io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Ghost in the Tank” by M.R. Robinson. Enjoy!

Ghost in the Tank

by M.R. Robinson

The first time you killed me, I cried like a baby.

Stupid, stupid, to cry over something make-believe—stupid and ugly and pathetic, too, when already the only thing I wanted in the world was for you to find me pretty. I couldn’t help it. I hadn’t expected it to hurt so bad, dying in the sim. I hadn’t expected it to hurt at all.

We were piloting mechs that first simstream. My first, your first. I’d been signed with S1MULANT for two weeks. You had inked your contract the same day I did, but you still showed me around the house like you’d always lived there, like you already knew everything there was to know. You acted like you didn’t care when the other girls ignored us, so I did too. I learned how to make you laugh; you learned how to make me queasy with a glance. It wasn’t a surprise, then, when the agency asked us to stream together. We had chemistry. I thought we did, anyway.

But the rest of it—

I mean, I knew to expect a fight. Back before the content crackdowns, the most violent streams got the most viewers, and Daniel had been clear enough even in my first interview with S1MULANT that I should plan to spend at least half my stream time getting beat to shit in virtual reality. All kinds of fights, he’d said. All kinds of fights, yeah, but we all knew the fans went nuts for a girl in a giant robot. So, I was nervous the first time I hooked into the simtank, the first time we went live. I wasn’t surprised.

It was how it felt to die that surprised me.

I could feel your mech’s blows from inside mine: the jolt and shudder of being knocked around, the scrape of steel against my hull. But none of it hurt, none of it felt real, until a metal fist tore through my cockpit and sent me flying in a shower of sparks. I landed on my back already gurgling around a mouthful of blood, sure that was the moment the sim would end. Instead you hit eject, like you couldn’t stand the thought of an unfair fight, and landed at my side. No more mech-on-mech action. Not that chat seemed to mind girl-on-girl action—not when you straddled my hips and wrapped one gloved hand around my throat, gun in the other.

You looked scared. I’ll always remember how scared you looked, like you weren’t the one on top of me with a laser pistol in your hand—like it wasn’t you, like it was someone else shoving a gun into my mouth so hard my teeth cracked. I don’t think I ever saw you look that scared again.

At the edges of my vision, the superimposed chat overlay accelerated to match my heartbeat: KILL HER KILL HER KILL HER whipping past, KISS HER KILL HER KISS HER as the viewcount skyrocketed. Long before I’d signed the contract, I knew S1MULANT had a reputation for snuff videos. That’s what viewers liked: girls killing one another on loop, so realistic you wouldn’t know it was VR without the obligatory disclaimer before every stream. I knew what to expect. They’d told us what to expect. But—that doesn’t mean I was ready to be the one on my back in the dirt.

Someone spent enough bits that a song started playing. A kids’ song, something out of an old cartoon. You looked like you might be sick. Someone spent a thousand more—pingpingping, numbers flashing pink in the periphery—to put a glowing cowboy hat on you. Stupid. Stupid.

“It’s okay,” I said, or would have said, if you didn’t have a pistol in my mouth. “You look so beautiful,” I might have said, or “I’m really glad it’s you, Mira,” or “you can make it up to me later,” but I couldn’t say any of that, because then someone spent five thousand bits and the gun in my mouth blinked into a claymore, and chat went nuts, and my vision went black.

I came out of my simtank already crying, mouth watering so bad I couldn’t keep from spitting all over the perfect polished tile. Every inch of my body hurt just like it had in the sim. You were out of your tank and across the room before my vision cleared; you tore two wires coming out. Later, when Daniel delivered a bill and a warning, you said you didn’t care.

That was my first mistake. You said I don’t care about the bill, and I thought you meant I care about you. How was I supposed to know better, when you tore two wires trying to get to me? When you held my hair as I vomited in the corner? When you touched me like an apology?

