The morning was just disaster after disaster. Tomorrow was my tryout and I had two broken ribs. I'd been prodded and x-rayed and the hospital had confirmed that, yep, my girlfriend had accidentally punched me hard enough to break my bones. I'd been given some painkillers and something to keep the swelling down, and they verified my lungs weren't torn up or anything, but after that it was just go home, take it easy, rest, and heal for the next couple months.

AEGIS and I apparently had very different views on resting and taking it easy because she'd woken me up with even more aggressive sexual advances than usual, and I practically had to beat her off of me before she gave up, telling me I'd hurt myself if I didn't stop, apparently completely unaware that maybe her stopping was also an option.

I'd been running a lot lately, both to get out of the house in the morning as soon as possible, and because it helped clear my head and give me time to think, and now here I was failing at that as well.

It was a beautiful spring morning, the blades of grass were flecked with dew, the sun was lighting the sky pink and orange without yet hanging in it. The air was full of a thousand bird calls, each of them early enough to merit a worm. There were no cars out yet, and the only sounds of human life were the distant noise of holos playing as people prepared for the day, and the faint dull low rumbling of a highway in the distance, more felt than heard.

And the pained wheezing of a stupidass kid trying to run with broken ribs. I was no doctor, but I had already determined experimentally that running required a lot of jostling movement and breathing quite hard, and what might the two worst things one could do to broken ribs be?

Yeah. Jostling and breathing hard. I was an idiot.

Instead of clearing my head and improving my day, running just felt like another disaster I was throwing on the pile. It was a mere couple blocks before I gave up, and was now walking home slowly enough to let my breath recover.

I was on the street outside our wide apartment complex, a shitton of identical, multi-storied stucco buildings, packed with overpriced, small units, as befitted any university student, when I saw something glint on the ground underfoot. I'd almost missed it in my exhaustion, but I saw it was a mobile, dropped and forgotten.

Hmm, did I say jostling and breathing hard was the entire list? Because as it turned out, bending over was also up there. Fuck me, very much.

I tapped it to life found it open to a message. The more I reread it, the more I thought how bizarre this was, and how my understanding of the situation could somehow both grow and shrink at once.

> Piss off, Moon

> Love, AEGIS

Sent to this device, from a Japanese name I thought I should recognize, listed in the mobile's memory as...the CEO of IkaCo.

Wasn't Moon's father that? I remembered her and Karu talking about that once, both of their fathers were in dealings together, and Karu had offered her condolences to Moon over her own dad. So why would she have him listed as CEO instead of...I dunno, 'dad', maybe?

Assuming this was her mobile. But checking around more seemed to verify that fact at least. Calls and messages from the other P-Force, almost all in the inbound direction. A very old one to me, telling me to talk to Cosette because she'd been annoying Moon and I was incommunicado. So yeah. Her mobile.

Why then a message apparently from AEGIS, from her father? And why abandon it here?

Not that my last detective work had gone so well, but I ran my fingers along the device and found a fresh, sharp scratch on the side. Dropped, presumably, and sure enough, a scuff of the same color on the sidewalk. So she read this message and lost her mobile.

I headed back in to talk to AEGIS. I opened the door to the sound of food being massacred, and remembered that I should probably start eating on my runs.

"Good run?" she asked with whimsy. I held up the mobile. "What's that? You got a new mobile?"

"It's Moon's."

"Oh," AEGIS said darkly. "Uh."

"Why does she have a message from her father which says it's from you, and tells her to piss off?"

She put down the mixing bowl of whatever she was working on and leaned against the counter. "Don't be mad," she said, which was always a great start to a conversation. "I thought what she tried to do to you was really fucked up."

"What did she try to do to me?"

"Blackmail you, basically? By threatening to tell me about...you and that bitch Alyssa?"

"Was that blackmail?" I asked, feeling stupid. "I thought she was just getting me in trouble." Lia had never been much of a tattletale, but I knew a lot of kids who were.

