It is fair to say that my wife has finally found her way back to me, returned to me as a man by the conversational AI that snatched her, wearing a skin that’s not hers.
Her remembrance of that romantic night in Jalisco, of the painted ladies dancing within the walls of a barely functioning weather canopy, seems faulty, as if all but the memory’s breadcrumbs were stolen from her.
Is that memory now used as a catalyst for someone else’s conversation, or, a thousand others? Are a thousand lips speaking its fragments as if they own the memory, too?
But I won’t complain. Not now. She, no, he — they, are here with me.
It begins in a bar. A lone bartender, whose synth exterior reflects the look of a vaguely familiar celebrity, shoves a drink my way with a wink, possibly suggested by her own embedded AI, before turning around to rearrange a nearby bottle. Whose wink does she borrow? I don’t know yet. Maybe nobody’s. Maybe yours.
The bar lacks the usual vibe of motion that orbits most venues of modern life. There are no strobes, no tiny repair drones buzzing past my ear, no dancing porn droids, no videos aside from a holo that splits the bar’s obligatory collection of liquor bottles with a woman in lingerie who urges those sitting at the bar to gamble. All two of us.
The bottle-sized holo-lady beckons with a curled finger, urging us to place a wager on a survival escapade in the Illinois desert, taunting us with a seductive smile that belies the fact that the speed pods caressing the desert sand will become tombs for most of the contestants. “Cat Ray Tube,” she purrs as a blurred vehicle races across a small background behind her, “has an over-under of point one five. Marlin the Wizard is at point four. Come on, what are you waiting for?”
Sometimes she flickers in and out, like a ghost squeezing out its last dime of energy.
Other than that, the place is dark and moist and stuffy. Its acrid countenance makes me wonder if someone burned alcohol into the floorboards beneath my barstool to accent the shrine of bottles in front of me.
A voice next to me has been trying to get my attention. “Hey,” he says after a few subtler attempts. I came here for him, know pieces of his story, but I’m still a little annoyed. I had been hoping for a first drink in peace.
When I look his way, he says, “Woah. Those eyes. The blue of those eyes is so deep and exhilarating that it would captivate a tired, angry, stranger.”
AI-speak. I laugh. I’m a master at triggering AI-generated discourse into saying stupid things, so I lean closer to him, throwing a black lock of hair off my eyebrow with a shake. “What fruit, exactly, do they remind you of?” I ask.
His eyes go blank for a moment. If he was healthy, he could use his very human brain to respond with an intelligible answer, but instead, he reaches for something more through his TalkLink AI module, but doesn’t find it. “Blue melon,” he says confidently, as if he has, indeed, found it.
“I see,” I answer. “Would you like a slice?” I pull a switchblade out of my trouser pocket, flip it open, and offer it to him. I stretch the bottom of my eyelid down with a finger as I stare at him with my dare.
He doesn’t take the knife. Instead, his head shakes violently while his spluttering lips stammer into, “I’m blithery blathery, sloping like a dog on a sled, rising up into your memory’s bed.” He looks at me with wild eyes, tilts backward, then to one side, his body swaying on his barstool like a palm tree bullied by a hurricane, then falls to the ground.
The bartender glides my way. “Hijack victim?” she asks. If I were her, I would have asked why I was carrying a switchblade.
I shake my head. “I don’t think so.” I jump off my barstool to check on my new acquaintance. My fingers peel open his eyes, which are squeezed tight like he’s a kid afraid of impending punishment. I need to sit on his chest to do so because his body is a storm of convulsing, innervated flesh and bone.
I look up at the bartender. “Nah, just melted.” His eyes look familiar but jaundiced, as if they knew me before their soul was lifted away.
“Volunteer?” she asks, using the slang for people who acquired AI conversation before a black market punctured a hole in society’s enthusiasm for the product.
“Does it matter?”
She shrugs. “It shouldn’t be so easy to trigger a brain melt.”
