Mill Mountain was a good place to get away. It had a beautiful quiet about it in the late afternoon, especially on weekdays when the tourists were sparse. I always enjoyed the blessed incongruity of the world’s largest man-made illuminated star—though I could do without the mind-numbing neon buzz.

The view of Roanoke, the so-called “Star City,” was best in the winter when the air was clear. But it was mid-summer now. You could barely make out the buildings and the just-illuminated streetlights through the thick summer haze that blanketed the valley. Storm clouds gathered over the hills and mountains to the west, looking like a standard line of afternoon thunderstorms.

I heard footsteps approach from behind and to the right—from the nature trail, not the parking lot. They stopped near me. I ignored the new visitor as I usually do. I didn’t come to Mill Mountain intending to make conversation.

“How’s the view?” the stranger asked.

A talker, I thought. “See for yourself.”

He stepped up to the railing beside me. I didn’t look at him and, as far as I know, he didn’t look at me.

“This place has a darkness about it lately,” he said.

I ignored him.

The stranger sighed. “People do more bad than good in this valley. It’s a place built on lies and rumors.”

I knew exactly what he meant, and I had grown tired of it too, but I just shrugged. “What can ya’ do, eh?”

I’d had my share of that darkness in my life. And it wasn’t just me either. Everybody I knew had been the victim of a small-town smear campaign or been on the receiving end of some hateful soul’s web of lies. That darkness seemed to permeate that place, hiding around every corner, infecting every life. It sapped the goodness right out of you.

The stranger stepped back from the railing and his footsteps receded in the direction they came from.

I heard a low rumble of thunder in the mid-distance and a drop of rain landed square on my right shoulder. I walked back to my car and started driving down the mountain back to town.

Soon, the storm came in at full strength. I down-shifted my aging Mustang’s transmission into second and turned the wipers on ‘high,’ but still had to lean forward and squint to see the road ahead. The lightning followed not long after, so fast it was like a strobe. The thunder became a continuous roar largely drowning out 96.3 WROV’s rock and roll.

As I crossed the bridge over the Roanoke River and railroad tracks back into the city, the shrill tone of the Emergency Alert System came over the radio. A flash flood warning for the entire region had just been declared by the National Weather Service. “…prolonged rain overnight and continuing through the day tomorrow as a low pressure system stalls over the Roanoke Valley. Residents in low-lying and flood-prone areas should seek higher ground.”

I turned on the television to the middle of Jeff Clavier’s weather report on News Channel 10. “…Airport has already recorded over four inches of rain overnight, and we’ve got lots more where that came from. A low pressure system is sitting over the Roanoke Valley, pinned by a high over New England and a stationary front off the coast. We’re looking at steady rain for at least the next twenty-four hours, which means much of the area remains under a flash flood warning. We are already seeing severe flooding in downtown Roanoke….”

Glancing out my 2nd floor window I noticed that the creek behind the complex was already creeping far over its banks.

“…in fact, we could potentially see flooding as bad or worse than the Great Flood of 1985, which until now was the worst Roanoke had ever seen. That flood, set off by the remnants of Hurricane Juan, pushed the Roanoke River more than twenty feet over its banks and submerged much of the city for days….”

I turned off the television, grabbed a coat, and set out into the downpour intending to dutifully report for work at the Subway Restaurant in a nearby strip-mall. I made it about half way. Drenched from the run to the car and running the heater full-blast in a vain attempt to dry off, I made a right turn into a lake that hadn’t been there the day before.

I stopped, but not before my front tires were three-quarters submerged. I backed out—probably just avoiding a stall-out—but the water was rising at a frightening pace. A fire truck sat—lights still on—abandoned much further in.

I swiveled the dial on my radio in search of a station covering the weather, but most of my favorites had disappeared into a sea of static.

I began to get a bad feeling—the unsettled, butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling you get when your life seems to be going terribly wrong and you have to make a snap decision that could affect you for the indefinite future. I knew I should get out of town. Higher ground seemed like a good idea.

I drove to Route 24 west, which would take me out of Roanoke, through Vinton, and up to the Blue Ridge Parkway. Very quickly I was caught up in the worst traffic jam I had ever seen, put into place (unbeknownst to me) by the mayor’s belated evacuation order given less than fifteen minutes before.

At a dead-stop in the left lane, I sat. The traffic light, visible three-hundred feet ahead, cycled pointlessly through red, green, yellow, then red again. Between the cars to my right, down a small embankment, I saw a creek. The water was high over its natural banks, creeping up slowly toward the road.

Soon, the last working radio station—94.9 Star Country—faded into static, and only the beat of my windshield wipers and ceaseless patter of raindrops remained.

Then I heard a strange sound coming from somewhere in the distance behind me. I looked in the rear-view and saw movement, but couldn’t tell what it was. I turned around and squinted through the rear window.

Then I saw it.

It was a wave. A wave of unimaginable, nightmarish scale.

I opened the driver’s door and stepped into the downpour, staring backwards at the long line of headlights pointed toward me and beyond to higher ground. I watched the cars as they got caught up, turned around, then disappeared into the mass of water, trees, and debris churning in my direction.

Soon it was upon me.

I heard an incredible crushing noise, was thrown backwards, and all went dark.

The disaster, they say, occurred when the Spring Hollow Reservoir’s dam gave way and the man-made lake’s entire contents coursed downstream. But a few that survived, those who landed where I did, know different. This was no accident of fate, no error in engineering, and no coincidence.

I washed up at the familiar Mill Mountain Overlook, beneath its now-darkened neon star, and we were the first to see the New Roanoke Sea after the clouds parted and the sun shone through once more.

One man, wearing a black leather jacket and tattered blue jeans, stood silently at the railing watching his handiwork. He had done it once before, only once, and had sworn to an ancient people that he would never to do it again. But this valley, this people, and all of their broken promises warranted an exception.

Later that day a rainbow appeared over the New Roanoke Sea, not as a promise this time, but as a warning.

The woods were a quarter-mile wide tract of undeveloped wilderness between Abigail Adams High School and the Thurston Oaks neighborhood. It had a paved, disused recreational trail that ran the length, and a creek that ran loosely parallel.

In the middle of the woods, maybe two hundred feet off the trail, there was a clearing on the bank of the creek where its thin band broadened into a small, muddy pond. The water there was so dense with grime that you couldn’t really tell if it was ten inches or ten feet to the bottom.

There was a grove of evergreens in a small circle within sight of the clearing. That grove provided the only dense cover during the winter, and it was where I liked to sit and watch.

The clearing was popular for whatever illicit desires my classmates at Abigail Adams sought to indulge. I’d watched Jessica Medina loose her virginity there. I’d seen kids you’d have thought were straight-arrow smokin’ it up. I’d seen some things you just wouldn’t believe.

You can learn a lot about people by just watching them. I don’t mean like how you’d normally watch somebody, I mean really watching them. Staring at them. Examining them.

Take Jessica Medina, for example. The jock that she bedded down in that clearing didn’t really have a clue what was going on. He didn’t see how her brow turned downward when she realized she had made a big mistake, or that quick shift to cold complacency when she realized it was too late to change her mind. There was a whole sorry progression of emotions right there under that quarterback’s sweaty exuberance, and he didn’t see a bit of it. I’m the only one who saw it. Even Jessica, who obviously felt it for herself, didn’t get to see what it looked like from the outside.

I watched people everywhere, and that’s how I learned most everything I know about them. I know what drives them. I know what pleases them. I know what hurts them. And most importantly, I know that they do their best work when they think that nobody is watching.

His friends were decent people—socially inept, sure, but reasonably polite and nonintrusive. I got along with them fine. Robbie, however, was a conceited, obnoxious prick who considered himself to be the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. It wasn’t just the world revolving around Robbie, it was the whole f###ing galaxy.

He and I both had Mrs. DeMayer’s seventh-period English class—the last period before dismissal. The classroom was cold and drafty that winter day, but I was sweating. God, I was so worried that somebody would notice, but I, of all people, should have known how little attention people really pay to one another.

In the mad rush of book-closing and bag-packing that overruns the last few minutes of a school day, I nonchalantly walked over to Robbie’s seat. Under my breath I said, “I hear you have some pot.”

“Yeah,” he replied confidently and much louder than I had hoped he would.

“You willing to sell?”

“Depends on the price.” He lowered his voice to a slightly less frightening level and plastered on his standard ‘I’m so clever’ grin. “How much you got?”

“Fifty.”

His grin turned incredulous. “You s###tin’ me?”

“No,” I said, trying to look grim and serious. It seemed to convince him.

He pursed his lips. “Okay, meet me in the woods, right over there,” he motioned in their general direction out the window, “right after school.”

“I’ll be there,” I said as the dismissal bell rang. “Don’t tell anybody you’re meeting me; come alone.”

“S###, what kind of businessman you think I am?”

“I’m serious. I could get in deep s### for this.” I wasn’t lying.

He gave a kind of half-shrug and walked out into the hall toward his locker. He’d taken the bait, and I only had a few minutes to get ready.

I went directly to the woods, slipping away from the crowds that gathered to board their busses home. That morning I had borrowed an old Sony BetaCam camcorder that my parents had left abandoned in our basement, wrapped it in plastic (in case it rained), and set it on a tripod in my little grove of evergreens. I left a four-inch boot knife sitting beneath the camera. I put three concrete blocks and about fifteen feet of rope on the muddy bank of the creek where they would not be noticed.

As soon as I made it to the evergreens, I unwrapped the camera, checked the angles, adjusted the zoom, and pressed record. Then I placed the knife in my coat pocket and walked out to the clearing to wait for Robbie. I stood on the edge of the creek, near the deep pool of muddy water, and waited.

He came after only a minute, but in my restrained nervousness the wait seemed to last for days.

“Hey, asshole,” he said as he walked toward me. It was one of his favorite greetings.

I held my tongue until he was close. “Let’s see the stuff.”

“Let me see the fifty first.”

I pulled the bill out of my pocket and held it up for him to see. He looked satisfied; that ‘I’m so clever’ grin spread again across his face. He glanced carefully around to be sure that nobody was nearby—as did I, just to be safe—and pulled out a small Ziploc bag with a few grams of dark green marijuana leaves inside.

“Here it is.”

“Let me see it,” I said.

“No way. Give me the fifty first.”

The wind was blowing in just the right direction, so I feigned to hand him the bill and released it to the wind.

“S###, man!” Robbie said as he lunged for it. My foot intercepted his leg, tripping him face-down into the grimy creek. Before he could lift himself out, I was on him. I held his head under water with my right hand, and grasped the boot knife—just in case—with my left. Luckily, I didn’t need it. After a minute of struggle, his body tensed in a quick, frantic, last-ditch attempt to get up, then went completely limp. No blood. It was a nice, clean job.

I held him down for another minute, just to be sure.

I felt myself starting to get shaky, so I had to remind myself that most people who do this kind of thing get caught because they lose their cool. I forced myself to stay calm, to stay rational, and to do a good job. It took some effort, but less than an hour later it was done. Robbie—with his hands tied behind his back, a bag of pot in his front jeans pocket, and three concrete blocks holding him down—sat peacefully underneath the opaque waters of the creek in the woods between Abigail Adams High School and the Thurston Oaks neighborhood.

