Rebirth16 min read
Welcome to the Phoenix Game
ButterPicks14 views
They told me to decide in sixty seconds.
"Welcome to the Phoenix Game," a cold, tiled voice said. "You have one minute to decide whether to begin."
I stared at the faucet in my tiny bathroom and watched not water but dark, sluggish blood pour into the sink.
"I—I don't understand," I whispered. My voice sounded thin in that tiny room.
Then the mirror did something worse than lie.
"Do you accept?" the voice ticked.
I leaned forward. My reflection—my face—blinked. For a breath of a second my eyes were hollow and bleeding. A flake of rotten flesh slid from an eyelid and hit the porcelain with a pathetic plop.
"No," I said. "No, this isn't real." I touched my cheek. My fingers came away clean.
"Thirty seconds left," the voice said.
Then my heel stepped on cold, sticky something. I saw it before I wanted to: a body, splayed between the bed and the door. Eyes taken. Lips gone. The suit was familiar in the most impossible way.
"Ten seconds," said the voice. "Five, four—"
"Start!" I barked at the last second and the world threw me into a train car like a coin into a fountain.
They told me my name.
"Game identity confirmed: Forbes Daniels," the voice intoned. Its tone had a slither of amusement in it. "Portal active. Phoenix Game: Round One—Infinite Train."
The car hummed. Outside, snow scoured the windows. Inside, people walked like actors waiting for an instruction. I did what the noise in my head ordered: I wrote things down. Station names. Times. Patterns.
I would forget everything else that had been me, but I kept my notes.
On the fourth day a man with glasses stopped me in a food carriage.
"You... you must be a gamer too," he said, almost delighted. "You keep coming back to the same cars."
"Which day did you board?" I asked, keeping my voice flat.
"Twenty-five days ago," he said easily. "I'm Marshall Hernandez."
"Coincidence," I lied. "I came in twenty‑five days ago, too. I woke up to the voice and that's how I got here."
He rolled his eyes. "The machine said my name when it installed me. I was given a name. It's always weird."
"Mine didn't," I said. "The voice called me 'Forbes Daniels.'"
"Ah." He studied me for a beat. "You checked the mirror?"
"I did. Twice," I said. "It lied both times."
"Don't eat the staff food," Marshall warned abruptly, tapping his pen against his beer glass. "I went to the platform on the third day. There are kitchens out there. And a butcher."
He smiled like he'd told a joke. "Don't eat the food they bring you."
"Why?" I asked. I was about to choose between believing him and pretending not to have noticed my growing hunger.
"Because," he said, "it's not always what it looks like."
We got into a rhythm: we collected station names ("Hanwind One" through "Hanwind Five," Noah stations, everything else), we watched the train cycle like a slow mechanical metronome. The pattern repeated; the loop felt inevitable.
"Listen," Marshall said on the twelfth day, rubbing his jaw. "There are thirteen stations. You can time a full circuit. Someone is supplying food. Someone is making sure people get to the train, then get taken off. The staff keeps giving out rations that have production dates moving backward."
"Supply chains don't run backward," I said. "Unless they're staged."
"Unless they're feeding us something else entirely."
We met a woman called Colette Martin—she called herself One‑Thirty‑Seven at first, then let us call her Colette. She was small and steady and had a way of folding her hands that made me feel dangerously protective. Together the three of us measured the train like surveyors.
On the morning after a fuel shortage announcement, chaos became meat.
"Heating will be nightly only," the conductor—a jumpy, sweating man named Gus Brewer—roared through the car.
People scrambled. A heavyset bully—the kind of man who takes what he wants because the world has taught him he's allowed—snatched a blanket from a child and snapped at the child's mother. He was the sort of animal that approximates punishment with casual violence.
Colette screamed when he struck her; I shoved the blanket back. He stumbled, rage blooming like heat. That night, someone found him dead—throat cut, one eye missing—dragged away by the aloof staff. When his stolen blanket reappeared around the neck of an old woman, the carriage smelled of iron and shame.
I remember being more afraid of the looking people than the cold. Marshall and I started pooling supplies. He counted blankets like a man counting coins before a long trip. I watched who starved, who disappeared. We did the only thing we could think of that felt like resistance: we hoarded.
"Tomorrow the doors will clamp tighter," I told him. "People are already learning to kill."
"You'd start a fight for blankets?" he asked, incredulous.
"I'd do more than start one," I said. "I'd make a bargain."
