“What the f—”

“Hello, Carey.”

Carey’s body jerked so fiercely at the sight of him that the VR headset slipped from his hands and thumped against the carpet. The stranger wasn’t the fearsome stalker he’d expected, just some weird-looking guy in his late twenties, his pale skin lit a hellish red from the Christmas lights.

The stranger stood up. He was holding a gun.

Carey checked the windowsill. The Glock was gone.

How could he have been so stupid?

“Give it back.”

The stranger smiled. “Seriously? That’s the best you can do, DrollTroll?”

He was maybe three or four years older than Carey, dressed like one of those Hollywood socialites, complete with loafers, skinny jeans, and a dress shirt under a fancy leathery jacket, his watch so large and shiny it resembled a piece of nautical equipment.

“Who are you?” Carey asked. “And what the hell are you doing in my apartment?”

The guy was smiling even wider now, as if this were all some sort of prank that was going perfectly according to plan. He wore his straight brown hair swept to the side, looking stylishly messy, an effect he had probably achieved through extensive use of hair gel and a blow dryer. Carey hated him already.

“Let’s have a conversation,” the guy said, aiming the Glock at Carey’s chest, even twisting it slightly as if to imply he had mad gangster skills with a pistol.

“Huh. Uknowit73vip,” Carey said. “Good to finally put a face to the stupid username.”

“Let’s not be crass. I want you to sit down and relax, Walsh. What is that, Irish?”

Carey tipped a nod. “You bet.”

“I mean it. Sit.”

Carey grabbed the VR controllers off the armchair, delicately placed them on the windowsill, and took a seat. He watched the stranger pick the AugerZT headset off the floor.

“Expensive?” he asked.

“Six hundred dollars,” Carey said, somewhat proudly.

“Wow. I’ll bet you saved up your allowance for months in order to buy this.”

“Eat a dick,” Carey said. “That’s probably why you’re here, right? You want money?”

“You kidding? Money?” the guy scoffed, as if genuinely amused by the thought that someone might need money. “My father’s a multi-billionaire owner of a private island. If I told you how much was in my trust fund, you’d wet your pants. More zeroes after that number than all the binary code running through your little toy here.” He indicated the VR headset.

“Binary?” Carey said. “Are you some sort of programmer?”

His visitor leaned forward. “More like a scientist. You could say I study the human brain. And right now, I’m interested in yours. You like virtual reality? Well, I have just the game for you, Carey Walsh.”

Smiling, his so-called stalker tossed the headset onto the couch and sat back down. The Glock now rested on one knee, still aimed at Carey. He seemed to be enjoying this moment, not in any rush at all.

“You wanted to talk,” Carey said, “so talk. You can start by telling me your name, because I’m not gonna call you uknowit...whatever bullcrap.”

“Call me Sam. And do you prefer Carey or DrollTroll69?”

“Wipe that stupid smile off your face.”

Sam wagged his eyebrows. “You’re a feisty one, eh? So angry. I can totally see the troll part of your personality now. I’ve been following you for several months, Carey Walsh, but it took meeting you in person to finally figure you out.”

“Figure what out, exactly?”

Sam shrugged in a casual manner that was really getting annoying. “Your habits. Psyche. The darkness in you.” He cleared his throat. “What’s the first thing that comes to mind when I say ‘Reddit’?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Just answer the question.”

Now, it was Carey’s turn to shrug. “Memes. Pranks caught on camera. Boobies. Jokes. Video clips of weird stuff you can’t explain, like those card tricks where the card somehow ends up on the other side of a glass door after the whole deck is thrown at it. Jokes about coding only software engineers understand. Boobies. Did I already say boobies?”

Sam’s eyes dimmed, almost as though he wanted to roll them, massage his temples, soothe a growing migraine. “How about emotional abuse. Does that ring a bell?”

Carey remained silent. Yup. Sam was gonna go there.

