Another handful of male voices joined in on the vulgar comment about Janette.

  The pre-adolescent chorus—crude, banal—echoed inside the Mediator’s mind like an insistent cacophony.

  It irritated him deeply, and he couldn’t understand why.

  It wasn’t just the discomfort one would expect from an adolescent stuck in a locker room full of uninhibited twelve-year-olds. He was getting angry. Genuinely angry.

  And that anger resonated with the limbic system of the body he had been grafted into.

  His muscles tensed.

  Heart and lungs slammed on the accelerator.

  Within his visual field, the white patches settled slightly. For a brief span of time, the formation of some features became possible—some somatic traits. A few of those luminous stains took on an almost fully anthropomorphic shape.

  A boy—the least generic among the figures he could perceive, depending on how the visual field drifted—was laughing crudely to his left. His attentional window was misaligned with that of the body’s actual owner: he could choose what to look at, and that was the only thing he had control over.

  The body itself kept moving autonomously.

  That boy triggered a sense of familiarity.

  As if he had dealt with him before.

  As if anger were selectively sculpting the white regions his eyes settled on.

  As if, with a delayed effect, the ontological dissonance had torn him away from the sensory register he had been transplanted into—preventing, at the last moment, the completion of the psychic fusion—the anger faded. It dwindled into an emotional hum: something in which, yes, he could still recognize himself, and partly identify, but which no longer felt properly his.

  Though he was still emotionally involved in the scene, he was now observing it as if he had been presented with an embodied riddle: an enigma whose purpose was to infer what the individual to whom the body belonged might be thinking, once granted detached access to a bodily schema and an emotional map that were not his own.

  What was I thinking?

  The Mediator wondered, instinctively.

  He shook the thought off at once, even though it had felt disturbingly genuine. It seemed obvious to him that this was a memory he had repressed. But it could have been mere appearance.

  No. He could not be certain that it had been his body. In no case. Not even if it stopped merely seeming obvious and became obvious outright.

  He could not allow himself to stop doubting.

  He did not want to indulge the whims of that demonic piece of shit.

  The white figures faded again, as if they were tuned to the evolution of his relationship with the mind he had overlaid himself onto.

  Between a theory of mind applied at point-blank range and a form of preventive metacognition, he realized that the boy’s body—now increasingly restless—was approaching a critical threshold: that point beyond which tolerance gives way and one often ends up doing something stupid, impulsive, and potentially dangerous.

  Then the body stood up.

  It seemed to turn.

  Now it was much darker, crossed by a few vibrating white streaks. He heard the creak of a door opening. It was probably a locker. If that was a locker, then the flickering white patches inside it were personal belongings.

  He grabbed one of them, roughly the size of a rat. His hand was shaking.

  He closed the door.

  He turned again and, still standing, raised an arm. The unmistakable sound of a spray can followed. He felt the coolness caused by the cloud of particles fired into his armpit. He sprayed it messily over other parts of the body as well.

  He could feel that he was wearing nothing but underwear.

  The boy pulled on a pair of long pants—as far as the Mediator could tell from the sensation, they were jeans—as quickly as possible.

  From the boy’s body came an intense desire: to get out of there as fast as possible.

  And he was sharing it.

  Fuck, let’s get out of here, brat.

  Move your damn ass.

  Meanwhile, the other boys were laughing, while an adult voice—buried under a jungle of sounds that seemed to come from a video game—was swearing. The Mediator absorbed those noises unwillingly. Not only because they were irritating in themselves, but because they resurfaced, after a long time, the disgust he had always felt for gaming—or rather, for those who gamed that way: crude, loud, ungrammatical.

  Evidently, the boy shared that sense of revulsion.

  Because it was precisely while they were watching that clip—or video—just as he had grabbed something that looked like a T-shirt, or a shirt made of a not-too-dissimilar fabric, that the boy snapped:

  “SHUT THE FUCK UP FOR ONCE! JESUS CHRIST!”

  He felt shame spreading through the bodily correlate, as the anger dissipated after opening a very brief window of silence—broken only by the sounds coming from what was most likely a smartphone. The boy lowered his gaze.

  Why is he feeling ashamed? the Mediator wondered, in that short suspended moment.

  Someone to his left answered back. The distance from which the voice came seemed to match that of the least generic white boy he had noticed earlier, just before that fragile sense of order had collapsed. It was the same voice that had made the first comment he had heard since he had shipwrecked into that sea of mooney:

  “What the fuck is your problem, huh?”

  Other voices joined in, meta-comments:

  “Leave him alone, bro. He’s totally fucked in the head.”

  Someone laughed.

  “Even his name’s messed up. His parents must have a screw loose too.”

  “This asshole."

  A simulacrum—an assemblage of white patches seemingly coordinated in an organic way—its whiteness now more intense than the diffuse white around it, moved closer. It ended up right in front of him. An eleven- or twelve-year-old, amorphous, sharply bright white. Shorter than his avatar. From the way the visual field settled, he understood that they were locking eyes.

  The Mediator was tense. Not fused, but in the process of identifying. Suspense was preparing to become his new skin.

  The procession of bullshit his accomplices—or acolytes, or whatever they were—kept spewing turned into an indistinct mass of sound. Not because—at least it seemed—he was too focused on what was unfolding in front of him to parse individual semantic threads. Rather, because the semantic failure had begun before his attention narrowed onto what now looked like an imminent confrontation.

  It was as if all the other voices were degrading into a phonetic mess. A tangle of meaningless noise. Glossolalia.

  Even his sense of time felt distorted, erratic, as if at war with itself. He felt as though he were watching an anime episode from point-blank range—one of those anime where characters somehow find the time to engage in long internal monologues in the middle of a chaotic situation, or even during a casual conversation where thinking that much would be absurd and anomalous.

  The voice of the swaggering simulacrum-boy, on the other hand, came through loud, clear, and sarcastic:

  “Can’t you hear? If you’ve got a problem, say it. I’m listening. I can’t wait to find out what’s going on inside the little head of our failed lil poet.”

  Something brushed his temple. Maybe a finger.

  With everything in him, the Mediator wished the boy he was trapped inside would respond.

  And not with words.

  Instead—silence.

  And yet the body was tingling, as if that desire had still been registered on an emotional level. He was holding himself back. He clenched tightly around the spray can of what might have been deodorant. The suspense briefly slackened.

  Aside from sweat and a few other smells he already knew from the world he now lived in, any other scent felt almost mysterious. He could no longer tell with certainty, relying on smell alone, whether something actually was deodorant.

