[ti]solo[/ti]Long Walk Home

"-and then Sarah was all like 'I'll never let you go!' and the dragon headbutted the tree again!" Shinx headbutted for emphasis and she disappeared into the long grass.

"Ahuh." Quincy replied, staring off into the middle distance as Fall reappeared and fell back into step beside him. They'd been walking for what felt like hours, and one half of the pair were getting on like a house on fire.

"And then guess what Sarah did!"

"Ahuh."

"Guess!"

"Oh. Well she probably did something 'cool'."

"How did you know!?"

"Intuition."

"Cool! I didn't know you went to college? I didn't even know they had Pokemon colleges! I bet Professor Ash works there. Have you met her before?"

"I met her, yes. Her lab is very clean."

"Yeah! It's nice and kinda comforting, isn't it? Like a fresh blanket when you're sick, or like the inside of your Pokeball when you've been trapped in the Everworld hiding from ghosts."

"I wouldn't know."

"You've never been sick?"

Quincy looked up at Sarah, who was stifling laughter at the pair's back and forth. "Are we there yet?"

Night fell, like a curtain on the mid-point of a play in an empty theatre. The weather was balmy. A breath of autumn that tickled Sarah's arms but left her warm. She sat on the vast spit of rock and looked out at the grassland. Quincy and Fall were nestled beside her, one on each side like fuzzy, sleeping bookends.

Above, a double-handful of stars had been tossed across the sky, streaking eastward in decadent display of brilliance. A thousand, thousand pinpricks of light, shining through holes in the curtain above.

A simulated curtain. Fake light. Sarah looked down at her hands. Hers? They weren't the hands she'd used for the last sixty years. They felt as real as anything in this world, but the dainty hands weren't hers. They weren't his. Perfect, round-nailed hands, sketched and rendered by some art grad in a computer lab and then adjusted by a dozen sliders.

The hands weren't his. These hands had never touched his wife, or held his children, or rested heavily on the Resolute desk.

"But I chose these hands. I moved those sliders. That should count for something," he said, suddenly feeling every pixel of his constructed form. He flexed his hands, feeling the polygons shift. It was as good as flesh and bone. Almost real.

"How is something I picked and made any less real than what I was given?"

Sarah clenched her fists, feeling her blood rise. It was too warm tonight. She kicked off her shoes, and they disappeared into her inventory. "If I bought a character change. Remade myself, real as can be, down to the pixel. If I made myself look like I do outside, would that make this body any truer? Is it a lie because it's not what I really look like, or because it's in here?"

"And if I changed my name. My real name. If I changed my name to Sarah Lee, would that make it any less real than the name I used to have? Would it be truer, just because it happened in the 'real world'?"

"Is a person the same no matter where they are and what they look like? Or are they changed by virtue of the world they're in? Is this body a lie, or just this world's version of the truth?"

"Am I two people now?"

Sarah drifted between two forms, lost in the woulds and weres of their realities. Were they one person split in two? Two people merged into one? Were they a chrysalis, an intermediate form that would hatch into some strange, third thing. The only thing the forms had in common was their mind. So was that the only thing that could be trusted?

He held up her hands, searching for seams, cracks in the fabric on their form. "Can I trust something that I know was made by someone else?"

Sarah suddenly felt too warm. Spark pinged from her palms, and the giant cat and electric blanket at her sides were too much. She stood up, taking deep breaths of the warm air.

"Most indecorous," grumbled Quincy, but Fall rolled over and the pair fell back asleep at the top of the spit.

Sarah looked between them. Her Pokemon. Living, breathing things. But only in the confines of the game. "They have nothing outside of here. No form. No brain. They're just code running on some computer somewhere. Are they real because that code exists outside?"

Fall moved in closer, burying her head in Quincy's soft wool. It looked so natural that Sarah almost dismissed it. "Are they programmed to do that? Code doesn't need to sleep, so why do they pretend?"

In the warm air Sarah felt a chill run down her back. She backed away, down the spit. "I've got to think," she said, and with sweaty palms Sarah opened her menu and logged out.

Overhead, false stars sparkled in a simulated sky, and programmed breeze ruffled the perfect stalks of grass. A million, million pixels moving as instructed, and nothing more.