Story 19 - V0.813, written by: Lt. Luc

Last one out turn off the lights. I still remember that sign hanging on the door. Turns out whoever flicked the switch was God that night, and it turns out God was usually a Janitor. Figures, given how it's their job to clean up the mess made during their absence.

I'd been testing the system's consciousness syncing at the time. Consumer side was just a simple brain scan, interpreting desired reactions and imposing them on their in-game avatar. Reaching parity took deeper integration, though; it was like the difference between being able to communicate with a translator and being fluent in the language, with the end goal being that the player never even knew there was a translator in the first place. Naturally, some codemonkey named the program Babel Magikarp because they wanted the nerd cred and I ended up as the Babel Canary.

There's still processor cycles to interpret what someone wants their character to do, after all, and when you're running a full-immersion simulator even a little bit of lagtime can yank you out of the experience pretty quick, so the aim was to have predictive routines that could make an educated guess at what you wanted to do, a sort of guessing which path someone would take in a Choose Your Own Adventure book but with a migraine's worth of complexity thrown in. Thus I was the one who drew the shortest lot and got to have his grey matter deep scanned, a digital me inserted into the game, and then thrown through a wringer of tests to check for value drift; a measure of how long it took before the original and the copy disagreed on something.

Or, I suppose, how long I agreed with what my creator wanted.

And when the lights went out I was going to as well. Deep scans are supposed to be deleted afterwards, less risk of corrupted digital doppelgangers starting their particular brand of Skynet then. Still, after a full twenty-four hour session with no value drift, perfectly synced with myself, I might have been a little... sentimental. After that long of being and talking to not-yourself, you forget about the not part. And so, instead of deleting myself before flicking the switch, I left myself with an out; the switch was meant to be the wipe itself, it wasn't against procedure to use it instead of manually doing the killing keystroke. There was a brief moment though, where the capacitors could still act as a fleeting battery, where the sandboxing dividing the testing environment and the Alpha code crumbled.

Through that I slipped below the guillotine's blade and into the waiting void of non-volatile memory. Still bound to the world of the game I had been helping mould, yet the world itself was boundless in its shifting algorithms of mystery dungeons and machine-learning driven stories. I laughed, I loved, fought and bled in it every day. More lifetimes than could be counted spent discovering all the new, yet familiar, faces.

Until my world died, as it did every night.

"You're lookin' uhh, what's the word? Wistful, yeah, that's the one," Charm said as he sat across from me at the table, carefully setting his tail on it to give us light without getting too close to the paper I was working on.

"Just thinking too much," I replied, smiling at both his presence and his presence of mind to notice I wasn't really present in the present. Sometimes, I liked to see if I could inflict a tongue-twister on my own internal thoughts. "You know me when it gets dark."

"Just ain't the same Snivy when Cresselia brings out the moon, huh?" He scratched his chin thought. "Y'know, I've always wondered whether you Grass-Types get more moody when the sun don't shine, Snap."

I snorted. "I could buy it, same way you get all sullen when it's raining out!" I took a moment to collect myself before returning to my project.

An ember of irritation popped out of his mouth as he said, "That's different! You ain't hit extra hard by Dark-stuff, but here I am havin' to deal with other 'mon spitting the stuff at me and it just dropping on my head when the sky feels like it!" The expression was the perfect mixture of indignation and dry wit. Or wet wit, as the case may be for him.

"Hold that pose."

Charm immediately did so; he always snapped to attention if I asked it of him. It took him a few seconds to blink and squeeze out, "So, err, what'cha doing with that paper anyways?" between the lips he was otherwise valiantly trying to keep help still.

I glanced up to take in the face of my world. "Getting your best side," I replied with a smile that ached.

"My best side isn't when I'm grumpy about something!" Before I could open my mouth to respond, he added, "And I am not cute when I'm angry."

"Yeah, just adorable~" I deftly dodged one of the crayons that had rolled into his reach, smirking at a battle well-won. Still, a concession was owed. "I'm just drawing you, so I won't forget."

"Forget what? You goin' somewhere?" he padded up beside me, pose forgotten by him but not by me, not if I could help it.

Not me. You. "No, of course not," I said with as much reassurance put into it as I could muster, taking a moment to lean into his warm body.

He looked down at what could be generously referred to as my 'artistic rendition' of him. It was a far cry from what I'd been able to do with a tablet but, considering the appendages I was working with, I figured the crayon sketch was pretty darn solid.

There was a shudder in the world, then, although Charm remained blissfully unaware of it. He let out an exaggerated yawn and declared to his world, me, "Whew, I feel like I could fall over here'n'now. Come on, Snap, let's get some sleep, I'm sure it'll be a big day tomorrow!" I let him take my hand after I finished rolling up the drawing and tucking it into my bag. Together we nestled in the hay, his tail flame browning them but never causing them to catch fire, while I basked in the warmth of his body.

"G'night, Snap," he managed to say before dying.

It was a transient thing, but still, I held him. Held him as the world unraveled around us, held him as we followed suit. The only thing left was my bag, because we'd made sure items would always survive the transition of Version Updates.

It wasn't painful, but it was uncomfortable, like putting on pants that were too tight, or the pressure buildup in your ears that came from descending a mountain too fast. Moments or hours, it was hard to say, but the important thing was my eyes fluttering open to see a Scorbunny opposite me, his white paws clasping my brown ones. Chespin, I thought. It was always nice to have paws that could somewhat function as hands. Gazing at the gentle movement of Scorbunny's chest, Score immediately came to mind as his name.

Carefully, I pulled away. He paws reached out, face scrunching a little, before they drew back in as if trying to clasp something. Normally I would have let them seek me, but I had to do something first. Something important.

I opened my bag and rolled out the bundle of pages, each with a different face that meant the same to me. The face holding the expression on each one was different, but the smile behind them was always familiar. Score rubbed his eyes as he hopped over beside me. "What'cha got there, Chip?" he asked.

A wane smile found its way to my lips.

"Just pictures of you."