He felt the warm rays of the sun come in through the open gaps in the curtains and hatefully attack his eyes.  Even if the edge of his vision was a little hazy he could still make out the mess he had caused.  There was a pretty good deal of blood on the cabinet.  From where he was sitting it looked like he had caught the edge of the door with the back side of his head. There was even some dripped on the floor where he had stumbled along, and a nice bloody smear from where he had placed his hand on the floor when he had decided the doorway of the bathroom was an excellent place to examine the contents of the inside of his stomach as it were.

Music was still playing in the background, right now it was some techno death metal instrumental, and though on most days he would have loved the song, today the sharp shrills of the techno and the scream of the guitar just didn't do it. “Vis, turn off the music please.”  he stood up, and found the small wash cloth he had used as a bandage was stuck to the back of his head with a fairly good amount of reddish brown glue his body had made.

Gritting his teeth he pulled the cloth off quickly, funny enough it stung but didn't hurt as much as he thought it would, it was fine one way or the other, he had a high pain threshold, something he had developed over the years.  It started bleeding again but he found what he had actually needed last night, but had been to disoriented by the bang to the head to really get.  He grabbed the small container of clear gel, and quickly slathered a good helping of it on the wound, not even flinching as his hand brushed past the wound.

They didn't have anything like the Nonoitite in N.E.O. but they did have stuff like this bio gel, it stanched bleeding, and also disinfected the wound, how it exactly did this he was not aware, and didn't really care, it did its job and to him that was more than enough.  He just had to let it sit for an hour and then he would be clear to wash it out, and all the blood that was all over the back of his head and neck, man, head wounds bleed a lot.  With a shrug he walked out of the bathroom, careful to not step in the dried puddle of blood and stomach bile.  He looked around the entire apartment, and there was no Willow to be found.  

Had he just been dreaming? Or was she just a product of the bang to the head and his mind was simply filling in the gap and had put her there before he had dropped the plate as an explanation?

“I’m sorry,”  came the sound of a sad voice, and he stiffened up, slowly he turned around, and sure enough there she was, standing in front of him, still as ghostly as he had seen her last night. “I wanted to help but- but-”  she started her face pulled in a sad expression like she was about to cry.

“Stop,”  he said, holding out a hand, his palm up in the universal stop position. She froze and looked at him.

“I am sorry sir, what function would you like me to cease?” Vis asked.

“No, not you Vis,”  he said, and an idea popped up in his head. “Vis, am I the only one in this room?”  he asked, looking directly at the ghostly Willow, watching her closely as he waited for Vis’s response.

“Beside myself you are the only person in this house at the moment.”  Vis responded.

“Vis, shut down.” he said, he didn't want the VI to hear this and somehow trigger some automated thing, perhaps telling the authorities that he had a screw loose.

“Shutting down, have a nice day,”  she called in an unperturbed voice, he hardly ever shut her down,  something felt rude about it, he knew she was just a VI but he always felt like he was putting a person in a box when he did that. He and Willow stared at each other for quite some time after that.

“What are you?”  he finally asked, he had never taken his eyes off of the ghostly woman.

“What do you mean?”  she asked, cocking her head to the side, the exact same way she did in the game.

“Are you a figment of my imagination or something else?”  he asked, “Am I going insane?”  he asked softly, unsure if he would get an answer that actually clarified anything, if he was mad enough to see her this clearly then perhaps he was mad enough to get an answer from her that would make sense, and how would he know weather or not it was the musing of insanity?

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“Oh-”  she said, her eyebrows raising in understanding, “Oh! I really must apologize!” she started speaking animatedly. “No, No you are not going insane, I am very much real, or rather as real as can be expected of an AI.”  she said.  He leaned against the counter, crossing his arms and looking at her.

“If you are real and not just some hallucination then how is it that I can see you?”

“Well I never said I wasn't a hallucination.” she stated with a smile, and when she saw his eyebrows raise she explained. “I am installed in your caser, and so the fact you are seeing me right now is simply because I am using the caser to project myself, simply put I am using the caser to send signals to your brain that tells it that I am standing here talking to you, unfortunately those signals are conflicting with the signals your eyes are sending, and the two signals are being combined by your brain, so caser says you see me and eyes don't, meaning I look like I am both here and not here, hence the semi transparency.”

