6 SQUARE
Kyu crept swiftly through the underbrush, parting ferns and padding along quiet stretches of moss. Finally he had hunted it down. He leveled his rifle at the unaware snake coiled on the rock in front of him, sunning its rough ivory length. Rage moved in him like burning black oil. You won’t hold Alex prisoner a day longer, devil. As his finger caressed the cold trigger he stumbled back.
In the snake’s place Val Lenny sat cross-legged on the forest floor. Kyu stammered “You—what? Are you here to try to get me to use the 9-Square again? I told you years ago I wouldn’t follow you into madness just to reach for the “future of therapy.” You’re trapped inside of some sick, neurotic scientific fetish. What are people to you?”
[Reader, go immediately to 4-Square.]
Val looked up sadly.
“Kyu, you already are in the 9-Square. You’re lost.
As for me, I dropped that project as soon as the first catastrophe, your friend Alex, was reported.”
“That’s bullshit, you—”
“No, listen Kyu. You got real depressed after that incident; tried all the usual routes of therapy, but unsurprisingly, knowing what we know, they did little to help. At that point you begged me to open the locked storage and give you a helmet.”
Kyu felt something move in his gut like a blue wave. Val continued,
“You told me in Japan they had reopened our research and were making headway with a modification called “Context Anchors,” or added bits of VR programming, directly from the client’s life, that would be inserted into the 9-Square experience but technically exist outside of its flow of networking nodes. You said they were claiming it could interrupt complete engulfment in the program. But I wasn’t willing to risk it, not on my conscience. So I didn’t give you one.”
[Reader, go immediately to 4-Square.]
“And that was when I broke in and stole a 9-Square… I was the one who chose, chose to go back into this madness.” Kyu’s eyes painfully glistened, as if they contained crystals in a cave. “I was suffering and hating so madly. I could have gone to a farm or commune and found some peace in this earth, but I so badly wanted to be healed by the light of some new horizon. I didn’t want to leave people, everyone else who was hurting in the world of tech and global catastrophe, behind. I wanted to be hurt like them so I could find how I could be healed like them; find how we would all need to be healed. Was I wrong, Val? Should I have given it up?”
Val let out a long breath and paused for a moment.
“Kyu, you’re not meant to be me.
If you don’t kill your masters you kill yourself. But, when you kill your master, you bring two people to life.”
Kyu looked off, like a child lost in consternation. Then his jaw squared. He raised the rifle flush with Val’s forehead.
[Reader, go immediately to 4-Square.]
Within the mirror of Val’s eyes he saw the snake’s bladed eye-slits. Then Kyu dropped his arm loosely to his side and let the weapon fall to the dirt. “You’re right,” he said, turned around, and began walking.
Kyu walked and walked. He became a motion of lightness. He blew through the forest and broke through onto a great plane. Sweet grass split out in wind-gusts on every side. The sun turned the air in warm and then cool breaths. The sky and the earth were so wide: endless oceans, and Kyu remembered.
There is only one story.
[Reader, proceed to the Center: 5-Square.]