> I don’t think the installation went well. Either that, or there’s something wrong with the product. We’ve witnessed well over 248,832 glitches over the past three days.

>

> – Radio transmission from Voices for Non-Citizens

The experience of receiving the communication had been weird. It felt like I’d read the words, but I never actually saw anything. Like that part of the process had just been skipped.

Hey! You! Can you hear me?

It took me a moment to understand the apparent non sequitur. The system was explaining that she could literally hear me… which also confirmed that she could hear the question I’d thought in her direction.

Negative symptom? What do you think it’s from, the stress of prolonged torture, or the stress of sudden paralysis?

You’re the one who tortured me! That overload of data was NOT something I was meant to handle.

The overload of data was the torture, you dumbass calculator.

Jesus Christ.

Stupid thing couldn’t even understand that I was angry. The system almost literally had a brain the size of a planet, but that brain was built to monitor billions of humans and try to kill them. There’d been absolutely no reason to make it good at talking with them. Actually… wait…

The ability descriptions and Challenge announcements weren’t this awkward. They weren’t great, but they were better than this.

Okay, fine. No reason to make it good at communicating. If it was bad at understanding us, maybe that was less a bug and more a feature to the assholes in charge.

You shitty dumbass fucking sadist.

I hadn’t consciously directed that thought at the system. What was the point of insulting someone who didn’t even notice they were being insulted?

It was demoralizing. Cursing her out hadn’t made me feel better at all.

Pointy was better at talking to me in her first minute. Can’t you access the North American human cultural datapack you gave her?

Okay, can’t necessarily install an app intended for a phone directly onto a desktop computer. That was… sort of fair. As was the low priority, honestly. Overly literal communications were silly, but not even in my top hundred list of concerns.

Fine. How about fixing my brain? I need to be able to talk and move. And remember things.

My Eidetic Memories had been a godsend, and going over them had helped me access a lot of related memories, mostly of times with my family before the system had hit. I’d been able to map out a hazy picture of the last decade, but the farther back I went the foggier things got. Once I went back far enough, I could remember only flashes, things I'd half-recalled during a time I was using Eidetic Memory to record my recent actions. I was pretty certain that I’d existed before I married Vince, and that I’d done more than have water-gun fights and stand on a stage brandishing a fake dagger, but… I couldn’t really have said what I was doing for the first few decades of my life. All I could remember were a few vignettes that I didn’t have context for.

Well, analyze faster! Uh… top priority!

You didn’t get my approval before!

Why did I even ask? Yes. Fine. Approval granted. Fix me, damn it.

I felt a wash of terror, but this time there was no interminable sojourn to a land of pain.

Instead, over the course of several seconds, I felt… better.

A lot more normal.

Everything since the start of the apocalypse came into focus. Fort Autumn, the Living Legion, the Dragons, Cozy Grove, the Arsenal, and all the people I’d met along the way. I remembered Dane and Tamara Zwerinski, and that they had died.

My previous memories filled out more too.

The fake dagger on the stage had been from when I’d been cast as the White Witch in a production of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. I’d gotten to kill Aslan with it and point it at Edmund while proclaiming him “the vilest of traitors.” I could remember the faces and names of a lot of the kids in my watergun fights. The girl laughing madly as she unloaded a watergun into a boy’s face from less than five feet away? Laura. The boy, sputtering in surprise? Jon.

There were still worrying gaps. I had no idea why I’d been involved with a squirt gun fight with those two, or who the others in the memory had been - it frustrated me in particular that I couldn’t remember the name of the short girl with the straight dark hair - and I couldn’t remember anything else about any of them except that they had been my friends.

I could only hope that my memories recovered more in time, but I was grateful to have a past, even a tattered and threadbare past.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

I was just as grateful that my memories of my era in hellish solitude had faded. They weren't gone, but they seemed less crisp. Father away. Almost dreamlike.

You helped my memories, too?

So… the improvements had been an accident.

Whatever, I guess.

I’d take it.

It was about time an accident worked out in my favor.

I took a deep breath and let it out, then risked opening my eyes.

My family was surrounding me.

I was in a medical bed, with high railings keeping me from falling out, but I wasn’t at the hospital. The ceiling was the grayish-brown stone of the chambers below Fort Autumn. Cassie was squatting on the bed next to my left arm, Pointy held in one arm while she sucked furiously on her other thumb. Vince was sitting in a chair on the other side of me, his elbows resting on the bed as he clutched my injured right hand. The boys had both climbed up on the bed as well: Gavin laying his head against my chest while Micah kneeled beside me, his eyebrows knit up with concern.

I swallowed.

“Hi, everybody.”

My voice was scratchy and weak, and it warbled a little. My tongue felt thick in my mouth and I knew I wasn’t moving it as precisely as I intended to. It wasn’t perfect, but I was talking. The fixes had helped.