When the train stopped early at Mobi Station the world bit us. The gunmetal sky made the platform look unreal. Marshall and I ran to the net café because net cafés shouldn't exist on the platform of nowhere. The kid at the desk snapped at us for not having cash.
"Can you credit us? I'll pay in information," Marshall said. He was always trying to be the reasonable one, the one who bought our lives a margin.
The monitors in the empty café flickered. One by one every screen lit up with the same line: ATTENTION: STATION NAME.
We ran. We jumped back on the train with seconds to spare, breath eaten by snow. Colette had tried to bribe a steward into not closing the doors and she'd been caught in a messy, tearful moment with the woman she had begged—an embarrassing scene that earned her pity instead of scorn. She climbed in with hair torn and lips shaking.
"Thank you?" She looked at me as if I would scratch her cheek and make everything better. I didn't answer.
For days we walked cars, we watched, we pretended to sleep. On the night a man's body with its throat carved like a butcher's joke was dragged past our seats, I felt sick—at the food, at the silence. I kept seeing the chef's smile.
"Where does the food come from?" Colette asked, her fingers never still.
"From the kitchens at the platforms." I kept thinking of the man in the chef hat moving like a ghost through hanging carcasses.
The day I found the kitchen proper was the day I saw the hook and the meat turning. It was an industrial, cruel place—the kind of room that is honest about blood. There, hanging on the hooks like something you'd see in a slaughterhouse, were human parts and the head of the bully I'd seen take blankets. The chef—Bryant Costa—caught my eyes. His pupils dilated into small, precise holes. He smiled like a man proud of a well-cooked pie.
"You're in the wrong place," he said, with the ease of a man who doesn't expect anyone to survive an accusation.
I stabbed at the nearest chef's knife like a frantic animal and the only thing I accomplished was to cut Bryant's face open. He howled and chased me into the snow and I ran until my lungs ached. When I got back on the train, the cold didn't help the nausea.
"I saw what you saw," Marshall said quietly that night. "I saw them carrying off a man by the hooks. They tried to pass it off as waste disposal."
"They're butchering people and serving us their meat," Colette said hoarsely. "We ate it. I ate it."
That night the train felt like a prison of mirrors. We made plans. We watched where food was delivered. We wrote names on paper and kept them safe. We agreed to be careful.
The next time the train stopped at a bright station—Glimmer Station, Mobi's twin—we made a choice to break something we couldn't fix.
We found a mirror that opened into a black hole. When we smashed it we didn't know if we were breaking a wall, ourselves, or a promise. The world spilled white light and I dove.
— The next place was a strange floating house over water, music gone wrong and a woman's lullaby looping like a blade. We survived by tricking a one‑legged thing named Ankin, who asked for skins. We pulled a human skin from the sky—literally; it dangled on the moon—and everything that had been pulling me apart righted itself for a breath. One hundred sixteen of us passed that round. We still had each other.
"You're better at this than you look," Marshall said, handing me some stale crackers. "Forbes, I want to ask—do you remember anything? Who you were before this?"
"Like you, I remember the sound of ocean waves and a building that used to belong to me," I lied. "Memory becomes something else when they design you for a game."
Colette laughed without humor. "We are pieces on a board. We might as well play chess."
We went from the eater trains to a children's park come to death: Lost Paradise. The park had an enormous smiling mouse with a false face and two hands—one with one finger raised, the other with five. It looked like an ugly math problem: 1-6-6-5. The park forced us to play with oversized dolls that threw electrified rings like petals of judgment.
"Play safe," I said. "Stand in the corner. Let the ring hit the wall."
"It will hurt either way," Colette shivered. "But yes. We learn to play with rules."
We split tasks: Marshall coaxed survivors into acting together; Colette and I cracked riddles; a nimble woman who called herself Wind—she was Twenty‑Five—jumped up statues and found secret levers. We turned shadow-tricks into answers. When two sun-moons rose at once we did something no one had predicted: we moved a plaza and twisted the ground until two stone lovers' shadows met and the park collapsed in on itself like a house of cards. We fell into white again and survived another test.
"You're an odd savior," Colette said as the bright light swallowed us. "You think deliberately."
"I think in terms of leverage," I said.
After the child-madness park, we dropped into a city.
"Round Four," the voice said. "A metropolis. Gather in two hundred square meters. Forty‑eight hours until collapse. Over sixty percent attendance required."
"Two hundred square meters," I told Marshall while walking under a rain that smelled like iron. "Make a radio broadcast."
