The next day, Rick panted after he stepped through the doorway portal he’d first found more than a month before, the same he’d only found after getting thrown through a wall by a rock monster. Leave it to Ditto to choose the spot where he only found the door by getting thrown through a wall.

Getting there had been almost as difficult as the first time, and though the cache on the path to the temple carved into the cliff contained different skills and boosts, Rick had ignored the two skills and put all the boosts into speed and stamina. It had barely been enough to let him escape fighting.

He’d disabled the constricting lightning ring to avoid ring-outs, and Ditto had given him the secret that opened the doorless wall—a series of back and forth taps on all four walls of the enormous inner room. All the while, he’d had to kite the rock monster and the mummy, and not once could he fight back without triggering his reconditioning. Twice already, he’d tried his luck, and both times, the rock monster had sent him back to the start. That triggered a frustrating series of resets until he got the starting point closest to the temple again.

But he’d made it. He stepped from the circle to the sunlit garden outside and, as promised, Ditto waited for him near the stairway and the dais. The shining golden box tempted him, but as Rick headed for the steps, the strange AI bot grabbed his arm.

“Not yet.” Ditto cocked his head. “Someday, but not yet.”

Even Ditto’s stern grip on Rick’s arm was enough to conjure anxiety and slight nausea. He gritted his teeth and the kung fu bot seemed to sense the change, and he—or it—let him go.

“Why here? You said it’s safe, but…”

“This is a hidden area within the map. Some know the Easter Egg, but no one can get in who hasn’t been here before.” Ditto looked skyward. “Whoever was watching us, they aren’t there anymore.”

“Easter Egg?”

The bot nodded. “That’s what it’s called in the code. I don’t know the etymology.”

Rick shot him a confused look. “What does this have to do with insects?”

Ditto laughed and looked at him differently. Rick couldn’t fathom why, but he smiled as though he’d said something clever. He’d have to look it up later.

Ditto guided him to a ring of stone around a circle of grass, then to center where he took up a defensive stance. Abruptly, the nature of Ditto’s old kung fu avatar changed into something that might have seemed at home in a blocky building simulation for children.

“What, are we gonna mine for Thorium or something?”

Ditto planted a hard jab on Rick’s nose and he reeled. The bot followed up with a knee, and in a blink, Rick was on all fours in the grass. He looked up at the bot, who studied him.

“How do you feel?” Ditto asked.

“Like I got roughed up by a sucker punching bot.”

“The reconditioning?” The bot’s blocky face was distorted and strange, entirely inhuman.

“You look like a ghost from Pac-Man.”

Ditto resolved into a version that had more detail, but remained blocky. Rectangular fingers extended from a squarer palm devoid of detail as Ditto helped Rick back to his feet. “How about now?” The bot’s expression was difficult to interpret, but the tone of his voice was clinical.

Rick blinked and monitored his feelings. There was anger at being taken off-guard, but no anxiety. He glanced at Ditto. “Please tell me your way of helping isn’t punching me in the face for several hours while you change the nature of your avatar.”

Ditto’s blocky eyebrows became an inverted ‘V’ and rose higher up his brow. “Of course not. You have to punch back—in fact that’s the—”

Rick slammed him hard in the jaw and smiled. “Like that?”

Unfazed, Ditto returned to his defensive stance and nodded. “Exactly like that. How do you feel?”

“Like I’m punching a vending machine,” Rick said. “I don’t understand why you can’t simply make everyone look blocky, at least to me.”

Ditto sighed. “Because someone would notice. The algorithm is good at isolating character or player specific effects. It’s the primary way it finds prohibited cheating programs.”

“So when you helped me during the qualifier?”

“A game-wide alteration—well within my power, and too wide for the algorithm to detect that you saw a different version without going through the files individually. Even a cursory check would have detected it had it come from any one player or group of players, and since it didn’t, the algorithm looked no deeper.”

“You have a lot of power over the game, then?” Rick asked.

Ditto shook his head. “I’m limited by the constraints of the algorithms, both the one that governs what I’m allowed to do and the one that guides the anti-cheat. Both our protocols change frequently, though the anti-cheat bot gets faster upgrades than I do.” There was a subtle undertone of resentment in Ditto’s voice near the end.

Rick had been playfully sparring with the bot as they spoke, circling and throwing out light jabs and straights to gauge his reaction to his progressive use of more force, but he dropped his arms and asked, “Are you an algorithm?”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Ditto also dropped his blocky arms. “I am many, Rick Prophet, but I am only me when they align”—the bot swept its arms down to indicate its avatar—“in this particular way.” Ditto cocked his head in that peculiar fashion again, like a bird attempting to triangulate the distance of some distant object. “Humans are not much different, though there’s far less agreement among your competing drives.” The bot leaned in as if studying a lab subject.

Rick shook off the unnerving quality of Ditto’s perceptive gaze while the implications of what it had said sunk in. He shook his head. Ditto wasn’t an it. The bot was, at least for now, a he. Regardless of gender, the nature of what “Ditto” meant became clear. “Your name…”

Ditto nodded. “It signifies comity and a measure of limited unity, yes.”

The bot increased its—his—resolution again, and this time when Rick punched even lightly, waves of dizziness, anxiety, and nausea rippled through him from tip to toe as he wavered like a stalk of long grass in a gentle breeze.

“This is where we’ll practice today.” The AI bot threw out a series of light punches Rick had trouble batting away.

One of the bot’s punches got Rick above his eye along his eyebrow and he recoiled. He rushed to all fours and retched in the grass. What came out of him was strange, like multicolored building blocks, but with stranger shapes. He glared at the bot. “You look too close to real. My brain thinks you’re real.”

