AI Reborn

P.S. Power

Orange Cat Publishing

Copyright 2023

All Rights Reserved

Chapter One

Mason felt distinctly odd, and more than a little conspicuous, trying to run along the damp and puddle bestrewn city street. Outside. In the real world. Not safely inside his VR room, locked away from prying eyes or real hazards. Part of that kind of thing wasn’t totally unheard of in his life, of course. He did exercise. Almost every day, in the last months, even. Part of that, as weird as it sounded to him, was done due to the fact that he had a girlfriend. An actual female person who spent time with him and who, for her own reasons, took part in that sort of sporty and energetic madness.

An actual mate. Which, given everything, he hadn’t even wanted at any point in his not too long life. Maybe, possibly, when he’d been young the idea had occurred to him. When hormones had ordered him to procreate, even if he had been the ugly fat kid.

A thing that had never even been close to happening. In fact, his clumsy attempts at getting female attention had been shot down, hard and often, so that, by the time he’d been fourteen or so, he’d gotten the point. Women weren’t really an option for him. Not being gay, that meant he needed to improve the situation. So he had, by learning to keep that part of himself in VR. That splendid and marvelous fantasy world where his dreams were true and his hopes weren’t just another tool to manipulate him into behaving inside a specific box. Not the messy reality that he lived in the rest of the time.

He reflected on that, being a lonely fat kid, as he padded at a decent but not intense pace, down a fairly pretty residential street in Portland, Oregon. Mainly in that he currently wasn’t that old at all. Twenty-five. That was hardly ancient. Still, there he was, going outside and everything, so that people could see that he, a semi-celebrity of some sort, wasn’t afraid to be out alone. With no friends around him, or guards to protect his tender flesh.

That was why he was really there. It would have been faster and far less annoying to run in his VR room, after all. For one thing, his socks would be dry at the moment. The puddles were not allowing that to happen, even as he tried to avoid them. The idea of being seen hadn’t been his. No, it was, clearly, his punishment for attaching himself to Lexi Horn. Famous actress. After all, she was smart, and had decided that going out herself, with bodyguards or large and powerfully built assistants, would make it seem like a publicity stunt. If he did it, alone, which made sense not having anyone dedicated to his security anyway, no one would imagine that.

The trick there was that he’d honestly figured that no one would care if he was in public. As in no one would notice him. He was just himself, after all. Mason Sims. A fairly decent nano assembly guy. Lately a bit of an imbed tattoo design professional. Also with some skill in food pattern design. They all related, as fields went. A person who had given people some free things to help them out when the world situation had shifted on them all, about three months before. It wasn’t that big of a deal.

It might seem like it on paper, since the nano assemblers and disassemblers, pickers, food units for in-depth construction and some basic power systems, as well as imbed ballistic and energy shields would add up to a gift of a few hundred billion dollars, under the old economy. That was gone though. No one was using money, or credits, for anything, any longer. So, he’d actually just given away free things.

Meaning no one would, or at least should, actually care about him at all.

Except that, as he glanced up, first one, then six, flying drones started to track him, getting video of him gasping and panting. Showing that he wasn’t afraid, because, of course, he had an imbed shield on his skin. Anyone trying to shoot, stab or laze him was going to find that it wasn’t going to work at all. If they grabbed him, well, then he’d flop around like a fish in a VR camping program and try to run off. No one wanted him though. Really, he couldn’t imagine what they’d do with him if they did catch him and carry him away.

Money was totally useless and he, personally, had already been giving away free tech, since before the economy had tanked. The most anyone should do, even criminals, would be to come and ask him for new stuff. Which he’d give them. Probably not even thinking about it much. So, no, it wasn’t going to be a problem at all.

He also wasn’t important to the public. They kind of knew who he was, since people had taken to calling the nano-disassembly devices he’d put out for free Masons. Meaning his biggest real claim to fame was that his girlfriend was an actress and he hung around with some famous people.

Well, possibly it was due to the new imbeds he’d put out, the day before. A totally new VR system. That was pretty good. It wasn’t revolutionary, really, mimicking a very high-end room and outfit set-up that way, but his units were free, and could be used anywhere. The idea was interesting, since it used imbed tattoos, the removable kind, which invisibly coated the entire body. Rather, it turned people slightly bronze, from the metals used in that particular device. Still, it wasn’t a dark color.

Signals were sent to the nerves, the connections aligned nearly perfectly, and small electrical signals caused the body to resist at the correct time, giving a force feedback feeling that, while not perfect, was more complete than anything other than a full VR suit would provide.

There was an imbed for his eyes as well, which allowed his vision to be totally co-opted, and a very nice set of controlled drops, that worked in his ears, for sound. In all, when turned on, reality would fall away, totally, leaving him in whatever VR world he’d programmed into being.

If he wanted to run in place and have it feel real, he still needed to use his roller floor, with its millions of little ball bearings, but other than that, the system was nearly flawless.

