Soft Reset — Part 1: Ninety Seconds

My rig lived in a bucket of ice.

Not the whole rig — just the part that mattered, the cooling loop soldered onto the manifold that ran hottest. Kit called it a war crime against small appliances, the one time I showed him. Said I was gonna burn out my brainstem.

But it's how I go home.

I filled the bucket from the tap, dumped in whatever the freezer still had — three ice trays, half a bag of peas older than my last relationship — and packed it around the loop until the status light stopped its worried orange blink and went to cold, patient blue.

An hour. Maybe ninety minutes if I didn't move much. After that, I could keep going, but the ice stopped making it safe.

Anyway, anyway, anyway.

Outside, the city was doing the thing it did a little earlier every year, which was try to kill everyone in it by six p.m. My building's cooling ration had run out at two. Sweat pooled behind my knees just sitting still. Somewhere below me a compressor that had been dying since spring made its long, grinding case for early retirement.

I didn't turn on a fan. A fan just moves the hot air around so it can hit you from a new angle.

I settled into the chair — a curb rescue from two summers back, foam gone soft in exactly the shape of me by now — and found the jack by feel, the way you find a light switch in your childhood house at two in the morning without looking. Port, just behind the left ear. In.

I want to say up front that I know how this looks. A girl icing her own skull to go sit inside a memory. I know it's a sim. I know the restaurant isn't standing anymore, if it ever stood anywhere outside a render farm's private accounting of one Tuesday, four years gone. I know the woman I'm about to have lunch with is not the mother upstairs in this same building, in a completely different sense of the word upstairs.

A soft reset keeps your save.

That's the whole trick of it, and the whole cruelty. Nothing wipes. The day is exactly the day, every time, no edits. It wasn't a recording, not exactly. Vivian had built it with enough rules to keep the day from becoming something else. I'm not rewriting my mother. I'm not lying to myself about why I keep coming back to visit a Tuesday instead of doing something healthier with my hours, like journaling, or telling a single living person how bad it's gotten.

I come back because it's the only place that afternoon still happens.

That isn't the whole truth anymore. Lately I watch Kat, too — not at the curb, never there, but at the sushi counter, in the half-seconds between plates. I tell myself it's because she was happy that day.

The status light ticked from blue to a color the sim didn't have a name for, which was its way of saying hold on, this is about to feel like falling, and it won't be. The apartment hummed its low, tired hum. Somewhere in the walls, Stinky Pete was almost certainly logging my dive time to a file nobody would read until the day it was the only proof of what had happened to me.

The ice bought maybe ninety extra seconds of brain before the trip started costing anything real.

Ninety seconds is nothing. The rig wouldn't throw me out after that. It just stopped pretending the trip was free.

Ninety seconds is also the length of an entire afternoon, if it's the right one.

I went under.