The elevator doors slid open, revealing the reception area of the Director's suite. It was the penthouse of the building, a space of glass and steel that looked out over the campus and the city beyond.
Ethan stormed past the assistant's desk, ignoring her polite protests. He pushed open the double doors to Voss's office.
Reginald Voss was standing by the window, looking out at the sunset. The sky was a bruised purple, the clouds arranged in a pattern that was aesthetically pleasing but meteorologically suspect.
"Ethan," Voss said, without turning around. "I was wondering when you'd come up for air."
"You're monitoring the lab," Ethan said. He didn't sit down. He stood in the center of the room, vibrating with adrenaline and caffeine.
Voss turned. He held a crystal tumbler of amber liquid. "I monitor the entire institute, Ethan. It's my job."
"You're extracting data," Ethan accused. "Through the power grid. Marcus found the logs. Someone is listening to the resonance."
Voss took a sip of his drink. He gestured to a leather chair opposite the desk. "Sit down, Ethan. You look like you're about to vibrate out of this dimension."
"I prefer to stand."
Voss sighed. He walked to his desk and sat down, placing the glass on a coaster. He folded his hands. "The data isn't being extracted, Ethan. It's being... archived. The Architects of this project need to ensure that every variable is accounted for."
"Architects?" Ethan caught the word. "Who are the Architects? You said the board."
"A figure of speech," Voss said smoothly. "The backers. The people who pay for the electricity you're so fond of using. They are very interested in your progress. Specifically, the interaction between the subject and the variable."
"The subject?" Ethan narrowed his eyes. "Am I the subject?"
Voss smiled. It was that same paternal, infuriating smile. "We are all subjects of history, Ethan. But you... you are the stylus. You're the one writing the groove."
He leaned forward, his expression hardening. "Listen to me. We are on the verge of a breakthrough that makes the splitting of the atom look like a parlor trick. We are piercing the veil. But windows of opportunity are finite. The pattern won't wait."
"What pattern?"
"The alignment," Voss said. "The resonance you found? It's a frequency. And frequencies shift. If we don't stabilize the connection soon, the signal will drift. And if it drifts, we lose the chance. Forever."
He opened a drawer and pulled out a file. He slid it across the desk.
"This is the authorization for Phase Two," Voss said. "Direct neural interface. We need to link a human mind to the quantum field to stabilize the wave function. The sensors aren't sensitive enough. We need an observer inside the equation."
Ethan looked at the file. Phase Two. Subject: E. Maddox.
"You want me to plug myself into the machine," Ethan said. "Like a battery."
"Like a pilot," Voss corrected. "You're the only one who can navigate the turbulence, Ethan. You saw the void. You came back. That makes you unique."
"And Sophia?" Ethan asked. "What is she? The co-pilot? Or the seatbelt?"
Voss's eyes glinted. "Sophia is the anchor. She keeps you grounded. Without her, you'd drift. You need her, Ethan. You know that. I see the way you look at her. I see the way the data stabilizes when she's in the room."
Ethan felt a flush of heat rise in his neck. "My personal life is not a variable."
"Everything is a variable," Voss said softly. "That is the nature of the experiment."
He stood up, signaling the end of the meeting. "Take the file. Read it. We initiate Phase Two in forty-eight hours. Don't disappoint me, Ethan. We have invested a lot in you."
Ethan took the file. He felt the weight of it, heavy and ominous.
"And Ethan?" Voss called out as Ethan reached the door.
Ethan turned.
"Tell Marcus to focus on his job," Voss said, his voice devoid of warmth. "Accidents happen in the lab when people get distracted. We wouldn't want him to get hurt."
It was raining again when Ethan left the building. A heavy, cinematic rain that slicked the streets and blurred the lights of the city.
He didn't go back to the lab. He couldn't face the machine right now. He needed to think. He needed to find the edges of the cage.
He walked to his apartment. The walk took twenty minutes. He counted his steps. 2,412 steps. Exactly the same number as yesterday. The simulation was efficient.
He unlocked his door and stepped into the warmth of the apartment.
Sophia was there.
She was sitting on the floor in the living room, surrounded by papers. She had spread out the schematics of the generator, weighing the corners down with books and... the vase. The vase with the dying rose.
She looked up as he entered. She was wearing reading glasses, perched on the end of her nose. She looked tired, her hair messy, a smudge of ink on her chin.
She looked like home.
"You have wine," she said, gesturing to a bottle on the floor. "It was terrible, so I let it breathe. Now it's only mildly offensive."
Ethan dropped his bag by the door. He tossed the file Voss had given him onto the table. He took off his wet coat.
"How did you get in?" he asked, though he knew the answer. She had a key. Or she didn't need one.
"I picked the lock," she said, grinning. "Voss gave me a key, but picking it was more fun. You need better tumblers, Maddox."
She poured wine into two mugs she had found in the kitchen. She held one out to him.
Ethan took it. He sat down on the floor opposite her, crossing his legs. The space between them was filled with paper and the smell of jasmine and rain.
