Jane put on the cap and the world blanked out. Everything went warm, soft yellow. Alain and Manjiri and little monkey Pinch jumped out from nowhere. ‘Jane!’ Manjiri cried. ‘Alain, look! It’s our old friend Jane!’
Alain reached up to touch her forearm. He was so small. Had she been so small? ‘Good to see you, Jane!’ Alain said. ‘Wow, you’ve gotten tall!’
Pinch ran up her back and hugged her head, chirping gleefully.
‘It’s good to see you guys, too,’ Jane said. She pulled Pinch off her head and held him against her chest. His fur felt totally unreal, and she loved every bit of it. He crooned and wiggled his toes as she skritched his ears.
Manjiri pulled out her scrib and flipped it towards Jane. A star map glittered in bright, bold colours. ‘We’re so excited for you to be with us on our latest adventure—’
‘THE BIG BUG CREW AND THE PLANETARY PUZZLE!’ Jane shouted along with the kids. The sim’s title appeared in mid-air, bold red letters shimmering with confetti. The kids took her hands, and she started singing with them at the top of her lungs. ‘Engines, on! Fuel pumps, go! Grab your gear, there’s lots to know—’ Jane couldn’t get the words out past that. She didn’t know if it was the kids or the monkey or what, but suddenly, she was ten years old again. She was ten years old and the entire world was crumbling down.
The kids did something she’d never seen them do before: they stopped singing the theme song. ‘Jane, are you okay?’ Alain asked.
Jane let out a sob. Why? What was wrong with her? She sat down on the fake floor, face in her hands.
‘Jane?’ Manjiri said. Jane could feel Pinch’s furry paw on the top of her head. ‘If you’re feeling bad, that’s okay. Everybody has bad days sometimes.’
Somewhere in Jane’s head, she was real interested that she’d triggered a script she’d never seen, but that tiny flicker was drowned out by . . . by whatever this sobbing, uncontrollable bullshit was.
‘Is there a grown-up you can talk to?’ Alain asked.
‘No!’ Jane didn’t know why she was yelling. ‘There’s nobody! There’s nobody here.’
‘Well, we’re here,’ Manjiri said. ‘You should talk to a real person when you can, but it’s okay to make yourself feel better with imagination, too.’
‘It’s just—’ Jane wiped her nose on her sleeve, knowing it did nothing for the snot that was probably running down her lip back in the real world. ‘I’m so scared. I’ve always been scared. And I’m so tired, I’m so tired of always being afraid. I just want – I just want to have people. I want somebody to make me dinner. I want a doctor to look at my leg and tell me to my face that it’s okay. I want to be – I want to be like you. I want to live on Mars with a family and go on vacations. You – you both always – always said the galaxy was a wonderful place, but it’s fucking not. It can’t be, if it’s got places like this one. If it’s got people who make people like this.’ She pointed at her sun-scarred face, her bald head. ‘Do normal Humans know? Do they even know this planet is here? Do they know that any of this is going on? Because I’m going to die here.’ Saying the words out loud made her even more afraid, as if putting them out into the world would make them happen. But they were there now, and it was true. ‘I’m going to die here, and no – nobody will care.’
‘I care.’
Jane turned around, and her mouth fell open. ‘. . . Owl?’
It was Owl’s face, but no longer flat on a wall. She looked like a person, a whole person, with a body and clothes and all of it. There was nothing real about her, not any more real than the Big Bug kids. But she was there. Owl smiled, kinda shy. ‘What do you think?’ she said, gesturing at herself.
Jane wiped her nose again. ‘How—’
‘I got the idea when you started playing the adult sims. I figured out how to build myself a character skin and paste it into the base code. No different from reorganising memory banks, really. And I’m not in here. This is just . . . a puppet.’ She sat down on the floor next to Jane. The kids, who had apparently run out of script, sat down too, smiling in stasis.
Jane couldn’t stop staring. ‘Can I—’ She reached a hand out, hoping.
Owl shook her head with a sad smile. ‘I couldn’t make this tangible. But we can share the same space, at least. That’s something, right?’
‘Why haven’t you done this before?’
‘I thought . . . see, you enjoyed the other sims so much, and I wanted to share them with you. I thought maybe if we could play together, you might . . .’ Owl’s voice trailed off. ‘I was worried you’d think it was a dumb idea. I’ve just been annoying you lately. I figured you’d rather play on your own.’
Jane almost threw herself at the Owl puppet before she remembered it couldn’t hug her back. ‘I’m sorry,’ Jane sobbed. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Shh,’ Owl said, sitting next to her. ‘Everything’s okay. You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.’