Fanfiction: Try Again (Your Turn to Die)
I haven't written a Silent Hill crossover in far too long. Let's mess some characters up.
Title: Try Again
Fandom: Your Turn to Die/Silent Hill
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: maybe a hint of Keiji/Sara
Wordcount: 5,200
Summary: Sara wakes in a town that's trying to kill her. She meets a man named Keiji, who probably isn't trying to kill her. They team up.
How did she get here?
It’s been a normal morning, as far as Sara can remember. She was at school. How...
She woke up in the road. Scrambled to the pavement as soon as she realised, but it might not have made a difference; there are no cars to be seen. Not moving ones, at least.
She’s in some kind of town. It doesn’t feel familiar; it doesn’t even look Japanese.
European? American?
It has to be Japanese, doesn’t it? She can’t have left Japan without having any memory of it. But it doesn’t seem possible that she could have woken up in an unknown town at all, and yet here she is.
No bag, which means no phone.
If there were people here, she might be able to find out where she’s supposed to be. But she can’t see anyone around. Not that she can see much of anything through this fog.
Is this place abandoned?
Where is she?
-
Sara finds a stained information board with a map on it. Silent Hill, it says at the top. Is that where she is?
It’s an English name, right? She knows what hill means. She’s not sure about silent.
It looks like there’s a road running out of the town. She doesn’t know where it’s running to, but maybe she’ll find other people if she follows it. That seems like a good start.
She’s increasingly suspecting that anyone she finds here might not speak Japanese, but she’ll cross that bridge when she comes to it.
-
Something has torn the road apart.
It’s just a normal road, and then, suddenly, it’s a chasm. Running the whole width of the street, from the buildings on one side to the buildings on the other.
She can’t see how deep it goes. She can’t see how far the other side is; there’s nothing but fog. Like the world ends here, and nobody bothered to build anything beyond it.
There’s no way across.
It feels like she’s being told she can’t leave.
-
She tries another road out of town.
It’s exactly the same thing. A slash in the road, a rift. Impassable. Penning her in.
Somehow, it feels like a part of her was expecting this.
If she can’t leave, where is she supposed to go?
She could try to find a rope, or a long plank of wood. Something that might help her cross one of the chasms.
You can’t cross, her mind is whispering to her. She refuses to listen. It’s still worth trying.
She manages to find a construction site, which seems promising. Or maybe it’s more that the construction site manages to find her; it’s not like she knew where to look. But here it is, in her path.
She slips through a gap in the metal sheeting surrounding it, past signs plastered with exclamation marks and words she can’t read. Danger signs, probably. But it’s not like there’s any construction taking place right now.
It looks like they were working on a house. Hard to tell which parts have collapsed from neglect and which parts they just never finished. What happened here?
There are some wooden planks scattered around the site. She’s not sure how wide the rifts are, but she knows none of these are long enough to take her across. A lot of them look like they’re rotting, too; she’s not sure she’d trust them to support her weight.
There’s a crowbar propped up against a half-constructed wall. Could she use that?
Might at least be useful to smash in a window and explore some of the buildings around here. She doesn’t like the idea, but she’ll need to find food sooner or later; she’ll need to find a bed if she can’t get out of here before nightfall.
She picks up the crowbar. It’s cold against her fingers.
There’s a noise behind her.
She turns around.
There’s a person. She can just about make them out through the fog.
There’s someone else here. She doesn’t know if they’ll have answers, but maybe-
“Hello?” she asks, in English. It seems like her best bet.
The person walks towards her. Or... maybe ‘walks’ isn’t the right word. It’s hard to pin it down, but the movement doesn’t feel right.
Sara takes a step back.
Why does she feel so uneasy?
What comes out of the fog has a lot of red curly hair and dark red skin and cracks all over its body and pitch-black voids where its eyes should be.
Sara tries to take another step back, get her bearings, take a moment to work out what she’s really seeing. This can’t be real.
Her foot hits the wall. There’s no space to retreat.
The thing lunges at her.
It’s clinging to her, it’s digging razor-sharp claws into her shoulder, and it’s making a terrible sobbing, moaning sound, and-
She’s not even thinking; she just reacts, she just swings out at it. She’s just trying to get it off her.
The crowbar connects hard with the thing’s ribs, just below its-
Sara doesn’t want to think breasts. Breasts feel like such a human thing.
The crowbar connects with its ribs, and it reels back, shrieking and sobbing.
Sara yanks the crowbar back, slams it into the thing’s head, and it collapses at her feet.
Sara’s left panting and shaking, the wall at her back the only thing keeping her upright. There’s blood spattered up both of her arms.
It-
It wasn’t human. Was it human?
It’s wearing a - a dress, or an apron, something like-
It’s wearing clothes.
It can’t have been human. No living person could look like that.
She was at school a few hours ago. Her mind won’t let go of it. How can this be happening? It was a normal day.
It was normal. She woke up and she went to school and now something human-shaped is dead and she’s clutching a bloodied crowbar.
“I-” She can’t breathe. “I killed-”
But the body disappears while she’s struggling to throw the words up. Just fades away, just vanishes into nothing. The blood that speckled her wrists is gone.
Sara tries to keep breathing, tries to make sense of this. She’s still holding the crowbar.
An illusion? A hallucination?
She should be concerned, if she’s seeing things, but all she can feel is relief. It wasn’t real. She didn’t kill anyone, anything. There’s no blood on her hands.
But there’s blood further up. The wounds are still there in her shoulder, deep claw marks. Even though whatever inflicted them can’t be real. Monsters don’t exist. Things don’t just evaporate into the air when you kill them.
Is she really here at all?
-
Whether the town is real or not, she should probably treat it as real, rather than assuming she can just leave wounds untreated or leap the rifts in the road without consequences.
It feels real. The brick of the unfinished wall is rough when she touches it. The air is cold and still and thick against her skin.
If this is real, but the thing that attacked her wasn’t, how did she get injured? Did she do it to herself somehow? With what?
There’s a rusted saw stuck in a wooden beam on a table nearby, like someone passed out suddenly in the middle of their work, like whatever made everyone vanish happened in an instant. With that and a little effort, she manages to tear a strip off the bottom of her shirt.
It’s that or the thigh-length socks, and she doesn’t like the idea of having bare legs in this cold. At least she can compensate for the shirt with her jacket.
She sits on the table, folds the fabric into a pad, uses her tie to secure it over the gashes in her shoulder. She doesn’t really know what she’s doing, but maybe that’ll help stop the bleeding. She tugs her bloodstained shirt collar back across the makeshift bandage and starts to redo the top buttons.