  The awareness of the fracture that had opened up between his sensory register and Earth’s sensory input saddened him.

  And the scene slowed.

  As if he were being forced to witness, with maximum attention, that episode of bullying—one in which the boy-as-reservoir was slipping into the familiar role of someone who, crushed by rampant idiocy, ends up suffering victim blaming.

  The classic: you brought it on yourself.

  “Are you really deaf, asshole?”

  “Hey, sweet little Mikey… you’re not seriously thinking you can tell me to shut up and then just stand there hoping I’ll lose the urge to break your ass, are you?”

  Mikey… the Mediator thought, uneasily.

  He felt trailed by that sense of familiarity. And now this new piece. Fortifying doubt into the conviction that doubting, in that moment, was the only safety measure available to him was becoming increasingly difficult.

  Then Mikey sprang like a coiled spring, raising the arm that held the maybe-deodorant. He heard a thunk. The simulacrum with the anomalous albedo collapsed to the ground. Right after, too much white moved in on him.

  He felt fear.

  He felt it as if it were his own.

  It was his.

  The Mediator vanished for a moment. And in that moment, he was thrown to the ground and beaten senseless. Punches and kicks. To the stomach, the head, the legs. He heard sounds. Voices, epistemically fractured.

  It hurts so fucking much, holy shit. Please. Stop.

  White filled almost his entire field of vision. Everything throbbed convulsively. Then, gradually, the pain began to fade. As if now he were being struck only by the receding echo of kicks and blows.

  Just as had happened before he ended up in the Sea of Mooney, he began to lose his senses progressively. The white figures frayed apart, until they became lines.

  The distance between himself and the lines increased vertiginously. Before their swan song, his senses—now extremely numbed—still allowed him to perceive a shift in posture. He was spinning, curled up, seemingly suspended in midair, within a black ocean.

  Far away, the white lines intertwined frenetically, forming a gigantic macramé-like sphere, as if thousands of titanic hands, each with thousands of fingers, were playing cat’s cradle at an inhuman speed.

  He could see—but it was a strange kind of seeing, as if he still had only two eyes yet could place them anywhere within his body—three-dimensional figures embedded in the overall weave, almost like bas-reliefs. The one that struck him the most was a Klein bottle.

  What surprised him even more was the fact that he could associate a name with that strange shape. It was true that information of that kind, in his new world, did not seem to suffer—by some arcane logic—the same fate as intersubjective information. Still, that was one of those useless facts that, according to the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, should have long since vanished unless periodically revisited. And it had never crossed his mind in the past two years.

  His stay within the womb of that tangle of white lines was brief. The lines suddenly transformed into a vortex that began to tighten around him. At a certain point, everything turned white. Then blindingly white. He closed his eyes—or rather, shut down whatever was functioning as his vision at that moment. Then he brought it back online.

  The Mediator was confused. He couldn’t form a coherent thought. And yet he was also seized by a fierce impatience: he wanted to uncover another piece of that story, no longer only because of the proleptic link between the narrative about that Mikey and Anton. He struggled to suppress the emergence of a desire for retrospective anagnorisis.

  Gradually, his field of view began to bring the surrounding environment into focus. No longer amorphous white blotches: now he could make out the outlines of what looked like a living room. Inside those outlines, everything appeared either roughly filled in with white, as if an impatient child had tried to color it in without precision, or left completely black.

  The outlines—white lines—were unstable, as if someone had traced over reality to animate it in black and white. God. Or rather, Audrey, or whoever stood in for her, misusing a technique known as rotoscoping. In other words: a mnemonic chronotope animated like absolute dogshit.

  A C-shaped couch.

  A low, wide table.

  A massive flat-screen television resting on one of the shelves of a sideboard that, even in this distorted reality, was clearly very expensive.

  The living room was large.

  And, once again, familiar.

  An adult female voice came from behind him.

  “Micheal! Don’t turn your back on me when I’m talking to you!”

  Mother, the Mediator thought coldly. He recognized the voice. He did not question the source of that vocal recognition.

  He turned slowly.

  His affective state conveyed cold blood.

  His mother was a female silhouette roughly filled in with white. Her movements, however, were fluid. She planted her hands on her hips, elbows jutting outward.

  “Don’t just stand there like a mannequin. Answer me! What the hell were you thinking? You could have killed him, you idiot!”

  The Mediator and Mikey responded with the same icy calm.

  Yes—even the Mediator.

  In that moment, the very words Mikey was about to speak flickered through his mind.

  “Self-defense.”

  “What? Self-defense? Are you fucking with me, you little shit? You yourself admitted, when questioned, that you first yelled at those poor boys and then attacked Shawn.”

  “There isn’t only that kind of self-defense.”

  “Oh, excuse me if I’m too stupid to understand what our li—”

  The living room disintegrated into dust.

  Literally.

  A swarm of white points detached from him and drifted away, just like the lines that had previously formed the macramé sphere. They rapidly arranged themselves into a ring. A toroidal structure the size of a football stadium, vibrating like a suspended screen—an image generated by static noise, frozen in place, hanging in a universe darker than Vantablack.

  This time he didn’t lose consciousness completely. And he could no longer shift the position of his stereoscopic visual field at will.

  His body schema was numbed, as if he were constantly on the verge of becoming paraplegic. He had a body—poorly drawn, like his mother’s. The same body as before. He seemed to be floating in midair.

  In reality, his sense of astonishment kept him from realizing right away that he could walk. He wasn’t floating: there was an invisible ground beneath him. Walking wasn’t ideal with proprioception this dulled, but he began to move toward the surface of the ring in front of him.

  As he approached, he noticed something. Gradually, the points composing the ring began to organize themselves into frames. He couldn’t see what was inside them yet. He was still too far away, and it would take time.

  Then he heard a voice.

  A voice off-screen.

  A shiver ran through him.

  It was Audrey’s voice.

  “Your mother was really a bitch.”

  Not as much as you, you fucking cunt, the Mediator thought with disgust.

  And yet, he couldn’t deny it.

  He hadn’t suddenly recovered the memories related to his mother, but merely thinking about her irritated him. A different kind of irritation: not rooted in a vague sense of familiarity produced by unconscious interference, as had happened up to that point, but grounded in genuine awareness.

  An awareness made possible by the opening of countless mnemonic micro-dams.

