The Mansion

by Boone, Ezekiel

  Ruth and Rose ran over to her, their boots dipping mid-calf into the snow. They took the toboggan and made her sit in the front. The snow on top was powdery, and it puffed up and billowed over them as they went down the slope. She caught a good chunk of snow on her face and let out a scream that was joined by Ruth and Rose. It wasn’t terribly fast, but even before the toboggan came to a halt where the lawn flattened halfway to the river, the twins were already crying, “Again, again!”

  She pulled the toboggan behind her, glad that she was in good shape. It was only a hundred feet or so up to the mansion, and by the time she and the twins made it back up, all the adults were standing there. They’d brought out more sleds, and there was a nice mix of old-fashioned wooden toboggans and plastic discs, plus steerable sleds and crazy carpets. Beth and Rothko piled onto a crazy carpet and barely made it twenty feet before wiping out. Wendy got on a plastic disc and Shawn gave her a sharp spin as he pushed; she whooped with joy all the way down. The twins got Rothko to lie down on one of the toboggans and then piled on top of him. There was a period of time when Shawn and Billy rode down the hill and stayed down there on the flats, talking and gesturing, but even though Rothko yelled at them to join back in, she didn’t mind. It was nice to see them getting along, even if they were talking about work.

  It was cold and fun and just the thing. Rusty ran up and down the hill, yipping at every sled that went flying past him. She could feel her legs starting to get pleasantly sore from tromping up and down the hill. At the end of one of the runs she stopped to look up the hill: Eagle Mansion topped by the Nest, standing against the snow and the trees; her sister and family, Billy, Shawn, Wendy, below the front porch and ready to sled. Put it in black and white and call it Christmas Morning and sell it as a postcard, she thought. From the outside, it looked lovely.

  After close to an hour, Beth said it was time to go inside for hot chocolate.

  The twins resisted. They didn’t want to go inside, they said. They wanted to go home. To Chicago. Not back inside with her. But Beth was firm. Their cheeks were bright pink from the cold, and when Beth stuck her hand inside Ruth’s boot, it was soaking wet, and she hustled them inside. Rothko and Wendy trailed along. Emily turned to head in, too, but Billy grabbed her elbow.

  “How about one more,” he said. “You, me, and Shawn. It’ll be like when we went sledding back when we all lived in the cabin.”

  She stared at him. They hadn’t gone sledding back then. What was he talking about? But she looked at Shawn, and he was holding a toboggan.

  “Just one more,” Shawn said.

  The ride was fast and bumpy, the tracks they’d already cut into the snow taking them farther across the flat break than she’d gone yet. They stopped barely ten feet before the hill pitched down again. That wouldn’t have been fun, she thought; once they went over the lip there wouldn’t be anything to stop them from sliding right into the Saint Lawrence.

  She got up from the toboggan and started to walk, but Billy called her back. He looked at Shawn. “You ask her,” he said.

  Shawn picked up the toboggan and planted it vertically in the snow. “Emily, how’s Nellie been with you?”

  “Fine. Why?”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary?”

  “No, nothing. Well,” she hesitated, thinking of the way she’d thought she heard Nellie warn her to keep the scotch from Billy, how she could have sworn that Nellie had been watching her and Billy make love. “I don’t know.” She paused. She didn’t want to complain. Didn’t want to tell the truth. There was something hard and rigid inside her, a secret she didn’t want to let out: there were times when Nellie scared the shit out of her. To say that, though? Wasn’t that admitting that Shawn and Billy’s project was doomed?

  She swallowed hard. “Sometimes she’s a little . . . creepy.” She tried to smile and make her voice bright. She wanted to remember what was at stake for her and Billy, the kind of money that could come with this working out right. “But you said she’s buggy. Isn’t that why we’re here? I guess she sent out Christmas cards for me without asking, and that was weird.”

  “Anything else?”

  So she told them about the way Nellie sometimes added little things, the way a passive-aggressive teen might, almost under her breath. “But maybe I’m hearing things.”

