"No," she said, finally looking him in the eyes. Her expression wasn't malicious; it was profoundly tired. "The world killed you. I just gave you a place to spend your retirement. You were working yourself to death to afford a subscription to a clean air tax. Tell me, Elias, in the thirty seconds before you clicked that link, did you actually want to go back to work tomorrow?"

"The link you clicked wasn't a simulator. It was a cognitive offloading sequence," she explained, looking out at the endless blue horizon. "You didn't download a game. You uploaded yourself. Your body is currently sitting in that pod, brain-dead, while your neural net is being hosted across eighteen thousand pirated server nodes worldwide."

Elias felt a cold spike of panic pierce through the artificial warmth. "What do you mean gone?"