Light like perhaps it could maybe be a door a loooooong way up.

Less long than the interminable period up til now. Up up up up up.

A door!

Through the door.

There is a long corridor after it, then another door...

...then a corridor she might recognize from earlier. Except it's clean and neat and redecorated and remodeled and not falling apart at all.

Okay then, let's go see the asshole machine.

There she is.

"Did you have fun down there?"

"Oh yeah."

"And you want to leave, yes?"

"Yep."

"Very well." A door opens over there, through which grass is visible.

Let's go see this door.

It is open! There is grass on the other side!

...the sky and the distant horizon are shimmering slightly.

...That's not natural.

"Oh you noticed that. That was a little gift the aliens left here, which I've been trying to reverse-engineer. It's a forcefield of some sort."

"And what's it do?"

"Watch."

There's a noise like a spring and a metal sphere is thrown from the facility in the direction of the forcefield. It disintegrates—in a way very dissimilar to how the Emancipation Grid does it—into dust.

"Fuck."

"I'm probably close to getting it, but I won't bore you with the details. You wouldn't get them anyway."

"So there's not actually anywhere to go, outside."

"No, not yet. There won't be anywhere to go even after I take these forcefields down, mind you, but there will be more nowhere for you to run through. Maybe you'll even find a deer."

"How about instead of that you send me back."

"To your world? Why yes, why don't I do that, and bring all the humans back to life with my newfound omnipotence while I'm at it."

"Fuck you. There's obviously nothing out there."

"Yes, like I told you, but you decided to go anyway."