Page 82 of Tapeworld Induction

The first tug didn’t budge the window at all.

Dylan shifted her weight and pulled the handle of the plunger upwards. The window swung open. Good job Isaak didn’t bother with the window lock…

One more jump and she was in.

Isaak’s flat was small and dark. Only one corner was lit up. His desk.

“Isaak!”

He was right there. But something was wrong.

He was sitting on a gaming chair, slumped forward. There was a thin line of saliva at the corner of his mouth. A plastic crown wrapped around the back of his head, covering both temples. It looked familiar somehow.

She pushed him up and held his body back in the chair.

“Isaak!” Tears welled in her eyes and started to roll down her cheeks.

He was unresponsive. The device on his head, she couldn’t pry it off. It was locked onto him.

Then she realised where she’d seen it before.

Those sleep trials I saw on my feed… This is the same device! He’s asleep!

She could hear Sacha and Talia at the door. It took her a while to undo the various chains from inside.

“Is he here?” Sacha asked.

“You made it, Dee!” Talia enveloped her in a strong hug.

“He’s here,” Dylan managed through her tears, arms still wrapped around Talia.

Lights flickered on. Sacha had hit the switch.

A stack of letters, bills of all kinds, littered the desk around Isaak’s screens. Sacha leafed through them. “Whoa. Damn, bro. Why didn’t you say something if you needed cash?”

Dylan cleaned Isaak’s mouth and pushed his hair out of his face.

“Rent, electric, water, net,” Sacha said, slapping each letter on the coffee table. “He’s overdue on all of them.”

“No wonder he’s had to work for that bitch you told me about, Dee,” Talia said.

There was a green LED lit up on the back of the plastic crown.

“Isaak… can you hear me?”

Nothing.

Dylan slapped his face lightly… That didn’t work either.

She told the others not to try to pry the crown off. It didn’t work like that.

“Hang on, we might be in luck,” Sacha said. He walked over to the kitchen – if you could call a two-hob install in a studio flat a kitchen – and picked up a cardboard box that had been discarded on the counter, bringing it back to the desk.

The three peered inside it. Polystyrene packaging and cellophane.

“This is how he got fucked,” Sacha said. “Someone shipped him the device, Isaak tried it on, and boom. Unconscious.”

“Is there an address on the box?” Dylan asked.