What do I do? I ask myself, feeling a panic attack embrace me, hold me, tighten its grip around me. What do I do? What do I do? Fuck, fuck, what do I do?

And two thoughts collide at once in my mind. The first is Dr. Ortega saying something about a scientist who came up with technology similar to this. The second memory is Kina telling me that she loves me.

She loves me, I think.

Kina loves me, and I left after promising I wouldn’t leave. I have to get back to her, I have to get back to her.

Once you’re in … get out quickly …

“Okay,” I breathe, “okay.”

My heart steadies back to its metrical rhythm, and I step into the chamber. Just before I press the button that will kill me, I remember Apple-Moth in my pocket. I take it out, see that its battery has dropped to zero, and run to place the little drone outside the door of the arcade, to soak up as much solar energy as it can.

As I reenter, a red light comes on over the door of the arcade and an old-fashioned tablet computer flickers on, the words MOSQUITOES APPROACHING flashing on the screen.

I move quickly to the death tube and climb inside.

I look up and see a small green button; I press it and the glass front spins shut.

The temperature drops dramatically, I feel my skin breaking out in goose bumps, I hear the mechanical sound of the approaching needles and I close my eyes. Just before the syringes pierce my skin, I remember Kina’s last words to me: You better not die.

And then I die.

There is nothing forever.

And then there is something.

Music; steady jazz. Sounds of conversation, of glass clinking against glass, of laughter.

“Sir, would you like a drink, sir?” a voice asks.

I’m standing in a very large hotel bar; only the second bar I’ve been in in my life after the night spent with Sam in the city.

I look around: a wooden dance floor leading to a slightly raised stage where a four-piece band in three-piece suits plays; old-fashioned booth seating filled with people in the most lavish and upmarket clothing. They drink and talk and laugh, and yet there’s something about them that is not quite right.

They’re animated, I think, and then I look down at my own hands.

The first thing I notice is the black sleeves of a suit jacket, and the white cuffs of the shirt underneath (fastened with gold cuff links), but as I focus on my hands, I see that they too are made up of millions of tiny pixels—the way animation or video game characters looked in the 2020s or ’30s.

“What is going on?” I whisper.

“Sir?” the posh voice asks me again.