SNIP!

The elevator slams to a stop so fast I'm smashed against the floor. I haul myself up and tap two split wires together in the box--there’s a spark, and I start racing up again. I glance back at the wall behind me, but its shorted out--no more damn smiling face. Thank God for that. In fact, the elevator's dark. Seems like the light sources are in the walls, and I just shorted them with the elevator.

The only light comes from the little orange floor marker, and its flying. 110, 120, 150... at 200 it slides to an easy stop, and the doors open soundlessly.

I'm staring into a room the size of a public park.

And it's shining--the whole place is shining with white light from some kind of nexus point at the top. This is the very peak of the pyramid structure, the beacon. Huge machines churn and whine, erupting from walls and floors, trailing fiber-optic cables into distant corners. Terminals all over the place operated by bots, probably programmed with enough practical AI to make a human look dumb as a rock.

In one corner of the room, though, there's this big ring of things--they're like standing life-support/cyber-jacks, bristling with tubes, antennae, cables, display screens and... people. There are people plugged into them, their flesh rent by the tubes, body fluids streamed directly into a single shared vault, tubes and cables extending their veins and organs into the building itself. These people--these things--they were part of the damn building. And it doesn't take much looking to find the benevolent smile of the face that foretold my doom in the elevator shaft, right there amongst them.

I stalk towards them, semi held out before me, finger trembling on the trigger. God damn do I want to blow these freaks away, but I don't have much time and I need information.

"What the hell's going on here?"

"Ahh," says one as I approach. "Jack."

"Jack," says a second before he finishes "Welcome to our--"

"Welcome home, Jack." Finishes a third.

I walk right in the center, cock back my hammer for emphasis.

"Somebody start talking right now. What the hell are you trying to pull here? Trust me, I'll feel like an angel blowing every one of you sorry bastards away, so don't fuck around."

The benevolently smiling one nods his head with a sort of slow, medicated wisdom.

"Jack, do not fight us, my son. We bring you paradise. We bring you eternity, away from the confines of the Meat, the limitations, the... degeneration."

"Baudrillard is our prophet," chimes another, and the others echo it.

"God wants to meet you, Jack. He is waiting, deep inside the MetaVerse--he IS the MetaVerse jack, the deep, all-knowing, all-loving entity within. Just a few more seconds, and you will meet him, Jack. All of us will meet him."

"You're all insane," I say, then I topple to my knees, coughing wildly, hacking out dark blood.

"Look at you, Jack," says the smiling bastard. "Weak, old--dying. Your heart is weak--you are ridden with disease. You consume raw nutrients and shit out mass quantities of waste that is so poisoned from the toxins you intake as to be useless even as fertilizer. You bleed and your wounds fester and boil and rot while still attached to you. You think so much of your precious meat, but it will consume you. We--we are immortal, Jack."

"All praise the prophet Baudrillard," chime two of the others, "the Simulacra God Cometh, all bow before him..."

I want to shut him up but my chest feels like its splitting in two. I can barely think it hurts so bad, and there are tears welling in my eyes.

He keeps talking, like chalk screeching across a board in my head. "You rely on complex networks--sewage systems, social structures, electric grids--to survive, and yet you cling to your meat when in truth all that you are IS the network, the connection node. You are nothing but a point of consciousness in an infinite biomass--a single organism composed of twenty trillion persons, all of which believe themselves to be individually important and meaningful."

"They are nothing, Jack. There is only the biomass, and you, Jack Fenix, are an illusory identity in its greater truth. The Simulacra God knows this--at his fingertips is the knowledge of the world. He sees every human interaction over the MetaVerse simultaneously--his mind is more vast than anything we can imagine, and he has shown us the truth. Do not deny the truth, Jack. Give in to us, and Nirvana awaits you."

The pain was taking over and my vision was going red. Maybe, just maybe, they were right... my only hope was to join, to see this Nirvana of theirs. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad, being part of everyone, being One...

Or maybe it was a lot of propaganda bullshit.

Time to make one more choice, old man.

"Show... me..." I manage, "Take away... the pain..."

I couldn't give in. I shove myself to my feet for the last stand.