All Dolled Up!

Charlie

"Don't worry, I'm sure you'll find someone else to..." I then paused as I went through the game controls. "Hey- there's a way you can find other people who'd want to talk to you about something that you’d be interested in."

There was a way to put in short text messages to appear over your head, and as I walked Charlotte through it, she was able to make 'I Would Like To Talk About Sherlock Holmes' appear over her character's head for about a minute or so.

This did attract someone, they were dressed up in a wizard outfit of all things. "Yeah, I love Sherlock Holmes. What'd you think of the ending of season four?"

HIs voice was far higher-pitched than I had expected. Were there children on this server? I wasn't even sure about that - there were 18+ servers you could go on, though for obvious reasons I hadn't chosen one of those for this session. I had assumed though that parents wouldn't be allowing kids on the servers, and while this person sounded like they were at least a teen, that was far younger than I had been expecting.

"Season? I'm sorry, what is that?" Charlotte asked.

"You know, the series on BBC," the other person said.

"Oh, he's talking about a television show, which we haven't seen," I explained.

"Jason! Can you come down here!" a voice called out from his after, though it sounded distant and far away and a woman's.

"Not now, Mom, give me a moment-"

Yeah, he was definitely a kid, and neither of us wanted to hear the family drama going on in the background as he did not mute his microphone while he was having an argument with his mother.

Still, we could give things one more try. Yet another catgirl wandered up to us and said, "Hello, my name is Stephanie."

Charlotte eagerly responded nearly immediately, but the thing was that there was something very... off with her voice. "Hi! I'm Charlotte! How are you doing?"

"I'm fine, isn't this game great?"

Once she spoke again, I realized what it was that had been annoying me. The cadence and tone.... "Charlotte, she's an AI."

"A what?"

"Artificial Intelligence," I said. At least, her voice seemed to be AI generated. "Hey, can you say the word 'potato?'"

"This game is pretty fun!" came the response. “What’s your favorite thing to do in it?” Yeah, that confirmed it.

At that point, I had given up, and we logged off.

"I'm sorry about that," I told Charlotte. "I had expected a bit of a different experience."

"It's not an issue," Charlotte said. "I never even thought a thing like this would be possible in the future. Say, I was curious about something for some time - have we traveled to other planets yet?"

"Ah, well, we did send people to the moon, and we have satellites, these machines which you can control remotely on other planets and moons," I told her. “But no one lives on another planet, I mean, we don’t even have a moon base yet.”

"So you can't book a hotel stay on Jupiter yet?"

"No," I told her. "We’re not even close to that."

She seemed rather disappointed by that, granted, I had no idea what the people of the 1900s thought the future would look like, but it seems like Charlotte had greatly overestimated our space travel capabilities.

"Still, I guess it's fine to try new things to see how they work out," she said. She didn't seem too excited by the whole thing, but thankfully didn't seem too irritated either.

Yet, there was something bothering me. "Charlotte, can you tell me something, do you feel... lonely?" It seemed like a crazy thing to ask because in my mind I was screaming 'Of course she's lonely!' given how for the most part of her existence, she was left in solitude in this house. When she wasn't trying to terrify anyone unfortunate enough to come into it, that is.

But, she often didn't show it, if it was true. After I had first met her, well, if she had really been starved for social contact, wouldn't she have been a bit more open about talking with me? And wouldn't she have wanted to find any relatives she had? She seemed completely uninterested in all of that, and I had rarely heard her complain about being unable to go outside. Logically I would say that she must absolutely feel lonely, but that was me making that assumption for her.

I had heard of such people before, who were fine living all by themselves and didn't go out unless absolutely necessary. They would order everything they needed either online or through mail, and you would rarely see their faces. But, they were happy as they were. Was Charlotte happy as she was?

If so, I realized it was quite pretentious of me to force this sort of thing on her.

Not to mention she wasn't exactly completely human anymore. She didn't age like one, and maybe her sense of isolation 'reset' everyday much like her body.

"Lonely?" she asked.

"Yeah, that was why I had thought of doing this in the first place," I told her. "I thought you might want to meet other people."

"Well," she began, "If all other people out there are like that I don't think I've missed out on much." She had a point there. "But I think what we experienced was something of an outlier, correct?"