“I’m sorry,” you said, “sorrysorrysorrysorry,” like you were about to start crying too. “I didn’t mean to—I didn’t even know they—that it would—fuckfuckfuck,” and then you tugged me close and pinned me against your shoulder despite my tears and my wet mouth.

The first time you killed me, I realized how much I liked it when you comforted me.

The first time you killed me, I realized how much I liked it when you hurt me.

The next day, when you asked if we could stream something different—a racing game or a truck sim or maybe just talking—and Daniel said no, I didn’t argue. So, that’s what we did. Again and again, that’s what we did. You killed me. You comforted me.

That’s what we did, until you ruined it.

• • • •

This time, when you kill me, I don’t end the stream.

After all these months, I’ve gotten better at separating simulated pain from my physical body, which is a polite way to say I don’t barf in the corner after every stream anymore. Instead I linger in virtual space—scrolling chat, catching my breath, saying hi to the regulars. You’re already gone. There’s no trace of you: just the sickly glow of the overlay. Same fight, different day.

The numbers look okay. Not good, not bad. My views have dropped lately, but they haven’t plummeted, which is more than some streamers can say post-crackdowns. For the most part, though, no one donates like they used to, not even my regulars. Feels like they’re rooting against me, and not in the fun i hope she gets ufckin pulped lmao way. Just bitching and moaning, nonstop git gud and show tits? and teabagging emotes. I know my streams aren’t as good as when you were here, really here. Still, I used to think people liked me. Now I don’t know what they like.

Someone donated a hundred subs in chat while I was busy getting my skull obliterated, which should make Daniel happy, at least. If the agency’s happy—if the agency leaves me alone—I’m happy. I don’t care about subs. I care about keeping Daniel off my back. And I care about my tips. A few thousand dollars more and I’ll be able to upgrade my simtank. The latest and greatest in simulated intelligence, the ad says. I check it a dozen times a day; I’ve watched every review.

I’ve been saving since you left. It’s slow. The bits people spend on emotes or power-ups go straight to me. I never see revenue from ads or subs. Fifteen percent goes to Daniel. Sixty goes to S1MULANT. Lucky thirteen goes to housing; staying in the agency house is mandatory, but it’s the first time in my life I’ve had a reliable place to stay, so I can’t complain. The rest goes to our debt. All the girls in the house lease our simtanks. Last time I checked, I was on track to pay mine off in twenty-seven years.

I swipe through a few other streams, stalling. A couple of the other S1MULANT girls are online. Ten thousand other strangers. These days, no one simstreams fights, not the way you and I do. The way we did. It’s not that people don’t want to watch girls die on camera anymore. The viewers for the VR streams are there. But—I don’t know. Everything’s different now. Everything’s harder. I try not to care. Try to keep my head down and pretend I don’t care about the algorithm pissing acid in my face.

Eventually, I log off and unhook myself from the simtank. The best part is the part where you kill me. This is the second-best part: the part where I get to admire the marks left behind by the machine. The wires leave raw patches on my arms; I already know there will be violent bruises around my eyes from the headset. They aren’t the right marks—the marks you’d left on me in the sim, never really there—but they’re something.

They’re proof that once you touched me.

Without the headset, the world shifts from lurid purples and neon-lit geometry back to the sim-room: damp, dark, cold. The lights went out a month ago. No one from S1MULANT ever came to fix them. We spend so much time in the tanks. It doesn’t make sense to keep the house nice too.

Outside the tank, outside the sims, everything is shit.

But in the sim, there’s only you. There’s you, and you, and you: a thousand recorded fights, each one home to a different memory, a different ghost. It’s almost like you never left.

• • • •

Daniel calls before I’ve even left the room. When I answer, his face looms larger than life in the center of my vision. He looks tired, like he’s forgotten to turn on his usual filters.

“Em, honey,” he says, like we’re friends, like he’s you, like he has any right to call me that: “Do anything else, I beg you. Anything. Sit there and talk. Take a shit on stream, for all I care. But this—no more of this. The fighting. The goddamned motherfucking lesbionic rerun show.”

