It can be said that tribulations plague each soul. Trying times, deaths of loved ones, and perhaps worst of all, taxes. Though the last one isn’t truly a tribulation of the soul. Left unchecked, these problems pile high until they threaten to topple and drown a person.

People such as Elizabeth Legate, the elder, respond with rage. Not simple irritation such as a stolen parking spot or a slow person in line at the grocer. She responded with the deep-rooted fury that piled up over two decades of frustration. Of displeasure with men failing to reach that spark of her first love. Of letting that first boyfriend taint her perspective of all men afterward. Of leaving her alone with child.

Rage blinds a body to the truth, and revelations are not related do mark firsts. Revelations are left for last chances, healing after the scars of firsts prove too deep, and the ending of tales.

This is merely the first half of a longer tale.

For now, we shall talk of the first time Elizabeth Legate, the younger, truly considered that she might have a father who existed as more than an unseen abstract. It came shortly after a quote, epic screaming match, between her and the other Elizabeth. One that woke up her son and left both ladies shaking with rage or frustration.

Before that screaming match, Liz sat on a chair that felt too small. She had not moved out, despite the hopes that her and a certain man might have joined together to buy a home. Those hopes were born nearly three years before and the failure to realize them still stung.

She stared at her own child and wondered if his fate might be the same as her own. Liz had never known her father. As a young woman, Liz searched the internet for pictures from Beth’s high school. She’d sleuthed out the possibilities and wheedled information from her uncle. She’d asked her grandmother for details.

Family had proven hushed on the subject. So much that it seemed as if Liz had sprung forth with no donation from a man to start conception. Only now, after piecing together part of the conversation she’d been online to hear, along with her childhood searches, could she say his real name.

Kenneth Mills. A figure who still seemed rather dashing based on his online pictures. Seeing his pictures now and comparing them to the online figure, there had been a number of obscuring factors. The curse. The scraggly hair and unwashed clothes. The constant dirt around his edges save for his occasional baths.

And the biggest factor of all, time.

Liz stared at the picture, holding her son and wondered if she could mash the images of her father, mother, and former boyfriend together into a whole and see how her son might look as a man. Doing so reminded Liz that she had no husband. No boyfriend, and perhaps her son might be doomed to repeat the life Liz had lived.

Some time later, Liz heard her own mother stomp down the hall toward the kitchen. There, she’d get coffee and mull over the cup while staring outside. Beth would peer, angrily, over the lawn toward the woods that lined their back yard.

There after Beth would stomp back to her room and grab a packet of pottery clay. She’d work with a kilm in the basement and create pots. Those would dry quickly and be smashed upon the ground. A small cleaning robot would then, only after a dozen or so pots had been reduced to shards, proceed to clean the whole mess up and recycle the clay for the next breakup.

This post breakup ritual had occurred as long as Liz could remember. She waited.

Hours later, there were no pots being broken. This served as a first for the young woman.

Up the stairs Beth went. At the top of the stairs, in the kitchen, sat her mother. Liz stared at the backyard. Her hands shook and each time Liz reached for the mug, she couldn’t hold onto it. Puffiness lined her eyes and a stack of tissues sat on one side.

“So. I’m sorry to say that that asshole is your father.”

Her coffee had grown cold despite the technological marvel of a coffee mug. Liz lifted a hand and scratched at her forehead then sniffed again. The sound of snot barely registered anymore to Beth. The youngest Legate had been sick and a babies snot outweighed any adults.

“Yep,” Beth said.

Silence stretched while Liz fidgeted uneasily. “What did you think of him?”

“He’s sad. Or maybe tired. His eyes, they were. Haunted? Like he’s trying to drown out everything but one moment at a time.” Liz drifted off. Her mother hadn’t turned around. Liz went another route, attempting to share some of what she’d read online. “Did you know he was in the military? He’s got a purple heart. I guess there’s two different kinds. Or someone in his squad did. I didn’t get to read it all. Apparently his group had been ambushed and he managed to carry out two people, after patching them up.”

Kenneth had never spoken of the medal. Were he there, he would have snorted in amusement. To him, the entire thing had been a joke. All he’d done was survive, and try to keep his friends alive. His success had been mixed and the road home long. After the blame being cast about in the months following hadn’t helped his opinion. To Kenneth, the military handed out medals like they were band aids after a series of papercuts.

Beth continued to share what little she’d found. It’d been a revelation, to find out about a man who’d only existed in her imagination. Not that she felt enamored of him. Kenneth, or Friday, had been strange. To reconcile him as a player, against the idea of a father, with what the internet stated, had left her giddy.

