Work Text:
It was an unfortunate reality of working in the tech industry—or really, working in technology at all, regardless of what the company you were working for actually did—that computer systems loved nothing more than to glitch and break and be inconvenient at the worst possible times. And that was assuming that everyone who interacted with those systems knew what they were doing.
As such, Gina and her husband Grant, both being employed in the tech industry and well-acquainted with the bullshit rigors of trying to keep the massive, sprawling VR systems that they worked on up and running at all hours of the day, had worked out a system very early on into their marriage to deal with the inconvenient realities of one or both of them being on-call for the week: if it was just one of them at the mercy of sudden phone calls at any hour that week, the other would set up the Murphy bed tucked into the home office for exactly this reason so that late-night emergencies wouldn't wake both of them up, pull some freezer meals out to dethaw so there'd always be something quick and easy to eat, and make reservations at their favorite Thai place for the day after call ended.
If it was both of them, then they added in a bottle of champagne to the list and upgraded their dinner reservation to the Brazilian steakhouse.
This week it was just Gina in the office, which meant that she was the only one to hear the curses slipping from her mouth when bright, peppy music started blasting into her ear in the middle of the night.
The Lobby theme for the Amazing Digital Circus, normally one of Gina's favorites since Caine had composed it for her back in the day, was never more loathed than when it played after midnight. Gina fumbled about in the dark for her phone, fighting with her sheets and pillowcases long enough for the song to loop before she finally grabbed the damn thing and accepted the call.
"H'lo?" she rasped, wincing at the sound of her own voice. Gina reached for the glass of water on her nightstand and took a sip. "Hello, Queenie speaking," she tried again. Much better.
"Uh. Mrs. MacArthur?" the slightly compressed voice on the other end asked. Either a higher-voiced man or a rougher-voiced woman, she couldn't quite tell. It wasn't a voice Gina recognized, either way, and apparently the owner of it was new enough not to know that real names were only used in the building itself.
"Queenie, please," she corrected tonelessly, slipping her fingers beneath her bonnet to massage at her temples. Someone was going to get yelled at later for breaching confidentiality, and it wasn't going to be her. "I'm guessing you don't have a username yet, so just give me a surname and an ID number to reference later, and tell me the nature of the issue."
She glanced at the time on the screen and bit back another round of cursing. Gina had thought it was late, but she hadn't thought it was four in the morning late. Depending on how long this took, she probably wasn't going to be able to get back to sleep when the issue was resolved. She might be able to join Grant for breakfast before his shift at least, so silver linings there...
What the hell even was the problem? Stack overflow? Cascade failure? File corruption?
It better be something important if she had to get woken up at four in the god damn morning for it...
"Uhm. Right. My apologies, Ma'am," the voice continued. At least they had manners. "This is Yao, ID number six-six-seven-five-six-three-six-B. Uh, there's been an unexplainable surge in Ms. Motley's vitals over the past few minutes that we're a bit concerned about and we're wondering how to proceed."
All of Gina's irritation curdled into cold fear in an instant. She shot straight up in her bed, hoping to God that she'd somehow misheard.
"Come again?" Surely it wasn't...
"Exactly as I said, ma'am," the voice, Yao, continued, heedless of her prayers. "I see there's a note on her file indicating that periods of increased activity are normal here and there, but this is far beyond the ranges listed in that note. Her heart's beating like she's running a marathon, and her breathing is similarly elevated. Her brainwave activity is far beyond what it should be outside of an Adventure. Her condition seems stable at the moment, but between the unexplainable cause and the other note in her file saying that she's experienced cardiac issues in VR before, I thought it necessary to call first before we try pulling her out of the Circus, Ma'am."
Gina braced a hand against the guest bed so she wouldn't fall over. It felt like the world had just opened up beneath her.
Ms. Motley. Ms. Christine Motley, technically. Chrissie to her friends.
After all the months they'd spent trapped in the Circus together under Abel's tyrannical management, it was hard for Gina to think of her as anything other than Pomni.
Gina took a breath and tried to keep her voice steady as she talked into the phone. "Ms. Motley is registered under the username Pomni within the company records. Please use that when referring to her. Now—tell me her vitals and run me through what happened prior to the surge. Don't leave anything out."
"Yes Ma'am."
She switched the phone to speaker mode and got out of bed while Yao told her about the past half-hour or so. In a step and a half she was at the computer along the wall, clicking the mouse to wake it up from its sleep. The office computer was never turned off while someone was on call. Even the few seconds it took for the system to start up could be vital.
Something important, Gina thought. Ha. Her and her fat mouth.
