There, in the hall, hobbled a dog. Her mismatched eyes, made useless from gray cataracts, seeped, leaving her once fine coat, matted, sticky, and tangled around her eyes and muzzle. Useless as they were for seeing, her eyes still worked to convey the old dog's presence of mind, which of late had been a general malaise but now seemed almost fearful.

"What is it girl? Don't tell me you're worried about the test too?"

Eli knelt, sliding his hand along her muzzle just under her ear, trying to avoid the mess of tangles he let her become. Legend was a mixed breed with large patches of black, brown, and gray. She had been sedate these last few weeks, eating little, moving little, mostly sleeping.

Her tongue lolled out for one quick pant, as she turned her head to smell his hand; touch and smell the only senses left to her. Her nose was dry, not cold and wet, as he expected.

"It's okay girl," he ran his hand down her back between her thin shoulders and felt the strong thumping of her heart. Legend let out a few miserable whimpers once she recognized his smell.

"Eli, I detect an elevated heart rate."

"Shhh, girl, I was just jogging," he continued to stroke her tenderly. He could feel the agitated pulse of her heart, "I didn't mean to wake you up." He slid his hand under her and, gently lifting her, held her close as he moved into the utility closet he'd made her temporary quarters.

"Shhh, everything's fine now." He stroked her, setting her down in the mess of towels and blankets that was her bed. She stood still at first, unsure what to do, before lowering herself, first her legs, then her head. Her eyes remained open. To Eli they seemed fearful but at least the agitation had fled.

He looked at her, then to the raw concrete pad where her bed lay and the surrounding uninsulated walls where she had spent much of her time these last few months. It used to be colder in this utility space before he fabricated a thermal plate and installed it on the wall close to her sleeping area. It radiated an even heat, but to keep her from accidentally running into it he installed a fiber mesh surround. The surround expanded and contracted whenever the slightest air currents passed by which gave off an almost wheezing sound. It disturbed Eli, but, at least, Legend couldn't hear it.

"Congratulations, unit tests have completed with one hundred percent pass rate, beginning functional tests in five seconds." AV's voice didn't sound quite a chipper, as though he sensed Eli's more somber mood.

Eli glanced into the hallway at the news. Unit tests were the simplest. He hadn't expected to find any errors there. He also suspected the functional tests would pass with no issues, he wouldn't get nervous until the integration or end-to-end tests. If any issues were likely to emerge, they would first show themselves there. And if all that went as planned, he would try to connect to the external network for some performance testing. A spike of panic went through him at the thought of connecting to the external network; the security protocols for Project Deep's immersives were better than military grade and the penalties for tampering with network traffic could best be described as barbarous.

Eli gently stroked Legend a few more times, more to calm his nerves than hers. He'd known her all her life, having gotten her as a pup. She had gotten him over more than one desperate time, yet right now his mind was elsewhere, obsessing over all the details, trying to ferret out anything he might have missed.

"Okay girl, you rest now, just rest now, I've got to get some work done, but after that, I'll make you some eggs just like you like." He stayed a few more seconds, stroking her matted coat, repeating reassuring words before leaving. Her breathing had calmed and settled into a regular pattern. He looked back at her, the light from the hallway falling over her face as she rested.

"Congratulations, functional tests have completed with a one hundred percent pass rate. Integration tests beginning in five seconds."

Eli took off towards the lab, his mind already there. The dog looked up and turned her head towards Eli's footsteps. She took a few deep shuddering breaths before settling down, her eyes open, facing the lab.

Eli's lab, like all his living spaces, was partitioned out of one of the two large columns that comprised his unit. Wedge-shaped, the curved outer wall of glass and metal mesh, allowed him to feel contained without being closed in, a nearly impossible task given how little space he actually had.

His entire living space was an exhibit of sorts, with only the lavatory having purely opaque walls. As a child, he'd struggled with feeling watched, until, as a teen, he'd rebelled and bypassed the local network protocols to create a simulated video feed, much like how he sanitized his AI's reporting.

It turned out to be pointless.

Afterward, he discovered that all the feeds from his space were just temporarily stored locally before being deleted. As far as he could tell, no one had ever accessed them. What should have been a relief that he wasn't being spied on instead became a deep sense of solitude and a certainty that he had been forgotten.

"Where are we?"

Eli entered the lab with a glance at the terminal screen. The green-blue text scrolled down as the integration tests spun up. Mounted to the inner wall, just behind his raised work surface, the screen cast a pale light over Eli's masterwork.

