Page 49 of Control

“About that,” Thaddeus said, interrupting me. “I wanted to apologize about the temporary housing we has you in.”

“It’s actually a nice place,” I said, letting him know that I still appreciated his efforts to look after me after I’d exposed myself to the entire world. “A little extravagant, but it provides me with what I need.”

“I’m glad,” he said, stroking his chin and looking away for a moment. “I wanted to be the one to let you know we’ve secured a more permanent residence for you. In fact, let me….” Thaddeus proceeded to share his HUD with me and showed me several pictures and a video of what appeared to be an exceptionally beautiful home that took me by surprise. It had 5 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms along with a massive living room, study, office, and a library room where several shelves had already been installed. Most of the floors were hardwood with the exception of the kitchen and bathrooms which were covered in tile. The overall colors of the walls and shelves were a dark, rich brown with areas of burgundy and violet as well as traces of indigo. Outside was a yard bigger than I’d ever thought reasonable with several trees all lending shade to the single story home. The backyard was also large with a gorgeous wooden gazebo set in a rectangular shape and covered by a sturdy, shingle-covered roof.

“Thaddeus,” I said as I looked past my HUD and over to him. “This is too much. There’s no way I can accept this.”

“We’ve already purchased it for you,” he said with a smile. As part of an agreement I had reached with him and the development company, I was offered a substantial compensation package for all I’d done. I had, overnight, become the face of Aurora and had generated massive amounts of traffic to their website and interest in their game, even garnering talks of a potential multi billion dollar buyout attempt from a major software company, though that was only speculation. “The paperwork is already filed and the house is in your name. We’re already having the movers placing all your belongings in it. We also made sure to settle you in a new area of the country where you’d previously shown significant interest in living. Not only that, but the neighborhood is monitored and guarded 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. No one gets in or out of it without someone noticing. We feel you’ll be completely safe there so you don’t have to worry about….”

“Stop,” I said, cutting him off mid sentence. I looked him dead in the eye and watched his smile slowly drop away. I glared at him for a few seconds and he knew I wasn’t happy with how he and his company had gone about things. “Look, Thaddeus.” I sighed and took a deep breath. “Don’t think for a moment that I don’t appreciate all you’re doing for me. I do, sincerely. It’s just…I can’t have you making decisions for me like this. If I’m gonna have something major like this happening in my life, I need to be the one making that choice. I can’t have someone doing it for me.” Thaddeus stared back at me a moment, the discomfort in his face becoming apparent. “I really am grateful for you doing this for me and I always will be. Just…please. Let me make the choices from here going forward. I have no problem with working with you to make Aurora a safer place for everyone. It’s something I want to do, but when it comes to having the final say in how my life goes whether here or in the real world, I am the one in charge. No one else.”

Thaddeus took a moment and digested my words. I could tell he was realizing he had crossed a line with me and the remorse built up on his face. I wasn’t angry with him or even really disappointed. Given who he really was, and by this time I was certain of it, I didn’t fully understand why he would take the liberty of making such a massive decision for me. He was essentially moving me across the country and placing me into a home that, while absolutely gorgeous and fancier than anything I’d ever lived in before, was something he’d practically forced on me. I’d discussed moving to a new location with his people through calls, but not once did Thaddeus step in and say he was going to do this.

“Hey,” I said to him as he nodded his head as if realizing his error. “The house really is beautiful. It’s…more than I could have ever hoped for.”

“I just want you to be happy,” he said, the confidence in his voice lessening. “You really have done more for this game, the people here, this company, me…than you’ll ever realize. We owe you a great debt and I want to be able to say we took care of you.”

“And I know you will,” I said, offering a kinder, gentler voice. “I have faith that you’ll take care of me. Hell, I saw the compensation package paperwork and the amounts you all are offering me…kind of insane.”

“Is it not enough?” he asked me. “I can talk to the board and we can see about getting you more.”

“No,” I said with a smile.”The amount you all offered me is more than fair. In fact I could argue it’s too much.”