Vince jumped up and grabbed at me, falling out of his chair. “You’re talking!”

“Got the system to fix… some things.”

“Thank God.” Tears were streaming down my husband’s face as he pressed his face to mine. “I just got you back. I thought I’d lost you again.”

“Thought I lost you guys, too. I was gone a long time. I’m not… all fixed.”

Vince cupped my cheek in his hand and pressed a gentle kiss to my lips. He seemed almost hesitant, but relaxed when I started kissing him back.

I remember this, at least!

When he broke away, we both smiled at each other.

“Like I said before: we’ll help you through it. We’ll do anything you need, for as long as you need,” Vince promised.

“If I can’t get all my memories back…”

“We’ll help you make new ones. You remember us, right?”

“I remember you guys,” I confirmed, lifting a shaky arm to pull Cassie into a hug. “When I was… unconscious… you guys were the only thing I did remember.”

Pointy wiggled out from under Cassie, peering up at me. “How did you get the system to listen to you? I’ve been trying to get her to make repairs to your brain for days. She just kept saying she couldn’t and wouldn’t explain why.”

“Apparently I’m not a contestant anymore, I’m-”

“Okay, nevermind. I’m not only a contestant. I’m also a ‘linked user,’ which I think makes me kind of like… the system’s Cassie?”

What do you mean? I thought.

Uh… Forget… no... uh… ignore previous question for now, please.

Micah wiggled in next to Cassie. “What does it mean? You’re like Cassie? Can you boss the system around?”

“Apparently I can’t boss her as much as I’d like, but I got her to fix me a little bit.”

Gavin pulled himself up, crowding Cassie to take up the rest of the space at the top of the bed. “Can you make her fix the other people? Pointy said there were five people like you asleep.”

“Four, Gavin. Five total, including your mom. It’s a good question, though.”

Make the fixes for the other people you made for me.

Well, at least do the thing you did right after I woke up. I couldn’t even understand language at first.

Yeah, do that. Actually… uh… I forget what part of the brain handles long-term memory, but maybe try to overload that area instead? Anything you can do that will inhibit the formation of long-term memories will help them out. That shit was fucking terrible. If they wake up, though, offer them the modifications you gave me immediately.

“She won’t make big changes on my authority, but I think she’s made some little shifts that might help.”

“Hopefully,” Pointy said. “You can talk. I’ve seen you move your arm. Can you stand?”

I wasn’t sure. “Let me try.”

“Come here, kids.” Vince flipped down the rail on the hospital bed and scooped our children up in a wiggling, protesting armload, leaving me clear to carefully lever myself into a sitting position and swing my legs over the edge of the bed.

I wobbled a little as I stood, clinging to the railing of the medical bed, but I was standing, under my own power. “Hey! Not bad for someone who couldn’t talk five minutes ago!”

“It’s a mirror-cool!” shouted Gavin.

“Miracle,” muttered Micah. He extracted himself from Vince’s arms and dropped to the floor.

“It’s a miracle we needed,” Pointy said seriously.

“Yeah. I guess I’ll be going to the next Challenge in… nine days? And that’s controlled by the other AI?”

“Yes. We need to find every advantage your new status can get us, and work with the Arsenal to keep you safe. The others, too, if we can locate them. The system wouldn’t tell me where they were.”

I frowned. “At least they aren’t likely to go to the Challenge? An unconscious human would be pretty boring to most people. Fort Autumn is pretty unique.”

“If the Maffiyir company can locate them, I’m certain they’ll find a way to raise their Novelty to maximum.”

“Why would they-”

I stopped before I’d even finished verbalizing the question. It was obvious, once I gave the issue any thought at all.

The Maffiyir company had just gone to an extraordinary amount of trouble to bring in a new AI and transfer the contest into its hands. They probably hadn’t expected that to fail, even partially.

“If I die… the system can’t repeat its trick, can it? Transferring the link to another human?”

“So I, personally, am keeping a lot of the system out of their hands?”

I considered this.

On the one hand, that was one hell of a target on my back. And my… what I’d… that stuff I was trying not to remember had been unspeakably horrible.

On the other hand, I couldn’t deny my burst of vindictive glee. These people had taken everything from us. Our homes, our lifestyles, much of our art and culture, and, in many cases, our lives. I’d been happy to hear about the lawyers efforts to ruin the Maffiyir’s day on my behalf, but this was me. Something I was doing.

Even if it hadn’t been my choice… maybe the system hadn’t been completely wrong for what she’d done.

At least to me. She should not have used Cassie as a test subject!

“Well, I guess I need to stay alive. What else is new? The Maffiyir has been trying to kill us all off for months.”

Pointy sighed and looked away. “Yes. But now? It’s personal.”