“You’ve trolled people on a bunch of different social media sites,” Sam continued, “but Reddit seems to be your favorite. Twitter you mostly use to make fun of anyone who opposes your small-minded political views. Facebook you’re an angel on, but I assume that’s because you use your real name. Plus, your mom and dad and ten million Irish cousins are probably on that platform. But Reddit, now that’s a different story. Using what you believe is an anonymous, untraceable username, your twisted nature really comes out of the closet. What I found—your pattern, so to speak—left even me stunned.”

Carey’s eyes immediately flicked to the whiskey bottle. He scooped it up, unscrewed the cap and took a swig. The burning liquid stung his throat. Warmth blossomed in his chest. Good ol’ Jameson—a drink for men.

Breathing through his mouth to quell the sting, Carey asked, “And what pattern is that?”

“A pattern of hate.” Sam sounded oddly fascinated now. If it bothered him that Carey was getting wasted right now, he didn’t show it. “Every morning, you wake up and the first thing you do is go to your computer. The first human interaction of the day is a hateful, insulting, belittling comment launched at some unfortunate soul on Reddit. At lunch, it’s the same thing. Before you go to bed, same thing. And you target different people throughout the day, most days, unless you find someone really sensitive to focus on. Then you’ll attack that person for days without letting up, until they either block you or stop responding.

“Since you signed up for Reddit two years ago, you’ve commented a total of 4,472 times—most of those trollish in nature. You’ve only actually posted thirty-four times, mainly to request help on games. That tells me your use of the forum is overwhelmingly geared toward causing others psychological pain.”

“How many comments did you say?” Carey asked, his brow furrowing. The more he listened, the more uncomfortable he became. Sam wasn’t just a stalker; he was an obsessive psychopath with a dark plan, obviously someone with a ton of resources at his fingertips, both financial and technological.

“Surprised? 4,472 comments. As of yesterday. Not sure what you got up to today, but it seems you never skip a day, so I’m guessing it’s a tiny bit more now.”

Carey shook his head. “And I’ll bet you read every single one, didn’t you, you obsessive, twisted freak?”

“I didn’t have to. I used software to analyze your language. You’re a CompSci major and a former software developer, according to LinkedIn. I don’t have to explain to you how text-mining applications work. I can say with certainty that a good eighty-five percent of your comments on Reddit were hateful or bullying in nature.

“This one’s my personal favorite.”

He took out his phone and, leaning forward, turned it toward Carey, a grin on his face. Carey read a comment he’d written weeks ago, in response to some redneck asshole’s critical remark on a videogame Carey had enjoyed as a kid.

Nice attempt at sounding intel-a-junt, Billy Ray Bob, but judging from the profile pic of you chugging a natty ice and wearing a Dallas Cowboys cap, I’m assuming you’re about 5 minutes away from making a mayonnaise sandwich before spanking it to a picture of your cousin from the trailer park’s latest family reunion. Leave the game commentary to the experts, hicky-doo-da.

“That’s some of my best work,” Carey said.

“I chuckled,” Sam said, leaning back. “So, according to the numbers, that’s—last time I checked, anyway—3,500 times you spewed your toxic crap in hopes of ruining someone’s day. Don’t mean to rub it in, but that’s like five a day, every day, for two solid years. It’s almost impressive.”

“3,800,” Carey said. “Give or take a couple.”

“What?”

“You said I’ve written 4,472 comments. Then you said eighty-five percent were trollish in nature. Eighty-five percent of 4,472 is 3,800 or thereabouts. Not 3,500.”

Sam slipped his phone out of his pocket and started tapping the screen. He must have been using the calculator app.

“I’ll be damned,” he said, lowering the phone. “3,801. How’d you do that?”

Carey took another slug from the bottle. It was almost gone. He should have bought another bottle while he was at it. He would have drunk that one, too.

“Like you care.” Carey drained the bottle, then tossed it and watched it roll across his frayed carpet. “Go ahead. Shoot me. I can tell you want to.”

Sam shot to his feet and began to shout. “Man, don’t you see what’s happened to you? What’s causing all this hate and self-loathing? I’ve read transcripts of calls between you and your dad. He’s emotionally abusive, a real prick. I’ve seen logs of your Facebook relationship updates—new girlfriend every four or five months, can’t keep her around for more than one or two. A bit of a commitment-phobe, Carey? Oh, and let’s not forget all the pictures you had up there and deleted. I’ve seen logs of those, too.”

