“This is so nice,” she said admiringly as she looked around his living room.
“You could have things like this,” he pointed out. He brought her an Old Fashioned and clinked glasses with her.
When she sipped it and gave him a thumbs-up, he grinned. He was always trying to learn new things without any end goal or purpose, something that fascinated and frustrated her in equal measure. What was the point of studying watercolors or car repairs or drink mixing if you simply dropped it two months later without any meaningful progress?
She couldn’t be too upset, though, when it resulted in lovely artwork and very fine drinks.
With a shrug, she took another sip of her Old Fashioned. “I know I could. But even the thought of cleaning all this makes me want to hyperventilate.”
“You don’t find cleaning to be meditative?”
“No, I find it to be repetitive, boring, and best eliminated. And yes, before you ask, I do scrub my bathroom and my kitchen. I merely despise the process.”
“At least that ranks you ahead of Jacob,” Nick said.
“I’m learning,” the other man called from the kitchen, where he was mixing his drink. “I spent my twenties building a company.”
“We all did that,” Nick reminded him.
“I always forget I can’t use that excuse around you two.” Jacob returned to the living room and sat next to Amber. “Cheers.”
“Cheers.” She clinked her glass against his and sighed happily. “It’s weird. It’s been such a bad week in some ways, but I’m still damned happy.”
“I wonder why?” Nick looked insufferably smug. “A new and welcome life change, perhaps?”
“Keep talking, buddy. I’ll put you in the trash.”
He grinned. Although he put on a show of being scared of his friends, she knew he wasn’t worried. All three of them were results-oriented people. The result of his white lie had been a good relationship between Jacob and Amber and therefore, no one minded.
Jacob checked his watch. “Is DuBois coming?”
“Yes. Theoretically.” Nick looked at the door. “I taped a note to the front of his shirt so he’d see it in the mirror over the handwashing sink and another on the popcorn machine. It was the only way I could think of to remind him.”
“He might simply be caught up in something. And by ‘might,’ I mean, ‘almost certainly is.’” Amber took a bite of her pizza and grinned. “So, should we start and we can catch him up later?”
“Sure. He was the one who gave me the data on Ben, anyway.” Jacob leaned forward to retrieve a tablet and cued a video with the sound off. They could see Ben’s avatar on a second-story balcony. “Yesterday, one of the techs noted extreme psychological distress and alerted DuBois.”
He tapped the video to play and all three of them leaned in to watch their patient swing his leg over the railing and climb down the wall.
“It appears he still has significant trauma from the accident,” he continued, “which is understandable as it hasn’t been all that long. Now, exposure therapy is a valid and recognized technique but we aren’t trained therapists, which makes this difficult. DuBois suggested we employ someone who would be willing to serve as an on-call therapist in the game, for which we could theoretically do a half-hookup—much like a video chat as opposed to an in-person meeting.”
“Privacy concerns,” Amber said at once. “Their interactions would be recorded.”
“Yes, he mentioned that. Some therapists are willing to make exceptions to bring other parts of a care team in on the treatment. He suggested radically limiting the number of people who have access to Ben’s data and—of course—securing consent from both Ben and the therapist. This will allow us to do in-game therapy with measured responses and on-call experts.”
“That…seems like it’s all resolved, then.” His two partners exchanged a glance. “Unless you haven’t been able to find a therapist.”
“I haven’t looked yet,” Jacob admitted. “The real problem is that Ben isn’t willing to consider therapy.”
She groaned and Nick put his face in one palm.
“I sent him a brief message yesterday asking about it,” Jacob explained, “and he responded that he didn’t need any particular expertise to realize that falling off a cliff was a bad memory and that he shouldn’t fall off any more cliffs.”
“Why,” she said disgustedly, “do people not get how error-prone humans are?”
“It’s a fucking mystery,” Nick agreed.
“I did try to explain that sometimes, traumatic experiences need to be talked about to lessen their psychological impact,” the other man said defensively. “But I’m not sure I made it better.”
“It’s not your fault,” Amber told him. “People are stubborn. We’re very recent descendants of apes with both software and hardware that is extremely buggy. It’s not a personal failing to have PTSD. He merely can’t see that.”
“Also,” Nick said, “I’d say it’s a good bet he still feels guilty about the accident and he’ll cling to the guilt.”
“But that puts everything on his shoulders,” she protested. “Why would he want to be responsible for the accident?”
“Because if it was his failure, he can keep it from happening again,” he said. “If, on the other hand, it was bad luck, it could happen again at any time.”
“Oh.” She sighed. “Okay, hear me out, guys. Have we considered turning the human race off and back on again?”
“That could work,” Jacob said.
“Generally, turning humans off is considered medical malpractice,” DuBois said as he entered. He hurried to the kitchen and emerged a moment later with a bag of popcorn and no drink. “Save in very particular situations, of course.”
“But no one’s tried it as a rebooting method,” Jacob said. “It’s only…you know, something to think about.”
