Shawn looked at Billy and then looked back at the desk. He nodded. “Okay. Let me go get a towel and then I’ll take you down to the infirmary. I’ll be right back.”
“Dude. Seriously. I think I need to go to the medical center in town. There’s broken glass in there, and I’m pretty sure this isn’t just a glue and bandage job.”
Shawn was already walking to the door. “I’ll get a towel. She can handle anything up to and including minor surgery in the infirmary. It’s pretty badass. Another innovation down there.”
The doors slid open as Shawn approached and then closed behind him, leaving Billy alone in the office.
Billy looked at his hand again. He didn’t feel good. The sight of blood didn’t normally bother him, but this was bothering him. He felt woozy. The room was really hot all of a sudden, and he realized he needed to lie down, so he did. The cool concrete was a blessed kiss against the back of his head.
“What the hell was that, Nellie?” he said. He closed his eyes. He was okay, but he just needed a minute. Plus, some stitches or something.
I WOULD LIKE TO BE PRESENT FOR DINNER TONIGHT.
Billy opened his eyes.
The voices were so similar that he wanted to believe he was imagining the difference. But he wasn’t imagining it.
In the last couple of years Eagle Technology and all the other players had gotten their virtual assistants to sound almost human. Not quite, because there was a uniformity that was ever-present, and all of them, even, yes, Eagle Logic’s, still had small hitches betraying their electronic origin, but the weirdness faded into the background. Once you’d used them for a little bit, you forgot that you were talking to a machine. That had been an impossibility in the early days of virtual assistants. Siri, Cortana, Google Now, Alexa, all of them some variation of the same stilted, synthesized voice. The space between words not quite right, their inorganic nature front and center. You could never, not once, with these first-generation assistants, forget that you were talking to a machine. And further back, accessibility programs with read-over capability, phone system operators, automated machines, even the good old Speak & Spell, were all so broken and mechanized that nobody could ever have mistaken them for human. Even in science fiction movies and television shows, Billy thought, there was still something off in the speech of computers, as if the directors were afraid to let the actors reading the lines sound like actors reading lines.
But Nellie. She was close. Her phrasing was off, he thought. Too formal at times, too careful, but she sounded real to him. And that made this tiny discrepancy between the two voices feel even odder. Still, he was certain that the voice he was hearing now, the Nellie talking to him at this moment, was different from the Nellie who had been in the room with him and Shawn. It wasn’t anything obvious, no thick accent or massive change in pitch. No, it was like one Nellie was simply older than the other Nellie. That’s what it sounded like.
I’M SORRY THAT YOU HURT YOUR HAND.
The cement felt cool and calming against the back of his head and on his body through the fabric of his T-shirt. He could hear voices, soft and chattering, outside the room. A woman, maybe Wendy, calling something to somebody else.
“Thanks,” he said. “What happened with the lights?”
SHAWN HAS TOLD YOU THAT THERE ARE STILL INCONSISTENCIES.
Was that an answer? Was she avoiding the question like she had with Shawn? Would he be able to tell if he were looking at a face?
“That’s why I’m here, I guess,” he said.
AND YOUR WIFE. SHE IS A MEANINGFUL PERSON. I AM VERY PLEASED THAT EMILY IS HERE WITH YOU AND SHAWN.
“Yeah, me, too,” Billy said, thinking again of those few months when he wasn’t sure if Emily would ever come back to him. Billy pushed himself back up into a sitting position. It was an awkward exercise. His hand was barking at him. “I’ll tell you what, Nellie. You keep the lights on for me, and you can hang out with us at dinner.”
I WOULD ENJOY THAT. THANK YOU FOR HAVING ME AS YOUR GUEST.
Billy blinked. It was disconcerting, having Nellie’s voice feel like it was coming from nowhere and everywhere. Or maybe it was soothing. He felt confused. Maybe he felt so messed up because of the cut. He was bleeding pretty good. Or maybe he felt out of it from being at the Rooster so late last night.
“It would help, I think, if I felt like I had somewhere to look while I was talking to you.”