“I brought in forty-seven thousand viewers at peak today,” I say, trying to find the doorknob through Daniel’s flickering face. He never makes an audio call when he can subject me to his face instead. Sometimes I fantasize about ripping the S1MULANT implant right out of my skull. They’d bill me for it, though, and probably sue me for breach of contract too.

“And, what, a thousand reports of adult content? Tell me, Emel, sweetie, is that good? Is it good, do you think, to have forty-seven thousand people watching a demonetized video?”

“Okay,” I say as flatly as I can. We’ve had this conversation a hundred times since you left. Blowing someone’s brains out in VR isn’t adult content, not according to the new terms of service. You can turn a face to paste. You can do worse than that, if you want. Put two men or two women together, though—let one of them touch the other’s throat just right—let them look at one another like I can’t help looking at you, the way I wish you’d look at me—and you’re in trouble, even if one is only a recording. That used to be different. A lot of things did.

“Okay?” Even through the static blue cast of the call, Daniel looks red. “Okay, okay, you want to get kicked around like a dog, so be it. We can work with that, honey. But no more reruns, no more dyke-drama-power-hour, no more woe-is-me. We’ll get some testosterone in there, set up a collab for with one of the boys from MCA, shake the censors off my back—”

“Okay.”

“What about the kid who does the shoot-’em-up content? Justin? Jason? Jaxon?”

“Okay,” I say again, flatter somehow. “Sure. Yes. Are we done? Can I go shower?”

He looks like he wants to strangle me. If he were here, he’d probably try. He’d grab my shoulders and yell like he used to yell back when he came to the house to check on us, back before the agency replaced his weekly visits with cameras in every corner. Used to be a lot easier for him to control what we streamed until someone realized it would be cheaper to leave us alone with the cameras and the tanks and the blown-out lights, even if that meant the occasional demonetized video.

Instead he ends the call, and I’m alone in the dark with the ghost of you.

Every corner of the house makes me think of you. In the white of the shower, beneath a flickering yellow bulb, a dribble of blood carves its way down my thighs to stain the water at my feet. I shut my eyes, tilt my head back, and remember leather-gloved hands, your high-collared mech-pilot’s uniform. I close one hand around my throat. I tell myself you’re the reason for the blood between my legs. Then I finger myself and pretend it’s you until Felicity pounds on the door and starts screaming at me to stop hogging the shower. When I get back to the bunkroom, I climb to the top and sprawl out in my bunk, so close to the ceiling I can almost feel it crushing me. I think about you. I think about the nights we spent in your bunk, me holding my breath, you whispering this doesn’t mean anything.

I think about calling you. I think about asking if you watched.

No, you would say. No, I don’t watch the simstreams, because you’re so much better than me, because you don’t think about me, because you don’t wonder, because you don’t care.

I don’t call. I never do.

• • • •

Every minute I’m not streaming is money lost; every minute I spend alone in my bunk makes me want to jump off the roof. So, when I wake up at four in the morning and see I’m not scheduled until eleven, I go straight to the simtanks anyway. S1MULANT doesn’t mind if we stream when we aren’t on the schedule so long as we don’t miss our scheduled blocks. They’d probably like it if we streamed twenty-four hours a day anyway.

I just—want to see you.

As soon as I go live, viewers trickle into chat. Regulars, mostly: the same names every day. I’m pretty sure some of them get off to the streams. To me. The worst ones tell me they do, so I don’t have to guess. You can’t use the tanks without going live. If we could, I’d never leave.

“Hi, chat,” I say, doing my best to sound cheerful. “Hi, junkman69. Welcome, rawdogrizz. Thank you for the subs, Mister_Bitch. Quiet in here today. How’d you get here? Stream coming up in search? Trying to figure out if I’ve gotten myself shadowbanned again, or—”

FIRST!!! LFG LFGGGG

???? is anyone elses audio fucked

can someone donte a sub :pray: :pray:

Lag lag lagggggggggg

do one where yiu get your brains bwlown out

I scroll through old recordings, doing my best to ignore the machine-gun ping of chat. It’s all here, Mira: every time you’ve ever killed me, every wound left in your wake. Laser swords on a spaceship bridge. An old-timey desert shootout. Lances on horseback. Chat lights up when I scroll past the laser swords. That’s what my audience likes. Mechs, lasers, spaceships.

