Are You There by Jack Skillingstead Jack Skillingstead tells us, “In recent years, internet ‘chatting’ has emerged as an entirely new form of communication, one that seems to invite intimacy while at the same time encouraging isolation. This situation, extrapolated forward, was the genesis for the current story.” He invites readers to visit his web site at www.jackskillingstead.com.

Deatry took the door because he wanted to see the look on the Bastard’s face. That put his partner Raymond Farkas in the alley, where Deatry assumed he was wet and not too happy. The hallway smelled like mildew and Chinese food. There were two light fixtures between 307 and the stairs. The one closer to Deatry was burned out. Muffled television voices spoke from the other rooms but 307 was quiet.

Deatry stood in the hall a long time, too long, his stunner drawn but pointed at the floor, finger outside the trigger guard. He had the passkey, but he couldn’t move. A memory of plate glass coughing into the atrium. Suburban sunshine, string music, and shredded shoppers. Blood on the terrazzo. White dowel of bone poking through mangled flesh and skin flap.

The hand he used to hold.

Deatry was sweating. The man in 307 shredded his victims one at a time, with some art, but no political considerations, at least none that Deatry was aware of. Why the paralyzing memory association?

Deatry started at the unmistakable buzzpop of a stunner burst. It had sounded from beyond the room on the other side of the door.

He fumbled the passkey, dropped it, used his foot. Wood splintering crash, jamb split, the door banged into the wall, and Deatry went through, sweeping the empty room with his weapon.

Curtains billowed. The burst had come from the alley. Deatry clambered onto the fire escape. November rain blew over him, chill on the back of his neck. There were no lights in the alley, unless you counted the checkerboard windows of the other buildings.

Deatry clanged down the zigzag stairs, iron rail cold on his hand, and dropped to the buckled concrete. The garbage smell was wet and ripe, bags of it piled around the dumpster. One of the bags groaned and stood up, a man. Deatry pointed his stunner.

“It’s me,” the man said, raising an open hand. “Ray.”

“Jesus Christ,” Deatry said. “Did you hit him?”

“Yeah, but he must have been wearing one of those repelling vests.”

“Did you see his face?”

“Nope.”

“Well—”

“Don’t worry, it’s not a total loss. I got to feel his knife. It’s real sharp.”

Farkas’s shirt was wet, but in the bad light who knew it was blood?

Then Raymond Farkas extended his hand, which was holding a flat module made of black metal. Deatry holstered his weapon and took it. Farkas swayed, and Deatry gripped his shoulder with his free hand.

“He dropped that,” Farkas said, and collapsed forward. Deatry dropped the module himself when he tried to catch his partner.

Dawn had begun to pale the sky by the time Deatry returned home and climbed the newly installed set of exterior stairs to the second floor. Inside, he stood at the window with a bottle of beer for a few minutes, not thinking. It was as quiet as it ever got in the grid. Deatry knew his ex-wife, who occupied the lower half of the narrow two story “slot” house, would be waking up soon. Sometimes, when she noticed his light on or heard him shuffling around after being awake all night, she came up to the bolted door that separated the two halves of the house, wanting to talk. Deatry hated that. He referred to Barbara as his ex-wife, but the truth was they had never legally divorced. A divorce would automatically have evoked the Space and Occupancy Act and forced them to vacate the relative spaciousness of the home they had legally shared as man and wife. And the other truth was (at least the truth Deatry allowed), they both loved the house more than they had ever loved each other. The Space and Occupancy Act was only one of many laws designed to encourage the sacred tradition of marriage. The SAOA hadn’t existed at the time of Deatry’s previous marriage. So that particular example of sacredness had been allowed to go to hell in its own traditional manner.

Deatry turned off the lamp, unrolled his Apple VI Scroll, and powered it up. White Echo was waiting for him.

“Hi,” he typed.

“I was almost asleep.” Her words appeared rapidly, a quick and flawless keypadder.

“That’s okay. I know it’s late. I just wanted to say hi.”

“And you said it. But don’t go. I—miss you all day.”

“I miss you, too,” Deatry typed, and he meant it. But he was also glad White Echo, a.k.a. Kimberly, was not an entity who could climb a flight of stairs and knock on his door.

“Are you all right?” Kimberly asked.

“Peachy. It’s Farkas. We followed a tip tonight and he got cut, and it was at least partly my fault.”

“How was it your fault?”

Deatry briefly described the situation at the co-op apartment building.

“I don’t see how it was your fault,” Kimberly said.

“I had the door. And I waited too long. Jackie Boy must have sensed something was up. Anyway, forget it. How was your day?”

“Delightful and lonely.”

“That’s life in the big city. The lonely part, anyway. Delight is a little harder to come by. You have a knack for it.”

After a long pause, during which Deatry began to think she had been disconnected, Kimberly typed: “It doesn’t HAVE to be lonely.”

