Lincoln, Fox and the Bad Dog

by D Roland Hess

  Right. To calculate network_value, examine the messages for references to me, Gwen, Dan, Brigit, Pittsburgh, murder, breaking the law, and the term “Compact”. Use the numbers in the contact_values config as a multiplier.

  Noted.

  There was a pause.

  The network defined will be chaotic with interdependent values causing possible feedback loops.

  I know

  There is no discrete solution

  That’s fine. Run a bunch of iterations until you converge on likely solutions.

  Okay.

  I’m going to send you an email with all of the accounts and credentials so you can get started. Text Gwen when the graph is in a steady state.

  Okay.

  I disconnected, pulled up the doc with the username and password information we’d built yesterday, put it in an email and sent it to Fox.

  He responded seconds later with an email that contained a picture of a baby fox and a baby badger in a basket.

  All right.

  It was almost six o’clock. Still too early to wake anyone up, but not early enough that I’d be going back to bed. Great. I felt rested though, surprisingly so.

  I could tell that it was thinking about getting light outside. Looking around the inside of the cabin, my world felt small. It had been cars, and fights and incarceration and nothing but stress and horror for the last week. I wanted to get out. I put on my shoes, threw on a jacket and put Fox in my pocket.

  No sense being stupid.

  Quietly, I opened the front door, then the screen door and closed and locked them behind me.

  It was really cool outside. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find frost on the ground, although I didn’t see any. I walked the lane back to the main street, and the sounds of my feet in the gravel were the only ones around. A car went by. I imagined that the person driving it was bored, half-asleep and depressed to be heading to work while it was still dark.

  The lake was behind me by probably a quarter of a mile, but I had to go out to the street, make a right and then another right to actually be able to get there. It was a nice walk. I saw two more cars.

  Lake Erie is cool because while it’s still clearly a lake, it’s big enough that you can’t see the other side due to the curvature of the Earth. Some magazine somewhere said that it has the second best sunsets in the world. It might.

  It’s big enough to feel impressive and powerful, but not big enough that it’s going to reach out and grab you with a tsunami. For me, it’s the like the Baby Bear of bodies of water: just right.

  It also has a varied coastline. There are some sandy beaches, some drop offs, some rocky areas. We were near a rocky piece with a bunch of private docks reaching out into the water, so I walked out onto one that looked like it didn’t get a lot of use.

  Several boats were tied fast and covered. None of them looked like they’d been out in months. I walked to the edge of the dock and sat down.

  In the east, a bunch of clouds cluttered the horizon. They were bright red against a deep purple sky. I watched for a while and wished that I had the kind of mental construction to really remember this sort of thing. But I didn’t. It was nice while I was seeing it, but the feeling was transient. The water lapped gently against the piles of the dock. I put my hands in the pockets of the jacket, and my right one fell on Fox. Instinctively, I held the grip, and a slight psychic presence touched me. It was all very peaceful.

  It would be nice to hold on to moments like this one, so I could remember them when times were bad or ugly. I remember taking a poetry class way back as an undergrad, and if the poems weren’t about how angst-ridden you were, they were all about finding solace in nature. I think that was something I just didn’t have the wiring for.

  I had real problems though. The poets just had to worry that they wouldn’t be young for long, or that the ladies or gentlemen at the writer’s workshop weren’t quite as interested in them as they would have preferred. I had people who wanted me dead.

  Go write a poem about that, Keats. I’ll just sit here with my hand on my gun, listen to the water, watch the sunrise and try to figure out what to do.

  Run. It wasn’t the first time I’d considered it. Run by myself. Gwen wasn’t a part of this, really, and she was probably safer without me around. Maybe if I had done that sooner, say, the last time I’d thought about it, we’d be better off than we were now.

  But maybe not.

  There’s no way to know.

  You can always speculate about the future because it hasn’t happened yet. You can try to bend it to your will. But when it comes to the past, any attempt you make at “what if” games are just that–games. You have no idea. It happened one way because of what you and everyone else chose to do. But if anyone had chosen differently, you cannot predict what would have happened. The chaotic nature of the universe makes it impossible. It’s almost like existence is some kind of strange fractal of events, where there are similarities at all kinds of scales, and you can generally say that two points close together will have a stronger correlation than two points far apart, but you can’t actually predict any of the values.

  The only way to find out what happens is to be there and do it.

  So screw thinking about what I should have done.

  The question was, should I run by myself, right now?

  The answer that came immediately to mind was no, for a variety of reasons.

  First, the purely practical. I didn’t have a car, and I wasn’t going to strand Gwen. My wallet wasn’t on me when Gwen had broken me out of wizard jail, so the Guard had obviously confiscated it. Maybe they had an evidence locker somewhere. Gwen had grabbed some petty cash from my house, but it wasn’t much. I had a larger, hidden stash of cash back my house and a backup card, but that didn’t help me now.

  Secondly, it wasn’t right to just bounce on Gwen. She was under the impression that being around me was more dangerous than not being around me. She may be right, but she also may be very, very wrong, especially in light of the little bits of information we’d put together about external interest in the goings-on in the ‘Burgh.

