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\chapter*{AwDae — 2112}\label{awdae-2112}}

\emph{``You seem kind of frozen, kind of stuck, in a few ways.''}

Sasha's words, that night in The Crown Pub, pressed in against AwDae. Pushed thoughts out of the way. Blanketed eir mind.

Ey lingered around the house for a few hours, laying on the floor, poking around in various rooms. All as empty and static as school had been. Eventually, ey paced back outside and across the road to the countless acres of federation-managed open space that abutted the foothills. Ey walked a few of the trails and deer tracks, mind spinning helplessly through numb hopelessness.

There was no birdsong, and while ey occasionally heard the buzz and chirp of insects, ey never saw any.

Ey gave up and returned home. Ey wasn't tired by the time the sun went down, but for lack of volition, bundled up all the same in what had been eir old bed and slept.

Having gone to bed so early, AwDae awoke before sunrise. Eir alarm clock, still familiar after so long away from this house, told them it was just past four in the morning. \emph{I made it past the witching hour,} the fox thought, then laughed. Something about the idea of time in such a timeless space tickled and upset em all at once. Time! What a concept.

Despite the dark, ey decided on another attempt at exploration. Fog be damned.

Ey slipped out of the house and wandered around the neighborhood. Curling streets. Cul-de-sacs. Rows of townhouses. Familiar, all. Ey even made it back down to the school on the hill, searching for unexpected lights left on in the middle of night.

The results were negative, unless one counted streetlights in this empty world. All the houses' and the school's windows were dark.

Ey trudged back up the hill toward home and shut out the darkness. The kitchen light brought little warmth, so ey turned it back off and waited for sunrise.

With the fog limiting render distance, sunrise took the form of a slow brightening, almost imperceptible at first. The world around home lifted through greyscale into brilliant color, settling on a teeth-aching azure.

During eir teens, ey frequently messed up eir sleep schedule enough to see the sun rise. Some days, ey would go down to the school for a run around the track before heading back up to the house again, sweating and invigorated. Or at least tired in a different way.

This whole sim seemed designed to, as Sasha had put it, keep em frozen in the past. The act of watching the world brighten and\ldots well, not come to life, but at least gain color tugged at memories of countless days. Of waiting for eir mom to wake and make coffee.

Coffee.

AwDae padded back to the kitchen, claws clicking on the hardwood beneath eir feet.

Prowling through the cabinets revealed startlingly little. The fridge was bare, as well. No food. No dishes, either. On testing, the faucet didn't produce any water.

``What the hell\ldots{}''

It didn't make any sense. The whole world was rendered in such loving detail. Why not include things one would expect to be in a house? Lesser sims had running water. Perhaps it was due to the limitations of the sim being run from eir implants? Though ey still doubted that the implants would be able to run something so complex in the first place. Scent, taste, and texture were all available to em — notoriously expensive to implement — so why no food? Why no coffee?

``All I want is something real,'' AwDae growled. Fists parked on the counter in front of the sink, ey pressed firmly against the Formica. Tears stung eir eyes and, sagging, ey slowly sunk down to the cool hardwood floor. ``That's all I want.''

The sulk lasted a good half hour, with the fox crying off and on. It brought less catharsis than ey hoped. By the time ey levered emself back up onto eir feet, eir backside was numb and tail struck by pins and needles, somehow more real than it had ever felt before.

No coffee. No water. No catharsis.

Tail hanging limp beneath eir stolen skirt, ey slouched back upstairs to eir room and climbed back onto the bed, laying on eir front, muzzle facing away from the windows and the taunting of the morning. In toward the closet, toward stasis and familiarity.

Ey ticked off the list of people in eir life who would be thinking of em. Some hopeful connection.

Johansson was almost certainly stressing out, doubtless stressing the rest of the Troupe in turn. His response to unknown situations was to try and make them into known situations. Put all that nervous energy to work, get things into a state where he could understand them again. Even with another tech handling sound, even if that had gone well, the boss would be jumpy and on edge.

Caitlin and Sarai would be missing em on a more personal level. AwDae was friendly with the entire company, of course, but it was those two ey had gotten closest to. Sharing that back-channel communication, that private space of the theater sim. Sharing conversation that went beyond the Troupe, beyond theater. If anyone had able to reach eir friends outside of STT, it would be them.

And of eir friends, Sasha was always at the front of the fox's mind. She was the one person, excepting eir parents, who had been in eir life the longest. She was the one who understood em best, even surpassing eir family. Sasha had to be worried, even with em having been gone for so short a time. She had to be looking for em. The skunk was even listed as eir emergency contact.