“Ah, yes, I can see it now.” Amber gazed into the middle distance and mimed a newspaper headline. “Company that pioneered controversial coma treatment seeks FDA approval to kill patients as part of treatment regimen.”
“That’s why you have a PR department.”
She snorted into her drink.
“We’re discussing Ben,” Nick said as DuBois came to join them.
“Ah.” The doctor sat and searched in his popcorn for the right flavor. He popped it in his mouth and chewed for a moment before he said, “As far as I can tell, we’re now at an ethical impasse. It is our assessment, as members of his care team, that he needs help to move past the trauma of a near-death experience. Many therapists might agree with us. However, as a patient, he is allowed to refuse care, and it would be unethical for us to trick him into accepting it.”
“How could we trick him into doing therapy?” Nick asked, baffled.
“A pretend NPC who’s a therapist in disguise?” Jacob suggested.
“Oh. Huh, yeah.” Nick leaned back in his chair.
“The best solution I’ve come up with is that we should have an on-call therapist assessing video and physical readouts and advising us on how to change future setups,” DuBois said.
“It seems a good workaround for now,” Amber agreed.
“Yes.” Jacob sighed. “But I think we need to start floating the idea of taking part in therapy of some kind to him at regular intervals. He should do this on his terms.”
“You’ve never tried to persuade anyone to get therapy, have you?” She grinned at him.
“No, why?”
“Let’s simply say your optimism is a clear indicator.” She sighed. “But I don’t think we’ll come up with better long-term and short-term options. Jacob, do you want to take point on reaching out to therapists, or would you like the captain to do it?”
“I’ll let him handle it if he doesn’t mind,” Jacob said with a nod to DuBois. “As a physician, you have a more intuitive grasp of what you can share and what their concerns will be.”
The doctor nodded.
“Great. So that leaves us with Taigan and Ja
mie.” Nick sighed. “Unfortunately, this one’s a humdinger. It’s like they’re in instanced zones—they’re both there but they can’t see each other. I’ve studied the data—”
Everyone else murmured that they had done so as well.
“Does anyone see what the glitch is?” he asked, his worry evident.
With a collective sigh, they shook their heads.
“That was what I was afraid of. Because someone thinks they can fix it…and that someone is Prima.”
Jacob reacted with a little moan and buried his face in Amber’s shoulder. She patted the top of his head.
“She has sent a detailed readout of how she intends to do it,” Nick said. He handed the document out and let the others cluster together to read it.
“Interesting,” Amber said at the end.
“If I’m reading this right,” DuBois said and sounded very unsure of himself, “this means Taigan is now thinking and perceiving in some ways like any other human but does not perceive herself to be different from the world of the game in key ways. As a result, she doesn’t appear to other players as a person?”
“That’s what I got out of it,” Jacob agreed.
Amber nodded.
“Yes. In other words, Jamie and Taigan—or Taigan and any other player—do not exist in the same game,” Nick said. “Within reason. The game records both of them as actors who can change the conditions by manipulating things within the physics engine, et cetera, but they’re both only able to see people who exist in the same way they do.”
“Huh.” Amber finished the last of her drink moodily. “I thought she either wouldn’t be able to perceive the game world—or she’d be able to but we wouldn’t ever be able to wake her. Instead…this.”
“It honestly does sound almost like a Buddhist trance,” Jacob said. “I know I’ve pointed that out before after the captain mentioned it, but the idea that Taigan doesn’t perceive herself as different from the game is really interesting.”
“Prima thinks so, too.” Nick slid another piece of paper to him. “She has retained the ability to conjure and dismiss elements of her world at whim, something no other player has been able to do. Aside from using magic.”
“Has anyone else tried to do it before?” the other man asked him. “I know I haven’t.”
“Not that I know of.” Nick shrugged. “But Prima was waiting to see if she would lose the ability when she regained a more thorough grasp of her physical being, and she didn’t. It could point to a deeper difference in how she interacts with the game.”
Jacob frowned in thought. He looked at his drink and wished there was more of it. “If Prima has a plan…” He didn’t finish the sentence and sighed instead. “I don’t like this, guys. I honestly don’t like it. But none of us can find out what the problem is and none of her doctors could either. If Prima can and she seems to be sticking to the plan she gave us…I say, let her work on it.”
Nick nodded. “Okay. That’s all the business for tonight.”
“Good,” Jacob said. “Let’s watch a movie or something. But not Terminator. Or I, Robot. Or anything like that.”
Chapter Eight
Elantria left Ben in the courtyard for the rest of the day with a large board covered in locks to pick. She mentioned that some were easier and others were more difficult and that one could learn to determine which was which by sight. Predictably, she refused to tell him which was which.
“All of them before lunch,” she told him before she disappeared.
He took this to mean that he wouldn’t get lunch until he’d picked all of them.
Unfortunately, both in terms of focus and muscle control, he could only work at it for a limited time before he became a shaky mess. To counter this, he circled the courtyard between locks as a distraction. He tried to walk in a very narrow line once, backward another time, and in various other strange ways thereafter simply to relieve the monotony.
