Virtual

  * * *

  Ten and a half hours later, he’d put in two grocery orders, one food delivery, adjusted the house temperature, set timers to record shows on TV, sprinkled the lawn, wrote three letters of resignation to Celia and discarded each. He was going on five cups of coffee and two saltine crackers; his eyes were watering and his hands were cramping.

  But the environmental systems were up and linked, so he didn’t have to physically monitor them anymore, and he had a standby for the night that would record whatever orders Victoria Marlow gave as messages so he could replay them in the morning and do her bidding.

  He learned a bit about her, too. She had a closet full of shoes, but walked around barefoot. She had a house big enough for a family, but lived alone. She had a state of the art entertainment system in the living room, but spent most of her time reading in a little den with a worn rug in front of the fireplace.

  It was purely selfish to note all of those things. Knowing her habits meant he could adjust the heating system to keep the floors warm so she wouldn’t complain of cold feet. He could concentrate his efforts in just a couple of rooms in the house where she actually lived, and he knew to have the TV set to stream an e-book webpage when it was turned on, instead of trying to guess her favorite channel. It made his life just the slightest bit easier.

  Taylor had dragged in the cot, and Madi had gone to his place to get him a pillow, a blanket, and his toothbrush. He’d have to use the gym showers to clean up, and the cheap-ass cafeteria for food, but it was doable. Not comfortable, but doable. Ryan Hotels and Resorts was now open for business.

  God, he didn’t even realize how exhausted he was until he stopped to take a break at midnight. Everyone, with the exception of a handful of night owls keeping an eye on the other side of the globe, had left hours ago, and the facility was shut down for the night. To think, Ryan used feel sorry for the poor schmucks who were stuck on night shift. They rarely saw sunlight and their social lives were shot; they basically lived for this job.

  Oh, how the tables have turned.

  The Marlow house was quiet. Security was engaged, windows and doors closed for the night, except for the bedroom window, which she’d left ajar to let in the night air. Ryan watched Victoria cook herself dinner and read for a while. He watched her emerge from the bathroom in a man’s T-shirt and shorts, put on lotion, and climb into bed. When the lights turned off, he watched her sleep until his eyelids became too heavy to hold up anymore.

  “How’s it all looking?”

  Ryan jerked awake, and rubbed his face hard to wake up. “Celia. What are you still doing here?”

  Her mouth quirked to one side. “My job.”

  “Yeah, well I hope it’s going better than mine.”

  She gave him a thoughtful look. “Let’s go have a talk.” Assuming his compliance was a given, she started walking away.

  Ryan groaned. His legs had fallen asleep, and his joints were stiff. Standing up hurt. Walking was almost impossible. Somehow, he managed to drag his feet out into the darkened hallway and after Celia.

  The cafeteria was closed, but there were stations with snacks and microwavable foods. Celia took a bowl of “home style chicken soup,” added water, and put it in the microwave. Ryan already knew it would taste like shit, but at the moment, he would have eaten anything, including the bowl it came in.

  They sat down at one of the tables, Ryan fighting to keep his eyes open, and Celia looking way too awake for his comfort. Did the woman not require sleep?

  “So tell me about Marlow house.”

  Ryan sighed. “It’s a sandcastle. Every time I touch something, it disintegrates. I can’t upload new versions fast enough, and it’s all stacked together. I think we should pull the plug.”

  “We’re not pulling the plug.”

  “We have to! It’s not like we can keep this a secret from her forever. She’s gonna find out eventually.”

  Celia was shaking her head. “No, that can’t happen.”

  “You’re seriously going to put your pride over doing the right thing? This is illegal. You do realize that, right?”

  “There’s more at stake here than just pride, Ryan. We can’t tell anyone the Marlow house is on the fritz, especially not the owner. Trust me on this.”

  “Are you listening to yourself? This is jail time. I’m not taking the fall because you—”

  “Then don’t screw it up.”

  “There’s no possible way I can not screw this up! You stuck me on twenty-four seven duty here. How the hell long do you think I can keep it up?”

