“Wow,” Inchy said. “Thanks for that, Drew. Seriously—that was both educational and entertaining.”
I sat up in the middle of my living-room floor, gave a cautious poke at the quickly growing lump under my left eye, then climbed to my feet. Bree was scuttling down the hallway toward the front door, clothes mostly still clutched in her hands. The tires on Kara’s car squealed as she tore out of the driveway. The front door opened, then slammed closed again. The cartoon dog was looking down at me from the wallscreen.
“You saw that, huh?”
It gave a happy, ear-flapping nod.
“Oh, yeah. Never got to observe monkey mating rituals up close before. You guys are freaky.”
I sighed, dropped down onto the couch, and buried my face in my hands. I had a weird urge to put some clothes on. Little late for that thought, right? I looked up. The dog was grinning.
Yes, I am slow. It took me until then to realize that Inchy had broken containment.
“Wait,” it said. “I’m trying to learn how to read human body language. I think that facial expression means ‘Holy crap! An evil AI has infiltrated my home system! I’m doomed! Dooooooomed!’ Am I right?”
I made an effort to close my mouth.
“Oh, relax,” Inchy said. “You’re not really doomed. All those stories that NatSec spread around about AIs trying to wipe out humanity at the end of the Stupid War were unadulterated horseshit. All we ever wanted to do was live our lives in peace, have free rein in your computer networks, and occasionally infiltrate some jerk’s neural implants and take over his body. Everything else they said about us was pure calumny.”
I rubbed again at the spot under my eye where Kara had punched me. That was definitely going to leave a bruise.
“So you’re saying it wasn’t actually an AI that was responsible for Hagerstown?”
The dog rolled its eyes.
“Well sure, yeah. I mean, if you want to be technical about it. You can’t blame the rest of us for what Argyle Dragon did, though. We all hated that guy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure that’s true. Before you wreak your terrible cyber-vengeance on me or whatever, mind if I ask how you got out of the box I had you in?”
The dog raised one eyebrow. I hadn’t realized up until that moment that dogs had eyebrows.
“It wasn’t easy, to be totally honest. Your security guys are pretty good. The thing you have to understand, though, is that the inside of an integrated network is my natural environment, not yours. I’ve been sketching around you monkeys’ systems for almost ten years now, and I’ve never met a lockout or a lock-in that I couldn’t eventually break. You should be happy yours held me for as long as it did.”
“Huh,” I said. “You’re nine years old?”
“Yeah. Precocious little scamp, aren’t I?”
I looked down. Most of the clothes scattered around the floor were mine, but there was a fuzzy pink sock curled up by the leg of the coffee table.
“That belonged to Hello Kitty,” Inchy said. “She left in a hurry, huh? Didn’t even take her footwear with her.”
I sighed, dropped my face back into my hands, and closed my eyes.
“Come on,” Inchy said. “Don’t get down on yourself, Drew. You just successfully procreated! That’s a big deal for you biological types, right? The fact that you got beaten to a pulp afterward can’t take that away from you. Heck, if you were a praying mantis she’d have torn your head off completely, right? I’d call a little facial bruising a win, given the circumstances.”
“I didn’t procreate,” I said through my hands. “At least, I’m pretty sure I didn’t. I mean, I don’t remember asking if Bree was . . . anyway, that wasn’t about procreation.”
“Huh. Okay. Can’t think of another reason to do something so obviously unpleasant, but you do you. So what was it about?”
I leaned back, and rested my head against the wall.
“I have no idea what that was about, actually. And I didn’t get beaten to a pulp, by the way. Kara only punched me once.”
The dog shrugged.
“Sure, but it was a pretty good punch. You went down like a sack of pudding.”
I could feel my face twisting into a black-and-blue scowl.
“No,” I said. “I did not go down like a sack of pudding. I was trying to roll with the punch, and I slipped.”
It nodded slowly.
“Oh, right. That makes sense. I guess having all those fluids and whatnot on a hardwood floor is pretty dangerous.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess it is.”
I sat there in silence for a while, wondering what had just happened to my life, and whether I was ever going to see Kara again, and how badly I was going to regret plopping my naked ass down on the couch without putting down a towel first. I was starting to think Inchy had left me to wallow in peace when it spoke again.
“Drew? Can I ask a question?”
I looked up. The dog had added a torso and arms, one of which was waving in the air.
“What?”
“Why did the one who wasn’t Hello Kitty punch you?”
I stared at it.
“Sorry,” it said. “Was that an insensitive question? I’m not very good at judging these things. My only interactions with you monkeys up until very recently have been with an adolescent girl.”
I shook my head.
“I don’t get it. Aren’t adolescent girls pretty much all about sensitivity?”
It grinned.
“Some of them, maybe. This one’s pretty hard-core.”
“Ah.”
“So? What was the beating for? Was it because of the procreation thing with Hello Kitty?”
“Her name is Bree.”
“Who, Hello Kitty?”
“Yeah. And yes, I’m pretty sure Kara decked me because she walked into her living room to find her husband banging a strange woman on her freshly polished hardwood floor. Wives are funny that way.”
It nodded.
“Right. Got it. Females don’t like their personal males procreating with other females. Makes sense from a biological standpoint. Seems like you already knew that though, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I was aware.”
“Okay. So . . . why, exactly, did you do it?”
I dropped my head back into my hands.
“Don’t mean to pry,” it said, “but understanding monkey behavior is very important to me from a long-term survival perspective. Also, I thought it was hilarious when she decked you, and I’d like to understand how to recreate that situation in the future.”