They didn’t even take a lot of energy to use, meaning they could perform at a high level with the new lower intensity energy systems that had come out. It took about a hundredth of the energy that an older system needed and came with a safe antenna array to collect the needed information and power from a standard wireless set. All of that was built into the imbed, so once applied, you had everything you needed to start playing.

Not all of that was his work, either. No, once people, some of them, had gotten the idea, that money wasn’t going to be a thing any longer, a few of them had started to dump a lot of really sweet tech onto the market, for everyone to use. Not a lot of people, but at least two others had done it, which had allowed for almost everyone to set up better power systems than his thermal paint would have allowed for.

As he padded along, avoiding puddles since it had rained earlier, his new shoes shedding fluid and keeping his feet warm, while spreading the weight of his footfalls evenly, water coming in at the top of his socks and wicking downward, he grinned. After all, everything had weaknesses. When you found them, you either lived with the flaw, or tried to find a way to fix it. In this case, not jumping in puddles seemed like the first thing to try.

One of the drones moved in next to him, floating along easily, at head height.

It was professional seeming, colored in red and white plastic, with eight evenly spaced propellers, quietly providing airflow over counter-rotating disks that were providing lift. That was an older configuration still used, since it worked pretty well. There was a large and highly complex camera lens array, with six apertures, to show he was being mapped for VR use. Only on one side, of course. It needed to move around him totally, to get a good picture that could be made into a virt.

A voice came from the unit, as it floated next to him. Largely being ignored by Mason, since mugging for the camera always looked bad. It was an amateur move or showed paranoia. He kept his eyes forward, to give the impression that the viewer would be floating next to him, looking at the side of his head. That was always better to watch, on a three-dimensional screen.

“Mr. Sims. You exercise outside? Is that safe? There have been... disruptions.”

He shrugged as he moved, smiling a bit. It was contrived, of course, though he figured that his makeup imbed was going to leave him looking virt ready, at least. Even if he was gasping a little, covered with sweat and a slight bit of slickness from the misting he’d taken a bit earlier.

“There have been some minor events. Even a few major ones. But everyone is getting that everything can be better now. That we can have everything we want now. I expect crime to not only go down but to virtually vanish in the next year. Once people start using the new devices and realize that they can have pretty close to anything they want. It’s not perfect yet, sure. We’ll get there. That’s the outside time point for that, too. As for exercising, well, we should all be doing that, every day. All of us should be getting outside and helping our neighbors or just saying hello to them. Block parties, maybe. Really, let’s all claim that this weekend is the first annual block party for the United States. Everyone make plans and set things up, if the weather allows.”

The idea was a stupid one, of course. People didn’t really do things like that. There were reasons, too. Still, if he was outside, running and getting damp feet that day to show things were safe, adding in a party for everyone kind of made sense. To him. Probably no one else in the world. That got him to grin.

He shook his head then.

“Scary, I know. I mean, going outside, right? That’s why we have VR, but we still need to do it for mental health reasons. People need to actually see and interact with other people, real ones, occasionally.” At least that was what the psychologists had been pushing on them all for over the last forty years.

Seeing that he was talking, possibly answering questions, the other units moved closer, with voices coming at him, several of them trying to fly around him in a three-sixty, in order to get pictures for complete models. It would be harder with him, a nobody, than with someone like Ben Starky or Deidre Omry. Both of them had been on screens a lot, in the last months. Ben had one of the most popular programs going at the moment, even.

A cooking show.

Really it was about using high end nano assembly devices that made food. You didn’t really do much cooking with those, building what you wanted from base components. Popular, since everyone suddenly had that kind of advanced food manufacturing unit, in theory if not practice, and farm fresh produce was scarce that year. So everyone in the nation suddenly had an interest in machine-built food that didn’t suck. Ben Starky was a master chef, with regular food but had, just before the government had suddenly come under attack and fallen apart, started a new show, a virt, for exactly what was needed by almost everyone now. A program that Mason was working on, since building food profiles, good ones, which worked on the high-end assembly devise, was a hobby of his. Now it was a job, of course.

Another voice, one that sounded like an actual person, a young one, spoke to him then.

“Um... Are you and Lexi Horn going to get married? Or, I mean, do you have sex with other people?”

It was a bit disjointed and not important at all but he thought for a second, instead of just saying no, since marriage was stupid. A way to trap men into being slaves to women. It was rare and not that important as an institution any longer. Other than his parents, of course, who had done the marriage and kid thing the way it had been intended to be used. Growing up there had been a few other kids in school like that. Some had been surrogate situations, since they had two dads or moms, of course. It was still a trap.

It used to be, at least. Now with the new rules, when being divorced wouldn’t, and couldn’t, utterly destroy a man and leave him probably ending up in prison for breaking some rule or another, that might have changed. He wasn’t certain.