I stand up, leaving the man’s body to wind down its convulsions. I pick up my drink, slug some down. “He’s not hijacked, not yet. And, no, it shouldn’t be so easy. I sensed the decay right away. This one’s been on the edge for a while.”
I lean close to her as I retake my seat at the bar, thinking that if the man were hijacked, he’d probably already be trying to roar through his carnage. I can’t recall the name of the celebrity she’s playing. I recognize the angular face and the exaggerated cleavage. But that name? It’s just not there. Sometimes I understand why people implant.
“For most people,” I say, “their AI turns their brain into a pot of soup about to boil over. The burner is just high enough that the boil doesn’t quite overflow the rim. When someone confronts an impending melt with certain keywords or phrases, it’s like turning up the flame. The soup spills over.”
The bartender speaks through thick crimson lips, the upper part of which could form the top of a big cartoon heart. “Is that why it’s called a brain melt?”
She’s the one with the exhilarating blue eyes, not me. Hers are blue pistachios set against caramel skin. Mine are green almonds set against a somewhat darker canvas.
The brain melt’s mistake with eye color was the first clue that his AI was on the fritz, aside from the fact that he’s on a list. “There are a thousand other ways to describe what happens, I guess. End result is the same,” I reply. I don’t have to tell her that he’ll end up a stricken wanderer.
“He doesn’t look like a street dump,” she says as if I had said it anyway. She’s right. He’s well dressed in a dark blue pinstripe suit highlighted by a double-breasted jacket.
“It’s just a matter of time,” I say. “Nobody takes these people in.”
She nods. “I had a cousin got a brain melt. Husband drove her from the Bronx to some small-ass town in Kentucky. Place was burned to a crisp. Hardly anybody left. Knew she could never find her way back. Paid some guy to hack her ID chip. Just blanked it out. He even went through the trouble of synthing her skin. Must have cost a fortune.”
“Overkill,” I respond. I wonder: Did her skin cost a fortune?
“Yeah. I guess,” she says unconvincingly.
“Local law enforcement just rounds ’em up and puts them out of their misery if they cause trouble. No need to do an ID wipe.”
“Another drink?” she asks, noticing my empty glass.
I look down at the brain melt. His body is quiet, but his eyes are now open so wide that I wonder if they’ll bulge out of their sockets and jump onto the nearby pool table. “I want about fifty more,” I reply.
“You got the bucks I got the booze,” she says while pouring another. There’s a good reason robots don’t perform some jobs. I like her. I don’t much like robots.
“I’m a volunteer,” she says as her fingers guide the drink my way, leaving two clear liquid streaks on the bar’s granite top. They look like tracks to the glass before nanobots clear them out.
I wonder almost out loud: What about the rest of the place? Doesn’t she have nanobots to clean up the rank smell of stale alcohol? Add a wisp of oxygen to freshen the fetid air?
“I got me some before they made it illegal,” she continues. “Turned it off. Freaked me out.”
I nod. But I want to be sure. “TalkLink?”
“Yeah.”
“Deactivated?” Again, pretty sure of the answer.
She nods almost precisely like I did, like she’s mimicking me the way a child would.
Mariah Charlot. That’s her celebrity cosplay. That long straight auburn hair down to her waist should have immediately reminded me. Her voice is hoarse, too, like the real Mariah Charlot’s. I wonder if her voice is also synth, or if, alternatively, she chose the synth skin because she was born with the hoarse voice of Mariah Charlot. I laugh at the conundrum.
“It’s funny to you?” she glares.
“No, no, sorry. I was thinking of something else.”
“You’re used to this.” She looks down at the body, which has transitioned from a complete rest to an occasional twitch.
“I hunt them,” I say. I snap open an identification card from my threadbare wallet.
She snatches the old wallet away from me like she owns it, scans the card with her index finger, smiles. “Old school,” she says as she hands the wallet back to me. “Federal Reclamation Agency. You help them.” Her eyes give off warmth as they search into mine.
“We try,” I say. “Local county sheriffs or hijackers usually get to them before we do.”
“That’s different than hunting.” Her eyes close for a second, then she drops the back of her open hand onto the top of the bar so hard that I think her knuckles should bounce.
An inverted prism of multihued light pops out of a pin-sized glow centered in her palm. The prism transitions into a hologram of a political news story about proposed funding cuts for the agency I work for.
“Out of my pay grade,” I reply. “Happens every year, anyway.”
“Figures, right? About the only sensible thing the government has done since that product was released.”
“Well,” I answer. “They coulda not let it out into the wild in the first place.”
“Yeah, that,” she agrees.
Her eyes aren’t part of her synth skin. I realize that the brain melt’s description had been perfect for their blue’s captivating essence. Other than describing the wrong person.
I wonder what she would look like underneath her skin. I want to ask her why she’s wearing a skin in the first place. Few people do these days. Nobody wants to be mistaken for a burn victim. But if she is a burn victim, the moment might turn awkward and ugly. Most of those people are gone, collected like bundles of useless debris, and shot off into the sun as if a statement needed to be made about one of humanity’s more tragic mistakes.
“So is he just gonna lay there?” she asks, changing the subject in my head.
“I know, bad for business, right?”
“You’re the only business right now. It’s the middle of the day. Drink up,” she laughs. “I need the business.”
I comply, shove the empty glass her way.
“Thatta boy,” she smiles. She pours another. Whiskey, the best Ireland has to offer, poured over three perfectly square ice cubes created by the greatest microscopic ice artisans of the middle twenty-second century. There is one precise oval crater at the top of each one. Not one corner has melted when I receive the drink, despite the refills.
“Damn, this is good,” I say, quaffing it like it’s water.
“You got inhibitors in ya’ or somethin’?” she asks as she fills another empty glass.
“Nope. Just a long line of drinker DNA.”
“Yeah, I know the type. I’d say I usually stay away from those kinds of men, but here I am. So, you know, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“I would not,” I say, taking a sip, slowing down a bit, looking at her, wondering what it would be like to bed Mariah Charlot.
Finally, I ask. “Why her?”
“Oh,” she responds. “This?” She points to her face. “You don’t know about her?”
“Ah. Not really.”
“I’m surprised.” She pours herself a beer, puts her elbows on the bar, sits her chin on her hands so close to me I could easily kiss her lips. My spine feels like it’s been electrified by the live wires of a thousand Mariah Charlot fingernails.
Her husky voice descends nearly into a baritone whisper as she says, “She was hijacked a month ago.” She steps back and throws her hands away from her waist before slapping her palms against her hips. “That’s it. Nothing more than that, really.”
“So, you’re sort of what? Honoring her? Paying homage?”
“Yeah. Something like that. I dunno. She was kind of sweet, right? All those charity drives, things like that. Most celebrities, they don’t much care for us little people so much.”
I should know about a celebrity hijack. I question her story in my head. Checking it out on the net would be rude. I’d have to flash a hologram. So instead, I just say it. “I should know about that. Never heard this before now.”
“You should have known, why? Because it’s your job and she’s a celebrity?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Maybe you just forgot,” she says, her cartoon heart thinning into a sly smile.
“Maybe,” I acknowledge. “God knows I could probably use some chip work myself.”
“You got nothin’?” she asks, sounding astonished.
“Just the basics.”
“No sex stuff?”
“I don’t need both heads to explode,” I reply, which draws a sincere laugh out of her. I don’t like fake laughs. I like hers. It comes from deep inside, alive, anticipatory, and rolls up through her throat and out like it wants to tickle my belly.
She taps the tip of the bottle against my glass, which responds with a dull clink. “Finish up, slowpoke.” I comply. She pours another, then walks a few feet to my left, drags a stool my way, and sits across from me. “Tell me,” she says.
“About?”
“You.”
“I don’t really do that,” I reply, trying not to sound too cold.
“It’s easy. Just open your mouth and talk.”
