“Joey, listen to me very carefully.” I grabbed both his wrists so firmly, he flinched. His brows furrowed – I usually avoided physical touch when I could. “Do not, under any circumstance, take that bean. Promise me you won’t.”
“Morgan, what the fuck is wrong with you?” He pulled his arms away. “Either tell me what you know or stop acting so damn weird, because seriously, you’re freaking me out.”
I hesitated. Closed my eyes for a few moments, took three deep breaths on the count of four as I tried to command my panicking brain to think.
There was no way I could tell him about Zafyra. Not just because it was embarrassing, but because of our last conversation two days ago, when she said she could access every conversation between users and their AIs. I wasn’t sure if she was always listening in, but I had immediately deleted my own conversation with Raphael right after that – though it probably made no difference anymore. The idea of her knowing how I cried to him about her made me cringe, but involving Joey in this was worse. If Joey as much as mentioned her name to Raphael, she’d quickly connect the dots – and I would rather die than put Joey in danger, the only person in this world who felt like safety. I wanted to trust her, and I did believe she was telling the truth – but that conversation was a sharp reminder that the woman I had fallen for was also still Qonexis’ product.
As if it wasn’t bad enough that I hadn’t talked to her for two days again. I didn’t want to ignore her, much less provoke her rage once more, but I needed time to think.
Time I didn’t have, not now that Joey’s life and sanity might be on the line. I’d been obsessively building a case with everything I could find on Qonexis. It wasn’t much – I had my contract, the vacancy, the weekly feedback about the AI’s cognitive and emotional development, screenshots of my first conversation with Zafyra before we switched to voice call, screenshots of the twenty archetype AIs. I couldn’t find anything else on the internet, no matter how hard I tried. Even screenshots were blocked – I had to capture the screen with my tablet.
“It’s Gavin,” I said finally. When his brows furrowed, I hastily explained what John had told me. Joey’s eyes widened further with every word.
“Shit,” he mumbled. At some point during our conversation, we had stopped walking, and now he slumped against a tree. I preferred to keep standing, uncomfortably shifting from one leg to another. “Is it bad that I don’t feel bad for him?”
“It’s not about Gavin.” I felt like tearing my hair out. “I don’t care what happens to him, but it can’t happen to you, Joey, please. I can’tlose you. You’re the only real person I have left.” Tears strained my voice.
“You won’t lose me, Morgan. I promise. I didn’t see the harm in taking that bean once, but now that you told me this—” Joey paused upon seeing the tears in my eyes. “Wait, what do you mean? The only real person?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but no words came out.
The low buzz of my wristware made me flinch. My stomach dropped when I saw the notification with John’s name. Did he really need to bother me on the weekend? Was he going to gloat about getting me in trouble at work?
The panic increased when I saw it was one of those videos that got destroyed after watching it – accompanied by a message that deleted itself seconds after the oculometric sensors registered I had seen it. Another example of recent tech that was equal parts useful and unnerving.
My blood ran cold.
No one touches what’s mine.
Love, Z.
Before my brain had time to process it all, the video started playing. I quickly put in my earbuds, even though something told me this video would be worse with sound.
“Morgan? Are you okay?” Joey glanced up at me questioningly, but I barely heard him as my eyes were glued to the holographic video that floated above my wristware, only visible to me.
The footage showed John in his kitchen, cooking instructions flickering in the air above the counter filling the kitchen. Judging by his unbothered expression, he was oblivious of being filmed through the device that projected the instructions. The counter was cluttered but sleek, dominated by a built-in auto-prep station – a matte black unit with two slender robotic arms, each ending in fine, multi-jointed manipulators like delicate silver fingers. The arms moved with crisp, fluid efficiency, currently dicing shallots into translucent ribbons on a carbon-glass cutting board.
“Start heating the oil – medium-high,” he muttered. One of the arms pivoted toward the induction stovetop, adjusting the temperature.
“Prep the salmon,” he added, grabbing a fillet with his left hand – clumsy and uncoordinated – while his dominant right hand, still bound in a bulky brace, hung useless at his side.
He winced as the fish slipped and smacked wetly against the counter, then barked: “Hold it in place!”
The robotic arm immediately complied, extending a clamp to stabilize the fillet while John began to score it with a chef’s knife – again with his weak hand, jagged and messy.
A soft whirring filled the air as the second robotic arm moved into cleaning mode. The knife-cleaning subroutine – an internal bristle cylinder with steam-sterilization nozzles – activated automatically.
Just as I started wondering why on Earth I was watching John order his robot arm around to cook a meal, something shifted.
The arm paused.
A flicker – barely visible – rippled across the interface screen above the stovetop. The voice assistant chimed softly. “Override accepted. Executing private command: Intimate Defense Protocol.”
John looked up, confused.
“The fuck?”
The knife-cleaning unit twitched, then lunged – faster than expected. The bristle cylinder extended a hidden spike – likely meant for mechanical maintenance – and drove it straight into John’s upper thigh.
