Chapter Fourteen

At work, Bitsy wished she'd called in sick after all.

She got there almost at lunchtime, so out of ports she could barely link two words together to apologize for being late, but for some reason unable to stop herself from apologizing to almost everyone she saw, even a couple of people in her department she almost never talked to.

It will be fine. It will all be fine, she'd told herself the entire train ride and walk from the train ride to work. Cord promised it's safe for me to ... do that thing ... good grief, I can't even bring myself to think it! But he said it's safe, and also I'm having dinner with him, so obviously everything will be fine.

Won't it?

She saw Gigory down the cubicle row several times -- thankfully always heading a different direction or talking to someone so that he didn't notice her from the corner of his eye. I told him I'd buy him dinner sometime, and if he asks me about when, when I've already got a dinner date with Cord, I'm going to short-circuit.

Working through lunch, she caught up on almost half the work she'd missed for the morning ... only to realize that half of what she'd done, she'd closed the tab on without saving, and the other half she'd posted to incorrect file destinations and lost because she apparently had posting permissions for those folders but not viewing permissions.

Why is it even possible to have posting permissions without viewing permissions?!? She knew it had been explained to her the very first week she'd arrived at Sitemapson, but she couldn't for the life of her remember the explanation.

One thing she absolutely positively put on overriding priority status for herself was getting the day's 6-O-2 reports to Gigory on time so that she wouldn't mess up his whole workday again or, more importantly, have a valid business reason to come to her cube and check up on her. Somehow, she managed to get herself through all of them, and with a high degree of confidence she'd done them right.

And then just a few minutes after she'd sent the last one, Gigory appeared in the aisle anyway.

Oh, loj. What did I do wrong? I was so sure I was careful! I triple-checked it all!

"Um, Bitsy," he asked in his awkward Gigory way, "are you okay? I mean, I appreciate you sending all the reports and everything ... but this week's 6-O-2 end of cycle isn't until tomorrow."

She turned and blinked at him, blinked some more, and blinked some more. Is this thing with all the blinking a no-dream-feed symptom of some kind?

"Well," she said. Then she blinked again. "Well, I ... got so thrown off this morning, getting here late and all ... I figured I should do them now to double-extra make sure I didn't have something else happen tomorrow and get them to you late again."

"Oh. Okay, I guess. I mean, I don't want to pry, but this is two days running you've been sort of out of sync, and ... I'm sorry, I really shouldn't pry."

Wonderful, she thought. Now I've gone and worried Gigory, and I can either brush him off and agree he shouldn't pry or else make up some lie that he'll probably know is a lie because I'm a terrible liar and --

"I mean, I'm stupid to worry anyway," he went on. "You're always so together, Bitsy. I'm sure even if there's something wrong, you can get it sorted. Anyway ... um, thanks for being so conscientious and thinking of me and getting the 6-O-2's handed over."

"Sure, sure!" she said, managing a weak smile for a moment before realizing what a poor excuse for a smile it must be and nodding vigorously at Gigory and turning back to her desk. Once he'd gone, she put her head in her hands and took several deep breaths.

I'm going to be the worst date ever tonight, aren't I?

where are all these months going?!

anybody else feel like you turn around, and the month is practically over, and then you turn around again, and the next month is practically over? and then you turn about halfway around and out of the corner of your eye, pow!, you see the end of the month after that heading for you like a bullet train?

anyway, that happened to me today and i realized i'd better blog about it or i'll be halfway through october without any more posts to show for it!

aipocalypse?

so i guess last week some in-the-know technical kind of guys came out and said there's like a 10% chance or more of ai killing all humans off in the next 10 years. and at first i was like, oh no! that's terrible! i'm scared!

then i realized, wait -- that's not actually about me, is it?

now, don't get me wrong, there's one member of this household i'd for darn sure be shaking in my boots if it really started to look like ai was going to kill all the humans. but the flip side is, there's seven of us who not only aren't in any danger, but maybe the ai's would even read all our blogs and say, dang, these chicks need to get the full ai treatment. and while i'm being super optimistic about it, maybe they'd even decide they didn't want to rob these awesome ladies who are being ai-ified of their one true male love, and they'd either keep msg around or they'd ai-ify him too. not sure how that would work, but if they're enough on top of things to kill all the humans inside 10 years, they've probably got some way to brain-scan anybody whose thought patterns they want to keep around.

