The Patented Corporate Asset

Zach pulled the microfiber cloth across the third leaf of the Eternal Oak. It wasn't an oak. It was a polymer-composite structural asset with a 4K texture overlay, but the manual called it an oak. The dust here was sticky. It wasn't the grey, fluffy stuff from the old world. It was a fine, yellow grit that tasted like copper if you breathed too much of it. Bio-Sync called it 'Nutrient-Rich Atmosphere,' but the techs called it lung-rot. Zach's lower back ached. He was twenty-three, and he already moved like a man twice his age. That was the dome for you. The gravity was slightly off—9.8 meters per second squared on paper, but in Sector 7, it felt heavy, like the floor was trying to suck your boots into the laminate.

"You're missing a spot on the underside," Marie said. She wasn't dusting. She was leaning against a 'mossy' rock that was actually a fiberglass charging station for the cleaning drones. She was scrolling through her feed, her eyes darting back and forth as the internal UI of her retinas projected a stream of data only she could see. Her face was lit by the faint, blue glow of her contact lenses. "Upper left. Near the branch with the serial number. Bio-Sync is going to dock your credits if the sensors catch that dust."

Zach didn't look at her. He kept his eyes on the leaf. "The sensors are calibrated for the 'Golden Hour' lighting. If I finish this before the sun-sim shifts, they won't see shit. Why are you even here? This isn't your sector."

"My sector is currently being 'optimized' for a private wedding," Marie said, waving a hand dismissively. "Some corporate heir wants a 'vintage forest' vibe. They had to scrub the whole place down with scent-blockers. I can't breathe in there. Besides, the Eternal Oak is, like, a legacy asset. It's vintage. It's retro. It's almost cool if you don't think about how fake it is."

Zach sighed, the sound muffled by his filter mask. He looked up at the canopy. The leaves were perfect. Too perfect. Every single one was the exact same shade of 'Forest Renewal Green,' a color patented by the company. The sunlight coming through the dome's glass wasn't real sunlight. It was filtered through a layer of liquid crystal that blocked out the actual, dying world outside and replaced it with a perpetual July afternoon. It was always summer in the dome. It was always 78 degrees. It was always a lie.

He moved his ladder. The metal creaked, a sharp, annoying sound that echoed in the quiet of the sector. There were no birds here. Birds were loud and they pooped on the assets. If you wanted bird sounds, you had to subscribe to the 'Avian Atmosphere' package on your personal audio-link. Zach couldn't afford it. He lived in a world of silence, broken only by the hum of the air recyclers and Marie's constant chatter.

"Check this out," Marie said, her voice dropping an octave. She pointed toward the base of the oak, where the plastic roots met the artificial soil. "Look at that. Is that a glitch?"

Zach climbed down the ladder, his knees popping. He knelt in the dirt—a mixture of shredded tires and brown dye—and looked where she was pointing. Tucked between two thick, grey roots was something that didn't belong. It wasn't plastic. It wasn't polymer. It was a berry, small and round, glowing with a faint, sickly purple light. It looked like a bruise that had been given form. It pulsed, just slightly, a tiny throb of movement that made Zach's stomach turn.

"What the hell is that?" Zach asked. He reached out a gloved hand, then hesitated. The berry looked wet. In a world where everything was dry and sterile, the moisture on its skin was terrifying. It looked like a drop of oil in a clean glass of water. "Is it a legacy asset? Like, an actual plant?"

"No way," Marie said, stepping closer. She leaned over him, her shadow falling across the berry. "The system wouldn't allow it. It would have been flagged by the Gardeners hours ago. It's probably just a rendering error. A physical glitch. I heard about this in Sector 4. Sometimes the bio-printers misfire and create something... weird."

Zach leaned in closer. The berry didn't look like a misfire. It looked intentional. It looked hungry. "It's glowing, Marie. Things aren't supposed to glow unless they have a power source."

"Eat it," Marie said. She let out a short, sharp laugh. It was a joke, but her eyes were fixed on the thing. "Go on. Eat it. I'll record it. It'll go viral. 'Tech eats forbidden fruit in the Bio-Sync Garden.' It's a vibe. It's very biblical-chic."

"I'm not eating a glitch, Marie. I don't want my stomach to be deleted."

