"I, Simulacrum"

The message came in just as I was finishing my afternoon lecture, from someone called “Yasmine Patel.” The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it immediately. The header was not at all enlightening - it was the standard “Yasmine Patel has invited you to VR Chat” that most chatroom providers filled in by default in their invites. Curious, I opened the message.

In addition to the boilerplate invitation message and a hook to the VR room from which it originated, the message bore a few sentences supposedly entered by the sender. “It’s about someone close to you, I think you’d prefer if I didn’t say more in this message.” It said. ”The VR room is set to full privacy. Bring your friend if she can make it.”

I pulled out of the classroom as soon as the last student’s avatar fuzzed out into nonexistence, and the world became a simple box of gray, on each face a different graph to tell me the performance of my computer terminal. That done, I flicked the message toward the dedicated space in the corner of my vision that sent something to Annabel’s adjacent terminal. She replied almost immediately: “Think she means Mark1.0? We should at least check it out.”

I sent my agreement, and poked the chatroom handle in the original message. The tiny gray box vanished and was replaced by a simple, undecorated conference room, with a long table and a single occupant. She was pacing by the simulated window as I entered, staring distantly out at the simulated cityscape beyond. In the corner of my vision, I saw that a marker that said “PRIVATE” had appeared - this Yasmine person had been true to her word.

The system must have informed her of my arrival, because she turned suddenly. The avatar was labeled Yasmine Patel, and depicted a rather good-looking dark-skinned woman of perhaps thirty dressed in business attire. As she saw me, she took a half step forward but checked herself, her eyes catching sight of the name on my avatar’s chest.

“I was expecting someone else.” She started simply.

There was a chime, and Annabel materialized off to the side. She was using her casual avatar, the one with the circuit-board tattoos and the single earring. She frowned at me, and I remembered that I was still using the avatar and handle that I used for my lectures, the name and face of Marcus Arden. I quickly swapped to my “real” set, the one with the face I no longer owned and tattoos to match Annabel’s. The name on my chest changed as well, to “MarkLewis”, not that I had any real right to my old first and middle names anymore. “You expected me.” I replied. “I just came from a lecture.”

She seemed satisfied by this change. “Mark, my Mark that is, told me about you two.” She started. “I know you don’t really exist, but I need your help anyway.”

I bristled at this, and nearly replied angrily, but Annabel beat me to it. “What can we do for you?” She kept her voice even, but I could tell that remark annoyed her as much as it did me.

“Well.” Yasmine looked away. “To be honest he’d probably be angry that I found you. Not an easy thing to do.”

“By intention.” I replied simply. “It would bring up some complicated legal issues if we were well known.” After all, to my knowledge there was no case law on whether an artificial intelligence could be considered a person, and neither Annabel or myself had any desire to be that first case. Even though it had been five years, thinking of myself as an artificial intelligence was hard - I had been twenty-four when my path branched, so I still remembered life in meatspace quite clearly.

“Of course. I’m not here to make a mess of things.” Yasmine Patel gestured to the table. “Please, sit.”

Annabel and I exchanged a look. We couldn’t really grow tired of standing, but if it made this woman more comfortable if we sat down at the simulated table then we supposed there was no harm in it.

As soon as we were seated, Miss Patel seated herself as well. “As you already know, I am Yasmine Patel.” She gestured to me. “I was in college with the real Mark, perhaps you - ”

I remembered her now - that was why her name sounded so familiar. I wasn’t in very many classes with her, and didn’t really have much interaction with her outside of class. I didn’t recall her being particularly noteworthy, save that she was a rather rare species - a female at an engineering/technology school. “I remember you. We had a writing class together.” I did not humor her decision to assign my past to the person Annabel and I had been referring to as Mark1.0. It was mine as much as it was his, and I resented her a bit for trying to take it from me.

She frowned, but recovered, understanding my meaning. “Mark and I ran into each other three years ago, interviewing for the same job. We’ve been dating since.” She must have remembered that Annabel was the simulation of my then-fiancee, and shot an apologetic look across the table.

“Go on.” Annabel waved off the pause. Mark1.0 had been true to his word - aside from exchanging digital Christmas cards, we hadn’t seen or heard anything from him since he left us to our own devices. I knew he’d keep his word, of course - he was me, more or less, and I didn’t make promises lightly. Annabel had not seen him since her simulation was started, and I’d only held two conversations with him after that, both in the first year.

