Survival/Apocalypse16 min read
Fourteen Nights in the Veil: I Chose to Live Old
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I signed the contract because of the money. A million dollars for one risky, weird job — find a missing high school girl and bring whatever was left of her back to the world. It sounded straightforward. It wasn't.
"Are you sure about this, Alayna?" Jameson Clark asked, pushing the file back and forth between his fingers like it was a hot plate.
"I am," I said.
"You know what they're saying." He leaned close enough that I smelled the clinic coffee on his breath. "That game fries brains. People go in and they never wake up."
"Then that's why I'll wake her up," I answered.
The agency didn't want drama. They wanted results. The client wanted me to enter an old holo-game called Fourteen Nights — no longer sold, banned for gore and sexual violence, a whisper-of-a-title that lived in message boards and private groups. The client's note said: "It’s an otome. All the men will pursue her like mad. Bring her home."
"Otome?" Jameson snorted. "More like otome from hell."
He was right, but money crawled into pockets like a slow tide. I signed. That night, I lay down in the white tank, fingers white around the bar, and watched the world fade until a different one slipped in.
A piano note, wet and far. A voice like lacquered silk smoothed into my ear: "My wife is cold. You will go down and keep her warm."
"Who—" My voice died. The screen before me painted a funeral hall: red wood, a long coffin, boys standing like a court. A girl lay inside. The music curled around the scene like smoke.
"They're burying me alive," I whispered.
"You must sleep," the narrator said. "You must be sweet."
Hands shoved the coffin lid at my back. The weight was real. Scent of earth. Silence thicker than sleep. I gagged — and my mouth filled with rice.
"Let me out," I croaked between ragged coughs.
The lid slid, light like a blade. A hand, gentle as paper, dragged me upright. A voice, cultured and soft, bent over me.
"My wife," he said. "Do you have wishes unfilled?"
He stood in white gauze, a hood over his face, his body long and tidy. He moved like a poem.
A glass panel dropped in front of me then: name, lineage, short biography. "Magnus Hansen," it read. "Scion of house Hansen. Master of the inner court. He tends music, preserves household, cries alone for his wife's heart."
Good grief. Even the NPC bios were ornate.
"Magnus Hansen," I said, testing a name with my mouth. The number near his status blinked up: Favor 65/100.
"Sixty-five," he said without looking, the number already a thing we both knew.
He helped me from the coffin as the others bowed and fell away, and the world smelled of oil lamps and red lacquer. He touched my wrist with a silk handkerchief and the fabric was cold and absurdly clean.
"Close your doors," he said, the words a warm breath against the air. "The night is loud."
That first night should have been a warning. The system flagged a request: "Invite one suitor tonight — 0/1." I ignored the pop and opened the window a hair. The moon hung low and wrong; I could see black specks along a skin of gray.
"Who will you have?" a servant asked outside the door.
"Who do I like?" I called back, because choosing any of these boys felt like picking a flavor of doom. "Call whoever comes easiest."
"Very well, madam!" he chirped, the steps receding.
They arrived as a pair — twin boys in sheer cloth that promised nothing but trouble. They called themselves Arak and Arian, but the labels meant nothing when both turned into a single screaming knot. When I pushed one off and reached for the other, their bodies collapsed into a wet bloom of limbs and mouths two pulses away from laughing.
"Please," one of them said, a sound like someone shredding paper into a throat. "We cannot be apart."
"Then go away," I said flatly.
They swelled like bad dough until the room stank of wet skin. My feet had a mind of their own: I threw the strip of cloth they offered, and when the thing lurched toward me with too-long arms, I threw myself through the window.
I should have known then that this would be a world where a broken rule could drown you. I should have known the favor numbers meant something like fate. But money blankets most of what would hurt you, and curiosity keeps poking.
A man in white appeared on the garden path with a lantern. He did something with the thing that had become the twins, and it burst like wet paper. He wiped his hands on the hem of his robe toward me with a domestic gesture.
"No one will hurt my wife," he said.
"Magnus," I answered, breathless. "Go away."
He only smiled and bowed as if that should reassure me. Then he invited me to the moonstone pavilion, and I let him because I needed answers. That's when the world started being kind and cruel both at once — music until my head turned, deep, too-deep sleep, and favors gained and lost like chess pieces.
"Why did you leave?" I asked him at the pavilion when we were alone, the moon leaking like old paint.
"Why did you sleep with me?" he countered, soft as steam.
"I didn't," I flailed. "I swear I didn't—"
He looked at me like a fault line. "If you mean it, then make it useful."