“You should probably clean that first, y’know.”
Sara jolts to her feet, grabbing for the crowbar. Gets hold of the saw instead. She’ll use it if she has to.
The man raises his hands in surrender, laughing. “Whoa, scary.”
Tall and muscular. Blond hair. His skin isn’t blood-red; it isn’t cracked. His eyes are still there.
He’s a person.
He almost feels familiar, but she doesn’t know where she’d have seen him before. Maybe it’s just that she wasn’t expecting another Japanese person here.
“You’re real,” she says, breathing hard. “You’re Japanese, aren’t you?”
He looks her over. Breaks into a slow smile.
She’s not sure how she feels about that smile.
“I come all this way,” he says, “and the one person I meet here is from the same country. What are the odds?”
All this way. “Where are we?”
He nods at the saw in her hands. “You planning to put that down?”
She puts the saw down on the table. She’s glad not to be holding it, if she’s honest. It’s too close-range; it’s too brutal.
She’s tempted to pick up the crowbar instead. Just to have a weapon in her hands; her experience with the red thing still feels a little too recent. But it probably wouldn’t be the best move when she’s making a first impression.
“Appreciate it,” he says. “Not that it didn’t look good on you.”
“Where are we?” Sara asks.
He takes an exaggerated look around, but a quick one; his eyes only leave her for an instant. “I’d say it’s a construction site.”
Sara folds her arms. It hurts more than the gesture’s worth. “Anything more helpful?”
“Well, you didn’t say how specific you wanted me to be. Road? Town? State?”
State? She was starting to suspect, but it still doesn’t seem possible. “Is this America?”
He looks at her for a moment. “You came to America by accident?”
“I’m not sure I really came here.”
The man raises his eyebrows. “Always enjoyed a puzzle. You were born here? I’d be surprised.”
She pauses. She doesn’t know if she can trust this man, but... well, it’s a relief just to have someone else with her in this strange place, someone else she can talk to, whether he’s trustworthy or not.
“I just sort of woke up here,” she says. “A few hours ago. I should be in Japan. I don’t know how I got here.”
“That so?” he asks.
That so? feels slightly too casual a response to hearing that someone woke up in the wrong country with missing memories. But he also had a confusingly casual reaction to being threatened with a saw. Maybe he’s just a casual guy.
“Do you know how to get out?” she asks. “The roads I’ve tried have been blocked.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen the same thing.”
“You came in somehow, right?”
He shrugs. “Hard to say if that way’ll still be there, but we can check.”
What does that mean?
“You want me to take a look at your wound?” he asks.
-
He sits by her on the table, brushes her ponytail aside, tugs her shirt collar across to expose her shoulder. “You know, if we’re at this stage already, I feel like I should know your name.”
“Sara,” she says.
He’s got a satchel open next to his knee. She’s propped the crowbar up against the side of the table, within arm’s reach.
“Keiji,” he says. “Good to meet you, Sara.” He lifts away the fabric and inhales through his teeth at the sight of the wounds. “What happened here?”
She glances over her uninjured shoulder, at the fog and nothingness where she was attacked. She doesn’t know how to describe how it played out in her head. Maybe it’s best to be honest. “I’m not sure.”
Keiji touches her injury with something that stings, dabbed on a handkerchief, and she flinches.
“Sorry,” he says. “Vodka. Trying to sterilise it. Should’ve warned you.”
His voice is amused. A part of her is wondering whether he deliberately didn’t give any warning, so he could see how she reacted.
“Any reason you brought vodka to an abandoned town?” Sara asks.
Keiji wipes the wounds down gently. His fingers are warm where they touch her skin. “You can ask again when you’re either my doctor or my therapist.”
-
Another road, another rift. Sara stares down into the depths, gripping her crowbar.
“Thought so,” Keiji says. “Someone wants to keep us here.”
Or someone wants to keep her here. She doesn’t have anything but Keiji’s word that this is the way he came into town. “How could anyone manage this?”
Keiji shrugs. “Can’t say I know. But there’ve been stories of things like this happening here. I flew out to investigate.”
Sara looks at him. “Are you a journalist?”
“Police detective,” Keiji says. “I was hoping I looked the part.”
“Did something happen to a Japanese citizen here?”
“Not that I know.”
“But you came out from Japan,” Sara says. “Why would the Japanese police send you to investigate in America?”
Keiji looks at her for a moment, and then he starts to laugh.
“Can’t get past you,” he says. “I never said I was investigating for the police. I just said I was investigating, and I was a police detective.”
He doesn’t seem even slightly concerned to be caught. In a weird way, it’s reassuring.
He can’t be trusted, evidently. It was just a feeling before, and now she knows. But he’d be more worried about her knowing if he had dark intentions, right?
“Can you call for help?” she asks.
“No reception here,” he says.
So where do they go? No roads out, and her shoulder is starting to throb badly.
“We passed a hospital on the way here,” she says. “It might have beds.”
“I’m listening,” Keiji says.
“And medical supplies,” Sara says. She gestures to her shoulder. “Maybe I can bandage this up properly. We can try to figure out a way out of here tomorrow.” It seems like it’d probably be best to get off the streets before nightfall.
Keiji nods. He’s smiling, very slightly. “I’m happy to follow your lead, Sara.”
-
Something lunges at her out of the fog. Red skin and black eyes, and this time she’s ready.
Sara jolts away and swings the crowbar. It feels like a familiar motion, like something practised, rather than something she did once in a panicky moment a couple of hours ago. Her shoulder is screaming at the exertion, but she can worry about that when it’s dead.
It’s not real, so she can kill it. And it can do real damage, so she has to kill it. She’s protecting herself, she’s protecting Keiji, and-
And it-
The crowbar smashes into its head.
It doesn’t just look like a person. It looks familiar. The build and the hair, disguised beneath the red and black-
It-
It looks like Joe.
It collapses at her feet, dead, and - no, no, no, no-
Sara drops to her knees in the road, tries to grab at it, to pull it into her lap, to take a proper look at its broken face, but it’s already fading away, and - no, it’s not a real thing, Joe is thousands of miles away, Joe is fine-
“Got to say,” Keiji says, “I’m a little confused. I thought I was just hallucinating. But then you attacked my hallucination, so I’m guessing you see something.”
Sara looks sharply up at him. “You saw him?”
It wasn’t...
There wasn’t really anyone there, was there? It wasn’t actually Joe. It couldn’t have been.
“Him?” Keiji echoes.
“Joe,” Sara says. “My - my best friend.”