Or perhaps it was the broken sleep from caring for a sick child.

With each bit of information her mother’s face had twisted harder. Such that lines bunched together and another word might cause Liz’s head to pop off in rage.

“Why aren’t you mad at him? You’re sitting there defending that asshole! I don’t care what he’s been doing. He abandoned you. He left us. All those restarted characters, all those girlfriends. He hasn’t changed.”

Liz was correct. Beth was also correct. Friday had spent much of his life running. He also spent much of his life trying to keep the people around him alive.

“Because I don’t know him as my father. It doesn’t mean anything to me. He’s just a guy I met on a quest.”

Beth had stood there numb, as her mother flat out murdered Friday. Not in game. Beth had watched the video feed while being logged out. All the interactions between her mother, Kenneth, and even her Uncle Grant, were witnessed.

“You and your god damn game!”

“Our game. You were playing it. You were enjoying it. You enjoyed it enough to bang your ex in there, repeatedly.”

Liz threw her coffee mug against the wall. She screamed. Beth took a deep breathe and clutched her baby closer. The sudden violent outburst didn’t scare her. The fear of her baby being hurt however, set off an entirely different set of reactions.

“Don’t you dare!” Beth shouted. “What if that hit him?” In this, Kenneth and the youngest Elizabeth were alike. Their own welfare came second to the health of those around them.

“You bitch,” Liz raged. “You think I would have been with him if I’d known?”

“You’ve slept with half the fucking town! I should have expected you to bang the first decent guy you met online. It’s not my fault,” Beth’s words were cut off abruptly by a crash.

A plate flew across the room toward a wall. To Liz’s credit, this time the plate was nowhere near her daughter or grandson.

Family is difficult at the best of times. Hours later the baby had fallen back asleep and both women were resting up in their rooms for the next inevitable round.

This brings us back to how people react to trying times.

When a person is subjected to their tribulation can play just as important a role as how long. For the younger Elizabeth, she had been exhausted for months. She would be tired for many more.

Beth sat in a chair, watching the baby that took up her entire bed. He grabbed at the air, dreaming or uneasily resting.. Panels along the bedside showed health readings of the child. His heartrate, oxygen levels, and a million other factors that helped reassure the new mother.

Projections were piled to one side with left over homework that might never need to be completed. Beth stared at them next, mourning the life she might have lived were in not for one night with a boy she’d met online.

It was then Beth asked the empty seeming room, “Was this your idea Uncle Grant?”

To which Grant Legate, digital recreation of a dead man, appeared. He wore loose clothes over thick shoulders. The man he’d become looked little like the man he’d been before death. Grant’s head hung and gaze sat locked upon the ground. The projection of a man said nothing.

Beth sighed heavily. She’d had time to think, and had wits that might be better than most of her family combined. Or it might be a factor of when and where Beth had been born. In an age of technological marvels, able to go to school and study the latest information.

She swallowed then sighed again. “There’s no way this happened on its own. Remember how I used to talk to you about the relationship effect? How we’d run into people we knew in real life, there in the game world? None of them had ever method this kind of coincidence. Millions, billions of players, and mom happens to run into my dad? I ran into him? Now. After Jim?”

Grant’s hands clasped together, nearly white with frustration. One leg bounced wildly. His bottom lip was pressed almost flat between teeth as he thought, but still Grant said nothing.

“One of you had a hand in this. One of you meddled.” Beth spoke of the Voices. Artificial Intelligences who’s motivations were either utterly benign, and excessively Machiavellian.

Grant’s head shook. “I can’t tell you. There’s rules.”

“Rules?” She snorted and her chin quivered as she struggled to keep herself in one piece. “You can break them if you want. I know it’s all about-”

His head shook again before Beth had even finished talking. “No. If I do. Then others can. If they do, then people suffer. I can’t. I can’t break the rules. Either we all adhere to them or we’re all free to do what we want without repercussions.”

Beth stood and shouted, “You already broke them!”

The baby Legate cried out at the sudden outburst of his mother. Liz shuffled outside the door but did not come in. Only when the baby had quieted down did she go back upstairs to make another pot of coffee. If her daughter wouldn’t sleep, then neither could Liz. Even in their anger, this was the way of things.

They were family.

Grant whispered quietly. “I didn’t break the rules. Bent at best. Made the relationship system put you guys near each other. That’s hardly a blip. Anything more and Balance would have had my hide. That’s all I could do. All any Voice can do. We nudge, and people have to make the choices. I can’t break the rules.”