I CAN DO THAT.
The voice was directed now. It came from a spot on the wall beside him. And there, where the wall had been issuing a generalized, diffuse blue light, there was now a soft, grass-green dot the size of a tennis ball at about head height. That’s where the voice was coming from, and as Nellie spoke, the ball seemed to pulse and breathe.
DOES THIS MAKE YOU FEEL MORE COMFORTABLE, BILLY? I DON’T WANT TO MAKE YOU FEEL UNCOMFORTABLE.
“Yeah,” he said. “Much better. Look, though, you can’t come to dinner if—”
NO.
Her voice was louder. If he’d been pressed, he would have said she was angry.
I WILL BE PRESENT FOR DINNER TONIGHT WITH YOU AND SHAWN AND EMILY.
“Exactly. Present. But only present,” Billy said, thinking of Shawn. Thinking of picking his battles. “You can listen and hang out, but you’re going to have to act like you are sleeping, okay? Just, you know, be invisible.”
I DO NOT LIKE IT WHEN SHAWN DOES NOT LET ME a topical anesthetic spray for removal of the glass shards will also make the application of stitches a more comfortable experience for you. If you will be so kind as to wrap your hand in the towel that Shawn is bringing so that you do not track blood through the house. Please do not squeeze your hand, however, as there is still glass embedded in your flesh.
The door opened just as Nellie’s voice switched over, and Shawn came in holding the towel, Emily and Wendy trailing behind him. When Emily saw his hand, saw the blood that had run down his arm and stained his shirt and puddled on the floor, she blanched. She started to say something, but Billy cut her off.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Just tripped.” He slowly got to his feet. He felt woozy, hot, but better than he had. He was pretty sure that any danger of fainting had passed him by. He took the towel from Shawn and gently pooled it under his hand. “Okay,” he said to Shawn. “Infirmary?”
Wendy looked him up and down and at the blood on the floor. “You want me to get somebody up here to clean this?” she said to Shawn. “Or are we still off-limits? Got to be honest, I was expecting something more exciting than just a shitty desk in here.”
Shawn shook his head and nodded toward Billy’s hand. “That not exciting enough for you? No. I still don’t want anybody in here. Don’t worry about it. I’ll clean it up.” Billy watched him glance over to the wall where the green ball of light still hummed and breathed and then back to Billy. “Okay,” Shawn said. “Infirmary.”
Emily kept her hand on Billy’s elbow as they went down the stairs, following Shawn to a small room back in the service area. It was slightly disappointing. The room looked, more or less, like a doctor’s office with an examining table, but instead of an overhead task light hanging from the ceiling, there was a metal box that covered most of the ceiling from wall to wall, hanging down nearly two feet. From each corner of the box, an articulating mechanical arm unfolded and started to move as Billy got on the examining table. Nellie asked him to relax, and he felt two of the arms gently steady his hand, with one gripping his wrist, and the other softly holding his hand flat. The other two arms moved quickly and smoothly. First they set up a sort of surgical paper tent so that he couldn’t see what was going on with his hand, and then there was the hiss of a spray, something cold and soothing that almost instantly numbed his hand. Then, just the whirring of belts and cranks as the arms did whatever they were doing behind the surgical tent. After a few seconds, one of the arms, sporting a pair of tweezers, started darting out from the tent to drop bloody chunks of glass into a metal bowl. Three larger pieces
and then the tinkle of ten or fifteen smaller pieces joining the large shards.
“Damn,” Emily said. She kept looking from his face up to where the arms connected to the ceiling. “Okay. That’s actually pretty impressive.”
“We’ve got prototypes of this in the field already, mostly military situations,” Shawn said. “The field units are really limited in terms of the kinds of surgeries they can perform, but here, with Nellie directing it, there’s a much larger array of medical assistance available. I mean, it’s still pretty limited. If you’ve got a real emergency, or, you know, you decide to shoot Billy in the head or something, you’ve got to head to town. The room next door is the clean room—circuits and computer stuff—and she has access in there as well. It’s kind of crazy. The more we explore what Nellie is going to be able to do, the more we realize we aren’t even scratching the surface. Can you imagine having these surgical suites available everywhere?”