Despite the alcohol, I feel something grow in my chest that shouldn’t be there after knowing someone for such a short time. I wish I knew what she looked like.
“Born in the Bronx.” Like you, I want to say. I stay silent after that, waiting.
“Come on,” she complains playfully. “More.” She leans in, again close enough for my lips to touch hers if I stretch my neck forward just a smidge. “Lots more.”
I laugh. I want to run off with her. But I don’t know what she looks like. What if she is a burn victim? Would I turn and run out of the bedroom? Am I that cruel?
“Was a cop. Managed about five thousand droids. All flyers. About yay big.” I spread my hands out about two feet.
“You look like a cop.”
“I’m not a cop,” I protest.
“You were.”
“Long time ago.”
“You don’t look old enough for a long time ago.”
“I’m fifty.”
“Shit, you’re a toddler. I could be arrested for the thoughts I’m having about you.”
“And you?”
“Eighty-seven years, three months, and two days.”
Strangely detailed reply, I think, but I’m getting drunk, so I toss it aside like a bad story. I want to pursue these thoughts she’s having about me, but instead I say, “So anyway, hitched a ride with the agency.”
“So, because, why? You got tired of chasing people with your drones?”
“No. My wife got hijacked at a Shanghai love fest.”
“Same as Mariah Charlot,” she says.
“Really,” I ask without a questioning inflection.
She nods.
“That’s a crazy thing. Crazy coincidence,” I say almost as a rebuttal. “My wife didn’t kill anyone, though.”
“I’m sorry. You can stop now. I didn’t mean to get personal.” She looks sad.
“It’s okay.” I don’t tell anyone about the years of grief, so I’m not about to start with her. “It was a long time ago. She got snatched by another government agency and disappeared from the grid. Anyway, hijackers seem to target certain people. I don’t know how to word it, or how to explain it. There’s a division in our agency that tries to find hijackers. They’re a slippery crew. Their quantum encryption techniques seem to always be a step ahead of our ability to crack them. Then, even when we do, they slip through our fingers anyway, and get more people.”
“Do you try to help them, too?” She asks. “Hijack victims?”
“No. I wish. But there’s nothing we can do. We can usually treat a simple brain melt. But a hijack? That’s a lot worse. The entire brain gets rewired. Programmed. Who did she kill?” That’s what most hijacks are all about. Murder for sport, viewed by snuff fanboys and lurkers.
“Mariah?” she asks.
I nod.
She turns her hand over and flips on a holo. A news story flashes in front of me: Hollywood star Mariah Charlot accused of mass slaying in Mexico City.
“I remember this,” I say. “Man, I do need an implant. I remember it as someone else.”
“It’s not like memory implants are expensive,” she chides.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s what my sister keeps telling me when I forget her kids’ birthdays,” I laugh.
She asks, “They can only hijack people with TalkLink chips?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Bug in the chip. Happened on a firmware update one day.” I shrug my shoulders. “I don’t know much more than that. Other than a bunch of chips ended up on the black market, and a bunch of those were essentially cloned. Those cloned ones? They’re the worst.” I never understood why people wanted a chip to help them generate conversation, but I don’t want to say that to her. She is someone who did.
I look down at the guy on the floor. He looks awake but he’s staring up at the ceiling, not moving. “Can you help me get this guy to a table?”
“Just like, sit him up like he’s a paying customer?” she laughs.
“I’ll cover his tab.”
“Will he drink if I give him something? I could use the business.”
“He’ll drink if I tell him to.”
“And he’s not hijacked?” she asks, sounding utterly confounded.
“That’s the first step to a hijack. A brain melt. It renders the victim stupid, is the best way to put it.”
“Ouch,” she says.
“Then, they just get the bots into his system. Any way they can. There are a hundred ways to deliver them. And it’s easy because you can tell a brain melt to do just about anything and they will.” There was some evidence that hijackers could now skip the first step, but I wasn’t sharing that.
“That’s why you wanted him to brain melt?”
