Liu Ruyan in the Simulator

A simulator offers a lover named Liu Ruyan, perfect in the way a program is perfect. The man running it treats the model as practice for a nightclub life he means to control. Outside the machine, affair and revenge are already moving. Someone real shares the name, or the face, and rehearsal stops being a technical word. / He can keep using the simulator as a weapon against people who wronged him after dark. Or the woman, simulated or not, can stop behaving like a route he memorized. The next session answers him, and he no longer knows which world is keeping score.