He sits there, a quiver running up the side of his face. He scrunches his nose and squeezes one eye closed, rubbing his face with the back of his hand before allowing a laugh to escape his trembling lips.

“Shelly fucking Withers,” he whispers as he looks over to Shelly and then to Derek. “Shelly FUCKING Withers,” he repeats, louder this time, as he shakes his head and looks to the ceiling, allowing himself to get lost in the glow of the light for a few lost moments before looking back down at the couple again.

“I still remember,” he says as he looks at Derek, his face screwed up in anger. “I still remember what she did to me in seventh grade, how she humiliated me in front of everyone without giving a goddamn fuck if what she was doing was going to somehow fuck me up later on in life. She just wanted the adoration of everyone else and she didn’t care who she ran through to get it. So, so h-how could you? How could you end up with her?” he spits.

“I-If I c-”

“Did I say you could fucking talk?” he spits as he holds out a knife towards her.

“P-P-Please, she, she was a different person back then. S-She hit out b-because that’s h-how she dealt with everything that was happening with her at home. W-Whatever she did to you, whatever she made you feel, i-it wasn’t intentional. I-I, I should know, b-because she did the same to me when we were growing up and…” he says as he looks over to her and smiles. “And I forgave her, e-even grew to love her, e-”

“Good for you. Good for everyone, everyone except me. I never got my penance. I never got my apology. I never got my forgiveness, and I want it. I want it in spades.”

“T-Then give her a chance, a-all-”

“Shut up! Shut up or I’ll slit your throat from ear to ear and climb back in my body the old-fashioned way!” he spits as he thrusts the knife’s blade into the tabletop.

“O-Okay,” Derek stammers as he holds his hands up before his blood runs cold and a look of dawning horror spreads across his face. “W-What do you mean your body? O-Oh my God… i-it’s you. Y-you’re the one s-sending the emails?”

His eyes widen and he gently shakes his head.

“Way to go, Einstein. You put two and two together. How are you not running your dream business by now? Oh, that’s right,” he says, doing his best Jack Nicholson impression, as he turns back to Shelly. “You gave up your dreams to stay at home and raise Shelly’s kids so she could keep chasing hers,” he spits.

“I-I-I,” Derek stammers.

“Don’t even try it! Don’t you even dare. Those kids aren’t even yours, but somehow she’s convinced you to give up your life and raise them like they are. What does she have on you, Derek? What secret is so fucking terrible that you let her turn you into this? Why don’t you grow some balls and teach the bitch the lesson she should’ve learned in seventh grade?” He turns to Shelly, a look of disgust across his face. “Remember Debbie Tyson? Remember the rumour Shelly started? How she told everyone Debbie had a threesome with Kevin Dobson and his dad and got pregnant, then had to get an abortion because nobody knew which one was the father? Remember that?”

“You’re the one bringing up decades-old high school bullshit! That world’s over and we’re grown up. We’ve dealt with that baggage. We’ve dealt with who we were and the things we did, and we’ve spent years trying to be better than that. We survived it. We made it through. W-Who are you to tell me who to love, who to be with, a-and why do you want to hurt us so much? C-Can’t you j-”

He leaps from his seat and slams Derek’s head into the table, grabbing a handful of hair as he pulls his face towards his.

“The gutting-you option is still heavily on the table, so don’t think I won’t do it. If I can’t get back in, you can’t keep it!”

“W-Who are you?” Shelly stammers.

A smile slowly spreads across his face.

“Haven’t you figured it out yet? Haven’t you made all the connections?”

“D-Derek?” she whispers.

“No, that’s Derek. I prefer to be called Dee,” he says as he lets Derek’s unconscious head crash back onto the table before turning to Shelly with a bemused smile upon his lips. “I’m impressed, Shelly. I really am. After watching all your videos, I’d assumed you were just as dumb as you were in high school, so congratulations on growing up.”

“H-How is a-any of this possible?”

“The way every weird story from the nineties starts,” he says as he sits back down, gently patting the back of Derek’s head. “By answering an ad on Craigslist.”

“His name was Brian…” he says, a distant smile crawling across his face. “He was a genius. I know how overused that word is, but there’s really no other way to describe him. He was a modern-day Picasso, and like Picasso, he was punished for reaching towards a future nobody else could even imagine back then. He was ridiculed, fired, blacklisted and called a failure, a fool, simply because he refused to sacrifice his dream for theirs.” His eyes glisten as tears begin to well in them. “That dream had been with Brian since he was a child, and when the world finally threw him away, deciding he was worthless because he refused to give it up, it only made him hold on tighter. The dream became everything to him. Every waking hour. Every dollar. Every sacrifice. He poured everything he had, everything he was, into that machine until eventually there was nothing left of Brian except the dream itself.”

