No Escape No Surrender

“Let’s not make this difficult,” the agent said, voice flat as glass. “You don’t want to die. I don’t want to clean up a mess. We can both walk away, you, a richer man.”

“I’m not giving you the notebook.” Stryker’s voice wavered, but his grip on the leatherbound thing was iron. “You don’t get to erase the truth. People deserve to know.”

The man across the room exhaled, slow and theatrical, as if bored by integrity.

“You can either take the forty grand and vanish,” he said, withdrawing a pistol and leveling it with Stryker’s brow, “or I put a bullet through your head and take it anyway. Either way, you're not leaving with the book. Choose wisely.”

The gun clicked into readiness. A sound as small and final as a clock striking midnight.

Stryker’s resolve buckled. He flung the notebook across the room, where it landed with a dull slap against the dusty hardwood.

The agent nodded. From inside his trench coat, he produced a thick stack of cash and dropped it onto the desk with a kind of disdain. Then, lighting a cigarette, he blew a slow ribbon of smoke into the dim.

“I’d ask you not to talk to anyone,” he said. “But who’d believe you?” A smirk tugged at his mouth as he scooped up the notebook and receded into the shadows—vanishing like fog before the morning sun.

Stryker stood there a long time, staring at the money as if it were something rotten. Then he stuffed it into his coat and headed home.

He sat, later, in his ottoman like a man trying to remember a dream. His fingers twitching as if still grasping the book, that strange, black journal that had changed everything. It had only held one sentence, but it split his understanding of the world clean in two. It was as if truth had been coded into its leather and ink, pulsing like a quiet machine.

That night, when he closed his eyes, the book spun through his thoughts like a satellite in orbit, spinning, opening, whispering.

He stood suddenly, as though jolted by some divine current. He had held the grail. Knowledge had passed through him like light through stained glass. No amount of money could equal the truth he’d seen, and he wasn’t about to let it vanish. He would find a way. He had to.

***

Over the next few years, Stryker became a man possessed, haunted, maybe, or blessed depending on the hour. He used the hush-money to fund what the world would later call a crusade: self-published books, midnight lectures, strange podcasts recorded under alias and moonlight. He traveled like a ghost through the country’s worn-out circuits, leaving behind coffee-stained pamphlets and minds quietly altered.

He could never quite explain how the book had worked, how a single sentence could reorder a man’s soul. It wasn’t just words. It was a kind of… resonance. A tuning fork struck in the hollow of the human heart. People either felt it or they didn’t. Some dismissed him as mad. Others called him a prophet. And in time, a movement began to form.

They wore silver lockets inlaid with emeralds, the color of awakening. A quiet way to recognize one another across cities and borders. A secret faith passed hand to hand.

One night, after a lecture in a converted observatory on the outskirts of Denver, a young woman approached him. Her voice was soft, careful.

“So… you’re the infamous Stryker Driscoll?”

She wore vintage overalls and a blouse the color of a bruised amethyst. The silver locket around her neck caught the fading light like a quiet signal.

“That’s me,” he said, smiling.

“I’m fascinated by your work. I’ve read every book, listened to all the recordings. This is my second lecture, I tried to catch you after the last one but missed you.”

“Well, I’m glad you caught me now,” he said.

There was a pause, then her eyes sharpened, playful but serious.

“Off the record,” she said. “Be honest. Is all this real to you? Or is it just a brilliant act? Because either way, I have to admit, it’s damn convincing.”

He laughed, startled by her directness. “I held the book,” he said simply. “I know it’s real.”

“I didn’t mean to offend.” She hesitated, suddenly shy. “It’s just… I’ve never held it. None of us have. But I believe. I feel it in my bones, like it’s already written into me.”

“I’m just not used to honesty,” he admitted. “Most people ask with a sneer, or a microphone hidden in their coat.”

She touched the silver locket on her chest and smiled. “Not me.”

“Then would you like to have dinner?”

***

An hour later, they sat in a shadowed booth beneath flickering Edison bulbs, a scattering of half-eaten hors d’oeuvres between them. Outside, the wind pressed softly against the windows like something wanting in.

“I’m obsessed with the Mandela Effect,” she said, swirling her drink. “Little glitches in memory that don’t make sense. I’ve had several myself. And that physicist, James Gates, he found actual computer code embedded in string theory equations. Binary, buried inside the math. Isn’t that wild?”

She took a sip of her bourbon and blushed. “Sorry. I’m rambling. I don’t usually get to talk about this stuff.”

“Don’t apologize,” he said. “It’s rare to find someone who doesn’t flinch when the veil starts to slip.”

He was about to say more, when he saw them.

Three men in charcoal suits. Government-cut hair. Eyes like dead satellites. They entered the restaurant and moved straight for their table, silent as winter.

His smile vanished.

