“She still has tons of fans.”
“Yeah, right,” he said. “Anyway, I offered her a sweet buyout,but her ego was too big.” He moved closer to me. Put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t you see?”
“Don’t I see what?”
He sighed. “I didn’t have any other choice but to post that review.”
I stared at him for a very long time. My eyes felt dry and itchy. I realized it was because I hadn’t blinked. “Leila Donnelly wasn’t Book Babe,” I said. “You were.”
Greg shook his head. “Book Babe is AI.”
“Wait. What?”
“It’s a program I invented back in college,” he said, “and it’s the future of book marketing. My mom wanted nothing to do with it. She never understood algorithms and she was wrong, wrong, wrong. You should see what a five-star Book Babe review can do for sales. And the engagement is off the charts. It now has more real followers than bots.”
I knew it was a mistake to keep asking Greg questions. The fact that he was answering me so honestly gave him all the more reason to kill me. But I couldn’t help it. I needed to know. “How did Leila fit in?”
“She was Teddy’s friend. He met her at a convention. She wanted to be a novelist, but she couldn’t write for shit, and so we used my technology to make her dream come true. To makeourdream come true. It was an experiment, and it worked. She was almost a partner. Until, you know…she wasn’t.”
I looked around the room. “These laptops.”
“My stable of authors.”
“Jesus…”
“They’re here for now, but I can move them anywhere,” he said.
“This isn’t right.”
“Why isn’t it?” he said. “They don’t go on tours and make you pay for them. They don’t demand huge advances. They write bestsellers in five minutes. They don’t ask for extensions or bigger cuts of the royalties. They don’t have skeletons buried in their closets that can get them canceled at the most inopportune moment. Hell, they don’t even have closets.”
“They don’t have souls.”
“With all due respect, Sunny. Who the fuck cares?”
“People care. People want to connect with other people. It’s why they go to book signings.”
He shrugged. “Deepfakes are so easy to make now. My authors can talk to readers over Zoom, do virtual chats with book clubs—nobody will know the difference.”
“Smart readers will know.”
“Oh, really? You seem pretty smart, Sunny. And I bet you thought Leila Donnelly’s video was real.”
I stared at him, speechless. I honestly couldn’t say a word.
“Anyway, Melanie Joan should have known when to quit.” He knelt down behind me. “Teddy should have known when to quit, too.”
I heard a click and a gunshot. It rang in my ears. I held my breath. I wasn’t hit. It dawned on me that Greg Scepter hadn’t intended to shoot me. I could feel him loosening the zip-ties on my wrists, his hands wrapped around mine, the familiar weight of my own gun in my palm.
“You done?” Teddy said from outside the door.
“Yep!” Greg called out.
The door opened and Greg yanked my right arm so that it was straight in front of me, the gun in my hand. He squeezed it. Pressed his fingers over mine to pull the trigger. It was my gun. My .38. I heard the explosion of it, felt the familiar kickback. Teddy Piro fell to the ground, a red stain spreading quickly through the front of his shirt.
“There we go,” Greg said. With my gun in his hand, he moved over to Teddy and listened to his chest. “Gone,” he said. “You’re a good shot, Sunny.”
He didn’t have to say it. I knew what he thought was going to happen. Teddy’s gun was on the floor outside the open door. Greg set my gun down in order to pick it up. And then he put it in Teddy’s lifeless hand and aimed it at me. “I’m sorry it has to end this way,” he said.