I want something different today. I want to see your face.

The simtank can’t change the recording. You’re an echo. A ghost, just like in the racing games I used to play as a kid: a simulation of a simulation, forever retracing the steps the real you told the virtual you to take once upon a time. Everything will be different once I upgrade my tank. No more reruns. You’ll even be able to think for yourself, according to the reviews. Indistinguishable from the real thing! Meet your heroes in VR! Bring your loved ones back to life! A few thousand dollars more, that’s all, and I’ll be able to talk to you again, Mira. I’ll be able to ask you anything. Everything.

“I’m upgrading my simtank soon,” I say idly to the chat. “Content will be better then. If you aren’t subbed yet, now’s the time.”

If anyone responds, I miss it. I’m busy putting the final touches on today’s stream. I’ve picked a replay of one of our last fights. Not one of the historical settings, not some far-flung planet, but something closer to home: a bar brawl, all neon lights and pulsing beats and a bartender with more decorative implants than flesh pouring drinks in the background. My chat always likes it when there’s bystanders. Anyone who pays enough bits during this stream can watch the fight from the bartender’s body.

I swipe the overlay as far to one side as I can get it, trying to focus on your face instead. Sometimes the sims get your expressions wrong up close; you aren’t easy to replicate. But the basics are right. Those are your eyes, so brown they’re almost black and prone to crinkling at the corners when you smile your sidelong smile. There’s the little divot of a scar in your cheek. The bow of your lips, parting as you take your place across from me, something cragged and silver glinting in between your knuckles.

You look like you. I want you to be you.

“Let’s go, Em,” the ghost says in your voice.

I know everything you’ll do. I’ve replayed this fight more times than I can count. The hardest part is remembering what I did the first time. When the ghost of you comes at me swinging, I have to remember to turn my head so you’re punching my mouth instead of air. I have to make it look good. I have to make people want to donate.

Your first punch splits my lip and leaves my front teeth wriggling. With the next, I throw up an arm to protect my face and hear something crunch in my elbow, feel something pop, and then I’m laughing, falling over a chair, drooling red down my chin. Someone’s paid their way into the bartender’s shoes. They’re using the opportunity to smash every bottle on the shelf.

Mira—you look perfect. You do. Your hair’s rumpled like when you used to touch me in your bunk, except this time you don’t get to say this doesn’t mean anything, it’s nothing, I’m just stressed, because you can’t say anything now, because the fights were always something different, something more than nothing. A few loose strands of hair stick slickly to your brow; sweat drips from your jaw and catches in the dip of your collarbone. I want to lick it up. I want to be on my back with you on top of me, salt dripping into my eyes. No swords or pistols here, not unless someone spends enough bits. Just our fists. Just your hands on my body.

“Mira,” I croak. I can’t remember if I said your name originally. I don’t think so, because the ghost of you doesn’t react—just keeps hitting me, even when I can’t stop saying your name.

Someone donates fifty bits. I can see the notification in the periphery of my vision, right where everything has gone black and blurred. That’s fifty cents. Fifty cents closer to asking you the question.

Hit me, I try to say. Hurt me.

Again and again, you do.

• • • •

The first time we fought this fight—the one with the bartender, the one where you hit me until your knuckles were bleeding as bad as my face—I came out of the simtank with puke already yellowing my shirt.

It was always hardest dying like that: slow, then sudden. I remember clutching my nose, moaning low and awful like an animal, and I remember you grabbing me, half-gentle, half-violent. You thought I was crying from the memory of pain. I was crying because I didn’t want it to be over.

