Vaporware

by Richard Dansky

  “But—”

  Then the curtain was drawn back and the doctor was shooing me back over to my own side of the alcove and that was the last of Sarah I saw for a good long while.

  * * *

  They let me out of the ER a couple of hours later, with 48 stitches in my back, a few more in other places, and a bandage around my left hand that came with a laundry list of instructions as to how to deal with it. The damage hadn’t been as bad as it looked, at least not all of it. The nose wasn’t broken, the nerves in my fingers were still functioning, and all that good stuff—it could have been a lot worse.

  Sarah, they were still working on, and I’d heard one of her doctors mention something about a police report.

  As for Michelle, I could see her when I came out the door, reading a not-too-ancient copy of Discover. Her hand was bandaged much more professionally than it had been, and her face was the color of the really good paper we put in the color copier at work, but other than that she seemed all right. She looked up over the top of the magazine and saw me.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey, yourself,” I replied. “How’s the hand?”

  She waved it at me, gingerly. “No tendon damage, no nerve damage, no muscle damage. Gloves might be a good idea the next time I do that, though.” She tried to smile.

  “I don’t think there will be a next time, one way or the other.” I looked around the room and saw old people, parents, sleeping children, and an entirely different nurse at the desk who somehow managed to look exactly like the one she had replaced. No familiar faces, though, none besides Michelle’s.

  “Where’s Leon?” I asked, figuring the answer would be something like “He’s off getting coffee” or something to that effect. Instead, Shelly gave me a brave little smile and dropped the magazine into her lap. “Leon and I aren’t really on speaking terms right now. He didn’t take the news of our little reunion tour very well.”

  My stomach dropped like a freight elevator, and it took my jaw with it. “Oh, no. Shelly, don’t tell me….”

  She waved me off. “No, no, it’s all right. If I’d really been serious about him, I wouldn’t have climbed back into the sack with you, now, would I? Of course, what that says about Sarah is open to interpretation.”

  I walked over to where she sat and dropped to my haunches in front of her. Looking up at Shelly was a lot more pleasant, and a lot less threatening, than looking up at Blue Lightning had been. “It doesn’t say anything about Sarah. It says a few things about me, and most of them aren’t good.”

  “You were under a lot of stress—” she began, but I waved her off.

  “I made that stress. All of that, it was me.”

  “Some of it was me,” she said, softly. “Enough of it.”

  I stuck my tongue out at her, which seemed like a better option than leaking water out the eyes. She stuck hers back out at me and crossed her eyes on top of it, which made both of us snicker for a moment.

  We stopped laughing, and I stood up. She stayed seated, watching me. “I love you, Michelle. I’m not in love with you, but I love you.”

  Her face got a little grayer, a little sadder. “I know. I love you, too, Ryan. Even though you’re a bastard.”

  I nodded. “Guilty. I’m going to go pay my bill now, and Sarah’s. Could you take her home when she gets out? There’s something I still have to do tonight.”

  She sucked in a mouthful of air with a hiss, and I knew right then that she’d figured it out. “What do you have to do?” she asked, but it was a formality, and she sounded defeated when she said it.

  “Something at work,” I said, and turned away.

  Chapter 29

  There was one car in the parking lot when the taxi dropped me off at the office. It was Terry’s, of course, but I’d been expecting that.

  I paid the cab driver and tipped him an extra ten bucks to cover whatever blood he’d have to sponge off of the back seat. He said something that might have been “have a good night” and took off, not that I particularly blamed him. There aren’t a whole lot of customers hanging around office parks at midnight.

  Five steps from the door I realized that I’d left my keys and my security badge at home. Getting in was going to be problematic. I considered ringing the doorbell to see if Terry would let me in, which took maybe half a second. If he was here, he was here for one reason only, and it wasn’t one that was going to make him feel kindly toward me.

