| Asymptote |

Arufa and Marsia held each other close under the soft light of the X2 Monument. Time slowed down just a little—Arufa felt it in her chest.

“You’re here…!” Marsia wailed, tears freshly dried on her cheeks.

“You remembered, too,” Arufa said, pulling away. “How did you know?”

“It’s really a long story. There was this awful government agent, and–”

“Was his name Ghiles?”

“No, it was White, but—wait, you had one too?” Marsia asked.

“Yeah!”

Arufa couldn’t help but notice the sigil on Marsia’s exposed chest, the same as hers. Locri, standing a decent distance away, had one too. So all four of us have that same tattoo. But what does it mean?

“Okay, enough. All of you,” Locri called. “Let’s sort out what actually happened.”

“Woah, woah. Don’t sit there and lead the conversation, Oversider. It’s our turn to talk,” Skyler said.

Arufa shot them a look. “Sky, quit it. What matters is, they’re real people. Let’s not start off on a bad note.”

“Well, unfortunately, Skyler started us off on a bad note when they stole my tasers last time,” Locri grunted, “so I’d like them back before we talk.”

“Bullshit! It’s not like you need them for anything!”

“Bullshit, I had to kill a guy earlier because you stole them. Lucky for us, he wasn’t real, but the mental illness certainly will be. So give them back.”

Skyler, a bit put off, pulled out the tasers from their pockets. They began to walk forward—time ticked slower with every step they took. Realizing this, they stopped and reconsidered.

Locri scowled. “Just toss them, moron.”

They backed up and hurled the small devices forward. “You’re welcome.”

“Alright, so what happened to you lot after we met the first time?” Marsia asked. “We saw you on the news. You killed four officers, right?”

Arufa winced. “No—okay, I didn’t think they were officers when it happened. And they were only after us because of that warrant.”

“The one that said ‘dead or alive’? Lady Marsia said she heard about it before it happened,” Locri said.

“Agent Ghiles put out the warrant ahead of time. Or at least, I think so,” said Arufa. She brushed a hand through her hair. “That was him trying to screw us up so we would have to make that choice.”

Marsia gasped and looked to Locri. “Agent White gave us the same one, yes? The choice to rewind time?”

“The ‘choice’, you mean,” Skyler mocked, putting up air quotes with their fingers. “Look, I totally agreed to it at the time, but, like. It wasn’t fair.”

“For the record, they definitely didn’t rewind anything. Sky still had your tasers, Locri. And there was still writing on my hand from before,” Arufa said.

“And I’m still missing a tooth!” Marsia added.

Arufa raised an eyebrow. “From what?”

“Agent White got in a fight with us,” Locri answered. “Knocked out her tooth, shot my hand. But I’m used to pain like that. It doesn’t really hurt at all.”

Skyler tapped their fingers together and averted their eyes. “Doesn’t hurt at all? Wow, I wonder why…”

“What? Do you know something we don’t?” said Marsia.

For a moment, Arufa wondered how she should break the news—or whether to say anything at all. Finding out it was all fake messed with Sky real bad. It could be a problem for them, too.

But we owe them the truth. The world is a simulation, and we’re all that’s real. Plus, I think I get these tattoos now. Ghiles wasn’t part of the simulation, obviously, but he didn’t have one. Which makes me think we’re the only four who have them. And if they’re the operators…

Then we’re the test subjects.

All spread out around her were the three other subjects trapped in this cage. They were only a few steps away from freedom—or demise. She took a deep breath, then began to explain.

“This is one big, fucked-up experiment,” she started. “You see those marks on your chests? Those are just markers for the Agents to identify us with. We can never really hide from them, because they run everything. The whole world. And how can they do that?

“Because X2 is a simulation on a computer. Or, maybe not a computer, I don’t know for sure. But it’s not real. And when you notice it, it all makes sense. The crowds are faceless and empty. The cars move without drivers. Everything is just a framework for our minds to build on.

“If I had to guess, we’ve all been seeing this world a little differently from the start. We might know if we compared all our life experiences, but we don’t have time for that. Knowing the Agents can track us, there’s no way at least one of them isn’t on their way right now. So, I’m gonna pause here for questions, then we’ll get to the plan. Anyone?”

Instantly, Marsia’s hand shot up. “So it’s all fake?”

“The four of us aren’t. And obviously the Agents aren’t either. But everything else is,” said Arufa.

“What about my parents?”

“Made up, probably.”

“At least she got to have parents,” Skyler muttered.

Arufa pinched the bridge of her nose. “Seriously, Skyler. Not the time for that.”

Locri spoke up next. “Do you have any idea what this experiment entails? Or what value we hold to them?”

“No clue. But there’s gotta be a reason out there somewhere,” Arufa replied. “Any more questions?”

No one spoke a word—she nodded and continued on.

“The plan is to lag out the simulation. It nearly crashed last time we met. If we do that again, it might break us out of here. But it also might kill us, and there’s no way to know which one until we do it.

“So I’m asking you all to trust me. Trust that we’ll make it out alive, trust that we’ll get to the bottom of this. To be honest, I’m terrified. But we have a responsibility to rebel against our captors, right here, right now. Or else we’ll just get our memories wiped all over aga–”

“Behind you!” Marsia shouted.

She whipped her head around to find a very heated Agent Ghiles running at them. His blonde hair shimmered in the wind, and he’d taken off his shades to reveal his deep cyan eyes, frantic and fearful.

“Stop!” he yelled between breaths. “Don’t you dare get any closer!”

Simultaneously, Agent White approached on the opposite side. Arufa had never seen her before, what with her silver-white hair and controlled yellow stare. But something stirred in her when their eyes met—she couldn’t pin exactly what.

“Any further and you’ll all die! Back up!” White called.

Locri threw a look at Arufa. “You sure about this?”

“Not at all, but it’s all we’ve got!” Arufa said. “Everyone, we’re out of time! It’s now or never!”

Immediately, she shot forward, closing the distance between her and Marsia. On either side, Locri and Skyler clamped in—as time crawled ever slower, Arufa saw the grief on their faces.

A second stretched to two, then to three, then to a minute. Eventually, they all stopped moving entirely. Arufa’s eyes were locked on Marsia’s, and as her pulse slowed to zero, her vision began to fade. She wondered if those bright red eyes would be the last thing she ever saw.

The wireframe of X2 flickered around her. She felt a horrible tug on her insides she’d never experienced before, like someone was trying to rip her guts out through a hook in her throat. The intangible sickle prodded inside her skull; she felt her soul tearing away from her body.

So badly Arufa wanted to cry for help. The pain was like nothing she’d ever dreamed of, this pull of inexistence. She wondered if she’d really made the wrong choice—if these were her last moments.

I’m sorry, she thought. If I just killed all four of us, I’m so, so sorry. I thought it would work. I thought they were lying to us. Is this what death feels like? What’s going to happen to me?

She lost feeling in the tips of her fingers, then in her forearms. Her bicepses, her shoulders, her chest. The sensation worked down through her legs and up into her neck. She suddenly found movement a contrived, impossible idea as her nervous system switched off, nerve ending by nerve ending.

Eventually, she was nothing but a brain and a spinal cord. The hook stabbed through her frontal lobe and ravaged its way into her core, where finally she felt her consciousness writhing against it. But it was no use—with a swift yank, every fiber of her being wriggled away from the artificial vessel she’d created for herself.

Arufa—her soul, all alone—laid motionless, unchanging, in the void. She had no words to describe the feeling. No face to express her emotion. Everything faded to just one idea, one inkling of a thought still alive in her heart.

“I’m free.”

And everything clicked to black.

Act I: Parallel as One

Fine.