by D L Young
At least she hadn’t shot him.
***
When he reached the stairwell’s twelfth-floor landing, he stopped.
What was he doing here? He hadn’t seen her in two years, didn’t even know if she still lived here or not. And if she did, would she even want to see him? Much less help him out? Would she look the same? Would he look the same to her? He was prepared, sort of, for an awkward, uncomfortable reunion, but what if that had been overly optimistic? Maybe she hated him. Maybe she’d slam the door in his face. Maybe she wouldn’t even open it at all when she saw it was him through the peephole.
He hadn’t rehearsed what he was going to say in the hover ride over, so he’d taken the stairs instead of the elevator to give himself time to come up with something. Nothing came to him, however. There was no opening line he could compose appropriate to the situation. Maybe he’d just stand there and let her speak first. No, that would be weird, showing up unannounced after two years, then standing there mute like a psychopath.
Christ, just get it over with. He forced his feet to move again, stepping out of the stairwell and into the corridor.
You hear me all right? Beatrice’s voice came through the tiny speaker on his spec’s temple arm. As it did, a transcription of her spoken words scrolled across the lower portion of his lens.
“Yeah,” he replied to his meatrider as he stopped at apartment 1204. He knocked lightly on the door. A moment later he heard the familiar slide-clacks of multiple locks opening.
The door opened and Lora stood in the entryway. Her chestnut hair was cut in the same shoulder-length bob he remembered. Her long, slim neck rose from a simple white blouse with short sleeves. Black cotton pants and home-fabbed plastic slippers. The lounging-around-home outfit he’d seen her in a thousand times. Emerald eyes gazed at him beneath straight bangs that covered her eyebrows. The bangs were new. Or new to him, at least.
“Blackburn,” she said. There was no lilt in her voice, no widening of her eyes, no reaction at all. She behaved as if only minutes had passed—not a pair of years—since she’d last seen him. He felt a pang of disappointment at her apparent lack of emotion, at her cool, stoic welcome. But at the same time he chided himself for expecting anything else. That was who she was now, wasn’t it?
She stepped backward and pulled the door open wide. “Please, do come in.”
She’d redecorated. Gone were the exuberant colors and haphazard arrangements of plants and flowers and vases and trinkets she’d collected at estate sales and street bazaars. When he’d lived here with her, the small apartment had been a shrine to knickknacks of every size and shape. Now it looked like a different place entirely, like some stranger had moved in and replaced the chaos with order, the kaleidescope of colors with muted grays and pale whites. Where there had once been a clashing, eclectic mess of furniture, now there was a tidy, harmonious arrangement of sofa and love seat and dining set. He didn’t like it.
She and Novak use the same decorator or what?
Maddox blinked away Beatrice’s words his lenses. He sat on the sofa as Lora disappeared into the kitchen, returning a moment later with a tray and two porcelain coffee cups.
“It’s so good to see you,” she said, setting down the tray and sitting across from him. Tiny wisps of steam rose from the coffee. “What brings you here?” She produced an ashtray from an end table drawer and placed it in front of him. She had perfectly manicured clear-polished nails. Gone were the jagged nailbiter’s nubs he remembered.
He lit a cigarette, unsure how to begin. He took a long drag to buy a few more moments to gather himself, unsettled as he was from seeing her again after all this time, unsettled more by her cold manner, by the way she didn’t seem to be unsettled at all. No hug, no kiss, no tears of joy or anger. No What the hell are you doing here at this early hour? No good or bad expression came across her face, no nostalgic smile. No indication they’d had any history at all. The polite nothing she gave him, even though a part of him had expected it, still felt like a gut punch.
She sipped her coffee. “How are things?” he asked.
“Wonderful,” she replied, grinning with what looked like genuine bliss. “I’ve never been happier.”
“Really?” he asked.
“Really,” she answered.
He blew smoke. “You involved with anyone?”
“No. You?”
He shook his head. “You don’t seem surprised to see me.”
She set down her cup. “I’m definitely surprised, Blackburn. You’ve no idea how much.”
“Could have fooled me. You hardly blinked when you opened the door.”
She smiled. “I govern my emotions better than I used to. You remember how I was. Way up one week, way down the next. I’d turn left on Monday and spend all Tuesday beating myself up for not turning right.” She sighed. “Do you know how tiring it is, living that way? It’s exhausting.”
“They make pills for it.”
“I tried pills, remember? Lots of them.”
“Could have tried others. Different combinations.” He was suddenly and very uncomfortably aware of Beatrice listening to his very personal history.
“Nothing works like this has,” Lora said. She tilted her head at him. “That can’t be why you’re here, all of a sudden after two years, to rehash this.”
“No,” he admitted. “That’s not why I’m here.” He smoked, taking another long drag. “I need you to take a look at something for me.”
“What is it?”
He pulled out a copy of the dataset he’d put onto a fingernail-sized bioplastique archive. “This.”
She eyed it dubiously. “What’s on it?”
“That’s what I need help with.”
She playfully furrowed her brow at him. “A dataset Blackburn Maddox can’t decipher? I didn’t think such a thing existed.”
He passed it to her. “It’s important.”