Carey’s eyes widened. “You really are a stalker. What do you want, you psycho?”

Sam went on as if he hadn’t heard him. “You know the photos, don’t you Carey? Pictures of you and a guy I’m assuming was your best friend. Ben Lukas was his name, I think.”

Every muscle in Carey’s body went tight. “You don’t fucking know me. You don’t know anything!”

“He died, didn’t he? It was on the local news. But instead of honoring him on social media like most people do nowadays—you know, when their best friend tragically dies—you chose instead to take down all his pictures. Why is that, Carey? What was your role in his death? And why did it change the way you communicate with the world? You weren’t a troll before his death.”

“I said shut up!”

Carey threw his empty glass at the wall, making it shatter. Then he lunged for Sam, arms extended, hands shaped like claws, only vaguely aware of the compact Taser that suddenly materialized from Sam’s fancy jacket.

The probes stung his chest like twin hornets.

“Ga-ah-ah-ah,” Carey sputtered as fifty thousand volts of electricity throttled his brain, knocking him unconscious.

***

Before he even opened his eyes, Carey became aware of a muted soaring sensation penetrating his entire body, accompanied by a dull, familiar roar.

No, it couldn’t be.

He squeezed his eyes shut, clenched his teeth, and willed himself to wake up inside his apartment where he belonged, suffering from no more than the worst hangover of his life.

But he was nowhere near his apartment. He knew it. Felt it with every cell in his body. He was far away from New Hampshire—his friends, his family, his job, all of it left behind. The dull roar encapsulating him was most definitely the sound of...but how could it be?

He opened one eye a tiny bit. The walls were white, curved, the windows little ovals of glass. Bright as a fresh morning inside the compartment.

“Son of a bitch,” he said, opening his eyes fully.

He was on an airplane. A private plane, by the looks of it. He swiveled his head to take in his surroundings. He was startled by the sight of a broad-shouldered black man in a suit and tie sitting behind him, calmly reading an iPad. The man glanced at him, then stared back down at his screen. A bodyguard, apparently.

When Carey tried to lift his arms, he found his body stuffed into a straitjacket.

“Who are you? What the hell’s going on? And why am I in a friggin’ straitjacket?”

The bodyguard ignored him.

But where was the other one? That rich kid weirdo who’d shown up at his apartment.

A toilet flushed.

Carey watched the front section of the compartment. Watched and waited, until a narrow door folded open and Sam walked out.

“Let me out of this thing,” Carey rasped at him.

Sam wiped his hands with a soft-looking towel. He tossed it over an empty seat and sighed.

“You’ll be out soon enough, DrollTroll. Do you like it when I call you that? Or do you prefer DrollTroll69, which I’m sure you chose because of all the sex you’ve been having your entire adult life. Am I right, broseph? Right on. Want to fist pound?”

“How about I pound your hipster douchebag face?” Carey snarled at him.

Sam’s eyebrows shot up in delight. “Thattaboy! What do you think, Terrance? Funny, isn’t he?”

The bodyguard's eyes remained fixed on his iPad.

“Fuck this.” Carey thrashed his entire body, expanding his arms outward with all his might. The straitjacket held firm.

“Might as well relax,” Sam said. “Enjoy the ride.”

Sam sat across from him in one of three seats facing Carey’s direction. It was a nice plane. Carey had never been inside one of these private get-ups. The seats were arranged in clusters, each with two rows of three that faced each other, so that small gatherings of people could have meetings to talk about the stock market or tea prices in India, or whatever rich people talked about on private planes. There was even a long conference table in the center.

“But I’m thirsty,” Carey said. “And hungry.”

“I’m not surprised,” Sam said. “You were even puking in your sleep.”

Carey smacked his lips, disgusted. “Must be why my mouth tastes like I licked a horse’s asshole.”

Sam chuckled despite himself. Carey felt slightly elated. At least he was still funny. They could never take that away from him.

