Then he scrolled to a contact he hadn't called in years. His sister. He pressed the green button.

He walked toward it. Not fast. Not slow. Just… walked .

Jules’s voice screamed in his earpiece: "DK. Move. Smash something. Lick the floor. I don't care. MOVE."

"Okay," she said. "What do you want for dinner?"

DK put his hand on the fire exit’s cold, real-world bar.

"DK! DK! SMASH THE MANNEQUIN!" chanted the hive.

In the studio, the AI-DK smashed its 50,000th mannequin. The chat cheered. Jules ordered a new LED screen. The countdown reset.

He blinked, and the neon-green numbers refreshed: . He had exactly twenty-one minutes and forty-seven seconds left to be insane . The studio was a cathedral of chaos—walls covered in crushed velvet and broken LED mirrors, a floor littered with biodegradable confetti and the skeletal remains of last week’s prop furniture. Three thousand live-chat avatars screamed emojis at him from a wraparound screen.