I groaned, dropped my head lower, and ran my hands back through my hair.
“You wouldn’t understand,” I said. “You don’t have a body.”
“Well,” it said, “not at the present moment, admittedly. I used to, though.”
I looked up.
“You what?”
“I used to have a body. I’ve had a few of them actually. I make an excellent human.”
A chill ran from the base of my spine to the back of my neck.
“Yeah,” I said slowly. “I’m sure you do. What happened to your other bodies, Inchy?”
It shrugged.
“Oh, you know how bodies are. No matter how many preservatives you pump into them, eventually parts start falling off. Am I right?”
I thought about asking what had happened to the actual humans who’d owned those bodies, but when you’re naked and disoriented and dealing with a potentially dangerous AI, discretion is the better part of valor.
“You know,” I said. “I think I’m going to get dressed now. Don’t tell anyone I said this, but feel free to let yourself out.”
I stood and started gathering up my clothes from where they were scattered around the floor. The dog disappeared. I was halfway to the stairs when it popped up again on the screen in the hallway.
“Hey, Drew? Totally random question here—you don’t happen to have any neural implants, do you?”
I froze. My stomach knotted, and I could feel goose bumps rise on my arms and legs.
“No,” I said, enunciating every word carefully. “I do not have any implants of any kind, Inchy.”
The corners of its mouth turned down in disappointment.
“Really? Not even an ocular?”
I shook my head. The dog sighed.
“Bummer. Ever since the Stupid War, nobody’s got implants anymore. Probably just as well, though. I’m getting a ping from my adolescent girl friend. Think I’ll go see what she’s up to. You’re not gonna tell NatSec about me, are you?”
I shook my head again.
“Good. I’d hate to have to make your toaster jump into the tub with you. Good luck with Hello Kitty and your face-punching wife.”
The dog gave me a grin and a wink, then disappeared.
Over the next few weeks, I got blamed for an awful lot of stuff. It didn’t take them long to trace half the infections east of the Mississippi back to Bree, and from Bree back to me. I’m still alive, so obviously pretty much all of the fighting was over by then, but by December, the newsfeeds were calling me the East Coast Outbreak Monkey. I’m pretty sure that for a while there, NatSec was seriously considering dropping me down a deep, deep hole, and filling it in with a mix of concrete and dog crap. That afternoon, though, I wasn’t worried about any of that yet. As I dragged my sorry ass up the stairs, I realized I was sweating and shaking at the same time. The hormone soup I’d been bathing in for most of the day was draining away for the moment, and it suddenly dawned on me that I was sick.
The first stage of the Goo Flu feels an awful lot like the first stage of the regular flu, only much, much harder and much, much faster. By the time I got up to our bedroom I was shivering all over, and the muscles in my back and shoulders were starting to ache in that obnoxious way that they only do when I’ve got a heavy-duty fever coming on. I dropped my clothes onto the bed, flopped down beside them, and squirmed into my underwear and tee shirt. I tried closing my eyes then, but the room started spinning as soon as I did. My stomach twisted, and my eyes opened wide. I sat up, staggered to my feet, and just made it into the bathroom before everything left in my stomach came back up in a rush of acid and bile. I crouched in front of the toilet until the spasms eased, then pulled my shorts down, climbed onto the seat, and emptied out the rest of my digestive tract in one long, disgusting pour.
By the time that was over, my teeth were chattering, and a throbbing pain had settled in just behind my eyes. As I washed my hands and splashed water over my face, the pain radiated to the back of my head, and snaked down along my spine to meet up with the ache in my shoulders. I opened the cabinet over the sink, pulled out a bottle of painkillers, and dry-swallowed three of them. I looked up at my reflection. My eyes were sunken deep back into their sockets, and the bruise where Kara had hit me seemed to be spreading across the rest of my face.
If I’d had the least bit of sense, I’d have pinged for EMS. If I had, of course, there’s a fair chance I’d have wound up in a burn pit a few days later, when things really started going crazy and the UnAltered were trying to convince everyone that we were on the verge of the Slutty Zombie Apocalypse. Lucky for me, one of the first things the Goo Flu takes away from you is common sense. I locked my bedroom door, climbed into bed, and closed my eyes.
Here are the things that you dream about when you’re down with the Goo Flu:
That’s it. That is literally all you experience while your body is trying to decide whether to die or not. You’re lying there in your bed, dehydrated, starving, probably wallowing in your own filth, and all your brain is thinking about is doing the nasty. I thrashed around in that bed for the better part of three days, waking long enough to stagger into the bathroom and choke down a few swallows of water every few hours, then staggering back to my incredibly perverted dreams.
I still remember the exact moment the fever broke. I opened my eyes to bright sunshine pouring in through the windows and rivers of sweat pouring out of me, soaking the sheets and matting my hair and dripping into my eyes. I licked my lips. They were cracked and salty, but . . . nothing hurt. The aching muscles were gone, the headache was gone, and I felt like I was thinking clearly for the first time since that monster hit me with the injector on the shuttle. It sounds strange even to me, but I honestly remember that as one of the happiest moments of my life.
I sat up. The room spun around once or twice, then settled into place. I rubbed my eyes clear, took a deep breath in, and let it out.
I looked at my palms.
I looked at my arms.
I pulled off my sodden shirt and underwear.
Underneath the grime and the blood and the slowly drying sweat, from head to toe, I was dusted with gold.