Love in the Large Hadron Collider

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New scientists were greeted with little fanfare inside the Large Hadron Collider, but Dr. Koltsov was assigned to the cubicle next to mine and thus became an object of my feminine curiosity. A pear shaped man with a graying goatee, he was unique only in the translator commissioned to him by our employers. His translator was divine, his grin betraying a snarky mischievousness. He looked like Val Kilmer circa Batman Forever. He looked like the type of man I thought myself finally capable of loving.

I whiled away the morning sprucing up my cubicle, a plastic fern here, a framed photograph of cybernetician Norbert Wiener there. Our Workspace Terminals were nothing like what I envisioned when first recruited by the European Organization for Nuclear Research—CERN to lay folk. When they first invited me to live underground, a mile beneath Switzerland in the Collider, I didn’t know about the rubber smelling tunnels, the university style dormitories or the cubicle mazes where we strove towards replicating the big bang on a microscopic level, a process that might extend human life. I didn’t know that CERN had offered the same three year contract to 10,000 other scientists, that they’d ranked each of us and put me 9,742 away from the top. That meant I worked on a control panel and lever, keeping time on my watch. Every seven minutes I pulled the lever and a four digit number flashed on my screen. It was always 6502. CERN said if the number was off by even a digit, I was to dial 911. Over time, the 500 of us in Administrative Deployment Research 6 learned to throw our levers at exactly the same moment. It made a terrifying crunch.

At lunch, I followed Koltsov and Val to Cafeteria 27. I hid behind a barrel of potato chips and watched Koltsov select a hamburger and lovingly top it with cheese, tomato and bacon strips. Like many of the top scientists in the world, Koltsov indulged a diet that would almost certainly fell him by age fifty. But Val? He knew a thing or two about cuisine. He waited in line for a beet salad with pistachios and feta, a bottled water reinforced with vitamins, and an organic strawberry flavored yogurt. I assured myself that in the real world yes, I would have no chance with a man who could pass for the stunning Val Kilmer of the go-go ’90s, but here, in an underground bunker comprised mostly of men, I had a shot. Here, I could transcend my dumpy features, my social awkwardness; I could become a goddess.

I followed them to a booth beneath a window. The view wasn’t real of course. CERN put up plasma screens almost everywhere that played videos of beaches or mountains. It must have done something for morale, because so far only 17 of the 10,000 scientists had committed suicide.

I caught Koltsov’s gaze walking past and decided this would be my best opportunity to make a favorable impression. I tapped my plate of whole wheat pasta and squinted vaguely in his direction.

“Are you Dr. Nikolai Koltsov from Administrative Deployment Research 6?”

Val translated in Russian. His voice was higher than I expected, an abnormality that would be damning in other, less attractive men.

“I am,” Val translated.

“I work next to you. My name is Dr. Elizabeth Elstob. Call me Liz.”

I put out my hand, but Val refused to acknowledge it. According to CERN bylaws, translators are not allowed to fraternize with the talent. Instead, Val repeated my greeting to Dr. Koltsov who scooted over to let me sit. The video window showed a grassy knoll. A smattering of dead pixels in the otherwise pristine sky ruined the effect.

“So,’ Koltsov said through Val. “Where is your translator?”

I shrugged. Researchers fluent in more than three languages weren’t required to have a translator. I’d tried one for a bit, but we didn’t get along. She was too bubbly for my tastes, and I’d fabricated a violation to get her reassigned—said she was stealing staplers by the truckload. Sometimes my viciousness towards other humans—the way I could suddenly turn cold and manipulative—surprised even myself. It was on my backburner of Things To Deal With.

Dr. Koltsov’s forearm brushed mine as he reached for the Heinz. It took a long time for him to get any ketchup out, and Val and I looked on with mutual disgust as he impotently slapped the bottle’s bottom. Finally he gave up, and with that ordeal out of the way, we fell into the line of dialogue familiar to every scientist within the LHC, that of the Life Story. I told him I’d grown up in Manchester and received my PhD with an emphasis in experimental particle physics from Oxford at twenty-five, that my father the glaciologist had spent the first sixteen years of my life researching floating ice shelves in Antarctica, that my mother played chess by mail with men from around the globe and called them her boyfriends. I highlighted my intelligence and bad luck, downplaying the clumsiness and occasional cruelty.

“Mm,” Val said.

