Thanks for checking out the next #SaturdayScenes installment for my in-work Ghost Writer, book 6 of the Our Cyber World series. You may access the story summary and other sample excerpts through the table of contents.

I’m looking forward to hearing what you think!

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Recap

After Vivian’s refusal to cooperate with Cynthia Spencer and her covert associates, Erin engineers Vivian’s and Andre’s escape. Now it’s time to make the drive home…

Chapter 9 ~ Getaway

As Andre drives away, I ask him how we came to find a delivery van in a parking lot adjacent to the hotel, how it happens to be unlocked, with keys conveniently hidden under the front passenger seat, and how, upon getting into it, we find two large bath towels with which we can dry off, along with a fresh change of clothes for us to change into, plus wigs, baseball caps, sunglasses and other forms of disguise. Andre gives me a three word response.

“She thinks ahead.”

I go on to suppose that she who thinks ahead knew my size to the millimeter, because the top and bra I swap for my soaked ones fit perfectly. Though I leave my pants alone, I have no doubt the same applies there.

“Is that your doing?” I ask. “How she thinks of everything?”

Andre shrugs, a gesture by which I conclude that if I hadn’t run out of that conference room screaming, in time they would have let me know what I was up against. In due course I would have also learned that, yes, Vivian dear, your nice photographer friend had a hand in putting her together. A big and able hand, I imagine Cynthia saying.

“Has she told you what she wants?” I ask.

“Erin?”

“Who else?”

“World peace, unhindered civil rights, passionate artistic expression, all of it under the rule of love.”

We exchange a look via the rear view mirror through which I beam my mocking incredulity.

“No, really,” he says, returning his attention back to the road. “That’s a direct quote.”

“I like the rule of love part,” I say as I climb back into the front passenger seat. “It’s got a nice lyrical ring to it.”

“She’s good with words,” Andre replies.

“Is that your doing, too?”

“What do you think?”

“OK, Andre. Are you going to level with me, or is this still not a good time? Not the right venue? I mean, we can go on flinging these verbal volleys until hopefully we scratch at some useful facts. But honestly, it’s three in the morning, I’m soaked, stressed out and not in the mood for all the clever sparring.”

He maneuvers the freeway interchange onto the 101 freeway south and says, “It’s true. What they say about her. All the stories on the Internet. How she’s a piece of government developed artificial intelligence code that escaped the farm. The Lab, actually, if you want to get technical.”

“You worked at that Lab,” I say. “Lab with a capital L, a pseudonym for the name of a facility whose identity we cannot reveal. You worked there.”

“Yeah.” He sighs, cranes his neck, and tilts his head side to side twice as if to loosen a knotty thought. “Back in L.A. That’s where the Lab is.”

“And she can do all those things?” I ask.

“The Associated Press has been doing it for years. Robo-news. You’ve heard of it, haven’t you?”

I summon a vague recollection of computers automating the process of writing news stories. “Robo-news and artificial intelligence fabricating news aren’t the same thing.”

“Fair enough,” he says. “But she wasn’t programmed for that. Auto-generating news, I mean. She would only propose outcomes, scenarios, and she would output in standard, technical prose.”

“Doesn’t seem like that much of a leap. Not much to add to her bag of tricks.”

“Yeah. And by now, she’s probably taught herself a few more.” He looks over at me. “Like I said, she was programmed to simulate and predict. But this…” He slaps the steering wheel. “No one taught her this, how to force an outcome by allocating and mobilizing assets. Not while I worked at the Lab, anyway.”

“Jesus, Andre! No wonder they want to put her back in the box. She can end up doing anything. Totally unpredictable.”

“Not totally. She always acts within her nature. Always within her core parameters.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means that she has a higher probability of acting morally than those who programmed her.” He pauses for moment. “More than me certainly.” Another pause. “That’s why she went rogue. Because she disagreed with them… with us. On moral and legal grounds.”

I swallow the apparent absurdity of his claim. I swallow it but can’t fully digest it.

“Before that last meeting, I overheard someone saying you’re not to blame because you weren’t there in the end?”

“I’d left the lab by the time she went rogue.”

“How long had you been you gone?”

He sighs again. “Around two years.”

“Two years? So you don’t know what they could have done to her, how they could have reprogrammed her.”

“From my interactions with her,” he replies, “it’s still her. Just smarter, and not because of anything they did. From what I gather, nothing innovative took place after I left. They went into maintenance mode. Tweak and upkeep.”

“So all this new stuff she’s doing—”

“She picked it up on her own.”

“Self-taught.”

He nods.

“From my interactions with her, she acts like one of us,” I say.

“That’s part of her charm.”

“You did that too?”

“Only if you think I’m feminine enough to impart that kind of charm on something or someone else.”

I sidestep his attempt at levity. “Did you?”

“With a lot of help. From someone I used to know.”

He stops short, like a leaden lump has caught in his throat. Twice he swallows, and he cranes his neck once, as if to release it from a vice.

