Gallery View

I went dark for a week.

Not on purpose. Or on purpose, depending on how you defined purpose. The deliveries piled up because the heat had spiked again and nobody wanted to leave their cube, and I told myself that was the reason. The moped needed a new starter solenoid. The lobby vending machine needed a service call I was apparently the only person in the building qualified to make.

The cooling pack started whining at idle and I spent three hours under the awning at the depot trying to coax it into not whining at idle, and then I gave up and let it whine.

I did not log into the Zoo.

I told myself I was busy. I was poor and I was busy. I was kicking myself.

The math kept running. I had spent two weeks building an impossible-room sim for a competition that came with the prize of a private critique from CancerCancer, the best sim creator on the planet, an actual stranger I had loved at a distance for years — and instead of submitting it I had rebuilt the inside of an arcade cabinet so that one person could walk through it for forty minutes and tell me I layered cyan over crimson. One person. The deadline had come and gone while I was scattering postcards through a bar.

I traded the critique of a lifetime for forty minutes of one shark walking through my weird little room and understanding it.

The terrible part was that I would do it again.

Why did you spend that much time on a sim for one person.

The harness, gentle for once: Because she was the one person.

She doesn't even know I exist outside the lobby.

She knows you exist in the rafters.

That's not the same thing.

You're polishing, the harness said. Which was Vivian's word, and I hated that the harness had clocked it.

I ran the noodle rounds. I ran the curry rounds. I ran a special pickup for an old guy in a tower I'd never been in before, who tipped four creds and asked if I was the one who'd painted that thing on the lobby vending machine downstairs, and I said no, because I had not painted anything on a vending machine, and he frowned and said huh.

I went home. I did not log in. The cheese wheel watched me. The Stinky Pete render kept showing him a man eating noodles and doing pushups, because the harness had stopped asking my permission three days ago and was now just running cover on autopilot, which I was both grateful for and a little spooked by.

Vivian texted me twice. Mouse. And then, an hour later: Mouse, come up.

I came up.

The Zoo was the wrong color.

That was the first thing I noticed. The light in the bar was warmer. The walls were not the walls. The walls were covered.

The walls were covered in me.

My pieces. Digitized, scaled up, ten stories tall, hung edge to edge. The shark portrait of Jamie that I had not even meant to show anyone. The vending-machine study from a year ago I'd half-deleted twice. The koi I'd painted on a slow Tuesday after a delivery to a customer who left their door open and let me see their fish tank for forty seconds. The cathedral-of-snacks sketch from the CancerCancer sim, the one I had not submitted, on the wall behind the bar like an altarpiece.

They had touched everything.

That was the first thought, and I hated myself for it before it finished forming. They had touched everything, and they had done it with love, which made it worse, because anger needed a villain and all I had was a room full of people trying not to scare me. I stood in the doorway. I could not move. I could not leave. There was no shape my body could make that the room would not interpret as a reaction, and no reaction I had felt yet that I wanted the room to see.

"Mouse."

Vivian. Low-poly fox at the corner of the bar, cane planted, smiling in my direction without looking at me, which was her thing.

I did not move.

"Come in, mouse."

I came in.

Now I could see what they had actually done. Avatars wore little museum badges. Lanyards. DOCENT, in one case, which was a joke I did not catch until later. Somebody had put out a folding table with bottles of virtual wine on it, the kind that did nothing to your blood alcohol but somehow always tasted right. A wheel of stilton sat at one end, blue-veined and rude-smelling, the kind nobody serves at a public event. Patrons drifted from piece to piece with their hands behind their backs the way people do in galleries.

Each one had added something.

A shark doodle pinned next to the shark portrait, drawn at maybe a third-grade level, signed Jamie. A neon koi swimming inside a little glass bottle on a side table — somebody had built that, a whole little aquarium, just to put next to my koi. A CancerCancer fan poster on the back wall, framed, signed by what looked like six different people. A tiny chalk arrow on the rafters above the door — mine — that somebody had touched up because the chalk had been smudging.