“I argued it wasn’t enough,” he said. “But they wanted to see if you were actually worth the amount that I wanted to give you.”

“You made me a millionaire!” I said with a smile and a small laugh. “That along with all the exposure and the videos and social media stuff and all these companies asking me to partner with them and the money they’re offering….”

I paused a moment and considered it all. It had only dawned on me in that moment that I had sudden become very in demand for who I was and very, very rich in the real world. As with the episodes in Aurora, my real life had suddenly become a whirlwind of activity. Along with being given this incredible new house, Thaddeus and his game company had offered to pay me over 10 million dollars for the work I had done in not only keeping the player base calm, but also for giving them the kind of positive media attention one could only dream of. Every news organization was talking about Aurora and while the interest in the game because of the exclusivity had always been high, my actions and the various videos online documenting the recent occurrences only pushed that interest into a frenzy with tens of millions more people applying to be allowed to be part of Aurora.

“My life,” I said, taking a moment to gather my thoughts. “My life should remain my own. I’m happy to work with you and your company and I’m happy to accept your offer as your spokesperson. Just…you need to know when to back off and let me do things for myself. I’m not a child anymore. I’m a big girl and I can take care of things on my own and if I ever need help, I will go looking for it.” I paused for a few seconds before going on to give Thaddeus some time to consider what I was saying to him.

“You’re right,” he said while nodding his head. “I’ll need to remind myself the next time something like this comes up. I’ve been the shot caller, so to speak, for so long that I often forget that certain people outside my managerial influence prefer to make their own choices. I apologize.”

“I accept,” I said, offering him a warm smile. “We’re OK. I just needed to make sure we’re on the same page with that kind of stuff.” He nodded his head once more and offered back a smile. “You say my things are already being moved in. When can I expect to be flown out to my new house?”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “We’ve already got you booked, first class of course. I…hope that’s OK with you.”

“It’s fine,” I said, offering him another playful laugh. “I figured you can’t go back and ask my permission for things already set in motion. I’ll just be glad to be out of a hotel suite and into an actual home I can call my own.”

“It’s a little better than an apartment,” he said with a smirk.

“It appears that way,” I said back to him while still looking over the photos of the house he’d shared with me. I glanced over to my right and noticed that several individuals were looking my way, but I didn’t wish to be disturbed while talking business with Thaddeus. Using my new GM powers, I thought of and conjured a small, wooden sign with a stand that had a message on it saying ‘Please Do Not Disturb; Private Meeting.’ Looking over the sign, virtually all of the players looking at me sitting with Thaddeus nodded their heads and moved on to other things.

“It’s concerning how good you are with that,” Thaddeus said to me while looking out to the people reading the sign and moving on.

“Why?” I asked as he looked back to me. “Thought Prompting is fairly standard, right? If you practice enough, you get pretty good at it.”

“That’s the thing,” he said to me. “It’s one thing to trigger a preprogrammed prompt in your HUD by thinking about it. You’re not doing that though. You’re generating objects directly from our data and manipulating them on the fly. We never programmed for that.”

“What?” I said, sincerely unsure of what he was telling me.

“The things you’re able to do,” he said. “It’s actually something we’re looking into. We never intended for people to be able to do such things. Even our old Game Masters can’t do what you’re doing and some of them actively participated in creating the GM modules that are used today.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, kind of seeing what he was getting at but I wanted him to say it so I could be sure.

“We’re calling it a ‘Matrix’ moment,” he said to me as he leaned forward. “The GM modules, the applications that we provide our GMs for them to use, don’t have those sorts of capabilities in them so to see you doing that is drawing a lot of attention. We really don’t know how you’re able to manipulate the data they way you’re doing it.” I leaned forward as well, genuinely surprised by what he’d said.

“This isn’t normal?” I said, lowering my voice even though I knew no one could hear us. Real world habit. “That’s not really possible though. I mean if it’s not in the code or the program to be able to do it, then how am I able to? It makes no sense.”

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