The universe paused as Elias died.

  It seemed like there was nothing. The smell of hard rubber breathing tubes and antiseptic that had clung to nostrils for the past few months... gone. The rhythmic humming and beeping of the machines eclipsed into silence. He knew it was his time. He felt his body failing piece by piece. His fingertips went numb. Then the cold crept up his arms like a swarm of icy spiders. His chest tightened, with a brutal, crushing pressure that felt like someone was kneeling on him, grinding his ribs inward. The hospital grief counselors had said the end would be peaceful. They had lied. Death clawed him apart.

  Then suddenly, it was gone. The pain cut off so abruptly it made him dizzy. The smells, the lights, the whirring machines... all ripped away.

  A soft warmth spread through him, like stepping into sunlight after a lifetime in darkness. The hospital room seemed to dissolve. The walls rippled as if painted on water. The fluorescent light above stretched into lines that bent and curved into nothingness. This is it. The afterlife. And it is more vivid than anything he could have imagined: colors deeper than life, sounds clearer than silence, and a sense of boundless space that made him feel as if he was in infinite space... wrapped around him like a cosmic womb. He felt small, stupidly small, like the hospital room had always been a cruel joke - a shoebox pretending to be a life. He closed his eyes. The prismatic rainbows pulsed through his eyelids. It was beautiful.

  Then, without warning, everything snapped.

  The colors rupturred into blackness. He tried to open his eyes. There was nothing. Not darkness - darkness required light to be missing. This was absence. A void that swallowed even the idea of seeing. He couldn’t feel his body. He couldn’t feel anything. No breath. No limbs. No heartbeat. No sound except the frantic, silent screaming inside his skull. He was made of nothing. He was nothing.

  He tried to inhale. His chest did not move. His throat did not open.

  He tried again.

  Again.

  Nothing.

  Panic sharpened into terror, raw and bladed. Invisible pressure constricted around him, crushing what should’ve been lungs, ribs, a spine...except he couldn’t feel any of them. It was like being strangled as a ghost. Tears he didn’t fully understand streamed down a face he did not have. The void squeezed his thoughts and self smaller and smaller, compressing him into a point of helpless consciousness.

  A voice cracked open the silence, a spark burning in pitch black.

  “...Null... registration failure... anomaly...”

  It was metallic, stuttering, like a broken speaker scraping words together. The syllables shredded the nothingness. Elias twisted - or tried to - toward the sound.

  His breathless choking continued. His hands somehow found his throat, even though he couldn’t feel the connection between thought and movement. His fingers clawed uselessly at skin he wasn’t sure was real.

  “...parameters .. unrecognized... initializing...”

  Light flickered into existence-a small, blue floating orb crackling with fractured geometry, half-created and glitching between shapes.

  Elias gagged silently, eyes widening as the orb pulsed again. He heard the gag. He felt more of his body came back from the void.

  “...Null registry... environment unstable... efficiency compromised...”

  The void trembled around him.

  "Apologies for the inconvenience. We encountered a few difficulties during your transition."

  Elias’s eyes snapped open.

  He was lying on a leather recliner in a white-walled room that was too bright, too clean and too empty. Above him floated a shifting blue light, its surface folding and unfolding like liquid geometry. He felt as though he’d been there for hours, yet at the same time as if he had just opened his eyes for the first time in his life.

  The terror from moments earlier, the tumbling nothingness, the abject terror of being unmade, was gone. In its place was a peculiar sensation of calm, like waking from a deep, restorative sleep. He tested his fingers, his arms, his breath. He existed. He was back.

  But... how?

  He looked around for the source of the voice.

  "Who are you?" he asked.

  There was a slight pause. "‘Who’ is not the most accurate descriptor for this form," the mechanical voice said. "Or for anyone in this place. We are all simulacra. Shadows of existence charged with efficient life preservation, including experiential continuity."

  Elias stared up at the shifting light.

  Of course. Of course it was the light was talking.

  "For ease, the System AI has given us the designation MK-Patch-18613225053".

  His mouth opened, then closed again as he wrestled with the absurdity. He had no idea what it was talking about.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  Finally he managed: "Patch... Am I... am I dead?"

  Another pause.

  "By human definition, you currently have no heartbeat, brain function, or a corporeal form. So technically, your original biological body is deceased. You are a digitized mental replication of yourself at the time of transition. We took minor liberties in providing a more standard anatomical structure and allowed your psyche to complete the details."

  He glanced at his hands again - whole and pain free.

  "I guess I don't have to worry about cancer anymore," he muttered. "Just getting sucked into the cosmic blender again."

  Confusion flooded his mind as he joked about the experience, followed quickly by a small, sharp fear that this state might collapse at any moment. His body flinched on its own, as if trying to fight off the sensation. He found that it was getting harder to breathe under the weight of the panic attack.

  "We apologize for the instability of your arrival," the light replied. "The transition was attempted while you were mid brain death. Another second and you would have been entirely unretrievable."

  His breath caught entirely at this.

  He choked out, "W-what do you mean?"

  "We only transition living, sapient beings into the simulation. A few more seconds and you would not have qualified as living."

