“Why is there a countdown? What’s gonna happen when it gets to zero?” Rec asked.

  Latch came over and glanced at the screen as the “clock” lost another minute. A look of surprise flashed across his face. He chuckled through his nose as if he’d just witnessed an ingenious move in a chess game.

  “It seems the system hasn’t decided if it likes you or not,” he arched an eyebrow at Rec. “Why don’t you show it what you’ve got?”

  Rec spotted an icon that looked like a treasure chest next to the profile button. He tapped it and brought up his Inventory, which was as empty as a new account should be, except for a loose piece of paper that invited a peek inside.

  Rec opened it like how he’d normally examine a game item. The note contained a short string that read “D28:060A.901C.332F”; an eight-digit alphanumeric code that could be a model reference or an identifier of another kind; and lastly, thirty characters mixing letters and integers and grouped in six, which he suspected was some sort of serial number, or backup code.

  Next to the treasure chest was a location pointer, which brought up a map with a blinking pin in the center and two lines of notes beside it—

  D32:094A.122D.4829

  [District 32 | Deserted Zone | Avoid Non-essential Travel]

  Rec compared the location coordinates with the string written on the piece of paper, then asked tentatively: “Is there a District 28?”

  Latch broke into a radiant smile and twirled his motorcycle key around his index finger.

  “Guess that’s where we’re going! You keen, Caesar? Don’t you miss the old days?”

  “I just saw you on Monday,” Caesar said.

  “This will be so much better than Monday.”

  They rode together in Caesar’s Jeep. The car had a motor carrier permanently attached to the shotgun side, which fit Latch’s motorcycle like a glove. Latch said the vehicle came with that and this meant Caesar and he were made for each other. Caesar’s version was that he’d had the carrier installed so Latch would stop pestering him about it. The final product was certainly eye-catching. The downside was that you could only get in the Jeep from one side, or through the sunroof.

  District 28 had more signs of human activity compared to District 32, but it was still far from bustling. The coordinates in the mysterious file led them to a standalone structure on the edge of the zone. At first glance, it resembled a museum, with the classic columned exterior and a dome on top. As the three approached the entrance, Rec felt an inexplicable pressure. Maybe it was because the temperature dropped lower as they drew closer, or it was the silence.

  When they were about to step in, a knee-high robot cruised out and held the door for them. Latch stuck out two fingers for a salute, and Caesar nodded in appreciation. The bot passed them silently and slid away. Compared to Caesar, this one had a much more moderate build and design. A simple cylinder on wheels, with two practical arms of steel. Other than the camera on top, it didn’t have any features that could make a face. Probably a service bot, Rec thought.

  The building had only one hall, divided by two lines of partitions erected one after another like dominoes, leaving a walking path in the middle. Each partition hosted a grid of cells that reminded Rec of postal lockers, except that there wasn’t a touchscreen for input anywhere. Some cells had a picture on them; the rest were empty squares. Rec glanced at the one closest to him and saw the headshot of a robotic dog missing an ear. Underneath, two dates indicating a beginning and an end.

  They were in a cemetery.

  Rec swallowed his unease and skimmed the eight-digit numbers on the cells, finding patterns. He left Latch and Caesar without a word and rushed toward the deep end of the hall—the countdown had dropped below six hours, which sounded like a lot, but he had no idea what he was looking for. He dashed past an android standing in front of a cell. A wire stemming from its chest was plugged into the port below the headshot. With gentle whispers and lively hand gestures, the android held a conversation with someone who wasn’t there, enclosed in an exclusive vacuum of frozen time where nothing else in the world mattered.

  Rec found cell FF0633A9 in the last aisle. There was no profile picture, and a thick layer of dust masked the empty square. He recalled the way Caesar connected to him earlier and studied his own fingertips. With a squeeze of his thumb, a cable popped out of the tip.

  Then he hesitated.

  He remembered the number one rule of security where he’d come from: never stick any hardware you don’t recognize into your system, or the other way around. In the meantime, Latch and Caesar caught up and gathered around him.

  “Is there something I should know?” Rec pointed his cable at the port but did not go in.

  “Knock yourself out,” Latch said. “You’re doing great.”

  “If I mutate or blow up, I’m taking you two with me.”

  Latch laughed. Caesar folded his arms in front of his chest and leaned against the partition. It was hard to tell his expression with that birdy helmet, but he sure seemed amused.

