As a Reaper let out a bone-chilling shriek that echoed through the floating glaciers and half-formed streets, Viktor took her hand. He didn't know if he’d ever wake up in a hospital bed, but here, in the world of fragmented reality , he was finally going to build something that mattered.

"Then you’re exactly what we need," she said, reaching out a hand. "The fighters here? We just survive. But an architect? You can learn to shape this mess. You can build us a way out—or at least a place where the Reapers can’t find us."

This story is inspired by the themes and visual concepts of the 2020 film Coma , where a young architect finds himself in a surreal world built from the fragmented memories of people in comatose states .

"Where am I?" Viktor stammered, his voice sounding thin in the thin air.

He sat up on a patch of grass that shouldn't have been there, suspended between the jagged remains of a Venetian cathedral and a futuristic skyscraper that seemed to melt into a river of liquid clouds. There was no horizon, only a chaotic collage of architecture and nature, bending the laws of physics until up and down were merely suggestions. "First time?" a voice asked.

Viktor turned to see a woman standing on a bridge that ended abruptly in mid-air. She wore a tactical vest over a hospital gown, a jarring juxtaposition that seemed to be the local fashion.

"In the fragments," she replied, hopping across a gap where a chunk of the world had simply failed to load. "This is Coma. It’s what happens when the brain tries to keep the lights on while the body is in the dark. We’re living in the subconscious leftovers of everyone currently asleep back there."

Viktor looked at his hands. They were translucent at the edges, like a low-resolution image. "I'm an architect," he whispered, the memory of a car crash suddenly sparking in his mind like a short circuit.