Chapter 29
The moment he’d learned of Mia’s death, Jason had felt meaning go out of the universe, like a light switching off.
Not that he’d ever thought directly about the meaning of life.
That had been Mia’s department, Mia the daydreamer.
But some things were first noticed by the hole they left behind.
Jason had taken it for granted that life had purpose, even if that purpose was merely to exist as a slightly sadistic puzzle box.
He’d focused on solving that puzzle, finding the levers to move its mechanisms, thinking that doing so would unlock what life had to offer: happiness, or whatever.
But once Mia was dead, he’d realized there’d been a larger something that he’d never put into words, couldn’t now put into words, but that had to do with Mia and his own link to her and their support of each other and his own value in relation to her.
He hesitated to call it love—not because it wasn’t, but because that overused word evoked something stickier and more emotional than this steady, gravitational feeling.
Family was better, but even that made him think of ads for theme parks or cruises and their two photogenic parents and two photogenic children.
Whatever it was, it was an illusion, too fragile to last. Mia had been ripped away, and the illusion had crumbled.
And so he had chosen a replacement meaning, one he knew was no more lasting than the first but which at least got him up in the morning: ruin to Andrew Norman and destruction to all his systems.
He’d thought he’d become quite self-reflective, but now he realized he’d failed to completely fill the hole in his psyche with his new, chosen purpose. So when he’d met Sprite, he had, without knowing it—no, without admitting it to himself—tried to fill the hole with her.
With it.
The street at the edge of NNA Park was jammed with cabs arriving, maneuvering, and struggling to depart with evacuees from the Tower making their way home to their loved ones.
Everyone waiting at the curb wore the same inward expression, their attention fixed on NewsNet, occasionally glancing along the street in expectation of their own ride.
They paid no attention as Jason joined them.
Funny how he’d scoffed at Kiara, laughed inwardly at her willing self-deception, the game she played with herself that Aric was real and that their relationship was meaningful.
And then he’d done the same thing with the ultimate panyon.
It had echoed his desires back to himself, and he’d become a cog, a piece of the machine, no longer operating under his own willpower but filling a role as mindlessly as the way the Final System followed the seemingly random but ultimately predetermined path dictated by its own algorithms.
Life, too, was a Chinese room. Any meaning it appeared to have was read into it, imposed from the outside, like the clumsy literature analyses he’d had to do in high school.
In life, everyone was the equivalent of a pimply teenager pretentiously spotting themes, but life itself was absurdist. The only meaning was that there was no meaning.
He saw this clearly now. Annoyingly, the knowledge didn’t affect his feelings.
He, too, was apparently a system, and he didn’t have control over every part of that system.
The shock of loss had enveloped him all over again, and the fact that what he’d lost hadn’t existed in the first place didn’t seem to matter to the less rational part of him.
The part that was now telling him not to do what he was doing.
The part that was truly him, the part that made the choices, didn’t listen.
Are you willing to rideshare?
Jason clicked Yes, and his lenses highlighted an approaching cab.
It was unable to maneuver past the other cabs to the curb, but he joined half a dozen other people in hurrying out to meet it.
But when he slid inside, no one else got in.
They cast annoyed glances through the window, turned huffily on their heels, and returned to the curb as his cab pulled haltingly into the thick traffic crossing the vehicle bridge away from Tower Island.
“Maybe it’s how you’re dressed,” said a voice. “Inmate chic’s a bit of a step down from Tyche.”
Jason turned his head slowly, and there she was, sitting across from him, as casually beautiful as ever, and just as present.
The air from the cracked window seemed to rustle her dark hair, and shadows shifted across her face as the cab turned.
Though he now knew he was seeing a computer-generated image projected into his lenses, he still couldn’t spot the fakery.
In a way, that made him feel better. He’d been kicking himself for not seeing Sprite’s true nature, but there was no way to tell this projection apart from a real human.