"Well, yeah," I said. Those types of people were common on the Internet, I just thought that with the number of people we had interacted with, we would've come across at least someone who Charlotte could connect with. "Though... you do see those kinds of people sometimes, I just didn't expect everyone to be like that."

"Though to be honest," Charlotte began, fidgeting with her hands nervously. "There is something that I realized - that I had been lonely until you came." She blushed at that, and I couldn't help but feel my heart skip a beat when she said those words. "There was someone missing in my life- someone who I loved, well, there was my family of course but... not 'love’ in the sense of familial love… you understand what I'm saying, don't you?" I nodded, as I could feel my heart galloping within my chest when I heard those words. When was the last time I had felt like this? I couldn’t even remember.

But, I had to focus! "I understand that, so I'm sorry if I seemed to be pushing you to do this..."

"Not at all! If anything, whatever you've suggested I try out has always been at least decent," she said. With a frown, she added, "And sometimes my ideas on new things to try don't make that much sense- I would've never tried smoking if I had known what it was really like! So you don’t need to feel guilty about suggesting something that didn’t turn out like you envisioned. And, about feeling lonely- I've spent much of my time wandering these empty halls. I know though that the people who filled them are gone - but whenever I could even start feeling something about that, I would go to sleep, and my pain would wash away..." She then perked up. "So there's no need for you to worry about me feeling lonely. This is how things are, and I have no problem with that."

That still felt sort of wrong to me, but who was I to question what she wanted and tell her that she wanted something else? The moment I even began thinking like that I realized just how paternalistic that was. "Also, I don't feel lonely anymore. Not with you around."

"Okay," I told her. "But hey, listen, if you learn how to do this you might be able to go back if you ever want to see how it is. And maybe you will find someone that you can talk to."

"I can try," she said, though there wasn't much enthusiasm in her voice. She was probably just saying so to placate me, which really wasn't why I had wanted her to start doing it in the first place, but I decided to leave it for now.

I figured that was enough VR for now, and so I pivoted with topics and went to one that I had wanted to delve much deeper into: the mystery as to why Charlotte was how she was. "So, did you find anything that might give us any more leads on what caused... well, you know?"

"I couldn't find much of anything," Charlotte said.

"Did you remember anything?"

"No, not much," Charlotte said. "Like I said before, I don't remember.... passing away..." Her face darkened as she said that. "But, I remember waking up, like this, but the house was empty. I was wandering around, calling out for people, but I couldn't find them. A lot of our stuff was there at the time though, so it shouldn't have been too long after. I... was really shocked when I couldn't move all of a sudden when the sun came up. I sat there, lying in the hallway, and it felt horrible when I couldn't move my limbs. I don't think it was until the next night when I caught a good glimpse of myself in the mirror and saw... what I had become."

I wasn't sure what to say in response to that, so I went and placed a hand on her shoulder reassuringly, which she seemed to appreciate. "Granted, I was a bit shorter than I had been before, so I had shrunk as well. Looking back, I should've noticed far sooner what had happened to me than I actually did. And when I became petrified again once the night was over, I picked up on the pattern. After a week, I think, I went into 'hibernation' until I heard someone coming in at one time." She then frowned and furrowed her eyebrows. "I don't remember who it was the first time, I think it was a realtor or maybe a lawyer, because they never stayed past the night." She then looked down at her hands. "And that's how it's been for so long. I remember the stuff in the house being taken away... and I couldn't do anything about it even though I knew it was being taken away. I just had to sit there and watch it happen."

The whole thing seemed to dampen her mood considerably, so I didn't even bother talking about it more, although I wanted to. Charlotte didn't have the answers that I was looking for anyway, it seemed. I would have to look for them elsewhere.

Because the answer, the explanation, it had to be out there somewhere! I found it hard to believe that Charlotte was the first and only person that this had happened to in the entire world - maybe somewhere, in some other house thousands of miles away, there was someone else just like Charlotte. Someone who was wondering why it was that they were like this.

I had thought about what the answers could be, but none of them really fit in or made sense in any way. Reading horror and supernatural fiction didn't give anything that could be considered close to an answer.

"So, can we see this new Sherlock Holmes series then?" Charlotte asked. This snapped me out of my thoughts and I smiled.

"Sure, that sounds like a great idea."