The tree swayed lazily in the nonexistent wind, Whitney's avatar's feet kicked up little tufts of grass that floated and disappeared in the air in a surreal way, like gravity didn't work on them quite right.

In the end, I'd chosen not to stay with AEGIS, even though she was AEGIS Prime again. She didn't understand, and honestly, I didn't want her to. I blamed myself for how she turned out, and despite my many threats to hold her accountable or correct the course of our relationship, I never did. I'd just lived the same illusion she had -- that one day she'd become just like Prime by magic -- all the while, criticizing her for believing it while I did exactly the same.

I'd dumped too much on her and fucked her up. And so when she opened her eyes again, a new AEGIS looking through them now, I felt I couldn't do anything but the opposite. I told her next to nothing. I left.

I ran.

I left her with Lia, who would do a better job raising a nascent AI than I ever could. I left Tem and Moon behind, both of whom had differing kinds of abandonment issues. I knew that and I abandoned them anyway. Because after failing Alyssa, what else was there for me to do but to fail everyone else in my life?

Bad decisions always felt like they excused more bad decisions somehow. I knew what I did was wrong, I knew what I was doing was wrong, I just didn't feel like there was anything I could do about it. I'd just fuck my whole life up all at once and get it all out of the way.

Knowing such is probably why, like Whitney, my avatar looked a lot less like myself nowadays. She'd noticed but hadn't commented, instead the two of us just sat in silence for long stretches, both of us aware of just how crappy we were.

"Are you going to continue college?" she abruptly asked, as though continuing a conversation.

I shook my head.

"Why not? You liked it, didn't you?"

I just hung there at the end of the swing, my feet flat on the ground. I'd played pretend once already. I'd been selfish and acted like my life was regular and I was fine, and as a result, some poor fuck was burying their daughter today. I wasn't even sent an invite to the funeral, because those making the arrangements wouldn't know of me. That's how small a piece of Alyssa's life I really was. Just one tiny lethal prick.

"Have you given any thought to what next then?"

I hadn't. If I had, my plans certainly wouldn't have started with coming here.

"I guess if you're here, maybe not, eh?" she echoed my thoughts. "Well. If nothing else, you seem to have a knack for circuits...and electromagnetism, physics and the like. You could...do what I did. Open up your own repair shop. I can't promise you'll make too much but…"

She trailed off and swung a little more, the tips of her feet entering and leaving my periphery.

"...but at least you never have to face anyone."

What if I should, though? What if there was no reason for me to exist if I was just going to hide away from the world? Whitney for all her lifestyle choices and self-isolation had still made it a clear priority to find some way to be Chariot, and I suspected that was because she needed something to live for, even if she thought herself a terrible person in all other respects. She had that one damn thing at least, where she could look at herself and say she was helping the world.

And I had, what? Why was I here? What was I doing? Why was I even alive?

I thought of how I didn't move, how I'd just laid there, staring at Alyssa's tranquil face as the fire crept in on us. I dropped the P-Force, my friends, everything I had for the shot to be there, and then I let that life burn. Now I had, what?

Whitney responded again like she was in my head. "Listen uh...I know...I haven't really expressed this. But, there's a reason I gave you a copy of my apartment key. And it's not so you could stop by and clean up, although I appreciated that, obviously."

She skidded to a stop beside me, and with her, I could feel the arm of the oak holding up my swing go still.

"I liked it when you came by. It meant a lot to me. Even when people feel bad about themselves and feel low and depressed...even when I don't want to be with anyone, and I feel like...like I'm a toxin, and I should be alone, for everyone else's own good...even after a lifetime of choosing to be alone…"

She stopped and sighed.

"Nobody wants to be alone, you know. Not...like, truly alone. Maybe most of the time I'd rather not deal with people and their expectations and pressures and all the garbage which is cultural norms. But when you stopped by, even if it was just for a second to say hi or to chew me out for not eating, I knew you cared, and that meant a lot."

She stood up and walked in front of me, sitting on the grass right in my field of view, her short purple hair bobbing above her swarthy frame as she plopped down.

