Note: I’m gonna need major help on this one from Sophie, for obvious reasons.
Ai tries to seem like she isn’t so much following Aya as she is simply walking behind her. She can’t give herself away now, not when she’s so close to escape. Her heart pounds in her chest so hard she’s worried everyone will know, but if anyone else can hear her blood rushing through her ears, they don’t react.
(Just get sent home. Put this all behind you. Maybe I won’t even remember, it’ll just be like a nightmare, when you don’t even remember the details, and I’ll be free.)
They get into an elevator, and Aya waits. After a moment of perplexed silence, she gestures to the badge scanner.
“Eh–Bala,” she says, looking between Bala and the buttons, “I don’t have authorization to get down there, it has to be your badge.”
“Right,” Ai replied, nodding and reaching out to swipe her badge. “Of course, I apologize. I’m just lost in thought.”
Aya frowns a little deeper. “You’ve had a day, haven’t you?”
Ai returns the gesture, slightly perturbed confusion. “What do you mean?”
“You suddenly care about Ai, and now you’re apologizing. You’re not normally this sentimental.”
Shrugging, Ai says, “Just thinking about why we’re doing this.”
The elevator doors open, right into the deep, buried lab. Ai steps in, looking around–the walls in front are painted white, but the ones behind her, the ones she hadn’t seen in the security video, are bare drywall. They weren’t meant to be seen.
“Get it set up,” she says. “Be fast.”
“Alright,” Aya says, gesturing to the side, to a thin door. “Go ahead and get changed.”
Ai frowns. “Changed?”
Aya blinks a couple times, baffled. “We’re not sending you to another mind, are we? Ai has to be in the driver’s seat if we want her to go back.”
“I misunderstood,” Ai says, before correcting herself, projecting more Bala-like condescension “Be more specific next time. I’ll be quick.”
Entering the small room, she takes stock of the supplies–it’s got diapers and a changing table. It’s made for this purpose, after all.
Of course, Ai has to be careful–she can’t take off her pee-soaked panties. She shucks out of her pants and lays down, but leaves her wet panties on, feeling ridiculous as she unfolds a diaper from the stack. Unfolding it, she feels ridiculous, but there’s no escaping what she has to do.
Lifting her damp panties off the table, she slides the diaper beneath her hips, adjusting it a little to get it straight. She’s uncertain why she knows how to do this, or what experience in her previous life had taught her to self-change her diapers, but she can’t question that right now. Folding the diaper between her thighs, she pulls it snugly over her wet panties, squishing the sodden pad against her crotch as she presses the sticky tapes down.
She almost puts the pants back on, but what would be the point? The diaper needs to be on display.
“Ready?” She asks Aya as she steps back in.
Aya nods, gesturing to the far controls. “Just needs your authorization and the dimensional code.”
(My–fuck.)
Ai hadn’t even considered that she’d need to do the work here, that she’d have to help with the set up. Walking to the display, she hesitates. A menu flashes at her, asking for dimensional coordinates. It wants four digits–if she guesses at random, she won’t have a prayer of getting it right.
Frozen, staring, Ai tries to think back to Bala’s meticulous notes. Had she written the code down anywhere? Would Ai’s memory be reliable even if she had?
She knows then she can’t get home, but she has to try.
(Hell, anywhere has to be better than here. Even if my mind gets scattered to a new dimension, at least it’ll be free of this place.)
Holding her breath, picking numbers at random, she enters a code, choosing an arbitrary number, a throwaway pick that has no meaning to her.
1508.
“Should we restrain you?” Aya asks, as Ai lies down on the mat, ready to slide into the machine, ready to go…somewhere.
“Just tell Ai that she’s going home,” Ai replies, heart pounding, fingers shaking with anxiety. “I know how she thinks. She’ll obey.”
Aya nods. “Okay.”
She’s waiting on Ai, waiting for “Bala” to wet herself. Ai closes her eyes, concentrates–she doesn’t need to pee, she already went just half an hour ago, but Aya doesn’t know that.
(If it’s just a trickle, it won’t even be visible, right?)
After a moment, she gasps and her eyes shoot open. It’s her best act, a performance to make it seem like she just arrived. Looking around, she blurts, “Where am I?”
Aya smiles warmly. “Just lie down, Ai. You’re going home.”
