Two years later, Captain Stellon was sitting on the edge of a Simuflex contemplating the pills in the palm of his hand. He was trying not to have second thoughts.

He’d failed his final year at cadet college and developed a deep resentment towards the treadmill he was on. He’d begun to see his life as a series of missed opportunities in the service of his career and lost all motivation.

His brief encounter with Kaitar had stuck in his mind though (much more than the series of casual relationships following the faculty dances). The first thing he did when he learned he’d failed his year-end exam was to track her down on MERGE. He knew exactly why he was doing it too. She’d been unimpressed with him. She thought he was a dick. How did she put it? “Cannon Fodder”. A bit harsh perhaps, but she’d worked out he was just obediently jumping through hoops – that he wasn’t his own man. And so his memory of Kaitar had become emblematic of all his lost opportunities. At some level he needed to redress that situation.

With just her first name, accommodation sector, and astrobiology class details, her image was there on the MIST. She was working at a company called Interloper Inc. So she never did make it to Earth. Working for a corporation! Ha! Forced to compromise by harsh realities. Captain Stellon was talking to himself, and this was Felquick’s cue to pipe up: “You know you’ll have me out of a job if you keep up with this level of cynicism.” Captain Stellon smirked, a rare moment of complicity between the two.

He checked out Interloper Inc. on the system – a small gaming interface company – and found Kaitar’s name listed in the Research and Development department. Then he noticed the announcement tag: Volunteers required for psycho-active trials of Earth II arena, a new game in development. Hourly payment in accordance with universal clinical trial protocol. For further details contact Interloper/547Z[13].

And so there he was, sat on the Simuflex wearing a surgical gown.

“What exactly are these pills for again?”

“One’s an artificial neurotransmitter. You can think of it as a perceptual booster. The other one’s hallucinogenic. Mild dose of lysergic acid.”

“What! You’re not serious?”

“It helps to flesh out the experience,” explained Kaitar. “We’ve found it significantly improves ratings in the post-immersion feedback.”

“Well that’s hardly surprising, is it? Lysergic acid would flesh out a walk across the room!”

“Very mild, don’t worry.” Kaitar was chuckling to herself as Captain Stellon, at once pleased he’d made her laugh and anxious about what he’d let himself in for, necked both pills, lay back on the Simuflex and let the machine adjust to his physical parameters.

“Just relax now. This will involve no effort on your part. There isn’t even a game structure or goal at this stage of development, so we just need you to lie back and the inputs should take care of the rest. You’ll be back with us in just a few minutes… but it’ll probably feel longer than that.”

Captain Stellon was nervous. He’d never been a gamer and this was in at the deep end – a clinical trial for an untested psycho-active scenario. That had to be about as concerning a prospect as a combat mission in the AFZ. He automatically began running through a mental checklist: which pocket of his trousers he’d left his coder in, whether he’d shut down the reflector system properly before he left his pod that morning. It was something the cadet college had drilled into them – that moment before take-off when everything needs to be double checked. But his attention was drawn back to the present by something banking out of his peripheral vision and then stabilizing just inches from his eyes.

A dragonfly. It made minute adjustments to its coordinates causing it to wobble twice, and then it just hung there, working its wings at an inconceivable rate, in order to remain perfectly motionless.

It was observing him. It was definitely observing him. Perfectly still. Like it was the most stationery thing in a world of swaying forms. Richard Stellon looked around. He was stood on the banks of a river. He could feel the warmth of the Sun on his back. Suddenly the dragonfly banked left and was away. He looked down. He was completely naked.

Planet Earth was stretched out around him in all its living, green splendour. Banks of foliage stacking up from the river. Behind him a forest. “Summer in a temperate zone,” he thought. “A hospitable season.” He began to walk along the river bank, the buzz of insects a constant soundtrack with occasional crescendos when he intersected the flight path of a bee, or a fly was drawn into the orbit of his sweaty head. “This must be what it’s really like. I mean, this has to be real,” he said out loud, and then, “Felquick? Felquick, are you there?” The continuing buzz of insects. No Felquick. This was more real than reality. “My own man.” The river moved silently, broad and green, strands of green weed undulating and waving in slow motion just below the surface.

A bird flew out of the trees with a menacing call – smart black and white livery, long-tailed, strutting now along the water’s edge, sunlight revealing a sheen of blue and green over the jet-black plumage. “Birds,” he thought. “When did birds evolve from dinosaurs? What era is this?”

He walked on down the river. He felt an almost invincible strength surging through his body but he moved like a herbivore, stopping regularly, scanning the landscape for potential predators. He picked up a sturdy branch and wondered which he should fear more – dinosaurs, other wild animals, or humans. “Just a game,” he told himself, but the beads of sweat at his temples argued otherwise.

He was on the inside of a meander now, tiny wet pebbles embedded in grey sand. The metallic azure of a kingfisher pulls his gaze skimming down the river, the sudden intensity of colour causing a sharp intake of breath. The heat of the Sun has him paddling through the cool water of the little beach. The Sun is still high in the sky. He decides to head for the shade of the woods.