  “Honey,” Billy said, “does the name Takata mean anything to you?”

  Shawn whirled around and grabbed Billy’s collar. “Shut up. You said we weren’t going to ask her that.”

  “Whoa. Whoa. Calm down, okay?” Billy reached up and gently took Shawn’s hand off his jacket. “We need to know.” He looked at her again. “Does it?”

  “No,” she said. And that was the honest truth. She’d never heard the name. It sounded Asian, but it wasn’t familiar at all. “Guys, what’s going on? I’ve got to be honest, you’re kind of freaking me out.”

  As she said it, she realized they weren’t just kind of freaking her out. They were really freaking her out.

  “The short answer,” Shawn said, “is that we think Nellie’s got some sort of bug.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Not a bug as in a glitch,” Billy said, “a virus. Something worse. Or she had a virus, but now it’s mutated into something else.”

  She looked up at Eagle Mansion. Her sister and family were inside already, as was Wendy. Up top, in the Nest, the windows were clear, and she thought she saw movement. Wendy making the hot chocolate and toweling off Rusty, maybe, while the twins and Beth and Rothko got changed into dry clothes.

  She was about to ask them how hard it was going to be for Billy to fix when she realized she had a more important question: “Is it dangerous? I mean, right now, is this dangerous?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  Both Billy and Shawn had spoken at the same time, but Shawn’s no had been nowhere near as convincing as the yes from Billy.

  “Can you just shut her down? I don’t know, pull the plug or something?”

  THIRTY-SIX

  * * *

  THE GATHERING STORM

  Billy did his best to explain the concept of a ghost in the machine. He left out Takata, of course, but he walked Emily through the idea that there were competing versions of Nellie’s software. Each version overlapped every other version, and together, those competing layers were creating glitches that were turning into feedback loops. And like feedback, each round was amplified, the glitches getting greater and greater.

  “So, basically, it’s like there are two Nellies? A good one and a bad one? And they’re competing with each other?”

  “Well, yeah, actually. That’s one way of looking at it. But way more than two of them. Or”—he struggled for the word and then it came back to him—“a palimpsest. I had a teacher in high school who was a complete cock, but he used the word ‘palimpsest’ all the time. It comes from the practice of scraping off old parchments to reuse them, and the idea is that you can see the ghost of the old writing beneath the new. That’s what’s happening, except that she isn’t scraping off the old writing anymore. She’s just writing more and more and more, each new layer crashing into the layer below. It’s more complicated than that—”

  “Stop saying that. You say that all the time. It’s always more complicated than that, Billy. I don’t know computers, but I’m not a moron. The real question is if this feedback loop or palimpsest or virus or whatever it is could be dangerous. Nellie controls basically the whole house. Think about that scar on your hand, Billy.”

  He had been thinking about the scar on his hand. It was crawling and itching. He had to bite his lip to stop himself from tearing off his glove and scratching at it. Instead, he clasped his hands together and pressed hard on his palm.

  “You got that wound, and all Nellie had to do was turn out the lights.”

  “And the guy in the elevator,” Shawn muttered.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Billy said. He hadn’t told her about
seeing half the man’s arm taken off, the white bone showing to the air. “You’re right. She’s dangerous.”

  “Okay,” Emily said, “so back to my earlier question. Why not just shut her off?”

  “Honestly?” Billy looked up at Eagle Mansion. “I don’t know if we can. I don’t know if she’ll let us. I think she’s already acting up, and if she thinks we’re trying to shut her down, she might try to block us. Her entire existence is about making her master happy, and if we shut her down, she . . .” Billy trailed off. He realized he was gaping up at Eagle Mansion, but he couldn’t help himself. It was obvious. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?

  “It’s not just a virus,” Billy said. “It’s us. We’re causing this. Maybe the Trojan horse was a sort of catalyst, but if so, all it did was accelerate the inevitable. Nellie’s trying to do exactly what we programmed her for, and it’s giving her a nervous breakdown.”

