by Rich Larson

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Jain and Stromile sprint through a dark labyrinth, terrified, confused, pursued by digital bogeymen.

Oh. Well, this will be the last time.

Promise.

• • •

“Fucking wait, Stro’!” Jain wails, pounding along behind him, battering her bare feet against the black metal floor.

But Stromile is more scared than he’s ever been, too scared to stop, and his long legs carry him farther and farther ahead. The labyrinth has not been kind to them. Its shifting walls herd them one way then another, offering escape routes and withdrawing them just as quickly, and all the while grotesque forms pursue them through the gloom.

The cast is dredged from their oldest nightmares:

Once, on a virtual school trip to the Getty, Jain wandered into a Hieronymus Bosch exhibit and hovered for almost an hour in front of The Garden of Earthly Delights. Now she’s hunted by an enormous knife that rolls along on fleshy treads made from disembodied ears, by emaciated rats the size of bloodhounds, by a hopping claw-footed knight.

Once, trawling through his parents’ old downloaded movies, Stromile picked Black Swan because the looping thumbnail preview of Natalie Portman’s flushed face turned his ten-year-old guts into hamburger. But the only face that carved its way into his subconscious was that of the darting birdman, a split-second apparition with greasy black feathers, yellow eyes peering from pitted sockets.

Now a full murder of identical birdmen hops and flaps after him, caws drowning Jain’s cries as the corridor opens into a vast circular chamber. Their cacophony gains a new dimension, echoes birthing and eating each other. Ghostly glowing specks drift through the air like embers, providing just enough light to see 1) the artificial precipice ahead and 2) the narrow metal pier that stretches across it.

Stromile stops dead at the edge.

“Go, ‘Stro!” Jain howls, slamming into him from behind.

“Was waiting for you,” Stromile says, even though it’s a deranged lie. “Make up your mind.”

He gropes for her sweat-slippery hand. The nightmare legion advances. They flee across the metal pier, feeling a shadowy vastness on all sides and even within themselves. Halfway across, the pier splits and retracts.

They plummet into the adumbrate pit.

• • •

Both Jain and Stromile know how a fall can feel like forever.

Jain was fourteen, and hated her mother, who was plowing steadily up and down the free-swim lane. She marched up the grooved steps to the high dive because she knew her mother was scared of heights, and would panic even seeing her up there. At the top, with the pads of her feet anchored to pebbly wet concrete but the tips of her toes poking out into the void, she realized the fear was heritable. She found her mother’s small, goggled face in the chlorine-green water, gave her a casual wave even as her stomach began a churning mitosis.

Stromile was sixteen and his friends were jumping off a bridge, wouldn’t you? It was a bright clear day and the river was high. Fearless Corey gainered backward off the edge, twisting through the sunshine. Devin had to act fast to keep his place atop the hierarchy; he jumped off stiff-limbed, grim-faced as a soldier. Stromile would allow himself to be fourth, but not last, so while Ty went howling over the edge he set his beer on the graffiti-swathed metal and practiced a two-footed leap, making sure his shaky legs would obey.

This fall is far shorter than those, but the unknowing slows it to a crawl. They lose grip on each other as they plunge, arms and legs sawing the dark air, every synapse frosted over with terror. They fall until their fall is broken by bodies.

Jain bruises her ribs on a recognizably bony back. Stromile lands on a tangle of limbs; a familiar elbow drives the wind out of his lungs. The sloping sides of the pit recall a flytrap, one that has been filling slowly with corpses, and they have landed on the top layer of the dead. It takes them a moment to gather themselves, to wriggle back to each other in the dark.

“Jain,” Stromile says, his voice shocked limp. “Look at them.”

“I know,” Jain says.

Every square centimeter of skin and fabric is familiar in this mass grave, because every body is either hers or Stromile’s. When a glowing speck drifts past and illuminates a dozen of their stiff, colorless faces, she feels a strange jealousy that becomes ravenous panic that could swallow her whole if she lets it.

“What’s going on?” Stromile asks, though the similarly panicked part of him already knows.

Jain draws a deep, inexistent breath. “We’re emulations,” she says. “God fucking damn it.”

• • •

First priority is getting out of the pit. The bodies don’t seem to be rotting, but neither of them like lying on a bed of their own unblinking corpses – and as Jain points out, it’s possible they are not the first simulated set to survive the initial fall, and death might be ensured by some feature of the pit itself.

“Or maybe we just expire no matter what,” Stromile says, hooking his hands under one of his body’s armpits to drag it toward the smooth sloping wall. “Built-in timer-type thing. So even if we get out of the pit, we just – drop dead. When it’s time for the next pair to come through.”