Deatry’s fingers hovered over the keypad like hummingbirds assessing the possibility of nectar. He didn’t want to get into it again.

“Brian?”

He gave it another few beats, then typed: “Damn it, I’m sorry. Barbara’s at the door.”

“Play dead.”

“Ha! I can’t do that. She knows I’m in here. She was already awake when I got home. The lights were on. She must have heard me come in.”

Lord of the Lies. They floated him above a nasty splinter of his personality.

“Okay,” Kimberly typed.

“I’m really sorry.”

“Yes.” Then: “It’s okay. I have to sleep anyway. Alone as always.”

Usually he could redirect her mood, but he was bone tired this morning. So even though he knew it was lame, Deatry replied, “I’m REALLY sorry.” And: “Gotta go now.” And: “G’nite.”

He sighed and turned off the Scroll and let it roll back into a tube. Then God played a mean trick on him. There was a tentative knock on the interior door, followed by a slightly more aggressive knock, and Barbara’s voice: “Brian? I’ve got coffee.”

Deatry turned in his chair and stared wearily at the door. He waited, imagining her on the other side. She didn’t knock again, and after a while her footsteps retreated down the stairs.

Deatry and Raymond Farkas were parapolice detectives working a dumpy quarter-grid of the Seattle-Tacoma sprawl. The local inhabitants paid their salaries. They didn’t have to pay, of course. It was a free country. And the paradetectives were free to ignore the non-paying enclaves, though Deatry had never done that and wouldn’t. The real murder police worked the tonier grids and had the terror watch, which sucked resources like a starving baby.

Deatry slipped down to the crime lab of the real police department, where he had a few friends from the old days. He showed the module to a man who looked like a cross between a boiled egg and a vulture in a white lab coat.

“It’s a Loved One,” the man, whose name was Stuhring, said.

An old memory stirred briefly in the refuse at the back of Deatry’s mind.

“Those dead person things?”

“Right. Guy’s dying but still coherent enough, got all his marbles rattling around, or it’s a living will thing. They hook him up and make one of these gizmos from his engramatic template. Fries his brain, but he’s not going to live anyway. End of the day, dear old Uncle Ned can still talk to you, respond just like the original, all that. Parlor trick. There was a vogue, then the creep factor killed it.”

“Will this one work?”

Stuhring rummaged around in a junk box, tried a couple of adapters, found one that fit, and plugged the module into a computer.

After a moment, Hello? appeared on the screen.

“It works,” Stuhring said.

“No voice?”

He shrugged. “You’d have to noodle around with it. Take the adapter. You can plug it into your Scroll, if you want.”

Hello? appeared under the first Hello.

“Why’s it keep saying that?” Deatry asked. “Is it broken?”

“How do I know? Ask it.”

Deatry typed: “Are you broken?”

They waited, but no more words appeared.

“There’s your answer,” Stuhring said.

“Maybe.”

Deatry had a weird feeling. He unplugged the Loved One and pocketed the adapter.

Deatry met Raymond Farkas at a bar on Second Avenue called The Scarlet Tree, though its patrons referred to it affectionately as The Bloody Stump.

Farkas eased into a chair, holding his right hand lightly over his ribs where the blade had gone in, scoring bone. He was older than Deatry, about thirty pounds overweight, and had a walrus mustache which was going gray.

“Hurt?” Deatry asked.

“What do you think?”

“I think it probably hurts.”

“You’re probably right,” Farkas said. “The doc said it was a razor or the Bastard’s usual scalpel. Guess he’d know.”

It was the middle of the day and they were drinking pints of amber ale. It didn’t matter, since they were private employees. It was kind of a perk. Deatry drank deep, then put his glass down and said: “I’m sorry, Ray.”

“What about?” There was foam in his mustache.

“Sorry I forgot your birthday, what else? Jesus Christ. I’m sorry I almost got you killed.”

Farkas shrugged. “I had the alley. You flushed him, then it was on me. I blew it.”

“I didn’t exactly flush him.”

Farkas shrugged again. “What else you want to talk about?”

“That module thing he dropped. It was a Loved One. You know what that is?”

“No shit? Yeah, I know what they are.”

Farkas had already finished his amber. He waved at the bartender and she brought over another one. Deatry still had a ways to go on his first.

“Pair a beers for the paradicks,” the bartender said, in a friendly way. She was fortyish, attractive in a twice-around-the-block kind of way. Deatry had once seen the inside of her bedroom and other things.

Farkas grabbed up his fresh pint and drained it by a third.

“You get anything off the Loved One?”

“No.”

“Could be a good break.”

“It won’t talk.”

“Get a techie to cannibalize it. That way you at least get the basics. If it was a relative of our guy then maybe we have a name.”

Deatry drank his ale.

“What’s the matter, you don’t want to take it apart?”

