“He entered the simulation in March and refused to exit. When it became clear he wasn’t coming out on his own, we tried other approaches to bring him back. None of them worked. Even manually shutting down the system didn’t work. He remainedunresponsive.” She paused. “He was too far gone by the time we intervened.”
Six months…no wonder the Daedalus scared him so much.
He was alone.
Marianne began listing qualities: someone who played games with genuine engagement, not as a performance. Someone without a large audience — if something went wrong, the questions would be manageable. Someone without close family.
“We looked for all these traits because the hypothesis was simple,” she said. “If Asher felt protective of someone, the instinct might be strong enough to bring him back.”
They picked me because I had no one. They picked me because I was kind. They picked me because I looked like someone a man like Asher would want to keep.
“Did it work?” he asked, feeling numb. “The hypothesis?”
“Yes,” she said. “And no.” She uncrossed her ankles and recrossed them. “It worked in the sense that my son formed an attachment to you. It didn’t work in the sense that the attachment didn’t bring him home. He stayed. He wanted to keep you in there with him. The system is sophisticated, but it still required hours between resets, and, we still haven’t figured this part out, but Asher was bypassing the exit prompts and having it create new games.”
Levi set the glass down on the side table, because his hands were going to shake and he didn’t want her to see them shake. He pressed his palms flat on his thighs.Why isn’t he the one telling me this?
“I want to see him.” He didn’t decide to say it. It was just there, in his mouth. Every sentence he’d sat through, every number she’d recited, every condition she’d laid down — all of it had been the price of getting to this sentence. He was paying it.
Let me see him. I’ll sign whatever you want. Just let me see him.
“No,” she said. “He doesn’t want to see you, Levi. I’ve spoken with him. He was very clear.”
For a second nothing happened. The sentence hung there, not connecting to anything.He doesn’t want to see you.The words were in the right order and they were in English and they didn’t make sense.
Then they made sense.
His hands went still on his thighs. The room tilted slightly.No.
No.
I promised.
He said my name. He tore a tube out of his own throat and said my name.
“That’s not true,” Levi squeaked out.
“My son did not go into that game queer, Mr. Mercer,” she said. “He is not gay. Whatever you experienced with him in that simulation was generated by the system to keep him engaged. It wasn’t real.” Her eyes didn’t move from his.
It wasn’t real?
She was still talking. He could see her mouth moving and hear sounds coming out and the sounds were about a company and a CEO and six months of recovery and he wasn’t hearing any of it because it wasn’t real was the only sentence left in the room.
His eyes filled. He couldn’t stop them. “You’re lying.”
“He is the CEO of a company that is in crisis,” she said sternly. “He has months of recovery ahead of him and a great deal of work to do. I don’t know why you would think he’d want to see you.” Her voice softened on the last sentence, and the softening was worse than everything that had come before it. “I don’t mean that unkindly. I mean it honestly. I am asking you, as his mother, to let him recover.”
One tear went. He felt it track down his cheek and catch on the edge of the tape holding the tube to his face, and the small stupid absurdity of it — crying into medical tape — was the thing thatnearly broke him open, because Asher would have wiped it away with his thumb. Asher would have said something unbearable about it.
Asher didn’t want to see him?
He said my name.
The thought was small and it was all he had.
He tore a tube out of his own throat. My name was the first thing he said. He said my name and his legs gave out and he was still reaching for me when she put me under…
He said my name.