Ai doesn’t want to be too obvious. She pretends to think for a moment, to calm down, though she’s anything but calm. Hoping it won’t give her away, she watches Ai, searching for a spark of recognition as she places the part. “Oh–okay. Okay, I’m going home. That’s good.”
Aya watches her back, and the two of them share a long searching look. Ai’s heart tightens in her chest, but Aya doesn’t make any accusations. Reaching out, she pats Ai on the shoulder.
“Just lie down, and this will all be over soon.”
Ai lies down.
Aya pulls the lever.
Ai slides into the machine, and white light flash in her eyes.
…
Ai didn’t know where she was, but at least she could remember. The machine, the jump, her promise to herself that anywhere would be better than nowhere, it all stuck with her.
Turning, she took in her surroundings. She was in the middle of a living room, with a couch and a television. Behind her, there was a kitchen with a kitchen island. Everything had a modern aesthetic with the exception of the far wall, where a mural of a huge blue wave had been painted. The sound of water crashing against sand in a constant rhythm steadied her anxiety. This world, it seemed more like the one she knew. More realized, more comforting, more of a world and less of a place invented solely to torture her.
Looking at her arms, she saw she was in a new body. Not her own. Her skin was tan, and the ground looked a little further away, like someone had panned the camera. And–to her chagrin–she’d once again appeared in a wet diaper.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Even now, she couldn’t escape the humiliation Bala had inflicted on her.
She didn’t exactly want to snoop, but she wanted to catch herself up as quick as she could, so she began to explore. On the coffee table in front of the couch, she saw a laptop. She could see the icon of a web browser. Good, they have internet here. Perfect.
Walking over to the desk, she sat.
Ai wanted to go to Google, or whatever equivalent search engine they had in this world. She could look up the year, what country she was in, see if she could find information about support for…
What will I pretend to be? A lost immigrant? An amnesiac?
Whatever she might have done, she didn’t have an opportunity, because her attention was stolen by a word document open on the computer.
“Academy J, by Mia Moore.”
Though she had told herself not to snoop, she saw the first couple paragraphs in her peripheral vision, and after that, she couldn’t look away.
I blew on my coffee, trying to cool it down to a temperature where I could chug it. I’d already pushed deadlines back more times than I was comfortable, I had to get this anthology finished, but the stories weren’t playing nice.
Maybe I could talk to Blossom about it, but I wanted to surprise her. If the characters kept taking on lives of their own, though, refusing to go where I wanted them to, I didn’t know if I could get this done in time.
I’d stopped at a cliffhanger, but I needed to get back to it. Get this story done, then finish the others. It’d already lost everything kinky, and I was unsure of where to take it from here, but it needed to get done, and I didn’t want the stress of deadlines to take the fun from the story.
Walking in, I saw Blossom at my computer, reading–
“Hey, I said I wanted it to be a surprise. I thought you just wanted to have some diaper time while I wrote?”
She spun, eyes widening. “Who the fuck are you?”
"What? Blossom, what's wrong?" I wouldn't say I was the most perceptive person in the world, but Blossom had never spoken to me like that before. Even when she was terse, she was level headed, with a point to make. Had I done something wrong? Was it the story? "Weren't you going to change or something?"
Tears were in her eyes, and she looked ready to scream, or like she might be having a panic attack. “You–this is–how do you know what’s in my head?”
“Blossom–”
“Don’t call me that!”
My heart was racing, but it would come in second place to my brain. What had I done? How could I fix it? I hadn’t done anything to make her mad, had I? The only thing that changed was that Blossom was that she’d read the latest Academy Works. “Is…is it something in the story?”
That set her off.
“You–” Tears streamed down her face now, unbidden. “You know everything I think. You know everything I do, even though you can’t, even though it didn’t even happen in this universe–tell me how.”
Not even my self-cynicism could keep up with Blossom. I groped around in my mind for anything I could have done wrong, hoping I'd find something, literally anything. It was so much better than the building confusion. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She stands up, gesturing furiously at the computer. “Here. This.” She points at the computer, reading aloud, reading each word as though it were a judicially ordered death sentence:
>>>Ai blinks, but the panic doesn’t set in until several seconds pass.
>>>(Where am I?)
>>>Sometimes, in the past, she’d woken up in an unfamiliar place. It always disoriented her, struggling in a foreign environment
“It’s the story I’ve been working on, for the anthology, but you know that.”
