* * *
Shitshitshitshitshitshitshit!
Ryan typed furiously to bring up the specs to a system he had never seen before. Number 50-B. Was that some kind of joke?
Aw, what the hell was this! Every screen he brought up looked like it was composed by a five-year-old. He couldn’t make heads or tails of it—he sure as hell hadn’t written it.
In a last ditch attempt to salvage the situation, he broke protocol, overrode the system, and pulled up the camera feeds. Fifty-one homes, over three hundred cameras filled the screen like dominoes; a giant mosaic of lives from all over the world. He ignored the mess, because if he looked at it, his brain would shut down in self-preservation.
When all else fails, go back to the basics. SQL was his god. He filtered the results again and again, until he was left with one house. By some miracle, he managed to engage motion detectors to find the woman he was speaking to, and a single video feed filled his main screen.
The woman was hopping from foot to foot in front of the breaker box. Her back was to the only camera in the room, but it was one hell of a view. If he wasn’t freaking out right now, he’d take a moment to appreciate it.
“Damn, boy,” Taylor said. He wasn’t looking at her, but at the code scrolling across a different screen. “Someone screwed ya big time.” He pointed to a line toward the top. Ryan’s user ID number was there, implicating him as surely as if he’d left a fingerprint. Only he’d never seen this stuff before.
“Go get Celia,” he told Taylor.
Taylor looked up and did a double take. “Holy shit, is that the pill?”
“Shut up and go get her.”
Taylor made a face. “You sure you wanna do that?”
“Now! Before I tell your wife you were ogling my client.” Christ, he was in such deep shit.
“Hey, what the hell?” the woman’s voice blared through the speakers. Clear as bells. He had no idea why she couldn’t hear him the same. “Are you still there?”
Taylor patted him on the back. “You’re up, slugger,” he said, and left. Hopefully to get Celia.
Ryan un-muted his mic. “Yeah, still here. Hold please.”
“Are you kid—” He cut off the audio. Shoving away from his station, he raked both hands through his hair. How the hell had this happened? Fifty accounts to one tech. That was the protocol. Not forty-nine, and sure as hell not fifty-one. Ryan couldn’t handle this on his own. It would take a total wipe and reinstall to get it working. Hearth had a one hundred percent satisfaction rate. To Ryan’s knowledge, there was no precedent or contingency for something like this.
Celia entered like a general walking onto the battlefield, cutting into his cerebral meltdown with three competent words: “Talk to me.”
She’d know what to do. She was the boss; that was her job.
Confident that she would come up with a solution, Ryan slumped in his seat. “I have no clue. Look at it! I don’t even know where the hell it came from.”
Celia scanned each screen, scrolled through a batch of code. “Can you fix it?”
Ryan’s jaw dropped. “Seriously?”
She just looked at him like he was wasting her time.
“There’s no way. I don’t even think this is our system…is it?”
Celia squinted at the screen. “Looks like an older version, but yeah, definitely ours.”
“Well, there’s no way in hell I can install a new version remotely,” he said. “The code isn’t modular; it’s all mixed and melted together so bad, just looking at it here is degrading functionality on the other end.”
“You can upload in batches.”
Ryan stared. Having this dumped into his lap had not been part of the plan. “How? Are you even seeing this? It’s…just… Even if I could isolate different parts of the system—which I can’t—nothing would work in the mean time. It can’t be done. You need to send a tech out there.”
“Not happening.”
“Why not?”
“First, because we don’t have field techs. Our houses are supposed to work without human interference, that’s what our customers pay for. And second, we have too much at stake to publicize a huge screw-up right out of the gate. Minor functionality flaws, sure, but an entire faulty system installation?” Celia shook her head. “You’re going to fix this. I don’t care how; I don’t care what you have to break to get it done. If something doesn’t work, fake it until it does.”
No, this couldn’t be happening. He must have had an aneurism in the last few minutes, because he could hear Celia talking, but none of what she said made sense. “What the…what now?”
