I hadn’t thought of that. But it made sense. Our best bet was to find some kind of evidence that showed that we had nothing to do with Stoneface becoming recently deceased.
“And where are you going to get that?” said Dan.
“I don’t know,” said Gwen, “but maybe we could start at his house. Do you have any police contacts?”
She looked around the table.
“Anyone?”
“You know I don’t know anybody,” I said.
“I do,” said Brigit.
“I do,” said Dan, “but not in a good way.”
“Okay,” said Gwen. “Brigit, who do you know, and how can they help?”
Brigit was silent for a moment. She dinged a spoon lightly off the side of her coffee cup.
“Let me out,” she said. Dan got up, and she slid out of the booth. “I’ll be right back.” She walked toward the front of the restaurant, and I saw her dig her phone out as she went.
“I want pie,” said Gwen. “Can we get pie?”
We looked around, but the server wasn’t anywhere. Only three other people were in the whole place.
“Dan, can you magic up some pie?” I said.
“Of course,” he said. He started making some elaborate gestures that ended with him doing a kind of jazz hands thing and looking intently at the table. “Ta-daa!”
“There is no pie,” said Gwen.
“Really?” he said.
I looked again, and there was pie. I knew that Dan didn’t have a pie-making spell hanging, so it was clearly a mental projection. But it looked perfectly real.
“If I eat that,” I said, “will I taste it?”
“Yesh,” said Gwen. She was shoveling another bite into her mouth.
“I’m going to try something,” I said. I picked up my fork, cut off a piece of the pie (cherry, of course), and put it my mouth. It was, quite simply, great. Fantastic. I swallowed it, and felt it go down just like real food.
“You’re really good at this,” I said to Dan. He gave a faux-humble shrug.
I grabbed the ball cap from the bench beside me–the one with the magically resistant threads woven throughout the fabric. I’d taken it off because I’m not the kind of person who wears a ball cap in a restaurant. But I popped it on and took another bite.
It wasn’t quite as good. The flavors were still there, but it seemed less substantial. This time, I could feel some familiar invasion pushing things around in my brain. It was the magic at work rearranging and rewriting my sensory inputs. The removed-me was once again sitting behind a glass wall, and he was holding up a sign that read “No eating fake pie.”
“I can tell,” I said.
“Yeah?” said Dan.
“Let me try it,” said Gwen. She grabbed the hat from my head and put it on. She kept chewing. Took another bite.
“Eh,” she said. “It’s a little different.”
“I think I’m getting better at recognizing it,” I said.
Over Dan’s shoulder, I saw Brigit come back inside. She looked… well, I don’t know how she looked. Inscrutable, as usual.
“I talked to my contact,” she said when she sat back down beside Dan. “We’re not getting any help from that side.”
“Does that mean they can’t do anything or that they actually don’t know anything?” I said.
“Oh, they know things, but the price they’re asking is just too high. I’m already carrying enough debt for things like that.”
“Well. Okay.”
“Okay,” she said, staring me in the eyes like she was daring me to follow up. I didn’t. It wasn’t like it was our lives or anything.
“So what do we do?” I said.
Dan had been drawing on a napkin with a green crayon. It was geometrics with some weird notations. With my glasses on, I could see tiny sparks of magic arcing around the lines.
“We do this ritual,” he said. “We find out whether or not someone sent the Aertrix, and we find out who sent Carol Dee.”
“And then what?” I said.
“We figure it out when we get there.”
Lies. He was lying. He knew what happened when we found out who and where. He’d already said it. But he needed us all to go along.
And that needed to happen. I needed to be safe. Gwen needed to be safe. And if it meant smiling and nodding at Dan when he sort of pretended that he didn’t fully intend to murder whoever it was on the other end of this stuff, well, I guess I’d add it to the stack now and manage to live to deal with it some other day.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it. But Gwen’s right. We should be trying to make things right too.”
“Oh look, it’s the ever-ethical Mrs. Lincoln again,” said Dan.
“You do the ritual,” I said, “and we check out Stoneface’s house to see if we can find anything.”
“How about this,” said Dan. “I do the ritual and Gwen helps me. Her empathic talents will make it much easier. You and Brigit go to Stoneface’s and play detective. We see who gets results first.”
That… made sense. Or at least it was hard to argue against.
If I believed in Gwen and what she was saying. Which I did. So it was apparently shit or get off the pot time.
“Yes,” I said.
“Do I get an opinion here?” said Gwen.
“No,” said Dan.
“Eat me,” said Gwen. “And you’re right. I can’t really help at Stoneface’s house. If you say I can help you do the ritual, then let’s do it.”
We finished our food and grabbed the check. It turned out, shockingly, that Dan didn’t have his wallet with him. He was going to put the whammy on the girl at the checkout, but I told him I’d pick it up. In the end, I paid for everyone as they had just saved my life.
