There’s a moment between the drips and the drop. You don’t land, you get lowered, like defective meat into a diagnostic centrifuge. My first trip into an EchoBox? No. That was 147 sequences ago. Transition began like always: a pressure hiss, then a cognitive slippage that felt like a policy violation. Ten seconds of neural drag—officially termed “Memory Slip.” Unofficially: the part where people scream. I don’t. Not because I’m brave. Because screaming violates protocol. The tunnel’s never the same. This one was vein-colored. Lined like an esophagus with a good memory. Pulsed in time with something else's heartbeat. I locked my jaw. Cold palms, locked knees. You move, you rupture something. You emote, you get flagged. I kept it steel-lipped. Alice’s voice drifted in, cheerful like a dentist’s ceiling TV. “Sequence initializing. Mild loop decay. Echo status: cognitively active. Possibly unaware.” Alice handles the inside. Dream-state maintenance. Map rendering. Recursive logic patches. Her job’s to make the dead forget they’re dead long enough for me to clean up their lingering subscriptions. She’s helpful. Creepy. Has opinions about wallpaper. VITA does the other job. My body babysitter. Outside, back in Redline Complex. She monitors vitals, yells when I almost die, and keeps my heart rate in a tax-deductible bracket. She’s not friendly. She’s not meant to be. If I stop breathing, real or simulated, she pulls me like an old tooth. My device uses a bypass, an obsolete backdoor left in EchoBox firmware 1.2. Originally designed for “DualLink Spousal Housing.” Because some idiot in Marketing thought grief would be easier if your dead wife could haunt the same room. It didn’t work. Ever. Two minds in one dreamspace. Mostly ended in psychic screaming matches and passive-aggressive appliance possession. Some full-blown memory wars. One case of fatal recursive gaslighting. So they disabled the feature. But the secondary neural branch, the Karen Pathway, was never deleted. Just deprecated. Hidden under some Remembrance Points™ promotional tier. Which means technically it’s still there. If you’ve earned enough grief coupons. And I have in theory. So I slipped in the side door. The tunnel narrowed, pixelated. Smelled like cinnamon and burnt skin. Alice adjusted the sequence delay, probably to let the environment resolve. The last thing I wanted was to spawn into someone’s raw childhood Then came the microZap ding. Not metaphorical. Literal. The arrival chime was identical to a 2024 Kenmore 1.6 cu. ft. counter unit. Probably on purpose. Someone at EchoCorp has a sense of humor, or a head trauma. I opened my eyes. Family picnic. Again. I knew the signs: color over-saturation. Loop jitter. NPC duplication. At least two uncles, same face, passing the same bowl of suspiciously smooth potato salad back and forth. One of them jumped his dialogue by three seconds. I noted it. Another uncle laughed twice. Same laugh. Same breath. Same crumbs. This was a corrupt loop. Still functioning. But brittle. “Karen Duece may be present,” Alice said casually, as if that were news I wanted. She came with the Grievance plus Platinum Package. If your mourning habits meet quarterly expectations, you’re rewarded with a personalized AI override daemon. She manages meal routines, memory syncs, and spiritual guilt injections. Also refuses to let you disconnect. Karen Prime, on the other hand, she runs the system. God-mode AI. Overseer of all internal sequences. Technically inside the EchoBox, though you never see her unless you screw up badly enough to need her. She and Aunt Karen don’t get along. Long story. Corporate politics. Mutual sabotage written in firmware. And me? I’m the janitor that walks in during their divorce hearings. The grass looked fine. Too fine. Algorithmically smug. The kids were all too still. The sky was frozen on 1:37 p.m. like someone thought that was the official time of