Beau rolled through the corridor that he believed led back to Dome 101 and into a vast chamber. Unfortunately, he soon realized he wasn’t in the right place at all. Somehow he’d taken a different connecting chamber and now he was lost. He stopped in the corridor, lit with haunting orange wall lights, and considered his situation.

  He rested one hand on his steering wheel while his other hand lay slack on the electronic rifle in his lap. He had no more ammunition for it, but it felt comforting in his grip. The truck’s engine idled and faintly vibrated the plastic floorboard. The headlights spilled out into a vastness nothing could have prepared him for. He peered into a completely unexplored area of Dr. Randall Gerben’s facility.

  The floor stretched out like a ballroom, finished in richly varnished wood. Amber light flickered from the sconces far above. Beau drove forward slowly. Dust kicked gently behind his truck as his tires spun.

  Off to the side stood a full bar, a real nice one with brass fixtures and glassware as big as a water tower. There were bottles with labels in languages he couldn’t read. There was a smell of alcohol and dried fruit. Past that, there was a sitting area with chairs like thrones arranged around a table which held something incredible: it was half of a 3D model of a Paradise Dome, cut in half and exposed like a diagram in a textbook.

  The Paradise Dome model had been cut along its radius to show every layer. The model on the table wasn’t a replica of Northwest Arkansas like Paradise Dome 101 or New York City like Paradise Dome 4455. This one didn’t have a number, and instead included thousands of slanted blue-lit egg-shaped pods inside. It wasn’t like any place that was familiar to him.

  A laptop lay open on the table beside the model. The screen was smeared and covered in layers of dust, but was plugged into the power outlet and its screen was still faintly lit. Lines of white code lay frozen on the screen. One line blinked beside the mouse cursor:

  FINAL MODEL UPLOAD: INCOMPLETE

  Beau stepped out of the truck. His boots crunched quietly on specks of grit. The silence wasn’t peaceful. It was heavy and expectant. It was the kind of hush you might find on a battlefield before the shooting and screaming began.

  What he saw next was difficult for his mind to comprehend. That’s probably why he didn’t remember seeing it when he first drove into what he realized was a bedroom. He hadn’t noticed the furniture at first, because of its disorienting size, but there was a gigantic king-sized bed. That’s also when he saw the figure.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  He drove his truck toward the bed to get a clearer picture. The figure’s shape slowly solidified into his perception and became real. The skeletal figure, which used to be a man, sat with his back against the bed. The skeleton wore black slacks and a white button up shirt and a pair of thin frame glasses. The sockets in his skull stared up at the ceiling.

  Beau felt the reality deep inside his gut. It was all so obvious, in hindsight.

  The figure before him wasn’t a giant. It was Beau who lived in the giant’s world. The skeletal figure was the remains of a real human. It was those inside the Paradise Domes who were shrunken down.

  Was Beau even human?

  He climbed out of the truck and paced slowly across the wooden floor. Near the bed was a cluttered work area—a gigantic whiteboard propped against the far wall and streaked with equations and sketches in half faded dry erase markings. The handwriting was ferocious. There were loops, underlines, and triple-circled phrases. He read terms like “Mass Elimination,” “Quantum Projection,” and “Project Adam.” There were diagrams of human silhouettes labeled “Original Scale Proposal 1:68.”

  It all felt obsessive, desperate, and chaotic.

  Beau’s eyes roamed over a stack of black binders on a nearby bookshelf. He examined the dates on the spines. They were decades old. There were stacks of research papers everywhere, like towers that piled on the surface of all three dressers. There were more piles of research papers on the floor under the bed.

  Something in the room shifted.

  A shadow broke across the floor, on the far side of the bedroom. It was just for a second, but just enough for Beau to notice. Then there was another shape that slipped behind the molding of a massive vent shaft. He heard the fluttering of wings and the color of something faintly green.

  There was something in the room watching him.

  Beau’s blood chilled.

  He sprinted back to his truck and scrambled inside. He peeled backward, skidding across the lacquered floor. As he spun the wheel, his headlights raked across the room—and for just a second he saw something green fly past him but couldn’t identify it.

  Then, a moment later, it was gone, ascending up toward the ceiling.

  He sped out of the bedroom.

  He floored it down the corridor, and soon the wood floor turned to concrete. He finally found the corridor he had been looking for. Red sconces blurred above him and cast their creepy light down onto his escape attempt. The battery in his truck chimed. The screen read 12% battery lift. He couldn’t stop and he didn’t look back.

  He had to return to Dome 101. He had to find Tessa. She was the smart one, she could make sense of it all. If he made it back alive, he promised to tell everyone the truth. This wasn’t their world anymore. It belonged to the humans and they were just a byproduct. He knew that now. But before he presented everyone with the facts of their false reality, he would pick up Tessa and they would search the room further. Together they would piece together the facts and find the answers they all needed.