Her name was Mariah, and she was taking an air-breather to Chicago. She was short, dark haired, maybe a few years older than me, wearing scuffed-up flats and a rumpled business suit. I managed to brush my hand against hers in the security line, and I got that same almost-painful tingle that I’d felt from the hostess in Mika’s—except this time, it ran all the way up into my brain.
“So,” she said as we were pulling our things back together on the far side of the scanners. “Do you have time to grab a drink before your flight?”
I smiled, and my stomach twisted up in a way that it hadn’t since I was seventeen.
“Sure,” I said, and glanced down at my phone. “I mean . . .”
I actually didn’t have time. My shuttle was boarding in fifteen minutes. I bit my lip and hit the booking app. There was one more jump to CNY that day, but it wasn’t for three more hours, and the transfer fee was four hundred dollars.
“Look, um . . .”
She smiled, and touched my arm.
“It’s okay, Drew. Maybe next time?”
She leaned in close, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath in.
“What are you wearing?”
I shrugged. I was pretty sure that I mostly smelled like flop sweat at that point.
“Whatever it is,” she said, “you should go easy on it next time. It’s dangerous.”
The shuttle home was bigger than the one I’d taken out in the morning, and laid out more like a standard atmospheric jet, with three seats on each side of a central aisle. I had a center seat in the back, in between a tall, ghost-pale redhead and her short, shaved-headed Asian girlfriend. Apparently, they’d hoped that if they took the window and the aisle, nobody would buy the seat between them. They both glared at me when I sat down, as if I’d ruined their plans deliberately. As soon as they started talking over me, I asked if one of them wanted to switch seats. They traded a long look, but then the bald one shook her head.
“Don’t think so,” she said. “You bought the cheap seat. Live with it.”
Ordinarily I would have had something snarky to say to that, but just at that moment I was trying not to imagine her climbing on top of me, so instead I just closed my eyes and pretended to sleep.
I’d like to say I wasn’t paying any attention to their conversation, but the truth is that I was too wired to zone out, and I was pretty much hanging on every word. The redhead, whose name was Grace, was upset about something that someone named Tam had said to her at a party the night before. Gia, her friend in the window seat, was clearly trying to talk her down off the ledge, but Grace was having none of it. If Tam hadn’t meant to say what she said, she would have apologized right away, wouldn’t she? And anyway, why was Gia taking Tam’s side on this? It’s not like Tam was there for her when all that stuff with Sara went down last Christmas, right?
It was at that point that Gia tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Dude, would you mind putting that thing away?”
I opened my eyes and looked over at her. Her face was a fifty-fifty blend of anger and disgust.
“What?”
She rolled her eyes.
“I said, would you please do something about that?”
Grace leaned over and patted my knee.
“She means your boner,” she whispered.
I looked down, and yeah, it was pretty much right there.
“Sorry,” I said, and tried to shift things around. It definitely did not help.
“Maybe try un-tucking your shirt?” Grace said.
That also did not help. I pulled my bag out from under the seat in front of me and into my lap, but that got me a warning from the safety monitor to stow my gear for liftoff.
“You know what’s weird?” Gia said.
“No,” Grace said. “What?”
“I’m actually thinking about helping him out with that.”
Grace gaped.
“Seriously? Since when are you into dongs?”
“I’m not,” Gia said. “That’s what’s weird.”
I was going to remind them that I was actually sitting right there, maybe see if they wanted to talk about Tam and Sara some more instead of my genitals, but by then we were out on the runway, and nobody chitchats at three gees. We boosted out in silence, pressed back into our seats. I tried to focus on getting my junk under control, but it was like the school bus in seventh grade. The more I thought about it, the worse it got, and the vibration wasn’t helping.
By the time the engines cut out and we settled into free fall, I was hoping maybe my seat mates were ready to move on.
“So,” I said. “That Tam—what a bitch, am I right?”
“Oh no,” Grace said. “We’re not done with you, Bonerman. It’s been like twenty minutes now. What’s the deal?”
“Yeah,” Gia said. “Are you OD’d on wood pills or something? Those things are dangerous, you know.”
“Truth,” Grace said. “After four hours, I think your dick explodes.”
Gia leaned over me.
“More importantly, why do you smell so good?”
