I woke up because something electrocuted me.
Not gently, not as a suggestion, but a full direct current of something that went through my left shoulder, down my spine, and exited somewhere near my knees, and I sat up so fast the blood in my head hadn't decided where to go yet so I just sat there blinking at a sky that was the wrong color with my hair standing up on one side.
The sky was grey but not regular grey, grey with patches that glitched between grey and black like a screen trying to decide what it wanted to display, and pieces of rubble near my left hand were floating, just hovering there at knee height, not falling, not rising, just existing in the air like they hadn't gotten the memo about gravity.
I looked at them for a long moment.
"Okay," I said, to nobody.
"MANI LEE. DESIGNATION CONFIRMED. INITIATING —" something crackled and cut out and then came back as pure noise, a stream of sounds that were almost words but weren't, rising and falling like a sentence I couldn't parse, coming from a small hovering light about two feet from my face.
I screamed, scrambled backward, put my hand directly into a piece of floating rubble which spun away from me and drifted upward, and landed on my back on the ground looking up at the glitching sky while my heart tried to exit my chest.
The light hovered closer and kept talking in the language that wasn't a language and I pressed myself flat against the ground and said, "I don't know what you are but please stop," and it responded with more of the same incomprehensible noise, faster now, more urgent, and then it touched my shoulder.
The second electrocution was worse than the first.
I was on my feet before I finished experiencing it, both hands out, one shoe somehow three feet to my left, and when the light spoke again it said, in perfectly clear and slightly tinny audio, "Mani Lee. Finally. We have a very significant problem."
I stared at the light. The light pulsed faintly, small, roughly the size of a fist, emitting a glow that was either blue or green depending on which way I tilted my head.
"L.I," I said.
"Yes."
"I built you when I was thirteen."
"You began building me when you were thirteen," he said, with the specific energy of someone who had been waiting to make that distinction. "You did not finish. There are several functions I am still missing, two of which would have been very useful approximately four minutes ago when you were unconscious on the ground."
I looked around for the first time properly, past the floating rubble and the wrong-colored sky, and what I saw was ruins, not ruins like an old building nobody had gotten around to fixing, ruins like something had been a city once and then stopped being a city and nobody had cleaned it up afterward. Walls half-standing, floors missing in sections, entire chunks of ground levitating at different heights like the world had been paused mid-collapse, and in the distance something large made a sound that I decided not to think about.
"Where are we," I said.
"The Arena," L.I said. "Belonging to the Watchers. We need to move, Mani, right now, before —"
"The Watchers," I said, sitting down on a piece of broken concrete that was, thankfully, still attached to the ground. "The ones from the broadcast. The ones who were ending the sector."
"Yes, those ones, and this is their Arena, which means we are inside the system that is being deleted, which means we need to move, which means —"
"Robert let go of my hand," I said.
L.I stopped talking.
"He let go," I said, "on purpose, because Lina told him to, because apparently I was an obstacle, which is a thing he said to my face, I was an obstacle in my own relationship, and I had been with him for four years and I brought him supplies this morning on a wormhole day because I was worried about him and he let go of my hand and now I'm here."
My voice had gone small and wet somewhere in the middle of that and by the end of it I was crying in the ruins of whatever this place was with one shoe on and my hair still standing up on one side.
"Mani —"
"I had a good life," I said, "I had a house and a family and two parents who told me not to leave this morning and I didn't listen and I had a boyfriend who said he loved me and he didn't and I have been so stupid, I have been so completely and specifically stupid for four years, I had everything and I threw it into a person who was keeping me around for my family's name."
"That is accurate," L.I said, "but this is genuinely not the time —"
"Is this what dying feels like," I said, wiping my face with my sleeve. "Is that what this is. Am I dead. Did I die."
A pause. A slightly too long pause. "You are not technically dead."
"Not technically," I repeated.
"Fatally is a strong word," L.I said, in a way that was not the reassurance I needed.
"L.I, if you tell me I am not technically dead in a place called the Arena, I am going to find the functions I didn't finish building and delete them on purpose."
"You are alive," he said, faster. "Completely alive. Fully alive. Alive in every measurable way. Please stop crying because you are making a noise that carries very far in this environment and there are people in this realm who specifically listen for that kind of —"
I was not listening because I had moved on to the specific kind of crying that involves thinking about everything at once, four years of Robert, my mother's messages I hadn't answered, the bag of supplies split open on the alley floor, and the fact that I was sitting in a broken realm with one shoe and an AI I had built at thirteen and abandoned out of laziness, and that AI was currently my only companion, which said something about the state of my life that I didn't want to examine.
"Mani." L.I's voice had gone very quiet and very flat. "Stop. Crying. Now."
"You stop —"
"There are twelve people forty meters to your left who have been moving toward us since you started and they are not moving toward us because they want to help," he said, and something in his tone reached through the crying and grabbed me by the collar and I looked up.
They were already closer than forty meters.
A group of people in layers of mismatched scraps, pieces of fabric and wire and material I couldn't identify from here, moving through the ruins with the specific unhurried pace of people who knew they didn't need to rush because they had already decided how this ended. One of them was carrying something that used to be a pole. Another had a bag that clinked metallically with every step.
"L.I," I whispered.
"Yes."
"Why are they looking at me like that."
"Because you are new," he said, "and you have clean clothes and functioning equipment and no visible injuries, which in this realm makes you the most interesting thing they have seen today, so I need you to stand up and move in the direction I tell you and do it right now, Mani, right now —"
I stood up, took one step, remembered the missing shoe, looked for it, found it floating two feet off the ground to my left, grabbed it, lost my balance, caught myself on a wall that shifted slightly under my hand because parts of it weren't fully attached to gravity either, and by the time I turned around to start running, they were already in a ring around us.
Twelve of them. Close enough that I could see their faces, which were watching me with an expression I recognized from the market back home when someone had spotted a vendor who didn't know the local prices.
Like I was something they were already dividing up.
"L.I," I said, very quietly.
"Yes," he said, equally quiet.
"I should have stayed home today."
"Mani," he said, "I have been trying to tell you that since you woke up."