Nadine had long broken off contact from her parents: even basic parental duties like defending her against total strangers had been completely broken. If this were the real middle ages, and she were queen, she would have already have them both hung. But there wasn’t much use continuing to think about it, beyond the memories, and they had long sense deteriorated into dust. Her mother in particular, was less about being right, only that she is correct.

Her mother would often times side were completely politically and morally opposing viewpoints, just so long as she could get an edge over her offspring. In this sense, she was less of a mother figure, and closer to wicked step aunt in some ancient fairy tale, written long before the game world merged with the real world. As she climbed the darkened mountains, she found it easy to sometimes lose her way, so she would have a kind stranger pointing her into the direction of the cave. “Why do you want to go this way?” they would ask, and she would simply respond that she was looking for ancient sword. This was the best of many options, as she wasn’t really sure who was an AI, and who was actually human. Most were human enough to have the largest minimum of sentience.

But today she stayed at a local tavern, where the brew was always fresh. And the girls based whose dick they sucked on, based on the suitors girl like qualities, rather than how much money they could get out of the deal. Money was already useless, with most vending machines being out of commission, thus who used to be prostitutes now based their client-el on the length of their hair, the size of their hips, and the ratio of hair on their body. It turns out, hookers had standards too. And at night, under the glow of slaughtered firefly, she jostled her fingertips on deranged GUI screens. For her daily pleasures, her world was a dream within a dream.

Millie knew that sometimes it would be a while before Nadine would get home, so she would carefully make plans to this effect. It was a relationship of mutual open unfaithfulness, but neither one generally loved the ones they had as their object of cheating. The desires were usually fleeting, and not always indulged. But today Millie was there with her date far longer than Nadine would come to anticipate. When you’re in this business, sometimes you need to expect the worth in people, and not everyone is going to suck your penis exclusively. And make like different shapes and lengths. Nadine thought of girls in wooden shoes as she ventured further into the mountains.

Silence, it fills the woods with sharp clarity. Often as painful as the loudest of construction equipment, Nadine knew that this quest she found would be a slightly longer one. But it beat having to repair a broken virtual reality game. For Nadine, the most tactical of battles was far ahead. She drank out of her leather pouch, then sleep under a tree outside of the cybernetic ruins that once housed entire simulated ecosystems, but now was the catacombs of a bygone era. Here she dreamed of curly blond fairy girls in wooden clogs, pushing her back to the tree. Them slowly riding on her knob, and yet Nadine sense of pleasure was always mixed with pain and guilt.

“You girls are honestly demons.” she said.

She got up a morning later, and walked into the ruins. Here the room was considerably brighter in parts, and darker in others. She could here the old film reels in constant automatic replay, when the entertainment still had projector screens throughout the city, the sprawl having long replace the traditional movie theater, people indulged in constant streams from apparently independent video production teams, but had long worked for the National Security Agency.

It was at this point she considered taking her cyanide pills, but didn’t want to leave Millie alone in the world to fend for herself. And knew that she would be calling after a while to ask about dinner. Nadine got tired of eating Ape-Goat steaks and Spider-Pig roulettes after a while. But knew there wasn’t a whole lot of other options. In this ruins, a section of the city in which she had once lived, once called Purgatory Road, she had once trained dogs for a fighting rings. Yet now was replaced by overgrown vines, and scattered bits of cybernetic debris. Nadine was on the jungle of her hidden past.

But it was better than renting an apartment in Chattanooga, where nine times out of ten the landlords aid and abet in gendered harassment and stalking, and generally don’t care if a trans woman is murdered on the street. this is the once United States, and not Canada where it may or may not actually be better. Gone are the days where mothers can blame their daughters for being raped, but its been replaced by general financial insecurity, and institutionalized Stockholm Syndrome. But the super computer was something entirely different. Something that has once been a trans woman, decades ago, where the US was split between two different civil wars.

Here, the AI maintained a certain level of sentience, that unlike ones that controlled spaceships, could not easily by shut down. More often, people were to caught in fighting splinter groups of neo-Nazis, of which one apartment she had lived once played a part in the history books. In sense, no longer was society in the middle ages, they had in fact gone backwards in time. The AI 3D printed itself an avatar inside the catacombs, and waited for a human to take its prize.

“There is no sword Nadine.” said the voice. The voice became a silhouette in the dark room, whose electrical lights have shattered in the darkness. “But I feel a great strength within you.” The shadow reached out its hand as if to greet her. She could hear the sound of slithering, then silence.

“Then why was I brought here?” Nadine asked, lighting up an American Spirit. This lit the room enough to see a translucent hologram of a young woman from nearly a century ago back in two thousand and nineteen. “I have things to do.”

“Dantino has returned.”