It made perfect sense that Greta and Peggy would be here today. It was a sign she was doing well, getting closer, uncovering more and more emergent gameplay – forcing stranger and stranger content out of the procedural generation system. Everything lost was somewhere. Because that’s how it worked – every lost opportunity could be played out at another time. Everyone else was probably an NPC, except for Margaret. She had everything she needed to succeed. She was collecting everything she needed to succeed, and seeing Peggy and Greta today was part of what she needed to succeed. ‘A cute dog,’ Margaret had said, but it was all she was capable of saying. It was all so clear to Margaret and then, as if with a snap of the fingers, it sounded crazy.

Margaret looked out at the deck. She didn’t know who the women were. She had no idea. Probably she was out of her mind with grief. Maybe none of it had happened – maybe she’d made it all up in her head to save herself, because she couldn’t save just one of her. Maybe she’d conjured a scenario in which she could look after herself, literally. Maybe she’d drunk so much that night that her brain had finally stopped in its tracks, and she’d been living in her wet, wet brain ever since. Maybe her body, her real body, had been sitting in a chair drooling in a hospital for twenty-four years. No one would talk about it. The two women on the street hadn’t even looked like her. Of course they hadn’t stopped. She was old and desperate-looking, running out of her house and onto the street, shouting at them. Of course two women who probably didn’t even look that much like each other had walked past her without saying anything. It hadn’t been Peggy and Greta at all. It was a trick of the light. She could feel it trying to settle in. She was becoming convinced of it now, and completely unconvinced at the same time. This was what was left from being divided. She was always in two minds. That’s what was left. At least two things being true at any one time. Never being able to come down on one side. Holding all possibilities in the air so they didn’t drop – weighing them up to try and get at what was real among the branches and branches of the game tree.

She kept it a secret – this residual ability, this hangover of being divided. She could hold all of it in her head, and anything that tried to settle never did. While everyone else settled into any new order, she saw everything all at once. She had been one, then divided, then one again, but no one mentioned it – Diane didn’t mention it, wouldn’t talk about it. Shame conveniently covered it up and moved everyone on.