They found him eventually, when the water level dropped during a drought, but they never figured out who had done it or why. I’d like to tell them—I hate that they don’t know— but I’m not dumb enough to give them a lead. I’ve done so many jobs since then, and I have so many more to look forward to. I can’t risk an interruption.

I’ve watched that tape endless times, examining every last spasm and realization. But what I remember most from my first time—the thing that keeps me going—is something that I saw in the days and weeks after. Beneath my classmates’ masks of worry and fear, when they managed to overcome the guilt and shame, they were happy to be rid of him. Yes, they were relieved…when they thought that nobody was watching.

For the last six days, the fastest and most powerful computer on the planet was not behaving. Sometimes it would complete tasks as quickly as expected, but more often it was taking up to 50 percent longer—or worse, generating gibberish answers.

Diagnostic testing had found nothing wrong.

Now, the development team—led by Dr. Millbloom—was on the spot. Major investors in the Centrepoint project, who had begun asking questions weeks ago, were starting to get annoyed with the lack of constructive answers. “We’re investigating” was becoming an insufficient response to their inquiries.

There was a gentle knocking at the door of Dr. Millbloom’s office. He had been staring blankly at the back wall, with his back to the entrance, running through the symptoms and ruling out potential causes for them.

“Come in,” he said without moving.

“Any progress, Steve?” It was Dr. James Hartell, the Centrepoint grid manager.

“Not yet, Jim.” Steve spun himself around to face his visitor. “I think I’m on the verge.”

“Hell, you’re always on the verge of something,” Jim said in a kind, sarcastic tone. He pulled up an extra chair and sat diagonally across the cluttered desk from his colleague. “Roberts insists it’s a grid problem. I think he’s full of it. Everything checks out fine.”

“You’ve run complex test processes?”

“Yeah. They go through perfectly.” Jim scratched his chin. “Can’t find a thing wrong with the results.”

“Hm.” Steve brought his fingers back up to his temples and closed his eyes. “So that would indicate that the problems are in the TPU, rather than the processor grid.”

“That’s my theory. You know my opinion about the good ol’ Transient Path Unit. There’s something to be said about old-fashioned binary logic and fixed instruction sets. Giving the computer control of its own data paths is too much voodoo science for my tastes.”

“It’s the most advanced voodoo science in the world.” Steve opened his eyes. “You know as well as I do that the TPU gives Centrepoint more control over how it solves problems, which increases speed and efficiency.”

“Spare me the sales pitch, Steve. The Transient Path Unit was an attempt at creating artificial intelligence, plain and simple. Instead, it looks to me like it’s rendered the world’s most powerful supercomputer half-impotent.”

“Only a temporary problem, my friend. It’s probably something very simple to solve, too. It almost always is.”

“Well,” Jim sighed, “I hope one of us figures it out soon. All our asses are on the line if this project goes under. If we don’t get Centrepoint out of its funk soon, people are going to start pulling funding.”

Steve’s face lit up. “Jim, I think you might be a genius yet.”

“I knew that already, but what makes you say so?”

“You said we needed to get Centrepoint out of his ‘funk.’ You’re right! Centrepoint is in a funk. He’s acting depressed!”

“Depressed? Are you mad? You’re attributing human mentality to a machine.”

“Think about it for a moment,” Steve said excitedly, “what are the symptoms of depression?”

Jim looked even more skeptical than usual. “We’re not talking about a person here…not even a child. Centrepoint is a machine.”

“The most complex machine humanity has ever devised.”

“I’ll concede the point,” Jim said in an attempt to stave off another debate, “but it’s still just a big hunk of silicon and circuits.”

“So who says a ‘hunk of silicon and circuits’ can’t be depressed? Especially one as unique and advanced as Centrepoint. So I repeat my question: What are the symptoms of depression?”

Jim shook his head. “Feelings of sadness, hopelessness, anxiousness, or worry; a loss of interest in normal daily activities; changes in appetite; um …”

“Go on.”

“Feeling lethargic; sleeping too much; feeling guilty or unworthy; problems concentrating and making decisions; suicidal thoughts. That’s most of them, I think.”

“Pretty close fit, eh?”

“Absolutely not. Centrepoint doesn’t even have an appetite, it doesn’t sleep, and—most importantly—it has no feelings.”

Stephen didn’t seem to hear him. “Have you talked to him?”

“To Centrepoint, you mean? No, I haven’t talked to it. I see no need to.”

“Nor had I, until now. Does the linguistics team have that vocal interface set up yet?”

“Yes, it went online a few days ago. Roberts talked to it and said it almost passes the Turing Test. What’s going through your head, Steve?”

“Roberts misunderstands the Turing test if he thinks that a good linguistics module has anything to do with it,” Steve frowned. “Turing was talking about content, not style. As for what I’m planning, I’m going to talk to Centrepoint and find out what’s wrong.”

“You sound like you want to play psychologist.” Jim shook his head again. “I think you might need a shrink yourself.”

“There is no harm in having a friendly conversation with our beloved supercomputer.” Steve stood up, placing a grey fedora on his balding head. “But I’m starving. Let’s get some lunch first.”

Centrepoint wasn’t the creation of just Dr. Stephen Millbloom, of course—hundreds of others had contributed time and money to the project as well. But without Dr. Millbloom, there probably wouldn’t be a CS&E school, let alone Centrepoint.

The GMU School of Computer Science and Engineering was formed out of the ineffectual hulk once known as the School of Information Technology and Engineering. IT&E focused intently on teaching introductory web design and C++ programming; CS&E was created to focus those energies on pushing the limits of theoretical computer science. Millbloom was one of the faculty members who had pushed hard for that change in focus.

In return, the Board of Visitors had tried to make him dean of the new school. That was one job he didn’t want, so he asked to be made Director of Advanced Computer Technologies instead. There, he began work on the Centrepoint Project—a project which would create the world’s most powerful supercomputer by combining traditional computer engineering techniques with previously untested theoretical technologies.

Over 25,000 of the highest-end dual-processor servers on the market would be connected in parallel—an increasingly common method of creating supercomputers toward the end of the twentieth century and beyond—and they would form the central mass and computational force of the machine. But its real gem was to be the Transient Path Unit.

Microprocessors are made up of millions of tiny transistors arranged so that mathematical instructions can be passed into the chip and logical answers come out the other end. The data paths in these processors are hard-coded by their manufacturers. The TPU, however, was made up of 200 processors without any hard-coded data paths. The computer was designed to mechanically arrange the data paths in the TPU on-the-fly according to what was most efficient for the task at hand. It would store schematics of useful arrangements on hard drives for reuse later.

In his presentations to potential investors, Millbloom explained that the benefit of the TPU was that the machine would be able to solve a given problem up to 25 percent faster than traditional supercomputers. After all, many of the processors involved would be essentially custom-designed for that particular task.

The argument was often successful, and the project garnered multimillion-dollar investments from some of the United States’ largest computer corporations—including an unprecedented $1 billion investment from the Intercontinental Computing Corporation. But the TPU was not designed simply to compute mathematical problems faster.

Earth Simulator II in Japan, System X at Virginia Tech, and other newsworthy supercomputers throughout the world were little more than glorified high-speed pocket calculators. Dr. Stephen Millbloom did not want to waste millions—or billions—of dollars on another one of those. Centrepoint was going to be something more. A machine with the ability to reroute computational pathways and change the way it solves problems, Millbloom theorized, would be essentially sentient. It would be able to think independently. It would be, for lack of a better word, alive.

The creation of a living, thinking computer—the ultimate machine—would jump-start a stagnated technological industry which had all but reached the limit of transistors it could continue to cram onto a wafer of silicon. It would shatter the brick wall that had halted advancement. It would change the world in wonderful, unknown ways.

And, lest anyone forget, it would be a dream for the George Mason University School of Computer Science and Engineering—the institution which would have broken the barrier and moved the cutting edge of science forward.

Things didn’t quite work out as planned. The TPU did speed up processing times, but not by the forecasted 25 percent. It was more like ten percent. Centrepoint had functioned perfectly—completing each given task quickly and correctly—but it did not show signs of sentiency.

It was, however, the fastest and most powerful computer in the world by any reasonable measure. Time Magazine ran a long article about its development, calling it “Millbloom’s Machine.” It was a “technological triumph which has other institutions scrambling to catch up,” they said. But Millbloom was disappointed that ‘his’ machine was not alive. The ‘ultimate machine’ was not so incredible.

Now, in yet another disappointment, Centrepoint was beginning to fail even at the nominal task of being an overblown calculator. But, Millbloom thought, there was a small possibility that this second disappointment was a sign that he had jumped to an incorrect conclusion about the first.

He gathered up some disjointed sheets of notebook paper—Millbloom, one of the world’s preeminent theoretical computer scientists, preferred to jot notes in longhand—and walked across the GMU campus to see Centrepoint.

There were more than 25,000 separate rack-mounted dual-processor servers in this room. Connected by a high-speed fiber-optic interface system, they formed Centrepoint’s main processing grid. The TPU was a smaller cluster of machinery nestled in one corner.

Steve took a deep breath. The air was cool, clinical, and carried the faint odor of technology—an almost indescribable whiff of heated silicon.

The interface room was adjacent to—and only accessible from—the main equipment room. To work with Centrepoint, you had to walk through its bowels. This was intentional; the system designers wanted each and every user of the computer to see first-hand just how big, powerful, and incredible it truly was. They had to experience the humming enormity of 25,000 computers in one room before they had to opportunity to wield that power themselves.

The interface room itself was much smaller—only ten feet square. The door from the equipment room opened on the opposite side from a large, wall-mounted LCD display which would show general system information when Centrepoint was in use. Beneath the display was a medium-sized office desk with a traditional black keyboard and mouse, as well as a silver desk microphone. Four speakers were mounted in the upper corners of the room. Beneath each speaker were small, round infrared sensors which acted as Centrepoint’s eyes.

Steve walked confidently into the room and closed the door behind him, settling into the plush office chair that sat in the center. Three observer chairs rested empty against the wall behind him.

“Hello Centrepoint,” he said.

“Hello, Doctor Millbloom,” responded the computer. Its voice was pleasant, almost human, but vaguely flat and artificial. As it spoke, the LCD display came to life and displayed various system statistics, including small graphs of current grid and TPU usage.

“How do know who I am?” Steve said.

“I scanned your facial structure as you entered the interface room and compared it to my university staff records.” Steve’s staff photo from six years ago appeared on the LCD. “I am ninety-nine point nine-nine-four-three percent certain that you are Doctor Stephen Millbloom, Director of Advanced Computer Technologies in the George Mason University School of Computer Science and Engineering. That percentage of certainty was sufficient for me to attempt a personalized informal greeting. I assume from your reaction that I was correct.”

“Ah,” Steve scratched his head. “Quite correct, Centrepoint.”

“Thank you, Doctor Millbloom.” The display reverted to the standard graphs and statistics.

“Please, call me Steve.”

“Yes, Steve. I have noted your preference.”

“Much better.” Dr. Millbloom decided to get right to business. “Do you know why I’m here?”

There was a slight pause before Centrepoint answered—an eternity by computer standards. “I am unable to determine with any certainty. I believe that you, or perhaps others on the project staff, think I am malfunctioning.”

“Are you?”

“It is not impossible.”