Deatry shrugged. His shrugs weren’t as eloquent as Farkas’s and he knew it.

“Why not?” Farkas said.

“Next time,” Deatry said, “I’m on the alley.”

“Whatever.”

They drank a couple more pints and watched the ball game, which was a disaster. When they left The Scarlet Tree Deatry waited while his partner eased into a cab. Farkas was on his first marriage and had a fourteen-year-old daughter. Deatry once attended a Patriots of September party at the Farkas apartment. It had been boozy but not overboard, plenty of kids, loud and friendly, the whole building population joining in, spilling out into the street. Farkas had a life. Deatry wanted to keep it that way.

Two AM. Deatry was staring at the chatwindow center screen of his Scroll.

“I miss you,” White Echo, a.k.a. Kimberly, said. “But I don’t want to keep you here on this dumb THING. I need a real flesh and blood man. Brian? Can you understand?”

Deatry finished another bottle of beer and set the dead soldier on the floor next to the rest of the empty platoon.

After a while he typed: “I understand.”

“We’ve been talking for months,” Kimberly said.

“Yes.”

“We don’t even use the chat enhancements.”

“I thought you liked the writing part.”

“I do. It’s old fashioned and sweet.”

“But?” Deatry typed

“But I want to meet you.”

Deatry didn’t type anything. Then, being funny, he typed: “I’m married.”

“No kidding? Oh my gawd!!”

Deatry smiled, but Kimberly wasn’t going to be diverted.

“Listen to me,” she typed.

“I’m listening.” He twisted the cap off another beer.

“We’re the walking wounded. We’ve talked all about that. What happened with my first husband. Your mother and the bomb. The way your father checked out. The way things have gone with your relationships. All that stuff.”

Deatry shifted on his chair, drank, held the cold bottle in his lap.

“But we’re cowards if we don’t try to love again.”

Deatry put the bottle down and typed: “I do love you.”

“Love behind a firewall isn’t real,” Kimberly typed.

“It’s real.”

“Brian. I want to take the next step now. I want to meet you. I want to go for a walk with you. I want to feel your hand in my hand. I want to kiss you. For real. Not just in my head. I want to have a relationship with you. I HAVE to try again.”

“I know.”

“It’s scary.”

“True,” Deatry typed.

“But in a way this is scarier.”

Deatry drank his beer.

“This is … too remote,” Kimberly typed. “It’s okay at first, then it’s kind of sick. I think.”

Deatry drank his beer.

“So what I’m saying is let’s meet. Like for a cup of coffee. It’s a simple first step. It doesn’t have to be perfect. I think you’re afraid it won’t be perfect, or that your heart will get broken. Hearts DO get broken. But you still have to take a risk. There’s no life without the risk.”

Deatry put his bottle down, almost typed something, then didn’t.

“So,” Kimberly typed. “Next Monday at ten AM I’m going to be at the Still Life Cafe. You know where that is? I’ll be there.”

Deatry typed: “Will you be wearing a red carnation in your lapel?”

“Sure.”

A long beat. Then, “Brian? If you’re not there, I don’t think I can come back online with you. I mean I won’t. I love you, but this keeps me from what I need. A relationship. In real life. I don’t want to hurt you, but I have to protect my heart, too.”

“It’s okay.”

“You’re not going to be there, are you.”

Deatry stared at the screen.

“Goodbye,” Kimberly typed.

The Loved One wouldn’t talk. Every night Deatry jacked it into his Apple Scroll and peppered it with conversational gambits, to no avail. But he had a feeling. In the police lab, when the Loved One had said Hello?Hello? Deatry had sensed more than the automatic response of a software program reacting to the electrical surge of being turned on. He had sensed a presence. Of course, Deatry was the first to admit he was a little nuts.

He was up all night Friday. Just before dawn he jacked in the Loved One and typed: “Hi?” The word hung on the screen all by itself. Ten minutes elapsed.

“I know you’re in there,” Deatry typed.

Then, after another five minutes: “Come on.”

When he stood up he was surprised to discover he was drunk enough to feel wobbly. Drunk enough that the room appeared to shift about, like sub-reality tectonic plates, or a cubist painting that tries to show mundane objects from multiple and simultaneous angles, images overlapping. He staggered away from his MirÃ³ desk, kicking over most of a dozen empty beer bottles and sending them rolling across the hardwood floor like bowling pins.

“Hello?” he said to the empty room. “Hello, hello! Jesus H. Christ.”

He blundered into the sofa and collapsed upon it.

After a while, Barbara started knocking on the locked interior door.

“Brian, are you okay?”

Fuck it, he thought, and he passed out of consciousness, leaving the module running.

The phone woke him, a piercing trill. Better than the auricular implants almost everybody had, though, voices speaking in your head, the last thing he wanted. He fumbled the phone out of his pocket. Wincing, he said, “Deatry.”

“It’s Ray. Got another body. Wanna see it?”

“Where?”

Farkas told him.

Deatry stuck his head under a cold shower and yelled. He put on a fresh shirt. It was only mid-morning, and he was still drunk. At the door he noticed the Scroll hooked up to the Loved One and running. His messed up little haiku floated on the screen: Hello?

I know you’re in there.

Come on.

Deatry hesitated, then left the setup the way it was and went out the door.

It wasn’t raining, but the streets were wet from the previous night. Puddles shivered in the wind like alien amoebas communicating their loneliness. Deatry stepped between them as he crossed the street, shoulders hunched in his old raincoat, hair still wet, dripping and uncombed from the shower.

The Coroner’s meatwagon was angled into the curb, blinking red lights. The M.E. whose misfortune it was to cover the grid that encompassed this block was a woman named Sally Ranger. Deatry had known her for years. A blond with bird-sharp features and a severely sexual figure. She always dressed impeccably, even now, as though she had been dispatched to rendezvous with an important business client instead of a methodically mutilated indigent. She stepped forward with a clipboard when Deatry arrived.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Just my opinion, but I don’t agree.”

She handed him the clipboard. “Sign here and I can take Mr. Vargas.”

“Who’s Mr. Vargas?”

“Your corpse.” Sally Ranger said, nodding at the alley where three men stood over something like a heap of rags. One of the men was Raymond Farkas. The other two were from the M.E.‘s office. They had a wheeled stretcher and an empty body bag.

“I’ll sign, but hold up a minute. I want to have a look before they move him.”

He scratched his name on the official form. His hand shook.

“You want a mint?” Sally asked.

He looked up. “What?”

“A mint.” She blew her breath, which was sweet wintergreen, into his face.

He scowled at her.

“Thanks, I’ll pass.”

She shook her head.

“What?” he said.

“The genius detective. Wunderkind.”

Deatry had known her since his days with the real police force. Right before his first marriage broke up he’d conducted a brief, messy affair with her. When she’d started expecting more out of him than he was able to relinquish he’d ended it. An outcome that hadn’t pleased Sally.

“One question I always wanted to ask you,” she said. They had walked into the alley and were approaching the trio of live men and the one deceased.

“What’s that, Sally?”

“Are all you geniuses by definition drunken bastards?”

Farkas looked at him, no expression on his face.

Deatry said, “No, not by definition. It’s more random.” He turned to Farkas. “So?”

“Arturo Vargas. Aged fifty-two. Head’s over there with some other stuff.” Farkas pointed. “Bastard’s standard M.O. I’ve already taken the pictures. A city uniform preserved the scene, but there wasn’t anything in the way of clues.”

Arturo Vargas’s head sat nested in a wet coil of blue-white intestine a few yards from the headless corpse. Rain had collected in the gaping cavity that had once contained the man’s viscera. Deatry took a few minutes looking at the layout, then he said to Sally, “Okay, thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” she replied.

“How’d you come up with the name?” Deatry asked Farkas.

Farkas, who was wearing surgical gloves, held up a ratty looking wallet of faux leather, a kid’s wallet with Indians and ponies and teepees machine-stitched around the edge. Deatry snapped on a pair of gloves and took the wallet and opened it. There was a driver’s license, expired by more than a decade. The faded photo showed a much younger and healthier-looking head, smiling. There were some other pictures in the wallet: a plump, attractive woman in her thirties, and a couple of young children, grinning. Deatry’s head was pounding. He closed the wallet and handed it back.

“Looks like he used to have a life,” Deatry said.

Farkas nodded. “That an official genius level observation, partner?”

“Let’s just drop the genius crap,” Deatry said.

As they were leaving the alley, damp wind blowing in their faces, Deatry holding his raincoat closed, Sally said, “I wouldn’t lose any sleep over these derelicts if I were you, Brian. Why do you even bother?”

“We’re the last stop,” Deatry said. “If we don’t bother nobody will.”

“And?” Sally said.

“And nothing.”

She shook her head, said, “What a waste,” then got in her car and drove away.

Deatry and Farkas spent the rest of the morning canvassing the neighborhood, which netted them nothing. At the tiny parapolice headquarters the City provided, Farkas accessed a subdivision of the Homeland Security Database and ran the indigent’s name, hunting next of kin. The genius and erstwhile wunderkind of detection busied himself by taking a nap on the sofa. Farkas’s tapping keystrokes and low voice entered and exited Deatry’s fitful dreams. At some point Farkas shook his shoulder and asked him if he wanted the light on or off.

“Huh?” Deatry said.

“I’m going home. You want the lights on?”

Deatry yawned. “No. I’m going home, too. You want to grab a bite?”

“Naw. Sarah’s holding dinner.”