He wasn’t real. He wasn’t real. He wasn’t real.
“Interesting,” Keiji says. “You crack all your friends that hard in the head?”
“Please be serious,” Sara says, desperate. “You could see him? He wasn’t really here, right?”
And Keiji actually respects her request. Drops the half-smile that already feels so familiar. Suddenly, he’s serious.
“It wasn’t your friend,” he says. “I was seeing someone else.”
Someone else?
He must see the question in her eyes.
“No one you’re likely to know,” he says. “But definitely not your friend Joe.”
Joe is okay. Joe is fine. She had to kill it, but it wasn’t her friend. It wasn’t anything. It wasn’t real.
-
Keiji helps her through the door of the hospital, his arm around her shoulders. She’s shaking too badly to walk without support.
He’s brought a flashlight here, apparently, which is just as well; it’s not like the hospital lights work, and there are no windows in the corridors. He finds a room with a dusty bed, guides her down to sit on it. Moves to rummage through a broken-down chest of drawers, in the light filtering through a window that badly needs cleaning.
Sara stares into space. It wasn’t real, but she can’t stop reliving that moment in her mind: realising just too late that the creature might have been her friend, knowing she’d done something irreversible.
“What’s wrong with this town?” she asks.
“Like I said,” Keiji says. “I’m investigating.”
“What are you expecting to find? I mean, what explains something like this?”
“Drugs might be the simplest explanation,” Keiji says. “Something in the air. We both breathe it in, and it makes us hallucinate. The chasms might not be there at all.” He pauses. “But it’s strange that we’d both see them in the same place, so I wouldn’t go trying to walk over them just yet.”
There’s the quiet creak of him opening another drawer, and then a pause.
“Huh,” he says. “Not sure this is standard hospital equipment.”
The words are casual, but there’s something strange about his tone. Sara looks over at him.
It takes her a moment to register what he has in his hands, and she tenses up the moment it hits her.
He’s holding a handgun.
He looks back at her, and maybe he catches her expression. “You want it?” he asks, holding it out to her. “Could be useful if we run into more of those things.”
She shakes her head. She doesn’t know how to use a gun. And she’s not sure she wants herself to be able to kill any more efficiently, after what just happened.
It hits her, perhaps a second too late, that refusing the gun means Keiji has the gun. But he doesn’t keep it; he shuts it back inside the drawer. It seems like he can’t get it out of his hands quickly enough.
-
Keiji manages to find some old bandages, with a little more searching. Brings them over to the bed she’s sitting on. “You want me to change your dressing for you?”
She doesn’t know if he’s offering for her sake or his. It feels like he’s constantly flirting with her. She’s too exhausted to care. “Thank you.”
He tries to move the collar of her shirt aside, but she’s buttoned it up against the cold and he can’t get it over her shoulder. He moves his hand to her top button and hesitates.
“Could you undo a couple of buttons for me?” he asks, taking his hand away.
-
Her arm feels slightly better, now that it’s been bandaged up properly. It feels like she can think a little more clearly, at least, without the pain constantly demanding her attention.
The hospital doesn’t have power. Unsurprising, given that it looks like it’s been abandoned for years. The lights won’t turn on; the monitors by the bed are blank. But...
“It’s a hospital,” she says. “There could be an emergency generator. So maybe there’s a landline or a radio we could use.”
Call for help. Get out of here. The emergency number for America is 911, right? Her English could be better, but she can at least say help and hospital and Silent Hill.
She tries to push herself off the bed, remembering at the last second not to use her injured arm. Keiji puts a hand on her good shoulder and presses her back down, gently but firmly.
“Get some sleep,” he says. “I’ll keep watch. It’s getting dark anyway, and you’re not going to heal if you keep moving around.”
It’s a tempting point. He’s looked after her so far, and she’s not sure her wariness of him outweighs her need for sleep right now. “You’ll need to sleep too, right?”
Keiji laughs. “Don’t worry about me. I’m good at being sleep-deprived.”
She can believe it. With those shadows under his eyes, she’s not sure he’s ever slept at all.
-
In her dream, she’s looking at a set of monitors. She can’t focus on what’s actually on them; all she knows is that it’s good information, but it could be better.
She’ll have to try again.
-
She wakes in the night to a gunshot.
She can just make out the scene in the beam of Keiji’s flashlight, lying skewed on the floor. The chest of drawers, one drawer yanked open. Keiji, breathing hard, standing with his back mostly to her and his arms out in front of him. Holding the gun.
And one of those humanoid creatures, red skin and black eyes, collapsing in front of him.
It’s dead, she thinks. She’s expecting it to disappear. But it’s still there, it’s just lying there.
Like a corpse. Like something real.
It should be over. But Keiji hasn’t moved, his breathing is getting faster and harsher.
“Keiji?” she asks, hesitant.
She hears Keiji swallow. He turns around.
“Sara,” he says. He sounds like he’s been running a long way. “I need you to take the gun away from me.”
There’s blood on his hands. Some on his face. It’s not fading away.
“Okay,” she says.
She gets to her feet, and puts one hand on his arm, and gently lifts the gun out of his grip with the other. She’s nervous; she doesn’t know how to hold it, she doesn’t know how to make sure it doesn’t accidentally go off. But Keiji obviously knows guns. He’ll have put the safety on, right?
“Where should I put it?” she asks.
“I don’t care,” he says. “Hide it from me.”
-
“Thought we were looking for the generator,” Keiji says.
He sounds as casual as ever. It’s hard to believe in it, now that she’s seen him with that gun in his hands.
He’s tried to clean himself up, but there’s still a smear of blood across his face. She doesn’t want to mention it.
“We are,” she says.
“Basement might be a better bet,” Keiji says.
It’s only then that Sara really registers what she’s doing. She’s pushed open a door with Observation Room still just readable on the plaque beside it.
It doesn’t sound like the kind of place you’d find the generator. Why would she be going in here?
“I thought maybe we’d find something useful,” she says.
The only thing in the room is a bank of monitors, with a lot of complicated-looking buttons and switches underneath. She...
She’d forgotten, in the chaos of waking up, but she was dreaming about this, wasn’t she?
It looks exactly like it did in her dream. Down to the flat-screen monitors, even though every other screen she’s seen in this place has been CRT. She’d thought the town must have been abandoned for too long to have flat screens.
She’s never been in here before. How did she...?
-
The generator is in the basement, as Keiji suggested. The instruction poster next to it is in English, predictably, but Keiji manages to get it working. Maybe he should do the talking if they find a functioning phone.