"Last time, you asked me for advice, and I didn't have any for you. I'd be lying if I said I didn't lose a lot of hours of sleep, lying around thinking about what I should have said instead. So this time...I'm gonna...gonna talk until I say something genius, even if it kills me. So that at least when I'm cringing internally at myself, it can be for trying too hard." She took a deep breath as though she were ready to cringe it up right now. "What my point was is that...when I turned -- and you right now -- neither of us seemed to have anything going for us in our lives at that moment. Everything we'd built up just, poof. But that's just how it feels, that's not hot it actually is."

I looked up and met her eyes. Purple like her hair. So strange that she'd care about her appearance enough to match in this world when out there, she'd just dress in whatever.

"Because when I turned, I had you, and many of your friends, and a few old buddies I kept in touch with on the 'net. And no matter how low I felt, you never stopped coming by to remind me of that. Even if...I couldn't do my work anymore, and I was this…" she looked down at her hands. "...monster. You'd been a monster too, and you were willing to stand by me. It's easy when we lose something to think we've lost everything but that's just an illusion, just our brain coping with the loss."

"Whitney," I said, my voice coming out clearer than it would of my real throat. "You live in a messy, tiny squalor. You have no job, talk to nobody but me that I know of, and hide in VR whenever you're not eating or sleeping just so you don't have to be yourself."

She nodded deliberately, but I could see her discomfort as I threw her reality in her face.

"I'm not saying this to be mean or discredit your opinion. Just, how can you argue that it's just an illusion? Your life seems, to me, objectively shit and broken because of what happened to you. How can you sit in the middle of that and tell me it's all just my brain playing tricks?"

"I'm not...I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't say that. I said...you didn't lose everything. Your loss was real, and it...it's gonna hurt and keep on hurting. If you're as weak as me, you might never recover. You might just...hide and...be weak and afraid."

She almost looked on the verge of crying, but suddenly stiffened, her voice growing uncharacteristically bold as she smirked at me, sudden and knowing. "But that's not the same thing as having nothing."

"What's the difference if it feels like it?" I asked.

"The difference is," she said, standing up and dusting vanishing grass particles off of her legs. "If you have nothing, you stay down. If you don't, you get up, and the people and things you have, they help you do so."

She reached towards me with a familiar, knowing smirk, her eyes darting back and forth between mine with the regularity of a pendulum.

I just sat there on the pretend swing under the pretend tree surrounded by pretend walls and pretended she wasn't offering me her hand.

"Are you really just gonna leave me hanging here, friendo?" she asked.

I sighed, which cleared my lungs for the deep breath I took to grab hold of her extended arm.

I felt a tug and then landed in myself, the visor of the neural uplink blinking in front of me that I'd been disconnected by an admin and the sounds of Whitney already getting up next to me. I pulled off the visor and blinked in the semi-darkness as she crawled around me and off the bed.

"Jesus, you're thin," I said before I could stop the words from coming out.

Before she'd worn tank tops and cargo shorts to keep her clothes out of the way of her work and minimize oil stains. Now she was in baggy cargo pants and a long-sleeve shirt to keep her body warm while she laid there completely inactive all day.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

"So step one is to eat a hot meal," she said. "I don't have much but ramen and hot dogs, so we're having ramen and hot dogs."

"There's frozen veggies from last time I shopped for you," I added, blinking as she turned on one of the apartment's three lights.

"Ramen and hot dogs and veggies," she said. "Pulmenti dei. Soup of the gods."

She seemed to own very few cooking implements which I found strange given how many tools and machine parts she'd once had everywhere. I guessed it was just a matter of interest for her; easier to pick up a thousand random quantum cores than a second pot. As she washed the one pot though, I got to work picking up trash and compressing it into a bin for extraction.

"Cleaning was step two," she said.

"I don't mind."

She looked at me as though thinking about reprimanding me for something and then just shrugged and went back to dishes. I was pretty sure I could see her thoughts on her face. She was making an effort here, by her astonishingly low standards, and wanted them to hit me with maximum impact. Whether that was by letting me do nothing or letting me work was her brief debate.