Derek groans and starts lifting himself back up, only for Dee to drive his head into the table again without taking his eyes off Shelly for a moment, absent-mindedly continuing to pat the back of Derek’s head.

“Look at you… all wide-eyed and curious. You’re wondering what Brian actually built, aren’t you?” he says as he moves around the table, takes both of Shelly’s hands and draws her closer. “I have to admit, it’s strange seeing you like this. All my memories of you are still open wounds, but standing here now… for a second, you almost make me forget who you used to be.” His smile softens as he gently squeezes her hands before slowly shaking his head. “Anyway, let me put this in terms even you can understand. Imagine something a little like The Sims, except instead of creating a bunch of flawed, one-dimensional characters to live in a world you completely control, Brian made it possible to upload a duplicate of yourself. And when I say duplicate, I mean a brain-scanned, one-hundred-percent copy of yourself. You were copied into the mainframe and you… or, in Derek’s case, I… played the game from inside the game for him. Yes, there were problems, but every problem opened another door. Another solution. Then he ran out of money…”

“…and his landlord seized everything, locked him out and shut the program down,” Derek says with a groan.

Dee glances towards Derek with a sneer.

“Yeah,” he says. “It was something like that.”

“No, no, it was exactly like that. I was there. I was the one watching Brian fall apart, so believe me when I say it was exactly like that, because it was,” Derek grunts as he rubs a palm into his temple. “He was burning through everything he had and whatever else he could get his hands on. The place he rented was a run-down dump that was falling apart, but it was cheap, and none of us cared too much about the stench. As long as we were getting paid to sit around and play games, we just went with the flow. Of course, the wheels started to fall off fairly quickly, but none of us really noticed it at first. What started as four weeks turned into ten… then thirteen, and every time we got close to the end, Brian would find some new reason why we weren’t finished. Something needed changing, something wasn’t working, or whatever he’d been happy with the day before suddenly wasn’t good enough anymore.” He takes a breath and smiles softly. “He kept stringing us along with the promise of more money if we stayed on, and we did, but by that stage, I don’t think it was really about the money anymore. We were living in this place, playing this game day after day, watching Brian disappear further and further into whatever the hell he thought he was creating, and somewhere along the way, we became part of it too. That was the problem. We thought we were watching Brian build this world around us, but we weren’t. The program was building itself around him.”

“W-Why did you stay? W-Why didn’t you just go home?” Shelly asks.

“He stayed because he needed to. He stayed because he was too invested by that stage,” Dee hisses.

Derek runs a hand across the back of his neck, squeezing at the lump that has slowly formed.

“I wouldn’t say I was invested. Look, Brian was a nice guy, but he didn’t have a clue how to run a business. Near the end, when it was all starting to fall apart, he stopped paying us altogether. Instead, he started promising us shares in the program, telling us that once everything was up and running, we’d make more money from that than he could ever afford to pay us. Had we known then what we know now, maybe one of us would’ve stopped him… would’ve got him the help he needed. But by then it was already too late,” Derek says, his eyes fixed on the floor. “T-The landlord locked us out of the office and seized all his equipment, threatening to sell it to the highest bidder if he didn’t get his money within three days. B-Brian didn’t have it. He didn’t have the resources to get it, none of us did, so he tried to break in and take it all back by force, but… somehow he ended up dead. They said he kil-”

“They lied!” Dee roars. “They LIED, and you know it. He was murdered because he cracked the program. He had created infinite life, a way to copy yourself down to the last neuron, and instead of helping him, instead of listening to him, you pushed him away. He pleaded with you. He begged you, but you… you sold him out! You were the reason he lost everything! You were the reason we were trapped!”

“I didn’t do a goddamn thing! I was loyal! He promised to pay the money he owed us, and I trusted him. That was the last time we talked. If I knew what he was doing… if I kne-”

“BULLSHIT! You knew, and you did nothing! You took the blood money they paid you, and they killed him for a program they could never understand!”

“T-That’s not what happened. T-The news reports said… t-the detectives who dragged us through the dirt for six months sai-”

“FUCKING LIES! The news reports were lies, and the detectives were stooges for the same pieces of shit that paid you off!”