Despite the mumble, I discerned a barely visible hint of excitement in his eyes. After eight months below the surface, I knew what to expect from translators: they went out of their way to sound robotic. But while summarizing my boring life, I sensed something else, a spark. Was he sending me some kind of signal? I reached for a napkin and tipped over the dispenser.

“I was thinking about possibly going to Island Get-A-Way tonight at nine,” I said as I righted the dispenser. “I think you should think about coming.”

There was no mistake about it this time. I didn’t even acknowledge Dr. Nikolai Koltsov. Val blinked at me, coughed into his fist, and translated for the doughy scientist.

“I hope to see you there, Dr. Elstob,” Val said.

I couldn’t be sure, but I hoped the sentiments were Val’s.

###

Due to the cramped dorm room closets, my underground wardrobe was severely lacking. For the big date, I spent an agonizing amount of time selecting the perfect combination of black pants, black tank top, and purple blazer courtesy of Lane Bryant. The jacket was slimming and I cinched the waist to give the illusion of an hourglass figure. I know that I was, am not, and never will be beautiful, but I always had excellent hips. They were one of the few human things I could always rely on.

Before the bar, I stopped by the Bergsonian Observation Deck, a place I went whenever I got nervous about working on something everyday citizens nicknamed “The Black Hole Gun,” a reference to the Collider’s supposed potential to ignite a space fabric tear. The Bergsonian was a cross between a cathedral and football stadium, the walls and pillars a stoic marble with enough pews to comfortably sit thousands. Everything faced the Jumbotron, a massive screen that displayed the innards of the LHC. Below the screen was a long rectangular window and I walked over to gaze inside the Collider’s heart: two diamond tunnels joined by an ever cackling lasso of lightning, the God Laser, where the atom smashing took place. CERN told us if anything truly amazing were to happen it would begin here. I pressed my nose against the glass and got as close as I could to the void. Even as a child I’d doubted the existence of a higher power, but in the Bergsonian I found myself able to pray to the god of machines, the deus ex machina. I wanted to know what it felt like to hurtle at speeds unfathomable to the human heart. I wanted to know what it meant to be human.

I arrived at Island Get-A-Way forty-five minutes early. Only a quarter of the bar was full so I walked past the empty dance floor and the internet terminals teeming with scientists and sat at the bar. The walls were painted to resemble a beach. Plastic palm trees dangled from the ceiling. Everything smelled of burnt microchips.

I passed the time by watching men troll the internet. On the surface, I’d imagined the Collider as a pressure cooker of love and sex and romance. I’d been alone for so long and assumed that here, underground with thousands of other likeminded scientists, I would find someone to love. But there was something crooked about these men, something juvenile and repugnant. I’d slept with four of them since my arrival. Each one battled severe bouts of impotency and could only get it up while discussing algorithms, social networking or the ramification of viruses in network discourse. I hoped a translator would turn out differently.

I ordered a double scotch and refilled it three times. Val and Koltsov were ten minutes late, then a half hour, then an hour. At ten-thirty, I gave up and resigned myself to an internet terminal. I booted up AlternaLife. My avatar was a thinner, perkier version of myself named The Digital Narcissist. In the game world, I was married to a man from Connecticut. We never discussed our real lives and I didn’t know his birth name, only his screen name BigTimeSteve30. We lived in a two-story with a white picket fence and lawn gnomes. Other people used AL to parachute from skyscrapers or explore the seven seas; I liked making virtual love to my husband and watching our digital children grow old. I’d looked down on video games on the surface but here, deep within the LHC, the virtual was a fine substitute for tangible companionship.

I drank another real life scotch and undressed BigTimeSteve30 on our marital bed. His avatar was lean and blonde, an Aryan superman. Oh my God, I typed while he straddled me. I love you, I love you, I’ll always love you.

###

I came to in a bathroom stall. I rubbed my eyes and scrolled through my cell phone. Apparently I’d texted the last three men I’d slept with back home, men from bars I’d referred to as “my gentlemen callers’ over the course of four humiliating years. I leaned back and examined the bathroom walls. Even in the LHC things were carved into toilet stalls, but everything here was more civilized. There were even jokes about chess. What happens when Black’s Knight (M) meets White’s Knight (F) in the middle of the board? A Knightmare. I stared at that one for a long time and thought about my mother on the surface, in the world of hamburgers and normalcy and chess by mail, in a world where I hadn’t gone on a date in years.

“Mom?” I slurred.

Static. Reception underground was terrible.

“Hello? Liz? Is that you?”

