CA Chapter Twenty-nine (Patreon)

“Amy came up with the cube farm idea not long after they started development of Veritas,” Myles explained as they walked back toward the camp. “She heard someone call the cubicles on the second floor a ‘cube farm’, and she thought it would be hilarious to make a farm literally populated by cubes.” He rolled his eyes. “Bridge said it wasn’t realistic and didn’t fit with the ‘theme of the game’, but she always takes things too seriously.”

“So you decided to do it yourself, now that you can.” Alpha said, pushing aside a bush to reveal a relieved-looking Toggle, the tent, and three plates of gently steaming eggs laid out on one of the blankets the gnome used for his bed.

“Yep,” Myles said cheerfully, though his eyes were locked on Amy as she followed Alpha. The moment her foot crossed some invisible boundary that defined the campsite, she stopped, and would have collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut if Myles hadn’t been there to catch her.

Turning, Alpha hurried back to them. “Is she all right?”

Myles cradled Amy’s body against his chest and said, “I don’t know.”

He sounded frustrated, and he looked around, his eyes landing on the bed Alpha had made for Amy. Alpha felt heat rise in her cheeks as she realized that she’d forgotten to tell the woman to go to bed the night before, which meant Amy had been left, sitting alone in the darkness for who knows how long, until she’d become aware enough to run away. No wonder she’d fled.

Crossing to the pile of furs, Myles knelt down and gently laid Amy in them. Then he picked up her hand and said, “Amy?”

Alpha felt a lump rise in her throat. Had he ever looked at her like that? Said her name with such concern? And if he hadn’t, was that because he didn’t feel those things for her, or because she was so busy pushing him away that he never had the chance?

Shaking off the pinch of what she refused to acknowledge as jealousy, Alpha walked over and sat cross-legged in the grass across from Myles. Leaning forward, she looked down into Amy’s face, which was as flat and closed as ever.

Frowning, she looked closer. Had she ever thought Amy’s face was closed before, though? Emotionless, yes. Blank, certainly. But closed implied some intentional separation, and there was a tension, a presence in the way Amy’s lips pinched at the corners, and her eyelids remained stubbornly closed.

“Amy?” she ventured. “We’d like to talk to you, if you can understand us. You must have a thousand questions, and we’ll answer them all. But you have to open your eyes, first.”

Toggle came up behind her, clutching his pointed hat in nervous fingers. “Mistress? I made eggs for Miss Amy, as well. If she’s hungry?”

Amy’s green eyes popped open, and she looked straight at Toggle. “Eggs?” she asked.

(===||:::::::::::::::>

Amy still had a tendency to drift away, her eyes going unfocused, and her stumbling words stopping mid-phrase. Still, as she slowly managed to pick up and eat the dozen or so small eggs Toggle had prepared for them, they told her the story of everything that had happened since she was hit by a car well over a year before.

Well, almost everything. Myles did most of the talking, and Alpha noticed that he skimmed over the part where Carl Landon declared his daughter dead when she wasn’t. He also completely left out the fact that Amy’s former fiance was now engaged to someone else, but, honestly, that wasn’t necessary information at the moment. He also didn’t mention that he, himself, was a digital version of Amy created by Bridget after Amy died.

“What… do?” Amy asked as she gave up on the last egg on her plate. Her left hand was all but useless, and her right was awkward at best, and seemed to tire easily. Myles had tried to help feed her, but she’d glared at him so fiercely he’d given up.

Alpha and Myles exchanged a glance. “What are we going to do now?” Alpha asked.

Amy nodded, though Alpha noticed that her eyes were beginning to look hazy again.

Alpha hesitated, waiting for Myles to answer, but while he’d taken the lead on filling in the time Amy had missed, he seemed reluctant to talk about what came next. “I guess… we get you out.” She sighed, shaking her head. “Your Uncle George is coming, and once he sees that you’re alive, he’ll be able to bring legal forces to bear far beyond anything we can manage. I mean, we originally intended to just,” she shrugged, avoiding looking at Myles, “sneak you out, somehow, but now that I’ve seen the security in Landon House, I don’t really think that’s a viable solution.”

Amy leaned - well, tilted, really - forward. “Need… talk to… Dad,” she insisted. Some of the impact of her statement was lost when she tipped too far and Myles and Alpha both had to reach out to catch her. She flinched away from Myles, which nearly landed her in Alpha’s lap. Myles sank back, hands twisting in his lap the way Amythyst twisted her skirt when she was upset.

Alpha bit her lip, glancing between them. “I don’t know if we can arrange that.”

Myles spoke up, voice oddly distant. “The moment Veralt realizes you’re regaining consciousness, he increases the dose of the meds he’s giving you. He says it’s because you’re irrational, and a danger to yourself, but I’m sure it’s to keep Carl from realizing just how much you’ve recovered. That’s bad enough, but I’ve narrowed down the possible drugs he could have you on, and, if I’m right, too high a dose will permanently cause the damage he’s been pretending has already happened. I think the only thing stopping him from doing it now is that as long as you show ‘progress’, Carl keeps funding Veralt’s research. If Veralt truly destroys your higher consciousness, he won’t be able to produce results, and Carl may give up and settle for just keeping you comfortable.”

