My head felt like someone had taken a sledgehammer to the inside of my skull. Pain spiked behind my eyes as I tried to open them, causing me to squint hard as I let out a pitiful whimper. The pain was slowly ebbing away, I could feel it dissipating when I wasn’t trying to do anything important like breathing. My mouth was dry, feeling like someone had taken a vacuum from an auto-dentist and left it turned on for several hours. 

“I think she’s waking up.” A soft, female voice said. 

Syl’s voice. 

That caught my attention, and despite the pain I forced my eyes to open. I was laid out on the couch in my homepage cabin. The world was only lit with the soft flicker of candles, with the sun outside having apparently long-since dipped over the horizon. 

The two people sitting across from me certainly were not what I was expecting to see. The first was The Narrator. The tall, pale woman was sipping from a plain white mug, watching me as I stirred. The other was someone I’d never seen before. She looked remarkably familiar, though I was certain I’d never seen her before. She had long ginger hair, and pale green eyes that felt comforting as they watched me.

As I tried to push myself upright, the new woman came over from where she was sitting and gently helped. “Take your time.” She said softly, letting me get my bearings as I stared at her. That voice…

“Syl?” I asked, incredulous. Despite the throbbing pain that continued to pulse in my brain, I still could focus on the strange surreality of seeing someone who I’d only ever heard the voice of before. As far as I was aware, most homepage AIs weren’t even capable of creating a VR body. Syl had always felt… Different, however. 

“Hey Kaela. Don’t try to do anything too extraneous, okay?” She said softly, and I nodded. I immediately regretted it, the motion causing more pain to shoot through my head. 

“What… What’s going on?” I asked, after a moment to catch my breath and let the pain subside. 

“Well…” Syl sighed, sitting next to me on the couch. “We don’t know. Not really.” She said gently, though I could hear the worry in her voice. That… only made things weirder. AIs weren’t supposed to show that level of vocal inflection. Syl pressed on, “Something is happening to your body in the real world. We aren’t sure what, the pod you are in is… Carefully isolated from some of the normal networks I should have access to. I can’t pull up any data on your vital stats right now.” 

“What?” I blinked in surprise as concern grew in the pit of my gut. Something was happening to my real body? How? I was supposed to be in the Behemoth coffin back at Fidaela, and they were just doing final testing on the pod’s long-term capabilities. 

“We don’t know. I’ve been sending pings to Doctor Yvea for a couple hours now regarding the lack of information, but she’s ignoring me.” Syl continued, with what looked like frustration on her face. 

“We… You keep saying ‘we’.” I groaned, cautiously turning my attention towards The Narrator. “How are you here?” 

“I keep an eye on all my players. Especially those who have… Unique connection points from say… An experimental coffin?” The Narrator replied, setting her drink down on the small table next to her seat. “I got concerned when the pain filters suddenly failed, and you had to be emergency disconnected. Sadly…” She gave a quick gesture to the VR space around us. “ …this was as far as that went.” 

“Wait… Are you saying I can’t even log out?” I asked. Fear tainted my voice as the implication sunk in. “That… That can’t be right! I still have…” 

My voice trailed off as I opened my menu, and found the log out button. It greyed out, a message in bright red text next to it. 

[This feature has been disabled by the administrator.]

What the fuck?!

Doctor Yvea frowned at her tablet. Another ping from Myles’ homepage assistant AI popped up on the screen. It was another alert stating that personal pain thresholds had been exceeded and the emergency disconnect had failed. She sighed softly. She had hoped that the pain dampening system inherent to the VR game space combined with the enhanced dampeners within the Behemoth coffin itself would be enough to prevent anything worse than a light migraine. Apparently it wasn’t. Yvea noted the failure in her report as she continued to work and muted the AI again. She wasn’t sure how it managed to keep getting around her filters, but it was only a slight annoyance. 

She perked up from her workstation as the door opened to the dark room. Lori stood there, nodding a greeting as she closed the door behind her. 

“What’s the progress on phase two?” The executive asked as she came over to look at the screens Yvea had been studying. 

“So far, so good. Pain levels unfortunately passed through, but the log-out override works fine enough. He’s definitely suffering right now, but the anaesthetic we’re giving now should put him out again until the surgery is done.” Yvea replied, keeping her voice as level as she could. She knew Lori would take any emotion right now as a sign of potential failure, and Yvea hadn’t spent ten years in schooling just to lose control of her life’s project now. 

“Shame. We’ll have to find a way to improve those in the future.” Lori nodded with satisfaction. “It’ll draw too much attention if people are feeling the surgeries when the Behemoth goes to market.” 