  “As long as it takes—”

  “I’m a graphics tech, for Chrissake! I shouldn’t be dealing with this crap at all—”

  “You’re smart enough to figure things out as you go along. I have faith—”

  “You want that house to run, you need to get me more techs, and I mean right no—”

  “I can’t get you more techs!” she snapped, and for the first time, her calm facade cracked like superheated crystal.

  Whatever else Ryan had been about to say suddenly didn’t seem important. He’d never seen Celia lose it like this. Not ever.

  She huffed and rubbed her forehead. “I did an audit and cross-check of our houses with Wallace Construction. There were twenty-nine accounts that got royally screwed up. Eleven of them turned out to be DOD contracts.”

  Ryan’s jaw went slack. “Say what, now?”

  “Funny, that’s exactly what I said. I didn’t even know we contracted with the DOD, so I asked above. It turns out they funded our early startup years. The technology was supposed to be used for matters of national security; safe houses, or some such. I didn’t get much detail on that part. Anyway, Hearth didn’t sign an exclusivity clause, so we were allowed to expand into the civilian market—with some adjustments—but apparently, we still have active contracts with the DOD.”

  “Holy shit.”

  Celia nodded. “It gets better. As soon as I brought the screw-up accounts to the board’s attention, they all got flagged. The DOD had to be notified, and everyone’s on high alert. As of this morning, we are under DOD scrutiny, and if we can’t sweep the situation under the rug, they will.”

  Ryan was speechless. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, if word of this gets out, someone might just go for a walk one day and never be heard from again.”

  “That’s not funny.” That someone could be any of the techs here, or even the clients. What better way to shut up a meddlesome lawyer, for example, than to make her disappear?

  Celia pushed to her feet. “No, it sure as hell is not. I’ve got every available brain re-coding security protocols on the DOD accounts, which are a hundred times more complex than Marlow. That means you and the other seventeen techs on civilian accounts are on your own. I’m sorry. I am. But I can’t spare any more resources for you.” She pushed the soup closer toward him and walked out.

  Right, because nothing said comfort food like a bowl full of hot water and artificial ingredients. Oh sure, no problem. Ryan could totally fix a whole entire house on his own without the lawyer who lived there ever finding out. Why not? Piece of cake.

  Ryan tossed the soup in the garbage and shuffled back to his pod. There was a ready-made cot in the corner calling his name, and he intended to answer with a long string of z’s. Maybe by the time he woke up, this would have all turned out to be nothing more than a feverish hallucination produced by his severely overworked brain.

  — Chapter 7 —

  Unfortunately, Ryan’s hopes got dashed to smithereens when he woke up the next morning to Miss Marlow yelling his name. Her house was still a mess, he was still living at the office, and to make matters worse, there were now men in black suits casually strolling the hallways of Hearth Global.

  Up and at ’em. Gotta keep the missus happy, so she doesn’t go filing any pesky lawsuits.

  Day two of hell had officially commenced.

  By day three, Ryan was read
y to kill the bitch.

  By the end of day five, he’d made it through a weekend in the office, hadn’t shaved in so long he looked like a yeti, and the house was almost ready to be set loose. And kill the bitch.

  Well, not really. In the end, rigging the oven to leak gas and the burner to spark after a sufficient amount of time had gone by might have been fun, but it would have ruined everything Hearth Global had worked for. There were thousands of employees all over the world, and one woman’s moody ass was not going to put them out of work.

  Security and environmentals were done up to 100%. More even, since he’d come up with a trick or two that were going to be pushed to all other systems in tomorrow’s scheduled update. The timers and memory functions, which made automated schedules, were finished as if they’d never been messed up to begin with.

  The house essentially worked.

  Except for one little, minor glitch: Ryan couldn’t get the hologram to respond the way he did. While he was at the controls, it moved the way he had envisioned it would, mimicking human gestures and expressions. He controlled it with a joystick like a video game, and had a camera trained on his face to capture the subtle nuances of natural speech. It talked the way he wanted it to, because he was the one responding to Victoria’s questions and commands.