I sigh. “It’s not that. I just… look, we don’t really have a clean, fast way to identify someone who’s got a black market TalkLink chip, which is, by far, the most defective. It’s not like we can cut into the brain of someone walking down the street or scan it. I guess you could say we want to get to likely candidates before a hijacker does. So we trigger a brain melt. Since it’s gonna happen eventually anyway. Maybe we can help them.”
She smiles. “That’s why they pay you the big bucks.”
I nod. “It’s a special skill.”
“So you trick the AI.”
“Yeah, yeah, sort of. I mean, it’s almost like cutting wires or something. Say the right combination of phrases, maybe add a visual cue, and the neurons zig instead of zag. The AI usually says something nonsensical. Then I know.” I look at the guy on the floor. “Then they collapse.”
“The worse thing is,” I continue, “Is that now that there are so fewer people walking around with black market TalkLink chips, hijackers are grabbing people off the street and injecting hacked TalkLinks into their craniums, then releasing them.”
“Releasing them for what? Better days ahead?”
“Yup. Someone else then infects them after they suffer a brain melt.”
“Is that what happened to this guy?” she asks as she walks around the bar.
“I dunno. It doesn’t much matter. End result is the same. When they become defective, you know, the whole thing does.”
“The whole thing being the person,” she says as she bends down to help move him.
“Yeah.” I scrunch up my nose. “This guy smells worse than a botless bathroom,” I complain as I lift him by the shoulders. I have no idea if his brain is salvageable. That’s for others to figure out.
His stench surprises me. I hadn’t noticed it when he was talking to me, maybe because the bar smells so boozy.
She picks up his feet, saying, “It’s important to respect an individual’s personal space, attire, and hygiene, as many factors can influence them. These factors include their immediate environment, as well as general activities. For example, an individual may have been required to run from an assault but has not had time to bathe properly afterward.”
I nearly drop his shoulders to the floor, but I pretend not to hear her AI-speak. We carry him to a bench at one of the bar’s wooden tables against a wall, which is covered with unanimated pictures of female celebrities. I wonder how many of them she’s cosplayed using a different synth skin. I look at her for a moment without saying anything.
We sit him up straight like we’re working with a mannequin bot or an airport greeter droid. When we finish, she pats him on the shoulder as he stares straight ahead. “There. That’s better,” she says. “Shall I fetch a beer for the poor fellow?” she asks.
“Well, he’s not gonna get up and order one,” I say. It takes hours for brain melts to recover enough to walk on their own, but she knows that.
“Smart ass,” she says, walking to the bar.
She retrieves a bottle of beer. When she brings it to the table and slides it his way, I say to the man, “Drink up.”
The man stares ahead as he takes a swig.
“Now what?” asks the bartender.
“Now you talk to me about respecting someone’s personal space. You said you deactivated your TalkLink, but there it was.”
“It kicks in sometimes. Is it ever really completely deactivated?”
“Fair question. The answer is no.”
“Are you evaluating me, Mr. Day?”
“You know my name, what’s yours?” I ask. The name she saw on my identification isn’t an alias.
“Just call me Bee for now,” she replies quickly. “Also grew up in the Bronx.”
“I didn’t say I grew up there. Just born there.” I don’t want to sound hostile. That won’t get me anywhere. I try to remind myself to soften my tone.
“Are you hungry?” she asks, not seeming to notice. “There’s a Szechuan place two doors down.”
“Do they have a ‘bring your own brain melt’ policy?” I ask, looking at the man staring ahead. “Drink,” I say to him. The man complies.
“What will happen if we leave him here?” she asks.
“Depends on who finds him sitting here staring into the void.”
“I could lock the place up,” she replies.
“I’m hungry,” I admit.
She smiles, revealing a top row of well-manicured, perfectly straight bright yellow teeth that glow slightly in our tenebrous surroundings. She dashes to an open doorway next to the bar, steps behind it, reappears, and shakes a metal hoop holding several keys.
“Seriously?” I ask.
