"He'll be ready by noon tomorrow," the man in the suit said.
He was ready by noon.
---
Afterward, Eric's head was a landscape he didn't recognize. Not painful, exactly. Wrong-shaped. Like a room where someone had moved all the furniture two inches to the left while he was out.
He couldn't see what he'd become, but he could infer it from sound. He had acquired a "fleet". Machines on all sides, each with its own opinion, and somewhere under them, threaded into him at the neck and skull and spine, a whole new set of connections that didn't do anything yet.
"We'll connect the tablet to Eric's network now," the man said.
"Okay." Amy's voice was very small. "Okay."
"You'll be able to see and hear the session. That's all, for this phase. You won't be able to participate."
"Okay," Amy said again, and then, barely above breath, she started praying. Eric hadn't known she still did that. He lay there in the dark of himself, feeling the tape pull on his hand, listening to his wife negotiate with a God she wasn't sure about on behalf of a husband she wasn't sure about either, and he thought: "whatever this is, be worth it. For her. Be worth it".
Something in the room changed pitch.
"Beginning," the man said.
---
Eric was alone in his own head, thinking about the duck lamp, when someone else said something in it.
"Testing. Can you hear me?"
He did not so much hear it as "have" it. It arrived the way his own thoughts arrived — from nowhere, fully formed, in the voice he used for thinking — except it wasn't his. It had a different weight. A different accent, if thoughts could have one.
"...So to speak, of course. Nothing mental is actual audio. The mind never produces sound waves. But you'll find 'hear' is the closest word available, and I'd rather not spend our first minute on vocabulary".
Eric's reaction was instantaneous and entirely internal and consisted mostly of profanity.
"That was my mental voice. That was my own voice and I did not say it. I'm not picturing this. I'm not doing this — I am hallucinating. Three weeks in a bed and my brain has finally filed for divorce —"
"You're not hallucinating. Though I understand why that's the first place you went. Most people go there". A pause, tolerant. "We can transmit physical, artificial "custom signals" directly into your brain through the interface setup you received this morning. Those signals force your brain to imagine and manifest my communications. That's the whole trick. It isn't elegant, but it works, and it works because a considerable portion of your nervous system is now wired into our systems".
"You're making my brain imagine things", Eric thought slowly, "and using that as a phone line".
"Yes".
"That's — ok. Ok. That's actually incredible". He turned it over. "Why does it need the surgery? Why not just — beam it in?"
"The VRC has never achieved this wirelessly. Not once. Everything we do of this kind, we do through surgically implanted interfaces". Something that might have been dry humor. "Believe me, we've tried. It would save us an enormous amount on anesthesiologists".
Eric had been awake and alone for three weeks. He had composed, in that time, approximately four hundred hours of unsendable material. And now there was a door in the wall of his own skull.
"Okay", he thought. "Okay. Who are you, and what do you want?"
"I want to determine whether you and your wife are worthy".
"...Worthy of what?"
"Worthy of what you're being offered".
"That's not an answer. That's a fortune cookie with a legal department".
"It's the answer you get before the interview. You'll have the rest after".
And then the interview started, and it did not stop for a very long time.
---
It was not a conversation. It was an excavation.
The voice asked him about his mother. It asked him about a job he'd quit in his twenties and the specific reason he'd given versus the specific reason he'd had. It asked what he thought happened to people when they died, then asked again forty questions later in different words to see whether the answer had moved. It asked what he would do if he could do anything, and then — this was the part that made Eric's skin crawl in a body that couldn't crawl — it asked "follow-ups that were too good".
Three things about it stopped feeling like a person.
The first was speed. It answered instantly. Not quickly. "Instantly", in the gap where a human being would still be inhaling.
The second was worse. It kept answering the thought he was "still assembling" — the half-built one, the one he hadn't found the words for yet, the raw shape of the thing before it became a sentence. Twice it responded to a question Eric abandoned before finishing. Once it responded to an objection he decided not to raise.
The third was the repetition. Ask a question two different ways and get the same reply both times, phrased identically, with the same little pause in the same little place. Like a drawer being opened. Like a script with excellent coverage.
Somewhere in hour two, Eric stopped thinking of it as "the man" and started thinking of it as something else, and once the word arrived he couldn't get rid of it.
"The entity".
He was careful not to think it too loudly. Then he remembered that was not a thing he could control, and thought it as loudly as possible out of spite.
"You're not the first", the entity said, unbothered. "Many people have sat where you're sitting. So to speak. And 'the entity' isn't the worst one I've been called this month".
---
What it told him next, it told him in the same order it had told Amy, which Eric appreciated more than he expected. It meant she hadn't been sold a different version.
His brain worked. His body didn't. That gap, the entity explained, was the entire business model.
Until his condition resolved — if it resolved — Eric would participate in an advanced computer simulation, running on VRC systems, populated by others. He would interact with them. He would live there. Staff would monitor the environment through displays, speakers, monitors, whatever was convenient.
"And before you ask: there will be no glitches. No anomalies. No corrupted geometry, no character falling through the floor, no moment where the seams show. Our technology is mastered to the point that such things are not possible in anything connected to VRC computers".
"Nothing's that stable", Eric thought.
"Ours is".
It wasn't said like a boast. That was the part Eric didn't like. It was said the way you'd say "water is wet" — as a condition of the universe, established long before you got here, not up for discussion.
The realism, the entity went on, came from the same trick as the conversation. Specialized computers, wired into his brain and body, transmitting impulses directly to his somatosensory cortex — indistinguishable from the signals real touch produces, because they "were" the signals real touch produces. He would feel contact. Texture. Weight. Heat.
"We also make extensive use of what you'd know as phantom limb syndrome. The brain can be convinced to feel a limb that isn't there. We simply do it on purpose and at scale. Internally we call it 'phantom undergoings'."
"You can make me feel a hand I don't have".
"We can make you feel a hand you've never had. Users routinely operate additional arms. Centaur legs. Wings. Tails. The technology has been refined to the point that people control these as naturally as the limbs they were born with. It takes most of them about a day. The tails take longer. Tails are surprisingly hard".
Eric, who currently could not operate a single one of his original four limbs, found that he had to stop and breathe. Or do whatever the equivalent was, in there.
"Say the rest", he thought. "There's a catch. There's always a catch and you've been circling it for an hour".
"There's no catch. There are specifications. You'll find the difference matters".
---
The specification was this: the simulation could not perfectly reproduce the real universe.
"The physics are close. The quantum mechanics are not exact and never will be. We don't pretend otherwise". A pause. "We find most people stop minding once magic is on the table."
"Magic".
"Optional. Per universe. We'll come back to it".
What makes the simulation "extremely" interesting, the entity said, is the genuine unpredictability — real randomness, not a random number generator — because the whole system was continuously perturbed from outside by non-digital hands: maintenance performed by actual people at actual terminals, and every interaction between the simulation and an avatar driven by a living human in the physical world.
"Randomness has to come from somewhere. Ours comes from you. All of you".
And then, mildly, as though it were the next line on a form:
"Using the physical universe as your template, you'll need to specify which laws, modifications, and rules will govern the universe you'll be living in. Physics. Magic. Death. All of it. In detail, in your application".
Eric stopped.
"Say that again".
"Your application".
"The universe I'll be living in".
"Yes".
"Which I'm — writing".
"'Which you're' designing. You may also copy any laws and implementations from other existing users' worlds. Or skip creation entirely and simply live in someone else's. Many do. It's considerably less work and there's no shame in it".
"No", Eric thought, and was surprised by how fast it came, and how certain. "No, I'll build it".
He'd been lying in one room for three weeks. Some part of him had apparently been taking notes.
---