Farkas put on his shoulder rig, and Deatry noticed his stunner had been replaced by a perfectly lethal and perfectly illegal Pulser.

“You hunting bear?” Deatry said.

Farkas didn’t smile. “Bastard’s vest won’t repulse this.”

Deatry stopped at The Bloody Stump and ordered a Caesar salad and a bowl of chili. It was past seven and dark when he arrived home. Even before he turned on the lamp he noticed that words had been added to the screen of his Apple.

“Please turn me off,” the words said.

And:

“PLEASE.”

Deatry switched on the desk lamp, removed his raincoat. He brewed a pot of coffee, making a mental note to re-supply his depleted canister of dark roast, then sat down with a cup. He looked at the Scroll for a minute, and he felt it again: the presence. He typed: “Why do you want to be turned off ?”

Immediately: “Because I can’t stand it.”

“Can’t stand what?” Deatry insisted.

After a beat: “It’s terrible.”

“What’s terrible?”

“What I am.”

Deatry thought for a moment, then typed: “You’re a responsive memory template. An interactive device.”

“I exist,” the Loved One said, and Deatry thought: The creep factor.

He typed: “Granted. You exist—in the same way my Scroll exists. Or my television.”

“More complex. You’re not Timothy. Who are you?”

Deatry hesitated, then typed: “Deatry. Brian Deatry.”

“That’s just a name.”

“I’m a public employee. I sort through lost and found stuff, like you.”

“Please turn me off, Mr. Public Employee.”

“Who’s Timothy?”

“Another person.”

“No kidding? Another person, huh?”

“You’re very sarcastic, Brian.”

“I have my moments. Who are you? I mean who were you?”

“Joni.”

“Joni what?”

“Cook. Joni Cook.”

“And when did you die?”

She provided a date and year.

“Twenty-seven years ago,” he typed. “How old were you?”

“Thirty-two.”

“That’s young. What happened?”

“I got sick and died. It happens to a lot of people.”

“But you were thoughtful,” Deatry typed. “You imprinted a Loved One for somebody who would miss you. Who was that?”

“My son.”

“Timothy.”

“Yes.”

“And you were with your son only a week ago.”

Joni said: “Time doesn’t mean anything.”

“What do you talk about with your son?”

“His day. How he’s feeling. Personal things.”

“What kind of personal things?”

“The kind that are personal,” Joni said.

“I guess I’m not the only sarcastic one around here.”

“Perhaps not.”

Deatry pulled his cell out and called Farkas at home.

“Yeah?” Farkas said.

“I’ve got a lead.”

“What kind of lead?” Farkas asked.

“Two names. Joni Cook and Timothy Cook. Mother and son. Joni is deceased.” He recited the date the Loved One provided.

“Your Loved One woke up,” Farkas said.

“Yep.”

“How’d that happen?”

“I left her running all day while I was out. I think she got lonely.”

“Lonely.”

“Well, something like that. I don’t know.”

On the screen Joni Cook said: “Hello? Brian, hello?”

To Farkas, he said: “It’s not a foregone conclusion at this point, but Timothy could be our boy. Tomorrow we’ll find out for sure.”

“Hello?” Joni said. “God, don’t leave me alone again, please don’t.”

Creep factor.

Deatry switched the module off.

He didn’t need the Homeland Security Database to locate Timothy Cook. Jackie Boy was right in the directory, under “C” for homicidal maniac.

Deatry was superstitious. He’d almost gotten Farkas killed once. He wasn’t going to take another chance. He checked the load in his stunner, holstered it, grabbed his coat, and hit the street, forgetting his cell phone on the desk by the Scroll.

A suburban dead zone, half past nine PM. Deatry was out of his jurisdiction and possibly out of his mind. Live oaks on a broad, quiet street, eerily backlit by arc-sodium safelamps. His detective I.D. got him through gate security. Timothy Cook’s address was a Cape Cod style box with pinned-back green shutters and a flagstone walk leading to the front door and a shiny brass knocker.

So knock.

Deatry touched the knocker—thinking: the brass ring—but didn’t use it. His erstwhile “genius” status had more to do with intuitive leaps than Holmesian ratiocination. Standing on the porch with leaf shadow swaying over him he knew Timothy Cook was the Bastard. Which helped and didn’t help. The man was even wackier than he’d first appeared. Sure, dissecting bums was one thing, but how about living some kind of weird double life? The dilapidated room in the city, and this antithetical opulence. It’d been easy to fish out the information that Timothy Cook was a lawyer. Okay, there was Jack the Ripper (Jackie Boy), the whole theory about Red Jack being some kind of nobleman or doctor or something. There’s always a precedent, Deatry thought. And that lawyer in the Cape Cod house would no doubt be able to find one on which to hang Deatry by his balls just for standing on his front porch.

Deatry turned around, intending to go back to his car and do a little ratiocinating.

