“What is going on?” Reeve stood up straighter and again tried to log out.

Nothing happened.

She felt the tentacles return and begin to constrict her chest. She focused all of her attention on the logout feature. It dimmed momentarily each time she tried to activate it, but then nothing happened.

Walter looked at her with concern. “Everything OK, Sweetie?”

“No, everything is not OK!” Hearing her half-orc’s roar, she put out a hand in apology. “Sorry. I can’t get the logout to execute. Just give me a minute.”

Come on, she thought, log out. Log out. She mentally selected the feature again and again. Log out, log out, log out.

Nothing happened.

She looked around her UI. Everything else seemed to be working. The logs were updating. The readouts of game time and real time were smoothly increasing, the former several hundred times faster than the latter. Her link to her Companion indicated Nyx was still stalking a deer somewhere to the south. Her feed was even being recorded, due to the option she’d turned on for play in the VRMMO. She opened an inset and saw the feed, the POV from somewhere over to her right. She cringed and watched herself cringe. Ugh. She looked so uncertain right now. Pathetic. And her father was sitting there, literally twiddling his fingers. Twiddling his fingers. She closed the inset.

“I need you to try to log out. Just select ‘Log Out’ from your UI.”

Her father scratched the bushy hair above the point of one ear and raised an eyebrow slightly.

“UI. User Interface.”

Her father’s other eyebrow rose to join the first.

“You don’t know what...” The tentacles tightened, and a series of unwelcome images flashed through her mind: sitting by her father, speechless, as he accidentally deleted an app from the smartphone she’d stupidly talked her mom into giving him for his birthday, the same smartphone that was currently in the back of one of his dresser drawers; falling out of bed and dragging herself panicked into the hall the time her mother somehow set twenty-two different reminders on the digital home assistant Reeve had insisted on, all of the reminders inexplicably timed to be delivered between 1:00 a.m. and 1:49 a.m.; staring out the backseat window of their new electric self-driving car, the one her parents had reluctantly purchased when manually-driven models were no longer legal, her ears covered so she wouldn’t hear her father arguing with the car about the route it had chosen; closing her eyes and not looking out of the backseat window anymore when they arrived at the destination and discovered her father given the car the wrong address.

For several seconds Reeve’s attention was consumed by the question of whether her parents had given her PTSD. ”Parent Traumatic Stress Disorder,” she said quietly to herself. She swallowed hard, fighting nausea and registered that her father was still talking.

“I’m in Human Resources,” Walter was saying, “we’re really about the people—“

“You must have to interact with a User Interface for something sometime!” The part of Reeve’s brain that hadn’t completely panicked registered the hysteria in her voice and tried to dial the knob down, with little success.

“Well, I’m sure I do, I just may not be familiar with the jargon…and if I run into a problem or things stop working there’s a button I can press that almost always does the trick.”

Reeve forced herself to ask the question, despite how afraid she was of the answer. “It’s the power button, isn’t it?”

“Yup.”

After a few seconds of desperately grasping for a mantra that could ground her, Reeve seized on, “It is enough for my parents to do their best.” Nearly two minutes and forty silent repetitions of the phrase reduced her hyperventilation to mere flustered breathing, and she decided to try again, choosing to proceed without first finding out what her dad had been saying to her for the last two minutes. “Shhzhhp!“ She raised a hand to help silence her father, who stopped his monologue and looked at her, eyes widening slightly. “Do you kind of sense something floating around to your right?” Without looking, she pointed her blade to her right and rotated it in a small circle through the air. “Like there’s something in your peripheral vision, just out of reach, even if you turn your head?”

“Oh, yes!” Walter’s face relaxed and he looked pleased. “I just thought that was a floater.”

“Floater?”

“In my eye.”

“In your eye?”

“When you get older, sometimes the jelly-stuff inside your eye clumps together and casts shadows on your retina. You see little things floating around in your vision. I have several.”

“That’s a thing?”

“Oh, Honey. There are a lot of things that change when you get older. The other day when I went to the rest—“

“Ew, Dad, no. Plus, you’re not old in here, you’re a youngish halfling. And I doubt they programmed in floaters. But, logging out, remember?”

“Right, sure.”

“OK. Concentrate on the thing you sense floating to your right. Imagine it moving closer to float in front of you.”

For a few seconds, Walter stared into space. And then he yelped, threw his arms across his face, and fell backward. His yelp became a stuttered, “Yayayaaahhh!,” as he frantically rocked side-to-side and waved his arms above him. His motions wound down slowly. “OK, got it. It’s here now. Just startled me.”

Reeve made an effort to skip over the embarrassment she felt at watching her father try to navigate the game and to instead focus on her relief that he’d managed to activate the UI without more coaching. Her effort was not entirely successful.

“Whoa, there’s a lot here—“

“Don’t touch anything!”

“Touch?” Her father, still lying on his back, reached out his hand and moved it tentatively through the air above him.

“Stop! Don’t imagine touching anything. Don’t imagine pressing any of the buttons you can see. Just hold on, OK?”

“OK, OK.” His hand drifted toward his left.

“Dad!”

“OK!” He let his hand drop to his stomach. “What do all of these things mean? Oh, it was a salmon, wasn’t it?”

“Dad, please. Just look down at the very bottom. See where it says ‘Log out’?”

“Got it.”

“Great. Now imagine choosing that option. As though you’re mentally clicking on it.”

“Clicking?”

“Like with a mouse...you know what, never mind. Just concentrate hard on the words.”

Walter sat up and his brow furrowed with concentration.

“Ooh!” He said.

“What?”

“I could feel it there. Like it became physical for a second.”

“Yes?”

“Then it dimmed.”

“And?”

“And then it lit back up same as before.”

“And you’re still here.”

“Should I not be?” Walter’s eyes lost their distant stare as they shifted from the UI to Reeve.

“Not if logout worked. And that’s the same thing that happens when I try…wuh…what are you doing?”

The halfling was slowly rising to his feet. He had a hand on one knee and was bobbing his head up and down, side to side. “Trying to see you around all this stuff.”

Reeve imagined what this all must look like in her feed and cringed. “Please. Don’t. Just imagine pushing it back to the edge of your vision.”

Walter stopped bobbing his head and raised both hands slowly as if feeling for something in the dark.

“Imagine it. Picture it happening.”

He lowered his arms to his sides, and concentration again stiffened his features.

“Whoa—“ He leaned forward and fell to his hands and knees. “There. Got it. Just made me a bit dizzy when it zoomed away.” He started climbing to his feet again.

Only half listening, Reeve called up her own UI and again tried to log out.

Nothing.

“Why?” She drove the naginata’s pole-end into the ground with such force that Walter felt it through his bare feet.

She tried again.

Nothing.