EXCHANGE

39

Abel looked at Lucky with an incredulous stare. "What'd you say?"

Before he could say anything else Lucky bounced back up toward the middle of the podium and they were released from their restraints. Abel gritted his teeth as he hit the ground, not expecting it to hurt as much as it had. It passed quick enough.

"Now if you'll all follow me over here to this monitor! Then we can see which of you devilish little players decided to defect!" Lucky called, bouncing off of the mounted gun.

"It...doesn't matter who initially voted," Abel said, climbing back up to his feet. "Sophie got the points for it because the old woman—Ai, chose to cooperate."

Lucky began to chuckle, the others sans-Simon had a confused-but-scared look on their faces. "Well now, it's such a shame you said that," Lucky said. "I was hoping you'd keep your mouth quiet so we could have spent some time together." He hopped toward Abel and as he got closer Abel saw three sharpened claws slide out of each of his paws. "Father said cheating is wrong," Lucky moaned as he swiped across Abel's throat.

The flesh was torn and ribboned in Lucky's right paw. He went again with the left and caught bone, he grappled it hard as the blood sprayed from Abel's neck. The others looked on in horror as they watched the young boy be torn to pieces before their very eyes. A terrifying shriek echoed as the claws retracted, Abel left to bleed out. "Time for you all to get going then. The Roulette Game begins now." Lucky said, tapping the ground twice with his feet and springing high into the air, up to the darkness far beyond what they could see.

"What did you do?!" Sophie yelled up after Lucky, but it was pointless. He wasn't coming back down. She ran over toward Abel, he looked up to her with something in his eyes that said "I'm sorry." The blood was draining quickly from his body, it pooled out onto the ground. Levi and Aria couldn't bear to look, Aria felt as if she was going to be sick.

"What is h-happening here…?" Levi asked.

"He should have kept his mouth quiet," Simon said.

There was an airy sort of feeling around the room, Simon hadn't moved from where he stood before, and it didn't seem the death phased him that much. "He spilled a secret and broke the rules. Lucky punished him. It's done and over, let's move on," It was harsh in the way that he'd said it, a perfected edge that he's sharpened to hurt the most. But...for the first time in a long while he didn't fully mean it. This time he'd tone it down a bit. He'd have to take charge and be the leader that he was in the last cycle. It...was strange. The boy never passed over before, what would this mean for the rest of this game? He couldn't let it shake him, he steeled his nerves and looked to Sophie who had been kneeled by his body. He'd known that she knew him, he never knew the specifics. He was always dead before she revealed the specifics.

"Get up already," he said, "If you don't want to end up like him then you get up. It isn't much of a bother to me, I'll get out faster if you do." He said with just enough sting to get a rise out of her, he knew that if she was left to her own devices she would stay down here with him forever. He knew there was no out. They would keep going around and around until the end of time. He wasn't going to have another cycle where she cried the whole time.

"He was right," Aria called from the monitor.

Sophie stopped and looked to her, "What?"

"C'mere," she was waving them over now. "It says it right here, Sophie, you have two digits to your password…"

"It's like I said, he revealed something he shouldn't have known, and he got punished for it. Shame, as Lucky was just about to talk about it, too. So really he died for nothing."

"You shut your mouth," Sophie started, looking back to him.

"Yes, I do think we should stop talking about him, it doesn't matter what he did or didn't know."

"You seem to know a lot about how this game works," Aria said, quieter.

"Me? I know nothing. It's just what that damn rabbit said." Of course, he did know, and Abel almost ruined it for him. If things were going to be different then they were going to be different in his favor.

"Well, what if he was behind us getting trapped here?" Aria asked, persistent as she could be considering the circumstances.

"Well then, we're stuck here forever without answers," Simon began, "Come on, use your head."

Sophie shook her head, "He's…"

"Your friend right?" Simon figured it had been the kindest question he'd asked in...he didn't know how long, and it wasn't even particularly kind. Maybe there was something about the uncertainty of everything that lit the littlest candles of hope that things would be different this time around. Or maybe he was just excited that there was a body so early. He couldn't remember which it was.

"Yeah," Sophie said, taking a short breath, "Doesn't matter...now." She resigned herself to the fact.

"A-are you behind it? Are you the mastermind?" Levi asked her.

Levi was always a bit on the slower side of explanations, it wasn't his fault, he grew up in a small village. He lived to see it quite a few times. Of course, he always said how it seemed like something was wrong in his village. All in all it didn't seem like it was breeding any geniuses anytime soon.

