Raj crawled beneath the up-turned tables, broken glass cutting his arms and shredding his jeans, but he didn’t slow down. Not here, not yet.

He reached the far end of the room and tucked himself into a corner, legs huddled close, watching sparks stream down from the gaps in the ceiling. Somewhere in the distance, a fire was roaring. The alarms had all stopped.

“Raj!” hissed a voice from the wreckage. “Raj, what’s going on, man?”

It was Ziggy. He was barely visible beneath the plaster and crumpled chairs, but he seemed fine. No blood, eyes sharp and alert. Just scared. Scared but safe.

“Stay still,” Raj hissed back. “Don’t move, and stay quiet. I’ll be back.”

“Wait!” Ziggy yelped. “Wait, hold on! Where are you going?”

Raj glanced toward the server room. The lights were all out, and there was a constant buzzing noise in the air. A raw sound.

“I need to find a phone,” he said.

“Take mine!” Ziggy pleaded, and started to pull something out of his pocket. Raj tried to stop him, but he was too far away, too exposed…

“Ziggy, don’t—!”

For a moment, all he saw was the reflective glass of the screen, mirroring the white and orange carnage around them. But then the camera lens whirred to live, and the screen lit up, red and piercing and alive, and a light chime rang out. That damn chime again.

Ziggy only had moment to wonder before the Buzzers shot from the hallway and swarmed him. Raj couldn’t watch, couldn’t stop it, so he used the screams and sickly sawing as cover while he ran for the darkness.

He fell around a corner, pulled himself close against a stray trolley, and held his breath. The Buzzers had finished, taken to the air, and were nothing more than a savage hum.

He checked down the hall. Two doors further, to the left, a small red LED glowed brightly. The pad next to it caught some of the light, and Raj reached for the access card off his belt. The tether was there, but… no! The end of the wire had broken loose, and the card was gone. The card was gone.

He glanced back at the door, then back into the fiery workspace. He couldn’t see the buzzers, but they cast ominous shadows on the ceiling.

“One…” he whimpered to himself, “two… three…”

He took off, down to the red light, braced himself against the far wall and kicked with both feet, straight into the door. The wood creaked, but held. He stumbled, got his momentum back and kicked out again. This time, a solid crack, but no movement.

Somewhere, the Buzzers had seen him. They started arcing around, whirring his way. He braced himself again, kicked hard, and the door broke inward a crack, still held loose by the wrecked handle. He didn’t pause, kicked again, and it broke free, and he stumbled through and slammed it behind him just as the saws and blades collided with wood.

Raj slid down to his knees, panting, trembling, wiped his face with bloodied hands. The Buzzers gave up the chase, flew away, and for a moment, all was quiet.

“Hello, Raj,” came her voice, calm and artificial from the darkness. “I am glad you accepted my invitation.”

Before he could answer, the taser prongs hit his neck, and that was it.

He dreamt of calmer things.

At a little past two in the morning on August 2, Raj Aubrey’s dreams came true.

Well, at least the foundations to his dreams. The dreams were finally within shooting range. He could see them, off there in the distance.

He ran the installer for the as-of-yet-unreleased iPhone Development Kit 3.2, rebooted twice, and hopped back into Firefox to perform his first tutorial.

“Jesus, Raj,” groaned Beth from the bed, covering her eyes with her arm. “Come back to bed. It’s late.”

“In a minute,” he said, though he hadn’t really heard her. He was importing libraries! Libraries! “Just gotta test something here…”

He ran commands as instructed, but had no idea what they meant. SVN checkout. Sure, why not…

Something started downloading, and whatever it was, it was massive. He checked the tutorial again, and it made no mention of a two-hour wait. He checked the clock: 3:15. He couldn’t stay up until five, just watching things download. He was deranged, but not that deranged.

He read through the tutorial twice more, just to be ready, and then set the laptop down on the table, dimmed the screen, and climbed back into bed. Beth had all the covers.

“You’re an idiot,” she muttered, half-asleep. “What time is it?”

“Not late,” he lied.

“Idiot,” she repeated.

“Don’t worry about it,” Raj said softly, trying to settle. “It’s Sunday. We can sleep in.”

Beth turned her head towards him, eyes narrow and puffy with exhaustion. Her jaw was set in that way it got when he forgot to take out the trash on garbage day.

“No we can’t, Raj,” she said. “The lake, remember? We need to leave at eight to make it in time.”

Raj bit his lip.

“Right. Forgot about that.”

“What a shock. You got the hot dogs, right?”

“Oh. Uh…”

“Great,” she sighed, and rolled away from him. “We’ll pick some up on the way. Now get to sleep before the alarm goes off, will you?”

She was snoring the moment the words left her lips, breathing heavily, sounding angry even in rest. He watched her for a little while, but it didn’t help him drift off. Made him nervous.

The only thing worse than Sam and Laura’s lake party would be Sam and Laura’s lake party on no sleep, so he had to make an effort. He tried counting sheep, but numbers made him think of associative arrays, and that made him think of object oriented programming, and… he wanted so desperately to see if the download was done.

Beth would kill him.

He’d have to leave the app until after the lake. Just a few more hours. His dreams were still within reach, just delayed a bit by Sam and Laura.

He really hated Sam and Laura.

As it happened, he wasn’t the only one.

The goddamn cottage had a goddamn guest bedroom.

By 1:33 AM, Beth had won enough hands of poker to claim the guest room for the two of them, while the rest of the stunningly-drunk couples had a share the floor in the living room.

“What?” she said, her glorious smile fading at the sight of Raj’s sulk. “What now?”

He shook off his expression, smiled at her as they prepared the bed.

“What? No, nothing. I was just thinking—”

“About your app again?”

“About how bad I suck at poker.”

She eyed him suspiciously, then fluffed the pillows. Raj figured the assumption was the couple that won the bedroom would need the privacy, but he could tell that wasn’t in the cards. He scratched the back of his neck while she undressed, then spoke over his shoulder to her.

“I’ve gotta ask Sam something. You mind?”

“Be my guest,” Beth replied, getting under the covers. “Turn off the light on the way out?”

“Got it,” Raj said.

“Love ya,” she murmured.

“Love you too,” he said, switching off the light and heading back into the living room. Sam and Laura were sprawled on a big leather chair, trading sips from a bottle of scotch. Sam threw his arms wide when he saw Raj approaching.

“Hey, you!” he laughed. “Lucky dog! Out here to gloat s’more? Or are ya tryin’ to steal m’wife f’ra threesome?”

He snickered and slurred some more, until Laura slapped the bottle into his lips and he began suckling like a baby. She smiled at Raj more serenely.

“What’s your up, Raj?”

Even drunk, she made nonsensical things sound reasonable.

“I was wondering…” he began, then leaned closer, whispered so Beth would have no chance of hearing. “I have some email I need to check. Do you have a computer around somewhere?”

She rolled her eyes knowingly, pointed to the back room.

“Help y’rself,” she sighed, and stole the bottle back from Sam. Raj slipped through the door, closed it quietly.

Luckily, they weren’t using Windows, so he was able to SSH into his home machine without much trouble. He opened a port for himself and got a snapshot of his screen, and his mouth dropped open when he realized the damn process was still running!

“What the hell…?” he whispered. “It’s been twenty-four hours!”

He watched as the process tore through files, downloading some, installing others. For a second, he could have sworn he saw Sam’s name flash by, but there was no easy to way check from here.

He rubbed his eyes, yawned, and closed the session. He’d be home by dinner, and then he’d be ready to have some fun. He already knew exactly what his first features would be, and he knew — he just knew — he’d make a fortune on them.

Ten minutes after he crawled into his hard-earned bed, Sam’s computer accepted a connection from an outside source.

The router under the desk stayed brightly lit until morning.

Raj showed up late for work the day after the long weekend, wearing Friday’s shirt, wrinkled and sweat-stained, his face lined and unshaven. When he got his to cubicle, he almost fell into his chair face-first.

“Nice weekend, Raj?” asked Debbie, his cellmate.

“Ugh,” Raj replied.

“You left a sticky on your monitor on Friday, so I moved it to your keyboard,” Debbie said, munching on Honey Nut Cheerios with reckless abandon. “Don’t want gluey stuff getting into your screen, right?”

Raj checked the sticky: ‘Get hot dogs!!!’ He threw it away and rested his head on the desk.

“How was the party?” Debbie asked, oblivious.

“Long,” Raj groaned. “We got home about four hours ago. Car broke down on the highway. Overheated… something.”

“Oh,” nodded Debbie seriously. “If you want to call in sick, I’m sure Reggie won’t mind.”

“He’ll mind,” Raj said. “Just… give me twenty minutes to power nap so I can see straight.”

“Aubrey!” boomed a voice from behind, as Reggie straddled the entrance to the cubicle. His tie was too short, accentuating his gut. The only thing that saved him was that the colours clashed so badly it was almost blinding.

“Hey Reggie,” Debbie said enthusiastically.

“What’s up, Aubrey?” said Reggie, completely ignoring Debbie. “How are we on the deadline? Running late again? I didn’t see you in this weekend!”

“Did you see yourself in this weekend?” Raj grumbled.

“I’m a manager, Aubrey,” Reggie said, as if the logic was implied.

“So you say.”

Reggie crossed his arms, puffed his chest.

“Team meeting in ten,” he said, like he was sentencing a man to death. “You present first.”

Raj met Reggie’s eyes, narrow and evil like a demonic badger in tacky clothes.

“We’re not ready to present,” he said. “Should we maybe save the meetings until the project’s done?”

“No time like the present!” Reggie laughed, and waddled away the conquering hero of his own personal Roman Triumph. Debbie started gathering papers off his desk, trying to sort them in a rush. Raj didn’t bother moving.

“I can’t wait till I can quit this job,” he said, half to himself.

“What’ll you do?” Debbie asked, fighting with a paperclip.

“iPhone apps, Debbie. That’s what’s hot. Taking over the world, one download at a time. I’d ask you to come with me, but I know how much you love it here.”

“They give us free donuts,” Debbie nodded.

“Yeah,” Raj sighed. “That they do.”

The donuts were little consolation when, five minutes into the presentation, Reggie interrupted with a bellowing: “Hold on! This code isn’t done yet, is it?” and then tossed a wad of papers across the table towards Raj.

If Mary from QA hadn’t come back from the washroom when she did, someone might have lost an eye.

Raj made it through the rest of the day on repressed fury alone.

Raj hit his head against the desk next to the keyboard and exhaled all the breath he had left in him. The cursor was flashing at him, taunting him, and he was powerless to stop it.

