Pontikos appeared in Althea’s view first when she woke.
“Good morning Althea, I have taken the liberty of restricting motor control for the time being.”
Althea tried to open her eyes, but could not move anything. She could still subvocalize,
“What the hell is going on?”
“Based on my recordings, you have been kidnapped by Walt’s men. They have you in a storage facility right now. I suggest significant Persona modifications before opening your eyes?”
“What? Why?”
“I am concerned about your psychological well being, Mistress. And about that…”
Pontikos trailed off, her cloud squeezing in the center as if wringing herself out.
“Just tell me.”
Pontikos brought up a Persona read out.
“Your compassion and empathy are both artificially lowered, as is your ability for introspection. These represent major deviations from your usual Persona settings. And that is a problem…”
“What? Why? I thought I could swap all I wanted?”
Pontikos said,
“You have not received Executive Persona Conditioning. I thought your initial confusions part of the transition process, but now that I know you did not intend to install me, you need to be warned.”
“About what?”
“Your current Persona changes deviate by too many steps from your baseline. If you continue live adjustments like this, you will undergo Persona fragmentation.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Pontikos drew a circle in Althea’s vision. Althea would have frowned if her muscles had been capable of the gesture.
Pontikos pointed to the interior of the red circle,
“This is your base line Persona. The quote unquote real you.” She drew a second circle, this one a little bigger than the first, “and this is your adopted Persona. The one you’ve been walking around in for the last 53 hours.”
“I didn’t know I had been using a different Persona for so long.”
“It doesn’t matter…” Pontikos put her cloud hand to her mouth and said, “actually, it does matter, but it doesn’t matter for the purposes of my current discussion. Just accept that this circle is a different color and larger.”
She pointed to the second circle in Althea’s vision.
“If we try to squeeze this into the first circle, something breaks, right”
Pontikos waved her stylus and the two circles jumped into each other, seemingly fighting for control. Finally, they settled, but the new mixture of shapes and colors looked more like an editing accident or piece of abstract art than a circle. Whorls of orange broke through the initial circle and the colors mixed in a foul combination.
“I still don’t get it. You make it sound like I will go crazy or something if I keep switching Persona Attributes. Can’t you just be clear?”
Pontikos flattened, giving Althea cold stare.
“Look. You mind no stretch, no change-y good. When you make it change-y, it break instead of bend.”
“Ugh, that’s too simple now. Can you just tell me what I need to do?”
A sound like gears grinding came from Pontikos’ avatar.
“Fine. Don’t store your new Persona settings for now. You can do it, but if you stick to a set of Attributes for too long, those attributes will start to linger. Eventually that set of Persona Attributes will become its own fully fledged Persona, complete with segregated memory areas. Your mind will fragment.”
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Althea started to ask a follow-up question, but Pontikos raised a puffy hand and said,
“That means you need to pick a set of new Attributes every, let’s say twelve hours if you must switch at all. It would be better to cling to your original Persona settings and only tweak one or two Attributes for a short time. But even that is dangerous if you do it too frequently.”
Pontikos shook her cloud body and pinched the bridge of her line-nose,
“This would be easier and safer if you had been properly trained.”
“Can we start that, you and me?”
“Oh yes. We’re starting right now. But you won’t enjoy the benefits for a year. At earliest.”
Althea felt like shouting. None of this had been her fault, none of this had even been her idea in the first place. The thought that this could do worse than kill her made her sick to her stomach.
Pontikos lead her through a series of breathing exercises and visualizations intended to “improve her focus naturally.” Given how basic the first exercise felt, Althea could see how she might have to wait a year for benefits.
Once they were done, she said,
“Let’s move away from the psychological horror of a mind break and back the real world. What’s happening?”
“Walt has you imprisoned in an Cybernetic isolation chamber.”
“What? Why?”
“Based on the conversations I have observed, he intends to have you fight in an arena.”
Althea did not possess a throat in Augmented Reality, but it still felt choked and rough as she said,
“Did Erie help him?”
“No, Althea. He gassed the room with a soporific and used an EM prod on you and the drones who tried to defend you.”
Althea nodded and considered what Pontikos said.
“How do we get out of here?”
Pontikos gave a little flip in Althea’s vision as she said,
“I have no idea! This particular chamber is all but inviolate. I would suggest CC-0,” Althea started shaking her head and Pontikos continued, “except that I do not think you wish to activate that mode. Besides, I do not think you would be able to find a way out of this trap.”
“Then we wait?”
Pontikos shrugged.
“We wait.”
“Know any good games?”
Pontikos flashed and said,
“I have a rather comprehensive store of AR games at my disposal!”
“Anything with an RPG adventure flavor where I can be a knight?”
Pontikos raised her eyebrow and said,
“Several! Magic or no magic…”
They engaged in a brief discussion and Althea found herself creating a big, beefy fighter for a sword and sorcery hack and slash RPG. Pontikos joined her as a Faerie wizard in-game. The moment Althea saw that avatar, she made a critical and personally amusing decision about Pontikos’s future.
After an hour in-game, Althea found herself feeling restless. Aside from a few encounters with lusty bar maidens and the occasional mercenary, the game felt like a series of hallway battles between treasure hoards and intermittent bosses.
This game lacked narrative cohesion, and seemed to introduce a random villain out of nowhere at the end of the second act.
“Log us out, Pontikos. I am good for now.”
“Was this not an amusing diversion?”
“No, it was fine. But I think some things are bothering me.”
“Like what, Mistress?”
“Like why have we not sat down and examined what happened to me more thoroughly? I mean how on Earth did Telepersona have a live Executive Alpha implant lying around?”
Pontikos had resumed her cloud shape.
She said,
“Because that is not how those things work. Only specially designed creche systems can install Alpha implants.”
As she spoke with Pontikos, Althea surreptitiously opened her interface preferences.
“That’s just shifting the subject. What made them leave such an insanely valuable implant just sitting off the elevator on a restricted floor?”
Pontikos nodded, seemingly oblivious to her own transformation. Instead of a cartoon cloud — an avatar that had already started to bore Althea — now Pontikos had dark tanned skin, purple veined butterfly wings and purple short-cut hair.
“I do not know. But the anomaly seems worthy of comment.”
“Right? Where are those creches usually stored?”
Pontikos’s wings fluttered quickly behind her back and she said,
“I don’t know. But let’s ignore that question for now and ask a better one: why wasn’t Steven’s interference with your Persona flagged?”
Althea shrugged,
“He made small changes and kept each change under a limit that would be flagged?”
Pontikos rolled her eyes and said,
“The AI Persona Admin would have flagged that change the first week.”
Althea said,
“And hey! Why didn’t his changes inflict mind shattering or whatever on me?”
“It is called Persona Fragmentation Syndrome. And his changes could have caused that syndrome, but the changes were small and spread out over a long time. The problem occurs when the changes are either drastic and longer than about an hour, or less drastic, but frequently accessed. This is a digression, Mistress. I assume you have a point about your access to an experimental facility?”
“Yeah, what if the Op who helped Maxwell was involved somehow? And what if there was something else going on in general?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just bugging me, the Steve thing. He had a kid in the house. What did he think we were going to do when we got back to his place with a kid under roof? I feel like something else is happening, something that would be really obvious if we had just one more piece of information.”
Pontikos shrugged and spun around.
“I wish I could help, Mistress.”
Althea shook her head and worried over the problem. Back at her base Persona set, she found herself easily distracted with trouble focusing on the problem in the first place.
All of that stopped being important when Pontikos said,
“Mistress, the cybernetic lock is opening. You should prepare yourself.”
