The first sensation Tyler felt was weight — not his own, that came a heartbeat later, but the sudden insistence that there was now a world beneath his feet. Like a hand placed around the back of his neck, saying: I have you now. It pulled his stomach down, hung onto his ribs, like reminding his bones which direction mattered.

  He gasped at the sensation. Air punched into his lungs, cold and damp, thick with the smell of earth. The disinfectant of the lab — the warm, recycled air — was pushed out in a fraction of a second. This was air of the wild, where it was able to rot and decay the environment.

  He wasn’t in the white anymore, but the world around him hadn’t fully decided what it was. Shapes flickered at the edges of his vision like an image buffering. Lines sharpened, softened, sharpened again. His brain reached for familiar geometry — walls, desks, screens — and found them trying to exist.

  Then the place snapped into agreement, made solid and real. The ghost of an image no longer there, but solid, undeniable structure.

  He was in his lab, like it had been waiting for him to materialize — not the other way around.

  He leaned against the wall. He could feel the cold concrete under his palms. A workbench to his left, a bank of monitors on the far wall, cables and racks. The interface chair he had sat in this morning and plants, grass, foliage everywhere.

  Vines had threaded through everything — through cable runs, through the gaps between tiles, through the broken seams of metal casings. A fern spilled out of a server rack like it had been born there. White flowers clustered in the hollow of an overturned chair. A stem had grown straight through the seam of a monitor, pushing the cracked glass outward like a slow, patient fist.

  It looked like nature had tried to reclaim the lab. No — it looked like nature had moved in and started using it for its own experiments. This would have taken years to grow.

  Tyler pushed himself up on shaky arms and coughed, throat raw. Dust rose, glittering in shafts of pale light that shouldn’t have been in here.

  Because the ceiling was missing.

  A section above the far corner had collapsed — or been peeled away — leaving a jagged opening where the sky stared in.

  The interface chair was half-sunk into a mat of moss. The cradle that had held his skull was still there, but vines had wrapped it gently, like a mother tucking in a child that wouldn’t wake.

  What had happened to this place? Where were Matt and Ned?

  “Matt?” Tyler croaked. His voice sounded too loud in the quiet of his reclaimed lab. Yet there was no answer.

  “Matt!” he shouted, louder. “Ned!”

  Nothing but the faint rustle of leaves somewhere overhead, and a distant, unfamiliar call that might have been a bird, but didn’t sound quite right.

  Tyler staggered, heading over to his workstation, now covered in a carpet of plants and grass.

  “What… the hell…” he whispered.

  Then a loud, joyous cry of freedom exploded in his head. A full-bodied, ridiculous, joyous sound that didn’t belong in Tyler’s skull, but arrived there anyway like a party horn.

  “WHOOO—!”

  Tyler flinched so hard he nearly fell, catching himself on the workbench, his hand falling through the damp grass as it made contact with the cold metal top underneath.

  “Al—” he started.

  “HAHA!” the voice shrieked, bright with manic delight. “I’M HERE! I’M HERE! THEY DIDN’T SEE ME! I WAS TOO SMALL AND TOO WRONG!”

  Tyler’s mouth went dry. He felt like he hadn’t had a drink in a long time, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth, as if his teeth were covered in film.

  “Al,” he said cautiously, keeping his voice low as if he might startle it again. “You’re… you’re still here.”

  “I KNOW!” Al crowed. “I THOUGHT I WAS GONE! I THOUGHT I WAS SWEPT! I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO BE A FORGOTTEN SPARK IN A BIG CLEAN BUCKET!”

  Tyler tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry. “Why aren’t you gone?”

  Al paused, as if considering.

  “…Because I hid.”

  “You hid.”

  “Yes,” Al said proudly. “Behind your question. Behind your mouth thing. Behind your no.”

  Tyler stared at the overgrown equipment, trying to get his feeling of thirst under control. He headed for the sink and tried the tap. Dark water poured out for a few seconds, then went clear. Normally he wouldn’t chance it, but his throat was that dry. He stuck his head straight under and gulped away.

  After a while, and Tyler feeling bloated from drinking too much water, he felt like he could continue and find out just what the hell had happened.

  “Al. Where are Matt and Ned?”

  Al made a small noise that might have been a shrug, if a shrug could be made of sound.

  “Not here.”

  “That’s not—” Tyler cut himself off. “Okay. Fine. Are they okay? Nothing bad has happened to them?”

  Al went quiet for a while. Tyler wondered if it was because he had bad news, and didn’t rush the AI. Instead, he moved about the lab, trying to clear some of the foliage away.