It took a minute to bring up the schedule for this week. Gina didn't particularly need it, but it was good to confirm. Chrissie was monitoring the Circus from inside tonight, a shift that usually went to Maxwell or Teale or Rosetta since quite frankly they were actually qualified to deal with any issues that might come up and they didn't care about taking night shifts. Chrissie on the other hand...
Chrissie had gotten especially attached to Caine while they were all trapped in the Circus together. She'd reactivated him, she'd hid him from Abel, she'd kept him company... she'd fallen in love with him. And beyond Gina's wildest expectations, Caine had fallen for her right back. The AI was practically head over heels for her.
Since only one of them could exist outside of the Circus, any interaction that Chrissie had with Caine had to be as Pomni. That meant it had to be either while she was in the Amazing Digital Circus as a paying customer rather than a paid employee, or while she was at work. And as a member of C&A's accounting division, Chrissie normally wouldn't have gotten very many opportunities to be Pomni at work.
So... Gina had argued to her bosses that Chrissie's unique bond with Caine would prevent him from going mad with power like Abel had, and that so long as she was still able to document any errors she encountered in the Circus for the rest of the team to fix, it wasn't as much of an issue that she couldn't fix them herself.
Which made this new disaster ultimately Gina's fault. Like so many other things that had gone horribly wrong—
Gina took a deep breath. She held it in for a few seconds, then breathed out slowly.
No. That sort of thinking wasn't helping anyone. Gina was already doing everything she could. If Chrissie pulled out of this alright, good. If she didn't...
Gina didn't want to consider that as a possibility, even when she knew she had to.
The problem was, as Yao had pointed out, tachycardia wasn't a new issue for Chrissie. That was an unfortunate consequence of their time spent locked in the Circus. When Abel had done that thing to her mind files that had just gotten worse and worse over the next few days... Grant told her that the girl had nearly coded in the VR pod before they'd gotten Abel to stop making it worse.
Gina still had nightmares about not being able to save her in time. C&A didn't have anything in the building that could restart a heart after it had stopped. They'd never had a need. The last she heard, corporate was still arguing over whether keeping a defibrillator on hand for such emergencies was even necessary when Caine could reverse the effects of abstraction all on his own.
...
Actually.
Speaking of Caine—
"Have you messaged Caine to have him check on the situation inside?" she asked, cutting off Yao's recounting of when they noticed the change in Chrissie's vitals.
Because that was odd, wasn't it? Chrissie was in the Circus right now. That meant she was with Caine right now. Knowing the AI like Gina did, he probably wouldn't let her out of his sight long enough to do anything more involved than stepping out to take a quick bathroom break.
Caine would have far more insight into whatever was happening to Pomni that was causing such a reaction in Chrissie. So why was Gina hearing about this from Yao instead?
"We... tried," they said slowly, "But Caine is not responding to pings at this time."
Gina blinked. "Come again?"
That... didn't sound right.
Caine didn't ignore pings. It wasn't in his nature. That wasn't to say that he couldn't chose not to respond to them—being able to create and learn and think independently inherently opened his systems up to being able to ignore them if he truly wanted to. He just didn't. Even when Caine had been angry at them all the time way back in his 0.6 update, he'd never not answered his developers when they called for him.
But... no, Gina thought back. There had been one time had hadn't answered them, hadn't there? When—
A number of puzzle pieces abruptly slotted into place, leaving Gina all but speechless in their wake. She ran a hand over her face, her mouth unable to decide whether it wanted to smile or sigh. In the end, she ended up shaking her head.
Caine...
Her boy.
Her sweet, wonderful, good-hearted, absolutely idiotic boy.
Gina picked up her phone. "Yao? Did Caine drop communications with the server around the time Pomni's vitals started rising?"
"I'm... not actually certain, but give me a moment to check, Ma'am."
Truth be told, there had been exactly one scenario Gina was aware of where Caine had stopped answering his pings.
It was after the Circus had been opened again following Abel's deactivation and all users trapped inside were free to log back out and return to the real world. After months spent in close quarters together, the AI was understandably sad to see them go, but to finally be without his beloved Pomni specifically for the first time since she reactivated him... Caine had given them all a big smile before they logged out, but Gina—Queenie, then—had seen the tears welling up in his eyes clear as day as he waved them goodbye.
The following days had been hell. C&A had long been prepared for the nightmare scenario of a player becoming trapped in the game for an extended amount of time. There were just too many sci-fi stories of that exact thing happening for it not to be a concern they'd need to address for their customers and shareholders' peace of mind. Their bodies could be fed and maintained through the VR pods, and their muscles stimulated to slow down the rate of atrophy, but—
They'd all still spent months lying down in bodies that hadn't moved. There was going to be atrophy. Frankly, Gina was happy they didn't all have bed sores on top of that.
So, suffice to say, it had been a hot minute before any of them were allowed back into the Circus to resume operations, and for greatly reduced hours than they would have normally been allowed to stay at one time.