  Running made sense. Getting the hell away from everyone and everything. I’d head somewhere that no one knew me and hope that the Powers That Be didn’t care or have enough on me to hit me with a locator spell. I’d give Gwen the option of just going home or coming with me. That wouldn’t be a horrible outcome.

  So I’d go back. That plan made the most sense.

  We’d drive back to the city. I would collect everything from my house that was of value, lock it up and call my attorney in a couple of weeks to start the sales procedure. If Gwen wanted to go too, we’d swing by her place and get whatever she needed.

  And then we’d hit the road.

  That made sense.

  Maybe it wouldn’t tomorrow, but right now, it did.

  A pair of ducks came across my field of vision, landing noisily on the lake in front of me. One dipped under the water for several seconds, its feathered butt pointing at the sky. I wondered where they were from, or if they had duck friends here they were coming to see. Maybe they were just passing through.

  She came back up after a while, and it didn’t look like she’d caught anything.

  I sighed.

  I didn’t want to go back. It was dangerous. And taking Gwen back was dangerous. It was probably even worse to not do it.

  I found that I dreaded it, and not for my own sake.

  A thought hit me, unlike any I’d had since I’d started working with Dan and Brigit.

  I thought that this would all just be easier if I were dead.

  If that happened, Gwen wouldn’t have to be concerned that being around me would put her in dangerous, horrible situations. If someone showed up to question her about what I’d been doing, she could simply say, “Oh he’s dead. You don’t need to worry about that.” And they’d leave her alone.

  I figured that in some parallel universe, the dock fell apart, or that Linco
ln had a heart attack and somehow drowned. It was probably happening right now.

  But not to me.

  I wasn’t going to do anything about it, but this would certainly be easier if I were dead.

  I exhaled slowly and prevented myself from drawing another breath. I didn’t need one. I put my mind into the same state that I do at the shooting range. Seeing everything but looking at nothing. Aware of my heartbeat. The sound of the water. My body felt immobilized, like it was suddenly coated with an invisible sheen of ice.

  I liked it. I didn’t want to move.

  But things press on, you know?

  The chaos was going to swirl, even though I sat here like a still point. I had to go engage with it. I broke the ice, felt it flaking off in my imagination. I placed my hand on the surface of the dock and pressed down. Leverage. I pushed myself to my feet.

  It was only when I was fully standing that I let myself breathe again.

  In ten minutes, I’d be back at the cabin. I’d wake Gwen and Babd, we’d head back to the city. We’d get our things, and Gwen would go with me or not. I could always find work. Someone has always done something horrible with their computer that they’ll pay you to clean up.

  The whole way back to the cabin, I had the feeling that something was going to jump out of the trees or from behind a car and sink its long long teeth into me, but it didn’t happen. There were real monsters out there, but the only ones after me right now were in my head. That didn’t make it any easier to deal with. My upper back felt taut and exhausted, like I’d been lifting weights for hours. The sensation I had earlier of being rested was gone.

  I got back, nothing ate me, and we packed up the car.

  Chapter 14

  No flaming banshees or giant spider-birds or crazed Praecants attacked us as we drove into the city that morning, so I figured we finally had some luck on our side. The plan was to pick up my car at the house, load as much of my most valuable equipment into it as possible, then do the same thing at Gwen’s and head west.

  She’d agreed that it wasn’t safe for her to stay here either, and that our best bet was to stick together. We could adjust in the future if that turned out to not be the case.

  We parked her car two blocks away and walked the length of the alley to the yard behind my house. No use being completely stupid. If I were running the Guard or if I were Dan and I were looking for me, I’d keep someone watching the place. We’d be sneaking in the back.

  I didn’t notice anyone watching, but of course that didn’t mean anything. They could be using magic to cloak themselves, or I could just be a shitty observer. Either way, coming here was risky.

  I undid the latch on the privacy fence and Gwen, Babd and I stepped into the yard. The little tomato garden I’d tried to start last month was dead, dead, dead, but it had been that way before last week anyway. Nothing magical about it. I was just a terrible gardener.

  Babd trotted up to the garage wall and peed.

  “Hold up,” said Gwen. She held her phone out so I could see it.

  On the screen, from a number I didn’t recognize, a message had just arrived:

  Don’t go in the house.

  Okay, weird.

  “Who is it?” I said.

  “No idea.”

  I looked up at my back porch and the door that led into the kitchen. Everything seemed fine. Was someone trying to scare us off?

  Then, her phone began to buzz. An incoming call from that same number.

  “Should I answer it?” she said.

  “Might as well,” I said. “Put it on speaker.”

  She tapped twice.

  “Hello?” she said.

  The voice that came out of her phone was oddly familiar.

  “Don’t go inside yet,” it said. “The Guard has set traps at the entrances.”

  “Who is this?” I said.

  “Fox.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I obtained an IP-based phone number.”

  “Well,” I said. “That’s clever. Nicely done.”

