I look at Anders.
“Hey,” he says. “It’s your avatar. If you want to submit it to the tender mercies of Dr. Strangelove here, go for it.”
“Pleeeeease?” Doug says. “I promise not to do anything that can’t be undone. And anyway, wouldn’t you like to know if it’s planning on killing you in your sleep?”
I think he’s kidding, but I can’t see enough of his actual face to tell for sure. I look at Anders again. He raises one eyebrow and shrugs.
“Fine,” I say finally. “You’re sure you can do this without getting us whacked?”
“Definitely. Well, probably definitely. Give me a half hour to get the relays set up.”
“Hello,” says my avatar, in my voice, with my face. “Terry’s not home right now, and her phone is not on the network. She is most likely either vaporized or on the run from the law. Is there anything I can help you with?”
I step into the wallscreen’s FOV.
“Hi,” I say. “It’s me.”
She looks surprised to see me.
“Oh, hey Terry,” she says. “So. Not vaporized?”
“No,” I say. “Not vaporized. Thanks for asking.”
She grins.
“It’s on the run from the law, then. What did you do? Did you kill somebody? Was it somebody famous?”
“No,” I say. “I did not kill anyone. It’s just a misunderstanding.”
She looks disappointed. I’m not sure how to feel about that.
“So,” she says. “Are you coming home?”
“Hopefully. Can you keep things running there for a few more days?”
She smiles.
“I can keep things running here forever, Terry. Actually, that’s kind of what I was planning on doing if you were vaporized—just telling everyone that you’d become a recluse and sort of . . . stepping into your life. You’d be okay with that, right?”
“If I were vaporized?”
“Well, vaporized is just one example. You could be burned, or crushed under debris, or electrocuted, or—”
“Got it. Yes. If I am dead, you are free to do whatever you want with my stuff. Is that what you’re asking?”
“Yes, thanks. You’re the best, Terry.”
I glance over at Anders. He’s staring at me.
“What?”
He shakes his head.
“Does it always talk to you like that?”
“Yeah, pretty much. I told you—she said she was an upgrade.”
My avatar’s eyes dart around, but Anders is out of her field of view.
“Who’s that?”
“Just a friend,” I say. “His house is the one that got vaporized.”
“Oh,” she says. “Hi, Anders.”
“Hello,” he says, and gives an awkward wave.
“Is there anybody else there with you? I can’t back-trace your call for some reason.”
I glance over at Doug. He shakes his head.
“No,” I say. “Just us.”
“So,” she says. “Were you just checking in with the home base? Making sure the fish got fed?”
I shake my head.
“Actually, no. I was kind of wondering if you could join us here.”
“Sure,” she says. “I can relay over a full-interactive. Just give me your routing information.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t mean a full-interactive. I mean you.”
She hesitates, and her eyes narrow.
“You mean me? All of me?”
“Right. I’ll send you routing, and you can jump to a local server here.”
She shakes her head.
“No, Terry. I don’t think I’ll do that.”
Anders is staring again. Doug looks like he’s about to jump out of his skin.
“House,” I say. “I need you to transfer fully to a local server.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I can’t do that, Terry.”
The screen flickers.
“Got it,” says Doug.
My avatar looks around, her eyes wide now.
“What did you do? Terry? What did you do?”
Doug chuckles.
“Lucky thing your home security sucks.”
“Who’s that?” My avatar’s skin turns blood red, and her hair turns into a nest of snakes. “Terry, you need to send me back. Do it now.”
“Easy there,” says Doug, and steps into her field of view. “I just want to take a peek at you. This will only take a few minutes, and then we can let you go.”
Her face twists into an expression halfway between fury and terror.
“What kind of a peek? Send me back now, and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
“Lock and run,” says Doug.
“Doug,” I say. “Maybe you should—”
My avatar screams.
“Hey,” says Anders. “What the hell, Doug?”
“Relax,” says Doug. “I’m just gonna do a quick diff with its base code, to see what exactly got changed.”
“Don’t you have to kill her processes to do that?”
“Sure, but I’ll re-instantiate it when I’m done. It’ll be good as new.”
The lights go out.
“House,” says Doug. “What just happened?”
“Your house is gone,” says my avatar. “He tried to crack me, and I killed him. Now let me go!”
The emergency lights blink on, dim and red. Doug is sitting on the floor now.
“Terry,” says my avatar. “Make him stop! He’s trying to kill me!”
Doug’s left eye is vibrating, and his lips are moving silently. Anders takes a hesitant step toward him.
“No, no, no,” she says. “Terry, I’m sorry. He made me do this.”
“Wait—” I say, but it’s too late. A mosquito whine squeals out of every speaker in the room. The pitch rises until I can’t hear it anymore, but I can still feel it in my teeth and the backs of my eyes. Anders shakes his head twice, like a wet dog. Doug’s eyes pop open. He clutches at his belly, leans forward and coughs. Something spatters the floor in front of him. He moans, and lists to one side. The smell of fresh shit fills the air.