Alpha turned a horrified look on him, but Amy was nodding jerkily. “He’s… so… so… so-sho-path. Will…do-”

“Anything if it’s in his own best interest. I know. You realized that when you worked with him at Veritas.” Myles said.

Amy closed her eyes and drew in a long breath. When she opened them, her eyes were as clear and focused as Alpha had seen them. She looked straight at Myles and asked,” Are you… me?”

Silently, Myles nodded.

Amy closed her eyes again, and tears formed along the edge of her lashes. “Bridge,” she murmured, face twisted with sorrow and something else. Anger? Frustration? “Tol’ her… no,” she managed, forcing open her eyes and swiping awkwardly at her cheek with her curled right hand. “Sure.”

Myles nodded slowly. “You did. I remember. You told her that after everything that happened with… the experiments,” by which he meant that every time Bridget had attempted to create a virtual copy of a human being, the copy had gone insane or destroyed itself, “you didn’t want it to happen again. You let her make updates, but only so she could track any changes, because you two were the only participants in your very own longitudinal study. But you told her no.”

Alpha looked at him, frowning. “You told me you agreed to it!”

He glanced at her, then away. “I didn’t want you to think badly of Bridget. I - Amy - did originally agree, and Bridge did what she did out of love. Maybe it was a mistake, but it was done for the right reasons. And it worked.” He held out his hands. “She applied that brilliant brain to the problem, and she finally figured it out, and here I am.” He tried for his usual insouciant grin, but it was more than a little frayed around the edges.

Amy looked from Myles to Alpha. “Not… crazy?”

Alpha wished she could respond with a quip, but knew this was the wrong moment for flippancy. “No.” She looked over and met Myles’ eyes, which were uncertain and vulnerable. “He’s not crazy at all.” Unable to resist, she added. “Though he does sometimes make me crazy.”

Amy and Myles laughed, the sound eerily similar in all but pitch.

Looking at Myles again, Amy said, “How?”

Myles chuckled. “I’ll let Bridge tell you when you see her. You know how she loves to brag when she makes a breakthrough.”

“Humble… brag,” Amy said, smiling affectionately.

“So much,” Myles agreed. “The important thing is that she did, and once I… came online, I discovered that I can see data and connections that even Bridget can’t. I have to keep it toned down, or it’s overwhelming, but I still kept finding these dangling bits when it came to you. The coroner who signed your death certificate suddenly sold the memoir he’d been pitching for years for a lot of money and retired. The doctor who had been treating you? Same kind of thing, except he moved to a beautiful villa in Spain he ‘inherited’ from a great-uncle who never existed.”

He hesitated, glancing at Amy as if to see how she was dealing with this, before he went on. “You always said you didn’t want to be cremated. You hated seeing your mom’s ashes on the mantle like some kind of macabre flower vase. But Carl had you cremated within twenty-four hours of your death. Except that even though he produced your ashes, and the crematorium’s records showed they did the work, the person who signed your papers also processed the same number of other bodies he usually did. Nothing was definitive, but it all added up to suggest something was being covered up.”

Myles shook his head. “I told you what happened with Carl and Bridget’s little game. How it got out of hand, and Carl had to step down as CEO of Veritas Corp. The thing is, he didn’t even fight it. If anything, he seemed relieved. Bridget and Hank thought it was because he felt guilty, and he was just glad that Hank had finally decided he was willing to take over. But then Carl moved.”

Amy nodded slightly. Either she was getting more control of her body, or Amythyst was figuring out how to adjust for her lack of control, because the motion was barely jerky at all. “Hates… travel,” Amy said.

“Right,” Myles agreed. “I swear, if he could hunker down in his private compound for the rest of his life, he would. But all of a sudden, he decided to move about as far away as he could without leaving the country. And once he got there, he quietly hired a whole contingent of medical personnel and locked them down with ironclad NDAs. Nothing indicated he was sick, so who were all of these people going to take care of?”

“You thought… I was… alive,” Amy summed up.

“And I was right,” Myles said, grinning. “And if Veralt wasn’t using you for his own personal gain, we’d be able to get you out, no matter what Alpha thinks.” He lifted an eyebrow at Alpha, who shook her head.

“Even if she could walk, there’s no way we could get out past a hundred security guards,” she argued.

“You’d be surprised how much people panic when fire alarms go off and smoke starts filling the halls,” Myles said. “Add some malfunctioning sprinklers and a sudden infestation of rats, and we could definitely create enough of a distraction to get her out.” He looked back at Amy. “But as soon as we leave immersion, Veralt and his newest cronies are just going to dope you up again, and I can’t do anything about it, since it’s out there.” He waved his hand to indicate the real world.

Alpha nodded. “I was hired to be your caretaker in the game and real life, but Veralt hasn’t left you alone with me for a second except in here, and there are guards watching ‘us’ all the time.” Myles had told Amy that Aspen was currently pretending to be Ava, watching over Amy’s empty Zombie, so she nodded in understanding.

“Which means as soon as you log out, you’ll be incapacitated again,” Myles said, grimly.

“What… do?” Amy asked again, insistently.

Ava sighed. “Either we have to figure out how to get you out while you’re unconscious, or someone else is going to have to force Carl to give you up.”

“Unc… George,” Amy said.

Myles nodded. “Uncle George.”