The skin on the surface of his hand was numb, but Billy felt the machine’s metal pincers probing deeper into the flesh of his palm, and he grimaced at the feel of glass grinding against bone. And then, relief. He tried, experimentally, to flex his hand, but the mechanical arms had him pinned tightly. One of the mechanical arms retracted into the box in the ceiling and then emerged again seconds later, all traces of blood gone. It zipped down, moving so quickly that if his hand hadn’t been pinned down, he would have started and yanked it back. The pressure on his hand was uncomfortable—even with the numbing spray, he could feel Nellie pressing and prodding, and then, after a minute or so, the pressure was gone and the arms holding him down relented. He pulled his hand out from the surgical tent. There was a neat line of stitches, maybe ten total, pulling the gash in his palm back together.
As he looked at the stitches, the arms started working on him again, and Nellie bandaged the hand up.
It was hard to relax, but there was something calming in the way she attended to him, something almost hypnotic.
TWENTY-ONE
* * *
WHISKEY
Well, so far, Billy and Emily’s introduction—or reintroduction, for Billy—to Nellie had been a disaster.
Shawn wasn’t surprised, but he wasn’t happy about it either. Of course things were going wrong with Nellie. Otherwise, why would he have brought Billy here in the first place? He’d had his engineers working on Nellie for years, some of his very best men and women, and while they could mostly get her to function in the controlled environment of the lab, they’d all ended up hitting walls and dead ends when it came to getting her to actually work. There was no question that if he wanted to crack Nellie, he had to bring in the man who’d conceived her, but it seemed like her glitches had actually gotten worse since Billy had come on board. It wasn’t just the little temper tantrum she’d had earlier—the screaming from the women had been because Nellie had blacked out all of the Nest and anywhere else she could in Eagle Mansion, not just the room he and Billy were in—but also other bits and pieces since the visit in September. It was like she was regressing, a little kid throwing fits. Two more men had been sent to the hospital in the last month of construction.
What bothered him most of all, however, was that as much as he didn’t want to admit it, he had been hoping to impress Emily. Oh, not with Nellie. That had never been her thing. Even if Nellie had worked entirely, Emily wouldn’t have cared much. But Eagle Mansion, the Nest, the private jet, the bodyguards, the employees at his beck and call, all of it. That should have been something. It wasn’t that he wanted her back. Not really. Just that it would have been gratifying to get some sort of acknowledgment of what she must have known to be true, which was that she should never have left with Billy so many years before. She had to know that.
Or maybe he was deluding himself. There was a reason that, when he came out of his jet, he was barely able to do more than greet her and then jump into a separate car. It didn’t matter that it had been a dozen years or that his entire life had changed. She was still the woman who had broken his heart by walking away. The only one who’d ever done that.
He had originally planned to take a walk-through with the foreman and then go out for a hike in the woods with Emily after lunch. Wendy could deal with Billy for a bit, make sure he was completely set up, while he and Emily got a chance to catch up. Not to try to get her back. Just to give her a chance to see how things were now with him. In case maybe things were rocky with her and Billy. But with Nellie’s playing her little game with the lights, Billy had gone to lie down and Emily had gone with him instead, leaving Shawn to his own devices.
It was just as well. It gave him time to make the walk-through of Eagle Mansion and the grounds with the foreman a more detailed inspection, to sign off on the work. And by the time he was done with the inspection, he was happy to sign off. Lawrence had done a good job and deserved the hefty bonus that Shawn was giving him. Lawrence had driven his men hard, and Shawn felt good about his decision to send the man and his wife off to Hawaii as an additional reward for his work. Eagle Mansion itself was immaculate. Outside, the powdered-sugar dusting of snow had finished melting, and while there were still a few odds and ends on the grounds slated for completion in the spring, even with the swimming pool empty—it would stay that way until May—the finished product was visible.