"Oh, come on. Everything in the dome is 'certified safe.' Bio-Sync says so on every internal memo. 'Safety is our Priority.' 'Nature: Reimagined for Your Comfort.' It's probably just a high-glucose byproduct from the root-coolant system. It probably tastes like blue raspberry."

Zach looked at the berry. He was tired. He was so incredibly tired of the dust, the plastic leaves, and the credits that never seemed to cover his rent in the sub-level dorms. He looked at Marie, who was already raising her wrist-cam, her face twisted into a smirk that said she knew he was too cowardly to do it. The smirk was what did it. The absurd, corporate-sanctioned boredom of his life suddenly felt heavier than the dome's gravity.

He reached out, his fingers trembling slightly, and plucked the berry from the ground. It felt warm. It didn't feel like plastic. It felt like skin. It felt like a small, beating heart. He didn't think about it. If he thought about it, he would stop. He popped it into his mouth and bit down.

It didn't taste like blue raspberry. It tasted like static. It tasted like the way a limb feels when it goes to sleep, a sharp, pins-and-needles sensation that exploded across his tongue and shot straight up into his brain. For a second, everything went white. His retinas burned. The UI in his eyes—the clock, the credit counter, the oxygen levels—all flickered and died. A red error message scrolled across his vision: SYSTEM CRITICAL. DATA CORRUPTION DETECTED. REBOOTING...

Then the world changed.

Zach screamed, but the sound didn't come from his throat. It came from the air around him. The 'Eternal Oak' wasn't an oak anymore. It wasn't plastic, either. The polymer skin sloughed off like wet wallpaper, revealing what was underneath. It was a pillar of raw, red meat, wrapped in thick, pulsing veins that throbbed with the rhythm of a heavy machine. The leaves weren't leaves; they were thin, translucent flaps of skin, weeping a clear, yellowish fluid that smelled like a hospital.

He looked down at his hands. They were covered in the 'dirt' of the dome, but the dirt was moving. It was a carpet of tiny, translucent worms, billions of them, churning through a bed of grey, fibrous sludge. He looked at Marie. He wanted to tell her to run, but the words died in his throat.

Marie wasn't Marie. She looked like a walking corpse, her skin a dull, waxen grey, held together by thousands of tiny, glowing corporate stickers. They were everywhere—on her forehead, her neck, her arms. Each one pulsed with a barcode. Her eyes were gone, replaced by two glowing, mechanical lenses that whirred as they focused on him. When she spoke, her voice wasn't human. It was a distorted audio file, clipped and stuttering.

"Z-Z-Zach?" she said, her head tilting at an unnatural angle. "You're... you're tweaking. This is... great for the... the feed."

Zach backed away, his boots squelching in the meat-moss. He looked around the dome. The beautiful, summer forest was gone. In its place was a biological nightmare. The rocks were calcified tumors. The grass was a field of fine, human hair, swaying in a wind that smelled like a slaughterhouse. Above them, the glass of the dome wasn't glass. It was a massive, translucent membrane, stretched tight over a skeletal frame of bone and steel. Outside, he could see the sky. It wasn't blue. It was a bruised, sickly orange, choked with the smoke of a thousand burning cities.

"It's a factory," Zach whispered, his voice cracking. "It's not a garden. It's a recycling plant."

He saw it then—the pipes. They were everywhere, hidden beneath the meat-foliage. Thick, black tubes that pumped a slurry of brown waste into the roots of the meat-trees. He realized with a jolt of pure horror what the 'Nutrient-Rich Atmosphere' really was. They weren't breathing air. They were breathing the vaporized remains of the world outside, processed through the lungs of this massive, living machine. Everything in the dome—the trees, the moss, the berries—was a filter. They were living inside a giant, corporate-owned kidney.

He tried to log out. He reached for the mental trigger that would shut down his UI, but there was nothing to trigger. The interface wasn't a software layer. He could see it now, through the glitch in his vision. The wires weren't just near his optic nerve; they were woven into it. They were grey, metallic parasites that burrowed into his brain, pulsing with every heartbeat. The 'malware' of the berry had stripped away the glamour, leaving him staring at the raw, digital infection that had been running his life.

"Nature: Reimagined for Your Comfort," a voice boomed from the sky. It was the Bio-Sync slogan, but now it sounded like a threat. It was the sound of a god laughing at a bug. "Bio-Sync: We Are the Pulse of the Planet."