“There was a door near the entrance,” Keiji says. He turns off his flashlight; the lights have flickered on overhead. “Director’s office. Sounds like somewhere that might be able to call out.”
He’s right. They need to prioritise finding some way to contact the outside world; there’s no way to be sure how long the generator will run. Maybe they should switch it off and find a phone first, now that they at least know where it is.
“We have to go back to the observation room,” she says instead.
Keiji pauses, then shrugs. “You’re the boss.”
-
Sara opens the door and catches sight of the monitors. They’re showing people. Is this a live feed?
A young woman with curly red hair, limping along an empty street, leaving a trail of blood; even at a distance, she looks familiar. A child in some kind of animal costume; it’s hard to tell if it’s a boy or a girl.
But she only has a couple of seconds to take in the assorted scenes she’s seeing. Every monitor suddenly cuts to solid red.
Except the one in the middle.
“Huh,” Keiji says. “Can’t say I was expecting that. You remember anything like this?”
The middle monitor shows Keiji, and-
It shows Sara. Wearing a white coat, smiling at Keiji. They’re sitting across from each other at a desk.
Every one of Sara’s instincts is telling her they have to leave. But she can’t just go; she can’t just leave without knowing what this means.
-
“You’re Keiji Shinogi, aren’t you?” Sara asks. “Thank you for coming.”
“Don’t have to thank me too hard,” Keiji says. “You offered cash.”
“Did my assistant explain the experiment to you?”
“He was a little vague. I wouldn’t mind hearing it from you.”
“We’re interested in learning about how people respond in a crisis,” Sara says. (Is she older than the Sara watching this? She looks a little older. How is that possible?) “Natural disasters, large-scale outbreaks, the collapse of society, being imprisoned, facing murderous forces. That kind of thing.”
“Sounds interesting,” Keiji says.
“Obviously it’d be unethical to put people in that kind of situation,” Sara says. “So we want to create AIs based on real people, and we’re planning to run simulations with those. We’d just need you to come in occasionally so we can update the personality profile. You’d be well paid, but I’m getting the impression you know that part already.”
Keiji scratches his chin. “That’s why you came to me? Left my job, you thought I’d need the money?”
“We’re just trying to find a varied pool of subjects,” Sara says. “Will you sign the consent form?”
“Got things I’d like to keep private,” Keiji says. “How many people are going to see this ‘personality profile’?”
“I’m in charge of the personality data and the AIs,” Sara says. “We might give general information to disaster response teams, but anything specific about you will stay with me.”
Keiji smiles. Pulls the consent form across the desk towards him, picks up the pen Sara’s offering. “Well, if it’s you, cute little researcher.”
-
Sara stares at the screen.
She wants to believe it’s just a hallucination. But she knows, in her stomach, what it means. It explains why nothing about this place makes sense, why impossible creatures attack her and vanish, why the road Keiji came in on could be torn apart a few hours later. It feels like she knew already, and she was just waiting for something to remind her.
She’s an AI, in-
This isn’t possible.
She’s an AI, in a simulation, and none of this is real.
She isn’t real. She isn’t alive.
And Sara Chidouin is behind it.
Which means that her ‘real’ self showed her this. She wanted her to know.
Why? Why do any of this?
Why would they need to run AI simulations of this? An abandoned, cut-off town full of monsters that look like people? How is that supposed to help disaster response teams? This isn’t a real situation. Why would they do this?
Why would Sara do this?
Maybe she can’t trust her memories. She’d assumed her memories before waking up here were of the real world, her true self’s memories, but maybe there’s nothing real in her head. She might not actually know what the world looks like. Maybe they really are facing this kind of problem out there, beyond whatever ones and zeros are making up everything that’s real to her.
Or maybe it was just curiosity. Maybe her real self just thought there was no reason not to do it.
It’s not like there are real people involved, after all.
(They were looking for a varied pool of subjects. How many other people is Sara putting through this?)
She’s terrified to look over at Keiji.
“I had to shoot him again,” Keiji says, quietly.
She doesn’t want to look. She has to look.
Keiji’s fists are clenched. He isn’t looking at her; his focus is still on the monitor. His eyes almost look red in the reflected light of the screens around it. “They made me shoot him again.”
“Keiji,” she says. Her voice suddenly feels like she hasn’t used it in weeks. “I’m-”
What does she say? I’m sorry you’re not real and you’ve been through a traumatic experience and it’s my fault?
There’s a reason there aren’t any pre-printed apology cards that say that, and it’s only in part because this doesn’t happen. Apologising isn’t going to make any of this better.
“I’m sorry,” she says anyway. Her voice is shaking.
The fury and tension is gone in an instant when he looks at her. Gone where?
“I’m not blaming you,” he says. “Mr Policeman is the one who signed the consent form.”
“But-” It still doesn’t feel real. “But I-”
“Sara,” Keiji says, serious. “Whatever happened out there, you’re in here with me now. If you’d known about this, you wouldn’t have let me see it. The only Sara I care about is the one right in front of me.”
-
They have to keep looking for a way out.
Is there a point? Does an outside world even exist? Maybe the rifts mark the boundaries of the simulation; maybe they’ll hit an invisible wall if they try to cross, or they’ll just stop existing.
What else are they supposed to do?
But they leave the observation room, and there’s nowhere to go. The stains on the walls have gone; they’re unnaturally blank. There’s no texture on the floor. Half the doors have disappeared.
The corridor stretches away until it cuts into white light at the far end.
The simulation is falling apart.
“They’re resetting it,” Keiji says, and Sara finds she has the same knowledge. This simulation is over. The researchers - the other Sara and her team - they’re going to erase it and start it again, or shove their AI playthings into some new terrible situation.
How many times has this happened? Sara and Keiji meeting each other, getting to know each other, only to have it wiped out of their minds with every new scenario?
But Keiji felt familiar. Is that some residual memory from the ‘real’ Sara, meeting the real Keiji and getting his consent? Or is it a faint memory of meeting his AI self before?
“I’ll try to remember you,” Sara says. Her heart is beating so fast. It doesn’t seem possible that it could just be an illusion. “I’ll remember this, I’ll remember you - we won’t have to start from scratch next time, we’ll-”
“You think that’ll work?” Keiji asks. “I’m getting the feeling this isn’t the first time this has happened.”
“I know,” Sara says. She’s trying to get her breathing under control. “I’ll still try.”
Keiji looks at her for a long moment. The light is brighter now, closer. The corridor is starting to shake under their feet.
He laughs. “Well, I guess it’s worth a shot. Cute little researcher.”