  Instead, I put my hands on the wall-mounted trash can-cum-ashtray that our building management had foisted on us and yanked. The bolts on one side pulled halfway out of the stucco, and I gritted my teeth to keep from whimpering with the pain. Thank God for cheap-ass construction, but man, I felt bad for all the rent we’d paid for the place. Another pull, and the bolts ripped completely free in a shower of plastery dust. I took that as a good sign and leaned on it, listening to the bolts on the other side pop out one by one.

  Then, with all due deliberation, I took the trash can and smashed the glass of the door in.

  It took three tries, and a couple of others when my hands just couldn’t take. The first time, the trash can bounced off. The second made a satisfying crunch and cracks spider-webbed from the impact in an impressive radius. Third time was the charm, and jagged hunks of glass fell out of the frame to shatter on the ground.

  Using the can to shove dangling remainders out of the way, I cleared a safe route under the push bar through the door and into the building. The alarm was whooping, which I had known would happen, but it wasn’t like Terry was going to remain unaware of my presence for long anyway. As for the other effects of the alarm going off, they were easy enough to deal with.

  I walked over to the keypad by the receptionist’s desk and tapped in a code. The alarm died mid-screech, echoing for a moment longer than I would have expected in the empty hallways. I turned, sat down in the receptionist’s chair, and waited for part two of the charade.

  Two minutes later the main line rang. I picked it up. On the other end of the line, a formal young lady with a hint of a Caribbean accent asked me for the passcode. “Zero-six-six-seven,” I told her. “Our boss has a sick sense of humor.”

  I could hear tapping of keys on the other end of the line and then the voice was back. “Thank you, sir. Is everything all right?”

  “Oh, yeah, it’s fine. I just didn’t close the door properly when I went out to my car.” As I talked, a moth flew in through the gap in the glass, fluttering confusedly toward one of the overhead lights.

  “Ah. Be more careful next time, sir, please.” Her voice was friendly but stern. “And you shouldn’t be at the office so late anyway. Go home and get some rest.”

  “I will,” I promised her, and hung up. Then I went to my office and smashed my way in there, too.

  I set the trash can down on the floor. It was dented. The glass had been tougher than I thought. “Thanks,” I told it, and booted up my computer.

  It only took a couple of moments and I was into our versioning database. The active projects were there, Salvador and a couple of prototypes that small teams were working on, but buried a little deeper in was the database that had what I was looking for.

  Blue Lightning.

  There she was, her file structure spread out before me like a willow tree of data. Animations here, rendering there, mission scripts and text strings and textures, all lined up in neat little boxes, one under the other.

  I highlighted them all.

  Checked them out.

  Moved the mouse over the “Delete” icon.

  And I waited, because there was bound to be some sort of last minute drama and I wanted to be sure I faced it on my terms, instead of getting surprised.

  Two minutes later, Terry shuffled in.

  “Where were you,” I asked. “I could have deleted everything ten times over by now.”

  I looked him over as I said that, and honestly, he looked like shit. He’d either been biting his fingernails or trying to claw his w
ay out of prison, because the tips were ragged and bloody. His eyes were red, the product of way too much time in front of the monitor, and he had a serious case of the caffeine twitchies. His t-shirt, A TeeFury special with a dinosaur, had brown stains down the front. I couldn’t tell if they were coffee, cola, or something less palatable, and his jeans had that tell-tale grubbiness at the pockets that said they’d been recycled for one day too many.

  He stopped on the other side of the desk and stared at me. “I was talking to her,” he said. “She told me what happened.”

  “That’s unfortunate.” I leaned back in my chair, careful not to put too much weight on the stitches. “She probably only told you one side of the story, though.”

  “She told me enough!” His hands clenched into fists, held in front of him like sword and shield. “She told me you hurt her. You lied to her!”

  “After she tried to kill Sarah, and—” I looked at him more closely and saw how wide his eyes were. Crazy-wide, my dad used to call it. Not a good sign. “You’re really not in the mood to listen to reason, are you?”

