This isn't real.

  I walked down the hall, attempting to control my breathing. It was coming out choppy and mechanical, like I couldn't quite take a full breath. My heart was hammering in my chest so loud I could hear it in my ears.

  My gun was gone, and I was stuck wearing the collar again. Looking around with my second sight didn't show any discrepancies. The idea didn't exist here. There were no minds here, and everything was as I recalled it to be.

  There was even a lit path guiding me where I was supposed to walk.

  This isn't real.

  I didn't know if I was being shown my past or perhaps a potential future. That's how these things work in fiction sometimes, right? A dream of a potential outcome or of an imagined past?

  But this wasn't fiction, no matter how much it felt like my life had turned into a storybook and I had become some sort of protagonist in it. That was silly, though. I wasn't a protagonist here; if anything, it would be someone like Vivi. A hotheaded fireball who could probably take an artillery shell to the face and walk off without a scratch on her, just by changing how kinetic energy transfer worked.

  She was the overpowered one; I was more like a support character that was introduced later on to complement the team's roster.

  I let out a shuddering breath of relief. This direction of thought, combined with the long walk, was helping me calm down. They kept the lab on the other side of the floor, behind over a dozen blast doors that required whoever was watching the cameras to open them up for me.

  I'm free. I wasn't brought back here.

  It wasn't even all for me. I passed dozens of rooms filled with unknowable beings, objects with odd properties, and so on. I'd never seen what was in those rooms. They never put windows on the doors, obviously.

  Arriving at the lab, I tapped my finger on the door to register my biometrics and accepted a handshake from the door with my interface. With a click, it unlocked, and I opened it and walked inside.

  The room looked exactly the same as the last time I had seen it. They hadn't brought me here in a while, after they finished what tests they could think up on me. The air in here tasted faintly of ozone. Someone had been using the electroshock chair on the highest setting recently.

  I remembered them using that on me. It wasn't pleasant. There never seemed to be any lasting brain damage, no matter what they did, though.

  This is an illusion.

  I found a seat at the interrogation table. There was nobody else here, so I wasn't sure what else to do.

  After thirty minutes of waiting, my mind spiralling, I got up and started pacing.

  Twenty minutes later, the door to the lab that I had entered through opened, and I turned to see which lab assistant it was. Only to see Vivi march into the room in her plainclothes.

  “Ready to go?” she asked while I breathed a sigh of relief. This wasn’t what happened, which meant it wasn’t real.

  “Yeah… ready whenever you are,” I said, standing up and following her out of the room.

  As soon as I passed through the doorway, the lights went out, and I was somewhere else. Alarms howled, red emergency lights streaked across the walls. I was holding Aurin’s hand and was running for some reason.

  Then there was an explosion of metal shrapnel behind us, and I remembered why, picking up my pace to get out of the area affected by the spatial anomaly, but taking the correct turn this time to lead us towards the elevator.

  “Where are we going?” Aurin asked.

  “You're not the real Aurin, right?” I asked in return.

  “What do you mean? Of course I am, you can check my memories if you want to make sure I'm not a shapeshifter or something,” she responded, confirming I hadn't been paired up with the real Aurin in this nightmare that started when I witnessed my own mind.

  I couldn't remember what I saw; all I knew was that it broke me somehow. Whether this was some kind of trial built by the idea or just a place created by my own perception playing tricks on me while it tried to resolve witnessing itself, I couldn't say.

  Whatever the case that meant this Aurin wasn't real.

  “Hey, I think I've been in love with you for a long time, but have been repressing it for your own good,” I said, words spilling out of my mouth faster than my mind could keep up. I didn't know how to talk to real Aurin about this, but a well-made copy? “I don't know how to reconcile that with the fact that I made you. Even though you've moved so far from what I originally intended that you’re basically already your own person.”

  I didn't mind spilling my inner thoughts to this thing at all.

  Aurin's eyes lit up, and she grabbed my face with both of her hands, “I know, stupid, obviously I know. You might keep a wall up when we join minds, but I can still feel what's going on underneath. All of that self-hatred bottled up in there isn't good for you.”

  Did I hate myself? I mean… I guess I kind of do.

  I had a kind of contradictory opinion of myself. On one hand, I believed I knew what was best for everyone around me and was willing to do what I needed to in order to impose that fact on them. On the other hand, I felt like I was a fuckup who couldn't keep their life together no matter how hard I tried.

  I didn't have much time to think about that before Aurin pulled my face into a kiss.

  This wasn't really what I had intended to do by telling her, but… whatever, she was warm and her lips were soft. When she finally let me down, I had forgotten the point I was trying to make. It didn't really matter anyway, I guess.

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  The fact that she wasn't chaste at all indicated this was probably my mind, not a trial designed by the idea. Which was useful information, now I just had to figure out how to break out.

  “We're not ending it with just that,” Aurin said as we entered the elevator.

  “Oh, I'm well aware of what you're planning,” I replied as she took my hand.

  “What?! Really? I thought I was doing so well hiding it!” she exclaimed, squeezing my hand.

  “Nah, sorry, we're currently in a blue jay. These events already happened,” I said, using our code word for a situation where our perception was being altered and we should not trust our surroundings.

  Aurin deflated when I made that comment, “Who's the blue jay in this scenario?”

  “Me.”

  “Someone got you?” she asked incredulously.

  “I got myself, I think. Something else was trying to get me, but it didn't take into account that my mind isn't really… standard issue,” I said with a sigh.

  “No, it is not, you're right about that,” she replied cryptically. Which was probably for the best, I didn't really want to know what I looked like mentally.