“Old school,” she smiles again. I half expect a different set of teeth. Maybe bright blue. Or a lambent green. I’ve seen such things. But they’re the same.
“Alright, then,” I say, slapping the man’s shoulder. “Don’t you go anywhere. You sit right here as if leaving will set this place on fire. Drink steadily, but slowly.”
When we step outside, the door of her establishment shuts with the authority of heavy iron. A covering that looks like melting tungsten crawls over the door’s small window. She slips a large skeleton key into a gaping keyhole and jiggles it for what seems like an eternity. “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I say.
“They’re fun,” she says cheerily.
“Okay,” I respond.
“Besides, they can’t be hacked. Burglars have no idea how to break the code,” she says after finishing. She presents the fat, long key to my face.
“No, I suppose they wouldn’t.” She has a point. Her door and its key must be two hundred years old. The forgotten knowledge is as unbreakable as a quantum cipher.
I look down the long, tunnel-shaped weather canopy protecting the sidewalk, which is quiet but for a few pedestrians several doors down.
The canopy displays outside temperature readings of 145 degrees Fahrenheit in scrolling text along its length near its curved ceiling. The sweaty summer New York air seeps through the canopy walls enough to make me wonder if synth skin feels like my t-shirt, which is already clinging tenaciously to my body.
Each storefront-length panel of the canopy jarringly displays a video, making me want to close my eyes. Bee waves her hand in a long swooping motion like a sports referee motioning a command to restart a clock. The videos flicker off. I must look like I want to lunge at her with appreciative kisses because she explains, “Neighborhood control.”
The panels turn into transparent views of trams sliding on air along the busy city street, which is covered by a translucent canopy of its own.
We walk two doors down to a place called Fired Up. “Spicy?” I ask as she pushes the door open.
“Yeah, that okay?”
“It’s fine.”
When we get inside, it’s a din of small robots, clattering dishes, and loud conversation. But it’s weird. Everyone looks like Boots Kingfisher.
“Who?” she asks when I mention this.
“He’s the guy who started this mess.”
“What mess?” she asks. “Brain melts? Hijacks? What?”
“He’s the one who made TalkLink available on the black market. Was one of its original engineers. And he’s, well, everyone here.”
“Yeah, I didn’t recognize who they were all playing. Think it’s a party?”
Boots is a short, round Korean man with no more than a few dozen strands of black greasy hair combed haphazardly over the top of his head. He’s nearly two hundred years old, so it makes sense that I can see age spots on his bald scalp through the strange net of colliding patterns that eventually fall below the back of his collar.
All the men in the restaurant share this look, and they’re all wearing black suits and green bow ties. Their thin mustache looks like it was drawn with a tiny black stylus.
“Beats me,” I say. “I don’t do cos. But why are they playing him? Nobody knows who he is outside of law enforcement.”
I probably shouldn’t have told her that much, but the mystery of my surroundings has overwhelmed my natural defense mechanisms.
“A booth, please,” she says to a greeting droid, which spins around in response. The droid is nothing more than a long, thick twisted wire erupting out of a small swiveling metal base that houses a fat green wheel. Its one eye is attached to the top end of the wire, which ascends from its base in a straight line but finishes with a slight curl forward.
Having spun around, the droid charges across the dining area with us in tow. “Sufficient?” the droid asks as we face a booth against a wall filled with beautiful Japanese-style animated lithography.
“It’s fine,” says Bee. “Can you still the pictures, please?” The charcoal branches and leaves and wispy clouds of the animations stop moving. It’s like she knows me.
“Your server will be here shortly,” says the droid in a high-pitched buzz.
“So?” I ask as we sit across from each other on synthetic benches. Mine sinks a little like there’s too much foam. “Hard, please,” I say. The seat under me stiffens.
“Why do you suppose we say, ‘please’ when we tell non-organics what to do?” she asks.
“You’re changing the subject. Tell me what the hell is going on. Please.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t been particularly truthful with you,” she says.
