Чарли Андерс - Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

Then my phone rings. Mine, not hers. “Is this Grace?” a man asks.

“Who is this?” I say without answering his question first.

“My name is George Henderson. I’m from the Divine Righters. I’m really sorry to take up your time today, but we have been trying to reach your partner, Shary, on email and she hasn’t answered, and we really want to get her to come to our convention.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible. Please leave us alone.”

“This tournament has sponsorship from”—he names a bunch of companies I’ve never heard of—“and there are prizes. Plus, this is a chance to interface with other people who love the game as much as she obviously does.”

I take a deep breath. Time to just come clean and end this pointless fucking conversation. We’re standing in the kitchen, within earshot of where Shary is sitting on a duct-taped beanbag with her cat mask and her cat-face device, but she shows no sign of hearing me. I realize Shary is naked from the waist down and the windows are uncovered and the neighbors could easily see, and this is my fault.

“My wife can’t go to your event,” I say. “She is in no condition to ‘interface’ with anybody.”

“We have facilities,” says George. “And trained staff. We can handle—” Like he was expecting this to be the case. His voice is intended to sound reassuring, but it squicks me instead.

“Where the fuck do you get off harassing a sick woman?” I blurt into the phone, loudly enough that Shary looks up for a moment and regards me with her impassive cat eyes.

“Your wife isn’t sick,” George Henderson says. “She’s… she’s amazing. Could a sick person create one of the top one hundred kingdoms in the entire world? Could a sick woman get past the Great Temptation without breaking a sweat? Grace, your wife is just… just amazing.”

The Great Temptation is what they call it when the nobles come to you, the Royal Wizard, and offer to support you in overthrowing the monarch. Because you’ve done such a good job of advising the monarch on running Greater Felinia, you might as well sit on the throne yourself instead of that weak figurehead. This moment comes at different times for different players, and there’s no right or wrong answer—you can continue to ace the game whether you sit on the throne or not, depending on other circumstances. But how you handle this moment is a huge test of your steadiness. Shary chose not to take the throne, but managed to make those scheming nobles feel good about her decision.

Neither George nor I have said anything for a minute or so. I’m staring at my wife, whom nobody has called “amazing” in a long time. She’s sitting there wearing a tank top and absolutely nothing else, and her legs twitch in a way that makes the whole thing even more obscene. Her tank top has a panoply of stains on it. I realize it’s been a week since Shary has gotten my name right.

“Your wife is an intuitive genius,” George says in my ear after the pause gets too agonizing on his end. “She makes connections that nobody else could make. She’s utterly focused, and processing the game at a much deeper level than a normal brain ever could. It’s not like Shary will be the only sufferer from Rat Catcher’s Yellows at this convention, you know. There will be lots of others.”

I cannot take this. I blurt something, whatever, and hang up on George Henderson. I brace myself for him to call back, but he doesn’t. So I go find my wife some pants.

Shary hasn’t spoken aloud in a couple of weeks now, not even anything about her game. She has less control over her bodily functions and is having “accidents” more often. I’m making her wear diapers. But her realm is massive, thriving; it’s annexed the neighboring duchies.

When I look over her shoulder, the little cats in their Renaissance Europe outfits are no longer asking her simple questions about how to tax the copper mine—instead, they’re saying things like, “But if the fundamental basis of governance is derived from external symbols of legitimacy, what gives those symbols their power in the first place?”

She doesn’t tap on the screen at all, but still her answer appears somehow, as if through the power of her eyeblinks: “This is why we go on quests.”

According to one of the readouts I see whisk by, Shary has forty-seven knights and assorted nobles out on quests right now, searching for various magical and religious objects as well as for rare minerals—and also, for a possible passage to the West that would allow her trading vessels to avoid sailing past the Isle of Dogs.

She just hunches in her chair, frowning with her mouth, while the big cat eyes and tiny nose look playful or fierce depending on how the light hits them. I’ve started thinking of this as her face.

I drag her away from her chair and make her take a bath, because it’s been a few days, and while she’s in there (she can still bathe herself, thank goodness) I examine the cat mask. I realize that I have no idea what is coming out of these nose plugs, even though I’ve had to refill the little reservoirs on the sides a couple of times from the bottles they sent. Neurotransmitters? Pheromones? Stimulants, that keep her concentrating? I really have no clue. The chemicals don’t smell of anything much.

I open my tablet and search for “divine right of cats,” plus words like “sentience,” “becoming self-aware,” or “artificial intelligence.” Soon I’m reading message boards in which people geek out about the idea that these cats are just too frickin’ smart for their own good and that they seem to be drawing something from the people they’re interfacing with. The digital cats are learning a lot, in particular, about politics, and about how human societies function.

On top of which, I find a slew of economics papers—because the cats have been solving problems, inside the various iterations of Greater Felinia, that economists have struggled with in the real world. Issues of scarcity and resource allocation, questions of how to make markets more frictionless. Things I barely grasp the intricacies of, with my doctorate in Art History.

And all of the really mind-blowing breakthroughs in economics have come from cat kingdoms that were being managed by people afflicted with Rat Catcher’s Yellows.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Shary is a prodigy; she was always the brilliant one of the two of us. Her nervous energy, her ability to get angry at dead scholars at three in the morning, the random scattering of note cards and papers all over the floor of our tiny grad-student apartment—as if the floor were an extension of her overcharged brain.

It’s been more than a week since she’s spoken my name, and meanwhile my emergency sabbatical is running out. And I can’t really afford to blow off teaching, since I’m not tenure-track or anything. I’ll have to hire someone to look after Shary, or get her into day care or a group home. She won’t know the difference between me or someone else looking after her at this point, anyway.

A couple of days after my conversation with George Henderson, I look over Shary’s shoulder, and things jump out at me. All the relationship touchstones that I embedded in the game when I customized it for her are still in there, but they’ve gotten weirdly emphasized by her gameplay, like her cats spend an inordinate amount of time at the Puzzler’s Retreat. But also, she’s added new stuff. Moments I had forgotten are coming up as geological features of her Greater Felinia, hillocks, and cliffs.

Shary is reliving all of the time we spent together, through the prism of these cats and their stupid politics. The time we rode bikes across Europe. The time we took up Lindy-hopping and I broke my ankle. The time I cheated on Shary, and thought I got away with it, until now. The necklace she never told me she wanted, that I tracked down for her. It’s all in there, woven throughout this game.