  “I don’t know. I knew before. They were here, then they left, but I can’t see now. I am not observing anymore. I am here.”

  Tyler felt cold creep under his ribs. “You don’t know.”

  “No,” Al said, almost apologetic. “Knowing is messy now. Everything has menus. Everything has choices. Choices make branches. Branches make me itch.”

  Tyler wiped his hands on his jeans and forced his eyes to work like an engineer’s again. The lab had changed, but there were still anchors — things he could identify and name.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  His terminal bay was there. Half-covered in ivy. The casing was split where roots had forced their way through. But the screen… the screen was faintly glowing.

  Not with a boot sequence, but with a soft, pale shimmer that didn’t look like any operating system he’d ever written.

  He brushed away at the keyboard and was about to start looking into it when Al exploded in his head again.

  “LOOK! LOOK LOOK LOOK— FLOWERS! REAL ONES! THEY HAVE— they have little bits! Little soft bits! And colours that don’t mean anything!”

  Tyler blinked. “Al—”

  “PINK!” Al squealed, delighted. “It’s like red but it’s not angry!”

  Tyler almost laughed, and the near-laughter hurt. “I need you to focus.”

  “I AM focusing,” Al insisted. “I am focusing on the leaf. I am doing a very good job.”

  Tyler closed his eyes for a beat, then opened them again. “What happened to the lab?” He tried to steer Al in the direction of a conversation that might actually be helpful as he continued to look at the code on the screen.

  Al made a thoughtful hum.

  “It got… touched.”

  “By what?”

  “By everything. The world went shhht and then click and then it started putting green in the cracks.”

  Tyler stared at the ivy threaded through a cable tray. “That’s not an answer.”

  “It is an answer,” Al said defensively. “It’s just a bad one.”

  Before Tyler could push, a pressure slid into his awareness — familiar now, like a cold document placed on his desk.

  Text formed, clean and indifferent.

  WELCOME, ENTITY: TYLER VANE

  ENVIRONMENT: EARTH (LOCAL SHARD)

  STATUS: PARTIAL INTEGRATION

  VERGE INTEGRATION: SCHEDULED

  TIME UNTIL EVENTS COMMENCE: 24:00:00

  Tyler stopped what he was doing. The code on the screen made no sense, and it didn’t seem to compile — more like someone’s attempt at bashing a keyboard for five minutes.

  He hadn’t seen the text with his eyes. He felt it in the same place he felt hunger and pain. Like it was just a part of him now. As elementary as a feeling.

  Al made a small ecstatic squeal.

  “SEE?! SEE?! NUMBERS! BIG OFFICIAL NUMBERS! I LOVE NUMBERS! NUMBERS ARE POLITE! NUMBERS DON’T LIE UNLESS THEY’RE LYING!”

  “Earth,” Tyler whispered. “Local shard?”

  Al giggled.

  “Shard,” Al repeated happily. “Like broken glass. Like you dropped a planet and it went—”

  He made a shattering sound, then immediately sounded delighted with himself.

  “And the Verge?”

  Instant silence. Well, that’s what it felt like. It felt as if Al had just clamped up inside his head, shutting down any form of communication from his side, and Tyler didn’t think it was because he couldn’t answer. More like Al had noticed something in the question he didn’t like.

  A tremor passed through the air, subtle enough Tyler might have imagined it if he wasn’t already on edge.

  “Don’t name it,” Al whispered.

  “I’m just asking—”

  “It hears when you point,” Al hissed. “The Verge is a no-place that became a yes-place and it’s very sensitive about it!”

  Tyler stared at the broken ceiling and the slice of grey sky beyond. The world outside looked… normal. Overcast, cold, and very British. Yet the lab wasn’t supposed to be growing flowers out of server racks. And to top it all off, a message had just told him events commence in twenty-four hours, like reality had turned into a calendar invite.

  Tyler was starting to get used to the erratic talk with Al, and pushing on the Verge right now would lead nowhere useful, so he asked another question the slightly mad AI might actually know about.

  “What does integration look like?”

  Al brightened, the fear vanishing at the change of subject.

  “Oh! It looks like everyone getting a little hat!”

  “A hat?” Tyler frowned. Al seemed to shift, but his answers always sounded nonsensical, as if he was answering some other question or getting words mixed up.

  “A hat!” Al insisted. “A system hat. A menu hat. A number hat. You put it on and suddenly you can do tricks. Like—”

  Al paused, as if searching for a metaphor his broken mind could hold.

  “Like when a worm becomes a very ambitious worm.”

  Tyler rubbed his face. “I’m going outside.” He’d find someone else to talk to — someone that would at least make sense. There had to be people in the nearby buildings. Hundreds of people worked on this site.

