The Rehearsal

The hologram director’s face flickered three times before stabilizing. His features were distorted by compression algorithms. These algorithms couldn’t quite manage the sixteen billion miles of quantum transmission. His voice crackled through the speaker system of the Transsolar Express, bouncing off titanium walls that had witnessed a thousand journeys between Earth and the mining colonies of Neptune.

“For Christ’s sake, Mendez! I said tension! I need to feel the sweat forming on your upper lip. These aren’t just any cops, they’re desperate men searching for a bomb that could vaporize half the Kuiper Belt!”

Officer Mendez wasn’t real. Nothing here was, except maybe the fear. The actors playing transit police moved in choreographed patterns down the central corridor of Car 17. Their mock-plasma rifles swept arcs. AI had calculated these arcs to maximize dramatic tension and minimize actual physical contact. Three-dimensional cameras tracked their every movement. They were floating orbs that resembled ancient Christmas decorations. These decorations could capture reality in slices thin enough to reconstruct from any angle.

In the next car over, Harkins and Voss waited with the girl. Real people playing fake kidnappers in a film about real terrorism. The irony wasn’t lost on Harkins as he pressed the prop neural disruptor against the child’s temple. The weapon was a cheap plastic mold. In post-production, they would add the sickly green glow. Audiences had come to expect this glow from black-market Venusian tech.

“Remember,” the director’s voice wheezed through their earpieces, “you’re not just criminals—you’re believers. The ransom isn’t about money; it’s about making a statement against the corporate annexation of Neptune’s hydrogen fields.”

Harkins nodded. Method acting. He’d spent three weeks in a cerebral feed consuming manifestos written by actual Neptune Liberation Front terrorists. Their anger felt real inside him now, a radioactive seed planted in fertile soil.

The girl—Misha was her name, though her character was simply “Asset 459″—trembled convincingly. Thirteen years old with eyes that had seen too much genuine horror back on Earth to require much acting. Child stars these days came pre-traumatized; it saved on production costs.

“Two minutes to your scene,” squawked the earpiece. “Rehearsal only—no recording. Just blocking the movements.”

The false policemen in the next car grew louder, their boots making hollow sounds against the train’s composite flooring. The Transsolar Express itself was genuine enough—a decommissioned luxury liner that once ferried the ultra-wealthy between planets, now reduced to a film set floating in the void between worlds. A perfectly preserved relic of better times.

“They sound real,” whispered Voss, peering through the small circular window that separated the cars.

Something in his voice made Harkins pause. The script called for mounting paranoia, but Voss wasn’t acting. There was genuine fear in his eyes.

“What do you mean?” Harkins asked.

“Those aren’t our actors. Look at their insignias.”

Harkins pressed his face to the glass, squinting at the approaching figures. The uniform patches didn’t match what he’d seen in wardrobe that morning. These were black with silver piping, bearing the unmistakable insignia of Neptune Security Forces—notoriously brutal, famously immune to prosecution.

“That’s impossible,” Harkins said, but he felt reality shifting beneath him like quicksand. “This is a closed set. Secured location.”

The girl whimpered, still in character, unaware that the game had changed.

Voss’s pupils dilated with pharmaceutical precision—a combat drug rushing through his system. “They found us. The actual mission. They know.”

“What mission? This is a film shoot!” Harkins hissed, but somewhere deep in his engineered memories, something else stirred—fragmented images of planning sessions, weapons caches, and manifestos that he’d somehow known without being told.

The false memories from his method preparation were aligning with something else, something buried under layers of cognitive reprogramming. Had he been an actual terrorist before becoming an actor? Or was he an actual terrorist who’d been convinced he was an actor?

The door between cars slid open with a pneumatic hiss.

“Neptune Security! Hands where we can see them!”

Voss reacted instantly, pushing the girl away with such force that she fell hard against the metal flooring. “It’s blown! Run!” he shouted, already moving toward the emergency hatch that led to the maintenance tunnels beneath the passenger compartment.

Harkins stood frozen, trapped between realities. The neural disruptor in his hand suddenly felt heavier, more real. When he looked down, the cheap plastic had been replaced by actual Venusian technology, its green glow casting sickly shadows across his palm.

The police—real or actors, he couldn’t tell anymore—raised their weapons.

The girl scrambled away on hands and knees, eyes wide with terror that no child could fake.

And somewhere, beyond the walls of the train, beyond the fabricated crisis that was rapidly becoming real, the actual bomb ticked away its final seconds. The bomb that would make a statement about Neptune’s hydrogen fields. The bomb that Harkins now remembered planting, in a life he’d been made to forget.

The director’s hologram flickered one last time before dissolving entirely.

“Cut,” said no one at all, as reality itself came apart at the seams.