Kendi Mutesi was striking her palm against the inside of Pod 6 in a rhythm that did not match the alarm.
By the time Amina reached the pod bay, the transparent shell had fogged with Kendi's breath. She was awake, but her eyes would not settle on anything in the present. She kept repeating one name—“Mariam… Mariam…”—though no one by that name appeared in the session profile.
Halima, the duty nurse, stood beside a crash kit. “Pulse elevated but stable. No seizure. Cloud exit key has failed four times.”
Kato arrived with a tablet. “Hard stop. Now.”
Amina checked the telemetry. A hard stop would cut sound, vibration, temperature, and orientation cues at once. That was sometimes necessary. For someone already confused about where she was, it could also turn a bad transition into a sensory void.
“Wait.”
“We don't have time to wait.”
Joel opened the original cue stack. “Her session was a coastal walk. Rope bell, sea, counted steps. All from her own consented recording.”
Amina looked to Halima. “Can we try a ninety-second local safe-exit sequence?”
The nurse checked the pulse trace. “If she spikes, I stop it.”
Joel stripped away every layer except Kendi's own rope bell and a voice note she had recorded during beta: *Three steps. Breathe. Turn right.*
Amina opened the pod microphone. “Kendi, this is Amina. You're at LalaLive pod bay. Don't follow Mariam. Follow the bell you recorded yourself.”
The bell sounded.
Kendi stopped striking the shell.
“Tell me one thing you feel in your body.”
Silence.
The bell sounded again.
“My hands are cold,” Kendi whispered.
“Good,” Halima said. “Continue.”
“Two things you hear.”
“The bell… and someone telling me to go into the kitchen.”
There was no kitchen voice in her original stack.
“Do not follow that voice,” Amina said. “Follow your bell. Tell me a third thing you know about now.”
Kendi shut her eyes. “I'm… in Nairobi.”
Her pulse began to fall.
Joel found a local emergency path in the firmware. It normally remained disabled because the company preferred cloud authorization. It required two signatures.
Kato objected. “That path is not certified for production.”
Amina did not outrank the nurse on clinical safety. “Halima?”
“If it opens gradually and keeps her orientation cues, I prefer it to a hard stop.”
Joel signed as technical witness. Amina signed quality authorization for that pod only, with a five-minute expiry.
The pod reduced vibration first, then heat, then the sound of the sea. The rope bell remained until the shell opened a few centimeters.
Kendi inhaled ordinary room air and began to cry.
Halima and an attendant helped her out. Amina wanted to ask about the kitchen immediately, but she stopped herself. Kendi was a person who had just come through an incident, not a data source waiting to be mined.
After several minutes, Kendi spoke first. “I was in a kitchen.”
Halima asked whether she wanted to continue talking.
“A little.”
“You can stop whenever you want,” Amina said.
“There were cloves. Yellow curtains. I don't have yellow curtains.”
Kato said, “Someone else's memory?”
“Not yet,” Amina cut in. “We do not call it that yet.”
Kendi frowned. “I knew it wasn't mine. But inside the pod it felt as if I was supposed to remember someone called Mariam.”
Amina recorded the words without turning them into a conclusion. “Which pack did you enter?”
“Rain Home. I first tried the portable version at the city festival.”
“LalaLive app?”
“No. A booth. F-19.”
That widened the incident beyond the company's own app.
Halima ended the interview and sent Kendi for a clinical check. Before the stretcher moved, Kendi caught Amina's hand.
“Don't make this a ghost story,” she said. “I was awake. I knew something was wrong. Find out where it came from.”
“We'll keep the record to what we can prove.”
Marwa arrived as the bay was being secured. She read the incident summary and stopped at `LOCAL SAFE-EXIT USED`.
“You opened an emergency path policy had closed.”
“With clinical approval and a technical co-sign.”
“And it worked.”
“Yes.”
Marwa did not praise her. “Suspend the entire beta cohort. No active pods until review.”
Ruth joined by video minutes later and approved a tightly bounded field check at F-19: no device seizures without authority, lawful sample purchase only, and no public naming of affected users.
Joel closed his tablet. “F-19?”
Amina nodded.
The empty pod powered down. Just before the diagnostic screen went black, one final line was preserved:
`EXTERNAL PACK ORIGIN: F-19 / LOCAL CACHE`.
Kendi was safely outside.
Whatever had followed her into the dream had come from outside LalaLive's app.