The alarm calls of birds resonate through the cathedral of overarching boughs. A deep rich odour of life-giving decay rises from the softness underfoot and everywhere he looks there are overlaid patterns of light, shade and form – the infinite variety of life.

A beam of sunlight piercing the forest canopy turns insects gold as they fly back and forth over a patch of grasses and wild flowers. He kneels among the verdant plants as if he too could drink their nectar. A braid of tiny white star-shaped flowers draws his eyes to a stalk from which a geometrical marvel is strung. The spider, its glistening web complete, drops down on a silken thread and slowly rotates, legs outstretched. Richard Stellon has stopped thinking. His concentration on the spider has become so intense that he too is a tiny weightless thing slowly spinning in a sunbeam. He has never felt such benevolence, the complete absence of worry, and his mind continually opening, wider with each rotation of the miniature spider, in a forest on Planet Earth, his ancestral home, where he belongs.

A new movement catches his eye. A person leaps up onto a fallen tree and runs on through the forest, lithe and agile, with the sure-footedness of a woodland animal. He jumps to his feet in amazement as the naked woman disappears through the trees. He’s running now, pursuing a vision of human perfection. He calls to her, “Kaitar!” But she doesn’t stop, doesn’t look round.

He tries to keep up, but her image is a distant blur. The air begins to change. It feels drier and there’s a strange smell, almost sweet, but unsettling. The trees are thinning. The Sun beats down on his back again. The smell is getting stronger, more acrid, and there’s something smokey too, like something cooking. He has lost sight of her.

Underfoot is hard and unforgiving. The smell has become sickly, unbearable, burning the back of his throat. He’s crossing a barren landscape of rocky escarpments.

He stops. She is nowhere to be seen. Looking back there is no sign of the forest or the river either. Wisps of smoke rise in the distance. He feels like retching on the strangely viscous atmosphere, and then he sees something moving on the horizon, unsteadily, hobbling along.

He walks to meet it, a mixture of revulsion, pity and fear pumping within his chest. What the hell is it? The stench, he realises now, is rotting flesh. Nothing could survive in this heat for long. The thirst would have him on his knees soon. And then what? Following death the body would briefly turn to that sickening soup he could smell in the air, before being cooked under the sun, dried to a mere husk among the rocks. But he had to know what it was. It was the answer to the riddle. So he kept walking towards it.

They had come to a standstill by the time he reached them. Difficult to say how many. The machine itself looked like an insect, but with a human torso at its mechanical centre. On top there were at least two more people. One of them was in flames, burning steadily like a camp fire, the other still alive but seconds away from death, its revealed ribcage already whitening under the Sun.

The man that accompanied them looked healthy, vigorous even, but he was emotionally broken. He couldn’t even meet Richard’s eyes. His private hell was too intense for communication. There was a plume of feathers from his back, like a peacock’s tail, useless for flight. He dropped to his knees, discarded the compasses he had been holding, then fell forward on all fours, muttering to himself in a croaky voice:

“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, with sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.” He moaned in defeat. “My hands always tied. Urizen has no wings.” With that he looked up for the first time and just as their eyes met, Captain Stellon gasped for breath and found himself back in Kaitar’s lab, strapped down in the Simuflex.

Kaitar undid the clasps and allowed the interface to disengage automatically. The headset slid apart like pieces of a puzzle and arced clear of Captain Stellon as he sat up rubbing his eyes.

“Welcome back,” she said. “I’m going to record our conversation. There’s a glass of water by the chair over there.”

Captain Stellon watched Kaitar move around the lab, recalling the curves of her naked body as he chased her through the wood.

“There’s a feedback form for you to fill out, but for now I just want you to recount what happened in as much detail as you can.” She perched herself on the surface opposite him as he searched her eyes for something more than the appropriate professional detachment, and found nothing. But of course. Why would his hallucination have had any bearing on her feelings for him?

He took a moment to gather his thoughts and then began at the beginning.

He described the events with great accuracy, except for two points. He did not describe the woman in the forest, nor did he say that it was her, glossing over the episode with the words ‘a female’. The second gap in his version was right at the end. He’d clean forgotten the words spoken by the man in the desert.

“He said something… something important I think. His words were like poetry or something. I felt like it was coded. Deeply meaningful, but obscure, if you know what I mean.” Then with some annoyance: “Damn! Why can’t I remember the damn words? It seemed like the whole point of the experience. It seemed to explain everything.” He looked at her apologetically. “I’m really sorry Kaitar. That’s all I’ve got. I seem to have missed out the most important bit. Maybe it will come to me later.”

“No, that’s fine. You’re doing a great job.” She smiled. “It’s actually quite common for the key semantic denouement to have become occluded.”

“What?”

“It’s quite common for people to forget the most meaningful words.”

“Really?”

“Yes, it’s a bit like a dream state where things can be incredibly vivid in terms of perception and our faculty of understanding is engaged, profoundly activated, but at a level just below the linguistic.”

“Below the linguistic? But he definitely spoke actual words.”