\emph{Or perhaps,} ey thought wryly. \emph{I simply want that to be the case.}

Eir parents, always loving but always distant, would be concerned. Ey knew their tendency to freeze up when confronted with the unknown, though. Mom was the type who might sit by eir hospital bed and hold eir hand, as mothers do, but not necessarily the type of person to take action, to do any digging into 'what's and 'why's. Dad would simply be glued in place, unable to deal with any emotions surrounding the event.

Ey turned eir face to rub it against the pillow, leaving the pillowcase damp from tears. Then grumbled and sat up once again. Scrubbed at eir cheeks. Bristled eir whiskers. Reengaged with physicality.

Eyes settled on eir bookshelf. Ey pulled down the most weathered book ey could find. Some bit of sci-fi ey had read countless times.

The fox flopped back onto the bed and flipped open to a random page, then frowned. Ey blinked several times, squinted over to the window and back to the page, trying to focus.

The words swam across the page. Would not stay pinned in place. Would not form sentences, nor even phrases.

Ey flipped to the first page. The swimming effect slowed, coalesced into legibility.

The effect was unnerving. As ey read, words would slip slowly into order, into focus — though the world around em remained static and sharp — and with every flipped page, it would take a moment before ey could move on.

And this wasn't the book ey remembered.

Eir frown deepened. The story was there, familiar, but the text read more like a retelling. An admittedly quite detailed one, but a retelling all the same. An imperfect memory. It used words AwDae would've used, rather than those the author might have chosen.

Setting that book aside, ey pulled another down. The effect repeated itself. Stronger, this time. Ey had a hard time getting the words to settle on the pages, even starting from the beginning. Brow furrowed, ey tried with a few more books.

One ey hadn't read yet — tsundoku, perhaps, books one always means to read but never gets around to — was an unintelligible jumble of letters. No, not just letters, but marks that hinted at the idea of what it meant to be a letter. Mere shapes.

``Well, huh.''

Still frowning, the fox sat on the edge of eir bed and picked up the original book, thumbing through pages and watching the effect distractedly. Words jumped out. Occasionally a phrase would form, but nothing exact. It was as though the book was deciding what to become from moment to moment based on where ey inserted their claw when flipping through it.

Ey hopped to eir feet, skittered back down the stairs to the pack ey had brought from the school, and fished out the scraps of notes. The scrap, the piece of paper with Cicero's DDR votes on it. No swirling, disjointed effect affected this text.

An hour's exploration later, ey had puzzled out what might be going on.

Of course AwDae's exocortex wouldn't have the complete text of the dozens of books on eir shelf. How could it? Ey had only ever read them as hard copies, never through any software mediated by the implants. Never on a screen of any kind. So of course ey wouldn't be able to read the books here in the sim, if that sim was confined to eir implants.

And ey was increasingly starting to doubt that the sim \emph{was} bound to eir exo, or any of eir implants.

A midday walk through the open space netted em a hypothesis. A shaky one, but something more plausible than what information ey had been working with.

There likely was some information stored in eir implants. Some few dozen terabytes, maybe. Enough to store a good chunk of data, but not necessarily an entire sim. Certainly not one this big.

Maybe it was that the implants themselves didn't store the sim, or not all of it, but acted as a framework? Maybe AwDae's brain provided all of the information needed to show em a sim, and all the implants did was turn it into an experience. Maybe the implants were a mirror, reflecting memories, recollections, hints and dreams.

That would be why the text of the books was jumbled, and when it wasn't jumbled, it was wrong. It was just eir recollection of the book being mirrored back at em in a way that was tangible. Tangible as much as anything was in this place.

That would explain why ey had been able to smell the seats of the auditorium, too. It was a scent that must've been permanently ingrained in eir memories.

And yet, this was an imperfect sim, based as it was on memories. The school with its countless hours of memory invested in it, had plenty of detail, as did eir home. Yet AwDae was willing to bet that, were ey to go into another house on the block, ey wouldn't find anything. Or perhaps ey wouldn't be allowed in at all. All those locked doors on that first day's explorations. Ey would have no memory of the inside, so why would the minimal system of implants-mirroring-memories be willing to show em anything?

Strange ramifications, here. This meant that eir implants were still acting as implants, but rather than taking signals from eir rig, the 'net, and eir mind, they were only taking in information from eir mind. That meant that everything was still up and running as though ey was delved into the 'net.

Which was absurd, of course. There was no way for the interferites to run without power, without data coming from the NFC pads on eir forehead or the contacts on eir fingers. Ey had been pulled back. Ey had felt that rending, that spike of pain. There was no possible sequence of events that led to this conclusion.

Was there?

Perhaps getting lost was as simple as layer after layer of redundant fail-safes failing in turn, implants remaining on even after contact was lost with the rig.

AwDae sat on the fence bordering the open space, watching the color of the light duck down through golden and into salmon. Ey realized ey would need to be more deliberate in eir search. If ey was limited to places ey had memories of, ey would have to remember just which places those were.