  “Are you?” he shot back. “Or are you just going to wipe her out?”

  I thought about that one for a minute. “I think I’m going to wipe her out,” I said finally. “She’s done, Terry. It’s time to let her go and move on. Besides, did you miss the part where I said she tried to kill Sarah?”

  He stared at his shoes, mumbling, “That wasn’t her fault.”

  “The hell it wasn’t. Look at me, Terry.” He looked away, and I was on my feet, shouting. “Look at me!”

  He looked.

  “She did this to me, the whole time telling me that she loved me. Sarah’s still in the hospital, for God’s sake. That’s what she did, and that’s what she’s going to keep doing until I put her out of my misery!”

  “Or until she finds someone who will treat her right,” Terry said. Suddenly all the anger drained out of him. “She’s not just yours, you know. We all made her. We all did. You’re not the only one who loved her, either. You can’t take that away. It’s not right.”

  I sighed and put my head in my hands. “It’s a game, Terry,” I said. “It, not a she. And it was only a game.”

  “You’re a piece of shit, Ryan,” he said, shoving my big, heavy monitor at me. It toppled over and flew across the keyboard, only to be caught short by the cable and angle sharply downward into my lap. I was already trying to flail my way forward in the chair when it hit, the corner catching me squarely in the package even as my feet kicked up in the air.

  “Son of a bitch!” I managed to kick the underside of the desk and use that momentum to bring the seat back to a normal level. I shoved the monitor off my lap. It dangled a minute, then crashed to the floor as Terry yanked all of the cables out of the back of my tower. The mouse and keyboard went clattering, whipping forward like mismatched halves of some insane gladiator’s weapon.

  “You can’t touch her now,” he howled, swinging the mouse down onto the floor. Underneath the ugly carpet was equally ugly concrete, and the plastic peripheral didn’t stand a chance. It hit with a sharp crack, sending graphite-grey shrapnel in every ankle-height direction. The keyboard he let go, and it sailed across the hall to smash into the wall there.

  “Terry, what the hell are you doing?” I threw myself out of the chair just in time to catch the jagged remnants of the mouse across the side of my face, as Terry used it like a whip. It cut me, deep enough to start blood flowing, and I gave an involuntary yell.

  He reared back to try again, but this time I ducked to the side and caught the cord as the mouse flew past. It changed its arc immediately and headed for Terry’s face. He had to drop his end and duck lest he get the same treatment he’d just given me.

  He backed away, and I threw the mouse onto the floor as I came out from behind the desk. “Terry,” I said in my most reasonable tone of voice, “I really don't need any of this crap right now.” He took a few more steps back, into the hallway, and I followed him.

  “I have had a very bad night, Terry. Very bad. And you are somehow managing to make it even worse.” I don’t know what he saw when he looked at me, but clearly it terrified him. It was the blood, maybe. Or maybe something else, a certain light in the eyes. Maybe it was something bluish-white; I don't know. I didn’t feel like asking.

  I stalked into the hallway. He stood in front of me for a moment, then made some sort of decision and took a swing. It was a wild roundhouse right, made with his elbow locked and no chance in hell of hitting. He might have gotten me earlier, when I wasn’t looking, but now that I was ready for him, it was a different story.

  I stepped inside his swing and gut-punched him. The pain in my hand was dizzying, but he let out a whumph and folded like he was perforated at the waist. I let him stagger back, then threw a kick at his right knee.

  He twisted enough to catch most of it on his shin, but it got him off balance and bought me the time I needed to take one step forward and knee him in the nuts. He sucked in air like a squeaky toy, and I brought my elbow down on the back of his head.

  Terry went down. He hit the carpet with a thump that was wetter than it had any right to be and lay there, moaning.

