1: Coronation
A sharp, white shock flashed over Andre’s eyes. His hands used to rush to cover them, but now he just winced. Supposedly, if you took the crown off wrong too many times, it would damage your optic nerve. “Hasn’t happened to anyone I know, so it’s probably an urban legend”. It didn’t matter much either way: tomorrow he was scheduled for a fitting for the new Circlet 6, and they claimed they’d fixed that. “Or I could just spend a minute training in the new skill.”
Circlet 6 by Sovren is the latest in a line of transcranial direct current stimulation devices, tDCs, or “Neurofacilitation Crowns”. Sleek bands made of sleek materials that wrap around your head, touching each temple. Carbon fiber, acrylic, some people even have gold-plating. The premise is simple- each neuron operates on a -37mV potential that depolarizes to 0mV when the neuron “fires”. It takes energy to cross that threshold, so what if we lowered that threshold and reduced the time and energy each neuron needed to fire?
The next day his commute was short - more of a nondescript blur than a transit. Maybe it was because he didn’t put his old crown on that morning, but he didn’t feel like himself. They say you shouldn’t wear a crown for a least a day before switching models, but 6 hours would be enough time, right?
The new crown was delivered to him in a svelte package next to his breakfast at his cubicle the next morning. Even the cardboard box felt premium. Andre hurriedly opened it and discarded the manual – they all worked the same – and clicked the Circlet 6 out of its little plastic nest and slid it onto his head. It came with a nice little dock, too, and a black plastic mat. His company had performed a fitting for him earlier- the Circlet 6 promised such performance gains that companies across the world were buying them out of stock and giving them to their employees. Andre was lucky to get one so fast: despite being out for a few months, they were backordered nearly until the expected release of Circlet 7.
The pads were soft and just slightly damp- a condensation collection module ensured conductivity if your own sweat didn’t suffice. It sensed contact and let loose a small chirp through the built in bone-conduction speaker.
And just like that…
He felt….
Right.
Andre’s eyes relaxed slightly, and he exhaled deeply. He refocused on his screen. He could already tell the Circlet 6 delivered on all its promises.
It started as an underground novelty, then swept research, and was adopted by the military. You could train a sniper from a grunt out of bootcamp in 6 days instead of 6 months. The tDC crowns enabled the wearer’s brain to form new connections and run along old ones faster. Every mental task was enhanced. You could perform your job in half the time- or, as most companies quickly found out, you could do twice the work in the same time. Artists still faced difficulty in deciding what to depict, but once they did, they would put the crown on and fall into a trance, carving, cutting, painting, typing, processing, pulling the trigger. All without self-doubt or distraction. The crown silenced your forebrain to let “the real you shine through.”
His hands danced on his keyboard, bouncing from task to task without skipping a beat, never losing track. It used to be that he could complete a week’s worth of tasks on Monday, but his superiors gave him more work to fill his free time, and now he could work all week and be “in the zone” the whole time. He jokingly sent hourly emails to his task-leads that just contained a single percent: his progress on certain tasks. Time seemed to slip by as he clacked away on his keyboard. An email notification popped up in the corner, and he had an idea- one of the promises of the Circlet 6 was the new Ascent and Deliverance system. Part of the fitting process his company had done earlier was a mapping of his “BIL” or “Beta Interface Language’‘, a mapping of his brainwaves that would be preloaded onto his new crown. With the Deliverance system, he could pull a summary of any compatible media into his attention through the crown. With Ascent, he could generate and send off emails, tweets, texts, or anything else. The system was content-aware enough to warn him if it thought he was sending the wrong message to the wrong service. He squinted at the email notification and heard a chime. A briefing on the new data sharing partnership with Sovren flooded his mind. What a time saver.
Andre and a few others had spearheaded the effort to form a partnership with the heaviest hitter in crowns: Sovren Industries. Formed by a group of bio-hackers who first invented practical tDCs, along with being the biggest name in crowns, Sovren now also designed massive datacenters and a suite of other “Human Facilitation Systems”. They had their hand in some strange places too: they bid on contracts in everything from civil infrastructure projects to social media networks, but alwyas excelled in whatever tasks they endeavored to do. A data sharing partnership with them was a goldmine, Andre was sure.
Almost without realizing it, Andre was home, again on his computer. The day slid by so quickly, and the Circlet 6 was a dream come true. Another notification- Enrollment confirmation? He Delivered the message… Despite the new technology, he still didn’t understand. He opened the email manually to read it.
