wrapped in an itchy horse blanket on the dirt floor of some abandoned barn with her fellow adventurers hovering over her – and then everything just blips off.

A seizure is when the electricity in your brain goes haywire.

A power surge is when too much electricity flows in through the outlet.

When it all comes back—when everything comes back; the entire cosmos—it's like she's learning how to breathe again. She's gasping for oxygen and the air feels cold and alien inside her lungs. Her tongue is fat and obtrusive in her mouth. She doesn't recognize any of her companions, can't discern any details on their faces.

Her brain is bleeding. Her fractured skull is filling with blood.

But then the white light starts to blast through. And even while it demolishes the barn all around her it is purely benign, casually disassembling the universe like an artist plying his craft backwards, each brushstroke picking up the paint and returning the canvas back to blank. The white light shreds the entire structure, sucking it up into the sky in a languid and blissful vortex.

Ava looks down on her body from above. She's floating up gently. She views the tops of her companions' heads. They're frantic to save her, racing around like ants. They don't seem to even notice the tornado ripping the world apart all around them.

She should feel bad for them. For their fear and heartache. But she doesn't. That isn't her world, anymore.

It's just like they say. It's peaceful. It's just like you'd expect.

This all-encompassing, world-eating cloud vortex is really just a tunnel to eternity.

To Heaven.

Ava turns away from Ostby and Ellie and Uri and Bach. Turns away from those trying to save her. Because those aren't her people, anymore.

And that's what comes next, right?

Her people. They should be waiting for her at the end of the tunnel. That's what they always say. She'll be greeted by the loved ones who proceeded her in death.

Who?

Someone will be waiting for her, right? Isn't that how this works? Your family will be waiting; your grandparents; your beloved pets.

But Ava doesn't know if anyone like that exists for her. And she thinks of all the AVAs in their chrome capsules. The clones. How does this work for them? Do they have souls?

Who will greet the clones in Heaven?

Wait.

Wait.

This isn't like they say. This isn't what you'd expect.

As she floats up the tunnel leading to the Pearly Gates the all-consuming peace suddenly recedes. It is replaced by implacable anxiety and terror. Lightning crackles in the walls of the white tornado. Darkness presses in and as the lights go out the last thing she hears is her own ragged scream, trailing off into infinity.

This Promised Land is a lot like a cramped office in some sterile office building. A room stuffed with servers and computer cases. Sunlight shining in through a window that doesn't open. Monitors and keyboards and wireless mice in a heap. Stacks of manila folders stuffed with pages, blanketing the entire surface of a work desk. An overwhelming amount of disorganized stuff. And the purr of—

Mom's ventilation system.

She can't move. Her whole body is being restrained by something.

This is one of those pods. One of those clone pods.

But that's not it. The purr she hears—it's not a sign she's back in her mother's lab—it's merely the air conditioning kicking on in this crappy little office.

What the fuck is this? She focuses on the piles of computer parts. Did I get reincarnated as tech support?

There's no turning her head. She's locked into some sort of machine. Or a glass cage. Almost like she's trapped inside a fishbowl, looking out, able to move only her eyes while scanning the room.

Did they manage to save me? Am I recovering in some sort of hospital?

But no, that's not it. This room is filthy. She can't even see the floor, there's so much junk piled up. As she searches the room for clues she passes right over a dead rat curled on its side and then something rumbles past outside the window.

Was that a... flying car?

And something else catches her eye out there:

The Bay Bridge?

Then it starts coming back to her. This is California.

That dead rat is—

Her vision returns to the rat and he's curled on his side on a little silver tray. It's reminiscent of the tray Sara had in her lab – the one which contained her surgical tools. And only then does Ava notice the equipment.

It's easy to miss among the rest of the mess, but the computer monitor next to the rat is on. The screen is covered in green lettering. Focusing, Ava can make out the top line:

This little rat—Javors, if she can believe it—has his little head shaved. He's not dead, simply comatose. Wires have been inserted under his little scalp. And as she traces the wires to see what they might be connected to she finds they lead directly to her. But she can't see exactly where they terminate because she still can't turn her head, even to look down.

What the hell is going on here?

This isn't Heaven.

