: Prompting Needed_

Selective Reality

"Liza!" She jumped and swung her head towards the voice out of reflex. Audio had not been turned on yet. She twitched her fingers to check the inputs just to confirm and found that the sound of her mother's call was a simulation, yes, but one from her own memory. She focused on the re-creation of her nest in front of her, the black walls and cluttered floor that shifted with the digital shimmer that only Rec Room delivered. Most other setups she had used in the past presented the entirety of the floor and its crisscrossing mat of cables as one single polygon. When she moved her field of vision, the program would move the polygon and retexture it to give movement effect. This caused moments of immersion-breaking as the corners of the rooms she would move through would break. Null voids in jagged fields of white and black would stab their way in. Tired of the uninspired ways other companies used to cover up these effects, the creators of Rec Room thought of a unique way to present virtual reality. Every pixel Rec Room generated for the user's dominant eye moved with the player and was set to provide simulated depth with the other eye in a smooth, convincing dance that remained unbroken and realistic. It was more polygons, essentially, but polygons that were smaller and more heavily populated than a standard setup. And yes, that meant Rec Room tech needed extremely expensive processors to handle the render load with twice the amount in weight of liquid cooling attached. But Rec Room was premium escapism and Liza needed that now more than money. Or space.

"Li-ZA!" The voice was closer now, and sassier. It rung through her with a tinny echo that made Liza's lip curl in disgust. Whenever her mother had had that tone in her voice, it had been served with a side of a back-handed slap. Liza felt herself about to flinch, but then shook off the tension from her shoulders. The cord of the headset slithered against her sweat-slickened back. Beyond the powered-down headset, the hum of fans pumping the latent heat from various motherboards pressed against her skin with a steady wall of heat. Really gotta get that AC fixed, she reminded herself. She stored that thought away, too, right next to the sharp, acidic memories of her mother. She flexed a finger, the movement causing the cursor on the Heads-Up Display to select the cognitive adaptation settings. A spinning prism flashed in the middle of the room for a second before shattering to reveal a new menu that had been tucked within. On it, she toggled off the options for deep brain analysis and throttled down the audio immersion parameters. Immediately the pressure on her temples of the synaptic probes waned. She took a reflexive, relieved breath. She then dismissed the menu with a wave of her hand, closed her eyes, and snapped her fingers. Light bloomed against her eyelids the moment her fingertips hit her gloved palm.

Liza slowly opened her eyes.

She was not in her room anymore. That came as a surprise. On any other setup Liza had plugged into in the past, a synaptic probe pulled the room she was standing in as the starting point of the program. From there, the program would allow her to walk out from that room and then would stream a path of connected memories for her to traverse until she reached her distraction of the day. But now, as she gawked around her digital form, she found herself in the middle of a grassy field, where each blade had been pressed flat by tires. All around sat cars, trucks, and vans of immeasurable makes and models, all tightly packed together and facing roughly the same way. Conifer trees surrounded the field half a mile away like a massive, organic fence. This is just like the lot up in Winnipeg, she thought. That would mean I'm at the fair. She bent down and reached out to press her hand down against the tire-pressed grass. The haptic sensors flexed against her palm, and she smiled. Even the environmental simulators were working. She could feel the residual heat from the sun overhead in her gloves. Ponderously, like listening to an approaching train as it slowly began to roll into town, the audio recalibrated and began to climb in volume. Liza stood and turned towards the sound of children screaming in delight. The occasional roar of rollercoasters shook the air and the ground. I'm going to have to give Jove a tip, Liza reminded herself. It had been her dealer's idea to install the optional pedestrian package so she could feel change in the ground beneath her as she walked. She took a step forward and the mobility pad whirred beneath her as it spun and moved with her. Though she could feel the friction on her feet, the transition was noticeably smoother than it had been. In a few steps she was through the trees and was walking towards the gate of the Totirc Fair.