"Of course not," she said, recovering more, but she did look back to his body, shaking her head. "Now come on, please. I can't bury the body here and I can't stand to look at it. I think I heard a door unlock."

Aria looked from her to the body, her own body looked as if it was about to empty its contents. Aria was always the peacemaker, although Simon did notice a little of her fire here. Of course, it made her story about her victim all the more interesting. Humans did funny things when put in the right situation.

He stopped for a moment, is this was omniscience felt like? Put a rat in a maze and eventually it'll have every twist and turn mentally mapped out. Give that rat infinity to explore said maze, then you've essentially given it godhood. But what, though, of the rat that simply wants to escape the maze? What of the rat who no longer trembles at the threat of death because he's died every single run-through? Simon had felt like that rat, and it had been no surprise that come the origin of his disdain came anger and hatred for everything and everyone around him. Who were they to him? For all he knew they were elaborate actors forced to reset their roles as soon as they were killed or left. Nothing ever changed, and nothing ever made him forget that each time he went through this maze he'd be left for dead, alone.

Nothing ever changed...except for the boy. He changed. He remembered. He passed over. Something inside him couldn't let that fact go. It was like one of the puppets he'd been surrounded by for so long was finally given life. A rat had escaped its predetermined path in the maze and landed directly in front of him. And Lucky killed him. The Rabbit had been many a things in his many cycles past, but caught off guard wasn't one of them, and that is how he had been when he'd seen Luke...Abel. That was his real name, he heard him say. Something almost seemed...pleased in a sick sort of way when he realized it.

And he could realize it. That was an important fact, Lucky could tell that he had remembered the previous cycle even before he opened his mouth.

Simon didn't know what he was going to do next, but he figured that he had to do something. He wasn't going to waste this chance.

"Then let's go already," Simon said. "My legs are tired of just standing here, and I'm not getting any younger."

40

Simon heard a gunshot and then a scream, neither he had been responsible for. He was only seven years old, it was the earliest memory he could recall. He remembered seeing a flash of light spill from the barrel of the gun like it was a divine hand coming to take him away to a distant land and time. It had been the first time he was kidnapped. He learned much later on that the people who had done it were a couple of known thieves who frequented the Osaka region. They'd concocted the idea to get rich by stealing the son of a famous CEO. It was genius, how could it ever go wrong?

Akihiko Nagatomi was well past his midlife crisis when he had brought Simon into the world. His wife, Naomi, passed during a difficult childbirth. After this Akihiko grew very close to his son. The trauma that would occur effectively erased any of Simon's memories before the kidnapping, his mind trying to repress anything relating to the event to protect itself, but instead it impressed itself as his first memory.

It happened in the middle of the night. There was a fresh blanket of snow coating the ground as the two kidnappers made their way toward the back of the Nagatomi home. They'd been watching the house for a few days prior to plan out just how they were going to accomplish their terrible goal. They found that the lights in the home were out by nine pm. The plan then was to break in through the back windows which was closer to the boy's room than the father's. To ensure they could make the escape they had a smoke bomb and mace to allow chaos. The plan, as chaotic as it was, went off without a hitch. Akihiko didn't even wake from his slumber for another hour, only to find the note initially asking for a hundred million yen.

The next time it happened Simon was nine. He had almost forgotten the fear that he experienced, but it came rushing back to him all the same. This time it was a political move brought to fruition by a rival company. Akihiko Nagatomi was the President of the Genros Foundation, an exceedingly wealthy benefactor to several international subsidiaries in regards to social, medical, biological, and even military advancements. Not everyone wanted Genros to invest in international affairs. They'd prefer the wealth be spread to flourish the Japanese economy and install new business opportunities for the unemployed and homeless. The 1976 kidnapping had been to pressure Genros to pull back their support.

The very next came not a month after the last, another criminal who thought they could make it big by hosting a ransom for the child. Each time it happened security was tightened and more measures were added to keep Simon safe. Unfortunately, this only increased the tenacity of those who wished to hold influence over Genros. Each time, as unfortunately as the last, Genros never budged in response to the kidnappings. There would be a response, and each of the three times that it has happened then the situation was cleared through force of soldiers and numbers far greater than the kidnappers. Simon initially believed that this was the force that his father had summoned to get him back, and each time it was the saving grace from the horrors that he had to endure. His father would save him no matter what had happened.