  “I’d better be a main character,” Rec grumbled and plugged himself in.

  A holographic screen popped up in front of his eyes, displaying a line of blanks for thirty characters, grouped in six. Rec punched in the last piece of the puzzle found on the paper. The screen froze for a second, then a progress bar replaced the serial number. Above it, two words in all caps:

  DOWNLOADING SCRIPT

  “Wait, what script—”

  The words after that never came. Rec stood motionless, eyes open yet unfocused. The progress bar reached the end in no time, and the holographic screen closed without a beep.

  “Hm,” Latch said and looked at Caesar. They shared a moment of silence, waiting for Rec to snap out of it, and the moment went on for longer than they’d hoped.

  “I didn't see any error message, you?” Caesar asked.

  “Let’s get him out of here first,” Latch stepped forward. “He’ll probably wake up in the car. The re-instantiation is supposed to take some time because of the wipe.”

  “Latch, are you sure this is—”

  Rec’s body jerked backward as he gasped loudly, breaking him off the port. A chain of notifications rushed through his head and reminded him of the first time he’d come back from (almost) death:

  Instantiation complete

  Environment: Wysina

  Class: Undefined

  Status: Low Impact

  Current Level: 1

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  He took a second to recognize his surroundings and recall what he’d been doing before he passed out, then he brought up the interface once again. It showed him the same layout, but the countdown had disappeared.

  “Was I… rebooted?” he asked.

  “Sort of,” said Latch.

  “How are you feeling?” Caesar asked.

  For the first time since he’d stepped onto this strange land, Rec wasn’t facing any imminent danger or physical suffering. No melting limbs, violent robots, ominous ticking clock, or brain-numbing error alerts.

  “I feel I can breathe,” he sighed.

  He turned to Latch, wondering if he could finally get some answers to all the questions that kept piling up, but he swallowed his words. Latch had the same expression that Rec had seen at the temple earlier. As if he’d forgotten that he was with company, Latch ran his fingers across the empty profile on the cell, catching only old dust.

  Caesar patted Rec on the shoulder and signaled him to follow as he moved toward the exit, leaving Latch alone with the ghosts.

  “You want some air? There’s plenty outside.”

  Rec rested his back against the Jeep and poked around in his console, occasionally glancing at the entrance of the cemetery. Latch was taking a long moment.

  He navigated to his profile. Next to the overview stats he’d heard at the time of reboot, he could now see a diamond-shaped matrix with four attributes. Rec wondered if this meant the system had accepted him as a legitimate user. The metrics weren’t quite like what he’d usually see in RPGs—

  Complexity

  Tenacity

  Stealth

  Mutation

  These didn’t make much sense to him at the moment because he couldn’t imagine how they summed him up as a person. The Exp bar on top of the matrix was self-explanatory, but instead of the classic Mana, he had Luck, and zero clues as to how that worked. Right now, his profile was pretty much a clean slate, except that he had already gained some initial experience points, presumably from the re-instantiation. At Level 1, his Luck was capped at 100 points.

  “How are you feeling?” Caesar asked again and pulled Rec out of his thoughts.

  “Much better,” Rec smiled.

  “No, I mean… do you still feel like yourself?”

  “I… guess so? Why?”

  “Hm,” Caesar studied him. “That’s interesting, ‘cause you’re running someone else’s core in you.”

  “Huh? Someone else’s core… Is that what I downloaded from that cell?”

  “Should be,” Caesar shrugged. “That’s what this place is for. When you can no longer keep up with the updates and maintenance of your skin, your core ends up here.”

  “What’s a ‘core’, by the way?”

  “Right,” Caesar nodded as if he’d just remembered Rec wasn’t from here. He organized his thoughts for a second then said: “It’s who you are. I’m not a doctor or a tailor so I can’t get too technical about it, but basically, every Wysinian is born with a core and a designated skin, and they stay like that for life. Well, there are exceptions, but I’ve never seen a core get put into someone who’s already… alive.”

  What does that mean? Rec’s mind raced. Caesar seemed to believe that Rec was some kind of medium hosting another being, but he sure didn’t feel possessed.

  At first, Rec had thought he needed the reboot because the encryption had damaged his system, but the countdown appeared immediately after Latch pumped that metal pin into him. So was it a test? Latch—whoever he was—needed a vessel to resurrect a ghost, and he used this to determine if Rec was worthy. Had he failed to re-instantiate before the end of the countdown, he would’ve been disqualified and expelled from this reality.

