Instantly filled with alarm, Akane lurched up and took in her – new – surroundings. The orange-brown sofa she’d awoken from was placed on a small circular rug in the centre of an expansive fan-shaped room with a high ceiling. Akane’s attention was drawn immediately to the ‘hinge’ of that fan, where an imposing steel door with a red ‘X’ daubed across the central mechanism marked the obvious exit to the facility she’d been brought. Such a shame that it was just as clearly unopenable.

Was this a death game that she had been kidnapped for, just like the Nonary Game she’d been about to put into motion? You wouldn’t have made that connection just from a glance. Building Q and the ship it had once mirrored had been designed, even after being rigged with puzzles and escape rooms and death traps, to retain the air of luxury of the original cruise liner. This place had none of that: everything from the dilapidated basketball hoop in one corner to the bar counter over on the opposite side, down to the very surfaces of the walls was rugged and practical, set up to allow for robust maintenance by whoever inhabited the place. And yet despite that difference in the overarching design ethos, something in the atmosphere had Akane convinced this place had the same purpose.

If this was a death game there would be some indication of how to proceed. Akane looked round for it. Could those screens beside the X-door be…? But one was blank and the other only displayed a list of unconnected words. ‘Hero’. ‘Fool’. ‘Future’. ‘Hex’. ‘Kill’. ‘Eye’. The screen with ‘Hex’ on it had a jagged crack through the centre. Nothing on there was helpful.

Akane was beginning to wonder if she’d have to go exploring the facility blindly away from her starting position. She and Aoi had figured such a beginning to their game would leave things unacceptably down to chance and had prepared carefully worded instructions to give to their players once they’d escaped the initial rooms. Surely the Nonary Game would have gone better than this confused beginning thanks to that precaution. But since the mastermind of this hadn’t done that…

At that moment a crackling sound drew her attention. On the other side of her sofa Akane found a low coffee table, on which was placed a bulky, old-fashioned television screen. The sound that had drawn Akane there had been the screen crackling to life, the light that produced its image now emanating out to cast an uncanny glow across the floor in front. Akane hurried round to look at that image head on.

What she saw shocked her. The face on the screen was wearing a gas mask – not just any gas mask, but the very one Aoi had used when kidnapping the players for her Nonary Game. If whoever had brought her here had gotten ahold of that mask, they knew far too much about what Akane had been about to do.

Akane’s alarm, and her diverted focus as she considered all the possibilities of what this meant, distracted her from the first thing the figure on the screen said. The man behind the gas mask seemed to waiting for Akane’s response. With no idea what she was supposed to be replying to Akane put on an act, sinking to her knees in front of the television and letting her voice soften. “Please! Let me go! I don’t know what you want from me so please, just–”

“You can lay off the crocodile tears, June.” The codename she’d intended to be called during the Nonary Game came through the speakers as a deep, malicious hiss. It should have been several days before she was called that for the first time. “You wouldn’t be here if I didn’t know exactly what you’re about to do.”

Even as Akane let the helpless act recede and her back straightened, the strength went out of her legs for real. “Who… are you?” she said weakly. How did he know about the Nonary Game Akane had intended?

“I’m what’s left once you’ve taken everything else out of me,” the gas mask replied. “You might as well call me… Mugen.”

The gas mask – Mugen – faded from the screen, to be replaced by a low-resolution, three-dimensional, computer-generated map. Akane recognised the shape of the room she’d woken in surrounding the path to the exit. Several corridors fanned away from the other side leading to many smaller rooms, through with the image only showing featureless brick-like blocks Akane only had the shapes of each room to go on: that wasn’t enough to work out what they were supposed to be.

“This underground bunker…” Mugen continued, even as the map revolved on the screen. “Well, there’s no reason to expect you to recognise this place. All the blood that’s been spilled in this place, and to you it’s no different to any other location of a death game. I’m going to make you understand.” The gas mask was suddenly back on the screen, larger as though Mugen had rushed the camera. “Seek me in this place. If you get to me, maybe you’ll find a way out.”

The man on the screen then began to turn away, as though about to leave. Akane cried out, “Wait!” When the gas mask was back dead-centre in the screen, she said, “What about the people kidnapped for the Nonary Game?” They were all now asleep, waiting for the start of the game. With Akane and not there that could never happen, and they’d just be left in a Soporil-induced slumber until death. That was a fate Akane wouldn’t have wish even on Gentarou Hongou, let alone Clover and Light, Hazuki, Junpei…

If Mugen appreciated her owning up he showed no sign of it. “Seems to me like you have other things to worry about.”

With those bitter final words, the screen went black.

o-0-O-0-o

Akane took stock of the various ways to progress further into the facility. The corridor to the left: fairly short, with a door at the end and one along the left-hand side, both locked. In the centre of the fan, another locked room and a corridor that went some way past it. But when Akane tried to head that way she ran across a heaped pile of rubble and criss-crossing metal poles, with only the barest glimpses of the other side peeking tantalisingly through the gaps.