Suddenly there is movement in the corner of her eye. She focuses in that direction—over toward the window—and a butterfly flaps past outside, trailing gold dust.

Wait a minute – do I know that butterfly?

But then she sees the boy. He's not much older than her, laying on a gurney under the window. Like the rat—like Javors—his head is shaved and wires have been inserted under his scalp. Bags of intravenous fluids hang beside his gurney. And same as with the rat, the wires seem to lead right back to Ava – but she's not sure where they connect, exactly.

He has a monitor beside his gurney, too. Ava strains to read the patient's name:

For a moment it's like she's about to have another fit and start whizzing through the infinite screens again. A sort of digital conniption. But she gathers her senses before they slip away and the questions start coming out faster than she can hope to answer:

What is any of this?

Am I somehow tapped into Bach's mind?

Have I been playing his game, all along? In his world?

Suddenly she remembers the morning after Human Resources raided Cripple Creek. When she found Sawyer's doppleganger dead in the road. Bach had known—had recognized him as Sawyer, too—even when Ellie and Uri swore otherwise.

Was that because Bach and I were the only real people?

Everything felt real; the water, the wind, the stab wounds. But in actuality it was all nothing but a game. A virtual world.

Why am I so disappointed?

Well that's simple, really. She doesn't know about this world with its flying cars and birds singing outside but that other world—Bach's world—was full of excitement and danger. And purpose. The quests gave her a sense of purpose.

But don't you still feel that way, kinda? Like you're on a quest?

It's true – she feels like she's on some sort of mission. Obviously she must be up to something, stashed away in this office full of junk, hard-wired to a teenage boy and a rat.

Come on, think.

What is she forgetting?

Virtually fucking everything, again.

And that's when her vision just seems to land by accident on a series of sticky-notes plastered around the perimeter of Bach's monitor. Someone has scribbled all over them. They say things like:

“You have to save him.”

And, “the only way he can escape is to beat the game.”

Is that my handwriting?

She doesn't know. It could be – but she just can't remember what her own looks like. And that's when she reads the next little note someone has stickied:

“IF YOU DIE IN THE GAME YOU'LL FORGET EVERYTHING.”

That's it. I've died before. When I woke up in that prisoner cart – I wasn't unconscious in the moments before. I was dead.

But she's still not exactly overflowing with memories.

I don't know my own name, do I? Is it really Ava? Did the game wipe my memory not only in the virtual world – but in the real one, as well?

An inventory of things she knows for certain is short and disconcerting:

This is San Francisco.

The year is 2062.

I'm Bach's—

What, exactly? Why can't she finish that thought? Is he her brother? Cousin?

Is he my son?

Her eyes race around the room, frantic for more clues; desperate for something to trigger her memory. But she's confounded repeatedly because she can't turn her head. Can't look down to see what she's trapped inside or where the wires from Bach and Javors connect.

And as she becomes more frustrated her field of vision crackles with static. Suddenly everything is phasing out, dispersing into bits and pieces of computer language falling into blackness – and just as suddenly it all comes back together. Just a blip, like a transmission being broadcast on an old antenna.

Or a glitch in the program.

Wait – is any of this shit real?

How would she know? Trapped inside whatever this apparatus is, she has less sensory input than she did back in that other world – that world which presumably exists only as code. Here, she can't feel the temperature of the air. Can't smell the dust in this junk-filled office. It seems like she's limited to sight and hearing, only – and even the former is severely constrained.

What if this is just more game shit? A cut-scene that gets played when I die?

Or what if you're just a crazy person?

She's in some sort of pod, isn't she? It's like one of the AVA pods, except she seems to be stood upright. But there is a glass surface right up against her face – she can see it now, so near and clean it's difficult to perceive at all.

And there's a reflection there – hers, presumably.

But as she focuses, the face looking back isn't the one she knows as hers. It's not 'Ava.'

But it's still familiar.

And it's awful:

Am I.... Am I Sara?

And right then, she falls into the screen trance again. The infinite screens. Oh and she's definitely inside the machine. She might even be the machine. Looking at their faces as they cycle past. Their clean and smiling and happy faces. And then it just stops, and she's confronted with yet another question she can't begin to answer: