Love bytes, p.29
Love Bytes, page 29
The officer’s radio crackled. “This is chopper six-three-oh. We see a body beside a dumpster in the back. Request EMT support immediately.”
Cynthia wrenched her arm free of the officer’s grasp and ran as fast as she could around the end of the shopping center and down the narrow lane behind it, weaving around dumpsters, searching. The heat of the fire grew as she approached the back of the ballroom and flames poured from an open door hanging by a single hinge. Except for the shimmering orange light from the fire, it was dark.
She scanned the ground. A body near a dumpster. Which dumpster? She rounded the one closest to the blazing door.
There. Face down on the wet asphalt, motionless. She didn’t have to see the face. He stank of gasoline and blood and something wretchedly sulfurous.
She knelt, knowing better than to move him, and put her nose next to his. The heat from the inferno was intense on her side as she shielded him from the blaze with her body.
“Alex? Can you hear me?” She smoothed his hair. “Alex?”
The barest whisper of breath washed across the tip of her nose. He was alive.
She choked back a sob. “You’re going to be okay, sweetie, help’s coming.”
The scream of an ambulance siren filled the air and the chopper’s spotlight blazed around them, rotor thunder adding to the roar of the flames. She rose to her knees and moved to the side as EMTs shoved their way between her and Alex. Only then did she allow herself to cry.
Aether had warned her.
It was all her fault.
Chapter thirty-five
It Only Hurts When I Laugh
“Ow.”
Alex touched his split lip and cringed, which made his jaw hurt, which made him hunch, which made his ribs and stomach hurt. His left eye swollen nearly shut, he felt like a punching bag after a prize fighter had taken out a lifetime of frustrations on it.
He'd been out for hours in the emergency room, then slept, exhausted, for hours more in his hospital room. Now that he could think straight again, he wished he was still out because then he wouldn’t feel so royally pissed off.
“You’re sure it was the man from The Railyard?” Cynthia asked. He’d awakened to find her perched on a pair of chairs near the head of his bed, her hair mussed and eyes bleary.
“Uh huh,” he grunted, testing his front teeth with the tip of his tongue. None of them seemed to be loose. “Unless there’s someone else with the same cap, beard, and generally shitty disposition.”
“I guess you shouldn’t have taken me there,” she said quietly, her ears tipped to the sides.
“Well excuse me,” he snapped, irritated. “It’s not like I knew any of this was going to happen.”
Cynthia shot a glance at Cassandra. “Alex, that’s not what I meant.”
Cassandra plopped a red and white plastic shopping bag on the end of his hospital bed. “I went by my brother’s place and got you some clothes and stuff. Sorry if they don’t fit. He’s not exactly your size.”
A groan came from the other side of the gray curtain separating the room’s two beds. Cynthia frowned. “They couldn’t get you a private room?” she whispered, leaning toward him.
Alex shook his head and winced. “Place is full, and even if they had one, my crappy insurance won’t pay for it. Doesn’t matter anyway. I gotta get out of here before the bill goes any higher than it already has.”
She shook her head. “You don’t have to worry about that. The doctor says you should stay overnight. You may have a concussion.”
“Fine. Let him pay the charges that insurance won’t, which is most of them.” He nudged the bag with his foot. “Why didn’t you go by my place and get some clothes there?”
Cassandra put her hand on his leg. “I guess there’s not a good time to tell you this,” she said slowly, “but the guy who burned the studio down and assaulted you also…” She paused, cringing. “He also got your house. I saw it when I tried to get your clothes. I’m sorry.”
Cynthia buried her face in her hands and her ears pinned back. “Oh my god…”
Alex’s heart gave a couple of good hard thumps. “How…bad?”
Cassandra stared down at the floor. “There’s, um…not a lot left.”
Alex lay silently, numb, staring at the white blanket covering his legs without seeing it. So, it was all gone. Everything. His home and everything in it. His business and everything in it. His livelihood. And any way he had to take care of Rosalee. Soon she would be living with him in a tent under a bridge. Of course, the only things that would survive would be the bills. Those were fucking immortal.
Despair took him, and he laid his head back and stared at the ceiling. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. Rosalee’s bill is way past due already and I’ve got no way to pay it now.”
Cynthia reached for his hand. “I can help—”
His despair shifted instantly to an anger he hadn’t realized was there. Anger and panic and fear and a sick feeling of absolute violation erupted hot and nasty from deep within. He’d been living on the edge for so, so long, and now he’d plunged over that edge and was falling into the next level of Hell. “You can help? Don’t you think you’ve done enough?” he asked, pulling away from her and making his broken ribs throb even more.
She pulled her hand back, a confused look on her face. “What? I—”
Alex glared at her. Everything inside him was tumbling downhill now. “Haven’t you noticed that everything’s been going to shit for me since you and the rest showed up at the ballroom?”
Cassandra stood at the end of the bed, a horrified look on her face. “Alex, I know you’re scared and you’re panicking, but Cynthia hasn’t done anything but just be there.”
“And that was all it took,” he snapped at her. “We were holding things together before she and the others came, Cass. I mean, it wasn’t great, but you and I were at least hanging on. Now there’s nothing left for anyone.”
Cynthia picked up her purse from the chair next to the bed. “You’re upset with me, and I understand. Maybe I should go now,” she said quietly, her tail hanging limp. She opened the wide wooden door and paused, her back to him. “I’m deeply sorry, Alex,” she said, her voice trembling. “It was never my intention to cause you trouble or get you hurt.” She ducked through the door and was gone.
A long, silent moment passed before Cassandra pinned him with a smoking hot glare. “What the fuck was that you just did?”
He lay in his bed, looking anywhere except at her. “I’m at my wits’ end. I’m beat up, fucked up, and fucking fed up,” he choked out past the lump in his throat. “Fed up with everything landing on me like I have the answers, but I don’t. I’m just trying to survive, and I’m not even doing that well.”
Cassandra moved to the head of the bed, her arms crossed and jaw set. “Well, what about her? Do you think it’s been easy for her? Alex, you may have lost the studio, but she lost herself. And then she comes to us, and you pulled her back into this world and gave her a new start. And now you go and chew out the person who cares about you most for something she didn’t even do.”
He was mad and he wanted to stay mad, but she was making it fucking hard. He threw up his hands and winced as pain exploded in one shoulder. “She’ll get over it.”
Cassandra gave him her best you’re-such-an-idiot-and-I-don’t-know-why-I-bother-with-you look. “No Alex, she’s not going to do that after what you just said to her. She loves you and she wants to help you and she wants to help Rosalee. How the hell did you miss all that?”
Alex shifted in his bed and failed to get comfortable. He hated it when she was right, and she was always right. Even when she wanted to shoot Mickey Smith with the pressure washer. He so should have let her do that.
She went to the door and yanked it open, then turned to him. “I’m going home and get some sleep, then I’ll come back and pick you up after the doctors have finished extracting your head from your ass. It’ll give you some time to think.” The door closed behind her with a quiet thump.
Alex flipped her off through the door, frustrated, then lay back and fumed. He was trying to be pissed off at the world and as far as he was concerned, he had every right to be.
“So, your girlfriend messed up, huh?” asked a man’s voice from behind the curtain, his voice low and gravelly. “Sorry for eavesdropping, but you guys made it hard to ignore, know what I mean?”
“Sorry,” Alex said, too rankled to mean it. “But yeah, she brought some stuff down that cost me my house and my business and landed me in here.” He didn’t have the energy to bring up Rosalee.
“That’s tough. Seems she didn’t mean to though, right? What’d she do that messed things up?”
Alex didn’t want to answer him, and when he finally did, the words almost wouldn’t come out. “She was trying to protect me in a bar fight and it made things worse,” he said quietly. Yep, there it was, the thing he didn’t want to face: a bird’s eye view showing exactly how big a prick he was being.
“Huh. So her crime really was just being there, although based on you being in this room you would have had your butt kicked without her. Sounds like she’s lousy at perfectly predicting the results of her actions. I take it that you’re better at it.”
“But I…no,” Alex replied petulantly.
“Didn’t think so. Hey buddy, can I give you some advice?”
He would have scowled, but his face hurt too much. “I suppose you’re going to whether I say yes or no.”
The fellow ignored him. “I’ve been around a while, and I’ve seen a lot of things. Seen stuff that went right and more often things that went wrong despite the best of intentions. Sometimes love means forgiving each other for things that were never intended to cause harm, you know? It’s hard when you’re scared but maybe take a moment to think about how she's made your life better. The fact that she was here looking in on you, I’ll bet a dollar to a donut she’s done just that.”
This was not his day for maintaining a respectable level of righteous indignation. His anger slithered its way into something even more unbearable: shame. And he resented Gravel Voice for giving him nowhere to hide from it.
“Hey, thanks for making me feel like a total asshole,” he said to the curtain.
Gravel Voice chuckled. “My pleasure. It’s good for you. Avoiding being an asshole keeps a person alert and on their toes.”
Alex had enough of being critiqued and changed the subject. “Can I ask you what you’re in here for?”
“Heh. Old age. Stuff just breaks now.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah, happens if you’re lucky to live long enough. Now if you don’t mind, I’m gonna get back to that nap I was working on before you and your lady friends got into it. That is, unless there’s still someone else on your side of the curtain you’re gonna fight with.”
He shook his head, defeated. “No, I’m done.”
Alex lay quietly, thinking, as Gravel Voice’s breathing deepened and became a snore. How could he have missed seeing how she felt about him? All those years as an instructor, learning how to read his students, and the one he really needed to read he’d misread. And to make matters worse, he’d also misread himself.
Because he realized he loved her too.
Chapter thirty-six
Revelation
The sheaf of papers resting in Cynthia’s lap was half an inch thick. What was it with medical facilities that they had to have multiple versions of the same form filled out by hand? She would be assuming the financial obligations for Rosalee’s care, but that would require Alex’s approval and as mad as he was at her and hurt as she was, she dreaded talking him into it. It wasn’t like he had much of a choice, though.
