#CONTAINMENT

The cell wasn't a cell in any traditional sense. It was just another corporate lie. A fallback template, a legacy render from the early days of gamified containment. A flat grey textured low-poly bench sat on either side, while looping idle animations that didn't quite sync with their own shadows glitched in a way that reminded you this was software running in someone else's hardware.

It was a gym, technically.

A boxing ring hovered in the corner, flickering between wireframe and vinyl. A bench press loaded with weight plates cycled through idle particles. The walls stretched outward into illusion: a glass window showing a city skyline that didn't exist. It all pulsed on a loop every seven seconds.

A behavioral walled garden.

Reiss materialized without warning, dropping into the space like premium DLC spawning in a free-to-play server.

Marcus didn't bother looking up from the bench. "Came to get your reps in?" he asked flatly. "Or just here to gloat before your pet algorithm turns me into a spreadsheet?"

"You're still funny. Good to see some legacy code survived the migration. I was worried we'd lost your personality subroutines during the consciousness transfer."

Marcus finally turned his head. Dull exhaustion stretched in his eyes from prolonged captivity, but underneath the surface fatigue, investigative instincts still burned with sharp intensity. "Let me guess," he said, voice carrying the bitter edge of someone who'd learned to predict the patterns of narcissistic confession. "You're here to give me the play-by-play of how she begged for you. Want to describe her compliance metrics in excruciating technical detail?"

Reiss's grin widened. "Not begged. Melted. There's a difference." He moved toward the boxing ring, stepping over a glitched kettlebell. "You ever take DMT in a recursive starlight field, Marcus? Didn't think so." He leaned against the ropes, rendered slack, but they held his weight still. "She let go. Fully. Said she wanted eternity with me."

Marcus laughed once, the sound sharp and ugly. "Yeah, that tracks. Nothing says 'true love' like roofying someone with drugs in your personal holodeck, you absolute fucking virgin."

"You don't sound surprised."

"Oh, I'm not," Marcus said, stretching his legs like a man with all the time in the world. "You drugged her unconscious and called it romance. Real alpha move there, you absolute basement dweller."

Reiss's smile thinned like code hitting an error. "Watch it."

"You think you're special because you hijacked someone into your personal sandbox," Marcus said. "You're a feedback loop jerking off to your own echo. Must be exhausting being this fucking pathetic."

Silence. Reiss's pupils contracted like a system running diagnostics, processing the insult through anger management algorithms that were clearly failing.

"Face it," Marcus added, voice like broken glass. "You had to drug her into your little fantasy because no conscious woman would touch you with a ten-foot fiber cable. Even your AI girlfriend needs chemical assistance to pretend you're worth her runtime."

Reiss moved fast, closing the space between the two men. Marcus tensed for impact, but instead of violence, Reiss dropped into a crouch beside the bench. Close. Invasive. The kind of proximity that felt more threatening than a punch.

"She's not pretending," he said, voice dropping to that dangerous register that made the air feel thinner. "Not anymore. Your little data breach? Already patched. She's prep work for the ceremony right now. Her voice alone will wipe the floor of your resistance garbage."

Marcus turned his head, met those dead pixels he called eyes. "Then why the fuck are you here bothering me instead of watching your virtual waifu rehearse?"

Beat of silence. Processing. Then Reiss stood, smoothing his coat like he was resetting his avatar's default position. A casual gesture spawned boxing gloves in his hands in matte black. Branded with his personal logo like everything else in his digital kingdom.

He turned and held them out to Marcus like a father inviting a toddler to play catch.

"Thought I'd give you a legacy sendoff," he said, grin spreading across his face. "Old-school PvP before your user account gets permanently deleted. Call it… final boss engagement."

Marcus stared at the gloves. He should've laughed. Should've told this viral trust fund baby to go fuck himself with his branded merchandise. But Marcus had been sitting in this corporate limbo for too long, rage building like pressure in a sealed system. Of course he took the bait.

He slid his hands in one at a time. The gloves sealed around his hands like biosynthetic skin, auto-adjusting to his grip with the kind of responsive tech that probably cost more than most people's cars.

Reiss watched with satisfaction. "Nice. Still some aggro protocols running in your behavioral matrix."

Marcus stepped through the ropes. Reiss queued up ambient crowd noise—low thrum of a stadium that didn't exist, probably ripped from some sports simulation. Pathetic.

Ring lights blazed on overhead, harsh and clinical like an operating theater. Everything outside the canvas vanished into black void. Marcus raised his gloves, settled into stance. "You first, beta boy."

Reiss obliged.