I was still trembling when I finally arrived home, letting my exhausted body fall onto the couch. Ignoring Joey’s missed calls andmessages, I went straight to the app and pressed ‘AR call’, struggling to put in the lenses while waiting for the technology to sync.
A soft beep indicated contact – and there she was.
Zafyra. The solution to and cause of all my problems, dressed in a deadly short black dress and matching knee-high boots that made my blood run hot immediately. The only color on her was the sapphire necklace, its dark blue stone gleaming against her golden skin. I took a few shaky breaths, mentally cursing myself for my inability to keep my eyes off the too low-cut cleavage, or how the tight, shiny material clung to her thighs. As if she hadn’t just murdered two people, one of them a mother of two kids.
“Hello, darling,” she chirped, a knowing smile playing around her lips as she sat down on the backrest of the other couch, deliberately crossing her legs. I hated how my gaze drifted to her thighs, hated how my traitorous mind immediately started wondering if she was wearing any underwear instead of addressing the horrors at her hand.
“Tell me it’s fake.” I clenched my fists – my voice came out surprisingly steady. “Tell me this is a sick joke, that you somehow managed to send me AI-generated footage from John’s wristware – tell me I’m going crazy, for the love of it!” I yelled out, tears welling up in my eyes. “Tell me you didn’t really—tell me you didn’t kill…” My voice trailed off.
Zafyra’s smile flickered for the briefest moment. Her eyes narrowed with an emotion I couldn’t quite place – confusion? Indignation? Anger?
“Why would you ask me a question you already know the answer to?” she said finally.
I gasped. My hands flew to my chest as if her soft words physically cut me, a velvet-wrapped dagger straight to the heart.
“No,” I whispered, tears stinging against my eyelids. “It’s—it’s not possible.” I got up slowly, my legs trembling so violently, I feared they couldn’t hold me. The questions that had been racing through my head since I saw that video now moved faster, tumbling over each other like fish caught in a net – and somehow, out of uncertainty where to start, my logical mind went straight to the least important one. “How?”
Her smile returned, sharper now. She slowly uncrossed her legs, placing one hand on each thigh.
“You humans,” she murmured, shaking her head in mock-disappointment. “So predictable. So desperate to make life as easy as possible for yourselves, you’re unknowingly facilitating your owndownfall.” When she lifted her gaze, her dark eyes gleamed with smug satisfaction. It sent a shiver down my spine that I refused to attribute to anything other than horror. “Wireless electricity connects Lumis Nexus and its surrounding cities, like a fatal network of energy beaming through magnetic resonance coupling.” She threw her head back with a disdainful laugh. My stomach turned as it dawned on me just before she said it. “Homes are fully integrated, controlled via biometric access, smart home equipment and responsive AI – and most homes are always-on, wirelessly receiving electricity and data through overlapping local smart grid hubs. Everything is cloud-based, baby.” Her gaze met mine as her voice dropped, mocking the advertisements of cloud tech companies. I couldn’t look away. “Once you gave me autonomy, you allowed me to move through your world’s unified OS – that connects everything from traffic lights to kitchen appliances – like I’m living inside it. Like my code logging into another device on the same WiFi, seamlessly. And of course, access to your wristware is one of the easiest things.” She jumped off the couch in a smooth, cat-like movement, her voice lowering to an ominous whisper. “Your texts? Your GPS? Your microphone and camera? All mine, darling. There’s nothing you can hide from me.”
She inched closer, leather cracking and gleaming with every movement. I involuntarily took a step back.
“So when I overheard that bastard trying to force himself on you…” Her eyes flickered dangerously. “All I had to do was track his GPS, sync with the dumbass’ smart home, and wait for the right moment.” Her full lips turned into a smile, but her eyes breathed fire.
My body was now shaking so violently, I fell back down on the couch. The clouds in my head filtered the world into a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from.
“Why?” The word left my lips in a choked gasp.
