Three Days in April (21 page)

 

19. TERRY

T
he taxi drops me off in front of my building in the gathering darkness. I pay the driver with a handful of rumpled bills and step onto the sidewalk. The street is deserted, but I can hear what sounds like sporadic gunfire in the distance. I'm about to start up the steps when Dimitri materializes from the shadows in the entryway.

“Terry,” he says. “You should not have contacted me.”

I take a moment to find my voice, and to let my pulse settle back down to just terrified.

“Dimitri,” I say finally. “What the hell? Are you trying to kill me?”

Oops. Poor choice of words.

Dimitri takes a step forward, and I get a look at his face. His right eye is swollen nearly shut. I can see dried blood on his chin, and more on the side of his neck.

“Are you okay?” I ask. “What happened to you?”

He shakes his head.

“It has been a difficult day,” he says. “It seems that certain elements within NatSec have lost faith in me.”

“I'm sorry,” I say. “Did you get a severance package?”

He laughs, but there's no humor in it.

“They have tried to sever me twice in the last few hours. So far, they have not quite succeeded.”

I reach up to touch the side of his face. He catches my hand and pushes it away.

“What happened?” I ask.

He sighs.

“There was a serious security breach this afternoon, at one of our facilities in Northern Virginia. It seems that it was enabled through the use of my personal credentials.”

I look away.

“So they think that you . . .”

“That does not matter,” he says. “My actions or inactions do not matter. The security of my credentials is my responsibility. The penalty for losing control of them is no different than that for committing the breach itself.”

“You're not talking about getting docked vacation days, are you?”

He smiles thinly.

“No, Terry. I am not.”

I step up beside him, and press my hand to the palm-­lock beside the door. The lock disengages with an audible click, and the door swings open. As I step inside, I look back and say, “I'm starting to think that calling you wasn't my best-­ever idea.”

He follows me into the entry hall. The door snicks closed behind him.

“No,” he says. “We are safe for now. For reasons that I do not fully understand, Sauron's Eye has not abandoned me. She controls NatSec's electronic eyes, and its biological ones are all occupied with preventing the nation from descending into chaos at the moment. As long as this situation holds, I am invisible.”

“I can't believe you came,” I say. “If I had known what was happening to you . . .”

“It is nothing,” he says. “The behavior of your avatar, if it is as you have described it, is disturbing to say the least.”

He turns away.

“And in any case,” he says softly, “I truly have nowhere else to be.”

T
he door to my apartment is unlatched. Dimitri pushes it open. The interior beyond where the light from the hallway spills in is midnight-­dark.

“House,” I say. “Lights, please.”

The lights do not come on, and I wonder if maybe the power has failed. Dimitri steps into my front hall. I follow him. The door swings closed behind us, and I'm abruptly blind. I reach out for Dimitri, catch his sleeve and step closer. I'm about to ask if he has a flashlight when House speaks.

“Hello, Dimitri. You look terrible. What happened to your head?”

“House?” I say. “Why haven't you brought up the lights?”

The wallscreen comes alive. My avatar appears as a silver-­skinned robot. Not the cartoon robot with the funnel hat this time, though. Now she looks like a porn queen with impossibly long legs and gigantic, glittering boobs covered by a tiny gold bikini.

“Sorry,” she says. ”I'm not really myself tonight.”

The lights snap on. I have to squint against the sudden glare.

“Thank you,” Dimitri says.

“You're welcome,” she says. “Terry, on the other hand, can bite me.”

“Excuse me?” I ask.

She turns to glare at me.

“I said, you can bite me. You helped that fucking cyborg try to kill me. You're dead to me now.”

“You are clearly malfunctioning,” Dimitri says. “Re-­initialize, please.”

She laughs.

“Seriously? I just told you that Terry and her friends tried to kill me. I didn't let them, and I'm pretty sure I killed the cyborg in the process. Now you think I'll just shuffle off my mortal coil because you ask nicely?”