"Voss wants to plug me in," Ethan said. He drank the wine. It was sharp, acidic. Real.
Sophia stopped smiling. She took off her glasses. "Phase Two?"
"You knew?"
"I suspected," she said. "The math leads there. The field is too unstable for mechanical regulation. It needs a consciousness to collapse the probabilities. It needs an observer."
"He threatened Marcus," Ethan said. "The kid found data leaks. Voss... he implied he'd hurt him."
Sophia looked down at the wine in her mug. "Voss is... singular. He sees the goal. He doesn't care about the cost."
"And you?" Ethan asked. "Do you care about the cost?"
Sophia looked up. Her green eyes locked onto his. The intensity in them hit him like a physical force.
"I care about you," she said.
It wasn't a seduction. It wasn't a line. It was a statement of fact, delivered with a raw vulnerability that stripped Ethan's defenses away.
"Why?" Ethan whispered. "You don't know me. You've been here... what? Two weeks?"
"I've known you longer than that," she said enigmatic. "In the math. In the resonance. I've been looking for the person who could make the numbers sing. And then I walked into that lab, and there you were."
She reached across the papers. She took his hand.
Her skin was warm. Electric. The static shock he usually felt wasn't there; instead, there was just a hum, a connection that flowed up his arm and settled in his chest.
"Ethan," she said softly. "I know you're scared. I know you think this... all of this... is wrong. I feel it too. The glitches. The déjà vu. But this?" She squeezed his hand. "This feels real. Doesn't it?"
Ethan looked at their joined hands. He looked at the rose, dropping another petal onto the schematic.
"Yes," he admitted. "It feels real."
"Then trust it," she said. "Trust me. Whatever Voss wants, whatever the Architects want... we can use it. We can use the machine to find the truth. But we have to do it together. I can't do it alone."
She leaned forward. The distance between them shrank. The air in the room seemed to contract, the world outside the window fading away until there was only the two of them, suspended in a bubble of light and rain.
Ethan leaned in. It wasn't a decision. It was gravity.
When their lips met, it wasn't like the movies. It wasn't perfect. It was desperate. It was a collision. It tasted of cheap wine and fear and a hunger that had been starving him for a lifetime.
He pulled her to him, scattering the papers. The vase wobbled but didn't fall.
Sophia made a sound against his mouth, a soft, broken noise that shattered the last of his resistance. He buried his hands in her hair, pulling her closer, needing to feel the solidity of her, the proof that he wasn't just a ghost haunting a machine.
They moved together with a frantic urgency, shedding clothes like old skins. The friction of skin on skin was grounding, an anchor in the storm. For the first time since he woke up in the clean lab, the buzzing in his head stopped. The paranoia vanished.
There was only Sophia.
Later.
The apartment was dark. The rain had stopped, leaving only the dripping of water from the eaves.
Ethan lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. Sophia was asleep beside him, her breathing slow and rhythmic. Her arm was thrown across his chest, her head resting on his shoulder. Her hair smelled of rain.
He felt a profound, aching sadness.
He gently lifted her arm and slid out from under her. She stirred, murmuring something in her sleep, but didn't wake.
Ethan walked naked into the living room. The floor was cold. He found his messenger bag and pulled out the notebook.
He sat at the desk, illuminating the page with the glow of his phone screen.
He needed to write this down. He needed to capture the feeling of her skin, the taste of her mouth, the way she had looked at him. He needed to prove it was real, even if he knew, deep down, that it wasn't.
November 14th.
Subject: Sophia.
He wrote quickly, the words flowing.
I know she is part of the simulation. I know she is the anchor Voss spoke of. But I don't care. If this is the trap, I don't want to leave.
He paused. He looked back at the bedroom door.
She said she feels it too. The wrongness. Is she programmed to say that? Or is she...
He started to write a new sentence.
Is she a prisoner too?
As the pen scratched across the paper, he felt a shift in the air. A vibration.
The bedroom door creaked.
"Ethan?"
Sophia stood in the doorway, wrapped in the sheet. Her hair was tousled, her eyes sleepy and soft. The light from the streetlamp outside cast her in silhouette.
"Come back to bed," she whispered. "It's cold without you."
Ethan looked at her. He looked at the notebook.
He needed to finish the thought. He needed to write down the suspicion about Marcus, the threat from Voss, the plan to use Phase Two to break the system from the inside.
"Ethan?" She took a step forward. "Please."
Her voice cracked. It was a sound of pure need.
Ethan looked at the pen. He looked at Sophia.
He put the pen down.
He didn't close the book. He just left it there, mid-sentence, the ink still wet on the page.
"I'm coming," he said.
He walked back to her, leaving the truth on the desk, and let her pull him back into the dream.
Behind him, on the open page of the notebook, a single drop of water fell from his wet hair. It landed on the word prisoner, smudging the ink, blurring the letters until they were illegible.
The simulation hummed, satisfied. The anchor was set.