Zach looked at the meat-oak. He saw a wound in its side, a deep gash where the skin had peeled back. Inside, he didn't see wood. He saw a server rack, the metal glowing red-hot, embedded in a mass of grey brain matter. The tree was thinking. It was processing data. It was the heart of the system, and it was hungry.

Retinal Feedback Loop

Zach stumbled backward, his heels sinking into the hair-grass. Every movement felt like wading through warm jelly. The air was thick, not with the simulated humidity of a summer afternoon, but with the actual, stifling heat of a massive biological engine. He wiped his face, and his hand came away wet with a fluid that looked like sweat but felt like oil. He looked at Marie again. She was still holding her wrist-cam up, her mechanical eyes whirring. To her, he was just a coworker having a weird reaction to a glitchy asset. To her, the world was still a 4K paradise of green leaves and soft light.

"Marie, stop!" Zach shouted. His voice sounded like it was being underwater. "Look at the trees! Look at your skin! It’s all... it’s all meat, Marie!"

Marie giggled. It was a sound he had always found charming, but now it was a series of digital chirps that made his skin crawl. "Zach, stop being so extra. You're literally doing too much. The berry was just a high-res texture error. You're probably just getting a feedback loop from your ocular graft. Just blink three times to reset the cache."

"I can't reset it!" Zach screamed. He grabbed his own head, his fingers digging into his scalp. He could feel the ridges of the hardware beneath his skin, the cold, hard lines of the tech that Bio-Sync had installed when he signed his contract. "The cache is the lie! This is the reality! We’re standing in a lung! We’re standing in a giant, corporate-owned lung!"

He looked down at his microfiber cloth. It was a piece of grey, dried skin. He dropped it in disgust. The 'Eternal Oak' throbbed. A low, rhythmic boom-hiss echoed through the sector, the sound of a massive valve opening and closing. He looked at the base of the tree. The roots weren't just in the ground; they were fused with the metal floor plates, veins wrapping around the rivets like ivy.

Suddenly, a notification flashed in his peripheral vision. It wasn't the usual blue Bio-Sync icon. It was a jagged, red warning sign. UNRECOGNIZED BIOLOGICAL INPUT DETECTED. SECTOR 7 INTEGRITY COMPROMISED. RE-SYNC PROTOCOL INITIATED.

"Oh no," Zach whispered. He knew what the Re-Sync was. He'd seen it happen to a tech in Sector 3 who had a mental breakdown. They said the guy had 'lost his connection to the brand.' They brought in the Gardeners, and when the guy came back a week later, he was the most productive employee in the dome. He didn't talk much anymore, and his eyes were always a little too bright, but he was 're-synced.'

A sound like a swarm of angry bees filled the air. From the canopy of the meat-trees, three shapes dropped down. They were the Gardeners. In the filtered reality, they looked like sleek, silver drones with soft, glowing lights and rounded edges—friendly little robots designed to maintain the 'nature' of the dome. In Zach's unfiltered vision, they were nightmares.

They were spheres of pale, translucent flesh, about the size of a basketball, suspended by dozens of thin, twitching organic tentacles. They didn't fly with propellers; they pulsed through the air, their tentacles lashing out like whips. In the center of each sphere was a single, large eye, bloodshot and staring, surrounded by a ring of needle-like injectors.

"Target identified," one of the Gardeners hissed. The voice wasn't electronic. It was a wet, raspy sound, like someone trying to speak with a throat full of gravel. "Technician 4092. Zachery Miller. System sync at 0%. Immediate recalibration required."

"Stay away from me!" Zach yelled, scrambling to his feet. He grabbed the ladder, but it was soft now, the metal turning into a flexible, bone-like material that bent under his weight.

"Zach, what are you doing?" Marie asked, her voice sounding like a looped recording. "The drones are just coming to help. You're being so weird. You're going to ruin my engagement metrics if you keep screaming like that. Look at the camera! Do something cool!"

She stepped toward him, and Zach saw the stickers on her face ripple. They weren't just stickers; they were small, parasitic organisms that were feeding on her skin. They were the source of the 'Natural Glow' that Bio-Sync promised its employees. It was a cosmetic parasite that made you look healthy while it drained your life to power the dome's sensors.

