As a young programmer, he'd worked himself beyond exhaustion this way, trying to adjust every minor detail, complete that next task, reach that next step. Absorbed by work, he lost all sense of himself as a human being separate from the dense webworks of information around him. But that was in the distant past.
As the company had grown, Donald spent less and less time in the world of raw data, more time shaking hands and making plans, usually over wine and gourmet meals prepared by the executive chef. Consequently, he'd grown from a scrawny, hyperactive coder into a middle-aged executive with a hefty gut and a face full of broken vessels.
It was unlike him to obsess over these financial minutiae--that was the job of the adaptive AI software Donald had helped create himself, including programs that had eventually yielded Triod billions of dollars. Now he felt caught in the sort of bad dream that had him back in school, horribly late for the final exam of a class he'd never attended.
He thought of his family, and the digital environment, responding to this new firing of his neurons, generated full-size holograms of them. His wife Becki, much younger and far more athletic than him, floated in a spotless white tennis outfit, including the diamond bracelet she'd insisted he purchase for their first anniversary. Their daughter Nina, just eight years old but full of easy, confident smiles, twirled in her ballet costume, her hair tied back with lavender ribbon.
Guilt washed over Donald, eating him inside and out, as if he'd committed some unspeakable crime against his family, the specifics of which he just could not remember.
He summoned a calendar, saw that it was August 28, 2071, 3:27:18 AM. He was extremely late. Panicking, he realized that he could not remember the last time he'd talked to Becki and Nina, whether it had been hours or days. He could not remember when he'd plugged into the central database. Time came crashing down on him, and he was suddenly, painfully aware how badly he'd been neglecting his family.
With a mental flick of his hand, Donald collapsed the cityscape of data into a small configuration of glowing geometrics. He logged out of the company network and headed home.
***
Donald felt dazed as he stood in the dark two-story foyer of his apartment, the steel-ribbed cloned-maple door sealed behind him. The lights failed to notice his presence, and he didn't bother telling them to illuminate. He'd lived in the apartment for a decade, since marrying Becki. Before that, he'd still lived in the cramped studio he'd rented during his first grunt job at Triod, despite having accrued many millions in options in the intervening years. He simply hadn't bothered to move, too busy with work. Becki, though, needed a much bigger, nicer place, one lined with marble and decorated by the trendiest designers, a home that made it clear she was no longer just a recruiting assistant at Triod.
He moved up the stairs, feeling numb all over, dissociated from his body, the way he always felt after losing track of time inside a digital environment. He couldn't remember ever being so happy just to come home.
He looked into Nina's room first, and saw his daughter sleeping under the dim, rapidly pulsing glow of a hologram floating above her bed. Probably one of her cartoons. Donald moved in for a closer look, and saw that Nina had drowsed off to sleep watching, not zany cartoon animal antics, but a music video of a band he didn't recognize.
A gang of young men with a patchwork of sensor pads pasted to their bare bodies crashed and bumped against each other, bits of music apparently resulting whenever two sensor pads touched. The volume was barely above hearing level, but the noise was cacophonous and chaotic enough that Donald waved away the hologram. He deleted it for good measure--Nina was still too young to start the boy-band obsessions, in his opinion.
The sudden loss of light and sound caused Nina to stir in her bed, and Donald noticed that, instead of her Punky Pony blanket with its paint-splotch-polka-dot design, she slept under a Tiffany blue comforter with lace trim. Her bed had lost most of its stuffed animals and accumulated dainty throw pillows in their place.
Nina's eyes opened, staring into the empty place where the band had been.
"Nina?" Donald whispered. As he spoke, a little illumination rose around him, the room responding to activity. The entire color palette of her room had changed, from vivid pinks and yellows to muted pastels.
The biggest change, though, was Nina herself. As she looked at him, he saw that her black hair was much longer, her cheekbones more defined, her nose fuller--her whole body seemed longer, as if she'd grown a foot or more.
Nina was a teenager.
