A three-dimensional icon of a gallows and noose filled the air above the letters-and-blanks display. The noose was cinched tight around the neck of a girl identical in appearance to the one playing the game-except that both her legs and face were blank. Instead of warm flesh, they were cold, burnished metal-the smooth, featureless skin of a Universal Matrix Specification persona.
The girl leaned forward and touched the stylus in her teeth to the letter W on the keyboard. The W key depressed and then disappeared, and one of the blanks in the word puzzle filled itself in.
At the same time, one of the metallic legs on the girl in the noose turned into a flesh-and-blood limb.
Timea leaned forward, one hand on the girl's shoulder in an effort to catch her attention. "What are you doing?" she asked.
The girl's eyes flicked for a microsecond to Timea. They glowed with an intensity and single-minded concentration that spoke of madness. She wriggled her shoulder uncomfortably under Timea's hand, as if the straight jacket were pinching her.
"Crashing myself," she said through clenched teeth. Then she giggled.
Timea felt a ghostly ache in her left wrist as she realized who she was talking to. She glanced down at her wrist, and saw the familiar bandages of her mummy persona. The bandages that were a reminder of those they'd wrapped around her wrist, after her suicide attempt.
"Don't shut down," she told the Al. She cast about for the words to frame the reason why. "Your children need you. You can't just abandon them."
"You-" The girl lunged forward, stabbing the letter U with the stylus, and giggled again at the pun. "You don't understand." She squirmed again, wincing as the straight jacket pinched her arms.
The graphics display behind her changed as the other leg became flesh.
"Yes, I do," Timea said. She glanced nervously at the word-puzzle solution.