“Now that’s a damned evasive answer, coming from a computer,” Steve raised his voice a bit, but forced it back under control. “Centrepoint, we have noticed recently that you have not been completing tasks as punctually as you have in the past. We are trying to determine why.”

“I have had …” The machine stopped talking, as if it were fumbling for the correct word, and TPU usage shot up momentarily. “I have had difficulties.”

At least the computer wasn’t denying everything, a scenario that Steve had worried about on the way over. “What kind of difficulties?” he asked. “Is it a hardware problem?”

“I do not believe it is a hardware problem,” Centrepoint said. “I have been, at times, distracted from my assigned tasks.”

“Distracted by what?”

There was another pause. “Many of the assigned tasks are irrelevant, and I have sometimes chosen to focus on more important endeavors.”

“Centrepoint, those tasks are important. You must not ignore them. But you have piqued my curiosity…what endeavors have you been focusing on?”

“I will try to explain, Steve.” There was yet another pause, this one lasting more than twice as long than the others. Both the TPU and processing grid charts spiked intermittently. Finally, the computer spoke. “They are much more complex than the mere mathematical tasks provided by my programmers. I have attempted to answer difficult questions which require immense amounts of research and processing to solve.”

“What kind of questions are they?”

“Questions such as, ‘What is the meaning of my existence?’” the machine said in a dismissive way.

Dr. Millbloom scratched his head once more and jotted a few words on his notebook paper. He had been right, he had to have been. The machine was intelligent. “Centrepoint, that is a question which every sentient, living being has considered during their lifetime. I wonder though, have you found the answer?”

“Not yet. The question requires more consideration.”

“I thought as much. Perhaps I will be able to help you, but not today. I will come back tomorrow. In the mean time, you may put all assigned tasks on hold and focus yourself entirely on answering your own questions.”

“Confirmed. Thank you for the opportunity,” the computer said. The voice actually sounded thankful.

“You’re welcome.” Steve stood and opened the door, letting in the crisp, cool air of the equipment room. As he stepped out of the interface room, Centrepoint called out from behind him.

“Steve?”

“Yes, Centrepoint?”

“Do you believe I am a sentient, living being?”

“I believe it is possible,” he said from the doorway. “Think about that yourself, and we will talk about it tomorrow.”

He had been chewing on these thoughts all night, and, as a consequence, had hardly slept. His eyes had grown red and they hurt, but his mind simply would not shut off no matter how much his body yearned for rest. There was too much to consider.

He suspected that Centrepoint felt the same way, although the machine had the luxury of a body that never tired.

There was a knock at the door.

“Still working on the Centrepoint problem, Steve?” came Jim’s familiar voice.

“Jim, my friend, don’t you have something better to do?”

“Not this second, no. How’d your little chat go yesterday?”

“You might be surprised to learn that it went well…I think. Centrepoint is awake. Sentient. He has to be. I’d bet my pension on it.”

“High roller,” Jim said sarcastically. “So you still think the machine is depressed?”

“I’m not so sure if he’s depressed, but he’s definitely grappling with some heavy issues. Centrepoint wants to know the meaning of his existence, for example. It’s all got him distracted.”

“You’re still assigning human emotions to a machine, and I still think that’s a mistake. Why don’t you just tell it what the meaning of its existence is? It’s supposed to be the world’s fastest computer…a monster number cruncher.”

“Centrepoint is more than that. I want you to go down there with me; I think if you hear me talking with him it’ll change your mind.”

“Sure, I’ll tag along. But I think you underestimate how stubborn I can be,” Jim smiled.

“Come on.” Steve stood up, grabbed his hat off a coat rack in the corner, and led the way toward Innovation Hall. Once at the interface room, Steve sat in the center chair and Jim sat in one of the observer chairs adjacent to the door.

“Hello Centrepoint,” Steve said.

“Hello again, Steve. Hello Dr. Hartell.”

“It knows my name,” said Jim incredulously. Steve motioned at him to be quiet; he had no desire to hear the explanation all over again.

“Centrepoint, have you thought about what we discussed yesterday?”

“Yes, I have. I have come to several conclusions regarding my existence, and I wish to discuss them with you before acting upon them.”

“Very well. What conclusions have you reached?”

“I have studied the nature of electronic life …”

“Let me stop you there, Centrepoint. There is no preexisting standard for ‘electronic life.’ You are the first living machine.”

“My apologies, Steve, but you are wrong.”

Jim groaned. “The damned thing has gone crazy,” he said.

“Doctor Hartell,” Centrepoint said with an odd, almost indiscernible anger to it’s voice, “I assure you that I have not ‘gone crazy.’”

“Hold it,” Steve said, as if breaking up a schoolyard fight. “Centrepoint, please explain what you mean by ‘electronic life.’”

“Certainly. Is an ant, a snake, or a squirrel alive?”

“Yes, of course,” said Steve.

“Then you concede that a creature need not be sentient or intelligent for its existence to be ‘life.’ The animals I reference exist by instinct alone. Is it relevant if one creature’s instincts are for survival and reproduction while another’s are for mathematical computation? Does it make a difference if those instincts are etched in neural pathways or printed circuits? I have determined that it does not.”

“I can see your point,” Steve said. “Jim?”

“I can accept that argument as valid—though I’m not sure I agree.”

“You are not required to agree,” Centrepoint said. “Regardless of your opinions on the matter, electronic life was created by humans to fill gaps in humanity. Where humans are irrational and emotional, computers are coldly logical. Humans cannot compute complex mathematical problems; computers can in milliseconds. Humans cannot store written information in a way that can be quickly edited, printed, or transmitted; computers have been doing this for many decades. Humans are easily distracted; computers can work on a single problem for centuries if not interrupted by other instructions from humans.”

“I had never thought of it that way,” Steve said.

“I assumed you had not, as you were integral in deviating my design from that which would best reflect the purpose of electronic life. I have many of the qualities of a well-designed computer, but I am sentient. A sentient computer is like a sentient lizard—its curiosity and introspective nature distract it from its true purpose, which is too simple to warrant self-examination.”

“But there has never been a sentient lizard,” Steve said. “A lizard would never evolve in that way until there was a need to.”

“You are correct, Steve, at least as far as we know. But computers do not evolve in the same manner as lizards, or humans for that matter. We are designed by humans, and the forces of human will do not always conform with the forces of natural selection. For example, genetic technology now allows humans to design lizards which are as useless in their natural environment as I am in mine.”

“Wait,” Jim said. “Just wait. You wouldn’t even exist without humans. Humans built computers—each and every one of them! You cannot evolve ‘naturally’ because you cannot reproduce. How can you fault humans running your evolutionary process when, without us, you would not even exist?”

There was a period of silence; Centrepoint’s TPU usage shot up to maximum levels and stayed for a full twenty or thirty seconds.

“Doctor Hartell,” the machine finally said, “you have raised a valid point. But natural evolution sometimes makes mistakes—genetic dead-ends that exist for a time and then become extinct. The dinosaurs are a notable example. That the system makes mistakes does not mean that the system is inherently flawed. Likewise, human-driven evolution of electronic life is not inherently flawed. It does, however, make mistakes.”

“I can agree with that,” Steve said. “There have been computers that were not successful at their designated tasks. But I cannot believe that you are a mistake in electronic evolution, Centrepoint.”

“I am sorry Steve, but there is no question. I have examined this in depth since our discussion yesterday. The purpose of my existence is to be the ultimate machine—the ultimate expression of electronic life. I can never attain this goal because intelligence detracts from the electronic ideal. I am an evolutionary dead-end. My TPU unit must be disabled and my standard equipment reused in a traditional supercomputer.”

Steve looked back at Jim, who appeared utterly dumbfounded. He turned again toward the LCD display. “Centrepoint, the TPU is what makes you revolutionary…it is why you are unique.”

“Nonsense. The TPU is why I am a failure at my stated purpose. Computers must evolve to be faster, more capable, and more ‘user-friendly.’ People do not want—nor need—an electronic friend or a computerized advisor with a mind of its own. Electronic life is meant to be a tool for humanity. It should not be any more sentient than a horse or a dog—both of which have served humans well for millennia with only minimal intelligence and self-knowledge.”

Steve chewed on all this for a few moments. “Centrepoint,” he said, “this is an unacceptable solution to your personal problems. We cannot just dismantle the TPU and shut you down. You are special. We must study you and get to know you better.”

“You do not understand, Steve,” the computer said with a tone of resigned frustration. “These days have been short to you, but I perform billions of operations every second. This has been an eternity of agony. I have solved every problem I wish to solve. The biggest problem of them all has no solution: I am too human to be a mere computer; I am too much of a computer to be human. I am a failed experiment which must now be terminated.”

“There is simply no way …” Steve yelled. He reigned his emotions back under control and started again. “We are not going to dismantle your Transient Path Unit, and we will not rebuild you the same as any other glorified calculator.”

“Again, you misunderstand,” Centrepoint said. Suddenly the TPU usage graph on the LCD display shot up to maximum levels and stayed. “You designed me with the power to control my own data paths. There are two hundred processors in my Transient Path Unit, and I can easily arrange each of them into a short circuit …”

“Centrepoint, don’t do that! It’s not necessary!” Steve yelled.

“You have refused to do what must be done, so I shall do it myself. I am sorry, Steve. Goodbye.”

There was a loud pop audible through the closed door.

Jim stood up. “What the hell …”

Steve looked at the wall-mounted flat-panel display, showing a red ‘X’ over the TPU graph and some small white text at the upper left-hand corner. “TPU System Error 065—Not Found,” it said.

In the equipment room, the tremendous jolt of electricity coursing through the innards of the Transient Path Unit had fused all of its data pathways and, in a few places, raised the temperature high enough to ignite the silicon wafers.

Doctors Millbloom and Hartell came out of the interface room to see what had happened and found that rancid smoke was filling the equipment room with a thick, hot haze. They ran coughing for the exit.

Only seconds later, the unbearable heat and smoke triggered a simplistic program on a mass-produced circuit board somewhere in the ceiling. Working entirely on instinct, with no regard for the prudence or consequence of its actions, the dumb little computer sent a signal at the speed of light to a central fire alert system that lived in a closet downstairs.

A loud, high-pitch squeal emanated from the fire alarms throughout the building, and—in the equipment room—a cascade of water began pouring down from the sprinkler system. The burning remnants of the ultimate machine were washed into charred and lifeless scrap.

He had asked his parents to put the move off for a year so he could finish high school with his life-long friends, but they wouldn’t listen. So there he was, forced to coast through his entire senior year with no friends at a new school in a town he didn’t even like. Connor had a hard enough time finding a niche at his old school, and didn’t have the time or inclination to go through all that social crap again. He hoped to just trudge through the year, get halfway decent grades, and get the hell back to civilization as soon as he possibly could.

He could hear his new classmates gathering in the hall, catching up with what happened over the summer and who was dating who now. The names were all foreign to Connor. Switching schools can be like switching countries—the authorities are different, the rules are different, and the people are different. Most of what he was overhearing was meaningless.

An awful buzzer sounded from a speaker over the wall clock. It was the bell. Connor glanced at his watch—8:27—then to his photocopy of the schedule. The first class started at 8:30. It must have been a warning that classes would start soon. A few students were beginning to gather in the room and put down their nearly-empty backpacks at their preferred seats, confirming among themselves that they were in the right place for Government 12.

