Ahh, the plot to destroy Cydia is finally revealed. Who’s behind it? You can probably guess – but you probably can’t guess what’s actually going to happen when the planet collapses.

Word Count: 42,149

I kicked the capsule. “This thing is pretty sturdy,” I said. “I don’t think you’ll be getting out. Is there a place where I can find a list of patients?”

“There is nothing of the sort,” the lab worker said, staunchly defending his knowledge. I looked around the room, at the terminals, at the cryogenic tubes. I thought of placing him in one while I left to find Curie, so that he couldn’t escape no matter what. I frightened myself with my own thoughts – I was being no better than Maiya, intimidating and hurting others to get the information I needed. And yet, it felt oddly rewarding; ever since that day in the purification plant, I could feel more and more of Maiya’s traits seeping into my personality.

Little by little, I was becoming her.

“Do you even know what you had planned to do to me?” I asked the lab worker, tapping his prison with my foot.

“No,” he said, lying to me. “Maybe you should have just let me do my job, instead of doing Maiya’s dirty work by proxy.”

“I told you, nobody sent me.”

“Don’t play me for a fool. Of course she sent you. She’s been acting suspicious ever since she moved to Central Square. We were all doubting her loyalty to us. She works on her own, she does whatever research she wants- she has an agenda that she’s not telling anybody. You’re not wise to listen to her.”

“And why would I be wise to listen to you?”

“Because I’m here. I’m not questioning my identity. Maiya is a woman with a million faces, and then some. Even when you think you’ve found the truth about her, it will turn around. Full one hundred and eighty degrees. Everything you knew about her will simply dissolve before your eyes.”

I didn’t want to fall for the man’s trap. I knew he was trying to make me admit that I had been sent by Maiya to gather information about The Collective. He probably wanted reason to arrest her – maybe he just didn’t like her. On many levels, I wasn’t fond of Maiya either, but I wasn’t about to let this man ruin my chances of discovering what had happened to Derek and the rest of my district. I especially was not going to let him ruin my chances to discover and stop what could have been affecting the entire planet. I kicked his prison again, harder this time, so that it shook and he held on to the walls.

“They’re building something in here. It makes me nervous,” I said, calmly. “I’m just looking for a friend of mine. I know he was taken here. I want to know… I want to know what you did to him. What somebody in here did to him. At the very least, let me know that something was done so that I can be at peace with myself.”

“Can’t tell you anything. What makes you think I have the authority?” As he said that, I tilted my head to think. I didn’t know what made me think that. I didn’t know what made me think that holding him up in a cage was somehow going to get me information.

But it was too late for that. I could hear more footsteps – I needed to either get the information out of this man or split. In the end, I could do neither; the doors on the wall burst open, and in strode a well-coifed man with blonde hair, dressed in a dapper grey suit. He was alone, and his blue eyes lit up the room. He smiled, his perfect white teeth brightening the atmosphere about the polished chamber.

I took out my Mu Gun and retracted the light, setting the lab worker free. He quickly ran away, out of the room, and I was approached by this well-coifed gentleman, who slowly stepped toward me and bowed. I respectfully, I bowed back before asking who he was.

“I’ll tell you when I feel you’re ready to know. But it seems you’ve made a little fuss in here; I saw it on my terminals.”

“How? There are no cameras in this room,” I said.

“The Collective is everywhere, Vincent Torsten. There is nothing you can do that we don’t know about. So, I hear you’re looking for somebody. I’d love to help you. Derek Marland, is it? You’re wondering what happened to him.”

“How… no matter. Yes, tell me what happened to him, if you’d be so kind.” I put my hands in my pocket. Who was this man – and how did he really know that I was looking for Derek? How had he burst in out of nowhere, expecting to find me here, knowing what to talk about, and probably knowing I’d set that lab worker free if he came?

Instead of talking, he just pointed to his head. “He’s in here, Vincent.” He tapped his cranium. “He’s all in here. You see, I don’t think you’re aware of just what you’ve stumbled into – you’re in my new home. You’re in everybody’s new home. Derek, you see, is just a new resident. He recently moved here, you could say. But here he is – just like all the others.”

“I thought that The Collective was in boxes, not in your head.”

“It’s everywhere. The Collective is my baby – my brainchild. And it will save this planet. It’s already saved your friend. It has saved you. It has saved your partner, Adam Curie, who is currently in the west wing of this facility being assimilated with all the others.”

“You know where Curie is?” I began to move, but he took out a Mu Gun and conjured a wall of light to block my path. I couldn’t leave – he had me trapped. I was going to get the knowledge I sought, whether I wanted it or not. There was nothing I could do. Helpless, I turned around, frowning at the man who had overcome me, waiting to hear the words that Curie’s life was about to end; that he would lose his consciousness in a mess of thoughts within The Collective. That he would become Derek; that Derek would become him. The loss of individuality – the fate worse than death.