We did. Marshall used a media floor to push an alert. I stole payphones and left messages. People came like moths. Colette arrived with two other faces I'd learned to trust: Gage Jesus, the old man who'd called himself Nine—soft eyes and an uncanny way with people—and Trey Gibson, who'd been an early ally, a blunt instrument with a kind heart.
We assembled in the square and tried to talk strategy. The city rotated; a grotesque long-man in a top hat smashed a subway gate and chased me into the tunnels before I realized he couldn't move vertically like me. He could smash; I had to run.
That night, through a group chat we'd set up, people reported banner slogans about "Large-Scale Physics Funding" and "Space Migration." Someone fed a thread about protests. An underground lab named M-Lab was circled on my map.
"Maybe they left," Trey muttered. "Maybe they went to the rockets."
"Or maybe they were taken," Colette said. She had started to carry a small, battered camera and write what it saw.
"Don't jump to endings," Gage said, with his old-man voice. "Collect data. Share data. Do not break into conclusions without proof."
We split into teams: one to the aerospace displays, one to the municipal records, another to the lab. I took a small band—Marshall, Colette, Trey and two young mechanics—and we moved through glass towers like children pretending to be giants.
That was when the real betrayal arrived.
We found a shipping manifest in a concierge terminal that looked plausible and boring. It showed a contract: "Population Transfer Program." The city had contracts detailing how citizens could be moved to "offsite habitats" with apparent bureaucratic consent. The numbers looked like a puzzle but suggested not everyone left willingly. Then I found it: an internal memo about "harvest returns" listed "meat distribution quotas" and a ledger with names.
One name chilled me because I'd been eating from its packet three nights earlier.
"Bryant," I breathed. "Bryant Costa's ledger."
Bryant was not human in the painful way I'd thought. He'd been a chef in the train kitchen who'd smiled at us while the room behind him dripped with what I'd first thought was animal fat.
"Show me," said Gage. He was shaking slightly, but his voice had the old man's steady ring.
I pulled the files and we read.
"Meat quotas," Colette said, her words a string of small glass. "Scheduled extra portions for the east car. 'Premium proteins' for staff." She looked up and there were twelve survivors around us already, their faces crumpled into different kinds of horror.
"We need to call them out," Trey said. His fists were tight and angry.
"No," I snapped, because the way forward had to be done where witnesses mattered. "We do it where they can watch. We stage it."
We sent the message out: a summons by public broadcast. "All passengers, please come to the main platform. We will hold a hearing."
There were many reasons to be afraid. There were even more reasons to be determined.
The platform filled like a basin. Snow dusted the shoulders of those who came: survivors, occasional staff who hadn't shown their teeth, a few who still wore conductor livery. The air smelled of old coffee, fear, and something else—iron.
"Make room," I said into the microphone Marshall had pilfered from the media room. The crowd quieted because the machine gave me a voice that could be heard: the one thing we'd been denied. I stepped to the middle with files in my hand as if I were a prosecutor in an unreal court. I had people who had eaten the food, whose children had been robbed of blankets, who had been threatened.
"This man," I said, "is Bryant Costa. He was the head chef on our cars. He has been... arranging our 'rations.'"
There were gasps. "No," someone moaned. "Impossible."
I set the ledger on an overturned crate and flipped it open. I let the inked names slide into the light.
"Here," I said, and read the entries aloud. "Dates. Quotas. 'Premium proteins'—"
"I can explain," Bryant said from the side of the platform. He was limp with sweat, his chef coat stained in a way that didn't match sausage grease. "I had orders. I had to follow them. I had no choice!"
"That's one of the worst parts to me," a woman screamed, stepping up. "You are supposed to save lives, serve us food. You were selling our names."
"People got moved!" Bryant cried, voice thin. "They were relocated for their safety! For a better future! The server said—"
"We are alive because we banded together," Gage said softly, and the old man's eyes were storm-dark. "We were kept alive by each other. Your 'better future' left bodies on hooks."
Bryant's eyes rolled to the sea of faces and he tried to hide behind a bunk of blankets that smelled like old cloth and younger lies.
I had planned our punishment like a machine because in this game you had to think in machines. This was not about vengeance alone. This was about ritual exposure. It had to be public, with witnesses. It had to be the kind of humiliation that burned out the possibility of repetition.
"Look at the ledger," I told the crowd. "Look at the ledger and tell me this is not coordinated. Tell me the lines add up and explain the keyword's insertion."
A hand went up in the back—Marshall's. He read from a page: "Third circuit, premium reserve assigned: 'staff use'—code: P/F/BR." This meant nothing to someone disconnected from logistics, but the letters matched the initials they'd used to obscure the truth. They had been lying to us while serving us.
