Chapter 4
The gray squares of the Minesweeper game stare back at me, tempting me to make a choice. If I click another bomb, I might rage and rip this monitor from the wall. Despite that, I subject myself to this torture because I need to win. After losing for the last hour, that’s all I can think about.
Until the animated paperclip pops up to tell me something is going horribly wrong with our code.
His mouth is full of razor-sharp teeth, one eye bruised shut, and he’s got bloodstains rusting his metal…
So he’s nothing like the original inspiration, other than his base, but it’s enough to get us sued if we leak his code.
We call him Clipper the Ripper, and I loathe his existence because he exists only to remind me I have work to do.
Ping.
Ping. Ping.
I groan as I close my game and open a new window.
The fresh batch of user data flickers across my monitors.
Hundreds of active conversations light up on the dashboard, their emotional metrics rising and falling with their response velocity.
The reaction loops are standard activity, nothing abnormal or unusual…
Until one line blinks from green to red.
Username: Eris.
“A new one just dropped,” I say mostly to myself as I open her chat window and watch her interactions with the AI software. “That’s interesting.”
“Why?” Kieran asks from the kitchen, the food in his mouth only slightly muffling his question.
Jace whistles, not moving from his sprawled spot on the couch. “If Silas thinks it’s interesting, then something is either broken or… No. Just broken.”
“Clipper the Ripper alerted me to a recent issue,” I explain, though the blond idiot doesn’t care when it’s his off time. I envy his work-life separation. “But it’s not an issue. It’s a new user.”
“Boot ‘em,” Jace eloquently suggests as he stands and stretches.
“She’s chatting.” I spin in my chair to look at Kieran and him. “Right now.”
“Wake me up if she’s unhinged or hot…” Jace starts out of the living room, heading down the hallway, before tossing over his shoulder, “Or both.”
Kieran flashes his middle finger at Jace’s back. He then gives me his index finger, telling me he has a question after he finishes the bit of sandwich in his mouth.
“First time user,” I fill him in, guessing where our conversation will go. “And she went straight into open chat.”
“No customization?” Kieran asks, leaning against my chair as he studies the monitor.
I shake my head. “Nope. She skipped it.”
“What’s the system think of her?” Jace inquires from the hallway threshold, his interest piqued despite his desire to sleep through the problem at hand.
“If you were listening…” I drawl, using as much sarcasm as I possibly can. “Clipper thinks she’s an anomaly.”
Kieran pulls up another computer chair and clicks through the metrics of the new account. “Is she active?”
“Yeah. She was. After midnight download.” I snort as I scroll through the brief chat. “Her first message asked if she should confess her trauma or flirt with the void.”
Jace sits on the edge of the couch, propping his elbows on his knees. “So she’s funny… That’s it? Since when does Clipper the Ripper flag dark humor?”
“The timing is weird,” I mutter, frowning. “There were no prompts triggered that I can see. She just… started talking. I wonder if the system thinks this is a suicide watch?”
“Run it,” Kieran demands softly.
I minimize everything that isn’t related to Eris, leaving her text thread in a dedicated window for us to watch. It takes me a minute to pull up the backside of her account, which is odd.
What’s even weirder is that there isn’t any personal information to be found. It’s all being blocked, so if we wanted to report an emergency, we couldn’t… The IP address leads me into a maze of pinging towers throughout the area. All I can gather is that she’s in Crimson Bay.
If she intends to commit suicide, we’ll hear it on the scanner or see it on the news before we can find her.
“She closed HimLock but reopened it thirty seconds later,” I tell Kieran. “That’s really all I can see.”
Jace glances up from his phone. “You’re stalking her already?”
“Has she moved to log off?” Kieran asks, a little worry bleeding into his tone.
“No.” I can see that too, but everything outside of the app is behind a wall.
The type of wall only Jace can tear down.
When he’s not being a snarky bastard.
“Is she hooked or seeking help?” Kieran mumbles to himself, standing to pace.
“She’s typing,” I answer, shrugging my shoulders. “But she keeps stopping.”
“Why?” Jace moves closer to the screen, watching me sort through code and firewalls, trying to break through whatever sorcery this woman is hiding behind.
I roll my eyes. “She’s thinking.”
“Oh, can you read her mind now?” Jace smarts, sliding me and my chair out of his way as he takes over. “What color are her bedsheets? What kind of soap does she use?”
“Gray. Unscented,” I pop back and sigh. “No, I’m not reading her mind.
She’s just… Not quite like the other users.
Clipper doesn’t know what to think of her behavior, so she’s been labeled an anomaly.
Do we leave her like that until we can locate her and do a wellness check?
Or do we remove the label because everything seems fine? ”
“She didn’t ask for anything?” Kieran repeats, sounding like he’s stuck on this being the most important information we’ve gathered tonight.
I track his movements as he continues pacing. “No.”
“She just started talking…” Kieran says under his breath as he stops and stares at the monitor. “What makes her different from our normal users?”
“Do you really think she’s any different from the standard user?” Jace inquires before grimacing. “I mean, other than having a demon of a system in place to keep her hidden?”
I take Kieran’s place at the wall of monitors and tag her thread so we can log her interactions into a separate folder to track how she uses HimLock. It gets a simple label.
Eris - Live Thread
“I think she doesn’t know how to lie… Yet.” I softly reply, mostly to myself. “What better way to test herself than with her very own AI boyfriend?”
Jace and Kieran both look at me, curious about what I mean. But I’m not quite sure I can explain it…
Most users come in needing something from the experience, whether that’s companionship, attention, validation, or control. You name it, we’ve seen it. These users poke at the AI like it’s a vending machine with a glitch, giving them what they think they want.
But Eris didn’t hesitate.
She speaks as if she’s already familiar with HimLock and its controls.
Or maybe like she doesn’t care what—or who—answers her.