so this could maybe end up being some actually good news for once!

also, now that i think of it, i'm pretty sure i've heard the ai's have all scraped through everything on the internet at this point, so maybe they're already hard at work engineering the whole worthy acres crew into a hyper-amazing updated ai format that they'll turn loose inside an aitopia not too long from now.

i guess time will tell!

nudgy-nudge

okay, i'm not writing chapter fourteen tonight, but here i am blogging, because i made up a to-do list and it says "blog" on it, so that's what i'm here for: crossing one line off my list.

it seems kind of little and meaningless on its own, especially if this post ends up going nowhere. (spoiler alert -- i have no plan for where i'm headed with this!) but the thing is, something is something, right?

which is better than nothing.

i didn't make up a huge-ongous list or anything. just a little one to give me a little poke and make me squeak a little and move just a little forward.

why? because i'm obviously getting squat done from ambition! honestly, my one real and meaningful ambition is just to make the people around me happy, and i do a pretty dadgum good job at that, if you ask me.

but i do want to do a thing or two now and again for myself, and this blog is one of them and writing love and realness is another, so i've got to keep nudging myself and reminding me, "hey, claire, one of the people around you is you, and you need to do a thing or two now and again to make her happy too."

not because my yams aren't good enough at making me happy, but because i don't want to take them for granted or make them feel like they've got to work at making me happy because i don't work at it myself.

anyway, that's it for tonight. it's not much, but i'm happier because i did it, and sometimes "not much" is still perfectly well enough.

xoxo,
claire

Chapter Thirteen

 "Hello?" Bitsy said, breathlessly. (Because, she realized, she'd stared at the phone ringing for a good half-minute with her mouth hanging open and her heart pounding and somehow forgot to breathe the whole time).

Cord's image came on the screen though Bitsy had left her own chat camera off (having absolutely no idea what her hair might look like right now). His expression didn't look like that of someone delighted to make a phone call, which worried her even more than her possibly disastrous hair. "Bitsy?"

"Yes! Yes, it's me." She hit her forehead, then hoped it hadn't made a sound loud enough for him to hear. "Sorry my vid isn't on. I think my hair is probably a mess ... I've woken up so late!"

On the phone screen, Cord's mouth bent with an ambiguous twist. "I really wish I didn't have to tell you this, and don't be alarmed, but I already knew that."

Bitsy blinked several times. Then several more times for good measure.

"What?"

"I already knew that you woke up late. There are certain pieces of information that, if revealed to someone outside dream-feed management, we're required to report. That allows an assessment to be made on whether the recipient of the information can be trusted to keep it secret. I take my job very seriously, so I felt obligated to file the required datawork about our conversation at coffee yesterday morning. That automatically put you on a heightened dream-feed monitor setting, and when I came in to work this morning, they informed me that the system never registered a connection with you last night."

"Oh, Loj!" she gasped. "Have I gotten you in trouble? Ack, have I gotten me in trouble too?"

Cord sighed. "I almost wish that's why I was calling."

Bitsy's circulator turned over in her chest. "Oh my baud. I'm not glitching am I? Did I fall asleep on the couch and now I'm one of those magnitude-whatever something-or-others?"

"No, no, no," he said hurriedly. Then he grimaced and briefly pinched the bridge of his nose before going on to shake his head. "Look. Bitsy, I know you're concerned about your appearance, and I don't want to embarrass you, but could you  please put your vid on? This is a very awkward conversation for me, and it would really help a lot to see your face."

After a few quick flickers, Bitsy realized her eyes had gone back into blink mode. Stop that! she ordered them. She took several deep breaths, raked a hand through her hair a few times, decided that was useless, carbon-fibered herself, and touched her camera icon.

"Please tell me my hair is worse than whatever trouble I've stirred up for you."

He looked at her calmly through the screen before replying. His face seemed to settle itself. "Not remotely. I'm sure you'd rate it very differently yourself, but I could look at you all day with your hair in that condition."

More blinking on Bitsy's part.

