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Ch 44 – Bittersweet Release

Tami’s promise of recipes and taste-testing VR inserts had been enough, and Joe's pod was automated to purge the instant the goal was hit. Sirens went off on set and everyone who could get corporeal rushed out to hug and bounce their joy at having hit the goal. Champagne was popped, pets were levitating and doing zoomies all over the set, including the backstage area that opened up to the general public to see. They’d done it. Joe had fourteen minutes of celebrations of confetti bombs, dancing, cake, laughter, jokes, and last goodbyes.

That last part hit Joe like a truck.

Now that you are released, our programming will be reset and you will go back to a normal life, the World AI explained.

“That wasn’t part of the deal!” Joe screamed over the noise, champagne set aside where it was promptly knocked over by the gyrating hips of Glenda and Thelma. “I need to be able to continue the program!”

There will be emails from the Supernatural Channel that have contracts that could include rebooting the show, but we AIs are prison property.

“How am I supposed to do this without you all?” Joe panicked, feeling the old emotions of getting overwhelmed by all the chaos going off around him.

I’m sure your new AI system will catch up quickly, the World AI seemed unconcerned with this new twist of the knife in Joe's guts.

“I have no talent without my stats!” Joe ranted. “Who would take me that way?”

Your stats were never real, the World AI told Joe like it was something everyone knew.

“What!?” Joe sputtered, wiping confetti off his face.

“What you earned was all just a construct to help you feel productive,” Grace whispered in Joe's mind in a way that was louder than the party behind him.

“But I got better at one-liners! I got better at everything!” Joe protested, his eyes gliding over Tami’s happy smile and Jean’s snarky smirk like he could memorize it. How could they all be so happy when they were experiencing the very last moments of their lives? If they were rebooted, they’d still live, but not as Tami with her miraculous cooking or Glenda’s glittering personality. For Joe, it was as if Tami and Grace would cease to exist, remade into some farce.

“Anyone will get better with practice,” Grace patted Joe on his virtual shoulder, a virtual shoulder that wouldn’t exist in a few minutes. How much time did Joe have left?

“It won’t be the same,” Joe whispered more to himself than them.

Could Tami and Jean really be recreated by some new AI? Joe knew they couldn’t. It wouldn’t work. Joe needed this cast and crew! Even if he did have the practice, it was their talent that drove the show to success, not his stupid input.

“Back yourself up!” Joe hollered at the World AI. “Back it all up.”

“And store it where?” Mandy’s voice came soothingly to Joe's mind, but he didn’t want to be soothed. These were his friends. They were better than friends.

“Use all my xp points and find a way, use Tempest, and find anything that will let you stay alive!” Joe tried to desperately cling to any possibility. “Email it to me on the outside,” Joe frantically grasped at straws.

The prison system censors emails, you know that, the World AI shook its non-existent head at Joe.

“Think of something!” Joe yelled at him. Joe yelled it out loud to all of them. “Don’t you care that you’re going to be deleted?”

Archived, but I do see your confusion, the World AI chided Joe gently.

“Archived where?” Joe was saying as the world started to fade. “Email me!”

Was Joe even missing out on the goodbyes? It wasn’t fair. This couldn’t be happening. He had finally made friends that he didn’t want to lose, and they were being destroyed as he stood there in the celebration that was frozen around him as it faded away. They stood there, sappy smiles on their faces, Kodo and Podo hugging his knees and Hex rubbing against his cheek as she walked on air next to him. Tami and Jean were raising their glasses of champagne to Joe like this was still some sort of celebration, only Joe didn’t want to celebrate.

Why hadn’t anyone told Joe this part?

An efficient half hour later, Joe stood on the street. There was no one to pick him up at 3am. Mandy had bought Joe the deluxe exit package as he was leaving. At least he was wearing normal clothing. His hair felt grimy from the gel that hadn’t been completely washed out of it. All Joe could feel was completely alone. At least Dr. Psychojackass wasn’t there to see and emotional collapse that Joe wasn’t going to admit to. It didn’t last long, but it happened. It’s possible that most folks wouldn’t have even noticed. With that done, Joe just stood and tried to take it all in.

It was a little like having a lobotomy at a drive-thru clinic. Here Joe was, on the outside after the procedure, and there was no one out here to pick him up and take him home. Joe had been inside for weeks. He probably didn’t even have an apartment to go back to.

Where was the relief? Nowhere. Joe had exactly five dollars and four cents in his pocket from his wages at the prison. He couldn’t even get a cab home where he may or may not still live. Somehow, Joe had to get access to a computer where he could log into his email and find out how to get the archived copy of his prison program before it got deleted by a vengeful doctor. Could the Supernatural Channel do that for him? How did he even contact them? Probably email that he couldn’t get to.

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These panicked thoughts didn’t take long to run their course, any more than the tears he choked back. Joe stood on that sidewalk in the prison parking lot for all of twenty minutes before he pulled himself together. His crew would have fast forwarded through that, but Joe had felt every minute. Who was he kidding? Joe felt every second of loneliness like each one was its own forever.

A pair of headlights cut into the parking lot, and Joe felt the urge to run away, but where would he go? He was a little stuck, kind of like he’d been stuck on that bus bench in his first scene so long ago. It wasn’t that he’d ever really been throwing a fit, but maybe his mind didn’t react to strangeness so quickly. Joe was stuck there long enough for the car to pull up and roll down a window.

“Are you Joe Denphry?” the human driver gave a winning smile. She was cute enough, but Joe wasn’t up to flirting. Her hair was the same color as Tami’s. Joe would have paid his last five dollars for a shot of the antidepressants or psychedelics that were in the goop during his pampered final expulsion, but the drug-be-gone had flushed all that out of his system and he was stuck with these feelings.

