TONY

"Why would a perfectly good, all-knowing, and all-powerful God allow evil and suffering to exist in the world?" Marilyn Monroe said as she sliced me open. I stared at her in shock as she carved vicious gashes into me. I adjusted my glasses while my intestines spilled out of me. Was I seeing things? What the fuck was going on?

The bystanders in the restaurant all stared dumbly, before continuing their conversations. The waiters did nothing, save for replacing her steak knife as if she'd dropped it on the floor. The string quartet I'd specifically picked out kept playing, without even changing their tune. Marilyn looked desperate, frantic, and frustrated.

This was getting gratuitous. Our tablecloth was drenched, our meals ruined, our atmosphere rancid. I signed a gesture; it looked a little like asking for the check. She stared at me, beautifully deadpan before the world paused. I tapped the side of my glasses twice and they turned clear, the restaurant falling away to my bedroom. I looked down, just in case, and felt a little embarrassed at the involuntary jolt of relief I had at not seeing my guts everywhere.

A settings menu popped up. What freaking setting do you click on for something like that? "Help" seemed comically insufficient. I clicked on "Reset Experience."

My driver pulled up to the restaurant and opened her door. A gust of wind lifted her skirt as she stepped out, and she struck that iconic pose I first saw in some history book when I was a teenager, with the correct amount of murder in her eyes. I got out on my own, watching her closely. "Liking what you see?" she batted her eyelashes. "So far," I responded. We walked in together, her draped over my arm, all laughs at all my jokes. Our host led us to the same table as last time. "Wait," I said, slipping my hand into my pocket. "I got a hundred dollars here for you if you can seat us over there," I nodded towards some random table. My hand left my pocket with a crisp hundred dollar bill that hadn't been there a second ago, but that I knew would be there once I asked for it.

There was an art to meeting the experience generator halfway, leaving it enough breadcrumbs for it to be able to reliably guess what you wanted to do without killing your sense of immersion, of being an actor in a scene and not its director. It took some getting used to, but I've logged enough hours that it just came naturally now. Almost too naturally; it was hard to switch off sometimes. I once pulled the same thing in real life at a coffee shop, "Oh yeah, I'm just waiting for my friend to send me the money he owes me." I refreshed my bank's app, expecting thousands to just materialize, but of course in reality there was no friend, there was no money in transit, nor was there any in my bank account. Annoyed whispers mounting behind me, I looked at the barista and sheepishly asked for a small instead. I left with my tail between my legs that day. There were rumors that Mental, the company behind E.G. was going to release brain computer interfaces soon, making awkward segues and awkwarder anecdotes a thing of the past, but until then this was the best we storytellers could do.

“Of course, sir," the host smiled, pocketing the money and leading us to a new table. I wanted to see if Marilyn would have the same, er, thought process at a new table. Maybe there was some weird bug at those specific X,Y,Z coordinates, or maybe her subroutines freaked out for some reason if that table was in her parameter set? You never really know, you can just make educated guesses. It made debugging a slow process since you could really only change one thing at a time. We went through the date at the new table much as before, including the part where she gutted me like my fish.

I signed for the check.

This time we sat at the original table. "I'll have the steak," she said, flashing a brilliant smile at the waitress. "No no no, she'll have the salad," I interrupted. The waitress gave me a barely concealed dirty look. "I guess I'll be having a salad," she laughed, trying to diffuse the tension. I wanted to yell, "I'm not being sexist, I just don't think you should have a steak knife right now!" but I don't think it would have salvaged the mood. The waitress brought out our meals, and Marilyn grabbed a wine bottle from the sommelier and cracked it over my head, then pushed the broken stem into my heart. "Damn it," I mumbled, asking for the check.

When we went to a French restaurant she strangled me. She pulled a pistol from her purse at an Italian joint. When we went to an anachronistic Thai restaurant, she anachronistically beheaded me. "You should have done that at the French restaurant," my dismembered head said, as my body waved down the check. Dinner and drinks turned into breakfast and coffee, where she threw boiling hot coffee in my face. I invited my driver to sit with us, and she kindly excused herself to the bathroom before driving the Aston Martin through the glass doors and over our table. "Did she steal your keys?" I asked, wedged between the car and the wall. He turned his pockets inside out; empty. I invited my driver to sit with us, and took the keys from him as we sat down. She excused herself to the bathroom before barring the doors and setting the whole restaurant on fire.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

"You are simulating a date with a very, VERY peaceful, non-confrontational, madly in love with me Marilyn Monroe," I said to the experience generator. "We are going out to a place with absolutely no sharp instruments, that is fireproof, and, uh, for good measure, I have very competent security guards. Ex-marine, no I guess it'd be ex-World War 2."