He reaches out to touch her face, and Sara wakes in the road.
Title: Try Again
Fandom: Your Turn to Die/Silent Hill
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: maybe a hint of Keiji/Sara
Wordcount: 5,200
Summary: Sara wakes in a town that's trying to kill her. She meets a man named Keiji, who probably isn't trying to kill her. They team up.
How did she get here?
It’s been a normal morning, as far as Sara can remember. She was at school. How...
She woke up in the road. Scrambled to the pavement as soon as she realised, but it might not have made a difference; there are no cars to be seen. Not moving ones, at least.
She’s in some kind of town. It doesn’t feel familiar; it doesn’t even look Japanese.
European? American?
It has to be Japanese, doesn’t it? She can’t have left Japan without having any memory of it. But it doesn’t seem possible that she could have woken up in an unknown town at all, and yet here she is.
No bag, which means no phone.
If there were people here, she might be able to find out where she’s supposed to be. But she can’t see anyone around. Not that she can see much of anything through this fog.
Is this place abandoned?
Where is she?
-
Sara finds a stained information board with a map on it. Silent Hill, it says at the top. Is that where she is?
It’s an English name, right? She knows what hill means. She’s not sure about silent.
It looks like there’s a road running out of the town. She doesn’t know where it’s running to, but maybe she’ll find other people if she follows it. That seems like a good start.
She’s increasingly suspecting that anyone she finds here might not speak Japanese, but she’ll cross that bridge when she comes to it.
-
Something has torn the road apart.
It’s just a normal road, and then, suddenly, it’s a chasm. Running the whole width of the street, from the buildings on one side to the buildings on the other.
She can’t see how deep it goes. She can’t see how far the other side is; there’s nothing but fog. Like the world ends here, and nobody bothered to build anything beyond it.
There’s no way across.
It feels like she’s being told she can’t leave.
-
She tries another road out of town.
It’s exactly the same thing. A slash in the road, a rift. Impassable. Penning her in.
Somehow, it feels like a part of her was expecting this.
If she can’t leave, where is she supposed to go?
She could try to find a rope, or a long plank of wood. Something that might help her cross one of the chasms.
You can’t cross, her mind is whispering to her. She refuses to listen. It’s still worth trying.
She manages to find a construction site, which seems promising. Or maybe it’s more that the construction site manages to find her; it’s not like she knew where to look. But here it is, in her path.
She slips through a gap in the metal sheeting surrounding it, past signs plastered with exclamation marks and words she can’t read. Danger signs, probably. But it’s not like there’s any construction taking place right now.
It looks like they were working on a house. Hard to tell which parts have collapsed from neglect and which parts they just never finished. What happened here?
There are some wooden planks scattered around the site. She’s not sure how wide the rifts are, but she knows none of these are long enough to take her across. A lot of them look like they’re rotting, too; she’s not sure she’d trust them to support her weight.
There’s a crowbar propped up against a half-constructed wall. Could she use that?
Might at least be useful to smash in a window and explore some of the buildings around here. She doesn’t like the idea, but she’ll need to find food sooner or later; she’ll need to find a bed if she can’t get out of here before nightfall.
She picks up the crowbar. It’s cold against her fingers.
There’s a noise behind her.
She turns around.
There’s a person. She can just about make them out through the fog.
There’s someone else here. She doesn’t know if they’ll have answers, but maybe-
“Hello?” she asks, in English. It seems like her best bet.
The person walks towards her. Or... maybe ‘walks’ isn’t the right word. It’s hard to pin it down, but the movement doesn’t feel right.
Sara takes a step back.
Why does she feel so uneasy?
What comes out of the fog has a lot of red curly hair and dark red skin and cracks all over its body and pitch-black voids where its eyes should be.
Sara tries to take another step back, get her bearings, take a moment to work out what she’s really seeing. This can’t be real.
Her foot hits the wall. There’s no space to retreat.
The thing lunges at her.
It’s clinging to her, it’s digging razor-sharp claws into her shoulder, and it’s making a terrible sobbing, moaning sound, and-
She’s not even thinking; she just reacts, she just swings out at it. She’s just trying to get it off her.
The crowbar connects hard with the thing’s ribs, just below its-
Sara doesn’t want to think breasts. Breasts feel like such a human thing.
The crowbar connects with its ribs, and it reels back, shrieking and sobbing.
Sara yanks the crowbar back, slams it into the thing’s head, and it collapses at her feet.
Sara’s left panting and shaking, the wall at her back the only thing keeping her upright. There’s blood spattered up both of her arms.
It-
It wasn’t human. Was it human?
It’s wearing a - a dress, or an apron, something like-
It’s wearing clothes.
It can’t have been human. No living person could look like that.
She was at school a few hours ago. Her mind won’t let go of it. How can this be happening? It was a normal day.
It was normal. She woke up and she went to school and now something human-shaped is dead and she’s clutching a bloodied crowbar.
“I-” She can’t breathe. “I killed-”
But the body disappears while she’s struggling to throw the words up. Just fades away, just vanishes into nothing. The blood that speckled her wrists is gone.
Sara tries to keep breathing, tries to make sense of this. She’s still holding the crowbar.
An illusion? A hallucination?
She should be concerned, if she’s seeing things, but all she can feel is relief. It wasn’t real. She didn’t kill anyone, anything. There’s no blood on her hands.
But there’s blood further up. The wounds are still there in her shoulder, deep claw marks. Even though whatever inflicted them can’t be real. Monsters don’t exist. Things don’t just evaporate into the air when you kill them.
Is she really here at all?
-
Whether the town is real or not, she should probably treat it as real, rather than assuming she can just leave wounds untreated or leap the rifts in the road without consequences.
It feels real. The brick of the unfinished wall is rough when she touches it. The air is cold and still and thick against her skin.
If this is real, but the thing that attacked her wasn’t, how did she get injured? Did she do it to herself somehow? With what?
There’s a rusted saw stuck in a wooden beam on a table nearby, like someone passed out suddenly in the middle of their work, like whatever made everyone vanish happened in an instant. With that and a little effort, she manages to tear a strip off the bottom of her shirt.
It’s that or the thigh-length socks, and she doesn’t like the idea of having bare legs in this cold. At least she can compensate for the shirt with her jacket.
She sits on the table, folds the fabric into a pad, uses her tie to secure it over the gashes in her shoulder. She doesn’t really know what she’s doing, but maybe that’ll help stop the bleeding. She tugs her bloodstained shirt collar back across the makeshift bandage and starts to redo the top buttons.