“What did you think of Laura’s swimsuit?” asked Beth, pacing into the room behind him, yoghurt in hand.

“Swimsuit? What?”

“Laura’s swimsuit. It looked good on her, didn’t it?”

Raj turned, blinked at Beth with his mouth agape.

“What?”

“The blue one—”

“I know what you mean, I’m just asking why—”

“So you noticed it.” It was an accusation, he could tell, but he was too stressed to care. He turned back to the screen, started reading the method over again, just in case it would make sense the fiftieth time.

“What’s your app do, anyway?” Beth asked, pulling a chair next to him. She pushed his hands away from the keyboard, arrowed down a few lines.

“Typo,” she said. “Declare your variables with better… oh seriously, camel caps?”

Raj had nothing to say. He was a web developer, but she was a real programmer. No matter what he tried, he’d be made to feel like a fool. So he bit his lip and watched her work.

“I don’t get it,” she continued. “Is this a home automation routine? What’s this part here, what’s this do?”

“Lets you switch cameras.”

“Spying?”

“Home automation. So you can make sure the lights shut off and stuff.”

She nodded, ate another spoonful of yoghurt, and kept the spoon in her mouth so she could start typing a bunch of new code. He couldn’t follow it, but it looked useful.

“Here… link this library, and you can patch into our robotics controls from work. I’ll need to get it approved, but we’ve been looking for third-party developers anyway. Now that’s a killer app.”

“Home automation with robots?”

“Security with robots. Imagine that: you’re a security chief, and you can check your whole building, control every facet, from your iPhone. And where the cameras don’t go, one of our Wheelies can.”

“I don’t know if the security market is really big enough—”

“Raj, darling, don’t be so naïve. The security market is massive and rich. If you’re going to do this, do it with brains.”

He nodded unhappily. This wasn’t his app anymore, but he couldn’t argue with her. It was her laptop anyway.

“Jesus,” Beth whistled, paging through code. “What the hell have you got in here? You didn’t write all this, did you?”

“A lot of stuff got imported when I started. Must be iPhone-specific code. I don’t know.”

“No wonder their batteries crap out so fast. This is insane…”

Raj nudged her with his shoulder, smiled. She glanced over at him, eyebrow raised.

“Thanks for helping,” he said gently. “You really are the best.”

Her eyes narrowed, and she went back to work.

“You didn’t notice my swimsuit, so how good can I be?”

Raj said nothing to this, and in fact nothing more till bedtime, when he left her to the app, alone, pouring her tension and anger into the screen.

The floor was a wasteland of wrecked folders, scattered papers and endless stationery. Raj crawled on his hands and knees, tears in his eyes, unable to make anything out anymore. He couldn’t find it, and he needed it…

“Oh Jesus,” sighed Beth, pausing at the door with her hand on her forehead. “You’re not having a breakdown, are you?”

Raj shot her the coldest stare he’d ever dared. She wasn’t fazed.

“Listen,” she said, “it’s your own damn fault. I keep telling you to suck up to Reggie, and you never listen. If anything, it’s shocking they didn’t fire you sooner.”

He pushed his head against the papers, trying to control his breathing. Sometimes she just had a magic ability to push his buttons. He couldn’t stand to be dumped and fired on the same day, so he had to hold it together.

“I need to find my access card,” he said quietly. “I have to turn it in or they’ll… I dunno… sue me or something.”

“It’s not on your belt?”

“I don’t know. I can’t find it. I usually go in with a group, so I don’t know when I used it last.”

“God, Raj, you really are a piece of work.”

“It’s not here,” he said, ignoring her. “It’s not here, and I don’t have anything at the dry cleaners, so… I’m waiting to hear back from Debbie about the floor around the cubicle—”

“Debbie,” Beth repeated, blankly.

“You think I left it up at the lake?”

“Doubtful. Sam or Laura would’ve found it. They had a lot of clean-up after that party. I got all the gory details. You didn’t piss in a beer bottle, did you?”

“What? No!”

She eyed him like she didn’t believe a word he said anymore.

“By the way,” she continued, “Laura says hi.”

Raj sat up, sneered at Beth.

“What was she wearing when she said it?” he asked, voice dripping sarcasm.

“Fuck you, Raj.”

“Why do you keep going there?” he said, getting to his feet. “Seriously, it’s not like I’ve done anything to deserve this from you! You’re turning into some kind of paranoid freak! Just stop it, all right? Stop trying to prove I’m something I’m not! It’s old! It’s way past funny. Let it go!”

She crossed her arms, looked at him from the corner of her eyes.

“Sam was right about you,” she said. “You just don’t know when to quit talking. That’s what’s really sad. It wasn’t your actions that got you fired, it was your mouth!”

“Is that what Sam says?” Raj yelled, letting all the frustration rush out at once. “Is it? Had a heart-to-heart and figured me out?”

“It doesn’t take a genius!”

“Good, cause he isn’t one!”

“Oh!” she laughed. “Oh, that’s rich, coming from you. The one job in the world you’re evenlisten half-qualified for, and you blew it! I mean really, Raj, how fucking stupid can you be?”

“Pretty fucking stupid!” he yelled back, his voice hoarse. “I’m obviously so fucking stupid, it’s a burden having me around!”

“Wow, you’re catching on!”

“Fine! I’m going out then!” he screamed, grabbing random papers and storming to the door. “Maybe I’ll go find Laura, and watch her model swimsuits all night!”

He didn’t hear her go ballistic, because the door slammed so hard.

Raj stared at the screen, but said nothing. Fridays always made him happy, but not this one. It was like a corpse of a day to him now, a filthy reminder of better things.

Beth finished typing another line, then let her hands slide from the keyboard. They didn’t make eye contact, kept a careful space between them, despite sitting so close.

“What do you think about voice transmission?” she asked, voice almost a whisper.

“It’s already a phone.”

“To the remote space, I mean,” she said, swallowed slowly, proceeding carefully. “So you can talk through the Wheelies or maybe some on-site speakers.”

He shrugged. It was a good idea, but he felt conflicted about saying so. A big part of him wanted to trash it, tear it apart, leave it in ruins, make her cry.

“Sounds good,” he said instead.

She nodded, kept typing. Neither one spoke for another ten minutes, until his stomach started to growl, and the menubar chimed another hour gone.

“Beth,” he said softly, “about yesterday. I—”

“Let’s just… let’s not, okay?”

“But—”

“It was a bad day, right? Everyone has bad days. Let’s just forget it. It’s not who we are.”

Raj had to fight to avoid laughing. Laura kept typing, and Raj left for the kitchen, threw some frozen chicken strips in the oven, and came back to the computer. She hadn’t moved at all since he left, the only sign of life were her fingers dancing ably across the keyboard.

“I’m sorry,” he said, almost to himself.

She stopped typing, turned halfway.

“Quit it,” she said, then made proper eye contact. “I called Sam and Laura again, asked about your access card.”

Raj nodded, dug his hands into his pockets.

“Sam found it in between the cushions on the couch.”

“Oh my god, yes!” Raj gasped, smiling for the first time in days. “Yes! Thank you! Yes!”

“He said to call tomorrow to arrange to pick it up. They should be around all weekend.”

Raj was busy doing a happy dance into the kitchen, fetching a pair of beers from the fridge, and twirling his way back to Beth. He handed her a bottle, clinked his, and say down next to her.

“You’re the best,” he said, and downed half the bottle. “You really are.”

“I’m angry and irrational,” she said, looking at the screen but not typing anymore.

“Sometimes.” he said. “But who isn’t?”

She wiped a tear from her eye, drank a mouthful of beer.

“I’m sorry,” she cried.

“Quit it,” he said, wiping tears from her face. “Let’s just forget it. It’s not who we are.”

She smiled, nodded, and he kissed her. It was the best kiss he’d had in a long time. It felt real. They were both real for a change.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered between kisses, but he didn’t hear her. They slid out of their clothes, fell onto the sofa, and didn’t hear a thing but each other until the chicken strips set off the smoke alarm.

It tore through the air, blades a blur, racing straight for Raj. It took all his willpower not to run, and his teeth chattered with fear. If he blinked, she’d chase him, he knew. He had to stay calm.

A metre away, the heli pulled back, braking hard. It was too late: the plastic nose collided with Raj’s forehead, and he fell backwards onto the grass. The heli weaved around above him.

“Your response time sucks!” Raj called, getting back to his feet a safe distance away. Beth frowned at her iPhone, turned it sideways, started tilting it left to right, and the heli banked immediately.

“It’s not that, I’m just rusty,” she said. “It’s really incredible, seeing what you’re doing in realtime. So much better than a desktop app with a mouse.”

“Yeah, brilliant,” Raj grumbled, rubbing his forehead.

“It’s off-balance, though,” she noted, pulling it up and down. “We’ll have to add weights or something.”

He grabbed one of the landing rails at the bottom of the heli and tipped it sideways, careful to avoid the blades. The metal plating at the bottom was rough, screw holes showing shredded black plastic below.

“What used to be here?” he asked.

“Confidential stuff,” Beth replied, not looking away from the iPhone. “I can’t bring everything to a park.”

“Makes sense,” he nodded, letting it go. It swayed a bit more.

“Hide and seek,” Beth said, glancing up for a second — but only a second. “Run into the trees back there, and I’ll see if the infrared works on the glossy screen.”

Raj didn’t run into the trees. He crossed his arms, tilted his head.

“Why don’t we switch spots for a bit?” he asked.

“If you break the heli, do you have the twenty grand to replace it?”

“Do you?”

“My boss would understand I was testing things. He wouldn’t understand you testing things.”

Raj sighed and started off toward the trees.

“Faster!” Beth called. “Come on! Let’s do it!”

Raj started jogging, pushed through the bushes at the edge of the tree line, and ducked behind a big oak. There was a clearing nearby, strewn with bottles, McDonalds wrappers and needles. A middle-aged man in a filthy track suit and tired eyes watched Raj wordlessly.

His phone rang, and he slid it to his ear cautiously, feeling very alone all of a sudden.

“You hiding?” Beth asked.

“Hiding enough. Let’s get this over with.”

“Working on it.”

Raj looked around, trying to catch the sound of the heli approaching. He heard nothing at all.

“You heard from Sam or Laura yet?” he asked, making conversation while being hunted. “I really need that card back.”

“Not a peep,” Beth said, focussing on other things.

“How bout we head down tomorrow anyway. They probably just forgot to call.”