But I really didn't mind just doing something mindless for a while. My brain was veering wildly between being dead and sprinting at a million miles a minute, and focusing on the task of fitting as many noodle cups into a single bin as possible was...well, not ideal, but it was something.

I felt a pang as I compared myself mentally to AEGIS, who always dove headfirst into work to improve her mood. With my just leaving like I had, odds were good she was focusing on her work right now, both to soothe her confusion and to mend it.

"What's on your mind?" Whitney asked, and I realized she'd been studying me.

"Nothing," I said.

"What's really on your mind?" she asked again, waving a knife around at me instead of the hot dogs.

"AEGIS, if you must pry."

"What about her?"

"Look, why are we talking about this?"

She set the knife down with the same delicate handling as she treated all her tools and then faced me fully. "Because you're not a runner, Athan Ashton. I am, and I know how much it sucks to live that way. I don't want you winding up being me, if you can avoid it."

"That's stupid."

"No, that's life experience. You get one life, and I wasted mine and then it turned out like this. It'd piss me off if you had this lesson in front of you and still went this way."

"And you think this is the critical juncture? Talking about AEGIS or not? If I clam up now, I'll be doomed to cup of noodle for the rest of my life?"

"Yes," she smirked. "Now talk about your frickin' feelers already."

"Okay," I said, feeling too worn out to be charmed, and settling on the next best thing, emotionally. "But before that, can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"You've never talked about your life being shit or something to avoid before. I always thought you were...not exactly happy, but approaching happiness. Before the Exhuman thing. Which I assume is what you're talking about since it's not like I could avoid Exhumanity even if I tried."

"I guess not."

"So why are you trying to warn me off of it?"

She studied me for a second and then apparently had enough of that because she turned and went back to the hot dog slicing as she thought. Her words drifted over as though she weren't quite talking to me.

"I've been doing a lot of thinking, after I turned. Not much else to do in my VR world really. I had a lot of time to reflect on my life, the decisions I made, where they led."

"And you decided your life was bad?"

"In a lot of ways, I think I took it for granted. Some decisions in it were bad. I'm still introverted as heck and sick of people and society and wouldn't change any of that even if I could. But without my self, or my shop, it becomes really easy to appreciate people, and I feel like...that's one of your few really good points. You don't give up on people. You don't run away when things get ugly with them. I don't want you to lose that."

"I literally just ran away from AEGIS because I couldn't stand her anymore."

"Ah. And how'd she take that?"

"Really...really...badly."

"Then I guess that's just more evidence that you shouldn't run, huh?"

I bet she wouldn't be standing there smirking at me if she knew AEGIS literally chose death over being dumped by me. I knew her words were just ignorant, but it felt sick that she was gloating at me over pushing someone to suicide.

She tore open some packages of instant noodles and added them to the now-boiling water, the splashes of which hissed and steamed as they hit the stovetop.

"And now, your thoughts?" she asked. "On AEGIS, from before?"

I gave the trash bin one final desperate push and then let it go, watching it seeming to inflate on its own...but it stopped just shy of overflowing.

"We...broke up," I said. "She didn't take it well."

"Oh. That kind of ran away." She shuffled uncomfortably before steeling herself again. "I said it before, friendo, you two were bad together. She's always been petty and abusive. I'm just glad you got out."

"Well...I'm not," I said. "Not for what it cost." She was about to interject when I finished. "She's dead, Whitney."

Whitney gaped at me over her shoulder for a second. "But...how?"

"Took a recovery drive and wiped herself out. The program running in Rua now is a different version. She considered herself a failed attempt and decided to let a different AEGIS take over."

Whitney slowly stirred the water making the trail of steam spiral upwards, her face completely focused in thought.

"She's not gone, gone, then. There are versions of recent backups around. If she wanted to live, she could. She just…"

"Didn't," I finished.

"Yeah." She swallowed hard. "Look, I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I have the utmost respect for anyone's decision to...self-terminate. When I started my business, it was kind of a desperation move. I thought, I'm sick of living. I'll just do what I always wanted to, and if it doesn't work, I can...can die knowing that I tried."

"Jesus Christ."