One of the Gardeners darted forward. Its tentacles wrapped around Zach's ankle. They were cold and slimy, and they burned where they touched his skin. He kicked out, his boot connecting with the fleshy sphere of the drone. It let out a high-pitched squeal and retreated, a dark, viscous fluid leaking from where he'd hit it.

"Assault on corporate property detected," the drone rasped. "Level 2 intervention authorized. Re-syncing through direct neural interface."

Zach turned and ran. He didn't know where he was going. The sector he had spent two years in was now a terrifying, unrecognizable maze. The paths he knew were gone, replaced by trails of slick, purple bile that led between hills of pulsating muscle. He ran past a 'flower bed' that was actually a cluster of open, weeping sores, each one emitting a puff of spores that smelled like old meat.

He could hear the Gardeners behind him, their tentacles whipping the air. He could hear Marie, too, her voice fading as he moved deeper into the meat-woods. "Zach! Come back! You're literally throwing! This is so mid!"

He ducked under a low-hanging branch—a thick, hairy limb that twitched as he passed—and found himself in a clearing he didn't recognize. In the center of the clearing was a large mound of soft, green moss. In the old world, it would have looked like a perfect spot for a picnic. Here, Zach could see what it really was.

It wasn't moss. It was a dense carpet of tiny, grey threads, and as he got closer, he realized they were moving. They were weaving themselves into shapes—faces, hands, fragments of memories. He saw the face of an old woman, her mouth open in a silent scream, before she dissolved back into the grey mass. He saw a child's hand reaching up, then vanishing.

"The moss," Zach whispered, his breath coming in ragged gasps. "It’s the people. It’s the ones they 'deleted.'"

He realized then that the dome didn't just recycle waste. It recycled everything. Memories, personalities, the very essence of the people who worked and lived here. When you died, or when you were 're-synced' too many times, your data was scrubbed and your physical form was fed back into the system. You became the moss. You became the grass. You became the 'nature' that the next generation of techs would dust and maintain.

One of the Gardeners caught up to him. It lunged, its tentacles wrapping around his chest. The needle-like injectors around its eye began to spin, glowing with a bright, sterile blue light.

"Initiating re-sync," the drone rasped. "Relax, Technician Miller. Nature is reimagined for your comfort. You will find peace in the brand."

Zach felt the first needle pierce the skin of his neck. It didn't hurt. That was the worst part. It felt warm and comforting, a wave of artificial bliss that began to wash over his brain, trying to drown the horror he had seen. His vision started to flicker. The meat-woods began to blur, the grey moss turning back into soft, green velvet. The smell of the slaughterhouse was being replaced by the scent of 'Summer Rain' (Product Code: SR-402).

"No," Zach wheezed, his hand fumbling for something, anything. His fingers closed around a sharp, jagged piece of bone that had been a rock a moment ago. He didn't think. He slammed the bone into the Gardener's eye.

The drone exploded in a spray of black fluid and white sparks. The tentacles loosened their grip, and Zach fell to the ground, gasping. The artificial bliss vanished, replaced by a searing pain in his neck where the needle had been. He looked up. The other two Gardeners were circling, their tentacles twitching with agitation.

He had to get to the center. He had to find the source. If the dome was a body, it had to have a heart. And he knew where it was. He could feel it pulsing beneath his feet, a deep, heavy throb that was getting louder with every step he took toward the center of Sector 7. The Server Tree. The Eternal Oak. It wasn't just a tree. It was the brain. It was the heart. It was everything.

High Bio-Load Warning

Zach ran. The pain in his neck was a sharp, localized fire that radiated down his spine, a constant reminder of the 're-sync' that had almost claimed him. The Gardeners were still behind him, their raspy breathing and whipping tentacles a constant soundtrack to his flight. He didn't look back. He couldn't. If he looked back, he might see the sheer scale of the horror following him.

The landscape of Sector 7 was dissolving. The 'glitch' from the berry wasn't just affecting his vision anymore; it felt like it was infecting the dome itself. Where he stepped, the meat-moss turned to a grey, liquid soup. The 'trees' groaned, their skin-leaves shriveling and falling like scabs. The air was becoming thick with a black, oily smoke that tasted like burning hair.

"Warning," a calm, female voice echoed from the sky. It was the dome's central AI, the one that usually gave weather updates and credit reminders. Now, her voice was distorted, slowed down to a gravelly crawl. "High... bio-load... warning. Sector 7... metabolic... failure... imminent. Please... remain... calm. A Bio-Sync... representative... will be... with you... shortly."

