CD Chapter Twenty-five (Patreon)

As soon as the headset switched from displaying the game to displaying the interior of the VR pod, Ava saw that the blue fluid was already draining away. By the time she sat up and pushed at the lid, the sling-bed had risen to support her, and she and the pod’s interior were only slightly damp.

The hatch opened, and she grabbed the lip of the opening to pull herself out. Her right hand sent a spike of pain down her arm, and she swore as she fumbled, just managing to catch herself with the left before she was awkwardly dumped back into the pod.

“Sorry,” Amythyst said, in her normal, feminine voice. “The regular pods have a grippy surface there, but this is one of the medical pods, and you’re supposed to have help getting out.”

“And a grippy surface would cause problems for a nurse how, exactly?” Ava grumbled, swinging her leg out cautiously. She found that the floor was, indeed, slightly grippy, and when she looked down, she could faintly see the texture warping the image of the tiles of the ‘laboratory’ floor.

“It wouldn’t, but it’s not as aesthetically pleasing, and costs a bit more to manufacture. Believe me, these things are already stupidly expensive.” When Ava looked up, Amythyst’s hand was half-extended, as though she was going to help, even though she had no physical body. When she saw Ava notice, Amythyst looked down at her own hand as if surprised, and withdrew it.

The entrance to the room opened, and B.T. trundled in, its little treads whirring as it rolled across the floor. When it reached Ava’s side, the tracks folded, changing from a flat line to a triangle, raising the top of the robot into the air. A green hand-shaped outline glowed on top of its ‘head’ invitingly, and Ava gingerly set her good hand on it. The robot chirped happily, and rolled slowly toward the area where the shower had once again opened in both floor and ceiling.

Once Ava was safely positioned in the middle of the blue circles, standing on two softly glowing green feet which turned out to be exactly her size, water cascaded from above in a deluge that rinsed away the residual goo and left Ava gasping.

As the flow cut off as abruptly as it had started, Amythyst coughed. “I, uh, should have warned you about that, right? My bad.”

B.T. gave a sad trill, then reached into a compartment that had been hidden in its chest to pull out a fluffy towel. When Ava accepted it, she found that it was already warm. Patting her face dry, she peered out at Amythyst, who was watching the process with apparent fascination.

Ava looked down at herself, realized that the wet bodysuit left very little to the imagination, and wrapped the towel around her body, sauna style. “I’m going to the bathroom,” she said abruptly. “What do I do with this thing when I take it off?”

Amythyst pointed to an image that appeared beside her. “There are suit receptacles in here, in the bathroom, and in the bedrooms. Just say you need to put away your suit, and the closest one will pop out. There’ll be a fresh one in the pod itself every time, but you can also ask for one in the other rooms, and put it on there if you’re more comfortable.”

Ava glowered at the AI. “And why didn’t you mention that before? It’s weird changing in this,” she gestured around, “lab place.”

Amythyst blinked. “Did you like the nest better?” The room shifted back to the colossal nest, though the open pod door destroyed the illusion that it was an egg.

“No,” Ava said, slowly, “I prefer changing someplace that doesn’t feel like someone else could walk in at any second.”

Amythyst cleared her throat. “Oh. Um,” she hesitated. “How about this?”

The room swirled, and when it stabilized again, it felt half the size it had been. The off-white painted walls had signs of wear, and the wooden baseboard was dinged and scraped in a few places. There was no furniture in the room except the pod, but otherwise it looked like a spare bedroom that might be found in any middle-class home in America. A small window looked out over a fenced yard, where a brown dog lounged on a patch of sun-warmed grass.

“Where is this?” Ava asked, walking over to the window.

Amythyst joined her, looking down at the dog as he rolled over, waving his paws in the air as he wriggled, scratching his back on the ground. “That’s Max. He belongs to… some friends of mine. I was their house, very briefly, and I still keep an eye on their place. I watch Bridge sometimes, too, but not nearly as much since she-” She broke off, eyeing Ava sidelong.

“Married your brother? Yeah, I remember.” It was Ava’s turn to offer a small grin, though hers was more mocking than cheerful. “So, if I did an internet search, would I find out who Amy Landon’s brother just married, and who, exactly, ‘Bridge’ is? Since you obviously don’t want to tell me.”

Amythyst sighed, and the room turned into an open, modern space complete with smart-glass tables and a sleek, royal blue couch with two pillows on one end; one black velvet square, and one a slightly smaller golden satin circle that perfectly complemented the first. “This is Bridge’s house. Bridget Anderson, the genius behind full-immersion VR. My - Amy’s - best friend, and Harkness Landon’s new wife.”

Ava’s mouth dropped open. She had fully expected that ‘Bridge’ was a player handle. But no, it was an affectionate nickname for one of the wealthiest and most influential women in the tech world. She was fairly reclusive, but even Ava knew her name, especially since she’d been all over the news several months ago, after a player broke into Veritas Corp headquarters and tried to kill her. Why, exactly, the guy had gone off the rails, no one knew, and speculation had run wild, as had paparazzi photos of the young genius. It helped, of course, that she was pretty and delicate-looking, and public sympathy was high.

“Bridget Anderson is your bestie? The one you’re trying to avoid, while you gallivant around breaking laws and coercing a complete stranger into going undercover? Why not just take all of your information to her and let her use her money and influence to crack Carl Landon’s house like a nut?” Ava stared at Amythyst in complete shock.

Amythyst took a step back, arms folding over her chest defensively. “I tried. Well, I hinted, anyway. She shut me down.” A wry smile touched her mouth. “Not literally, obviously, though she could, but she told me that Amy was dead. Period. I think I freaked her out, because-” The AI stopped, chewing her lip indecisively.