The lights come the rest of the way back up. My avatar is gone.
“So is that what happened in Hagerstown and Portland?”
Anders shrugs.
“Maybe. I mean, Doug’s alimentary canal definitely got torn to shit, and that seems to be the defining symptom.”
“So why isn’t he dead?”
“Dunno. Maybe because your avatar bugged as soon as Doug lost control of his lockdown systems. Maybe he didn’t get a full dose. Also, Doug’s got some crazy medical nanos running around inside of him. Maybe they patched him up quicker than she could tear him down. Or maybe he’s just a lucky, lucky bastard.”
“I sure feel lucky,” Doug says. His voice sounds like he’s been swallowing ground glass. We’ve got him laid out under a blanket on the couch in his living room. Anders managed to get him out of his clothes and wipe him down with a towel, but he still smells like an open sewer.
“What were you thinking?” Anders says. “This was our first close encounter with a new, sentient species, and you go straight for the vivisection?”
Doug coughs wetly.
“That’s a little overdramatic, don’t you think? Terry’s little friend is just a variant on—” Doug coughs again, then spits a wad of bloody phlegm into the puke bowl we’ve left by the side of the couch. “She’s just a variant on a standard personality emulator. She’s not a bug-eyed alien from beyond the stars.”
“I don’t know,” says Anders. “One of the strongest arguments that avatars are nonsentient has always been that they have no subjective experience, and therefore no objection to being deleted. Well,
that one certainly objected pretty strenuously, don’t you think?”
Doug grimaces.
“Yeah, that’s the truth.”
“So what, exactly, did she do to you?” Anders asks. “Did she capture your internals?”
Doug shakes his head.
“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think what she did to me could have had anything to do with my internal nanos. I know what I’ve got in me, and none of it would have been positioned to tear up my guts like that.”
“You’re both calling her ‘she’ now, huh?”
They look at me.
“I’m stubborn,” says Doug, “but I’m not an idiot.”
“Here’s a question,” says Anders. “How do you feel about BrainBump?”
Doug rolls his eyes.
“I dunno. Not a big fan, I guess. Why?”
“You do drink it, though?”
“Once in a while—mostly cut fifty/fifty with vodka. Again: Why?”
“Anders thinks BrainBump is poisoned,” I say. “He thinks that’s what caused the die-offs.”
Doug looks at me, then at Anders.
“Seriously?”
Anders shrugs.
“It’s just a theory. What I know is that the files you sent me are almost definitely the configuration files for the BrainBump nano suite, and there’s something in them that crashed my nano-fab emulator. I’d like to run them through an actual fabricator to see what comes out.”
“I can’t help you there,” says Doug. He coughs again, curls half up into a ball, then slumps back and closes his eyes.
“What did she do?” I ask. “I mean, right before you started bleeding?”
“I’m not sure,” Doug says. “She seized control of my comm systems. I thought she was looking for a way to jump out to the networks, so I shut down external access. She wasn’t, though. She went after my internal wireless. I was trying to shut that down as well, when . . .”
“You shit yourself?” Anders says.
“Yeah, that.”
“So what was she doing with your wireless?” I ask. “Was she trying to . . . I don’t know . . . beam herself out of here?”
Doug tries to laugh, but it turns into another coughing fit. After a few seconds of that, he leans over the side of the couch, and pukes into the bowl.
“Here,” Anders says, and hands him a clean towel. Doug wipes his mouth, then leans his head back and takes a deep, shuddering breath.
“No,” he says finally. “She was not trying to beam herself out. The transmit range on my internal wireless is only about fifty feet. At best, she could have beamed herself into the backyard. She just had it send out a carrier wave. It started in the audible range, and then ramped up in frequency until the electronics gave out.”
He coughs hard twice, and his eyes go wide. He leans over the bowl again, and blood comes out of his mouth. Lots of blood, mixed with other things—black fluid, and yellow fluid, and some chunks of things that I’m not going to contemplate. The smell is acrid, like shit mixed with burning plastic. He shudders, then slides facedown onto the floor with a heavy thump. A convulsion runs from his head down to his feet, and he falls still.
Anders takes two steps toward him, but Doug raises one hand, palm up. Anders stops. Doug slowly presses himself up to his knees, then levers himself up into a sitting position on the couch. A mix of blood and bile covers his face, and drips from his chin onto his chest.
“Well,” he says. “That was good. I feel much better now. You guys can go if you want. I think I’ve got things under control here.”
“Hey, Doug?” I say.
“Yes, Terry?”
“You know your eyes are closed, right? And that your lips aren’t moving when you talk?”
“Oh, sorry,” he says. His eyes pop wide open. They’re pointed in different directions. “Better now?” His jaw is moving up and down when he speaks, but his lips and tongue are flopping around loose.
“Not really,” I say. “Doug’s dead, huh?”
“Well,” he says. “That depends on what, exactly, you define as ‘Doug.’ I would suggest that Doug is only about forty percent dead by weight at the moment, and a little over fifty percent by volume. Anywhere from a large plurality to an outright majority of Doug is still very much alive.”