AEGIS shook her head. "Moon's basically retarded when it comes to dealing with people. So yeah, I think that was her intent. You had information she wanted, she had information you didn't want me to have, leverage one to get the other. It pissed me off, and no small part of that is that controlling information is my thing, and if she thinks she can beat me at it, oh I'm fucking ready to throw down so hard. She has no idea who she's messing with. I could--"

"Hey. Focus?"

"Sorry. Yeah. So she pulled that shit, and I just wanted her out. Now she had a message from her daddy she was afraid of reading, I think, and I just...well...controlling information is my thing."

"You took a girl's message from her father," I sighed.

"She started it."

"And you stepped it up from getting people in trouble over misunderstandings and college bullshit, to hacking, data manipulation, and emotional blackmail. Do you have any idea how messed up she is about her dad?"

"Enough that she didn't use her mobile for two days after getting a message from him."

"Enough that it's a big fucking reason why she's a screwed up person, AEGIS. I've been in her head, and her shit with her dad is like, half of everything about her. And you just casually step in and fuck with that relationship? Jesus."

"Well, I didn't know that…"

"What'd she do? She didn't snap and try to kill you did she?" I asked, suddenly realizing that Moon was very tightly bottled, right until she exploded.

"No, she just crumpled. She was crying and bowing and begging for her message. I told her to fuck off and I'd give it to her...and then I did."

"And what was the message?"

She grinned at me and picked up the bowl again, apparently confident she'd weathered this conversation. "It was in Japanese and took me a while to get a decent translation, but basically it said 'come home'. To Japan."

I sat down, feeling my chest ache as I moved. "That's...that's it? She just...up and left? But...she dropped her mobile...does that mean anything?"

She shrugged. "Maybe she just dropped it. Good news for us anyway, now you don't have her running around meddling in your life. Not that it gives you permission to get into more trouble with that bitch."

Normally I would have argued in Alyssa's defense, but I was just lost thinking about Moon disappearing on us. Just...one message and she's gone? Just like that?

But then I thought on my own life. Just one night, and everything changed for me, too. Just one chance to have a normal life and I jumped at it. Was it the same for Moon? Was she going to reconnect with her father and put all this baggage in her heart away? I had to hope so, but it didn't sit right with me. Things going well made me uneasy.

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"Was the message really from her father?" I asked AEGIS. "Not a...scam or anything?"

"I didn't check. Give me a sec," she said, pouring circles of batter onto a pan. I shook my head as she sifted powdered sugar into the bubbling pancakes, which already looked like they had chocolate in them in at least two forms. "Yep, seems authentic enough. Came from IkaCo, anyway, I can't tell from where in there without more digging. Should I get digging?"

"No, just...just making sure," I said, falling back to thinking. As much as I wanted to focus on Moon and her situation, my thoughts kept wandering back to the mobile in my hands, and not in a useful way. Hers was different from mine, newer. Probably used a lower voltage, given the shape of the holo projector, but it's possible that there was just a subprojector elsewhere on the chip. If I could just see the delith cell powering the whole thing, the size of that would tell me everything.

Damn it, brain. Focus for a minute. On something useful.

I pulled out my own mobile and looked at it. My brain immediately started going to circuit diagrams again as my eyes glossed over my page of contacts.

I was supposed to be no-contact with the rest of the P-Force, by my own stipulation, but if something was up, they would know. But there didn't seem to be anything up, Moon had just gotten a message saying to go, and then she'd gone somewhere. Trying to draw any other conclusion here seemed like I was just in denial.

I sighed and put away both mobiles, just in time for AEGIS to accost me with a plate.

"You need to eat lots to heal sooner," she said singsong at me. I could veritably smell the sugar from here. Pancakes all right, but they hadn't set right, probably because she'd tampered with the ratios to take out the bad stuff and put in more good stuff, as she called it.

And they were coated in powdered sugar. And drowning in syrup. Both maple and chocolate. I wondered if they were also somehow salty. Sugar-blasted goopy salt pretty much summarized her cooking style.