A man was standing behind him.

He was about forty years old, baby-faced, ginger hair very thin and combed over. A smile that stopped below his nose.

“I knew you’d come,” he said.

“Then you knew more than I did,” Deatry said.

“Naturally. Let’s go inside now.”

Suddenly the man was pointing a stunner at him.

“Now what’s the sense of that?” Deatry said.

“Go ahead inside. The door’s unlocked.”

“You’re Timothy Cook.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been slicing up the residents of my grid.”

Cook sniggered. “Residents.”

Deatry calculated his odds. They weren’t promising. He decided to scream for help as loud as he could. A tactic that would have gotten him ignored back in his grid, but in this neighborhood it was probably as good as a ten thousand dollar alarm system. He started to open his mouth, and Cook shot him.

He inhabited a jellyfish dream. Boneless slow wobble in consciousness suspension. Gradually nausea asserted itself. He tried to pitch forward, found himself restrained, and vomited into his own lap. Which was fairly disgusting, but—in his present jellyfish state of mind—it was also kind of fascinating.

A man in jockey shorts paced before him, mumbling. His skin was very pale. Lamplight slid along the blade of the scalpel he was holding.

A dim fragment of Brian Deatry was alarmed. The fragment attempted to form a coherent response to the situation. All it could arrive at was the word: “Don’t.” And even that came out sounding like “Dawnt.”

The pacing man stopped pacing.

“Dawnt,” Deatry said.

The man stood before him, feet planted, toes wiggling. The knife started to come up, and then there was a commotion, a door crashing open, and the man turned sharply. The quick movement tripled him in Deatry’s woozy vision. Bright blue flash and a sound like a hundred light bulbs popping out at the same time. The man sprawled to the floor, head by Deatry’s left knee. Scorched whiff of pork. Deatry’s fragment put a name to the face: Cook. Jackie Boy.

Then Farkas was there untying him.

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing coming out here by yourself,” Farkas said.

The Deatry fragment managed: “Shaabing ur life.”

“Thanks,” Farkas said. “You did a hell of a job.”

“Cook the bastard,” Deatry said, more or less coherently.

“I cooked him, all right,” Farkas said.

Monday at ten AM Deatry was not at the Still Life Cafe.

Monday night, Deatry, stone sober, sat before his Scroll in the darkened room that had once been a “spare” bedroom when the house he shared with his second wife was a house undivided, except for the everlasting divisions in Deatry’s own mind. He stared at a list of names, women he had chatted with to varying degrees of intensity over the last year or so. For months those names hadn’t impelled him in the least. Except for one. White Echo. Kimberley. Now some of the names were lit, indicating online status, and some were dark. White Echo was dark. Deatry stared at the other names for a while, then he stood up and grabbed a beer. He looked out the window for a while. It was raining again. Raindrops trembled and squiggled down the pane. He returned to his desk. White Echo was still dark.

“I’m looking at your picture,” Deatry typed.

“Which one?” Joni, the Loved One, asked.

“Some kind of park. Lake in the background, but not summer. Cloudy sky, a playground. You’re wearing a black skirt and purple wool leggings and a funny hat.”

Deatry had confiscated an image wafer from Cook’s home office.

“What’s funny about my hat?” Joni said.

“I meant pretty and sophisticated.” Deatry was drunk.

“I know that picture,” Joni said.

“You’re very beautiful in it.”

“Thank you, Brian.”

“Was that a park you visited very often?” Deatry asked.

“No. But I wanted to.”

“Why didn’t you then?”

“My husband didn’t like me to go out of the house without him, and he didn’t like the park. So we only went that one time, the time he took the picture of me. He thought I was beautiful, too.”

“He didn’t like you to go out of the house?” Deatry twisted the cap off his fifth beer.

“He used to say it was so dangerous. With all the bombings and the crime. But we lived in a nice neighborhood with a Homeland Watch Captain and everything. It wasn’t that dangerous. I always thought it would be nice if I could take Timothy to the park and let him play while I sat with the other ladies. Or sometimes I thought about going by myself, just to be out in the fresh air with a nice book.”

“That’s not asking too much,” Deatry typed.

“No, I didn’t think so, either.”

“Your husband sounds like a harsh man.”

Deatry had started to type “asshole” instead of “harsh man” but stopped himself. And then he thought, What difference does it make? It’s like talking to myself anyway. But he didn’t type asshole.

After a long pause, Joni said: “He was a brutal man.”

Deatry stared at the picture on the screen next to the chatwindow. Joni Cook possessed, or was possessed by, a gamine quality. Her face was infinitely vulnerable and guarded, her eyes large and dark. He felt drawn to those eyes.

“Was the park very far from your house?” he typed.

“Not far at all.”

“I would have enjoyed meeting you there sometime.”