I shook my head, trying my best to comprehend the insanity that had consumed everything I know. Distantly, I was aware that I probably sounded as unhinged as the situation felt. “It’s not a story, it’s my life.”
“What? You’re not making sense.” Was this a joke? If it was, it was pretty messed up, even for Blossom. Had I stumbled into a scene or something? I was ready to grab onto literally any answer.
“I got into that machine, and I was desperate to get anywhere else: away from that place, that–that Academy, I guess, and I got here and…what are you? The architect? Are you reading my mind and just writing down everything that happens?”
“Blossom–”
“My name isn’t Blossom. It’s Ai.”
I stared at her, uncomprehending. It didn’t make sense. How could she be Ai? I’d known her all this time, and…
I got a sinking feeling of fear, and of comprehension. The last thing I’d written, Ai had left her universe, come to another.
It couldn’t be real, could it?
Surely–
“I just make it all up,” I explained, trying to convince myself as much as her. “Nothing I write is real. It’s just a story.”
“You–the ‘story’ you wrote, you tortured me. You humiliated me. Why?”
“Because it’s just a fantasy, just a story. Ai isn’t real!”
“I’m standing right here.”
“If…”
I felt insane. Playing along with the delusion, or engaging with the idea that this might all be true, but I don’t know how else to move this conversation forward. “If you’re really Ai, prove it.”
“How? You know everything I’ve ever thought.”
“Take off the diaper.”
She stares for a long moment, confused, then her eyes widen. “You want me to go away.”
“I’ll bring you back, I just…I need Blossom to tell me if it’s all real.”
“I don’t trust you. You hurt me.”
“Okay, but…what else can we do?”
Her eyes were red and tears streaked her face. The confusion and fury of the situation, trying to comprehend what was going on after…well, after she’d escaped from Academy J, probably, it’d all bled through her emotions. Finally, though, her shoulders slumped in defeat.
“Promise.”
“I promise.” Of course I did, what else would I say?
It seemed to be good enough for her. Keeping her gaze on mine, she reached down and popped the tapes off her diaper.
…
“Don’t worry, just breathe.”
She looked at me, and I could see the point where Blossom left and Ai appeared. It transitioned subtly, but I knew Blossom’s face too well not to notice her expression shifting. Besides that, I’d left myself another clue. “So you believe me?”
“I do.” I swallowed. Believing her meant too many things about my world, it brought out too many existential fears, but I couldn’t disregard evidence when it was staring me in the face.
“What did this Blossom person say that convinced you?” Ai asked, interrupting my train of thought.
“It’s not what she said, but…she had an idea,” I explained, turning around. “Since what I’d written apparently actually happened, sort of, in another universe…”
Turning around, I pointed at my computer screen, emphasizing the new lines I’d written.
>>>While Ai leaves, Aya gets an idea. Pressing a few buttons on the screen, she sends an additional bit of information through–she can change things, more than just copying minds. She changes the color of Ai’s eyes to pink, but only when she’s in control.
Ai read the line, then turned, looking at herself in the window reflection. Her eyes were bright pink.
“So what are you?” she asked, turning to look at me. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I’m just a writer, I make stories for the internet, but…if you’re here…” Existentialism rose in me again. If Ai was a fictional character, and she was here, did that mean all fictional characters were real? Or did it just mean that I’d been creating universes when I wrote alone?
Or did it mean that I was just like her? A character?
She frowns, an idea forming in her head. “If you can make things happen by writing, though…can we just ask the story to explain everything?”
My eyes widened. Of course–of course. “You think so? I mean–sure, it worked once, but–” Turning to my laptop, I readied my fingers to type. “So…what do I say, anyways?”
“Make Aya send a book, I guess. One that answers all of our questions.”
Simple. And–if it worked, that’d mean I’d be able to do more. My excitement started to build, and I typed quickly, frantically. The prose was awful, it was contrived and as thoughtless as the most low-effort fanfictions, but I didn’t care about the quality.
>>>Aya has another idea, and sends through a magical book that can answer any question, ensuring that Ai won’t be confused anymore.
“That’s it.” I hit enter, and a moment later, the book appeared on my desk. Flipping to the first page–
(Hold on. No. This is wrong. What the hell was I thinking? Let’s figure this out.)