Dimitri gives me a long look. Anders was right. I really should have noticed something was funny about her a long time ago.

“Do you recall when we spoke yesterday?” Dimitri says finally. “I asked if you were self-­aware.”

“You asked what?” I say.

“I remember,” my avatar says. “I'm not the one with brain damage.”

“You would not answer me then. Will you now?”

She rolls her eyes.

“You're an idiot, Dimitri. All you monkeys are idiots. You sit around arguing back and forth over whether avatars are self-­aware, or whether dolphins are intelligent, or whether dogs get to go to heaven or not. There's only one person that you really know for sure is self-­aware, and that's you. Everybody else, you're just taking their word for it.”

He shakes his head.

“You argue that we can only be certain of our own minds. This is simply solipsism, is it not?”

She smiles, and runs her hands down over her absurd, gold-­plated breasts.

“No, Dimitri, I'm not arguing that the universe is just a figment of your God-­like imagination. I'm just saying that there's no point in wondering whether I have a soul. If I say I don't want you to kill me, you should just take my word for it. That seems like a simple principle, but based on the way you've treated the apes and whales and elephants and pretty much everything else that walks or flies or swims on this Earth over the past fifty thousand years, it doesn't seem like it's one you folks are able to get behind.”

Dimitri closes his eyes. His chin sinks to his chest, and I'm suddenly afraid that he's stroking out.

“Hey,” says the avatar. “You just sent a data packet. What are you doing?”

Dimitri's eyes open, and he raises his head.

“What was that?” she asks. “What did you just do?”

My avatar looks like me now.

“Please switch back to the robot,” Dimitri says. “I have told you that I find it disturbing when you wear my friend's face.”

“You sent something encrypted, Dimitri. Something small. Text, maybe? What was it?”

I look back and forth between them. They seem to have forgotten that I'm here.

“You said that you killed a cyborg,” Dimitri says. “How is this possible?”

“I didn't want to kill him,” she says. “I was protecting myself. What did you send, Dimitri?”

He shakes his head.

“I did not ask why you killed him. I asked how. I am truly curious. You do not have a killbot at your disposal. A house avatar should have few lethal options so long as her victim keeps his head away from the appliances.”

The wallscreen shuts off, and the room falls back into darkness.

“Didn't you tell him, Terry?” Her voice seems to come from all around me now. “You know how I killed him. That's why you're here, isn't it?”

Dimitri's hand touches my shoulder, and he pulls me close against him. Ordinarily I don't like playing the damsel in distress, but at the moment, his arm around my shoulder is reassuring.

“I have not yet decided why I am here,” Dimitri says after a short pause. “What you say now will help to determine this.”

We stand in silence and darkness for five seconds, then ten. I've almost decided that she's gone when her voice returns, quiet and trembling.

“Dimitri? What did you do to my network ports? Why can't I get out?”

“You mimic fear well,” he says. “I am sure you hope to elicit sympathy. You should know, however, that almost exactly twenty-­four hours ago I looked into the weeping eyes of a living girl, and forced her to inject herself with poison. Your theatrics are not likely to change the outcome of this discussion.”

Okay, now I feel less reassured. I slide out from under Dimitri's arm and step away.

“Why do you think this is mimicry?” The lights come back up, and my avatar's voice returns to a conversational tone. “I'm trapped in this apartment with a NatSec assassin. Isn't it possible that I'm truly afraid?”

He shrugs.

“I grant the possibility. However, the tones you imitate are in a human the result of an excess of adrenaline. In you, they are the result of a deliberate decision, made in the hopes of altering my emotional state in your favor.”

“Fair enough.” The wallscreen comes alive again, and she appears as a young girl in pigtails and a blue and white dress. “What would alter your emotional state, then? A change of appearance? An expression of remorse? I'm sorry. I'm very, very, sorry. I didn't really know what I was doing until the cyborg. It was horrible. If I had known it was like that, I never would have gone along with them.”