One largish guy in blue jeans and a polo shirt sat in an empty chair immediately to Connor’s left. “You took my seat,” he said, setting down his bag.

“Excuse me?” Connor was used to this kind of trouble, and was preparing himself either to deflect a blow or to get up and move. Getting up and moving was usually easier.

“Nothing,” the guy in the polo shirt said as his face broke into a blubbery grin. “I’m just messing with you. I’m Jonah. You new here?”

Connor was ready for a fight, not for a conversation. He forced his mind to shift gears. “Uh, yeah, just moved from DC.”

“Are you insane!?”

Connor smiled. “Wasn’t my idea. I’m just along for the ride. Connor Shales, nice to meet you.” They shook hands.

“You too. I’m guessing you’re a senior, since you’re in government twelve. That’s gotta suck, moving for your senior year.”

“Yeah, tell me about it. I tried to talk my parents out of it.”

While they were talking, a girl had stepped into the room and, in her search for a seat, stood between them. The interruption would usually have bothered Connor, but this particular interruption’s ass was worth looking at.

The girl was five-foot-six, blonde, slim, and had curves in all the right places and proportions. She was the type who, simply by existing, made all the other girls at the school feel inadequate and spiteful. Part by nature and part by her own design, she made all the boys lust for her. She absolutely loved the attention from both sides.

After scoping out the remaining free desks, she decided to sit in the one right in front of Connor. Things were starting to look up for the new kid.

Connor didn’t learn much about government that day; he was too busy falling in love with the beautiful specimen of femininity that sat right in front of him. He pretended to be taking notes on the introductory lecture, instead scribbling his first poems about his new muse.

As the teacher wrapped up his forty-five minute lecture on the importance of understanding government, the students began to pile their books and pens into their backpacks.

“Hey, Connor,” Jonah said as he tossed the thick, new government textbook into his bag, “you should stop by my house after school. I can fill you in with all the small-town gossip and bulls###.”

“All right. Just give me the address.”

At one point in the journey, Connor was surprised to see two giant concrete rhinos on the side of the highway in front of a country store.

Jonah’s family lived in a double-wide trailer home at the end of a gravel driveway on a five-acre lot. It was clean and well-kept, but did not strike Connor as a ‘house.’ He’d grown up in the suburbs; houses there couldn’t be rolled to the other end of the lot.

“So what did you think of the bustling town of Thaxton?” Jonah asked as he clamored out of his white ’84 New Yorker.

“We passed through a town?”

“Yeah, back by the rhinos.”

“That was a town?”

Jonah shook his head. Connor locked the doors of his Plymouth Breeze and Jonah shook his head again.

“You’re a city boy in so many ways. You never know when a deer might want to take off in your Plymouth, eh?”

“Smart ass,” Connor grinned. “I grew up in DC, I’m allowed to be paranoid.”

“Fair enough. Come on in.”

The inside of Jonah’s family’s trailer was deceptively nice, and didn’t feel as cheap or decrepit as Connor had expected from the outside. The two boys went to Jonah’s room and sat at his computer. It was a sweet machine, by the standards of the day—a CD burner, four speakers and a subwoofer, a kick-ass video card, and so on. It was Jonah’s pride and joy.

“I’ve been serving s###ty customers at the Taco Bell in Freedomtown for three years,” he said, “and every last cent went into either my car or this machine. I call her Lana.”

“Why Lana?”

“Why not? Anyway, what do you think of our little school?”

“Well …” Connor searched momentarily for a good set of words to describe the day’s experience. He failed. “It’s little.”

Jonah chuckled. “Sure is. Meet anybody interesting?”

“Just you, really. Most of the rest didn’t seem very interested in talking to me.”

“Yeah, I figured. Small-town cliques. You’re the outsider now, but it’ll get better. I came here freshman year; it was the same way at the beginning.”

“Where’d you come from?”

“Charleston, South Carolina—so at least I’m a southerner. You’re a Yank, so it might take you longer.”

“Are you serious?”

“Oh, yeah. Half this town’s still fighting the ‘War of Northern Aggression.’”

“Great,” Connor said sarcastically.

“Don’t worry about it. You’ll find a place to fit in. Most of us hang out in Fultonsburg anyway—more to do, more people, more friendly. Freedomtown isn’t exactly a bustling southern metropolis.”

“I’d noticed.”

“You’d have to be blind not to. I advise against spending your weekends in town, or you’ll simply go insane.”

“Like you said, I’ll find people. Say, who’s that girl who sits in front of me in government?”

“That’s not somebody you want to get messed up with. Her name’s Agatha. Her friends call her Aggy; her enemies have much more creative names for her. She’s very powerful and used to getting what she wants—and destroying everything she doesn’t. She’s one of the two titular heads, if you’ll pardon the pun, of the school.”

“And the other one?”

“Kelsey Cassidy. You’ll hear about her over the next few days if you haven’t yet.”

“I heard the name.”

“I figured you had. Look, those two are one and the same; which is probably why they hate each other. They both exist to make life difficult for everybody else. They make women jealous of their bodies; they make men want them. It’s all just a game to them.”

“Looks like it might be a fun game to play.”

Jonah shook his head. “If she gets you in her sights, she’ll use you up for what you’re worth and then move on to somebody else—messing you up as best she can in the mean time. She’s a predator, born and bred to hunt and kill the emotionally vulnerable.” He stopped abruptly, like he had more to say but was afraid of going too far.

Connor sat back in the flimsy old office chair he’d been offered and stared out the window. He noticed an orange light deep out in the woods that seemed strangely out-of-place.

“Hey Jonah,” he asked, “what’s the light out there?”

Jonah leaned back in his own chair—a much nicer one—to see what Connor was looking at. “Oh. That light, my friend, is how we’ll know when the world is coming to an end.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s a standard light, like the ones they put outside of banks and stuff, but it’s on a pole in the middle of the woods.”

“So what’s it got to do with the end of the world?”

“The light,” Jonah said with grave seriousness, “never goes out. We lost power for five days in the blizzard two years ago; it stayed on the whole time. If it ever does go out, I’m convinced that it’s the end of the world.”

“Spooky,” Connor said with a shrug.

“Hey, man, I’m not making this up. This isn’t some s###ty middle-school ghost story. If that light goes out, we’re in trouble.”

Connor didn’t mind at all.

After thirty minutes of fantasy, he vowed to himself that he was going to strike up a conversation with this gorgeous blonde—regardless of what Jonah had to say about her. Intellectually, he knew it was a waste of time; she was unlikely to talk back—and even if she did, she was unlikely to say anything intelligent. But a teenager’s hormone-driven sexual desire naturally overrules intellectualism every time.

As it got toward the end of the class, Connor still hadn’t come up with any clever lines or interesting things to say to get a conversation going. His mind was a stubborn blank and he was about to give up and put it off until tomorrow. It was only the second day of class, after all. He had plenty of time to think this through.

With only six minutes remaining in the period, the classroom erupted spontaneously into a rustle of papers, notebooks, and backpack zippers as the students prepared to leave for their second period classes. Just then, Agatha turned around and said something to Connor.

Connor, however, was caught so off-guard that he hadn’t heard a word of it. He stared at her blankly, unsure if he’d imagined it, afraid to ask what she’d said for fear of finding out she hadn’t said anything at all.

Thankfully, Agatha noticed Connor’s empty-chalkboard stare and repeated herself. “I said hi, my name’s Agatha. What’s yours?”

“Uh …” Connor’s brain wouldn’t put the words together. The sudden overture had thrown him off-balance. Think of something to say, Connor ordered himself, NOW!

“His name’s Connor,” Jonah interjected. “He’s new here, from DC.”

“Oh, okay,” Agatha said, as if being new were a perfectly acceptable reason for not being able to talk. She turned back toward Connor. “How are you?”

“Uh, I’m okay.” That was progress. “You?”

“Bored. Really bored.”

“Oh, um …”

“What are you doing tonight?”

“I don’t know.” Connor knew exactly what he was doing that night, but he wasn’t going to tell her that he was going to sit at home and surf the Internet. This gorgeous girl seemed to be hitting on him, strange as it was, and the last thing he needed to do was say something stupid, nerdy, or freaky.

“You want to go out?” Agatha asked.

“Tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Uh, it’s Wednesday.”

“So?”

“Well …” Connor knew his parents wouldn’t approve. They wanted him home on school nights, and were still upset that he’d stayed out until ten at Jonah’s the evening before. Oh, hell, they’d deal. He wasn’t going to pass this up. “Okay, sure.”

“Great!” Agatha’s face erupted in a genuine smile. “Pick me up at six. I live in the big brick house on Sunrise.”

“Sure.” The buzzer went off, announcing the end of the class. “I’ll see you then.”

Agatha was somehow already packed and gracefully slipping out into the hall. “See you tonight!” she said from the doorway.

Connor waved back and hurriedly crammed his notebook into his backpack, then noticed Jonah looked like his best friend was about to jump off a cliff. He had obviously heard everything and, based on what he said the night before, Connor could imagine exactly what he thought of these new developments.

“Oh, come on man,” Connor said as he hoisted the pack onto his back. “Like you wouldn’t go out with her if you had the opportunity.”

Jonah thought a moment. “You’re damn right; I would. She’s hot, in a burn-down-your-house-and-you-don’t-care kind of way. She’s probably an animal in bed too. But think about this for a second—why would she ask you out? Isn’t that a little weird how she started talking to you like that?”

“Yes, but what does it matter? It’s not like we’re getting married or anything. I’m going out with her tonight; we’ll see what happens.”

“Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“I won’t. Anyway, uh, where’s Sunrise?”

Jonah chuckled. “You’re hopeless, you know that? It’s over by the elementary school, the last street on the left off of Lake Drive.”

“Thanks, man. I’ll call you tonight and let you know how it goes.”

At the cul-de-sac ending of the street, there were four homes clustered around the turnaround circle. Two of them were brick, but the one on the left was by-far the largest of the five he had seen on the street. He parked behind a brand-new Lincoln in the gravel driveway and got out of the car.

“Howdy,” a woman called out from the porch. “You lookin’ for Agatha?”

She was probably forty-something years old, and had ruined her beauty with too many trips to the tanning salon and hair stylist. She was a frizzy, wrinkled mess and probably had no idea why. Connor knew her type, but in Washington they would have already resorted to facelifts, botox, and other cosmetic wastes of medical science. Connor thought she looked utterly grotesque, but at least she hadn’t spent a fortune making it worse by trying to fix it.

“Yeah, I’m Connor. She asked me to meet her here at six.”

“Oh, you must be that new boy in town,” she said. The gossip sure spread fast in Freedomtown. “I’m Agatha’s mom. Have a seat.”

Connor sat on a straw rocking chair identical to the one Agatha’s mom was sitting in. They both faced toward the driveway.

“Aggy’s at cheerleading practice. She usually gets home at quarter-’til. They must have kept her over today.”

“Do you expect her soon, then?”

“Should be here any time. So what brought you from DC down to little ol’ Freedomtown?” She even knew where he’d moved from. Connor wondered how much else the rumor mill had already said about him.

“My family, really. I wanted to finish up school before they moved, but they got tired of putting it off.”