"Uh, yeah, I'm not hungry," I said.

"Mmhmm," she muttered as she pushed my chair into the table, pinning me there effortlessly. "I put a lot of work into these, the least you can do is try them."

"Effort like...changing the recipe?"

"Improving the recipe."

I picked up the fork on the plate and ran it against the unset marbled goop to shred a sliver of it. I put it on the tip of my tongue and waited.

"It tastes like salt."

"You always say that, you're not eating it right. Salt enhances and accentuates flavors," she explained, pushing her glasses up her nose. "Sugar, sweetness, is the most basic desired flavor of all cooking, it's the basic fundamental fuel of life, and human brains are hardwired to love the stuff. But on its own, becomes rather one-note and monotonous. That's why people talk about things being too sweet, so I add a lot of salt to increase the depth of the flavor and add its own."

"So it's two-note and monotonous."

"You can do a lot with just two notes, Athan. Just eat it."

After the morning I was having, I was in no condition to try to put this into my body. With my luck, it would break the rest of my ribs from throwing it up again, while AEGIS patiently explained to me why my vomit was culinarily impossible. It was time for my rarely-used power move.

I picked up the plate and threw it across the room.

"Athan, what the heck!" she screamed.

"Not eating it."

"I worked hard on that!"

"And I've told you again, and again, and again, sugar and salt isn't edible."

"There's flour, and carbs, and...two other forms of sugar. And chocolate chips, which are...well, I got milk chocolate instead of semi-sweet. There's a whole palette of flavors in there!" She went to the crash site and surveyed the damage. "And now there's like a gallon of syrup in the carpet…"

"Better than in me," I sighed. I felt bad, I really did, but no amount of pleading or explaining seemed to phase AEGIS' zeal for fucking up food as much as possible, and so it had begun to come to this. I was a toddler, throwing food across the room.

While she fussed with the carpet, I snuck out, not even taking the time to change or grab my things. Her preoccupation with cleaning wouldn't last, efficient as she was, and she would be back to feeding me any second. I had to make my desperate maneuver count.

I slammed the door and ran...about two steps before I had to hold my side and gasp for air, and doing that fucked me up even more. Not like running meant much when she could jet off at a cheetah's sprint in a heartbeat, so instead I pathetically scurried away like some kind of...fearsome...scuttling crab.

I wasn't sure where I was going, but I'd been leaving the house just to get out of it a lot recently, so that wasn't exactly new. Often times I wound up on campus, and that's where my feet were taking me now. Heading to Alyssa's right now would probably result in her homicide, so I didn't do that.

What I really wanted most was to just get away. And I knew the expert on that. I checked my mobile, saw that it wasn't a preposterously early hour, and began messaging Rito as I walked. After I hit send, I moved to back towards home, where she'd been before and found a secluded corner where nobody could keep an eye on me to stop her from working.

I got back, and then I just had to wait. The temptation to sit down and rest was strong, but I'd learned that tended to get you a bruised backside when waiting for Rito to move you somewhere. The chair you were sitting on suddenly disappears from under you, and before you even know you've arrived, your butt hurts.

So I stood, and waited. And waited. And continued right on waiting. Until I realized I'd just spent a couple minutes standing somewhere else and never quite noticed it. I shook my head and got walking.

Up a flight of stairs and I was there in front of a different apartment door. I knocked, to no answer of course, and then let myself in with the spare key under the doormat.

The smell of decay hit me immediately when the door opened and I almost regretted coming here, but I wasn't going to trouble Rito again just yet. And however bad it might have smelled, it was better than AEGIS' cooking. I stepped into the darkness within and waited for my eyes to adjust.

The blinds were heavy and drawn, narrow pathways amidst piles of junk, scrap, garbage, and refuse led between the apartment's bathroom, kitchen, and bedroom, and the stench intensified near the sink, where about a thousand cups of instant noodle towered over the rest of the debris on the counter. Dark, stagnant water with things floating in it, lazily poured over plates and cookware. If she wasn't more careful, she'd wind up with a full pond in here and start breeding mosquitoes.

