The cold metal decking vibrated under Alexandra’s boots, a low, mechanical shudder that thrummed through her feet.
Around her, the remaining newcomers began to stir.
Some groaned, blinking against the dim, yellowed overhead strip lighting.
To her left, two middle-aged men in tailored business suits were already on their knees, frantically feeling through their suit jackets and checking their pants pockets for missing cell phones or leather wallets.
Near the central hatch, three youths with dyed, neon-streaked hair sat up, rubbing their heads.
Their leader—draped in a flamboyant hippie vest with a heavy bronze ring piercing his septum and multiple studs trailing down his lower lip—shoved himself up on shaky legs and glared at the armed figures standing near the bulkhead.
“Who the hell are you guys?” he drawled, pointing at the group.
“We were just kicking back at an internet café—how the fuck did we suddenly end up here?”
Zha didn’t even bother looking in his direction.
He raised one broad hand, cutting off the rising muttering from the rest of the civilians.
“Everyone, please keep it down for a second. We’ll explain the rules shortly, but right now, let’s have Xuan finish the rundown of Alien.”
Xuan adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses and continued his analysis.
“Following that, the commercial crew naturally intended to eliminate the organism. Their armament was hardly optimized for suppression; based on my projections, close-quarters thermal tools like welding torches possess a nominal threshold of energy that renders them virtually useless against a biological asset endowed with such velocity and high-density carapace. However, at point-blank range, it is more than capable of tearing through flesh instantly…”
The three punks snapped.
Being ignored by a roomful of people while trying to assert street cred was bad enough; being talked over by a guy in glasses lecturing on sci-fi biology while they had splitting head-rushes was an outright insult.
The ringleader shoved past an office worker who was cowering on the steel floor plating, lunging forward into the clear space with a snarl.
“The fuck are you punks looking at? Who the hell do you think you are, giving orders and pretending we don’t exist? I know your faces. I know your neighborhood. Try that again and see if I don’t drag a crew down to carve up your whole damn family!”
Classic street-level trash.
Every single threat they ever barfed out always began and ended with carving up families, paired with the delusional, cracked-out insistence that they recognized everyone from local turf wars.
Beside the leader, his two cronies stepped up, puffing out their chests.
But as they stomped forward, the surrounding civilians scrambled backward, clearing space around the three loudmouths and leaving them standing in the middle of the room.
Before Zha could move, Jie let out a dry breath that sounded almost like a cough.
Without a word of warning, a heavy-caliber firearm cleared his vest.
Jie aimed right at the ringleader’s nose.
“Shut your mouth,” Jie said, his voice dropping an octave.
“We’re in the middle of a critical briefing, and you are testing my patience.”
The punks and the nearby newcomers flinched at the sudden gleam of polished chrome.
Yet the ringleader sneered, reaching into his own jacket.
“You think you’re hard?” he mocked, pulling out a heavy, blocky sidearm of his own.
“Whose crew do you claim? Man, if you’re gonna peddle prop pieces, at least imitate a standard Type-54. A hand cannon? Real funny, asshole. You think actual hardware is just lying around for anyone to pick up? Look at that finish—it’s a cheap plastic knockoff—”
The gunshot cracked through the cramped compartment.
The sound bounced off the bulkheads, rattling dust from the pipes and leaving the smell of burned powder hanging in the air.
Jie hadn’t hesitated for a microsecond.
The heavy round caught the ringleader’s forearm mid-draw.
The impact tore the limb apart, sending bone fragments and a spray of blood across the grey wall.
For a second, the punk just stared at the ragged, smoking stump where his elbow used to be, clutching frantically at his shoulder.
Then all of a sudden
A piercing shriek broke through the ringing in her ears as he collapsed sideways onto the floor.
His two cronies dropped right beside him, scrambling backward on all fours and slipping in the blood as they slammed themselves flat against the far bulkhead.
