This was true. He hadn’t been thinking about this quite disturbing hypothetical.
Hypothetical… Ish would still be alive?
“You found Ish,” he said. Minerva nodded, stone-faced. “Dead.”
“Thoroughly,” she said. “Thanks to secrets and effing rules.”
“We don’t know it would’ve made a difference.”
“Oh, good one! That’s brilliant. When were you going to tell us? Or was it supposed to be a last-second surprise? ‘Hey folks, guess what’s showing up in ten goddamn minutes?’”
His head was again sinking into a muddy abyss. Vision blurring. “Two months… orders… not before ETA twelve months.”
Minerva slapped both hands over her face and produced a stifled maniacal laugh. “Two months. Eff me… eff you. Hahaha, ridiculous.”
She struggled to her feet, all strength appearing to have drained from her body. Her boots skidded across gravel as she shuffled outside. John thought he could hear her weeping as she left, but his ears had dipped below the surface. The real world returned to some intangible realm just out of reach. And he didn’t mind so much.
Minnie set her bag on the kitchen counter, slid open the pantry, and browsed the empty shelves for a snack. On to cold storage. Equally vacant, of course. The shelves and coldstore existed here solely as décor. If she cared to take the time plugging in Qin’s food hack, she could slap a full banquet across every counter and gorge herself into a coma. If she was hungry.
She walked into the living room and peered out the panoramic window to the dock and lake. Some kids were standing in a canoe, playing balance. So carefree in their perfect world. Well, it probably helped to be only a vis. The kids were, essentially, animated paintings with zero AI. That would change if she went outside and actually interacted with them.
“Meh,” she said, plopping down on one of her crescent sofas. Across from her, she spotted a bundle of luxurious silver fur. Emilie was curled up between two pillows on the opposite sofa, sleeping as usual.
“Wake up, you,” Minnie said, and lazy lids rolled slowly upward to reveal a pair of lethargic cat eyes. “I’m home!”
Emilie stretched out a leg, splayed the paw and claws, began to purr, and settled back into an even more luxurious slumber.
Minnie threw a pillow at her. “You suck. Where’s Noodle?”
Emilie opened one eye. “Probably destroying something,” she said. “Check the attic. You see I’m trying to nap here, right?”
“I’m up here!” Noodle called from the attic, appearing a second later, orange tail swinging as he dangled by a single paw. He let go, dropping to the hall floor, and skittered into the living room. He hopped into Minnie’s lap, curling and twisting, his incredibly soft fur caressing her hands. “Where’ve you been? It’s been weeks!”
He arched his back, white belly on full display for an overdue rub n’ scratch. Minnie smiled and obliged.
Noodle raised his head and gazed at Minnie, remorseful. “We thought maybe… like maybe you were punishing us.”
“We?” Emilie sneered.
“No, no.” Minnie cradled his head in both hands and scratched his cheeks with her thumbs. “Nothing like that—I’d never. Just some bad days at work. You missed me?”
“To put it mildly,” Noodle said as Minnie etched circles into his tummy fur. “Ferrets are highly social creatures. This girl,” he nodded to Emilie, “can’t be bothered. I wanted to play chess.”
“Takes too long,” Emilie said without opening her eyes. “And you’re terrible at it. I don’t even have to cheat.”
Minnie smiled and turned on the tube. The media options appeared in the air between the sofas. “What do you guys want to watch?”
Emilie ignored her.
“Whatever you want,” Noodle said as he spun around on her lap, tail whipping across her arm.
Minnie let the tube pick. A semi-recent series played from her archive. All presumably famous actors she’d never seen or heard of.
Noodle cleared his throat like a person. “I know you can watch and scratch at the same time.”
Minnie loved her pets. Maybe she’d adopt a few more. But why? To fill the emptiness? Why not get a mate like others? A kid or two? Even Aether had a husband and daughter in her game. Oliver and Trista. Minnie had never met them—never wanted to. Whatever Aether had gotten from them were clearly things Minnie couldn’t provide. Plus, they’d been around long before Minnie had come into the picture. Maybe even before John?
John.
She’d come here to escape from him, and yet here he was. What to think of this return module situation? If they could make it across this continent, build a boat, get to Threck Country, and make it another year, they could actually go home. They’d sleep the whole way, so the time would pass like nothing. Probably dock in Earth orbit, deal with some company folks—debriefs and whatnot, take a shuttle down to the surface. See her dad again. He’d be, what, a spry young 85? She’d probably travel the world, give speeches, plant roots somewhere, and be a professor. The idea of going back wasn’t entirely unappealing, but she’d spent so long disassociating from Earth, knowing she’d never go back, knowing that the game would forever be her sole experience of her former home. The game, and actual human interaction. Her friends.
Oh, how she hoped they didn’t suffer. Hoped they weren’t scared. Hoped that Aether, as she drifted into the black, didn’t only try to be a mom to Qin. She better not have waited for the painful, suffocating, dehydrated end. They would’ve had ample meds and access to the air mixture so as to avoid inevitable agony.
Meds.
John again.
Had he tried to kill himself, or had it been an accident? He was too stubborn, too sure of himself for suicide. Then again, being disabled, no longer able to take care of himself—what did that sort of thing do to a proud, bigheaded personality like his?
Minnie looked down at Noodle, writhing in delight as she absentmindedly pet him from neck to belly. “I gotta go, guys.”
Noodle was outraged. “What? No!”
“I was just about to go over there,” Emilie said, stretching her back. “I don’t mind if you pet me now. If you want.”
Minnie grinned. “I love you two. I’ll be back.”
She closed the game and opened her eyes. The inside of Ish’s EV was still illuminated from the two portholes above. She’d been gone less than 30 minutes. A thermag glance through the wall revealed a still-idle John in the cave. His temp appeared normal, heart rate fine. He wouldn’t be truly lucid for a few hours. In the meantime…
Minnie plucked Ish’s fone from her pocket. A quick thrice-over with a few wetwipes. She held the device up before her, facing the optics toward her, “eye to eye.” Ish’s familiar pale yellow-brown iris, or rather, a reproduction of it. Up close, one could detect a fone’s lack of ridges and canyons, the replica iris and surrounding white sclera were merely a convex disc bonded to the inner casing. The optics orifice contained several lens layers behind a tinted concealer, without which someone could see inside. Minnie preferred to think of the data within the device before her, not the bio organ it resembled, the person it represented, the body from which it’d been extracted.
She set the fone on a console, reached into the medkit at her feet, pulling out the extractor—a simple, silicoated tool that looked like a warped eyelash curler—and turned to face her reflection in a shiny black display.
She opened her fone’s manual command interface. One of a few functions that had to be manually sight-typed for safety and security.