The letter he handed her was on paper so thin she hesitated to touch it.
“It’s addressed to me, but trust me, it’s for you.”
She wanted to take it home and read it where she couldn’t embarrass herself, but if Woods sat through three interviews she could manage this. She read it in the wide alley garden between two office buildings, where admin staff ate lunch to pretend they’d gotten away from everything. At some point she started shaking; he stood next to her like they were pretending the wind was cold. She read it again. She put it in her pocket. He didn’t argue.
“Will you see her again?”
“I could get arrested for passing her company information. We’re getting sued.”
“I know.”
“Fuck it, I’m hungry,” he said.
They found a place far enough away they felt all right sitting down. He ate three pieces of bread out of the plastic basket in the first five minutes. Then he tore a napkin into pieces.
“Samara’s skin and bones. Anthony’s got insomnia. Dr. Asshole said it was just drug interactions. The prison claims the game damages the cortex. They’re probably going to sue each other while Samara and Anthony are suing us.”
“But not Marie.”
He looked at her. His eyes were very dark; they couldn’t quite get them to register in Themis—they coded as black, which always looked flat, so anyone who met him in the game thought his eyes were lighter brown. It must have been a surprise for Marie to see him as he really was.
“We can’t do that.”
“Are you going to see her again?”
“I’m not passing her a letter, Ben.”
“Are you allowed to have an assistant with you, for the interviews? Stenography? Someone has to be holding the recorder.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
Her lips pulled tight across each row of teeth. “I have to do something.”
“If you’re looking to feel less guilty, stop. No such thing.”
He blurred underneath the tears that sprang up. She let them go—too late not to be penitent—so her vision would be clearer for what came next. “Then I’ll go myself,” she said.
“It’s more than your job is worth.”
There was nothing to say to that; her job had been worth so little there was no point.
Outside it was not quite dark, and just beginning to be cold: the temperature of Themis, decided by a developer so much her senior she’d never met him.
When she turned toward home, he walked with her.
Halfway there, he said, “We have one more interview with her.”
Hi Marie,
My handle on the Themis team is Erytheia. It’s not my real name, but it’s easier to keep track of who wrote which code this way. Erytheia was one of the daughters of Themis. (I didn’t pick it.) When we were getting ready for the dry run they made me your experience specialist so we could concentrate on each user’s take on Themis and build as rich a world as possible.
Woods showed me your letter.
I just wanted you to know there wasn’t a committee. All your letters came to me, and I read them all. Some of what you told me went into a development memo, like how there weren’t enough insects for a landscape with that much standing water and vegetation. But I didn’t send my letters to trick you into writing more often, and I didn’t discuss anything personal. I answered you because I wanted you to feel like there was a person writing you back. I was the person writing you back.
—E
Hey Marie,
Can you sleep? I can’t fucking sleep. My body thinks it’s too dark because it’s dumb and can only remember one set of things at a time and it’s stuck on Themis—like, we were definitely stuck on Themis but you don’t have to be such an asshole about it, get used to night and day and let me get some fucking sleep, damn.
And honestly the Themis shit doesn’t really bother me. Everything I can remember from there is all of us just doing our best and getting along, so it’s not like it was embarrassing. I feel like an idiot for not realizing sooner—now it’s so fucking obvious why the movie bank didn’t work, because it was too complicated to make it work inside the game or whatever—but actually being there was fine. The part that bothers me is the whole time out here that I thought I was just depressed and dreaming about some random planet is the part that’s vanishing, like that’s the only part the drugs actually affected once the wall wore off. Can you imagine what we must have looked like to everybody else, hopped up on that stuff?
I’m signing Samara’s guy’s thing. Are you? You should, they’re trying to pay us off but that just means they know they fucked up and want us to keep quiet.
You’re not talking to anyone about any of this, right? They told me you’re having a rough time and I get that. What wasn’t better about Themis than being locked up? But you get killed that way, or they find some reason to extend your sentence twenty years, so zip that shit and just wait for Samara’s guy to make us too famous to die.
When we get out we should see if we can get a parole dispensation to cross state lines, it was cool all living together, that was nice. Plus movies work here, that’s a reason to stay here. Plus I bet your bread in the real world is amazing.
Keep your cool, Marie. I know you can do this.
—Anthony
Marie,
My attorney heard from Othrys Games that you’ve been in contact with the company, trying to make a deal to get back to Themis. He wanted to send you a cease-and-desist, but I told him I wanted to talk to you first before we did anything official.
The case we’re building downplays the nature of the game as much as possible. It doesn’t matter that the game wasn’t some battle simulator where we died all the time—it matters that they did it to us without our permission and then hoped people would ignore it because nobody cares about us. If you keep asking to go back in there, they’re going to use it as evidence that what they were doing was benign, or helpful, and we’re going to have to fight that impression in court, and when the game hits shelves and it’s fine, it will look even worse. We’re fighting the company—we can’t let the game become the thing we’re fighting.
This thing is really important—my lawyer says it could be a cornerstone for other cases about prisoners’ rights. That’s big, Marie. It’s bigger than us. Cut it out.
I’m not saying all this to be cruel—I miss it there too. I could do my work and close doors behind me, of course fucking I miss it. But trying to get back to a lie is only going to hurt us. We need to be free again here. This is our shot. What they did to us was wrong—you can’t fix that. Let me fight it.
Flush this letter. They can’t find it.
Samara
The Othrys lawyers call Benjamina for a deposition, and she sits in a meeting room with no windows with her back to the door—the only other seat, across from the lawyer whose smile is set tight across his face and doesn’t get anywhere near his eyes—and tries to ignore that this is all a setup to make her uncomfortable.
She answers fifty questions about the game: its purpose (“Any game’s purpose—entertainment”), what game play will be like (it takes ten minutes, and the lawyer’s mouth purses the more she talks about how beautiful Themis is), the passage of time (“Four to seven times faster than real time, everybody playing an instance has to agree on the speed if they’re playing in the MMORPG rather than single-player,” she says, just to watch his jaw tick before he asks for clarification), how long it’s been in development (five years), how long the beta test has been going (just over a year), the chance of fatigue (“The same as with any mentally stimulating activity, like a deposition,” she says, and the lawyer’s lips positively disappear).