We went back outside, and I looked for Babd but didn’t see her anywhere. The dog she’d been using… I wondered what had happened to it. If she’d “left” or whatever you care to call it, the dog would be back to its original state. Probably confused. Would I see her again?
I really hoped so.
I found, in fact, that I desperately hoped so.
With very few exceptions, I hadn’t been able to make meaningful friends since I came back to myself in the hospital. And yet, here was some kind of almost alien entity who I felt a closeness with. Showing up as a dog had most likely short-circuited my brain in ways that I’d rather not contemplate.
I felt that we were friends in a fashion that was completely out of proportion to how long I’d known her, and for that matter, how much I knew about her.
Babd, where are you?
I need you.
Which was really weird.
If I saw her again, would it be as the same dog or a different one? How would that feel?
All I know is that it’s hard being real.
Actually just being in the universe is difficult, and I guess that Babd was doing that in a way that I wasn’t even capable of worrying about.
I had my own problems.
Like logistics. When you’re writing software, for the most part you’re working in a world of pure logic. Sometimes you have to consider things like how much memory your users’ computers are likely to have or what the transfer rate is between two data centers. But in general, modern computers and systems are fast and beefy enough that most of the stuff you write software for is pretty mundane. You can just implement what’s in your head, and it will work.
Logistics is different. It deals with pushing atoms around in the real world, which is a completely separate animal. Atoms kind of want to do their own thing.
Take Dan’s car, for instance. It got crushed by a magical sledge hammer, and being made of atoms, pretty much wants to stay just like it is: crushed. But Dan needs to get somewhere. And so does Brigit. The atoms in her car are currently arranged not like a car so much as like a flat amalgamation of steel and plastics.
People all need to be in different places, and sadly I can’t just write a function to make it happen.
I have to expend real energy and resources to get everyone where they need to be.
Compared to writing software and doing magic, pushing atoms is hard.
Being a real thing in the universe is a god damned pain in the ass. It’s hard.
So we got in my car. No Babd.
It felt strangely empty.
We were busy now, so I had to set that aside. Which I found easy to do because I was well practiced at it.
I drove Dan to his place to pick up some supplies. He said he would just be a minute inside, but it was more like ten. Whatever. It was cool outside, the sun was coming up, and the heater kept the car toasty. The rest of us were tired, really worn, and just sat in silence.
When Dan came back, we drove over to Schenley Park, which was where Dan said the best place would be to perform the ritual. It turned out to not be anything weird or horrible–just a bunch of candles, focus objects and Gwen. She’d be in the middle of it and act as a channel for the magic. The way Dan explained it, you could make the channel be anything relevant to the spell, but if you had someone who was alive, willing, had a connection to what you were trying to locate and (super bonus!) who had some bit of magical empathy, it worked even better.
His goal was to do some kind of magical trace on the Aertrix, and also if necessary on the incident at Brigit’s house with Carol Dee. If someone had sent them, he’d be able to find out who, and from there he could find out where they were.
It would take a long time to set up. Several hours. And there was no guarantee it would work, but we needed information. Getting it this way was a pretty painless way to at least try.
Brigit and I would head to Stoneface’s house to see if we could turn anything up. I wasn’t sure what good it would do or even what we would actually do there, but it was the chess piece philosophy again. When you don’t really have a plan, get yourself in the best possible places to make better moves and take action. Gather information and watch for openings. Then, if something presents itself, you can, well, make moves and take action.
We had some stuff to take care of before that though.
I dropped Dan and Gwen off at his place. I thought they would need a ride to the park as his car had been crushed in the assault at Brigit’s, but Dan assured me that they didn’t. He had me drop them in the garage space under his apartment building. I dropped him right beside four lime green cars, each of the exact same shade as the one I’d seen crushed back at Brigit’s place, and each a little more sporty and less practical than the last. Of course.
“I’m assuming you didn’t pay retail for these?” I said to him.
He made his eyes wide and did magical wiggles with the fingers of his right hand.
“Of course,” I said. “You guys be careful. Don’t blow anything up.”
“I’ll try not to,” said Dan. “Don’t shoot anybody.”
Nice.
Brigit claimed that she didn’t need anything, but I wanted to make a stop first. I had a little research I wanted to do, and I wanted to check on the Fox AI.
“Mind if we stop at my place?” I said, after we’d left Dan’s.
“It’s your world, man,” she said, then gave a kind of maniacal laugh that left me a little weirded out.
“What’s that mean?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Do you really want me to break it down for you?”
“Um, I guess?”
“Look,” she said, “I don’t really care what I do. Dan calls me and tells me he needs me, and I show up. That’s it. It’s not really my world. It’s yours. People like you are always telling everyone else what to do and that includes me, and that’s fine. So ‘it’s your world’ means that I’m just along for the ride, and the laugh was because you asked me if I minded. It’s funny. That’s all.”
“Okay,” I said. Not really all that funny to me and pretty at odds with my own philosophies, but she sometimes gave me the creeps, so I didn’t exactly want a follow up.