Eli was a self-taught systems engineer. At age ten he had reverse-engineered a top-of-the-line apprehension harness, and shortly after that re-engineered it, improving performance and reducing the weight, making it effectively portable. At fourteen he'd reprogrammed his AI monitor into a lab assistant and personal companion, bypassed the state's monitoring protocols, and published his somewhat radical theories on decentralized apprehension nodes and immersive realism.

At seventeen, they had assigned him to group counseling with seven others like him, all diagnosed with Phrenophasia; a condition that made using apprehension tech impossible. As a joke, they called themselves the Phasiacs. It was the best period of his life. He felt understood, heard. He had friends from all around the world. He met Gia. They talked, laughed, played online games together. However, as he got to know them, learned how their situations mirrored his, he began helping as he could. He fabricated custom apprehension gear for each of them, one by one, until he was the only one left in the group.

Now, at twenty-four, his latest invention sat on his lab table. He called it a synchronized neural construct, or SNC.

It was a wire-frame box, no larger than a human head, inside of which, suspended from silver support rods, was a cobalt icosahedron core. From this central suspended core, millions of moving multi-colored light filaments emerged. The filaments formed the shape of a human brain, his brain specifically, and around this neural construct, an apprehension circlet hovered. Beside this box, and over the surface of the worktable, lay parts of previous prototypes, discarded cabling, week-old half-filled coffee cups, empty plates, papers with random notes and technical drawings, and tools of various sorts, all a testament to his single-minded pursuit of this engineering marvel.

"Integration tests in progress, Eli; thirteen percent complete with no failures."

Eli stood at his worktable, looking briefly at the tests scrolling by before turning his attention to the SNC. The filaments surrounding the core moved about in an agitated rhythm, and the colors were predominately reds, oranges, yellows, and purples. Some areas of the 'brain' were brighter than others, showing the higher current utilization of those areas.

I need to calm down. He looked around his work area. It was a mess. His fabrication station, on the furthermost wall, was covered in the debris from discarded prototypes. He started picking up notes, separating them into piles, the moved to the wall to file them away. That done he started clearing the work surfaces, be it coffee containers or prototype neural constructs they all got gathered up before he made for the dematerializer port.

The dematerializer port was square, not even a handspan wide, where he could deposit material for recycling. It automatically sorted whatever you gave it by material type, broke it down and reused it if possible, incinerated if not. Eli watched the material levels as he fed each plate, prototype, cable, and cup into the square before returning to adjacent work areas and repeating the process.

"What's our power consumption this month?" he asked nervously as the power-hungry dematerializer powered up.

Tracking power consumption had become an obsession. Before implementing his many power rationing protocols he would often deplete his discretionary power in the middle of an important project, forcing him to wait to complete it.

"We are on schedule," AV replied.

He didn't want to spend too much power, but spending too little was also a waste. Eli had broken the power consumption into a per-day schedule. As he worked, the SNC's filaments slowed, greens and blues joined as the reds and oranges receded.

"Congratulations, integration tests completed with one hundred percent pass rate. End-to-end tests beginning in five seconds." AV's voice was back to being enthusiastic again.

"Remind me never to let it get this bad again," Eli grumbled as he returned to the dematerializer with a cable and began feeding it in, one section at a time. The fabricator was restricted to producing only parts small enough to fit into the dematerializer, but he'd found a way around it by creating spools of various filaments he manually assembled into cabling.

"So noted," AV paused, "Eli, we have now passed your previous achievement record. End-to-end test 22 percent complete with no failures." Yellow spiked in the SNC, brightening up the lab momentarily, as Eli registered the achievement.

Finished with the cleanup, he began sorting his various tools and organizing them, storing them away in tray shelves built into the wall, or clicking them into place on the room's tool wall. When he was done, he returned to the workstation and finally looked at the test results screen.

End-to-end tests complete.

Completed 2312 of 2312 tests.

Passed: 2312

Failed: 0

Eli stared at the screen for a few seconds, the SNC pulsing purple, blue, violet.

"Congratulations Eli, End-to-End tests completed with one hundred percent pass rate."

"What was the coverage?" Eli asked, even though he already knew the answer.

"The test coverage was one hundred percent." Then, after a brief pause, AV inquired, "Eli, the Project Deep login protocol is ready to execute. Should we login?"