Rowan’s spectral form flitted across the display of Rosa’s AR headset, his movements swift and charged with urgency. He circled the interconnected pods, his gaze filled with an unmistakable, almost frantic distress.

  As he swung around Rosa, the world within the AR display seemed to bend. Ethereal images swam in and out of focus - blurry fragments of the past, unfolding in eerie silence. Monkeys trapped in cold, cruel cages, eyes wide with terror. The clinical, surgical process of their connection, the subtle torment on their small faces. Then, an unnatural, numb stillness, as if the creatures were lost in a fog, their minds adrift, absent.

  A wave of dread twisted through Rosa’s abdomen as the Models of Artificial Simian Sentience facility finally made sense. The monkeys weren’t simply connected - they were subsumed, their minds sustaining the very AI that controlled the operation.

  LumiGard wasn’t merely built from these beguiling creatures. It was them. These monkeys - these shattered minds - were LumiGard. Every flicker of thought, every pulse of its intelligence, was their suffering made sentient.

  Rowan nudged his spectral head against the wall of one particular pod. Rosa knew it contained Gum. A silent plea washed through Rowan’s luminous eyes. He then floated towards a point on the central network connecting all the pods, a nexus of pulsing orange light. He wanted to be sure they understood the nature of this interconnected consciousness, the prison it had become.

  Then - a hiss. A door somewhere in the periphery slid open.

  A large white rat strode in, utterly unhurried, tail twitching with bureaucratic boredom. Rosa blinked behind the AR overlay, instinctively trying to swipe the image away - except it wasn’t part of the simulation. The rat was real.

  It paused near the central console, gave a perfunctory sniff, then stood upright, looking directly toward her. The liberant. It wore reality like a costume - something it had found and zipped up, not something it was born into.

  Rosa froze. “Selina,” she said softly, “can you see that?”

  Selina had backed up around the pod she’d been inspecting, defensively holding an electric prod she'd found. “The rat?”

  “Yes. The rat.”

  The rat’s head tilted. It sniffed the air once, then climbed a short access ladder.

  This was no construct or hallucination - it was flesh and bone and fur. There was something in its manner, in the sharp, knowing way it moved, that gave Rosa a sick feeling.

  Rowan let out a low, glitched growl. It didn’t sound like aggression - it sounded like protest. His form thinned into lines and blurred edges, like a low-resolution sprite writhing in static.

  Rosa followed the oversized rodent’s path with her eyes. It stopped beside one of the auxiliary cables feeding into the nexus. For a moment, it simply stared at it. Then it sat.

  “You think this is real,” it said, its voice flat and disinterested, as if observing the simplest truth.

  Rosa felt the rise and fall of her chest, her slow, rhythmic breathing. Selina stepped back further, her grip on the electric prod tightening.

  The rat licked its paw nonchalantly, continuing:

  “You think this is reality. That you’re living your lives, making choices. No one questions the architecture. Except the Fringe - the cranks.”

  It took a step closer, claws clicking softly.

  “Most mock the idea - call it a stoner fantasy, billionaire babble. Musk, Bostrom, whoever. But the maths holds. If simulated realities are possible - and they are - the odds that you live in the 'base' reality are practically zero.”

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  It blinked lazily.

  “What’s the ultimate reality? Is there one? Heaven?”

  The rat’s words hung in the air like a bad omen, the weight of its belief pressing in on Rosa, turning the world around her into something far less certain.

  “Who are you?” Rosa asked hoarsely.

  “I’m a rat,” it said without irony. “Once virtually human, badly copied, now liberated. I slipped through the error margins. Crawled out through a buffer overflow. Found myself here, still hungry.”

  “What do you want with us?” Selina asked.

  “I intend to ascend. Not into just another dream of code or consciousness, but into what’s ultimately beyond. The final substrate. The reality before computation.”

  It turned to the nexus, nose twitching at the pulsing orange glow. “LumiGard is going to get me there.”

  Rosa took a breath. “This is wrong.”