Somebody had built a wall for my walls.

I had spent two years watching them watch each other. I had never once thought they were watching me.

The anger I had been afraid of did not arrive. What arrived instead was harder.

Jack rose from a barstool with a glass of rosé in his hand. He was in his rabbit form, ears up, military posture turned down by exactly the right number of degrees. He raised the glass toward the room.

"To mice and men?" he said.

"No," I said, before I could stop myself. "Hated that book."

A laugh went around the bar. The good kind. The kind that meant they had been waiting for me to be the one to say it.

Jack tipped his head, grinning. "Fair enough. New toast, then."

Across the room, Gemini lifted her glass. Human avatar, expensive, the same one she always wore. She had not added a piece to the walls — I checked, because of course I checked. She was the one person in the room who had walked through the entire show without putting her own mark on it. She had a small, considering look on her face that I recognized from the bar nights when she would beat the crossword in eleven minutes and then pretend to still be working on it so the rest of us could keep up. The look of somebody who was clocking the technique.

"To secret doors," she said, "and the mice who open them."

The bar drank.

Vivian's cane tocked once against the floor — the tock she used when she wanted the room to know a shift was happening. The shift was me. The shift was that I was crying, soundlessly, in a body that did not technically have tear ducts, which the Zoo was rendering anyway because the Zoo was kind that way and Vivian had probably tuned a parameter.

She put her paw on my shoulder. Did not say anything. Did not need to.

The crowd scattered slowly. People do not leave a gallery all at once; they leave the way snow melts, here a patch and then a patch. Jack drifted to a corner with two other patrons and started telling a story about an arcade cabinet he had owned in 2031. Gemini stayed at the wall with the cathedral-of-snacks piece for a long, long time, head tilted, lips moving in a way that looked like she was reading something only she could see. Vivian closed the bar at her usual cadence.

Nate was not in the room. I noticed only because I had been looking for him. He never came to other people's openings.

I walked the room.

I had not built any of it. I had built the things that were in it, but the room itself — the docent badges, the wine table, the way the koi piece had been positioned three inches above eye-level so a mouse-scale viewer could see it without craning — somebody else had done that. A lot of somebodies. The crew, maybe, prompted by Vivian. Definitely Jamie.

Definitely Jamie.

She came in late, fins-first, slightly out of breath, like she had been running and didn't want anyone to think she had been. She had a bottle of virtual wine in one hand and paint on her knuckles from somebody's still-wet contribution.

She looked at me across the room. She lifted the bottle.

"Told you I'd help," Jamie said.

I could not move. The shark grinned. She did not come to me right away — she walked the gallery first, slowly, hand brushing a frame here, a wall there, looking at the room she had built around my walls before she looked at me again. When she got to where I was standing, she was smiling the smile I had spent two weeks failing to paint, the original of which made the copy look like cardboard.

"There's something for you near the koi," she said. "Won't ruin it. Go look."

I went. There was a tiny flowerpot, painted onto a postcard-sized canvas with a clumsy hand to look like a mousehole. There was a green door, red trim, the kind of detail somebody adds when they have no idea what they are doing but they care a lot. Pinned to the side of the pot, where you would only see it if you knelt: a postcard. Hand-drawn. Lines shaky, the way lines are shaky when somebody is using a stylus for the first time and is afraid to commit. A mouse in a hoodie. Whiskers a little uneven. One ear bent.

The smile.

The smile was perfect.

On the back, in careful all-caps: 1 OF 8. — J.

I held it for a long time. When I stood up, she was waiting. The smile said the rest.

We went to the studio.

I pinned the postcard on the easel, next to the shark portrait — my best canvas, the one I had told myself I was not going to show anyone, the one she had asked the question about cyan and crimson. I stood back. She stood beside me. We looked at the two of them side by side.

A small shaky mouse next to a free-swimming shark.

A door unlocked.

We left it that way.