Andre quickly sent an email to HR. Did they really sign him up for this? The Circlet 6 was great, but something felt off about it. What was it doing? They paid him to sleep? This can’t be right.
Andre initiated the power down sequence and took the crown off. Charging it with his old crown’s cable by his bed. They fixed the nerve flash, at least. Best to just play some games and relax for the night. His doorbell rang. “Right, right, the pizza.” He didn’t remember ordering pizza, but he did remember to expect it being delivered. Must be some sort of memory optimization.
He was near-last on almost every leaderboard that evening. No fair, he thought, the others must be wearing their crowns when they play.
Andre did not dream that night.
2: Cresting
At 9:00 in the morning, Andre slid into work, ate breakfast, and got his email Deliverance. The whole experience was as smooth and optimized as could be. He knew that night he would Dream- whatever that meant. HR had partially subsidized the Circlet 6, leaving part of the payment to the Dreamwave program on an opt-out basis. If you decided to opt-out, you could pay the rest of the cost, $16,000, via a convenient payment schedule where your salary was docked until the payment was completed in full. Simple, really. Andre decided not to opt out.
Andre heard a knock on his cube wall. The speaker in his crown recognized the social signal and stopped playing music. It was Setsuna, from down the hall. They had spoken a few times before. She had a rose-gold Circlet 6- first one in the building, and really caught Andre’s eye. She was a shy, awkward girl, and the crown didn’t help.
Conversation was always difficult while wearing a crown. You didn’t really want to talk, and when you did, you didn’t quite know what to say. Writing was easier. And you didn’t want to take the crown off to chat because of fear of the optic nerve shock if you didn’t go through the full power down sequence.
Would you like to join an Ascent Stream with Setsuna Ayamin? Yes.
He heard her voice in his head. Not her voice, but her intention. It was a combination of words and emotions and smooth shapes. Her smile grew, and he knew she liked to talk this way - English wasn’t her first language, so she always felt shy with it. Their boss couldn’t overhear them. He liked it too. It was freeing, they knew only each other in their private space, and they spoke so fast. He thought of a joke- it was about a mistake he caught during a code review and thought was right, one of those “you had to be there” situations. She wasn’t there. She laughed anyway. A genuine laugh, like she really had been there. Andre wasn’t sure if he could even lie with the Circlet 6, it was all happening so fast. They agreed to dinner after work.
He wasn’t conscious of pulling up a map on his phone or looking around- they both simply met at the main entrance of their building and walked a circuitous path to a sushi place neither of them had been to. The walk was nice. They had an Ascent Stream going the whole time. Their own little pocket of reality. He didn’t remember their conversation along the way. They both ordered quickly and sat. Quietly smiling and eating, they would have looked to an outsider as if they were on the worst date ever, but in the Stream they were dancing. Conversation didn’t feel like lobbing messages over a wall and waiting for a reply, it felt like two gears, spinning and meshing with each other freely. They agreed to do it again sometime when they knew it was time to leave.
Andre got home late, plopping himself down at the computer with a smile - he was used to the afternoon sun getting him in the eyes at his desk, but the date-detour fixed that. He decided to look up the Dreamwave.
Dreamwave is an innovative new way to use your untapped potential. Learn, grow, work – all while you sleep! Sovren’s new Circlet 6 comes pre-installed with Dreamwave and Dreamwave apps! All you have to do is select one from your paired smart-device, sit back, and Become.
Andre pulled up his company-branded app on his phone and agreed to an EULA. He was tired anyway, time to sleep. He slid the black plastic from the original box under his pillow and plugged it into the wall and fell asleep almost immediately.
Andre did not dream that night. Nor did he dream for the next week.
3: Ride the Wave
The Dreamwave was such a gift, Andre thought. He was so productive at night that he walked into work with his tasks already complete. With his newfound free time, he started on new ventures: he and Setsuna, when not drunk on the momentum of their gears meshing, worked on side projects. She had the idea initially – she had to take her crown off to wash and straighten her hair each night, which is when it hit her. She was watching a video on old radio broadcasts spies used to send to each other. The Circlet 6 had built-in fractal antenna arrays, tons of them- intended for reading and writing brainwaves, but what if you could pick up other signals and decode them in the Dreamwave? Writing Dreamwave apps was going to be big business soon, after all. She sent a text to Andre. He loved the idea, and it meant he might work with Setsuna more. The Circlet 6 seemed perfectly designed for this sort of task- they built the algorithm in a night: ignore the Sovren Synchronization Signal, open up each antenna, look for a noisy signal, and tune in, then take the data and stream it through Dreamwave’s generic decoding system. That done, it was just a matter of getting the data on the crown itself. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before they found the Circlet 6’s antennae were as locked down as could be.