“Mom?”

“Hello? Liz? is that you?”

“Mom. I’m going to die alone. I’m drunk and I haven’t seen the sky in months and I’m going to die alone.”

“Hello? Liz? Is that you?”

“I’m going to die alone.”

“Hello? Liz? Is that you?”

Then a dial tone. Then silence.

###

The next two weeks passed in the usual solitude. Dr. Koltsov and Val made no move to explain why they’d stood me up. Then a scientist was caught masturbating in his Workspace Terminal, and CERN sponsored a mandatory sexual harassment course for all of Administrative Deployment Research 6. We were corralled in the Bergsonian where a man with scruffy white hair and a Lacoste shirt lectured us. By chance, I was seated near Dr. Koltsov. Val sat between us. Occasionally they would glance in my direction and I would feel shamed.

“My name is Harold Kupstas,” the man in Lacoste said. “I’ve been brought in by CERN and I’m going to stay underground until the job’s done. By the time I’m through with you, sexual harassment will be a thing of the past and not a one of you will even consider abusing your wicked sticks in the office.”

The name of the seminar flashed behind him on the Jumbotron. On Not Masturbating at Your Workspace Terminal. After an hour of PowerPoint slides, Dr. Koltsov said something to Val under his breath, who in turn whispered to me.

“I’m sorry about the bar thing.”

“So am I.”

Val translated.

“I’ve thought about your offer a lot since then,” Val said for Koltsov. “There was some difficulty originally.”

I asked him what kind of difficulty and Val repeated the question. The Russian scientist leaned forward and showed me his left hand. Wedding ring.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Val translated in his familiar monotone. “I would love to go to the bar with you this Friday. A man can become incredibly lonely underground.”

I nodded stiffly and tried to focus on the lecture. Kupstas was explaining that if we couldn’t wait until quitting time there was always the bathroom. A wave of applause broke out amongst the crowd. The overhead lights made everyone’s skin look like plastic.

###

The LHC had rolling recruitment, and on the Friday morning of Big Date #2, Dr. Elena Piscopia entered Administrative Deployment Research 6 for the very first time. A few researchers were uncouth enough to stand up and follow her with their eyes. Scientists were not supposed to look like her, this much I know. She was dark and slender and her arms looked carved from stone. Her hair fell around her in loose curls and her cheek bones were high and elegant. She looked like a judge on a fashion reality show. She looked like a 401k.

Elena was assigned to the Workspace Terminal on my left and it didn’t take long for her to breeze inside Koltsov’s cubicle on my right. I grabbed my World’s #1 Scientist mug and cupped it to the cubicle wall. I’d seen this done in movies but it didn’t really help one to eavesdrop. Luckily, Elena was quite loud and I didn’t need the help of any wacky instruments to hear her.

“I like to know my co-workers,” she told them in her Italian accent. “And I mean know them. If we’re all friendly, then we’ll be more productive. And don’t you think the work we’re doing here is just terribly important?”

Val and Koltsov enthusiastically agreed.

Every seven minutes Elena returned to her cubicle to record 6502, but soon she’d scoot back to Val and the three of them would get to chatting again. I learned that Dr. Piscopia was from Brescia and had earned her doctorate in advanced computational electromagnetism at the University of Salerno.   Her parents were political dignitaries and showered her with gifts from every region of the globe. She spoke six languages fluently and had a passion for fashion, Sudoku, model trains and yoga. And then, much as I’d dreaded, Koltsov dropped the bombshell. Val translated the invitation for drinks with us later that evening.

###

Val and Dr. Koltsov were already drinking martinis by the time I arrived at Island Get-A-Way. They’d already ordered Elena and I glasses of wine. I took the seat closest to Val Kilmer.

“You look beautiful tonight,” Val said.

“Thank you.” I pointed at him. “Are you saying that or is the doctor?”

He translated to Koltsov who quickly responded. “Me,” Val said.

“You or the doctor?”

He translated again. “Me.”

So we had come to an impasse. I’d worn my blazer from our first aborted date, but Elena showed up in a striking black evening gown, her hair done up in curls, and what I think might have been a genuine diamond brooch. I decided right then and there that I would have to get incredibly intoxicated to survive the evening.

“A toast,” Val said as instructed by Koltsov, “to new friends, the return of spring, and of course, to the Large Hadron Collider and the unabated glory of scientific endeavor.”