The only way to progress was to the right. Akane took the corridor on that side until she finally found a door that was unlocked, just as the corridor hooked round to the left. The room she stepped into was astonishingly bright; Akane flinched back as her eyes adjusted. It was a good thing she hadn’t stepped further into the room while she couldn’t see since the path forward – as pure-white as the walls all around – was flanked on both sides by a sheer drop into an abyss Akane couldn’t hope to see the bottom of.

At the end of the white path an imposing mound-like installation towered over her, various metal protrusions spiking out all over the back shell, while at the front a red ring as wide around as Akane was tall seemed to stare back at her with its faint but unmistakeable glow. Akane carefully made her way along towards it. As she approached a cylindrical podium emerged from beneath the floor, spiralling round as it rose to face Akane with the computer screen embedded in its surface.

Cautiously, Akane pressed the palm of her hand against the screen and it turned on. The bottom edge turned into a touchscreen keyboard while a grid of many unlabelled icons filled up the rest. Akane, with nothing to choose between them, picked the first one at the top. The icon expanded to fill the screen – a representation of the file opening – and… gibberish. All that was displayed was a meaningless sequence of random, jumbled characters, line after line of them without end.

Was the file just… junk? No, it had to be more than that. If the file was encrypted it would show this exact result on opening. When Akane closed the file a new icon had appeared just above the keyboard: a multicoloured spiral with the label ‘Decrypt’ beneath it.

Something about this setup rankled Akane. It seemed… too easy. Too mindless, and pointless. Yet she had nothing better to do than to try. With her finger she dragged the icon of the file she’d tried to open and dragged it down towards ‘Decrypt’.

Akane’s worries were soon proved right. For a few moments the computer got to work, progress bars and twirling spinners giving the impression of a great deal of processing power being put to its task. But then everything froze at once, and an error message covered all the progress bars. ‘Decryption not possible.’

Of course. If whoever had encrypted the files didn’t want it broken then it would be impossible to do so without millions of years of effort, Akane knew that. She’d kidnapped Hazuki Kashiwabara rather than either of her daughters exactly so that she would be able to explain this stuff to Junpei. With a grimace Akane stepped away from the console.

Within moments Mugen’s mocking voice emanated from speakers around the room. It seemed to come at Akane from all directions, from all parts of the gleaming dome over her head and also rolled up from the abyss on either side of her. “You’re not gonna get very far with this if you don’t give it a try!”

Akane’s fist clenched. “There isn’t a way forward here. As you’ve presented it, I’m supposed to go somewhere else and find a key that’ll let me progress here.” Some part of Akane’s professional prides savoured that; had she been the one to design this space every detail would have been carefully picked to ensure an absolute clarity of purpose. “So I’m going to go look for it now,” she continued, turning on one foot as though about to head out.

“Wait!” Mugen snapped, his voice reverberating through the open space. “Come on. You know all the rooms but this one are locked. This device is the only way to proceed. Use it. Again.”

With a sigh Akane turned her attention back to the screen on the podium. To her surprise a new prompt covered the errors from before. It read ‘Use full capabilities? Yes/No?’ Full capabilities? Whatever those capabilities were, they shouldn’t be able to overcome the hurdle of pure logic that had obstructed the decryption the first time.

Akane pressed yes anyway.

She heard an ululating, alien hum from the giant installation in front of her, and could have sworn that the red ring glistened and turned as well. The prompt disappeared, then the error messages followed, and the progress bars filled like they’d never stopped. The decryption reached the end without fanfare: what had been meaningless text was now an image, a photograph showing Akane, Junpei, and some blond American she didn’t recognise standing in what looked like a green-walled communal shower, staring at a yellow button on the wall.

How had the computer managed to do that? “Is this… a quantum computer?” she muttered to herself. What could one of those be doing in a death game facility?

“Heh. Got it in one,” Mugen’s voice replied. “This place really is a find.”

Now Akane was wishing she had Hazuki on hand to explain things for her. Her layman’s understanding was enough to know that somehow a quantum computer was capable of certain programming tricks, using quantum mechanics to interleave multiple different possible routes of calculation all at once, which was how it had ripped apart encryption that would be impossible for an ordinary computer to solve. Wait: that description sounded like she was talking about alternate realities? Akane peered at the mysterious photograph on the screen once more: an event which she had never experienced in her own history was displayed for her to see, as plainly as if it had happened in reality.

With some understanding of what to expect Akane moved each of the other icons to the Decrypt tool, one by one. All of them resolved into more photos, or videos, or clips of voices. And all of them showed events involving her and people she knew but which had never happened: Junpei sinking helplessly into a deep pool; Clover in a cramped room, agonising over a choice on a screen while an armoured figure looked on; Aoi and herself being swarmed by figures in black-and white robes. There was even a video of Akane arriving in this very room only to trip and fall into the abyss, something she obviously hadn’t done. These all had to be from alternate realities.

