The hologram of the janitor passed out on the roof fades away from the center of the room.
Still lying on the recliner, nevertheless, Ryan is as motionless as a corpse.
Her brows knitting with worry, Michele approaches his recliner. Tears are running down his face, but that does not mean he has exited the game yet. This is probably yet another side effect of his brain experiencing a difficult life in Uranus.
“Ryan. Ryan,” Michele calls him by his name, each time louder. “Ryan. Ryan.”
“Maybe he’s still in the game,” Senator says, standing next to Michele.
“That’s not possible,” she responds, trying to hide the fright in her voice. “All the signals indicate a successful exit.”
“Soldier,” Senator calls and shrugs his shoulders afterwards when he gets no reaction.
“Can you hear us, Ryan?” Michele tries again. “RYAN,” she yells at the top of her voice.
“Janitor,” the coder reluctantly calls from the back, his voice barely louder than a mutter.
And with that Ryan opens his eyes.
His vision still blurry, Ryan sees his mother right above him, blessing him with the same compassionate smile that she always had on her face.
“Thank Goodness,” Michele says, letting out a relaxed breath. “You scared us.”
Ryan rubs his tearful eyes with the back of his hand. He is disappointed to see Michele in place of his late mother. She looks genuinely scared though, as her mother would. In her white coat, Michele now resembles more of a nurse than a butcher—ignoring the dried blood stains on the coat.
“Are you OK?” she asks, touching him on the forehead. “Headache, nausea, or any other symptom?”
More than anything else, he is aware of the game helmet on his head and how much he resents it. He does not remember what he even liked about it in the first place, but again he will also probably forget what he hates about it now. Leaving Michele’s question hanging in the air, his trembling hands slowly reach over his helmet. Taking the devil’s agent off his head, he hands it over to Michele.
Half confused and half worried, Michele takes the helmet and passes it to a flying robot.
Leaning on his hand, Ryan gathers all the strength that is left in him to sit up.
Michele rushes to help him. Senator also joins and lends a hand.
Sitting up on the recliner, Ryan gathers the will to look at Lynda. From experience, his expectations are not high, and he is petrified at what he might see.
Taking a deep breath, he turns to Lynda. He winces right after his gaze falls on her twisted face, the wrinkled skin under her eyes, and her bleeding nose.
“Anything we can get you?” Michele asks, gently touching him on the shoulder.
“How—” Ryan says, his gaze still on Lynda. He takes a hard swallow. “How come I don’t know my name?”
“Your name is Ryan!”
“I mean in the other life,” he says, turning to Michele.
“In the game?” Michele asks, lines in between her eyebrows.
“Yeah, yeah. That’s what I meant. In Uranus.”
“You know you were in a game, right?” she says, looking Ryan directly in the eye with a passion that can only be found in the gaze of a mother.
“I know. I know,” Ryan says, breaking the gaze. “You don’t have to remind me each time.”
“All right then. Maybe… Ah… Maybe your character was suffering from amnesia or something.”
“Okay. Does he?”
“Not that I know of,” Michele says hesitantly, searching through the records of the character profile that appears on the hologram before her.
“It just doesn’t feel right.” Gradually regaining his strength, Ryan stands on his feet. “Something is fishy here,” he says, trudging away from the recliner.
“Something like an intentional glitch?” Michele says and with that everybody turns to the coder.
“Sure, why not? Blame the tied-up software engineer,” the coder says mockingly. “My system does what you asked for, imitating life to the highest precision, and that’s that,” he shouts.
“In real life, we don’t forget who we are,” Ryan says interrogatively, his voice hardened as if has aged several years since the last time he gave himself to Uranus.
“Sure, we do.”
“What?!”
“We identify ourselves with the distorted image that the eyes around us reflect. They say ‘It’s you’, and we believe it. How people view us shapes our perception of who we are.”
“What in heaven’s name are you babbling about?” Ryan asks, frowning. Like a tiger ready to charge, he paces the area before the coder.
“What’s my name?” the coder asks Ryan.
“What?!”
“You heard me. What is my name?”
“Hmm… Coder?”
“Fuck you too. I’m a software engineer. But that’s my profession. I asked for my name?”
“Ah… Is that even relevant?”
“Frankly speaking, I sometimes forget it too. I immerse myself in what my job defines of who I am, so much that sometimes I forget that deep inside there is a suppressed soul in me, with dreams, passion, and a purpose. My profession has become my identity, and it’s hard to define who I am without it. Did you know that I used to be a researcher before selling my soul to this damn corporation? I built a scalable solution to decoding human genomes. By four orders of magnitude, it sped up identifying the genes causing breast cancer. Four. Imagine that! Imagine how many young women are saved, all thanks to me and my selfless research.” Taking a deep breath, the coder licks his lips. “With their breasts intact, au naturel.”
“Don’t old women get breast cancer too?” Ryan mutters, sharing a glance with Michele.
“The point is that,” the coder continues, “I’m more than what this corporation says I am. But somehow, I myself have forgotten me. Who’s the real me and what were his neglected dreams?”
“Are we done with your little group therapy session, Rajneesh?” frustrated Senator growls, deliberate on the name.
“Rajneesh?” Ryan mutters and stops pacing.
“So, his character,” Michele jumps in, “didn’t remember his name because…?”
“Because everybody views him as just a janitor, until the point he himself is forgetting who he really is.”
“Rajneesh!” Ryan exclaims, getting everyone’s attention to him. “Where do I know this name from?” He asks, stroking his chin.
“Nothing. Nowhere,” blurts out Rajneesh, the coder. “I don’t know. Can we move on please?”
“Agreed,” Senator says, his face melting with boredom. “We have a loooong day ahead of us.”
“Why janitor?” Ryan asks Michele, gradually taking his suspicious gaze off Rajneesh.
“Why janitor what?”
“Why did you put me into a janitor?” Squinting his eyes, Ryan strides toward Michele.
“It’s not me. It’s the algorithm,” she says, her voice begging to be believed. “The program is designed to use physical proximity for selecting the host character. There was no one else around. It was either the after-hour janitor or… you preferred to be Gary?”
“Oh, hell no. Not that jerk.” Facing Michele, Ryan pulls himself up on the recliner.
“There you go,” she says, taking a relaxed breath.
“But this time, you gotta readjust it a notch. The parameters for selecting the host character, I mean. I would need a certain level of social prestige, or otherwise, Lynda won’t listen to me. Someone…well educated, perhaps?”
“How does a full professor at Harvard sound?” Michele asks, looking through the characters that are presented in the hologram before her.
“It sounds…awesome! I always dreamed of going to Harvard.” A grin cracking his face, his eyes gleam with excitement. Although he knows by experience about the pain that the game will inflict on him, somehow he has forgotten how it would feel. And somehow—he does not know why—there is a thirst in him to taste the pain again, remember it, and hate it all over again. “Can you do that?”
“Yes, but we gotta hurry up. It seems Lynda will leave her building in 10 minutes.”
“Where is my helmet?” Ryan says, looking around, not even trying to hide his enthusiasm.
A robot slaps the helmet on Ryan’s head. Having his eyes rolled back into his head, the grin on his face grows wider as if a missing organ is reattached to his body.
Ryan picks up the handheld game console and holds it tightly on his chest before lying on the recliner. Hugging the console, he turns his head and looks at Lynda, whose face is still covered in blood. “Hang on, my love. I’m coming for you,” Ryan whispers and sleeps into the game.