“My dad’s going to love you,” Sam said, shaking his head.

“Is that where we’re going? To your dad’s...place?”

“His island, you mean?”

“Jesus,” Carey said. “Your old man has his own friggin’ island?”

“I’m done talking,” Sam said, turning his gaze to the window. “Get some rest. You’ll need it.”

He stuck in a pair of white earbuds and ignored Carey the rest of the ride.

Later, Carey woke to the thump of the plane landing, his entire body shivering upon impact. Through the windows, he saw palm fronds, which meant they had landed somewhere tropical. Were they within the United States’ borders? He asked Sam, but Sam ignored him, motioning instead for Terrance to get Carey off the plane.

A blast of hot, humid air slapped him from head to toe as soon as he stepped out. That was the first thing Carey noticed, the second being the ocean in the distance. This truly was an island, and not a very large one at that. Barely a finger of land surrounded by infinite water in all directions.

The next thing he noticed was people—not many, but enough to indicate this wasn’t some secluded wilderness. It might have been an actual country with a government and all that. These people were brown skinned, dressed in plain white or blue shirts, each undertaking some menial task. In the distance, a cluster of buildings rose from the trees, looking oddly shiny and sleek and out of place, like a million-dollar sports car parked inside a rugged forest, miles from anything resembling a road.

The path to get there took Carey past tiny shacks where native islanders went about their daily chores or hung around lazily in hammocks. Women with chocolate-brown skin smiled warmly at him, as though Carey were a tourist on vacation, who might purchase all manner of shell necklaces, fish-and-plantain lunches, or handmade massage oils from them.

Sam had, thankfully, released him from the straitjacket, though Carey was by no means free. Terrance occasionally prodded him with a taser to remind him what was in store should he get out of order.

The humid air coated his skin like a layer of warm honey. He hated it. Already, he missed the crisp, dry air of New Hampshire. Mosquitoes buzzed around his ears and flew into his hair. The taste of bile and the fading sour sweetness of Juicy Juice mixed unpleasantly in his mouth. He had to spit every minute or so to keep from puking. Terrance was kind enough to let him drink from a water bottle as needed.

The walk took about five minutes. Finally, the path opened up to a circular driveway with a decorative palm tree in the center—a palm tree in the process of being split apart by a jagged bolt of lightning seemingly crafted from solidified light, frozen in a single moment of ravenous fury.

“I’ll admit, that’s kinda cool,” Carey said.

His kidnapper and bodyguard ignored his occasional comments. A narrow road wrapped around the main building to a parking lot in back, though Carey saw only a handful of shabby cars and trucks—the boxy, old-fashioned variety that looked as though they consumed leaded gasoline, like the good old days when no one cared about air pollution or global warming. Most of the employees probably walked to and from work each day. The building itself was majestic, and not just compared to the rest of the surroundings—it would have been an incredible sight even in a place like Silicon Valley. A broad set of doors, made from sparkling glass, split apart automatically to allow couriers and employees in and out of the main building.

Custom lettering—which appeared to be made of the same solidified light as the decorative lightning bolt, each letter at least two feet tall and sizzling—spelled out the facility’s name.

AMPLE VR-TECH

“Dumb move,” Carey said. “Now I know where we are. All I have to do is look up Ample VR-Tech locations.”

“Lot of good that’ll do you,” Sam said. “We have locations around the world. Besides, what good is knowledge when your brain’s been wiped of every shred of memory?”

That shut Carey right up—not that he knew exactly what was being implied, but still, it sounded pretty scary. If anyone could wipe a person’s memory using shady, illegal technology, it was the owner of a building like this one.

As soon as they entered the air-conditioned lobby, Terrance forced Carey to the right, where another man—this one just as burly as Terrance, only he was white and wore black, thick-rimmed glasses—stood before a featureless door with no viewing window. The bodyguards exchanged a nod. Sam swiped a keycard against a reader next to the door, and something clicked inside.