In her game the discovery of alternate realities and the morphogenetic field was supposed to be the climax, the epiphany that would allow Junpei to save her life. Mugen had thrust it in Akane’s face in the very first room she’d reached.

When she pointed this out Mugen chuckled harshly. “I guess from where you’re standing it really is a big deal. For those of us who’ve been put through this sort of thing multiple times, that stuff’s old hat by now. Figured I’d get it out of the way.” Mugen didn’t elaborate what he meant by that. Even so, Akane understood that this was the idea she was supposed to take away from this room.

The final icon in the grid turned out to be different from the others. When the quantum computer had finished decrypting it the icon snapped back into place; it now had the shape of a key and was labelled ‘Open Interior Doors’. Akane pressed it. Though the screen only gave the slightest indication that this had done something Akane was certain that her purpose in coming to this room was now complete. She turned away from the podium and it retracted back into the floor the way it came.

As Akane reached halfway along the path back to the door that which rankled her built up enough that she couldn’t help but comment. “This was odd, as a first puzzle room.”

If Mugen was irritated by Akane’s judgement, he suppressed it in his voice. “What do you mean?”

“Just that this was too simple to be a real puzzle. Just going through the motions on a computer, and without enough direction. It’s not how it would work in a Nonary Game.”

“That sort of aesthetic guideline doesn’t matter a damn to me,” came the hollow reply. “You’re Zero, remember? I’m just Mugen.”

o-0-O-0-o

After leaving the dome with the quantum computer Akane followed the corridor it was on, around the bend to the left and all the way to the end. Through the door she found there she entered into a strangely cylindrical room, though fortunately the floor – grey with three painted neon-green bands – was flat beneath her feet.

Akane looked around, in case this was the next puzzle room. But the room seemed too bare for that. The only points of interest she could find were a strange gear-like slot, mounted dead-centre in the far wall, and also a door out the other side, embedded in a recess on the left side of the cylinder. This door was an unusually lustrous gold. When Akane inspected she found that it wouldn’t open, and had no handle or keyhole. Only an electronic keypad on the wall to the side gave any indication of how it was to be unlocked. It was asking for a five-letter code, but Akane didn’t feel it was wise to begin tapping in words at random. Daubed beneath the keypad were the words, ‘To Be Avenged.’

So Mugen had set this up to avenge someone? That made sense as a motive, given everything he’d said so far. She and Aoi had wronged a great many people in their efforts to acquire the resources needed to stage their Nonary Game. Or maybe Mugen was someone who knew one of the people they’d kidnapped.

Nevertheless, Akane wouldn’t make any progress here until she learned who Mugen wanted to avenge. When she turned to leave this time there was no barked objection from Mugen. It really was time to backtrack.

Akane headed all the way back to the first lounge. Had a new way out of here opened up, from what she’d already done? She checked the middle corridor first. The quantum computer couldn’t do anything about the barricade of rubble in her way, but the door on the right… Yes, it was now unlocked.

Inside Akane found a room that was furnished luxuriously by the standard of the places she’d been so far, even if it couldn’t match up to the standards of the Gigantic. Opposite the entrance was another bar counter, like the one in the lounge, but behind this one Akane could see all the various bottles of liquor prominently on display. Some of them were only half-full, resealed and then placed back in their rightful slots. In the corner a large fireplace lay beyond some sofas and a table, its chimney running all the way up to the ceiling.

As Akane inspected the other objects around her the room’s purpose began to clarify. A pool table, a jukebox, slot machines, board games: all the hallmarks that this was some kind of recreation room.

A room with this much detail had to have been laid out in front of Akane for a reason. She was expected to find something here. So she got to searching.

The first niggling intuitions of what was going on occurred when Akane went round to the other side of the bar counter and found a stiff and unused playing card on the mixing area: the five of hearts. And those instincts grew stronger when she found the four of hearts attached to the statue of the knight next to the fireplace, lodged in the head of the halberd, and then the two on the nearest couch. She was finding the cards in a different order, but this was far too reminiscent of her puzzle for the Nonary Game’s casino to be mere coincidence. Turning over the playing cards she’d already found confirmed that impression: the same mark on the back from where they’d been augmented with microchips to allow interaction with other components of the puzzle.

“When I said that the puzzle with the quantum computer wouldn’t work in a Nonary Game,” Akane said, “this wasn’t what I meant you should do.”

No reply. Not that it would have mattered: Mugen had arranged this puzzle long before Akane had said that.

Getting back to work, Akane knew that she needed two more cards to be able to solve the puzzle. She found the seven of hearts playing card on top of the jukebox leaving just one more to find. Akane knew what she had to do to get it. Though the fireplace here looked nothing like the one in the casino Akane approached it anyway. The lights on either side of the mantlepiece were faux-gaslights rather than the projector beams Akane and Aoi had used for this puzzle, but Akane turned them on anyway and nodded as a small cloth bag tumbled from the chimney into the fireplace.

