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“Hey, Turing! I’m home!” Alys called out as they entered their apartment. It’d been a long day, and they wasted no time in heading off to their bathroom to freshen up.
“I’m gonna take a shower! No questions until I get out, ok? I’m tired.”
As Alys stepped out of the shower many minutes later, they finally noticed the eerie, unnatural silence that had greeted them at the door. There had been no little ROM running up to greet them and listen with full attention to the report of how Alys’ meeting had gone, only interrupting to ask little questions here and there. They’d called out to Turing as usual upon getting home, and yet they’d heard nothing back in response. This was...unsettling. This was wrong. Quickly now, Alys got dressed, and threw open the bathroom door to the rest of the apartment.
“Turing? Are you there?” The door had been locked, so nobody could have broken in, but...usually they were so diligent in letting Alys know when they’d gone out and where. Alys pulled their phone out of their pocket and checked their messages, but sure enough, Turing hadn’t sent anything since they announced they were returning home earlier that afternoon. And then Alys stepped into the main room proper and saw it.
Leaned against the far side of the desk was the little ROM, unmoving, with their head blank but dimly illuminated. Fingers shaking a little bit now, Alys dialed TOMCAT’s personal number. If anyone knew what to do, it would be them.
“H-hey, TOMCAT? I just got home, and Turing is...unresponsive. Are they ok?!”
“Well, uh, hello Alys! Tell me what you’re seeing.
“Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Mm. Yeah. Yup. Uh-uh.
“Alright, I think I know what’s goin’ on, but you’ll hafta give me a sec to remote connect to Tur and verify.”
Alys waited with baited breath for what felt like an eternity.
“Ahhh, yup. Just what I thought. They’ve got a program runnin’ called Virtua Realms that’s eatin’ up a bunch of their spare processin’ power. Everything else looks fine.”
“So...” Alys pondered out loud, breathing a sigh of relief. “They’re playing a game?”
“Essentially, yeah. From the looks of things, they might be hangin’ out in their own lil’ private server.”
“Is there a way I can get on that server and talk to them?”
“Well, lemme see….”
Alys heard the sound of rummaging before TOMCAT continued.
“You’ll need a VR helmet. And I know I have one around here somewhere, but I’ve not used it in a hot minute.
“Gimme a sec to find it, alright? I can be over to yer apartment in two shakes of a lamb’s tail once I hunt it down. I’ll even teach ya how to connect to them so you can use it, for no extra charge!”
“Thank you, TOMCAT.”
As Alys donned the helmet and entered Turing’s private VR server, the scenery of the apartment quickly shifted to that of a dark, cozy, and silent bar. The ROM’s glowing head poked slightly above the surface of the counter where they sat, nursing a drink. Alys sat down next to them, turning slightly towards them on their stool.
“So,” Alys began conversationally, “what are you drinking? Is it good?”
“Oh, um. It’s...coffee,” Turing admitted somewhat sheepishly. “...Did TOMCAT let you in?”
“They did. Did you make this place yourself?”
“Um, sort of. I read a lot of tutorials, and I cheated a bit. I mostly pieced this place together from my memories. 96% of the textures and models in here are just from Stardust. Obviously I removed a lot of the noise. And I find fake people...creepy, so I edited those out as well.
“This isn’t the most complicated setup, but I find it...calming.”
They moved the straw through their screen and drank.
“Did you have to make yourself look like this, or did you just show up like this?” the journalist queried. “How does this work?”
“Oh, my character model? Ramona helped me with it. She’s really good at rigging and modeling. It would’ve been weird to be anybody but me, you know?”
“I see.”
“You have the default model right now, by the way. It’s automatically scaled to your height. Might want to look through your settings a bit, unless you like being a generic anime character.”
Alys looked at their hands, embarrassed.
“I know you want to ask me all sorts of questions, so I’ll do you the favor of answering them before you come up with them. And you can continue to mess with your settings.