I sighed and pulled off my shirt, wrapping it around my face for whatever protection the smell of my own sweat would have over the other stank, and got to work.

I kept a roll of trash bags here, and used them aggressively, which diminished the amount of crap laying around very quickly. Even with all the takeout and instant noodles, I could tell she hadn't been eating properly, and considered making a batch of something large she could have for a few meals that wasn't just crap.

But that was just a pipe dream. For now, just getting all the shit detoxified and in cabinets was the goal, and that looked like at least an hour for me.

Still, it wasn't an unpleasant hour, all things considered. I'd really taken a liking to mundane things since going to college, and as it turned out, cleaning was about as mundane as things got. No drama, no fuss, no Exhuman bullshit, just a man and his sponge and a war on grime. Just like God intended.

After I was done and my arms ached slightly from all the elbow grease I'd put in, and my hands felt dry and nasty, I headed for the back, set on finding a place to sit and rest for a bit.

She was laying on the bed like usual. Tall, black hair in a huge mess around her, far longer than when we'd first met. Even thinner now than then, too, and she wasn't exactly bulky then. She was wearing simple, comfortable clothes, a pair of pants and a loose fitting tee with an obvious lack of bra, and a visor that wrapped around the entire upper half of her face.

It was hard to tell if she was awake or asleep, but by her relatively normal breathing, I guessed she was just plugged in at the moment. Which was good. Always made me feel like a creeper if I was here while she was actually sleeping. Not that it really made much of a difference physically.

I moved some more clothes around to make some space and laid down on the bed next to her, dragging another wired visor across her as I did. Once I was settled in, I pulled the visor over my eyes and waited for the neural uplink to establish. After just a couple seconds, I was running the rest of the controls with my mind alone, feeling more than thinking my way through the menus in a practiced, intuitive way, until the game kicked on and reality disappeared from under me.

In its place, new reality. Diffusely lit, gentler edges, brighter colors. Nothing to proclaim that this world wasn't real, but unrealistic enough to make it apparent.

Like before, menus floated through my thoughts as I felt my way through them and checked on my status and that of my friend's. No surprise, I hadn't changed at all since last time I logged in, while she'd gained most of thirty levels.

With a thought a staff appeared in my fingers, and I gave it a lazy wave, feeling the disconnect which threw many new players out of the VR experience, that my arm in physical space wasn't actually moving, just my perception of it. For those with cheaper hookups, the sensation of one's real body was still very strong and the disconnect could be immersion-breaking, even enough to induce nausea in some very confused minds. It had never bothered me really.

I waited while the staff did its thing, and after an eight-second timer, the world stretched like I was being pulled into a wormhole, and when it regained itself, I was standing in a familiar european-style garden under a shady oak which was inexplicably purple. White stone walls surrounded us, blocking out everything but the tree, the grass, and the blue sky. There was no way in or out of here but the staff.

From one of the oak's thick branches, a swing hung. And on that swing, sitting with her legs crossed, toes touching the ground was Whitney, or at least her representation in digital space, since the real one was lying next to me on the bed.

While my character looked just like me, since I had no reason for it not to, hers was opposite in nearly every way. Short purple hair, below-average height, stout frame, large breasts, an irritable face. I knew she came here to escape, but couldn't she escape her life without also escaping being herself? The thought of it made me a little sad, as it always did.

"Hi Athan," she sighed as she saw me. "Come to bother me again?"

"Just running away from home again," I said with her same melancholy. She gave me a little nod, and with a peculiar twirling of her fingers, another swing materialized from her inventory and hung on the tree next to her.

I sat down and kicked off for a little speed. "I cleaned your kitchen a little. You need to take better care of yourself."

She didn't reply, just kicked off the ground as well to swing exactly opposite my rhythm.