A kid with short, spiked blonde hair lay on the floor in a fetal position. He wore a nicely tailored suit and sharp toed shoes. Both hands clutched his throat. His blood stained a large swath of the hotel room’s beige carpet around him.

"Looks like he bled to death," said the doctor.

"Obviously," Hans snorted. "Good thing we have a Doctor around that can figure those things out. How long has he been dead?"

The Detective stepped up to Hans and punched him in the stomach. Holding this belly and sputtering, the kid with the blonde hair fell to his knees.

The Doctor turned away, took a step, and leaned over Hans’s body. "It just happened. The blood is still seeping into the carpet, which is still quite wet. Not dried at all." He pressed his hand into the carpet, and then held up his blood red hand.

"The game is still playing." The kid pointed a bloody hand to a cassette player, which was hooked up to a microcomputer. Hans and the Detective walked up to the desk.

"How can you tell?" asked the Doctor.

"The cassette is still playing and on the screen ..." Hans turned to look at the screen. Bloody fingerprints on the keyboard. The detective ejected the cassette and held it in his bloody hand.

"What the hell did you punch me for?" Hans, on his knees, on the teal carpet, struggling to get the words out.

"I don't know." The doctor scratched his head with a bloody hand.

"Not you, him." Hans stood up and pointed at his dead body on the deep purple carpet. "Why'd you wipe that blood all over your shirt. How are we going to get out of here, now, without being noticed?"

"Both of you can just turn your shirts inside out. It will be fine."

"We should report this to the Committee for United States Security," said Hans.

"No, we go back to our room. Get our shit together, and get out of here," said the Detective.

"To where?" asked the Schrodinger Kid.

"Julia will lead us to the connection."

“Who the fuck are you talking about?"

“Kate, my dead wife. I never told you before that I had a period of drinking, before the alien invasion. That’s when I met Sarah.”

“The game is still playing. Should I stop it?” The exotically patterned carpet is admired.

“I don’t see why.”

“Speaking of games. I was once absolutely obsessed with playing this game, Third Memory, when I was younger.”

“I play it all the time, now!”

“I’ve heard that there’s a new game in 3-bit color.”

“3-bit. Wow. Technology. What is it about?”

“A guy goes crazy in a hotel room with mauve carpet, because his family died in a car accident, and he watches all these different TV shows and projects himself into the different worlds. But he never remembers one to the next. At the climax of the game, a giant wall of TVs melts.”

“Wait, that’s not new, it’s Third Memory.”

“Is it?”