“I don’t think so.” Jain points upward. “I think we’re experiencing a major glitch.”

Overhead, the retractable pier that plunged them so unceremoniously into their current environ is stuttering in and out of existence. A handful of their pursuers followed them over the edge, but didn’t fall properly: they hang suspended in mid-air, swimming sluggish freestyle, their various mouths and maws moving but emitting no sound.

“This is so messed up,” Stromile mutters, trying to heave his body to the top of the growing pile. “Sometimes, when I was a kid, I used to imagine this happening. I used to come up with dumb little tests to make sure I was real.”

“Well, we’re not,” Jain says, rolling a fetal-curled version of her body across the corpsescape. “So we have to just – make the most of it. Make a plan.” She watches his latest body tumble and slide out of position. “Why aren’t you using mine? They’re lighter. They’ll be easier to stack.”

Stromile’s eyes shrink and dull, his mouth locks down to a flat line, and Jain has to guess what’s going on his head. We can trepan and know: Moving Jain’s unmoving body reminds him too keenly of a night he thinks of often lately: Jain drugged herself senseless before bed and in the bleary midnight he moved her arm this way, then that way, like a prop, then slid his cold hand halfway up the inside of her hot thigh, just to warm it, then felt guilty and snatched it away.

“I’ll switch,” he says, and reaches for a set of her ankles.

Jain, meanwhile, is trying to reason out the why. Her prior life with Stromile is clear enough, the apartment and city and friends that they shared, but there is a vast fog-filled trench separating those sunlit memories and this dark labyrinth. Why were they emulated, and why are they running a maze?

Her first guess is mapping, that they are part of some algorithm seeking maximum transit efficiency – but that can be done by a fungus, to far better effect.

Her second guess is basilisk, a vengeful general intelligence that’s damned them to virtual hell for transgressions real or imaginary.

Her third guess is couple’s therapy.

• • •

“We wouldn’t do that,” Stromile says, muscling himself up and over the edge of the pit. He turns, squats, lowers a hand. “No way would we do that.”

“If we got desperate enough?” Jain’s concentration is split – half goes to the conversation, half goes to scaling the piled-up bodies. Stro’ made it look easy. “Dunno. I could see it.”

Stromile dangles a hand in the air like a lure, even though Jain isn’t nearly close enough to reach for it. That triggers a disproportionate fury inside her, and that makes her even more confident in her hypothesis.

“It’s so fucking cruel, though. To us. To emulations of us.” He frowns down at her, free hand knuckling his cheek. “We’re never cruel to each other.”

“Maybe we thought of it as being cruel to ourselves,” Jain says, finding her footing on her own contorted back. “Two lanes. You being cruel to you, me being cruel to me.”

She pushes off, grabbing onto Stromile’s forearm; he grips back and hauls her upward. Wriggling over the edge scrapes her ribs raw. The simulated pain feels extremely real, and when she looks across at the monsters suspended mid-air, at their hooked beaks and blades, she can’t suppress a fear-shudder.

It makes her angry, too. Some version of her – the real version, for whatever that word is worth – condemned her to be chased, maybe tortured, almost definitely killed, and conserved her capacity to feel pain. It feels like a punishment, and it’s no great wonder Stro’ is in denial.

“A really important experiment,” he decides, still squatting by the edge. “That’s the only way I’d volunteer for emulation. Like, if it was going to save a hundred times more lives than …” He waves down into the corpse-filled pit. “That.”

His concentration is also split. Half on the present situation, the protoargument with Jain, half on the fact of his own unreality. The blurs and gaps in his memory always (not always; he is code that has been running for no more than one emulated hour) seemed normal to him. Now each is suspect.

Example: Why can’t he remember his fourth birthday party? Because the fleshy architecture of a four-year-old’s brain was still growing, or because he is a cheap, stripped-down version of the full Stromile? Or, even more gnawing, because the full Stromile wanted to hide things from him? Can an emulation’s memories be selectively edited? If so, what else is subject to editing? He cannot trust the full Stromile, meaning he cannot trust himself, meaning he cannot trust –

“Jain.” He impales the fluttering thought while it’s still small, still controllable, and presents it. “What if only one of us is emulated?”

Jain rubs her side. “Don’t say that.”

“And the other one’s just a machine intelligence, or an avatar for the researcher.”

“Don’t do that, Stro’. Don’t get lonelier on purpose.” She stands, stretches real-feeling muscles. “Look. All I know is, you seem like you. I seem like me. We’re definitely in a sim, and the sim is almost definitely glitching, and we should take advantage of that while we can.”