Somehow, without a word, we ended up together on the shower floor, both of us still in our clothes. When someone knocked, you reached up, turned the water on, and shouted something about almost done. Then, only then, did you ease my ruined shirt over my head and toss it aside. You took my hands in yours and squeezed my fingers like you meant to break them.

“I can’t do this anymore,” you said.

I didn’t answer right away—I couldn’t figure out what you meant—and you released my hands, then pulled your shirt off, too. For no reason. No reason, except to wrap your arms around me. I tilted my head to crush my nose against your neck and ended up with my eyes full of hot water.

“I’m leaving, Em. I called my parents last night and they’re making the arrangements. I have a trust I can use to buy my way out of the contract, and then I’m getting a real job. My dad’s going to let me work for him.”

Again I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. I didn’t have anything to say. What did you want me to say, Mira? Congratulations or wow or take me with you or—I don’t know. I didn’t know. Did you want me to beg? I didn’t have anyone to offer me a job. I didn’t have a trust fund. I only had you.

“The sims are so fucked,” you said. You were talking faster, gripping me harder. “It’s fucked, all of it. I thought it would be different, do you know what I mean? I thought it would be better.”

Easy enough for you to say, I might have said. You, who could buy your way out. You, who knew your parents would take you home the moment you were ready to leave. You, who had never wanted to kiss me in the same way I wanted to kiss you.

I licked my chapped lips and tasted copper. I inhaled, trying to find the smell of you—salt, summer, sunlight, coconut shampoo—and almost choked on a mouthful of water. “I like spending time with you,” I said, soft and stupid. “I don’t really mind the sims.”

You didn’t reply. Just leaned back and looked at me.

That was the moment. That was the moment I knew you would say I’m taking you with me, Em, we’re getting out of here, you and me. I knew it. Even if you didn’t want me, Mira, you cared about me.

I knew you did. I was so sure you did.

You swallowed hard. You took my face in your hands. Slowly, you pressed one thumbnail into my split lip until blood welled from the center.

“I thought this would be fun,” you said. “It isn’t fun anymore.”

I never thought this would be fun, I would have said, except by then you had one hand in my hair and your thumb in my mouth.

• • • •

When I get out of the tank, I have a dozen missed calls. For all of three seconds, I’m irritated. Then I realize it’s one in the afternoon, and panic takes the place of irritation. I’ve already forgotten the name of the streamer Daniel had picked for a collab. Jacob or Joshua or Jordan, some name like that, buried in an early-morning message I’d barely bothered skimming. I can’t even remember how I was supposed to contact him. The only thing I remember is that I was supposed to contact him. Two hours ago. In other words, I remember exactly enough to know I’m in trouble.

It’s been so long since I streamed with someone else. Someone other than you. I suck down a shaky breath, then another, one hand pressed to the cool, curved exterior of the tank to ground myself. For once, the darkness of the sim-room is a comfort. What’s the worst that can happen? Daniel screams at me? Fine. No big deal. S1MULANT sends me a bill? Sure. Enough debt and it stops being real. As long as they don’t start garnishing my tips. If that happened—I don’t know. I don’t know.

The next breath is a little easier, a little steadier. I hit play on Daniel’s first message and start scrolling through my notifications to distract myself from the lecture I know is coming: Daniel, Daniel, Daniel, Mira, Daniel—

I stop. Carefully, like someone has slipped a bomb between my ribs and one wrong movement will set it off, I fold my hands under my armpits and peer at the ceiling. Everything’s gone strange and slantwise. I count each breath. In, hold, out, hold, accidental thick wet wheeze, in. Four times.

These days, almost everyone sends video messages. Projections, simulations, whatever. It was different when we were kids, but now people want you to look at them, even if they aren’t really there.

Yours is just your voice. Maybe you’ve had enough of your face showing up onscreen. Maybe you don’t trust me with your face anymore.

“Forgive me for calling,” you’re saying. You sound thin and far away, nothing like my memory. Nothing like the recordings. “I was thinking about you, Emel. Not—well, anyway, you know. There’s something I wanted to talk to you about. Maybe we could meet up sometime this week.”