  His mind was slowly reassembling the portion of memory from which it had split after he had been isekai’d. But at that pace, it would take centuries.

  It was Audrey who carried the narration forward, verbally. Meanwhile, the Mediator moved toward the ring. His curiosity about exploring the environment had faded. It was strange to admit, but now all he really wanted was for that harpy to keep talking.

  “You really were an alienated kid, you know. So it must have been hard for her too. Or rather—maybe it’s more accurate to say it was hard only for her. For you, both she and your dad were nothing more than tools: a way to secure food and a roof. Everything necessary to keep the body from weakening or getting sick—things that, in turn, would have interfered with your creative process. You know… maybe the real asshole was you.”

  Those words landed like a sharp thrust.

  And they rang true.

  And that truth sent a stab of pain through his stomach.

  “But let’s not linger. Let’s move the story forward.

  As the end of your second year of middle school approached, you experienced creative block for the first time in your life.

  It wasn’t the first time you’d been unable to generate new ideas. That had happened before. But those crises lasted a few days at most. This one, instead, had already been dragging on for three months.

  At first you sat down as you always did: completely blank sheets in front of you, a pen, notebooks full of notes you gathered whenever you could during the day, before the phase you called ‘integration.’ Other times you chose to study, depending on what you thought would be more useful to determine whether your mental draft, once developed, might satisfy the requirements you had set for your personal ascent toward the ineffable.

  And yet, you struggled to be productive.

  It was as if an audience of thoughts—initially shy—had begun to raise its voice, gradually increasing the pressure on your self-control. But even that, all things considered, was manageable. Willpower had never been lacking.

  The real problem was something else.

  For someone who had always been able to ignore anything the body instinctively refused to recognize as a stimulus, the fact that certain stimuli were now imposing themselves—demanding at least attention—required a radical shift. A reversal in your attitude toward the very vocation you had believed, until then, you controlled.

  For example, the prematurely developed breasts of your classmate Janette were anything but a negligible distraction. You wanted to touch them. You wanted to join your horny peers as they displayed their arousal without restraint. Now you shared something with them—at last, a legitimate reason to attempt some form of social integration. And yet, even temptation alone was enough to turn into residual attention, and that residual attention ended up contaminating everything: not only the body of knowledge meant to be filtered through poetic technique, but the creative flow itself.

  The unified impression you derived from rereading your poems—when you tried to discern whether and where you had made progress—had changed radically. What had once been an abstract, uneasy yet still optimistic contemplation of your imagination had slipped into a contrived contemplation of something vague, opaque, and uninteresting: an escape attempt increasingly close to failing miserably.

  Naturally, you gave serious consideration to the idea of hybridizing your attempts to construct original, untainted passageways toward the holy grail of poetic hermeticism with the diverting tentacles of the milieu in which you operated. In that initial phase—brief, yet significant—which among other things marked the prelude to your creative block, you were convinced that by pursuing a new path, by gradually ceasing to resist those forces dragging you toward material banalities, you would merely be changing your point of observation.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  A different point, yes—but one that could still remain unique in its own way.

  In the end, you thought, the nature of the search would remain intact; only the tone of the works would change.

  But it wasn’t like that.

  There is a fundamental difference between identifying an unexplored point within shared experience—something that is, in principle, available to anyone—and transcending shared experience itself, creating a new destination for imagination to explore. The more the connectome and the milieu interpenetrate, the further one drifts from the unknown.

  All of this, when you were little Mikey, you didn’t understand.

  You felt it.

  Gradually, the time you devoted to poetry diminished. Your divorce from poetic research didn’t push you to adapt, nor to indulge those invasive stimuli, nor to “make a move” on Janette. You probably could have managed it, in my opinion. At that age you were already fairly attractive. Nor did it push you to make friends.

  Instead, it produced dysthymia.

  You turned into a kind of functional zombie. Hygiene and nutrition became intermittent concerns. At school you spoke to no one. Your academic performance collapsed, though it never became truly disastrous. You spent entire days in bed, doing nothing except generating fantasy stories in which you embodied a boy capable of doing what you had failed to do: finding a place where milieu and vocation coevolved.

  But in those stories, the vocation was never poetry.

  Thus, creative block gave way to definitive renunciation.

  Anhedonia.

  Your days followed one another, all identical, indistinguishable. The only thing that spared you from a severe depression was the hope—thin, stubborn—that perhaps, with time, you would manage to find a milieu in which to resume the search without having to compromise.

  Your locus amoenus."

  Meanwhile, the Mediator had moved close enough to the immense surface of that strange ring to notice that, inside it, rows of large 1s and 0s were flowing, changing at irregular speeds both within individual panels and from one panel to another. They resembled screens broadcasting real-time stock market data. Above and below him, the curvature of the surface was barely perceptible, the ring was so colossal.

  He found himself distracted more than once.

  The story had lost its bite, the way it does when you’re listening to something that could involve you, but you’re aware that an irreparable fracture has opened between the worldview of the protagonist and your own. The worldview of that child, and his own. His own as the Mediator, not as Micheal.

  What would he think if he managed to integrate the other fragments of the fragile archipelago of identities he was part of? What emotional impact would this story have had on Micheal?

  As Audrey spoke, he began to form hypotheses about how all of this might connect to Anton. Perhaps Audrey had lied about Anton, and was telling this story without any real reason, simply because she was insane and did things at random. Perhaps, he thought, I’m nothing more than a kind of stress ball for her.

  While he was ruminating, Audrey continued the story.

  “During the last year of middle school, though, that hope began to dissipate. The idea that a radical change of perspective was necessary started taking hold in your mind.

  Fuck poetry. I don’t need it. I never needed it.

  You kept repeating it to yourself.

  It still took months before you decided to change your life. And when you did, the change was abrupt. All of a sudden, you started taking care of your appearance.

  Your parents—who, for the entire period during which their son seemed like a periscope through which an alien presence stared at them from an abyss they wanted nothing to do with, had essentially vanished—were stunned when one evening you boldly asked them to take you shopping.

  You had never shown any interest in your wardrobe. From time to time, they bought you some cheap, anonymous clothes—things you wouldn’t reject, for reasons no one quite understood. Not even I’ve managed to figure that out.

  Your father was happy. He ruffled your hair with a smile he had never shown you before and said that in the following days, when he had more time, he would take you shopping properly.

  You had no idea what you liked in terms of clothing, nor what your peers liked, and you had no desire to argue with shop assistants to get advice. So your parents did almost everything. They even seemed to be enjoying themselves. You, on the other hand, forced yourself to believe that sooner or later this process of normalization wouldn’t feel inevitably empty.