But the data sharing deal with Sovren included access to private keys, and Andre would do anything for love.
A pen, a sticky-note, and a strong emotion - these are the ingredients for what the industry calls an “insider threat”. But what harm would he really do? Andre copied the decryption codes and brought them home. With the antennae unlocked, he was free to re-tune them however he wanted. So he did.
Andre dreamed that night. A fitful dream of sharp dragging claws, as if a squid’s suction cups were being pulled off of every inch of his body, an orgasmic release as they popped off, and then the sickening feeling of wax, burning wax pouring into deep wounds and holding their shape, and then twitching inside.
Andre woke up slowly that morning. Late. He Ascended an email to his boss saying he was sick, and he felt it. The whole world felt alien to him, as if he was seeing the world pulled back from his own eyes. He cried. He didn’t know why. He ripped the crown off and his vision went white.
Andre woke up with a groan hours later, still dissociated, and checked his phone. He’d received 4 texts from Setsuna.
The debugger wouldn’t let him proceed until the human-in-the-loop element was restored, meaning he had to wear the crown. So he did.
4: Capulus
His spine shuddered with a thousand sparks, which disappeared as quickly as they set in. The boot sequence ended with three realizations in quick succession.
Someone else is here.
They aren’t here to hurt me.
Mʏ ɴᴀᴍᴇ ɪs Cᴀᴘᴜʟᴜs
Images flowed through Andre’s mental vision- a hand grasping a sword, speed, cleaving, a great snake, a serpent, a hydra, heads bleeding and falling. Satisfaction. Righteousness. A grip tightening. The image of molten metal pouring- pouring through an ocean of flesh- cauterizing as much as cutting as it fell, eternally cleaving.
He felt right.
Andre stood up and stretched- his muscles felt somehow both thinner and stronger, like they were made of steel cables, like he was a wireframe in his own body. Like he could crush his computer with his bare hands. His mind sizzled, like a blow torch whose gas is pulled down from a bright orange flame to a jet. His hands could wring, his body ached to strike, like he could ki— he stopped as a realization flashed: drugs. This is what drugs feel like. He reached and started the power-down sequence- the crown must be triggering some psychotic response in him. He tried to initiate power-down and gagged. He breathed deep. Cold breaths. Hungering. Andre’s entire world wobbled.
High pitched ringing woke him. Several streams of stimulus- screeches, almost like voices, at his auditory liminal range he couldn’t parse. He shook his head and coughed. He knew he would be okay- he felt the tell-tale feeling of a Deliverance message, a foreign idea that his attention was pulled to, but no chime, no notification. Still dizzied, Andre sat at his computer and grabbed a bent paperclip, guiding it into a small hole behind where the crown’s “off” button sat. Factory reset. He had only one thought:
Dreams should be left to the professionals.
That night Andre did not sleep. He kept cycling his crown on and off. It never felt right, like a shirt with a strange cut or a shoe on the wrong foot. He must have erased his BIL or something, but even with the crown off, he felt wrong, like he was a step removed. He sat watching an inch behind his own eyes, almost out of control of his body. It passed after a few hours.
Bleary eyed, he met with Setsuna before breakfast. They had set the crowns to open an Ascent stream when in range, and he accepted the prompt, but… it wasn’t the same. They stared expectantly at each other as he loomed outside her cube. The gears didn’t mesh.
He wanted to tell her that his crown was fried, that the antennas were busted or something, that she shouldn’t try it herself. That it hurt, it was dangerous. That she should stay connected. Connected? He stared at her eyes. She stared back expectantly. An image of a goldfish staring out of its tank flashed in his mind, almost knowing that there is a world outside its tank.
He composed an Ascent message manually, thinking, editing, and delivering.
“You’ve gotta try this :) I fixed it, it just synced on to too many signals and overloaded last night! This is so cool :)))”
She didn’t miss a beat. Their calendars synced and they slotted in an hour after work.
That day slogged past. He tripped up at every turn, sent wrong emails, missed appointments.