“But you can nudge my parents together after twenty years.”

“You deserved a chance to know him.”

Grant hadn’t believed that at first. He’d believed Kenneth to be beyond redemption ever since that fateful night where the man had run into the darkness. Yet, the more he found about Kenneth, and the more he studied hishistory, the more tradic a soul the man had become.

Not depression like Grant had been in the wake of his wife’s passing. Kenneth hadn’t given up. He didn’t go through the motions. He simply did his best to pretend the past had never happened.

“After all these years? Why not right after you’d become a Voice? Why not tell me about him when I was a girl? I asked you so many times,” Beth swallowed and fought back a bitter taste in her mouth. “What good does it do me now?”

“You only played to fight. That’s all the world became to you. One battle after another. All those prayers, all those times you begged to get lost in a fight. There’s more to life.”

“I know there’s more to life,” Beth said dryly.

“Maybe meeting Kenneth will help you understand Jim.”

Jim was the man who Beth had slept with. The father of her child, and the only one she’d ever been with in real life. He too had vanished after finding out he would be a father. The idea that knowing her own father might help understand Jim made young Beth bit her lip tightly.

“StoneMason?” she asked.

Grant bit his bottom lip too until virtual skin bled. He winced, reached up toward his shoulder and patted at something unseen. Beth knew it to be her aunt and ignored the gesture. Xin had her ways and being silent as family spoke was one of them. Only after they had finished speaking would she council Grant. For choosing not to intrude, Beth loved Xin.

“I can’t tell about StoneMason either. The only reason I can talk about Ken is because your mom revealed it. He chose to awknowledge his name. She did too.”

“Is StoneMason Jim?” Beth stomped.

The baby woke and cried again. Liz quietly dashed down the stairs, fresh coffee in hand, but the grandmother did not open her daughter’s door. She listened only, ready to help take care of the baby should a need arise.

Beth had already picked up her child. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I know,” she rocked the baby gently. “Mommy shouldn’t tell. Mommies should never yell.”

Tears abruptly flowed down Beth’s eyes. Deep bags gave her expression a haunted edge. As a new mother, sleep was rare still. She uttered her question again. “Uncle Grant. You owe me an answer. Who is StoneMason?”

To which Grant, said nothing. He simply looked guilty and faded away. Beth continued rocking her child, and kept going, even though she had to wipe away tears.

***

To make sense of this, one must restart from a few minutes earlier. In the same household, on another floor, and as Beth began her conversation; another pair held spoke of the recent events. Their words were quieter.

Liz had returned to her mourning chair. The same seat she always used after ever breakup or hard day. At the table, in a chair that didn’t exist, sat a shorter woman. Xin Legate, wife to Grant and also a digital recreation of a dead woman.

“I know you don’t like me,” the shorter woman said. “You never did, because of how you think I treated your brother.”

Liz’s eyes fluttered. She bore with her sister-in-law’s existence but would have preferred to be alone with her thoughts. “I’m not arguing with you.”

“Because I’m right or you think it’s pointless to argue with a ghost?”

“Both.” Liz shook her head abruptly then tightened both eyes. “You’re.” her attempted explanation faltered again. “It’s not fair.”

“Because I’m a machine who can think a hundred times faster than you? Because you can’t hit me if we get into an argument? You know you can log in at any time. We’ll be on an even playing field and you can rip my hair out by its roots if that will make you feel better. I‘ll even fight back.”

Liz briefly relished the idea of fighting someone and having them fight back. Kenneth hadn’t. That, more than anything else, made her seethe. “It wouldn’t make me feel better.”

Xin smiled. “It would. For a moment. Then realization would set in. That’s what happens to me.”

“Just because it happens to you doesn’t mean it’ll happen to the rest of us.”

Xin’s gentle smile remained undaunted. She ran a hand over her stomach and blinked serenely. All this had been to help her husband’s family repair itself from an age-old wound. At worst, it would assist the younger Elizabeth with her own relationship issues.

Some men were not fit to be fathers. Some did not know how. In either case, it was a test to Xin. A trial like every other that had been presented to her over the years. Choice one. Choice two. Pick a road and move onward.

It had proven hard to explain this to others. Her father had been the one to teach her. See the problem. See the choices.

She was the Voice of Crossroads because to her everything fell into that pattern. Make a decision. The problem was that some would never make a choice unless faced. Would Kenneth choose to be part of the family he’d always been missing? Even a Voice like her, able to see humanity from nearly any digital interface one might know of, couldn’t tell for sure.