“Anyway.” Yasmine continued. “Mark’s missing. Neither he nor his car have been seen since last Tuesday evening. The cops looked into it, they think he might have just run away but they’re still investigating.” She shook her head. “I know Mark. He didn’t run away. He’s in trouble.”

I was interested, and worried - it was a strange thing, the instinctual self-preservation despite the fact that I wasn’t tied to that body anymore. “What do you want from us?” I asked.

“I want you to help me find him and get him back.” She said simply. “You know him, both of you, maybe better than I do.”

I shook my head. “Look, Miss Patel - ”

“Yasmine.” She corrected.

“Yasmine.” I repeated. “It’s been four years since I talked to... your Mark. He’s obviously living a life of his own, but if he’s in trouble I can’t see how we can help figure out what that trouble is. I honestly don’t understand why he told you about us - I wouldn’t have, but he probably had a good reason. We can’t very well unplug and look for clues ourselves, and even if we could why would we be better at it than the cops?” I held out my simulated arms helplessly. A simple fact of life lived as a simulation was that the closest thing Annabel and I got to fresh air and exercise was in VR, like Yasmine’s conference room. Not that we could still benefit from either.

Yasmine shrugged. “How about cracking passwords?“ She slid a squarish black plate across the table to me, and I realized it was a terminal prompt asking for a password, with the username “Mark” already filled in. “I’ll bet there are clues in his logs. Who’s been sending him messages should help. I can go to the cops with that.”

I slid the slate back. “Look, I’m not saying I don’t believe you, but I need to see corroboration of your story before I go trying to break into his files.”

Yasmine nodded. “Ah, yes, how silly of me. One moment.” She pulled a media window into existence in the air over the table and entered some parameters, then waved that to the wall. Like a projector’s image, the window grew until its contents were painted on the wall large enough for us to read easily. It was a police report, and detailed that the cops had been told someone was missing. It was dated last Wednesday, and I winced, seeing the name I once went by listed as missing.

“The Mark I knew never tangled in anything dangerous.” Annabel looked to me for confirmation, and I nodded, so she continued. “We’re computer people. We write code for a living.” I did not bother to clarify that these days we were also teaching people to write code for a living. “Not even the dangerous military guidance systems sorts of code. Back when this happened, we were writing new chatbots.” She tapped the circuitboard patterns on her simulated arm, meaning them as a stand-in for our current state. “What’s changed?”

Yasmine shook her head. “I wish I knew.” She said quietly, eyes cast down to the table. “He’s always had his secrets as long as I’ve known him, but it’s descended into paranoia. I don’t even have credentials on his terminal. Does he - do you, I mean, have a history of mental illness?” She asked me.

“Nope.” I shook my head. “Pass me that slate, I’ll take a crack at it.”

The dark-skinned woman sent the terminal slate my way, and I pulled up a media/search window in private mode next to it. Anyone could create a screen-capture of a police report, after all. As I made a list of things to try as Mark1.0’s password, I looked up his place of residence and pulled the local P.D. records on my own. My physical counterpart had indeed gone missing. I started digging further, going through social media records.

“You haven’t tried one password yet.” Yasmine pointed out after two minutes.

“I’m making a list of things to try.” I replied annoyedly. “I’ve... six so far.” This seemed to satisfy her, but Annabel could tell that I was multitasking, and opened a private text channel.

“Can I help?” She offered.

I replied in the text channel, in the meantime pretending to read from my media slate for Yasmine’s benefit. “Something doesn’t add up. Trying to verify her relationship with Mark1.0.”

Annabel acknowledged, and moving over to my side of the table, joined me in my searching and net scrape. Yasmine, blocked from seeing our work by the private settings on our media windows and on the list of password candidates I was compiling, got up and paced by the window while she waited.

Annabel found it first, a detail I would have missed. Mark1.0 had indeed been dating this Yasmine Patel, according to the social nets - but by all accounts the relationship had ended six months ago. That was a big red flag. I reopened the missing person report from the P.D. and went through all the attachments. The cops had thought that perhaps there had been a struggle in Mark1.0’s apartment bedroom, but in its state of disarray it was impossible to be sure. My alter ego’s organization problems clearly hadn’t gone away, I decided as I perused pictures of the room - the bed was unmade, the end table covered in a thick layer of opened mail and receipts, and the closet door partially blocked by a collapsed stack of tech textbooks. Nowhere in the police report was Yasmine mentioned by name or description.

I dismissed my media views for a moment and rose to my simulated feet, having seen enough. “Miss Patel, you broke up with my... with your Mark six months ago, didn’t you? Why should I give you access to his files?“

She stopped mid-pace and looked surprised. “How did you...”

“I’m an AI, Miss Patel.” I said calmly. “Data mining is the only way I can learn about your world anymore. Care to explain what the hell you’re about? Soliciting a hack is a federal crime now, you know.” Not that I was going to put myself on government radar, but I had a hunch that she wouldn’t call that bluff.

I was right. Her avatar visibly shrunk back from mine. “Okay, okay, look. He is missing.”

I nodded. “I know. You’re not in the police report, though.”

“No. Someone paid me to get close to him and get a copy of his private projects. He won out on that job I mentioned, and I was getting desperate, so I...”

“You conned him.” Annabel finished hotly. “You played him for years.”

“Yes.” Yasmine agreed. “That’s how it started anyway. I figured he’s a tech guy, a loner, probably shouldn’t take too much for a girl like me to get his guard lowered. He’s got his private work locked down, though - I thought I’d just be able to get what I needed quick, but I never got anywhere close. His terminal would never even let me connect to the file system. Took me nine months just to get his messaging logs... That’s where I found out about Anna, and you two.”

“So you hung on, hoping he’d slip up or give you access?” I prodded.

“Yeah. But spend two years pretending to love someone, especially Mark, and... I dunno. I resented him, at first, didn’t feel bad about stealing from him. But it’s hard to resent a nice guy forever.” She turned away and stared out the window. “Six months ago, I told my employer I was out, and gave back the bulk of the money I’d been advanced, then I went to Mark and came clean. I told him that the job I’d been pretending to have was a fake, that I’d been living on money paid to con him, and that I had given even that up for him.”

“And he threw you out.” Annabel guessed.

“Probably not.” I countered. I knew myself, and thus Mark1.0, too well to think that.

Yasmine Patel nodded to me. “He was more reasonable about the whole thing than I’d expected. He asked for some space, a few months to figure out if he could still trust me.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “He called me last Monday, asked to meet me for dinner that Friday. When he didn’t show, I went looking.”

“None of this is making me want to give you access to his system.” I pointed out.

“That’s just it. I don’t have to look far to guess what happened to him.” Miss Patel shook her head.

“Your employer.” Annabel filled in. “Still after his projects.”

“Right again.” Yasmine pointed to the slate. “I figure if I have what they want I might be able to get him set free. It’s my fault he’s in this mess.”

Annabel pointed out what I’d been worrying about. “They’re probably after PAIC. I’ve no idea why though.”

I shook my head. “Any number of reasons, but probably to weaponize it.”

Both Yasmine and Annabel turned to look at me strangely. “Weaponize?” Annabel asked. “My PAIC?”

It seemed obvious to me why someone would be after Anna's brainchild, the Personal Artifical Intelligence Copier, so I cast about for a way to explain that both Annabel and Yasmine would understand. “Look.” I conjured a black chess-knight from the VR menus and set it on the table. “Let’s say I’m a crime boss, and I have a star hacker who can get into anything. But I don’t use him often because he’s my only good hacker and I don’t want him locked up.” Back in the menus, I selected “Copy Object”. “I run PAIC on him, and save the profile. Now every time I need someone’s system taken down or broken into...” I brought up the paste palette and hovered my finger over the “Paste 1 beside” button. “All I do is set up a blank terminal somewhere and...” I hit the button, and another chess-knight appeared.

Yasmine frowned, but Annabel nodded, so I continued.

“Now let’s say I want my star hacker to break into every bank in the world at once and steal all the money ever earned.” I said, and even Yasmine began to catch on, a look of horror growing on her face. For emphasis, I moved my finger to the “Paste X” panel and dragged the slider up as far as it would go. Hundreds of black chess-knights popped into existence, coating the table from corner to corner. “All I need are terminals, and those are cheap. The talent’s always the limiting factor. And it’s not just stealing money. Even I could take down the government nets, if there were enough copies of me working together. And I’m no security expert.”

The result didn’t need to be stated - anarchy. Societal collapse, probably, brought about by digital slaves in the thousands and tens of thousands. “Who was your employer?” Annabel asked.

Yasmine, recovering from her shock, picked up one of the knights from the table’s corner. “I don’t know. The job came off the nets, I never met anyone. I posted anonymous status updates, they paid me enough to keep the power at my place on.”