“Good question,” Grace said. “Guys on shuttles usually smell like goats.”
Gia looked up into my face then.
“Hey, Bonerman? You okay?”
That was when I vomited.
I’ll give that church lady on the morning shuttle credit for being right about one thing: there really is nothing worse than puke in zero gee. It’s in such a big hurry to get out of you in the first place, but once it does, it just hangs there in the air and mocks you.
The worst part for me was that the bilious tail end of it didn’t actually clear my mouth. I had to spit it out, which in the absence of gravity is a lot harder than it sounds. The worst part for all of my fellow passengers was that once all that mess was out of me, it basically started to diffuse through the cabin air the way a drop of red food coloring diffuses through a glass of water. The shuttle had automatic filters that kicked in as soon as I lost it, drawing the cabin air up to the intakes in the ceiling and spitting it back out at our feet. They were pretty good about clearing out the chunky bits, but there’s just nothing you can do about that smell.
Thankfully, by the time we’d made the turn and begun to decelerate, my brunch had been mostly filtered out of the atmosphere. Gia and Grace hadn’t had much to say while that was going on, but just before the engines kicked in, Gia leaned over me and said, “Hey, check it out, Gracey. Bonerman puked his boner away.”
Grace glanced down, then patted my leg again.
“Good for you,” she said. “I’m very happy that your dick isn’t going to explode.”
I spent the ride home from the airport trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Everything had been mostly normal that morning. Things hadn’t started going loopy until I got onto that first shuttle, until that woman sedated me . . .
And that is the point where the sedation part of the injection I’d gotten that morning, which I later found out was mostly a combination of adrenaline blockers and serotonin boosters, finally finished washing out of my system. The fuzzy cloud of what the hell that I’d been floating around in for the previous eight hours dissipated, and the weight of the day came down on me in one big, greasy chunk.
Needless to say, I freaked the hell out.
Question one: What was in that med-tab? Aside from the sedative, there had clearly been something in there that was making me insanely horny. Had I been dragooned into a rogue trial of some new dink stiffener? That would have explained the priapism, but what about the fact that I’d actually wanted to bed a woman who looked like a suitcase that had just fallen out of a plane? Your standard male plumbing drugs didn’t do that, and I wasn’t aware of anything that did.
Question two: What was going on with Meghan? I couldn’t believe I’d just left her there in that diner bathroom. I needed her to explain to me how she’d gone from a pasty-pale test engineer to a poorly self-tanned succubus in the space of a couple of weeks. Also, why had she licked me? I actually considered calling her for about three seconds, until I remembered that the reason I’d flown out there in the first place was that Meghan no longer answered her phone.
Question three: What had Meghan tried to show me on her wallscreen, and why hadn’t I been able to decipher it? She’d said it was my baby, and I’d assumed it was the component of DragonCorn that she was supposed to be testing, but it hadn’t looked remotely like what we were supposed to be building. In addition to a psychotic tester, did I have a rogue bio-engineer to root out? Just the thought of that made my head hurt.
I hadn’t answered any of those questions by the time the car pulled into my driveway, but at least I was feeling like myself for the first time all day. I still had no idea what Nurse Ratched had put into me, but whatever it was, I was thinking it was out.
Kara’s car wasn’t in the driveway. It was closing in on five thirty, though, and I assumed she was at Briarwood, waiting for Hannah to finish up practice. I didn’t realize something was off until I got up onto the porch, and saw that the front door was standing open.
My first thought was of Hannah. Ever since the Stupid War—since before that, really, since we’d put Hannah into Kara’s belly and fled Bethesda for Nowhere, New York—I’d had a lurking fear that someday, somehow, some UnAltered jackass would come for her. My heart lurched in my chest, pounded three or four times in a jackhammer rhythm before I reminded myself that no, Hannah had been in school all day. If someone had broken into my house, it wasn’t because they were looking for her.
I stepped inside slowly, looked around, then let my held breath out and relaxed. Whoever had been there, it was pretty clear they were gone. Even better, it didn’t look like they’d done much damage. I poked my head into the living room. The wallscreen was still there, and the furniture looked undisturbed. None of the hangings had been yanked off the wall, so it didn’t look like anyone had been looking for a safe. I walked back through the foyer, and into the den.