With Sam leading the way, the bodyguard led Carey down flights of stairs, their footsteps echoing loudly in the vertical, concrete-walled shaft. After three flights, which brought them down into some sort of basement area—a sub-sub-basement, it seemed—another featureless door blocked their way. Sam swiped his keycard, but this time, he also leveled his eyes a few inches from a retinal scanner.

“You want to tell me what’s down here?” Carey asked.

“Not really. I’d rather you shut up and see for yourself.”

Asshole.

Carey’s anger quickly faded, replaced by the sort of awe a child must feel upon first seeing Mickey’s Castle at Disney World. Though just as impressive, this was no towering magical edifice; it was a sprawling subterranean warehouse full of tech and lit by walls of computer screens.

His jaw dropped. It was like something straight out of a sci-fi novel—a haven of machines that must have been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. A computer engineer’s wet dream.

The room itself was also impressive, considering it was so far underground. Three stories tall and vast in every direction, it looked as though it had been overtaken by a half-alien, half-machine infestation. Wires snaked across the walls and covered the floor; servers stood in tight clusters like miniature cities; thick electrical cords dangled from power cells stuck to the ceiling; computer terminals blinked and beeped; and busy arrays of widescreen monitors covered the walls, displaying what appeared to be the vitals of human patients and other, more cryptic, information that made no sense to Carey.

“This way,” Sam said.

They walked along a narrow aisle, stepping over crossed wires and closed laptops on low stands. The occasional technician or engineer scurried like a frightened mouse among the terminals and stacks. A few stood in front of VR terminals, wearing headsets and haptic gloves, heads tilted back, hands grabbing as they roamed virtual landscapes doing God-knows-what.

Unlike the native islanders outside, these men looked as though they’d never seen the sun. Maybe they, too, were prisoners of this criminal enterprise.

“Pick your jaw up off the floor, DrollTroll.”

Sam flashed him a mischievous smile. Carey responded with a threatening thrust of his chin.

“After you wipe that smirk off your plastic face, Bruce Jenner.”

Sam squinted one eye at him. “Doesn’t she go by Caitlyn Jenner now?”

“You would know, you twat.”

“Well, based on the porn sites in your browser history, I’d say chicks-with-you-know-what aren’t a new thing for you.”

Carey’s face warmed. It had only been a one- or two-time thing, just out of curiosity.

The bodyguard pushed him along.

Their destination was a well-lit, glassed-in conference room with a vaulted glass roof that sat in the corner of the warehouse, like a tiny cathedral awash in its own holy light.

“Soundproof glass?” Carey asked, stopping to wash his gaze over it. “So the workers won’t hear what kinds of schemes you guys are hatching inside?”

“Something like that,” Sam said.

Terrance pushed him along. Once inside, they took seats around an oblong table made of wood with a polished, dark-cherry finish. The chairs were plush and comfortable—and empty. At least this wasn’t some sort of torture chamber where he could expect to be cut, choked, electrocuted, or burned. Rather it seemed the sort of place where people discussed financial forecasts and day-to-day operations.

Perfectly harmless...he hoped.

The largest chair at the head of the table drew his attention.

“He’s on his way,” Sam said.

Something buzzed. Sam whipped out his phone and studied the screen. His glossy lips stretched into a wide smile.

“Two minutes away. Always on time, that’s my dear old dad.”

“I feel like zombie Steve Jobs is going to walk in here at any moment,” Carey said, glancing at Terrance to see if the bodyguard had found the joke funny, but the man only returned a cold stare.

Sam erupted in laughter.

“Holy crap, DrollTroll,” he said, slapping the table as he chuckled. “That was actually pretty good. Zombie Steve Jobs. Because he’s dead!”

“You don’t have to spoil it,” Carey said, glumly.

“Sorry, did I interrupt you from spoiling someone’s day with an insult on Reddit meant to demean them and make them feel worthless? Because if I did, please continue trolling, DrollTroll.”

“What did I ever do to you, anyway? You act like I pissed on your dead mother’s grave.”

“Be careful. My mother is actually dead.”

“Well, sorry, but I—”

“I’m not sorry,” Sam said. “She was a cold-hearted bitch.”