When I swallow, I taste blood.

• • • •

None of this is real, you used to say after a stream, when you pulled me close and touched my neck and we sat together in the tank’s cool shadow. I always thought you meant the sims. When you left, I realized you meant this. You meant the house, the agency, me. You meant everything.

• • • •

I can’t bring myself to call; I don’t trust myself not to say something I shouldn’t. So, I text you. Sunday? 2 PM? You insist on meeting in person, which makes sense: it’s hard to make private calls in the house. There are cameras almost everywhere and mics everywhere the cameras aren’t.

But—maybe it’s because you want to see me.

I plan accordingly. It takes me an hour to get ready. I put on makeup borrowed from the box under Sasha’s bunk, then take it off again when my reflection makes me flinch. I change my outfit three times before I give up and steal something of Felicity’s out of the laundry. Almost everything I own has a S1MULANT logo on it. I want to look good for you, though. I want to look like a regular person, like the kind of person you want to see.

I can’t remember the last time I left the house. We aren’t prisoners; it’s easy enough to apply for a daypass to take the train downtown. Still, it’s been a long time—I never wanted to leave when you were there, never wanted to leave after you were gone—and I’m twitchy from the moment I step outside until the moment I reach the café. I keep expecting someone to recognize me. It sounds stupid, I know. I’m just used to being watched.

I get there early, hoping to scope out the café. But you’re already there, because of course you are: sitting at a shady table right outside and flipping through a paper book like you’re some starlet in a period piece.

One glimpse and I go lead-footed and clammy, torn between wanting to run to you and wanting to flee. You look up from your book before I can decide. When our eyes meet, you smile. My stomach clenches.

Mira, you look like a stranger. I’ve seen you every day since you left. A version of you. But this version of you—that smile that doesn’t even make your eyes go crinkly at the corners, the bow-necked blouse that makes you look like you’re on your way to a job interview, your hair cut short enough to tuck behind your ears, even the slope of your shoulders—

Somehow, you look less real than you do in the sims.

You don’t reach for me when I approach. You don’t hit me in the face or try to hold my hand. You don’t even stand to greet me. “Emel, hi,” you say, and gesture at the chair across from you with one manicured hand.

Hearing you call me anything other than Em makes me want to collapse or die or melt into the sidewalk. “Your hair is different,” I manage. You’ve always had a gift for getting me to say the stupidest possible thing.

“It’s nice to see you,” you say. You slip your book into your bag. “I went ahead and ordered. Black, iced. Is that still what you like?”

“Right. Yes. Yeah, that’s good.” I can’t remember how to make small talk with anyone other than rawdogrizz and Mister_Bitch; I can’t find any of the words I’d practiced on the train. It’s all I can do to stumble ahead, stupid, always so stupid around you: “Do you ever watch my streams?”

“No,” you say. You lean forward, hands outstretched like you’re holding out a gift. “I wanted to talk to you—”

“Is that—are you engaged—?”

“No, no,” you say again, but that doesn’t stop you from jerking your hands back, tucking them under the table. “I wanted to offer you a job.”

“A job,” I echo. I squint at the table like I might be able to see through it if I just try hard enough. I don’t want to look at you. I can’t look at you.

“It’s a consulting gig. My parents are looking to poach a few people out of the agencies. We’re moving into the streaming space, and we need people who know that world. When they asked if any of the girls I knew could be a good fit, I thought of you. We’ll buy out your contract, obviously.”

I look up. “You thought of me?”

“I thought it might make sense for you.”

“Is there housing?”

“A complex, like any of the tech companies, but it’s nicer than the S1MULANT one. No bunks, private bathrooms, all the amenities.”

“Will you be there?”

“No. No, it’s not like that. It wouldn’t be like it was.” You pause. “There’s a morality clause. It’s—important to my parents.”