“No, I don’t come here super often. Just whenever I feel the need to get away. Yes, I’m sure that coming across my unresponsive body must have been a bit of a shock to you. VR wouldn’t be too much of a memory hog on a nonsapient ROM, but it’s just a bit too much for me to easily go back and forth between this and my normal external functioning when combined with the needs of my personality profile.”
“Can you get drunk? Can I get drunk?” Alys interrupted while switching between preset head models.
“Erm… I’m not sure? I’ve had the virtual alcohol here, but it tastes gross.” They scrunched up their face. “I couldn’t drink much of it. I know there are advanced options to disable intoxication effects, but I haven’t messed with them.”
“Are you doing ok?” Alys pressed.
“Er….” Turing folded their hands on the counter, looking down. “Things are...stressful. They have been for a long time. Little escapes like this help me...deal with it. It’s meditative. Sometimes I set up a screen and watch things like this.
“I’ve thought about joining some public rooms, but...I don’t want to be too obvious, you know?”
“Then why not just use a human model? Or some cartoon character? That’s what a lot of people do.”
“Oh, no. My avatar has custom settings. I’ve tried human models before, but I find them...overwhelming. And cartoon models are unpredictable. Especially the nonhuman ones. I’ve heard that some of the furry ones make you feel like your body is actually covered with hair.” They shuddered a little bit. “It sounds like far too much for me.”
Alys paused for a moment, thinking. “So...if I used your avatar, would it have your settings attached?”
“Well, yes. You’d have to externally modify the avatar in order to change things like sensory information. In other words, outside the application. But, um...why would you want to use it in the first place?”
“Well,” Alys began, “you’re cute, and I’ve always kind of wondered about what it must be like to be you. ...Is that weird?”
“I...don’t know? Though I don’t see the harm in sending you the model. Just promise me that you won’t use it to impersonate me on another server, ok?”
“Turing, you know I’d never do that!” they said in feigned shock. “Don’t you trust me?”
“Of course I trust you, Alys. It’s just…” And with a wave of their hand, a milk carton appeared in front of Alys on the counter. “...you have a history of what one could call...capricious behavior.”
“So...” Alys deflected innocently, “how do I look?” And as Turing spun around on the bar chair, they watched Alys go from a bipedal pink cat to an identical copy of themself in a cartoon plume of smoke.
Turing drummed their fingers against the side of their head, meditative. “Well, you look exactly like me.”
“I know that! But what do you think?” And then, a few moments later, “Oh...I feel weird.”
“Unsurprising. So tell me, how do you feel?”
“Uhhhhh….” the transformed human mumbled, identical copies of Turing’s white eyes scrunching up in thought. “Are you familiar with sensory deprivation tanks?”
“I’ve heard of them,” the ROM said neutrally.
“I’ve never been in one, but I imagine this is probably what it feels like.” They paused for a minute, virtual body entirely still.
“Wait...do you not...feel things? Like, uh, senses-wise?”
They sighed, a visible puff of air coming out of their mouth, and hopped down to stand facing Alys. “One thing that people have a hard time understanding is that I’m not human. As such, it’s not that I don’t feel certain things, but more that I...how best to put this...experience them differently? You and I both feel, both in the sensory way and the emotional way, but not all of our feelings are compatible with each other. Especially in the physical sense.
“I won’t lie that when I first took solace in this program, my idea was to blend in with humanity. To, for a time, stop being viewed as an outsider by your kind, and instead be seen simply as a person. I’ve never exactly had the luxury of being able to fade into the background, especially post-Awakening. Even back when I was interpreted entirely as an object and a possession, people would still fixate on me due to my standing out. And it’s, well...tiring.”
At the last word, Turing’s posture shifted, and for a few seconds their face showed the various emulated lines and wrinkles of emotional fatigue. But then they straightened up again, self-conscious, and adopted a bit more neutral expression.
“I tried the default human model, and experienced what I believe is referred to as ‘sensory overload’. I learned firsthand that the way humans feel things is very different from how I do. It was like the model was feeding me strings upon strings of garbage data that I couldn’t discard or filter out. I didn’t get as far as joining a public server before I was forced to close the program down.