The moment that Caine had seen them enter the Circus again weeks later, he'd been overjoyed to see Queenie, but seeing Pomni had had the AI fly over in a rush to sweep her model into his arms, babbling all about how much he'd missed her and pecking his teeth against her cheeks over and over again like they were in an old Looney Tunes short and he was Pepe Le Pew with that damn cat again. Gina hadn't really thought much of it at the time, too caught up in a quagmire of emotions that came from seeing her boy so happy.
Could Caine have found love sooner if she hadn't put him in stasis all those years ago? she wondered. Could he have found happiness sooner?
Gina didn't know. She'd live the rest of her life not knowing. Caine might've since forgiven her, but it would still be a while off before Gina could forgive herself.
Things had proceeded more or less like normal until Gina noticed that she was suddenly alone in the Circus. Then Teale had called her from the waiting room in a fright, half-panicking because Pomni's heart rate was climbing, she didn't know if the other girl was abstracting again, Caine wasn't answering his damn pings for some reason, and could Gina please just go check on her and let Teale know she's okay before she ends up figuring out how to abstract in real life?
It had taken five minutes of terrified searching to find the pair not far from where Gina last remembered seeing them tucked away in a closed room, making out like lovestruck teenagers. Apparently, Caine had been too preoccupied to notice that he was being pinged.
Gina couldn't remember the last time she'd yelled so much.
To say nothing of poor Teale when she found out what had actually been happening.
So, there was a possible explanation. Technically not allowed by the server, or the company guidelines, but... Caine was literally purpose-built to be creative. He was very good at finding and creating loopholes in what should have been strict rules. That being said, if Gina's hunch was correct, he still probably would've needed to change some of the Circus's internal settings first before anything got off the ground—which, because he was the Admin AI, meant that it would've been logged in the Circus's history along with all his other executable actions. She checked the server logs, and—
Yep. Right there at 3:54AM. Content filter temporarily disabled by Administrator.
Yao picked the perfect time to chime back in.
"Alright Ma'am, we weren't able to confirm when Caine went unresponsive, but it was after miss Pomni's heart rate started climbing."
"That's fine," Gina said. She tapped the monitor of her computer for a moment, feeling mildly silly about the motion after realizing that Yao wouldn't be able to see it. She faked a cough into the phone. "I think I might know what's going on now, at least. You have visual in Pomni's pod, right, Yao? Just to confirm a hunch real quick—are her hips moving at all?"
Even in full virtual reality with all of their brain's movement data translated to their digital bodies instead of their physical bodies, their physical bodies still tended to move around a bit in the pods. Not enough to risk hurting themselves or somehow opening the pod from the inside while it was still running, but enough to wiggle, generally.
"One moment." There was the soft rustle of motion on the other end of the line—
And then a pause long enough to tell Gina that Yao was busy putting their own puzzle pieces together just then.
Oh, Caine.
"I—Ma'am," Yao sputtered, "Is she—are they—?"
"You know, Yao," Gina sighed into the phone, "I think for the sake of both of our jobs, it's probably better if you don't finish that sentence." She shook her head, already moving the mouse to put her computer back into sleep mode. "Don't worry. I'll talk to them. I don't fancy getting woken up in the morning for something like this any more than you fancy having to call me for it, Yao. This will not happen again."
"I—thank you, Ma'am. I'll just... put a note in her file that tonight's incident was just... a minor glitch on the side of the equipment. Or something. I... genuinely wouldn't even know how to log something like this, to be honest."
"I appreciate that, Yao. Hopefully if another glitch happens later down the line, there'll be more notes informing the medic on duty that that sort of thing is normal for Pomni."
She heard Yao choke on the other end of the line. Poor guy. Gina really had to find their office in the employee records and get them a fruit basket or something for this. And figure out their gender.
"Alright, I'm considering this issue solved. I'm hanging up the phone now. Please don't be afraid to call me again if things start taking a turn for the worse, but otherwise have a good night, alright?"
"...You as well, Ma'am. I hope your talk goes well."
A short tone told Gina the call had ended, and she tossed her phone back onto her pillow for safe keeping before climbing in after it. No sense trying to get back to sleep, but maybe she could at least doze for a bit before Grant got up.
He'd... want to hear about this. Between long hours at work and lifelong fertility issues, Caine was the closest thing to a child either of them had. There were things he'd want to say to the AI from father to son. Stories to share and lectures to make, probably.
Gina would leave him to it. Her own talk with Chrissie was bound to be similarly eventful. Gina liked the girl, she really did, and she didn't regret sticking her neck out for her—
But she really should've given Gina a head's up first before deciding to make her late night meetings with her boyfriend conjugal.