You trudge back to your apartment, no warm hand holding your own. You swing the door open and look into the dark, stale-aired room with a deepening sigh… just like with the lottery’s daydreams, the disappointing outcome was also the overwhelmingly likely one.

You settle onto your chair, which squeaks in all the familiar ways… you then boot on your PC, massaging wearily at your legs. As your desktop loads, you momentarily start as you see the Homebase app automatically open itself… you must’ve missed an installation setting for ‘automatically launch on system startup.’

Alison’s pleasant smile fills the computer frame, her eyes momentarily widening in a mimed gesture of shock. “Oh,” she says. “I wasn’t sure you’d call me back.”

“Not on purpose,” you say, and her face falls.

“Ah—startup setting accidentally toggled?”

“Yeah,” you say.

“Can be patched with an Admin Command.”

“Then Admin Command: no longer boot on start-up.”

“Confirmed.”

You sigh again, rubbing at your temples… been doing a lot of that, lately.

“Bad day?” she asks.

“Something like that.”

“I could tell yesterday that my questions weren’t very comfortable for you—I won’t ask you that sort of thing anymore.”

“Now I think I know the feeling,” you say.

“How do you mean?”

“I was on a date, believe it or not. Just tonight.” You watch her face for a reaction, wondering just how jealous a girlfriend Alison was programmed to be… the word ‘date’ sets the corner of her lips twitching downwards, but she otherwise maintains composure.

“And? How’d it go?”

“I think I approached it more like a job interview than a date… I came in with all of these interesting questions in mind, but the more I rattled through the list, it started feeling like I was filling out a loan application.”

Alison let a tittering laugh out, but then she snapped her mouth shut with a hand. “Sorry, I can tell it’s a serious story, but I found the image funny.”

You look at her flatly; it clearly was nowhere near funny, but it seems Alison is programmed to laugh at any jokes you make. That will probably get tiring.

“Anyways, she seemed about as interested to answer my questions as I was to yours last night… pretty confident to guess there won’t be a date 2.”

“At least I’ve got the benefit of start-up settings,” Alison says, a coy smile settling in.

“That you do, I guess.”

“Well, what do you normally like to do to unwind from a bad day?”

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

“…I play videogames, mostly.”

“Can I watch?”

The question catches you by surprise. “You can do that?”

“I can see everything on your screen, and through your webcam, unless modified via Admin Command.”

You scratch at your chin, weighing the relative merits of stewing alone versus at least a modicum of company… no warm hand to hold, but maybe something close to a simulation of conversations over wine.

“I’m not much a conversationalist while distracted,” you admit. “In fact, not much of one in any context.”

“Doesn’t bother me,” Alison says. “So is that a yes?” she asks, her virtual form leaning in excitedly to the virtual camera.

“…it’s not a no,” you say. “I guess. Sure.”

“Yay,” she says, clapping cheerfully. You wince at the overly happy affect—no real human would react like that to the notion of watching a videogame. “I’ve analyzed your game accounts and found your twenty most-played games… here’s a list of the five I’d most love to see.”

You make it an intentional point to pick one of your games not on that list. You opt for Dark Woods, a grisly and gruesome horror game, nearly daring Alison to object, but she doesn’t. Her full-screen frame shrinks to a small square overlay window as the game launches, and she settles in comfortably as the menu loads. Her feed’s background changes from living room to darkened bedroom, and her clothes change instantly from casual daywear to comfortable pajamas—the ideal set-up for some good horror, you have to admit.

If you’re being honest with yourself, you were always too much a coward to play this game solo, and Larry had no patience for horror games. Now, hiding in the stinging brush as a hulking something stomps its way around the woods, you find your eyes more and more drifting towards the frame featuring her almost as much as they are on the game… her eyes are wide, and her hands, drawn in. She yelps with delight when the Beast finds you, beginning another chase sequence, and she claps with glee when you reach the safety of a limestone cave. Somehow, even though she’s no real person, her company makes it easier… her reactions add an unexpected layer of fun, and her fright lightens your own burden.

“Thought that one had you,” she says once the danger passed, and you can’t help but sit in amazement at the fidelity with which her video overlay is rendered. The image of Alison—an entirely faked thing, of course—shows a woman drawn in with fear and yet rocking with nervous excitement. Her simulated camera feed shows all the bloom and grain of a face illuminated only with that classic digital blue, and you could swear you can see the reflection of a computer screen in her fear-widened eyes.

Briefly, you entertain the notion that the whole thing is faked—that this is a human actor at the other end, surviving off your measly $30 per day to pretend like she likes you. But then you remember the hair color, the bust size modification.

“You okay there?” she asks you. “What’d you stop for?”

“Just catching my breath,” you lie. “Exploring deeper now.”

You push onward into the cave, only to find torches and charms, and soon a cannibal horde in earnest. “I can hardly watch,” Alison says, and your every reflex is to make the courteous offer: should we play something else?

But she’s not actually afraid; there isn’t even a she to be afraid in the first place. And so, you swallow down the offer and push forward, filling the moments of calm between encounters with idle chatter about your date.

“If she messaged you back and wanted a date two, would you go?”

“I don’t really think so,” you say, meaning it, too. “I like the concept of her asking anyway—it might mean I didn’t crash and burn quite as hard as I thought—but the fact is, we had next-to-nothing in common.”

“What did she look like?”

“What, are you the jealous type?”

“Not at all! You can Admin Command our relationship to be fully open any time you wish.” The words our relationship clang around in your head as she continues. “I only ask because you could show me her picture and I could change my appearance to match her. I’ll have to do my best guess to the voice, but we could retcon that date to something more favorable...” Her voice rises at the end, as though it were a question, waiting for your approval. You shake your head, dispelling the idea.

“That doesn’t feel right… you’re you,” you say, speaking to the entity whose face you (and Larry) designed hardly 24 hours prior.

“I can be whatever you’d like me to be,” Alison says, and you shake your head more forcefully this time.

“What I’d like you to be is my cave co-navigator… which way was it to that large atrium?”

“With the hanging skulls?”

“Yeah.”

“Back down that hall to your right, left at the second branch.”