Press Start to Play by Daniel H. Wilson, John Joseph Adams Page A

really will make a difference. The cat is winking up at me.
    Shary crouches in her favorite chair, the straight-backed Regency made of red-stained wood and lumpy blue upholstery. She’s wearing jeans and a stained sweatshirt, one leg tucked under the other, and there’s a kinetic promise in her taut leg that I know to be a lie. She looks as if she’s about to spring out of that chair and ask me about the device in my hands, talking a mile a minute the way she used to. But she doesn’t even notice my brand-new purchase, and it’s a crapshoot whether she even knows who I am today.
    I poke the royal cat’s tongue, and it gives a yawp through its tiny speakers, then the screen lights up and asks for our Wi-Fi password. I give the cat what it wants, then it starts updating and loading various firmware things. A picture of a fairy-tale castle appears with the game’s title in a stylized wordmark above it: THE DIVINE RIGHT OF CATS . And then begins the hard work of customizing absolutely everything, which I want to do myself before I hand the thing off to Shary.
    The whole time I’m inputting Shary’s name and other info, I feel like a backstabbing bitch. Giving this childish game to my life partner, it’s like I’m declaring that she’s lost the right to be considered an adult. No matter that all the hip teens and twentysomethings are playing
Divine Right of Cats
right now. Or that everybody agrees this game is the absolute best thing for helping dementia patients hold on to some level of cognition, and that it’s especially good for people suffering from leptospirosis X, in particular. I’m doing this for Shary’s good, because I believe she’s still in there somewhere.
    I make Shary’s character as close to Shary as I can possibly make a cat wizard who is the main adviser to the throne of the cat kingdom. (I decide that if Shary was a cat, she’d be an Abyssinian, because she’s got that sandy-brown-haired sleekness, pointy face, and wiry energy.) Shary’s monarch is a queen, not a king—a proud tortoiseshell cat named Arabella IV. I get some input into the realm’s makeup, including what the nobles on the Queen’s Council are like, but some stuff is decided at random—like, Arabella’s realm of Greater Felinia has a huge stretch of vineyards and some copper mines, neither of which I would have come up with.
    Every detail I enter into the game, I pack with relationship shout-outs and little details that only Shary would recognize, so the whole thing turns into a kind of bizarre love letter. For example, the tavern near the royal stables is the Puzzler’s Retreat, which was the gray-walled dyke bar where Shary and I used to go dancing when we were both in grad school. The royal guards are Grace’s Army of Stompification. And so on.
    “Shary?” I say. She doesn’t respond.
    Before it mutated and started eating people’s brain stems, before it became antibiotic-resistant, the disease afflicting Shary used to be known as Rat Catcher’s Yellows. It mostly affected animals, and in rare cases, humans. It’s a close cousin of syphilis and Lyme, one that few people had even heard of ten years ago. In some people, it causes liver failure and agonizing joint pain, but Shary is one of the “lucky” ones who only have severe neurological problems, plus intermittent fatigue. She’s only thirty-five years old.
    “Shary?” I hold the cat head out to her, because it’s ready to start accepting her commands now that all the tricky setup is over with. Queen Arabella has a lot of issues that require her Royal Wizard’s input. Already some of the other noble cats are plotting against the throne—especially those treacherous tuxedo cats!—and the vintners are threatening to go on strike. I put the cat head right in front of Shary’s face and she shrugs.
    Then she looks up, all at once lucid. “Grace? What the fuck is this shit? This looks like it’s for a five-year-old.”
    “It’s a game,” I stammer.