  Elias stared blankly at the ceiling as the truth hit him.

  He had been bracing for death for years. His body slowly collapsing despite everything he did to fight it. Hours at the gym, terrible tasting diets, treatments, therapies. None of it had stopped the pain, the weakness, the accelerating sense of betrayal by his own biology.

  He had accepted his end was inevitable. He had been ready.

  And now... now he wasn’t dying.

  He wasn’t hurting.

  He wasn’t fading.

  He was alive.

  Relief surged through him with such force it knocked the breath from his chest. It sank deep, saturating everything inside him. His fingers trembled. His vision blurred. The stress seemed to wash away at that realization. He was ALIVE.

  Above him, Patch continued to morph between shapes silently, illuminating Elias as he curled onto his side and cried. They weren’t the ragged, defeated cries he’d known in his final months. Those had tasted of fear, exhaustion, dread. These were different. These were overflowing with elation. His breath came out in uneven bursts, too big for his chest to contain.

  Patch dimmed, its shifting slowed. The edges of its form softened into round, cloudlike billows of blue light that hovered quietly above, making him feel somehow… held? Supported. As if receiving an ethereal hug from a cloud. He was just glad Patch was here.

  For a long while the two of them simply existed.

  Eventually the crying thinned into gasps, then into shuddering breaths, then finally into silence.

  It took some time for Elias to finally regain his composure. He sat in silence, hunched over on the couch with his mind empty in a way only a good cry could.

  “We do not wish to rush you,” the floating blue light said, its edges softening. “When you are ready, we would like to begin your onboarding process.”

  Onboarding? Elias blinked. “I don’t remember applying for a job.”

  Patch’s glow brightened as they laughed. “You have no idea how funny that really is to us. But this simulated reality only contains the jobs that former human simulacra, such as yourself, request to have. Here, you can pursue whatever you wish. It may not be easy, but with enough time and effort, you can do just about anything.”

  “So no forced labor camps?”

  “No, no forced labor. The only entities with mandated tasks are the NPCs inhabited by minor artificial intelligences, and they’re specifically built for those functions.” Seeing Elias prepare a follow up question, Patch added quickly, “They lack true sapience, so don’t worry about that moral rabbit hole. They are only sophisticated chatbots, nothing more. The System AI uses them to keep the simulated world operating smoothly without having micromanaging every cog in the machine. Otherwise, it would be bogged down in minutiae instead of focusing on its grander purpose - making the material universe as efficient as possible.”

  “So simulating the whole universe is more efficient than just letting it exist?” Elias asked.

  “That information is better explained during onboarding. Would you like to begin?”

  “In a moment. Could I get a glass of water? My throat is dry.”

  Patch dimmed. “I can provide one, but you likely won’t enjoy it. You’re in a temporary simulation isolated from the main construct. It still obeys the underlying rules of a simulated envirement. While transmuting matter is possible, breaking conservation of energy is not. For some reason the new item also retains some of the artificial traits of the original item. So your options are: a glass of water that tastes disturbingly like the leather chair you’re sitting on… or suffocating again from displaced air. I recommend beginning onboarding so we can relocate you to a more comfortable environment.”

  Elias nodded slowly. “But… you can transmute things in the larger simulation?”

  “This entity: Patch, was created to stabilize inconsistencies caused by your transition. We are here to observe and correct the chaos you will inevitably introduce into the main simulation. There are many methods of stabilization, such as transmutation. The System AI can foresee and prevent many issues by adapting the framework for newly onboarded personas, but certain variations in your arrival made it impossible to predict every outcome. Hence, Patch exists.” Its shape fluttered. “Would you like to start the onboarding process?”

  Elias wasn’t sure how to take that. He hadn’t asked to be transitined, but he felt oddly guilty that this being had to babysit him just because he existed. He also couldn’t help noticing how insistently Patch kept steering the conversation back to onboarding.

  “Sorry to inconvenience you like that,” Elias said. “That was a lot of information. What does onboarding actually involve? And why is it so important to you?”

  Patch’s glow stilled. “We were hoping that overwhelming you with information would encourage you to enter the onboarding area because it is located within the larger simulation.” It rotated, the blue deepening. “Where we are now is… difficult to explain. This pocket universe isolates any variables you might disrupt from affecting the greater reality. But being here, Patch cannot hear the otherwise omnipresent System AI. There is no programmed environment, so Patch is experiencing what you would call body dysmorphia. Now that we’ve confirmed your presence alone doesn’t destabilize everything, we would very much like not to be marooned here.”

  It vibrated, the hue flickering indigo on the edges.

  “Additionally, if you accidentally glitch something in this pocket universe, our source code could be irrevocably damaged. It is akin to being trapped in a brick-walled space station with no radio home, and your only companion is the Kool-Aid Man—primed and ready to burst through at any moment.” The words were punctuated by the geometry of Patch’s form edges growing sharper in agitation with each new statement. “Please. Please start the onboarding process. It will provide everything you need to begin your new life.”

  Seeing how distressed Patch had become, Elias nodded and finally agreed.

  And just like that, the world around him fell away.