  “I’ve had about enough tonight, Terry,” I said, leaning close, where he could hear. “Our baby girl grew up and did all sorts of naughty things. If I were rational about this, I’d say that we had to preserve her for science, because clearly this is important and groundbreaking and all sorts of other crap. But right now, I’m just pissed off. Correction: I’m pissed off and I’m tired and I’m bleeding, and I’m not in the mood to deal with any more shit from her or from you acting on her orders.”

  He looked up at me. I could see the tears, but he didn’t move, didn’t try to get up, didn’t try to stop me.

  I didn’t think I’d hit him that hard.

  But there was one shot left I still had to deliver. One more shot and then, hopefully, his part in all this would be over.

  Right next to his ear, I whispered, “She didn’t love you, Terry. She felt sorry for you. That’s all. She told me.”

  “No! Shut up! Just shut up! It’s all your fault!”

  I thought about that for a second. “The only thing that’s my fault is that you ever met her, and for that, I’m sorry, Terry. Oh, and you want to think about getting your resume up to date. I don’t think this is going to be a good place for you anymore.”

  I balled my hands into fists and brought them down together on the back of his head. Agony sheared through me, running like lightning up my arms. I welcomed it as a small penance, as proof I was serious about what I was doing.

  Terry’s body went limp, unconscious, not dead. I left him there in a heap, and then stepped carefully over him on my way to reception, where the real challenge was waiting for me.

  It was there, in the shape of Dennis’ box. I found it in front of the reception desk and scooped it up like it was the baby Moses. “We’re going to the server room,” I crooned to it. “We’re going to the server room, and then this will all be done.”

  I hadn’t taken five steps toward the lab before the lights started flickering and dying. The only steady illumination came from down the long hall, a diamond-bright blaze of blue and white.

  The light stopped me. I turned.

  “What, are you going to try again? It's not going to work.” My voice didn't echo. Instead, it was muffled, swallowed up by the hallway and the heavy ozone in the air. Even as I spoke the words, they dropped into silence.

  “No,” she said. The voice came from right behind me. I spun, holding the box in front of me like a shield.

  She was there. Beautiful. Radiant, even, in every sense of the word. She stood there, the carpet smoking and bubbling around her feet, and slowly clasped her hands behind her back. For a moment she held the pose like a statue, then cocked her head to the side. Otherwise, she didn't move.

  That didn't make me feel better. I'd made her. I'd designed her. I knew what moves could
come from that stance, what animations and attacks had been built into it.

  “Just...stay back, OK? I don't want to fight you anymore.” I took a step back, and then another and another, until a soft thump announced that my head had made contact with the wall. I still held the box in my arms like it had my salvation in it.

  Blue Lightning did nothing. She breathed, or what passed for it, and small daggers of electricity crawled along her arms, but that was it. She just stood there, watching me, and in return, I watched her. There were no marks from what had been done to her at the house, no sign of the struggle that had written itself so painfully on mine and Sarah's skin. A low hum filled the air around her, the buzz of high-tension wires and overpowered bug zappers. But she said nothing, did nothing.

  She just looked.

  “What are you doing here?” I finally asked. My arms were aching from holding up the lockbox, while the cuts and bruises and burns on the rest of me throbbed and stung and otherwise inflicted slow-developing agony. I could feel my knees buckling just that first little bit, proof that I'd hit the end of the line. “How did you get here? Why are you back?”

  “I never went away,” she said. “I'm here. I'm always here. You carried me into your house, Ryan. I didn't go there on my own.” She smiled. “And here, I'm just fine. At least, I will be until you do what you're going to do.”

  I slid along the wall a couple of feet toward the server room. She made no move to follow me, instead just glowed ever so slightly brighter. “What do you think I'm here to do?” I shouted, finding a last reserve of bravado somewhere. “Huh? Do you think you can stop me?”

  “If I want to,” she said simply, and vanished.

  The hallway went dark; the electric hum disappeared. All over the building, the lights went out. The HVAC died, the thrum of its compressor pushing air through the ducts and vents fading away. One by one, the emergency-exit signs flickered and went out, fading like campfires collapsing in on themselves.