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[ It's late, and Anders is up on the surface, face lit occasionally by the rolling crackle of the sky. But he's not thinking about this strange place called Earth, his eyes distant. ]

Has anyone else met someone they... knew in their Matrix, but who was extracted from a different Matrix?

[ He's fumbling with the question, not sure how to ask what he wants to ask and not daring to voice what underlies it. ]

There are other versions of us still living their lives. It feels like I'm ...

[ A pause, and he decides not to follow up with whatever point he was planning, sighs instead, switches the feed off and tries to work out if there's some way to delete the recording from the network. ]

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[ A mm of acknowledgment. ]

Is it putting a strain on your relationship at all? That this person isn't the person you knew, but just someone very similar.

[ Anders gives a soft, pained little laugh. ]

I don't know. Sometimes it's like I've known him ten years, sometimes just a few months.

[ She chews on her lip a while, then decides: optimism. That's the ticket. ]

Well, but that's exciting, though. It means that it's still this person you love, but there's so much that's new to discover about him.

[ Anders is incapable of generating his own optimism, but Kitty's is a welcome relief. ]

I hadn't thought about it like that.

[ Obviously, or he wouldn't be dragging his introspection all over a public network. ]

You don't think he should be waiting for his Anders? The one who already knows him?

[ So, that makes it pretty clear that this is someone Anders loves-loves. No wonder he sounds so distressed.

Well. She doesn't even hesitate before she responds with a very practical: ]

Do you want to wait for your own version of him? The one you already know? Or do you want to be with this person?

[ Anders doesn't even hesitate: ]

He's real, and he understands what it meant to be a mage, of course he's who I want to be with.

[ Kitty's speech - which would have been very good, and very insightful, and which would have worked hopefully to address some of the absurdity underpinning monogamy which is frankly a bourgeois construct even if Lizzie-Temple-the-very-ordinary-waitress doesn't really talk in terms like bourgeois constructs - sort of dies on her lips.

She at least keeps her voice relatively light. ]

Sorry. What it meant to be a what?

A mage. In my world I had magic and he didn't, but here he grew up with magic too. It seems such a small difference but it's meant a lot.

[ Why didn't she use text? If she'd just used text, it'd be a lot easier right now. Because it's hard to keep her voice level.

I trusted him. I put my trust in him. ]

I can't imagine that's a small difference at all. It seems like that'd quite change someone's life.

[ Anders thinks that he's surely imagining the shift in tone, paranoid from years of persecution. Surely here in the real world, where noone has magic, it doesn't matter anymore? ]

For anyone else. He grew up away from a lot of the politics of it all. But the way people treat a mage is still completely different.

Yes, I suppose it would be.

[ That comes out brittle in spite of all her best efforts. Calm down, Kitty. Lizzie Temple doesn't have magicians in her home. And even if she did, Anders is still Anders, right? He still runs that clinic. He's still the man who would come into her cafe for coffee.

And so bloody what? Have you ever met a decent magician? ]

That sort of power would quite change your place in society, wouldn't it.

You understand, then.

[ Anders is pleased that she does, since that doesn't happen often. Maybe more often in the real world than in his Matrix. ]

I can't really imagine who I'd be without magic. Probably wouldn't even be called Anders.

[ You haven't any idea just how well I understand. ]

Why wouldn't you be?

Well, it's not actually my name. They took me away from my family when I showed signs of magical use, and people called me Anders there, because I looked and spoke like I was from the Anderfels. It stuck.

[ It doesn't touch on how emotional even thinking back on that time makes him. None of it was real anyway, so his father turning him over to the Templars shouldn't still sting but oh, it does. He'd forsworn his name then because they'd given it to him, and now it's hard to remember that he ever had another. ]

[ She's heard that's what magicians do. They take on new names, just like that. She remembers faintly a boy, just a little older than her, being taken away - a boy she'd sometimes played with - and someone saying, He'll get a new name now. It makes them more powerful, apparently, choosing their own names - that's what's she's heard. Honestly, she thinks it's because they're all just too ashamed to face the people who knew them before they were wicked and exploitative and cruel, and so they're hiding by changing their identities. That makes a lot more sense.

So this one, too, then. Casting off his name as soon as he got apprenticed to a magician. Forgetting who he was, forgetting his common origins. Probably so he could be more cruel. If he saw his family again, would he be ashamed? Would they turn away from him? Or would he even care, would they just be another throng of common fools to him? Would he even bother to glance at him from the window of his luxury car?

And also, that single question that she just doesn't understand: why does he run a clinic? Why does he care? He's a magician - what's his angle?

She forces a more chipper note into her voice. She tries hard to sound cheerful. ]

Well, it's a cute name. I like it. And do you like how you turned out?

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