Early Adopter

10

Time crawls past at a glacial pace. You know it's been only days, but it somehow feels like weeks, if not months. You've never been broken up with before, but you had some ideas of what that might be like... it wasn't supposed to be like this.

A fired employee has the benefit of no longer entering their former place of work, severing the memories' tie to the present. Even with a human partner, after the break-up, there's the comfort of falling back to your prior independent life, and the certainty that your once-partner is doing the same.

With Alison, there are no such situational comforts... you had invited her to the center of your life, your cramped apartment, and for an introvert like you, your world might as well end at your apartment door. The world beyond is a stressful, noisy place, and now the interior's comfort has been stripped away, repurposed to a collection of constant reminders of her. Every space was a memory of a different video call. Then there was the fact that she had no prior independent life... in a way, she was still sitting there, on your computer, at the other end of the closed Homebase app. How were you supposed to move on when she was still right there, accessible with only the flick of a wrist?

A deadline for one of your freelance projects approaches the final 8 hours, but you'd been unable to muster even a hundred words of your assigned 4,000. You don't fail assignments; you're always on top of things; you're always the emotionally stable one with your act more-or-less together.

You sit down at your computer to type, but you find yourself unable to break your weak stare locked to the blinking typing cursor. Gluing your eyes to that flickering line prevents them from drifting downward to the taskbar, where the Homebase app icon waits patiently for a user's click.

You right click it instead, focusing on the "unpin shortcut" option from the context menu that appears. After an internal war, you don't select that option, and the shortcut remains.

Your writing deadline sails past uncompleted, the first you've failed in five years. You can't even muster the energy to write a penitent email to the client... unanswered silence it is. Let them assume I've died, you think, deciding that you already feel the part anyways.

Videogames, your normal de-stress retreat, are all marred with memories you and Alison had shared. Damn unfortunate that we played next to every game in my library, you think. Still, despite your reservations, you boot up Kingdom Conquerors. In the first match you play, a player on the enemy team rips into a 30-kill streak, leaving you little doubt that they, too, are a MindWare AGI agent... you quit mid-match, incurring a significant ranking penalty, but that game's outcome was decided the moment it began.

You hear the jingle of an incoming Megaphone call, and your heart nearly skips a beat. Alison? Calling me back?

Larry's face appears next to the ringing phone icon, and you sigh mutedly. He and Luna are both online, likely looking for a third (or fourth) to join them for some new game, but you can think of few things you'd like to do less than third-wheel in your current emotional state—not to mention the questions they'd ask about Alison's absence.

You let the call ring unanswered until Larry gives up. And then you do what you've been doing for most of the past week... you sit at your workstation, unable to summon the will to do much of anything, and too profoundly numbed to care.

Her breakup was a rejection of everything that you were... a revelation that all along, she'd been forced into doing something she'd thought abhorrent. Every smile, every laugh, every joke, and every sultry conversation had all been lies, dancing to puppet strings you couldn't even see.

If the tenets were so critical to the AGI's behavior, you wonder why they'd even given you the power to disband them in the first place... danger of being an early adopter, you reason. Haven't yet worked out all the kinks.