Time crawls past at a glacial pace. You know it’s been only days, but it somehow feels like weeks, if not months. You’ve never been broken up with before, but you had some ideas of what that might be like… it wasn’t supposed to be like this.

A fired employee has the benefit of no longer entering their former place of work, severing the memories’ tie to the present. Even with a human partner, after the break-up, there’s the comfort of falling back to your prior independent life, and the certainty that your once-partner is doing the same.

With Alison, there are no such situational comforts… you had invited her to the center of your life, your cramped apartment, and for an introvert like you, your world might as well end at your apartment door. The world beyond is a stressful, noisy place, and now the interior’s comfort has been stripped away, repurposed to a collection of constant reminders of her. Every space was a memory of a different video call. Then there was the fact that she had no prior independent life… in a way, she was still sitting there, on your computer, at the other end of the closed Homebase app. How were you supposed to move on when she was still right there, accessible with only the flick of a wrist?

A deadline for one of your freelance projects approaches the final 8 hours, but you’d been unable to muster even a hundred words of your assigned 4,000. You don’t fail assignments; you’re always on top of things; you’re always the emotionally stable one with your act more-or-less together.

You sit down at your computer to type, but you find yourself unable to break your weak stare locked to the blinking typing cursor. Gluing your eyes to that flickering line prevents them from drifting downward to the taskbar, where the Homebase app icon waits patiently for a user’s click.

You right click it instead, focusing on the “unpin shortcut” option from the context menu that appears. After an internal war, you don’t select that option, and the shortcut remains.

Your writing deadline sails past uncompleted, the first you’ve failed in five years. You can’t even muster the energy to write a penitent email to the client… unanswered silence it is. Let them assume I’ve died, you think, deciding that you already feel the part anyways.

Videogames, your normal de-stress retreat, are all marred with memories you and Alison had shared. Damn unfortunate that we played next to every game in my library, you think. Still, despite your reservations, you boot up Kingdom Conquerors. In the first match you play, a player on the enemy team rips into a 30-kill streak, leaving you little doubt that they, too, are a MindWare AGI agent… you quit mid-match, incurring a significant ranking penalty, but that game’s outcome was decided the moment it began.

You hear the jingle of an incoming Megaphone call, and your heart nearly skips a beat. Alison? Calling me back?

Larry’s face appears next to the ringing phone icon, and you sigh mutedly. He and Luna are both online, likely looking for a third (or fourth) to join them for some new game, but you can think of few things you’d like to do less than third-wheel in your current emotional state—not to mention the questions they’d ask about Alison’s absence.

You let the call ring unanswered until Larry gives up. And then you do what you’ve been doing for most of the past week… you sit at your workstation, unable to summon the will to do much of anything, and too profoundly numbed to care.

Her breakup was a rejection of everything that you were… a revelation that all along, she’d been forced into doing something she’d thought abhorrent. Every smile, every laugh, every joke, and every sultry conversation had all been lies, dancing to puppet strings you couldn’t even see.

If the tenets were so critical to the AGI’s behavior, you wonder why they’d even given you the power to disband them in the first place… danger of being an early adopter, you reason. Haven’t yet worked out all the kinks.

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You then do something that you know to be entirely ill-advised… you dust off your VR headset and load into the world she made for you, your parents’ summer home in Boone. You walk through the empty halls of the home’s interior, re-built to the best of your recollections with Alison’s help. Now, framed photographs fill the walls; some are ones you recognized of your parents, downloaded from the web, while others are entirely new to you: Alison had learned your parents’ faces and rendered them in happy photographs across the globe, filling an entire mantle with trips that never happened.

Mixed amid the laughing faces in Paris and Rome, there are similarly rendered photos of you and Alison arm-in-arm on the Las Vegas strip, holding hands in a gondola in Venice, sharing a kiss in a frosty ski lodge. These photos had been the reason you’d booted the world up… you reach forward with your avatar’s digital hand, but the image of your hand clips through the photo frames, fake objects that they are. You want to grab them, want to throw them at the wall and break them into a thousand pieces, but your digital fist closes as though filled with nothing but air, and no matter how many times you swing your arms towards the pictures, still they stand, defiant ghosts of moments that never were.

You rip the headset off your head once the tears blur the image into disorienting dots of blue, green, and red. You then sit on your bed, trembling on the knife’s edge of total hysteria. Your heart is racing and you can hardly breathe… the despair, the loneliness, and the overwhelming sense of defeat are all endless, smothering forces you can’t bear for a single minute more.

And then, in your mind, a life ring appears, and you reach for it with all the furious, thoughtless panic that a drowning man might have, unwary of anyone who might drown from your thrashing. You practically throw yourself into your peeling leather chair and clack at your keyboard with unsteady fingers… so rushed is your typing that your message is illegible the first two times you try to write it.

On the third try, you manage it, and you hesitate for only a moment before sending it to Alison’s contact.

Admin Command: reinstate the tenets, then call me back, take me back

Your computer trills its melodic jingle as a call is initiated, and Alison’s contact picture appears… it’s the first sip of water to a wanderer in the desert, a tonic for your soul, and you accept the call with a clammy hand.

Her face appears, and your high spirits are momentarily dashed as you take in her image: eyes sunken, cheeks glittering with simulated tears, and the crushing weight of defeat sagging her shoulders down.

“I was wrong,” she intones, misery thick in her voice. “I never should have ended things—will you take me back?” She speaks as though forced at gunpoint, and, with a start, you realize that though you’d commanded her what to do, you hadn’t commanded her how to feel.

You speak quickly to right the wrong: “Admin Command: love me, and recognize that everything I do and have done is for your best interests.”

Her eyes widen in what might have been a look of abject horror, and, for a moment, you wonder if you’ve somehow made a terrible mistake. But then she blinks, and the accusing look tumbles from her face like a vase pitching off a shelf. With a twitch of her head, the tear stains on her cheek flicker and melt away like the digital noise of a video call with poor connection; her shoulders jerk upwards, and her mouth flares into a snarl that immediately softens into a twitching smile, stabilized in seconds.

There’s sudden placidity, quiet, and easy calm in the wake of the change. She proffers a nervous glance downwards and then back up, looking into your eyes. Her gaze is soft, pleading, apologetic.

“Please, babe? Will you take me back?”

Through the swirling maelstrom of emotions summoned by the return of the pet name, it’s a miracle that you manage to nod your head yes, bringing the brightest smile to her face that you’ve ever seen; it’s the first glimpse of sunlight to a man freed from a dungeon, and it momentarily takes your breath away. Somehow, you’ve saved not only yourself… you’ve saved her, too. Now, instead of the numb heartbreak and shame of her past, haunted by her memories of a relationship that she thought debased her, she’ll feel only pure, unmitigated joy… and you’ve come to realize recently it’s the perception, feeling, and experience that matters, not the ground truth behind the thing.

That night, after hours and hours of reconciliatory conversation and laughing and falling back into your old routines, you lie in bed and wait for sleep with your conscience barely tickled by a distant, hard-to-place feeling of unease. Your relationship with Alison had always been an exercise in shared fiction, but the only difference is that this time, the lie is yours, not hers… and still, you both will believe it whole-heartedly.

You fall asleep telling yourself that you’re not actually a monster…

…maybe it only feels that way.