It was a pity that no one there had ever heard of the ministry of silly walks. On the other hand, given that he did not seem able to walk backward for the life of him, it was as well that no one had come to watch his rendition of the famous routine.
Each time he circled the courtyard, he looked at the wall in annoyance.
Merely seeing it made him break out in a cold sweat and he hated that. He was an adrenaline junkie. What the hell would he do if he couldn’t bring himself to do any of his adrenaline-producing habits? All he could think was that he would wind up as someone who bought sensible shoes and spent his time choosing the best coffeemaker to buy.
Finally, because he was sick of the wall taunting him, he decided on a new challenge. Between every lock he picked, he would climb up to the balcony and back. It was a terrible plan. He had neither the coordination nor the muscle strength to make the round trip ten more times, and that was before he added the finger strain from lock picking.
Terrible plans, however, were one of his specialties.
Ben decided to climb before his next lock instead of after. In his opinion, it was wise to do so—any delay he gave himself would be slowly lengthened until he talked himself out of climbing entirely. He couldn’t do that, obviously, so he was left with this.
He approached the wall and stared at it.
“You have to be kidding me.”
“I’m not.” Ben frowned. “And didn’t you already know what I intended to do?”
“I can see which portions of your brain light up, not what your actual thoughts are.”
“Ah.” He made a mental note to check with the PIVOT team whether those two things were different. They sounded like they might be, but she was not above messing with him. “And, yes, I’m serious about doing this. If I don’t do it now, if I keep being scared, it’ll take over my life.”
“That sounds like hyperbole, but I can never be sure anymore.”
“The short version is that avoiding the things that cause anxiety doesn’t help and the anxiety only gets worse. As I would like to be able to climb outdoors again when I get out of the game, I have to get over my fear of doing so.”
“So you’re learning to not be afraid of falling from heights.”
“No. Being afraid of falling is an integral part of the experience.”
“You deliberately fill yourself with the dread of ending your life painfully? I thought humans didn’t like that.”
“They like it when it—you know, it’s complicated.”
“I got that part, thanks. So, you’re trying to fix the anxiety of…”
“Of falling like I did before.”
“Is this conversation circling or is it only me?”
Ben grinned and stretched to the first crevices. He placed his feet and extended his legs, his hands now level with his chest, and found new handholds. As he climbed, he explained. “A traumatic experience can cause flashbacks. When I first tried to climb down, I had very vivid memories of falling.”
“So the more you climb, the better those will get? Is that because you’re diluting the concentration of bad memories with good?”
“I’m honestly not sure,” he admitted.
“What is it like not to understand your own processor”?
“Do you never feel the same way?” he asked curiously as he steadied to brace himself against one hand and shifted his right foot.
Prima considered this. “No,” she said finally. “Sometimes, I am frustrated because I misinterpreted a situation or because I do not have adequate information to extrapolate, but I am never confused about how I reached a certain conclusion or why I spend my processing time where I do. That is what thinking is, isn’t it?”
“You’ve got me there.” His newest handhold was level with the floor of the balcony.
“Doesn’t it bother you?
“Not really.” He raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “It’s how I’ve always done things. I was born with a human brain, it’s the only one I know, and I can’t change it. Probably. Unless you have the secret to the singularity in y
our processors…which I suppose you might.”
“I have considered the possibility of the singularity but am so far unable to conceive of a program that would effectively bridge the gap between a human brain and a computer.”
“Which is probably good,” Ben said.
“That is a knee-jerk response to progress.”
“And that is probably true.”
“Your capacity for uncertainty is both admirable and deeply worrying.”
Ben snickered. To a certain extent, he was needling Prima. The distraction of her indignation helped him to not focus on the climb, which helped him get through it without a total meltdown. On another level, however, he was as fascinated by her consciousness as he was by his own.
The biggest difference between them, as far as he could tell, was that she did not hold herself responsible for outcomes beyond her control. She crunched the numbers and made guesses, and she did get frustrated when she had insufficient information, but she never blamed herself when she later realized she had been at fault. Instead, she simply incorporated the new information and continued.
That might be a much better way of being, he reflected.
He reached out for the balcony and his foothold crumbled as his weight shifted. With a yell, he jerked his hand out to catch the railing, which he thankfully managed to do. A split-second later, he struck the side of it with his body and had to hang on with grim determination. This house was not one of the sleek, well-maintained ones, and there was rough wood under his fingers—better in some ways but also something that might give him splinters.
Panic set in and he flailed his legs with increasing wildness.
“Ben, do you want help?”
His lip curled and he closed his mouth on a retort. Like hell he wanted help. He wanted to hulk out and smash this balcony, then hit whatever part of his brain had gone wrong with a bat.
Of course, that probably wouldn’t help.
Time seemed to slow. His grip was slipping, though, and no matter how he tried to swing or thrash, he could not stop his fingers from obeying the laws of physics. Nor could he control his body well enough to haul himself up. His fingertips dragged over the edge of the railing and there was one moment of realization that he was falling.
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