“Of course,” said Dr. March. He was still looking at Benjamina.
“Let me know when,” she said, and that was the last thing anyone needed from her.
She drove home with shaking hands, for no good reason—Marie was a test user, they used to have test users at fucking conventions. She’d liked that better; there were plenty of ways to test what players would believe without lying to them at the beginning. Management wanted to test if the environment could fool the mind, but no one had asked Benjamina. None of this had been her idea. Nothing was her fault.
The night was barely cloudy, and she drove past her turnoff and out until there was nothing but the highway on either side, so when she set up the telescope, she could see a glimpse of Proxima Centauri through the haze of light pollution. It blinked back and forth in the lens, and it was so dim. Light from there would never quite suffice.
No one had said anything to the development team—no one ever did unless something was wrong—but she suspected this game was more than a Virtual Experience market maker. There were private companies prepping long-haul spacecraft with stasis technology; they’d want to train their people in the most realistic conditions possible, and they had money to burn.
Normally she’d write a letter to Marie. Dear Marie, I was looking up at Proxima tonight and I thought about you. Dear Marie, I got your letter. I programmed the thrush to mimic you a little, and you noticed. When the first astronauts land on Proxima Centauri b, maybe there will really be birds. I’ve studied everything I can, and there’s no telling. It might all be a layer of ice. There might be mountains everywhere. They might try to make a new home in a place that’s nothing but poison. Dear Marie, I want you to be happy there.
Through the lens, the planet slid around the star.
Woods,
After you came and talked to us, Samara found out you hadn’t even paid us for our time in Themis. Mistake, by the way—if you’d paid us it would have at least looked like you weren’t trying to use us like lab rats and get away with it—and I feel like you should have known better. Not the company, but you. You always seemed like a guy who wanted everything to have a reason.
Samara’s got a lawyer, and the company should have papers by now. She told me not to contact you. I’m glad she’s suing, because you all deserve it. Go bankrupt.
But I have an offer for whoever’s in charge: I can’t testify if I’m dead, and I want to go back to Themis permanently. I don’t know how long “permanently” is, since the prison refuses to keep people on life support for things like that and you won’t want to bring me to a hospital, so just budget accordingly—a person probably starves to death in a week? So, a week. Unless I’ve built up such a resistance to the meds that it kills me in a few hours, which I assume would be cheaper.
I don’t know who actually made Themis. I’m assuming you were involved, because you had the shortest fuse of anybody there, and at the time I thought that’s just what being law enforcement did to people, but it makes more sense if you made it. And I don’t know who I was writing to, that whole time. In Themis I just thought I had someone I loved, and he was where my letters went. I didn’t know I needed to love someone so badly you could lie to me about it for four years—but that’s how it worked, the psychologist said. You made Samara write reports because whatever you managed to do with her, there were some things she wouldn’t fall for. I was an idiot and I’d been lonely my whole life. You could do anything to me.
It wasn’t you, was it? Was it one person writing me back, or did you reply by committee? One of you must have seen the picture of my arrest, since you gave me long hair in Themis. You talked about missing my braids. Whoever it was, go fuck yourself. I didn’t even like it, it was too long, but in Themis I kept it long all that time for your sake. I wanted to cut it—it got so humid in the summers I dreamed of shaving it off, I must have told you, I wrote you so much—but keeping my hair long was like a promise we’d see each other again. So I kept it.
I thought that I couldn’t quite picture you because being in stasis on the ship seeped the color out of your dreams. And then it had been a long time, so of course I couldn’t really remember you—I looked at your messages and forgot whether you had good posture or not when you typed. I wanted to think you hunched like I did, like that weird pang in the lower back was something we shared 25 trillion miles away. I wondered sometimes why I’d gone to Proxima Centauri if I had someone I loved so much. Not that you can say that to the person you left behind. I never even mentioned it to Samara. But everybody knew Carlos and I had loved ones back home. When there are so few of you, you end up knowing a lot of things that you never talk about.
Carlos isn’t real, right? I mean—the doctor told me he wasn’t, I know he wasn’t. But there wasn’t a person pretending to be him? He was just a program that got really excited about apple cider?
I don’t even know how to be angry at you—it was the worst hour of my life and I threw up after, but it wasn’t you (whoever that is) explaining it, I would have been able to tell. So it still feels like you weren’t part of what went wrong, like the program got stuck even after I woke up and you locked me out and I’m still carrying you, someone I love and just forgot—
Anyway, I’m going through withdrawal. The prison definitely doesn’t care—they said if I could go through it with the drugs that got me in here I could go through it with whatever they stuck in me to make me forget Themis. But maybe if you read this letter, you still consider me market research and this will be helpful. No appetite, no energy. I have a headache right behind my eyes. I’m always cold, even though Themis was colder than prison so you’d think I wouldn’t be. I sleep a lot. I always dream of being back in Themis. Probably good news for you. Sell a million copies. Just give me mine.
And fix the bread. It never worked right, that should be changed.
Let me go home.
Marie
Benjamina waited until the office was empty before she crossed the floor to Woods’s office. Stoic, not penitent; stoic people didn’t skulk over to meet someone they barely liked just to see how interviews had gone with the people they had used.
She’d never been to his office before—he must always have come to her, strange, she’d never even noticed—and it was so blank it startled her into stillness at the threshold.
“Want an invitation?” He was standing, reaching for his coat, like he’d just been waiting for her so they could walk out together. “You look like a vampire.”
She didn’t say anything, and she didn’t move closer; after a second, he cracked a grin. “You’re kind of an asshole, Harris.”
They walked out in silence, but from the way his thumb brushed the front of his coat lapel over and over, something terrible had happened and they were just waiting to be away from the cameras.
Six blocks later, he said, “It was bad.”
She stopped and looked at him.
“She, uh—” He rubbed his hand once, rough, across his forehead. “In Themis she looked fine. Healthy. It was stupid to assume she’d look the same in person, but I didn’t expect… I didn’t expect it. Samara’s suing us.”
It took her a second too long to catch up, and before she could stop it, it was out: “Because of how Marie looks?”
“No, if Samara knew how Marie looked she’d have just murdered me.” His hands had disappeared into his pockets, fists that pulled against the shoulders and ruined the line of his coat. She’d put that into their last game, the noir murder mystery—the private eye yanked on his coat from the inside that same way. She thought she’d invented it; she’d been proud of herself.