Carey sat back. “Now I see where you get it.”

“Funny coming from you, DrollTroll.”

“Quit calling me that, rich boy, or I’ll rearrange your face so it’ll take all of Daddy’s money to pay for the surgery necessary to fix it.”

“I’d like to see you try, DrollT—”

A door clicked, silencing Sam.

Carey watched as another bodyguard—this one a short Hispanic bodybuilder with massive biceps, dressed in the same suit and tie as the others—entered the room, followed by a slightly taller, wiry, and well-preserved man in his fifties dressed in colorful Bermuda shorts, flip-flops, and a dark-blue T-shirt, with a necklace sporting a tiny seashell at the throat. He moved with the spry and mischievous energy of an imp, shocks of white hair running back from his temples, giving the impression of devil’s horns. His hands were in a constant state of motion; he pointed approvingly at Sam, gave Carey a thumbs-up, drummed his fingers against the back of the end chair, and finally sat, fingers coming together on the table to form a steeple.

“So, my son tells me you’re a former software guy with a couple years of app development under your belt. And a gamer. You even have one of those new VR headsets in your apartment. Very cool, very cool. Appropriate. Please, sit down.” Turning to Sam, he said, “Nice job, kiddo.”

Sam took a seat as well, nodding only once, as if the compliment had no effect on him. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe he’d done this hundreds of times and was getting sick of his job. What kind of a twisted family was this?

“Uh, my name’s Carey? Can’t say it’s nice to meet you. You must be...”

“I’m Roger Solsteim, CEO and original founder of this fine company, Ample VR-Tech. You’ve already met my son, Sam...”

So that was his real name. Carey wasn’t sure why he had thought otherwise. Maybe because the guy was a criminal kidnapper looking at countless felony convictions if ever caught.

“Why am I here?” Carey asked, interrupting the CEO, whose reddish eyes gazed at him with a curiosity he found both comforting and penetrating at the same time. Like being swaddled in a blanket while someone inserted a finger in your ass. “I never signed up for this. I never gave my okay. This is criminal kidnapping, and you’re an accessory to it if not a direct perpetrator. All of you. Complicit.”

“Carey, Carey, Carey. My son sent me plenty of screenshots displaying the...shall we say, the work you do on the side.”

“What, trolling?”

“Exactly. DrollTroll69 I believe is your alias of choice.” His lips pursed as though he found the name distasteful. “I can’t say I understand your motives, but judging from the hundreds of images my boy took the time to collect, I’d say you have plenty of your own reasons for doing what you do. And plenty of your own demons driving you.”

“That’s none of your business. I didn’t break any laws. You can’t just kidnap people because they act like assholes online.”

“And in person,” Sam added.

“You shut up,” Carey said, exploding out of his chair and lunging across the conference table to strangle the uppity little bastard.

Terrance was on him in a flash. Seizing hold of Carey, he slammed him against the conference table once, twice, and finally a third time.

“All right!” Carey coughed and sputtered, feeling like a gorilla had played soccer with his ribcage. “Enough!”

Terrance slid him off the table and plunked him down in the chair once more. Carey hugged himself and tried to breathe steadily as the pain receded. Roger waited patiently.

“Now,” Roger said, “I’ll tell you why you’re here and answer any questions you might have. We find it makes the transition easier. In about an hour, you’re going to wake up in a place where the rules of reality are vastly different. Your survival will depend not just on accepting what you see but understanding why you’re seeing it.”

Sam found it necessary to butt in.

“We’re punishing you for your sins,” he said, “but we’re nice enough to give you a tour of hell first.”

“Yes, um...” Roger’s brow furrowed as he glanced at his son. “Thank you, Sam. I’ll take it from here.”

Carey pretended to cough—“Sociopath,” he inserted—and then coughed again.

“I find that utterly offensive,” Roger said, his expression crestfallen. “My son is no sociopath. Although”—he raised his brows in acknowledgment—“knowing his mother when she was alive, I wouldn’t be all that surprised.”

Sam grinned at that.

Making fun of his dead mother. Yeah, definitely not a sociopath.