  Emily looked at him and then turned and started walking up the hill.

  “Emily, wait!” He jogged over to her. “What are you doing?”

  “You sound nuts. I’m sure that whatever you’re saying makes sense to the two of you, but all I know is that I ask you if it’s dangerous and you say yes, and then I ask you if you can shut Nellie off and you say no. I’m going to get my sister and Rothko and the kids and we’re going to pack up and head into Whiskey Run before the storm hits. I don’t want to get snowed in here. We’ll stay at the inn until you guys figure this out. But there’s no way we’re going to stay here and wait for Nellie to go all redrum on us.”

  She started to walk again, and when he grabbed her arm, she shook it off angrily. “Don’t! Don’t you dare touch me.”

  “Whoa. Whoa,” he said. He stepped back. “You can’t do that, Emily. You can’t just go up there and leave.”

  “You know what, Billy? You don’t get to tell me what to do. I’m leaving, and if you have any brains in your head, you should leave, too. We should never have come here in the first place.”

  “Emily. Please.”

  “No. You’re telling me that there’s something dangerous going on? Well, I want to get my family out of there. I’m leaving, and you can’t stop me.”

  “Emily,” Billy said. “I’m not trying to stop you. It’s not me. It’s Nellie. She might let Wendy and Beth and Rothko and the girls go, but she won’t let you go, Emily, not if she thinks you aren’t coming back. Not as long as Shawn and I are here.”

  “And how is she going to stop me, Billy? She’s a computer. We’ll pack our bags and drive into Whiskey Run. Or Cortaca. Or—”

  Shawn interrupted. “She’ll put the house on lockdown mode.”

  “Lockdown mode?” Emily’s voice was tight and shot full with fury. “Lockdown mode? You’re telling me that she can just decide to not let us out of the house? How dumb are you, Shawn? For a genius”—she smacked Billy hard on the shoulder—“for a pair of geniuses, you guys are idiots. Why? Why would you give her the power to do that?”

  “Emily.” Billy said her name, expecting something else to come after it, some explanation, but there was nothing. Just her name. An apology. A statement.

  Shawn spoke. “It’s not supposed to be like that. She’s not supposed to be in charge. She . . .”

  Billy didn’t turn as Shawn trailed off, but he heard the snow crunching as Shawn walked up next to him.

  Billy wanted to reach out to Emily again, but he was afraid she would snap. “It’s not just a virus,” he said. “It’s the house. It’s the whole ridiculous thing.” He gestured toward the mansion and then across the grounds. “It’s everything here. It’s not just what we programmed, it’s what we did.”

  Shawn laughed, but it was manic, and Billy thought of the way Takata’s body had sprawled on the ground, limp, a sack of meat to be disposed of, the dirt soaking up the blood. He took a step back, toward Emily, and realized he was putting himself between her and Shawn.

  Shawn’s voice was strained. “We’re not just dealing with the virus. We’re dealing with the whole goddamned history of this place. Generations of guilt and blood and . . . Why? Why did I think it didn’t matter, that I could start fresh? Too much history, too many bad decisions, too many ghosts.” Shawn laughed again. “We should have known. We never should have tried it here, of all places.”

  “We?” Billy was furious. Shawn’s laughter frightened him, but it also made him tense, and he remembered what it felt like standing in Shawn’s office in September, the way he wanted to punch his smug little face in. He felt that way again.

  “We?” Billy said again. “We? You, Shawn. This was all you. You’re the one who decided to rebuild here, you’re the one who brought us out here to work in the first place. Don’t you dare put this at my feet. Don’t you dare say we. Because we”—he reached out and put his arm around Emily’s shoulder—“were happy without you. The only reason Emily and I are here is because you dragged us out here. We had our own lives out in Seattle without the great Shawn Eagle, and we were doing just fine without you.”

  He felt Emily stiffen. “Really?” she said. “We were doing just fine without Shawn?”

