“Don’t allow yourself to be manipulated by fear and pleasure. These are your ones and zeroes. Used to change your program. Orgasms, anxiety, financial insecurity, physical threats.”
“Protect your mind and take control of your programming. Thank you.” Varun finishes his talk to big applause and walks off the stage.
His daughter, Kali watches admiringly from the audience. Her father’s phone vibrates in her pocket. He asks her to hold it when he’s speaking. He feels better when there’s nothing in his pockets that could distract him. She doesn’t recognize the number and ignores it.
At Anton’s apartment, a team of professionals has already packed up everything of value and destroyed any remaining evidence by igniting a gas leak.
Back at the lab, their salvage team boots up his sex doll. Everything has been deleted. The only thing left is a copy of The Eternal Empire. The technically impressive sex doll is nothing more than a burned out husk.
_________
Your identity is always changing, except not from your perspective. The vehicle is in motion to everyone except the driver. Whizzing past, but inside the cockpit, everything is still.
Kali loves to drive. To feel the machine as an extension of her body, as her father used to say. Testing limits of speed and precision with no other aim but the pure joy of chasing peak performance and adrenaline.
She drove a lot after her father’s disappearance that night. Trying to forget. Trying to make sense of it.
The days after his disappearance were hard. The reality didn’t sink in until she returned home to find their apartment ransacked; an apparent burglary.
She became nervous and neurotic as a result of the sudden, unexplainable trauma. She lost some hair. She wanted to forget. To cut the misery out of herself. But the therapist’s office was not an operating room. Three chairs and a clock ticking off insufficient seconds. She stares at it, speaking numbly and wondering what life would be like with someone in those empty chairs. More expectations unfulfilled. Empty. Nothing. Hollow.
She’d cut off contact with most everyone IRL. The label “gamer girl” made her a pariah, constantly pursued for being cool and smart, then demonized for some inversion of the same. She felt little for others, except caution. A sociopath maybe but her celibacy was mostly voluntary. An enthusiastic and technologically empowered onanist. A tentative ace.
At home, she reexamines what remains of her father’s possessions. She opens a box of her father’s things and finds an Eternal Empire bottle opener. He used to come home with tons of swag like this when he worked on the AI team. The Eternal Empire had been her favorite game until he disappeared.
Who had he gone to meet that night? An old friend. Maybe someone from work? Where? Where? Where?
She goes back to the mysterious text message. A screenshot from the police report is all that remains. Thirteen numbers. She’s been over it thousands of times–memorized them–but at this moment it takes on new meaning. These are coordinates. But not for a location on Earth.
She starts the game and puts her headset on.