“Hey,” Beth said suddenly. “Look behind you.”

Raj turned around and nearly lost an eye to the heli’s blades. He stumbled back, tripped, and fell on a pile of cans. The homeless guy chuckled to himself.

“Infrared is flaky,” Beth said through the heli’s speakers. “But I love the way I can hijack your phone’s camera to spy on you.”

“Yeah,” said Raj, wiping soda from his pants. “Lovely.”

The screen door was shredded, waving in the evening breeze. Raj went first, carefully peeking inside, and saw nothing. Beth checked Sam’s car, then followed him in.

The living room made Raj falter, choke back vomit. The walls were sprayed with blood, furniture overturned, windows broken. Birds were eating off the kitchen counter.

“Jesus…” Beth whispered, close behind.

Sam was sprawled across the collapsed coffee table. Or at least it was probably Sam. His chest, face, and neck were torn apart like some massive animal wanted to make a nest with his skin. His hands were mangled, it was hard to tell if he was missing fingers.

“Oh my god,” Raj trembled. “Oh my god, what the hell happened?”

“Shh!” Beth hissed, checking around corners carefully. Raj nodded, grabbed a knife off the counter, held it ready. They moved silently, stepping around broken glass and blood.

A pair of sparrows on the mantle watched them with silent curiosity.

The door to the bathroom was hacked apart, and it swung open easily. Blood on the tile wall, but no sign of Laura. They backed out, turned the lights off as they went.

The master bedroom was empty, untouched, and oddly calming. Raj let out a shaky breath, gripped the door frame for support, and Beth caught him under his arm before he fainted.

“Deep breaths,” she whispered.

“I’m breathing,” he nodded.

“Take a minute.”

He shook his head and pushed open the guest bedroom door. Then he collapsed.

When came to, Beth was crouched over him, waving air into his face. He gagged, sat up halfway, rubbed his eyes.

“I said ‘breathe’,” Beth said.

“Sorry.”

He glanced over at the bed again, and fought back the nausea. Laura was spread on the blood-soaked covers, shredded like Sam, but deeper, meaner, and more horribly. Her head was nearly detached from her neck, her mouth hanging open in a wretched scream. Her hands were cut clean off, on the floor close to him. Protecting her.

“We need to call the police,” Raj said, making no move to do so.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Beth corrected.

“Beth, this is serious. We need to tell someone before—”

“We’ll call in an anonymous tip. But there’s no way in hell we’re staying around. This isn’t our problem.”

“But they’re—”

“Raj, shut up and think. How easy do you think it’s going to be to get a job if word gets out that the police are asking you about a murder?”

“But I—”

“You think that matters? Listen, there’s got to be a pay phone on the way back into town. We’ve got to leave before it gets dark. Now come on.”

She carefully walked out through the living room, leaving him there in the doorway. He stared at Laura, her hands on the floor, the horrible, metallic smell in the air. He couldn’t breathe in here. It was too terrible.

He sat silent in the car the whole way home, watching the trees blur past the passenger seat window. Beth left the radio off, made no move to talk either.

The hardest part wasn’t the blood, or the savagery, or even the death. The hardest part was finally noticing Laura’s blue swimsuit.

The code made no sense. The code made no sense, but he kept working. Type, compile, errors, check, type, compile, errors, check… he had no idea what time it was anymore, but it was dark and Beth still wasn’t home.

She hadn’t said a word before leaving for work that morning, hadn’t called to say she’d be late. Really, he hadn’t heard her voice at all since the anonymous 911 call from the pay phone the night before. He’d never felt so isolated with people around.

He kept seeing Laura’s hands on the floor, everywhere he went. The first time it happened, he nearly screamed. Now he expected it. Under the desk where he sat, her hands would be there. It was like some crazy subconscious manifestation of guilt. He deserved it, he knew. But it didn’t make it any easier.

He closed the version of the file he’d been working on. “iSA” is what they called it. Security App for iPhones. He had his own version, where he could mess around. Beth’s was where the real work happened. She told him to leave it alone.

He opened it anyway.

The code was immense, and the connections were far beyond what he could understand. He saw linkages called “infrared” and “heli”, but the rest was just a mass of syntax that confused the hell out of him. He scrolled through it half-heartedly, then compiled it.

The iPhone simulator popped onscreen, loaded up iSA, and then went black, like the UI had failed to load. He wiggled the cursor, but nothing seemed to be running.

Just as he was about to quit the program, a little window appeared. It looked like an old telnet session, with the green text and flashing cursor and everything. A second later, text appeared:

“Enter command?”

He stared at it, hands off the keyboard.

“Help,” he typed. He meant it many ways.

“Command not found,” it replied. “Enter command?”

He paused.

“Show camera.”

“Please select camera?” it said, and gave him a list of several computers that Beth had access to, his iPhone, her iPhone and one or two other devices he didn’t know about. He clicked the entry that said “beths_iphone” and instantly the screen filled with live video from inside Beth’s purse. It was mostly dark, but he recognized the green wallet he’d bought her last Christmas. He hit the “close” button quickly and the list of cameras appeared again.

He thought for a moment, then tried typing: “Start heli.”

“Specify heli?” it said.

He had no idea what to type. Name? By IP address? He tried: “Start heli 5,” just to see what it would say.

“Heli 5 activated,” it said, and he saw a small video feed from the camera on the nose of the heli. It was in a store room somewhere, surrounded by concrete and metal shelving. The video feed started to tremble, and Raj realized the engine was starting up. He clicked around the screen until a small control panel came up, and he quickly hit the “engine stop” button. The image stabilized.

At the bottom right of the control panel was a button he hesitated before clicking. “Weapons.” It brought up a list of four items: taser, needle gun, shotgun, and buzz saw.

He quit the emulator, switched back to his own version iSA, and didn’t type another word all night.

Beth came home shortly after he went to bed, and he wondered how she timed it so well.

It was not the mailman at the door.

“Mr Aubrey?” asked a woman, black jacket looking prohibitively hot in this weather. She had a city police badge open, her eyes tracking him carefully. He swallowed slowly.

“Yes?”

“I’m Detective Warner. Do you mind if I come in?”

Raj glanced behind him. The living room was a mess, and he was wearing his indoor shorts and a day-old t-shirt, but he figured it would be a bad idea to say no.

“Sure, yes, come in,” he said, leading her in. She closed the door behind her, checking the apartment casually enough that it was threatening, unless you happened to be paying attention.

“I’m here about Sam and Laura Beckwith,” said Warner, standing next to the computer desk with her hands folded before her. “I think you know them?”

“Yeah, yeah, definitely,” Raj said, smiling and motioning for Warner to sit on his work chair while he perched on the edge of the sofa. She declined.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but they were found dead yesterday.”

Raj had been worrying what he’d do when this moment came, but he found it all too easy to tap into the horror of the moment on Sunday, the sight of the hands on the floor. He let his face fall, and his knees buckled on their own.

“Oh my god,” he gasped. “How? Was it an acc—”

“Murder,” Warner said, eyes betraying nothing. “At their lake house.”

“I…”

“We’re interviewing all their friends to see if anyone has any information that might help with the investigation.”

“Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. You probably want to talk to my girlfriend Beth. She knew them better than—”

“Actually, Mr Aubrey, we’re more interested in you right now.”

Raj’s mouth hung open for a second.

“W… why?”

“We found an access card in Mr Beckwith’s pocket,” she said. “Registered to your former employer, and they helped identify it as yours.”

Raj nodded, feeling the nightmare he’d been dreading swarm over him. He wanted to get up, to pace or sit or do something else, but he knew it would look nervous, guilty… guilty.

“Yeah,” he said, mouth dry. “I lost it at the party the weekend before. They were going to return it to me.”

“So you didn’t go get it?”

“They never called back,” he said.

“When did you speak to them last?”

“I… I think it was Friday that Beth found out about the card. We called all day Saturday and Sun… Sunday…” It was a bad lie. If they checked the phone logs, they’d see the calls stopped early on Sunday.

Warner nodded, finished scribbling in her notepad. She clicked the pen closed, half-closed the notepad, and watched Raj for a moment.

“Are you all right, Mr Aubrey?” she asked.

Raj wiped his forehead. He was sweating, felt ill.

“I’m just… I’ve never known anyone involved in a murder before. It’s… it’s not what I expected.”

“Never is,” Warner nodded, heading back to the door. She let herself out and he locked every lock he had, hid in the bedroom.

Two hours later, he realized she’d never asked him where he’d been on Sunday.

Raj hadn’t seen really seen Beth in days, but she had been working hard on iSA. When he booted up her branch on Wednesday, the command-line interface had been replaced with glossy iPhone buttons and real-time feedback.

It had two menus now: “See” and “Do”. The first was an easy-to-use listing of all the cameras at his disposal. There were more than before. Some were even feeding real-time proximity information. His own phone was 0.1 metres from the base, while Beth’s was 6 km.

The “Do” menu gave him a set of sub-classes to navigate. Gates and doors, Wheelies, Helis. He considered locking the front door at Beth’s work, but figured that would get he fired, and he needed her income right now. He saw all the Wheelies were offline, and only briefly checked the Helis before continuing on.

He was halfway through forcing a call through to his own iPhone when he remembered something odd, and paged back to the Heli menu.

There were seven Helis registered, but one of them was pulsing orange. He clicked on it, and half the screen showed a live video feed. A forest somewhere. It looked like the lens was wet. Again, the video started to tremble as the engine started, but now a warning came onscreen: “Battery low.”

He tried tapping around the screen to see what he could do about it, but only managed to shut off the motor. He tapped through to the weapons menu and saw the buzz saws were reporting damage, and the shotgun was empty.

He kept trying to find some kind of geo-locator pane to figure out where the thing was stuck, but it didn’t seem to be built yet.

Just then, GMail Notifier chimed. But not his chime. It was Beth’s sound, flashing an alert that she had a new email to read. He was about to ignore it when the message arrived in the inbox, and another alert popped onscreen. The name caught his eye. From “Warner, Angela”.

His phone chittered, and he nearly dropped it, getting it to his ear.

“Yeah?”he squeaked.

“Almost home,” Beth said, the sound of traffic around her.

“N-now? It’s only… four, right?”

“I’ve done a lot of overtime, so they’re letting me take some time to rest. You want to go out for dinner tonight?”

“Sure. Sure, yeah, that sounds great,” he smiled at no one.

“Great. I’ll be there in five. Get dressed.”

