Page 51 of Control

“That’s reasonable,” he said to me. “I just hope nothing from out of the blue catches you by surprise.”

“It won’t,” I said, giving off the impression of confidence when I really did have a fear of someone betraying me. It was something I could never let go of, but I still chose to ignore it. I didn’t want to spoil any potential friendships. “I know you’re trying to tell me something, but I don’t want you violating any sort of privacy policies you have internally.”

“I may not have to,” he said. “You’re technically an employee now as far as I’m concerned. We have a contract. I know you’ve not signed it yet but part of that is you having access to a lot of the internal data we have. That includes all the personal data of all the players here.”

“I already have that,” I said, pointing out an apparent oversight. “I’ve been exploring all of the Gamer Master functions and I realized right away I have access to player information. Well, a limited amount anyway.”

“You don’t have what I’m offering you though,” he said, apparently wanting me to see that he was giving me the opportunity to look into the very personal details of any player I wanted. I knew he was speaking specifically about Reyna. “In fact I’ll do that as soon as we’re done here. I’ll add full access to your GM profile so if you feel you need to you can look into someone. As you see fit of course.” Any person would be tempted to delve into the mind and habits of others if given the chance, especially if that person you were wanting to know more about was your partner. Him laying this temptation out in front of me rubbed me the wrong way and I felt he was once more crossing a line, but I held my tongue.

“I can’t stop you from giving me access,” I said. “It’s your company and your call. Just do me a favor. Don’t ever treat me like I’m just another employee. I’m not here to be your puppet. I’m here for my friends and I’m here to help people. I’m not here to judge others or to act as some go between for you. It’s like I told your people when they contacted me with all this stuff. I don’t mind playing a role, but I get to choose that role. I won’t have someone dictate to me how I go about my life here. As long as you and your board of directors keep that in mind, then we’ll both get something positive out of all this. The day anyone starts pushing me to do things I find objectionable is the day I walk.”

“The board did agree to that generous compensation package,” Thaddeus said back to me, an attempt to get me to capitulate some.

“I don’t give a fuck about the money,” I shot back immediately. “If taking your money means I have to sell my soul then I’m fine with sticking with my old job and just playing videos games on my PC again. I won’t be your tool. I made that very clear to your people the other day before they sent over the paperwork. Don’t think for a second that I’m not having someone go over that contract with a fine toothed comb. You either take me for who I am and let me operate the same way I see fit or I walk.” I could feel myself getting aggravated with the conversation.

“Ana,” Thaddeus said, putting his hands up to try and assuage my concerns.

“Don’t,” I said, cutting him off again. “Just…don’t.” I shook my head and looked away a moment, scoffing at this attempt to manipulate me. “You really have changed, haven’t you.” I looked back at him and stared into his eyes. After a few seconds I noticed him sink in his seat some, intimidated. “I thought I knew who you were, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe you’re not the person I remember. Maybe you’re not the person who offered me what I thought was the greatest advice I’d ever heard. Maybe I lied to myself all these years, holding you in such high regard. Or maybe you’ve just been in the corporate world so long you let it change you.”

Thaddeus broke eye contact with me and looked down to his lap. His hands which were still on the table slid down and out of sight. I had grown tired of the facade he was showing me and I wanted him to talk to me the way he used to, back when he looked after me at Latchkey. Back when Thaddeus was Theresa and I used to call him Mrs. Montgomery and life felt simpler. I’d figured it out after giving it a lot of thought during the weeks since she first appeared to me as Thaddeus. I had never told anyone about the things Mrs Montgomery had said to me in all the years since. Not my mother, my brothers, or my ex spouse had any idea of the conversations she and I had when I was little. She was the only one who knew.

I remember when she had to leave and it burned me. To me, she was the big sister I never had or maybe a trustworthy aunt. Still, the days after school she spent with me and the other children were cherished memories of mine. When she told me she had to go away for school, I wasn’t really sure what she meant. At that time I figured once you got older you would just be done with school and then you’d work. What she really meant was that she was going away to graduate school so she could further her education. I knew she had been going to the University of Texas there in my home town, but I wasn’t aware that graduate school was a thing and that attending that could mean she had to move to a different city or even state.

“I always wondered what happened to you,” I said to her even though her Thaddeus avatar was in front of me. “I remember the day you left and wondering if what you told me was maybe a joke and that you’d be back on Monday. But you weren’t joking. You really never did come back. I remember going there and thinking you would. Every day I remember thinking you’d come back today, that maybe you were just on vacation or something. But that was it. You really never came back.”

