Wake up

Body Zero

You awaken in a deeply familiar place. It’s home! You’re home on your couch with your head in some sort of electrical helmet. You know what it is, of course, you invented it. You look around the room and know where every object came from. The emotions begin to overwhelm you.

You tear off the helmet and sit up, tears welling in your eyes. You bring your head to your knees and cry, and cry, and cry, partly out of happiness for your nightmare to be over, partly because of the trauma you experienced and partly for Elana, who you now remember clearly.

Your name is Samantha Nabodi, former head of the men’s division at Dreamcorp. Elana was your coworker and is currently your lover, and perhaps more immediately, in danger. You’re intimately familiar with the systems and know that the file Elana ran to free you will inevitably be exposed. She all but gave herself up to save you.

You pick up your phone to call Elana. It goes straight to voicemail. Maybe she got out, you try to assure yourself. You try calling again. Nothing. You spend the next hours calling her, more and more **** each time but still getting the same results. She must be in trouble.

You’re angry that your mission failed. It was nearly the perfect plan too. You wrote untraceable code that would allow you to control one of the minds of a male ****. You passed it off to Elana to execute it in the system, but then something went wrong.

You open up your laptop and start searching for any potential errors. You need to know how you got it wrong. You scroll and scroll, but nothing pops out. Did Ana know? No, now you’re just being paranoid. If she had known you were planning her ****, she wouldn’t have taken the risk.

You and Ana had never gotten along. It started as a clash of personalities. You were the innovator, she was the seller. And whenever an opportunity came to throw you under the bus, she took it. She’d overpromise on your behalf and then blame you for not delivering. But then she really took it too far. When you and Elana would sneak off to make out and finger each other in one of the empty rooms, she used your laptop to transfer company money to your personal account. It didn’t take long for the suits to fire you. They didn’t even want to hear an explanation.

This was supposed to be your ****. An out of control **** strangles his mistress. There’d be an investigation but they’d conclude it was an accident, just one of those rare black swans you can’t predict. If anything, the blame would fall on Katja. She already had a reputation for incompetence.

That’s gone now and maybe Elana with it, all because of you. You punch your bookcase out of anger, snapping on the sides and sending a shelf of neuroscience tomes tumbling. You need to save her.

You spend the rest of the night writing code that will destroy the facility. You put in on a flashdrive that you sneakily place into a necklace. Once executed, it will create enough chaos that you should be able to get to Elana. All you need to do is get to a computer.