"I can't believe it," Liza breathed. All around her were the colors and sounds of a memory so long passed she had thought most of it a dream. A breeze, warmed through heating coils, flowed over her face as the fans kicked on to the response of remembered wind. She breathed in, expecting to take in the scent of fried dough and cotton candy but could only smell the coils and her own sweat. The contrast fostered a pang of loss that sat in her gut. "Still," she said, walking towards the gate and holding out her hand to initiate a summon command, "it's better than what I'd be smelling at work." A token appeared an inch above her hand then plopped into her waiting palm. The size and shininess of the polished coin was too exaggerated to be real, but Liza supposed that the tokens must have seemed glittery and grandiose when she had been a small child. This was the effect magnified by the passage of time. She tossed her hand up to flip the token and caught it between her forefinger and thumb. The sun caught the words etched into one side: Totirc in Union: United in Fun. She smiled and presented her entrance fee to...

an alarmingly tall and angular woman who stood between Liza and her fun.

Liza froze in confusion. The gatekeeper stooped, her densely matted hair cutting out the sun as wizened fingers of a crone took the coin to whisk it away into her swaying and ratty robe sleeves. Then, on legs that creaked like frozen trees in the night, she stepped aside. Mechanically, Liza stepped around the figure and into the packed-dirt paths of the fair beyond the plaster arch behind the gatekeeper. Her slack-jawed look of fear slowly melted into a simple frown. Why had that woman been so tall? For that matter, why was she a witch? She glanced back and up towards the shadowed face of the gatekeeper. The top of the woman's head, adorned with a crown of wet moss and leaves, was more than eight feet from the ground. "That's-"

The world blinked. It was as if Liza had blinked, but instead the world went dark for a brief second then came back online. Suddenly, six-foot-tall Liza was looking down at a slightly smaller gatekeeper, dressed as a druid from a story Liza could still only half-remember. "Slick," Liza murmured. The program had predicted her confusion and recalibrated her in-game height and understanding of the world to match her present self rather than the height and experiences as that of a child. "Quick thinking," she said to the bright cerulean sky above.

"Are you looking for the revue," a voice asked, snapping her attention back to the world she was in. She glanced down at the gravelly voice and found a small man whose face had been spliced with that of her dog's. Carrie's lolling tongue and deep setters' eyes stared up at Liza from a head that was much too oval and affixed to the body of a four-foot-tall carnival barker, complete with the loops and toggles that cascaded down the front of its jacket. The lips of the hybrid's mouth somehow formed the words, "We've gotten all the lights calibrated for a human's eyes this time."

"OH, HOLY MOTHERFUCKIN' SHIT!" Liza slapped her gloves against the headset and heaved upwards, wincing against the small slicing pain of the probes disconnecting forcibly from her neck and temples. The darkness and heat of the computer room crashed around her. In one glove, the feeling of a small, warm hand trying to tug at her arm for attention made her cry out and she ripped off the gauntlets too, throwing them to the ground. To her right, the screen clicked on and slowly lit, turning from Sleep to Active. The screen read: CONTINUE? "Charlie, no," she said to her virtual assistant. "Discontinue program. Run scans for all memories stored about dogs in the Rec Room database and place them in a sandbox for now." The tower next to the screen chimed twice, then set upon the task.

Liza sat on the motion pad and felt goosebumps spread over her shoulders despite the heat of the room. As she shrugged the sensation away, the room 'woke up.' The fluorescent strips, hung vertically a foot away from the pad, were now slowly illuminating around her. Damn thing had Cassie's face! She shuddered. She had not thought about her last dog since the fire had taken Cassie and killed her mom. She rolled her shoulders again, this time feeling the scars stretch the neck skin. "Liza..." her mother cooed.

"Hey, Charlie?" The computer's tower chimed and waited for an instruction. "Call Jack."

The speakers clicked to life and the number dialed out to her father. It was time to finally have that chat.