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Ronan cries foul. He doesn’t care about the rules. He doesn’t care if this
is a separate issue entirely. When he first exited the Nordome Network to
deal with this Talus problem, he looked Mayumi up. They have a protocol for
this. She has a contact card. He should have been able to get a hold of her.
He’s been too wrapped up in the trial that he hasn’t worked too terribly
hard, and he certainly didn’t file a restraining order, but if she had
entered another simulation, she should have left a message for him. That was
what they agreed upon, and she knew that. She obviously didn’t die
permanently, or something, or she wouldn’t be here now. He demands that she
tell him where she’s been, and why she didn’t make sure to leave a trail for
him.
“I wanted out,” Mayumi explained. “I never wanted the Norse experience as
much as you did, and honestly, I was sick of us.”
“You could have just talked to me,” Ronan reasons.
“I couldn’t. I tried. Not in so many words, but I did try to work on us, and
you just kept pretending that everything was fine. That just made it worse.”
“So, what, you killed yourself? Or did you just capitalize on the
opportunity.”
“I installed a suicide inducer,” Mayumi explains. “I just jumped to a new
body.”
“That’s enough,” the court agent says. “We’ll let the adjudicator decide
what happens here. She’ll know if any of this is relevant, or if they need
to change anything.”
They spoke with the adjudicator. As it turned out, Mayumi was indeed rather
difficult to find, even for Castlebourne. Smartdust only gets you so far,
and it’s possible to hide out in certain dark corners, if only for a little
while. The judge is very interested in understanding what Mayumi did, and
only grows more interested when Mayumi is rather evasive about it. She
abandoned her child, which the adjudicator sort of knew already, but what
she didn’t know was that Ronan was not cognizant of her whereabouts, or her
apparent attempt to hide. “Where were you?” she pressed.
“I was home,” Mayumi finally clarifies. “I was in my new home. We were in
the outer lands, in a small dome which my new husband built for us.” This
planet is inhospitable, except in the domes, and the outer lands refers to
any space outside of those. You can’t just go and build your own dome,
though. When the adjudicator points that out, Mayumi continues to evade,
until she finally lets slip, “Talus has experience working with diamond.
It’s really not that hard, as long as you find a place. We’re not the only
ones.”
The adjudicator is shocked by this. The trial will have to be placed on hold
while they run this new investigation.
Ronan doesn’t care about that. This is personal. If the simulation that
Ronan is trying to get back to were real, he would have the right to kill
the lover, and divorce and disgrace his wife. Is that why she lied, because
he’s so fixated on the culture that she thought he would exact revenge? He’s
more enlightened than that. He went under the dome for the experience, not
because he genuinely wishes he had been born a thousand years ago. There are
some lines that he won’t cross, game or no—backup substrates or no. He also
straight up doesn’t feel the same way about infidelity as his character
might. He doesn’t want to be with anyone who doesn’t want to be with him.
All she had to do was be honest, about the whole damn thing. What an idiot.
What an absolute incomparable moron. How did he ever see anything in her,
and why did he waste so much time keeping them together?
He takes a deep breath, and focuses on Gia, as well as his real family. Vith
and Isavet need him, so he needs to leave. But wait. If she’s been with
Talus the whole time...who has he been raising for the better part of a
decade?
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