Xiaoyi hurried over, picking up the ringleader’s discarded sidearm from the spreading red pool.
He flicked the safety, testing the weight in his palm.
“Jie, this is a cheap zinc replica. Not real steel.”
Jie nodded silently, sliding his heavy firearm back into his holster.
“Use the spray to stop the bleeding, patch him up so he doesn’t bleed out on the floor… and let this be a lesson to every new arrival. Do not pull iron on me when my nerves are already strained. I might just pull the trigger by reflex.”
Smooth.
If you’re going to threaten people with summary execution, just spell it out instead of wrapping it in corporate packaging like an HR memo.
While Xiaoyi dumped hemostatic spray onto the screaming punk’s arm—the chemical foam expanding with a hiss—Xuan didn’t glance down at the mess.
He stepped around the pool of blood, adjusted his glasses, and turned back toward the veterans.
Zha glanced back over his shoulder, pulling a pack of cigarettes from his jacket and tossing one toward Xuan.
“You holding up okay? That’s real lead flying around.”
Xuan batted the cigarette away.
“Nicotine degrades cognitive output. Unacceptable. Shall I resume the operational breakdown of Alien?”
Zha offered an easy grin, striking a match for himself.
“By all means. Lay it out.”
While Xuan droned on, laying out the tactical situation for the room, Alexandra tuned out the specifics.
The script had already diverged; sitting here listening to a recap was a waste of time.
She closed her eyes to conserve focus.
“The tactical situation has been established. Can the remaining personnel verify our current position? If my structural assumptions are correct… we are sealed inside the cargo vessel housing the specimen.”
Alexandra opened her eyes in time to see Zha, Lan, and Jie exchange tense glances.
Xuan’s lips curved into a faint smile.
He didn’t know.
He was fishing, and they swallowed the bait whole.
“Ah,” Xuan said, noting the expressions on the veterans’ faces.
“That was merely a hypothesis to test your reactions, but your expressions confirm it. Still, I require a thorough debriefing from the three of you regarding our current circumstances. Otherwise, the physics of my presence here remain entirely illogical.”
Jie and Lan opened their mouths to speak, but Zha stepped in, holding up a palm.
“Quick question before we get to that—when did you last view the film Alien?”
Xuan adjusted his wire-rims.
“Approximately seven years ago. The memory is fresh; details remain optimal.”
Turning his gaze toward the terrified cluster of newcomers, Xuan tilted his head.
“And the rest of you—presumably, you were confronted with an option on a web interface. ‘Do you want to know the meaning of life? Do you truly want to… live?'”
“I was running a local compilation protocol when the string populated my IDE,” Xuan continued.
“Crucially, my terminal was isolated from external networks. No known payload should have bypassed my firewall architecture. Naturally, I immediately began reverse-engineering the source binary. And do you know what I discovered?”
A couple of the cowering office workers blinked up at him in bewilderment.
They were sitting in blood and metal, and this guy was giving a computer science lecture.
Xuan paused, pushing his glasses up his nose.
“The text was not composed of binary zeros and ones. Its source code wasn’t electronic at all; it was compiled using a synthesis of archaic linguistic glyphs—Oracle bone script, Egyptian papyrus notation, and Sumerian cuneiform. The three oldest writing systems known to human history, interwoven with anomalous markers that defied baseline comparative translation without a shared Rosetta dataset…”
Good grief, does this guy ever stop flexing his academic credentials?
“Alright, enough staring at the bloodbath,” Zha interrupted, stepping into the center of the compartment and blowing a plume of gray smoke toward the ceiling.
“Lan, do us a favor and break down the reality of our current situation for the newcomers before someone else loses a limb.”
Lan’s eyes lit up as she stepped forward, brushing a strand of hair from her shoulder.
“Oh, I’d be delighted!” Lan beamed, her tone cheerfully conversational despite the drying blood a few feet away.