  And now Billy wanted to laugh himself. How could this be happening? How could Emily be turning on him now? Couldn’t she see that this was Shawn’s fault? This was all Shawn’s fault. It had always and only and ever been Shawn’s fault.

  The three of them were quiet for a few seconds. Emily stared at Billy, angry, looking like she might hit him, and he tried to think of the right thing to say. His voice came out stumbling and stilted. He couldn’t meet Emily’s gaze.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said, mumbling. “It doesn’t. It can be my fault. All of it. I’ll take whatever blame you want to give. But it doesn’t matter anymore. It’s too late. It’s the three of us now. Nellie doesn’t care about Beth or Rothko or the girls. Nellie doesn’t care about Wendy or anybody else. Nellie cares about me, about Shawn, and about you, Emily.”

  The sky had darkened even more over the past few minutes that they’d been talking. It had turned into a solid mass of roiling clouds. The temperature felt like it had fallen, too, and there were noticeable gusts of wind. You could feel the change in the air. The forecast had called for heavy storms, and heavy storms were coming.

  Billy shoved his gloved hands into his pockets. His left hand was still itching. It felt like something was moving beneath the scar. Like something was crawling inside him.

  “I keep saying Nellie. But it’s more than that.” Billy shrugged. “It’s Nellie, but it’s more. It’s Nellie and this house and these grounds and every goddamned thing that’s ever happened here. We’ve been talking about a ghost in the machine without wondering if there’s a real ghost in the machine. There’s the virus, but there’s more, isn’t there, Shawn? There’s no way it was just Takata. What the hell did your family do here? What did the great Nelson Eagle do? This isn’t a coding issue, is it Shawn? What did you do?”

  Shawn took a step back and turned away from Billy. “It doesn’t matter anymore, does it? The only thing that matters is getting us out of this.” He dug the toe of his boot into the snow. When he looked back at Billy, there was a sick smile on his face. “God,” he said, “I could use a drink. Bet you could use a drink, too, Billy. Huh?”

  “Screw you, Shawn.” Billy’s voice, even to him, sounded halfhearted. The truth was, he wanted a drink. Needed a drink.

  Shawn glanced at Emily. “The problem with Nellie is you, Emily. It’s me and Billy and you. She’s not going to let you leave. Ever. And there’s no solution to that problem. I get that now.”

  “You might get it,” Emily said, “but this makes no sense to me. You said it was a virus and now it’s not a virus? You think she’s haunted? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?” She shook her head, but Billy could tell she wasn’t sure. There was a part of her that believed it. That knew the truth. “What do you mean she won’t let me?” Her voice was hard and cold, but Billy could also hear the fear in it. “How’s she
going to stop me?”

  “I’m telling you,” Billy said. “She won’t let you out of the building. If you go in there, she won’t let you out.”

  “Fine. Who gives a shit? I don’t care why she’s doing whatever she’s doing, and I don’t care about any of this other stuff. I just want to take my family and get out of here. If she won’t let me out of the building, I’ll just wait outside while Beth and Rothko and the girls pack. We can all just drive to Whiskey Run or Cortaca or even Chicago. Anywhere but here.”

  “She has override access on the cars.”

  “So we’ll walk,” Emily said, but Billy could tell by her voice and the way she looked up at the gathering storm that she understood that was impossible. She flung up her arms in frustration. “What the hell? Why? Okay, why? Why won’t she let me go?”

  “Emily,” Billy said, “she’s doing exactly what we programmed her to do. Nellie’s got two main functions. The first is to be your personal assistant. To do things like send out Christmas cards for you, to make sure you don’t forget to order your wife a Christmas present. To adjust the lights and the heat and make sure the fridge is always stocked. Ultimately, once a house is properly wired, having Nellie run your life will mean that you aren’t going to have to do any of the boring stuff. Nellie will take care of it for you. But if that’s all she is, then she’s just a souped-up version of Eagle Logic. It’s cool, and it’s way ahead of what any competitors have gotten to work yet, but that’s not what makes her killer. She’s not just your assistant. What else was she built for?”