Page 120 of Anarchy Missing

EPILOGUE - CASE

I stayed in the cave for weeks. I let Sheila poke me with her little minion-bots. They climbed all over my body testing me for… hell, who the fuck knows what they were testing me for. Lincoln did find some kind of inert programming inside me after the old corrupted nannites were purged and a new set—this time not linked to the supercomputer at ToyBox—were introduced. He says whatever code Molly put inside my body with that lariat thing is beyond repair. Just junk. So he says. It makes me very nervous. If it happened once… might I be corrupted again?

I guess Molly and I have something in common now. We both live in fear that whatever the Blue Boar did to us can happen again.

ToyBox Corporate has been moved to SkyEye until we can figure out what to do.

Rebuild? Jesus Christ. I don’t know if I can rebuild that place. I liked it a lot when I came up with the whole glass cube design. But we still don’t know how the SmartGlass program mutated and took over. We’re pretty sure it’s dead. Gone, whatever you call it when a computer program goes sentient and then gets destroyed.

Thomas is still very pissed off. I can’t blame him. I did shoot that fucker in the chest. Couple times, I think. And if there’s one good thing that came out of this, it’s that the whole inhibitor thing has disappeared with the computer program.

Lincoln says that makes no sense because the gene therapy we were using to keep it going still had a few months left before it needed to be renewed. But I don’t care. We’re not doing that anymore. I think we’ve been through enough bullshit to trust each other from now on. We don’t need it. We’re a team. We’ve always been a team. And no drug can bond us together. No. That’s not where trust comes from.

“Hey,” Lulu says, snuggling up next to me in our bed. I moved in with her since my house is a fixer-upper now. “Let’s not go in to work today.”

I smile at that. “I’m all for hookey. But I’m pretty sure Randy Shits would have something to say about it.”

“Shultz.” Lulu laughs.

“Same thing,” I say.

Randy—everyone actually—woke up from the SmartGlass mind control not remembering one thing. Days were missing in everyone’s memory. In fact, no one even remembered that the banks were robbed. Or the problem with power and the water.

They were covered in bruises and yeah, some people did die. But it’s like… there was some kind of mind control still in effect. Because people just went about cleaning things up for about a week and then morphed right back into good little robo-people who go about their days and nights on autopilot.

It’s a good thing Sheila is around to take care of shit. Because she’s the one who ran diagnostics and figured out the money was never taken from the bank accounts. It was just hidden inside the systems. That’s what happens when you make currency digital like that, I guess.

The power plant, Sheila figured out, was on some automatic natural disaster shut-down protocol. And the water treatment plant was the only thing that actually played a role in what happened that week.

It was tampered with. Sheila discovered that the city water supply was laced with powerful psychoactive drugs. Kinda like the ones Thomas uses to keep himself turned off.

Well, used to use. I shot that fucker with an inhibitor too. No wonder he’s still pissed at me. He tried taking his pills again, but they make him deathly sick now. Almost like the inhibitor that prevented us from attacking each other.

Yeah, he’s still pretty mad about that.

Steve has been in quarantine. Sheila loaded a copy of his program into a closed system to try to see if he had any info in there. But it was clean. We think. Hence the quarantine. Maybe we’ll let him out again someday, but it’s not looking good. That day is a long way off.

I think one super-sentient computer is enough for one world. At least for now. We have too much technology at our fingertips and not nearly enough sane, ethical people to keep it all in check.

It took a few weeks to sort out everything the city was doing. Like the new coffeehouses. City Coffee. Should’ve known. It was laced with psychoactive drugs too. Lulu and Molly were sorta disappointed about that. They really liked cinnamon coffee, I guess.

But it was the forensic trace that Sheila ran on the coffeehouses that was probably the most disturbing thing about the whole experience.

It’s insane that a computer program could start up a chain of businesses. And it did. It absolutely did. It syphoned money out of every account in every bank in Cathedral City. Pennies at a time over a period of two years.

Two years that thing was living in my house. Watching me through the windows.

I shiver under Lulu’s soft touch just thinking about it.

The city hired a general manager for the coffeehouses online. Everything was done online. The rental contracts for the store space. The contractors. The deliveries. Equipment rental. Employees. All of it. And this is the part that freaks Thomas out.

He is desperate to trace every move the city made in that respect. Every single one until he’s back in charge.

That’s all he thinks about. The long-term plan. We’ve had some setbacks, but he’s still going for it.

And I’m still in.

People don’t know that the SpyGlass tablets were corrupted. They have no idea. So we’re just… moving ahead with that little plot. Full fucking steam.