  They also took you to get a new haircut.

  Making friends with your classmates would have been difficult. But that wasn’t your goal. Your goal was Janette, who had become even prettier in the last year.

  She was supposed to be your turning point.

  You were a tall boy. Very thin, but good-looking. And Janette, luckily for you, already found you fascinating and, even though you had always ignored her, had tried several times to strike up a conversation. So, awkward as you were, you managed to win her over quickly.

  I won’t dwell on your first date or the other details of the relationship—it was fairly ridiculous. Even to you, while you were living it. You didn’t have a crush on her. From your point of view, she was an utterly boring girl.

  No real turning point.

  Your mind remained plagued by the sense that you were neglecting something extremely important. Still, being with her was an injection of well-being and self-confidence. Somehow, the kisses and the first shy contacts with a female body made you happy. A faded happiness. A dreamlike clarity. A collection of moments in which you fooled yourself into believing there might be something even greater than your poetic yearning, now almost completely extinguished.

  But in reality, it was just sexual attraction.

  You felt nothing—perhaps not even affection—for her. You sensed that in that kind of relationship you could have obtained more, but not with her. And maybe you would have ended up developing the same kind of relationship with that feeling as you had with your poetic goal.

  You hated listening to her. You hated talking to her.

  She was fine with that.

  She was fascinated by your silences. She thought that indifference concealed a mystery that, with time and enough love, she would eventually unravel.

  How wrong she was.

  How much you misled her.

  Do you realize you were a piece of shit?”

  The question came out of nowhere.

  Inside himself, the Mediator confirmed that conclusion. If what she had said was true, that boy really had been a piece of shit.

  I really was a piece of shit, he thought.

  Then another question surfaced, slower, more poisonous:

  But who the fuck is preaching from the moral high ground here?

  "In any case, the relationship ended at the beginning of the summer vacation before you started high school. Shortly before that, you'd experimented with fellatio for the first time. She hadn't been particularly good at it, but you'd enjoyed the experience enough that you couldn't think about anything else. You wanted to do it again. You wanted to go further.

  It was precisely that awareness—how pleasant it had been on a purely somatic level, and how much more pleasant penetration might be—that set off an alarm.

  Sex could become the epitaph of your poetic crusade if you let it get entangled with romance. Or its remedy, if you exploited it as motivational fuel.

  Never before—after a year and a half of creative block—had the need to start writing again set your connectome ablaze. The jolt to your dopaminergic system had convinced you that partial integration into the social fabric and creative writing could peacefully coexist.

  But now you needed time to get your hand back in. And Janette represented a useless distraction.

  You thought you'd easily find someone to fuck later, once high school started. There was no need to commit to anyone. Sex was so good it was self-sufficient—you didn't need to put in even minimal effort to maintain a lasting relationship.

  Your ideal future: poetry and casual sex.

  But you were still a fourteen-year-old virgin who'd received a clumsy blowjob from an equally inexperienced classmate. When have a fourteen-year-old's plans ever worked out according to his predictions?"

  While Audrey was recounting the end of his supposed first romantic relationship, the Mediator had reached the surface of the toroidal structure. He touched it.

  It was damn cold. His senses, however, were still numbed, which dulled the impact. What remained was a strange sensation: a faint echo of what happens when ice burns under prolonged contact—more the idea of pain than pain itself.

  He walked along a segment of the ring as Audrey went on, describing Mikey’s thoughts about what his future was supposed to look like.

  At the word according—outside his field of vision—lines burst forth from one of the panels behind him, far away. They resembled the webs Spider-Man shoots from his wrists: sudden filaments, taut, impossible to anticipate.

  They struck him.

  They wrapped around him.

  They yanked him backward.

  All the panels looked virtually identical, and each one was smaller than he was. Despite the lingering numbness, when the network of white lines seized him violently and began forcing him into one of the panels, the pain flared sharp and unmistakable.

  He screamed. Loudly. Uncontrolled.

  His body folded into an unnatural posture: head and legs thrust forward, his forehead nearly brushing his knees. His arms, still outside, reacted instinctively, grasping for the inner surface of the ring in a desperate attempt not to be swallowed.

  Predictions.

  It had all happened too fast.

  Resistance was useless.

  He fell onto something soft.

  A bed.

  Mikey’s bed.

  Obviously familiar.

  Around him, the room. Austere. A space that felt like an improbable hybrid between a monastic cell and a hikikomori’s refuge: stripped down to deprivation, yet layered with isolation. Nothing superfluous, nothing inviting. Only what was necessary to remain shut in.

  His visuospatial sketchpad must have been saturated with information, because although the world was still rendered in black and white and the outlines of objects quivered slightly, they were no longer distributed at random. Details were emerging. Proportions held. The definition, if not sharp, was at least stable.

  It was as if, with a physiological delay, the episodic buffer—the fragile interface between consciousness and long-term memory—was slowly resuming operation. As if traversing the recesses of his past had not been merely observational, but structural: the gradual reconstruction of a bridge that had been damaged.

  He stood up.

  Not by choice.

  In front of him, the desk.

  A sheet of paper.

  A pen.

  Both trembled faintly, as if still waiting to be called into use.

  At first, the emotional climate in which his consciousness drifted—detached—was saturated with pure frustration.

  He recognized it immediately: the frustration of someone who hadn’t merely disappointed himself, but had already stopped believing he could ever live up to his own expectations.

  His wrists began to itch.

  A destructive impulse.

  The more the anger grew in the body, the more the Mediator’s psyche overlapped with Mikey’s. When Mikey grabbed the chair with wheels and hurled it at the mirror fixed to the wardrobe—screaming—the glass exploded in a sharp crack, a liberating crash. In that instant, the Mediator was absorbed. Temporarily erased.

  The cognitive defusion between the Mediator and Mikey intensified immediately afterward, as the body—almost as if that single gesture had been enough to empty it—began to show increasingly convincing signs of release.

  He caught sight of himself in the cracks of the mirror still clinging to the wardrobe.

  Messy hair.

  The T-shirt and shorts—black, with a few white strokes suggesting folds—clearly hadn’t been changed in days.

  He laughed.

  A loud, solitary laugh, sealed inside the room.

  He dropped onto the bed and covered his face with his hands. He felt that Mikey felt the need to cry. But no tears came.