“I wanted to,” she said to me, a spot of emotion breaking through. “Obviously I never forgot you. When I was at Cornell, I had to work my ass off to get what I wanted. Day in and day out was a nightmare. It was so hard for me. I had to work and attend classes until the day I graduated. I worked at a few companies, helped them get their game development teams up and going. Many, many times I wasn’t taken seriously because I’m a woman and that started to drive me crazy so I said screw it, I’m doing my own thing. And I did. I started working on something like Aurora. I guess you could say it was the precursor to this place. I worked…so hard on that damn project and it felt like I couldn’t quite get what I wanted from it. The world felt too small and sitting at a PC felt too confining.”

“So you built Aurora,” I said, interjecting. She’d told me this before in our previous meeting, but I felt it was something near and dear to her so I let her speak.

“Yes,” she said to me. “But even that wasn’t enough. I wanted it to feel real, just like the real world. I started looking into neural technology. The more I looked and explored, the more I knew it wasn’t something I could do on my own so I got in contact with an old friend from Cornell. They were working on a technology that you could use to potentially read data directly from your mind, even while you were asleep. I told him what I wanted to do and together we came up with something that would work in concert with the game.”

“The headband,” I said. “You had someone else build the technology behind the headband, but you developed the game world.” I was under the impression that she had created the headband on her own, but I was wrong.

“Right” she said. “It took almost a decade of money and research, testing, failing, testing again, over and over. And finally we got it. We’d come up with something that would work and when we paired it with a pre-alpha version of Aurora, it worked nearly flawlessly. It was finally coming together. I finally had a way to create a game that felt not only real to life, but also had an interface for which people could access it easily and while they slept. The amount of lag was virtually nonexistent and….”

“You sent me the headband,” I said, stopping her before she could go on a rant. Theresa stopped speaking and stared back at me, realizing that all of her long held secrets concerning me were on the table now. “You kept an eye on me all these years from afar. You looked into the things that happened to me. The shit with my ex-husband and my time dancing and before that when I was homeless. You knew all about that.”

“Yes,” she said, taking a moment to considering her words. “I’m aware of it all.”

“Did you know about it as it was happening?” I asked, feeling strangely calm about all this. “Did you know…that I went back to my ex and the abuse continued? Did you know it was a massive mistake and said nothing to me?” Theresa remained quiet. She knew what I was getting at and she rightly believed I would be upset, but strangely enough I wasn’t.

“I knew what he did,” she said to me. “I knew what he did and I knew you went back, but I only found out after the fact. Yes, I followed your posts on social media and I extrapolated from them that you had returned to Will.” I felt my hands beginning to shake.

“Did you ever consider saying something?” I asked, my voice still calm. I wasn’t trying to be accusatory with her. I was only hoping to know what it was she’d thought of the situation. I’d assumed she’d been covertly watching my social media and once I had mentioned on Facebook what had happened to me, I was certain she probably accessed the criminal case records on Will since all those filings are readily available to the public.

“Once,” she said, with hesitancy in her voice. “When I realized what you’d gone through and what you had gone back to, I wanted to come out and talk to you. But who was I to do that? I took care of you after school. I wasn’t your mother or family. I was just the person charged with your care for a little while.”

“Yet you brought me here,” I said. “Look, Theresa. I’m not upset with you for not saying anything. After all the years went by and no word from you, I figured you’d forgotten about me anyway and I knew at the end of the day, I was probably just another kid you took care of while you were working and going to college. I don’t know. I guess maybe I thought we had something more than we really had.”

“But we do,” she said to me. “I know why you might feel that way. You have to understand, Ana, that it’s not always someone’s place to inject themselves in someone else’s life. Sometimes you have to just let others make their own decisions.”

“I can taste the irony in that comment.” I said to her, taking her aback.

“You know what I mean,” she said. I nodded and let her continue. “How would it look? Me, suddenly coming back decades later and telling you what to do! How would you even take that? What would I even say?”

“You could have said it’s going to be OK,” I said to her, my calm voice breaking a little. The emotions of the moment were becoming too hard to ignore. “You probably don’t remember but a few days before you left, you and I took a picture together. We were in the cafeteria as usual and we’d just got done playing chess. The assistant principal was taking photos for the wall art we used to do. You put your arm around me and she snapped it. After you left, it got put up on the wall by the main office. I stole that picture and I kept it. And I still have it.” With that, Theresa’s face which had remained mostly emotionless through our more heated comments finally showed signs of distress.

“I remember,” she said, her male voice cracking and her eyes welling up. “I remember that day. I knew I was going to have to quit there because I was moving and when I saw them come with a camera I knew we needed to take at least one photo together.”

---