Death.

That's the word that's in my mind when my consciousness returns. And as soon as it does, all I can feel is darkness-I can literally see and fill its pressure on me.

I was dying, I think to myself. Jake's already dead, I blew up the entire world before I died, and...

A tiny groan comes from the back of my throat as if I had been struggling against the darkness.

-and June died with me.

I let the tenseness out of my straining body. The darkness is too heavy, too deep, and strong. If I'm definitely stuck, what's the use of trying to get out of this?

Then a question strikes me: am I really dead?

That's when I start remembering things-a bit more in detail.

Jake did 'die' in June's Virtuality, but he turned out to be alive after all-in some different sort of dimension or something. And I and June had been given two guns-I remember the way we pedaled a bike to a nearby park and aligned our backs against each other's and, well, shot ourselves.

-and there's no way we could have killed ourselves just to die; as far as I know, June was far more clever than that, nor was I stupid enough to suicide for nothing.

Does that mean that... we only died in the Virtuality, just like Jake?

Woah. My head is starting to take more time loading itself up. I decided to slow myself down and prevent any more hard thinking—at least for now.

Alright, then. Just one more wrap-up question: where am I now?

The next second, I find myself straining and tensing up again, trying to truly open my eyes and move around. My arms feel paralyzed and stuck into place, and though I feel something other than myself straining against my movement sometimes, I can't be sure about that because I just feel numb all over the place.

Suddenly, after an entire minute of fighting to move freely, I hear a tiny buzz from above me and my eyelids open in an instance.

Jesus. All I can see is white-a brilliant, sterile, clean white. It's so brilliant that I immediately close my eyes and try to roll my eyeballs freely around-at last do they work, and I can feel my closed eyelids shift a bit as I do the tiny, trivial, but exhausting exercise with my eyeballs. Finally, when I feel better prepared than before, I open my eyes again.

It takes little force than before and this time, I simply let the brilliant light razor down on my pupils. Though my eyes turn sore and watery, I try to clench my fists as much as they can and wait till the white turns to black, then back to white, meaning that I'm a tiny bit accustomed to it.

I'm about to open my palms up and try lifting my upper body into a sitting position when I hear a robotic voice that seems as if coming from a computer.

"Eye movement detected. Deactivate body constraints?"

Though the voice is so sudden and clear that it hurts my ears a bit, I concentrate more on what my reply would be. Though I'm not sure what the 'body constraints' are, I don't think deactivating them would end up deactivating a bomb supposed to kill every human on earth or just deactivate a serum to kill myself. I don't know where those two wild imaginations came from, but I try my reply.

The thing is, my lips won't work quickly. My mouth simply feels dry and pausing to work.

"Reply input session will end in 5 seconds from now. 5, 4, 3-"

I managed to force my lips open and almost yelp a dry squeak from my throat.

"Yeah."

I meant to say 'yes', but my teeth won't shut themselves and I end up hissing only after the 5 seconds countdown's over.

Another buzz, slightly bigger than before, is heard and I feel something loosening all around me.

"Constraints deactivated."

I try to sit up once more to see where the computer or speaker is, and that's when I find out that I can move much more freely than before. My right hand heavily lifts before falling back to the ground weakly, but still, that's a start. I slowly try rolling my head to the side and find out that it works, though every part of me feels sore and centuries-old.

Very slowly, I start awakening parts of me-from top to bottom. From head to toe, as the song went. Almost feeling amused to my bad sense of humor at such a pained moment, I manage to prop myself up on both of my elbows and my eyes slowly adjust themselves to the light and look of the place I'm in.

-and it's shocking.

I find a completely white room as small as the room I used to own when I lived in Virtuality with nothing on the walls except a tall metal door-there are no windows at all, even. When I look down, my eyes scouring over everything, I find all kinds of things on the floor.

And they're not even things familiar to me.

I see a tank of water that seems to be made for my height and width-it reaches only about half the height of the room. Then, I find a small mat of something that looks soft and plush. Next is an alignment of surfaces-on a thin block of cement, 6 surfaces with different textures are exhibited in a row: the first one is tiled, made from real tiles. The next one is black and scratchy-just like an asphalt road. The others are also of various textures that I'm quite familiar with. One of the bigger things placed on the floor of the room is a treadmill. It's not like one I might find in a typical gym, but a treadmill that somehow looks... scientific, literally. There are no bars that a person can grab as he or she walks on it at all, but just the belt. The crazier thing about it is that it's sort of built into the room's corner, making the location where a user might step onto it not much higher than the floor of the room.

Bewildered at the treadmill, I look away and find a few other stuff left in the room for me to observe.

There's a simple-looking structure that is cushioned and right-angled, making it look like a table and chair. Also, another object is just a simple block of cement that would come to just below my elbows if I stood up straight, with several cups and bowls--all of them featureless and un-traditional-looking--on it.

Even more confused, I sit up onto my butt-for my weak elbows are hurting-and then finally look right below myself to see what I've been laid on.

It's another cement block that's been topped with a thick sheet of mattress and a cover that's been rolled away from my reach to one end of the block. Thin straps of some material lie almost purposefully around the spot I had just been lying on, just like a bigger and elongated version of a rib cage which bottom end still lies loosely next to my legs and feet as if I had been wearing them.