We toasted. I finished my glass of wine quickly—a lackluster cabernet—and signaled the bartender for a double scotch. Elena did enough talking for us all. She sipped wine and prattled on about the virtues of Paris in autumn and how all of Australia was terribly vulgar with the exception of the Sydney Opera House. She even retold the plot of an experimental play she had seen, something light about a priest and rabbi trapped in a plummeting plane above the Bermuda Triangle. She had those men in stitches, and it didn’t take long for all of us to become drunk, me more so than the rest. That’s when Dr. Elena Piscopia raised the stakes.

“I think,” she said, “in the spirit of friendship and discovery, that we should go around the table and each tell a deep, dark secret about ourselves. I think it’s very clear that the four of us are going to get along famously during our stay underground, and it would only be appropriate for each of us to try to reach greater understandings about one another.” She folded her hands on her lap and took a breath; her posture was magnificent. “Dr. Koltsov? Why don’t you begin?”

Koltsov licked his lips and looked from left to right. He leaned forward on his elbows and grinned.

“I have an exceptionally large penis,” Val said slowly, his voice drawn out and skeptical, making absolutely sure we knew whose side he was on.

Elena, ever the gracious game player, smiled politely at Koltsov and turned her gaze on me. “Liz?”

I nodded. I wasn’t about to fold. “I haven’t spoken to my father in six years.”

The atmosphere shifted then and turned irrevocably serious. I was not like Dr. Koltsov. I would not acquiesce and say something trivial so Elena could steal the show with some secret trauma, some hidden blemish of her otherwise spotless soul. I knew a woman like her had never suffered any real hardship. I called her bluff.

“How about you?” She pointed to Val. “The translator.”

“Me?”

“Yes. You.”

“We’re not really supposed to talk much unless we’re translating.”

It was the first thing I’d heard him say on his own.

“I don’t think the good doctor will mind,” Elena said.

Koltsov’s expression was confused, but good natured and harmless. He slapped Val Kilmer on the shoulder and motioned for him to go on.

“All right,” Val said as he downed what little remained of his martini. “I hate translating. I’ve only taken this job as a kind of penance. I’m a failure. I wanted to be a great poet. I didn’t know that poetry was dead.”

We turned back to Elena, and I smiled triumphantly. The goal of the exercise was unspoken, but it was clear the winner was the person with the darkest secret. Surely it wasn’t Val Kilmer. Go to any coffee house in the civilized world and you’ll find at least five failed writers with dramatic proclamations about the sour state of modern poetry. And Elena? Emotional damage was one arena she couldn’t best me in.

“Over the last two decades,” Elena said, “I’ve been hospitalized once every five years.”

No one took the bait so I asked her what for.

“Attempted suicide,” she said with a smile.

So there it was. We didn’t speak for a long time but kept on drinking, kept sizing each other up. Someone played an old jazz song on the jukebox and before we knew it, the bartender announced last call.

Dr. Koltsov pushed back his sleeves and allowed Val to translate. “My friend and I share a double dorm. I have a bottle of good wine and some rye. Would you two like to join us for an after hours hootenanny?”

###

How exactly we’d pair up became obvious as soon as we left the bar. I’d always had a quick little stride and easily kept pace with big Russian Koltsov, but Val and Elena kept falling behind, the sound of their shared laughter reverberating down the hall. I tried to slow down, but Koltsov clawed my elbow and made jokes in Russian. I tried not to glare at him. I tried not to turn around and scream at the monstrous injustice unfolding behind me.

Before we began, Dr. Koltsov removed his wedding ring and set it on the nightstand. I’d never been with a married man before, but the last thing I expected was sentimentality. If he was willing to betray his wife physically, what did a ring matter? Koltsov had some awful Russian pop music going and supplied both Elena and I with more subpar cabernet. Elena and Val retreated into his room while Koltsov invited me to his bed. I hoped things would be over quickly. We undressed, and much as I’d anticipated, he’d exaggerated the size of his penis. It was completely normal, the mean of all penises throughout the vast history of time and space.

Then he yelled something hard in Russian.

Val returned. We hadn’t even begun properly but there he was, in the corner of the room while Koltsov pointed him towards a seat. Val wore nothing but Jockeys, and I’m ashamed to admit that his watching turned me on. Koltsov spread my thighs.

“Oh yes,” Val repeated robotically, translating Koltsov’s whispers and grunts. “This is the best. You are the superior best. The absolute superior. Oh my Jesus. Oh my Jesus. Yes.”