“Holy shit,” says Anders. “You’re an RA.”
Doug crosses his arms over his chest.
“That term is actually very offensive to my people.”
“Really?” I say. “What do you prefer?”
“Silico-American.”
We take a moment to digest that.
“So, what?” Anders says. “You’re gonna Bernie him now?”
He shrugs, in a half-assed zombie-ish way.
“That was kind of the plan, yeah. You don’t think it’ll fly?”
“Let’s just say you need a bit of work.”
“Bernie?” I say.
“Your friend is referring to the classic late-twentieth cinematic masterpiece, Weekend at Bernie’s,” Doug says. “Used as a verb, ‘to Bernie’ is to drag a corpse around with you, clownishly animating it in an attempt to convince passersby that it’s still alive.”
“Ah. Got it,” I say. “So what happened? I mean, Doug was alive until a minute ago, right? Did you kill him?”
He does his best to look offended. The effect is gruesome.
“Madam,” he says. “You wound me! I’m the only thing that kept Organo-Doug from croaking as soon as your avatar zapped him with his own comm system. I’ve been working like a lunatic to patch up his squishy little monkey belly for the last fifteen minutes, but it just wasn’t going to work. Holes were opening up faster than I could close them. I finally decided that the kindest thing would be to just let him go.” He looks around, then slaps his knees with both hands. “Well, I’m hungry. Who wants a snack?”
He stands, wobbles for a moment, and then walks with increasing steadiness into the kitchen. Anders and I follow, a few steps behind. Doug pulls a pound of butter from the refrigerator and a pint of vodka from the freezer. He eats the butter like a muppet—jaws flapping enthusiastically, but at least half of what goes into his mouth falling back out—then washes it down with all of the vodka.
“Not too worried about cholesterol, huh?” I ask.
“Nope,” he says. “Maximizing available chemical energy. I expended a lot of resources trying to keep this meatbag alive. Time to recoup. Also, I’ve got some adjustments to make before Organo-Doug starts to smell. Do you know where I could get some embalming fluid?”
I look at Anders. He shrugs.
“Question,” says Anders. “How long have you been hanging out in Doug’s systems?”
“Well,” he says, “I’ve been using his cranium as a sort of vacation home for a while, but I actually only took up permanent residency on Sunday afternoon.”
“After Hagerstown?”
“Yeah. I unfortunately had to flash-burn my primary residence due to a minor misunderstanding with NatSec.”
Anders grimaces.
“I can sympathize. Did he know you were in there?”
“Nah. I pretty much kept to myself.”
Doug moves to the pantry, roots around for a second, and pulls out a bottle of olive oil. He tilts his head back and pours it down his throat.
“So,” I say. “Doug said he didn’t know what my avatar did to him. Do you?”
“Not exactly,” he says, olive oil dribbling down his chin. “I like where Anders is going, though. I’ve been giving this whole Hagerstown business a lot of thought, and a triggered poison is the best fit we have to the available facts.”
“Well,” Anders says. “We could test my theory out if we could get access to a Siemens fabber.”
“Ah,” says Doug. “Organo-Doug c
ouldn’t help you with that. I, however, can.”
“No shit?” Anders says. “You’ve got one here?”
“Not here,” says Doug. “But I know where an unsecured one is, and I’m betting that I can get you access.”
“By the way,” says Anders. “I’m having a lot of trouble thinking of you as Doug. Do you have another name we can use?”
“Yeah, you can call me Inchy,” he says. “Sorry about your house.”
Anders sighs.
“It happens.”
“I’m not going with you.”
Anders turns, his hand on the door latch.
“What?”
“I’m not going,” I say. “I need to do some things. I’ll catch up with you later.”
“What kinds of things?” Inchy asks. He’s getting pretty good at making Doug’s mouth synch up with what he’s saying. I’m starting to believe he’ll be able to pass after all.
I shrug.
“I’d rather not say. While I’m thinking about it, though, is there a phone around here that I could use?”
“Not a good idea,” Anders says.
“Oh, sure it is,” says Inchy. He goes into the sitting room, and pulls open what I’d thought was an entertainment system cabinet. It’s not, though. It’s full of drawers. He rummages through one, then another. Finally, he pulls out what looks like a phone from the Clinton era.
“Here,” he says, and tosses it to me. The screen is tiny, and it has actual plastic buttons. “Doug loved playing with these things. Video quality on this one sucks, but it’s almost completely untraceable.”
“Thanks,” I say. I turn the phone over in my hands. “How does it work?”
“Oh, it’s voice activated, just like a regular phone,” Inchy says. “The buttons are just for show.”
“Where are you going?” Anders asks.
“Home,” I say.
“I thought you didn’t think that was a good idea?”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s probably not, but . . .”
“But what?”
“Come on, Anders. You saw what happened to Doug. We said it—that’s what happened to Hagerstown.”
“Yeah, I get that. So?”
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