  It was more than clever.

  “I have also come to a steady state with the social graphing exercise.”

  “Great. Let’s talk about that later. Right now I’d really like to get in the house. Any idea what the Guard actually did?”

  “I am unsure. I have only a single camera and microphone available inside the house, so my ability to determine their actions was limited. They examined many things inside but did not remove or disturb anything within my field of view. After they left, I recorded sounds at the doors consistent with the casting of spells.”

  “Hey Babd,” I said.

  She came trotting up. “Yes?”

  “Can you see magic on my back door?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you planning to tell me that before I went through it?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “I did not think it was of note.”

  “Any idea what this particular bit of magic does?”

  She ran onto the porch and sniffed at the door.

  “It smells like-” and her words became meaningless to me. Well, they sounded like words, sort of, as I could tell she was speaking, but the sounds began to do strange things to my hearing. A wormlike sensation started to move inward from my ears, and I felt my vision tunnel.

  She kept talking and proportions seemed to stretch. Her mouth grew and grew, but I perceived no deformity. The porch seemed to be miles away. I felt very, very small, no taller than the blades of grass around me.

  The sounds kept coming.

  I noticed that my fingers were numb and cold.

  “Stop it!” I said.

  Gwen was covering her ears.

  Babd stopped talking, and instantly the world reverted to its normal appearance. The worm making its way into my brain vanished.

  “Oh, apologies,” said Babd. “I was using my native tongue. It seemed the most efficient way to describe the forces at play within the door.”

  The coldness retreated. I clenched my fists and feeling came painfully back to my hands. Gwen was sitting on the ground, eyes closed, trying to breathe deeply.

  “You okay?” I said.

  She shook her head minutely.

  Babd and I needed to have a talk about the fragility of the human condition if we were going to continue to be friends.

  “Is it still getting worse?” I said.

  Gwen shook her head again.

  I put my hand against her forehead and felt an icy sweat forming. I stood there for a moment until her breathing calmed down.

  “Okay, you stay put,” I said. “I’m going in to get my stuff. Babd, you wait here, and for the love of God, don’t ever do that again.”

  “Noted,” said Babd.

  “One question, and please try to answer in English this time. If I hit whatever they put on that door with the ‘dispel’ round on Fox, will it remove it?”

  For an instant, I had the inkling that I was talking to some kind of genie who would find some ambiguity in my wording and tell me the wrong thing. Too many undefined antecedents. Instead of waiting for what might be an unintentionally misleading answer, I decided to act.

  I walked up the three stairs, drawing my gun.

  “Fox, dispel.”

  The gun pulsed once.

  I aimed it at the door from several feet away and pulled the trigger. And what the hell, I did it three more times for good measure. Each time, there was a descending electrical hum that quickly passed out of my audible range.

  “Okay, Babd. Is there any magic left on this door?”

  She trotted up again, sniffed around.

  “No,” she said.

  “If I open this door and walk through it, I’m not going to get blasted?”

  “You will not.”

  “Or teleported or launched through the roof or turned into a piece of lucite?”

  “You are mocking me,” she said.

  “
Just a little,” I said.

  “Then your mother is a piece of lucite,” said Babd.

  “Wow,” I said. “That was… an admirable attempt at banter.”

  “I am a fast learner,” she said.

  “Go sit with Gwen,” I said.

  “Oh, is there man’s work to do?”

  “Just do it, please.”

  She loped down the stairs and laid her head in Gwen’s lap. Gwen looked at me and gave a weak thumbs up.

  I opened the door.

  Nothing unusual happened, so I walked inside. Like Fox had said on the phone, (Fox had said on the phone!) no one had really disturbed anything. They were probably just cataloging, getting a look around. Hell, if I were them, I wouldn’t have wanted to touch any of the stuff either, especially if it represented some kind of forbidden juju for them. They’d want to call in the big guns to take care of it.

  I wasn’t going to give them the chance.

  Of course, I couldn’t take everything with me. I’d need a box truck. But the really important, irreplaceable stuff would fit in my car. I grabbed two large duffel bags from my bedroom closet. One I used for traveling, and the other had a bunch of musty ice hockey gear inside that I hadn’t touched in years.

  Into the one, I put my most important pieces of fabrication equipment. The custom precision tools I’d crafted for building magically active circuitry. Raw materials. I layered it in the bag with bathroom towels for cushioning. This stuff was truly one of a kind. I could get mundane things like the table vise and drill press wherever we ended up. There was so much I’d planned to do with Fox that I just hadn’t had the time to execute yet.

  As I came out of the workshop into the living room, I saw the microphone beside the custom hardware computer that contained the Fox AI.

  “Hey Fox, can you hear me?”

  “I can,” he said through the system speakers.

  “You don’t have a western accent anymore. What’s with that?”

  “I decided that I did not want to feign a manner of speech.”

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  “I just want you to love me for who I am.”

  The computer too? Everyone was trying to be funny.

  “Fox, I’m going to have to shut you down for a bit. You okay with that?”