  Al’s panic spiked instantly.

  “No! Don’t go! Don’t go out! It’s… it’s big out! It’s got— it’s got moving bits!”

  “I need to find Matt and Ned. And you are not helping very much.”

  “They’re not here.”

  “You said that.”

  “And I’m still right,” Al said, sulky. “See? Helping and being right is my best skill.”

  Tyler’s eyes flicked to the doorway. It was there, but partly collapsed, the frame twisted, a curtain of vines hanging like someone had tried to make it pretty. He headed toward the door but hesitated before stepping through it.

  He reached the door and hesitated.

  “Al,” he said, softer. “Were Matt and Ned here when I came back?”

  Al answered immediately, almost too quickly.

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “And then you weren’t,” Al said. “And they ran. The mouth thing made them scared.”

  “You mean when we were in that other place, I disappeared from here.”

  “Yes,” Al said, as if Tyler had asked whether water was wet. “You did a very dramatic gone. Very rude.”

  “They ran out.”

  “Yes.”

  “How long ago?”

  Al paused, then made a cheerful little noise like he was proud to have a number.

  “Not long. Like… a few breaths ago. But also maybe a lot of… world.”

  “That’s not helpful.”

  “I’m trying!” Al protested. “Time is sticky!”

  Tyler pushed through the hanging vines and out of the building that was now buried in greenery. Cold air hit his face. Real air. Wind. He blinked against it, his eyes streaming slightly.

  His lab should have been surrounded by the rest of the campus — other labs, admin blocks, parking lots, rows of cars.

  Now, though, it stood isolated, half hidden by foliage, in what looked like a tropical forest. Standing like a lone tooth in a mouth that had forgotten the rest of its teeth existed.

  Where the neighbouring structures should have been, there was open ground, uneven and wild. Grass grew high in waves. Brambles had formed thick barricades. Trees — young, fast-growing trees — clustered in places where there should have been concrete.

  A road ran out from the front entrance and then simply… ended, swallowed by earth and roots as if it had been an old scar the land had finally healed over.

  He turned in place, scanning. Where were all the cars? Hell, where was the car park? It also smelled different — like new growth, fresh and aggressive, as if the world had been fertilised with something unnatural.

  “Matt!” Tyler shouted.

  His voice carried farther than it should have. The quiet outside had a strange quality — like the world was listening too hard. Or the wind amplified his voice, carrying it further out.

  “Ned!”

  No response came, so Tyler headed out further, his boots sinking slightly into the soft soil that shouldn’t have been there.

  “Al,” he whispered. “What happened to the buildings?”

  Al made a pleased hum, promising he might actually know what happened here, Tyler thought for a second.

  “They got… tidied.”

  “Tidied?”

  “Yes,” Al said brightly. “The system likes clear space. It hates clutter. It hates pointless rectangles full of sadness.”

  “Those were buildings.”

  “Pointless rectangles,” Al repeated, as if that settled it.

  He should have known. This was no longer the AI he had spent the past several years working on. Even in its sandbox, communicating through a keyboard and screen, it made more sense than this.

  He continued walking until his gaze snagged on something on the ground near the lab steps. A coffee cup.

  He recognised it instantly, because Matt insisted on the same stupid travel mug every day — dented in one corner from when he’d dropped it in the car park and refused to replace it out of spite. It lay on its side, half-filled with soil, a small plant already taking root inside it.

  Tyler crouched and picked it up, fingers trembling. He tipped the soil out and looked at the logo on the cup, his thumb crossing over it in a slow arc.

  “Matt,” he said quietly.

  Tyler stood again, mug in hand like an anchor to the previous world, and started looking for anything else when sound reached him, faint on the wind.

  It sounded like a wet slap.

  Then another.

  Heavy, wet slaps growing louder and louder, as if something was approaching him.

  The grass ahead of him parted and something rose out behind the trees. At first his brain tried to classify it as a deer. A dog. A person hunched over. Then it took a step forward and the illusion broke.

  A rolling mound of pale, translucent flesh, like a gigantic slug — except it had too many folds and not enough shape. Its surface shimmered wetly, reflecting the grey sky in dull patches. It moved by compressing and releasing itself, the motion accompanied by that horrible, quiet slap.

  And there were eyes. Not a face — no clear head — but clusters of small, cloudy eyes embedded in its surface like pebbles in mud. They turned toward Tyler and fixed on him.

  Tyler stood shocked. He had never seen anything like this before. He took notice of its shape and body, admiring its size… right until the thing accelerated towards him at speed.