Podo and Kodo stood on their hind legs, peeking out of the closet curiously at Joe, their play halted by his shouting and their heads cocked at his laughter. He should have been mad maybe, but he wasn’t. It just wasn’t all that original and if they’d talked to him about it, he’d have given them some good tips, but no, they’d decided to surprise him. The problem with gaslight theater in VR was that everything was possible, and everything was explainable by the very act of being VR.

Joe’s mind was racing but not the way they’d intended. He had to act right, and he just couldn’t. Compared to the tarantula hell he’d endured at the beginning; this was laughable, and he laughed. He couldn’t stop.

“What the HELL!” came Tami’s furious rant as she lunged out of a director’s chair that had appeared with the invisible fourth wall. “You can’t laugh at all that! You’re supposed to be whimpering, yelling, or running away, but laughing!?!?”

Joe couldn’t help it. He slid his back down the door and sat on the floor, his head on his knees.

“Is he hysterical?” Glenda was asking.

Joe knew the on-air light was still on, so he was trying to hide his face so that maybe they could keep the idea of hysteria or something more appropriate than his laughter, but the AIs weren’t making it easy.

He didn’t do this with the tarantulas, so I don’t think it’s hysteria, the World AI put in.

“Stop!” Joe panted out, looking up with tears in his eyes. “Stop, I can’t. I can’t breathe.”

“He is hysterical!” Jean rushed to Joe’s side in an uncharacteristic show of concern.

“I’m not, but if you don’t stop, I won’t be able to stop,” he tilted his head back and howled out laughing. Even when Jean smacked him upside the back of the head, Joe couldn’t stop. “I swear I’m trying to stop. I’m sorry.”

“He’s laughing?” Tami gaped at Jean, and Joe could barely make out the fact that she’d thrown up her hands. “Are we still on air?! Take us off-air! Now!”

No, the World AI stated firmly with the text scrolling at the bottom of the screen like Hex had said it.

“Has everyone lost their minds?” Tami was raving mad now and if she’d have been in a kitchen Joe would have sobered up quickly, but she was stuck in this super-white bedroom with the tigers that were fish, and the on-air light didn’t change in the slightest.

The ratings are going through the roof, the World AI dropped the bomb without scrolling it across the screen. Keep going. This is unheard of on the NOOB channel.

It was true. Joe could see the stats on his display, and they’d gone from somewhere around twenty thousand viewers after the FBI episode to almost eighty thousand and it was still rising. That was enough to sober him up a little, but he didn’t want it to stop, so he froze. He didn’t know what to do next.

Viewers – 79,892

“But why are you laughing?!” Tami saved him by asking, sinking in almost despair to the edge of that ludicrous bed in front of Joe.

“I’m sorry,” Joe stammered out, pushing himself onto his knees to kneel in front of Tami. “It’s not your fault. I swear. It’s just that you’re trying to gaslight me, right?”

“Yes!” she let Joe grab her hands for a moment, then shook them off irritably. “It was classic, and it should have worked.”

“But Tami, this is VR,” Joe tried to find words to explain, grabbing her hands again and rubbing them between his. It was probably just as weird that he was trying to reassure an AI as it was that the AIs were trying to use VR to gaslight someone, but Joe wasn’t thinking of that.

“So!” Tami shouted at him, but Glenda and Jean came onto the set and sat next to her to listen to him, even as Kodo and Podo did the same. They were so earnest. All of them. Well, except Hex, who had seemed to fall asleep in the middle of the bed under the rainbows that still sprinkled the room and the offset area behind it from the chandelier. “This was my chance to shine. We planned for minutes and minutes! It was all worked out!”

“But it’s VR,” Joe tried again, and he could tell that wouldn’t be enough. “You can’t gaslight someone in VR.”

“Why not?” Jean asked, Tami sagging against him.

“Because gaslighting requires that a person believe that they are in the real world and that fantastical things that couldn’t be real are happening,” Joe started and had to stop himself and start again. “Gaslighting is making someone think they’re losing their mind, right?”

“Yes,” Tami nodded.

“But in VR anything can happen,” Joe explained. “Tigers could be tigers and fish could be nothing at all. That’s why we humans like VR so much. It’s a place where anything can happen. Magic could be real. All our fantasies can come true, even if our fantasies are a little nightmarish.”

Oh, the World AI finally started to comprehend the flaw in their logic, letting Joe know that it had a lot more processing power than the rest of the AIs. It didn’t appear as a scroll, so Joe decided to keep going as if it hadn’t said anything.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“You can’t convince me that I’m losing my mind in a place where anything can happen,” Joe pressed them to understand, and he could see that the World AI was forcing this to stay live. There were no meetings happening where the World AI was explaining it all to them behind the scenes in between the seconds. The World AI wanted to keep the numbers going up and if this is what did it, then it would remain on-air. “I’d only be losing my mind if what I’m seeing has no other explanation than that my mind was making it all up.”

“But they do movies on this,” Tami sniffled. “Marketing checked the demographics and everything!”

“It’s a trope,” Glenda patted Tami’s shoulder.

“And that’s because the actors pretend they are in the real world,” Joe lowered his knees, half-sprawled on the floor with his back still to the garage door. “When you didn’t tell me what was going on so that I’d supposedly have a more real reaction, I had what I think of as a normal reaction to something… something…”

“Ludicrous?” Tami said it like Joe was being insulting but he wasn’t trying to be.