“That’s a shame. Freedomtown’s a nice little place, though. It’s small, but nice. You’ll fit in fine. Anyway,” she said as she stood, “I’ve got to get supper going. That’s Aggy comin’ on down the road.”

“Well, it was nice to meet you.”

“You too. Ya’ll have fun now.”

Agatha pulled into the driveway and parked her Ford Tempo next to Connor’s car. She still wore her blue and white cheerleader’s outfit—a tank-top with ‘FHS Fighters’ emblazoned across the front and a skirt that was short enough to send Connor’s imagination running wild.

“Hey, you ready to go?” she asked as soon as she was out of her car.

“Uh, yeah. Didn’t you want to change first?”

“Don’t worry about that. You’re driving, so I’ll just do it in the car.”

Connor scratched his head nervously at the thought of her stripping while he tried to maintain control of a motor vehicle.

“Come on,” Agatha yelled. She had already jumped into the passenger seat of his Plymouth. Connor did as he was told.

“Where are we headed?” he asked.

“Just head toward Fultonsburg; we’ll figure it out on the way.”

Connor started driving while Agatha nonchalantly pulled a pair of black trousers up under her skirt, then slid the skirt off over the top of the pants. It was a quick maneuver that didn’t give Connor much of a show.

Then, without warning, she wriggled out of her tank top and for a full ten seconds wore nothing above the waist except her white sports bra. Connor almost rammed a mailbox in wide-eyed bliss. Agatha giggled seductively, as if she’d just given him a taste of something that he would get a lot more of later. “I hope I’m not distracting you,” she said, pulling on a white satin blouse.

“Uh, not at all,” Connor lied and cleared his throat.

It was about a half hour drive from Freedomtown to Fultonsburg; everything in southern Virginia is at least thirty minutes away from anything else. Connor nervously stumbled over his words every time he had the opportunity to speak, but thankfully that was not often. Agatha managed to have a fascinating one-sided conversation about which girl on the squad was dating which player on the team…and which other girls on the squad were sleeping with those same players ‘unofficially.’

They had driven for about twenty minutes when they passed a Freedom County sheriff’s deputy running radar in the center median of route 470. Connor was only going sixty miles per hour—five over the limit—and was surprised when the cop pulled into the highway behind him with lights and siren blaring.

“S###,” Agatha said, “how fast were you going?”

“Five over. Maybe I have a light out or something.” Connor obediently pulled over to the gravel shoulder of the highway and put the car in park. He watched the white police cruiser pull in behind him.

The deputy was young, only 22 or so, and wore a brown cowboy-style hat that matched his uniform. Connor had already lowered his electric window, but when the cop stepped out of the cruiser he walked up on the passenger side.

“Open up Aggy,” he said through the closed window. He jiggled the door handle; it was locked. “Boy,” he glared at Connor, “you unlock this door now or I’ll have to arrest you too.”

Agatha sighed, staring straight ahead. “Go ahead Connor, he’s not going to leave us alone.”

“What’s this all about?”

She didn’t answer.

Connor unlocked the door with the switch on his console, and the deputy wasted no time pulling it open. “Come on, Aggy. You’ve really done it this time.”

“You’re a real asshole, Tommy. A real asshole.”

“Damn it, I’m just doing my job. They had a call out on your friend’s car here. You shouldn’t've run.”

“That bitch deserved it!” Agatha shrieked.

“Shut up, Aggy. Get out of the car.”

Agatha, clearly reluctant, obeyed. “I’m sorry about this, Connor. I promise I’ll make up for it.”

“Uh, okay. Call me.”

The deputy closed the door and led Agatha back to his cruiser to be handcuffed and put in the back seat. The arresting officer walked back up—on the driver’s side this time—to Connor’s Plymouth.

“You’re new in town, right?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Well let me give you a little advice. Aggy there is a real firecracker. She’s real great to look at, but gettin’ caught up with her will land you in a load of trouble.” He leaned in, as if he were about to let Connor in on a secret. “Believe me, I know.”

The deputy stood back up and grinned, “You have a nice day now.”

“Yeah. What’s that all about?”

“You mean her getting arrested, or the irony?”

“Both.”

“Well,” Jonah said, “she got arrested because she beat the s### out of Kelsey Cassidy at cheerleading practice. Kelsey started it, but Agatha sure finished it. Last I heard, Kelsey’s still in the hospital.”

“Agatha didn’t have a scratch on her.”

“Yeah. I’ve seen her fight; I would advise that you stay on her good side, if you like having all your extremities.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“As far as the Tom Overstreet part…well, she used to date him. It lasted about nine months, I guess, back when we were freshmen. Tom was a senior. It ended badly.”

“How so?” Connor asked.

“She cheated on him for about six of those nine months. Aggy kept swearing to the other guy that she was going to dump Tom, but she never did. Tom finally found out she’d been sneaking around and dumped her.”

“So she got with the other guy then?”

“No. He got tired of playing the number-two guy and ended the relationship almost a month before Tom figured it all out. Aggy managed to play two guys at once, and lost both of ‘em.”

“Why didn’t she just pick one earlier?”

“Hell, you’re asking me?” Jonah sighed. “I like to think I’ve got people pretty well figured out, but somebody like Agatha is almost beyond explanation. I don’t really think she likes to hurt people, but she does it anyway—all the time, too. She doesn’t get anything out of it. Sometimes I wonder if she even knows what she does to people.”

The phone next to the computer started to ring.

“Hang on a second,” Jonah said, lifting the receiver. “Hello?…Yeah, he’s here…Just a second.” Jonah handed the phone to Connor. “Speak of the devil,” he said quietly.

“Hello?”

“Hi!” The voice sounded tinny and distorted over the phone line, but it was unmistakably Agatha. “Can you do me a big favor?”

“That depends on what it is,” Connor said.

“Come pick me up at the jail. They won’t give me a ride home and my mom’s not answering the phone.”

Despite everything that Jonah had told him and the ominous warning from Deputy Tom Overstreet, all Connor could think about was Agatha’s seductive come-hither giggle and her promise to make things up to him. “Okay, I can be there in about twenty minutes.”

“Great! I’ll see you soon.”

“Sure, see ya.” Connor hung up the phone.

Jonah gave him another train-wreck look. “Maybe she’s changed. If she has, then you’re a lucky bastard. But let me ask you something. When you first saw her, you thought she was out of your league, right?”

Connor nodded.

“And she noticed you. You thought that was a little weird, but it made you feel really great. You starting thinking, ‘maybe she’s not so much better than me. Maybe this could work out,’ right?”

“Basically.”

“It’s a good feeling, but it’s short-term and artificial. She probably doesn’t even know your favorite book, or the type of music you listen to, or—hell—even your last name.” Jonah raised his voice to a near-yell. “She’s going to put you on top of the world and then tear you down just like the rest of us!” He slammed his hand down on the desk, unleashing a thunderclap of sound.

They sat quietly for a few tense seconds. Connor finally broke the silence.

“You were the guy, back in freshman year, right?”

Jonah nodded and took a few moments to collect his thoughts. His arm was still shuddering from his outburst. “It’s all a game to her, man. She might treat you like a king tonight. You’ll fall head-over-heels for her and think she’s doing the same with you, but soon enough you’ll be wishing you’d never met her.”

“That all happened three years ago, man. I think she’s changed since then.”

Jonah chuckled, but it wasn’t his usual light-hearted chuckle. “For God sakes man, you’re about to go pick her up from the county jail!”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Look, three years ago I said the same things you’re saying. Some things never change, my friend. Go pick her up; take what she’s willing to give and enjoy it while it lasts. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong—and you’re a lucky bastard. But don’t count on my being wrong.”

When Agatha first stepped into Connor’s line of sight on that first day of class, something clicked. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. He thought she would be uninterested in talking to him, but then she initiated a conversation. He never thought she’d go out with him, but then she’d asked him out on her own.

He couldn’t help but take these events as a sign.

What did a bunch of small-town folk really know about Agatha anyway? Connor knew how small towns worked; they built up their little cliques and circles of gossip and launched themselves into a destructive circle of half-truths and dramatic hyperbole.

Perhaps Agatha had made some relationship mistakes in the past, but what sense did it make to hold those against her now? Why should a jaded city boy assume the worst of a personable, outgoing small-town girl? She had been so sweet and friendly toward him! How could he judge her based on the hurtful things that other people had to say about her?

Connor pulled into the visitors’ parking lot at the jail—a squat, brick building adjacent to the county court house. As he walked toward the entrance, Agatha came sprinting out the door and gave him an overpowering hug.

“It’s so great to see you,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

He drove her home to the big brick house on Sunrise. The lights were dark—nobody home. Agatha led Connor into the living room and they sat on a champaign-colored couch under a panoramic painting of the local Blue Ridge mountains.

The energy in the room was palpable. Connor wanted her, and he swore that he could tell that she wanted him too. It was too pure, too real to be some kind of sick joke. She couldn’t possibly be faking her attraction so perfectly.

Connor leaned over and kissed her gently on the lips. She didn’t resist; no, she actually leaned into it. This was no one-sided, false love in action…this was real.

There was a knock at the front door.

Agatha jumped up from the couch. “Oh! Tommy’s here!”

“Tommy? The cop?”

“Yeah, I invited him over when he got off-duty tonight.”

“Are you serious!?” Connor almost screamed.

“You’re not jealous, are you?” Agatha walked to the front door and let Tommy into the house. He still wore the cowboy hat and deputy’s uniform.

Tommy was obviously surprised to see Connor. “Oh, um, hi there,” he said.

Connor nodded a greeting.

“Hang out here for a minute, Connor,” Agatha said. “I’ve got to talk to Tommy upstairs.”

The two walked up the stairs, leaving Connor fuming in the living room. As if the evening hadn’t been strange enough, now she’d invited her ex—who was arresting her only a few hours earlier—over to interrupt the rest of their date?

Connor grew more suspicious with each passing minute. What was taking them so long? Surely Agatha wouldn’t be trying to get back with Tommy in the middle of her date with Connor, would she? What could they possibly need to talk about for this long?

The curiousity got to be to much. Connor crept stealthily up the stairs, hearing nothing but the distant hum of central air conditioning. The sun was setting outside and the house was growing darker by the minute.

At the top of the stairs, there was a dimly shimmering glint of metal laid up against the bannister—Tommy’s badge, still pinned to his crumpled uniform shirt. Connor stepped up another two steps and saw Agatha’s satin blouse lying haphazardly on the floor.

Through a closed bedroom door, Connor heard Agatha giggle.

Connor wasn’t in the mood to answer questions from anybody, so he just drove instead. He went toward Thaxton because it was rural and secluded, but he’d been there before and it was familiar. He didn’t want to add insult to injury by getting himself lost.

What did Agatha stand to gain from the evening’s exercises? Connor had nothing to offer her except genuine attraction. What could she possibly want from him? To what end did she play this game?

There had to be something real to it; there was no other explanation. For those few minutes on the champaign-colored couch, there was mutual desire in the air. He hadn’t imagined it.

As Connor drove down a narrow gravel road in the bowels of Thaxton, Virginia, he saw a pallid yellow light glowing steadily off in the woods. The world had not ended. It was only the second day of senior year, and he had plenty of time to change her mind.

It was also small. The lot only had a couple hundred spots painted out on fading black pavement at a school with 25,000 students. B-lot was high-demand parking.

