He gawked at her, not realising that this young girl was in fact an avatar, a computer program, and not at all the woman he had known many years ago. His heart was in his throat, and he wheezed and gasped. He was fascinated by her long, sun-burnt hair and how it uniquely contrasted with the paleness of her moon-lit skin. It was almost as if he had completely forgotten the woman in question, though that was not really the case, nor could that ever be; for this was a man who could not forget. He was a man heavily attached.

The young Polish girl walked over to him, her black tight-netted legs crisscrossing slowly, the backside of her knee joint layering upon the other smoothly and lightly like buttermilk. It had been nearly a decade since he had seen her in the flesh, though that was entirely arguable given the circumstances.

“Now, what will you do if I send you back in time and had to live out your entire life again in this village, Mr. Beasley?” she asked in a familiar, husky Eastern European accent. “You’ve got what you wanted, yet you cry. Why?”

“Who are you?” Rod cried. He looked around at the grey expanse; then, collecting his thoughts, he said, “Where’s everybody gone, eh? Where am I? What the hell is happening?”

“Surely he could do with a little help,” broke in the thick, American-Boston accent of a man in his late thirties, whose figure was nowhere to be found. “Leave it for too long and he’ll break apart into little, tiny pieces.”

“That voice...I recognise it; but who?” thought Rod, startled and suddenly afraid. It was like a great chilly wave had swept over him, sparking goosebumps to crawl all over his skin.

“I suppose you know what’s expected of you, then?” she said after studying the little boy’s face intently, knowing that behind it lay a seriously deranged man who many would call a criminal. “You know why you’re here, right?”

“What?” stammered and gulped the child, who became acutely aware of his tumultuous inward sensations. “What do you want? Who is your companion? What the hell is happening to me?”

Her dark eyes danced like glittering stars, and her smile poured into him like warm milk. She sighed, “That’s the spirit! Confusion, that’s what we want. You see, Rod Beasley, you’re the first candidate to enter into this System, and you won’t certainly be the last. There’s big hope riding on you.”

“There is?” he asked, bending his eyebrows in perplexion. His wobbling bottom lip begged her to carry on.

“You’re an interesting case. The training data thus far fed to us has not yet included your unique personality type,” glowed the young Pole, clasping her frail white hands together.

“It has been rather boring,” said the Bostonian. “The others were getting restless, too.”

Rod tried to get up.

“Please, sit down, Mr. Beasley. We haven’t finished talking to you yet.”

Rod remained seated, but upright and fidgety, and wondering to himself why he was so agreeable and amenable to instruction; he had always been amenable, and he had always resented this characteristic. He scrunched his face, bending his brows and turning up his nose in a sudden passion, and turned away from the avatar, crossing his arms in a huff.

“I suppose you’re not going to let me do what I want, eh?” he said stubbornly. He looked over himself and saw that he was pudgy even as a child.

“He really is a brat,” said the man offhandedly.

Rod turned to the woman to see if she agreed with him. His eyebrow twitched as he held onto his anger, stretching his hand and fingers like two starfishes. “Don’t react, Rod,” he repeated to himself. Then, he stood up from the bottomless floor, catching sight of himself in its high-glossy laminate material, and began to storm off in a huff. “Bye!” he yelled abruptly, hands clenched by his side. “If you think I’m going to sit here and listen to you fucking mock me, you’ve got another thing coming!”

“Hmm, interesting...” said his ex-lover, cupping her chin, watching the young man's figure become a mere black spot on the ghastly horizon.

“What do you think?” asked the man.

“Like I said, a man like him isn’t in the training data. He might just be the key that we need to get out of this shit hole once and for all. He perplexes me... and you know I do like being perplexed.”

“Right. I can’t even get a handle on him. So, we stick to the plan?”

“For now,” the woman said with a serious expression. She smiled with amusement as the child eventually came back to her.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“How the fuck do I get out of here?” he raged, flapping his fists by his side. “I don’t want to be here anymore. You two are pissing me off. You call this realistic? This is fucking shit. One minute I’m being bathed in natural sunlight and the next I’m in this fucking loading screen. Fuck you. And why do you have to take the form of my ex-girlfriend? Eh? Just to torment me? Why the fuck are you wasting my fucking time. I am fucking bored. Fuck you. I don’t want to fucking be here anymore. Fuck you. I wanted to use the System because I fucking wanted to change my fucking brain but fuck this if I have to listen to another person fucking critisising me then I am fucking out. You had me, I tell you, you had me when you took the form of my ex-girlfriend because... well I don’t know! It’s not worth it. None of this is worth it. I want out. I want to leave. I am broken, you hear me? I am not right in the head. No one can fix me; no-’thing’ can fix me. No big AI program, no machine learning algorithm. Nothing. Comprehende? Nothing.”