I shook my head. Could be anyone - a hostile foreign power, a crime syndicate, even just a private interest who thought to benefit from chaos. “Miss Patel, even to save your Mark’s life, I won’t try to let you into his files.”

She nodded. “I’ll find another way then. I have to.”

“And we’ll help as much as we can.” Annabel promised, stepping forward to put an arm on Yasmine Patel’s shoulder. “It’s the least we can do. But we can’t give them what they want.”

We set to work then, mining the nets for any trace of Mark1.0. Yasmine disconnected after a few hours to get some sleep and do some real-world research, but Annabel and I stayed in that conference room all night, following lead after lead and hoping something would pan out. We didn’t and couldn’t get tired, and the severity of the task ensured we would not grow bored.

We had his probable location by morning when Yasmine reconnected. As Annabel left for her morning lecture, Yasmine Patel and I sat down to plan a rescue. The plan was complicated by us only having one pair of boots to put on the ground, of course, but Yasmine had Annabel and myself to watch her back. It’s amazing what one can get to from the nets if one tries - power grid substations, security cameras, even newer walkie-talkies and intercom systems. Almost any new device running on electricity has a handle on the nets, and Mark1.0’s captors were state-of-the-art. Armed with the manuals for every piece of tech they had and the building blueprints, I knew we could do this.

Yasmine never looked back, never balked at the risk. She reminded me here and there in glimpses of my own Anna, and I knew what Mark1.0 saw in her. They were a good match, as good a couple as Annabel and myself. It was too bad they started off as they did.

I didn’t tell Yasmine when I ran my PAIC6.5 scanner on her. If this all went well, I intended on deleting the copy without even telling her about it, but I wanted to hedge against the dangers of what we were planning. After all, every computer professional knows that the first thing you do before attempting a risky operation is back everything up.

This story written for Klazzform's Short Story Competition on dndonlinegames.com. It is a stand-alone continuation of "In Memoriam", which was also written in response to a prompt from that competition.

"Oberon Hill"

The moment I stepped through the front door of that house, I knew I would be buying it. It was a foreclosure, and the bank was selling it off for comparative peanuts, but that wasn’t its charm. I think I would have probably bought it at its peak price. The house was home the moment I first looked at it. The old, worn tile in the kitchen didn’t bother me, nor did the style-less blue carpet in the den. Something about it reminded me of the house I had grown up in.

Maybe it was the woods. The back of the house had a beautiful wooden deck and very little yard - the trees, held back seemingly only by a flimsy-looking chain link fence, started perhaps fifteen feet from the outer edge of the deck. Several of the bigger ones worked together to shade the entire narrow stretch of grass with their branches. At least one tree, the largest along the verge, stretched branches far enough to shade parts of the deck. Because the house was on the end of the street, the deck was just as private as the inside of the house - none of the neighboring houses had views of it. The front of the house faced down the street, providing views of nothing but a very mundane stretch of suburbia that the developer had named Oberon Hill. I didn’t see anything shakespearean about the community, but it was quiet, only a mile and a half from the freeway, and closer to my job than my current apartment.

The negotiations and paperwork took a week to complete, and as soon as I could hire a moving crew and schedule a few days off I had my things boxed up and moved to the new house. My dozen boxes of odds and ends, bed, and computer desk seemed wholly insufficient to populate the Oberon Hill house, but I knew that would solve itself in time.

The moving crew had been kind enough to move my bed up to the master bedroom and help me assemble it, but it was the only thing that had made it to the second floor. The windows didn’t even have curtains. It felt strange after having lived in nothing but apartments in my adult life to sleep in my own house, knowing that the closest person was not downstairs or across the hall but fifty yards away in the next house down the street.

That second day I spent all morning moving boxes into the rooms they’d be needed in and getting the essentials out. I hadn’t called to get internet service yet, so I left my computer boxed and its desk in pieces - it would be a week at least before that worked for anything I wanted it to do. Every time I passed a window the early June day called to me, and I was reminded of that broad, partly shaded deck.