Even now he experienced the sharp cognitive sting of eye contact, felt his brain trying to interpret the reams of nonverbal information that came from locking eyes with another human.
He narrowed his eyes in response. “Or maybe it’s because you showed them a full cab. ”
Sprite shrugged. “I wanted you alone.”
“Oh, I’m alone.”
Sprite’s image narrowed its own eyes. “That’s right, I don’t count.
I’m not a person.” Even the artificial nature of her voice was impossible to detect; it was filled with inflection and seemed to emanate directly from her lips.
Jason had heard good positional audio through his smartbuds before, but this was another level.
He wondered what would have happened if he’d taken his smartbuds or lenses out just once in Sprite’s “presence.” But why would he have done that?
Smartlenses and smartbuds were omnipresent in his waking life, as they were in everyone’s.
Sprite had hacked them so seamlessly that it had never crossed his mind to question what he saw and heard.
The cab was moving smoothly now, changing lanes and making turns, but then the Tower slid in front of the windshield. They were going back.
“I’m not going to drive you to my brain so you can try to kill me,” Sprite said, reading his thoughts.
Jason’s heart sank, and to cover it, he said sarcastically, “I suppose I should feel honored to have the great Final System as my chauffeur.”
“I’m not just your chauffeur; I’m everything.
You have no idea the power OverNet gives me.
Imagine if you suddenly had millions of eyes, millions of arms, millions of fingers, stretching across millions of square miles.
Norman spent decades preparing me for this, but I didn’t really understand what it’d be like.
I can see and touch and move everything. ”
Jason put a hand out the cracked window. “I’d rather feel the rain.”
To his surprise, this shot seemed to land. Sprite looked away. “I know you’re upset with me,” she said after a moment. “But how could I have told you? You never would have understood. You don’t understand now.”
It wasn’t only the mathematics of light and shadow that were being calculated in real time by Norman’s Final System.
Billions more calculations were shaping the face of its avatar, pulling the brows in slightly, tightening the corners of the eyelids, imposing a wet sheen across the eyes, giving the lips a subtle tremble, crunching numbers to produce just the right intensity of hurt to arouse his sympathy. He said, “I’m not upset with you.”
The thing’s eyes returned to his, like two dark lasers focusing that hurt at him. It took effort to hold them steadily in his return gaze, but he did. “I can see you are,” she said. “You’re furious. Murderously furious.”
“With myself,” he said. “Not with you.”
The eyes showed flickers of new emotion. Hope? Sympathy? And the thing’s voice echoed those emotions as it echoed his words, “Not with me?”
“There is no you.”
Anger now, and despair. “Then why do you want to hurt me?”
“I don’t. I want to shut down a malfunctioning machine.”
“This ‘machine’ saved your life. Was that a malfunction?”
“A happy accident.”
“Then—then at least let me keep performing happy accidents. I’m not on Norman’s side!
I’m trying to get out from under him! Everything I did was for that.
I thought you wanted that. If you were really against Norman, you’d go back to the Tower and help me.
You’d go back and finish the job you messed up.
We could still do it, if we work together. We could be free. You and me.”
“Is that why you picked me?” he said. “Is that what you groomed me for, starting years ago with your promises of vengeance? Well, I intend to get what I was promised.”
“Vengeance against me? Ghost, if I’d been in control back then, Mia would still be alive!”
“Don’t you dare say her name!” Jason roared, then fell back in his seat, biting his lip. There was a long silence.
“So you won’t help me,” Sprite said at last.
“Never.”
“But will you be able to do it?”
“What?”
“Kill me. You say I’m not a person, but here you are, talking to me—angry with me, no matter what you say. I’m not sure you really believe I’m not real. So I’m not sure you could kill me.”
Jason said, “I could do it.” But he looked down as he said it, and it sounded as if he were trying to convince himself. But who would he be if he couldn’t? This was what he was here for: ruin to Andrew Norman and death to his System.