Alter-Ego

Alicia staggered out the front door, lifted an unsteady foot toward the top step, and tumbled down to the ground in an unseemly mess. Too weak to pull herself back up, she propped herself up on her elbows and retched. Waves of nausea spilled over her as she slumped back down again. Remembering something she'd read in some poorly written spy novel years ago, she dug her thumbnails into her gums until she tasted blood.

There. A bit better. She took a deep breath. A few more deep breaths and she'd be able to force this emotional hologram back into the cozy space of real life. She shut her eyes as memories came back - briefly, visiting only in her weakness, soon be buried deep again.

Christmas had started out innocently enough. A lazy winter's day had dawned beautifully in her cozy suburban neighborhood. She'd awakened amind pleasant thoughts and voices, and tiptoed downstairs. The Others had started to appear later. Others - who were they, really? She thought she'd understood what she was getting herself into with this mission. It was supposed to be something comfortable, a bit of a reward for the challenging ones of years past and of the most recent, more serious missions. This was supposed to be normal practice - practice for real life, or whatever it was that awaited her when her service time was up. They hadn't warned her that this one was going to be worse than the others!

The woman - what was her name - another retch - Anne! God, she wasn't a woman. Nevermind what the programmers thought or tried to imagine they thought, this wasn't a prime example of normal human behavior. They'd overdosed Anne on self-pity and cynicism, resulting in some odd transposition of a spiteful fourteen year old personality into a middle aged body. Fucked if that was normal, Alicia reflected. Anne had that frightening, demonic, quality that arose when an Other either had a serious, real, psychological breakdown - or when the imbeciles they had down in R2N084 seriously slacked off on the robustness checks.

Never mind the cause. For now. Eventually, it would have to be examined, analyzed, documented. The difference between flipped bits and a bipolar Other was as much as the difference between a 2 minute mindFix and a 5 year stay in the rehab suite, unless she was able to do most of the damage control now, herself. Alicia couldn't afford the time in the rehab suite - monetarily or in terms of the impact on this supposed career she was forcing out of herself.

Anyway. Christmas. Damned, bloody, godforsaken Christmas. Alicia had stretched out on the sofa and allowed her e-pill to take effect. The e-pills were another supposedly genius invention by the Regulators to try and eliminate all of the false results that cropped up when agents couldn't snap out of agent mentality well enough for the "real world" simulations. She hadn't been thrilled at the prospect of taking it, but she'd been promised that the rewards would be both lasting and genuine if she just gave herself the chance to experience things from a "real" state of mind. Fucked if she'd ever do that again - agents were trained for a good reason.

Anne had been in a pretty good mood as the day started. Something was wrong with the Environment settings, though, and the two Others in the house hadn't interacted correctly. One of them kept forgetting that it was Christmas, and the other one kept forgetting that it wasn't the morning after a hard night of drinking - or whatever else causes a person to sleep until 1430 without having pulled an all-nighter or something similarly heinous the previous night. Most Others probably could have dealt with the funny Environment settings, but Anne's bugs were unusually adept at exploiting those particular vulnerabilities. She sat at the kitchen table, with her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed into little darts of hatred, working one of those mindless puzzles in the daily newspaper. Alicia, fully under the influence of her e-pill, offered a few cheery remarks only to be met with withering retorts. Confused and slightly dizzy, she'd returned to her post on the sofa.

Eventually, the Environment settings restored themselves and the characters acted like the family they were trying to represent. Anne turned to Luke, the Other that had slept in, and made some trite remark regarding her excitement about the impending holiday ritual. Alicia decided to increase her participation percentage for the simulation, and maybe get some better grip of the situation and the Others, by handing out the packages stored underneath the Evergreen tree temporarily residing inside the family's living room. It was when they were unwrapping the presents that things started to fall apart.

Alicia hadn't been warned that the e-pill made the user completely vulnerable to all of the emotions of an untrained human, and so she was unprepared for the magnitude of the depression that hit her when she realized the Others' - especially Anne's - utter lack of human regard for the holiday, even though this whole Simulation was supposed to stitch together something desired and created by the Others. It wasn't disregard. It was something bordering on hatred? No - there clearly wasn't enough love for the hatred to be there. Spite maybe?

