Page 56 of What If It's You?

As you’ve probably guessed, I’ve now met with both versions of you. Your counterpart in World D suggested I find a technical/program-based solution which, if it’s possible, I’m not going to be able to manage on my own. Would love to discuss all this further if you’re available.

Best,

Laurel Everett

With the email sent, there was nothing left to do but, well…work. I couldn’t remember the last time it had felt less vital, all the myriad tasks that made up my job suddenly revealed as so much pencil pushing, the ultimate goal fractions of a percent more profit meant to further fatten an already behemoth beast. I muddled through the morning, hawkeyeing my inbox. The only interesting thing that came in was another nudge from Maren about the job,I knew this was a longshot but even if you’re not applying (SOB) can we schedule a call and catch up? I miss youuuuu

I frowned. When had I become the kind of person who had toschedule a callto catch up with an old friend? In both lives, probably? After all, World O Laurel definitely seemed more spontaneous, not that I had the quality in great quantities. Clearly.

By lunchtime I was firmly in a funk, my carousel of worries revolving endlessly,Will you ever find out how to stay in one life? What’s going on with Ollie and you? Are you not the person you thought you were? How is it you’ve lived this long and can’t even answer that?singsonging on repeat. If I was going to be forced to sit on such an objectively shitty carnival ride, there should at least be funnel cake.

It took me a solid twenty minutes of half-assed small talk over lunch to realize that Drew was clearly just as funkified as I was. The prospect of someone else’s problems perversely felt like a relief.

“So what’s really going on?” I said once we’d both snagged coffee and dessert.

“What do you mean?” he said, eyes darting away, shoulders hunching.

“Did something happen with Nisha? Or your family? Sorry it took me so long to notice, I’m a little in my own head today, but clearlysomethingis off with you.” I pointed at his plate. “I mean, how else can you explain a bowl of dry Froot Loops for dessert when there wasflourless chocolate cake from Flouron offer.”

“Wait…what?” He shot a half-panicked look at the buffet.

“There wasn’t. But you believed me, which means you weren’t even looking.” I sat back and folded my arms, smirking triumphantly. “So? Gonna tell me what’s up?”

Drew smiled weakly.

“Sorry if I’ve been a downer,” he started. God, sometimes I forgot how Midwestern he was, at least in this world.

Drew blew out a huge breath, cheeks puffing.

“It’s just…remember how I said AltR has been bugging lately?”

“Yeah…” I took a sip of coffee, choosing my words carefully. It probably wasn’t the time to let him know how deeply invested I was in whatever was going wrong with his program. “Something about the processing power, right?”

“Right.” He nodded, his expression miserable. “And even though we logged out every active user—or, well, all the ones we can control, at least—it just keeps getting worse. If we can’t figure out what’s wrong within the next couple days, we’re going to have to scrap the entire program and start from scratch.”

“What? Why?” Drew’s head jerked up at my panicked tone, then he frowned. I blinked, recalibrating. “Sorry, I just…know how much time and effort you’ve put into this. And what I saw was incredible!”

“That’s nice of you to say. But an experimental division program that still doesn’t have any user-facing applications and that’s starting to pull processing power from Pixel’s primary servers isn’t really a winning bet, it turns out.” Drew gave me an exhausted half-smile.

“Ooof. When did that start?”

“Last night.” He closed his eyes for a second, rubbing his temples slowly. “For now it’s not impacting the network in any meaningful way, but it shouldn’t even behappening,so…yeah. Can’t really blame them for wanting to keep their entire business afloat.” He sniffed out a single bitter laugh, then sighed, meeting my eyes. “Honestly, though, it wouldn’t be the worst thing. When we built it out the first time we were just guessing. I’m sure we’d be able to improve on a lot of stuff if we started now. But…” He flashed a pained look at the rim of his mug.

“It would be a metric fuckton of work?” I supplied.

“Exactly.” He laughed bitterly. “I know I should be happy that they’re not just shutting us down entirely, but functionally…we’llbe at square one. And I don’t even know what I’m looking for, so the chances that I find the bug…” He shook his head, morose.

“You said the processing power is basically maxed out,” I said slowly, rotating my mug back and forth between my hands.

“Yup. Our current best guess is that the AI isn’t performing as expected for some reason. Which is…problematic.”

“Is it possible…there’s a sequence running in the background that you’re not seeing?” I glanced up to find Drew frowning at me, mouth slightly open.

“I guess? It happened once, really early on. But that was a really specific case.”

“Specific how?”

“We had everyone input an inflection point that happened here, like at the Pixel offices, so we could limit the variables and fact-check how well the AI was building out a physical environment. Luke and JaeHo picked the same moment, just randomly. Who they sat next to the first day at lunch. They’re super tight ever since theydidpick each other, and they work on the same team, obviously, so I guess they kinda…mind-melded on it?” Drew shrugged. “The program couldn’t figure out when the sequence was supposed to end, since it was trying to rework the same moment for both of them. I could dive into all the technical stuff going on, but suffice it to say that we don’t have the processing power to handle multiple users trying to visit the same moment. At least not until the AI iswaymore robust.”

---