  Or died.

  “Latch is… is he like me?”

  For some reason, Rec didn’t want to use the word “human.”

  “Like you… as in?” Caesar narrowed his eyes, wondering if he understood the question.

  “We don’t look like Wysina natives, do we?”

  Rec didn’t turn his mind to his own foreignness when he first met Latch because the guy was “normal” in that regard, but Caesar’s appearance reminded him that Wysina wasn’t a city for humans.

  “You look fine.” Caesar shrugged. “So does he—but don’t tell him I said that.”

  “You two go way back?” Rec chuckled.

  “We met at a bar a while ago, then he just stayed in the picture.”

  “A lot of relationships boil down to that… This core in me, do you know who it is?”

  “Someone important to him, I suppose.”

  Rec recalled the look on Latch’s face when he was in front of that miniature tomb.

  Someone important to him.

  Did Latch expect him to turn into that someone? Rec wondered. And was Latch disappointed that Rec was still pretty much his own self? Sometimes he wished he could change his thought patterns and stop making depressing commentary about every life event, but he couldn’t help it.

  A blaring alarm tugged him back to the present. The entrance busted open and Latch dashed out at a surreal speed. His movement was more like skating than running, as if he were riding on a pair of jet engines beneath his feet. Before Rec could make a greeting wave, Latch had already flown past them, rolling clouds of dust behind.

  “Shit,” Caesar jumped into the Jeep and hurried Rec in as he fired up the engine. “Okay, the first rule to survive Wysina: when you see Latch running, you should too.”

  “What’s happening?” Rec asked.

  “The idiot probably touched something he shouldn’t,” Caesar tutted. “I knew the day was too normal to be true.”

  Behind the Jeep, a black line appeared on the horizon. Shielding his eyes from the glaring sunset, Rec peered out the rear window and realized it was a row of drones flying this way. About a dozen of them, forming a U shape. Unlike the fedora that Rec had met, these were heavy-duty combat drones—practically designed and unequivocally lethal.

  Caesar hit the gas. Meanwhile, from the bellies of the killing machines, miniature missiles flew toward the Jeep, trailing plumes of smoke.

  A system alert echoed in Rec’s mind—

  Skill Acquired: Run for Your Life

  Tenacity +10

  “Yeah, no shit!” Rec exclaimed. “Missiles? They’re using missiles on us? What the hell did he do?!”

  “Beats me.” Caesar pulled up alongside Latch and yelled out the window. “Asshole! You want a ride or what?”

  With a smirk, Latch leaped to the front of the car, showing off his effortless jumps and spins like a figure skater. The soles of his boots were hovering several centimeters above the ground and propelling him forward like a magnetic levitation train.

  “Loser buys drinks!” Latch shouted.

  As soon as those words left his mouth, Latch’s body shuddered, and he nearly fell over. Darting to one side, he avoided colliding with the Jeep. His speed dropped instantly, and he struggled to keep up with the car or simply maintain his balance. Livid, he cried out to Caesar:

  “I forgot to charge my shoes! I forgot to charge them!”

  Grinning ear to ear, Caesar pressed a button on his wheel, and the sunroof began to close. Latch lifted an arm and a wire rope shot out of his sleeve. It threaded through the open window then out of the sunroof’s slit, locking into a loop and hoisting him off the ground. He landed on top of the car. They heard him over their heads.

  “Caesar, show me my baby!”

  With an exasperated sigh, Caesar pushed another button and popped the tailgate. Four mechanical arms lifted the Gatling gun that had been sleeping behind the backseats and sent it to the roof, then they transformed and constructed a mount to fasten it in place.

  Latch grabbed the machine gun and immediately shot down the nearest drone. One foot braced against the base and leaning backward for balance, Latch unleashed hell, laughing like a maniac. Their chasers pulled back and ascended, forming a dark cloud tailing the trio. A second later, the cluster of drones opened fire simultaneously. In the background, the sun dipped below the horizon.

  Rec watched the rain of missiles pour down from the sky. Strangely, his initial panic had evaporated and all he could think of was the question Caesar asked him right after he came back to life.

  How are you feeling?

  He felt hungry.

  Now he remembered—he never had that goddamn lunch that brought him here.