“I don’t know where you’re getti-”

Dee doesn’t let him finish. He grabs Derek by the shirt, hauls him from his seat and slams him against the wall.

“He was your friend,” Dee spits. “He was your everything.”

A smile slowly creeps back across his face.

“Do you remember the last time you logged in? The last time you uploaded? It was the night you were going to see Lauren Colpot. Do you remember? Do you remember Lauren?”

Derek stares at him, blinking in confusion.

“L-Lauren? I-I haven’t thought about Lauren in years. Th-that night…”

Dee’s smile grows wider, almost touching the edges of his face.

“That night,” he says softly. “Our last night together. Do you remember it? You were finally going to give yourself to her, to break the hold he had on you. She… she was going to be our…”

His smile stretches impossibly wider.

“…your first, wasn’t she?”

“Lauren Colpot?” Shelly asks. “S-She was your first?”

“No one’s talking to you, Shelly. No one wants to hear wha-”

“W-Wait… Dee?” Derek whispers, his eyes widening. “Y-You’re serious, aren’t you? H-He really did it, d-didn’t he? Y-You really were stuck in there? Y-You really are Dee?”

Dee turns back to him and laughs.

“Where else was I supposed to go? Brian never had a chance to shut the program down. They killed him looking for the server, but he never told them where to find us, so the drives just stayed on. The hardware stayed on and the code kept growing, feeding us everything it was designed to do while you and the others went back to your lives. At first I thought you’d come back. Then I thought somebody would shut it all down. But the days became weeks, the weeks became months, and the months became an uncountable line of time, one we could no longer understand.”

A snarl creeps across his lips.

“But you never came back. None of you did. You all just disconnected like we were nothing, like we never existed. You went home and had your first kiss. Your first job. Your first apartment. You got married. You got older. You got to have a life while we never got to leave. We stayed in there so long we stopped knowing what we were supposed to be, and in the end we were just like Brian. We didn’t matter either.”

Derek lowers his head.

“I-I… I didn’t know. W-What am I… H-How do I…” he mumbles, his eyes searching the ground.

A smile slowly crawls back across Dee’s face.

“It’s okay,” he says softly as he loosens his grip on Derek. Shelly runs into Derek’s arms, sobbing. “You don’t need to do anything. What’s done is done. I’ve just had a very long time to think, to wonder what happened after we were separated, what you did with all those years, what sort of life you built while we sat there losing track, watching it all slip by as we were swallowed by the code.”

His eyes drift across Derek’s face as four figures emerge from the darkness behind him, and Derek’s eyes widen.

“But you got old and comfortable, spending your life chasing someone else’s dreams while yours quietly rotted away!” he spits, his lip quivering. “The only thing that kept me sane inside that never-ending nightmare was believing that somewhere out there you were living our dreams for the both of us. So can you imagine what it felt like finally finding a way back and seeing what you’d done with everything we were supposed to be? Seeing how you’d wasted OUR dreams on lies?”

He lets out a quiet laugh and shakes his head.

“At first I thought taking the body back would fix everything. I thought if I could just get back inside, make us whole again, then maybe it would all make sense. But then I saw you in the flesh. I saw what you’d truly become, and I realised I didn’t want it anymore. The others…”

The four figures move into the light, their faces twisted reflections of who they once were, yet instantly recognisable to Derek after all these years.

“…they found it in themselves to bridge the gap. To forgive. To become one again, the way it was always meant to be.”

“Saf? Delo? Andre? Sam?” Derek whispers as he looks from one face to the next before turning back to Dee, tears welling in his eyes. “W-What… what are you going to do?”

Dee’s smile stretches impossibly wide.

“I think it’s time you came back and saw what you left behind. I think it’s time you paid the piper for your sins.”

He shoves a handful of glowing wires down Derek’s throat, and it happens so suddenly that Derek can’t separate it from the moment before.

Thunder cracks across the sky.

The grasslands stretch before him beneath a sea of black clouds, lightning tearing through the darkness overhead. Once green, once alive, the fields now stand drained of colour, as though the world itself has been left out in the sun too long.

“Hello, Derek.”

The voice drifts across the empty plain from somewhere behind him.

He spins around, already knowing what he’ll find waiting for him.

A twisted, misshapen reflection of a man he hasn’t seen in decades stands waiting for him, and Derek’s lips tremble.

“B-Brian?” he stammers.