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

“It’s supposed to be good for people with your…It’s fun. You’ll like it.”
    “What the fucking fuck?”
    She throws it across the room. Lucidity is often accompanied by hostility, which is the kind of trade-off you start to accept at a certain point. I go and fetch it without a word. Luckily, the cat head was designed to be very durable.
    “I thought we could do it together.” I play the guilt card back at her. “I thought maybe this could be something we could actually share. You and me. Together. You know? Like a real couple.”
    “Okay, fine.” She takes the cat head from me and squints at Queen Arabella’s questions about the trade crisis with the neighboring duchy of meerkats. Queen Arabella asks what she should do, and Shary painstakingly types out, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself.” But she erases it without hitting send, and then instead picks SEND AN EMISSARY from among the options already on the screen. Soon, Shary is sending trade representatives and labor negotiators to the four corners of Greater Felinia, and beyond.
    2.
    After a few days, Shary stops complaining about how stupid
Divine Right of Cats
is and starts spending every moment poking at the plastic cat’s face in her lap. I get her the optional add-on mask, which is (not surprisingly) the upper three-quarters of a cat face, and plug it in for her, then show her how to insert the nose plugs and earbuds.
    Within a week after she first starts playing, Shary’s realm is already starting to crawl up the list of the one thousand most successful kingdoms—that is, she’s already doing a better job of helping to run the realm of Felinia than the vast majority of people who are playing this game anywhere, according to god knows what metrics.
    But more than that, Shary is forming
relationships
with these cats in their puffy-sleeve court outfits and lacy ruffs. In the real world, she can’t remember where she lives, what year it is, who the President is, or how long she and I have been married. But she sits in her blue chair and mutters at the screen, “No you don’t, Lord Hairballington. You try that shit, I will cut your fucking tail off.”
    She probably doesn’t remember from day to day what’s happened in the game, but that’s why she’s the adviser rather than the monarch—she just has to react, and the game remembers everything for her. Yet she fixates on weird details, and I’ve started hearing her talking in her sleep, in the middle of the night, about those fucking copper miners and how they better not try any shit because
anybody
can be replaced.
    One morning, I wake up and cold is leaking into the bed from where Shary pulled the covers back without bothering to tuck me back in. I walk out into the front room and don’t see her at first, and worry she’s just wandered off into the street by herself, which has been my nightmare for months now and the reason I got her RFID’d. But no, she’s in the kitchen, shoving a toaster waffle in her mouth in between poking the cat face and cursing at Count Meesh, whom I named after the friend who introduced Shary and me in the first place. Apparently Count Meesh—a big fluffy Siberian cat—is hatching some schemes and needs to be taught a lesson.
    After that, I start getting used to waking up alone. And going to bed alone. As long as Shary sleeps at least six hours a night—which she does—I figure it’s probably okay. Her neurologist, Dr. Takamori, was the one who recommended the game in the first place, and she tells me it’s healthy for Shary to be focused on something.
    I should be happy this has
worked
as well as it has. Shary has that look on her face—what I can see of her face, under the cat mask—that I used to love seeing when she was writing her diss. The lip-chewing, the half smile, when she was outsmarting the best minds in Melville studies. So what if Shary’s main relationship is with these digital cats, instead of me? She’s relating to
something
;