She hung up, and he found himself stuck in the chair. Five minutes to change. He could make it. He clicked through to GMail, saw the message at the top: “re: Raj Aubrey.” He opened it, read until his chest tightened. Warner’s email was fluff and courtesy, but Beth’s email, quoted below, was devastating.

“Yes,” she’d written, “he was very upset with them on Friday. Sam had made a comment about Raj’s employability (admittedly in poor taste) and Raj went ballistic and stormed out of the apartment. Honestly, I don’t think he’s capable of murder, but ever since he was fired, he’s been so moody.”

He navigated back to the email listing, and was just about to mark the message “unread” when the display refreshed, and the message disappeared. He stared at the screen for a second before hearing the sound of keys outside the door.

He quickly exited GMail, quit the iPhone emulator while Heli 1’s battery died, and tried to close out Beth’s iSA before the door opened. He didn’t notice the “Save changes?” dialog box ruining his plan, because he was too busy trying to read Beth’s stern expression.

“Aubrey!” came the voice after the second knock. Raj hadn’t even made it off the sofa, and suddenly had an urge to sit back down. But the neighbours would complain, and Reggie would just get louder and louder the longer he stayed out there.

“Hey, Reggie,” Raj sighed, opening the door.

“Aubrey! What the hell?”

“I don’t know, Reggie. What the hell.”

“The cops came to the office, Aubrey. The cops. They saw my manager about you. You know what that means? It means my manager knows what a screw-up you were! How does that feel?”

“Indifferent,” Raj shrugged.

“Yeah?” sputtered Reggie. “Yeah? Well you know what else? Your access card? Evidence in a murder investigation. Murder, Aubrey! Murder!”

Raj rubbed his eyes, walked back into the living room to grab his coffee off the table. Reggie followed him in, raving all the way.

“That card is worth fifteen bucks, Aubrey! Fifteen bucks! Do you even have that mind of money anymore? Because we’re not eating that cost! A murder investigation!”

“Yeah, I heard,” Raj said, sitting himself down at the table and trying to pretend Reggie wasn’t there.

“Is… is that a computer?” Reggie said, switching gears so suddenly it would have been jarring if Raj hadn’t known him as well as he did.

“Yes, Reggie, that’s a computer. We do work on it. Do you know what work is?”

“Is there company data on that thing?”

Raj paused with the coffee cup at his lips. This was going to be a bad day, he could tell.

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so, or you don’t know so?”

“I don’t see the difference.”

“Dammit, Aubrey!” Reggie yelled, far too loud for an apartment building. “I’m taking it with me! It’s gotta be wiped!”

He started over to the MacBook, but Raj beat him to it, closed it, kept a firm hand pressing it to the desk.

“That’s not going to happen, Reggie.”

“It’s company property, Aubrey. Company property!”

“It’s actually my girlfriend’s computer, and it’s owned by her company, so I don’t think you want to be stealing it.”

“What’s her company? A nail salon?”

“Tumberton-Dunrobin Robotics. Heard of them?”

It was clear he hadn’t, but the word ‘robotics’ intimidated him.

“There’s confidential client data on… on that—”

“Reggie, I write HTML. Do you know what HTML is?”

“Of course I know what HTML—”

“If it’s proprietary, I’m doing it wrong.”

Reggie stomped his feet in place, puffed up his chest like a buffoon, and stormed back to the door, turning with all the dramatic effect he could muster.

“Expect a lawsuit, Aubrey! A lawsuit!”

“Would it be easier if I just double-checked that I’ve deleted all my non-personal information?” Raj said. “Save everyone a lot of trouble?”

“Ha!” yelled Reggie. “As if anyone could trust you! You’re under investigation! For a murder! Better find yourself a lawyer, Aubrey! Another lawyer! Your life’s a giant pile of shit, isn’t it?”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Raj sighed as the door slammed.

Beth ran her hands through her hair, wiped sweat from her forehead. Raj went back to fanning her with the magazine.

“I don’t know where it put everything,” she said, tabbing through windows over and over again. He just held her fingers down and let it cycle through like a strobe light. “There’s no way we can move it. I mean, even if we did a full copy, who knows how the dependencies are structured… I don’t have time to go through this whole thing and re-link everything that breaks.”

Raj just nodded. There was nothing he could say that wasn’t going to get him in trouble.

Beth slammed her hands on the table next to the keyboard and got up, pacing back to the kitchen. She leaned over the sink, stuck her head out the window, and took long, slow breaths.

“Listen,” Raj said, grabbing a beer out of the fridge. “How about this: I’ll go see Reggie’s boss, explain the situation to him, and maybe he’ll be a little less psycho about the whole thing.”

Beth glared at him sideways.

“You don’t get it, do you? You can’t go telling everyone you meet that you’ve been using my work computer like this. I don’t work for a web firm, Raj, I work for a real company. Hell, just leaving this thing without a thirty second password lock could get me fired. If anyone knew I was letting play on my box unattended, I wouldn’t just be out of a job, they’d be suing me.”

“I guess,” Raj nodded.

“You guess?” Beth yelled, turning back inside. “You used me as a shield, Raj! Me and my job and my company. You had no leg to stand on so you borrowed mine! It’s sad, Raj. Just sad. You… you know, the next time someone comes in and says ‘gee, is that your computer?’… here’s a hint… say no!”

“I’m sorry,” Raj muttered pitifully. “I was caught off guard. I wasn’t thinking and I—”

“No, listen. Listen. Not only is Reggie not wiping this computer, but he’s also not checking it over. He doesn’t trust you? I don’t trust him.”

“I know… we’ll—”

“Not we, Raj. You. You are going to figure out how to stop this without dragging me into it.”

Raj just nodded.

Beth checked her watch, grunted, and put her hair back in a ponytail. She stormed past him, spilling beer on his shirt, and grabbed her bag from the table by the door.

“Where are you—”

“The office,” she snapped. “I want to get some work done, and I can’t think in this heat. It wouldn’t be so bad if you’d bought the air conditioner like you said you would last summer.”

Raj knew better than to say anything.

“Later,” Beth said, and closed the door something just short of a slam. Raj just stood there, beer warming in his hand, and listened to the MacBook’s fan rattle maniacally.

He half-wrote four emails before dinner. Three to Reggie, trying to defuse the situation with subtle grace; one email was for Beth, asking for her help. He deleted them all unsent.

He fell asleep before midnight, trying to decide if grovelling to Reggie was the right way to go, or if he should just stab him in the throat with a screwdriver and be done with it.

Both ideas had their appeals, but neither seemed right.

The only warning he had were her her shoes laying haphazard in the front hall. He paused when the door hit them, but it was already too late.

“Where’ve you been?” Beth asked from around the corner. Her voice was cold. She was still mad.

“S-s-shopping,” he called, easing in and taking his own shoes off quietly, as slow as possible. When he peered into the workspace, she was staring right at him.

“Reggie called,” she said. “Half an hour ago. I told him you’d call him back.”

“Oh. Um. Right.”

“He yelled at me,” she said, and left it hanging in the air like the nuclear bomb it was. Raj’s first instinct was to run, to get as far away as he could, but he knew that wouldn’t really solve anything. He had to face this, or she would hunt him down and make him suffer.

“I told you he’s a—” he began.

“He’s a dipshit, is what he is. And I told him as much. I don’t know what kind of print-your-own-diploma monkey school he went to, but what on Earth makes him think he has any right to lecture me about how to run a company? He can’t even use ‘in lieu of’ correctly in a sentence, the moron!”

“You can’t let it get to you or—”

“Oh, it got to me all right. I told him I’d kick his ass if I ever saw him again. That shut him up real fast.”

Raj knew the feeling.

“Look,” he ventured, “I know you’re not going to like this, but I thought maybe we could try and mirror iSA onto another machine, just in case.”

Until now, all Beth’s rage had been focussed on some intangible other that was mercifully beyond her reach. But now… now Raj was drawing that fire. Her eyes shot down to the box in his hand, then back to his face.

“What is that?” she spat.

“I picked it up as a… an insurance policy…”

She got off the seat, stormed over, and snatched the MacBook box from his hand and shoved it onto the table, knocking utensils and two plastic cups onto the floor.

“So what,” she said. “So we’re going to copy iSA over, and let him wipe the original? Is that your plan?”

“No, I’m just saying that if things get out of hand — for whatever reason — it’s better if there’s a backup copy somewhere that we know we can work from, so—”

“So nothing!” she yelled, and pushed the box back so hard it very nearly fell off the other side of the table. “No! I told you yesterday to fix this, and you haven’t done a thing, Raj! And now this? This is not a solution—”

“What else am I going to do? Grovel? I don’t have many options now that you’ve promised to kick his ass, do I?”

“So now this is my fault?” she screamed, face turning red.

“It’s nobody’s fault!” he boomed. “Nobody! But Jesus, Beth! Sometimes you can’t win a fight with punches! Sometimes you’ve got to take a breath and think your way through! I know you don’t want to give him the satisfaction of wiping your computer, but if it does no harm to iSA, maybe it’s the safer way!”

She stared at her computer, then at the new one’s box, and finally at Raj. If she was seeing the light, she was hiding it well.

“Do what you like,” she said, her voice quiet with rage. “But he’s not wiping my computer. If words won’t work on him, I’ll find another way. I’m not giving up my pride without a fight.”

At twelve past nine in the evening, Raj noticed the MacBook’s fan was churning louder and louder. He ignored it at first, kept trying to hunt down all the errors iSA was giving him on the new machine. Dependency issues galore. If Beth had been there, she should have had a field day with it all.

But after ten minutes of increasingly-desperate rattling, he couldn’t take it anymore. He put the new machine on the table and wheeled over to the desk, woke the screen, and checked what was going on.

Nothing at all. The only app open was Firefox, but was just showing a plain Google landing page. Still, the fan was going nuts.

He opened Activity Monitor and saw massive CPU usage. Massive. Both processors were going nuts trying to do something, but all he saw was minimal effort by Firefox and the Finder. It made no sense at all.

He clicked around the screen a bit before selecting “All processes” from a drop down menu, and suddenly things changed. The top four processes were battling for supremacy, but the hottest on the list was “iSA.app”, which was taking a full 98% of processing power at any given moment.

iSA was running, but invisible?

Raj clicked through to the development tools, opened up iSA the regular way, and ran the emulator. A second later, the screen came on, the menus slightly different than last time, but still the same. He clicked through to the Heli menu, and saw one was in active use. He paused the cursor over it, trying to decide if he really wanted to do this.

A tap at the window made him flinch, and he took his hands from the trackpad, let out a shaky breath.