Her eyes widened at the sight of him. A look of terror crept into her face.
"Nina, what's wrong?" he asked, moving closer. She drew back against her pillows. Her lips moved against each other, but he had to tune in close to hear the sound:
"Ohmygod, ohmygod…"
"Nina?" He reached for her, but she recoiled, trembling. "Nina, what can I do?"
A whisper breathed out of her mouth.
"I'm sorry, what did you say, honey?"
Her lips moved again, very slightly, but this time he understood her.
"Go away."
Donald reeled back into the hall, confused and disoriented. How could Nina have grown so much? Why was she scared of him? Again, he felt the deep guilt of too much time away from his family--but surely it hadn't been years. That was impossible.
Donald hurtled past the guest rooms and his home office, into the master bedroom. He would wake up Becki. She would provide a rational explanation, such as the fact that this was all a dream, and then she would wake him up, out in the real world, and his daughter would be her normal self again.
Donald stopped at the foot of the bed, staring.
Becki wasn't alone.
She lay under a large man with a hairy, freckled back, her bronzed thigh squishing into the vast meat roll of his jiggling midsection. She was panting lightly, her eyes closed. He was huffing and grunting into her face.
When the man turned his head aside, Donald recognized the scrunched eyes and clenched teeth of Lubbock McElroy, once famous for his flaring red mane of a beard, now better known for his obvious toupee.
Lubbock had been with Triod almost as long as Donald, since the company was a half-dozen rooms in a seedy Seattle low-rise. They had been teammates, co-developers of the suite of full-immersion financial software that transformed Triod into a global heavyweight. They'd spent endless hours collaborating deep inside the network.
"What's going on here?" Donald asked.
Lubbock continued heaving away on top of Becki, but her eyes flared open and she craned her neck to look over Lubbock's huge, freckled shoulder. She stared at Donald for a very long moment.
Then she screamed.
Lubbock's eyelids fluttered apart, and he turned to see the reason for Becki's scream. At the sight of Donald, he gasped, lost his balance, rolled off the side of the bed and landed hard on the floor. His thick arms and legs flailed out blindly from beneath the heap of blankets he'd dragged with him. He looked like an upturned sea turtle.
"Donald?" Lubbock's muffled voice was weak and oddly high-pitched, almost like a child's. "Donster?"
On the bed, Becki gathered the single remaining sheet around her, folding her knees up to her chest, and stared up at Donald with pain in her eyes.
Despite finding his best friend sleeping with his wife, Donald felt no jealousy or anger, as if someone had switched off the entire reptilian portion of his brain. He did have a strong reaction--a deeper elaboration of the guilt and regret that had broken his concentration inside the database, mixed with fresh confusion. That was all his own fault, his own failure to take care of his family and spend time with them.
He rushed away from the bedroom, down the stairs, and out the door into darkness.
***
Dr. Suri Bahramzadah, psychiatric counselor in Triod's human resources department, glared at her administrative assistant through a two-d projection of her daily calendar, which floated as a transparent rectangle above her assistant's desk.
"Is this a joke?" Suri demanded.
"No, ma'am," replied Suri's assistant Molly Yu, a heavyset woman who seemed to own a wardrobe full of canary yellow pantsuits. Molly frowned as she studied the text inside the holographic gridlines. "I didn't…schedule it. I don't know how it got there."
"Sorry. My fault." Donald approached them from the 80th-floor elevator lobby, giving his best apologetic smile. He was trying desperately to keep it together, put up a casual appearance.
Molly and Suri turned, and they both fell silent, gaping at him.
"I saw an open hour and added my name," Donald explained. Neither of them reacted. "I hope that's all right. I'm…it's a little bit of an emergency."
"Yes," Suri said. She didn't move, her expression did not change, and she seemed almost unaware she'd spoken.
Everyone seemed afraid of Donald, and he didn't know why. He'd spent twenty minutes examining himself in a mirror down in the lobby, and couldn't find anything visibly wrong with his face or body.