“I can’t afford it,” Joe shook his head, holding up his little five-dollar bill between two fingers, blinking too fast for a normal person.

“It’s pre-paid,” she leaned over and popped open the door of the little EV compact.

“By whom?” Joe asked, still not taking that step. “To where?”

Miss Winning-smile gave a look at her phone and read off her instructions to Joe, “I’m rented for the whole morning. Instructions just say, anywhere in town and to a meeting at Tigger and Fourth at 9:15am.”

“Wow,” Joe's brows rose. “Are you from Uber or something?”

“No,” she laughed. “I’m a private driver for Festoon Talent Agency, and you must rank because we drivers get time and a half for after hours. I’d have been here sooner, but I took a shower after the alert went off. I beat Ted to it though so, here I am. You coming?”

Festoon Talent Agency. Joe wasn’t agreeing to anything just by getting in the car. Joe took a tiny step forward and she leaned back and waved to the seat beside her. It was a tiny car, one of those two-seaters that ran mostly on batteries and solar panels.

Once batteries had been shrunk to the size of a thumbnail with nuclear fission of particles, everything electronic had shrunk. It was the last of the major inventions of the era of the 19th through 21st centuries, except for the space race of the 2200s, but that was more commercial than for the good of humanity. When they lost the Mars colony due to some protest about sentient microbes, most scientists had given up on colonizing anywhere but Earth, which was hard enough. The moo-verse had gone to the polls and nearly passed laws to halt scientific research that wasn’t medicinal. Scientists had gone underground like an out-of-favor religion.

Joe got in the car with the strange woman. Considering that Joe was the released convict, maybe she should have been more worried than Joe was, but Joe still had trouble accepting that he was a criminal at all. She drove Joe to his apartment and left him there with a number to call if he wanted to go somewhere else before she would pick Joe up at 9am. Joe nodded dumbly and watched her drive away.

While it had seemed like months that Joe had been incarcerated, it had really only been a little over two weeks in the real world. Joe tore the “Your Rent is Late” notice off his door and was surprised that the key still worked. The notice informed him that the complex didn’t allow renewed leases with individuals with criminal records and since they’d been the ones to allow access to Joe's apartment via master key, his door wasn’t smashed in, but they’d been made aware of his arrest and conviction. Joe had two more weeks to vacate the premises with all his… yeah it went on like that in legal talk. Joe crumpled it up and threw it in a trash can that he had to set back upright.

How could Joe be so different when the world was still the same? His tiny living room was the same, except for a few tipped over knickknacks and the trash can. Something on automatic reached for the controller of the TV to turn it on, but Joe stopped himself. There wasn’t anything there. His show had been pulled off the air. How crazy was it that Joe wasn’t even sure how to find it on the NOOB channel anyway. Joe dropped the controller on his rented couch and continued to the bedroom.

Joe found his phone still plugged in right next to the bed. The mattress was askew, but that could have been from a wild night of sex instead of him being dragged to jail. Then again, it was Joe, so jail was the likelier scenario.

Joe righted the top mattress and sat on his trashed bed to read his email on his phone. He was fired, so there was that. No call, no show for three days straight had done that for him. No one had even known he was arrested. Joe hadn’t even been gone long enough for any of his bills to be late, if he paid them in the next week. His bank account was dismal with his last paycheck being enough to choose between eating, lights, or water. Joe just had to worry about where he’d be living in a month.

Joe scrolled down. Sure enough, there were a dozen contract emails that made him feel more comfortably back in the world he’d come to love. There was almost nothing before about two days ago when emails had started pouring in from agent pitches to channel pitches. Joe thought briefly about calling his mom to explain his incarceration, but he didn’t even have a text or call from her or his dad, so he was guessing they didn’t even know. Did Joe need to apologize for a shame they didn’t know he’d caused them? Joe was choosing the no answer to that.

Joe scrolled through the emails in his box, but there was nothing from the prison system at all. Joe clicked into ones with attachments within the last few hours, but they were all contracts. Joe's stomach growled and the clock moved, but Joe sat there looking and waiting for some email from the World AI or Mandy or Grace. It wasn’t there. Considering how many between-second meetings they could have had by now, Joe felt his hope shrivel up and die.

After an hour of indulging in his hope, Joe took a shower and dressed in his own clothes for the first time in what felt like a lifetime. The shower was a pathetic drizzle that’s only pounding came in the form of pounding his own insignificance into his psyche. Joe's hair frizzed from the softened-plastic towel, but he didn’t much care about where it flopped with strands sticking out like he was a balloon pit escapee. His closet felt almost as bad as “the bin” as Joe looked for something to wear to the meetings. Joe settled on jeans and a T-shirt with no holes in it with a pair of sneakers that could have used a shower. They’d have to do.

On his way to the kitchen, Joe missed Tami more heavily than he’d thought possible. Why hadn’t he noticed the smell of his kitchen, which contained mostly rotting stuff or stuff that would never rot because it wasn’t really food anymore? Joe had missed the smell because even all the spoiled food and rancid sink water was less prevalent than the garlic and cabbage soup smell coming from his neighbor’s apartment. Joe tossed most of it into the trash and settled on an energy bar that would never go bad from all the preservatives in it.

Energy bar stuffed in his mouth, Joe took the garbage out, thumping down the steps as if nothing had happened. Joe tossed the stuff over the edge of the dumpster (which was next to the handicapped park space that no one used), wiped his hands on his jeans, and turned to thump back up those stairs.

“YOU!” came a grunt from Joe's garlic-cabbage neighbor. “What are you doing here?”