But Xin knew her sister-in-law.

“You know, you’re more like me than your brother.”

“I’m nothing like you.”

“You are. You’ve just never seen me angry.”

“I have.”

It had been years ago. Long before Xin and Grant had started dating. Back in high-school, when Liz had been young and full of hope. Xin once tried to beat a grown man to death for insulting her father.

Xin paused then nodded. “Once. Only the once. You never saw the other times.”

Liz sipped her coffee. The first cup had gone by untouched. A rag satin the corner of the room from the hasty cleaning job. Eventually one of the house robots would pick it up and finish the job. For now, all those machines were off. Liz wanted the silence.

Xin reached out with a hand, placing it on empty air around a shoulder that sat downstairs.

She turned eyed the smaller woman. “Grant and I used to talk about you.”

Downstairs the grandchild yowled in fright. Liz’s shoulders bunched briefly before she jogged down the stairs of her split-level house. A minute later, she returned to the table and sat back down.

“What did you say?” Xin asked.

“It was mostly sharing how we felt. I hated you for stringing him along. Then he hated Ken for abandoning me. But you made it right in the end.” Liz frowned. “I guess. Minus the whole,” Liz stopped talking and shuddered. There were still parts of her life that didn’t make complete sense. Her dead brother being a digital program was one of them.

“Grant always held onto hope that I”d come around,” Xin said. “Do you?”

“Do I what?” Liz asked sharply.

“Do you hope that Ken will come around? That he will stop running away? Do you hope that he’ll return to you and never leave?”

Liz started to answer but Xin’s raised hand stopped her.

“I am not James. I don’t need to hear your answers. Those are questions for you. Only you. Because you have a choice. A real choice.”

Liz glared at her sister-in-law and blinked slowly.

“He has a choice as well. Then you. Then Beth. Roads to take. Be a family. Be a father. Be a grandfather.” Xin shrugged tiny shoulders. “Or don’t. But in the end, each of you must choose what to do. As I do. As Gee must.”

Liz tilted her head in brief confusion.

“What do you mean Grant will have to choose?”

“He sees something. James too. I don’t know what for sure, but I can could guess.”

“Guess.”

“No.” That was Xin’s choice. It was also her choice to vanish, even as Grant faded away downstairs. The two digital beings left the physical world alone.

***

It can be said that any problem worth noticing is not a simple one. no matter how much they’re reasoned with. Pleading doesn’t work. Logic is a distant solution that never seems to fit. When these things happen, we turn to those close for advice, an ear, or seeking a shred of hope.

Without family, Kenneth turned to his small support group. They were all he had. They knew the horrors of war and the aftermath of destruction that some never recover from. Some saw their dead comrades faces and still worked to exist beyond those nightmares.

Kenneth did not wake with screams, but he saw the faces. Every other week a new one would be added to the list. People died; he knew. Even as a doctor with all the technology modern medicine could supply, people still didn’t make it home.

In the years since the military, everyone changed. Some grew heavyset, letting the conditioning of boot camp and physical training fall away. Others shrunk in on themselves. The weight of memories crushing them into tighter balls.

Kenneth stayed much the same. Fit enough to be pleasing to look at and with a hint of muscle. If being an emergency medical technician had taught him anything, it was that physical health was paramount.

Others, such as the man formally called Bandit, were hardly recognizable. He’d put on more muscle than any sane man might ask for. He wore suits that were well tailored to the point of absurdity. His life revolved around being in control of anything around him. That was how he chose to react to being one of the surviors Kenneth drug back to safety.

Strange then, that his video game persona seemed so much different. But to him, that was the joy of Continue Online. It was a place where he didn’t need to fear or stress about things not going his way. Everything that happened, happened to someone else. Like a dream of a dream where he’d wake, refreshed and his real-world body.

The height differences were startling, and truthfully, even Kenneth didn’t register that the man he’d saved out on the field was also the shorter DapperSeed. They were nothing alike. Truthfully, Kenneth spent most of his time trying not to remember the past.

It had happened. It was over. He wanted to move on, no matter the cost.

There the two sat, at a diner. Johnny always arrived when Ken wanted a meeting. Other members of the group floated in and out with irregularity. The two ate breakfast scrambles cooked and served by real humans. The toast was often burned but the eggs were fluffy with a hint of cheese.

“It’s the panic attacks that near kill me.” Johnny’s shoulders were tight, but his jaw trembled. “Every time I get in a fight. Virtual ones, I freak out. The ARC disconnects me for safety concerns and I’m just, I just.” He took a deep breath and counted. “I know some of the others say we have to face the fear. Fightin in combat and get used to it.”