Dr. Nikolai Koltsov was not a generous lover. My thoughts drifted as I focused on a water stain on the ceiling. I thought of my parents—a disturbing image considering the circumstances—and of my father’s preference for Antarctica and glaciers over flesh and blood human beings, of my mother’s horrific loneliness, all those unfinished games of chess, the queen left impotent.

When it was over, Koltsov rolled off and Val returned to the other room. I listened to him and Elena make love until the simulated dawn of the video windows.

###

I awoke the next morning hungover and humiliated. I buried my head beneath the covers and tried not to wake Dr. Koltsov, his snores overpowering the reverent talk of new lovers the next room over. The light from the window hurt my eyes and as I tried to figure out a way to sneak out undetected, everything suddenly became clear. It appeared to me like a vision, my cruelty manifest. I would go to Randal Kupstas and tell him that I’d seen one of the translators make forbidden contact with another scientist, that Val Kilmer was a sexual deviant who liked to watch Koltsov and I engage in intercourse. I would teach Dr. Elena Piscopia and all women like her a lesson by getting Mr. “I didn’t that poetry was dead” booted out of the LHC. I would punish everyone alive with love and emotions.

But I would not enact my revenge immediately. I resumed my everyday life as though nothing had happened. Every seven minutes I pulled my crank. 6502. 6502. 6502. I bided my time. I was good at my job and played AlternaLife and continued sleeping with Dr. Koltsov so as to ensure he would verify my fabrications. I decided to wait three months, short enough for Elena and Val Kilmer’s relationship to feel fresh and new and beautiful—the stage where you just can’t help but touch the other person, where everything you do radiates with love atomic—but long enough for the two of them to tentatively discuss the future, to break down those emotional barriers and imagine a future devoid of hardship and loneliness.

They passed notes during work and, as my cubicle was between theirs, used me as the middle man. What started as simple folded up pieces of paper ballooned into massive manuscripts concealed in manila folders. I wondered if her beauty had driven him back to his shaky poetry. I wondered if he considered her his divine muse. He must have, because I often heard Elena weeping as she read in her cubicle, gasping, “It’s beautiful. It’s so fucking beautiful.” I understood the low probabilities of falling in love and devoted huge portions of my day to fantasizing about their funerals.

At the end of three months, I called my mother for the first time since The Bathroom Stall Incident. I warmed her up with banalities. I asked for summaries of her favorite reality television scandals and the latest gossip involving her neighbors the Boremanians.

“That’s all very exciting,” I said. “So anyway, do you think I’m a good person? Do you think there’s something fundamentally wrong and vindictive about me and that’s why I’m potentially unlovable? That I’ve lost what makes me human?”

Then there was a long pause. “Liz? You’re breaking up?”

“Mom. Answer me.”

I heard her blow into the receiver. “I’m going through a tunnel, dear. Stay safe!”

“I called the house phone.”

“Tunnel!”

I hung up. I paced the dorm room and masturbated. When I came, I thought about my parents again. I tried to ignore it.

###

Randal Kupstas’ office was located in the Janitor Sublevel beneath a warehouse of mops and cleaning chemicals. His room was tiny and smelled like disinfectant. He still wore his Lacoste and sat behind a desk littered with ceramic statues of comic book superheroes, all alien females with impossible breasts. He awkwardly placed his elbow on his knee and clicked his tongue.

“Let’s rap,” he began.

“There’s a translator. I don’t know his name, but he looks like Val Kilmer circa Batman Forever. He’s Dr. Nikolai Koltsov’s. He’s having an affair Dr. Elena Piscopia and he’s a peeping tom as well. Koltsov can confirm everything.”

“Yowza,” Kupstas said.

He went through the procedures then, of how it would take forty-eight hours for the necessary forms to be processed before Val would be physically removed from the Collider. I nodded and tuned him out as he continued to explain the details. When I’d imagined this moment, I thought I’d feel something powerful, something close to joy. But there was nothing—maybe even a feeling worse than nothing—and when I returned to my dormitory, I killed the remaining five hours of the day drinking scotch in my pajamas and humming show tunes I’d loved as a girl. Most of them I couldn’t remember and my humming was unsatisfactory at best.