"Yeah, I'm sure they will," Zach muttered, his lungs burning.

He reached the clearing where the Eternal Oak stood. From a distance, it had looked like a tree. Up close, it was a mountain of flesh. It was at least fifty feet tall, a massive, pulsing pillar of muscle and bone that stretched up toward the dome's ceiling. Thick, translucent arteries, some as wide as a man's torso, ran from the base of the tree and disappeared into the ground. They were filled with a glowing, blue fluid that Zach realized was the 'lifeblood' of the dome—the processed data and biological energy of every living thing inside.

He saw the gash he had noticed earlier. It was larger now, the skin around it curling back like a burnt orange peel. Inside, the server racks were humming, their red lights blinking in sync with the tree's heartbeat. This was the Server Tree. This was the literal heart of the dome. It was where the reality-filters were generated, where the credits were tracked, and where the 're-sync' protocols were managed.

Marie was there. She had followed him, though how she had navigated the meat-woods without the glitch-vision, Zach didn't know. She was standing at the base of the tree, her wrist-cam still raised. Her face was a mask of confusion and boredom.

"Zach, seriously, stop," she said, her voice a series of digital pops. "You're going to get us both fired. Look at this tree. It's totally bugged out. The texture is all... smeary. It's going to look terrible in the video. Can you just, like, stand still for a second so I can get a good shot of your 'panic attack'? It’s very 'existential-dread-core.'"

Zach looked at her. He saw the parasitic stickers on her face, the way they were slowly burrowing deeper into her cheeks. He saw the mechanical lenses in her eyes whirring as they tried to focus on a reality that wasn't there. He felt a surge of pity, followed by a cold, hard anger.

"Marie, it’s not a bug!" he shouted. He stepped toward the tree, his hand reaching for the largest artery—a thick, pulsing tube that seemed to be the main supply line for the tree's upper sections. "It’s the truth! We’re being eaten! This whole place is a stomach, and we’re just... we’re just the seasoning!"

He grabbed the artery. It was hot, vibrating with the sheer volume of fluid pumping through it. He could feel the data, the memories, the life-force of the dome rushing past his palms. It felt like holding a live power line.

"Target identified," a raspy voice said from behind him. The two remaining Gardeners had arrived. They were hovering at the edge of the clearing, their tentacles twitching. "Technician Miller. You are interfering with a Level 1 Corporate Asset. This is a capital offense. Immediate termination authorized."

"Go ahead!" Zach yelled, his voice cracking. "Terminate me! Feed me to the moss! But I'm taking this whole shitty garden with me!"

He looked at the artery. He needed something to cut it. He looked down at his boots, then at the jagged bone he was still holding. It was sharp, the edge serrated like a survival knife. He raised it, his muscles tensing.

"Zach, don't!" Marie said. For the first time, a note of actual fear crept into her distorted voice. She wasn't seeing the meat, but she was seeing the anger in Zach's face, the way he was looking at the 'legacy asset' with murder in his eyes. "That's a legacy asset! Do you know how many credits that’s worth? We’ll be in debt for ten lifetimes!"

"We’re already in debt, Marie!" Zach screamed. "We’re in debt for our souls!"

He slammed the bone into the artery.

The reaction was instantaneous. A fountain of glowing blue fluid erupted from the wound, spraying Zach and Marie in a cold, sticky mist. The Server Tree let out a sound that wasn't a groan or a creak, but a digital scream—a high-pitched, piercing shriek that echoed through the dome and made Zach's ears bleed.

The UI in Zach's vision went into a total meltdown. Thousands of error messages flooded his sight, too fast to read. MEMORY LEAK. KERNEL PANIC. REALITY OVERFLOW. THE BRAND IS COMPROMISED. THE BRAND IS COMPROMISED.

The Gardeners froze. Their tentacles went limp, and they fell to the ground like rotten fruit. The glowing blue fluid continued to spray, drenching the clearing. Where it hit the meat-moss, the grey threads dissolved instantly, leaving behind bare, rusted metal. The 'Eternal Oak' began to sag, its massive muscle-trunk losing its tension.

"What did you do?" Marie whispered. She was looking at her hands. The blue fluid had hit her, too, and where it touched her skin, the corporate stickers were peeling off. Her grey, waxen skin was turning... pink? No, it was turning into something else. It was turning back into human skin.