Something's a bit too wrong with this room-this is the only but biggest conclusion I have ever made about this room till now.

Frowning deeply, I slowly shimmy down to the end of the mattress I'm on and place my feet on the floor-it's tiled quite systemically, each tile holding one of the strange furniture I had just taken a look at; just like Tetris blocks.

I slowly put some pressure and power to my feet and stand up, feeling dizzy and weird. I feel a bit too weak by now as I move my weight from foot to foot, too stretched and moving. Still, I take a step forward.

That's when the tiles move.

When my foot lands a few inches ahead of my other foot, a tile with the chair on it slides forward to lie in front of me while every other tile also moves to make the entire floor fit in well again. So surprised by this sudden flicker of the tiles-I mean, who could have thought that the tiles would move?-, I stumble and pull my arms close to my chest, a bit too scared out of my wits to take another step.

"Goddam." I whisper.

"New behavior set detected-memorize into file?" The computer's back.

Was it talking about the way I was surprised and pulled my arms close to my chest?

"Err, better not?" I say anything that comes to my head as I dumbly stare upwards to search for the computer or speaker.

The computer stays silent for a second before suddenly perking up again.

"Confirmation needed by occupier. Choose between two options: want exit from the room or want return to the program Virtuality?"

Now, this is one of the most understandable questions the computer has asked me till now.

"Exit from the room." I answer immediately, my voice coming out better than before. No way am I ever going back to Virtuality.

"Request accepted."

Another buzz comes from somewhere, and I can just somehow... feel that the tiles aren't as alive as they were just a second ago. I take another slow and tensed step and am very relieved to find that the tiles haven't moved at all when the step has been stepped.

So I guess I managed to turn the crazy automatic system off.

With steps that are cautious, then almost hurrying a bit too much, I ignore all my sore muscles and jog over to the metal door I saw before. By the time I make it, I feel as if I had just raced from the café to the mart parking lot back in June's Virtuality. I try pushing the door, but of course, it doesn't open straight away. I look around it, then find a tiny touchpad next to it.

"Biological code needed to open door. Exit will be unaccepted for a day if the suggested code fails for 5 times at each set of tries." The computer explains before silencing itself again.

Taking a deep breath, I slowly raise my right thumb to the pad.

A red beep is emitted from the thing. Jesus. Only 4 more tries left for the day. And I don't want to stay here any longer.

I press my second finger hard to the pad, and that's when I hear the green beep, then the sound of some rarely-used hinges swinging open to the outside.

The door opens.

Feeling so much relief to exit the room that feels almost hellish to me by now, I take a deep breath and take a step to the outside.

The outside air is much more cooler and cleaner than before-I can literally feel myself relax as I make my way down a narrow grey hallway. I can feel my physical capabilities returning to normal slowly since my steps get steadier as I continue down the hall.

The hall's bare, much like the room I had been stuck in-wait; except for a few metal doors identical to mine, each of them placed about 15 feet away from each other.

I push against one and find it locked-it also has a touchpad next to it. I try my thumb but it doesn't work. Perhaps I'm not authorized to get in there. I can imagine another person inside the room, as stuck and strapped into place as I had been. I don't like the idea much and decide to find another way to open the doors.

I'm about to reach the end of the hallway when a thought strikes me.

Jake and June-what if they're in one of the rooms?

I suddenly feel an urge to race along the hall, no matter how many and long they are, calling their names. However, as fast as that idea came to me, I know how I would refute it: I'm simply too tired. Waking up had been tiring in its own essence-and escaping out of the damned room was twice that tiring.

So I swear to myself that I will definitely look for them later-after I recharge myself.

I emerge out of the hallway into another bare space with nothing much decorating it except a few chairs aligned beside the sterile, white walls. The thing that surprises me about the place is not its bareness-actually, I'm sort of getting used to it by now-but the light.

From somewhere, bright, white light floods into the room, illuminating its entirety. I swear I've seen such bright light before-however, somehow, my eyes slightly hurt. This time, I immediately force my eyes to stay open and stumble forward, trying to find the source.

Somehow, I make my way to one wall and walk along it, sliding a hand on its rough cement surface. And that's when I feel the breeze.

It's soft but cool and definitely there-it drifts in and laps against my face.

I go against it with a feeling that the breeze and light are related.

Now, the light shining against my half-closed eyelids aren't totally white-it's filled with hues of red and orange.

I know what the light is.

Before I know it, I'm standing behind a small rectangular window, my arms both placed on the sill loosely.

I now watch a sun-I mean, the sun, actually-positioned over a mostly grey, abandoned patch of a city; the sun's orange, bright rays fall over the grey scraps of garbage and ruins of steel and concrete. The trademarks of a usual city-the roads, the sidewalks, the buildings-are all gone, or, indistinguishable from the grey sea of broken-down things.

Though my eyes stay on the ruins of a city for a while, simply surprised and confused, they turn back up to the sun. Its position seems to look as if it's not caring of what the humans created one time ago turned into-it's simply cool and... somehow 'new' to me.

I realize then that it's my first time seeing the real sun through my own eyes in, probably, years.