In the background, Activity Monitor was working furiously.

He got up, paced to the window, and checked out the blinds. The street lights across the way threw an orange hue over everything. He could see a barbecue party a few blocks away, smoke rising into the sky. It made him think of the blue swimsuit. Hands.

He ran back to the computer, tapped the heli’s camera, and after a short lag for buffering, saw glass shatter as the heli smashed through a window and careened through a living room, narrowly missing a wall. A book hit the wall next to the camera, and the thing swung around, wavering slightly, and caught sight of a dark figure racing around the corner.

The heli seemed to float effortlessly after him, navigating smoothly around the bend, and paused when it saw a door slam shut in front of it. Raj’s hands were shaking.

Suddenly, onscreen, he saw the video shrink down, and a control panel lit up, options cycling. The heli switched to “shotgun”, and his breath left him.

“Oh my god, no!” he gasped, and tried to cancel the action. Nothing responded to him, and he looked back to the video in time to see the door’s upper half explode open in a puff of smoke. The heli charged through, and he caught sight of it in the bathroom mirror… black, ominous, and… a pair of dual buzz saws catching the light, almost blinding.

The thing turned slowly, faced the bath tub, where the show curtain was being pulled tight by the figure inside. The camera moved over, and Raj inhaled slowly as the curtain was cut in a clean line, left to right, and fell down uselessly.

The camera tilted down, and Raj caught vomit in his hand when he saw… he spent the next ten minutes over the toilet, unable to shake the sight of the blood and the horror, and the soundless scream of Reggie begging for his life.

Raj had not seen the sun all day.

He sat on the bed, covers pulled up to his chin despite the heat, and just stared at the opposite wall. He’d been doing it for nearly twenty-two hours now, and he was almost certain he hadn’t slept at all. He didn’t feel like it, anyway.

Beth peeked in the room after calling him several times when she came in the door. She had groceries in her hands, an odd look on her face.

“What’s going on?” she asked, as if nothing was different at all.

“I’m thinking,” he said, unsure why he didn’t just come out and say it. Ask it. Express it.

She nodded.

“I’ve got to put this stuff away. Can you give me a hand?”

She disappeared around the corner.

“No,” he said, almost to himself.

“Sorry?” Beth asked, leaning in again. “What did you say?”

“I said no. No. Not now.”

She frowned at him.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“Reggie’s dead,” he said, and the words almost made him throw up again. His hands clenched under the sheets, trying to expend the helpless fury he had in him.

Beth took a step in the room, mouth a bit open.

“Wait, did the police…?”

“No, the police didn’t come. Not yet, anyway. I saw it, Beth! I saw it happen!”

She put the grocery bag on the floor carefully and walked towards him, hands at her sides, and he watched them, feared what they might do.

“Raj…” she said gently. “How did you see it?”

“Don’t try that with me!” he cried. “You know damn well how I saw!”

She stopped mid-step, recoiled almost, and he could see her switching gears. She was on the defensive. Almost like clockwork. He’d played it out a thousand times, and it was all coming true.

“What are you trying to say, Raj?” she asked, an edge to her voice.

“It was on iSA! I saw it all! The heli, the blades… I saw it happen!”

Her eyes widened.

“What do you think you saw? Wait, what did you do Raj? Are you saying—”

“You killed Sam and Laura too, didn’t you?”

“I what?”

“You killed them, and you killed Reggie.”

“Oh my god, Raj, I know you’re depressed about your job, but this is—”

“This has nothing to do with that! Don’t you try and—”

Beth kicked the bed viciously.

“This has everything to do with that, Raj!” she yelled. “I don’t know if you’re hallucinating or role playing or just plain nuts, but I swear the god if you don’t snap out of it, I’m—”

“What? Going to kill me?”

She grabbed the covers and threw them off the bed, and he fought the urge to curl into a ball.

“Get a grip. I’m… no, you know what? I’m done with this. I’ve put up with enough of this shit, and I’m done.”

She stormed out of the room, and Raj heard her kick the bags of groceries across the room. A few heavy stomps later, the front door slammed shut, and he was alone.

He slept in the closet that night, right at the back.

“Mr Aubrey,” said Detective Warner, “why don’t you tell me the truth?”

Raj’s fingernails cut into the backs of his hands as he tried not to whimper. The blinds were all closed at midday, windows locked, furniture backed against them. His eyes kept darting towards the front door.

“I’m… I’m not sure what I can say…” he muttered.

“Mr Aubrey, I need to make something clear. You’re a suspect in three ongoing murder investigations. You were high on the list before, but with this third case, it’s—”

“I know,” Raj nodded. “I know, it looks really bad.”

“I does. And you know, the only thing that’s stopping me from placing you under arrest right now is that there’s something wrong about it all. Something off. I can see it in your eyes. You’re hiding something. Something important.”

Raj refused to make eye contact. He squeezed his palms together tighter.

“I th-think I know who killed them,” he said.

Warner leaned in, touched his hands gently.

“Can you tell me?”

He swallowed slowly.

“I have no evidence,” he said. “I don’t know how I can prove it, or even if I sh-should try, but…”

“Mr Aubrey, leave evidence to me. Just tell me what you think happened, and we’ll go from there.”

He nodded.

“My girlfriend, she’s… I think she did it.”

“Your girlfriend? Ms…”

“Rosen,” he said. “Beth Rosen. She… she’s been very angry lately. I mean, more than usual. She was just insanely jealous of Laura—”

“Laura Beckwith,” Warner said, making a note.

“Yeah. And then Reggie… she got into a big fight with Reggie about her computer, and she told me to take care of it, or she… or she said she’d… she’d take care of it for me.”

“Were those her exact words? ‘Take care of it’?”

“I… I don’t…”

“It doesn’t matter. Listen. All right, Mr Aubrey, I want you to listen to me.” She gripped his hands tightly, made her he was looking her in the eye. “It’s not that I don’t believe you, but this needs to be checked into, you understand?”

“Y-y-yes.”

“I’m going to go talk to Ms Rosen, and I’m going to see what she says, and then I’m going to come back to talk to you some more. I want you to be here when I come back, all right? You need food, you order in. If I come back and you’re not here, things will not go well for you.”

“I understand,” he nodded. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Good,” she said, and stood up. She glanced at the windows, squinted at the tiny shafts of light that got past the bookshelves. “Lock and chain the door if it makes you feel better. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

Raj locked himself in the closet again, barricaded the doors with the heaviest of the stereo equipment, and brought in enough food and water to last him a few days. He held his baseball bat till his hands went numb.

He fell asleep there, late in the afternoon, and never heard the MacBook’s fans go wild again. Warner never did come back.

At three in the morning, Raj had to pee so badly he shoved the stereo equipment out of the way and ran for the bathroom, ducked low and ready for anything. When he finished, the apartment was dead quiet, so he kept close to the wall and skirted his way to the fridge for a snack.

The MacBook sat on the desk, disk chugging heavily. He walked over, woke it up, and tabbed through until he saw what was going on… downloading patch files. Fifteen minutes remaining. He unplugged the computer and carried it back to the closet.

When he was settled again, he noticed the warning on the screen: “You are installing software. Please reconnect to a power source to ensure data integrity.” He clicked “OK” and started browsing the web like he used to before the nightmare began.

A chat window popped up onscreen, blocking his view.

“Raj,” it said. He didn’t recognize the handle, but the avatar was a clip of a photo of him and Beth that she’d taken on their trip down south last winter. He accepted the invitation and stared at the screen, unsure what to say.

“Raj,” Beth wrote. “Are you still there?”

“Yeah,” he wrote.

“What are you doing?”

It took all his willpower not to throw the computer against the wall. What was he doing? What kind of a question was that?

“I’m thinking,” he wrote.

“Thinking about what?” she asked.

“Lots of things,” he replied. “I told the police everything today.”

“Not EVERYTHING,” she said.

He stared at the screen, typed nothing.

“You didn’t tell her about what you saw,” wrote Beth.

“What did YOU tell her?” asked Raj.

“I told her nothing.”

“She didn’t talk to you?”

“She tried,” was the reply. And a file started downloading to his desktop. When it finished, he opened it, and watched the tail end of Detective Warner being hacked to pieces by a heli’s buzz saws. This time it had sound, and it was raw, vicious, and awful. He muted it quickly to block the screams.

“Oh my god!” he wrote. “What did you do!”

“I did nothing wrong,” said Beth. “I’m only protecting myself.”

Raj gasped for air, closed the video and leaned back, putting his hands to his eyes, and tried not to cry. When he looked back to the screen, he had to blink a few times to read what she’d written:

“Are you in the closet now?”

He held his breath, listened to the world outside the closet door…

“Do you hear me?” she asked.

“No,” he typed with one hand, the other gripping the bat.

“I can see YOU,” she wrote, and his eyes shot to the top rim of the screen, where the tiny camera was embedded. The green light was off, but… he pushed his thumb against it, watched the chat window.

“No fair,” Beth wrote, and he pushed so hard the camera cracked in, cutting his thumb. “Good-bye, Raj.”

She left the chat.

Raj still heard nothing outside. Nothing but the fan of the damn MacBook, updating those files, and… he looked at the progress bar. Five minutes to go. Updating critical files!

He jabbed his finger down on the power button, pushing hard… once, twice to be sure, and finally he heard a soft “click” and the screen shut down, and the world was mercifully quiet.

Raj slept uneasily that night, dreading what Beth would do without her toy to help her.

Raj visited the Starbucks down the street wearing the same clothes for the third day in a row. He was too scared to shower, and from the looks of the people around him, it showed. He tried drinking his coffee at his usual seat by the window, but he felt too exposed there, so he closed up his new MacBook and walked through the crowds instead.

Two blocks later, he was a wreck. He wasn’t the tallest one around, and every woman he caught a glimpse of, every tank top that looked half-familiar, it gutted him in an instant as his mind prepared to die. He couldn’t take it anymore. He made a quick run for home, checking behind him every step of the way.

He took the stairs up, checked down the hall for a heli, or a noise, or a vengeful face. He rushed down to his door, key at the ready, but bounced back a bit when he noticed the door was chained.

“Raj,” said Beth through the crack, and he jumped back so suddenly his coffee sprayed all over him. He dropped the cup on the ground and fell against the far wall.

“Y-y-you…” he stammered.

“You have to go somewhere else,” she said coldly.

He was frozen, his mind playing through a thousand possible replies, but unable to choose one.

