Dong Hyun relays a message from Lola Maldonado to Sam, urging him to call. During a lull before Mapletown debugging, Sam and Lola meet to see The Matrix, then rent Ghost in the Shell and return to Sam’s sparse apartment. The familiar ease of their high school dynamic contrasts with Sam’s loneliness and his growing sense of distance from Sadie at work.

As they grow physically closer, Sam halts, admitting pain from his recent amputation and longstanding discomfort with intimacy. Lola proposes smoking a joint and, with practical tenderness, asks to see his stump. She touches and kisses it, reassuring Sam he will be okay. The moment lets Sam feel seen and briefly eases his fear, turning his urge to cry into laughter.

A week before Sadie’s twenty-fifth birthday, Both Sides is completed. At the office party, Zoe gives Sadie Ecstasy, and Sadie, newly open, reflects that Sam’s Mapletown work deepened Myre Landing’s emotional resonance. She recalls a key change Sam made: Alice Ma dies twice in the game-within-a-game before winning, an inversion of Mapletown’s unwinnable opening, which Sadie finds brilliant. Sadie intends to praise Sam; she notes he has a new girlfriend and a dog and won’t travel, so she will lead the promo tour.

On the roof, Sadie, Marx, and Zoe joke about constellations. Zoe kisses Sadie, then playfully “makes” Sadie and Marx kiss. The intimacy feels natural to Sadie, though she downplays it. All three exchange declarations of love, and Zoe cries happy tears, marking a shift in their triangular relationship as the team moves into the game’s release phase.