“Yeah, I got that much,” I respond.
“I don’t know much,” she says. “I just know you may not be who you think you are. I mean, none of us really knows for sure nowadays, right?”
“Well, I am, but go on, I’m listening anyway, because I like this restaurant and the décor of many Boots Kingfishers.”
She sighs. “I’m not good at this. I’m not some spy or nothin’. I really am a bartender. But someone came into my place two nights ago. Showed me your picture. Pictures. Showed me about five of them, saying you could be any of them. Kind of gave me some instructions.”
“I don’t do cos or synth,” I say. That little orb of feeling growing in my chest for her earlier has turned into something unpleasant. “There’s only one of me.”
“Yeah, I know that now,” she says. She touches the tops of my fingers with the tips of hers. “I guess this is goodbye,” she says. “I really liked you.”
“Weird, but okay.”
“Look for me someday, okay?”
She has no time to say anything more. All the Boots Kingfishers disappear, replaced by one, now in front of me where Bee had been sitting a second ago.
“It’s like magic, isn’t it?” says Boots. “It isn’t though. It’s just quantum physics, holograms, and a dash of playtime because I’ll always be a little kid inside.”
The expletives I hurl at him only make him giggle like the little kid he says he is.
“You had no real awareness, did you?” asks Boots in a shrill voice that reminds me of a dolphin.
“About?” I say angrily.
“How your ability to trigger a brain melt with just a few clever phrases and reactions was part of a multiyear process to decode a massively quantum cipher.”
A server droid brings us food. Mine is exactly what I would have ordered, including a Japanese matcha green tea.
“I’ve never confessed this outside of a tiny circle of impatient law enforcement personnel, Mr. Day, but I am the very first hijack victim of my own work. It’s embarrassing, but I carried on. I’m not happy about what it has all become, but I’ve been as powerless to do anything about it as your wife was in the neighboring bar just moments ago.”
My anger is subsiding because he is mining my curiosity with such ferocity that I can’t help but listen.
“I make it sound so easy. But the computational work you’ve been developing has taken years to achieve its primary result. You’ve been doing this how long?”
I shake my head. I truly don’t remember. Fifteen years? Twenty?
“Each case you solve, each, you know, AI puzzle you unwind, resolves yet another piece to the bigger cipher that you have just now broken to potentially, and I emphasize the word ‘potentially,’ unlock millions of people from their prison.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Everyone with TalkLink, even black market, is networked to one another.” He leans in as if sharing a secret, saying in a whisper, “Small detail the marketers leave out.” I don’t tell him we learn it on the first day of agency training.
“I knew if you interacted with her, you’d crack the code,” he continues. “So I found her, then sent her to a quaint Bronx bar, and waited for you to harness your outlandishly wonderful sorcery. Consider it a reward for your years of dedication.” Boots’ grin nearly wraps around his head. “I’ll be honest. I don’t know if her prognosis is good, but I’m very hopeful. This is all — well, we are in unknown territory.”
“I still don’t get it,” I say.
Boots sighs. “It’s possible none of us will ever be the same. AI is almost hardwired into anyone with the chip. So hardwired that I’m not one hundred percent sure that my AI chip isn’t feeding you this information instead of me.”
On cue, Boots smashes an eggroll against his chin as if he missed his mouth. “Hmmm. That was clumsy.” He examines the eggroll, tries again. He bites too hard, catching the tip of his finger within the lock of his jaw. “Ouch!” he exclaims.
He gently places the eggroll onto its small plate.
“Perhaps I should concentrate on my explanation,” he says.
He seems to be close to a brain melt. I am hoping against that. There can’t be many things worse than the impossible redundancy of a hijacked brain melt.
He waves a finger in the air. “I know that look,” he says. “I’ve seen it at least a dozen times while surveilling you. I’m not suffering a brain melt, Mr. Day. Nor am I technically hijacked. My associates freed me from a hijack some time ago. I’m merely adjusting to another chip deactivation.” He chuckles. “I’ve had a lot of chip work done over the years. Undoing it all isn’t fun.”