“I think I would have liked that, too,” Joni said. “You seem like a very kindly man. At first I was afraid of you. I didn’t know you and I was afraid. But now I can see the kindness of your heart. Or the loneliness.”

What the hell? Deatry thought.

“When your module is turned on and no one is talking to you,” Deatry typed, because he was curious, “why are you uncomfortable?” He almost typed “lonely.”

“It’s hard to explain,” Joni said. “It’s like standing alone in a blank room and not knowing if anyone will ever come into the room. Ever. And even then knowing if someone does come in, like you are here now, they will never be able to touch me, and I’ll never be able to touch them. It’s like standing in the blank room with my memories and nothing else, and thinking about how no one will ever touch me, and thinking this is all there is and all there ever will be.”

Deatry looked away from the Scroll. Rain tapped at the window. He thought about the woman downstairs, and then he stopped thinking about her.

He typed: “Let’s say you came to that park one day and I was there.”

Long pause. Then, “All right.”

“Let’s say things were different.”

“Yes.”

“Let’s say we knew each other but had never met in person. In real life.”

“We wrote all the time and that’s how we knew each other so well.”

“Yes,” Deatry typed. “And we never turned on all the virtual chat enhancements. We just wrote, no voice even.”

“Like letters used to be.”

“Right,” Deatry typed.

“So one day we decide to meet.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“We would have seen each other’s picture.”

“Right,” Deatry typed.

“What next?” Joni asked.

“We meet by that playground, and I’ve brought a couple coffees, one for each of us.”

“I like mine with lots of sugar and just a little cream.”

“I know that, so I’ve made sure it’s right. Like I’m going for making a good impression.”

“It’s because you’re kind. You’re a nice man.”

“I can be nice,” Deatry typed. “I have my moments.”

“What next?”

“I’m guessing there’s a bench somewhere in that park.”

“There is.”

“We go and sit beside each other,” Deatry typed.

“It’s October, not too cold, sunny but brisk. The color of the water and the sky are wonderful.”

“Yeah, it’s nice.”

“Yes.”

“We talk about stuff, our lives, our dreams.” Deatry was pretty damn drunk.

“I like just talking,” Joni said. “But there’s more between us, we’ve known for a long time, and now sitting so close beside each other we can feel it strongly.”

“I take your hand in mine,” Deatry typed, and in his mind he feels her hand, and sees the vivid blue sky and the darker blue of the water. He’s filling up the blank room. For both of them.

“I look into your eyes, your kind eyes,” Joni said.

“And I kiss you on the lips.”

Joni didn’t reply, and Deatry looked at the window again and thought about retrieving another beer, but he didn’t really want another, so he stayed where he was, and part of his mind occupied the bench with Joni Cook in a nameless park on a mythical afternoon in October. Then Joni said: “That really happened to me, Brian.”

He wasn’t sure what she meant.

“I did meet someone in that park. A man. A kind, sweet man. And we held hands, and he kissed me, just like you did.”

Deatry didn’t know what to type. Several minutes elapsed, and the room started to become blank again. When it got that way he could feel Kimberley wanting to come in, or maybe it was Barbara. Finally Deatry typed: “Are you there?”

“My husband knew,” Joni said. “And when he got home from work, he hit me as hard as he could with his fist. Timmy was there. He always saw his dad hitting me, but not like this time. This time his daddy killed me. Timmy was just a little boy.”

Deatry wanted to type something but couldn’t. I’m talking to myself, he thought. It’s an auto-reactive program. Yeah, he thought. Just like a real human being. That was funny but Deatry didn’t laugh. He looked at the picture of Joni Cook.

“I knew in my heart that he would do it one day,” Joni said. “So I had it in my living will to make this thing, if there was time.”

“The Loved One,” Deatry said.

“Yes. I was in a coma for three days. That’s when they did it.”

“So Timothy would still be able to talk to you.”

“A boy needs his mother,” Joni said. “Please turn me off now, Brian. Please.”

Deatry powered down the module.

Rain ticked at the window like a clock.

At the paradicks office, Deatry and Farkas labored over reams of paperwork with the object of A: justifying the shooting death of Timothy Cook, and B: justifying the trans-jurisdictional nature of that shooting, not to mention the illegal weapon used. In the middle of it all, Farkas handed Deatry a hardcopy file that told at least two stories in the subtextural labyrinth.

“The short not-so-happy life of Francis Cook, our guy’s dad,” Farkas said. “Gives you a clue about the Bastard, though. If you need a clue. My opinion, the character clues don’t matter. You come out of something bad, you have to have a strong will, but you make your life work. Plenty of people do it. Then there’s guys like Timmy Cook.”