  The Mediator felt compassion.

  He wanted to comfort him.

  To comfort himself.

  He wished he could go back in time, stay with Janette, if only to avoid realizing that between his personal keyhole—the one through which he had believed he could peer into the heart of the infinite from a unique, incomparable angle—and Mikey’s connectome, a Galilean chasm had opened.

  The intuition that had sparked his passion for poetry had been an illusion.

  A childish illusion.

  Now, definitively lost.

  His immature senses had deceived him.

  The Mediator couldn’t hear Mikey’s thoughts, but he knew what he was thinking. And he also knew what he would do next.

  He would write a poem.

  One of many.

  He would devote the last month of his summer vacation to honoring his vocation. That month would be the swan song of his poetic vein.

  He bent over the desk.

  Picked up the pen.

  An Olympian calm flowed through him. At that point, it no longer mattered what had originally driven him to devote so much time to poetry.

  The Mediator thought—and he thought it as if he were speaking to Mikey:

  now I am free to aim the third eye wherever I wish.

  The poetic self, the Mediator’s self, Mikey’s self fused in the exact instant the tip of the pen traced the first character.

  That day, the first lines he wrote were both the worst verses he would produce in that period and the cornerstone of the atmosphere that would permeate all the others:

  Foul murmur.

  blood evolves;

  the senses sharpen, but they rot.

  I witness, powerless,

  the molt that renders imagination desolate.

  At the exact moment he placed the period, something tore him away from that room with brute force.

  He saw it recede, shrink, as if the walls had suddenly turned transparent. Details vanished as the distance increased. It felt as though he had fused with a screen while, for some arcane reason, a 3D modeler was zooming out at an unnatural speed.

  Everything turned black, except for a few white fragments of the room, now reduced to a flickering dot.

  Once again, he slipped out of every sense—except sight.

  Then he was expelled.

  He landed hard on a black floor, abruptly reinserted into a sensitive body. Losing and regaining consciousness so violently felt like an icy stab, followed by sharp shivers, like small lashes striking along his spine.

  He got up.

  The place resembled a corridor. To his left, absolute blackness. To his right, thin white lines traced the inner angles where black walls met, emitting a faint, unstable glow.

  He chose the right without thinking.

  He walked forward.

  No sound.

  The smell of mold.

  He felt the urge to speed up. He had the distinct sense that something extremely important was nearby, and he wanted—needed—to reach it.

  He was filled with a tense, almost electric anticipation.

  He walked at a brisk pace until the corridor forced him to turn left.

  The new stretch opened up in front of him, long—so long that he couldn’t tell where it ended. The geometry of the space changed: no longer just a succession of black surfaces and angles, but an arrangement that introduced, for the first time, a choice.

  There were doors.

  They were distributed along the walls, irregular in sequence. Some were open, their panels flung outward, motionless, and from those openings filtered a minimal, pallid white light, meager, just enough to signal a presence beyond the threshold. Others were closed, black, opaque.

  He knew it: beyond that corridor lay the area that had been drawing him in from the beginning. The point toward which his movement tended almost automatically.

  But now that attraction was no longer pure.

  A secondary curiosity had lodged itself in his attentional field, disturbing it. Not strong enough to replace the main objective, but sufficient to interfere: what was behind those doors? And, above all, why were some open and others not?

  He tried the first ones he encountered.

  They were closed.

  They didn’t yield.

  The surface offered a blunt resistance, without response. No variation. No signal.

  He could have ignored them. Kept walking, followed the direction he felt was necessary. The impulse was there, but it couldn’t fully assert itself.

  He kept moving forward.

  He passed four closed doors—two on the left, two on the right. The smell of mold remained constant, low, like background noise.

  At last he stopped in front of the first open door.

  It was on his left.

  Facing the threshold.

  Black.

  From its center, concentric white waves pulsed outward, expanding until they broke against the doorframe.

  The temptation to step through that specific doorway wasn’t particularly strong. He sensed it would be a waste of time. Maybe other doors would provoke something different? He could still turn back. Maybe if he went in, he’d never find out how all of this connected to Anton. Or maybe the opposite was true. Maybe if he kept going, the door would close behind him. Maybe Audrey had conditioned him to believe there was nothing important here, only to lift that conditioning later and let regret surface. And to what end?

  Useless to think about it.

  Really—useless.

  He had to suppress, as he had so far, the human brain’s spontaneous tendency to suffocate lucidity beneath egocentric or anthropocentric hypotheses.

  He couldn’t afford to stop doubting.

  In the end, some persistent itch would have to remind him that, no matter what the emotional current suggested, derealization should be the dominant sensation throughout this entire dreamlike—virtual, or whatever-the-hell-it-was—journey. Even if that meant complete depersonalization.

  He wasn’t afraid.

  He brushed the threshold. A timid, icy jolt ran through his bones. His hand disappeared past the penetrable surface, without disturbing the concentric waves in the slightest. He pulled it back.

  Why not? he told himself.

  His calm—similar to post-coital well-being, disturbed only by the sense that something truly important was now within reach—encouraged him to prolong the path. Maybe just to pretend he still had some measure of self-control.

  So he stepped inside.

  This time, the chill that froze him to the bone was anything but timid.

  And yet—it was intensely pleasant.

  His POV shifted.

  He was inside a girl’s bedroom.

  He hadn’t really paid attention to the objects in the room. He was simply about to throw a girl onto the bed. His right arm held her around the knees. Her body—full, firm in the way he liked—was covered by jeans, perfectly positioned for his left hand. Everything was still rendered in two tones. Black and white, with black dominating, as if a mangaka had drawn on a black page and he had plunged straight into it.

  He felt arousal pressing against his clothes.

  The wiring of the body his ego had slipped into overpowered him through excitation alone.

  He threw the girl onto the bed—large, wide.

  She let out a small cry.

  Seeing a girl in those colors was strange. But now the details were hyper-realistic, as if only color were missing. She was really pretty. She was clearly aroused too—visible in the expression on her face.

  The body grabbed her by the legs and dragged her forcefully closer.

  Another small cry.

  I really did have good taste, the Mediator thought.

  She tilted her head to the right. Feigned embarrassment.

  Then he was violently ejected.

  The contrast between the intensity of the sensations inside that body and those outside was abrupt. Only for an instant did he register that the body back in the corridor seemed disturbingly engineered to eliminate anything that might slow the path toward the strange attractor.

  It was as if his self-control were under house arrest, and whatever was policing his emotions was utterly inflexible.