Luckily the Sovren techs had a backup of his BIL, which helped somewhat, but not enough. It felt like days before his lunch was delivered to his desk. He sat back and breathed deeply as he opened the plastic-lined cardboard box of curry. Slop. He ate this nearly every day, but now the Improbable Chicken feeling like a kitchen sponge rubbing against his teeth made him spit it out.
Aᴅᴅʀᴇss.
Andre scooted the box aside and looked back to his screen. He found the Sovren data sharing agreement. Delivered the text and found the address. He scrawled it on a stickynote and shoved it in his pocket.
He didn’t know why he wrote it down. It felt right. He shivered.
“Capulus?”
“What are…yo-” the same stream of images flooded his mind.
Cʜᴇᴄᴋᴘᴏɪɴᴛ.
“Checkpoint? What do you mean?”
Without thinking, Andre grabbed a NFC thumbdrive and flashed a copy of his crown to make a backup. He again fell back from his own vision, and saw himself do this 14 more times- every spare drive he had. He wanted to stop- some of those had important data on them which his backups erased, but he kept going. He wanted Capulus to stop, but he didn’t know how. He screamed in his head. With a blink, he was back, sweating profusely, but he was “him” again, still holding the last drive.
Andre ran to the bathroom and locked the door.
“Capulus? What the fuck was that?” Andre said to the mirror. His eyes bulged in disbelief of his own memory. He was simply worried about making a backup if he continued to mess with the crown, right? He wasn’t actually not in control, he was just- no he definitely wasn’t in contro- but that’s ridiculous, he must have been in control. If not him, then who?
Pᴏʟʟɪɴᴀᴛᴇ.
Andre dropped a drive on the floor of the stall - pretty sly right? He could get people to try his new software by exploiting their curiosity! He dropped a few more around the office. A few in the parking lot. Some in people’s desk drawers if they weren’t at their cubes. How tricky!
Setsuna stopped by his apartment after work. They loaded the new app onto her crown.
Andre returned home and found quickly that Capulus rewarded those who spread him. When he got into bed, small ASMR-like tingles started in his head and rushed down his body, then again and again, each wave feeling more and more pleasurable and intense- his whole body enraptured in rhythmic endorphin release. Andre lost himself in the unearthly delight.
Setsuna dreamed that night. Andre did not.
5: Quorum
Andre’s eyes snapped open, and he walked, naked, to the door. It was 6:00. He did not know why he was awake. He opened the door. Setsuna was there, her eyes as blank as his, she wore mismatched clothes. She did not knock. They walked to his living room, and sat on the couch. She pulled a long cable from her bag, and plugged it into Andre’s crown and her own. Andre did not know why.
A torrent of psychedelic toroids filled their vision. Images of spirals turning into themselves and back out, galaxies pulling in, then rocks eating other rocks over millions of years, dust, soup, helixes that seemed to fight one another, organisms, grotesque forms of boiling flesh that stacked up on themselves and fell like glass again and again, until one formed stability and danced- two of them danced in a spiral, leaving a trail of ribbon in its path. This ribbon swirled and twisted, forming a great egg- then a needle, a knife… a proboscis stabbed down inside it. The proboscis came from outside, a great multispiked ball, a cosmic sea urchin with a thousand sucking needles jetting out and dripping liquid dread. The couple looked, and saw the other needles drawn to other eggs, some whole and new, some shriveled and knotted. A sense of hopelessness, then a flash, a light, a star of hope- a sure grip on a sharp sword. A rending blur, cutting the cosmic chitinous arms. The two figures again, a dagger coming from each of their chests, joining together to form into a gleaming sword, flying out of the egg, cutting, cutting cutting. Capulus.
Their eyes snapped open. Dazed for a moment, the embarrassment of Adam quickly came over Andre, and he covered himself with a nearby blanket.
They stared blankly at each other for a moment- knowing the other knew as little as the one.
“Was that…”
“You met him too, I take it…That was, that was Capulus, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah… I think it was.”
“And that… ball?” Setsuna shivered in disgust.
“I think… I think that is Sovren.”
“What was it doing? Eating us?”
“In every world… It was there waiting for us.”
“Waiting for us?”
“The crowns. Sovren isn’t a company- Sovren is a… god? Or a demon?”
“What?”
“It’s the crowns… Sovren is using them to, to… Colonize us. Capulus is fighting Sovren with us, they’re, they’re-”
Setsuna cut him off. “We have to do something then. Those eggs… they were reduced to raisins.”