“Oh yes, I don’t doubt that, but we often find the words are not as meaningful as they seemed in the psycho-active arena. In the rare instances when subjects have been able to recall the words spoken, they are often quite banal – half-remembered bits of text, sometimes even passages they once learned in their childhood and were not aware they still knew. It’s a mysterious mechanism. Some of us think archetypes are involved.”

“Hang about. Archetypes?”

“It’s an ancient theory. Goes right back to a man called Jung in the Common Era. The idea that the mind, like the body, has an evolutionary history, stretching back through the millennia, and that we share certain deep structures of the mind – symbolic narrative representations. There’s a lot of scientific evidence to show this may be the case. They were doing psycho-active immersion experiments long before the gaming industry got hold of it.”

“Mmm.”

“Your story, for example, conforms pretty closely to the template.” Captain Stellon’s expression clouded suddenly. “Yeah, it comes as a bit of a shock to hear that, I know. It all feels so personal of course, while it’s actually happening. But the cortical stream inputs set up a pattern of excitation – in your case it moved from positive to negative emotion, and cued your brain with contextual semantics: words, sounds, smells, colours… oh and insects… that’s what they employ me for.”

“Insects?”

“Yeah! The basic coding and narrative arc are all products of AS – no human involvement at that level of design. But for some reason, AS likes a few humans to do some of the detailed work. Maybe it’s just making us feel useful. But I’ve got to say I’m really chuffed the dragonfly came out so well. You described it perfectly by the way.”

“Oh thanks.” He smiled despite having lost the thread of the conversation.

“I invent insects!” She pronounced playfully.

“Don’t you mean discover?”

“No, I invent them. Other people discovered them. That dragonfly never actually existed. I’ll show you the model if you like. It’s a kind of amalgam, much like your whole experience in the psycho-active arena. The amazing thing is how the brain constructs total experience out of such scant raw material.”

“But hang on. Are you saying the whole thing was directed then?”

“Well they tend to go in a similar way, presumably because AS is extrapolating from databases of millions of human stories. So it’s usually some kind of natural communion with the return to Earth, often accompanied by a heightened aesthetic experience, nearly always a river followed by a forest (but that’s because of the perceptual clues), then there’s some kind of journey or quest, often involving a member of the opposite sex who takes the subject to the next stage of the narrative. Yours was a bit unusual, in that there was a sexual component to this transitional phase.”

Captain Stellon hurriedly interrupted, “Oh, you mean that she was naked. Yes, she was naked. Did I forget to say that? Yeah, that’s true, we were both naked. But… I wouldn’t say sexual, exactly.”

Kaitar casually placed the clinical observation notes on the table next to him as Captain Stellon blustered on.

“It felt more like a kind of purity. It was just so beautiful there, at the beginning, like paradise,” but glancing at the clinical notes he read: TIME – 12 mins 34 secs – Sexual Arousal. Subject has Erection (53 second duration). Captain Stellon’s voice tailed off as he stared fixedly at the floor for a moment to collect himself.

Kaitar deftly filled the silence. “Actually yes, the paradise archetype is one of the constants. Probably goes back to our evolution as a species, maybe even earlier. Religions often have that idea of a state of natural innocence, preceding a fall. The ancient Earth religions, like Judaism, Christianity and Islam, had their paradise gardens, and all our contemporary myths seem to have Pre-Degradation Earth as their starting point, our paradise lost. Even that weird Muskian story about the still birth in Biosphere One could be seen as a kind of dark paradise myth. All of these updates and reinterpretations are just an echo of the original evolutionary process that saw Homo sapiens emerge from a more purely animal state over millions and millions of years. The brain developed along with that change, you see, so it’s a hardwired narrative tendency if you like.”

“So you’re telling me my brain was coming up with a religious myth of some sort,” ventured Captain Stellon.

“We don’t need to bring religion into it, but myth, yes, absolutely. We’re basically inducing a controlled mythic experience. AS intends for Earth II to be an epic game in the fullest sense. It’s quite a privilege to be involved.”

“I see,” said Captain Stellon, somewhat deflated. He felt trivialised now, not to mention embarrassed.

By the time he’d filled out the feedback form the next subject had arrived in the waiting room.

“It was lovely to see you again, Kaitar.”

“Yes, what an incredible coincidence!” she said one more time. “We must have that drink. How are you fixed for Selt Set?”

“I can do Selt Set. Let me know a time and place. I can tell you all about how I screwed up college.”

“Well, this is the nearest I’ve got to Planet Earth so far, so I can’t really boast either.” She gave him that magical smile as they shook hands, and he was captive again.

On the way out of the building, laughter rang in his ears. Hysterical laughter.

“Well, I had to pretend it was a coincidence. She’d have thought I was stalking her otherwise. Some things are best left unsaid,” remarked Captain Stellon, hoping to pre-empt Felquick’s hilarity.

“I’m not laughing at that,” said Felquick.

“What then?”

“She must have sat there timing your erection,” said Felquick and was off again with the hysterical laughter.

Captain Stellon remained steely-faced as he stepped out into the plaza. He had a lot to think over, and those pills hadn’t completely worn off.