“You should probably clean that first, y’know.”
Sara jolts to her feet, grabbing for the crowbar. Gets hold of the saw instead. She’ll use it if she has to.
The man raises his hands in surrender, laughing. “Whoa, scary.”
Tall and muscular. Blond hair. His skin isn’t blood-red; it isn’t cracked. His eyes are still there.
He’s a person.
He almost feels familiar, but she doesn’t know where she’d have seen him before. Maybe it’s just that she wasn’t expecting another Japanese person here.
“You’re real,” she says, breathing hard. “You’re Japanese, aren’t you?”
He looks her over. Breaks into a slow smile.
She’s not sure how she feels about that smile.
“I come all this way,” he says, “and the one person I meet here is from the same country. What are the odds?”
All this way. “Where are we?”
He nods at the saw in her hands. “You planning to put that down?”
She puts the saw down on the table. She’s glad not to be holding it, if she’s honest. It’s too close-range; it’s too brutal.
She’s tempted to pick up the crowbar instead. Just to have a weapon in her hands; her experience with the red thing still feels a little too recent. But it probably wouldn’t be the best move when she’s making a first impression.
“Appreciate it,” he says. “Not that it didn’t look good on you.”
“Where are we?” Sara asks.
He takes an exaggerated look around, but a quick one; his eyes only leave her for an instant. “I’d say it’s a construction site.”
Sara folds her arms. It hurts more than the gesture’s worth. “Anything more helpful?”
“Well, you didn’t say how specific you wanted me to be. Road? Town? State?”
State? She was starting to suspect, but it still doesn’t seem possible. “Is this America?”
He looks at her for a moment. “You came to America by accident?”
“I’m not sure I really came here.”
The man raises his eyebrows. “Always enjoyed a puzzle. You were born here? I’d be surprised.”
She pauses. She doesn’t know if she can trust this man, but... well, it’s a relief just to have someone else with her in this strange place, someone else she can talk to, whether he’s trustworthy or not.
“I just sort of woke up here,” she says. “A few hours ago. I should be in Japan. I don’t know how I got here.”
“That so?” he asks.
That so? feels slightly too casual a response to hearing that someone woke up in the wrong country with missing memories. But he also had a confusingly casual reaction to being threatened with a saw. Maybe he’s just a casual guy.
“Do you know how to get out?” she asks. “The roads I’ve tried have been blocked.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen the same thing.”
“You came in somehow, right?”
He shrugs. “Hard to say if that way’ll still be there, but we can check.”
What does that mean?
“You want me to take a look at your wound?” he asks.
-
He sits by her on the table, brushes her ponytail aside, tugs her shirt collar across to expose her shoulder. “You know, if we’re at this stage already, I feel like I should know your name.”
“Sara,” she says.
He’s got a satchel open next to his knee. She’s propped the crowbar up against the side of the table, within arm’s reach.
“Keiji,” he says. “Good to meet you, Sara.” He lifts away the fabric and inhales through his teeth at the sight of the wounds. “What happened here?”
She glances over her uninjured shoulder, at the fog and nothingness where she was attacked. She doesn’t know how to describe how it played out in her head. Maybe it’s best to be honest. “I’m not sure.”
Keiji touches her injury with something that stings, dabbed on a handkerchief, and she flinches.
“Sorry,” he says. “Vodka. Trying to sterilise it. Should’ve warned you.”
His voice is amused. A part of her is wondering whether he deliberately didn’t give any warning, so he could see how she reacted.
“Any reason you brought vodka to an abandoned town?” Sara asks.
Keiji wipes the wounds down gently. His fingers are warm where they touch her skin. “You can ask again when you’re either my doctor or my therapist.”
-
Another road, another rift. Sara stares down into the depths, gripping her crowbar.
“Thought so,” Keiji says. “Someone wants to keep us here.”
Or someone wants to keep her here. She doesn’t have anything but Keiji’s word that this is the way he came into town. “How could anyone manage this?”
Keiji shrugs. “Can’t say I know. But there’ve been stories of things like this happening here. I flew out to investigate.”
Sara looks at him. “Are you a journalist?”
“Police detective,” Keiji says. “I was hoping I looked the part.”
“Did something happen to a Japanese citizen here?”
“Not that I know.”
“But you came out from Japan,” Sara says. “Why would the Japanese police send you to investigate in America?”
Keiji looks at her for a moment, and then he starts to laugh.
“Can’t get past you,” he says. “I never said I was investigating for the police. I just said I was investigating, and I was a police detective.”
He doesn’t seem even slightly concerned to be caught. In a weird way, it’s reassuring.
He can’t be trusted, evidently. It was just a feeling before, and now she knows. But he’d be more worried about her knowing if he had dark intentions, right?
“Can you call for help?” she asks.
“No reception here,” he says.
So where do they go? No roads out, and her shoulder is starting to throb badly.
“We passed a hospital on the way here,” she says. “It might have beds.”
“I’m listening,” Keiji says.
“And medical supplies,” Sara says. She gestures to her shoulder. “Maybe I can bandage this up properly. We can try to figure out a way out of here tomorrow.” It seems like it’d probably be best to get off the streets before nightfall.
Keiji nods. He’s smiling, very slightly. “I’m happy to follow your lead, Sara.”
-
Something lunges at her out of the fog. Red skin and black eyes, and this time she’s ready.
Sara jolts away and swings the crowbar. It feels like a familiar motion, like something practised, rather than something she did once in a panicky moment a couple of hours ago. Her shoulder is screaming at the exertion, but she can worry about that when it’s dead.
It’s not real, so she can kill it. And it can do real damage, so she has to kill it. She’s protecting herself, she’s protecting Keiji, and-
And it-
The crowbar smashes into its head.
It doesn’t just look like a person. It looks familiar. The build and the hair, disguised beneath the red and black-
It-
It looks like Joe.
It collapses at her feet, dead, and - no, no, no, no-
Sara drops to her knees in the road, tries to grab at it, to pull it into her lap, to take a proper look at its broken face, but it’s already fading away, and - no, it’s not a real thing, Joe is thousands of miles away, Joe is fine-
“Got to say,” Keiji says, “I’m a little confused. I thought I was just hallucinating. But then you attacked my hallucination, so I’m guessing you see something.”
Sara looks sharply up at him. “You saw him?”
It wasn’t...
There wasn’t really anyone there, was there? It wasn’t actually Joe. It couldn’t have been.
“Him?” Keiji echoes.
“Joe,” Sara says. “My - my best friend.”
He wasn’t real. He wasn’t real. He wasn’t real.