"Understood," it responded.

My driver let us out at an old-timey ice cream shop, the kind you picture a cherubic blond kid would order a root beer float at. Gee willikers. My security guards stood outside while we chatted and looked over the flavors. Nothing sharper than an ice cream scoop here, good. No purse, nowhere she could hide anything on such a tight dress. I lifted her skirt to make sure there was nothing there. "Excuuuse me, mister," she said, scandalized but unable to slap me because of her programming, "I am a lady!"

"Sorry, sorry, just making sure."

"Of what, that my knickers ain't all in a twist? And just when I thought I was really falling for you."

"How about we all just forget the last five seconds ever happened."

Her ruby red lips were now all smiles. "I already forgot."

"Me too. Do you know what you want?"

"Oh, I never know what I want."

"Can I have a cone with one vanilla and one chocolate."

The man behind the counter, in his little paper hat and striped shirt, jumped to action. I watch her closely, making sure she wasn’t about to lunge over the counter and gouge my eyes out with the scoop. She made no movement to that effect. "Here ya go, one vanilla and one chocolate, on the house for the beautiful lady."

"Gee willikers, thanks Mister!" she blew him a kiss. He blushed. If this was a less realistic experience he might have grown hearts for eyes and floated away.

We ate our ice cream at the counter, but my head was on a swivel the whole time. Marilyn, still peaceful. Security guards, still outside. Man at the counter, still adorably quaint. Marilyn, still peaceful.

"You feeling okay hun?" she asked. "You keep looking around like, well, like a little prairie dog."

"Yeah, I'm, just dandy. Would you kindly change the subject?" I asked.

"Would you kindly" was another one of those "meeting the experience generator halfway" things, a classier way of telling the sims how to behave without totally taking yourself out of the experience. The developers got it from some video game, thinking they were being real clever. For example, sometimes the sims would start "hallucinating", our term for when their AI made things up, went off script, or got caught in a loop. It can be kind of scary when your Marilyn Monroe just says "If you can't handle me at my worst, then you can't handle me at my worst, then you can't handle me at my worst, then you can't handle me at my worst," forever. That happened sometimes when there were too many people using the experience generator at the same time. Mental would rather lobotomize it, cut its memory and CPU time to serve everyone poorly, than risk you putting on a movie or something instead. Instead of saying "Please reset your context window," you could say "would you kindly rephrase that" and walk away with some suspension of disbelief intact, "some" being the key word. There was a small dictionary worth of such hacks, like "God willing," if you were running a more medieval experience. "Would you kindly" just felt more appropriately mid-century mid-Atlantic here. Y'know, in the game the people saying "would you kindly" weren’t exactly the good guys, so the whole thing felt a little incriminating.

"Sure. I suppose after we're done here, you'll be wanting to go back to your place and show me some new flavors?" she said, breathily.

"Oh. Uh, yeah." I had completely forgotten that this was supposed to be a sexual experience. A sexperience. I started thinking about all the ways she could kill me in an apartment. No handcuffs for sure.

"Because of course I want to."

"Of course?"

"After all, I 'love you unconditionally,’ right Tony?"

"W-would you kindly, uh, be less scary."

"Would YOU kindly tell me why would a perfectly good, all-knowing, and all-powerful God allow evil and suffering to exist in the world?"

"I, honestly, have no idea?"

"Okay. Thanks," she said before smashing her head into the glass counter.

"I fucking give up!" I yelled, ripping off my glasses. I pulled up Mental's bug filing forms and typed:

"Hello. I'm a storyteller working with your E.G. One of my experience's sims keeps killing me and or itself after having some kind of crisis of faith. Something about God creating suffering. I tried a bunch of ways to fix it, and have attached logs of my last few experiences. Any help appreciated!"

Somewhere in California a bug report was filed.

"Ah shit," Alfonso said, "not again."