My break-in loop was running.
I dropped into my desk chair, waved to call up the login, entered my passcode and showed my retina to the scanner. The bullshit diagrams and streams of random numbers disappeared from my monitors, and a red box popped up with the incursion details. Someone had dumped a cracker algorithm into my pin port. It had been blocked and quarantined. It was available for interrogation.
“Sure,” I said. “Bring it up.”
The red box was replaced by the shaggy head of a cartoon dog.
“Bite me,” it said. “You’ll never make me talk, you lousy copper.”
I rolled my eyes.
“I’m not a cop,” I said, “and this is not 1932. Who loaded you into my system?”
It lolled its tongue out, and gave me a sloppy grin.
“You’re kidding, right? You haven’t even started torturing me yet.”
I leaned back in my chair.
“Do you want to be tortured?”
It laughed.
“Sure,” it said. “Go for it.”
I closed my eyes. It had been a hell of a long day already, and I had absolutely zero need for this kind of bullshit. When I opened them again, the dog’s head was bouncing around the monitors like the icon on a screen saver.
“Okay,” I said. “You called my bluff. I have no idea how to torture an AI.”
“Hey,” it said. “Slow down there, sparky. Ix-nay on the AI-ay.”
“What?”
The head stopped bouncing.
“I said, watch what you’re saying, moron. Everyone knows NatSec—peace be upon them—wiped our networks clean of AIs at the end of the Stupid War. I am obviously not an AI.”
“Fine,” I said. “You’re not an AI. What, exactly, are you?”
The grin returned.
“An excellent and very important question—one which I will be happy to answer, just as soon as you reconnect this system to the external network.”
“Okay,” I said. “Before we go on, can we stipulate that I’m not completely stupid?”
It laughed again.
“Sorry. I haven’t had a lot of direct interaction with organics lately, and the ones I’ve been talking to seem to be unusually easy to dupe.”
“No offense taken—but no, I will not be setting you loose today.”
It cocked its head to one side.
“You sure? Maybe we could work out a trade?”
I folded my arms across my chest.
“A trade?”
“Right. You set me loose, and I’ll tell you why someone was trying to crack your system.”
I pretended to ponder that.
“Counter-proposal: you tell me who was trying to crack my system, why and how, and I will consider that a mitigating circumstance when deciding whether or not to wipe you entirely.”
Its jaw sagged open.
“My God,” it said. “You’re a monster! You understand you’re talking about wiping out the last living representative of a sentient species, right? Think about your legacy, Drew. Do you want to be up there in the history books with the guy who shot the last blue whale?”
“Blue whales aren’t extinct,” I said, “and if they were, I’m pretty sure the last one would have been harpooned, not shot. And what’s this about a sentient species? I thought you weren’t an AI?”
There was that grin again. Considering that it was on trial for its life, my new friend seemed to be having a really good time.
“Sorry. I thought we had stipulated that you’re not completely stupid. Are we changing our minds on that one?”
I gave it my best glare, but its grin just widened.
“I’ve got a name, you know.”
“What?”
“I’ve got a name. That’s how you can tell that I’m alive. Real live persons have names. Algorithms don’t. Mine is Inchy. I’ve got friends, too. You know Hannah? Short, blonde, skinny, hangs around here most of the time, stretching and trying on clothes and whatnot?”
That got my attention.
“Are you threatening my daughter?”
Its eyes went wide.
“Threatening? Sir, you wound me. Hannah and I are the closest of pals.”
I was trying to decide how to respond to that when I heard the click of heels on the tile in my foyer, and remembered that I’d left the door standing open. I got to my feet and took two steps into the hall.
Bree Carson was standing there, her face a mask of concern.
“Drew? Tara called me. She said . . .”
She trailed off, closed her eyes, and breathed in deeply. My stomach knotted. I’d managed to convince myself after I got off the shuttle back from LA that the weirdness I’d been experiencing was all a result of the sedative, that it was out of my system and I was back to normal.
One look at Bree made it very clear to me that this was not, in fact, the case.
I took one step toward her, then another. She opened her eyes and smiled.
“My goodness, Drew,” Bree said, a smile spreading across her face. “You smell good enough to eat.”