"I think you should start over and slow the game down once it gets to the civilization phase." you said, shifting a little to let her lean into your shoulder. "This was just a test game, right?"
On the screen, the last survivors of the squirrats squabbled over the delicious little green motes of Food, their numbers steadily dwindling and their artificial forest crumbling, reclaimed by simulated nature. May dropped the controller on the couch and buried her face in the wool knit of your sweater. Utterly unsure of what to do, you froze awkwardly, not moving a muscle, and you realized she was crying.
Okay, that went from zero to sixty really fast.
"May, they're just procedurally generated little models, it isn't real..." you said, trying to be reassuring. Drawing her in for a hug. "It's okay..."
"It's not that..." she said, pulling away from you and wiping the tears away with her forearm. "We don't... W-we can't start over..."
Oh. She wasn't talking about the game.
Oh.
She huddled back to your shoulder and you hugged her tighter as the freezing rain pattered against the windows, driven by the harsh Atlantic wind.
"Hey. It's okay. It's going to be okay. We're going to be okay." you assured her, but she shook her head.
"Don't start that. You know it won't. It's hopeless." she said bitterly.
"Well... no. It's going to be hard and it's going to suck a lot and it's not fair." you admitted.
"It's hopeless." she repeated. "We're too late."
Right.
Climate depression was... not good. You'd had it bad in your earlier teen years: it was a huge part of your motivation for the rig-the-election scheme. Unsurprisingly, lot of people, a lot of kids especially, had a hard time coping with the end of the world looming outside their window. It really didn't help that, until AOC won the primaries, the Democrat's best offering was to try and reach carbon net-zero by
2100 (Contrast the GOP, who had in 2024 added the plank that climate change was real, so America must move quickly to secure land and resources and secure the border from climate refugees). The feeling that the world was spiraling the drain was
intense, and even though you were probably a bit more optimistic than most of your peers given the aggression Congress was finally pointing to it and the massive progress made elsewhere in the world, it was hard not to feel it sometimes. Everyone who wasn't delusional did. When you were young, just after the divorce when your mom was barely hanging on, she'd drank a bottle of wine while watching the news and tearfully apologized for bringing you into the end of the world. That shit had stuck with you.
You wondered, for a moment, if all of May's outfits and movies were her trying to live in a time when it
wasn't too late.
You considered trying to break out the charts and graphs on your phone that showed how fast progress was being made, the technologies that might fix it, but Athena whispered into your ear that it wouldn't help: hers was a rational fear, but not one she could be reasoned out of. Right, losing an argument never made anyone feel better. So instead you just held her for a while, unsure what else to say.
She got it together after a few minutes, pushing herself to the other end of the couch and apologizing, her face red and tear-streaked. There was a wet patch in the wool on your shoulder. You told her not to worry about it.
"Do you want to play something else? Or watch a movie?" you asked.
"My dad's going to be home soon." she said, shaking her head.
"... do you want me to go?" you guessed.
"Want to get something to eat?" she suggested instead.
----
A few bitterly cold minutes later, you folded up your umbrella and walked into Ditko's, which was a diner a few blocks from where May lived. Best as you could tell, it was her favourite place in the universe, probably because it was one of those places which affected a retro Americana aesthetic, and because the people who worked there knew her and her dresses. You slide onto the vinyl of a corner booth and took a few tries at scooping the menu up in your artificial hand before May handed it to you, smiling. Already looking a little cheered up.
"Know what you want?" you guessed, given the way she didn't reach for a menu. She nodded, so you scanned down and decided to go for a classic. They had a cheeseburger (the menu assured the customer that all their meat was vat-grown), and by god, you wanted a cheeseburger.
You put in your order, and May got pancakes. They had pancakes? You flipped the menu over and noticed their breakfast menu was, indeed, all day. Well, if there was ever comfort food, that was it.
"Sorry for going to pieces on you there. My treat." she said, after you placed your orders.
"Oh no, May, you don't have to bribe me with cheeseburgers because you did a sad. It's fine." you said, laughing.
"Yeah, but you got the last one anyway. It's fair." she insisted. "And... I dunno. It's just a lot."
"It
is a lot, yeah. It's... something I think about for sure." you said. "But... right now I'm just thinking about a burger. I didn't realize how hungry I was."
"Borger." May said sagely. As you waited for your food and talked about the stupid game and how next time May would slow down and give a steadier guiding hand to her critters, you noticed the salt and pepper shakers (there were four on the table, a bit overkill) looked delightfully stackable. Idly, you picked one up between your mechanical fingers, lifted it, and set it down atop another.
"Liv, are you making mechanical noises?" May asked.
"... am I?" you said, snapping back to reality a little. Your hand was already positioned to place another in the stack.
"Yeah, you were like... brrrrr, eeeeeeerk, bzzzz." she imitated, moving her arms robotically. Oh, guess you were.
"Look, I pretended to have a robot arm way before I had a robot arm, okay?" you said. "It's totally normal and not weird. Brrrrrrr."
You placed the final salt shaker atop your precarious little tower. Unsurprisingly, given your clumsy fingers, it toppled immediately.
"So, you free this weekend?" she asked.
"I, uh, got a thing on Saturday? Late Saturday. It's work related." you said. By which you mean that at one AM on Sunday, you were going to be hijacking an automated truck carrying police robots. "I'm probably going to be out of it all weekend. Sorry."
"It's okay. That internship seems like so much... I don't know how you manage it
and school." May said. "And have perfect grades. I have, like, okay grades, and I work my keister off. What's it like, being so smart?"
"I'm not that smart, trust me." you deflected.
"Bullshit, you're a genius." she said. "I know you aren't planning on working with them, so... why do you spend all that time there, huh? What's the deal?"
---
[ ] It's just for my career later. Honest!
[ ] I'm there to learn. They're evil, but there's doing all this really cool stuff, and I want to learn as much as I can to make my own cool stuff.
[ ] Okay, for real... I'm poking around to see if I can do some good. Expose bad stuff, or hack their systems. Make the world better.