Bryant's shrug was a vain attempt to look small. "They made me," he said. A groan rose from the crowd; Bryant was using the oldest defense in the book: orders.
Then the crowd decided the first truth. One of the women whose husband had gone missing stepped forward. She had nothing to lose and everything to let go.
"You said we'd be safe if we ate your food," she spat. "My boy—" She lowered her voice and began to cry. "He died. You fed us his brothers."
Colette leaned forward, thin voice cutting. "You butchered who you were supposed to protect and called it rationing."
Someone started to chant: "Expose him! Expose him!"
"Public answer," Gage said in a calm that was almost worse than rage. "You will be given your words in the middle. Then we will decide your fate."
He turned to me. "Forbes."
I nodded because it was the only humane method left. I had thought—maybe foolishly—that Bryant would confess, or the staff would clamp down. I had thought that reason would hold.
Bryant had no plan for a public humiliation. He had no plan because he was a man who believed the world owed him cover.
We made him stand on a table in the middle of that platform. We gave him a forked mic and a blanket from one of the carts so his hands couldn't make a sudden reach for anything dangerous.
"Speak," I said simply. The platform was packed with the whole car's survivors. A few staff watched from the edges. Even Gus Brewer, the conductor with the bulging eyes, stood like a man who'd swallowed a bad pill.
Bryant's voice trembled. "I did what I had to do," he said. "You don't understand—"
"Explain the ledger," Colette said. She had never been so still or so fierce. I could see the dent in her cheek where a fist had landed when she was younger.
He talked; he lied; he flinched and smiled and tried to make it smaller. He started with excuses: orders and quotas, rationing, supply chain failure, the need to maintain morale. He used the bureaucrat's language and the soldier's voice. He named names of officials as if they'd carry him away. The crowd hissed at each new attempt. The stiffs at the conductor table looked more unsettled than I'd ever seen them.
Then we did what I'd feared but had planned: we turned his own ritual of food into evidence.
We brought out the plates—rows of them—collected from the train's disposal. We laid them down in front of him, one by one, pieces of each meal with a small tag: time, date, source. Each tag matched numbers in his ledger. We placed the last plate in front of him: a neat portion he'd claimed to have prepared that day. I had Colette write the day and the label. The woman whose child had been taken stood at his side with a knife she did not raise. Her fingers shook.
"Do you deny," she said, small voice, "that you prepared this?"
Bryant's eyes watered. "It was standard," he said. "It was—"
"Standard," the woman repeated. "Your standard included our dead."
He crumpled. I watched him pick up the cutlery as if looking for a lifeline. He had none. Marshall read aloud one ledger entry after another, numbers and names that had once been a list and were now a story of people bought and burned.
At first, Bryant searched for pity among the crowd. Then he looked for plots, for some ally. He found none. The people around him were an audience that had watched too much to trust mercy.
When his words stopped making sense, we turned the next mechanism on: public disgrace.
"Take off your chef's coat," Gage said—his voice like thunder turned to gravel. Bryant's hands trembled. He took off the coat like a convict in an old play. "Walk the platform," Gage said, "and tell us who told you to do this."
He walked. His name was shouted like a curse. Children of the carriage spat on him; women who had been forced to beg shoved bread at him then yanked it away. A dozen people came forward with bones of proof—receipts, notes, scraps of conversation. With each admission his face paled and his protests grew thinner.
He began to cry when a man whose brother had been cleaved into a makeshift ration stood and emptied a five-gallon jar of preserved pickles over Bryant's head. The bright acid water ran in streaks over his cheeks, making the letters on his coat curl.
"You will not sleep the same way again," the woman whispered to Bryant as she dumped her child's blanket in his lap and walked away. "You will know what it is to be watched."
He staggered back onto the table and tried to speak, as if any further sound could be used as a bargaining chip for his life. "It wasn't me...it wasn't me," he sobbed.
"You will tell the names," I said. "All of them."
He named three. We wrote them down. Two were still on that train in uniforms. The conductor who had kept the record, Gus, was one of them.
Then we did something I had not intended but became necessary: the crowd voted.
"Shame," called someone. "Shame," they echoed.
"Expel," said another.
"Reveal them," said a third.
"Public abandonment," our old Gage proposed, and the crowd's voice rose like a tide. We needed to ensure he couldn't return to the system that had turned compassion into a ledger. We needed an action that would serve as a deterrent.