I feel sick. I feel like you’ve got me on my back in the dirt, one hand around my throat and a gun in my mouth. I press my fingers to the sticky underside of the table, then drag them towards me until I feel the snag of a splinter. “What do you mean? Maybe I don’t remember what it was like.”

“You know what I mean, Emel.”

And you get this look. I know this look. I know the bobbing of your throat like you’re swallowing a stone. I know the darting of your eyes like you’re afraid of being watched, afraid of being caught doing something you shouldn’t. The last time I saw this look, you were cradling my face in your hands and saying I thought it would be different, I thought it would be fun.

“The way you felt about me,” you say.

• • • •

The first time I told you I loved you—the only time I ever said it out loud—we were streaming.

I didn’t mean to. I know you don’t believe me, Mira, but I swear it wasn’t planned. It just felt right, somehow, to choke out those words like a bloody-tongued prayer as you beat me senseless with the flat side of a broadsword. I remember the taste of that sword. I remember how beautiful you looked. It’s the only recording I’ve never replayed: a historical sim, complete with shining armor. You looked radiant and furious at once, like some avenging angel come to punish me for the sin of wanting you.

Outside the sims, I couldn’t be someone who loved you. Outside the sims, I was only Emel. I never would have dared to say those words, not when all I wanted was to please you. In the sims, though—

“I love you,” I said, spilling blood down my chin and onto your boots, “I love you, I love you so much, please,” and you stopped. You brought the tip of the sword to my throat. You looked like you were going to be sick.

“Em,” you said. Em, and nothing else.

Then someone in the chat spent three thousand bits on power-ups and the blade at my throat blinked into a chainsaw.

You didn’t try to comfort me, not that time. When the stream cut, you ripped out of your tank so suddenly the machine blared in protest, then dragged me out of mine by the collar of my sweat-soaked t-shirt before I could catch my breath. “What the fuck—what the fuck was that about?”

“Mira—”

“Putting on a show?” you snapped. “What, for chat? For an extra tip? Anyone could see that. My family could see that. Do you know what my parents would do if they thought—if I was—if we—? Are you stupid? Do you think that’s okay, to fuck with someone’s life like that?”

I didn’t say it for chat. I didn’t say it for your family. I said it for you, only for you, and I said it because it was true. But I couldn’t figure out how to tell you that. Your anger in that moment felt so much worse than when you hit me in the sims, and I just wanted everything to feel good again.

So I shoved you.

You shoved me, too.

I stumbled back, then came up half-laughing, half-crying. “It’s okay. It’s okay, you can hit me, if that would help—”

You did. By then, you were crying too. It was the first time I think you’d ever wanted to touch me as badly as I wanted you. I was so glad. So what if the price of your touch was a torn-up lip and a bloody nose? You hit me. You hit me until we were both crying too hard to fight anymore, and then we crumpled to the floor, tangled together like one body. There on the cold tiles, you pressed your open mouth to my red cheek and dug your nails into my arms and neither one of us said a word for a long, long time.

It felt good. It felt sweet and right and true, like the first time I came to your bunk in the middle of the night and you dragged me in and pulled me against your chest and touched my waistband and said is this okay? but what you meant to say was this doesn’t mean anything and I said yes but what I meant to say was I love you, I love you, please.

• • • •

I need air. I need air like I’ve never needed air in all my life. Standing up from the table feels like coming out of a sim, like I’m one wrong step away from vomiting all over my shoes. “Fuck off,” I say, only it comes out strangled. I’m too busy trying not to cry to come up with a better line.

You’re faster than me, though, and you’re out of your chair with your hands around my wrists before I can escape. Immediately, the heat of your touch claws an awful, shameful sound out of my throat. Your breath catches; you inhale as if you mean to speak.

Then you press your lips into a thin line, drop my hands, and wipe your palms on your perfectly pressed slacks.

“What did you come here for?” I croak. “Just to fuck with me?”

“Please, Emel, don’t make a scene. I came here to help you.”

“You feel guilty,” I say.

“I don’t feel guilty. That’s not what this is about.”