“To do what?” Stromile asks dully.

“Find the edges of the map,” Jain says. “Find a way to clip through the walls. Fuck, I don’t know. Maybe we live here now, and we hunt those weird-ass bird-people for sustenance. Let’s just get moving, okay? It’s better if we’re moving.”

Stromile’s lips twitch, just the smallest feint toward the faintest smile. “Jain the Shark.”

“Stro’ the Seal.” Jain waggles her hand in front of him. “Up you get.”

• • •

They circumnavigate the pit, keeping an eye on their hanging pursuers, and find a new corridor opposite the one they fled through. To Stromile, this implies that the bridge does not always split and retract, and the flytrap is not always the end of the emulations’ brief and terrified existence. Some of them make it across.

“Maybe,” Jain says, when he voices the idea. “Or maybe if you take different turns in the maze, you pop out from that side.” She spirals a finger in the air. “I feel like the pit’s right in the middle of it all. You can take different routes but you end up here no matter what.”

She does not add, that’s life, but somehow Stro’ hears it anyway, and there are enough floating embers in the corridor to illuminate his brief flash of disgust.

“I would think that?” she guesses, heat rising to the surface of her face. “Because I’m so fucking cynical?”

“No.” Stromile pauses. “But this could be the tiniest waypoint. The map could be massive. Why would you think we’re in the middle?”

“Because I’m so fucking egotistical,” Jain suggests, and grabs Stromile’s hand, worms her fingers through his, because maybe that will help.

They keep moving, and eventually the corridor bifurcates. Right or left was simpler when they were shepherded by monsters and moving walls. Now the maze is frozen, and the couples’ therapy theory hangs over them like a chlorine cloud, and each decision excruciates. They become unnaturally diplomatic. Stromile mines Jain’s deepest right-or-left desires; Jain relentlessly reaffirms his feelings at every dark junction.

It’s a relief when they hear the soft scratching sound. They agree with their eyes and hands to follow it, and the next three turns require no discussion: right, left, left again, until the soft scratching is bone-shiver rasping. Stromile stops her at the next split, because he is still trying to make up for not waiting during the chase, and hunkers down to stick his head around the corner.

“It’s one of your demon things,” he reports. “It’s stuck.”

“They’re not my demon things,” Jain says, squeezing his shoulder a little too hard. “Unless we adopt one. Is it cute?”

That gets a laugh, the half-gasp Stro’ does when a dumb joke goes straight to his limbic system, and Jain can’t remember the last time she heard it, which means he must always have his guard up around her these days. She takes a deep breath, reminds herself the demon thing is only digital – less comforting knowing she is, too – and follows him around the corner.

It’s not cute.

• • •

It’s a naked man crawling on all fours, hands and feet and head turning into knurled black branches, with a grime-spattered convex mirror where its buttocks should be. The baffling anatomy is further confused by the way it flickers back and forth between two positions: on the floor, mid-crawl, and in the floor, frozen upside-down inside some sort of shaft. Each teleportation scrapes twisted wooden limbs against black metal.

“Glitching again,” Stromile mutters. “Think it’s a spawn point?”

Jain peers at the disappearing floor under the creature’s writhing appendages, trying to see down the shaft. “Maybe,” she says. “Maybe we can slip through here, too. Get to the – to the base code, or whatever.”

The demon has spotted them, no eyes required. It starts to snarl, clawing the air with its branch hands.

“Or get stuck like Mister Mirror-Butt,” Stromile says.

“Or just blink out of existence,” Jain says. “Yeah.” She eyes the thrashing demon. “But first, I say we kill that thing.”

Stromile feels a potent déjà vu. “Why?”

“To find out if we can.” She ticks her fingers as she speaks. “To make it sure it doesn’t follow us. To put it out of its misery, because it’s got a mirror for an ass. We’ll just stomp on its head and see what happens.”

“Can’t tell if it’s miserable,” Stromile says. “Maybe it likes having a tree for a head and a mirror for an ass.”

“I was kidding, Stro’. It doesn’t have likes or dislikes, because it’s not real.”

“Neither are we.”

Jain feels a foam-toothed wave of frustration building inside her. “Neither is God,” she says. “I’ll do it. You don’t even have to watch.”

She stalks forward and gets low, timing the flicker of superpositions, the motion of the demon’s branch hands – then Stro’ barrels past her, and swings his foot into its fleshy human gut. Its snarl becomes a winded moan, meaning it has simulated lungs in there. Part of Jain is still pondering that as Stro’ seizes one of its woody legs and drags the demon toward them, away from the shaft.

