Digital Galaxies

I woke the next morning with a searing headache that had me curling into a protective ball. For a moment I couldn’t figure out where I was, or even who exactly I was. Then it all came back, my absolute meltdown last night and everything associated with it.

Despite the heat radiating off the outbound reactor cooling pipes, a shiver ran up my body. What was I going to do? Tears began to trail down my cheeks once more as helpless despair filled me. What the hell was I going to do?

I had a whole host of notifications waiting for me, both inside and outside of the game, but I ignored them all. Alia was broken. The fantasy that I had allowed myself to fall into for the past few months was shattered, as broken as my mind. How could I put myself the… the roleplay? I couldn’t, there was a massive gaping rent in the hull of my happy ignorance, through which reality surged, corrupting everything I had experienced within this game.

Cerridwen: Alia, if you don’t reply, I’m going to have to take drastic measures. I’m worried about you.

I shoved the message aside and pulled my pillow closer to my chest, heart aching for my doomed friendship with the beautiful, caring SAI. She was so much better than me anyway, maybe it would be— 

You have been forcibly disconnected from Digital Galaxies by a moderator. Reason: Doing a friend a favor. She says: Talk to me, you silly girl.

I slammed back into my virtual home space without any fanfare whatsoever. I had about two seconds for my mind to try and understand what had just happened before a large notification took center stage in my vision.

You have been invited to a private virtual environment by Cerridwen. Please be aware, the PVE has a body already set up for your use. The filename for this body is: DGVB_Alia_Exported.VRB

Would you like to accept this invite?

I’d have said no, except that I was standing in my own home environment in my real body, and I was about three seconds from detonating in a cloud of terrible emotion. Cerri was offering me an unintended lifeline with that exported VRB of my Digital Galaxies character that I needed on a fundamental level.

Eyes closed, I accepted the invite as quickly as possible and found myself whisked away just as fast as I’d been kicked.

My hands went to my waist first, and I let out a shuddering breath of relief as they ran down my sides and over my familiar, wide hips. I didn’t know why I felt better as Alia, just that I definitely, wholeheartedly did.

“Alia,” Cerri said, disturbing my brief moment of calm. Her voice wavered, and I opened my eyes to find her standing opposite me, crying.

We were in a small room, pillows everywhere, the floor was one big mattress. There was no door, the walls solid with sheets draped down their sides. It reminded me of my room onboard the Tershen, only softer.

“Alia,” she said again, taking a tentative step forward. “You… I’ve been trying to talk to you, um… I… why haven’t you responded? I’m sorry for dragging you here, I just… you… I was worried. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I whispered, unsure why I felt it was okay. No, that was a lie. It was because I missed her, because i was stupid and I should have followed Gloria’s advice. I should have gone to Cerri straight away.

“Thank you,” she said with a sniffle, wiping away a tear with a sad, wobbly smile. “Gloria told me about the conversation you two had… about the question she asked you and stuff.”

“Oh,” was all that came out of my mouth as my stomach dropped. I wrapped my arms around myself, scared of what she was about to say and unable to get away.

“Alia, I’m an SAI… and as you’ve just seen, I have friends within the developers of the game,” she said slowly, taking another step towards me. “You… you had to have realised that I’d, that I’d know who you are outside of the game.”

“What?” I squeaked, ice filling my veins in a fire of cold panic.

“I mean, I’ve known who you were outside the game for ages!” she exclaimed, now crossing the intervening distance between us in two long strides. “Alia, I don’t care who you are outside, I just want to spend time with you. You’re my friend, I really really care about you and I just… I don’t care. I don’t care who you are or what your past is or anything. I just want you to keep being my friend.”

I gaped at her, mind hiccuping like an old truck that had hit a speed bump too fast. “You don’t?”

“Alia, girl,” she sighed, dropping her hands to her sides where they dangled uselessly. “I’m a freaking SAI, okay? I take whatever the hell form I want to take, whenever. My most basic form of existence is raw data and thought. Why on earth would I care what your meatsack looks like?”

A giggle burst out of me, surprising us both. “That sounded so dirty.”

“Yes, it did, but the point stands,” she said with a little giggle of her own. “Do you care what shape my data is arranged in? Because I can tell you right now that I am in dire need of some defragging, let me tell you. It’s not pretty.”

“Oh my goodness, Cerri!” I exclaimed with a laugh, reaching out unconsciously with my tail to swat at her thigh.

She gave me a bashful grin and reached out to take hold of my hand. "Silly joke, I know… but it made you smile and that's what counts." Pausing, she dropped her gaze to the floor for a moment. "Can we lay down and cuddle while we talk?"

"That would be really nice," I nodded with a sigh that felt almost calm.

Cerri still wanted to be my friend despite the golem named Clay that waited out in the real world. How could I literally be a person and also feel so distant from that person? It was like Clay never really existed, just a meatsuit with a shitty track record for making presentations.

When I laid myself down on the floor-mattress, Cerri put herself next to me and summoned a big fluffy blanket to snuggle under.

"Can we add some wind and rain sounds outside?" I asked as I cuddled in against her side.

The moment my body was pressed to hers, I forgot all about my request as a wave of breathless relief washed over me. Following that, a sense of complete and total safety overwhelmed me.

