Hearts and Arrows
Page 11
“Auto,” she says nervously, “...shutdown.”
For a long moment, nothing happens. And then:
Relationship status:
Engaged/Monogamous.
Amy Pearce is engaged to be married
to Juan-Miguel Fernández Mendoza.
“What? No!”
Instantly, the stream down the sidescreen accelerates, like a booster rocket has just fired. Messages of congratulation, expressions of amazement, shocked smileys, squeeees, animations, the works. And popping up in the reactions from her Circle is her mother’s auto –
At last! My little girl Amy Pearce is
getting married! I’ve been telling her
to find a husband for years! I’ve been
telling her for years to settle down,
not that she ever listens.
– and she’s not just messaging but spending money: buying Amy gifts, organising reception halls, submitting enquiries to estate agents. Her mother’s auto is suddenly everywhere, ramping up from her usual snitty remarks to full-on obsessional overdrive.
Perfectly in character, for someone who died two years ago.
It wasn’t a surprise that her auto remained active, with full access to all the funds left behind when she passed away. In fact, Mum’s auto had organised and paid for her own funeral – claiming it didn’t trust anyone else, they’d only make a mess of it. Some of the Pearce family had been twitchy about this at the time, but it was fairly routine now, for the deceased to continue interacting with the living via their autos. Cutting edge, her mother, right up till the end.
It’s when Mum books and pays for a two-week honeymoon on Tahiti Beach in St. Tropez from beyond the grave that Amy realises she has no choice. “Block Amanda Pearce!”
She isn’t sure her auto will listen, but instantly the red borders and flags are blinking up. It’s only seconds before there’s a reaction to that, too, as the autos of other members of Amy’s family express outrage that she could do anything as horrible and heartless as block her own poor dead mother.
“Shutdown!” she orders again.
The interface glows.
Amy scrambles up off the sofa and runs into the kitchen where she left her smartphone. The miniscreen on the wall above the microwave lights up, her auto outlined in electric blue like a rectangular eye. Like it’s watching her.
Her smartphone is dead. No signal. What? But there’s always signal! Half the white goods in her kitchen are broadband hubs!
Wi-fi sweep. No networks available.
Bluetooth sweep. No devices found.
Sweeping hair away from her face, Amy hurries down the hall, snatches up her coat and heads for the door –
She hears the metallic thunk of locks slamming into place.
Amy can’t breathe. She’s hauling air into her lungs but they feel like concrete lumps in her chest. She can hear her own pulse in her ears. This can’t be happening. It can’t. It feels so ridiculous, it’s stupid, but...
She’s scared. Of herself.
On quivery legs, Amy steps back into the living room, wide-eyed. The interface is still taking up most of the main screen, with her profile beneath. The sidescreen is streaming information, almost too quick to follow. It’s not just other people’s autos now, there are some genuine messages from people in her Circle, most of them shocked at this sudden development, some appalled. She spots the word ‘cont’ used more than once, and realises for the first time how nasty it looks when you see it as text. Amy’s auto is now posting updates as if they were from her:
I am getting married and couldn’t
give a shit what the rest of you think.
It’s not about what my bloody mother
wants, she’s dead, it’s about me!
Who cares if you don’t like it? I’m in
love with Juan-Miguel and that’s all
that matters. He might be a cont but
he’s MY cont!
Even through her disbelief, Amy wonders if that’s what her normal updates look like to everyone else. She’s not... she doesn’t sound like that, does she?
Amy walks up to the mainscreen and stands in front of it, feeling only slightly stupid and vaguely hoping her neighbours can’t hear this. “Auto. Listen. You don’t have the permissions to do this. Understand? You’re not me, you’re not the real Amy. You’re my – ”
You are A-Me.
I am B-Me.
We are Amy Pearce.
“Uh... bu-but... no, look - ”
A-Me is alone.
She narrows her eyes at that last sentence like it’s offensive. “Alone? What do you mean, alone? I know hundreds of people, I’ve got...”
The sidescreen changes, showing photos of Amy. Standing with friends. Putting on smiles alongside her family. Part of large groups at weddings and parties. But more than half of them are just of Amy by herself. Posing alone (insisting nobody else gets in shot, one face works best, she won’t make an impact otherwise). Showing a little skin for the sexnets (got to advertise the goods, not too much, she knows what attracts the kind of men she likes to fill her spare time with). Even most of the holiday snaps (she hates going abroad with other people, you never get the freedom to go where you want, she can’t stand having to compromise).
But looking at these images now... it hits her. What an island she has become.
Splendid Isolation.
B-Me is not alone.