Then the coins contained in that bag were fed into the slot machine by the entrance door to activate it. This slot machine blatantly showed how it had been bodged to fit the puzzle: the front panel had been misaligned as it was welded into place over whatever had been there before, and through an opening on the side Akane could see how the guts of the machine had been ripped out and replaced with what was needed for this puzzle.

In Akane’s game the players had been given a hint about what code to enter into the slot machine. This room hadn’t been set up to give that hint, but nor did Akane need it. She pressed the symbols in turn: club, diamond, and heart.

The final card dropped into the prize tray of the slot machine. It was supposed to be the six – of hearts rather than spades, since that was the suit being used this time – but instead Akane acquired a card that only showed a single large heart in the centre, no number anywhere.

The message from Mugen was obvious, at least to Akane. This was still the number six card, whatever it said on its face.

With all those cards in hand Akane headed over to the one feature of the room that could hold the final part of the puzzle. Where Akane had actual casino tables available to stage this last section, Mugen had had to carve the slots into the playing surface of the pool table, nothing in common but the green felt. Akane was able to put the cards in the right places without the slightest problem. Not because of any skill at puzzles – she’d always lacked for that – but because she knew the solution to this like the back of her hand.

A cumbersome thunk, followed by an amount of chaotic rattling, sounded somewhere inside the back of the bar, some sort of reward for solving the puzzle dropping into a compartment where she could reach it.

Had the entire purpose of this room been merely to echo a puzzle from her Nonary Game? It seemed so; there was even, among the pleasant photos of landscapes dotted across the walls, an engraved version of the Sheldrake image that Akane had brought as a guidepost to put Junpei on the right path. That abstract dog had watched over everything Akane had done in this rec room, an unmistakable signpost back to her game.

“Was this puzzle really,” Akane said, straightening her back and glaring up towards the ceiling defiantly, “about my Nonary Game? I already know you know about it. I already know that’s why you brought me here, and what you’re getting revenge for.”

Silence reigned. Akane stayed standing where she was, not wanting to back down an inch or even give the appearance of doing so. “Whatever harm it caused you, I’m not going to apologise. I didn’t have a choice! The Nonary Game was my only chance to survive!”.

For a moment Akane thought Mugen was ignoring her again. Then a harsh sound came through the speakers, altered first by the man’s voice distorter and degraded further by the ‘good enough’ audio fidelity of the PA system. From instinct more than any quality of the sound itself, Akane understood it to be Mugen’s disgruntled snarl. “You think it’s just that? You think that single Nonary Game is the only reason I need to put you through this? If you’d just left it at that none of this would have had to happen.” The lights turned on behind the rec room’s bar through some unseen control, drawing Akane’s attention towards where the prize from then puzzle had dropped. “Go on,” Mugen growled. “Look at the prize you got. You’ll see what I’m talking about.”

Akane headed over and found the openable compartment beneath the rows of liquor bottles. An eclectic combination of objects awaited her inside, scattered about haphazardly since they’d dropped down from their secure chamber above. The largest item, and the one which most have made the greatest proportion of the sound Akane had heard, was a hefty device, almost as long as Akane’s arm and looking like nothing so much as the handle of an oversized screwdriver. Akane set it aside.

Following the handle out of the compartment were three photos. Akane collected them all together to examine, since they’d clearly come as a group. The first one she looked at she recognised instantly: an aerial view of Building Q. Then the other two… One of them she had no idea about at all, schematics for some tall, tendril-like structure. But the third photo – Mugen had described this place as an underground bunker, hadn’t he? – looked like it could be the surface-level entrance to this facility. Three different buildings, unrelated on the surface but presented by Mugen as a complete package.

The final part of the reward was another set of three items. Were those Nonary Game bracelets? The first one certainly had the exact same reddish-pink shade as the bracelets Aoi had put around her sleeping players’ wrists not too long ago. The other two weren’t the same – one black with more knobs and buttons, the other much bulkier with a square rather than a round screen – but they shared the specialised locking mechanism to ensure they couldn’t be removed by whoever wore them. Every indication was that these were bracelets for a killing game. But when Akane looked at the faces they only showed a date and time: not bracelets, but mere watches.

“It wasn’t just this first Nonary Game,” Mugen said, the static hissing around his words. “You completed it, accomplished everything you needed to, reached a point where you could have stopped. And then… you didn’t.”

What Mugen was saying didn’t make sense.

Her kidnapper continued without caring one bit about Akane’s confusion. “You got a taste for it. You kept trying things, again and again and again. How would you have put it…? That’s right. You’d have started going on about alternate timelines, that the branch points that make new timelines reflect the potential possibilities that already inherently exist in the situation. I don’t know about that. But your personality, the part of you that made it certain that you’d drag us all back into this every time, that’s what makes a timeline like this an inevitability. That’s why you’re here.”

Mugen fell silent there, which meant that he didn’t address Akane’s gradually forming questions. There was something odd about the way Mugen had said all that. Akane looked once more at the bracelet-like watches in search of an answer. The time, ticking up second-by-second, didn’t help her much: she couldn’t even tell whether it meant morning or evening. But the date: December 26th, 2033. Over six years since what had been, for her, the day before.