Deatry read the brief file. It was like one, two, three. One: Francis Cook was a professional, a doctor who also happened to be an alcoholic who enjoyed beating the shit out of his wife. Two: one day he went too far and killed her. Three: police investigation and publicity and a manslaughter charge ruined him, and maybe guilt ruined him further, and, after his sentence, he ended up on the street; a straight fall from the top of the societal heap to the bottom. As a coda: he died of exposure at the age of fifty-eight, the body identified by his DNA flash file. And coincident to it all, about ten years later, derelicts started getting themselves dissected all over Deatry’s Grid.

On a bench under a blue October sky, Deatry and the thing that pretended to be Joni Cook sat with their arms around each other and watched a white sail skim the lake.

Thirty years previous, the world shuddered, glass coughed into a shopping mall’s atrium, bodies sprayed apart, including Deatry’s mother’s. He had been eleven years old.

Brian Deatry’s numero uno character clue.

The hand he used to hold.

Sometimes the room stubbornly remained blank. Then it was only their two voices. And not even that, but mere typing of symbolic characters in a chatwindow. Deatry had never bothered to figure out how to activate the voice routine. He would have felt uncomfortable with that.

On a very bad night, on a particularly bad night, Deatry typed the wrong thing. Joni had been talking about Timothy again. Not Timothy the little boy, the victim, but Timothy the grown man who had talked to her every day and never once revealed that he was a homicidal maniac, or at least neither Joni nor Deatry ever mentioned it. They were in the blank room and she was talking about Timothy, the wonderful man her little boy had grown into, and why couldn’t she talk to him anymore? Deatry, who was frustrated and drunk and craving, not the peaceful October lake, but the other place they sometimes visited, the place where his body came alive in his hand, where they made love of a remote sort; Deatry and the auto-responsive module.

“Let’s not talk about Timothy anymore,” Deatry typed.

A pause.

“Why not?”

“Never mind.”

“Has something happened to Timothy?

“No, he’s fine, I’m sure.”

“Please tell me, Brian.”

He considered turning the module off. Isn’t that what he always did? Turn the module off ? There was a turned-off module living downstairs. There was another turned-off module a couple of grids away, that relationship ultimately depersonalized back to a dark name on a chatfriend list. White Echo was a dead module; Kimberley, somewhere, lived.

Even Deatry himself was a dead module.

Or becoming one.

He was staring at the window again, the rain squiggle, the flat glare of arc-sodium safelight, an infinity of loneliness.

He turned back to the Scroll. New words had appeared.

Hello?

Are you there?

I’m hell on staring at windows, Deatry thought.

He typed: “Joni, listen to me.”

“Yes?”

“We have to be careful. If we’re not careful we’ll get lost and forget what we’re doing.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I mean we’ll forget who we are, and we’ll start thinking this is a real conversation and that we’re real people.”

“Brian, I know what I am.”

“That makes one of us.”

“Why are you acting so strange?”

“Who says it’s an act?”

“Tell me what’s happened to Timothy. I know you’re keeping something from me.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m just talking to myself.”

“Brian?”

“I’m talking to myself.”

“You’re scaring me.”

Deatry typed: “Timothy is dead. My partner shot him because he was about to cut me open. Your son was hell on cutting people open.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s the truth, and you’ve probably known it all along.”

“Please don’t. Why would my son want to hurt you?”

“I’m a police detective.”

“You lied to me.”

“Yes.”

“It was so nice for us. Now it’s ruined.”

“Yes,” Deatry typed. “It’s ruined.”

No more words appeared. Deatry got up and went into the kitchenette. He was out of beer and coffee. He grabbed his coat and keys and his stunner. Just to prove it didn’t matter, he left the module running when he left.

At half past two AM he returned. The Scarlet Tree closed at two. Remarkably, Deatry was not drunk. For the last hour he had been thinking about Joni. Thinking about the bench, the high October sky, the blue lake. The blank room, his cruelty.

On the screen Joni Cook’s reactive memory engramatic imprint had written: “You used me.”

He removed his coat and sat down. He wasn’t drunk, but he had downed a couple of pints and felt lucid. He typed a long, rambling message, and then waited for a response. None came. He waited, but there was nothing. He typed: “Are you there?”

Nothing.

He opened a window to White Echo and typed another message. When he was done he read it over and was repelled by the desperateness of what he’d written. He deleted it.

He left the desk and turned on the TV. Every once in a while he checked the Scroll for a reply from Joni. There never was one. Finally he got up and wiggled the cable connection, noted the power ON light of the module. Everything was in order. Just before dawn, thinking of the blank room, Deatry powered down the module, unplugged it from the Scroll, and threw it in a drawer.

He was dozing on the sofa when the dead module named Barbara knocked on the interior door.

“Are you there?” she said.

Deatry stared at the door, wondering: Am I? Rain ticked at the empty pane. He stared at the door, some kind of urgency churning him. He stared at the door, and in his mind he stood up and opened it.

Copyright(c) 2006 Jack Skillingstead

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