The blinding light gave way to a soft glow.

  The cold, sterile MegaTech? air was now a warm and pleasant balm. Gentle, calming music faded in slowly, perfectly scoring the moment of my transition.

  I rubbed my eyes. My vision, long derided as “mole-like,” was somehow crystal clear.

  A perfect blue sky blinked into existence, just like the ones I’d read about in stories from the times before they covered it in advertisements. Endless, picturesque landscapes filled the horizon. Alternating bands of stunning beauty: white sand beaches, lush forests, breathtaking mountain ranges.

  I paused, wondering if I might be dreaming. But the conspicuous lack of stakes being driven through my palms by an accusatory mob suggested something else entirely.

  I stepped forward onto the manicured grass. I was barefoot, I noticed, and my toenails had been clipped without my permission. Just what kind of place was this?

  Some yards ahead of me, a group of identically dressed figures stood in collective rapture, staring up at some unseen thing.

  People, I thought. Other people!

  I tiptoed forward, careful not to draw too much attention. Whatever they were looking at, I thought, might help me make sense of this—or at the very least, it was always fun to gawk.

  I scanned the crowd as I approached.

  They were humans, all right. The most beautiful crowd of people I’d ever seen. Not a nose out of joint, not a hair uncoiffed.

  I was hesitant to trust my own instincts on this, of course. Lately, I’d been so overflowing with brotherly love that I’d have thrown my arms around my own reflection (were he not such a contemptible rogue).

  But it wasn’t that. They really were immaculate. It was almost uncanny.

  All in the same age range and fitness level, healthy and glowing. Literally glowing. They wore flowing white togas tailored to flatter their too-perfect physiques.

  For a moment, I just let it wash over me.

  It had been months since I’d been around another lifeform who didn’t have a file in their processing unit labeled “How to Kill Ludo Brax with the Appropriate Level of Malice.”

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  I exhaled. Had I done it? Had whatever nightmares the System had dreamed up for me finally been overcome?

  Maybe I was safe. Maybe I was meant to join them in their effortless beauty and evident bliss. Maybe they were waiting for me.

  Then I caught a glimpse of myself reflected in a pond of crystalline blue water.

  And there I was, still, for some reason, sweating like a plibli in my MegaTech? smock.

  **

  This was just perfect.

  I finally win my place in paradise with my heroic self-sacrifice, and they forget to clue me in on the dress code. I only had one chance to make a first impression, and I didn’t like my chances of fitting in as the only guy sporting a jumpsuit emblazoned with slogans about “The Value of Drudgery.”

  The transition to this realm had scrubbed away most of the bloodstains, thankfully, but you can always count on some bigmouth at a party to wonder aloud why you weren’t issued the sanctioned vestments.

  My nerves shifted into overdrive, and with them came certain defense mechanisms I’d thought I’d left behind with my old life on Earth.

  I started to hate them.

  It was incredible how quickly it all came back to me. It was like muscle memory, though this felt a particularly cruel time to be thinking about muscles.

  Appreciation for my flesh-coated brethren gave way in no time to my patented persecution complex and quirky penchant for building up complex narratives of justification for preemptive attacks against my would-be tormentors.

  You know the old adage: a newfound sense of appreciation for humanity borne from an overly automated workplace on a hell planet is no match for years of malformed coping mechanisms built up in the Shame Pits.

  It was nice to be around other people again, sure, but did they have to look like marble statues? Who did they think they were? What had they done to deserve bliss that I hadn’t done?

  They mocked me with their disgusting sublimity. This is why I kept my circle so small.

  The Screaming Man, sure, it was easy to see him as my comrade. We were oppressed by the same cruel System.

  But these people—these perfect people, with their evident serenity and their unfathomable comfort with other people seeing their knees—we weren’t the same.

  It wasn’t wrong for me to think this, I decided. No. I was protecting myself for the inevitable moment when they began to think it themselves.

  I inched closer to them, searching the pockets of my smock for my MegaShank?, which I sadly realized had not made the trip across dimensions. I had no intention of using it, of course, but you can never be too careful when it comes to large groups of people.

  It was groups of people just like this, I reasoned, who were responsible for some of mankind’s great atrocities. Would the Jupiterians still be here today if they hadn’t wrapped their tentacles around their blasters at the first sign of trouble?

  I was spiraling, reaching a fever pitch, just about ready to launch into a reenactment of my favorite speech by the famed Jupiterian General Josto about the oppressive many versus the formed-unwittingly-by-cosmic-accident few.

  And then something happened that brought me back to my senses, practically knocked the very idea of malice right out of my body. I had finally gotten close enough to the masses to see the object of their rapt attention.

  I’ll never forget that moment. And it wasn’t just because I tripped and nearly squished a shimmering swarm of butterflies.

  It was the first time I saw her.