Akane quickly examined herself. She didn’t look or feel any older. And yet she couldn’t help but know that these displays were telling the truth.

Akane left the giant screwdriver handle propped against the sofa as she passed through the lounge. With no other players in the facility there was no danger of anything happening to it in the time she was away.

o-0-O-0-o

The final route from the lounge Akane needed to check was the short corridor to the left. When she’d looked before there had been two doors, both locked. The one at the end was still closed, even after the quantum computer had unlocked all the others. Strange. Still, the door off to the left was open; Akane had a way forward.

A sterile room greeted her, and she was overwhelmed trying to take in all the details: dials and buttons and sliders whose purposes were unknown to her. The many screens would have provided some clue about what this room was used for if they’d been turned on. No such luck; they were all blank, and Akane didn’t want to risk trying to guess what control would activate them. If she was going to work out what sort of puzzle she was expected to solve in here, she would need some clue to get her going.

No silent treatment from Mugen this time: his voice was blaring through the tannoy only moments after Akane had finished her survey of the room. “Before you start complaining about my puzzles again,” he said, “think about what would happen if I gave you a puzzle you hadn’t seen before. You’d be stuck here forever. We both know that.”

Akane scowled, but didn’t reply.

Mugen continued, “So let’s skip this puzzle right to the end.” And then the door closed behind Akane with an ear-rupturing crash.

Though it was already too late Akane turned and started hammering on the door, her fist bouncing futilely against the steel. “What?! Mugen, what are you doing?!”

“That door will open again in twenty minutes,” Mugen stated. “A goddamn stupid system, but it’s not like I was able to change it. Now, what happens next…?”

There was a click of something unlocking, and then a panel in the floor rose to reveal a strange blocky device. Before Akane could even begin to try and determine what the device was even for a shower of sparks erupted from every opening she could see, the spoke started to whirl and coil above the top surface. Then the entire thing caught fire.

Akane pressed her arm over her mouth. If she started to inhale the smoke from this fire it would impair her ability to think, impair her ability to put it out or to find a way to get the door open and escape. Still, she was only buying time. As she watched the light of the flames grew harsher and the waves of heat lapped against her even from the far side of the room.

Then, just as Akane was concluding that there was no sort of fire extinguisher in the room that she could use to save herself, a pleasantly mellow and controlled sound came from the ceiling above the very centre of the room. She looked up to find a set of vents installed together in the ceiling, and now that a light had flickered on next to one of the vents it was now gently spewing out a creamy white gas.

Where the gas settled over the burning device the flames weakened and receded, until the fire had been supressed completely. Akane had been saved from burning in the fire. But even with the fire totally extinguished the vent stayed open and the gas kept coming through. When Akane took her next breath, as shallow as it was, a harsh tickle ran along the back of her throat. Her hand was back in front of her mouth in an instant. And yet the suffocating gas kept coming still.

“That damn fire extinguisher,” Mugen said, with more venom in his voice than he’d ever mocked Akane with. He’d left it long enough that it was clear that sparing Akane from his trap was not his reason for denigrating the extinguisher on the ceiling. “Listen to me, Akane. There is exactly one way you can survive this. See those ten lockers along the wall?”

It took Akane’s eyes longer to focus on them than she would have expected. She hurried over.

“One of those ten lockers contains an oxygen mask. Select one of them, and don’t touch the others.”

Akane picked locker number six, purely at random. When she stepped back, she found her legs struggling to hold her weight and her mind only barely able to focus on maintaining her balance. If this kept up, would she faint…? She bit down on her own tongue, let the pain jolt through her. She needed to stay alert, whatever the cost, so that she could understand what was happening in front of her.

The button she’d pressed next to locker six lit up. Then other lockers opened up one by one, their doors springing out to their full extent with rhythmic, unrestrained clangs. When they were done only lockers five and her choice six remained closed closed, the light of the button on the number six locker still lit. None of the opened lockers had anything inside them.

Akane expected some further instructions from Mugen. But all that came as she listened out was a high-pitched, electronic screech from the PA system, protesting the volume of what it was supposed to transmit. When Mugen’s voice did play through it once more it was softer, muttered, like he’d backed away from whatever microphone he was using; Akane had to fight through both that and her increasingly muffled thoughts to make sense of it.

“This, again… Why? No, no, no, no, no, no, you made me do it. You made me…!” and then the announcement fell away, the ending beep filled with finality.

Akane hadn’t gotten the instructions she’d been expected, whatever had kept Mugen from relaying them. But she wasn’t going to give up. The pattern presented by the lockers before her – one target, all but one of the empties being revealed – was one she’d always be able to recognise.

A Monty Hall problem.

By now Akane’s thoughts were utterly scrambled, weighed down by the desperation in her lungs. But all she needed to do now was know the correct solution, and then to switch her choice by pressing the button for locker five.

