of a burning building. You couldn’t try too hard, you just had to inhabit it.
Joey messaged.
The woman responded almost immediately.
Lily’s ‘voice’ was calm but somehow edgy.
“I’m not sure,” Joey said. Then,
Joey said.
Joey held her thought. She scanned the room for movement and noise, and finding none, dove back in.
Lily didn’t reply.
Joey said. 21, now that was young to die. Too young she thought.
Joey said.
Lily said,
There was another pause. Speaking this way was halfway between a conversation and an online chat; it wasn’t clear to Joey when she was supposed to stop or start. It seemed possible that her new friend had already lost interest. Still, she was pretty sure she could feel the young woman’s presence and attention, like her eyes were fixed on the back of Joey’s head. If either of them had still had those things.
Joey continued,
Lily said.
Joey transferred the information to her new friend. She felt a sudden rush of relief and cleanliness when the connection was made. It was like clasping hands.
Lily said when the transfer was done.
Joey could feel Lily’s consciousness ebbing away of her own.
Joey stammered.
said Lily. Warmth enveloped Joey as the girl continued speaking.
Joey began to compose a response, but deleted it.
Joey said.
Lily corrected.
12.
At the top of Jeanette’s office building there was a greenhouse and a patio that, on nice days, was packed elbow-to-elbow with smokers. At lunchtime, though, it cleared out and became a great place to while away 30 minutes eating Potbelly and leafing through a paperback or ogling the runners in the gym across the street.
But it was winter, so the patio was bare and harsh. Wind lashed Jeanette’s face where she stood, with her arms pressed against the rail and her phone pressed against her cheek. Across the way, the runners were flush-faced and seeping with sweat. Jeanette exchanged squints with them. Her phone rang for a long time.
“You have reached LifeMedia client services. If you know the extension of your desired party, press 3. If you are experiencing an emergency with BrightBox, PlanetStream, RunPlay, or AdventureScape, please press 7 and dial 911 on another phone. To speak to an operator, please enter your ten-digit account number and four-digit routing number.”
Jeanette pulled the glove off her right hand , revealing a lobster-red fist of cold-bitten fingers that looked about eighty years old. They reminded her of what Joey’s hands must have looked like after the flames devoured them.
Jeanette pressed her phone’s touch screen with a rigid finger that had gone stiff at the joints and stuffed the phone back into the crook of her shoulder. She tried not to picture her sister’s scorched flesh. Pain helped beat back tears. She tried to focus on the stinging cold in her hands.
“Now paging Steven Milton,” the recorded voice said. It was more artificial-sounding than Joey’s voice, Jeanette reflected, though the woman who had recorded it had probably been completely alive.
The phone rang for a few moments. An audio track played: hand bells chiming an inappropriately Christmassy tune. Every few minutes the track cut off and a prerecorded male voice announced, “We value your patronage. If you would like to communicate with an artificial intelligence service representative, hit the pound key. If you are experiencing a power surge, nausea, vertigo, or audiovisual hallucinations, please shut down your LifeMedia product and call 911.”
Jeanette pounded at the patio fence with her fists to coax more blood into them. The lunch period was dwindling away. Before the day was out she had to draw up four more banner ads for a new vitamin/appetite suppressant and copy-edit a brochure for a frightening-looking automated diaper changer. Louis had been chipping away at the projects since before Joey’s accident, but no one had taken the time yet to probe his work for cute, self-conscious misspellings or inappropriate innuendo.
Jeanette chewed her dry lower lip until skin sloughed off and flew away in the wind and sticky blood began to trickle into her mouth. The sting was on the verge of pleasurable, even if the blood tasted coppery and gross. With each new bite the wound grew worse, but beckoned Jeanette’s attention even more. She couldn’t stop.
The hand bells went silent but the recorded message didn’t play. Jeanette knew she was done waiting when she heard a soft click followed by the din of office chatter, muffled by distance and drowned out by the sound of someone’s breath.
“Hello, Steven Milton’s office, how can I help you today?”
“Hi— uh, is this Mister Milton?”
“Sure is, what can I help you with?”
“Um,” Jeanette turned to block the wind from hitting her receiver. “Hi, I emailed you earlier and we met a few weeks ago, my name’s Jeanette-“
“Oh, Miss Porter. Or Miz, I guess. Hi.”
“Hi. Uh, yeah. So anyway like I emailed you about, my sister’s been having these difficulties, she’s been-“
“Hasn’t really been herself, is that right?” His voice was deeper than Jeanette remembered. It was hard to picture the voice coming from such a soft-featured creature as she remembered him being.
“I, yeah. She’s been irritable, disagreeable, gruff…she doesn’t like the things she used to. She didn’t want to leave the house today, which seemed odd to me.”
Milton’s pen clicked. “What was she like before her upload?”
“She was really high-energy, outgoing, passionate..,” Jeanette said. Her sister seemed too big for words to cover. “She was very active. Loved adventure. She loved it too much, obviously; that was kinda the death of her.”
“Oh hey now,” Milton said, “Ma’am— Miss! A lot of what you’re saying is perfectly normal for the transitional phase, which lasts anywhere from a month to four months after upload. Do you remember— let me put it this way— do you remember going to middle school?”
Jeanette laughed and touched her face. “Yeah, she and I both wanted to blow the place up.”
“…Well,