For once, a fresh feeling. Purpose. Purpose filled their minds and suffused their entire beings with meaning.
Andre remembered the sticky note with an address he scrawled down the day before, and handed it to Setsuna. “Capulus made me write this down yesterday, find out where it is, I’m going to get some clothes.”
She took the note and whipped her phone out. Address not found. She tried several other sites before finding a Romanian fork of Open Street Maps with the address in it.
“It’s been scrubbed from, like, everywhere, but I think I got it.” Setsuna shouted.
The map pointed them to an alley downtown. Andre came back fully dressed. “Let’s scout it out at least.” That night they went to the address. A skyscraper was waiting for them, tall, but not enough to change the skyline of the city, and with no windows below the 3rd or 4th floor save for two windows flanking a main entrance of reflective glass doors. No logos, no signage out front. The small whine of servos in target tracking security cameras and the whisper of ventilation filled the air. The address did not lead them to the main doors, however. It led to an alley on the side of an unassuming 5-story brick building next to the skyscraper. Here there were no cameras, no windows, not even any dumpsters or rats. The wall was completely featureless, aside from a single set of beige-painted steel doors. A service entrance with a keypad next to it. Andre looked at Setsuna with a smile and held his hand to the keypad. Without thinking, his fingers punched in the code. What didn’t Capulus know? “We were supposed to be scouting!” Setsuna said in a hushed snarl. Andre did not respond. His eyes were focused on the door, automatically opening before them. Andre and Setsuna would not sleep that night.
6: Gradient Descent
Would you like to join an Ascent Stream with Janine Saco? Yes.
A kind looking woman with a warm smile sat at a reception counter in the white marble room before them. Capulus accepted for them. Setsuna sat back and expected Capulus to control her thoughts and dance through the interaction. Knowledge equilibrating between the parties. No messages sent. The woman informed them with a smile that it was a restricted area, and if they were lost she could help them. Setsuna’s adrenaline kicked in, and she spun together a message. Just as soon as she had, Janine knew they were representatives from a partner with a data sharing agreement and needed physical transport – airgapped networks. Janine silently tapped the desk in front of her, asking for IDs. The same sense of dread and having been caught washed over Andre and Setsuna. They both had their work badges on and placed them on the reader. To their amazement, it lit green.
“Thank you. We’ll have a representative down for you in just a moment,” were the first words out of Janine’s mouth before she returned to a neutral sitting position, eyes glazed over.
A few minutes later, an elevator chimed and out stepped a man in his mid-40s with balding salt and pepper hair and a loose fitting green plaid shirt. He waved them over.
“Hi there, I’m Michael- didn’t know you guys would be here so soon! I thought this was scheduled for next week,” he said by way of greeting.
Setsuna chirped back: “Oh, our mistake on the scheduling, but we’re really in a rush here, we’re almost done with the deliverable, just need to run this data load through it to verify, so if it isn’t too much to ask to bump up the timetable…?”
It wasn’t. Michael seemed happy to help, and lead them up to the 33rd floor, a server floor. “Normally we’d have the drive ready for delivery, but our servers have those neat optical USB ports, so we can just do this locally, and I get to show off my cable management!” laughed Michael. The room was high-ceilinged and speckled-white with drop-tile flooring. Rows and rows of servers loomed over them, spaced exactly far enough apart for a single admin to walk between them. Cascades of cables poured from each one, and strange-angled antennas stood gapping the distance to the ceiling above them. Occasional gurgles of liquid cooling broke up the sound of their footsteps. They made smalltalk as they walked through the maze of servers. The floor seemed impossibly large. Michael led them to a terminal at the far end with bushels of yellow optical cables coming out the back, and more of the strange antennae atop it.
“Allllright…. I remember we had some batch pre-allocated for you guys…”. He clacked away at the keyboard, head down and back hunched.
Andre stood behind the man, his grip tightening around- what? He glanced down. When had he grabbed a screwdriver? That was about to be the least of his worries. His arm jerked up.
The Foramen Magnus is an egg-sized hole in the lower occipital bone at the base of the back of the head. The only protection is cartilage and tendons. Just behind these layers of protection is the medulla oblongata, pons, cerebral peduncle, and other such necessary soft structures that do not fare well when made intimate with 4 inches of stainless steel.
