The first twenty-four hours were a descent into raw, unfiltered horror. James had expected some jolt, some flicker of awakening from a life scripted down to the last breath, but nothing prepared him for the assault of the real. The car-park doors slid open and the outside world slammed into him like a physical blow.

Air—real air—invaded his lungs, thick with exhaust and salt and something metallic he couldn’t name. Wind tore at his hair, not the gentle recycled breeze of the dome but a living thing that clawed and shoved. The sun, unfiltered by diffusers or softboxes, blazed down with a ferocity that seared his retinas. He looked straight into it, pupils contracting to pinpricks, and a scream detonated from his chest—primal, guttural, a sound no microphone had ever captured. It ricocheted off concrete pillars, froze every soul in the lot mid-step: security guards, gawkers, satellite trucks. A collective inhale, then silence.

Then the swarm. Bodies surged forward, faces distorted by excitement and greed. Hands thrust objects at him—black rectangles flashing, clicking, recording. Phones, he deduced dimly, but the word felt wrong, alien. Cameras everywhere, always cameras, only now they weren’t hidden in walls or disguised as birds. They were weapons aimed at his face. He dropped to all fours, scrambled beneath the nearest sedan, metal scraping his scalp. The asphalt was coarse, oily, studded with shards of glass that bit into his palms. He curled fetal, shaking so violently his teeth clacked. Urine let go again, hot and shameful, soaking the unfamiliar fabric of his trousers, pooling beneath him in a dark, spreading stain. The ground itself was wrong—unyielding, cracked, vibrating with the distant thunder of engines that weren’t on tracks.

Christ, even the ground felt different: broken glass, dirt, mucky asphalt grinding into his palms like teeth. He groaned, a wet, animal sound, and buried his face in trembling hands, trying to blink away the constellation of black rectangles angled at him from every side beneath the car. Phones. They had to be phones. He’d become a meme for sure. He’d heard the terms muttered by extras when they thought no one was looking—memes, internet, mobiles, TVs, gaming consoles, PCs—whispers during set breaks, hushed like contraband. The technology inside the dome had been a lie: clunky beige boxes, rotary dials, cathode-ray tubes frozen in 1950s amber. Out here the devices were sleek, glowing, alive, their lenses unblinking eyes that devoured him in high definition. Was that deliberate on Christof’s part? A calculated cruelty so that if Truman ever clawed his way out, the sensory overload would break him, send him crawling back to the dome’s soft edges, begging to be re-caged while the control room applauded the prodigal son’s return?

The asphalt scraped his cheek raw as he shifted, shards of a shattered bottle carving thin lines across his skin. Real blood welled—hot, sticky, metallic on his tongue when he licked his lip. Pain. Real pain. Not the choreographed pratfall, not the staged paper cut. This was fire under the skin, a bright, singing agony that bloomed and pulsed with every heartbeat. He’d never known it before. Even the sand on Seahaven’s beach had been imported, sifted, sterilized until it was powder-soft and scentless. Here the grit was alive with microbes, oil, piss, decades of spilled lives. It wormed between his teeth when he gasped.

He scratched at his scalp, nails raking through hair matted with sweat and dust, hunting for the seam where the dome ended and the world began. There was none. His fingers found only bone, then scraped harder, harder, until skin split and blood slicked his hairline. He banged his forehead against the undercarriage—once, twice—metal ringing like a gong. The impact sent white lightning through his skull, a migraine supernova. He welcomed it. Pain was proof. Pain was outside the script.

Phones kept flashing. Someone laughed. A child’s voice mimicked his sob. The sound ricocheted inside his chest, amplifying until it felt like his ribs would crack. He clawed at the asphalt, nails splintering, palms shredding on jagged pebbles. Each scrape was a new language his body was forced to learn: abrasion, laceration, infection. He pressed his face into the filth and screamed again, the sound muffled by muck, tasting of diesel and despair.

Then a voice cut through the cacophony, clear as a bell struck in vacuum.

“James!”

A woman. Not his mother—God, the reality slammed into him again, a second sledgehammer. His mother, his father, his wife: all actors, all paid to love him. His stomach lurched; bile burned his throat. He retched onto the asphalt, strings of saliva and half-digested studio cafeteria slop splattering across broken glass.

“James, it’s Sylvia.”

The name detonated behind his eyes. Sylvia. The one variable Christof couldn’t script out. Banned, erased, reduced to a forbidden photograph hidden in a scrapbook. His mind—already spider-webbed with fractures—shattered outright. He’d been outside the dome mere minutes and here he was: a piss-soaked, bleeding, gibbering wreck, reduced to fetal curls beneath a stranger’s car while the world live-streamed his collapse.

He turned. Asphalt tore another layer from his cheek. Through the forest of ankles and wheels he saw her: Sylvia, haloed by merciless sunlight, face luminous with tears and terror and something fierce. Real. She was real. Her mouth formed his name again, soundless now over the roar in his ears.

He reached. Fingers scraped across oily concrete, leaving bloody commas. The distance between them was only feet but felt like light-years. His arm trembled, elbow buckling. Darkness licked the edges of his vision—shock, blood loss, the sun’s white coin still branded on his retinas. He stretched further, nails splitting on a rusted bolt, pain flaring so bright it eclipsed thought.

Their fingertips brushed.

The world tilted, sound collapsed into a single high note, and the darkness rushed in like floodwater, swallowing the phones, the blood, the glass, the sun. He fell forward, cheek smacking the curb, and knew nothing more.