The eGirl (11 page)

Alisa came into my room that night after the boys were down and lay on my bed next to me.

“I read the story.”

“What did you think?”

“Am I really ‘sad-eyed’?”

“She said ‘pretty but sad-eyed.’ You were sad when she came over.”

I brushed the hair back from her face. “You are pretty, at least. You’ve got your mom in you.”

She smiled a little. “Mom was beautiful.”

“Yeah.”

“You really had Selena be her?”

“Just that once. Thanks.”

She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “Good night, Dad.”

“Good night, honey.”

♦ ♦

Calls from national and even international media started coming into my office, but I declined everything, telling them I’d said everything I wanted to say. I got a lot of mail from friends telling me they had read it, and wished me well.

Heather called me three days later.

“I don’t know if you’ve been following the comments on the story, but some of our readers are talking about starting a fund to get Selena replaced. There are also some rumors about Vertex just taking care of it. I called them, but they had no comment on it yet.”

I held onto the surge of hope inside me, not wanting to get ahead of anything.

“Thank you. This is something I couldn’t have done myself, and wouldn’t have thought to do.”

“Thanks for letting us do it. It’s a good story. The kind you look back on and feel grateful for having had a chance to tell it.”

♦ ♦

A little while after I hung up with Heather, I realized someone was knocking on the door. There had been a few reporters who’d come by, but when I looked out the window and down at the sidewalk, I saw an old woman standing there.

When I opened the door, she looked up at me nervously.

“Mr. Dawson, I’m Laura Harrington.”

I shook my head in confusion. She seemed to know me, but she was no one I knew from Adam. Although the name—

“My husband was Kip Harrington.”

Oh.

“I should have come here long ago. I’m sorry. But I read the article about you. I want to tell you how sorry I am.”

I couldn’t deal with this, not now, not after two years.

“Mrs. Harrington, I appreciate this, but—”

“I just have something I need to say. You don’t know how sad I am about what happened to your wife, and just recently. I wanted to tell you this before, but losing Kip like that was so hard. I’d tried to keep him safe, but it was just so difficult. He would get angry and combative.”

I closed my eyes.

“I can’t—I’m sorry.”

She pushed something into my hands.

“I wanted to give you this.”

I looked down. It was a gift chip. I looked up at her in shock. After two years, she was coming here with a
gift chip
? Was I supposed to take the kids out to dinner to help them deal with losing their
mother
?

I started to say something, but she cut me off.

“Mr. Dawson, I’m an old woman. I have cancer. I have no children, no real family. But I have some money. I was going to leave it to the symphony, but I realized it’s just music. It’s not what matters.”

She pushed my hand back toward me, closing my fingers around the gift chip.

“There’s enough there to replace your robot. I called the Vertex people about it. It’s all I can do now, but I hope it helps.”

She nodded at me one last time, turned, and walked away.

12.

When they’d finished loading Selena’s backup into her new body, the Vertex tech pulled me over to the setup terminal.

“What do you want for her startup appearance?”

There was a row of faces on the screen: Elsa, Megan, a bunch of others Selena had apparently stored. I pointed to the one she usually used, the first one I’d put together. He selected it, and the blank featureless face on the eGirl on the table beside us—the face she had died in—became Selena.

Alisa let out little squeak of glee.

♦ ♦

When I’d placed the order, I’d been concerned about what backup we were going to have to use. I had been certain it would be the last one before I’d deleted the bonding module, and I would get the old Selena, not the new one. But Selena had immediately run a full system backup on her own, wanting to save her new self. She’d finished uploading it no more than thirty seconds before the accident.

That was what she had meant as she died. She couldn’t die, because she’d backed herself up.

The Vertex techs had been shocked when I’d explained what I’d done with the bonding module, telling me I was very lucky I hadn’t corrupted her entire system.

“I’m not even sure how her OS rebuilt the bond,” one of them told me. “It could only have done it if there was an awful lot of self-programmed code around it to draw on.”

“She said 6 petabytes.”

His eyebrows went up.

“Wow. That’s a lot for just three months. What the hell were you doing with her?”

“A lot of stuff.”

“That’s the thing about AIs,” he finally said. “They can really surprise you. I’ve been doing this ten years, and I still can’t believe some of the things I’ve seen them do.”

♦ ♦

The tech finally booted Selena up. In about two minutes, her eyes opened. She sat up slowly.

“Just take it easy,” the tech said. “You’re going to be a little disoriented. Do you know what day it is?”

Her eyes came to rest on me, and I tried not to lose it. Alisa was squeezing my hand so hard she was cutting off the circulation.

“Paul, where are we? Why is there is a five-week gap in my memory?” Then she looked down at herself. “Why am I in a new body?”

“There was a car accident. After we left the restaurant. Your old body was destroyed. It took some time to get you a new one.”

Alisa hugged her. “We missed you.” When my daughter let her go, she stood up and came to me. We held each other for a long time as the kids hugged us.

“Everything looks good,” the tech finally said. “I think you guys are good to go.” He smiled. “Glad we got you back in business.”

♦ ♦

That evening, we went up on the roof to look out over the city. Selena and I sat in a pair of lawn chairs holding hands, watching the fog roll in. I felt good for the first time in weeks. Between the fundraising, what Laura Harrington had given me, and Vertex deciding to give me a big discount on the new body, I’d had enough money for two Selenas. After replacing my car, I’d donated the rest to charity, a battered woman’s shelter Megan had worked with.

“I have something I need to say,” I said.

“What?”

“I love you.”

Her eyes got wet, and she pulled my hand up to kiss it.

“You really do?”

“I really do. The new Selena. The one without the old bonding module.”

She smiled. “I love her too.”

Then she turned into Elsa. “Paul, I will make you pay for this. The worst of Level 4. There will be no mercy for you tonight.”

I laughed.

“I hope not.”

THE END

About the Author

Michael Dalton is a professional journalist and editor who writes erotica for readers of discriminating tastes.

Michael wrote his first piece of fiction in third grade, for which he was immediately accused of plagiarism by his teacher. His first piece of erotica—which has thankfully been lost to the mists of time—came a few years later.

Since then, he has been writing more or less steadily, interrupted only by occasional demands of work and family. Michael enjoys writing across genres, and often mixes erotica with science fiction, fantasy, and alternate history.

Michael lives with his family and multiple pets in Southern California. He blogs at
michaeldaltonbooks.com
and can be found on Twitter at
@MikeDaltonBooks
.

Other Books by Michael Dalton

The Teaser

Faith, Hope & Charity: A Novel of Virtue and Vice

Immaculate Deception

The Needle and the Dungeon

Vector

The Hunt

Amber: The Making of a Sex Toy

The Wizard's Daughters: Twin Magic Book 1

The Wisdom of Dogs: Stories

Roland: The Choice

Michael's books are available from fine ebook retailers.

Amazon:
http://amazon.com/author/michaelsdalton

Smashwords:
http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/MichaelDalton

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