Through the morphogenetic field Akane felt one-tenth of herself siphoned away into an unjust universe where making the right choice got her killed. But in the timeline she was in the oxygen mask was right in front of her, along with… something, small and round; Akane’s vision was failing her, and she had no time to wonder what the other item she’d received could be.

With the last of her strength Akane strapped the mask to her face, cradled the other object against her chest, and let sleep take her.

After Akane awoke Mugen’s voice return to the speaker system. Whatever had disturbed him earlier, there was no sign of it in his voice. “Welcome back,” he said, voice dripping with sarcasm. As Akane clumsily, still drowsily, got herself back to her feet, Mugen added, “Good thing I didn’t get any innocent bystanders involved in this, don’t you think? If there’d been anyone else in there with you, things could have gotten real messy.”

Akane looked around. The vent on the ceiling fire extinguisher was now closed with no more choking gas; it was safe for Akane to take off her oxygen mask. The door to the room was open, and though it could slam shut on her again like it had before Akane was sure that it wasn’t going to. Then Akane inspected the other item she’d retrieved from the locker. It was a carefully machined cog. almost as large as the palm she cradled it in, with an intricately shaped inner hole. The metal had the same sheen as the handle Akane had found in the last room.

“What was that, earlier?” she asked into the empty air. When Mugen didn’t reply she pressed further. “You were supposed to give me the instructions to the Monty Hall problem. I know you were going to. What stopped that?”

After a deep sigh Mugen responded, though it wasn’t the answer Akane was hoping for. “It doesn’t matter. I’m going to see this through to the end. I have to.” As if to make it perfectly clear that she wouldn’t get the information out of him, Mugen continued, “You’ve got everything you need, now.

“Come and find me. I’ll be waiting.”

o-0-O-0-o

On returning to the lounge Akane had attached the small cog to the end of the handle: the intricate design on the inner hole of the cog allowed it to be threaded into place and then held it there without the slightest bit of give. That completed the tool Akane needed to proceed, and she took it with her.

The tip of the device had a shape too distinctive for Akane to miss where it was supposed to be used, so she took it to that bare cylindrical room at the very end of the winding right-most corridor. There, gleaming in the middle of the plain grey concrete, was the gear-shaped slot that perfectly matched the tip of the completed driver. Bracing the device using her entire body, Akane lifted the end up and slid it into the slot. It fit snuggly.

“You keep asking why I brought you here, why I’m doing this to you,” Mugen announced over her action. “You still don’t understand.”

Cup-like handles on either side of the device’s shaft allowed Akane to turn it, and some axle behind the gear-shaped slot. The mechanism didn’t budge at all when she twisted the driver anticlockwise, but when she tried clockwise it began to turn. It was slow, tough going: some complex assemblage of gears squealed and ground from all around the cylinder of the room as they converted her human-strength motions into something that could propel an enormous alteration to the room. After several minutes of sweat-drawing effort Akane reached the other end of the mechanism’s range of motion and the slot ejected the driver she’d brought as it locked into place.

“You forced so many of us into your Nonary Game, made us go through hell for it. And when it worked, and you should have just taken what you’d won and rested on your laurels, you kept conniving and intriguing and finding new crises to drag me through. You never looked back and you never stopped! You. Couldn’t. Stop.”

When Akane turned around she saw several pill-shaped pods, arrayed in a symmetrical ring around the entranceway. They’d been drawn along a rail up from beneath the floor, the result of Akane’s efforts. The last one out had come to the level of Akane’s chest and was obviously the one she was meant to look at, being the only one easily accessible and having flashing lights in many colours along the side. When Akane pressed the button to open it the seam cracked open with a hiss of chilly mist.

“And after all that,” Mugen concluded, “after all you forced me to scramble to keep my feet underneath me and keep up with you, after everything you put me through…”

The lid of the pod opened. The body Akane found inside was unmistakably – older, sporting an enigmatic satisfied smile, a diamond ring on her finger, dead – herself.

“You died. You died, anyway, after everything I did to find you.”

This really was Akane’s future. Six years after arriving at the start of her Nonary Game, she was dead. Presumably even sooner: the body in the pod hadn’t aged that much compared to her, and the equipment in the pod seemed designed to preserve the corpse.

But how was she here? She hadn’t thrown her mind across the morphogenetic field into the Akane Kurashiki of this time; the body in front of her was proof of that. Clearly something she didn’t know about was responsible, and without anything to go on it would be impossible to speculate.

One thing that Akane could now begin to think about was the password to the door out of here. She returned to that strangely golden door and reread the inscription beneath the password input device. ‘To be Avenged.’ Now that she’d seen inside the pod there was only one person Mugen could be referring to. For the five letters the password required, she typed in ‘Akane’.

The input device buzzed harshly. A light on the side flashed red and then the letters on the screen faded away.