“Interesting,” Keiji says. “You crack all your friends that hard in the head?”
“Please be serious,” Sara says, desperate. “You could see him? He wasn’t really here, right?”
And Keiji actually respects her request. Drops the half-smile that already feels so familiar. Suddenly, he’s serious.
“It wasn’t your friend,” he says. “I was seeing someone else.”
Someone else?
He must see the question in her eyes.
“No one you’re likely to know,” he says. “But definitely not your friend Joe.”
Joe is okay. Joe is fine. She had to kill it, but it wasn’t her friend. It wasn’t anything. It wasn’t real.
-
Keiji helps her through the door of the hospital, his arm around her shoulders. She’s shaking too badly to walk without support.
He’s brought a flashlight here, apparently, which is just as well; it’s not like the hospital lights work, and there are no windows in the corridors. He finds a room with a dusty bed, guides her down to sit on it. Moves to rummage through a broken-down chest of drawers, in the light filtering through a window that badly needs cleaning.
Sara stares into space. It wasn’t real, but she can’t stop reliving that moment in her mind: realising just too late that the creature might have been her friend, knowing she’d done something irreversible.
“What’s wrong with this town?” she asks.
“Like I said,” Keiji says. “I’m investigating.”
“What are you expecting to find? I mean, what explains something like this?”
“Drugs might be the simplest explanation,” Keiji says. “Something in the air. We both breathe it in, and it makes us hallucinate. The chasms might not be there at all.” He pauses. “But it’s strange that we’d both see them in the same place, so I wouldn’t go trying to walk over them just yet.”
There’s the quiet creak of him opening another drawer, and then a pause.
“Huh,” he says. “Not sure this is standard hospital equipment.”
The words are casual, but there’s something strange about his tone. Sara looks over at him.
It takes her a moment to register what he has in his hands, and she tenses up the moment it hits her.
He’s holding a handgun.
He looks back at her, and maybe he catches her expression. “You want it?” he asks, holding it out to her. “Could be useful if we run into more of those things.”
She shakes her head. She doesn’t know how to use a gun. And she’s not sure she wants herself to be able to kill any more efficiently, after what just happened.
It hits her, perhaps a second too late, that refusing the gun means Keiji has the gun. But he doesn’t keep it; he shuts it back inside the drawer. It seems like he can’t get it out of his hands quickly enough.
-
Keiji manages to find some old bandages, with a little more searching. Brings them over to the bed she’s sitting on. “You want me to change your dressing for you?”
She doesn’t know if he’s offering for her sake or his. It feels like he’s constantly flirting with her. She’s too exhausted to care. “Thank you.”
He tries to move the collar of her shirt aside, but she’s buttoned it up against the cold and he can’t get it over her shoulder. He moves his hand to her top button and hesitates.
“Could you undo a couple of buttons for me?” he asks, taking his hand away.
-
Her arm feels slightly better, now that it’s been bandaged up properly. It feels like she can think a little more clearly, at least, without the pain constantly demanding her attention.
The hospital doesn’t have power. Unsurprising, given that it looks like it’s been abandoned for years. The lights won’t turn on; the monitors by the bed are blank. But...
“It’s a hospital,” she says. “There could be an emergency generator. So maybe there’s a landline or a radio we could use.”
Call for help. Get out of here. The emergency number for America is 911, right? Her English could be better, but she can at least say help and hospital and Silent Hill.
She tries to push herself off the bed, remembering at the last second not to use her injured arm. Keiji puts a hand on her good shoulder and presses her back down, gently but firmly.
“Get some sleep,” he says. “I’ll keep watch. It’s getting dark anyway, and you’re not going to heal if you keep moving around.”
It’s a tempting point. He’s looked after her so far, and she’s not sure her wariness of him outweighs her need for sleep right now. “You’ll need to sleep too, right?”
Keiji laughs. “Don’t worry about me. I’m good at being sleep-deprived.”
She can believe it. With those shadows under his eyes, she’s not sure he’s ever slept at all.
-
In her dream, she’s looking at a set of monitors. She can’t focus on what’s actually on them; all she knows is that it’s good information, but it could be better.
She’ll have to try again.
-
She wakes in the night to a gunshot.
She can just make out the scene in the beam of Keiji’s flashlight, lying skewed on the floor. The chest of drawers, one drawer yanked open. Keiji, breathing hard, standing with his back mostly to her and his arms out in front of him. Holding the gun.
And one of those humanoid creatures, red skin and black eyes, collapsing in front of him.
It’s dead, she thinks. She’s expecting it to disappear. But it’s still there, it’s just lying there.
Like a corpse. Like something real.
It should be over. But Keiji hasn’t moved, his breathing is getting faster and harsher.
“Keiji?” she asks, hesitant.
She hears Keiji swallow. He turns around.
“Sara,” he says. He sounds like he’s been running a long way. “I need you to take the gun away from me.”
There’s blood on his hands. Some on his face. It’s not fading away.
“Okay,” she says.
She gets to her feet, and puts one hand on his arm, and gently lifts the gun out of his grip with the other. She’s nervous; she doesn’t know how to hold it, she doesn’t know how to make sure it doesn’t accidentally go off. But Keiji obviously knows guns. He’ll have put the safety on, right?
“Where should I put it?” she asks.
“I don’t care,” he says. “Hide it from me.”
-
“Thought we were looking for the generator,” Keiji says.
He sounds as casual as ever. It’s hard to believe in it, now that she’s seen him with that gun in his hands.
He’s tried to clean himself up, but there’s still a smear of blood across his face. She doesn’t want to mention it.
“We are,” she says.
“Basement might be a better bet,” Keiji says.
It’s only then that Sara really registers what she’s doing. She’s pushed open a door with Observation Room still just readable on the plaque beside it.
It doesn’t sound like the kind of place you’d find the generator. Why would she be going in here?
“I thought maybe we’d find something useful,” she says.
The only thing in the room is a bank of monitors, with a lot of complicated-looking buttons and switches underneath. She...
She’d forgotten, in the chaos of waking up, but she was dreaming about this, wasn’t she?
It looks exactly like it did in her dream. Down to the flat-screen monitors, even though every other screen she’s seen in this place has been CRT. She’d thought the town must have been abandoned for too long to have flat screens.
She’s never been in here before. How did she...?
-
The generator is in the basement, as Keiji suggested. The instruction poster next to it is in English, predictably, but Keiji manages to get it working. Maybe he should do the talking if they find a functioning phone.
