I don't need other people. I don't even need Charlotte, any more. And all I need you for is this body.
"Is she speaking to you right now, Amy?"
Amy nodded.
"Does she tell you to do things?"
"All the time." A moment too late, Amy realized where the question was headed. "But I don't do what she says. When I'm in control, I make the decisions. When she's in control, I have to fight her. That's why I had to grab the fence at the garbage dump. To distract her, and get the control back."
Dr Arminius uncrossed her legs and stood. She noted something on her reader. "He'll be happy to know that."
"Who?"
"Javier. He keeps talking about that fence. When we show him the video of you grabbing it, he has a very intense reaction. Phobic, almost."
"I guess you should stop showing it to him, then."
Dr Arminius caught her gaze. "That sounds like a threat, Amy."
It's just some friendly advice.
"It's just some friendly advice."
? ? ? ?
After that, the PhDs prescribed a regimen of game therapy. They had her old gaming stats, in addition to her preschool and kindergarten records. They would use them for comparison, to analyze any changes in her decision-making process since consuming Portia. Luckily, this meant finally leaving the Cuddlebug. Unluckily, there was no shower. Amy could only give herself a wipedown with wetnaps while a small cleaner bot named BOB, adorned with a smiley face and repurposed for surveillance, looked on.
It should be easy to break out of this place, once the opportunity comes.
The games were full-body, but didn't come with any of the usual haptic bangles that she was used to playing with. Instead, they gave her a special suit to wear for gameplay. It was the same green as the vN prison jumpsuits, but made of a stretchy material that was too clingy to be comfortable. It would measure which parts of her lit up at what times.
"It's based on old mocap technology," Dr Singh said, as though that were supposed to explain things. "That's why it's green."
The games themselves were basic: they didn't want to clog her systems (and therefore their readings) with too much sensory stimuli. Most of them were puzzles. In one, she had to align a series of colour-coded boxes outfitted with holes so that they formed a tunnel for a cat to cross somebody's backyard without getting rained on. (Amy had a lot of questions about this premise, none of which were answered.) Some boxes only had a single hole that aimed right or left, some boxes had two, and once in a while you scored an extra one with three. You had to build the route around things like decorative rocks or patio furniture. The more boxes you used to create the tunnel, the more points you lost. During the timed trial version, a dog got loose in the tunnel and you had to give the cat room to run before he got her. The dog was obviously automated, though, so Amy didn't worry about it very much.
Then the game introduced another character, the next-door neighbour. The neighbour wanted to steal the cat, and was building his own tunnel to lure the cat into his own backyard. He had special boxes with food in them that would tempt her into his maze. A real person was obviously playing the neighbour; he kept making weird, incomprehensible mistakes and just sitting back to watch them happen. He moved the boxes lazily at first, and he let Amy win a bunch of times. Eventually, he improved. He just started copying everything Amy did. Then he did it much faster, and started grabbing all the good boxes before she could get to them, and lining up tripletunnel scores so he could get extra boxes and create mazes for the dog to lose himself in.
It was at this point that Amy realized that the dog was her best ally in the game. He would always chase the cat back into her yard but never the neighbour's. She just had to keep him on task. This meant keeping him within one box of the cat at all times. She had to deliberately slow down her gameplay, grab only the single-entry boxes, and lead the two of them straight home. It felt like relearning the whole game over again, but it worked. The third time it happened, the neighbour just gave up halfway through.
"Sore loser," Amy said.
"You have no idea." Dr Kamiyama entered the room as the lights rose and the projection faded. He carried a huge pouch of cold barley tea that he siphoned through a slender tube. Amy had never seen him without it. "Say you were back in your old life. Would you ever play a game with that player again?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"He's inexperienced, and gets frustrated too quickly. It's like he's never played a game before."
Dr Kamiyama nodded. "What if I told you that you had just played against your clademates?"
"That would make sense. Portia kept them underground. There wasn't any electricity. No gaming."
The pouch crinkled in Dr Kamiyama's hand. "Pardon me, but could you please repeat that?"
"There wasn't–"
"The other thing!"