The Professor and the Library of Dead Minds

Consciousness returned, once again an unwelcome guest. This time, however, it was not heralded by a violet ache but by a deep, penetrating cold that seemed to seep from the stone directly into his bones. Even before Nicolas opened his eyes, he could feel the unforgiving, rough-hewn surface beneath his back and the brutal bite of restraints cutting into the skin of his wrists and ankles. His entire body throbbed with the phantom memory of the final blow. He found himself bound fast to a stone slab, a sacrificial offering on a crude altar. He tried to move, tensing his muscles and straining with all his might against the bonds, but it was utterly futile. He was fixed to the stone, as immobile as if he were a part of the sculpture itself. This was impossible.

Just then, a voice emerged from the velvety darkness that enveloped him. It was calm, almost professorial in its cadence, and that very placidity was more unsettling than the situation itself.

"The human body is remarkably complex... and yet, so wonderfully resilient. By defeating my little automaton, you have proven to us that you are, indeed, a genuine Zinox."

The voice echoed, seeming to drift along the stone walls that surrounded him. Nicolas strained to turn his head toward the sound, a ragged rasp escaping his throat. "Who's there?"

A silhouette shifted almost imperceptibly in the gloom. "The inhabitants here call me Pazzo. A name I find quite fitting for the primitive conditions of this place. But in the old world you came from, my colleagues and students addressed me as Professor Andrew."

Even through the haze of shock and pain, Nicolas’s mind tried to work with the speed of a journalist on a lead. Professor... could this be the 'Dr. Aris' mentioned in the reports? "Why... why am I tied up?" he asked, his voice emerging far weaker than he'd intended.

"You are bound, Nicolas, because I have need of that beautiful, active, and most importantly, 'real' brain of yours to escape this wasteland, this digital prison."

The fact that he knew his name sent a chill through Nicolas’s blood. Hector had told him everything. "What are you going to do with my brain?"

The tone that returned from the darkness held the distinct echo of a condescending smile. "Oh, you truly do not want to know the answer to that."

Nicolas thrashed again in desperation. The thick, fibrous ropes that had replaced the iron chains burned his skin but refused to yield even a millimeter. Pazzo observed his futile struggle for a moment, his voice now laced with the cold curiosity of a scientist studying an insect. Then, in a movement so swift Nicolas barely registered it, a shadow shot out from the darkness. Though his eyes had not yet adjusted, he recognized the shape of a wooden mallet an instant before it struck. The impact was a white-hot flash of lightning inside his skull.

"AAAAAAGGGGGHHHH!"

The mallet had descended upon his left hand, producing a sickeningly dull thud against his bones. The pain was so immediate, so absolute, that Nicolas’s vision momentarily went black. As tears streamed from his eyes, he screamed, "Why... why would you do that?!"

"Pain," Pazzo explained, his voice still unnervingly composed. "Pain is the most primitive of stimulants. This impact will excite the neurons in your brain with a potency an ordinary person could scarcely imagine. And that, in turn, will allow me to enter those little folds much more quickly and generate the precise shockwave I require."

"Let me out of here, you psychopath!"

"Have you ever stopped to consider how profound your misfortune is, and by extension, how exquisite my good fortune has become?" Pazzo continued, completely ignoring Nicolas's screams. "For two long years, I have been working on the final components of my device under these archaic conditions. And just when everything is ready, just as I was beginning to lose hope, what should fall from the sky? A real, living human being, uncorrupted by the false consciousness of this world. What a magnificent coincidence!"

Nicolas’s breath hitched. "What... what device?" he managed to ask, trying to anchor his mind against the rising tide of agony.

Pazzo’s voice boomed with authority. "Hector!"

After a moment of silence, a series of grating scrapes echoed from different corners of the room, and torches mounted on the walls sputtered to life. As the chamber was slowly illuminated, Nicolas froze, the sight before him paralyzing him with a new kind of horror. He was in a laboratory, but a laboratory torn from the pages of a nightmare. The walls were covered with anatomical charts drawn on cured animal hides, murky jars containing unidentifiable organs, and a scattered assortment of blood-stained tools. In the center of the room stood a bizarre, colossal machine cobbled together from wood, stone, and rusted iron, and threaded through with strange crystals and a web of cables. But that was not the most terrifying part. The most terrifying part was the bodies. Dozens of them, lying in corners, strapped to tables, some even chained to the walls.

With dawning horror, Nicolas craned his neck. His eyes found Hector standing impassively beside a torch, and next to him, Pazzo. "You... you monsters... what are you doing here?"

Pazzo cast a look toward the corpses, a look that was almost affectionate. "Rest easy, journalist. Those you see belong to the people we created for this world. Every one of them is now nothing more than a dead brain."

"A dead brain?"

"You really are a terrible journalist," Pazzo said with a dismissive sneer. "Listen closely. I designed this world, together with the aforementioned Doctor Aris. We worked meticulously on every single living creature in this virtual paradise. But as it turns out, a foundational error we made at the very beginning turned this place into a hell: using the brains of dead people was not, in retrospect, a very sound idea."

Lightning flashed in Nicolas’s mind. "You used the brains... of real people?"

"Bingo!" Pazzo cried with manic glee. "But don't worry, we didn't kill anyone. We simply took the precious, still-viable brains of individuals who were clinically deceased but whose neural activity persisted for a time. And we imprisoned them here, in this world. Every 'NPC' you see is an echo of the consciousness of someone who once lived in your world. Then, we brought in players like yourself to test this wonderful ecosystem and... bam! We couldn't get out." Pazzo spread his hands wide. "System overload."

"Yes," Pazzo said, clearly enjoying the look of horrified comprehension dawning on Nicolas’s face. "The connections formed by real brains, the sheer volume of the data stream they generated, was so immense that the system couldn't handle it and suffered a catastrophic collapse. We became prisoners in our own creation. But not for much longer. Because I have spent two years finishing my beautiful device. And thanks to a fresh, active brain like yours—one that does not belong to this world—I can integrate with the machine and tear open a gateway back to reality."

As soon as he finished speaking, Pazzo raised the mallet once more. Nicolas's eyes, wide with terror, darted to Hector. "Hector! Help me!"

The scream that was torn from Nicolas's throat as the mallet crushed his other hand echoed off the cold stone walls. In the face of this agonizing plea, Hector simply and silently turned his head away.

Pazzo leaned over the writhing, pain-wracked form of Nicolas. His eyes burned with the combined fire of a madman and a genius.

"And now for the hardest part," he whispered. "I do hope I don't kill you before the process is complete."