  But as soon as he relinquished control, the hologram turned into a statue and talked like a robot. A female robot, for some reason. It didn’t move a muscle, never showed up facing the speaker as it should, and only spoke when addressed directly by name. He’d been testing and tweaking it in a virtual environment for three days now and had made zero-point no progress.

  Ryan had done his job too well. He’d gone beyond the capabilities of the system in the way he interacted with Victoria. She spoke to him now as a person, made conversation and expected him to answer, even though she still sometimes caught herself and shook her head at the strangeness of it.

  And Ryan, idiot that he was, answered every time. No matter how robotic he made his voice, just the fact that the hologram seemed to hear and understand her made Victoria more comfortable with him. Which was good. Except it wasn’t. Because Ryan could spend the next fifteen years of his life coding the hologram feature, altering the responses and expanding the memory database of previous exchanges, and the thing still wouldn’t act human. Because it wasn’t—and wasn’t meant to be.

  The moment he got the thing up to standards and let it run on its own, Victoria would notice something was wrong, and she would complain, and she’d be told that what she was asking for wasn’t one of the system’s capabilities. The clever girl would put two and two together, figure out that she’d been watched 24-7 all this time, and go nuts.

  There was no graceful way out of the mess he’d created.

  Well, if he was going to hell, he might as well enjoy the ride; push this as far as it could go. Who knew? He might come up with some revolutionary new solution and become a legend.

  Ryan got up to stretch. He no longer had to stay there all the time. Victoria’s schedule was pretty set, so he knew exactly when he had to be available to play a robot and he’d rigged his iPhone to alert him if something came up while he wasn’t at the helm. Celia had even allowed him to hook his home computer up to Central. He couldn’t do everything from there, but he could do enough that staying at Hearth wasn’t necessary.

  He was going home.

  The computer beeped as he got to the door. Through the speakers, Victoria’s front door closed with a soft click. “Honey, I’m home,” she said to herself.

  Shit.

  Ryan dragged his feet back to his seat and maximized the video screen.

  Victoria was leaning against the front door, head tilted back, eyes closed. She looked exhausted. Shoes dangling from their straps in her hand, honey-brown hair mussed, circles under her eyes. But she was home early.

  Ryan checked the logs. No, she wasn’t. She hadn’t even come home last night. He’d been so damned busy with the hologram, he hadn’t even noticed.

  Victoria opened her eyes and frowned. “Ryan?”

  Another thing the hologram shouldn’t have done, but had anyway: appear to greet her when she came home, called by name or not. But now he’d been summoned. Ryan switched on the hologram and took up the joystick. “Welcome home, Victoria,” he said.

  Victoria smiled as if she was glad to see him. “There you are.” She peeled herself away from the door and made her way toward the kitchen. “You wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had.” She stopped next to the hologram, and Ryan turned it to face her. The way she was looking at him made Ryan uneasy. He felt her gaze as if he were really standing there.

  He switched cameras to see her face. Her eyes were soft, so different from the first time he’d seen her. She looked like a woman who needed to be swept up in a giant bear hug by someone who cared. Someone obviously not him.

  “You know, I…I actually missed you,” she said with a chuckle. “Weird.”

  What the hell was he supposed to say to that? The original system would not respond. He couldn’t not. “Shall I order your favorite?” A legitimate question. The system would log her preferences and would know what her favorite takeout food was.

  Victoria groaned. “Not today.” She pulled a bottle from the wine rack and struggled with the cork for a moment. If he’d been there, he would have opened it for her. Already knowing where she would head, Ryan started the library fireplace and raised the temperature there a few degrees. Another thing the system should not know to do independently of a set timetable or motion detection.

  Victoria drank a glass in the kitchen and poured herself another, taking the bottle with her. She set both down in the library and went to change out of her skirt suit. Her back was to the current camera in her bedroom, and even though he should have, Ryan didn’t switch away.

  Victoria stepped out of her skirt, rolled her thigh-highs down her legs, pulled her top off over her head. For the forty seconds it took her to get into her sweat pants and flannel shirt, she was naked except for her baby-blue panties and matching bra. Ryan couldn’t look away. He’d seen her like this before, but for the first time he actually saw her.

  Without conscious thought, his hand reached out to touch the screen.