Nadine had long broken off contact from her parents: even basic parental duties like defending her against total strangers had been completely broken. If this were the real middle ages, and she were queen, she would have already have them both hung. But there wasn’t much use continuing to think about it, beyond the memories, and they had long sense deteriorated into dust. Her mother in particular, was less about being right, only that she is correct.

Her mother would often times side were completely politically and morally opposing viewpoints, just so long as she could get an edge over her offspring. In this sense, she was less of a mother figure, and closer to wicked step aunt in some ancient fairy tale, written long before the game world merged with the real world. As she climbed the darkened mountains, she found it easy to sometimes lose her way, so she would have a kind stranger pointing her into the direction of the cave. “Why do you want to go this way?” they would ask, and she would simply respond that she was looking for ancient sword. This was the best of many options, as she wasn’t really sure who was an AI, and who was actually human. Most were human enough to have the largest minimum of sentience.

But today she stayed at a local tavern, where the brew was always fresh. And the girls based whose dick they sucked on, based on the suitors girl like qualities, rather than how much money they could get out of the deal. Money was already useless, with most vending machines being out of commission, thus who used to be prostitutes now based their client-el on the length of their hair, the size of their hips, and the ratio of hair on their body. It turns out, hookers had standards too. And at night, under the glow of slaughtered firefly, she jostled her fingertips on deranged GUI screens. For her daily pleasures, her world was a dream within a dream.

Millie knew that sometimes it would be a while before Nadine would get home, so she would carefully make plans to this effect. It was a relationship of mutual open unfaithfulness, but neither one generally loved the ones they had as their object of cheating. The desires were usually fleeting, and not always indulged. But today Millie was there with her date far longer than Nadine would come to anticipate. When you’re in this business, sometimes you need to expect the worth in people, and not everyone is going to suck your penis exclusively. And make like different shapes and lengths. Nadine thought of girls in wooden shoes as she ventured further into the mountains.

Silence, it fills the woods with sharp clarity. Often as painful as the loudest of construction equipment, Nadine knew that this quest she found would be a slightly longer one. But it beat having to repair a broken virtual reality game. For Nadine, the most tactical of battles was far ahead. She drank out of her leather pouch, then sleep under a tree outside of the cybernetic ruins that once housed entire simulated ecosystems, but now was the catacombs of a bygone era. Here she dreamed of curly blond fairy girls in wooden clogs, pushing her back to the tree. Them slowly riding on her knob, and yet Nadine sense of pleasure was always mixed with pain and guilt.

“You girls are honestly demons.” she said.

She got up a morning later, and walked into the ruins. Here the room was considerably brighter in parts, and darker in others. She could here the old film reels in constant automatic replay, when the entertainment still had projector screens throughout the city, the sprawl having long replace the traditional movie theater, people indulged in constant streams from apparently independent video production teams, but had long worked for the National Security Agency.

It was at this point she considered taking her cyanide pills, but didn’t want to leave Millie alone in the world to fend for herself. And knew that she would be calling after a while to ask about dinner. Nadine got tired of eating Ape-Goat steaks and Spider-Pig roulettes after a while. But knew there wasn’t a whole lot of other options. In this ruins, a section of the city in which she had once lived, once called Purgatory Road, she had once trained dogs for a fighting rings. Yet now was replaced by overgrown vines, and scattered bits of cybernetic debris. Nadine was on the jungle of her hidden past.

But it was better than renting an apartment in Chattanooga, where nine times out of ten the landlords aid and abet in gendered harassment and stalking, and generally don’t care if a trans woman is murdered on the street. this is the once United States, and not Canada where it may or may not actually be better. Gone are the days where mothers can blame their daughters for being raped, but its been replaced by general financial insecurity, and institutionalized Stockholm Syndrome. But the super computer was something entirely different. Something that has once been a trans woman, decades ago, where the US was split between two different civil wars.

Here, the AI maintained a certain level of sentience, that unlike ones that controlled spaceships, could not easily by shut down. More often, people were to caught in fighting splinter groups of neo-Nazis, of which one apartment she had lived once played a part in the history books. In sense, no longer was society in the middle ages, they had in fact gone backwards in time. The AI 3D printed itself an avatar inside the catacombs, and waited for a human to take its prize.