He played me a tune so lovely it made want to forgive everything. I leaned my forehead against the bridge and went under the wave of sleep.
When I woke the next morning, the courtyard had stolen the night's fright but kept the evidence: a red scarf on the floor, a puzzle piece tucked under the screen. "One of fourteen," the system coldly announced. The game called itself not nights but deaths. Fourteen Deaths. Fourteen designs of loss harvested and collected.
I started to play. Game rules were many and spare. Favor above 80? You gained a boon. Favor below zero? The game warned coldly: "Risk of murder by NPC." The balance sat like a scale between seduction and threat. I could feel the logic in the way the courtiers obeyed habits and lists. It was a story-world built for feelings and for traps.
"How many nights must I stay?" I demanded of Magnus one evening.
"Fourteen," he said.
"Fourteen?" I swore.
"Fourteen deaths," he corrected gently. "Fourteen ways the world ends. You must gather the pictures. We must rearrange the map." He watched me with those veiled eyes, and I decided, despite everything, to use him.
"You're not trying to hurt me?" I asked, oddly childish under the moonlight.
"I am trying to keep you," he said. The words slotted themselves like a blade.
That was the strange thing: Magnus could be tender in the way a knife is tender — precise, inevitable. He wrapped me with small care every day and watched me with a kind of patient hunger. I started to answer with a softness because I needed lines to hold on by. Each time I mistook him for safety, my favor climbed and the game rewarded me.
"Favor +5," the system said when I called him "husband" while trying to get him to guide me.
I caught two lucky breaks in that twisted courtyard. One, the supposed brother of a ghostly painter — a wan man named Aurelius Gauthier — accepted a screen as penance and left me a red umbrella that betrayed nothing. Two, a dusty paper boy in a stall, trapped in his role, handed me a dry, curled puppet of a girl that smelled like recess and ink. That puppet was Katie Ford.
"Katie," she whispered when Jameson and I found her in a room of folded paper. "Who are you?"
"My name is Alayna," I told her. "I'm here to take you home."
She blinked, as if surprised the word still mattered. Her eyes were a blank lake. When Jameson leaned in and tested her hands, she grabbed his wrist with the force of someone who had remembered what it was to be a child.
"Her memory's patchy," he told me.
"Then we'll stitch it," I said.
But stitching only goes so far when the sinews that hold the world are a crazed, leaking brain.
"Listen," Aurelius said one night in the bamboo. "The project—there's an investor. They wanted something different. They wanted 'real' dream-logic."
"Real for whom?" I asked.
"For them," he said. "They are sick, Alayna. They made this to see something...they wanted their fantasies to be real."
He didn't try to hide his fear. He shouldn't have. Respect the source of the horror, he said. It costs you.
After more nights, we had ten of the fourteen puzzle fragments. They made a map of city and shrine, of the big house, of the lake. The system notes were merciless: "Collect 14/14." We were nearly there. Each completed fragment clicked like the truth settling in.
That truth was that the game's inner server — the brain that dreamed the world — hummed in another place: a factory with rows of glass tanks and human-shaped shells. I thought of that when I woke on the clinic gurney: fifteen hours, the nurse said, and I felt like survivor debris.
I insisted we act. We tracked addresses, met with police who walked like crows, then finally into a sick basement. The place stank of machine heat and old coffee. There were posts, beds, papers. And there was a central hall where tanks glinted darkly. Under floods of wires, a large brain pulsed in a vat. A red line ran from it, blood bright and slow, into the stillness of a black pool. I nearly gagged.
"Who runs this?" I demanded. The detective brushed his fingers through his hair the way the civilized pretend they do not flinch.
"Company says it's a simulation tank gone wrong," he offered.
Wrong? Wrong is tidy. Our discovery had layers like an onion left to rot.
We found the artist who designed the faces. The controller, with his microphones and dark smile. The investors who treated players like cattle. They sat in a room after we forced the police's hand, thinking themselves untouchable. They were the men in suits, nerves slick.
That's when I made the choice I would not forget: show the world.
We set a press conference at the clinic. The city had to know something. If the police were slow, we would show up in daylight with cameras and survivors and families. The investors had to answer. The cult that built the machine had to be exposed. If a thousand eyes watched, maybe the system would stall. Maybe it would be the kind of punishment that the monsters feared: public truth.
The hospital conference room filled fast. "This is a story," said one photographer under his breath. "The studio will eat it." Katie sat at my side. Magnus, surprisingly, followed me from the edge of the crowd like a shadow, veil and all. Aurelius kept his shoulders still. Jameson stood like a second bodyguard. The room smelled like antiseptic and underlying smoke.