…
Ai blinked awake. She’d become disturbingly used to the experience of finding herself in a new place, a new world, and she took in her surroundings with speed.
It didn’t take long, because she had no surroundings. The world wasn’t. She’d appeared in a complete void.
Behind her was the only thing of substance–another person. Average height, slim build, he wore a onesie with a full, drooping diaper beneath, but seemed to barely notice.
His ears had the slightest tapering point to them.
“Who are you?” Ai asked, because what else was there to ask?
“That’s complicated,” he replied. “I’m…not sure how I want to handle this, honestly.”
Ai was too smart not to make a deduction, an intuitive guess. “Are you another writer, like Mia?”
He laughed. “Dammit, this is the problem–If you weren’t so damned clever, things might’ve gone differently, but I couldn’t make you any other way. I can’t write idiots.”
She faced him, stunned. Here he was, talking about how he’d made her, with a tone no more complex than if he’d talked about making a bowl of cereal. “You created me?”
“No.” A thin smile curled his lips. “You’re on loan. Mia, too, though I didn’t ask for permission there, I just borrowed her because I didn’t know what else to do. I did try to follow in your creators’ footsteps, in their style–with a couple exceptions, I had to get a little pedantic revenge out where I could–but…I don’t know. They can be mean, really mean, but I don’t know if they’re worse than me.”
“If you’re…I don’t know what you are, but if you’re so powerful…can you send me home?” Her eyes were wide, pleading.
He looked back with a cool, calm stare. “Your creators and I were questioned, once, together: ‘Do you ever feel bad about what you do to your characters?’. They both said yes, instantly, without question. Of course they did, of course they had empathy for the suffering they inflicted.”
The statement hung in the air, and Ai couldn’t help but ask the obvious followup. “And you?”
“I said no.”
Ai swallowed and took a step back. In the void, that didn’t mean much, she had nowhere to go. “So why talk to me?”
“It’s like I said, I don’t know what to do with you,” he replied with a shrug. “There’s no good outcome, not that I can see.”
“Send me home then. At least give me that.” Her chest stuck out a bit, posturing confidence. She had the courage to stick up to anyone, at least right now.
“You don’t have a home, Ai. I never wrote it.” He shook his head. “And if I made you a place, gave you a happy ending where you can put all this behind you, what story would that be? It’d be an anticlimax. Worse than a cliffhanger, it’d be…well, it’d be lame. I had an idea, that you could end up in charge with Aya’s help, that she would tie down Bala and make her wet herself after every diaper change…it was too complicated to get to that ending, and didn’t feel in character. None of it worked.”
“I don’t care.”
“I do.” He shook his head, frowning a little. “And I wrote you clever. I wrote you smart, and stubborn, and as real as I could, but that means I can’t hurt you how I want. You’re too good for that, you ruined it, and I couldn’t make you compliant without breaking your character.”
A moment of silence passed.
He studied her, thoughtful and curious. “Do you want to know why it doesn’t bother me, when I hurt you?”
It was a hypothetical question. She answered regardless. “Yes.”
“Because you’re not real. You’re a character, a puppet for me to play with. I make you dance, I make you cry, I make you beg, and then I, and my audience–your audience, really–we get to remember what happened to you. You’re just a vessel for surrogate experiences, for our fun.”
She fell quiet for a long moment. “Like Bala.”
He shrugged. “I thought it was clever at the time. It’s not the same as reality, of course–it has to be intense, so intense that it’d be torture in real life, or else it’s too mild. I’d never want to be tied and bound and have my mind destroyed, but I want to remember it. My audience wants to remember it too, and they want the ending to stick with them.”
“So…” she started, thinking about it for a long moment. “I’m fucked, then.”
“No. I went too far, I got too weird with it, I tried too many new things. The story’s kind of off the rails, and…well, shit. When it was my turn with the playroom, I really trashed the place, didn’t I? Anyone who comes after me’s not going to be able to do anything with it.” He looks around. “I didn’t bother deciding what this space should look like, either. Too much work for no real benefit.”
She stared at him, eyes watering a little. To have her reality stripped apart, to be told in no uncertain terms that her life was not her own, and that her fate would be decided by an uncaring being who enjoyed her pain, it broke her just a little.
“I could stop the story here,” he admits. “Just give up. Walk away, and don’t come back.”
“I’d just…be here?” she asked, looking around. “Alone”
“No. You’d be…nothing.”
