Ready Player
Heheardthembeforehe heard anything else.
Two voices, low, arguing — not whispering, just compressed, the volume pushed down into their chests. Paul and Marianne. Paul was closer, maybe two feet to his left, and his hands were doing something near the top of his thigh that hurt. Marianne was further away, her voice angling up at him from a chair.
His mouth was medication dry. Someone had been deciding what went into his blood for a long time. The air tasted like nothing. His chest was tight behind his sternum; he knew what it was and he wasn’t going to think about it yet.
The voices were giving him more than the room would.
“— pulling up in ten minutes,“ Marianne said. “Help Mr. Mercer into the wheelchair. The documents are signed.”
“Did you tell him about the drip?” Paul said. Silence. “Marianne…did you tell him?”
“It’s in the discharge paperwork. He’ll find out when he reads it.”
Paul made a sound — a short, hard, nasal exhale. The pain in his thigh faded, then resumed. Something metal was set down near his left side, harder than necessary, clinking against glass…or maybe hard plastic?
“We’ve kept two people drugged for three weeks,” Paul said, still hushed but not hiding it anymore. “We’ve done physical therapy on them and they can’t even feed themselves because of the hyoscine I’ve prescribed...”
“Asher will do what I tell him to do. He always has. I will talk to him and we will put this mess behind us.”
Asher.
He didn’t like how she said that name.
“You saw the footage,” Paul said. “Both perspectives. All of it.”
The footage. What a strange way to describe what happened in there. He’d been inside it doing the things it contained, and hearing someone reference it from outside, from a room with tile floors and humming equipment, felt wrong. The things he’d done were things he’d done. He would do them again. He would do most of them differently, because he’d learned over the resets.
Where is he?
“And?”
“You don’t think Mr. Mercer is in danger?” Paul scoffed. “From your son?”
“It was a game,” Marianne said.
“Your son raped that boy.” Paul’s voice was flat…not angry flat, though. Tired. “More than once. I don’t care if Mr. Mercer didn’t fight him off every time. Nothing about what happened in there was okay.”
No…that’s not what it was.
It wasn’t.
Marianne clicked her tongue against her teeth. “Clearly we didn’t watch the same footage. Everything Mr. Mercer did in that game was his choice. It was a game. It did not matter.”
“The system was designed to make every sensory input physically and emotionally real. You helped design it. So don’t —”
“Which is why we are paying for his care in perpetuity.” Her voice closed over Paul’s like a door on a foot. “If Mr. Mercer has difficult feelings about choices he made in avideo game, he can discuss them with a therapist we have vetted. Go be actually useful and get a wheelchair.”
Fire spread into his veins. It was so warm….
He came up slowly from the haze, cold gloved fingers cleaning the thing on his thigh that burned. He opened his eyes to the hideous plaster flower ceiling he had grown to hate. Still here…
I don’t think I like this.
He turned his head and saw Marianne beside the bed in a paper apron over her cashmere, working on him with that stern look on her face. There was a basin on the mattress by his hip. Soft pink, the kind that came in a stack at the supply station. Gauze, tape, the metal tools…a scalpel.
She glanced at him once as she finished the bandage, still silent. He didn’t look down at the wound because he knew it was going to be bad—he could feel how hot his leg was, how deep the damaged tissue ran. That was going to be an issue. Marianne peeled off her gloves and dropped them on top of the gauze, then the paper apron over her head, and dropped that on top of the gloves. Then she crossed to the chair by the window and sat down.