That was wrong? That didn’t make any sense. Akane wracked her head trying to think of other possibilities, ways for the message and password to somehow refer to someone else, and failed to come up with anything that could believably be the case. Everything Mugen had placed in front of her had been leading up to the moment where she discovered her own corpse, and so… ah, Akane finally understood. She entered five letters once more, this time starting with the ‘K’.

‘Kanny’. The light on the input device turned green and the golden door slid open.

After passing through a dingy locker room on the other side of the golden door Akane found herself on a new corridor. She took a moment to gain her bearings: the special passageway she’d taken put her on the middle corridor out of the lounge, only now she was on the other side of the rubble that sealed it off. This was progress that Akane instinctively, with her years of experience designing her escape game, understood to be heralding the very end.

She turned away from the pile of rubble and headed down the corridor. The doors on either side here were sealed shut so as to guide Akane onwards, around the corner to the left. One final door beckoned her, at the very end of the corridor. Visualising the path she’d taken throughout the entire facility, Akane figured she’d gone all the way around to reach the back-left of the underground shelter. The room she was about to enter ought to be the one at the end of the leftmost corridor out of the lounge, the one behind the door that hadn’t opened even when all the others had.

All the locking mechanisms for this final door were linked by a complicated array of cogs and camshafts to a metal half-ring shaped handle at the centre, making the way to open it blindingly clear. Akane reached out and lifted the handle away from the door… and then flinched back, morphogenetic pain coursing through her palm as though the metal was burning hot. She should feel all her future timelines fading into catastrophe. What Mugen had in store for her beyond this door… Akane didn’t want to believe he was capable of such a thing, and yet with six extra years of events that she knew nothing about – including her own death – who knew what bitterness he’d sunk to, and what that bitterness would make him do?

There had to be something she could do to avert her fate. And yet there could surely be nothing of the sort: Mugen controlled everything in this underground bunker, everything about the scenario she’d woken into, and in any case her understanding of her future timelines proved there was no way forward. Nothing in this reality could help her.

Something… from another reality, then? If there was some way to gain access to an alternate timeline, could that provide some unexpected extra that would get Akane out of this predicament?

Akane turned on her heel and raced away from the final door.

“Where are you going?” Mugen roared. Akane didn’t answer him. There was only one place in this facility that could grant her what she needed.

She hurried back along the corridor up to the wall of rubble. Then through the locker room and the room with the pods, letting nothing distract along the way. Her target was just beyond there, in the vividly white dome above the featureless abyss. The quantum computer: a machine that drew its power from a substrate of alternate realities. If anything could get Akane something from outside her current reality, that was it.

Ignoring Mugen’s further rage-filled demands Akane searched through the pictures she’d decrypted earlier. Each was from a different alternate reality, a different outcome for the people she’d known in her life. About a fifth of the way down she found a picture and alternate timeline that looked promising. She now had all the information about her present situation she needed. Now, if she could just work out how to make the quantum computer do its work…

When Akane returned to the final door and once more grasped the handle there was no more morphogenetic jolt of doom. Nor could there be any certainty. There was only the hope that her message had gotten through.

o-0-O-0-o

The final room was a crescent that surrounded the outermost corner of the facility. Shuttered windows separated a row of complex control panels from whatever was in the chamber on the other side. On the outside wall of the crescent an array of green-painted pipes ran over the door she’d entered through and connected various dial-covered devices along the entire length of the curve. Halfway along the outside of the crescent an alcove intruded, its walls bulging out to take up a good third of the width of the crescent and its open door showing the softer, cleaner illumination inside compared to the rest of the room. But Akane’s attention was fixed on one spot, right next to the door that led back to the lounge, where the gas mask’s black plastic eyes stared back at her.

“Mugen,” she whispered. She sighed, closed her eyes, and shook her head, “Junpei.”

When the gas mask was lowered Akane wasn’t surprised by the face beneath. He was older, yes. Hair slicked back in a way that wouldn’t have suited the version of him that Akane and Aoi had kidnapped, nor would the black leather jacket that seemed to absorb the light from the space surrounding. And there was that unmistakable hollowness in his eyes… But this was still her Junpei.

“Go on,” Junpei said, his voice still as harsh and cold as all the announcements he’d made as Mugen. “Ask.”

Akane nodded resolutely. “How did I die?”

“That damn Monty Hall trap.” Junpei couldn’t meet her eyes. “There were three of us in there. Still only one mask, so we had to choose between us. You… insisted.”

“I’m sorry. But that didn’t mean you needed to…” Akane struggled to find the words for everything she’d undergone since waking in this place. “… become me about it.”

Junpei scowled at her. “You get it, now? This sort of thing really just is who you are. The core of who you are as a person is just to get yourself and everyone else around you involved in these events over and over again. If you hadn’t been like that, maybe I could have saved you.”

The silence hung in the air between them. There wasn’t anything Akane could have said about events long past.

Instead, she asked, “So what now? What do you have planned for the end of your game?”

“Nothing complicated,” Junpei said, sweeping his hand towards the alcove on the room’s side. “There’s a button in there that will open this” – he jabbed with his thumb over his shoulder to the door behind him – “and also the X-door at the shelter’s entrance. All someone has to do is press it.”

