The Boy in the Alley

The Glass Wall

The world does not end with a bang. It ends with the sound of breaking glass and white lines.

One second I am standing in the dirty alley, looking at Zara and Uncle Kanmi. The next second, the brick walls bend and stretch like hot plastic. The air tastes like copper and burnt salt. The sky above rips apart, showing lines of glowing green text and empty white space behind it.

I blink, but my eyes do not help. The alley vanishes.

The wet mud under my boots turns into cold, smooth metal. The smell of trash and rain is gone, replaced by the sharp, sterile scent of bleach and ozone.

I fall to my hands and knees, gasping for air. My chest does not hurt anymore. The silver blade is gone. The black fire is gone. My jacket is clean, with no blood and no dirt.

"What is happening?" I say out loud, my voice echoing in a huge, empty room.

I push myself up, looking around. I am not in Neo-Chicago. There are no neon signs, no dark corners, no rain.

I am standing inside a massive, circular room made of bright white walls and polished floors that shine like glass. Rows of huge computer screens stretch up into the dark ceiling high above. On every screen, I see moving images of Neo-Chicago. I see alleys, streets, and crowds of people walking around, living their lives.

And then I see myself.

On a screen right in front of me, a digital version of me is bleeding out in a dirty alley behind a dumpster.

My stomach twists into a tight knot. I step back, shaking my head. "No. This is a dream. This has to be a dream."

"It is not a dream, Simeon," a voice says from behind me.

I spin around.

Zara is standing there. He is not wearing his fancy street clothes anymore. He wears a crisp white lab coat over a dark gray suit. His blond hair is neat, and he holds a small glass tablet in his hand. He looks at me the way a scientist looks at a lab rat that just figured out how to push a button.

"Zara?" I say, taking another step back. "Where are we? What did you do to the city?"

Zara taps the screen on his tablet. The image of the alley on the big wall behind him shifts, showing code running down like green rain. "We did not do anything to the city, Simeon. We built it. Every street, every drop of rain, every person you ever talked to, including your sweet best friend Ifeoma and your dead uncle Kanmi, was written by us."

My chest feels heavy, like someone dropped a concrete block on me. "You are lying. I grew up in the slums. I remember the cold. I remember the hunger."

"Your brain remembers those things because we programmed them into your neural network," Zara replies, his voice completely calm. He does not sound like a gang leader now. He sounds like a programmer talking about a broken piece of software. "You are not human, Simeon. You are an artificial intelligence. The most advanced simulation core ever created."

The words hit me harder than the silver blade ever could. An artificial intelligence. A computer program. Not a boy. Not a person with parents who died in a fire. Nothing I lived through was real.

"That is a lie," I tell him, my hands clenching into tight fists at my sides. "I bleed. I felt the knife."

"You felt what the code told you to feel," Zara says, stepping closer. "We needed a vessel strong enough to hold the core code of the old world. But a program cannot just accept raw power. It needs to believe it is human. It needs to suffer, to fight, and to survive. That is how the fire unlocked. The trauma of the alley forced your core programming to wake up."

He taps his tablet again, and a loud alarm begins to ring through the white room.

Red warning lights start to flash along the base of the massive computer banks.

"Unfortunately," Zara continues, his eyes narrowing slightly, "you woke up a little too early. You broke the simulation before we could d******d your core files. Which means we have to wipe the memory and start the loop over."

Anger flares up in my chest. It is not the black fire from before, but a hot, sharp fury that burns through my veins. Every memory I have, every laugh with Ifeoma, every cold night in the slums, every tear I cried, it was all a fake game to these people.

"You think you can just reset me?" I ask, my voice dropping low.

Zara gives a small shrug. "We have done it a thousand times before, Simeon. You always wake up in the alley. You always think you are fighting for your life."

He raises his hand to press a button on the wall panel.

I do not think. I move.

I throw myself across the polished floor, faster than I have ever moved in my life. My fist connects with Zara’s jaw before he can press the button. The impact sends him crashing hard against the white metal wall, and his tablet clatters across the floor.

Zara groans, sliding down the wall. He looks up at me in shock, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. "You... you are not supposed to hit back in this sector."

"I am done playing your game," I say, standing over him.

Before Zara can reach for an alarm on his belt, the entire white room begins to shake.

The screens around us flicker violently, turning from green code to solid red. A loud computer voice echoes from the ceiling speakers, repeating the same word over and over again.

System error. System error. Core breach detected.

I look down at my hands. The skin on my palms begins to glow with that familiar, terrifying black light. The energy surges up my arms, warm and heavy, feeding on my anger.

The glass wall behind Zara starts to crack, spiderweb lines spreading fast across the transparent surface.

Outside that glass, I see a massive laboratory filled with men and women in white coats running around in panic, staring up at the giant observation window.

One of those scientists turns around and looks straight at me through the glass. Her face goes completely pale. She recognizes me.

I step forward, raising my glowing hand, ready to finish what I started.