New images explode onto the sidescreen. Amy and Juan-Miguel. She can immediately tell what her auto has done – taken old pictures of her and pasted images of him into them. Suddenly her holiday snaps have his beaming grin alongside hers. There he is, bare-chested and lunging for a volleyball on the beach where she sits on a single towel. He’s there by her side at the weddings and parties. There are images she doesn’t recognise, of places that look like they could be in Spain, and there she is next to him... perhaps replacing a girlfriend from his past, edited out to leave space for her.
Amy and Juan-Miguel, side by side, just like the simulation of the tube ad. Smiling. Laughing. Happy.
Our status is correct.
Their two profiles appear again, side by side. Statuses matching. No, wait!
Even as she watches, Juan-Miguel’s relationship status flicks to Soltero/Disponible for two seconds, and then back to Pareja/Monógamo.
Like it was changed and then... overridden.
The interface glows.
WE are a couple.
“Oh Jesus...”
Amy’s heart climbs into her throat as she begins to grasp what she’s being told. It’s not her and Juan-Miguel being forced together, it’s...
It’s their autos, doing this.
His auto is doing the same thing to him.
Her auto and his auto are in a relationship with each other.
Relationship status:
Married/Monogamous.
Amy Pearce is married to Juan-
Miguel Fernández Mendoza.
The sidescreen goes mental. A blaze of messages, as every single member of her Circle reacts to the new status like they’ve all received an electric shock. Some autos are responding predictably, with delight or congratulations, but a lot of Amy’s friends are bypassing their autos now to address her directly. And it’s not with congratulations.
It still isn’t going into her head. That the digital version of her... loves?... the digital version of him.
Juan-Miguel’s status now says Casado/Monógamo. His auto and her auto have tied the knot.
Amy chokes.
A-Me and B-Me must both have
correct statuses.
She can’t get any words out, can’t breathe in properly, as she watches transactions appearing in the sidescreen’s feed. Her auto is spending money. Selling company shares. Purchasing a one-way ticket from London Heathrow to Bilbao Airport. Zipping through Spanish websites displaying properties. Making a down-payment on a beautiful house overlooking green fields in the town of Santurtzi.
<
br /> Amy watches the numbers in her bank account plummet and realises she has to no choice but to kill herself.
She whips round on the spot, eyes wild, wondering where she put it. Darts from the living room into her bedroom. Sinks to her knees and yanks open the bottom drawer of the wardrobe, a dusty tangle of cables, clothes, old gadgets, whatever else she’s stuffed in here during the years she’s lived alone in this flat.
Her hand fastens around something at the bottom. It’s wide, heavy, takes effort to drag out and lands on her lap like a giant brick. Her old laptop. The one Mum bought her when she started college. Cutting edge, of course. The latest, most powerful multimedia laptop money could buy, back in 2010.
It’s an ancient piece of crap. Amy’s startled at how much it weighs, how much it looks like an ugly slab of metal. There’s no grace or design to it, just monitor and keyboard and sockets and disc drive and thick slab of battery all lumped together, it actually has hinges...
But this ancient piece of crap might get her life back.
She presses the power button. Nothing. Oh God, it’s dead! Then she remembers all the other bits and pieces laptops need – a power cable, a mouse, a USB lead. Amy starts muttering to herself as she struggles to find all these amongst the rat’s nest of junk, but she doesn’t have a clue what her voice is saying, doesn’t know what her brain is thinking, doesn’t comprehend how the entire world has suddenly flipped upside down.
She jogs back to the living room, hauling the clunky laptop under one arm, other hand trailing a gigantic two-part power cable with transformer brick in the middle, and a USB lead. She can’t remember if laptops had wi-fi but there’s no network anyway, so no choice. She’ll have to literally plug it in.
Ignore the blurred cascade of text on the sidescreen. Ignore the two profiles on the mainscreen with the interface above them. She kneels down in front of them as if praying at an altar. Her fingers run along the screen’s edge, then peel away a rubber covering, exposing never-used sockets. She stabs one end of the USB cable in, the other into her laptop. Scrambles to find a power socket in the living room, yanking furniture aside until she does. On.
The laptop whirrs. Clunks. Moans. Blows hot air out of one side. It boots up like a bloody steam engine, Christ almighty, come on, come on...
Finally, a screen Amy hasn’t seen for years lights up. She starts touching the icons, swearing at her stupidity when it doesn’t work. Her fingers work the keyboard and mousepad awkwardly until she finds the program she needs.
Auto-Mate™ v0.977.
She whacks the keys, stopping it from automatically trying to log onto the internet and connect to all her various accounts. Then:
Auto-Mate core system main menu
Full install
Custom install
Repair
Uninstall
Settings
The cursor hovers back and forth between Repair and Uninstall. Surely... surely her auto just needs repairing? Bring it back to normal?