“There is no sword Nadine.” said the voice. The voice became a silhouette in the dark room, whose electrical lights have shattered in the darkness. “But I feel a great strength within you.” The shadow reached out its hand as if to greet her. She could hear the sound of slithering, then silence.

“Then why was I brought here?” Nadine asked, lighting up an American Spirit. This lit the room enough to see a translucent hologram of a young woman from nearly a century ago back in two thousand and nineteen. “I have things to do.”

“Dantino has returned.”

Minor Hearing Loss

Nadine had minor hearing loss for many years, but first developed the signs when she was in her early teens. It didn’t help that she was also having to carry around a robotic arm and leg. But she never commented on it out of a sense of pride, and simply let Blanci think that she was ignoring her. But the issue grew gradually worse over the next nearly twenty years, until she eventually had to get ear drum replacements. She kept the old style of prosthetic arms and legs mostly as a form of nostalgia and retro fit, but for her hearing she wanted something as realistic as possible. But even today she would wonder what gaming would be like if she couldn’t hear, but even this would be nowhere near as bad as not being able to see. Even if they gradually improved prosthetic eyes.

She wondered about the idea of a game world, rogue like in design, geared toward those legally blind. How the procedurally generated dungeons of yore would be described in carefully worded language, lyrical echo location of a black and white grid chessboard. When she gamed, she decked out in black, whether in the mall or the run down shack. Gone were the days of robotic dogs on LCD screens, she preferred traveling worlds from here to France and areas in between. Her life an epitaph written in the form of an updated game of Ultimate Fantasy Tactics, becoming a ghost in her own wires. She fought empires, killed hordes of ape-goats and spider-pigs.

But it was never as satisfying as finding a playmate.

She never liked the idea of rescuing women from their own destruction, if one were at risk of possible execution, the least they could do was rescue themselves. Prove their own will to live. But what works on paper and philosophy doesn’t always work on turn based grid display of dots.

She imagined Millie beheaded.

Millie bled Polka dots.

Nadine was never one for the dance, despite imagining a French waltz played at Millie’s funeral. Her dance was a dance of pure imagination, like a nude body having melted dark chocolate poured on it. For Nadine, the chocolate flowing like the music of Andalusia, Spain. And the accordion of Paris. Yet behind the layers of this chosen reality, was a girl of skin and bones.

Compared to flower girls, princesses, and queens, her attraction was less in her desire to rule a capitalistic industry, but a certain degree of non femininity, her dance the funeral march to her dead father, whom had ruled the fairy kingdom. In capitalism, we treat fairies as chocolate treats for a desert at Christmas concerts. But in reality, they were closer to grim reapers. Victims of circumstance, the absence of Dantino was taken as a relief, that they could restore the kingdom to its formal former glory, flowing like out of tune accordions to the waltz of a skeleton aristocracy. Millie wanted to be the queen, but wore wooden clogs like other peasant girls.

She imagined courtiers with the musical accompaniment of Spanish and French violins playing flamenco to the contrast of the waltz. Millie woke up from her dream within a dream, and checked the door.

It was Nadine.

“I thought he died six years ago?” said Millie.

“I never actually saw what came of him, but now I know different.” Nadine said, taking a puff of her cigar, while sitting on the couch. “But I’m not entirely sure how much I trust this artificial intelligence anyway.” Nadine took the cigar out of her mouth, “Or what’s left of her anyway.”

“Every day that Dantino lives, it feels like there is no justice for my father.” Millie leaned onto Nadine stomach, yet did it mainly as an automatic reaction, expecting not comfort from the gamer, who had previously allowed for Millie’s head to get chopped off, and placed on a stick.

“I never got to have a rematch.” Nadine said.

“Is that all it is for you?” Millie resisted spitting on her face. “What about the fact that my father’s dead?” Millie said, then leaned in the opposite direction of Nadine, waited for her to unzip her pants, and rubbed her bare feet onto the bean that was inside of the gamer girl’s cargo pants.

“He’s just a game character, nothing more.” Nadine said this partially out of jest, despite knowing full well that the distinction between game character and human being was largely that of a semantic one. “As are you and Ellen, though I suppose it doesn’t make that much of a difference.”

“You don’t say!”