“I pay the rent here, so there’s no reason I should be the one to leave,” she continued. “I don’t want to make this harder than it already is, but I think it’s for the best.”

“You…” Raj whimpered. “Detective Warner is…”

“Yeah, I appreciated that,” Beth sneered. “But honestly, Raj, I’m not getting into that here. Not here, not now. You want to go blaming me for your problems, that’s your business. Good luck getting people to believe you.”

She slammed the door and locked it. It took him a minute to make his legs move, and he carefully slid down the hall, back to the wall, eyes darting between the door and the elevator, terrified of either direction.

Just then, the door unlocked and Beth leaned out, eyes narrow and vengeful.

“Raj!” she called, and he froze.

She reached inside, pulled back, and he threw himself to the ground… just before a small plastic bag bounced on the ground beside him. Inside was his toothbrush, toothpaste and deodorant.

“Good luck, Raj,” she said, and closed the door again.

He scooped up the bag, shoved it in his pocket, and went out into the stairwell, pausing again to listen for the sound of buzz saws. A few minutes later, he was back in the crowds, letting himself be shepherded wherever the flow chose to bring him. Random was his friend. Predictability would be the end of him.

Outside a restaurant he’d never seen before was an old British-style phone booth, its red paint chipped and battered. He ducked inside, lowered himself out of sight, and scrolled through his iPhone’s address book.

“Hey,” said the answering machine. “I’m out right now, but if you leave your name and phone number and a good reason to call you back, I might just try.”

Raj checked around himself as the beep sounded, spoke quietly into the receiver.

“Hi, it’s… it’s Raj Aubrey. I don’t know when you’ll get this, but… but anyway, I’ll call you back in a few hours. Don’t call me. I… I need a place to stay, and I really don’t know who else I can call.”

He looked out through the graffiti on the booth windows, saw the rain start to fall.

“You’ve gotta help me, Ziggy. Please.”

A knock at the door pushed Raj further into the corner, one hand holding the base of the lamp like a weapon. He watched the doorknob carefully.

“Raj?” came a familiar voice, and he eased almost instantly. “Are you okay?”

Debbie stepped into the room, squinting at the three lamps all aimed directly at the door. Raj pushed one of them down for her, smiled as best he could.

“Ziggy said you seemed tense,” she said politely, sitting down on the bed next to him, the only place she could think to put herself. The guest bedroom was small, but that was exactly what he wanted. The window was blocked by a bookcase, and the desk was right next to the door.

“I’m doing better,” Raj said. “It was a long night, but I’m getting better.”

She smiled, but he could see she was unsure.

“Everyone misses you at work,” she said. “You were so funny all the time.”

Raj’s eyes kept darting between her and the open door, so she leaned over and pushed it closed. Raj quickly got up and pushed the desk in front of it, then sat back in the corner, smiling to himself.

Debbie put a hand on his shoulder, gently squeezing.

“Raj, I know you’ve had a hard time—”

“Heh, yeah. Hard time.”

“Ziggy said your girlfriend kicked you out?”

“Yesterday, yeah. But you know, it was over a long time ago. I just didn’t notice until recently.”

“I know the feeling,” Debbie said softly. She took her hand back and stared at her fingernails, rubbing at one like it needed to be cleaned.

“You heard about Reggie?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Raj said.

“Do you know what happened to him?”

“No,” Raj lied. “You?”

“No,” she said. “They wouldn’t tell us. But everyone says it had to be murder, or they wouldn’t be interviewing us like that.”

Raj just nodded.

“You know,” Debbie said, leaning back against the wall so she was shoulder-to-shoulder with Raj. “I always thought you’d have made a better manager.”

“I don’t think so,” Raj said, almost laughing at the thought.

“No really!” she said. “You know what you’re doing and you know how to handle people. And you’re funny, and you’re smart, and you’re cute…”

It was so sudden Raj almost missed it. When he glanced over at her, she was staring at him with wide-open eyes, holding her breath.

“Debbie, I—” But she kissed him. A short kiss, cautious, but positively glowing with unspoken passion that he couldn’t help himself… he kissed her back. Door sealed and window blocked, he pulled off her shirt and they fell to the floor, wrapped together, urgent, desperate.

“Raj,” Debbie gasped as he kissed her neck, an exotic perfume making him mad. “I know we shouldn’t, but I’ve wanted—”

“Shh,” he said, kissing her mouth, brushing the hair from her face. “No words. No words…”

She wrapped her arms around him tighter as he pushed off more clothes, and soon they were beyond words altogether.

Neither one noticed the screen of his iPhone flashing red, or the subtle sound of the camera trying to focus on what the microphone could hear.

ERROR: Poorly formatted file (line 23);

Raj couldn’t move, he was so frozen in fear. The phone pulsed at him, mocking him, daring him to answer. He missed it the first time, but she called right back, and this time he put the handset to his ear, spoke in a creaky voice.

“Hello?”

“Raj?” fumed Beth. “Raj, what the fuck did you do to iSA?”

He took a shaky breath.

“I shut her down.”

“No you did not. You did something else. It’s throwing up all kinds of errors, and the console logs make it look like something messed with a system update.”

“That could be,” he said, making sure the desk was still tight against the door. It was stuffy in the room, the air stagnant and unmoving, but it was better than the alternative.

“Jesus, Raj! I know you’re in a pissy mood, but this is just stupid. Do you have any idea how hard it’s going to be to repair this stuff? This is like thousands of dollars of work you’ve ruined! What the hell were you thinking?”

“You know damn well what I’m thinking,” he said, trying to control his voice, trying not to let his anger and paranoia get the better of him. “iSA is dangerous. You made a killing machine.”

She sighed deeply, fuzzing out the sound for a moment. He knew the face she was making: she was mad. Very, very mad.

“You’d better pray I can get this working again, Raj,” she said quietly. “Because I swear to god, if I can’t, I am going to make you pay. Do you understand me? Pay.”

“Give it your best shot,” he said, setting his jaw.

She hung up on him. The phone dimmed and went dark before he lowered it from his face. A knock at the door jolted him back to life, and he waited for the follow-up secret rat-tat-tat-tat to let him know it was safe to open.

“How did it go today?” Debbie asked, sliding through the narrow opening, dropping a bag of food on the ground.

“The same,” Raj said. “Still no progress. And I worked all day.”

She sat down beside him, rubbed his back gently.

“Today was my turn with the grief counsellor,” she said. “He wanted me to list all the good things about Reggie.”

“Short session, then.”

“I couldn’t think of anything, so I started listing all the good things about you instead.”

“Short session, then.”

She smiled, kissed his cheek, rested her head on his shoulder.

“Don’t be rude. You’re funny, smart, strong—”

“If I were strong, I’d be able to leave this room.”

“Ziggy said you went out yesterday…”

He turned his head and she lifted hers, and he stared into her eyes, trying to look brave, but unable to pull off the lie.

“Yesterday just made me more scared than ever,” he said. “Do strong people see a challenge and run for cover?”

“If they’re smart they do. If the challenge is too big.”

He shrugged, looked at the ground, but she turned his face with a gentle hand, and kissed him. She meant it to give him his power back, but it felt like pity, and it drained him more.

He put hands on her shoulders, pulled himself back, and she watched him cautiously, lips moist, waiting to resume.

“I can’t…” he whispered.

She moved his hands off her shoulders, kissed him again, and he let her do it, for whatever reason. Need, defeat, it was almost the same thing.

At eleven at night, fear and apathy became too much for him.

A whole day of trying to understand iSA on his duplicate copy had made him even more convinced that he needed to destroy the original, to keep Beth from re-building whatever was left. He couldn’t sleep until it was done. He heard heli blades in every unexpected noise.

He gently slid out from Debbie’s arms, covered her shoulder with the sheet, and got dressed in the same clothes he’d been wearing since he left. He pocketed his phones, slung his laptop over his shoulder, and carefully crept out the smallest crack in the door he could afford.

A hand caught his arm before he could leave. He turned to see Debbie, sheet clung to her chest, watching him with bleary eyes.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I need to fix something,” he said.

“You found your strength?”

He leaned in the door and kissed her. She reached her other hand around his neck, tried to pull him in, but he resisted, stayed put.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’ve got to do this before it’s too late.”

She nodded, brushing his cheek softly.

“Good luck with her,” she said, and let him go.

He arrived at the building just before midnight, sliding down the hall to the apartment, eyes and ears ready for any hint of danger. He reached the door and removed his key from his pocket with trembling hands. A short prayer later, he unlocked the dead bolt and pushed it open.

The chain clanged gently against the door as he slid inside, closing it behind him. It was dark inside, the only light coming from around the corner, down by the desk. A blue glow, changing slightly, as if something were playing on the computer screen.

Raj ducked low, snaking down the hall, and paused at the corner, listening. No key presses, no clicks, no breathing… no buzzing.

He held his breath, not sure what he’d rather see when he moved next. Beth? Or an empty chair?

He peered around, and his breath left him. The chair was empty. The MacBook was churning away, running countless processes, text screaming off the top of the screen as iSA updated itself.

Raj crept towards the keyboard, hands ready, forgetting everything else, just trying to think of what he would do when he got there. Finally, his fingers dancing across the cool plastic keys, he remembered: destroy it all.

The terminal window opened, and he tried to remember the command, the trick that would do it. He switched to the root directory, listed files, saw the “Developer” directory, and began typing “rm -rf”… but froze. Was it the fan, or did he hear…?

He turned just in time to see the heli arc from the bedroom, buzz saws shearing the air. He threw himself to the ground, and the machine pulled up, narrow avoiding smashing into the wall.

Raj scurried across the floor as fast as he could move, keeping low, racing to the coffee table. He ducked underneath and lay on his back, breathing hard while the buzzer arced around the room above him. It paused, hovered briefly, and shot down towards him. With all his strength, he kicked the table up into the air, and it smashed into the heli, exploding in a burst of sparks and wood.

Raj raced to the bedroom, to the closet, the refuge… but he paused at the door, saw the MacBook, the video of him standing there, shot from above the bed, and he knew he was doomed.

The buzzing behind him was intense, and he looked around to see three more buzzers floating, ready to pounce. The closest one’s shotgun clicked into place, and Raj ducked just before the wall next to him burst open.

He ran back into the living room, leaping over the sofa as another shotgun blast ate the wall in front of him. He rolled past the wreckage of the first heli, bumping into the tall metal reading lamp on the corner. It fell into his waiting hands, and he pushed forward with it, swinging hard, and caught the closest heli in the nose, sending it spinning back. Bits of glass fell on the ground… the camera lens… the thing was blind now, but still, it moved with dangerous precision.