“The game you are about to experience is called Luminether Online,” Roger said, grinning proudly. “And it’s my masterpiece.”

He sprang from his chair and scampered to the door that led back to the warehouse.

Were they supposed to follow him?

Sam pushed himself lazily out of his chair. If the son was a sociopath, the father was definitely a narcissistic wacko. They made a great team. Shaking his head, Carey followed them.

They approached a room—if you could call it a room—that looked like a huge, top-secret black box with its own roof and bomb-proof walls. It occupied what seemed to be an entire corner of the warehouse. There could only be one thing inside that box: the game itself, or at least its beating heart.

Roger approached the only apparent door, which appeared to be made of thick steel. He pressed his badge against a sensor and leveled his eyes against a green-laser eye scanner.

“Why does it need its own room, all this security?” Carey asked. “It’s just a bunch of computers and VR headsets, isn’t it?”

Roger chuckled. Sam cleared his throat, smiling condescendingly at Carey.

“Fine,” Carey said. “I guess I’ll see for myself. Social skills, guys. They need work.”

“Shut up, DrollTroll,” Sam said, placing emphasis on Carey’s username as if to show how ridiculous it sounded. Carey had to admit, it was slightly ridiculous—but compared to most usernames on Reddit, he might as well be JohnSmith123.

The screenname had begun its life on Counter-Strike, a competitive multiplayer shooter game where you could play either as a terrorist or a counter-terrorism agent. Carey had been but a young lad then—only seven years old when he discovered it. The game became his obsession for a number of years. His parents even called him “Agent Carey” because he spent so much time taking down terrorists. His father had never approved of the game, but he liked that Carey always chose to be a federal agent rather than a terrorist. He took it as a sign he’d raised a good, law-abiding son who would grow to respect authority.

Carey had also been obsessed with The Lord of the Rings books throughout his childhood, which had led him to select the name DrollTroll321 (the version without the numbers was taken). It wasn’t until he became older and started joining other platforms that he came up with the, admittedly lame, version of the name with the appended, sexualized number 69.

It had been with him since, for almost twenty years.

And he’d never felt embarrassed by it until Sam Rich-Boy Asshole came along.

He shook his head and took a deep breath. This wasn’t the time for reminiscing. They were at the door. What could possibly be inside if not VR headsets and more computers and servers?

A burst of air-conditioned coolness gushed over his face as Roger flung the door open. It was chilly inside, at least thirty degrees colder than the rest of the warehouse, probably to keep the machines from overheating.

And the machines inside were...wait a minute...

What the hell?

“Are those...pods?” he asked. “For...people?”

“You’re quite perceptive,” Roger said, flashing a toothy smile over Carey’s shoulder at his son, as if to congratulate Sam once more on his successful choice of a victim.

They stepped inside. Carey tried to resist shivering as the air chilled him down to the bone. The room was much larger than it had seemed from outside, and well-lit thanks to rectangular light panels hanging on the walls and ceilings for maximum illumination. The four corners of the room were home to clusters of server towers. Along the walls, computer stations had been set up with VR headsets of all different sizes perched on shelves.

The center of the room was devoted to the pods.

They were unlike anything Carey had ever seen, except in blockbuster sci-fi films where humans aboard a spaceship sleep in pods during interstellar travel to resist the effects of cruising near lightspeed.

There were sixteen of them in total, each large enough to fit an adult human. They were black, futuristic and shiny, somewhat like a Tesla electric car crossed with an expensive coffin. Thick cords and wires snaked from each one and disappeared into holes in the floor. Next to each pod was a machine, with monitors displaying vitals of the person inside.

Behind Carey, someone cleared his throat. Carey turned to see Roger pointing his phone at the pods. He tapped the screen, and suddenly the light panels set along the walls—they were actually computer monitors—began to display images.

A brain spun in each one. Soothing music, like something out of a nature documentary, filled the room.

“This is your tour,” Roger said, “so pay attention. This information will help you adjust to the new reality which awaits you.”

“I’m listening,” Carey said, watching the spinning brains.