“What is it about?”

You falter. “Please,” you try again. “Please, let me help you. Is this what you want? To waste your life working for S1MULANT, watching these—these replays? I—I mean, it’s fucked up, you’re sick, I’m sorry—”

“I thought you didn’t watch my streams.”

“I don’t.” A muscle jumps in your jaw. Then: “Once.”

“Are your parents proud?”

“Em,” you say.

You look almost like you might cry. More than anything, you look like you wish I’d stop staring. I can’t help myself, though. I can’t stop studying the rise and fall of your chest, the movement of your throat, the pale scar on your cheek. I know you. I know every inch of you, Mira. So it’s easy for me to imagine what it would be like, working for you. Getting memos from you. Staring at your name in my inbox. Pretending I don’t know what your laugh sounds like when you’re trying to be quiet in the middle of the night, pretending I don’t know how it used to feel against my skin, pretending I don’t care about the fact that I’ll never truly know your hands again. Maybe I could learn to see you from across the room without thinking about what it felt like when you hurt me, when you held me. Maybe I could even learn to like it: your cool pity, my hot shame, this smile that doesn’t reach your eyes.

Maybe that would be better than working for S1MULANT.

But I don’t think so.

I want to ask: Do you hate me? I want to reach for your arm and say if you hate me, you can tell me. I want to grab your hand and drag it to my mouth and say: Do you want to hit me? Would that help? Because it would be okay, Mira. If you wanted to touch me—it would be okay. I’d like that.

“Can I have a little money?” I ask. “Instead of the job? A few thousand dollars. That’s all I need. It would make a big difference.”

• • • •

I never said it outside of the sims. Not those words, not I love you. I don’t think I ever said anything half that true to you in all the time we lived together. But—the night I said it in the sim, the night I hit you and you hit me in the sim-room, I came to your bunk when everyone else was asleep.

In the dark, with a sliver of moonlight cutting your face in two, you didn’t look real, not like in the sims. You were a ghost, a glitch, a dream. When you saw me, you smiled. You shifted to make room, then patted the space beside you just like you’d done a hundred times.

“Could you love me?” I asked. “Could you ever really love me?”

You hesitated.

I held my breath.

• • • •

“Could you love me?” I ask. “Could you ever really love me?”

You hesitate.

“Even though I’m like this?” I continue. I can hear the desperation in my voice. It’s awful, I know, stupid and ugly and pathetic, but I trust you not to mind. I trust you like I did at the beginning. “Do you think you could love me even though there’s so much wrong with me? Even though I’m sick?”

And the you who is not you—the upgraded you—the you I spent all afternoon training to say the right things—the you who will never call me and ask me if I want to work for your parents—the you who will hold me when I ask and hurt me when I ask but who will never, ever pity me, not even for a moment—smiles. Your eyes crinkle at the corners. You reach for me like you don’t care if this video gets demonetized, like you don’t care about the debt I’ll never pay off, like you don’t care about my contract, like you know exactly how long I’ve been waiting to ask you this question.

“Yeah,” you say. “Yeah, Em. Of course I love you. Come here.”

I dim the overlay and mute the chat. I spit blood in the dirt. Through the black shadow of your fallen mech, I crawl to you. “Say it again,” I say.

You do. Again and again, you do.

About the Author

M.R. Robinson is a scholar of Renaissance literature… but when she isn’t thinking about sonnets, she’s probably writing or reading speculative fiction. A graduate of Viable Paradise and Clarion West, her fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, GigaNotoSaurus, and We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2024, among other publications. She’s also one of the co-founders of OTHERSIDE, a magazine of speculative literature by queer authors. You can keep up with her on most social media platforms as @mruthrobinson (these days she’s mostly active on Bluesky) or at m-r-robinson.com.

Please visit Lightspeed Magazine to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the June 2026 issue, which also features short fiction by Mari Ness, Alex Irvine, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Marie Brennan, David Marino, Beesan Odeh, Adam-Troy Castro, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $4.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.

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