She breathed a terse sigh. “Make her happy. Do whatever it takes, got it? I want to see a satisfied customer by two p.m.” And she walked out.
— Chapter 5 —
Ten minutes after Celia’s departure, Ryan’s ears were filled with a strange buzzing sound as he took stock of the situation. There was a severely lacking file associated with house number 50-B. All it told him was that the owner’s name was Victoria Marlow, and her house had been built by Wallace Construction. Funny, Wallace had been removed from their approved vendors list months ago. He instant messaged that little piece of information to Celia, before he braced himself and looked at the guts of Miss Marlow’s operating system.
Bad idea. The buzzing got louder as he scrolled through what could only be described as chaos.
Subsystems—firewalled.
Processing unit—garbage.
Logic—a veritable absence of one.
Ryan had never had a panic attack before. It wasn’t so bad, really. His brain was mush, his face felt numb, he hadn’t moved at all in a few minutes, but it felt like he was floating.
Then that buzzing became louder, and he realized it was a voice. Victoria Marlow was yelling through the speaker box so loudly, there was feedback.
It jarred him back to reality. Time shifted from its pleasant standstill, to too-fast forward. With his heartbeat jackhammering, Ryan forced his brain into high-gear damage control.
While Miss Marlow yelled herself hoarse, he catalogued what he could actually do to fix this. The only thing working at the moment was the main uplink. He’d have to reprogram everything remotely from here. That could take weeks! What was he supposed to do in the meantime, be her on-call servant?
Ryan stopped typing.
Could he do that?
The virtual version of him was spinning on one of the screens. It was the first complete scan he’d done and the only one he had access to. Could he use it?
More importantly, would it work?
If he fixed the Marlow code just enough, he could upload new modules one by one and systematically deactivate parts of the old system. The trouble was, there would be gaps and overlap in functionality, and because the code took up so much memory, he’d have to keep a manual log of each personal preference, because the system wouldn’t be able to retain any of it or “learn” any patterns.
But if he did it right, it might be possible without Miss Marlow ever knowing the difference.
Celia did say to make the woman happy.
As far as plans went, this one was certifiably insane.
Ryan shrugged. No other choice.
He pulled up the graphics program, dressed his holo-self in a suit, tweaked minor details to make the image look real, and pushed it across the uplink to Marlow house. The entire time he watched the status bar inch across the screen, Ryan prayed that his first attempt at communication didn’t crash the whole entire system out of the gate.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Pinky?” Taylor said from the doorway.
“I don’t know, Brain,” Madi replied. “What are you thinking?”
The bar turned green—100%. Thank God.
“I’m thinking my brother-in-law is losing his marbles.”
Ryan ignored them both and turned on his headset. “Uh, okay, sorry for the delay.”
“Apology not accepted,” Miss Marlow growled
back.
Ryan didn’t blame her.
His IM pinged with a new message from Celia: WALLACE OUT OF COMMISSION. WILL INVESTIGATE. STALL FOR TIME.
He rolled his eyes and logged off the messenger. “I don’t know how this happened, but it seems your home was never properly entered into our system. We are working on getting it up and running for you. I will restart your unit from here, and when it boots up, you should be able to hail your concierge.” He hoped.
“It better work this time.”
Ryan did a quick patch-up with the video/audio and made sure there were no runtime errors before he shut the damned thing down.
For five whole minutes, while it booted back up, Ryan saw nothing and heard nothing. Longest five minutes of his life.
Then the system reengaged, and a huge weight lifted from his shoulders when the house popped up on screen again. The irate owner was in her living room, looking like she might start throwing things. Ryan heard her say the call word, and initiated the hologram.
Taking a deep breath, he prepared for the longest, most complicated, well-intentioned con ever devised.
Because until he could fix Miss Marlow’s system, he was on call to do her bidding. They would be getting to know each other well. She just wouldn’t know about it.
“Yep,” Taylor said grimly, “there it went. The last marble.”
Virtual Page 2