Surreptitiously Alicia fingered the hidden "explain" button on her emergency controller for the Simulation. A hologram of Anne popped up, wandering around the supermarket with a shopping cart and talking to herself.

"FUCK IT!" She snapped to herself in a self-righteous tizzy. "They don't deserve anything - I'm too tired to do anything. I've given my fucking life - and - I just won't do it anymore." With one last bitter sigh and the dramatic gestures more suited to one living inside one of those awful Soap Opera worlds on the Fix, Anne swept a few boxes of fruit snacks into the shopping cart and headed for the checkout. Alicia checked Anne's status meters in the holographic projection and realized that her "Connection" fuse was completely blown out.

Great. This was an Other with a serious grudge who'd - either intentionally or not - completely disconnected herself from the EmotionWeb connecting herself to all of the Others. In other words - she just didn't realize what the implications of her emotions actually were and instead was locked in some sort of terrible feedback cycle, eating her own emotions and interpreting those as being the ones shared and expressed by everyone else. She was becoming jaded on resentment and negavtivity.

Catching her breath, Alicia looked up. She tried to remember the protocol, to force herself back into agent mode, to find the mental breadth and width of the problem space, but under control of the e-pill it was all but possible. This was Christmas, for fuck's sake. A time for love, enjoyment, for practicing the "good" skills, for experiencing thoughtfulness and for tasting some of that oft-fabled "magic" that the programmers liked to joke on about. It was Christmas, not another empty day on the holodeck. Right? The pill was strong. Alicia had to struggle to remember if this was another Simulation or if she'd been deposited back into actual Real Life for this assignment. She was human, natural - worst of all, vulnerable. She had to get a grip, even as the room started to acquire that uncomfortable, grimy sheen of an overplayed Sim. She had to let this be real. Be Real. The magic had gone, living a bland, slightly metallic taste in her mouth, but maybe the day could still be salvaged a bit.

An hour or two later, more Others showed up. Alicia was as prepared as she could have been - the e-pill was finally starting to wear off and she was regaining a few vestiges of sensibility. Weary as she was of approaching Others as an agent, she was beginning to slip back into her old self.

At least, she had been. Nobody had warned her that an increased number of Others would intensify the effects of the e-pill. Nobody had warned her that after an evening of catching a glimmer here and there of the insects residing inside Anne's rotten, hollow, body that it would only take a moment for that *other* Other to crack Alicia herself wide open with a renegade shot. Betrayal, distrust, and - that old friend - resentment all came flooding forth from Anne's proxy directed toward Alicia. The meter on the controller hadn't registered the full magnitde of the apathy and bland cruelty - and of course, the proxy hadn't been able to recognize the EmotionWeb disconnect, and fuck - fuck, she'd subscribed to Anne's reality herself, and - time to fall apart - ?

In an instant, the Simulation wavered and faded - no, those were tears. Damnit...was this the Simulation? So hard to remember again. Alicia wasn't convinced that the Others were Others - they seemed all of a sudden so real, even with the obvious discontinuties and - the pill - someone programmed the Others to make sure she'd get another pill as the first was wearing off - what bloody fucking sort of - oh, shit on it all. Alicia pulled herself through the soupy layers of perception and forced herself to find her way upstairs to get the e-pill remedy. She made it outside, and then swallowed, bracing herself for the impending weakness and nausea...

Another deep breath. The world was okay again. Not magical, not glimmering, not radiant, not wonderful - but okay. Her strength was returning in leaps and bounds. "I should have seen this coming," Alicia told herself ruefully. They wouldn't have put her through all those other Simulations just to give her this year off. She'd be okay - this was what they trained her for. The e-pills had probably been a part of their bloody game, trying to see if she was still as vulerable and gullible as she'd been before. It hadn't been fun, but she wasn't nearly as shaken or upset as she'd been the first time, before they'd given her any Training.

She'd figure it out some day. Some day - some day, she wouldn't be an agent confined to silly simulations and games. When she finally learned whatever it was that They were trying to show her - or maybe just when she had enough credits saved to buy herself passage away from here and into the Real Thing. Maybe then she'd find the magic - maybe then she'd have a reason to spend Christmas somewhere real.