Emily Eternal (Jason ignores Emily) | Database of Machine Vision in Art, Games and Narratives

Brief description

When Emily admits to Jason that she has inadvertently manipulated his memories, replacing a casual girlfriend in Paris with herself, he is furious with her. She is still connected to him through the interface chip he wears on his throat, but he ignores her, refusing to acknowledge her presence and even walking right through her "avatar". She tries to get him to follow her upstairs, but cannot move outside of a radius around Jason since her existence is only in the interface chip he wears, and she is disconnected from her servers.

Her inability to move independently of Jason reminds me of two-player video games where both players are on the same screen, and cannot move too far from each other.

Pull Quotes

But he’s found a chair and is sitting down, his face contorting as if he’s puzzling something out. The lie, I realize. He’s still angry about the lie.

“Come on, Jason,” I say quietly, attempting the stairs again. “We can talk about this while we search.”

But I still can’t get to the top step. That’s the trouble with being in interface. I’m geographically tied to the chip. So, if the person wearing it doesn’t budge, I’m not going anywhere either. This is fine in normal circumstances, but if you’re in a fight? I mean, how’s that for a way to force people to engage with one another?

“Jason, I—”

He rises and moves to the stairs without a word. He takes the steps two at a time but doesn’t pause when he reaches me, instead, simply passing through my body as if to remind me how immaterial I am.

That’s how it goes for the next twenty minutes as I’m made to follow Jason from room to room, enduring his silence as he searches for supplies. Only, he does so with such a single-minded focus as if to convince me he’s just that determined and definitely not, 100-percent no-way-at-all ignoring me.

I get it. I wish I had a simulation to blink off into for a while just to give him some space. But I don’t and we’re out of time.

Wheaton, M. G.. Emily Eternal (pp. 193-194). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.