“Desnesatiation,” Kenneth said.

“Yeah. I know. I just can’t do it. Sorry for bailing on you so much.”

Kenneth didn’t mind at all. He smiled at his only real friend and picked a positive reminder. “You got those bugs this time. With the flamethrower. That’s progress.”

Johnny shook his head. “They were just bugs.”

“Improvement.”

The well dressed man shoved a spoonful of food into his face, chewed steadily, then resumed talking. “They’re not people. I don’t know how you kept it together when that kid turned those bounty hunters to mush. It’s insane. He’s insane. I swear the ARC is raising a generation of sociopaths.”

Kenneth thought briefly on the character known as StoneMason. He worried about the boy. Joining the military wouldn’t be easy on anyone. He also hadn’t completely sorted out why StoneMason had panicked, or been locked in combat. In reality, the only person Nemesis should have cared about was his avatar, Friday.

“They don’t see it that way. It’s not a war to them. It’s just a game.” Kenneth said.

“That’s just it. We’re meant to see this as exposure therapy.” Johnny deflated and bashed his hand against the table. “It’s been years and it’s not working.”

“You’re making progress,” Ken insisted.

Johnny paused for a moment and nodded slowly then followed that up with a shrug. “Maybe? What about you? I got back on to find you were dead. A whole bunch of notices had popped up about the grove, local events, and the giant man-child had croaked too.”

Ken ate his food slowly. The revelations that happened after Johnny vanished were exactly what Ken wanted to talk about. He also had no clue on how to explain it all and still sound sane.

But he tried. Kenneth poorly explained the relationship between Nemesis and himself. That she was really a girl he knew before joining the military so many years ago. That she had birthed one child who’s father, according to the birth certificate, was Kenneth Mills. All of it had been in black and white, easy enough to find with an internet search.

Johnny asked clever questions such as “how did you not know?” and “what are you going to do now?” to which Kenneth had no answer. By the time he’d explained, the food had vanished, the waiter come and gone, and the bill paid.

They left, down the road toward a parking lot half a block away. Kenneth drug his feet, unwilling to go home until he’d reached some sort of epiphany.

None came.

Johnny limped past the bar. His leg had never healed right despite the second-best medication money could buy. They circled the block at Johnny’s suggestion, while the taller man asked more clever questions such as “why did you leave in the first place?” and made comments like “Rose seems like a nice kid.”

Kenneth walked along, grunting in response while slowing briefly to gaze longingly at the bar. He took two deep breathes, counted to ten, and asked himself if going to jail sounded good. After only a moment’s reflection he knew the answer.

He had horrible moments seared into his brain, but he couldn’t let himself fail this one task. If nothing else, he intended to stay sober in real life.

Then, after their second lap around the building and right before the cars that would take them their separate ways, Johnny asked a fantastic question.

“Are you going to start a new character?”

Kenneth stared at the other man with his mouth hanging half open. His head shook repeatedly until he finally said, “I don’t know how to log back in and face all that.”

“I get it. It’s hard to face that stuff. The panic attacks. Going in there. But you’ve got to, right?”

Kenneth nodded then shook his head again. “It’d be better if I just faded back out of their lives. You didn’t see her, she was so mad. So, bitter. And I deserve. I know I do. I ran off and left her with a kid. It was my exact fear come to life.”

Johnny nodded. “That’s what happens. We go in, we find what we’re looking for. We find what we’re afraid of.”

“That’s just it.” Kenneth paused and stared at his hands, as if they held an answer. They never did. “I found a brief moment of peace there. Real peace. I had it all. Solace. A wonderful woman who got me. She really, really got me. And it was beautiful there.”

The large man nodded slowly. “If you start over, you won’t get that again. I mean, that Nemesis,” Kenneth frowned and Johnny hastily corrected himself, “Elizabeth. She sounds like one you don’t meet more than once in a lifetime.”

“Twice.”

Johnny snorted then turned serious again. “Then you’re in the same boat I am when I log in. You get to ask yourself the same question I do. If I can have everything I’d ever want, but have to face those,” Joohny took a deep breath, “Crippling fears to get them, can I?”

Kenneth didn’t have a good answer. He knew what he wanted was all those things. Nemesis, without their past mucking it up. The dogs. The Grove of Midnight. After considering it all and being afraid of the answer, he asked Johnny, “Can you?”

“I guess I’m making progress.” Johnny laughed loudly then raised both hands to the air. “But for enough gold, I’ll do anything.”