Soft Reset — Part 6: Then What

I don't know which time it was. That's the part nobody tells you about doing something two hundred times — eventually you lose the number, and losing the number is when things get comfortable and you start making mistakes.

Third stone past the mailbox. My arm out. The frame ready to skip the way it always skipped.

Except this time I didn't wait for the wall.

I shoved.

I don't have a better word for it. There's a place in the sim, right at the hinge of the second, where the render hasn't decided yet what it's going to refuse to show you — and every other time I'd let it decide, let the wall come up, and stood at it like a good, grieving daughter. This time I put my whole self into the half-second before the wall existed, the way you lean into a door you already know is locked, except this door had never actually been tested, not for real, not by someone willing to break something to find out.

The door opened.

My hand closed on my mother's sleeve.

I felt her weight shift under my grip — real weight, real cloth, real her — and the car went past behind us, close enough to feel the wind of it, and did not hit anything, because I had her, because for once in two hundred tries I had actually, physically, impossibly had her.

The sim did not stop there.

It should have stopped there. That was the whole memory, that was the whole day, sushi and river and a save point three feet short of a curb. But a soft reset keeps your save, and I had just handed the file a branch it had never been asked to hold, and the render — I don't know how else to say this — the render said yes, and, the way a good scene partner says yes, and, except the scene partner was the entire rest of my mother's life, spooling forward because I had asked it a question no grieving daughter had any business asking, which was: then what?

Then what was: my mother, walking, on two legs, in a body, forever.

Then what was: a kitchen I had never stood in, because it didn't exist, because we never lived in it, except in that half-second I could smell the coffee and see the crack in the tile by the sink that someone had been meaning to fix for eleven years.

Then what was: Kat, grown, taller than me, laughing at something in a doorway with a version of herself I had never gotten to meet — not the girl learning chopsticks, not the girl I have spent a year now being quietly, wordlessly afraid for. A woman. Unhaunted. Nothing wrong with her that I could see, and I looked, God, I looked so hard, the way you check a person's face for a bruise you're terrified is there and are so relieved not to find that the relief itself nearly takes your knees out.

She was fine.

She was going to be fine.

I had fixed it. All of it. Not just the curb — everything downstream of the curb, every bad thing that curb was the first domino in, undone, unwound, replaced with eleven years of ordinary mornings and a crack in a tile nobody had fixed because nobody had needed to be anything other than a little lazy about it.

It was the best thing I have ever felt in my life.

I want to be exact about that, because I think exactness is the only thing that will make you believe me when I tell you what it cost. It was not a nice memory. It was not comfort. It was the specific, physical sensation of a wound closing — not scarring over, closing, like it had never opened — and my body did not know the difference between that feeling and being loved, because there isn't one. There's no separate nerve for fake joy. It runs on the same wire.

Somewhere very far away, in a room I still, technically, had a body in, a rig that had been designed to run for ninety extra seconds on an ice bath had been running for considerably longer than ninety seconds.

I didn't feel it happen. That's what I mean when I say the render spends you to keep going — it doesn't ask first. My skull was doing something it was not built to sustain, somewhere underneath eleven years of a kitchen I'd never stood in, and the whole magnificent impossible future kept unspooling, warmer and warmer, the good kind of warm, right up until it wasn't a metaphor anymore.

The edges of the kitchen started to smear.

Not glitching. Not the wall. This was different — this was heat, real heat, my actual brain in my actual skull complaining in the only language it had left, and some very small, very distant part of me that was still me and not the render understood, with the flat clarity of a fire alarm going off in a building you love, that if I stayed in that kitchen much longer I was not going to have a brain to come back to it with.

Kat, in the doorway, still laughing.

My mother, calling my name from a room that had never existed, in a voice I would have given anything, anything, to keep hearing.

I have never wanted to disobey my own survival instinct so completely in my life.