Chapter 2: The Rules

The voice established the parameters over the course of the first day. It spoke at irregular intervals, sometimes responding to Iris's questions and sometimes delivering information unprompted, as though following a script only it could see. The apartment was self-contained. Food appeared in the refrigerator overnight, replenished through a mechanism she could not locate. The water worked. The electricity worked. A tablet on the nightstand provided access to a curated selection of books, music, and films, but no internet, no communication with the outside world. The voice told her the apartment was located inside a larger facility. It did not specify where. It told her the walls were reinforced and the window was a screen displaying a composite image of various cities, which explained why the skyline never quite looked real. It told her she would remain here for an unspecified duration, and that the conditions of her release depended entirely on her willingness to participate in a process the voice called the audit. The audit, as the voice described it, was a structured examination of her life. Every significant decision she had made, every relationship she had maintained or abandoned, every secret she had kept. The voice claimed to have extensive documentation. Financial records, personal correspondence, surveillance footage. It recited details of her life with a specificity that made her stomach clench: the name of her college roommate, the amount of an irregularity she had discovered in a client's books three years ago and never reported, the last thing her mother said to her before dying. Iris asked who was behind this. The voice said that was information she would earn. It told her the audit would begin tomorrow and that she should rest. She lay in the bedroom with the lights off and stared at the ceiling, mapping the contours of her fear. She was not physically harmed. She was not hungry. She was, by every material measure, comfortable. And that was what frightened her most, because comfort was a tool, and whoever had built this cage understood exactly how to use it.