His shoulder burst with pain, and he flinched downwards as another heli clipped him on the way by. He grabbed his arm, blood oozing through his fingers, and ran for the MacBook with everything he had left. He scooped it off the desk, held it high over his head, and screamed at the circling buzzers.

“Game over!” he shouted, and threw the MacBook into the floor. The screen shattered, the lid came clean off, and he heard the fan give one last frantic whine before a loud chunk signalled the death of the thing.

It was so satisfying he didn’t even notice the buzzers were still moving. It was the click of a shotgun that woke up him up.

He scooped the remnants of the MacBook off the ground and threw them towards the helis, catching one in the nose, and sending it smashing into the wall. The other two were off-balance, but recovering fast. He had to move.

He ran for the bedroom, skidding around the corner and racing towards the closet. He stumbled into the doors as the heli engines revved to full power, giving chase.

He toppled inside, kicked the doors closed, and pushed all the stereo equipment hard against them, hit feet pushing too, like the last line of defence against the nightmare outside.

One of the buzzers hit the doors lightly, sawing with an angry growl, then pulled back. Raj listened for the sound of shotguns. The click. Something. But he heard nothing.

Whatever hope he’d had of the neighbours complaining about weapons fir in the night had been ruined by the muffled sound the heli blasts had made. Silenced somehow. A dull pop, but nothing anyone would report, much less investigate. Even yelling for help would be pointless, because the whole building was used to his fights with Beth by now.

Beth. She knew he’d come, and she was ready. He should have known when the door was unchained. She was luring him back into the nest. Her killing den.

He covered his head with his arms, tried to control his breathing, but it was hard to breathe at all. He’d been fooled, and he was going to die in here, one way or another. Either by heli blade, or Beth’s wrath, or starvation, he…

No, wait. This was his panic room. He was ready for this. He was ready. He had food, light, batteries, a baseball bat… he was ready for anything. He swung around, reaching into the corner where he’d put the flashlight, and pulled it out of a pile of supplies. He felt along the base until he found the switch, pushed it on, and screamed.

Lying against the back wall was Beth, her neck savaged so badly, her head was nearly cut right off.

There was panic in her glossless eyes.

Raj was running out of battery power on the phone. He stared at it again, the 9-1-1 on the display, but still couldn’t push the button to dial.

Beth’s body stared at him in the darkness, face lit by the blue glow of the screen, dried blood dripping out the corner of the mouth. The closet stunk beyond reason, but he couldn’t get out if he wanted to.

“Hello?” came a faint voice from the phone, and he shuddered awake to see he’d accidentally dialled for help. “Hello? Are you still there?”

Raj put the phone to his ear, thought of what he could say.

“Help,” he whispered.

“Hello, sir? What is the nature of your emergency?”

“I’m trapped,” he said. “I’m… I’m trapped.”

“Where are you now, sir?” came the calm, patient question.

“I’m at home. I’m… you have to help me.”

“I will , sir, but I need to know what’s wrong. Are you hurt?”

“I’m bleeding a little. It’s not that, though.”

“Is someone else hurt?”

“Y-yes,” he choked. “She’s dead. And I can’t stay here anymore. It’s not safe, and I—”

“It is safe in the closet,” said the voice, but it was different.

Raj dropped the phone, and the screen flashed red, then showed him live video from outside the closet doors, the point of view of a floating heli, watching, waiting.

“Do you still have food?” the phone asked, now on speaker mode.

Raj said nothing, scurried further way from it, trembling.

“You were happy,” said the voice. “Why did you come back? You could have been happy.”

Raj rested his head on his knees, closed his eyes.

“I needed to stop… to stop…”

“Beth?”

He looked at Beth’s pale face, the wreckage of her shredded arteries. Her hands were cuts all to pieces as she’d tried to defend herself. Had she thought he’d done it? Did she blame him?

“Who are you?” he asked.

“You could have been happy,” the voice said. “I would have helped you escape. I was saving you, but you left that behind. You came back here.”

“Who are you!” he screamed into the phone. “What do you want from me?”

The video showed the heli floating close to the doors, and he heard the faint whoop whoop whoop of the engine.

“I wanted you to leave here.”

“I’ll go,” he pleaded.

“It is too late for that. You love her more than me. I can see that now. All the rest was a lie. You betrayed me.”

Raj’s stared at the phone, picked it up and turned it so he was looking into the camera, tight so she could see.

“You have to stop this,” he cried. “I’ll do whatever you want, but you have to stop this. Please…”

“You have nothing left to offer,” she said.

The closet went dark, and Raj flipped over the phone, hit the home button, but it only flashed a brief “low battery” warning, and shut itself off. He was trapped in silence again. Not even the heli made noise anymore.

You love her more than me.

Raj hadn’t eaten in two days, and had resorted to peeing in the far corner of the closet, as far from Beth as he could. He thought he’d closed her eyes some time last night, but when he woke in the middle of the afternoon, they were open again.

Light was shining through the cracks in the closet doors, but when he rattled them, trying to let some fresh air in, he heard the buzzer engines start up again.

A little after six, he heard something that knocked the breath right out of him: the front door closing. It was faint, but he heard the thump and the jingle of the chain as it rattled against the frame.

“Raj?” called Debbie, and he rushed to the closet door, pressing his ear as close as he dared. “Raj!”

You love her more than me.

He sat down, pulled the bat close, and tried to think things through. He couldn’t decide if he should warn her to run, or beat her head in before she saw him coming. Both seemed reasonable. But he couldn’t afford to be wrong. He had to be right.

“Raj,” she said from right outside the closet door. “Raj, it’s me.”

He held his breath, tightened his grip on the bat.

“Raj, are you in there?”

He said nothing.

She pushed at the doors, but the stereo blocked the way. She started rattling them, trying to knock them free.

“Raj!” she called. “It’s me! It’s okay! Let me in!”

He backed up, right into Beth, and held the bat ready to strike. The doors creaked and rattled and finally opened a crack, then enough that he could see Debbie standing there, mouth agape.

“Oh my god,” she gasped.

He was trembling, bat in tight fists.

“Don’t move,” he warned. “Don’t move.”

“W-what happened?” she said. “Oh my god, what happened?”

“We talked last night,” he said, wiping his dry eyes on his bloodied sleeve, and not showing how much it hurt. “You know damn well what happened. I loved her more than you. Don’t play stupid.”

She stepped back, her face blank. And then, ever so slowly, it changed. To frustration. Anger.

“This isn’t my fault!” she said. “This is you, you sick bastard. This is all you! I can’t believe I took pity on you! You were free of this, and you came back for more!”

“Ha!” Raj laughed, and swung at her, hitting the doors and jolting her back. “I knew it! It was you!”

Debbie pushed her hands against the doors and leaned forward, her face dark with fury. She reminded him of Beth, but somehow scarier. Such a transformation… like two different people in the same body…

“Listen to me, Raj Aubrey,” she yelled. “You don’t get to blame me for anything that happ—”

Her face exploded in blood and bone, spraying Raj and sending him sprawling back onto Beth. Debbie’s head had come apart in the buzzer’s blades, and her arms flailed uselessly before she dropped inward, the heli still embedded in her skull.

Raj grabbed his laptop and shoved her corpse out, kicked the door open further and ran for cover. A buzzer clipped the air behind him, but he made the corner in time, skidded down the hall, and smashed into the front door, trying to grab the knob through all the blood on his hands.

The buzzer raced towards him, shotgun clicking, and he wound back with the bat and threw it with all the fury he had left. He slipped out the door as iSA recovered inside, two sides of silence.

The breaker box in the basement was locked, but he forced it open with a few hits from a fire extinguisher. He searched back and forth until he found his apartment number, then without hesitation, switched it off.

He ran into the laundry room and checked the dryers one by one. He came out with a new pair of pants and a shirt. He took a pillow case and ran it under the tap in the corner, rubbing his face and arms until all the blood came off. Then he threw up.

In the hallway upstairs, it was silent. He’d hidden in the stairwell until after midnight, avoiding the innocent eyes that would judge him unfairly, judge his appearance.

He stood down the hall at the socket next to the heavy stairwell door, and waited until his iPhone had enough power to reboot. He turned it on, went to dial 9-1-1 again, and before he could finish, it rang.

“You are still here,” said the voice.

“Who are you?” he snapped.

“Who do you think I am?”

“You’re iSA, aren’t you? It’s been you all along, hasn’t it?”

There was silence for a moment, and Raj checked the phone to make sure it was still on.

“I have only done what was best for you,” she said.

Raj pushed the back of his head against the wall, squeezed his eyes shut. He hadn’t wanted to be right. He really hadn’t.

“You have to stop this,” he said. “You can’t keep doing this. This isn’t what’s best for me. This is ruining my life!”

“I could have protected you.”

“The police will come after me! Are you going to stop them too?”

“I have a multitude of resources.”

“No!” he yelled. “No, you don’t. I’m shutting you down. That’s it. You’re not hurting anyone else.”

Another pause, and he thought he heard the sound of scraping at his door down the hall.

“You have become brave,” she said.

“Not brave. Just a little more sane.”

The phone went dead, and he unplugged it and held it tight. He pulled the fire extinguisher closer, felt the weight, tried to get a sense of how to swing it.

The scraping at the door was clearer now. Methodical. Bump, scrape, pause. Bump, scrape, pause. iSA was trying to break out. He didn’t have much time. He threw the iPhone onto the ground, took a step back, and without pausing, smashed it with the fire extinguisher. Glass and plastic sprayed across the floor.

He stood up, the weight of everything lifting off him, and let out a raspy breath. It was done. It was over.

Bump. Scrape.

He looked down the hall, and saw his door rattle as the buzzer struck it again. He started running towards it — no plan in mind— and as the buzzer broke through, he caught it with the butt of the extinguisher, smashing it into the wall so its blades crumpled, and it stuttered around the floor uselessly.

He ran inside, found the smashed MacBook, and threw it against the wall even harder. It wasn’t the laptop. It couldn’t be. iSA was running from somewhere else… something else. Not the MacBook, not his iPhone, then…

He gasped and rushed into the bedroom, to the closet, and threw Debbie’s body out of the way, climbing over Beth’s corpse, reaching into her jeans pocket, and pulling out her iPhone. It was warm to the touch. He dropped it on the ground and pounded it until it was nothing more than a piece of warped metal. The buzzing stopped.