“I’ve already tasked the software teams to look over where we may have missed something, and they are finding better ways to dampen it.” Yvea said. “Otherwise, the connection ports have been installed in the frontal lobe, parietal lobe and temporal lobe. The coffin is just finishing up with the ports in the occipital lobe now too. We’ll be set for the second half of phase two within the hour.” 

“Good. Make sure the control module gets installed first. The last thing we need is him coming out of the pod and being impossible to stop.” Lori agreed as she straightened up. “Oh, and if the software team figures out the dampening issue, get them to hotfix that. When phase three starts, there’s going to be a lot more pain and I don’t want to be wasting time recalibrating the neural implants.” 

I groaned as I gradually woke up. 

Again. 

Syl, The Narrator and I had been trying to figure out what was happening to my real body, though none of us had a solid idea. That was, until I felt extremely drowsy and had passed out in Syl’s arms. 

The pain was gone this time. Finally. I sighed in relief as I sat up again, finding it day once more in my small cabin. Someone had put a blanket over me when I was out, and Syl was sitting on the floor next to me with her head resting against the couch. 

“Hey…” I groaned out softly, my throat feeling incredibly dry still. 

“Hey.” Syl replied, her voice failing to keep the concern and frustration out of her word.

“What happened?” 

“They injected some kind of anaesthetic into you, evidently. It knocked you out completely.” The ginger AI said softly, though I could tell she wasn’t finished. She refused to meet my eyes as she continued, “They did surgery on your brain, Kaela.” 

That got me fully awake. 

“What?!” I asked, bolting upright. “How? Why?”

Syl gave me a shrug, though she gently pushed me back down into the couch. “I don’t know. I was only able to penetrate a little bit into their systems without getting detected, but the internals of the coffin showed activity from what was being labelled ‘optimization tools’. They… They are surgical tools, carefully adapted to be discreetly hidden in the coffin.”

“I…” So many thoughts hit me at the same time. My Aunt had been the one to bring me in for this. She had to have known about this ahead of time. But what even was this? They were doing surgery on my brain, for some reason. Was that why Doctor Yvea had been asking me if I felt anything while I was in the game? Oh gods… 

I felt the shakes before anything else. The involuntary shivers that came as the mental breakdown started. The weight of everything came crumbling down onto me as the world started to turn blurry with tears running down my cheeks. Syl gently pulled me into a hug, holding me as I sobbed into her shoulder. 

We stayed like that for a while. The feelings of betrayal, fear, anger, and so many others that were hard to put a name to swimming around me in waves of intrusive thoughts. Not even my own aunt loved me enough to care what happened to me. My parents all but abandoned me as soon as I was able to start taking care of myself. Lori was all that I had of my family. The fun, caring aunt who loved me despite her corporate position. The aunt who seemingly just trapped me in an insane non-consensual surgical machine that was doing who-knows-what to my brain. 

“I wish I could help you more right now, Kaela.” Syl said during a lull in my breakdown. My body ached and everything seemed to be so much colder than they had been a few minutes ago. “Miss Lea has sent several requests to join this instance to see you. Would you like to talk to her?”

I nodded weakly. The world felt like it was falling apart, losing all meaning and cohesion. But at least I knew my friend still cared about me. Thankfully, Syl was on the ball and within moments, Lea spawned in the middle of the cabin. 

In this space, she still looked a lot like her character in Stellara Nova, though she had a loose tank top from some punk band I’d never heard of and ripped blue jeans. I didn’t catch what she said immediately when she joined, mostly because she had all but vaulted the couch and pulled me into her chest. 

“Kae, oh my gods I was so worried when we couldn’t get ahold of you…” Lea said, slower this time. She was holding me close, one hand running down from between my fluffy ears to the top of my tail over and over again. “What happened? What’d she do to you?” 

“I… I don’t… Wait, what? What’d who do?” I asked, confusion growing on my face as I looked up at her. 

“Nitra! She was alone with you, she had to-” Lea started, but I cut her off.

I shook my head slightly. “No, Lea… It’s… It’s the real world. And a long story…” 

“Tell me.” Lea demanded, doubt written all over her face. 

And so, for the next hour I explained my situation, NDA be damned. If my aunt was willing to subject me to that kind of pain for a secret brain surgery, then I was going to be honest with one of the only people on this forsaken rock who actually cared about me. 

MaeveWerepuppy

Well well well, if it isn't the consequences of someone else's actions! Poor Kaela. 

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-Mae