The truth of the situation was that Akihiko, as much as he loved his son, never faltered to any threats or acts of terrorism. To react would be to show weakness, and he knew that the work he was supporting was life changing work that needed to be experienced by the world. He was not in control of a military force, he had no police, he was but a common man when it came to these situations. There wasn't anything he could do. He could have paid the ransoms, but there was nothing guaranteeing they wouldn't off his son after receiving the funds. And in that case the only net gain was that he armed criminals with money for life. He couldn't trust people who stole his son away to stay to their word, and so he did...nothing. He didn't feel good about it, never did, but he remained.

It worked out then that someone had the courage to do something, as soldiers did find the way to save Simon each time he had been kidnapped. They've been noted to wearing heavy-looking black gear with no identifying features on them. The Prime Minister has disavowed their connection to the Japanese military, so the obvious assumption went to the Genros Foundation. We only fund development and research, Akihiko remembered that was the first thought that ran through his mind as he saw the tabloids connecting Genros to the rescue.

After the third kidnapping Simon was assigned a full time bodyguard to keep him safe all hours of the day. And for a little over eleven years this much became the truth. Simon received the best therapy his father could provide for him and as the years passed the need for a bodyguard around at all times wasn't needed. By the time he was seventeen Simon had requested that he need not one at all, and it was then he resumed his public education. Four years of normalcy passed in the blink of an eye.

41

When Simon was twenty-two he left his father's home and started living on his own. He and his father had been quite distant for the past few years, Simon had largely recovered from his previous traumas, but he learned the truth about his father's inaction during his kidnappings which led to many fights between the two. Simon was hurt that his father considered his public image and company over his own well-being. Akihiko regretted his actions, but had trouble vocalizing his feelings as anything other than anger, and it wasn't until after a fight that he'd realize he was most angry with himself.

It wasn't the only reason that Simon left, he felt that with age his father wasn't really himself on some days. There were times when Akihiko wouldn't speak to his son at all, and most of them weren't even predicated by a fight. There were times Simon even swore his father's eyes were burning white. He was a natural brown, so he'd convince himself it was just a trick of the light, but it happened more than once to stick in his mind.

The day after his coming of age party he hit the road and found himself a nice apartment on the edge of Osaka. It was there he picked up a job with a newspaper just on the edge of Osaka.

He started as but a peon learning the ropes, but he quickly grew and found a niche in reporting on issues in the workplace. He despised it when people in power took advantage of others, it made him sick to his core, it reminded him of the times he was kidnapped and how powerless he had been, how powerless his father had chosen to be. It was no secret that rumors were flying around about Genros' involvement in cases surrounding one of their subsidiaries, Arctic Systems. There were a staggering amount of employees that were killed in the past ten years in motor accidents. An accident was tragic, but there had been talk of it being more than an accident based on all the commonalities of each accident.

This was all overseas, of course, and Simon didn't have access to his father's money. He couldn't very well fly across the world to write up on a scoop.

So, he did what any good reporter would do in this situation, he went for the source. He went home. What he found was that his father's home was a mess, as if somebody had thrown a large party. Heirlooms littered the floor with little regard and framed photos lay cracked against the walls they once hung on. As he climbed the stairs past the foyer into the parlor room he saw scratch marks on the walls. They grew in frequency as he continued, finding a large slash mark by the next door in. An invisible weight tied itself around his ankles as he struggled to move closer, just past this door was the hallway that lead to his father's room. He slammed the door open and began running to confirm the fears that had almost suffocated him. Simon burst through the door to his father's room to find it empty. The rest of the house had been empty as well, but it had confused him then. Who had been in the house to make these markings? He then saw a slip of paper stapled to what used to be the door to his room.

He looked at it with a wild sort of contention as if it were there simply to spite him. He walked up to it slowly and yanked it off of the door. It was his father's handwriting. He recognized the strokes easily enough as it was his father that taught him how to write. He looked the paper over and started to read. His father was gone, it was a note of goodbye. His father knew he'd be back and would see it on the door. Most disturbing was that throughout the duration of the note his father's grip on his own sanity began to slip. What started relatively composed devolved to more frantic and short sentences. The strokes themselves looked like they were rushed. Near the end of the sheet he sees a phrase repeated twice, "get out of my head."