  Actually, could she even tell me something I didn't know? Given she was created by my mind, wouldn't it stand to reason that she could only know things I knew?

  I tried to think of something I could ask her that only she would know, but I didn’t, unfortunately, the elevator came to a stop before I could come up with anything.

  I stepped through the door into the blood-covered room and reality shifted again. This time, I was in front of the shield barrier, peering inside at the group of Atlas employees.

  Without really thinking, I just did the same thing as last time I was in this situation. Clearing out the room of people, then cutting the throat of the security guard.

  With a sigh, I turned to look at Aurin, who was standing there, horrified again. I just shrugged at her and continued onwards to the door downstairs. I'd rather be out of here before that muscle mass showed up again.

  As I walked through that door, my perspective shifted again. I was sitting with Aurin.

  I didn't bother engaging with her; I just turned to look up at where Vivi would show up. I wanted to get this over with.

  I had no idea why I was being shown this sequence of events again, but at least I wasn't being forced to live out my time at Atlas again, except trapped in my own mind.

  “Are we leaving now?” I asked Viv, who was sitting on the ceiling.

  “Yeah, how did you spot me?” she asked in return.

  “None of this is real, and I'm being forced to replay some event from my past. Trying to speed run through it because I don't want to be here, as you might imagine,” I answered.

  “Oh, damn, you joined up with us then?” she asked on her way down.

  “Well… no, I'm still deciding,” I said, only for Vivi to shoot me an odd look. Then she glanced at Aurin, her face going blank the moment she did.

  “Let's complete the simulation then,” she said, and marched away. This time, she didn't become furious at me. Instead, she seemed almost manic as she skipped down the hallway.

  Following Vivi out of the facility, we reached the shield. She threw a single protective suit at me without much fanfare. I pointed at Aurin while glaring at her.

  “That's not really a good idea,” she said.

  “Can you just let me finish repeating this so that I can return to my own mind?” I snapped at her.

  Aurin placed her hand on my shoulder, and I felt myself relax slightly.

  With a sigh, Vivi obliged, then once we were suited up knocked the shield barrier down with her hand again.

  As soon as I stepped outside of the facility, the world exploded into fractal patterns, and I fell back into that endless dream. The memory of it returned the moment I was back inside it.

  …

  I woke up lying on a shitty bed.

  “Subject M-436, please report to the lab for testing,” a machine-generated voice crackled over the intercom in my room. The collar on my neck started to beep.

  Fuck's sake. Do I have to do it all again?

  Am I being timed? I could finish it faster if need be.

  Throwing myself out of bed, I marched out of the room and down the halls until I made it to the lab and waited for the unskippable wait to end.

  “Ready to go?” Vivi asked, but I didn't bother looking at her; I just walked through the door.

  “Bluejay,” I said the moment I appeared next to Aurin. Then started leading her to the elevator. “Follow me.”

  She tried to ask me something, but I wasn't in the mood to talk. Once there, we climbed aboard, and I stewed in silence. Aurin put her arm around me and pulled me towards her.

  I let go of a little bit of the tension I was holding onto from being forced to relive this moment. Just a little bit, though.

  Arriving at the group of people, I made them go through the same routine as last time.

  Without looking at Aurin, I walked through the door. Then, without even looking up at Vivi got up and started walking down the hallway.

  “Whoa, hey, wait up a second,” she said, dropping down in front of me. “What's going on? You suddenly look miserable, and like you have a destination in mind.”

  That was interesting. Was the original me the one she remembered seeing between time skips?

  “This has already happened, some kind of anomaly, I'm trying to get out of here as fast as possible. This is the second time this has happened,” I replied.

  “If there's a loop going on, then you—” Was all I heard before I stopped listening.

  Looking at her mental model, I noticed there was something off about it. She wasn't angry or defensive at the moment, so the spider wasn't there. Instead, it was like the web was bouncing slightly.

  That was helpful. Joyous or manic minds were much more receptive to external manipulation as they didn't have the same defensive layers.

  “A new spider comes to roost on a nest long abandoned,” I said aloud, inserting the image I wanted into her model and seizing control of it. I probably couldn't do this to the real Vivi, who would expect something if I started speaking metaphors aloud.

  The action left me feeling like my mind was drifting away. I lifted my hand to my face. Then waited several seconds for the action to actually happen.

  Turning to look at Vivi, she was staring into space blankly, but her mind was fighting back against my intrusion. The new spider was finding the web sticking to it in ways that made control over it difficult. There was also a presence lurking somewhere in the distance of her mind.

  “I'm sorry, Vivi, this is for the best,” I said to her. My voice came out of my mouth chipped and delayed. It sounded like I was slurring my words as well.

  She shook her head back at me. Which was odd because I didn't make her do that. Some of her cognition must have slipped through.

  I walked up to her and patted her head, “We'll be out soon.” Her ahoge tickled my hand as it came close.

  With complete control over her, I had us all walk out of the facility. Aurin clutched my hand at some point, but my mind wasn't fully there, so I wasn't sure when.

  At the entrance, I had her produce two suits again, but for some reason, she started fighting tooth and nail when I tried to make her do this. Maybe something relating to not wanting me to spend her money.

  Also, I had no idea how The Stream actually worked, so I had to release some autonomy back to her in order for her to do it properly. She shook in place while I put the suit on and made sure Aurin had it too. I didn't want to walk outside and for us to just die from exposure, because the suits were technically necessary in real life, which the place I was trapped in was based on.

  I didn't want to find out what would happen if I died here.

  Taking hold of Aurin's hand, they walked through the door together after Vivi opened it. I felt myself falling back into that dream once again, fractal patterns endlessly expanding in my vision.

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