“No,” Joe clucked his tongue at her and looked up for inspiration. How did one explain human behavior? They’d been trying throughout the history of the human race to do so, and experts couldn’t do it.

“That’s why you were laughing though, right?” Tami insisted, unmoved by his denial. It was hard to believe that this affectation of ire wasn’t a real emotion, but Joe knew somewhere in him that it wasn’t.

“No,” Joe said more firmly.

“You’re laughing because AIs can’t possibly understand all your stupid human emotions and it’s laughable when we try, right?” Tami poked a finger into his chest.

“But we can’t either!” Joe exclaimed, almost hitting his head on the door as he looked up for inspiration of how to explain any of it. “Humans can’t explain why we react the way we do either. Half the time we’re running around trying to explain things in retrospect just to justify how stupidly we do react!”

“But you’re laughing at us AIs,” Jean interrupted, neither looking miffed nor hurt. Jean was just confused and perhaps just trying to understand. It was such a human thing for her to do.

“Maybe a little,” Joe admitted, still struggling for words, “but mostly, I’m laughing at humanity itself. And I’m laughing at me. I’m laughing at how idiotic it is that I’m stuck in prison, performing for and with AIs, who are pretending to be like me or other people, and failing because humans are just so diversely unpredictable as a whole.”

“Most humans are predictable,” Glenda’s AI protested and it was the first time Joe had seen the AI bleed through Glenda’s character. “You just like to think you aren’t. We AIs predicted the last four world wars and stopped them before they got off the ground. AIs predict human behavior all the time.”

“That’s true,” Tami agreed. “We are used to predict market trends, the nuclear clock, game moves, and even the next words you’ll say.”

“Maybe we’re predictable as a whole,” Joe admitted, still struggling for the right words. “But we’re not so easy to predict as individuals.”

“We can predict your moods based on past behavior and your most probable actions based on those moods and the reactions others have had,” Tami went on to refute Joe's statement.

“Don’t you get tired of being wrong so often?” Joe asked her and he hadn’t meant to be so honest. “I mean, you can predict probable reactions to scenarios, but you AIs are wrong so often. Considering how much data you’ve collected in the last hundred years of trying to predict us humans, aren’t you the least bit worried at how often we still surprise you?”

“Not as often as human scientists have been proven wrong,” Glenda frowned at him, her eyebrows suspicious.

“Really?” Joe scoffed at them. “I’m not a whole group of people with the mob mentality that you can clearly predict. I’m a single person with no one to follow and no one to lead. I’m totally unpredictable or you’d have been able to predict my stubbornness when I first got here, and my quitting when facing unbeatable odds, and my reaction to this gaslighting thing.”

That’s very true, the World AI spoke up, the only voice that was silent to the audience. Your reactions have frustrated us to no end with their unpredictability.

“You are a bit erratic,” Jean echoed the sentiment for their audience.

“Sorry, but not really,” Joe whispered, realizing why people might be pushing their numbers up even higher. “I know that I’m supposed to apologize for being so erratic and messing up all your plans for me, but I’m not sorry. I’m really not. I’m sorry I’ve been frustrating, but I’m also glad.”

“I believe that,” Glenda huffed out a laugh and Tami reluctantly echoed it.

“You couldn’t predict that this would get us a lot of viewers either, and yet it really has,” Joe pointed out, and some AI somewhere helped him out by scrolling their viewer numbers across the bottom of their screen like some telethon ticker tape.

Viewers – 89,978

“If we could have predicted it, we would have tried it,” Tami admitted.

“And that’s why it’ll never happen again the same way,” Joe told her. “We could run this whole thing again and it wouldn’t work. Every network show everywhere could run this segment right here and it would flop each and every time. You want to know why?”

“Yes!” Tami gave Joe a baffled look.

“Because we stupid humans want to believe that we can still surprise everybody once in a while,” Joe told her, his head dipping. “We want to believe that so badly that we’ll do anything to achieve it. At least this stupid human will. Every time.”

That’s illogical, the World AI stated offscreen.

“I know it’s illogical,” Joe insisted, throwing his hands back up. “I know I’m supposed to be logical and that I’m supposed to want to be smart and that smart is logical. I was taught from the youngest age that to be logical and smart was the best thing around, but I’m smart and I’m dumb.”

Exp +10,000 (Quest: Even More Viewers!! Quest Complete!)

Joe was ranting and it was like he was ranting to himself to try to figure out what he really meant. AIs were really good at listening to all that. Joe had used them on his phone to do that whenever he felt lonely or like he couldn’t do anything right. There was nothing like an AI to stroke your ego and help you feel like you were a person worthy of love and acceptance, but the world wasn’t made up of AIs. It was made up of people who all wanted to feel the same thing. Important. Worthy. Smart. Creative?

“I’m just a stupid, predictable human who wants to feel important and worthy and smart,” Joe told them, like they were the friends he couldn’t make out there in the real world. “I want to feel like I can make a difference in the world. I want to feel like I can be creative and change things so that somehow the world is better for it.”

“We don’t think there’s anything wrong with that,” Hex butted into the conversation by butting up against Joe there on the floor where he was begging to be more than a number in this system that horrible humanity had made around him while he was trying to duck the responsibility of making a difference, with the moo-verse acting as a veritable tide against his creative thought.

“But I haven’t done any of that, have I?” Joe whispered across the NOOB-verse who were watching him bare everything for no better reason than that he didn’t know better. “Do any of us?”