It had been so striking because Simon had seen that his pen left the paper and continued onto the door, repeating it up and down the length of the wood. He took a step back to get a better view of it all, he realized that it went past the door and plastered the entire wall. He saw it so clearly now that it shocked him he didn't before. The door to the parlor had the familiar scratch marks on it, so it was most likely that Akihiko Nagatomi had written this note before whatever was running through had enough. Then he moved toward the parlor and then writing on the walls wasn't enough, whatever was bothering him had him rip apart the walls, probably with his bare hands.

There was a loud thumping sound from the back of the house. Simon took off like a bullet to the source, the paper was still gripped tight in his hand. He found his father in what he could only describe as a royal mess. The table in their dining room was tipped over against the wall. Red writing covered the walls and floor as the makeshift katakana stretched across the boundaries of the room. Simon saw his father in the center of the room bent over, adding to the message he'd been writing. His fingers were coated a deep red that bubbled from the blisters on his fingers. He was painting the message across the dining room with his own blood.

"Father?" Simon asked, taking a step in, but as he did his eyes were drawn to the start of the message. He didn't know how it was the start, it drew him in like a pull of a magnet and his brain was as attracted as a robot's.

He didn't notice his father finish and crane his neck around, his blank eyes looking straight through him as if he weren't even there. Simon was scanning the room for the next piece of the writing.

The bitter truth about life is that it ends and often it is without grace. I've learned this fact several times over in the time I've spent on this planet…

It was The Eye of Timaeus, the first passage from the LIFE book, but of course Simon didn't know that. He only read it as the musings of a man driven mad, most likely by the guilt that had finally caught up to him. He looked down finally to the poor creature that had been his father and was shocked to see the look in his eyes that he had convinced himself he wasn't crazy for seeing. It was as if there weren't any pupils at all, just the whites that filled everything.

His father was on all fours as drops of blood dripped from his fingertips, he looked almost frog-like from where he sat, turning fully to face Simon.

"What's wrong with-"

Akihiko lunges toward his son in one swift motion, tackling him straight against the table and knocking the wind out of his system. His head hit the wall and just like that his consciousness was flicked off like a light switch.

42

Simon woke up restrained to a chair sitting upright. Sweat coursed down his forehead and he grit his teeth as he yanked to try to free himself. He screamed as it did no good. He was breathing heavy by the time he quit fighting it. He saw around him five other people restrained just like he was.

This was the first cycle. Simon wanted nothing more than to escape the atrocity that was the Roulette Game, even cooperating with the other players to ensure that everyone could make it out alive. He was going to make it out alive and bring his father down, it was obvious he didn't care about Simon, so Simon could give less than a single shit that he went nutso. Of course, that he kidnapped him, almost twice over a slap in the face and kick in the teeth. He would be brought down. These other people were innocents that obviously were unlucky enough to get mixed up in his business. This needed to end.

Before the third round of the game had begun, Simon was defected against by one of the other players and he was shot in the end, the fraction of a second before his brain matter splattered across the room was long enough for his life to flash before his eyes. It was a painless feeling as it all fleeted away, and it was only a moment later when he regained consciousness sitting upright, restrained to the chair.

Confusion struck his face harder than a tire iron as a strong sense of familiarity over the situation rose from the depths of his subconscious. He didn't fully understand what it had meant and chalked it up to a horrible nightmare. When events began playing out in a similar fashion as in his nightmare Simon began to accept it more as reality. He was going to get out of this crazy place and figure out what had happened to him. He remembered of course that one of the other players had defected against him before the third round of the game. He took this knowledge with him and made the extra effort to befriend that player, he lessened his edge he knew he had on him, it was a self-defense mechanism he built up in response to his childhood traumas and suited him well for being a reporter. It didn't suit him, however, for being easy to make friends with. The things he said usually had a bit of a blunt edge to them that people that weren't used to it considered it rude. Simon tried his hardest to dull the edge. It turned out, his plan had worked. He made it past the third round—everyone did.

Unfortunately, things would end up crossing a similar path in the interim between rounds three and four. One of the other players learned that Simon knew more about the game than anyone else. Simon in turn learned that he was the only one who remembered that one had happened previously. The other player convinced the others that he was the mastermind behind the game. The sight wasn't pretty, he was ripped limb from limb in the ensuing chaos. Desperation to get out led to anger and anger led to hate. Hate turned to violence and Simon could feel it tear his body apart.