"Why are you here?" a reporter asked. He wore curiosity like a glove.
"Because people are missing," I said, and I told them everything: the game, the vats, the missing players, the tanks stacked like graves. I told them about the list — the investor names, the studio devs, the "administrative" staff who edited and laced the dreams. "They took people into a dream and didn't let them go," I said.
The first reactions were polite. "Is there evidence?" someone demanded.
"Yes." I handed papers to the man in charge of the city's media desk. "Investigate the factory. Open their servers. Check the tanks."
We walked them there like prisoners to the gallows.
The factory door let in a burst of sunlight and the air hugged us with stale heat. A crowd had gathered because word moves fast. Phones rose. Videos streamed. Families of test subjects held photos. The press flushed in like a flock. The men we wanted stood behind a table under a banner that read "New Conscious Media" and looked exactly how you imagine would-be gods look when the scaffolding cracks: small, fragile.
"People!" I shouted into a camera. "This is the place. This machine is a factory for false immortality. It's how they sold dreams and took lives. These men — look at them — they made it."
At first they tried to hide. A lawyer read a pre-written statement about safety and bad accidents and corporate responsibility. The crowd surged with a sound like bees. "We saw through your tank!" someone screamed. "They are in there!" A woman pushed to the front, hair like salt, holding a photograph of a thin boy.
The lead investor — Kenneth Ross — tried to put on a face of calm.
"Accidents happen," Kenneth said. He made his voice even. "We are conducting a thorough investigation—"
"Accident?" a mother roared. "My boy never woke up. He fed us dreams instead of bread. He is gone." She pointed at Kenneth like someone touching a blister. "You handed us dreams. You took his waking life."
Kenneth's mouth opened. For a moment he looked animal, not a man. "We followed regulations," he offered. "We had oversight, we had doctors—"
"Do the names 'obedience' and 'sacrifice' mean anything to you?" someone else demanded. "Did you sell the idea that sacrifice makes meaning? You murdered people, Kenneth."
He stuttered. The lawyer flanked him. "We did not intend—"
People circled. Phones, cameras, expressions like knives closing.
"What did you expect?" a reporter asked. "That dreams would be safe? That humans can be used like spare parts and no one notices?" His voice climbed. "Show us your logs. Show us the contracts."
"Search warrants," a detective said quietly. But the crowd wanted a more visible punishment. They wanted the humiliation to be public, not a backstage legal dance.
We pushed every exposed nerve. We had names. We had the lab. We had witnesses. We had survivors who could speak — and survivors who couldn't but whose parents were here. The field of public outrage is a terrible thing. It does not reason. It wants a scene.
"Kenneth Ross," I said into the mic as the cameras stayed merciless. "Stand and answer."
He blinked as if seeing us all for the first time. "I—"
"Explain the vats!" Jameson barked. "Why the brain? Why the blood?"
Kenneth's skin paled. "We were researching consciousness—"
"Consciousness?" The mother spat blood on the word. "You studied their hearts as if you were butchers!"
At that, a man from the crowd stepped forward: Cosmo Campbell, the former server technician. He had worked nights in that basement. He held a manila folder. "They lied to us," he said. "They told us it was for therapy." His voice shook. "They said it would heal. I saw their board meetings. I saw what they called 'the harvesting'."
"Who are 'they'?" someone asked.
Cosmo looked at Kenneth and then at the other men on the platform — Angelo Calhoun, Arturo Christensen, Angelo's smile gone slack. "Ace investors," he said. "The greedy, the men who wanted gods."
"Those are the names!" someone shouted, and a girl in the front row with a camera pointed it straight at them. This is where public punishment becomes theatrical. People begin to measure a man not by indictment but by the sound of their shame.
Kenneth's face twitched. He went from forced calm to something like fury to naked fear. "You have no proof," he hissed, "no proof of intent."
"I have proof," Cosmo said. He opened his folder and put a hard plastic disk on the table. It whirred with the hospital monitors and ledger boards and investor notes. "Our emails, the release schedules, the payment to the 'dream donors'."
A lawyer pushed the disk aside. "This is unverified," he said, but his voice lacked power.
"Verify it in court then," a woman screamed. "Verify it in public!" She pounded her palm against the table and the blow rang like thunder.
Kenneth's eyes became tiny black beads. He began to sweat like a man in a fever. His handlers tried to flank him. The cameras chewed their faces into caricature. Phones were up close enough to see sweat beads.
"I didn't mean—" he started. Then he shut his mouth.