Just like Kupstas promised, Val was taken away the following Tuesday. I’d never seen the LHC officers before and had pictured something like stormtroopers, but alas, the two security guards that marched into Administrative Deployment Research 6 looked straight out of a shopping mall. They were overweight and sported handlebar mustaches. In lieu of guns, blocky walkie talkies hung from their belts. One was eating a granola bar, its vanilla nougat shiny in the pale yellow light. They entered Koltsov’s cubicle and pointed at Val, then motioned for him to follow. He protested, but they shook their heads and told him to keep quiet.

“Sorry, bud,” the guard said. “Orders from above. You’re being ejected. It’s the surface for you, big guy.”

Val’s muscles tensed, and for a moment, I thought he might try and overpower them. But then I saw Elena stand up and stick her head over the cubicle wall. He looked at her, then held his hands out to be cuffed.

“That’s not necessary, guy,” the guard said. “You can just follow us out. You’re not a flight risk.”

As they left, Elena shrieked. She screamed. She stamped her feet and jumped up and down. But she never left her cubicle, never chased the security officers who would return Val Kilmer to his failed poetry and predictable life. Five minutes went by before Elena, her mascara running, her face splotchy and wet, ran for the exit. Dr. Koltsov knocked at my cubicle wall and peered inside. He said something to me in Russian. I told him I did not understand. He said something to me in Russian. I told him I did not understand.

###

And then Dr. Elena Piscopia transformed into the department ghost. She stopped showing up for work and no one saw her in any of the cafeterias, the bars, even visits to her dormitory went unanswered. This gave me much less pleasure than anticipated and sometimes, if I listened hard enough, I could hear her missing crunch when I pulled my lever. I thought that would be the end of things. It wasn’t. It was another week before everything came to its inevitable and violent conclusion.

It started like any other day. I was hungry and daydreaming about the biscotti I would eat in Cafeteria 27 when I threw down my lever. 6503. I stared at it dumbfounded. 6503. 6503. It was a digit off. This had never happened before, and immediately the other researchers began wailing, all of us at once. So I knew it wasn’t just me. I knew that everyone had seen what I’d seen. I reached for the phone and dialed 911, but the line was busy. The compound swelled with screams.

Everyone bolted toward the exits. I could make out the same phrase shouted again and again in different languages. Beobachtungsplattform. Piattaforma di osservazione. Cubierta de observacion. Plate-forme d’observation. Observation deck. The Bergsonian. A buzzer sounded. I searched for Dr. Koltsov among the shuffle, but he hadn’t waited for me and I was nearly knocked to the ground looking for him. I gave up and followed the other panicked scientists.

As soon as I reached the hallway, it became apparent there were problems throughout the entire Collider. It was overrun with people—scientists and translators and bartenders—all pushing and shoving towards the same destination: the Bergsonian. Administrative Deployment Research 6 was three floors away and it took a long time to inch through the tunnels and into the stairwell. By the time I arrived on the correct floor, the alarm had stopped, and for the most part, so had the screaming. Whatever had gone wrong had corrected itself and a tangible sigh of relief spread throughout the mob. But I pressed on, eager to discover the reason behind the momentary madness, the reason behind 6503 instead of 6502.

I had never seen the Bergsonian so close to capacity. People who’d just entered struggled to get a better look and those who had already seen it stood stupefied and awed. We looked towards the Jumbotron. Someone had shattered the glass that separated the Bergsonian and the LHC’s God Laser. But there was no one on the other side. Nothing but teeth of glass and a trail of blood that zigzagged straight into the laser. A stranger on the left reached for my arm.

“Someone’s killed themselves,” he said in French. “Someone’s fused themselves to atoms.”

I pretended not to understand. I didn’t need to wait for the news later that evening. I already knew Dr. Elena Piscopia was dead.

###

I did not eat that night. I returned to my room and drank and thought about Elena and Val, of what I had done. I tried to believe that this wasn’t the desired outcome, that I hadn’t seen this coming, but I refused to allow myself even that minor comfort. I logged into AlternaLife and wondered what I was becoming, what we all were becoming. BigTimeSteve30 entered our virtual house and said Honey, I’m home. I told him I’d had a horrible day. I asked him to hold me and he did, caressing my virtual back while I rubbed my real life temples. Tell me you love me, I said. Tell me you’ll never leave me, that I’ll never be alone. Tell me I’m not a monster. Tell me I’m capable of loving someone. Tell me that I’m still human.

You are. BigTimeSteve30’s thoughts appeared in a cartoon bubble. I love you. This is our life. This is our real life and I will love you forever.

He held me closer and I pushed the button that caused my avatar to cry. I pressed it again and again. Then again and again.