JOEL AWOKE IN THE hospital bed. He recognized the ugly pale green and white walls immediately, and the six tentacled arms poking in from the sides of the bed. His arms and legs were weak. Both elbows and knees were numb. His whole body felt like there had been a fight inside and a lot of furniture got broke.

Beside the bed he heard the faint sounds of hydraulics. When he tried to speak, the side of his face was stiff.

“The facial rework suits you.” Joel knew the voice immediately. “It’s an eggshell ceramic. I think you’ll like it.”

“I didn’t know I needed a rework. Was the damage in that rock-men thing real?”

The Gabriel’s low chuckle was chilling. “No. You needed enhancements for some of the work you’re going to do.”

“My face?”

“No, your face was fine. Still is. I had you fitted with some co-processing and additional organic RAM, plus a few interfaces.”

“Facial interfaces. Sounds nice.” Joel wondered if the Gabriel could detect sarcasm as well as giving it out.

“Well, Honey likes it.”

At the sound of her name, Joel’s whole body tried to get up and out of bed. Bad idea.

“You’re restrained. While you heal.”

“Where is she?”

“Soon enough, Joel. You’ve got some recovering to do.”

Too tense to rest, too tired to think. Bound by the restraints, Joel couldn’t even move enough tot tell whether the chip that he’d jammed in the back of his head was still there or not. The Gabriel knew about it, he’d said as much. Joel knew that his encryption was good enough that nobody would break in. Not that he was any genius at encryption, far from it. Just because the chip was coded to scramble itself if it was interfered with. An unprompted passcode had to be put into a particular, un-obvious place or, instant melt.

That was when he started to wonder how much the Gabriel was able to surveil him, to observe his thoughts. If he could read what Joel was thinking, he wouldn’t need to read the chip. He would just have to watch while Joel read it. While that was in doubt, if Joel was going to be secure, he would have to acquire information without looking at at, and pass it on without seeing it. And without giving away who he passed it on to.

The last part might not be quite as hard as it looked, since he didn’t know who the people were at the other end of the chain. And, not reading or interpreting what he found, well, he didn’t know what half of it was about. And the other half he didn’t believe.

So he was left thinking about Honey. Also not a comfortable thought while he was tied down. Feeling responsible for her having been taken, even though he couldn’t have prevented it. He tried the best he could. There was nothing he could have done about it, other than what he did.

Still, knowing that the Gabriel had almost total power over her. He was jumpy about her while he couldn’t see her.

Unable to sleep, unable to do anything else, Joel worried about what it was that the Gabriel had recruited him. Those thoughts didn’t take him anywhere good. He veered off to think over the promise that he made to Honey and her weird friends.

He didn’t care much about them or their crazed ideas. And he had no idea who any of them were. Literally none. They could be people he’d known all his life or they could be on another planet. He had no way to know.

Honey liked them and trusted them and he didn’t want to do anything that would disappoint her. As he turned their conversation over in his mind and the things the clown and the girl had said, he felt some faith. He couldn’t have said why, but he felt like there was some truth behind it. That their group with its odd passphrases and ritual greeting, was founded on something that mattered.

Maybe he only felt that way because he knew that Honey had a lot of faith and believe in them. In his life before, he realized, he had been okay with staying on the fence and skeptical about them. She could have her connection with them and it didn’t matter too much to him, as long as she was safe and she was happy.

Now, he felt like his life was on a faultline, a crack between the world that he knew, the view from the virtual nerve center of counter-conspiracy theory dwellers and the Gabriel himself.

In the village, the world that now seemed to be a place of simple values, and a world he thought he would likely never see again, back then he thought the Gabriel was a fairy tale. A fiction. A booga.

Now his life was in the booga’s hands.

Eventually he drifted into sleep. The dreams and phantoms there weren’t any more comforting.

~~

Honey was at his bedside when his eyes flickered. He jumped to hug her, but he was still fastened to the bed, unable to move.

“Are you okay?” She nodded but her faint smile made him doubt it.

she stroked his arm. “It somehow wound up with me getting what you wanted, Joel. My life is almost entirely virtual now, Joel. I guess it’s a kind of immortality, but I don’t know whether it’s a win or not.”

“And I don’t know whether I really won or not. But I’m glad you’re here with me. Is that very selfish?”

“Yes, Joel.” she said, “But not in a bad way.”

He was happy while she stayed, but he couldn’t tell whether he was being brave for her or she was being brave for him.

He asked her as she left. She looked back with a smile.

“Both. Silly.”

~~

Later he heard the door open and Gabriel’s trolley shooshed behind him. Fixed horizontal in the bed, Joel noticed that his body shivered when he recognized the sound of that trolley. Yet he never heard the Gabriel’s feet.

The hooded figure stood my the bed and loomed over him. Uncomfortable, Joel asked him, “So is the interview stage over?”

“There never was one. The process was set up to look like a contest, Joel, but really it was all training and induction. You were selected to be my incarnation. The others were chosen for their ability to test your strengths and bring out the necessary qualities in you.”

Staring into those eyes, Joel wondered how much of the Gabriel was human. Obviously some. And, also obviously, not all of him. “I have some terms and conditions.”