“Hey,” she says. “I heard you might have had a visitor this morning. Sorry.”
“I did,” I reply. “Can you elaborate?”
“Sorry, no. I’m a limited-interactive. Terry has authorized you for direct access, however. Would you like me to attempt connection?”
Just as well, I guess. I hate talking to fully interactive avatars. I get that they’re just simulations, that they don’t really have thoughts and hopes and dreams and whatnot, but the good ones have been able to pass the Turing test for a while now, and deleting them has always felt weirdly murder-ish to me. No such problem with the LIs, though. They’re just annoying.
“No,” I say. “Don’t ping Terry now. I’ll get back to her later. Delete.”
Whatever this Dimitri thing is, I don’t feel much like dealing with it at the moment. I open the door. Steam pours out into the hallway. My room is to the left, Gary’s is to the right. He’s sitting on his bed staring into space, either stroked out or watching something on his ocular. One eye focuses on me.
“Hey,” he says. “Towel, maybe?”
I turn into my room and shut the door behind me, drop the phone on my nightstand and fall into bed.
I have a recurring dream where I’m downtown, wandering around the mess just north of the harbor in the middle of the night. I have a car, which I do not in real life, but I can’t remember where I parked it, and the streets keep changing names and directions until I don’t recognize anything. I usually wind up getting chased around by somebody. This time, it’s a bear in a tutu who keeps yelling at me to stay away from his girlfriend. He corners me in a blind alley. I’m standing on top of a Dumpster, scrabbling at the brick wall of the building behind it, waiting for his bear teeth to sink into my ass, when I snap awake. The late afternoon sun is slanting through the window, and I’m soaked with sweat.
I’ll later learn that while I was napping, the good citizens of Hagerstown, Maryland, more or less simultaneously crapped their pants and died.
About the Author
EDWARD ASHTON lives with his adorably mopey dog, his inordinately patient wife, and a steadily diminishing number of daughters in Rochester, New York, where he studies new cancer therapies by day, and writes about the awful things his research may lead to by night. He is the author of Three Days in April, as well as several dozen short stories which have appeared in venues ranging from the newsletter of an Italian sausage company to Louisiana Literature and Escape Pod. You can find him online at edwardashton.com.
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Also by Edward Ashton
Three Days in April
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Excerpt from Three Days in April copyright © 2015 by Edward Ashton.
the end of ordinary. Copyright © 2017 by Edward Ashton. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.
Digital Edition JUNE 2017 ISBN: 978-0-06-269031-9
Print Edition ISBN: 978-0-06-269032-6
Cover design by Nadine Badalaty.
Cover illustration © Shutterstock.
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