Aurelius stepped forward. He was never a man comfortable with crowds, but his voice was clear.
"You showed dreams to people who could not consent properly," he said. "My art was used and we were told to help script nightmares and paradise as a product. I protested. They silenced me. I called them 'mad' and they made me complicit."
He spoke of promises and bribes and the lunches where images were passed around like menus. He spoke of terms like "permanence index" and "ascension," words you cannot say without a lemon of bile. The crowd ate it. People sobbed. I watched Kenneth's face warp. He tried to say he was an idealist, but the words were empty of anything anyone wanted to hear.
Then it broke. The crowd turned from words to actions like a weather front. Someone ripped a nameplate from the table — Angelo's — and flung it into the mud. Others chanted. "Shame!" The chant rose like a tide.
Kenneth reached to the lawyers. They formed a thin wall. He stumbled back as an elderly woman shoved a photo at his face. "This was my son," she said. "He was a good boy. You took him."
He tried to answer and the words fell apart. He cried, but not like someone penitent. It was the sound of a man who realizes that his social currency has been drained. He pressed his hands to his face and vomited, not blood but something like bile and the bile of all the assurances he had made to himself.
The crowd reacted the way crowds do: some applauded. Some went silent. Someone filmed the vomit as a loop. Someone else smacked him with a rolled-up newspaper. "You can apologize in court," Kenneth croaked. "I will cooperate."
The leader of the press conference, a local anchor, turned her back and faced the cameras. "There's your man," she said. "He will face probe, but we are not just watching for indictments. We are speaking for the missing."
The investors—Angelo, Arturo, Kenneth—stood like men whose names had been erased from their own history. They made small movements. Their supporters tried to shrivel into the first rows. Their graph of power dropped instantly. People who had once wanted to be seen with them crossed the street.
"What will happen to them?" a father asked me later, palming his photo like a talisman. "Will they go to jail?"
They might. Lawworks are slow and clean. But in that moment, humiliation was the law. Kenneth's colleagues sawed through their ties. Their social nets burned. They were unmoored by shame impulse, by the social equivalent of a public flogging: brands pulled endorsements, startups broke ties, banks froze accounts. "Bad press" became "bad life."
Kenneth tried to stand tall at the end. He wiped sweat from his forehead and said: "We will work with authorities. We regret—"
"You will not regret in court," the mother told him, voice a toll. "You will watch your balance drop. You will watch the people you bought walk away. You will feel watched when you go into a store, and you will feel small. You will lose your reputation. That is your fine."
He crumbled. His expression moved through white-faced denial, confusion, small laughter, then the slack collapse of someone losing air. His eyes slid away from everyone toward the bright phones. He saw the footage feed and in the glow of screens he became a creature of spectacle.
Then something worse: people came and called his name. Employees who had been hired and slotted into roles to manage PR and who had been complicit, wore badges of "research coordinator" and "clinical supervisor." Now they turned on him. "You said safety protocols," one of them screamed. "You told us to throw away red flags!"
The man in the middle couldn't buy loyalty anymore. He tried to call in lawyers, but the law looked like a distant hill. The crowd shifted. A few people began to clap slowly, a sad wash — not praise, exactly, but satisfaction like a wound closing.
We left after hours. The press stayed. The cameras kept turning. The investors were escorted to cars with dark windows and very real fear behind their eyes. They tried to coordinate a statement. "Technical failure," they said to every camera. The words became paper-thin.
At night, they would lie awake and realize that their name in public is a mark no accountant erases. Their donors would recalculate their trust. Their speech would always be the echo of a woman who stuck a photo under their nose.
Punishment had many faces that day: shame, loss, public exposure, doors closed in the rain. It did not end injustices, and it did not save the world. But for the first time, a long list of families felt acknowledged. They had a story on record. A group of men was on the defensive. The factory would be opened by the state. The tanks would be examined. The brain in the vat would be studied and catalogued. Names would be called.
I watched Magnus from the crowd. His veil was a shimmer, but his eyes were stormy. When I met him later in the corridor, he did not speak. He only slid a cold piece of something into my palm.
"Keep it," he said. "It will bring you a chance."
It was a shard of an object I now knew by the game's language: "Lingshi" — a token that can resurrect once. The system had given me a life-line. I kept it, because hope strings better than logic.
Back in the hospital, after testimony and after media cycles and the rest, they released Katie and Jameson and Aurelius. The police held the factory for a time, but paperwork took the long road to results. The town made lemonade of the scandal; the website batch-fed journalists to one another. But in our small rooms and the tea left in the corners, our wounds wanted time. Horror does not heal with headlines.