I couldn’t let that happen to Curie. I had to escape this man and get to the western wing. With all my strength I tried to run around the wall created by this man’s Mu Gun, but he kept moving it – I couldn’t get through. I pounded on the wall, hoping it would break, but remembering that even my kicks could not free the lab worker.

Eventually, I ran the opposite direction – away from the man and his Mu Gun. If I couldn’t get to the western wing through the door this man had come through, I would find an alternate route. I had to, before they got to me as well – before I was assimilated with all the others.

I could hear the cries of all those living on Cydia; they didn’t know their eventual fate, and yet their souls cried out for salvation all the same. I wanted to help them. I didn’t want to see my world changed; eight years of normalcy had embedded itself too deep in my mind to simply crumble beneath my feet. Before I could reach the other door, a security officer appeared.

“The Collective is everywhere, Vincent Torsten!” the man said from across the room, laughing. “Don’t think you can get anywhere!”

As the security guard rushed toward me, I readied my fist. With swift movements I landed a punch square in the middle of his face, knocking him out. I could feel the fluid that had leaked through the skin of his face; it was not blood. I guessed that he was being sent back to The Collective at that moment. His body lay, lifeless, on the floor behind me. I heard the whirr of the Mu Gun’s light firing at him – as I turned around, the well-coifed gentleman was angrily stomping away, with the security guard’s lifeless body floating along with him in a Mu Gun capsule.

Through the hallways I could see more guards. Thinking quickly, I tried to avoid the majority of them – not really knowing where I was going, I snuck by several guards and worked my way, eventually, around to the other side of the lab I had been in. I was on my way to the western wing – where Curie was waiting for me. I only hoped that I wasn’t too late.

One security guard spotted me as I ran through the halls; I defeated him with ease, making me call into question just what material my fetch was made of. Maiya, perhaps, was creating custom fetches with extraordinary strength. I thanked her, in the back of my mind, for that. It gave me a fleeting chance in this hellhole facility.

However, my urgency did not pay off; I quickly got lost in the monstrous Renaissance facility.I was surrounded by nothing but polished Slate walls – I could see reflections of myself in every direction. It was nothing but a repetitive hallway of mirrors; I thought, for a moment, that perhaps Maiya had provided me with a map of this area as well, but I knew that would have been too much of a blessing. I was without navigation, so I simply kept moving in the direction my gut let me – or whatever it was I had in a fetch.

Through the narrow hallways I ran, until I saw an open room. Thinking it might be what I was looking for – or would lead me to that goal – I stopped and took a look inside. Terminals floated against the walls of that nearly empty room, but there was something very different about it – something that set it apart from the rest of the facility.

It was the walls.

I remember those walls; they were the only in the facility that were matte black. I was one person once again, in that room, for that brief and defining moment in the Renaissance facility. But it was what I found on the floating terminals that truly defined that moment – for upon the terminals on the farthest wall of the room I saw a map of Cydia. With my hand, I rotated the map, noting several marks across it, both on and below the surface.

On other terminals, diagrams and schematics for chemical compounds floated in midair. Looking at the name for this chemical, I saw that it was an enzyme – whoever had created it was designing and manufacturing it there in the Renaissance facility. Underneath one of the diagrams read its name, “Taconic Rasase.” Apparently, the rasase was created to break down Taconic Slate, and the marks on the map represented injection sites.

Different dosages and concentrations had been injection in different locations around the world. As I looked across the map, I saw that there had been injection sites in places I was very familiar with – beneath Tychon, beneath district 137, and nearby the purification plant that had fallen in my old district.

The entire operation was a setup. The fetches, the instabilities in the Slate mines, The Collective – everything fit together. And suddenly, I felt utterly helpless; what was I supposed to do against this?

I moved around the map again, zooming in on the red points that represented injection sites of the rasase. As I zoomed in, the shape and scope of the injections became clear; the rasase was seeping through to the core of the planet, causing the structure of the mines to break down. That explained why nobody could weld the Slate back to stability – as they welded, the rasase simply crept back in, destroying the bond and the Slate.

Not wanting to sacrifice this information, I began to copy it, unsure if my decision would prove to be a fatal one. With each passing second, as the files copied to my fetch, I became more and more nervous. And when the files were finished copying, I used my last moments of spare time to search the databanks in the room for a map of the Renaissance facility.

I was lucky enough to find one. I hastily copied it to my fetch, and ran out of the room, praying that nobody had seen me – and knowing that, in all probability, somebody had.