0 & 1

print("Nine")

Ari

Everything hurt. My head hurt, in more ways than one: utter confusion, and something that felt an awful lot like a hangover, but ten times worse. My vision was fuzzy, overwhelmingly bright, and the headache was spreading to the back of my eyeballs. My stomach to my gut felt like I just got stabbed, and I couldn't feel my legs. Overall, I was in hell.

The roaring of the car made it worse, and the road certainly wasn't smooth. We were bumping up and down on the rocky pavement, and I felt like a drill was buzzing into my brain.

"Do you know where we're going, anyway?" Lena asked Summer.

"Just looking for somewhere snug," Summer replied from the driver's seat.

I looked out the window. "Well, Summer, you seem to know an awful lot about this more than we do. Mind telling us what this is all about?"

Summer said nothing. I could hear her silent swallow.

"It's a long story," she said after a while.

Lena glanced at her. "From what I'm getting, we're going to be here long enough to hear it." She then looked over to me. "We're in the real world."

I paused, then raised my eyebrows. "The...real world."

"Yeah." She looked away. "Our entire lives were just...fake. Nothing. A dream."

I stared at her.

I swallowed, and looked down at my lap. It hurt. "So, no industry? No company? No competition? Everything wasn't real. Just a...fragment of our imaginations?" I looked up wildly. "Wait, if that's true, then why are you guys real? Why does it exist in the first place? How did we get out?"

"Everyone in that world is real." It's Summer who answers this time. "They all exist, but their bodies and minds were transferred into a computer database so big you couldn't even imagine it." She looked at me in the broken car mirror. "All ten billion people, dead and alive."

"But why?"

She sighed. "Like I said before, it's a long story. I'll tell you about it sometime, just not now. For the moment, we're vulnerable. Very, very, vulnerable."

"From what?" Lena asked.

Summer slammed on the brakes, and my vision spun. "Those," she whispers.

She forced open the car door. "Get out."

My eyes widened. "What-"

"Now, Boss!'

Lena opened the door, and we ran out into the nearest alleyway, hiding from whatever it was.

I couldn't help but peek around the corner, so I did.

Around it was this huge, terrifying, monster-like robot, with terrifying, sharp teeth and black, pooling eyes. I ran my back into the wall, forcing myself not to make a sound.

Holy shit.

end

end