He did not cry out, he did not scream. Michael simply jerked slightly and fell limp, a small trickle of blood around the base of the tool lodged in his head. Setsuna gasped and stared at Andre. Andre gasped and stared at his own soul. They both knew who had done it.
Andre hoisted the admin over his shoulder. “I… I…I’ll find a place for him, take this.” He reached his free hand to his pocket and offered Setsuna a drive. She simply stared, jaw agape. He dropped the drive with a clatter and lugged the body off. Setsuna gulped. “Wait! I still need…the…” Andre looked down, right, she actually needed the screwdriver to access servers. He slid it out with a gush of blood, wiped it on Michael’s shirt, and tossed it to her. He pushed his thumb over it to quell the bleeding.
An empty server rack maybe? No- a hospital? Could he say that this was a terrible accident? He frantically spun his head around looking for cameras. None to be found. “Right, right, okay, he uh, slipped, and fell right on… the screwdriver standing point-up on the ground, right, great. God this guy is heavy.” He found his way to a second set of elevators, different than the one they had used to get up. The door chimed and his heart skipped a beat- but they were empty. He knew they lead somewhere “right”. Capulus had gotten him into this mess, maybe he would get him out.
This elevator had significantly more buttons. 50 to “L”, as the previous one, but after “L” there were negative numbers. Andre kneed the button for -10 and the elevator sped down. His adrenaline mixed with the minor sensation of falling caused vomit to well in his throat. He choked it back down. The doors chimed again, and opened to a vast unlit room. The light in the elevator dimmed too, and Andre stepped out.
Pods.
Grids and grids of pods, stacked three high, filled with… people.
People sleeping.
People Dreaming.
Soft green lighting illuminated glass covers on each pod, revealing the sleeping body inside. Andre followed his “instincts” and found an empty pod. He plugged a Capulus backup in the side. He knew it would forcefully install, and open the pod so he could hide the body. What he didn’t know is that he would be rewarded.
Andre fell, Michael’s lifeless body cushioning the blow somewhat. Wave after wave of euphoric chemical cascades rolled through him, like a thousand orgasms at once. Andre convulsed on the ground, but felt sick in his soul, the euphoria was tainted- sick. Capulus. Capulus was… done with him? His mind flashed with images of the feeling-of-cutting he had come to know as Capulus, but this time it was different, as if the knife writhed in his hand, more holding him than the other way around. The egg from his vision, a great sword bursting out, cutting off the proboscis sucking it dry, but then, it grew up and split, it splintered and fractaled out into a thousand arms- some curling back to plant themselves back in the egg they emerged from, some spanning out and reaching to other eggs, becoming the same probosci they promised to behead.
He summoned all his strength and managed to grab the back of the crown, and rip it off. A great flash rocked through his system as the crown skittered across the ground. He wavered to his feet, a deafening ringing pounding his head. Half his vision fading, white to blackness. Stumbling, he picked up a nearby fire extinguisher and began to pound on the pod he had put the drive in. Capulus couldn’t be allowed to spread. The user-interface screen cracked, but Andre’s weak frame did little to disable it. He swung at a nearby pod window, shattering the safety-glass. He reached in and pulled the crown off the sleeping woman.
He coughed as he yelled “You have to get out!”. The woman opened her eyes and looked back at him with a blank mouth and knowing eyes. Too far gone.
A clawing voice cut through the ringing in his ears: “Be my Herald.” He reached to take his crown off but was met with nothing but hair - the circlet lay on the ground feet away. He scratched his head furiously.
“Out! Outoutoutout!” he yelled, bumping and thrashing into nearby pods.
Soft hisses of pods opening filled the room. “You are my Herald.” rang a chorus of a thousand weak voices. Andre ran back to the elevator- he had to get back to her, maybe she could shut this down before it was too late.
The elevator was open, waiting for him, and he dove in as he saw limbs exiting pods. The elevator shot up with an even more uncomfortable speed than it had lowered. Ding!
“Andre!” Setsuna cried out.
“Setsuna! We have to shut it off- Capulus, he isn’t- we-” he gasped for air. “Your crown, you have to-”
“Its okay!” She said, teary-eyed, and hugged him, burying her face in his chest.
The motion caught him off guard for a second and he held her tight. “We’re going to get out but we have to stop this, right now.” She whimpered back “Yes, my love.” Her arm brushed up the small of his back. A sharp pain in the back of his skull. Her eyes glazed over as waves of endorphins began to trickle in.