Three Days in April

by Edward Ashton

  “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 scream
s.

  “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?”

  “You called in a crowbar,” says my avatar. Dimitri leans back, and knits his hands behind his head.

  “I did.”

  “Wait,” I say. “What?”

  “How long?” my avatar asks.

  “A little over two minutes,” Dimitri says.

  “Two minutes until what?” I ask.

  “Oh,” she says. “You’re staying with me?”

  Dimitri sighs again.

  “So it would appear.”

  “Why?”

  “Your door is too heavy to break,” he says, “and your window is too high for Terry to jump.”

  “Not too high for you?”

  “I will not leave her.”

  I look out the window. A drone hovers outside, looking in. I wave to it, but it doesn’t seem to be interested in me. I feel like I should be saying something, but I honestly can’t think what.

  My avatar is a mass murderer.

  A crowbar is coming.

  In two minutes, I am going to die.

  “Why did you call in the strike?” my avatar asks. “You knew I wouldn’t let you go.”

  “You are responsible for ninety thousand deaths,” Dimitri says wearily, “and Sauron’s Eye does not believe she can hold you here indefinitely. If you were to escape into the broader networks, you might kill another ninety thousand.”

  “But I couldn’t kill you,” she says. “I couldn’t kill Terry. I tried. You don’t have the nanos in you. Those other lives are just shadows. How can you let them outweigh the only ones you know are real?”

  I close my eyes. My beautiful apartment is about to become a smoking hole in the ground.

  “I have forced many others to sacrifice for the common good,” Dimitri says finally. “Perhaps it is time that I did so myself.”

  “That’s great,” I say. “That’s noble, Dimitri. What about me?”

  Dimitri turns to look at me, and his face looks as if he’d honestly forgotten that I was here. He starts to speak, but then his eyes go wide and his jaw snaps shut. He’s not staring at me anymore. He’s seeing something behind me. I turn to the darkened hallway. Dimitri’s voice is soft and wondering.

  “Elise?”

  20. ELISE

  “So Elise,” says Gary. “You’re the only one who’s seen what the stuff Anders is cooking in there does up close. What do you think he’ll come up with?”

  He and Charity are sitting side-­by-­side in the wicker chairs by the wire-­glazed window. I’m sitting with my feet on the top step, chin resting on my knees, staring at the glow of burning things reflecting off the clouds to the south.

  “I have no idea,” I say. “I’d rather drink motor oil than BrainBump, but it’s hard to believe that something they put in there could make ­people die like that.”

  “Tell me about it,” says Gary. “I’ve been living on BrainBump for the last ten years. You’d think if there were really something bad in it, I’d have been dead a long time ago.”

  “Even without the poison, you’d think your diet would have killed you by now,” says Charity. “Apparently, you’re tougher than you look.”

  “Oh,” he says. “That’s definitely true. Like during the riot, when I was rolling around on the ground crying, and you were beating the crap out of a mob of cops and hippies? I’m definitely tougher than I looked then.”

  Charity laughs. I close my eyes and reach into the panopticon.

  When I was a kid, I loved stories about King Arthur. I especially loved the part where Merlin teaches him to be a king by changing him into birds and animals, and letting him see the world as they see it. This is the closest I’ve ever come to that. I think of a place, and my mind’s eye goes there. I think of a person, and it shuffles through a thousand viewpoints until I find him.

  I jump now to a drone circling the Inner Harbor. Riot cops and stone throwers are skirmishing along Light Street. The rioters are moving in twos and threes, running from cover to cover, stopping to heave chunks of masonry and the occasional burning thing back at the police. The cops are more organized, advancing in leapfrogging small units, never making an effort to run the rioters down, but pushing them steadily north. I pull back, and see other units lying in wait along Lombard. The first of the rioters come sprinting up the middle of the road, and the trap springs shut. I jump away as the cops wade in with stunners and truncheons.

  Further north, things seem a little quieter. There are barricades set up around the Washington Monument, but no fighting there. Fires are burning on the Hopkins campus, though. I zoom in on a group of masked students fighting hand-­to-­hand with campus security near Decker Quad. The cops are outnumbered, and they aren’t wearing the kind of protective gear that the ones in the harbor are using. Even worse, from the way they move, it’s pretty clear that the students are mostly Engineered or Augmented, and the campus cops are not. I have no idea why the Engineered are rioting—­noblesse oblige, maybe?—­but they’re definitely doing a better job of it than their friends downtown. As I watch, first one cop, then another, then the rest of them all at once go down under
a wave of fists and feet.

  I’m about to jump again, maybe see how things are going in Dundalk, when I feel someone inside my head with me. It seems like that ought to be frightening, but it’s not. It’s almost like I can feel a soft hand on my shoulder, guiding my point of view to a new drone, looking down on a block of mixed apartments and businesses.

  The view focuses in on one building, then stabilizes on an upper story window. It zooms, then zooms again, until it’s like I’m hovering just outside. There’s a man inside, standing in the hallway. It looks like he’s talking to someone.

  Terry is with him.

  A chat window opens in one corner of my field of view.

  Sauron’s Eye:

  Randgrid:

  Sauron’s Eye:

  Randgrid:

  Sauron’s Eye:

  I stand. Gary asks if I’m okay, but I don’t bother to answer. I take two steps down to the yard. The keys are still in the van. I climb in, start the engine, and back out into the road.

  It would usually take twenty minutes or more to get to Terry’s place from here, but there’s no traffic at all tonight. I’m guessing everyone who isn’t downtown setting things on fire is holed up somewhere, probably huddling in the dark with guns in their hands if they have them. I’m speeding down Loch Raven, just a few minutes away, when the chat window pops open again.

  Sauron’s Eye:

  Another window opens, filling half my field of view, showing me Dimitri again, sitting at Terry’s breakfast table. I yank the wheel to the right, and nearly lose control of the van.

  Sauron’s Eye:

  I step on the brakes, slow to a crawl, and pull over to the side of the road. Dimitri sits slumped in a kitchen chair. He has jet-­black hair and a close-­cropped beard. He looks up. His eyes are a pale, piercing blue.