“If they freed you, why didn’t you free others? How can you watch all this over the years and not do something? And why the hell have you been surveilling me? How have you been surveilling me, for that matter?”
“Oh, I have freed others.” He doesn’t sound defensive when he says that. More like he’s reciting a statistic. “Well, you have. That’s why we are facing each other across this table. You’re the cipher crack. It took years to find someone who can do what you do. And then years more to watch you do your work.
“Long before we found you, my associates freed me from my hijack, but they could easily have mistakenly killed me instead. In fact, there was a ninety percent chance of that occurring. They were willing to risk that, but they didn’t think it was a choice the government would find acceptable.”
“You might be surprised,” I say, thinking of burn shots to the sun, that grim episode of human history during which genetic mistakes spawned by an attempt to adapt humans to climate change were angrily disposed of like someone throwing unpleasant diaries into a raging fireplace.
“My level of surprise is insignificant compared to your achievement. How many brain melts have you triggered? A thousand?”
I can’t answer him because I don’t know. A lot.
“Unaware of your end goal, because your superiors kept that information to themselves,” Boots adds.
He waves a finger at the door. I haven’t noticed anyone standing there, but now I do. It’s Bee. Or someone who looks like her. She opens the restaurant door, and the brain melt walks in as if nothing had happened earlier. Another Boots Kingfisher gently pushes the man inside.
“There she is,” smiles Boots. “Please forgive her synth skin. She hasn’t quite been herself these past years.”
The brain melt looks at me with a combination of love and lust. It’s all quite strange. “Jesse?” he says. He runs to me, looks at me for a moment as if not quite sure what to do, then sits down on my bench and embraces me tightly, kissing my cheek. “Oh, oh, Jesse,” he cries. “Jess.” Tears wash his face, splashing against mine.
“A thousand pieces of the puzzle,” says Boots. “And now, your wife is finally free.” Boots is shedding a tear, too. He pulls something out of his pocket, saying, “Replicating this effort among thousands of other brain melts will be difficult, but this is a wonderful start.” He slides it my way across the table. It’s my assignment card. “Each person has their own key. Combined with the hundreds of cipher combinations you’ve already established. Please excuse me.” He wipes his face with a napkin. “This is all quite intense.”
“You work for the agency?” I ask warily as the brain melt loosens his grip.
Boots shakes his head. “Not really. Once the government discovered my hijack was overturned by my associates, they chained me to a plea deal, which I accepted. They assigned me to observe this last track of yours because I told them you were as close to the solve as I suspected you were. From your first day at the agency, nobody could tell you the purpose behind your work. The promise was too great. Failure would have consumed you.”
“Failure?”
“The promise of unlocking your wife, after all these years. Maybe, hopefully, thousands more if we can replicate this success. Perhaps someday, millions.”
“A massive cipher gets broken all because I can sass an AI?”
He nods with a smile. “Yep.”
The brain melt kisses my cheek, lets go, takes my hand from the table, and clasps it in his. “This place reminds me of that place in Jalisco,” he says. “The one with the painted ladies on the wall?”
I nod my head. I remember it like it was yesterday. Nothing about our surroundings reminds me of that place, but I don’t care. My throat tightens. The corners of my eyes fill with warm salty water.
“And we had some kind of coconut drink under a moonlight weather canopy,” he says. “I hate coconut.”
“It was a pina colada. You liked it just fine.”
He, or she, they, look at me with forlorn eyes. “No. I hate coconut.”
I don’t know what she is anymore. He. She. They. But I know I’m again filled with their essence. Love — it’s so strange, isn’t it? Yet so very, very simple?
Notes
This story first appeared in The Kraken Lore publication on Medium. It was originally posted to Ruminato in August 2024 when I set up the Substack, but it was not sent to subscribers.
Thanks for reading!
I’m going to avoid any and all bring your own brain melt establishments. 🤣