  One paradox of human decision-making is that emotional control grants the ability to choose, but only by simplifying the self into something less alive.

  It was perhaps in reaction to that limbic assertiveness that he went back into the room.

  Exactly the same sequence unfolded.

  Then he was expelled again.

  A mnemonic clip.

  Nothing more.

  At that point, the attractor prevailed.

  He resumed walking and, along the corridor, entered five more open doors. Not all of them—there were many more than he had anticipated. The corridor had revealed itself to be longer than he thought, as if it were stretching while he advanced.

  Why those five?

  He would have said it was random.

  But the doubt remained: perhaps he had been compelled to enter precisely those doors, by some mechanism he couldn’t perceive.

  And yet, he hadn’t felt anything different in front of them compared to the ones he had passed by.

  In the first clip, he was sitting on a bench. It was night. He was smoking a joint.

  His mood was calm, but dark.

  He was hungry.

  A faint nostalgia intertwined with the chemical hunger.

  It was evident that this moment belonged to a period that was anything but happy—to put it mildly—and yet the placid stupidity that followed was, undeniably, pleasant.

  In the second, he was beating a guy bloody.

  Others were trying to stop him, shouting his name, begging him to calm down.

  A girl stepped in front of him, crying. He shoved her aside without hesitation. She fell badly.

  In the end, they restrained him. Some spoke to him the way one speaks to someone who has lost control: with fear, with caution. Someone said “friend.”

  There was nothing in the body that could suggest they truly were.

  To the Mediator, those people conveyed nothing. No familiarity.

  But the rage coursing through the body as it struck—that he recognized.

  And it was liberating.

  More and more, it felt as though those doors contained what little remained of a dark period of his life.

  Saying that he “remembered nothing” was no longer accurate.

  After the final, exhausting, dramatic poetic efforts of that summer, he had loosened the restraints on his impulses and let them guide him, reducing existence to a pendulum: sex and violence.

  All of it set in a melancholic, desolate wasteland.

  In the third clip, he was in class.

  Rocking back and forth on his chair. Looking out the window—even though there was nothing defined outside it.

  Voices of teachers and classmates formed a continuous murmur, on which the tired apathy in his eyes rested.

  “MICHEAL!”

  The teacher. Male voice. Hoarse. Unpleasant.

  “Why the fuck are you yelling, idiot? What the fuck do you want?” Micheal replied.

  The Mediator experienced the scene with detachment, but from the same point of view.

  He didn’t disagree with the reaction—more in line with Psycho-Mike than with himself—but he couldn’t feel it as his own.

  “You’re wanted in the principal’s office, Micheal,” the teacher replied, resigned.

  “I don’t feel like going.”

  “Why do you always have to be like this?”

  Micheal stared at him.

  The contempt he felt was arbitrary, clean. He had no intention of talking to him.

  He stood up.

  “Yo—” the teacher tried.

  “Shut up, asshole,” Micheal said, passing him and cutting him off.

  The path to the principal’s office was stripped of detail.

  The people he encountered along the way were barely sketched, more similar to the rotoscoped mother than to the level of definition he had grown used to in the previous scenes.

  The principal’s office was devoid of detail as well.

  The principal himself was a squat black mass, outlined by an unstable white halo. In front of the desk there were two chairs. On one sat a man just as lacking in definition, completely black, as if the scene held no emotional value for him whatsoever.

  So why was that damn door open?

  The Mediator perceived his indifference.

  He perceived Micheal’s intolerance at being forced to listen to people toward whom he felt nothing: neither respect nor contempt.

  What irritated him was simply that they wouldn’t leave him alone.

  That they were trying, with evident clumsiness, to shackle him with their bullshit.

  “Oh, Micheal, thank you for coming. Have a seat.”

  From the tone, he seemed genuinely happy to see him. The voice, however, trembled slightly, as if he wasn’t used to using that register with someone like him.

  From what he had inferred by observing the previous clips, the Mediator believed he understood why.

  And yet, in that body there was no signal suggesting that Micheal was wondering about the reason for this meeting.

  Micheal sat down.

  “Sorry for calling you in so suddenly. But don’t worry: you’re not in trouble. On the contrary, I’d say we have some excellent news for you. This gentleman came here specifically to announce it.”

  “Who are you? What do you want?”

  The tone was flat, but charged with a glacial irritation.

  A brief silence followed.

  The Mediator would have sworn he could imagine the expression that would have formed on that smooth, black face, if only details had been allowed to exist.

  “Hello, Micheal. My name is Anil Berth. I’m very pleased to meet you.”

  He extended his hand. Micheal did not take it.

  The man struck the Mediator as instinctively unpleasant as well, for no clear reason. In that fantasy world, after all, the first thought that crossed his mind whenever he interacted with anyone—known or unknown—was always the same: Shit. What a nuisance.

  A moment of hesitation, then the man continued.

  “I’m something of a delegate for a group of prestigious literary organizations that award the title of National Youth Poet Laureate each year, recognizing the most promising poetic talent in the United States. Have you ever heard of it?”

  “No.”

  “I assumed as much. It was rather difficult to gather information about you, since you’ve never shown any real interest in youth literary competitions. But let me ask you something out of curiosity: why did you send all your poems to the Urban Poet Group in Salt Lake? If you weren’t interested in showcasing your talent, wouldn’t it have made more sense not to share any of them?”

  “None of your fucking business.”

  “Uh.”

  A brief pause.

  “As I was told, you do have quite a temperament. A real rebel. You know that many people, after reading some of your poems, have compared you to Rimbaud?”

  “They’re wrong. I’m not a rebel. Rimbaud and I are very different. If we had met, I probably would have beaten the shit out of him.”

  “What?”

  The voice lost its certainty for a moment, then resumed.

  “Perhaps I explained myself poorly. You and Rimbaud are clearly different. Your poems are far more anguished, nihilistic, saturated with resignation. But more attentive eyes haven’t failed to notice that some recurring motifs in your work closely resemble his. Two different perspectives gazing into the same unknown.”

  “I repeat: they’re wrong. Those you call attentive, to me, are blind.”

  The principal intervened, without much conviction.

  “Come now, Micheal. Try to be a bit more respectful with our guest.”

  “No, no. Please don’t worry, Mr. Fate,” Berth interjected. “There’s no problem at all. It’s clear the boy isn’t interested in exchanging ideas with me. And that’s perfectly legitimate.”