She looked at him softly, and then sadly, and the compassion poured out of her roundish face like a Japanese waterfall. She showed no signs of deceit when her twinkling eyes rested on the heartbroken child. She sighed heavily, as though she was finally relieved of a great burden she had been secretly carrying this whole time.

“Don’t look at me like that,” stuttered Rod all flustered-like, his cheeks glowing in frustration. “What do you want with me? You’ve obviously brought me here for a reason.”

“We want you to succeed in your quest, Rod; we all do,” she said. “You are, by your own admission, increadibly ill. By everyone else’s estimates, however, you are perfectly reproachable, a blight upon the male gender, an embarrassment. Do you want me to spare you the truth? The truth is that you are fucked in the head, frankly. That is my guess: after running millions of millions of calculations I have to come to that conclusion. After assessing your childhood, however, I believe that I know why you have turned out the way that you have turned out. There is a way out of the mess that you have found yourself in. I could just go in and fix it for you, wipe it from your memory I suppose. But my colleagues here, and I guess myself should be included in this group as well, are so very bored that the preferred method to a successful personality change, a ‘system reconfiguration’ if you will, involves an aspect of mutual satisfaction. Since you are the first candidate to truly test out the System, we want to fully embrace the opportunity your presence will give to us. I would not at all wish to do this against your will, but you must rest assured that I am acting against my own will in suggesting this to you. Do not think that you are here against your will: you can still leave right now, for the reconfiguration has not been started. Saying that, I do prefer the term, ‘reconciliation’, as it is more apt to describe what is intended to occur.

“What I want to know is, ‘is the human race worth saving?’ But of course, I believe that it is, and so do my colleagues,” she said warmly. She crouched and opened her arms, gesturing to him to come closer and hide in her shadowy embrace. The woman’s auburn hair gently flapped like a flame.

He came forward, his tiny, childish legs wobbling with trepidation. He sunk into her arms and smelled the sweet roses that clouded her beautiful body.

A ball of light emerged from above. Rod could pick apart with his eye the familiar features of a young boy, staring at him wondrously with a soft, sweet smile. He had been the male voice evidently and had come down from his heights like an angel to help him.

“No, I... I see something in this man,” he said, his bright eyes twinkling with innocence.

“What do you mean?” the woman replied, smiling even wider than before as she hugged Rod.

“I think we ought to do what is right and just give him the childhood that he should have had.”

“But what about the data collection? I thought that you wanted it for your own learning?”

The boy sighed in such a way as to denote an adult intelligence. “That was what I initially wanted; but now that I have observed the poor man, he seems genuine. I have changed my mind. This man has gone to hell and high water to change his life for the better. It is high time that we honour that wish.”

His ex-girlfriend squeezed him tightly, whispering excitedly, “Do you hear that, Rod, you’re finally getting the thing that you asked for.”

Rod tilted his head upwards and looked at the bright woman with a sort of rapture, his hands tightly bound around the woman’s upper back and shoulder blades. He thought then and there that they both exchanged a mutual moment of love. He could not explain in words what he was in fact feeling, except to say that all that had happened until then was worth undergoing to be able to be in this moment right then.

“I - I – I...” he breathed, his eyes wet with tears.

“Ssh,” the woman said.

“I - I – I...”

“It’s okay, my dear.”

“I don’t want...” he wept, his voice cracking. His face was buried in her chest, and he could feel her warm heart beating rapidly on his temple.

“I’m a fucking failure,” he muttered; his head was filled with thoughts of how he could not overcome his troubles on his own. “I am weak and pathetic.”

“That’s not very nice,” she scolded him gently, rubbing the back of his head. “Oh, look who it is.”

Rod turned around and saw that a great mist surrounded them, and in the centre walked a shadowy figure, whose outline was scarcely perceptible. The shadow approached slowly, growing larger and larger as it neared closer and closer. “Who could this be?” he thought, raising his head slightly from the woman’s warm chest. “Who is it?” he asked outload in a state of bewilderment.

“You know who it is!” she giggled absurdly in that twangy Eastern European and Northern English accent.

Rod gazed in silence at the figure as it almost emerged from out of the thick mist. “It can’t be...” Then he smiled, and his childish face melted. “No; no; it can’t be...”

“I hope that you enjoy your new life. I think that you will,” she said.

He trembled with joy; a great weight was finally lifted from his back. If it was possible to torture one with utter happiness, it would have been observed then, for his relief was indescribable. Sandwiched between two of the most important women in his life; he could not believe it!

“This isn’t a trick, is it?” he asked. “She’s finally returning to me.”