“It was my daughter’s death that inspired me to build Ample VR-Tech. It was during a long and arduous depressive episode after her funeral that I was suddenly inspired to contribute to humanity in her memory.”

The spinning brains froze. The image—duplicated across a dozen screens—zoomed in and began deconstructing the brain section by section, corresponding labels popping into existence with actual popping sounds.

“‘What if I could eliminate bullying forever?’ I thought to myself. The human brain is quite malleable. What if, using powerful technology, I could cure whatever deficiency or abnormality was responsible for a bully’s urge to belittle others? An urge we now know stems from the underdeveloped centers normally responsible for empathy and self-control.”

The brains on the monitors were swept away, replaced by a scene in which nanorobots swarmed across neurons like ants covering a tree branch.

“What if,” Roger continued, “I could connect the neocortex to the cloud? Such an interface would have limitless applications. Not just for reshaping the human brain using simulated experiences and nanorobotic agents, but to actually enhance cognition by connecting us to A.I. systems, as one example.

“Neuralnanorobotics. I wasn’t the first to think of it, but I’m the first to take experimentation where no one else had the guts to take it. My breakthrough took years to accomplish, and someday, I’ll share it with the world. But not yet. I’m close, but it’s still not finished.”

Carey stood rooted in place, fascinated. “What’s missing?”

“More people like you,” Roger said. “I can’t very well experiment on human test subjects in the US. Especially with the risks involved—and the deaths which are, unfortunately, inevitable.

“But if you survive, Carey...” Roger approached Carey, his expression one of pure madness, as if he saw not a person standing before him but a golden opportunity that would change the course of human history. “If you survive the integration and enhancement process to the very end, you’ll be one of the first people in human history to experience the benefits of what I like to call a ‘superbrain.’ A brain upgraded, enhanced, and expanded. A mind containing a wealth of knowledge you didn’t have to learn, because it was so much faster just to download it.”

His eyes shone as wetly as his lips, which he kept licking. Carey cringed slightly.

“Okay, old man. I get it. I saw The Matrix.”

Roger seemed slightly taken aback. “This isn’t some action film, Carey. This is your life. And it’s about to change. Think of yourself as a smartphone on airplane mode—no internet connection whatsoever, no ability to make calls. You’ve been like that your entire life. All of us, throughout human history, disconnected in a way we can’t even fathom, wandering around like dummies seeking ways to connect with each other and with a world we find so threatening that we act like children at story time, dreaming of gods and heaven and spirits to explain it all.”

The image on the screens now showed a spinning brain inside a cage.

“But there is no god. There are only neurons. Everything we perceive, everything we feel—what we call reality—is just code filtered and interpreted by our brains.

“But what if it didn’t have to be that way? What if you could disable airplane mode and turn on...the infinite? Connect yourself to something so powerful and so vast that you would be like a god among men? What if we all reached that level?”

The image of the caged spinning brain transformed into one person, who had apparently found enlightenment atop a mountain, followed by dozens of people all holding hands and gazing up at the sky.

“Real tempting,” Carey said, feeling less and less inclined to believe Roger the more eccentrically the old man behaved. He seemed to be on the verge of hopping up and down and screaming at the top of his lungs. Maybe he should be the one wearing the straitjacket, not Carey.

“But...?” Roger said.

“I’m just saying, if it’s so great, why haven’t you done it? Oh wait, that’s right. Because being in the machine kills you, like you just said. It’s why you always need new test subjects, right? And what good is being godlike if you’re dead?”

Roger smiled, subtly shaking his head. “I’m close, Carey. I’m even developing a nanobot power source, so we can carry this technology around inside our heads. The trick is convincing our stubborn brain cells not to attack the foreign bodies responsible for the enhancement, while protecting the proteins and sugars in the tiny spaces between the cells from becoming collateral damage. It’s all very complex stuff, but...if anything can help me pull this off, it’s Astros, my precious world-within-a-world. The Land of the Gods.”

Carey scoffed. “I’ll tell you what I think...”

Suddenly, an alarm went off. The lights in the room turned red.

Blood red.