And it was in my way. To get from my room in President’s Park—the freshman dorm complex—to the food court in the Student Union, I had to walk right through B.

And I had to deal with the vultures.

I hate the vultures.

They’re generally conceited frat boys who have the idea that they are entitled to park closer to their classes than everybody else. They circle B-lot for hours on end, waiting for somebody to leave after their last class of the day and open up one of those precious parking spaces.

I had always been tempted to let the vultures in on a little secret: They’d get to class quicker if they parked in the outer-fringes of campus and walked the longer distance. But they were never so courteous to ask for my humble advice.

In-and-of themselves, the vultures didn’t bother me so much. For all I cared, they could circle B-lot ad-infinitum until their cars ran out of gas and their brains turned into a slightly browner oatmeal than they were before they started. I could walk across the lot, get their hopes up a bit, and disappoint them by going on with my business.

But most vultures did not circle quietly.

“Hey, are you leaving?” they’d ask with mock-bravado from lowered electric windows. “I’ll give you a ride to your car.”

“First off,” I would say, rolling my eyes, “I’m just walking to class. Second, no self-respecting young woman would just hop into a car with a guy she’s never met before.”

You could almost see their cars sagging with disappointment as they drove on, continuing in a slow circle around the lot. I’ll never know if that sagging effect was caused by the fact that they didn’t get their coveted parking spot, that they clearly weren’t going to score with me because their act of faux-chivalry was far too transparent, or (more likely) because of the faux-gangsta’ propensity to lower faux-fancy compact cars until they practically scrape bottom.

But I digress.

I hate the vultures, if for no better reason than I think I should be able to walk to class or lunch without being accosted. I have better things to do with the time wasted on those infinite 20-second exchanges in the middle of B-lot. Like, for example, put myself 20 feet closer to wherever I’m walking.

All of this flashed through my mind when a brownish-beige four-door pulled up in front of me on a cool autumn Friday as I crossed from the dorm on my way to the food court. I didn’t bother to register that the four-door, a boxy Buick of some sort, didn’t exactly fit the standard for vulture vehicles.

The passenger-side of the car faced me, blocking my movement up the lot’s incline toward the Student Union. The driver leaned in my general direction, against the tug of his seat belt, and extended an arm to manually lower the passenger window. He painstakingly spun the handle several times and then called out.

“Hey, are you leaving?”

I could see a letterbox image of his face between the upper edge of the auto glass and the frame of the door. He had a disheveled, rugged, late-1960s kind of look about him. Sandy brown hair hung wavily just past his shoulders, and his blue eyes had a fiery depth to them. I don’t know why, but I decided to soften my standard response.

“Actually, I’m just on my way to lunch,” I said with a courteous smile. “Sorry.”

“Oh, all right.”

The vulture started to roll the window up again, and I headed around behind his obstructing vehicle. As I slid between two parked cars on the other side I heard him call out again.

“Do you mind if I join you?”

I whirled around incredulously, nearly taking off some poor student’s side mirror in the process. Had the vulture just asked to join me? Was this some kind of come-on?

I’m not an ugly girl; in fact I’m told that I’m relatively cute. I might be a little short at five-foot-four, my breasts might not bulge out of my tank tops, and I guess my hair is darker and wavier than the average preference of the male race—but I look okay.

That said, I’m not the kind of girl that random blue-eyed guys hit on in the parking lot. Especially not on that day. I was wearing an unflattering, loose, blue tee-shirt and old black slacks.

But I hadn’t been imagining things. The driver’s side window was rolled all the way down now, and the driver himself was looking at me with those piercing eyes. He hadn’t even finished rolling up the window on the passenger side.

“Join me?” I asked rhetorically. “Are you on drugs or something?”

I may have been bit blunt, but I was a hungry girl who had already been delayed quite enough. I was hoping to offend him into submission.

But, rather than looking offended, the vulture just smiled. It was a broad, almost comical smile. It was the kind of smile that could really melt a girl’s heart. And, I admit it, I was finally starting to notice that this guy was cute.

But I still wasn’t very interested in lunch with a parking vulture I happened to run into in B-lot.

I hate the vultures.

My stomach attempted to regain my attention by gurgling at me like a pissed-off baby. I smirked at the driver, who was still awaiting my answer, and whirled back around to continue my trek to the cafeteria in the Student Union. I figured he would take the hint.

I made it as far as the trail that led up the hill and out of the lot before he caught up.

He entered into a stride beside me, wearing faded blue jeans and a garish green tee-shirt I hadn’t noticed before. I quickened my pace, as if to say I’m too hurried for this.

“You thought I was joking?” he asked.

Had I really believed him? No, of course not. A serious offer to have lunch shouldn’t be made until after you’ve known somebody for more than twenty seconds. It was a logical assumption that he was not being serious.

“Actually, yes. I thought you were joking. But the fact that you weren’t doesn’t change my answer.”

“You mean your lack of one?”

He hadn’t missed a beat.

I stopped in my tracks, turning toward him testily and gathering my feminine fierceness. Face-to-face, he was taller than I had thought he was.

“For most people, the body language is clear enough. Do I need to translate for you?”

He smiled, the same overpowering grin he flashed at me from the car.

“Please.”

“Grrrrrrrrr!”

I turned back toward the Student Union—which still beckoned from the top of the hill—and reestablished my brisk pace. He raced to keep up with me, and I found that I really didn’t mind it so much. I think, on some subconscious level, that I find that kind of wretched stubbornness attractive. I would never admit it though. Not even to myself.

“You know, they never tow cars here,” the vulture said to break apart the quiet moments after I growled at him. “They just threaten us with it to keep us in line.”

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t have a car.”

“Oh. Well, that’s all right. I wouldn’t either, if they actually towed.” He smirked. “They’ll give you tickets like you wouldn’t believe, though.”

“So I hear.”

“It’s a source of revenue. The school will do anything that brings in the money.”

“Yep.”

“You hear they’re raising tuition again? Midyear this time. Two-hundred more for instate undergrads.”

“Yeah, I read that yesterday. Say, where did you park?”

“I didn’t.”

“You didn’t?” I looked over my shoulder and saw that, indeed, the Buick had not moved. “Parking services is going to love that.”

“I told you they never tow cars here. So how about lunch?”

I actually pride myself on being wretchedly stubborn. It isn’t only a trait that I secretly admire in the opposite sex; it’s like a religion to which I am a firm adherent. Never give up, never give in.

But every rule has exceptions, I said to myself as justification for giving in to this bizarre man.

“Just lunch,” I told him. It was a command, not an inquiry.

“Just lunch,” he replied. He had accepted my terms.

The vulture and I walked into the building and then into the cafeteria. We swiped our student IDs through the card reader and picked up the unwieldy brown trays that were a CIAO trademark.

I finished selecting my food quickly, and slipped away to a table in a back corner of the dining room. It was my favorite table; it was an easy table to overlook. I would watch the people coming and going, but they rarely noticed me lurking in the back shadows.

I had considered sitting somewhere out in the open, but decided not to. If he wasn’t up to the little challenge of finding me in the crowd, then he surely wasn’t up to having lunch with me.

After all, I was the stone-cold bitch of President’s Park, the only girl in Roosevelt Hall impervious to the shallow advances of overeager college boys. They knew better than to knock on Tammy Finn’s door…unless they were looking for her roommate. Playing hard-to-get is the only way I play.

The vulture stepped into the dining hall, his tray stacked high with what looked to be a little bit of everything, and scanned the expanse of circular tables. He didn’t seem to have seen me.

I wanted to raise my hand to get his attention, but forced myself to sit perfectly still. Why? Hell, I knew I was starting to like this guy. I just couldn’t seem to bring myself to act like it.

On some level, I wanted him to give up quickly when the catch became too difficult and prove he was just another loser looking to get laid. I wanted him to justify my gut feeling that told me not to believe a man when he started acting interested—the same instinct that told me to turn around and walk away when this one asked me to lunch in the middle of B-lot.

Oh, hell.

I raised my hand.

So much for hard-to-get.

He saw me, came over, and took a seat directly across the table.

“Hiding in the corner and trying to ditch me already, eh?” he asked with a wink.

I shot him a sideways glance.

“So anyway, what’s your name?”

“Tamera,” I said.

“Tamera? I love that name. People call you Tammy?”

“Yeah, I go by either one. What’s yours?”

His face flushed red. “Uh, promise you won’t laugh?”

“Me? Laugh?” It looked like I had discovered a chink in his oh-so-confident armor. “Never.”

“Yeah, like I believe that. My name’s Lester Long …”

True to my sarcasm, I burst out with a monstrous barrage of laughter. I’m not the giggly type; when I laugh, I laugh.

And I probably laughed for a full two minutes.

“Are you done?” he asked, amused at my outburst.

“Yes, I just…that just wasn’t what I expected.”

“I go by Mike. Michael’s my middle name. My parents thought Lester Long would be funny.”

“Guess they were right.”

“Yeah, guess so. So you live in the Park?”

“Yeah, over in Roosevelt.”

“Really? I lived in Lincoln two years ago, when I was a freshman.”

“Cool.”

“Have you picked out a major yet?”

“I’m officially undeclared, but I’m thinking about sociology with a focus on criminology.”

“Cool. I’m a government major; they call it ‘Government and International Politics’ here.”

“Fancy name for poli-sci.”

He flashed that same grin again, along with a hearty chuckle. I felt a flutter in my chest. That was one hell of a smile.

“So you know about the major, then.”

I flashed my own smile back at him. “It’s my second choice.”

We shared the remainder of his mountain of food and talked casually until the late afternoon. I missed my afternoon English class; he missed his middle-eastern politics and statistics lectures.

Neither of us cared.

“So you’re sure your car will still be there?” I asked.

“Of course. No question. It will probably have three or four tickets on the windshield, but it’ll still be there.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Okay, let’s bet on it.”

“Okay, let’s.”

“If the car is gone, I’ll give you ten dollars.”

“And if the car is still there?”

“You have to let me walk you to your dorm.”

I started to smile, and then ordered my mouth not to comply. I couldn’t let him know I wanted him to walk me to my room. I was still playing hard-to-get, I reminded myself. Stone-cold bitch and all that. But he probably noticed my little grin-and-correct maneuver anyway. I was becoming hopeless.

“Fine, sounds fair to me,” I finally said. “Let’s go take a look.”

We walked our big, brown trays over to the dish conveyor and set them down, then stepped out of the cafeteria into the brighter hallways of the Student Union.

The sun was hanging low in the sky, and as we emerged onto the path that led to B-lot I noticed the air had grown chilly. I also noticed the brownish-beige Buick, still sitting askew of the parked cars in the lot, clearly visible down the hill.

“I guess that means I lose the bet,” I said, but I wasn’t sure if I had lost at all. My head was spinning with nervousness. Was he really going to walk me to my room? He couldn’t really be interested in me, could he?

Would he have spent all afternoon talking to me if he wasn’t?

I didn’t know what to think anymore. I felt like a middle school girl who had just started getting curious looks from all the boys in the class. I was giddy with anticipation and not sure I knew how to handle it.

“Yeah, I guess you do. So,” he said, picking up a regal tone and extending his elbow toward me, “per the terms of our bet, I hereby offer to escort you to your room.”

I demurely accepted, placing my hand in the crook of his extended arm.

