The false reality that surrounds me begins to melt away, and the heat of the sun is gone, replaced by the nothingness of the paralysis bed inside my cell in the Block.

And now I’m here once again, unable to move, unable to feel anything at all. Staring at a single spot on the white wall, rage and pain warring inside me, hopelessness overcoming me.

In the Block

When the harvest begins, all that exists is fear.

It feels like an eternity before it ends, before the nanotech releases its grip on the parts of my brain that access terror and panic, before my heart begins to slow and my muscles relax.

Back in the Loop, the prison I was in before the end of the world, the harvest lasted only six hours, and when it was done we were left alone in our small soundproof cells. It seemed horrible at the time, but compared to the Block it was like heaven.

The harvest tube stays in place while the water comes. It rushes in from the ceiling, smelling of acrid chemicals and bleach. As usual, I consider letting it drown me: pushing all the air out of my lungs at the moment the tube fills, and waiting to die so that I don’t have to face another day of this hell.

But I don’t.

The tube fills with water until I’m completely submerged. Time passes—ten seconds, twelve—and then the water drains away, throwing me to the floor once again.

The air comes next, so hot that my skin feels like it’s about to blister and burn. Once I’m dry, the tube lifts and retreats into the ceiling.

The harvest is over, and what comes next is just as terrible.

I wait, naked on the floor, my arms magnetized together behind my back by the implanted cobalt in my wrists.

It’s been sixteen days since Happy, the all-powerful artificial intelligence that first ran the world and then destroyed it, tried to trick me into giving up the location of my friends. Happy somehow accessed my brain and convinced me that I had been broken out of this prison by Pander, Malachai, and Kina, but I figured it out; I realized that none of it was real despite how convincing the simulation was. I took them to the river near the center of the city and savored the memories of spending time there with my family when I was young. Me, my sister, my dad, and my mom would go to the riverside on summer days and spend hours playing, swimming, talking, and just being together as a family.

It took the AI about four minutes to realize it had been deceived. Since then Happy has tried every day to trick me into giving up information. It uses different tactics: fear; coercion; bargaining; confusion. Then it tried a twenty-day simulation of a life after the war, a life with Kina.