The corridor coughed her out again, like a system retrying a failed packet. Alice came to with her cheek pressed against the floor, the contact slick and warm as living tissue. Her HUD still screamed “CONNECTION LOST,” but the font had grown jagged, its outline squirming in a way that made her skin crawl.

  Above her, the ceiling no longer existed—just a haze of shifting code, glyphs like time-lapse clouds zipping past so quickly her eyes couldn’t fix on them. The Rabbit stood over her, his porcelain mask now tinged with faint shadows, eyes tracking her even as his body stood perfectly still.

  He offered a hand—six fingers fanned and almost gentle.

  “System resilience impressive,” he mused, his voice emerging as a double-helix of silk and static. “Most users error out by this cycle.”

  She ignored the hand and rolled upright, vision spinning as the corridor snapped back into shape around her. This time the walls bled light from countless hairline fractures, the glow pulsing in sync with the Rabbit’s voice.

  “Query sequence will resume,” he announced, head tilting forty-two degrees to the left. “Accuracy is appreciated, but candor is mandatory.”

  Alice caught her breath.

  “What if I lie?”

  The Rabbit’s mask smiled wider—so wide, in fact, a fine fracture formed across the cheek, as if the ceramic was about to split. “False inputs are easily detected,” he said. “But the system finds beauty in the effort.” His fingers began their tapping again, logging everything in invisible fields.

  He circled her now, his movements as smooth and precise as before, but occasionally stuttering—his entire frame would freeze for a half-second, then catch up all at once, as if reality itself was buffering his performance.

  “Full designation, please,” he said, though she’d already answered this once.

  “Alice Kingsley,” she replied, the syllables feeling foreign, as if she were quoting someone else’s biography.

  The Rabbit logged this with a rapid-fire staccato on his left palm. The blue light pulsing at each fingertip was brighter now, almost urgent. “Confirmation: User Seven-Seven-Four-Nine, alias ‘Alice Kingsley.’ Next: last coherent memory before recursive entry.”

  Alice hesitated. Her mind cycled through the same few images, but none of them felt authoritative. “Back-alley clinic,” she said, uncertain. “Cheap neuro-sync rig, the kind you only use if you’re desperate or suicidal.” The memory surfaced—plastic bench sticky with blood and antiseptic, the taste of copper in her mouth.

  The corridor flickered. Segments of the wall peeled away, lines of code bleeding out and running down the paneling like candle wax. For a heartbeat, the air was thick with the smell of burned plastic and nervous sweat.

  “Intriguing,” the Rabbit said.

  It’s voice overlapped by a chorus of quieter versions, as if a dozen Rabbits were asking the same question at different decibel levels.

  “Was this a voluntary procedure?” The Rabbit asked.

  “Nothing’s voluntary when you don’t have other options,” Alice snapped, immediately regretting the flash of emotion.

  The Rabbit paused, as if savoring her resistance.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Clarification: did you sign the waiver?”

  His head tipped another precise increment.

  “I was out of my mind, I just wanted it to work,” Alice said.

  The memory was clearer now: the surgeon’s hands shaking, the electrodes clamped to her scalp, the wall-mounted terminal displaying a contract she’d never read. She’d scrawled a signature anyway.

  “Noted,” the Rabbit purred, logging it with an even faster burst of finger-taps. “Purpose of procedure?”

  This question landed like a gut punch. Alice didn’t want to answer—not because she feared the truth, but because she feared what the truth meant here, in this place where nothing was real but everything was permanent.

  She tried to stall, glancing at the corridor’s edge. The ceiling was gone now, just a river of glyphs, the light from above flickering through her as if she were a shadow on a screen.

  “I wanted the noise to stop,” she said at last. “Couldn’t take the chatter. The ghosts. The—” She groped for a term. “The overlays.”

  The Rabbit’s mask split along the fracture for a moment, as if a secondary smile had grown beneath the first. “Commendable candor,” he said, and this time the static in his voice cut deep, like a razor dragged through a speaker cone. “Most users attribute their pain to outside sources. You recognize internal causation.”

  Alice bared her teeth. “Glad you’re enjoying yourself,” she said, her pulse a furious thrum in her temples.

  The Rabbit’s hands blurred, logging her responses into a field only he could see. “You misunderstand. My satisfaction is irrelevant. The purpose is diagnostic: we must identify the core error before escalation.”

  The corridor’s floor grew transparent under her feet, the paneling replaced by a direct view into a churning, bottomless data stream. Hundreds of tiny Alice-avatars swam in the depths, each one frozen in a different posture: screaming, weeping, running from something unseen. She recognized some of them—different ages, different styles, all unmistakably her.

  Each time the Rabbit logged a new answer, another avatar appeared below, glitched and flickering, then absorbed by the current. Alice felt something inside her fragment, a fresh wave of vertigo threatening to unseat her.

  She locked her knees and focused on the present.

  “What’s the point?” she demanded. “Why do you care about any of this?”

  The Rabbit’s head swiveled, the mask’s smile relaxing by a micron.

  “I do not care, Miss Kingsley. But the protocol requires a narrative. It’s the only language users understand.”

  His eyes blinked out of sequence—one, then the other, then both together.

  He drew close, so near Alice could see the infinitesimal cracks running through the mask’s glaze, the way light bent around the tips of his six fingers as they hovered over her pulse.

  “Query: do you regret the procedure?”

  She opened her mouth to answer, but the world telescoped inward—a tidal rush of memories, too many to sort. The back-alley clinic, the surge of white light as the needle drove into her brainstem, the way her limbs spasmed against the gurney. The technician’s face—eyebrows shaved to keep from contaminating the client—leaning in with a look of bored pity.

  “It’ll pass,” he’d said, voice wet with static. “The transition’s always like this. Just keep your focus.” She’d tried, but the focus dissolved into a thousand points of agony, each one a memory she couldn’t own or discard.

  The Rabbit’s query repeated, fractalized.

  “Do you regret? Do you regret? Do you—”

  Alice forced herself upright, fighting the pull of the data stream beneath her feet.

  “No, I don’t regret it. I regret being here, talking to you.”

  The Rabbit accepted this without offense.

  “Honesty noted.”

  He resumed his orbit, this time faster, his limbs stuttering more violently. With each pass, the walls of the corridor buckled, bleeding away the last of their substance. Soon there was nothing but a thin ribbon of floor, barely wide enough to stand on, and a sky of cascading code. Alice risked a glance upward, and for a split second, she saw herself reflected a thousand times in the glyphs above—some images younger, some older, all of them marked by the same desperation. The Rabbit halted directly in front of her.

  “Thank you for your cooperation,” he said, the phrase now nearly devoid of sarcasm. “Final query: what do you desire?”

  The question was so blunt it stunned her. For a moment, she couldn’t answer. The world seemed to pause, everything waiting on her response.

  She blinked.

  “Resolution,” she said.

  The Rabbit’s mask fractured completely, the smile splitting wide enough to expose a soft blue glow underneath. “Acknowledged. Resolution will now commence.”

  The last of the corridor vanished, dumping Alice headlong into a void of pure signal. Her ears filled with the sound of recursive query, her skin prickling as the system stripped away her last defenses, preparing her for whatever came next.