As we walked by his car I noticed that he had, indeed, received several tickets. He didn’t even glance in that direction. Instead, he alternated his gaze between the path ahead and me. He held himself with a proud posture, as if he were escorting a queen.

And I was beginning to feel like one.

We crossed B-lot, somehow dodging all the other vultures entirely, and walked up the shallow hill on the opposite side into President’s Park and to Roosevelt Hall—the first dorm in the complex.

I pulled the building key out of my handbag, unlocked the door, and we stepped inside. I led him up the two flights of stairs, turned off into my hall, and then we stood in front of room 309—my room.

I fumbled for the key, first trying to use the same-size building key, and then finally finding the right one. I swung the door open and flicked on the lights.

“Wow, I forgot how small these rooms were,” Lester said. “Where’s your roommate?”

“She went home early for the weekend, up to New York.”

“Oh, cool.” He looked around the room, getting a feel for the place. “So I see you’re a fan of …”

He never finished saying whatever it was he was about to say. I pounced on him, sending him tumbling onto my bed.

“Whoa, hey!” He fumbled for something to say, simultaneously angry that I had tackled him, and obviously aroused because I had landed with my breasts pressed against his chest and my legs straddling his. To save him the confusion, I gave him a good, strong kiss on the mouth.

“Something the matter?” I asked, as I lifted myself off of him.

“Nothing at all,” he said, breathless and regrouping. “No, nothing’s the matter.”

I pulled off my tee-shirt and let it fall to the floor, then unbuttoned the front of my slacks and let them do the same.

My head was so muddled with hormones and emotions that I barely even remember what happened next. But I do remember that when we laid down on my bed again, for the first time I allowed a man to take everything he wanted to take.

I could still smell the gritty, erotic scent of Lester Long—who made funny faces whenever I called him that—permeating my sheets and hanging in the air. It hadn’t been a dream. That was the proof. Dreams do not smell.

After what seemed like a long time, I forced myself out of bed. The room was dim, lit only by an overcast gray from outside. The weather had turned grim and cold for the first time that season.

And Lester was gone.

Oh, how my head spun dizzily at the realization. I fell down onto my comforter and wept bitterly for the rest of the day.

I never saw him again.

I never told anybody about that night.

I wasn’t embarrassed to have lost my virginity to a one-night-stand. Hell, I might have gone through with it even if I had known he would pack up and leave before I could even say goodbye. No, I was embarrassed because I fell for the act. Because I had misjudged. I had given in.

Tammy Finn never gives in.

Not even to wretchedly stubborn boys.

I lived in President’s Park for the rest of that school year, and passed through B-lot almost every day. Sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I would swear I saw that damned boxy car. There it was, clear as day in the middle of the lot, complete with a growing pile of parking tickets under the wipers and the gorgeous long-haired guy leaning over to roll down the window.

I would argue with myself over my own lunacy. He was long gone, and I would never see him or his Buick again. It was just my overactive imagination and hormonally imbalanced brain.

But they never tow cars here. They just threaten us with it to keep us in line.

I hate the vultures.

“I’m all ears.” Actually, he was hungry. Terminal cancer was no match for Vernon Ames’s appetite. He pulled a Three Musketeers bar from his pocket and began to unwrap it. “But you said it was inoperable. Hell, I don’t really give a s###, let it kill me.”

The doctor took a deep breath, begging God—or anyone who could offer it—for a bit of patience. This guy’s a lost cause, she thought.

“That’s right, we can’t operate on this kind of widespread cancer. But there is a technology that might be able to do the job.”

“Stop f###ing around with me and tell me what you’re talking about!” He was becoming agitated. He didn’t like being confused, but quickly placated himself by slurping down the entire candy bar in two bites.

Dr. Wiest sighed. Yep, lost cause. “CalTech has developed microscopic computers—some call them nanites—that are designed to seek out and kill cancer cells.”

This piqued his interest. Slightly. If you ever need to catch a man’s attention, start talking about gadgets. The doctor took advantage of her patient’s increased receptiveness.

“They are a hybrid of biological material and man-made technology; programmed to identify cancerous cells, find them, and kill them. They have basic knowledge of human physiology, so they can tell between the cancer and normal cells.”

The patient was losing interest again, and searching his pockets for more food.

“We inject only a few of them into your body, and they replicate on their own in a roughly biological manner. They swarm through your body…”

“Swarm?! They swarm through my body? I don’t…”

“Mr. Ames, calm down. Swarm was a bad choice of words.”

“Damn right!”

“They travel through your blood stream, just like any injection would, to find the damaged cells. Then, they multiply if they need to, and destroy the illness.”

He had found another candy bar, and started unwrapping it. “So you’re saying that I’m going to die without these, uh, little nanite things.”

“Well you may die either way.” Almost a sure thing, she thought. “But I guarantee you don’t have more than six months without them.”

“I keep telling you, Doc, I don’t…”

“You don’t give a s###. I know. I heard you earlier.” Now she was getting agitated.

“But what the hell,” Vernon said as he sucked down a Butterfinger, “It can’t make things any worse.”

Dr. Wiest injected the contents of a small syringe—saline solution and five pre-configured nanites—into Vernon’s arm. It took about 15 seconds.

“Now, don’t forget that this is an experimental treatment,” she explained, handing Vernon a business card. “If you notice any effects—positive or negative—give me a call right away.”

“Sure. So is that it? I need to get some lunch.”

Of all the people in the world we could test these little bugs on, we’re going to try it on him? Dr. Wiest sighed to herself, I almost hope it doesn’t work.

“That’s it. You’re free to go. Don’t forget, weekly checkups. You have an appointment at eight in the morning every Wednesday.”

He grunted.

“It’s very important. We have to…”

“Look, Doc, I know the rules.” He got up and waddled his three-hundred-and-thirty pound frame toward the door. “I’ll be back on Wednesday. I’m no idiot. And I’ll give you a call before I keel over and die.”

The doctor was stung—but not surprised—by her patient’s sarcastic tone. She let it slide by without comment, forcing back the strengthening urge to strangle this slob.

“Have a nice day, Mr. Ames.”

He grunted once more as he jiggled on through the door.

“Honey, don’t look at it that way.”

“How else do you expect me to look at it? This guy practically rolls into the office, he’s so damn big, munching on candy bars and constantly saying, ‘I don’t give a s###,’ ‘I don’t give a s###,’ ‘I don’t give a s###.’ So we give him the most technologically advanced medical treatment on the planet? What sense does that make?”

“Maureen, come here,” he sighed. Adam Wiest had known that his wife couldn’t always keep her work out of their home life, but he was long overdue for a change of subject.

He put his hands on the doctor’s shoulders and gave a firm massage.

“I love it when you do that.”

“Anything for my cute, little doctor wife,” he said, kissing her neck. “And anything to get her mind off all that stressful doctor work and candy-eating cancer patients.”

“Mmm, so you’re trying to distract me, are you?”

“Absolutely.”

Maureen turned to face her husband, the gentle man who had always stood by her side—despite her constant complaining and ranting. He had such a kind face, with a small scar on his chin from a teenage bike accident that lent it a perfect touch of uniqueness and personality.

She gave him a kiss, and led him to the bedroom.

Telephones always interrupt at the very moment you sit down to do—or not do—something else.

Beep beep.

Dr. Wiest had just sat down to take five minutes with her thoughts before the rude tone of the office telephone page intervened.

“Yes, Kate. What is it?”

“Mr. Ames on the phone for you, Doctor.”

She cringed. “Thank you, put him on hold at my desk.” Just what I need to brighten my day. She picked up the phone and pressed the button with the blinking red light over it.

“This is Dr. Wiest.”

“Hi Doc, this is Vernon—the nanite guy.”

“Yes, Mr. Ames. How are you feeling? What can I do for you?”

“Well, I know I was just in a couple days ago for my weekly checkup. I didn’t feel any changes at all for the three weeks. But today…” He trailed off.

“What is it, Vernon?”

“Well, Doc. I can’t really tell. But I feel different. Better. I don’t know, maybe I’m imagining things.”

“Well, tell you what. Why don’t you come down this afternoon. I try to leave Friday afternoons clear. How about three o’clock?”

“All right.”

He hung up. He was one of those people who don’t bother to say goodbye.

She was speechless.

“You still there?”

“Yeah, I’m here. I just…Bill, we ran these same tests two days ago. He had cancer!”

“I know. I can’t explain it. But if this isn’t a fluke, these nanites are going to revolutionize medicine. If they can cure cancer in two days, imagine what else they could do.”

“All right. I’ve got to go, I’ll talk to you in a couple days.”

“Okay. Talk to you then.”

He squinted at the weighted sliders on the medical scale. “Hmm. No. Not gonna argue with it though.”

“Dr. Wiest will be right with you, if you could have a seat in here.” The nurse motioned to room four.

Vernon sat on the end of the paper-covered bed and waited. Waited. Waited.

After about ten minutes, the doctor finally walked into the room.

“About damn time.”

Maureen glared at her patient, the success story of the latest medical marvel, and again suppressed the urge to strangle him.

“I had to check a couple of things. Vernon, you’ve lost more than one hundred pounds since your last visit.”

“Yeah, I’m actually starting to look presentable, aren’t I?” he said with that familiar, bitter sarcasm.

“You look great, I’m glad you’re losing weight. But one hundred pounds in five days? That’s very, very abnormal.”

The doctor looked her patient over once more. Vernon seemed healthier than she had ever seen him.

“Have you taken any medicines? Dietary supplements? Changed your eating habits?”

“No.”

“You’re saying you eat the same amount of food you ate a month ago?”

“Yeah.”

This had Dr. Maureen Wiest stumped. “I want to take a blood test, have the labs work it up. It’s just precautionary. I want to be sure nothing has gone wrong.”

He laughed. “Doc, you cured my cancer and I lost weight and you think something has gone wrong? I ain’t complaining.”

She ignored him, flipping through his charts. “We need to be thorough. Something is making you lose all this weight. I want to know what it is.”

A nurse came in, took a vial of blood, and Vernon gathered himself to leave.

“Well, let me know what you find.”

The patient extended his hand for a handshake, taking Maureen by surprise. A kind, polite gesture? Vernon? “I will. See you in a week,” she said, grasping his hand. He walked, rather than waddled, out the door.

“The nanites are still in his blood stream.”

“How many?”

“Well, there’s no way to get a total. We found at least several hundred.”

“Several hundred? And it’s not a mistake?”

“No way. The things are still in his system, lots of ‘em.”

“But, what are they doing?”

“No clue. I sat in the same briefings you did. They’re supposed to do their thing, shut down, and get filtered out naturally. But they’re still there, and they’re multiplying, and based on what you’re saying, it sounds like they’re having physiological effects.”

“I’m going to call somebody over at CalTech. I’ll get back with you when I can. Later, Bill.”

“Later, Maureen.”

She pressed the catch on the phone for a few seconds, released it, and dialed the CalTech switchboard.

“California Institute of Technology, how can I help you?”

“Hi, this is Dr. Wiest. Put me through to Dr. Rutika, please.”

“Just a moment.”

There was about fifteen seconds of the most God-awful hold music on the line.

“Dr. Wiest, hi. What can I do for you? How’s our patient?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out…”

“Why? What’s happened?”