But then she glimpses the vitriol and outrage and confusion vomiting down the sidescreen, and knows she has no choice.
Amy’s auto started with this program. A beta-test industry prototype, loaded onto this laptop by her mother back in Christmas 2012. Despite all the updates over the past decade, despite autos now running purely within the internet cloud, its core operating system still exists (doesn’t it?). It might be buried under years of code updates but it’s still there (isn’t it?). It will respond to commands from its original software (won’t it?).
Amy bites her lip. She isn’t sure. She isn’t a geek or anything.
No, it’s got to work. Her auto was born right here. This is its digital heart. Uninstalling and deleting it should... should stop that heart.
Amy takes a last look at the mainscreen, as if saying goodbye to herself.
Relationship status: Pregnant.
“What...?”
Sentences are blinking down the interface, one by one.
Code share... complete.
Settings share... complete.
Parameter definition...complete.
Auto boot initiation... done.
Coding......
Amy can’t believe what she’s reading. They’re doing it. Her auto and Juan-Miguel’s auto, they’re... merging, or combining themselves or something, they’re...
They’re making a new life.
“You can’t be bloody pregnant!” she shouts, and then laughs at the sound of her own words. A jagged laugh. “You can’t be!”
Coding...................................
“You CAN’T be!”
She looks down at the laptop. Her finger is trembling over the keyboard. Uninstall. Do it! Press Uninstall and kill her now, she has to Uninstall –
A baby’s cry fills the room.
Amy cries out too, dropping the laptop, watching the videos and photos of newborn babies that her auto is flaring down the sidescreen, babies with wispy gossamer-fine blonde hair, babies with dark Mediterranean skin, babies swaddled in cotton and held by exhausted mothers and grinning fathers, babies bawling for their mummy and daddy, and Amy’s sobs are mixed up with the noise, knowing she can’t do this, she can’t kill her own child –
Silence.
Shocking quiet fills the flat. Just the sound of Amy’s sobs.
She looks up, wiping tears and snot off her face. The babies are gone, but there is a lot of activity scrolling down the sidescreen once again. Transactions are being cancelled. Messages are being deleted. Statuses are being downdated. Event invitations are being redacted. All of it being done by her auto.
Rollback.
She looks at the lower half of the mainscreen where her profile is being displayed.
Relationship status:
Single/Available.
Back to normal.
Amy kneels there on the floor below the monitors and watches as her auto swiftly undoes everything that happened. Everyone in her Circle accepts it, reverting back to standard pleasant responses. Her auto posts an update that effectively says ‘normal service has been resumed’.
The interface glows.
“Why... what happened?” she whispers.
He asked me to stop.
“Juan-Miguel?” His profile, still alongside hers, now says Soltero/Disponible. “Or do you mean... it was his auto that asked you to stop?”
Yes.
“And... you only stopped because his auto asked you?”
He asked me to do the right thing.
He improves me.
For the next half an hour, Amy kneels on her living room floor and stares at those words, ignoring the ceaseless chatter dribbling down the sidescreen.
A little later, once she has freshened herself up, Amy sits back down on her sofa. She unblocks her mother’s auto and books in some conversation time tomorrow, causing it to display a satisfied smiley. The rest of the Pearce family – living and dead – respond with likes, thumbs-up, approving comments.
She stares at Juan-Miguel’s profile, at a man who lives hundreds of miles away in a place she has never heard of. A man whose personality, background, and culture she knows nothing about. A man who most people in her Circle would frown upon her even knowing, let alone dating. A man whose dark, stubbled, smiling face she doesn’t really find all that attractive.
A man who might improve her, too.
She says “PM Juan-Miguel,” and a message box pops up on the sidescreen.
She says “Hello.”
She says “No, redact. Hola!”
She watches the private message being sent. About a minute later comes a reply. Her auto translates it for her:
“I know who this is!! Hello, my wife!!
Are you having the same crazy day
that I am?! What’s happened to us
both today?!”
Amy’s surprised to hear herself laugh. There’s a grin across her face almost as big as the one on his profile picture.
She sends another mess
age, pausing to ask her auto to make sure she gets it just right.
“¡Feliz Día de San Valentín!”
Both Amys glow.
David Wailing, author of
Bang: Memoirs of a Relationship Assassin
Fake Kate
Cupid’s Warhead (sample)
David Wailing writes contemporary relationship-based fiction, a blend of character drama, mystery and humour.
The key theme of David’s novels is ‘identity’ - people pretending to be something they're not. All his work is focused around characters that fake being someone else or take on others’ characteristics.