“You think I’m a fucking seal,” he says to it, voice raw.

The demon stops flickering, freed from its loop, but freedom is fleeting: Stromile pins it to the black floor, and the violence feels no different from childhood wrestling matches, so he goes further, grinding his knee into a knurled joint, pulling and twisting. The demon’s leg snaps clean off. Surprise stills him for an emulated heartbeat. Then his fury resurges and he sets to clubbing the demon with its own limb.

“You think I’m this dumb happy seal,” he grunts, swinging for its featureless head, “just sitting in the background clapping for you.”

Jain feels the dark wave crash inside her. “You called me a shark!” she snaps. “Like I’m some dead-eyed, heartless –”

She darts in and starts kicking.

• • •

The demon has a death condition, or something like it. Once its four limbs are torn from its body, once its stumpy head is a crush of splinters, it stops moving and moaning. This leaves Jain and Stromile sitting side by side with the carcass, flushed and panting, their digital adrenaline slowly subsiding. They look at themselves in the cracked mirror of its ass.

Stromile sees shards of his dad, who was always calm, always quiet, then once on a family road trip refused to let a jacked-up white pickup truck pass them on a hill – for his own good, he said, lurching on the accelerator, it’s dangerous to pass uphill. And the pickup sped up, too, and Stromile’s mom swore and said just let them pass, but Stromile’s dad gave him a strange clenched smile in the rearview mirror.

The white pickup truck gunned it, swinging into the other lane, thrummed past gleaming in the sun, and there at the crest of the hill an oncoming autohauler smashed it to pieces. Stromile’s dad kept driving, even though a flying chunk of metal had struck their windshield and webbed it with cracks. After a while, he pounded his fist against his thigh and howled: his fault, his fault, his fucking fault.

Jain sees shards of herself, but from a night (that feels) three months ago: drunk-flossing in the bathroom, staring at her toothpaste-flecked reflection, listening to Stro’ creak around on the bed. On the edge of the sink: a bottle of Tramacet, her mom’s untouched scrip for last summer’s herniated disk. You have it, her mom had said, because Jain had a migraine and never could handle pain.

She heard Stro’s sleepy giggle, him watching something on the wallscreen, and thought how nice it might be to be Stro’, to be a cool still lake instead of a thrashing whirlpool. She rolled the red pill between her fingers, poked it through her lips. Then another, and she knew any more would be dangerous, but the tiny part of her that wants to vault off bridges, or over the yellow stripe in the metro station, badly wanted a third.

“I’ve always been so scared to be mad around you,” Stromile says abruptly. “And lately I’m scared you think I just …” He drifts a hand through the dark. “Float along. Like nothing affects me. But on the inside, I get so fucking mad, and so fucking scared. And sometimes I have real bad thoughts, Jain.”

Jain blinks. “I think I need to go back on SSRIs,” she says. “But I didn’t want to tell you, because I thought you were a cool still lake. Not a seal. I never thought you were a seal. I just had to come up with an aquatic animal on the spot.”

“I meant shark in a good way,” Stromile says. “Like, always moving. Always surviving.” He knuckles his cheek. “And some sharks, you know, these gray reef sharks – they’re really social. They make friends. They probably tell each other all their dark tormented shark shit.”

Jain hugs him hard, and he hugs back, and the flood of emulated endorphins makes them both feel demented for not doing it earlier. They stay like that until the twist becomes awkward, then adjust, then stay like that until the black metal floor puts uncomfortable pressure on hip and tailbone. Finally, they let go and get to their feet.

Stromile’s dark eyes are thoughtful. “Do you think it’s glitching because it’s been running so long?” he asks. “Like, that’s how bad we are?”

“That’s how bad they are,” Jain says. “You and me – we’re okay. We’re going to be okay.”

“Because we’re going to hunt bird-people for sustenance,” Stromile suggests. “Learn to clip through walls.” He nods toward the shaft in the floor, which has finally stopped flickering. “Maybe find the base code, even.”

“And corrupt the shit out of it,” Jain says, giving him her most shark-like smile. “Yeah, Stro’. We’ll do it all, for however long we get.”

They take a last look at their reflections in the demon’s shattered ass, then roll its limbless body off the edge. It falls slowly and spirally, like a dead leaf, until the dark swallows it. A faint thud suggests a floor; the lack of crunching mirror-glass suggests it is soft.

Both of them know how a fall can feel like forever. Maybe you do, too. They walk to the edge, hand in sweat-slick hand, and jump anyway.