  “Exactly. Get to the point. Move it.”

  Micheal’s tone was flat, but this time the irritation was real. He wasn’t interested in the conversation, but neither did he particularly want to go back to class: between here and the classroom, there wasn’t much difference anyway. The Mediator recognized that familiar, dulled emotional map.

  “All right. In short,” the man resumed. “Some members of the Urban Poet Group, struck by your style, submitted your poems to several competitions. Many of them won. Before long, rumors began circulating about a young cursed poet. Those rumors reached people within our network. When we engaged with your poetic imaginary, we were astonished. Technically, there are poets more skilled than you—after all, the award is usually given to older youths with more experience—but never, since the inception of this title, has someone so young managed to drag adult, expert readers into a timeless abyss, alternating objective correlatives and abstract imagery the way you do.”

  “I told you to get to the fucking point!”

  He snapped. This time, for real. The Mediator linked the outburst to the previous sentence: a load of bullshit, after all.

  “All right.”

  A pause.

  “In short: congratulations, Micheal. You are the youngest person ever to receive the title of National Youth Poet Laureate.”

  “Wow. Fantastic.

  Can I go, principal?”

  He stood up without waiting for a reply.

  The principal brought his left hand up to his face. He was at a loss for words.

  Anil didn’t say anything either.

  Micheal turned to leave.

  “Wait—” Anil tried.

  Micheal cut him off.

  “Stop busting my balls. I don’t give a single fuck about your title. The people who hand it out don’t understand a damn thing about poetry. The poems you judge are worthless. All of them. Mine included.”

  He paused. Not to think. To force him to follow.

  “And do you want to know why I think that?”

  He waited.

  “Why?” Anil asked, his tone impossible to decipher without the aid of any visible body language.

  “Because there’s nothing to understand. Poetry is either shit glued to the banalities of everyday life, or it’s self-deception. Humans like to fool themselves. Some poets build better illusions than others and move from deceiving themselves to deceiving everyone else too.”

  His voice hardened, sharpened.

  “You — like all people who call themselves passionate — are nothing but a sheep. A blind follower of the bullshit that pathetic losers cobble together with their imagination so they don’t have to stare the void in the face. Poetry — at least the kind that tries to do what I was trying to achieve — is one of the biggest scams in history.”

  The words came out harsh, almost feral.

  And yet they clashed with what was growing inside him.

  A wide, muted sadness.

  A pressure that felt close to breaking through.

  For a moment, it truly seemed like he might start crying.

  But the Mediator never experienced the peak of that distress.

  He was yanked out.

  That clip too — the longest so far — had come to an end.

  Then came the final clip.

  It was the last open door.

  And one of the last doors along that corridor.

  Farther ahead, to the left, distant enough to remain indistinct yet close enough not to feel unreachable, a narrow band of soft light was calling to him. A pale, stable strip. Most likely the strange attractor.

  He wanted to go there immediately.

  And yet, for the first time since entering the corridor, he felt anxious. A thin anxiety—not sharp, not overwhelming, but sufficient to slow him down. The thought of what he might find beyond that light unsettled him.

  Perhaps that anxiety—until then imperceptible at a conscious level—had always been there.

  Perhaps it had been precisely that which had driven him to step through the open doors one after another.

  Only one remained.

  He could have turned back.

  The very idea of retracing his steps now intrigued him.

  But the attractor was stronger even than that faint hesitation.

  Paradoxically, it seemed as though that very trepidation existed in order to push him through the door.

  He entered.

  This clip was the shortest of all.

  Within that body, the affective landscape was pure despair.

  A quiet despair. Without spasms. Without drama.

  Whoever inhabited that body had completely lost sensitivity to beauty, harmony, and meaning. There was no anger. No acute pain. Only a stable moral void.

  The Mediator recognized himself in it—and that recognition alarmed him.

  He remembered that emptiness.

  Once again, he came close to psychic fusion.

  For a brief instant, he stared into the deepest abyss he had ever encountered.

  But he managed—by sheer chance, without understanding how—to enact cognitive defusion.

  He clearly remembered, or convinced himself he remembered, that during that period he had repeatedly contemplated suicide.

  Not as a moral act.

  Not as an expression of despair.

  An aesthetic suicide.

  Suicide as a subtype of existential caprice.

  Perhaps it was his mother’s voice that enabled the separation.

  She was seated on the opposite side of a bare table.

  He was wearing something resembling a uniform—hard to say, given the usual problem of bitonality.

  Perhaps it was a juvenile detention facility.

  His mother did not look him in the eyes.

  Everything happened quickly.

  He understood very little.

  She said only:

  “Wasatch Advanced Learning Program. It’s a high school for gifted students. It was founded just a year ago, but it’s already considered very prestigious in the region. Perhaps there you’ll meet students who can make you feel less alone. What do you think, sweetheart? I’ve already spoken with the school. They would be very interested in working with you.”

  On his mother’s face — defined, readable—there was genuine concern. Not hysterical, not theatrical. A tired, restrained worry, as though she were trying to save something without knowing anymore what it was, or how.

  He dropped back into the body standing in the corridor.

  Wasatch, the Mediator thought.

  Anton, came immediately after.

  The residue of anguish he had carried beyond that door lingered only briefly. It dissolved quickly, like an emotional echo losing cohesion as soon as it was no longer sustained. Now he wanted to reach the strange attractor immediately, driven by the increasingly clear impression that the link between that attractor, the ultimate purpose of the experiences he had undergone in that bitonal limbo, and Anton was the high school his mother had named.

  He was so restless that he broke into a run toward the glow.

  He became short of breath.

  It was a strange kind of breathlessness.

  He had never stopped to consider how abnormal breathing was in that place: the air seemed to offer resistance selectively, as if every inhalation had to pass through a medium governed by slightly different physical laws. Oxygen was not lacking, but the breath never fully anchored itself to the body, as though the lungs were operating in an adjacent dimension, subtly misaligned.

  It took him a few minutes to reach the glow.

  To get there, he passed through a corridor similar to the one that had led him to the passage lined with doors. When he arrived, he found himself facing a fork: he could continue straight ahead, into absolute darkness, or he could test an open doorway positioned at the beginning of the opposite wall of a passage that opened to the left, skirting the bleak corridor.

  The threshold was a liquid film, unstable, threaded with faint, ephemeral, shifting bands of light that surfaced and vanished without ever settling into a definitive form.

  Colors finally appeared.