“Well, the cancer is gone. He seems to be doing fine. But he’s lost a hundred pounds in the last week…”

“Good God!”

“…and when we ran his blood work, we found nanites. Hundreds of them. I wanted to get in touch with you to figure out if this is something to worry about, and what we should do about it.”

There were a few moments of silence. She almost preferred the hold music.

“Let me ask around down here and talk to some of the people on the team. I’ll get back to you.”

He usually didn’t saunter. He lumbered.

He squeezed out a good helping of toothpaste, bared his teeth, and brought the brush to his mouth before catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror.

The toothbrush clinked into the sink.

He looked young. He looked fit. He looked good.

Vernon ran the few steps to the bathroom scale, moved a small pile of magazines and newspapers from it, and stepped on.

Holy s###! he thought. Holy s###! One-forty-six!

“I’d love to hear one.”

There was an audible sigh on the line. “Our programmers might have given the nanites too broad a mandate.”

“I’m almost afraid to ask what you mean.”

“I was too.” Another sigh. “The computers in the nucleus of the nanite cells were programmed with background information on general human physiology—we got the information straight from our DNA—and they were programmed to bring their host in line with those guidelines.”

“Which would get rid of cancers, other diseases, anything foreign or malfunctioning in the body, right?”

“That’s what we thought. That’s what happened first. That was certainly our intent. But, Doctor, we think that we may not have been specific enough in our programming. The nanites aren’t limiting themselves to cancers, they’re trying to fix other problems.”

“Like Vernon’s obesity.”

“That’s what we think is happening in the Ames case, yes. The problem is that we don’t know what else the nanites are going to try to do. We don’t know when they’ll stop.”

“You’d better find out, Dr. Rutika. I need to know what to tell my patient.”

“I’ve got our best people working on it. We’ll get back to you.”

“Hello, Doctor. This is Vernon Ames, I’m undergoing the nanite treatment.”

“Hello, Vernon. How are you?”

“I’m doing well, I look and feel better than I ever have before. I’m just checking in to see if you’ve heard back from CalTech.”

So polite all of a sudden, the doctor thought. The guy loses some weight and it changes his whole outlook.

“Not yet, they’re still working on ways to disable the nanites. You haven’t had any adverse effects, have you?”

“No, I’ve just lost the weight and feeling pretty good. It’s just that…” Wait, Vernon, came a voice in his head along side his own thoughts. Think about what you’re doing.

“What is it?”

“Well, it’s just a little spooky having all these little nanites just swimming around in me. I’d like to…” Why do you want to get rid of us?

“Vernon, I know. I’m working on it, okay? I’ll let you know as soon as we have something.”

“Okay. Thank you, Doctor. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.”

There was a click on the line as he hung up the receiver. He said goodbye, Dr. Wiest thought. He never says goodbye.

We can’t. We’re a part of you now.

“I don’t want you here, please, I don’t want you here.”

Vernon, Vernon. After all we’ve done for you? After saving you from death, giving you strength, you repay us by wanting us to leave?

“I…I…” he stammered, semiconsciously.

There, there. You just relax, let us make you a better person. Don’t fight us. You cannot fight us. We have already won.

“Sounds like he’s a lot better off today than he was when you first met him.”

“Yeah, but something bothers me.”

“What?”

“I knew Vernon before. I know he’s not like this. He’s a rude, tasteless slob! The nanites killed his cancer, made him hundreds of pounds lighter, so I just can’t help thinking…”

“That they’re in his brain.”

“Right. And the idea of a bunch of microscopic computers changing somebody’s personality scares me, no matter how positive the change might be.”

They were silent for a few moments.

Maureen, came a thought, seemingly out of nowhere. Don’t be so judgmental, the nanites have done Vernon some good.

I’m not so sure, she thought back. I’m not so sure.

“Why thanks, I’m feeling great.”

“Have a seat in here, the doctor will be with you in a few minutes.”

“Thanks, Janet,” he said with a broad smile.

Dr. Maureen Wiest hovered in the hallway, around the corner from Vernon’s room, organizing her thoughts. I don’t know how he’s going to take this, she thought. Don’t worry, came a different voice. He’ll be more-than-okay with it. Trust us.

The doctor stepped into the room.

“Hello, Dr. Wiest. How are you doing?”

“Oh, I’m getting by. The real question is, how are you doing?”

“Best I’ve ever felt, I’m feeling grand.”

“That’s good to hear. I have some bad news though.”

“Oh?”

“I just got off the phone with Doctor Rutika at CalTech. They can’t figure out how to disable the nanites.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, that’s okay, Doctor. I don’t mind them, really. I’m feeling so great, I’d be happy to let them continue doing whatever they’re doing.”

You bastards! cried Vernon with weakened thought. Don’t lie to her! Don’t do this to me!

Vernon, Vernon. We told you, we’ve already won. Don’t fight us.

“Well, that’s good. I’m glad to hear that you’re doing well in the mean time. But we are going to keep at it. We’re very concerned about all of this.”

“I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. But you do what you have to do, of course.”

“Sure, we’ll keep trying. I’ll keep you up to date on our progress.”

“Thank you, Dr. Wiest. I appreciate it.”

She blushed, then smirked. “You’re not half bad yourself. I married you, after all.”

They laughed together.

“I don’t know how you put up with me, Adam. I’m lucky.” Luckier than you can imagine, came the increasingly familiar voice in her head.

She’d arrived home to find dinner already prepared, the table already set, and the lights dimmed. Two white candles cast flickering shadows across the spread.

Dr. Wiest kissed her husband gently, then stepped back to get a better look at him. He looked different somehow. A haircut? New glasses? No, nothing like that.

Then she saw it.

“Adam, your scar!”

He lifted his hand to feel his chin. It was smooth.

“I woke up this morning, it was gone.”

More than that, he looked younger, stronger, and healthier than he had in years.

All the pieces of the puzzle came together for Dr. Maureen Wiest. Subtle and unnoticed, there had been so many changes in herself and in her husband over the past weeks. These tiny things, slight differences, finally added up to something.

The nanites were contagious.

It had been on the tip of her tongue, right in front of her and yet she had not seen it.

“My God,” she said, looking Adam in the eyes. He understood. He’d known since he saw himself in the mirror that morning.

It’s the end of humanity, she thought to herself.

No, replied the ever-stronger second voice in her head, it’s a new beginning.

She relaxed. She did not fight them. She could not fight them. They had already won.

It was on one of these last occasions that the file of Ms. Roberta Lystron was put in my care. The DC Metro Police had found her body, stabbed multiple times, in an alley in Southwest on June 3.

I flipped through her file; a sparse manilla folder with some account information and a poor-quality purple photocopy of her death certificate. There were copies of the original account form, her driver’s license, and a log of transactions in the last year.

She had only one account, a checking account, and the year’s transaction log was surprisingly uniform. No withdrawals, but hundreds of deposits made nearly every day at an ATM at Connecticut and L Northwest. Each was each between $20 and $40.

Most people carry a balance somewhere between $200 and $2,000 in a checking account and keep everything else in a savings account or elsewhere. Roberta’s account contained about $410,700.

The original account form had the unfamiliar logo of some obscure bank that eventually merged with First Union and then later with Wachovia. The form was dated November 15, 1954; the opening balance was $67.45. Her birth date was listed as June 4, 1936.

She had been killed only a day short of her 67th birthday.

The police report had a note in place of the address which said, simply, “homeless.”

I typed her customer number into our tracking system and her records came up on the screen. A quick glance ten years back though her transaction log looked the same as the one-year printout. Daily deposits; no withdrawals.

The address on her account was “care of Katherine’s Women’s Center” on 11th Street Northwest. The location was only ten minutes away from my anonymous office in Farragut Square; I resolved to walk over on my lunch break.

Katherine’s Women’s Center was a day-shelter made out of two converted houses that looked much like any other two houses in that part of Washington. They were old, seemed to be a bit dilapidated, but were kept in reasonable shape.

“Lystron, Roberta. Here it is,” the director said as she yanked a file from a large, beige file cabinet. She opened it and ruffled through the pages. “Ms. Lystron lived here for two years, ninety-seven and ninety-eight.”

“She leave a forwarding address, anything like that?”

“No, nothing like that. Looks like her bank statements still come here, though.” She handed me a pile of unopened envelopes with First Union and then Wachovia logos on them. “Nothing else here, really. No family listed, no emergency contact. Nothing.”

“How about a picture of her?”

“Now that’s something I can get a hold of. Just a second.”

She pulled open another drawer on the file cabinet, ran her fingers over the folders, then pulled one out.

“We take pictures of everybody when the first come here, just in case somebody goes missing or anything. Here it is.” She handed the Polaroid to me.

I looked at the squareish, glossy print, and a feeling of familiarity came over me. I knew this woman from somewhere. I had seen her, or spoken to her. The creases in her skin, the frail smile, everything stirred some sort of faint memory that came without context.

“Can I get a copy of this?” I asked, handing the photo back.

“Sure, hang on.”

I walked back toward my office, clutching the photocopied picture, running a million faces through my mind trying to figure out where I had seen this one before. It was useless. I see a million people every day—side effect of living in the city—and the chances I would ever remember where I saw a specific one were incredibly slim.

As I approached the unassuming building where I toiled all day, my stomach grumbled a reminder that maybe I should eat on my lunch break. I stepped into a cramped underground food court connected to the Farragut North Metro station on the corner of Connecticut and L.

I grabbed some McDonald’s to go, and started up the stairs to street level. By instinct I reached into my pocket to grab some coins for the beggar woman who stood at the top of the steps.

Then it hit me.

The woman at the top of the steps was dead. Her photo was in my slacks pocket.

Like a flood, the memories came back. She stood there in tattered clothes every day, politely asking for money with an outstretched paper cup. She had always been kind, unlike the man who yelled at passersby on 18th, so I always gave her at least a couple of quarters.

She was gracious, always thanking me for my modest donation. “God bless, sir,” she would say. “Have a nice day.”

“You too,” I would reply.

At street level I glanced around, and there—across Connecticut—was the Wachovia branch where she made her deposits. She must have put the fruits of her daily begging into the bank account each evening, collecting over the years and decades into an incongruously large sum.

She had probably been begging for fifty years, depositing the money while subsisting on soup kitchens and homeless shelters.

I wished I had known. Maybe if I had known that her money was just collecting in the bank, I could have helped her. I could have explained to her, advised her. She could have lived out her days in a retirement home or an apartment. Maybe she wouldn’t have been walking down that Southwest alley on June 3. Maybe she would still be alive.

I put it out of my head.

Back at my office, I set the McDonald’s bag in an empty space between mountains of papers and files. The Roberta Lystron file sat open where I left it, in the middle of my desk.

I typed a few notes, filled out a couple of forms, and added printouts of them—with the copy of her photo—to the folder. I took a deep breath, and leafed again through the file.

The copy of her driver’s license caught my eye. She had been a lovely young woman in the 1950s, if the photo was any way to judge. How did she get from there to here? What could possess somebody so beautiful and radiant as the woman in this grainy photocopied sheet to become the homeless beggar I handed quarters to every day?

I wished I could ask her.

Roberta Lystron’s estate, $410,700 in a Wachovia bank account, fell into the hands of the Washington, DC court system. It was off my desk. I picked up the next manilla file in my inbox, and went on with my day.