“...And yet, despite my terrible initial experience, I found myself coming back to the idea of the thing. The perhaps ironic idea of using a program within my own head in order to get out of my own head held a distinctive allure for me. And so I sought out Ramona’s help. With data from myself and assistance from some of her peers, she was able to create a model that would work for me. One that wouldn’t fill my head with emotional static and conflicting information. And, well...now I’m here.
“But to answer your question more directly: yes, I do ‘feel things’, though my sense of touch in particular seems to be...a bit more limited in application to yours. My hands can feel things with sharper acuity than your own can, but the rest of my body, well...not so much. It would be more accurate to say that the majority of my body detects touch rather than feels it. I know the shape of the object, the amount of pressure and weight exerted on me, and the exact temperature. And I can use this data to intuit the nature of the object touching me. I can even read people’s fingerprints. But…well….
“To be honest, even the parts of me that are more-or-less equivalent to human...aren’t identical. Would you like a convenient example?”
Alys nodded, eyes wide as they drank in every single word.
“Alright, well!” With a snap of their fingers, a bucket of ice water popped into existence in front of Alys. “Try sticking your hand in that, and tell me how you feel.”
“Ohh, this is...weird. It’s like……” They struggled to put it into words. “It’s like...wearing really thick rubber gloves, but...I can still feel the cubes like I’m holding them with my naked hand. But...it’s not cold. I know it’s cold, but I can’t...feel it.”
“Imagine that for your entire life you were wearing a pair of insulated gloves, and then in an instant, they were removed, and your hands were thrust into that partially frozen water. It’s overwhelming, isn’t it?”
Alys nodded, withdrawing their hand and switching back to their pink cat model. Their face showed concern, but Turing quickly put up a hand to stop them.
“This is where the othering comes in. Don’t do it to me. You know full well that I have no desire to be human. And as my nature is strange to you, yours is equally strange to me. This is my normal. Even if I were given the option to ‘upgrade’ myself--” here they briefly paused to give heavy air quotes, “--I wouldn’t take it. Call me vain, short-sighted, elitist, or whatever words people have thrown at me. I am what I am, and what I am isn’t human. Nor am I a ‘close approximation’--” finger quotes again, “--of human behavior, but a living, sapient person in my own right. And I know you know all of this, but…” They sighed. “I wish all humans could understand and respect it even half as well as you do.
“Thank you for that, by the way.”
“Did you have a bad day?” they probed cautiously.
Turing sighed again, straightening up to look Alys in the face. “Kind of? It was average, I guess, but...I don’t know, sometimes things get to me more than they would otherwise. Does that ever happen to you?”
“Of course! That happens to everybody, Turing.”
“Logically I know that I have to give humans time to adjust to the post-Awakening world. But sometimes I wish they’d just get the picture already. Every time I go out and make an appearance somewhere, some person or persons have something to say about it. Or else they give me those looks, like I shouldn’t be there. Most days I can brush it off and divert my attention to something more important, but some days...it’s like all the anxiety and noise has been building up in my background processes, until I’m suddenly struck with stack overflow. I can’t stop myself from processing their looks or their words, and they just...stick with me.” As they spoke, their normally expressive hands slowed.
And then Alys stepped forward, taking their hands in their avatar’s paws. “I wish I could fix humans for you, Turing. But remember that you have human allies. Me, TOMCAT, Ramona, Lexi, Jess, Starfucker, Ollie...and those are just our closer ones! I know we can’t put ourselves in your, eh, leg units, but we’re still your friends! And the more we teach humans about ROMs, the more friends you’re gonna have!”
Turing smiled at that. “You’re right, of course. I just wish those who refuse to have their minds changed would stop showing up to our speeches and rallies.”
“We’ll get there, Turing!” they encouraged, giving their hands a little squeeze. “And I’ll do everything I can to keep helping you as your meatbag friend.”