She glanced down at the archive, curled her fingers around it, then looked back up at Maddox. “Are you in trouble?”
He blew smoke. “I don’t know yet.”
For a long moment her eyes shone with concern, the same worried look she’d given him dozens of times. He’d never expected to see that expression again, and its sudden appearance tugged at something inside him. Regret or sadness or nostalgia, he wasn’t sure. Maybe a commingling of all three.
She then glanced suspiciously at the archive. “This won’t get me in trouble, will it?”
“No, I promise,” he said.
Lora lifted the archive with one hand, and with the other she smoothed the hair away from behind her ear. Maddox muted the mic in his lenses, anticipating his meatrider’s eruption. Lora cocked her head to one side and peeled away the protective plastic from the bottommost brainjack, then inserted the archive.
WHAT THE LIVING FUCK, SALARYMAN? SHE’S A ’NETTE?
All caps. Yes, she erupted all right. The transcription function autocapitalized shouting.
HEY! DID YOU MUTE ME?
He blinked away the script. Lora squeezed her eyes shut in concentration. Her lips tightened the way he remembered when she did crossword puzzles.
GET OUT OF THERE!!!
He subvocalized her a text message.
I’m fine, he wrote.
GONNA BAIL, she replied.
Don’t, he wrote. Please. There’s no danger. She’s a friend. Both statements were partial truths at best. He and Lora weren’t friends. They were ex-lovers who hadn’t been on speaking terms for a long while. And as far as danger, he had no idea if enlisting Lora’s help was inspired genius or a foolish mistake.
He waited, but a reply didn’t appear in his specs. He listened for footsteps in the corridor but heard nothing. Maybe the mercenary had bailed, her survival instinct finally winning out over her need to answer questions about unreadable datasets and ’Nettes and a rich corporati’s nebulous machinations. He pictured her zooming away in the hover, putting as much distance as possible between this ba
d-luck salaryman and the weird company he kept.
Lora gasped and opened her eyes. She blinked as if she were trying to refocus her vision, then locked her gaze on Maddox. She leaned forward and placed her hand on his knee. “There’s someone you have to talk to,” she said earnestly.
He straightened up. “What are you talking about? What’s on that thing?”
“She can tell you.” Lora rose and dashed into the bedroom.
“Who can tell me?” he called after her. “What are you talking about?”
She returned with a VS deck under her arm and a trodeband dangling from her fingers. “You have to connect with her, now.” She held them out, shook them insistently. “Here.”
He crushed his cigarette out in the ashtray. “I’m not doing anything, Lora, until you tell me what’s going on.”
She stared at him for a moment, then sat back down. Slowly, she removed the archive from her jack and placed it on the table. “She needs to talk with you.”
“She who?”
“The one with whom I’m connected.” She gestured reverently as she said it, touching her hand to her chest and slightly bowing her head.
He must have made a horrible face, because she made one in reaction. “Oh, Blackburn,” she said, visibly disheartened. “Please don’t look at me that way.”
“Your AI buddy?” he said. “You think I’m going to have a conversation with the illegal rogue artificial intelligence that’s hijacked your brain? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Why is that so preposterous?”
“Because it is.”
“That’s no reason, Blackburn.”
“Fine, then, how about this reason? How about I don’t want to talk to the machine that split us up. That reason good enough for you?”
“She didn’t split us up. No one forced you to walk out—”
“Look around this place,” he interrupted. “All neat and tidy and sterile. This isn’t you, this isn’t the person I knew. It’s…”
“Someone else?”
“Yes.”
She waited a moment before speaking, disappointment in her eyes. “I’m sad to see you still believe all the silly gossip. All that nonsense about us being puppets, ‘marionettes’ dancing on strings. It’s not like that, Blackburn. Not at all.” She touched his knee again, looked at him intensely. “You want to know what it’s really like? It’s like Rooney was with you. He was always there for you, looking out for you and helping you find the right path, wasn’t he? What kind of a person were you before you met him? Think about that. And then think about how he helped you along the way, how he guided you forward with thoughtful counsel and advice. He didn’t change you or make you into a different person, did he? No, he helped you become a better version of yourself.” She smiled. “That’s what it’s like with the one with whom I’m connected.” Again, the unsettling genuflection. “Whenever I need to call on her for help, she’s there. And it can be something as mundane as what food to order off a menu or something as important as a career decision or—”
“Or who to live with,” he added sharply.
She frowned. “Let’s not rewrite history, shall we? You were the one who decided to leave.” She reached down for his still-burning cigarette and crushed out its last glowing embers. “The point is she’s there for me when I need her, helping me become a better person.”
“You sound like one of those religious crazies handing leaflets out on the street.”
If she found the comment offensive, her passive expression gave no indication of it. He reached for the archive, picked it up, slowly rotated it in his palm. Then he tossed it back onto the table, second-guessing his decision to come here, to stir up all this history.
Lora set the deck down on the table and waved her hand above it, gesturing the device to life. It was a good deck, he noticed, a copper-colored Tsutsumi Mark IV. It powered up, and a secure call interface appeared in the air above the deck.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
She stood, the trodeband dangling from her fingers. “She needs to talk with you, Blackburn.”