He woke up a moment after dying restrained to the chair. He was breathing heavy and shook like a Californian earthquake. He screamed as the memories flooded into his mind and pounded his brain like a drum. He couldn't let the others know that he remembered or else they would do the same thing to him. This time, he was defected against in the very first round of the roulette game. One of the players had woken up without him noticing during his screams and didn't feel safe keeping him in the game.

No matter the cycle. No matter the reason. No matter the person. Simon always died.

He tried a fourth, fifth, tenth, twentieth, fiftieth time. When the fifty first cycle came around he had exhausted all of his ideas on how to cheat his own death. He tried killing everyone as soon as he got the chance. He tried killing only one of them and asserting his dominance. He tried befriending them all and being the hero. He tried forcing himself on the girls. He tried forcing himself on the boys, anything to make any sort of difference, nothing pleased him, nothing pleased He Who Created This Loop. He tried to use the information of his previous cycles to help them escape quicker. He tried everything. He tried everything.

Simon woke up on the one hundredth cycle second for the first time in...well, ever. The boy woke up first, Lucas, he called himself. It was the first time that anyone else had woken up before him, before his memories began rushing back to him like the souls of a million lives. It was the first time that the idea that these were anything more than puppets destined to repeat the same actions in the same closed environment—that they were living breathing people...almost. He almost considered it, but then he resigned it to a fluke and nothing more. There was no way that the boy would just randomly break script after a hundred times. There was no precedent to this…it couldn't have happened. Simon didn't know what to do. For the last twenty cycles he'd been stuck in a rut of being as rude as could possibly be. His old edge would have been terrified to see what new sort of wall he'd built up. It was the only thing he could do to keep his mind off of his infinite nothingness.

He next noticed that the podium had begun to short circuit just after the second round had concluded. In the entirety of his time in the SubCon Facility the electricity had never gone out, the wiring never short circuited, and the podium never had any difficulty retracting into the ground. He'd voted to defect against Aria that round, and he knew that he'd taken the blame for the murder of Ai as well, but truth be told Aria was the only person he'd defected against in that cycle. He'd tried exposing the other player in a previous cycle, it of course turned to backfire against him as they led a pseudo mutiny against him. Mutiny wasn't quite the right word, as it implied that he had any sort of power in the first place.

Levi gained his courage by knocking him out. It was well deserved, he'd seen how Levi looked at the girl almost half his age. He knew what buttons to press to get a reaction out of him. Getting a reaction out of them was the only thing he could control.

Levi, Sophie, and Lucas...Abel. Gods, he needed to stop doing that. His name was Abel. He was sure of it because he said it in this new cycle...this cycle where everything was different. They left him behind, which had been his plan ever since he noticed the podium's malfunction. He was sure that if he let the others in on the fact that something wasn't right they'd find a reason to kill him and his one chance could be over. Who knows if Abel would wake up first again? Maybe he would at two hundred cycles? The possibility was there, but Simon wasn't willing to accept the possibility because that would mean that his suffering though this game was only half over before he got another chance. He had to ensure he could check it out alone.

He didn't think Levi would have hit so hard, he never hit that hard anytime before. It was enough to knock him unconscious. What eventually woke him up was the dull sensation that came with the forcible removal of his arm and leg once Levi exploded. This too came as a surprise to Simon.

The first thing that entered his mind before even the pain was the desire to look for the podium, and there he found that the damn machine had been stuck trying to close, leaving a space just big enough for him to fit through. He crawled with his good arm—his only arm—and slid himself into the crevice created in the mess. He landed hard and a good portion of his blood splattered onto the ground. He almost died there if it weren't for his determination turned into palpable armor. He pushed himself forward and made it to the metal door which had the name LUCAS emblazoned on the front. He made his way inside and could feel faint as he dragged himself in, the blood was openly pouring out of him now.

He saw a large monitor on the right side of the room, and it lit up as he entered, playing a video clip he couldn't quite make out—his vision was waning. He forced himself to keep his eyes open. He's not sure he can trust what he saw, but for the moments before the last of the blood oozed from his body he could almost swear that he saw a young teenage boy held in a cross pose beside a sort of metal exoskeleton...a form all too familiar to him. Knives and blades were cutting up the boy's head in a surgical manner by a figure off screen. It had been too much before his vision faded before he would wake up again. Lucky. That boy...had been Lucky. Not in the sense of the term as the word, he was sure the boy had his own misfortunes, but he had been….Lucky. And he looked so much like Abel. Maybe...he thought. Maybe if this changes...maybe we can stop...all of—