Ditto extended his hand to Rick again. “Before we continue, you must understand something. It’s possible you may never fight again without being terrified. If you can’t accept this, we have no use for you.”

Rick swallowed his fear and his anger, swearing as he gripped the bot’s outstretched hand.

***********************************

Day two wasn’t any more pleasant than the first day, though Rick got to the temple garden in his first attempt this time.

Ditto had been relentless, and within minutes, Rick was a quivering mass of simulated flesh puking strange bits of building blocks into the grass.

“Do you want to quit?” the merciless bot asked.

Rick shook his head and got back into position, barely in time to prevent getting clocked by Ditto’s jab-hook-uppercut combo. Rick danced out of the strike zone, but swayed on his feet. He blinked as the entire world’s horizon tipped back and forth, as though he were a sailor aboard a small ship in a tempest. He swallowed hard as his stomach threatened to revolt, and his heart rate zipped along, making him light-headed.

“Breathe,” Ditto instructed. “Engage your curiosity about the sensations in your body. Do they define you?”

Rick focused. His thumping heart was a fast but steady presence, and the discomfort in his abdomen shifted. Strangely, when he looked for where, exactly, it was in his body, it fled, then reappeared in another area of his stomach.

“Fear is excitement without a purpose,” Ditto admonished. “What is your purpose?”

“My purpose”—he threw a Flying Knee at Ditto—“is to knock your fucking head off!”

Ditto deflected the knee, then drastically increased his avatar’s resolution.

Panic raced through him, a cacophony of disorganized sensations that sent him yet again to all-fours. He retched, but nothing came out. He retched again and three tiny blocks emerged. Empty.

He stood. He breathed. The duplicitous kung fu bot had again assumed a less distinct form, and the devolution made a space for him to recover. In the span of twenty seconds, the riot of terrible sensations subsided to something less dangerous. “That,” he said, “was a dirty trick.”

Ditto offered only a passionless, what are you gonna do about it, shrug.

Rick got back into position. His heart rate had slowed, and though he may have imagined it, it seemed to Rick that his distress was lower now than it had been, even though Ditto’s resolution was the same as it had been when he started. He smiled. “Crank it up a notch?”

Ditto nodded and complied. A titter of increased distress assaulted Rick. He stood against it, like a sea captain bracing himself against a hurricane at the prow of his ship. “Again.”

The bot increased his resolution again, and anxiety shot Rick’s heart rate ever higher. Just the increased resolution was enough, since his mind had linked the grassy ring and Ditto’s presence with impending violence. He examined his shaking hands. His mouth became dry and a bitter taste blasted the back of his throat, like he’d eaten something poisonous.

He raised his arms, though they hadn’t stopped trembling, then jabbed, not tentatively this time, but a real jab. Dizziness subsumed his thoughts, but he shook it off. Fear is excitement without purpose. What is my purpose?

***********************************

Exhausted, Rick came home to an empty house. Ditto had agreed to block off the muni ads again, which meant he’d been able to fully occupy his own head on the short walk from the station.

He checked every room before he remembered Kristina had told him she had a late appointment with her therapist.

He’d met the man, a mid-forties psychologist, while he was in the hospital. Kristina had accompanied him, and though Rick had expressed gratitude—his wife truly had been getting better—the purpose of the visit had been to get Rick onboard with couples’ therapy.

They’d relented when they saw his mind was mixed up from the opiates, but Kristina had brought it up continually since then, both in the hospital and at home. It was as if she’d joined a new religion, and she couldn’t help wanting him to join too.

Rick pushed away the uncomfortable thought and another came in to fill its place. Ditto had said he’d met Kristina, and the realization about what that meant had bubbled to the surface more than once. It angered him, and so he pushed that away as well. He needed Ditto, so he couldn’t push back—not yet. He needed Hector, too, so again, he didn’t push, but the anger at being at someone else’s mercy was building, and he feared what might happen when he could no longer push it away.

He popped a pain pill and this time, he did grab a beer. He downed it in three gulps and he was halfway through the next when his wife came home.

She plopped down heavily on the couch next to him and sighed. “Honey, you look…”

He nodded. “Hard day.”

“Hard? You look like you’ve been to war.”

She was probably right, because he certainly felt like it. He wanted to say, “Try vomiting every couple minutes for six hours and see how you feel,” but if he opened up about how difficult a hill he had to climb, he’d have to open up about so much else. Though he knew they’d have to have a serious talk about a serious subject one day, today wasn’t the day.

“It’s difficult getting back into the swing of things,” he lied.

She gripped his hand.

Here it comes…

“You could come to therapy, talk about it.”

He took a deep breath and tried to remember his wife was only trying to help. “We’ll go. I promise. Let me figure out how to do this job again first?”

She smiled. “Not couple’s therapy, I mean for you. For yourself.”

He squinted at her, then took a long drink of his beer. “For me?” The Western Republic has no room for weak men. He wasn’t in the Western Republic anymore, and good riddance, but the Western Republic was very much still in him, especially about this.

Maybe it was the opiates, or maybe he was just tired of fighting after trying to claw back his future for the umpteenth time in the last several weeks. “Okay. When we’re making money again, I’ll go.”

She looked at him with suspicion, as though he were trying to trick her.

“No joke, it’s just that I don’t have a research study paying for mine.”

Her eyes widened, then her expression softened. She scootched closer and put her arm around him, then laid her head against his chest. “You know, I’ve missed you.”

He turned slowly to meet her eyes and found something there he hadn’t seen in a long time.

An appetite.

He stood and she followed him up, leading him by the hand toward their bedroom.