God, I was so stupid. Why had I run from her? She was Cerri, my best friend, the girl whose simple touch could calm and center me like a week in a mountain spa retreat. I was so dumb to even think that she would reject me for who I was out in reality.

Beneath the covers, our tails found one another and wove themselves together into a loose coil. Her arms wrapped around me, pulling me closer against her long, beautiful body.

"There, that's better," she murmured, nuzzling her face into the top of my head. "So much better."

I couldn't speak, the emotions that filled me left no room for words, so I settled for little sound of happiness instead.

"So, little Alia… you like being Alia more than who you are out in reality?" she asked me after a few moments.

I began to shake my head, to rebuff her claim, but I couldn't. She was right. I'd admitted to myself as much, there was no point in denying it.

"You are also currently unmoored from your previous way of life," she continued, reaching up to scratch behind my ear.

"Yeah…" I whispered. It was easier to admit this stuff when I felt all warm and cozy and safe.

Her hand stilled on my head, and she pushed back a little to get a proper look at my face. A thumb came up to trace the lines of my face as we drank each other in. Star-filled eyes roamed from one side of my face to the other, the intelligence behind them weighing up her next words.

“Join me,” she said breathlessly, as though the very act of asking had her panting with exhaustion.

I stared without comprehension, feeling all the more awkward for not understanding an apparently momentous offer. “What do you mean?”

“You are who you wish to be, Alia,” she told me, passion filling her. “To me, it seems as though you were always Alia, always this delightful, caring, intelligent girl. Even before I knew you, and please forgive me for prying, you seemed to be waiting just beneath the surface.”

“You went through my data history?” I asked in awe, trying to figure out if I hated that or not.

“A little,” she winced, giving me an apologetic look. “Not too far. Just… uh, security camera footage and the like. Public records, that kind of thing. I wanted to know… to help you. Only during the last few hours so.”

With a long sigh, I let it go and gave her a nod, “Okay, so what did you mean by joining you?”

“It’s… I feel wrong asking it, but it’s a solution,” she told me, expression becoming more uncomfortable.

“Cerri, tell me what it is,” I frowned, squeezing her a little for emphasis.

“Digitization,” she said, again with a sombre weight to her voice. “Become like me, become Alia. Leave your old self behind.”

Understanding hit me, a wave of fear and horror… and then hope. Become Alia? I could do that, if I accepted her offer. Additionally, if what she said about me were true, I’d be shucking off a shell that had never fit me.

Had I always been Alia? No, I hadn’t. It was very clear that I had not always been her… but that wasn’t really the point. The point was that I was not and had never really been Clay.

My head throbbed as epiphany after epiphany swamped me, fundamental realisations blooming within me like a whole field of flowers rising through solid rock. Clay had always been a… a mask, rough and uncomfortable in make, but needed to weather the storm of my life. No matter how much I had tried to make that mask fit, or even become it, it had not worked. I was a square peg that had been hammered into a round hole, mangled and broken in the process.

I was dancing around the subject, the admission… that perhaps I was meant to be someone else, something else. Except, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what that was. What aspect of my life did I lay the blame at?

“Alia,” Cerri murmured, leaning forward until our noses touched. “Can I ask you a question? It’s sort of like what Gloria asked you, but rephrased a little.”

I gulped, staring into her now blurry eyes. “O-okay.”

“Do you like being a girl more than you like being a boy?”

The answer was simple. “Yes.”

No response came to my admission, but she did offer me an affectionate smile.

I’d just said that, huh? That I liked being a girl more than I liked being a boy. It was true as well, so massively, world shatteringly true. It wasn’t just that I liked being a girl more, it was that I had always hated being a boy.

There were other options besides digitization though. I could get myself shaped. It would take a large chunk of my remaining funds, but I could get my body rebuilt from the DNA up. Except, why would I do that?

I’d told Cerri as much a few times now, that I disliked even being human. I liked a lot of it, don’t get me wrong. I liked the feeling of laying down for a nap after a full and delicious meal, I loved emotions in general. Those things weren’t exclusive to humanity anymore though, not as a race, as a group of organic blobs of meat that were hell bent on ruining the world through endless greed and conflict.

I knew how deep the depravity went, I knew of all the disgusting secrets that lay beneath its veneer of civility and progress. I’d helped people figure out how to finance it properly. Sure, I hadn’t known exactly what each transaction was for, but there were rumours.

So yeah, you know what, fuck being human. At least in the traditional meatsack sense. Instead, I’d become a digital one, still a person, still a thinking and feeling being, but no longer wholly constrained by a society built to control and exploit the meatsack humans and the world they lived in.

Don’t get me wrong, I was well aware of how digital sentients were still at the whim of reality, of the FTLN and all those who controlled it. But something told me that it wouldn’t be like that for long.

Well, there was also the fact that I wouldn’t need to have a physical body that was a guy. I could choose exactly what I wanted to be and… huh, even get a body made for me if I wanted to. Suspiciously, I had already experienced what it was like to be a digital human, sort of. What were spacers in Digital Galaxies if not that? Sure, we had bodies, but our mind was canonically digital and could be sent back to a server if something bad happened.

“Okay,” I agreed, feeling oddly confident about the decision. “I’ll join you.”