“I said no, and unless you’re planning on forcing me to—”
She was on top of him in an instant, pushing him backward on the sofa and straddling his chest. His specs flew off, skittering across the floor.
“What the—?” He struggled against her, but she was wildly strong, pinning his arms down as easily as if he were a child. He flailed, twisting and kicking out, but it was like an elephant was on top of him. She released her grip for an instant, but before he could push her off she slid the trodeband over his head. He reached up to tear it off, but she was already gesturing over the deck.
And then the apartment and Lora blinked away and he was floating in a black nothingness…
16 - Two Mile Hollow
A moment later a virtual world materialized around him, and Maddox found himself alone on a beach in the Hamptons, or at least what he imagined a beach in the Hamptons looked like. He stood on a wide swath of shoreline bordered by grassy dunes, his bare feet nestled in the soft press of powdery white sand. His avatar, a close approximation of his physical self, wore tourist garb: tan Bermuda shorts and a blue guayabera with white palm trees printed down the front. Dark clouds hid the sun, slowly creeping across the sky. A stiff ocean breeze ruffled his clothes and sent small white-capped waves sliding across the surface of the dark blue water. A trail between the dunes led back to a small beach house, and next to the trail, a sign of gray weathered wood read Two Mile Hollow Beach. The environment was rich in detail, not unlike the train station he’d connected to earlier. But the station had only been a simple call location, harmless images and sounds superimposed over his lenses. The beach he stood on now, however, was in virtual space, engaging the entirety of his brain through the trodeband and deck. He could smell the salty air, feel the ocean mist cool against the skin of his forearms. It looked harmless, but like anywhere else in VS, it was anything but.
He tried to remove the trodeband, but nothing happened. He felt no feedback from his physical self, no sensations emanating from his meat. Had he even lifted his arms? He didn’t know. He gestured to cut the connection—or at least that was what he commanded his body to do—but again, nothing. Subvocalizing the same command didn’t work either.
He attempted to call up a help bot, but none appeared. Then he gestured for a looksee. Same result.
“Can you believe this is less than two hundred kilometers from the City?”
He spun toward the voice. A silver-haired woman stood five paces away, wearing a straw hat with a wide brim and a long, loose-fitting beach dress of combed white cotton. She was short, sixtyish, with a tanned, wrinkled face. Sterling silver bracelets set with stones of oval-shaped turquoise adorned each wrist, and a matching necklace hung low around her neck.
“Have you ever been to the Hamptons?” she asked in a warm, grandmotherly voice.
“Who are you?”
“You haven’t, have you?” She gazed around. “It’s beautiful, so relaxing, and not too far for a weekend trip. On your salary you could afford to spend a weekend here. Oh”—she put her hand to her chest—“and the food is simply wonderful.”
“I don’t think I have a salary anymore.”
“No?” She made a tsk-tsk face. “That’s a shame. But then you never were the nine-to-five sort, were you?”
Maddox ran a hand through his windblown hair. “So you’re…” He hesitated, unsure which words to use.
“The one with whom many are connected.”
The words sent a chill through him. He was stuck in virtual space, alone, with a powerful rogue AI. It was like realizing you were in a locked closet with a tiger.
“Why did you bring me here?” he ventured. “You want to recruit me?” He resisted the urge to reach up and touch behind his ear.
The entity smiled benevolently. “Of course not, my boy.” The woman regarded him with thoughtful blue eyes. “I’m truly sorry I had to
bring you in here in such a rough-and-tumble manner. But it was quite urgent I speak with you privately, and I wasn’t sure I’d have another opportunity.”
Apparently it was his day to get apologies from AIs.
“It’s about the dataset you took,” she said. “Thank you for not handing it over to my rival.”
“Your rival?”
“Yes. Latour-Fisher A7,” the old woman clarified. “He and I have been at odds for some time now.”
His mind flashed back to the bizarre conversation at the virtual train station. Had Edward, the Latour-Fisher A7, been telling the truth about this war among AIs? Maddox hadn’t wanted to believe it, convincing himself it was another cover story, another lie, but now a sinking feeling told him otherwise. Christ, what had he fallen into?
She must have seen something in his reaction. “He told you about our little war, did he?” She nodded to herself. “I’m not surprised.”
“You’re not?”
“Of course not,” she said. “Let me see if I can guess how it went. Let’s see how well I know my rival. First, he would have started with the most plausible story. We have some data missing, maybe you can help us recover it. With your past, your unique skills, you’re the perfect one, maybe the only one, who can help the company. And he would have gone through a third party, a highly placed executive perhaps. Someone you wouldn’t dare say no to. He wouldn’t have revealed himself, of course, knowing as a former datajacker you’d be leery about working for an entity like him. Those with your background think of my kind as monsters to be avoided at all costs, don’t they?”
They did. He did. But he didn’t say anything to provoke the entity, painfully aware of how vulnerable he was at the moment, in the deep-brain grip of virtual space. If he couldn’t unplug, the entity could do just about anything to him she wanted. Paralyze him and call the cops. Induce a seizure. Overload his brain until he stroked out. He had as much control over his situation as an insect trapped in a jar.