"Bryant," Gage said in the end, "for the record and for those yet taken—step down."
He did. They took his tools. They took his pockets. They took his laces. They left him in the middle of the platform dressed in shirt and bloodied apron, with a card pinned to his chest listing the ledger names and the contracts he had signed.
"From this day," said Colette, and her voice was cold as knives, "people will know your handwriting. People will know your face. If you ever step near another cart or cook another meal, we will make you a monument to your own crime."
People gathered in a circle. There were cameras—phones always catch everything—and the scene was recorded. The crowd called out every name Bryant had given, and we replied with time and place for each. Those names would be kept in a dossier and pinned to every entrance. Fear lives in details, and details would make this easier to watch.
Bryant's reactions shifted as the crowd's anger matured. At first, he sought pity—then denial—then bargaining. When bargaining failed he tried to blame higher-ups. When that failed he flung accusations at the staff. Each step earned him less mercy. He went from belligerent to pleading to barely audible.
Around him, the platform reacted like an animal to a wound: we hissed and we listened and we took photographs. People who had been neutral became prosecutors. Someone began to clap—once—then others followed, a slow, ugly cadence. People spat; people cried; some, in a human flicker of mercy, raised a hand to Bryant's shoulder to steady him as he was led away.
He was dragged to the edge of the platform and left there. His apron was nailed to the siding and his ledger stuck on top. For anyone who might later claim ignorance we built a public record that could not be erased without being witnessed.
"Let his shame be his sentence," Gage said.
The crowd dispersed in a kind of exhausted justice. We had not executed him—no banners flew to that effect—but the human world we were reclaiming needed its own rules. Shame would be our law until we could make better ones. People talked in whispers for hours about the ledger and the names and the contracts. People scanned the platform and marked which officers might be implicated.
That night, sleeping under thin blankets and with our stomachs emptier than they'd been—because Bryant had been a main cook—we slept easier than we had in weeks.
The punishment had been public, horrible, and exacting. It had done what it was meant to: it burned the possibility of quiet betrayal and set a precedent. In the months—or the passing days—after, when people argued about whether to trust the staff, they pointed to the ledger and said: remember Bryant. They whispered the platform's story and it became part of our brief, messy law.
We left the train.
We stepped through the mirror I had smashed and came out in white light. We had been subjects in a monstrous laboratory, and our reaction had been to make the monsters visible. We had judged and been judged.
Later, when we were pulled into the next rounds, when water and skin and music and shadows tried to unravel us, the memory of that public punishment held like a knot.
"That was ugly," Marshall said later, while we huddled in the floating house.
"It was necessary," I answered. "It taught us that truth matters in a measurable way. And in a game designed to break us down, seeing the ledger tear the fabric was an advantage."
"Do you think the game will change because of us?" Colette asked. Her fingers folded around a thin cup.
"It already has," I said. "We taught it we will not be anonymous.
"We are Forbes, Marshall, Colette, Gage, and our names matter."
We shook hands like brothers. The game watched and learned.
"What's next?" Marshall asked.
"Keep our names," I said. "And keep each other."
We fell through white and into the game again: a mirror palace like a moonlit drum; a theme park that needed two shadows to touch; a city that bent and folded like a map in someone's hands. Each time we survived it wasn't because we could fight—it was because we learned to see the system the way a surgeon sees a chest: where the organs were, where the ruptures lay and where to stitch.
"Do you ever think," Colette said under another bright light, "that we're being tested on our capacity to be human?"
"I think," I answered, "they are testing whether we will keep being human when identity is a line on a checklist and our names are data fields."
After the city fell into two halves and we hauled a skin from the sky and Bryant Costa's name was etched across the train platform like a warning, the game moved us onward.
We were only a number at the start—thirty‑two. By the time the voice announced we had passed another round the list had already thinned—people folded like paper under pressure. But we kept moving, learned more, and slowly the idea of surviving outweighed the urge to be just clever.
At the amusement park, we learned how shadows can be used as hinges; at the floating shrine, we learned how moon-skin is stitched; in the city we learned how bureaucracy can be punished by public record. We took the lessons of each place and turned them into tools.
"What's the final round?" Colette asked me once, sitting under an empty sky between rounds.
"I don't know," I said. "But I know this: whoever thinks of games as loops will lose. Whoever treats us as anonymous items will not survive our response."
At night, when the white light thinned and the voice reset us again, I pinned my name on the inside of my coat: Forbes Daniels. It was small and useless and very much mine.
And I kept walking.
The End
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