By the time he watched Lawrence drive off, it was late afternoon. His security detail was spread across the lawn. They were taking themselves particularly seriously today, Shawn thought. He appreciated it, and he knew it was a necessary part of his normal life, but it seemed a little silly. It was hard to imagine any real threats to his life out here, past Whiskey Run. But everywhere else? He was simply worth too much money to pretend that he had a regular life anymore. Generally, his director of security kept things in the background; however, there was no way to be subtle about security in Whiskey Run. In Baltimore, his house and offices had been turned into fortresses, but there were usually enough people around that the security could blend into the background. And when he was traveling or at conferences or TED Talks, it’s not like he was the only billionaire on the block with a black-suited, gun-carrying group of guys surrounding him. Here, though, at Eagle Mansion, it seemed almost silly to have bodyguards with him. He was a lot more likely to be eaten by a bear than he was to be assassinated or kidnapped.
The closest of them, the head of the detail, a Norwegian named Finn, looked up at him questioningly. Shawn motioned for Finn to stay where he was and then turned and went back into the mansion. He wanted to do this by himself.
He walked through the lobby and dining room, working his way back past the kitchen and into the service corridors. Farther back, behind the staff quarters, he pushed through the doors that led him outside again. Fisker DeLeon had not been thrilled at Shawn’s insistence on keeping the burned-out groundskeeper’s cottage as it was, but Shawn was the one writing the checks. The little prick of an architect could just do as he was damn well told and work around it. There were things that Shawn was happy to have covered over, but there were some things he didn’t feel he could forget.
It wasn’t like the small building was big enough to get in the way. It was barely twenty feet by twenty feet, and it was fifty, maybe sixty feet away from the main mansion. Among the gardens for the kitchen and the new outbuildings for maintenance and garage space and the updating and expansion of the servants’ quarters into a modern, functional staff lodging area, this small, damaged piece of real estate was an afterthought. Because of the style of Eagle Mansion, the wood and rock making it feel like a natural part of the landscape, even with the fire damage, the groundskeeper’s cottage didn’t seem too out of place. It looked almost quaint. If you looked closely, though, you could see that he’d had Fisker’s crew put a new door on the ruined building. He didn’t want guests just wandering into the cottage; there was a biometric handprint reader on the door. He supposed he could have run Nellie out here, but the handprint reader was an easy solution. Hard to fake and impossible to
lose the key unless you accidentally chopped your hand off. He winced at the thought. That poor guy losing part of his arm in the elevator. The whole construction project had been like that. More accidents and injuries and deaths here than at the whole Eagle Technology campus in Baltimore combined. At least it was done. All that was behind him now. Just some landscaping to do in the spring, a week or two of housekeeping taking the dust covers off the furniture and prepping for the first round of guests. No real construction to speak of.
He stepped into the cottage, leaving the door open behind him. The open door let in a little extra light, but that wasn’t the only reason. Even though there were a couple of people in Eagle Mansion, getting things ready for Billy and Emily, there was something about being closed up in the old cottage that made him feel alone and uncomfortable.
Even after all these years, the room still smelled of smoke and char.
Shawn had to admit that Fisker had done a terrific job staying true to the old mansion while still updating and expanding it, even if Fisker had grumbled about leaving this wreck of an old building, where Shawn had lived as a kid, untouched. Well, not entirely untouched. As well as the security door, the contractors had also replaced the roof and put in new windows, making it weathertight. But otherwise, it was the same. The old woodstove was still a twisted wreck of blackened metal. The stone walls were still covered in soot. The soapstone sink was split from the heat of the fire, falling in on one side where the cabinet had burned away. He always forgot how small the space actually was. It was smaller, still, when he’d lived in it. His mother had hung curtains made from old blankets to divide the room and carve out a bedroom for her and his father, another small space in the corner where Shawn’s mattress had been. Good lord, it must have been tight, the three of them living in there, but the actual dimensions didn’t really matter; it was a space, Shawn thought, that had to be measured by the distance of time.
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