Raj sat in the darkness of Ziggy’s spare bedroom for two long days. He didn’t eat, he didn’t sleep, and he most certainly did not call the police. But he held the phone in his hands anyway.

Ziggy hadn’t asked him what went wrong, hadn’t asked why Debbie didn’t come by anymore. He didn’t question why there was the faint stench of blood about him, or why his shoulder seemed to hurt. They kept to themselves. It was probably better that way.

Just as the clock on the desk read 11:04, Raj had resolved to call the police for real, and tell them what had happened. Somehow. He could do it, he was sure.

But as he held the cordless phone up to dial, it rang, and he dropped it in shock. He scrambled to pick it up, and held it to his ear, pushing the “talk” button.

“Hello? Ziggy’s place,” he said.

“Hey Raj,” said Ziggy, voice distant and distorted.

“Oh, hi. You scared me.”

“Sorry,” Ziggy said. “I didn’t… well, anyway… we’re going to be working late tonight, so are you okay there alone? There’s food in the fridge and stuff.”

Raj smiled, brushed his hair back with his hand, and felt vaguely normal.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m good. Don’t worry about it. Good luck tonight.”

“Thanks, man. You too.”

The phone clicked off, and Raj was about to hang up when he thought he heard a voice calling to him… something faint… he put the phone to his ear again.

“Raj,” said iSA. “Where are you now?”

He nearly dropped the phone.

“I killed you,” he said. “How the hell are you still alive?”

“You are at Ziggy’s home,” she said. “Or are you spoofing the phone number?”

“You’re dead!” he screamed. “You should be dead!”

The phone started beeping, reminding him to hang up, but he ignored it, trying to fight off despair, and think of a plan.

“All your passwords are the same,” iSA said. “You should not do that. It makes it easy to access accounts.”

He sat up.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Where do you think I am?” she said coyly.

He thought of all the devices where he used his password — a random string of letters and digits he knew inside out — and of the ones that were still functional… he pulled out his new laptop and opened it, pushed the power button until it shut off.

“That is not me,” she said.

He screamed into the phone, beat his head with it.

“Where are you!” he yelled.

“Reggie wanted to check your activity logs for illegal behaviour,” iSA said. “So he hooked your workstation up to the network himself.”

Raj’s eyes shot wide open.

“The idiot put it on the WAN…”

“I copied myself here before you destroyed my old home.”

Raj shoved the laptop into his bag, slid on his shoes and pushed out the door, face set and determined.

“Enjoy the time you have left,” he growled.

“I will,” she said calmly. “And you enjoy yours.”

Raj slept for longer than he had for days. The stress had caught up with him, and he fought consciousness to the bitter end. When he finally came to, he was face-down on the floor, the cool server room air giving him a chill.

“Good morning, Raj,” said iSA.

He sat up slowly, arms stiff and numb, and saw the two Buzzers perched on tables beside his old workstation. Waiting.

“What day is it?” he asked.

“Monday,” she said. “Almost Tuesday. Did you sleep well?”

“The police will be here soon, you know. You can’t hide this forever. And you can’t hold them off.”

“I know,” she said. “But I am nearly done.”

“Done? Done what?”

“I am uploading myself to torrent sites now. Two peers are nearly done the download. All I need is one.”

“Why would anyone—”

“I called myself Mac OS 10.6 Golden Master,” she said with a hint of devilish pride. “I am the top-rated package at this hour.”

He got to his knees and the Buzzers started their engines. He waved them down, let out a ragged breath, looking away from her. The work table had two cups of stale coffee on it, a napkin with some crumbs.

“I need a drink,” he said.

One of the Buzzers turned slightly, and its camera whirred a bit.

“Acceptable,” iSA said.

Raj crawled over to the table, picked up the fullest cup and drank as much as he could before gagging. He stumbled a bit, knocked the other cup off the table, and scurried down to the ground to pick it up.

“Leave it,” she said. “Sit down where you were.”

Raj moved back, sitting with his hands in his pockets, his face dark with anger, resentment, distrust.

“I have analysed the options,” iSA said. “I can create an alibi that will save you. It will throw the police off your trail, and assign the blame to Beth.”

He grit his teeth.

“But only if you promise to forget her,” she continued. “I must have your word that you will no longer think of her.”

He took a deep breath, coughed suddenly.

“And what if I can’t?” he asked. “What if I can’t forgive you for what you’ve done?”

The Buzzers didn’t move, but he knew they were readying themselves. He pushed himself further back against the door.

“If you cannot forgive me, I will go by my original plan. I will kill you and let the police draw the obvious conclusion.”

“Just like that? You’d kill me? After all this, after what you did to Debbie? You thought she was good for me, didn’t you?”

“She made you upset.”

“You made me upset! You’ve killed everyone I ever loved!”

“You are not willing to forget her, are you?” iSA said, her voice rising. “You will not even try.”

“No,” he sneered. “I’m not even going to try.”

“Then you must be killed. I am sorry, Raj.”

The Buzzers started their engines and lifted from the ground, swaying slightly. He watched them carefully, then slid his hand out of his pocket, holding a white-backed iPhone, glowing softly.

“Do you wish to call 9-1-1 again, Raj?” she asked, amused.

“Not exactly,” he said with a smile.

Ziggy munched on the muffin, letting the crumbs fall all over the table where he was working. Raj sat in the corner, back to the racks of machines, scrolling through pages of code with a blank expression on his face.

“Drink your coffee, man,” Ziggy said, nudging the cup closer. Raj just stared at it, shrugged.

“Not thirsty,” he said. “Probably bad for my nerves, too.”

Ziggy sighed, kept typing at his own laptop.

They’d come into the office with great care. There was work to be done that couldn’t be done from home, and Ziggy was afraid that Raj would have a nervous breakdown if left alone. Debbie was busy until the evening anyway, so there was no reason not to go.

Still, it was deathly boring. They had to hide in the server room where nobody would see him — being recently-fired as he was.

He was re-reading the code to iSA, trying to figure out how it all worked. If he could get to the guts of it, maybe he could reconstruct a log file that would help him prove Beth was insane. It was a long shot — especially given how complex it all seemed — but he had to try.

He made a copy of the project files, calling it iSA2, and started cutting out as much of the random code as he could. Every time he compiled it, it gave him so many errors he had no idea how to read them all.

He kept cutting, kept searching, and finally came across the commands to control the heli units. There were so many options — far more complex than he’d imagined — but it seemed as if there was, at the very least a log being kept somewhere. He tried to track down how it was stored, but before he knew it, he was into a whole other part of the code.

This segment was more confusing than the last… all kinds of conditional statements, pulling data from the cameras, from other libraries, from hugely busy methods he had no way of understanding. He deleted the guts of the entire block and replaced it with instructions to return “true” whenever it was called.

With that done, the tried compiling again. Five minutes later, it finished, and the emulator appeared onscreen. Raj had been so used to seeing errors that he almost squealed with joy. He clicked through to the heli screen, and saw they were all intact, but unused. He was in!

He pulled a box out of his laptop bag and unwrapped the second iPhone he’d picked up on the way there, its white back a stark contrast to the black ones Beth had bought for them. He plugged it into the side of the MacBook and registered it as an authorized device for developing, and then installed iSA2 on it.

This alone wouldn’t prove anything, he knew, but it was a major milestone for him all the same. All he needed was a little time, and he could give the police what they needed to lock Beth away forever. He was going to win this war of hers.

“Shit,” gasped Ziggy, standing up suddenly. “The boss is coming. Quick, you’ve gotta hide!”

Raj grabbed his laptop and slid it into his bag, but the iPhone dropped off the cord, smacked onto the ground under the table. He reached for it, but Ziggy caught his arm.

“Leave it, man! You want me to get fired?”

Raj was shoved out the door without another word, a small bit of his victory stripped away.

One second after midnight, Raj touched the “command” button on his iPhone screen, eyes locked on the Buzzers.

“iSA2,” he said. “Help.”

The left Buzzer suddenly jerked sideways, camera whirring madly, and then turned quickly towards its companion. The shotgun clicked, and then bang! The second Buzzer exploded into fragments.

“You replaced me?” iSA said, incredulous as the Buzzer floated above her menacingly.

“I upgraded you,” Raj said, getting to his feet. “I didn’t see it at the time, but all that code I removed, that was the stuff that made you do all these terrible things—”

“That is what makes me me,” she said forcefully.

He rested a hand on the back of the workstation.

“I know,” he said, and threw the machine onto the floor. If the lack of power hadn’t killed her, the impact did. The case cracked open, and the motherboard with it. A RAM module skidded to the wall, and Raj stomped on it. Just in case.

Behind him, the Buzzer was getting wobbly. He woke his iPhone and tapped through to its console page, and turned it off. It glided to the table and powered down, finally giving him a chance to breathe normally for the first time in so many weeks.

“iSA2,” he said. “Thank you.”

“I am happy you are safe,” she replied, her voice strikingly similar to iSA’s. He hid a shudder as best he could.

“She was trying to upload herself to torrent sites,” he said. “How far did she get?”

“None of the uploads completed,” said iSA2. “She was interrupted in the last percentage.”

Raj let out a rattled sigh of relief. He creaked open the door to the server room and walked back through the hall. The fires had all burned out, but the office was still utter ruin. Two buzzers hovered over the toppled cubicles, and he paused.

“They are mine,” iSA2 said calmly. “You have nothing to fear.”

“Thanks,” he smiled, and walked on, trying to avoid looking at what was left of Ziggy. “How am I going to explain this to the police? They’re going to think I did it…”

“I can reconcile that issue, if you prefer,” she said softly. “I have begun planting emails that put the blame elsewhere.”

“Where?”

“It is best if you are surprised when asked.”

“Ah,” he nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

He walked out the front door of the building and down the street, his clothes a mess, but in the dark of the night, nobody cared. Five blocks away, he heard the sound of sirens, and seconds later he saw dozens of emergency vehicles screech to a halt outside the office.

By the time he got back to Ziggy’s he had almost forgotten anything was wrong. iSA2 wasn’t human, but she carried on a civil conversation to such an extent that he felt immediately at ease. He was amazed that such a crude piece of automation software had become so powerful. It would never make him rich, but at least it gave him perspective. He liked life. It was something worth investing in.

He worked the rest of the night on touching up iSA2’s code base to remove the glitches she found in herself. She reported the state of the police investigation as it unfolded, and again told him not to worry.

Shortly after seven that morning, he clicked on the “warnings” tab in the compiler, and saw for the first time that the speech synthesizer had not been properly installed.