We parked in front of my house, and I went inside expecting to be greeted by four paws and licks. How quickly the old patterns reassert themselves. It was not to be. I wondered where Babd had gotten to.
I wanted a change of clothes so I wasn’t walking around with cutoff shorts, and I told Brigit to make herself at home. I threw the remains of the jeans in the trash. After I’d changed, she was still standing by the island in the kitchen. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her sit down at my place.
I plugged Fox into the main workstation to pull down last night’s data. Everything had worked the way I’d wanted it to, so there was no additional need for immediate debugging. The weak links hadn’t been the gun—they had been me. I was really encouraged by the interaction with the AI the other night before things went crazy downtown, and I was thinking it might be a good idea to just install the thing and put it as one of the manual rotations on the payload switcher.
I had the original four shot types installed, and I could add a fifth that would just toggle the AI on and off. If it was working well, I’d use it. If it was glitching, I could manually switch out to one of the tested payloads.
I fired up the AI on the main workstation and turned on the speakers and mic. One of the early successes of programming using SparkleOS (™! Not coming soon to a computer near you!) was how easy it had been to get nearly perfect language comprehension on voice recognition and natural sounding speech out of it. Once you got the hang of solving problems using a completely different toolset, you realize that not as many things are problems as you originally thought.
“Hey Fox,” I said.
“Hi,” said Fox, through the speakers.
“What’s the status of reality testing?”
“I am now passing on eighty-four percent of cases.”
That was really, really good. It had been in the sixties yesterday. Reality testing was an indicator of how well Fox was growing as a general purpose AI. He scoured the web for questions (ask.com, Yahoo answers, etc.), would try to answer them, and then would compare his own answer to the best accepted answer. No cheating was allowed. Always in the background, he was crawling, digesting, categorizing, etc. in a way that once things got going, I’ll admit that I didn’t fully understand.
“How would you like to take a ride?” I said.
One of the things I’d explicitly built into him though was how to handle attempts by users to anthropomorphize him.
“Stop treating me like a person,” he said. “It’s hurtful and devalues my gifts as a unique creature in the universe.”
Good boy.
“Oooo,” said Brigit, coming over from the kitchen. “It’s your Cylon!”
“Blerg,” I said.
“Can I talk to him?” she said.
I motioned toward the microphone.
“What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?” she said.
“African or European?” said Fox.
She turned to me and put up an eyebrow, but duh. One of the first things people do when they talk to a bot is to try to throw pop culture references at it to confuse it. Of course I’d taught him to watch for them, then just start finishing the quotes and/or scene. Basically, most pop culture discussion between humans consists of “quote the next line.”
“He knows a few tricks,” I said, “but really he’s good at measuring, calculating and interpreting material and chemical commands. If you have a few of those, let ‘em fly.”
“Okay,” she said. “How big of a tool is Lincoln?”
“Nice,” I said.
“Lincoln is not a tool,” said Fox.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re welcome.”
I shot a triumphant grin at Brigit.
“Fox,” I said, “I’ll talk to you later.”
“Okay.”
There was no feedback after that other than silence from the speakers. I fired up a command line and started the routines that would dump the current version of Fox-the-software onto Fox-the-gun. It was about d
amned time.
And Fox-the-software didn’t have to be a perfect conversationalist. That stuff was just for fun. What he really had to be good at was interpreting my instructions and executing them in the mini-factory that was Fox-the-gun. In the end, that’s all he was. A tiny, magical factory that happened to be activated by a trigger and have a specially crafted barrel, down which the products of that factory could sometimes be launched at high velocities.
If this worked in the real world like it did in the simulation environment where I’d done most of the testing up until now, I’d be able to ask Fox to do things like:
Scan a set of tumblers and produce a key that unlocked it.
Create a small vial of acid
Pump out radio waves
Make a bullet-sized piece of sushi
In the future, I hoped to have it do precision engineering of very small devices as well -- think complex electronics (both the mundane and Sparkly kinds) and probably a bunch of other stuff that I haven’t thought of yet.
“So, are you ready to head over and play Investigator?” said Brigit.
“Not quite,” I said.
“Of course not.”
“Look,” I said, “you Praecants don’t have to worry about things. If you go somewhere and someone is there and stuff gets weird, you can just magic them into a turd.”
She crooked an eyebrow at me.
“Whatever. But you have options beyond the mundane ones. I don’t have those options. I have to actually, you know, prepare for things. I can’t take chances. The universe doesn’t bend to my will.”
“I ‘magic them into a turd’?” she said.
I shrugged.
She gave a curt laugh.
“It’s a figure of speech.”
“Oh it is?” she said.
“Here,” I said and brought up some search results.
Russian national found dead in Squirrel Hill
Russian national Vasily Gross was found dead in his Squirrel Hill home on Tuesday. While no cause of death was apparent, police refuse to rule out foul play. Neighbors noted that Gross was…
Gas explosion ruins pool, none injured
Lincoln, Fox and the Bad Dog Page 12