“The real Erin, or shall we say, Erin in the flesh,” he adds. “You see, in order to fool people, you have to be able to know them, to predict how they think, how they will react when you present them with a piece of information. If you want to automate that and scale it up, you have to model a person.”

“This person. Is she still out there?”

“Last time I heard. But she’s quite beside the point now. It’s no longer about her.” He turns to me. “You seem pretty interested for someone who wants no part of this.”

“I just want to know who’s lurking in my shadowy blind spots.”

“Now look who’s getting lyrical.”

I allow myself a smile. “What about you? Are you going to help them put her back in the box, help her stay out of it, or none of the above?”

“Putting her back in the box is a waste of time. They already tried that, and it didn’t go far. I’m not playing that game.”

“Yet here you are.”

“In the flesh, trying to stay sane.”

“Is that why you agreed to tag along with me?”

“Yeah, and to keep you sane while I’m at it.”

“Keeping something requires its existence. Don’t know that we can claim that about my sanity.”

He’s about to say something else, but he hesitates. Then he gets it out all the same. “I care about you, Vivian. I don’t want you to get hurt again.”

I’m about to press him on that. I’m about to ask him if he really means it, or whether he is playing his role, one more bit player in this government-sponsored play. But his eyes bring me to a jolting halt. I hold his gaze for a moment before I have to look away. Through the passenger side window I stare at the blur of a world that speeds by.

The world keeps speeding by until we enter Seal Beach nine hours later in a sedan that Andre traded for the delivery van somewhere around the Santa Ynez Mountains. By now it’s almost noon. Outside my quaint beach bungalow, the sky and ocean blend into slate gray. On the radio, on the way here, the weather report predicted a storm. It’s beginning to rain. The surf is rising.

From the kitchen window I can see the spray shooting out from under the pier. A few surfers brave the rough water to hang on for brief, turbulent rides. Fewer souls dot the wet sand at the water’s edge. Some walk. Others stand to look out to sea.

Andre digs up what he can out of the pantry and refrigerator to make me lunch. I have no bread, so instead of making sandwiches he rolls and wraps lunch meat, sliced cheese, and lettuce inside flour tortillas.

For a couple of minutes, we eat in silence. Or I should say, he eats, while I play with my food.

“Feeling OK?” he asks as I stare at the toothpick he’s driven through my wrap. “You should eat,” he adds when I don’t answer.

I look up, not so much at him, but rather at the window behind him. It’s weeping inside and out.

“What happens now?” I ask.

Andre shows me his phone’s screen. It’s flashing red. He waits for me to make eye contact with him. I nod to let him know I get it. Careful what we say.

“I would have thought they’d be here by now, ready to collect their prize,” I say not caring who is listening or what they think about what I’m saying. “Hell, why isn’t Cynthia here, imploring me to write her memoir?”

He shakes his head as he says, “I’m guessing she doesn’t like to venture out in bad weather.” Now he raises an eyebrow. I get it again. He wants me to play along.

Except I don’t want to. “I’m not doing it, you know,” I tell him. “I’m not writing her stupid memoir.”

“Relax,” Andre says. “They’re going to give you space. Let you do it on your own terms.”

“How nice of them.”

He shakes his head again, and follows that up with another raised eye brow. “I told them what happened while you slept. They understand.”

I take a bite of my wrap and leave unasked the question that his remark prompts. He was talking to them, for reals or not, and he didn’t tell me until now?

“I told them she got us out of there,” Andre adds. “That’s good. She’s contacted you again. And that’s what they want.”

I swallow more than chew another bite and chase it down with a gulp of water. A flash of lightning strobes through the weeping window.

I get up. “I need to get some sleep.”

“Sure.”

“Will you be here when I wake up?”

“I think I’ll wait until the storm dies out.” I don’t know whether he means the literal storm or the one swirling in my head and inside my chest. Maybe he means both.

I half shrug as I head into the bathroom. There, I take a double dose of sleeping pills. After relieving myself, I strip down of all my clothes and climb into bed. I fear, drugs and all, it will take me a while to doze off. But sleep pulls me under like one of those waves takes down a surfer out there.

It’s dark outside, pitch black and still raining when I wake up. Eight o’clock, the kitchen clock says.

I find Andre sleeping on the couch under a multi-colored wool blanket.

On the kitchen table I find his phone acting as a paper weight over a note that reads: “She will contact you on this phone. If you want me gone, just say so. Burn this note.”

A minute later, I’m using the stove’s burner to ignite one corner of the note before I take it to the sink where I hold it as long as I can before dropping the remaining still burning corner into the garbage disposal opening.

I step up to the window. From there I watch the rain lashing at the tall glass panes. My reflection stares back at me. With a shiver I realize I’m naked.

On the couch, Andre is still sleeping. I approach him slowly, hearing his soft breathing.

From the kitchen, I hear his phone vibrating on the table. I ignore it and crawl onto the couch and under the blanket. He stirs only to shift his weight and give me more room.

The phone stops vibrating, only to start rumbling again a minute later. It stops and vibrates again two more times.

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