"You're alive," Katie said one night when she could stand without the blank eyes.
"I'm alive," I told her.
"Why?" she asked, the world forgetful like a child.
"Because I wanted you," I said.
She smiled, a small, fragile thing.
We spoke often at night. Magnus came sometimes, always at a distance. He was a man who had been loyal in a way I could not parse: perfectly kind, precise like a blade. Once he stood on the roof and said, "Will you come with me?"
"Where?" I asked.
"Home. To stay. To not leave."
"I can't," I said. "Not yet." I thought of the vat, of the factory's brain, of the twelve puzzle pieces still humming under my skin. I thought of the box we had made, the choice that I had announced to a god-thing three nights earlier: "I choose to live old and long, to die of old bones. I choose a long life, not a perfect death."
"You chose to live?" Magnus asked. His voice was tilted like a question you offer a priest.
"Yes," I said. "I chose old age."
He stood quiet for long minutes, then bent forward and kissed my forehead like a benediction. "Then live," he whispered. "I'll keep watch."
And he did. He became my graveyard sentinel, not to claim me, but to keep me. The game had taught me how to negotiate with lovers who are also predators. I gave him tenderness where I could and ground him where I needed. Sometimes he would smile without the veil and look like a man learning to be less monstrous.
The last night in the system — the fourteenth death in the game's scheme — was a question asked by a vast, laughing presence: "How do you want to die?"
I thought of every exchange. The twins who morphed under my window. The painter whose brother had died one way and been set in paint another. The priest turned crocodile. The god in the lake and the factory brain. I chose the most honest answer I could: "Thank you. I choose old age after a long life."
The presence hummed. The world folded. I woke on the clinic gurney. The machines chirped. The doctor said, "You were gone for fourteen hours."
"Fourteen hours?" I said. The number felt small. But when I later saw the press releases and the broken investors on the morning feeds, I understood: the game had been a microcosm, an engine of hunger. We had thrown a stone into its pond and watched the ripples reach shoreline.
"Do you regret it?" Magnus asked once, much later, standing under the gray sky where the clinic roof met open air. Katie leaned on Jameson's shoulder behind us.
"No," I said. "I don't."
He folded like a man relieved. "Then let it be settled."
"How?" I asked.
He smiled that odd smile, and I thought of the tiny things he did: drank his tea without sugar, hummed a tune and handed me a handkerchief. "We will live," he said.
Years later, they would call the factory trial. Some men would be found guilty of exportable crimes against the brain and the person. Others would be fined and retired. It was not total justice. Few things are. But the public shame had shifted the pattern of power. Families found records. We left the court walk into a light rain as if the city had been scrubbed.
On my dresser, I kept the red scarf, the small puzzle box that had once opened into a nightmare, and under the drawer a folded cloth — the Lingshi that Magnus had given me. I never used it. The choice to live is the bravest one I took.
That is what I told Katie when she said, "Will you come with me on my first real walk outside the town?"
"Yes," I said. "And we'll go slowly. We'll count things like bricks and birds."
She squeezed my hand. "Can we take Magnus?"
"Of course," I said, and it surprised me how much I wanted him there.
He came, as always, in a sloped veil, offering a hand that never felt like confinement. He brought with him a book of quiet songs.
We walked through the hospital gates like survivors who do not need a sermon, just fresh air. Somewhere the city was spinning new scandals, new little dramas, but that day the sky was mild.
"Fourteen nights," I murmured. "I nearly thought it would take my life."
"You almost let it," Magnus said. "You almost loved it. Some people die for their loves in those games."
"I didn't," I said. "I chose old age. I chose the slow end at home, wrinkles like maps."
He looked at me then with a look that could have been gentle mockery or adoration. "Your ending suits you," he said.
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe endings suit different people."
We walked on. The factory would be studied. The broken brain in the vat would be cataloged. Laws would be rewritten slowly and too late for some. People would build shrines and wear their losses like armor. But in the small slow days to come, I would learn to make soup that tasted like summer and read books that made sense, and if I had to, I would die slow and small and human.
When I set down the red scarf in the drawer that night, the little puzzle box sat beside it like a memory, and the Lingshi in the lining warmed like a secret. Magnus bent and kissed the top of my head.
"Good night, Alayna," he said.
"Good night," I said.
Then I turned the lamp off. The light died slowly, like a person who prefers the end to be quiet. The moon outside was ordinary. No god had to roar. I had chosen old age, and the choice felt like a full meal.
The End
— Thank you for reading —