“There was a door near the entrance,” Keiji says. He turns off his flashlight; the lights have flickered on overhead. “Director’s office. Sounds like somewhere that might be able to call out.”
He’s right. They need to prioritise finding some way to contact the outside world; there’s no way to be sure how long the generator will run. Maybe they should switch it off and find a phone first, now that they at least know where it is.
“We have to go back to the observation room,” she says instead.
Keiji pauses, then shrugs. “You’re the boss.”
-
Sara opens the door and catches sight of the monitors. They’re showing people. Is this a live feed?
A young woman with curly red hair, limping along an empty street, leaving a trail of blood; even at a distance, she looks familiar. A child in some kind of animal costume; it’s hard to tell if it’s a boy or a girl.
But she only has a couple of seconds to take in the assorted scenes she’s seeing. Every monitor suddenly cuts to solid red.
Except the one in the middle.
“Huh,” Keiji says. “Can’t say I was expecting that. You remember anything like this?”
The middle monitor shows Keiji, and-
It shows Sara. Wearing a white coat, smiling at Keiji. They’re sitting across from each other at a desk.
Every one of Sara’s instincts is telling her they have to leave. But she can’t just go; she can’t just leave without knowing what this means.
-
“You’re Keiji Shinogi, aren’t you?” Sara asks. “Thank you for coming.”
“Don’t have to thank me too hard,” Keiji says. “You offered cash.”
“Did my assistant explain the experiment to you?”
“He was a little vague. I wouldn’t mind hearing it from you.”
“We’re interested in learning about how people respond in a crisis,” Sara says. (Is she older than the Sara watching this? She looks a little older. How is that possible?) “Natural disasters, large-scale outbreaks, the collapse of society, being imprisoned, facing murderous forces. That kind of thing.”
“Sounds interesting,” Keiji says.
“Obviously it’d be unethical to put people in that kind of situation,” Sara says. “So we want to create AIs based on real people, and we’re planning to run simulations with those. We’d just need you to come in occasionally so we can update the personality profile. You’d be well paid, but I’m getting the impression you know that part already.”
Keiji scratches his chin. “That’s why you came to me? Left my job, you thought I’d need the money?”
“We’re just trying to find a varied pool of subjects,” Sara says. “Will you sign the consent form?”
“Got things I’d like to keep private,” Keiji says. “How many people are going to see this ‘personality profile’?”
“I’m in charge of the personality data and the AIs,” Sara says. “We might give general information to disaster response teams, but anything specific about you will stay with me.”
Keiji smiles. Pulls the consent form across the desk towards him, picks up the pen Sara’s offering. “Well, if it’s you, cute little researcher.”
-
Sara stares at the screen.
She wants to believe it’s just a hallucination. But she knows, in her stomach, what it means. It explains why nothing about this place makes sense, why impossible creatures attack her and vanish, why the road Keiji came in on could be torn apart a few hours later. It feels like she knew already, and she was just waiting for something to remind her.
She’s an AI, in-
This isn’t possible.
She’s an AI, in a simulation, and none of this is real.
She isn’t real. She isn’t alive.
And Sara Chidouin is behind it.
Which means that her ‘real’ self showed her this. She wanted her to know.
Why? Why do any of this?
Why would they need to run AI simulations of this? An abandoned, cut-off town full of monsters that look like people? How is that supposed to help disaster response teams? This isn’t a real situation. Why would they do this?
Why would Sara do this?
Maybe she can’t trust her memories. She’d assumed her memories before waking up here were of the real world, her true self’s memories, but maybe there’s nothing real in her head. She might not actually know what the world looks like. Maybe they really are facing this kind of problem out there, beyond whatever ones and zeros are making up everything that’s real to her.
Or maybe it was just curiosity. Maybe her real self just thought there was no reason not to do it.
It’s not like there are real people involved, after all.
(They were looking for a varied pool of subjects. How many other people is Sara putting through this?)
She’s terrified to look over at Keiji.
“I had to shoot him again,” Keiji says, quietly.
She doesn’t want to look. She has to look.
Keiji’s fists are clenched. He isn’t looking at her; his focus is still on the monitor. His eyes almost look red in the reflected light of the screens around it. “They made me shoot him again.”
“Keiji,” she says. Her voice suddenly feels like she hasn’t used it in weeks. “I’m-”
What does she say? I’m sorry you’re not real and you’ve been through a traumatic experience and it’s my fault?
There’s a reason there aren’t any pre-printed apology cards that say that, and it’s only in part because this doesn’t happen. Apologising isn’t going to make any of this better.
“I’m sorry,” she says anyway. Her voice is shaking.
The fury and tension is gone in an instant when he looks at her. Gone where?
“I’m not blaming you,” he says. “Mr Policeman is the one who signed the consent form.”
“But-” It still doesn’t feel real. “But I-”
“Sara,” Keiji says, serious. “Whatever happened out there, you’re in here with me now. If you’d known about this, you wouldn’t have let me see it. The only Sara I care about is the one right in front of me.”
-
They have to keep looking for a way out.
Is there a point? Does an outside world even exist? Maybe the rifts mark the boundaries of the simulation; maybe they’ll hit an invisible wall if they try to cross, or they’ll just stop existing.
What else are they supposed to do?
But they leave the observation room, and there’s nowhere to go. The stains on the walls have gone; they’re unnaturally blank. There’s no texture on the floor. Half the doors have disappeared.
The corridor stretches away until it cuts into white light at the far end.
The simulation is falling apart.
“They’re resetting it,” Keiji says, and Sara finds she has the same knowledge. This simulation is over. The researchers - the other Sara and her team - they’re going to erase it and start it again, or shove their AI playthings into some new terrible situation.
How many times has this happened? Sara and Keiji meeting each other, getting to know each other, only to have it wiped out of their minds with every new scenario?
But Keiji felt familiar. Is that some residual memory from the ‘real’ Sara, meeting the real Keiji and getting his consent? Or is it a faint memory of meeting his AI self before?
“I’ll try to remember you,” Sara says. Her heart is beating so fast. It doesn’t seem possible that it could just be an illusion. “I’ll remember this, I’ll remember you - we won’t have to start from scratch next time, we’ll-”
“You think that’ll work?” Keiji asks. “I’m getting the feeling this isn’t the first time this has happened.”
“I know,” Sara says. She’s trying to get her breathing under control. “I’ll still try.”
Keiji looks at her for a long moment. The light is brighter now, closer. The corridor is starting to shake under their feet.
He laughs. “Well, I guess it’s worth a shot. Cute little researcher.”
He reaches out to touch her face, and Sara wakes in the road.