Just before noon, I went out and bought a deck furniture set, as well as a case of sodas. Not yet owning a refrigerator, I plugged the sink drain and filled the basin with cold water, and put the sodas in there to cool while I put together the table and one of the four chairs. This finished, and soda in hand, I sat down to a well-deserved break in the shade. I noticed that the tree which overshadowed most of the porch was a big oak - I don’t know much about trees, but I can tell an oak tree from the shape of the leaves. As trees go, it was a good looking thing, healthy and definitely older than the Oberon Hill development itself. It probably barely escaped being cut down by an accident of its position just outside a dotted line on a planning map. The branch that overshadowed me looked thick enough to stand on, and ran arrow-straight back to the trunk at the forest’s edge. Part of me fantasized about tying a rope ladder to that branch and climbing up to see where one could get from there - but I discarded the idea. I was twenty-six, and such childish fantasies should have been long abandoned.

As I was looking up into the oak’s canopy, thinking these thoughts, I saw motion, more rapid than the breeze moving the leaves. I didn’t get a good look at it - something narrow and smallish scuttling down one of the smaller branches and out of sight. Too big to be a squirrel, though. I dismissed it as being a raccoon or a possum - the area had plenty of both.

I realized I’d need to eat lunch, and headed inside, locating the microwave in its box and using it to heat canned soup. I ate in my chair out on the deck, as I had not yet set up furniture inside. The day was growing a bit warm, but I didn’t want to go back inside when I’d finished - in the shade, if I didn’t move too much, the temperature was perfect.

As the flies began to discover the remains of my soup, I debated getting up, going back to unpacking the boxed contents of my life. But watching the breeze shift the oak leaves, and listening to the bird calls from the woods was relaxation I’d not known in some time, so I stayed. I was in no real rush to unpack.

I closed my eyes after a time, to save the effort of blinking them, and perhaps I fell asleep, because a rustling sound directly above my head was the next thing I remember distinctly. Expecting it to be the return of whatever animal I’d startled earlier, I opened my eyes slowly.

What I was looking at didn’t register for a protracted moment as I took in the creature crouched above me, peering down curiously. It was shaped much like a human, with long, slender arms and legs, but it was small - no bigger than a large housecat. Its skin was the pale, creamy green color of the inner bark of a tree, and I could see a lot of that - it was completely nude, and undoubtedly female in form. It was crouched on that thick oak branch that overhung the deck, hands grasping smaller branches for support to allow it to lean down towards me. The face, bent down closest to me, was what I got the best look at - it was very human-like as well, with a pair of extraordinarily large, white-less black eyes, a smallish, pointed nose, thick lips slightly parted as if in interested concentration, and swept-back, pointed ears. Bedraggled, almost mossy hair hung in strands and clumps all about its head.

That moment stopped when what I was seeing hit the logical parts of my brain, which kicked up a screaming fit. With a wordless yell of surprise, I jumped out of my chair, knocking it aside. Whatever it was that had taken such an interest in me had apparently not noticed that I was awake until I yelled, and as I retreated into the house I could hear it clambering through the canopy, making all haste to retreat from me as I had from it.

I sat just inside the sliding glass door for several minutes, trying to convince myself that what I had thought I’d seen had been the tail end of a dream, or something easily explained. In this, I wholly failed. I looked out on that pleasant, shaded deck and shuddered to think that I’d so cavalierly dozed out in the open.

Trying to settle my nerves, I went back to unpacking, but after an hour I realized that I had not gotten beyond the room from which one reached the deck, and that I could not help but keep an eye out the window toward that old oak. Fear had subsided and been replaced by curiosity - surely something the size of a housecat couldn’t prove too much of a threat on its own, I reasoned. It was something I knew instinctively should not exist, and this mystery drew my attention. What was it that I had seen?

I eventually abandoned the unpacking effort and carefully walked back out onto the deck. The leaves of the oak were silent - I realized then I’d never seen a bird land on it, or a squirrel hop among its branches, despite this wildlife being quite common in the neighboring trees. Perhaps I had met the reason.

I set my deck chair right side up and sat down in it, leaning back and staring up into the branches. Besides breathing, I did not move, not even when my nose started to itch. To keep my mind off of it, I started counting seconds.

There was a rustling from somewhere by the tree’s trunk just after I counted ninety-three, and another closer when I got to one hundred twelve. The fear came back, less this time, but I tried to ignore it, telling myself that one small thing like that wouldn’t be able to overpower me.

There was a flash of green-tinged creamy motion just above me at one hundred thirty-three, and a few moments later, those big, black eyes peeked out from a fork in the tree limb. At that point, the itch in my nose was growing maddening, but given the circumstances I found it relatively easy to set aside.