“I guess there’s some kind of catch?”

Junpei shrugged. “Of course.”

In that instance flashes of all those failed timelines jolted through her mind. First visions of Junpei lurching frantically after Akane as she entered the chamber with the button. Then came various adrenaline-filled moments as she and Junpei scuffled and grappled with one another, fought to force each other’s hands away from the button, all the different ways that could play out turning the future timeline into an unfathomable tangle of spaghetti. And then, always, the worst outcome.

A sudden clang from behind Akane snapped her out of her morphogenetic stupor. The door behind her had open. Akane spun around, taking a few steps back into the final room out of pure shock. She and Junpei should have been the only people down here.

“You wouldn’t believe,” came a rough, grizzled voice, “what I had to solve to escape that room I arrived in.”

Past the man who was stepping the entrance Akane could see that the next door along the corridor, just off to the left, was now open; through it came an alien green glow that silhouetted the new figure from behind. From his receding white hair to his plain blue, workmanly shirt with a thin tie, Akane would have never recognised this person if she hadn’t specifically called for him.

“You!” The Junpei that had been Mugen also recognised the intruder, from the long whiles he’d spent poring over the quantum computer and its windows into other timelines. “What are you doing here?!”

The older man sighed, but warmly. “Akane… I mean, my Akane,” the older Junpei said, “told me how I could get back here once we learned what was going on.”

“So that’s what you were doing,” the younger Junpei snarled in Akane’s direction. “Sending a message to him.” After a moment he added in a self-deprecating mutter, “I can’t believe it. It took me years to work out how to use that thing.”

“My Akane said we should have expected a timeline like this to exist,” the older Junpei continued. “That each potential possibility, just by inherently existing in the situation, means there’ll be some alternate future out there that reflects it. I don’t know about that. All I know is there was always some part of me that blamed Akane for everything.” Then, with confidence in his strides that belied his old age, Junpei interposed himself between Akane and his younger self. “And that’s why you need to stop.”

The younger Junpei clenched his fist. “Stop? What are you on about? I’m not going to kill her. That’s not what I’m doing here! All she has to do is listen to me and then I’ll let her out. That’s all.”

“That’s exactly what you’ve got to stop!” the elder snapped back. “You think it solves anything? You think there’s someone out there, what, tallying up the score, and they’ll add one to yours because you got one over on her? I can be so fucking stupid sometimes.”

And then the older Junpei stepped to his left and crossed the threshold into the alcove.

“No!” The younger Junpei roared. “It was supposed to be me!” But, unlike in those alternate futures which Akane had those brief visions of, he didn’t launch himself after the older man.

Akane felt alarm rising in her voice as well. “What about the timeline you came from? Don’t you need to get back there?”

“That isn’t a problem. The thing that brought me here, that transporter, it actually makes a copy and sends that. The version of me that stayed behind will get to carry on as though nothing happened. Anyway, look at me.” He waved his hand over his wrinkled face from just inside the doorway. “I’ve lived a good life. I’ve raised my grandson into a fine young man.” A look of sudden realisation crossed his eyes and he added, “I’m guessing that transporter’s how you got here too, Akane. So you don’t need to worry about your Nonary Game. The other version of you is gonna carry it out like nothing ever happened.”

That was a relief to know, at least.

“I’m guessing you left something in here to make it quick,” the older Junpei said to his younger self. “So the two of you, just live your life and forget about this damn place.”

The click of a depressed button sounded from in there, amplified by the shape of the alcove. And then the door slammed shut.

Akane and Junpei stood in front of the X-door, watching its inexorable and unacceleratable rise. Junpei, the gas mask that had made him Mugen hanging limply from his hand, spoke up out of nowhere.

“I’d meant to make you beg.”

“Oh?” Akane replied.

“I was going to make you beg for my forgiveness. That was the point of that room. I was going to stand there until you’d satisfied me, until you’d really proved you’d gotten everything I was saying, and then I’d step into that room and press that button.”

Akane closed her eyes, pondering it. “I don’t think I really have it within me, to need that forgiveness from you. But if you can live with that…”

“I guess I’m going to have to,” Junpei replied.

Hand in hand they stepped through the open X-door, heading to the elevator that would take them up towards the sun.

o-0-O-0-o

On November 1st of 2027, Junpei returned the younger Akane Kurashiki of that time to her bed. He’d gotten her out to the transporter and back without her waking, thanks to Soporil, and without Aoi spotting him.

After putting the covers back over her sleeping form, carefully tucking them around her shoulders, he brushed the hair away from her eyes and the scarf around her neck. He was the one person in this world who could touch her without it being an unacceptable measurement of her metaphysical state.

The copy of Akane that Junpei had sent into the future would be waking to play the game he’d set up in that underground shelter. He was sure that the other version of him, the one who’d stayed behind in the transporter pod in the future, would get what he wanted from her. The plan was foolproof.