Page 75 of Light Leech

When would this end? How long had I already been running?

Despite my best efforts to focus on the present, I reflected upon my time with Deleon. That corporate imprisonment had ended but in the beginning, I never saw that end being anything other than my grave.

Past wars, especially those that “unified” Medislavia had neither clear beginnings nor ends, yet the end did come.

Am I understanding this correctly?

People stopped. Some began walking while others stared into the abyss ahead and screamed.

Am I naive for believing in an end?

“No, you just have to forget your present suffering and have faith that your efforts will pay off.”

Why couldn’t you have told me that from the beginning?

“Because we reached this understanding together.”

Not as all-knowing as you act, bakuh?

The swine snorted, each laugh a draining echo until the sound of capitulation cries drowned him out.

Perhaps my strength was in not understanding this and accepting that. I didn’t need evidence of the end or an explanation of the present. Regardless of the relief of this conclusion, the continual analysis tired me.

The familiar exhaust I had felt while running up the stairs returned like a tide rolling in. Moments of clarity and mental fog pushed and pulled as I fought to keep up my momentum. Ralia kept pace, showing no signs of exhaustion. Focus, or the lack thereof, kept her face still and focused straight ahead.

The hall continued with no sign of change. When it came after what felt like an hour of running, it was not gradual, but as if in the blink of an eye, our surroundings shifted.

We now ran in smaller groups stretched out across multiple rows of cubicles. Their walls divided us with neurosets on desks and corporate posters with passive aggressive statements of control. Though this scene was darkened by the light-headed structure of the neurocore, it was easy to see this for what it was.

We were sprinting through an office building.

The people who sat at their desks paid no heed as we ran by. The business itself was nondescript, but I could tell this was one of those places where Water Hill’s failures would fill space.

The building was not endless like the previous corridor. After a long stretch, we emerged and ran through a parking lot, past a row of skyscraping apartments, then back to the parking lot and through the office building once again. Everything had the dark neon cast of an artificial world, but the idea remained the same. I was running through a repeating workday and felt my mind coated by the thoughts of a standard corporate employee whose single motive was to impress his superior.

Clock in. Clock out. Repeat. Repeat the same job with my mind tapping in and out of the neuroset.

Just as there had been with the tunnel, there was no end in sight. No reprieve or hint of retirement aside from death.

One of the competitors ran right, choosing to jump through the window rather than continue with the group to the next work day where the only thing we were promised was a token of appreciation to distract us from the fact that we would never receive a raise.

I knew I was no employee, yet I felt the frustration of decades of labor where my only rewards were disappointing paychecks and a jacket with the company’s logo.

I watched the defecting competitor smash through a veil of red light that shattered like glass.

My pace grew lethargic as I focused on the man who had ejected himself from the race. He did not fall, as anyone would after leaping through a window, but disintegrated. A digitized scream broke the dense silence of the race as his form broke into red pixels that flickered like fireworks.

“Pet!” Ralia shouted.

I focused on Ralia as I quickened my pace to reach her.

We glanced at each other, now side by side again, as we ran into the next business day.

Years of endless work at the corporation passed until we passed through the office for the last time. I knew that only a mere hour or two had passed, but the cognitive fatigue and the attached experiences of a corporate slave argued otherwise. It reminded me of the life I thought I had lived with Naoma and our kids, but this illusion was a lot easier to see through.

The cluster of runners had spread wide as some began to walk and others chose to end their race prematurely. A vivid memory of the first man to jump through the window plagued me. Each subsequent scream was just as painful, leading me to wonder if there was any chance their consciousness had survived the unapproved capitulation.

The result did not matter. I could not lose or surrender if I wanted to. I did not trust this Test and therefore, did not trust that there was any safe exit besides victory. Even victory carried no promise of safety.