It was sitting in a directory labeled simply Project Mnemosyne . The date modified was December 5th—"1205"—but the year was missing. What caught his eye was the "RP." In his world, that usually meant Roleplay or Recovery Protocol .

Elias looked up from his monitor. For the first time, he noticed the clock on his wall. The second hand moved from twelve to eleven, then to ten. He reached for the mouse, his hand shaking, and hovered over the icon that promised to extract the rest of his reality.

He scrolled down to the last file in the archive: EXIT_STRATEGY.exe . Beside it was a small text file titled READ_ME_ELIAS.txt .