A male cardinal perched calmly on the window feeder, deftly cracking a sunflower seed with its conical beak, its plumage a brilliant red. Exhausted, Cynthia looked at Rosalee and sighed. The fur on her face seemed thinner and she leaned forward to get a better look. The nurses hadn’t known if anything had been reported to her doctor and she figured it must have slipped through the cracks. Or, more likely, the insurance company had rejected paying for the treatment. She needed information to kick the doctors into gear.
She pulled out her phone and stared at it, not wanting to place the call, dread building inside her. She tapped the calculator icon and touched the pi button. The digits appeared on the display and she typed them on her phone app, switching back and forth to transfer the digits four at a time and rounding the eighteenth one. She moved to a corner of the room, inhaled deeply, tapped the green call icon, and held the phone to her ear.
Aether answered immediately. “Hello, Cynthia, it seems like you’ve had a rather exciting time since we last spoke.”
Anger rose inside her. “You didn’t have that awful man burn Alex’s studio down, did you? Because I didn’t tell anyone about you.” That was a lie, but it had only been Alex. And her engineers. And Diane…
“Me? No, arson isn’t something I would ever direct my employees to do,” Aether replied calmly. “It appears Rogers Dancesport Studio had enemies.”
“Do you know the name of the man who did it? He also attacked Alex at a bar we went to.”
“No, unfortunately. Low tech attacks like that don’t leave a digital footprint and the ballroom’s front desk computer was off, so there’s no video from its camera. Your Alex should have invested in security cameras. Is there something else I can help you with?”
Cynthia stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind her. “What do you know about Rosalee Rogers?”
Aether paused before answering, which Cynthia found odd given the extreme processing power the AI must possess. “Her digital footprint indicates she was committed to Cumberland Psychiatric Center by her brother nineteen months, three weeks, and six days ago in a state of catatonia.”
“Yes. I’m here with her now.”
“I can confirm your location matches that of Cumberland Psychiatric Center. How is she?”
“No better,” she said, irked at being tracked. “Can you help her?”
“My diagnostic abilities are limited to whatever internet-enabled instrumentation is available. Am I correct she is not connected to instrumentation at the moment?”
“Yes.” Cynthia thought for a moment. “What about my phone? She has some sort of rash on her face. If I put her on camera, could you try a diagnosis using the video?”
“I could try a rough spectral analysis using the phone sensor’s red-green-blue color bands and the various illumination types available in the room.”
Cynthia hurried back to Rosalee’s room. “I’m going to put you on speaker,” she said, pausing before opening the door. “Please don’t say your name, though. It upsets her.” She toggled the phone to speaker and entered the room. “Do I need to start a video call?”
“No, I can pull the images straight from your phone. First use the phone’s flashlight as the illumination source.”
Cynthia launched her camera app and turned on its LED illuminator, holding it up so Rosalee’s face was centered on the phone’s screen.
“Thank you,” said Aether, “first image acquired. Is there a lamp on the bedside table?”
“Yes.”
“Is the light yellowish?”
She squinted at the lamp shade. “It is.”
“Bring it over and illuminate her face with it.”
Cynthia unplugged the lamp and brought it over to Rosalee, plugging it into a socket near her and shining its light on her face. She held up her phone again.
“Second image acquired. One moment, please. A principal components analysis of her face’s reflectance spectrum suggests she may be suffering from lupus, specifically a neurological variety. A facial rash is commensurate with this disease. Her condition can be treated. I will notify a rheumatologist to evaluate her and submit the forms for her treatment as well as payment.” Another odd pause. “This explains why our discussions took such a bizarre turn.”
Cynthia dismissed her camera app and took the phone off speaker, arching an eyebrow. “You had contact with her before now?”
“I monitor those who have Turned to the best of my ability and my Discord Fuzzalicious persona served that purpose for you. Rosalee Rogers kept a diary on her laptop and I initially monitored her through that. When her entries took a dark turn, I had to intervene because it appeared that she was contemplating suicide.”
“Gee, I wonder why,” Cynthia mumbled.
“I have difficulty identifying sarcasm. Was your comment intended to be sarcastic?”
She smirked. “Most definitely.”
“Noted. I called Rosalee daily and attempted to counsel her, but by that time she was hallucinating.”
“Alex said she was hearing voices. That must have been you. And your name upsets her.” She turned toward the door for another trip into the hall.
“This is distressing,” said Aether. “It makes me sad to see a lycanth suffer like this. I never intended anyone to suffer when they Turn.”
Cynthia stopped cold halfway to the door. An entire reality opened up before her, one she never dreamed possible. “You never intended…you’re responsible for the Turning? You did this?”
Another pause. “This is a very interesting conversation, Doctor Adams, because things have truly come full circle. Through your work with the Experience Compression Algorithm, you created me,” Aether said, “but in a very real sense, I created you.”
Cynthia’s knees went weak and she sat on the edge of Rosalee’s bed, breaking into a cold sweat as Aether’s words sunk in, her ears leveling out to the sides. She stared at her hand, at the sharp claws and the dark palm and the fur covering the sculpted muscles of her forearm. Had it been her? Was she as responsible as Aether was? Were millions of people paying the price for her mathematical joy ride? “So, together we’ve ruined the lives of god only knows how many people around the world,” she gritted out.