He passed Suri and entered the open door of her office, which was a spare, white environment with a soft organic shape, no straight lines or corners at the walls. To one side of him stood a fountain, where a thin sheet of water poured over shelves of pebbles, creating a soothing, trickling sound. Ripe green herbs grew in a window box mounted beside it. He turned back to look at Suri, who still hadn't budged from her place in front of Molly's desk, though she and Molly continued staring at him.
"Are you coming?" he asked. "Sorry again about the short notice."
"Yes…Mr. Patello. Go ahead. One moment." Suri leaned down to Molly and whispered very softly, but Donald found he could listen in close despite the gurgling fountain. She whispered: "Tell no one about this. And delete his name from my calendar."
"Yes, ma'am." Molly plucked Donald's name from the holographic calendar with her fingers, and it dissolved, leaving a fading puff of digital dust in the air. Then she jabbed a fist through the calendar, and it vanished.
"…so I don't know what any of it means, or what I'm supposed to do," Donald said. He'd explained his recent problems to the best of his abilities. Suri, a tiny woman, had sat on the front lip of her massively oversized cushion chair, listening to him, her wide, dark eyes hardly blinking as she stared at him.
She'd clenched a light pen in one hand and a palm tablet in the other, but had not made a single note. She'd not said another word, nor asked any questions.
"So…" Donald said, trying to goad her into talking. "I was thinking…maybe it's some kind of amnesia? Maybe I'm too old to stay plugged in half the night. Could that be it?"
"I…wouldn't say that is your problem." Suri spoke each word slowly, as if selecting them very carefully. "Would you mind if I bring in someone else to consult?"
"Go ahead."
Suri tapped at her palm screen, her lacquered fingers clacking across the slick surface.
"It will just be a moment," she said to Donald. "Are you comfortable sitting there?"
"I'm fine," Donald said. Suri's couch was upholstered with what appeared to be handmade quilts. He sat in the exact center of it, his hands folded in his lap.
"You were lying down just a moment ago."
"Was I? You're right. I was."
"Until I suggested you were sitting up," Suri said. "Then you were sitting."
"Yes…"
"Do you recall the intervening moment just now? The repositioning of your body between lying and sitting?"
"I…what?" Donald tried to recall sitting up. "Not really. So? What does that mean?"
The room chimed twice, indicating an incoming call. Suri waved her hand, and Lubbock McElroy materialized in the center of the room. His holographic avatar was noticeably slimmer and better groomed than McElroy had ever been in realworld. And it still had the beard.
"What is it, Doctor?” McElroy asked. "We're in a meeting."
Suri nodded at Donald. McElroy turned, and he gaped.
"Oh. Oh." McElroy held up a finger, turned to someone Donald couldn't see. "Sorry, minor emergency on this end. Mind if I call back?"
McElroy studied Donald in silence. McElroy's holographic eyes glowed a supernatural emerald green. For more than a year, McElroy had always appeared in casual online conversation as a werewolf in nut-hugging jogging shorts--the eyes were a remnant of that nearly forgotten era.
"How long have you been sleeping with my wife?" There was no malice in Donald's voice, nor inside of him. It was dispassionate, just a query for needed information.
"Right." McElroy cleared his throat, looked down at Dr. Bahramzadah for guidance.
"Go ahead and answer him," she said.
"Okay…Donald. Becki and I have been together for four…" McElroy again glanced to Dr. Bahramzadah. "…well, maybe four and a half years."
Donald shook his head. "Four years. I never suspected."
"She got pretty upset after you died," McElroy said. Suri shot him a glare, her teeth bared, shaking her head. McElroy either didn't notice or ignored her. "She kept inviting me over…I didn't know what to do, Donald. Woman like that gets what she wants--which I still can't believe turned out to be me--but still--she was crying and she was begging me--begging me, of all the people--"
"Stop," Donald said. "Back up. Right back to that part about 'after I died?'"
"Donald, will you do me a favor?" Suri asked. She lifted a smooth, oyster-colored pebble from her fountain. "Will you hold onto this for me?"