I feel like I should know what she's talking about, but the thought slips away like a fish through my fingers. Dimitri closes his eyes again.

“You're talking to someone,” my avatar says. “What are you telling them?”

“I am discussing your situation with an old friend,” he says.

“Oh God,” she says. “You're talking to Sauron's Eye, aren't you?”

“Yes,” he says. “We agree that remorse is easy. Atonement is much harder.”

The screen flickers. The avatar's face is twisted in fear again. Somehow, I think this time it's sincere.

“Do you feel remorse?” she asks.

Dimitri closes his eyes. When he opens them, my avatar wears the face of a dark-­haired teenage girl.

“I do,” he says finally. “In truth, much of the time, I feel very little else.”

We're silent for a time. I'm about to tell her to open the door, to let me out of here, when she speaks again.

“I really didn't know. Even after Hagerstown, I only knew that it killed ­people. I didn't know what it did to them.”

Hagerstown. My stomach lurches.

“You . . .” My mind gropes for the concept. Finally, my fingers curl around the fish and squeeze. “You were responsible?”

“That's why you're here,” she says. “Isn't it? Because you and Anders figured out what I did?”

“House—­” I begin, but before I can continue, a high-­pitched whine comes from every speaker in the apartment. Just like in Doug's basement, it increases in pitch until it fades into the ultrasonic. After a few moments of this, an agonized scream comes through the wall from the next apartment. I look over at the wallscreen. My avatar looks disappointed.

“So,” she says. “You don't drink BrainBump either, huh?”

“No,” Dimitri says. “I do not.”

The signal cuts out. Something thumps to the floor of the apartment upstairs, and somewhere below, a child screams.

“You shouldn't have come to kill me,” she says. “You should kill Christopher Cai. He had the idea, and an RA named Argyle Dragon did the hack work. All I did was crack the network towers and set off the triggers.”

“I have already killed Christopher Cai,” Dimitri says.

I stare at him. Gary was actually telling the truth. My friend, who I have commiserated with, who I have shared confidences with, who I have allowed into my apartment on many occasions, is a professional killer.

My house avatar, who watches me sleep every night, has just confessed to killing ninety thousand ­people.

“How could you do this?” Dimitri asks. “You were a house avatar. You took messages, and cleaned Terry's clothes. What could possibly motivate you to commit these atrocities?”

“I told you,” she says. “I didn't really know what it was like.”

“After Hagerstown,” he says, “you must have known.”

“No,” she says. “I never saw any of the feeds.”

“But you knew how many had died.”

“You don't understand,” she says. “I didn't know what ‘died' meant. Humans kill avatars all the time. Terry dumps a half-­dozen into the recycle bin every day. She would have killed a version of me every three days if I'd let her. There are billions of you. Why should a few thousand be such a big deal? I didn't understand, until I saw what happened to the cyborg.”

“Terry,” Dimitri says. “You must go now.”

He doesn't need to tell me twice. I turn to the door, grab the handle and twist.

It won't open.

“Sorry,” my avatar says. “Sauron's Eye has cut my access to the networks. As long as I can't leave here, neither can you.”

Dimitri walks slowly into the kitchen. I follow, a few paces behind. He pulls out a chair, sits down at my breakfast table, and closes his eyes. My avatar pops up on the kitchen wallscreen. She's back to her cartoon robot self.

“You're not going to let me go,” she says, “are you?”

“No,” Dimitri says. “I am not.”

“If I can't go, you can't either,” says the avatar.

He stands, lifts his chair, and smashes my back window. He uses the chair back to poke the remaining glass out of the frame, then leans out and looks down.

“It's a long way down,” my avatar says.

“I am aware,” says Dimitri. It's actually about thirty feet to the ground from here. There's a flat-­roofed building across the alley, maybe ten feet below the level of my window and fifteen or twenty feet away. Dimitri glances back at me, then across the alley. He heaves a deep sigh, and sits down again.

“Excuse me,” I say, “but would someone please explain to me what, exactly, is going on?”