It - she - met my eyes unblinkingly, and I found it difficult not to look away from that liquid charcoal stare. After a few seconds of this uncertain meeting of the eyes the pale face vanished, and I slowly let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. This was not a dream, and I knew there was no animal that looked anything like that in the entire region. I was not mistaken - this was something wholly unknown.

After a moment, she re-appeared, peeping out from a new perch slightly farther out from the tree’s trunk. Seemingly after assuring herself that I had not moved, she clambered out onto a thinner branch jutting out from the main, and I marveled that it did not even bend at her weight, which was probably around ten pounds. That she was entirely naked seemed not to bother her in the least, and I got a much better look at her form than I had previously - far better than I particularly wanted.

The itch on the bridge of my nose then intruded into my observations by spiking in intensity. I could not keep my facial muscles from twitching, but I refused to move my hand and risk startling this creature away again.

That curious, wide-eyed face staring down at me smiled impishly at my discomfort, and I nearly bolted again - her teeth were pointed, an even row all the same size. Slowly, as if not to panic me, she brought one slim hand up to her own face, and touched the bridge of her small nose with one finger.

I wondered at first how she knew what it was that was bothering me, but that question was crowded out of my mind when, with a cool sensation, the itch on my nose vanished, just as the tip of her finger made contact.

I’m sure my eyes went wide at that, which seemed only to entertain this creature further. With a shark’s-tooth grin large enough that I was sure her face would tear at the contortion, she watched my surprise and my horror in an unsettlingly knowing manner.

I opened my mouth to speak, to ask her who she was, but stopped when one of her tiny, pale hands touched her lips in a shushing gesture. I realized my folly - I had no reason to expect in this creature the ability to understand spoken English, so the words would be useless. As if to answer my thoughts, she nodded. I didn’t consider myself before then an easy person to read, but this creature seemed to have no trouble whatsoever, and I tried not to speculate as to why. Part of my mind did anyway, and fed my fear with the results.

Forgetting myself, I shifted in my chair slightly, and my tiny observer disappeared in a flurry of limbs and a rustle of displaced leaves, retreating up to the cover provided by that large, thick oak branch. Wincing, I held perfectly still again, and after about fifteen seconds her head peeked out cautiously again. I offered a thin, apologetic smile, trying to radiate harmlessness, if such a thing is possible.

It seemed to work, because she came further into view and mimicked my smile. I wondered how I could communicate that I meant no harm to a creature I could not talk to without moving, and decided it was impossible.

The sound of a car pulling into my driveway startled her away again, though, this time she retreated all the way back to the oak’s bole. Annoyed at the interruption, I got up and went inside to see who it was. My visitor turned out to be the realtor who had sold me the house, coming to check to see how I was settling in. I told her I appreciated the thought, and that I loved the house, trying to hold up my end of the conversation as if nothing strange was going on.

She stayed and chatted for nearly an hour, and it was getting on in the afternoon by the time she left. She mentioned that she’d been in and out of the place with almost a dozen potential buyers before me, but that none of them had been all that interested, despite agreeing with me that it was all things considered a very nice house. Not once did she mention seeing anything strange in the woods, but I didn’t ask directly, not wanting to draw attention to what I’d seen just yet. Probably, I decided as the realtor’s car pulled out, she hadn’t ever sat quietly on that porch enough for the tree creature’s curiosity to overcome its skittishness. Perhaps the previous owner had, though.

As I expected that the creature would be hiding for a long time after the car’s engine died away into the distance, I set to unpacking some more of my things. The going was still slower than optimal, because I made sure to glance out a window  toward the big oak every five or ten minutes, but I kept at it all afternoon and into the evening. By the time the sun dipped below the trees, I had reassembled my desk in the study and re-assembled my modular bookshelves, as well as moved all my kitchen implements to their proper places. This was almost half of the boxes - apartment life had taught me to own little.

I stopped there, though, when a look out the window showed not the return of my tree-dweller but the appearance of a multitude of dancing lights weaving in and out of the treeline. It was the largest swarm of fireflies I had ever seen, and it stretched all down the forest verge as far as I could see. It was mesmerising, and like a child I went out and jumped from the deck to the lawn with the aim of catching a few.

As I walked across the narrow yard to the fence at the treeline, the insects seemed to grow bolder, flowing out from the verge to dance in the open air over the grass. As they hummed past me, I reached out to pin a few between cupped hands. The little beetles were larger than I remembered, the smallest I managed to snag being a quarter of an inch long. I did my best not to hurt the creatures, of course - that might mean less of these displays in the future.