“What is it?” she asked, her voice suddenly very small.

“We have to go,” he whispered, rising fast. “Now.”

They slipped through the kitchen in a blur of motion and warning glances. A bored cook smoking a cigarette at the rear door watched them disappear into the night.

They ran through alleys thick with steam and neon reflection, past dumpsters humming with flies and flickering signs that buzzed like they were trying to speak. Somewhere behind them, the low thrum of pursuit echoed off wet brick.

Stryker’s hand found hers, warm and trembling.

They rounded a corner and stumbled upon a shuttered storefront, its windows dusted over, its sign long since faded to illegibility. A forgotten place in a city that had long stopped remembering.

Stryker grabbed a brick from the ground, shattered the lower pane, and reached inside to pop the lock. The door creaked open like it hadn't moved in years.

“Inside,” he whispered.

Upstairs, they found a small room half-eaten by time. Dust hung in the air like suspended memory. Torn wallpaper, an old chair with a missing leg, and a single broken mirror leaning against the far wall. They crouched low, hidden in the folds of a curtain.

She caught her breath, her locket swinging gently with her heartbeat. “Stryker,” she whispered, voice barely more than breath. “They’re trying to stop you from spreading the truth, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” he said. “They must have realized I’d found someone else who was… awake. That changes things. Now neither of us are safe.”

Her brow furrowed, a dozen questions rushing in all at once.

“Tell me… How did you even find the notebook? Why don’t they want us to know? Who is running all this? Why do so many people refuse to wake up? Why do others who do see it, not fight like you?”

He looked down, eyes tracing invisible lines across the floorboards.

“I wish I could answer all of those questions. My life was in pieces after the volcano eruptions in 26’. I moved around between the few cities that hadn’t been destroyed before making my discovery. Since then, I have dedicated everything to it, but some things are still so elusive. What I can tell you is that one day I was just like everyone else and then I came across that book, suddenly my whole world transformed. Everything I had known, never truly existed. I had a choice then, I could attempt to free myself and others from the lies, but risk being hunted down by the system I was a part of, or I could continue within the lie. The thought of losing everything and everyone that one has ever known or loved is overwhelming to many people. Even though I believe most of us must see the glitches and artificialness in everyday life, the repercussions of acknowledging it, of following that rabbit hole, seem too dire, thus is our programming.”

“Do you believe there is a way that someone could escape?”

“I… I don’t. I do not believe that we exist outside of it. We are not physical beings at all, we are codes, a string of instructions. Patterns meant to simulate feeling, purpose, loss. But that doesn’t change our significance if you really think about it. If anything, it makes us more profound.”

She nodded slowly, eyes wide with wonder and fear. “What happens if they catch us?”

“Well,” he grasped her hand. “Dying essentially reprograms us, starts our campaigns over. We may be placed in any character or location.”

“So, all of this will have been for nothing. We won’t have any of our current knowledge, we are essentially being reset. Erased.”

“In essence yes. However, fragments carry over. Ghosts in the machine. A glance, a dream, a moment of déjà vu, that’s how we remember. The code bleeds through. Therefore, I believe all that we have learned or lived through can be accessed on some level evermore. I promise you. I will never give up, I will expose what I’ve learned, I will always find a way to come back to the truth.”

She reached for his hand and squeezed it tight.

“I don’t want to forget this,” she said. “Not any of it.”

He looked at her, and in the stillness between sirens, something passed between them, something unscripted.

“I won’t let it end here,” he said. “No matter how many times they wipe me, I’ll find the truth again. I’ll find you again. I promise.”

“What about the notebook though?”

“What do you mean?”

“How do you explain how it manifested? Do you think it was originally here or…?”

“It is possible that it was here from the beginning and had been well shrouded, purposely situated as some kind of enigma. Yet, I ascribe to the theory that it was recently placed. Whether due to the stage we are currently in, completed by some kind of automated intelligence or inscribed in the programming, I am unsure. Another concept that makes me hopeful is that a sentient being intervened in an attempt to notify all of us. He created and placed the notebook here in hopes of a great awakening. Perhaps that is also why so many bizarre and incomprehensible events have been occurring as of late. They have been messing with the program so we can all realize how absurd it all is, how all this in fact, cannot be real.”

She stared at him. “When you say sentient being…”

"It could be a god. Or a defector AI. Some old soul who broke the loop and sent back a message. The possibilities are endless. Whoever, or whatever, put that notebook here… they want us to know.”

A door thumped open downstairs and subsequent footsteps reverberated as the agents drew closer. Stryker closed his eyes coming to terms with what was about to happen. He cleared his mind of everything except the feelings the notebook had induced and the sentence that had changed everything. He would commit it to his memory, he would inscribe it to his core.

This is a simulation.

This is a simulation.

This is a simulation.