The Wheel

85. Veronica

I put only one word in Google search engine and click on the first link. No! It can't be!

"Emma!" I screamed.

My friend chocked on her salad out of fright and started coughing.

"Veronica, can you stop already?" Mike asked as politely as he could.

"Do you remember what Ayama told you about your diary?" I persevered.

"Don't remind me about that, please!" she grumbled.

"You just need to have some fresh air," Mike continued to calm me down.

No! This time I'm going to be absolutely right!

"When you told her that you didn't give up your diary willingly, Ayama said that it wasn't quite right! So she knew you gave your diary to Sam, being hypnotized, and you did it not willingly!"

"So what?" Kate asked skeptically. "Ayama was in the habit of lying to us!"

"She hasn't lied to us once!" I declared.

Mike got up to get me out of the café.

"Sit down!" I shouted so loud that Mike fell back on his chair, and people's attention was again concentrated on me.

"Now we're screwed. I bet people from DarkHOLEnet are already looking for us," David pressed his palms to his face.

"Ayama said there was one trial," I began explaining my arguments that I didn't doubt for a second. "What kind of trial? Suffer for a while in the room and that's it? She said when the trial was complete she would let us know!"

"God," Miguel shook his head, "when that horror was over, the room opened! That was it! The trial was over!"

"No! She said that everything we see is a part of the trial that our life is the trial. Didn't you hear her hints? When you finished your story, Miguel, she said 'What is our life? Just a game.'"

"What are you implying?" Emma asked.

"When I googled 'Ayama' I didn't find anything useful, but look at the signboard of the Maya shop: it's mirroring and on the glass we can see the word 'ayam' – and what is Maya? This word means 'illusion'! Ayama said if we had looked at her differently, we would have understood a lot of things! Do you understand now? What did we feel when we woke up in the room? It was like a dream! Chris even shouted that everything that was going on was a crap, a dream, and Ayama said: "I like the way you think, Mr. Royce, it's interesting," - and then she told us about that bank that conducted a research about the probability of us being in Matrix and about the question of the wise person whether he was dreaming about the butterfly or the butterfly was dreaming about him! Do you think it was for nothing? How did Sam call her? 'The one who should be trusted."

"Call Fox Mulder, Dana Scully and tell them to take Neo with them," Kate tried to joke to calm down me and the others.

"How can Ayama be trusted if we didn't agree to take part in 'The Wheel', whereas she said that we fully realized what we were about to do?!" Mike resented, not paying attention to the costumers who were staring at us. "How do you explain that? To trust some artificial intelligence that's a very 'smart' idea, Veronica! Maybe you want to say that we had worked in DarkHOLEnet and made a huge mess, so we were forced to take part in that freaking show to stay alive?! So all the things that have ever happened to us, our worries, our emotions are not real?! You want to say that Miguel's parents weren't killed, David didn't have that diarrhea in the pool, and Kate doesn't have a dead sister?! How do you explain that?!"

"I don't know!" I shouted. "I have no idea, but I feel that something is wrong! All of this isn't true!"

The situation reached its emotional peak. Suddenly I felt like the time had stopped. I looked around: I was right! The waiters, other costumers of the café, clients in the boutiques – everyone except for me and my group mates froze still.

We started silently looking around. A second later our phones vibrated! My trembling hand reached to my iPhone: there was an audio message.

"The trial is complete," I heard Ayama's voice, when I unlocked the phone.

The iPhone fell out of my hands – I was shaking.

"What's going on?! David asked in shock. "What the hell is going on?!"

A second later a blinding flash of light appeared out of nowhere.