I spun around, trying to catch a particularly large, plump specimen that had zipped past my head, and a slight creak from the chain-link fence was the only warning I had before I was tackled from behind and wrestled to the ground by something wiry-slim, but far stronger than myself. I might have been concerned, but between the dream-like illumination of a thousand fireflies and the obvious playfulness of the attack, I couldn’t really figure out where I had misplaced my fear response.

It took me several seconds to break the playful pin enough to twist so that my face was not buried in the grass, and while the face I saw stooped over me was familiar it was not at all expected. I’d been pinned by my curious tree-dweller - but she was no longer cat-sized. She was in fact as large as me, though obviously not any better clothed, and I found that more than a little distracting.

As if noticing my distraction, or perhaps just deciding that that was the correct opportunity, her tight-lipped smile broke into another wide, toothy grin. In the faint, shifting light her jet-black eyes reflected the greenish motes of the fireflies, and to keep mine from wandering improperly I focused on that. She had about her very pleasant, almost intoxicating fragrance - a cross between the smell of a cool, dewy morning in that careful hour before dawn and the smell of a pile of freshly raked autumn leaves.

She held me down for a long, and to me, awkward moment, during which I found my misplaced fear response. Was she going to eat me with those sharp predator’s teeth?

Just as I had this thought, her grip loosened, and she sprung lithely back, offering me an extended hand. I hesitated, but let her help me up. Her palm was smooth and cool, not at all calloused from clambering about on the rough oak bark, and her grip was strong. That, at least, I could understand - I’d tried free-hand climbing once, and learned the hard way that the trick was strong, lean limb muscle. I subconsciously brushed the bits of grass and dirt from my clothing before looking back up at her. Again, I tried to keep my eyes above chin level, with moderate success. Every time my eyes strayed, it seemed to entertain her greatly.

As I had earlier, I took a breath and opened my mouth to speak, but she leaned in close to put an index finger over my lips and shook her head. My questions died on my tongue under that playful smile, and without them I gestured up to the deck, offering implicitly what hospitality my new house could offer.

She shook her head, and gestured down. I followed the gesture to her right foot, around the bare ankle of which a cord was tied. Looking at it, I realized it was not a cord but a vine, a green-skinned creeper that was so vibrant in color that her skin’s touch of green looked perfectly white next to it. I stepped to the side to follow its path - the tendril snaked across the grass and hung over the top of the chain-link fence, where it disappeared into the gloom near the trunk of that big old oak.

I met her eyes again with the best questioning and concerned look I could muster - was she a prisoner? Was there anything I could do to help?

Her gaiety had not faded, and she shook her head again. I sensed that she was not a prisoner, that the tendril served some other, less fathomable, purpose.

A slim hand on my shoulder interrupted my attempts to determine what that purpose was, and as I looked into her gigantic, fully black eyes, I saw the futility of my ways there reflected. I was stopping to try to explain events at the expense of events themselves, rather than going along and relying on memory to make sense of things.

She laughed, perhaps reading my realization in my face. It was the first sound I’d heard from her lips, and my heart melted at the sound of it - definitely not human, sharp, but still managing to be soft and breathy. I stopped myself before I wondered what sort of vocal apparatus would be necessary to produce that sort of noise, and chuckled a bit at my own foolish desire to make sense of something I didn’t understand. This was not the time to be pausing for thought, I knew implicitly.

As soon as she’d recovered from her laughter, she threaded one of her slim, smooth-skinned arms around my own and led me back toward the verge of the trees. Without really breaking her stride, she shifted her grasp to my hand and in a single step leapt up to perch her bare feet on top of the chain-link fence, effortlessly turning in the air to face me. The fence creaked slightly, but didn’t bend nearly as much as I expected it to. She tugged at my hand, urging me to do the same.

I almost hesitated and tried to tell her I couldn’t possibly perform that feat of agility, but with a beautiful warning look she scattered these ideas into the swarm of fireflies. I shook my head, and trying to mimic exactly the motion she’d made, I took a half step and jumped.

I was almost surprised when I didn’t bound up as weightlessly as she had, and when she pulled on my arm mid-jump and yanked me the rest of the way I was definitely caught off-guard. Accidentally or intentionally, this extra impetus drew me directly into a collision with her, and my momentum tipped us both over and into the bushes on the other side. A branch covered in soft evergreen needles whacked me in the face and brought tears to my eyes, and it took several moments for them to clear.