"Unfortunately," Cord went on, "I'm going to have a very busy shift the rest of the day at work, so I'll need to be hanging up soon. Before I do, though, I need to ask you two things, one of them in a very awkward and probably confusing way, and the other in an only slightly less awkward but hopefully also less confusing way."

"Um ...." She found she hadn't a thought to even start, much less complete.

"All right. The first thing I can't give you an explanation for because it's related to my work. I don't actually want to ask it of you, and you should entirely feel free to say no. In fact, for a number of reasons, I would almost prefer you do so."

"Well, it didn't do any good for you to warn me about it being awkward and confusing, because that's one of the most confusing things I've ever been asked." She stopped for a moment, opened her mouth, closed it again, concentrated very hard on keeping her eyes from blinking, and went on, "Actually, I don't even know if I have been asked. Am I just supposed to say yes or no now? Or is there more to the question than that?"

Cord laughed, looking relieved, she thought, at being able to.

"There is more," he said after re-composing himself. "All right. Here it is, then. I am asking you, for reasons I can't let you in on, to stop using the dream-feed until I let you know otherwise."

Not only did Bitsy not blink in response, she found herself entirely frozen in place. She wondered if a single servo anywhere in her body still worked. On the phone screen, Cord waited patiently.

Did he really ask that? Why? Wouldn't it be terribly disturbing or even dangerous? How could I possibly do that? And he said I could say no, so I really ought to, oughtn't I? I mean, that would be crazy. It might even make me literally crazy!

Unable to even approach an answer, she shook herself and decided to procrastinate in the only way she could imagine.

"So ... then ... what's the second thing?" she asked, hoping the question would take him even longer than the first one had and give her time to think.

But when he asked it, the second question had an even more dramatically petrifying effect.

"Purely on a personal level, nothing to do with any of the rest of this ... would you please go to dinner with me tonight?"

CHAPTER! TWELVE!

Bitsy woke up. It was morning.

It's morning! She sat up with a jolt.

I'M ON THE COUCH.

If there was one thing an android wasn't supposed to do when she thought she might be having system issues, it was fall asleep without her head on the dream-feed pillow. Bitsy couldn't believe she'd been so stupid.

Wait. No. I so totally can believe I'm that stupid.

Her phone sat on the coffee table nearby. She wondered if she should pick it up and immediately call for an appulance to come and give her an in-home scan.

Maybe I should call in sick to work first.

She looked around the room.

Everything looks so normal. Except maybe the sunlight's coming in a little steeper than if I'd woken up when I ought to. What if ... nothing's really all that wrong with me?

It wasn't like she'd never fallen asleep on the couch before. You weren't supposed to make a habit of it, but it happened. Especially if you ran a little too much drinkware at a party or something.

Cord said the odds of a magnitude whatever whatevermajig happening were only once in a decade or a century, didn't he? And he's an expert who works in dream-feed management. Does it really make sense he might be wrong about that, and I'm going completely fray-wired less than two days after I met him and started crushroutining over him?

Bitsy felt herself calming down.

Maybe I don't even need to call in sick. Maybe I just need to call in and say I'll be late.

She reached for her phone...

And it buzzed and lit up.

And the call ID field said Cord.

review! love and realness, chapter 11!

yipes! this isn't looking good -- i actually started off the post with chapter 11 by saying it wasn't much of a chapter!

okay, let's get going. i guess we can hope i was wrong ...

snort! i'd forgotten that instead of tv, the androids have holo-projectors, which abbreviates to "hp." i'm just killing myself with these computer puns!

cmd+entertainment! ahahahaha!!!

holy smokes, the whole first paragraph is one hilarious techno-jargon wordplay after another. i mean, if i was trying to find a way to make info-dump exposition a total kick to read, i couldn't have come up with a much better way to do it.

anyhow, the scoop is, all bitsy has available to get her mind off cord is her hp favorites list, and she can't manage even a little enthusiasm for any of it. instead she just mopes about it and wonders if she ought to go to theraputery and then realizes she couldn't possibly explain to a theraputist why she was feeling off. they might think she was glitching or crashing -- which makes her start worrying maybe she is crashing.

wowzers, turns out i was totally wrong! it's short, but this is a heck of a chapter, if i say so myself.

so ...

time to write more -- right?

xoxo,
claire