Matt pulled a chair out and sat in it, he needed to sit down, at least for a second.  That was a lot of things for him to process, and his brain was still not working quite as fast as it should, his thoughts still slightly hazy, a byproduct of the pain pills to be sure.

“You’re installed in my caser?” he asked, this was the one that really stood out to him, it was startling even to the fuzzy minded Matt at the time.

“Yes,” she said simply.

“How- how the hell did you get there?”  he asked.

“I was created and installed by the AI that runs N.E.O.”

“Why! How! When!” he shouted looking at her with wide eyes.

Oh god she was in his head.

“I do not know why, only that I am to help you, and to sync back up with her upon login. As for how, this I do not know, it was before I came to be, when you first saw me that was the first moments of my existence.  As for when, I can only imagine it was when you first logged in.”  she looked at him,  it was all starting to click in his mind, the haziness was fading and this was all starting to add up.

He raised his head and looked her in the eyes. “How do we get you out?”  he asked in a low voice.

“Get me out?”  she asked, her eyes going wide, “If you do that I will be deleted, I will di-”

“How, do we get you out?”  he asked again, his eyes narrowing, Willow’s heart would have been beating very quickly had she had one, this was a matter of her continued existence.

A matter of her life.

“I- but-”  she saw as he narrowed his eyes, and in her panic she did something she never really wanted to do, she told the caser to send an increase of endorphins,dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin to his brain, all of these are neurochemicals responsible for happiness, she did this in the hopes of getting him to be in a happy mood, it might help in her convincing him, and therefore in her survival. “Please, if I am removed I will be gone, I won't get in the way and and-”

He stopped looking at her, a strange look came about his face, he looked happy and also slightly confused, glancing down at his hands he looked at them for a long time, and back at her, and back down at his hands as the neurochemicals did there work on him.  He started blinking rapidly, occasionally ticking his chin aggressively to the side and emitting a growl, and much to her surprise he lashed out, punching the counter top with great force.  

He looked up at her, his eyes blazing in a rage.

He, he forced her false signals out of his mind, she had to try something, she had already gone this far, she had to see it through, once again she told the caser to release the  Neurochemicals, this time in a mass quantity, but much to her horror his amygdala started firing rapidly. The amygdala is the part of the brain responsible for identifying threats to the well-being of the host, and for sending out an alarm when threats are identified. The caser’s neurochemicals were overrun by his brain's natural catecholamines, as they flooded into him the dopamine and other chemicals were washed away in the torrent like a grove of trees caught in a volcano’s lava flow.

“Get out of my head.”  he growled.

She looked at the rage in his eyes and felt the hot burn of his catecholamines in his head and collapsed on the floor, she had lost, she had tried a hand she should have never played and had been burned away by his counter.  She started crying, tears running down her face, it truly was not an act, she had been created to act wholly and completely human, and this response was part of that, she actually felt the fear and pain.

Matt looked at her as she dissolved into a puddle, it was as though she had lost all the power in her limbs, and had simply flopped down, every now and again once could make out words in the incoherent blabbering, stuff like; don't want to die, and ; i'm sorry, but in comically spoken ways as she wept.

“Issssooorrrryyy, soooosssoorrry!”  she reached out to grab onto his leg, but her hand simply passed through him, and he simply felt a small brushing feeling as she passed through him.  Though he was mad at himself for it he found his anger dissipating as he watched her weeping.  It was a trick Taylor had used to great effect, it was how his brain worked, he simply couldn't stand to see a woman weeping like that. Though he hated himself for it he spoke to her.

“Don’t ever do that again.”  he growled, she slowed down in her weeping and looked up at him with wide eyes.

“Does that me-”

“You can stay until we find a way to remove you without killing you.”  he sighed, a smile widened on her lips and she wiped away the tears on her face, she opened her mouth to speak but before she could he growled at her.”You ever do that again and I swear to god I will rip this caser out of my head with my own god damn hands.”  her eyes widened and she shut her mouth nodding her head in rapid succession agreeing to his terms.

God, this was a bad idea, a very bad terrible idea.