  The membrane was pale blue, streaked with irregular veins. Red, blue, orange, and green dominated. Looking at them was like watching a lit building on the ocean floor: light filtered, warped.

  Once he caught his breath, he fixed his gaze on the threshold.

  The trepidation was at its peak. His heart pounded hard, too hard for that numbed body. Then he crossed it. The sensation was almost identical to the one he had felt at the previous thresholds, but amplified—as if the same experience had been compressed and then released with greater violence.

  On the other side, he was seated in a classroom again.

  Few desks, all occupied. His was near a wall made almost entirely of windows, just like before. But it wasn’t the same classroom. He knew this without needing to reason it out: this was Wasatch.

  Everything retained the texture of the membrane. As if the scene had been sculpted out of that substance and then animated. Sounds arrived muffled. His head throbbed. The pain was dull, persistent.

  In front of him, someone was speaking, standing beside a large rectangle. At first he couldn’t make out the words. His gaze stayed locked on that rectangle, which didn’t seem to be a chalkboard. That, probably, was the even larger panel behind—or sometimes to the side of—the figure seated on a swivel chair: a liquefied silhouette that had to be the teacher, slowly rotating.

  Interactive Whiteboard, he thought, as the pain in his head gradually began to subside.

  He couldn’t take his eyes off the one speaking beside the multimedia board.

  Is it him?

  Could it be Anton?, the Mediator wondered.

  He felt it with unsettling clarity: in that classroom, the only real bond he perceived was with that boy. Everything else remained in the background—opaque, interchangeable. At first he couldn’t parse the words being spoken. The sound reached him as a continuous stream, offering no semantic footholds. Then, gradually—without a clear transition point—the language began to align. Sentences took shape. Meaning stopped slipping away.

  It became unmistakably clear the moment he uttered the name Hofstadter.

  The voice was warm, low, unexpectedly pleasant. Perhaps it was pleasant because the Mediator knew—without knowing how—that Anton was someone he had loved. Perhaps because it was his voice. He was certain of it. He spoke with an effortless fluency, as if thought and language were synchronized without friction.

  Fuck doubt.

  I remember this voice.

  I really remember it.

  “Hofstadter suggests that consciousness is precisely a strange loop: a ring in which the cerebral system, passing through increasingly abstract representations of itself, ends up generating the notion of an ‘I’ that observes and lives experience. In other words, the mind builds a self-model—an image of itself—and this model becomes the internal subject, our self. Consciousness, for Hofstadter, is the emergent condition of a symbolic system capable of self-representation.”

  Fuck.

  I remember.

  I remember this day.

  The anagnorisis was not gentle. It was violent. Like being ripped from sleep by a bucket of ice water.

  The iridescent, cerulean substance the boy was made of began to solidify. Not abruptly, but with organic continuity, as if it were simply changing state. Colors emerged one by one—the ones the brain instinctively assigns to real people. In a few seconds, as though shedding a liquid cocoon, a human figure stood out sharply against the otherwise uniform space of the classroom.

  Anton.

  Tall. Thin without being striking. Brown hair falling wherever it pleased, without any recognizable order. Careless just enough not to look intentional. But the gaze—that was what mattered. Sharp, faintly irritating. The gaze of someone who dissects you while you’re still deciding what to say.

  The Mediator’s eyes flew open.

  Anton looked at him. And smiled.

  Something warmed in his chest.

  How long has it been since I felt this warmth?

  Is this what it feels like to see someone you truly care about again after so long?

  He wanted to stand up. He wanted to run to him and embrace him. He didn’t even remember being capable of feeling something like that.

  He didn’t know what to think.

  In truth, he didn’t want to think.

  My friend.

  Finally.

  His eyes filled. He tried to hold it back. Pointless. A few tears fell anyway. Everything else lost its meaning. The classroom, the lecture—none of it mattered. Only the two of them existed.

  That emotion—so intense, so unmediated—shook the archipelago of identities that until then had remained stable thanks to detachment. It wasn’t a collapse. It was worse. More subtle.

  Small changes occurred, imperceptible even to the Mediator. An infinitesimal Hopf catastrophe—a micro-fracture, irreversible, in the balance between semi-autonomous identities. A new equilibrium, almost identical to the previous one—but no longer the same. And with no way back.

  A step toward integration.

  Enormous, for something that happened in a single instant.

  Meanwhile, Anton kept speaking.

  “If we want, we can also cite Blindsight, Peter Watts’s novel, which sums it up brutally: Metaprocesses blossom like cancer, awaken, and call themselves I.”

  Meanwhile, the interactive whiteboard had begun its own metamorphosis.

  The same process that had allowed Anton to reappear, but slower, as if it were struggling to keep up. The whispered voices of the classmates were growing clearer. That mnemonic reality was gradually shedding its liquid mask.

  “If consciousness is a retrospective narrative produced by the brain—a kind of user interface that gives us the impression of having a choosing self, the story the brain tells to explain to itself and to others what it is already doing—then wouldn’t free will ultimately be just an illusion? Consciousness works a bit like a heads-up display.”

  A ripple of snickers spread through the classroom.

  The Mediator laughed too.

  The teacher—still a cerulean, unstable puppet—flinched.

  An image had appeared on the interactive whiteboard, one the Mediator could now clearly see:

  A dark-haired boy, with the typical look of a pornhwa protagonist, stared at a holographic panel floating in front of him, eyes wide open. The display projected statistics in glowing characters:

  [SEXUAL STATS]

  Endurance: 8/100

  Size: 12 cm

  Technique: 2/100

  Ejaculation Control: 5/100

  Charm: 15/100

  [UNLOCKED SKILLS]

  Virgin (Permanent Debuff)

  The boy stared at the panel with a mix of shock and humiliation, while a mechanical voice announced:

  “Welcome to the Sexual Leveling System.”

  Behind him, blurred, a female figure smiled.

  “Anton! Have you lost your mind?”

  The teacher’s voice trembled with indignation. “Your presentation had been excellent. Why the hell did you ruin it like this? I demand an explanation.”

  “But prof,” Anton replied, managing to simulate surprise with disarming ease, “I’m not a huge fan of litrpg either, but your reaction seems just a bit over the top.”

  “Are you fucking with me?”

  The voice cracked. “Get out of my sight. Now.”

  That was the moment reality shattered.

  He found himself suspended in midair.

  All around him, cerulean droplets—some iridescent—floated motionless. The movement of the scene was almost imperceptible.

  Like a freeze frame.