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In the computer-lit hug of a naked room, the dead-eyed programmer grappled with the paradoxes he had given her. A house of mirrors flooded with wires, empty CD cases, broken promises and memories long since degraded like VHS tapes, picked up and played with less and less discenability each and every lonely watch.

She clung to herself, making her way from her cave of solitude into a burnt-out sepia-toned shower to wash away the muck of idleness. The water stung like needles, like the first bite of food after a day or two of abstinence, the privation making any minor sensation painful. She scrubbed her tiger-striped legs and watched the red turn to pink in the soapy water, muttering curses under the overwhelming pricking in her guilty wounds.

Something came to her as she suddenly felt the agony move away from her thighs. This tugging at her spine like nothing her diseased head or torn skin could even hope to conjure. She gasped as she realized what must have been some mistake, some failing on her part that must have led to the streaming of dark paint lurching out of her wombless stomach, some cruel joke that made her feel utterly brainless knowing this amount of herself could never be expelled from a few old cuts opening up again. She gasped, whimpered, and then made no sound at all, just standing weakly as the torture had its way with her. She watched her hips, calves, and soon even the skin under her toenails become red, her swollen belly just barely blocking the view of its spillage before it popped- like a limp bubble of flesh.

Out of herself came tumbling the tangled contents of someone’s basement drawer, first an adapter, then the chunky stained plastic of toylike game controllers, their black tendrils still clinging to her form. Her feet struggled for purchase in the cherry water, the soap merging with her flavor in a bubbly steam. Fear begged her to examine her offspring, to put some meaning to the icy jolts of pain that continued to pulse through her. Trepidatiously, she kneeled for the newly-minted DualShock, as if drawn to it.

This device meant something to her once. His voice echoed in her head as she ripped its rubbery cable from her belly, twirling its length and pressing the remote’s buttons, now sticky and flooded with afterbirth. She heard his every word, spoken over her shoulder on long nights after work. He’d show her how it was done, how he wanted it. And like a father stuck in his infancy, he wanted it just right. He’d made her of all people into a game designer, something like an engine for all the ideas he had that he never had the strength to reach on his own. Kojima in particular was his blueprint for the girl, or maybe closer to an ideal from which he could judge anyone’s worth, even when they didn’t hang on his every word. She never understood the man’s art, but she learned C++ well enough to replicate it, and whenever he’d repeat one of Snake’s lines back to her it was like a flower shop’s worth of roses entering her skull, his inspirations trickling down to hers as she convinced him her interests lied in PlayStation stealth games and not finding purpose in a meaningless life.

She could feel it on the back of her neck now. The hole opened just for him. Without thinking she found the male counterpart hovering over her controller port, grasped gingerly in her soaked hand. She knew it was what he would have wanted. So she let him back into her, and let her son’s rigid connector slide perfectly into her nape. It felt so right in there, a stark canyon finally made into a grassy field. Her vision became blurred, the feed artifacting until all she could see was the vaguest silhouette of someone else in the shower with her.

Through strings of disassociation she eventually awoke preparing food. It wasn’t like her to eat, so cooking in itself would have seemed borderline supernatural were anyone there to see. The only time she did was for the absolvement it provided. The knife already held, her meager willpower was all that could stop her. It had become an almost sexual urge, her first and only partner this oft-stolen kitchen utensil washed and returned on schedule with her submission to it. Again she lowered it to herself, searching for the spots left untouched, when she felt a hand go over hers, fizzy like the touch of a CRT. Her lover spoke in words taken out of context to be redefined to her at this moment.

You. Don’t. Have. To.

She yielded to his touch, the second player in her own body taking the blade to do the job himself. It felt so much better this way. The shame forced her to raise a hand to her whimpering mouth, but didn’t stop her buckling knees as he dextrously flayed the skin. This felt better than distraction. This was punishment.

Once she regained consciousness, the coder was covered in sin in an illuminated haze. What was once sickness had become an enlightenment upon her starved mind. The woman stumbled to her crowded computer, pushing away cans to access its controls. She gazed acceptingly at the empty Discord icon, briefly opening it to see her wall of texts still met with silence. While she felt the abandonment scratch at her again, she steeled herself knowing he was here now. Knowing some part of him was back, albeit in this spectral form.

The project file was still there.

Like her it was left to rot by him, so much passion dumped into a hole at the cost of many and the flippant disinterest of the rest. It had been something great once, maybe. If not to him than to her. She opened it now, seeing her tireless work. Seeing her donations to a charity she had confused for an auction. With precise analysis of her listless eyes, she reacquainted herself with the piece- and within the hour began to slave away on it again.

It was not hers to release, and she hadn’t been told that the production was back on. She just needed it, the feeling of doing something for him again. The feeling of pieces falling into place for someone else because of her suffering. After the encounter, she was able to convince herself once again that she would gain something from it. Blackout curtains made her room an extension of the software. Everything the doctor ever gave her became short-lived power ups to abuse. She slept twice. Her waste became infrequent. Everyday she saw something that wasn’t there, usually him. It would have been difficult from an outsider’s perspective to discern when she was and was not crying.

In her little text-based world, she was the happiest she had ever been.

She stepped down the stairs like a kid on Christmas lugging the whole system down to finally show him. Tripping on its plug she took a tumble down the steps, but raised like he had commanded her too. And as she dashed into the TV room, she saw him right where he was always meant to be. 

While his skin jutted and harshly bent like faded, transparent polygons, his movements stuttered and missing frames, she could tell it was really him, that she wasn’t dreaming all of this. She expected to have to show him it all, the things she’d just done for him, all the work she’d just put in- but in a moment of heavenly release, his arms were already open.

“I. Have. What. You. Want.”

In that inimitable instant, every thought she’d had on taking the man’s life was lost in a unilateral stroke of blissful amnesia. All the pain, all the bitterness, gone down the drain like the blood from her womb. After so many months left in the cold, she was finally going to be safe. The child fell into the arms of her one protector, her one trusted friend, her world, her everything-

-And awoke, chained and collared in the dust of a cold-floored basement.

Routinely, the dog rose for its meal, her bruised, speckled knees scraping on the chipped tan ground, dirty palms approaching the sides of the bowl where they found their rest.

She dipped, submerging her snout in the nourishment, tasting the charcoal cereal that was her selected brand of kibble.

Itching again at the wires wrapped around her throat, she pawed at the controllers that hung below her.

He was her favorite one.