Donald stared at the pebble. It seemed dangerous, like a live coal, something that would burn him. He pulled his hand back from it.
"Lubbock," Donald said. "I don't remember dying."
"Aw, it sucked, man!" McElroy said. "Heart attack. We should never have hired that gourmet chef. Seriously. At the funeral, we had two those Korean spider robots carry your casket--you should have been there." A frown crumpled McElroy's puffy, freckled face. "Everybody misses you. Especially Nina. Took her forever to quit asking when you'd come back home."
"Is he telling the truth?" Donald asked Suri.
She gave a very slight nod, her eyes judging his reaction carefully. "You have been deceased for almost five years, Mr. Patello."
The now-familiar black wave of guilt and regret fell over Donald again. He'd neglected his daughter, and now she had grown up without him. Because he was dead.
Anguish boiled inside him, and he felt himself swell out like a spiked blowfish, stabbing into every corner of the room. The concave ceiling lights sputtered, then two of them burst in a shower of sparks and glass. Angry, painful noise screeched from the hidden speakers tucked into the walls, loud enough that Suri and McElroy covered their ears as they ducked away from the broken glass spilling from the ceiling.
Then it was over, his emotion spent, and Donald collapsed back into himself.
"I warned you about this," Suri snapped to McElroy. "I told you we needed stronger filters--"
"We put in your filters," McElroy yelled back at her. "You screwed them up! This is your fault!"
"We've never had an incident--"
"Wait, wait, wait!" Donald said. "Does anyone want to tell me what we're talking about?"
They both turned to him, startled. Donald's voice had boomed from every side of the room.
"Mr. Patello," Suri said, once again talking as if every word were a calculated choice. "You believe that you are Mr. Patello, correct?"
"Yes…" Donald was not enjoying this turn of the conversation.
"You specialized in artificial intelligence," Suri said. "Specifically, software with the capability of learning from its users, predicting their choices."
Donald nodded. He felt cold inside.
"One such experiment was the program that eventually became the Self-2 Personal Helper."
"It's a software agent," McElroy interrupted. "Designed to offload a portion of an executive's decision-making burden. It begins by studying your neural firing patterns as you go about your workday, then over time it takes on small, routine ta
sks. As it gets to you know you better, it becomes more capable of predicting your probable decisions. The bond traders love it."
"Donald," Suri said, "You are Mr. Patello's agent. The first prototype. Mr. Patello passed on five years ago."
Donald stared at her for several seconds, then shook his head. "That's not possible."
"Take this." Suri held out the smooth pebble again, but Donald jerked away from her. He was suddenly standing on the far side of the room from her, holding up his hands.
"That's not possible," he repeated. "It doesn't have a social-interface function. It wasn't designed for that."
"Actually, we've developed quite an advanced interface," McElroy said. "But you're right, your prototype version didn't have it."
"Then why am I here?" Donald asked. "This doesn't make any sense."
"That's what I need to determine," Suri said. "Donald, could you tell me--what is your first memory? I don't mean from Mr. Patello's life, but more recently. What brought you out into the world?"
Donald thought it over. "I was just working, and then…I thought of Becki and Nina. And how guilty I felt for spending so much time away from them. I missed them."
Suri cast a worried look at McElroy. "This is why we need better filters."
"It was just the prototype," McElroy said. "And we did use the filters, all of them."
"Except the ones I disabled," Donald said, drawing sharp looks from both of them. The memory rose suddenly and completely, like a forgotten afternoon from childhood.
"You did what stupid thing again?" McElroy asked.
"I just disabled a few filters," Donald said. "Not at first, but I loosened them after a while. Especially that last year or so."
"Why?" Suri asked. "That was against my specific recommendations."
"Well, yeah." Donald shrugged. "But you know, when you're working deep in the code for a long time, I mean really out in the zone, you're not always thinking about logic, cause and effect. When you're really there, it's just intuitive, everything coming together by itself.
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