She could hear the music, switched now to a heavily brass instrumental tune, and felt as though the quick-tongued conversation of those around her only added to the melody. The aroma of food she hadn’t eaten in years, the sound of her mother’s native tongue, all things to remind her of a home she’d once loved more than anything.
Yet, with the other eye obscured by her palm, it was like she could almost make out shapes in the darkness behind her lid. Other people she’d loved. Individuals who, while not family in the conventional mortal sense, were family nonetheless.
Jo spun, dropping her hand and trying to cast away those haunting shadows. Holding out a hand, she willed the Door to appear. With a flicker, it solidified into existence.
“One more time, gently now.” She wasn’t sure if she was reassuring herself, or bartering with the door. Whatever it was, it worked.
The Door opened and shut, and Jo found herself standing in a familiar entryway. She’d never expected to be happy about being in the home of a serial killer. But given the week she’d had, and the whirlwind of emotion the Door had thrown her into, she was ruling off every impossibility on her list.
Rather than beginning to search the house for what she needed, knowing she should get to work on her hacked solution to what should be a nearly impossible task, Jo walked over to the couch in the sitting area to the left of the door. She dropped onto the cushions and leaned back. She couldn’t actually sink into them without using time, and that was something Jo didn’t want to risk for multiple reasons—her current streak of bad luck being chief among them.
Instead, she closed her eyes and just took a moment to breathe. Her first hurdle had been crossed. Not gracefully, mind you. But crossed without any sort of major desk-level mistakes.
The USB almost felt hot under her fingertips, as if it were urging her onward. Jo stood at its silent (hopefully imagined) behest. She was a third of the way there.
But the last two thirds would be subsequently more difficult than the first.
The artificial intelligence androids ran on was, put simply, a work of art. It started out as a kernel, a seed, that housed all the information on the world wide web in its casing. Then, a learning algorithm was applied over-top (simple to say, not so simple to do, as her corporate espionage hacker friends would assure her). From there, the AI grew, much like a regular human child. It gathered experiences, learned from them, formulated reason and morals and ethos —all the things that made humans, human. Primus Sanguis was no different, but comparing it to basic AI was like comparing Chopin to whatever the pop hit of the day was.
All of this meant that the androids didn’t need any kind of terminal. Like a regular human, their bodies were bioengineered to be self-contained. They fed off biological fuels, they learned through osmosis from the world around them. They didn’t need to plug in to anything, ever.
But theycould.
And as far as Jo was concerned, that was their power—the ability to constantly refill and refresh their endless database of information from the web, and store backups of collected memories as well. To process it all with the power of a supercomputer, and make real-time adjustments day to day based on what would best suit the world around them. Every day, mankind produced more than 4 exabytes of data, and that kind of transfer was much too large to go over the air efficiently.
“Where is your terminal?” she whispered.
If the Bone Carver had a terminal he plugged into, it likely would be hidden somewhere. The information stored on there about the android’s state could be deadly in the wrong hands, and her serial killer seemed too smart for that. Jo started on the first floor, wandering through closets and guest rooms, clocking into time only as needed to (very lightly) tap on walls where she thought there was enough space for a hollowed-out alcove. She’d come during the day, meaning the man was at work, but she still didn’t want to draw attention to herself.
When the downstairs proved a bust, Jo headed up. It was the more likely candidate since his bedroom was upstairs. Despite her most thorough search, she found nothing.
Jo looked around the master bedroom, from the well-manicured closet to the meticulously made bed. Everything was perfect, not a thing out of place. It didn’t even look lived in.
It didn’t even look real.
But what was real anymore? Jo closed her eyes with a groan, covering them; now wasnotthe time to have an existential crisis. Taking a shuddering breath, Jo fought against the gremlins that screamed between her ears whenever she lingered in darkness for too long. Voices and languages she’d never heard and didn’t understand were spoken from mouths she didn’t recognize. It was as if her mind and memories were slowly being fed to that inky soup, and what was being regurgitated back made little to no sense.
Jo opened her eyes, reminded herself to focus, and turned for the bedroom door.
There, where the door should have been, wastheDoor. Capital D. As if it were waiting.
“Now you’re mocking me.” It was somewhere between a whisper and a growl.
The Door stood, unassuming and silent. It gave her no response, but it did not disappear either.
“I don’t even know if the terminal has its own room. For all I know it’s hidden behind his headboard.”Why am I even talking to the Door?
USB in hand, hoodie straining against her back with how deep she was trying to dig her palms into the front. Jo stepped over to the Door.
“The terminal,” she commanded. “Nothing else.” Jo reached out a hand, the USB curled in three fingers, her index pointed to enter in a pin code that she trusted would come to her at any moment.
So much trust—that was her first mistake. The second was even thinking it was a remotely good idea to have her USB drive, the thing she depended on most, anywhere near the Door that had been doing nothing but toying with her like some sentient trickster. But Jo wasn’t thinking quite clearly. And in the seconds before the inevitable, the idea of letting go of the USB stick seemed just as egregious an error.
Magic sparked and sizzled between her finger and the pin pad. It shot into the electronic she was holding in her hand. Plastic and circuits exploded like shrapnel, digging into her skin. Jo let out a cry, both in pain and anger. She held her bleeding hand—at least, she’d expected there to be blood.
She looked down at her palm, at the impossible angles of plastic jutting from her skin. There was no blood. It was like her flesh had turned into the most grotesque Jell-o mold and USB bits were the filling. It hurt, but there was no blood.
“Wh-what’s happening to me?” she whispered. And then, louder, Jo shouted at the Door, “I needed that you piece of—”