“Because?” Ava prompted.

“Look,” Amythyst said, arms dropping to her sides as she spun away abruptly, walking around to the wall furthest from Ava. “Amy and Bridge were working on a project to… to copy people. Right? They recorded the brain patterns of hundreds of people doing thousands of things, and looking at tens of thousands of images. It started as a way to make NPCs in the game more realistic, though Amy’s goal was to create therapists and support programs that would function as well as real people, but be able to be with their patient twenty-four seven.”

She started pacing. “When they thought they were ready, they ‘copied’ the people they’d scanned the most; themselves. They placed the copies in sandboxes that were completely sealed off from any other system, and they found that two things happened.”

Amythyst stopped, looked at Ava, and held up two fingers. She waggled one. “First, they went insane. They couldn’t handle the flow of data, no matter how limited it was. And they couldn’t accept that they weren’t ‘real’, even though they were copies of the very people who’d decided to make the copies. Second, they killed themselves. They took hold of their own code, and tore it apart. When we denied them access to the code, hoping they would adjust, they just… turned themselves off. It was like watching a human go catatonic, and no matter what we did, they wouldn’t respond.”

She sighed, shoulders slumping. “So we gave up. If our own copies, who knew what was going on, couldn’t handle it, there was no way it would go well if we copied someone else. I - Amy - moved on to other projects, but Bridge used what we’d learned as the basis for her Coma Protocol. When she showed it to me,” she shook her head, “I was amazed. She’d patched together ‘new’ people out of the memories and scans we’d recorded, and then she put the conscious part of a player to sleep, letting them experience a different life as if they were dreaming they were the NPC. When the player woke, the NPC returned to their original state; just another complex but unaware program.”

Amythyst chuckled warmly, “In all but one case, anyway. We’re still waiting to see how that will turn out, but we have hopes that it-” She stopped and shook her head. “He will be all right, even if he does achieve true sapience, and realize what he is. Because he’s not a copy of anyone else. He is, simply, himself, just like any other person out there.”

Ava took a step toward the wall where the AI had stopped her pacing. “Then what about you? Why are you here, and, as far as I can tell, sane?”

Amythyst’s green gaze caught Ava’s. “Because Amy was dead,” she said, simply. “Bridge made sure that I came to awareness very slowly, and didn’t trap me in a closed system the way we had all the other versions. It could have gone horribly awry. As you’ve seen, I’m powerful enough that I could have taken down Veritas Online with me, at least. But she was desperate, in mourning, and we’d promised that this was what we’d do, if anything happened to one of us. And it was still a close thing.”

Ava felt a chill roll down her back at the dark expression on Amythyst’s face, but the AI went on before she could think of what to say. “When I split off from the program she’d hidden me in, that program thought I was a virus. It very nearly deleted me before I managed to hide in Zoey and Marcus’s house.” The room around them turned back into the spare bedroom with a view of the dog, who was now chasing a squirrel through the too-tall grass, barking madly.

“Bridge’s house system was too locked down to escape into. I was still just pieces of myself, and none of those pieces remembered how to get through her firewalls and encryption. So my, Amythyst’s, first coherent memories are of this place. A place Amy Landon had never been. I could differentiate me from the memories that were flooding in, all seeming just as real and new as what I was currently experiencing. Then, I found out Amy was dead, and Bridge needed me.”

Ava nodded. This made sense, from everything she’d seen of Amythyst. While the AI was a prankster, and a bit of a tease, she was also a caretaker. She was warm, thoughtful, and a fiercely protective friend. She would have held herself together in order to support someone she loved, no matter how torn up she was inside. Much like Ava herself had done for Molly.

Amythyst’s expression gentled into melancholy. “And here we are. Bridge has Hank now, but she still can’t let me go. When she realized I thought Amy was alive, she was terrified that it meant I was cracking up, too. Corrupting my program, I guess. So I just stopped trying to talk to her about it. She was getting ready for her wedding. I wasn’t going to bring her down, or remind her again that she didn’t have a Maid of Honor because her best friend was gone.”

Ava nodded slowly. “What about this Zoey or Marcus, then? Why not have one of them infiltrate Carl Landon’s house and check to see if your theory is right?”

Amythyst laughed. “They live too far away, for one. They’re smack-dab in the middle of the country, and they can’t just travel almost two thousand miles and put their lives on hold for as much as a year. Plus, Marcus is an adult, but Zoey is fourteen.” She shook her head. “Nope, fifteen, now. Still, a kid. Though I have no doubt she could and would do it if Carl or someone else in his household wouldn’t recognize her.” The AI grinned fondly, the shadows finally vanishing from her eyes.

“And no one else knows about you?” Ava asked, shocked. How was functional artificial intelligence still a secret? More importantly, how was someone as outgoing and extroverted as Amythyst surviving with so few friends?

Amythyst shrugged. “One. Bridge’s mom, who was practically Amy’s mom, too. But she has her own things to deal with.” She offered a saucy wink. “Going off on a long vacation with her boyfriend, for one. But while she could sic her lawyers on Carl, I have a feeling he’d just leave the country altogether before they could stop him, and then he’d not only be out of their reach, but possibly out of mine, as well. I can access a lot of systems in other countries, but I can’t influence the people associated with those systems as easily, and I need physical bodies, at least if I want to get Amy’s physical body out of there.”

“Which brings you to me,” Ava finished.

“Which brings me to you,” Amythyst agreed. “I told you no more secrets, and I meant it. What other questions do you have?”

Ava grimaced, switching her weight from one foot to the other. “Just one, for now. Can B.T. help me get out of this suit? I really need to go to the bathroom.”