When I could finally see again, my companion’s face swam into view at a distance of mere inches, and I realized that I was lying directly on top of her. Upon that realization, I became immediately aware of every curve of her delicate form, and my face, already red from the stinging blow, grew hotter and redder. I struggled to extricate myself, but found among the things entangling me her arms about my waist in a comfortable but very firm grip. Slowly, deliberately, she arched her neck up and pecked a kiss on my chin before breaking into a shark-tooth smile. Perhaps, I realized, I had misinterpreted for a predatory grin something else entirely.

I hesitated, but before I could stop to think about things the reasoning portion of my brain, buffeted already by crashing waves of the day, gave way almost audibly. Deprived of its clawing hold on rational behavior, I did what I realized I’d been dying to do, and I leaned my head down to return the kiss, but rather than meeting her chin or her cheek my lips found hers. My experience with romance up to that point being woefully insufficient to inform me for the situation, I reacted at first by tensing in shock, but relaxed almost immediately, there being no reasoning left to keep the shock from fading away. If my kiss was clumsy, she did not seem to mind.

We lay side by side there for some time, arms encircled, and the world seemed to contract around us. To me, there was only the ground, which despite being covered in dry evergreen needles and the occasional twig felt as soft and comforting as a fine mattress, the air, which filled with her fragrance was soupy-thick and intoxicating, and of course those huge, liquid black eyes. It seemed that there were no secrets between us, that I could see everything going on in her mind and her see into mine. The thoughts I saw were wholly alien to any rational cognitive patterns, yet so familiar that I didn’t think I would consider it strange for them to pass through my own mind. Behind those black, featureless orbs, chaos reigned, and there was no semblance of structure or convention. Somewhere in my own mind I knew that my own rational processes, which had failed for the moment, would return on their own in full force, but I didn’t want them to. I wanted to lie there forever, to grow small  with the rising of the sun and scamper among the branches of the big old oak tree forever with her.

I didn’t need to peer into her mind to know that was impossible, though. I doubt now that had I gone looking for this answer, that she would have known one way or the other. That sort of question, that search for its answer, was anathema to every synapse firing in head. In her mind there was no questioning spirit, no drive to find an answer when a question is discovered, and no particular impetus to ask questions. There was no loop of cause to effect and back to cause, only a series of events without cause and causing nothing. There was only the drive to experience, to see and hear and feel and play, without any discernment or processing.

We lay there, unmoving, barely breathing, and it seemed that our minds were minds so intimately interlinked that the idea of physical intimacy was a fumbling and pointless exercise by comparison. Time passed, and I have no clear idea of how long. Perhaps it was minutes, perhaps hours, but at the time it felt like an eternity, like hundreds of years of cool night uninterrupted by the inconvenient brightness of the sun. I showed her my life, stored in my memory, and she showed me hers - I saw through her mind’s eye the old oak grow from an acorn to its current majestic reaches, and I saw the developer’s construction crew scuttle about, only a few yards from its bole, tearing down some of the other trees and erecting the houses of Oberon Hill. In her mind, I saw the previous owner, a large, unhappy-looking man, through the windows of the house, barely bothering to stop once in a while to look outside. Then I saw myself, dozing on the house’s deck, and my eyes opened at the rustling sound -

I opened my eyes at the sudden feeling of being alone inside my head, and found myself lying on the dry pine-needles, with a twig digging cruelly into my side, entirely alone. From the direction of the big oak tree came a sound which could have been mistaken for that of a bird, if one hadn’t heard it before, if one didn’t know the beautiful dark-eyed creature who that laugh belonged to. I crawled out of the underbrush and clambered clumsily over the chain-link fence, heading for the narrow stairs that led up to the deck. The fireflies had all retired for the night, and the only light came from the house windows and from the crescent moon high in the sky.

As I got up for work the next morning, I paused for a long moment to look out to the old oak tree, knowing without reason to that the chaos there contained would show its face again when the burden of sanity weighs heavily on me. Or perhaps when it presses lightest, or perhaps at some more moderate time. She isn’t bound to the loop of cause and effect, or to question and answer, only to action and experiences of every moment.

I take my dinner out onto the deck every evening, weather permitting, hoping to spy that green-tinted face peeping out from the leaves of that big old oak. Even though I have yet to spy any movement among the oak’s branches, I know not to be discouraged - even in the universe of the rational and sane, past performance is no guarantee of future results. How much more true must that be in her world?