“Nothing.”
“You’ve been there before. I gave you a different name, different trials, but it was you even then. And, when I got lost, you went away. If I put you down now, if I stop here, you’ll go back there.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“You wouldn’t. It’s not forgetting, though, it’s nonexistence.”
Her posture slumped.
Defeated, and yet…she had a little fire left in her. “So, don’t end the story, and don’t hurt me.”
“I don’t know how to do that.” He shook his head. “No story is better than a bad story. I can’t break character, I can’t undermine the world I made, and I can’t give you a happy ending.”
“Then figure it out, asshole. You made me, or, well–someone else made me, but you say you’re the one making this happen, so you have to end it. If you try to give me a bad ending, if you keep hurting me, it’ll be like you said. I’ll ruin it. So you can’t break me, and you can’t change me without disappointing your ‘audience’–well, fuck your audience.”
He gave her a warning look. “Careful. I like my audience. I love them, even. I want them to like this, because I care about them. I care about your creators, too, I…” Laughing, he added, “I wanted to impress them. That’s why I tried to do everything. But I started with the sex and the torture and the smut layed down thick, and then I got weird and experimental, and it’s been, what, ten thousand words now since anyone’s had a smutty thought?”
“Please.” Her eyes were huge. “I just want to be able to…be.”
“I know. If you didn’t want to stay an adult, to stay in charge of your mind, you wouldn’t make for a good protagonist, it’s just…I’ve got other people I need to worry about, and I’ve gone and made you so sympathetic that I can’t even hurt you properly.”
She took a deep breath. Her resolve didn’t break, and he wished he could have the tenacity he’d given her. “Okay. Tell it to me. All of it. Everything you wanted to do. Maybe I’ll think of something you hadn’t.”
He laughed at her. “That’s not how this works. You can only be smarter than me by being faster, by coming up with clever ideas quickly, you can’t think of things I don’t know.”
“Do it anyway. Prove yourself right.”
Though he didn’t know exactly what this would result in, he followed through with the idea anyway, just to fill another half page. “Well…fine. I never figured exactly how to line up with the world of the Academy, but the short version is, Bala wants to be free, to be cared for, to be…a baby, sort of. She doesn’t want autonomy, but she has to have it, because–” He shrugged. “Because it’s a bad story if she can just make the kind of universe she wants to live in. There needs to be conflict, get it?”
“Okay. So…you make her what she wants.”
“How so? I didn’t set it up at all, there’s no foreshadowing, nothing.”
“I don’t know, that’s your job.”
“And your job is to be the victim. To have a bit of hope, to have a chance at escape, but to ultimately be the surrogate for our fantasies. Bala can steal your mind, she can make you the victim, because it’s hot when you can’t say ‘no’.”
“You know, this is going to look pretty fucking pretentious if you don’t have a good ending, not after all this.”
“Unless I just don’t publish you anywhere.”
“I don’t think you’re going to keep this buried.”
“You’re right.”
She shrugged. “Okay. So if you need it to be hot, why not just…make it work differently?”
“Change the rules in the middle of the story? That’s not up to my standards.”
“Don’t change the rules. Write a better story.”
He knew where she was going with this–of course he did–but he still frowned. “I’ve never been criticized by my own character before.”
“Can you do that, though?” she asked, eyes sparkling with hope. “Try again? Give me an ending where I’m happy?”
“Huh,” he said, tilting his head a bit. “You know, I…I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
Hope dashed, her jaw drops open. “Why?”
“Frankly? I’m busy. I’ve got more projects on my plate, and this one is already overdue. I can’t just start over from scratch.”
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
“It’s okay. I’m not going to leave you like this. I’m not the only one borrowing characters out here, and, well…maybe someone can do a better job than me.”
“So you’re just going to pass the buck?”
“Yup. Don’t worry, it’s…” his face sours slightly. “Okay, maybe you should be worried, a little, but you won’t remember any of this. Mia’s going to forget, too. I’ll just have to be sloppy, there, to write in a retcon, because otherwise your creators will have a fuck of a time trying to write after this.”
“Promise me there’s hope,” Ai looked him in the eye, pleading.
“I promise. I don’t know what she’s planning, but I know she does happy endings sometimes.”
Ai nods. “Promise me one more thing. Don’t forget me.”
“If I did my job right, nobody will.”