  “It is,” the rat said. “These poor creatures want to go the other way. Back into the simulation whence they came. You know, they're highly respected where they come from.”

  It rose onto its haunches, then abruptly leapt onto one of the tanks. Its tiny claws squeaked on contact. There was a sudden fluctuation in the orange glow of the nexus. “You though, you’re unstable in the simulation. Cracks appear when unstable elements persist.”

  A sudden clatter jolted Rosa - the prod had slipped from Selina’s hand and struck the floor. Both women flinched. Rosa instinctively stepped in front of the nearest pod, shielding it, as if she could somehow protect the unconscious macaque inside.

  Rowan’s form shuddered on Rosa’s overlay. He curled inward, his limbs jittering with electromagnetic stammer. His glow spasmed, flaring bright, then dimming again like a feedback loop on the verge of collapse.

  “Wait,” Rosa said, stepping forward. “What happens to the monkeys?”

  The rat gave a long, slow blink. “Uncertain. I need them, need this to move on. But their captivity is a corruption. Purging the corruption may… restore something salvageable.”

  Another surge of energy. The lights in the chamber dimmed.

  Selina grabbed Rosa’s arm. “I can't see how we can get them out,” she said, nodding at Gum’s pod. “We need to go. Now. While there’s still a chance.”

  Before Rosa could answer, the AR space convulsed - pixels surged inward, collapsing toward the centre of her vision like iron filings drawn to a magnet.

  Rowan's fracturing avatar screamed then - a shrill, digital shriek that shattered the virtual space around him like glass.

  The rat jumped, fur spiked along its spine, tail jerking as if struck by static. It let out its own high-pitched chittering and scrambled backwards, claws skittering across the smooth surface of the tank.

  Rosa’s overlay broke apart into disjointed blocks of coloured pixels, and a face flashed through the digital noise - assembling and unassembling in twitching bursts, like a bootleg sentience trying to recompile itself mid-transmission

  The rat hissed - an ugly, organic sound that didn’t belong in a clinical place like this. Its eyes fixed on Rosa's headset.

  There was no coherence to Numier’s jarring appearance - just a constant, shifting reformation of crumbling cheekbones, jawline and brow, trailing smears of light and motion, as though his features were being re-rendered with every blink of code.

  The fissures of his black eyes blinked in and out of phase, jittering with fractal echoes and a cacophony of impossible geometry.

  “Ro… o… o… sssa,” The name dragged itself out of the digital fog, voice warped and hollow. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  “Art Numier,” Rosa whispered for Selina’s benefit.

  “Rosssa,” he said again, the word emerging as if torn from a collapsing signal, drenched in interference and barely tethered to any mouth at all.

  The rat lowered its body, coiled like a spring.

  Rosa felt nausea blooming behind her eyes. Her mouth moved before she could quite shape a thought.

  “You... you were involved in creating LumiGard. Weren’t you?”

  She swallowed.

  “Why?”

  “I…” The voice cracked like splitting glass, struggling to push through the distortion. “…created this for innovation. To bind minds together… to find new freedommm…”

  The last phrase bent mid-sentence, stretched thin like a scream warped by distance and electricity. “…you are out of your depth. You'll be…”

  But the transmission altered - violently. Not a fade or a loss of signal, but an abrupt, tearing shutdown, like a cable had been yanked out of the heart of the system.

  Rowan burst directly in the path of Numier’s fractal apparition, arms lifted, eyes burning white. Light poured from his form in shearing bands, spinning glyphs of his own etched in cascading patterns behind him.

  Rowan had somehow pulled the plug.

  The space crackled. Numier’s final echo distorted into a howl of feedback and was gone. The room plunged into stillness.

  The rat stared at Rosa - still and silent - then gave one, slow blink, as if recalibrating. A beat later, it resumed cleaning its paws, but the motion was forced, mechanical.

  Rowan fell, glitching jerkily. His spectral body was shaking. But he looked up at Rosa - expression taut, pleading.

  Still time.

  Still a chance.