“Welcome to your new reality, everyone. Once we return from this little excursion, I’m personally cooking dinner for the survivors—consider it hazard pay. Though physical conditioning varies wildly among you lot, I strongly suggest putting your first hundred-point payout straight into cellular vitality and muscular density next time around.”
A middle-aged man in a slicked-back business suit clutched his leather briefcase tighter to his chest, his face pale.
“What are you talking about? Points? Return from where? Where are we—is this a hijacking?”
“Not a hijacking, darling,” Lan replied, ticking points off her fingers.
“Rule one: you’re inside a cinematic death loop controlled by a higher entity we call the God Dimension. Rule two: you survive consecutive movie drops, you bank thousand-point payouts, and you use those points to buy physical upgrades, magical items, or military-grade gear that shouldn’t legally exist.”
“That’s insane,” one of the younger office workers snapped, his voice cracking with hysteria.
“You expect us to believe we’re trapped inside a movie? Check our watches—there’s no signal! This has to be some kind of elaborate virtual reality setup or a terrorist training facility—”
“Check your watch yourself, genius,” Lan interrupted, her smile thinning.
“Press your thumb firmly against the casing.”
The young man hesitated, looking down at the heavy black metallic band strapped to his left wrist.
Grimacing, he pressed his thumb to the center of the dark glass.
A translucent crimson display projected above the glass.
His name appeared on the list alongside the scenario information and the countdown.
The young man stared at it, his face draining of color as his bravado evaporated.
Beside him, the two businessmen fumbled with their own wrists, gasping as identical crimson text materialized above their hands.
Alexandra watched Lan carefully.
She’s holding back.
Basic rules, basic survival information.
She’s leaving the useful stuff out.
Around the compartment, people stared at their watches, whispered to each other, or simply stood there looking sick with disbelief.
I know where this is going.
Some of these people aren’t making it out.
Her first instinct was to do something.
Should I?
I could help.
Jie said changing established events makes the scenario harder.
And saving one of the movie’s cast members actually pays out points.
But these guys are different.
They’re not part of the movie.
They’re teammates.
Some of them aren’t going to make it out alive.
What happens if I stop it?
…
I have no fucking idea.
Then her eyes fell on the young white-collar newcomers: the man flirting with the woman beside him.
If I remember correctly, stopping those two from walking out could mean fewer Aliens later.
Could.
Maybe God doesn’t give a shit about the original chain of events anymore.
Maybe everything becomes unpredictable.
Let’s see how things go first.
Aside from Xuan, two figures stood apart from the panic, barely reacting.
One was a towering, heavily built Caucasian male standing with a wide military posture.
Beside him stood a leaner man with a hard, flat expression, eyes tracking every movement in the room.
Zha stepped toward the leaner man, extending a hand.
“Names?”
The leaner man—whose eyes flicked constantly between the bulkheads, the hatch seals, and Jie’s holster—took half a step back, ignoring the outstretched hand.
“Call me Zero,” he said, his voice flat.
“I have no interest in answering further inquiries or shaking hands.”
Zha lowered his hand and turned to the giant beside him.
The towering Caucasian grinned, stepping forward and squeezing Zha’s hand hard.
“Kampa Rovasky. Call me Kampa,” the big man rumbled.
Zha blinked once, matching the pressure before pulling his hand back and flexing his fingers.
Zha swept his gaze across the rest of the cluster.
Aside from the mutilated punk whimpering on the floor while his two cronies cowered behind him, the remaining roster consisted of the two corporate executives clutching their briefcases like shields, and a trio made up of two junior analysts and a woman in a professional suit.
While the two younger men alternated between nervous scanning and trying to stay close to the female executive, her face had settled into quiet focus.
Zha stepped back into the center of the compartment, his voice carrying over the remaining whispers.
“All right, round-robin introductions,” Zha commanded, crossing his arms over his chest.
“State your name, your primary civilian profession, and what you’re good at. We need to get our bearings before things start moving.”