"But to my surprise, business did come in. I got a few commissions and then a few more, and soon I was making a--" she smirked significantly "--a living at it. And I just kind of kept on that inertia."

"And if you didn't you'd just die?"

"Is that so strange?"

"Hell yes that's strange. We live in a modern society where people can get help or change careers or get an education. Find a new passion, make new friends, something. Just, I do this or I die, that's insane."

She shrugged. "I think that's most really serious entrepreneurs. They put everything on the line for a vision they have. I think that's most military service people. This mission goes well or we die. I think that's a lot of things, some of them just kill you slower. Is spending fifty years grasping at a career which is going obsolete and work is becoming harder to find and your savings drying up...is that any different from being dead?"

"Yes, because you're still alive."

"But to what point? You're never going to get better. You can start over, sure, but most people will never do that. Things just get worse and worse and then you're dead. Why wait that long?"

I took a step back and looked at her stirring the instant noodles in the pot. She wasn't rivalling Saga for emaciation yet, but somehow looked worse for having lost the weight more suddenly. How could she stand there, straight and tall, cooking something to eat, to live, and talk like this? How was someone so freaking pessimistic capable of functioning?

"So after you turned, why aren't you dead?" I asked.

She turned and smirked at me. "I have the P-Force to help. And you."

"Is this you helping me, right now? Talking about how it's fine for AEGIS to self-terminate because I fucked her up?"

"No," she said, turning off the stove and serving a steaming bowl of noodles, with cut pieces of hot dog and veggies floating in the broth. "This is me helping you. Soup, and an ear, and someone who has ideas different from you listening to what you are feeling."

I just stared at her as she made another bowl and then joined me at the small clean space on the countertop.

"Are you crazy? Or more specifically, have you gone crazy recently, or have you always been and I just never noticed?" I asked.

She smirked at me with a hint of a laugh as she ate a spoonful of soup. "I guess it depends on your definition. But I've pretty much always had thoughts like those, they're just not typically relevant to the conversation. Or polite to bring up. But, we've got a literal dead robot girl on our hands, so now's not the time to beat around the bush on talking about death."

"I guess."

We slurped in relative silence for awhile, the warm soup doing nothing to make me feel any less frigid inside. To say nothing of her. Maybe she'd just overshared on purpose to get my mind off AEGIS, but if so, Jesus, what a gamble.

And then I realized, I was being really, really judgey. That word, 'overshared.' Could that even apply to us? We shared Exhuman powers for God's sake, how much more intimate could we be? Was I just being disgusted by some part of her and trying to dress it all up as her fault? I wasn't sure, but I felt convinced that in a warped way, she was trying to help, and that meant the fault for feeling like I did was in me somewhere.

For the like, third time, she spoke up before my thoughts got anywhere. Probably because my thoughts had nowhere really to go but in circles.

"You still having the engineering obsessions?" she asked.

"I dunno that it'll survive without classes. But...I can't pretend I wasn't trying to figure out what the optimal level of resistance for your stove's burners would be, to maximize heat to energy ratio, given household current."

"You realize the burners themselves aren't variable resistors," she smiled. "There's a heating element under them which works on an alternating pattern based on heat sensors."

"Oh. Yeah I guess running the voltage through them directly would uh...shock the crap outta people."

"Would certainly make oven mitts a lot more required. Look, I've been procrastinating an unhealthy amount on getting my exosuit up and running. I just don't feel the spark, if you know what I mean. I'd love an extra pair of hands if you're going to be staying here, and I can't think of anyone more qualified than you."

"You...you mean it?"

"All that talk about finding things to live for. I don't think finding a new hobby is a bad start." She gave me a small wink. I remembered the conversation as things to die over, but same coin, I guess.

"Hell yeah I'd like to repair an exosuit," I said, putting down my spoon. "Where is it? When do we start? Are the hydraulics nitrogen-compression or do they use some proprietary gas mix? Is it an Ur-Horizon AI? I hate those."

She just laughed and reached over and put the spoon back in my hand. "We'll get there, Athan. Just keep on living and life will keep on happening to you. And before you know it, you'll get there."