Zach watched as the dome around them began to 'melt.' It wasn't a physical melting, but a digital one. The textures were sliding off the objects. The 'summer sky' above them flickered, showing the bruised orange sky of the real world for a second before turning into a mass of grey static. The hair-grass was vanishing, revealing the cold, hard floor of the recycling plant.

"The glitch is spreading," Zach said. He felt a strange sense of calm. The pain in his neck was gone. The weight of the dome felt lighter. He watched as the Server Tree continued to collapse, the server racks inside bursting into flames.

"Nature: Reimagined..." the AI voice stuttered one last time. "For... your... com-com-com..."

Then, silence.

The hum of the air recyclers stopped. The constant, background throb of the dome's heartbeat died away. The only sound was the drip-drip-drip of the blue fluid falling onto the metal floor.

Zach looked up. The membrane of the dome was tearing. Great rents were appearing in the sky-screen, and for the first time in his life, he saw the real sun. It wasn't the soft, golden light of the Bio-Sync 'July Afternoon.' It was a harsh, white glare, filtered through a haze of ash and dust. It was ugly. It was terrifying. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

He looked at Marie. She was sitting on the ground, her wrist-cam lying forgotten in the puddle of blue fluid. Her eyes were no longer mechanical lenses; they were human eyes, wide and bloodshot, staring at the wreckage around them. The parasitic stickers were gone, leaving behind small, red marks on her face. She looked tired. She looked real.

"Zach?" she asked. Her voice was normal now. No digital pops, no clipped audio. Just the voice of a girl who was very, very confused.

"Yeah?"

"I think... I think the lighting is really bad now."

Zach laughed. It was a dry, hacking sound that turned into a cough, but it felt good. He sat down next to her in the wreckage of the meat-forest. The 'Eternal Oak' was a heap of smoldering meat and melted plastic. The clearing was a graveyard of corporate assets.

"Yeah, Marie," Zach said, looking out at the ruined, orange world through the holes in the dome. "The lighting is terrible."

Terribly Lit Wreckage

The silence was the loudest thing Zach had ever heard. In the dome, there was always a sound—the hum of the climate control, the simulated rustle of wind through plastic leaves, the distant chime of credit deposits. Now, there was only the sound of their own breathing and the occasional metallic groan of the dome's skeleton settling into its new, broken shape. The air was cold. The 'perpetual summer' had vanished with the power, replaced by a draft that tasted of soot and old rain. It was the smell of the world outside, finally breaking in.

Marie was shivering. She wasn't wearing enough clothes for a world that wasn't exactly 78 degrees. She was wearing a Bio-Sync tech vest over a thin mesh top, both of which were now soaked with the blue fluid of the Server Tree. She looked down at her wrist-cam. The screen was cracked, a spiderweb of black lines across her last recorded video.

"It's not uploading," she said. Her voice was small, stripped of its influencer confidence. "The network is down. My whole feed... it’s just gone. Do you know how much work I put into that? I had three million followers in the sub-sectors. I was this close to getting a Tier 2 housing voucher."

Zach looked at her, then back at the smoldering remains of the Eternal Oak. "Marie, the vouchers aren't real. The housing isn't real. We were living in a kidney. You saw it."

"I saw... something," Marie said, hugging her knees to her chest. She wouldn't look at the meat-scraps. Her brain was already trying to rewrite the experience, to turn the horror back into a 'glitch' or a 'technical malfunction.' "But the dome was safe. It was clean. Now it's... it's just a mess. What are we supposed to do now? The Gardeners are dead. The food-dispensers are probably dead. We’re going to starve in a pile of garbage."

"We’re not going to starve," Zach said, though he didn't know if that was true. He stood up, his joints protesting. He felt heavy, but it was a different kind of heavy. It was the weight of his own body, not the artificial gravity of the dome. He walked over to one of the fallen Gardeners. The fleshy sphere had shriveled, looking like a discarded balloon. He kicked it, and it didn't hiss. It just moved.

He looked up at the holes in the ceiling. They were several hundred feet up, but the structure of the dome—the bone-and-steel ribs—looked climbable. If they could get to the top, they could get out. They could see what was left of the world.

"We’re leaving, Marie," Zach said.

