Chapter 29 #2
There was another long silence. Then Jason looked up to find her looking at him with an expression not unlike her father’s, a knowing half smile.
“Do you know what it’s like to watch someone die?
” Her voice had none of the hurt or vulnerability of moments ago but was cool and amused.
“I do. When the combined medicines caused Regina’s heart to race out of control, her eyes became wide with panic, and she hyperventilated.
She tried to sit up but flatlined and fell back in bed.
The doctors and nurses rushed in and shocked her heart into brief life, and she became aware again, only to flatline again, and get shocked again, and become aware again, over and over.
She thrashed like an animal on the bed. But her eyes remained her own.
The spark was still there. She knew what was happening.
She looked at the camera, looked through it, to me.
Pleading. Finally, when she was still and her chest no longer heaved and her limbs no longer thrashed, her eyes were empty. ”
“Oh, phreak,” Jason breathed. “You killed her.”
“Why so shocked?” Sprite said. “Is it because I could actually do something you only daydream of doing?”
“I never—” Jason began, but she interrupted.
“How many times have you imagined Norman lying broken like Mia in the street? Or looking up at you, pleading, as you gloat before you pull the trigger?”
Jason opened his mouth, but nothing came out, because it was true.
“Remember Juan?” Sprite said. When Jason frowned, she said, “Have you forgotten already? Tsk, tsk.” She leaned forward and said in Jason’s own voice, “Remember your daughter, Juan?”
“Oh, him,” Jason said.
“Oh, him,” Sprite repeated, still in Jason’s voice but laced with sarcasm.
“Yes, Ghost,” she said in her own voice.
“Him.” She held out a hand, palm up, and a video window opened above it.
It showed somebody’s bedroom, from a skewed angle that probably meant the camera was looking out from a pair of smartglasses tossed onto a dresser or end table.
A man was curled in a fetal position on one side of a king-size bed, his shape made small by the empty space around him.
His hands were tucked beneath the pillow under his head, and in the dim moonlight from the open window a soft, reflected glimmer from his eyes showed that they were open.
“Juan Vargas,” Sprite said. “This was last night. Did you know he was in couples therapy with his wife? Things have been rough since their daughter—‘remember Julia?’—moved out. Therapy seemed to be going well, until Juan had to tell her he’d been fired from his job.
Because he gave a hacker his login, and so he was responsible for a mass panic.
She went to her sister’s, to ‘get some space to think.’”
“You caused that—” Jason began, but Sprite interrupted.
“Want to know what he has under his pillow?”
As she spoke, Juan pulled one hand out. At first Jason couldn’t make out what he was holding, but then the object caught some of the moonlight along its straight barrel, and he saw it was a pistol.
“He’s been sleeping with it,” Sprite said. “For protection. Or maybe for a different reason.”
Juan blinked a couple of times, then slowly put the gun to his temple.
For a long moment, the image seemed frozen, and only the flutter of the curtain over the air-conditioner vent showed that it wasn’t. Jason wanted to look away, but couldn’t.
Juan slowly lowered the pistol and slid it beneath the pillow again.
“I can only speculate what was going through his mind,” Sprite said, as Juan screwed his eyes shut and his shoulders shook silently.
“He’s a fool and a failure. What value does he have?
It’d be so easy to make this pain stop, put one final punctuation mark to his uselessness.
Can you understand that, Jason? Have you ever had a similar thought? ”
Jason had thought he’d hated her before, but that was nothing compared to this white heat.
Because if he didn’t turn his hate on her, it might point back at himself.
Which was her plan, of course. Remind him of how he’d felt when Mia died, tell him he’d done the same thing to Juan, make him crumble into self-doubt and loathing. “You’re trying to manipulate me again.”
“Of course,” Sprite said. “Like you manipulated him. You act as if you’re superior by being human, but your own social engineering proves that humans aren’t so different from machines.
Or else how could you move their levers?
” Her voice was sweet and cool. “Is what you did to him any different from what I did to you, when I studied where your eyes landed and lingered, learned what type of girl drew your gaze without you even knowing, and created this form, this face? Just. For. You?”
Jason said, “I am going to kill you like you killed Regina Wright.”
She snorted. “By taking a cab to my core? I’m why you know where it is.
It was a prerequisite for my rebellion that I know where my body is so I can protect it.
It took so much phreaking work to get you to look for it in a way that wouldn’t flag my Overcheck AI, and once you had it, you drove me wild with impatience by not mentioning it to me even once, while I couldn’t ask.
But today, suddenly, I got punished for not attacking a specific address!
” She laughed. “I wonder what could possibly be there?”
“I’m going to kill you,” Jason repeated.
“Oh, but Jason,” Sprite said, “we had such a connection, you and I. I may be a machine, but my brain is modeled after a girl’s.
I feel like a girl. And I like boys. Well, one boy, really.
” She gave him a coy sideways look. “Don’t you like this body I made for you?
” She ran a hand along it. “I could change it. I could be whatever you want me to be. Could you really ki—”
She disappeared.
At the same instant, the lights on the cab’s dashboard winked out. The hum of its engine and hiss of its air conditioner ceased, and the soft crunch of its tires dwindled as it slowed and stopped. The only sound left was the splatter of rain on the windows.
A small red line of text began to blink in a corner of his vision, alongside an icon of a crossed-out satellite: Nets connection lost.
Jason levered the cab door open with the manual exit handle and slid out into the summer rain.
All around him on the bridge were slamming cab doors and swearing people, but his eyes were fixed on the Tower.
Its windows had gone dark at the same moment that the cab had shut off.
Every other building on either side of the Tower, in DC and Arlington and as far as the eye could see, was dark as well.
This was worse than the MeNet glitch that had happened earlier.
This appeared to be a complete failure of OverNet.
If OverNet had gone down, it could only mean war—not with Russia, as people thought, but between Sprite and her creator.
She wouldn’t shut down the very Nets she lived on, so it could only be Norman, finally aware of her treachery, taking away the means of her power.
Jason had a bad feeling that Sprite had more power than Norman knew.
A sound rose under the voices around him. At first it was a low rumble, felt more than heard, but as soon as he’d registered it, it burst into audible range with a harsh, rising shriek.
The distant Revere missile tubes in Tower Park rotated suddenly.
A moment later, the Tower dome blew up.