The room had an acrid scent, and his mouth tasted of copper. In the corner, a song was playing on an old jukebox, but a high-pitched ringing in his ears made it sound muffled and a mile away. An eerie hue was cast into the hazy air by the neon signs hanging on the wall behind the bar.

 

And there were bodies — many bodies. Stretched across the bar, under chairs, and sprawled on the floor were at least half a dozen people. They were all dead, and there was a gun in his hand.

 

Cain stared dumbly at the weapon and the carnage around him for a long, hard minute.

 

Where the hell am I?

 

He racked his jumbled brain, trying to piece things together. The last thing he remembered was being at an office party and chatting with someone about a new assignment. Now, inexplicably, he was here, and instead of a drinking glass, he was holding a long-barreled pistol with an open bolt. Everything in between was just a blank.

 

Dazed and disoriented, he squeezed his eyes shut and waited for it all to make sense — maybe to wake up from a bad dream, but no dice. Then his eyes opened wide with fear. He could hear sirens far in the distance, and he somehow knew that they were coming for him. He ran.

 

Outside, the parking lot was full of cars, but no one was around. His first instinct was to toss the gun, but that and the unspent shells in his pocket were his only connection to whatever was going on. Instead, he awkwardly jammed the gun into his waistband and headed for the nearest subway station.

 

The sirens were getting closer—much closer. But there was no way he could explain anything to anyone. What the hell would I say? Cain thought to himself as he hurried through the turnstile.

 

He took a seat in the nearly empty car and began scrolling through the notifications on his phone. Among several missed calls from the office and a news flash about a string of murders in the city, there was a single text message from the company to the entire department:

 

To All Staff: Contact the office ASAP. There have been some technical problems with today’s test. All staff implants are currently offline.

 

“What test?” he whispered to himself. As he said this, a sharp pain suddenly cut across the top of his skull like a knife, and he almost blacked out. A wave of nausea rolled through his gut. He furtively glanced around, but the only other passenger on the train hadn’t noticed anything. It passed just as quickly, and then the pieces started to fall together.

 

The Test. Oh, God. What did they do to our minds?

 

He dialed the office, and it rang once before being picked up. “Cain, this is Seth. It’s about time you called. Where have you been?”

 

“I’d rather not say right now. I have some questions I need you to answer for me first.”

 

Pausing for a moment, Seth said. “Of course. What do you want to know?”

 

“We work together in Special Projects, right? Refresh my memory about today’s test.”

 

“Huh? Are you kidding? Of course we do,” he replied. “Today was the personality insert. We were finishing up the final field test but lost the telemetry from the testing center and all tracking data when the AI malfunctioned. You’re the only one to report in so far. What’s going on?”

 

He broke out in a cold sweat as he leaned back in his seat. “An insert? Were we running an Archetype today?”

 

“Yes, that’s correct. Are you OK? This is our biggest project to date and the first time we’ve automated all of this with the AI from scratch.”

 

Trying to keep the panic out of his voice, he replied, “Seth, please. Just humor me.”

 

“Well, as you know, the movie studio we’ve been partnering with wanted to test a character type for an upcoming film. They wanted to know if we could overlay the perfect cold-blooded killer for this big-budget action movie onto a non-actor before purchasing the tech for their production. The Archetype is a psychopath with a gun fetish, built to the client’s specifications.”

 

The pistol felt like ice against his skin as he realized what had happened and the danger he was in. “Seth. What’s the status with the AI? Is it still offline?”

 

“Yeah, we disabled the neural interfaces to do some troubleshooting when it glitched out. The techs think it was some kind of software error, but they have it all put back together. The AI will access your implant in a moment and fill you in on what happened. It’s coming back online as we speak.”

 

Cain leapt up from his seat, his eyes bulging. “NO, Seth! Shut it down! Shut it down! For God’s sake, pull the damn...”

 

* * *

 

The businessman sitting at the other end of the car doing some last-minute paperwork glanced over at this sudden outburst, but whatever had happened seemed to have passed. The guy at the other end of the train was just sitting there quietly, staring at him with a stupid grin on his face. He shrugged. “Must be stoned or something," he said under his breath and went back to his work.

 

The train screeched loudly through a bend in the tunnel. At the last stop, the doors opened. A single passenger stepped out of the train and looked around.

He started to laugh.