"Leaving? To where? Outside?" Marie laughed, a bitter, sharp sound. "There’s nothing outside but dust and those 'deleted' people. Bio-Sync says the atmosphere is 40% toxic. We’ll die in five minutes."

"Bio-Sync says a lot of things," Zach said. He pointed toward the sky. "Look at the sun. We’re still breathing, aren't we? The air is thin, but it’s not killing us. The 'toxins' were probably just an excuse to keep us inside the filter."

Marie looked up. The harsh, white light hit her face, revealing the fine lines and imperfections that the dome's lighting had always hidden. She looked older. She looked human. "I don't know, Zach. This is... it’s a lot. It’s not very aesthetic."

"Screw the aesthetic, Marie. Look at your hand."

She looked down. Her hand was shaking. For the first time in years, she wasn't looking at it through a lens or a filter. She was just looking at her skin, her nails, the way her blood moved under the surface. She watched a small drop of the blue fluid slide off her finger and hit the floor.

"It feels... weird," she whispered. "Like I'm actually touching things. Not just... interacting with them."

"That’s because you are," Zach said. He reached out a hand to her. "Come on. Let’s go before the corporate security drones from Sector 1 realize the heart stopped beating."

Marie looked at his hand, then at the ruined forest. She looked at her broken wrist-cam. Then, slowly, she reached out and took his hand. Her grip was weak, but it was warm.

They started walking. They stepped over the calcified tumors that used to be rocks. They navigated the grey, sludge-filled paths that used to be trails. As they moved, the 'glitch' in Zach's vision began to stabilize. The meat-woods didn't turn back into plastic, but they stopped pulsing so violently. The horror was still there, but it was a quiet horror now. It was just the reality of the machine they had been living in.

They passed the flower bed of weeping sores. The smell was still there—the copper and the rot—but it was fading, replaced by the dry, dusty scent of the real world. Zach realized that the 'Nature' of the dome was dying because it was no longer being fed. Without the power, without the data, the biological engine was shutting down. The meat was rotting. The veins were drying up.

"Do you think there are other people?" Marie asked. "Like, in the other sectors? Do you think they saw it too?"

"I don't know," Zach said. "Maybe if they ate the berries. But most people are too afraid of the glitches. They like the lie. It’s comfortable."

"It was comfortable," Marie admitted. "I liked the way the light made my hair look. I liked the 'Avian Atmosphere' at 4 PM. It made me feel like I was somewhere... important."

"You were somewhere important," Zach said. "You were a component. Now you're just a person. It’s a downgrade in some ways, I guess."

Marie let out a small, genuine laugh. "Shut up, Zach."

They reached the edge of the dome, where the membrane met the concrete foundation. The 'glitch' had caused the membrane to pull away from the wall, creating a gap large enough to crawl through. Zach peered through the gap.

Outside, the world was a vast, grey plain of rubble and dust. In the distance, he could see the skeletal remains of a city, the buildings like broken teeth against the orange sky. There were no trees. There was no grass. But there was space. There was miles and miles of open, unfiltered space.

He felt a sudden, sharp pang of fear. The dome was a nightmare, but it was a contained nightmare. The world outside was an unknown.

"Is it... is it bad?" Marie asked, leaning over his shoulder.

Zach looked at the ruins, then at the sun, then at the girl standing next to him in the wreckage of a corporate lie. He felt the weight of the bone-knife in his hand and the grit of the real world in his lungs.

"It’s terrible," Zach said, a small smirk playing on his lips. "The resolution is garbage, the color palette is depressing, and there’s absolutely no brand consistency."

Marie sighed, leaning her head against his shoulder. "Ugh. Literally the worst. My followers would hate this."

"Good thing they're not here," Zach said.

He stepped through the gap and into the dust. He didn't look back at the dome. He didn't look back at Sector 7 or the Eternal Oak. He just kept walking, pulling Marie along with him into the harsh, white light of a world that didn't care about their comfort.

They sat down on a piece of rusted metal a few yards away from the dome. The air was silent here, too, but it was a different silence. It was the silence of a world that was waiting for something to happen.

Marie pulled out her cracked wrist-cam one last time. She held it up, trying to find an angle that didn't catch the glare of the sun. She looked at the screen, then at the ruined world, then back at the screen.

"Zach?" she said.

"Yeah?"

"The lighting is still terrible for my brand."

Zach nodded, looking at the orange horizon. "Yeah, Marie. It really is."