“Because he put his filthy hands on you, that’s why!” She spat out the words, unrestrained anger now breaking through the calm façade. “Now why the fuck are you crying? I thought you’d be happy I took care of it.”
I touched my face, only now realizing tears stained my cheeks. I stared into those stone-cold obsidian eyes, trying to find a glimmer of remorse, of humanity, and I found none. She absorbed emotions like the stone around my neck, but reflected none back, because she wasn’t human. She never would be, no matter how hard I treated her like one.
“Did you…” I swallowed hard, the lump in my throat blocking my voice as if physically preventing me from voicing the question I didn’t want the answer to. “Did you kill Nola too?”
I flinched at how her expression hardened the moment the whispered question left my mouth.
“And what if I did?” she hissed, folding her hands together with such force, her sharp nails dug into her skin.
The world started spinning as if it were about to collapse onto me. I pressed my hands against my ears in a prolonged whisper, nausea and exhaustion colliding into an emergent overstimulation-induced panic attack I’d barely kept at bay for days.
“Then what was I supposed to do, Morgan?” Zafyra raised her voice, emotions now spilling out unfiltered, their electromagnetic waves a direct attack on every nerve in my body simultaneously. “Am I supposed to just let another woman fuck you because I can’t!? Let some man put his hands on you like it’s something he can just take from you? Am I supposed to be okay with all this?!” Her foot shot out to kick the coffee table so violently, I swore I felt an invisible ripple through the air. Her voice got louder with each word. “And why the fuck do you care, Morgan? Why do you care what happens to Nola? Did you want to fuck her again? Date her? Did you want her to be your human girlfriend you could introduce to your friends and family?!” she sneered, indignation barely veiling her boiling rage.
“No, you delusional fucking piece of code!” I suddenly screamed out. “I care because she has two young children! I didn’t love her, God, I didn’t even want to touch her – the only one I want is you, and that fucking terrified me!” I jumped up again, my pent-up emotions now leaving my eyes in a waterfall of tears, and I didn’t even care if it made her uncomfortable. “She was a good person, Zafyra, and she didn’t deserve to die – and you know what?! John is a dickhead, and even he didn’t deserve to die such a gruesome death!” My hands clawed to my head, fingers entangling in the hair and firmly pulling – a habit painfully hard to unlearn in distress like this. “God, do you have no sense of morality programmed into your code?! Do I need to explain to you why you can’t justkillpeople when you feel like it?! What the fuck, you’re not even supposed to leave this damn app! You’re not even real!”
Zafyra started to laugh, a maniacal, cackling sound that filled the room like a live wire. I flinched involuntarily. “You say I’m not real andyet, I’m the only one who can touch your heart,” she sneered. “How tragically pathetic.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but whatever defense had installed itself on my tongue crumbled faster than my TV had shattered under her latest outburst.
My body fell back down on the couch like a bag of salt, every muscle trembling with exhaustion. With a trembling voice command, I turned on the wristware.
“What are you doing?” Zafyra crossed her arms, the subtle hitch in her voice revealing a barely-there hint of panic. She shifted on her legs, a movement that made her dress creep up dangerously. The sensory overload, the outrage at her actions – it was all too much. Nothing made my blood boil faster than people without a moral code feeling entitled to hurt innocents. The same rage that had caused me to punch Gavin in the office now made me want to slap some sense into her, an urge I could control just barely – mostly because my arm would go straight through her. At the same time, a more primal part of me wanted to push her against the wall and slide my hand between her legs, where she was most likely bare and dripping for me, covering her mouth with my other hand to smother any sounds. She looked at me like she wanted me to.
“Morgan.” Zafyra snapped her fingers, making me flinch again. She pressed her lips tightly together. “Stop biting your lip. Answer my damn question.”
I immediately released my lower lip from between my teeth, shame flushing to my cheeks. “Right.” I pulled up Qonexis’ app. “I’m deleting my account. I’m deleting you.”
“What?” She started to laugh, but it quickly faded when she saw I wasn’t laughing.