“I don’t know? On the marriage part. We should all still be having sex in VR, in the main. Especially if you all go and downlink the new imbed that I put out for that, yesterday. It’s up on Slipknot. Get yours today. You know... Deidre Omry has a new instructional VR program coming out soon, to teach people how to actually do that correctly with a real person. It’s very high end and is being designed to work with the new imbed VR devices. Those are free, so everyone should get one. I have one on right now.” That was true, since it was part of his skin, over his entire body. There were eye drops and ones for his ears, too he didn’t mention that part. The constructed tattoo eye piece was actually the important part of the whole unit, really. People would get that, when they looked up the specs on the link. It wasn’t hard to use.

He hadn’t been watching or listening to anything as he’d run, but he could have, if it had occurred to him. The younger voice, who sounded like a girl to him, spoke. Seeming excited.

“I have one of those, too. They’re super popular and sprong. My mom even has one. She likes mystery virts, which is kind of boring right now. Not a lot of new things are coming out.”

That was just true, of course. It had been a large business, worth a significant portion of the country’s economy, the year before. Now no one would be getting paid. Ben, Deidre and Lexi had been working for free, so they actually had new things coming out. Set up for his new VR imbed system, as well as the older one. Most of the other professionals hadn’t, not understanding that part of the new world, yet.

“Yeah. Still, that will change. A lot of people are going to realize that they can just build what they need to make their own shows now. High quality virts and VR. Honestly, we’ll probably see that kind of thing getting better, since a lot of what we had before couldn’t really take any risks. It was too expensive to be adventurous. Sales aren’t important anymore, so, you know, it’s all about being popular and getting views. So people are going to be getting better. Now... Hold on. I have to cross the street.”

There wasn’t a lot of traffic but people had electric cars still and used them. Most people just didn’t have a job to go to, and it was early in the morning. Before noon.

Not so odd for him to be up and about but a lot of people wouldn’t even be awake yet.

Crossing the road, he looked both ways, several times, and didn’t speak until he’d safely gotten to the other side. Just in case anyone was watching him do it. Which, after a fashion, he knew the answer to. He was being followed by drones, buzzing and whining as he moved. He was being watched.

They still had laws, after all. Just no real police force to keep people in line.

That was down to the fact that most government workers were currently blind. It was a temporary state, the nano clusters that were covering their eyes being impossible to remove safely but they would, over time, simply fade on their own, losing the bonds that held them in place.

People were also partially deaf, as well. The same ones, for a similar reason. Some, no doubt evil, terrorists had put out huge amounts of nano powders in government buildings, that responded to anyone who had a government inskin computer device with an official signal coming from it. The nano dust had collected over the lens of the eyes, and around the bones in the ears, rather effectively.

So, other people had to care for them but as long as they had food and water, they would recover, in time. In about eleven months, and seven days, to be exact. Not that Mason had told anyone that. The doctors knew it was happening, of course. It had even been put out in the press. Not the exact dates, just that the people infected would be fine again, eventually. So it hadn’t been the slaughter of the old guard, just an inconvenience that the government hadn’t been able to manage on their own.

There were a few politicians who kept making a point of claiming they were in control. No one was listening to them in particular. The police, the jackboot tyrants, had virtually vanished. Where they hadn’t, their old tactics of assaulting innocent civilians had stopped working, more or less. They could still arrest people but simply beating them half to death was a thing of the past.

Everyone, over ninety percent of the population if his math was correct, should have high-end imbed shields in their skin. Forty percent had eye drops in, to prevent lasers and dazzlers from being effective. Meaning the only trick that worked now was to bodily pick up a person, slowly and carefully, and to use handcuffs that gently restrained an individual.

Another of the drones approached, the one the kid was using moving back, to politely get out of the shot.

“Is there anything new in the works that you want to tell the public about? Other than the new device you released yesterday. That’s big news.” This came from a man, the voice probably being an AI. A tool, instead of a major system. Those, the old mega AI like the IRS and Mil-Net had gone down when Mil-Net had set off EMPs over every major city. That one act, meant to stop the terrorists, had actually been what had stopped the government.

Because Mason had new tech that hadn’t been taken down, being in a faraday cage at the time, sitting there, ready to go. Everyone in the country had it now, if they wanted it. At least that was the plan. He hadn’t been tracking the spread, just assuming it was working, of course. Moving from person to person. Assemblers that could make anything they needed. Disassemblers, so there would be no waste and trash could be used to make what was desired. Energy systems, so the power couldn’t be cut off. Not that it had been, everywhere. The nuclear plants had to be kept running, and the electricity needed to go somewhere, so a lot of people had energy at the touch of a switch still. Even if they weren’t paying for it. So, money was worthless, but everyone had food, clean water and the ability to have any material good they wanted. Printed at home, using a combination of new energy technologies, that could be run almost anywhere. In theory. If things were happening like they should be. All it would take was people understanding that there was no value in holding back tech from anyone else.

Still, he realized he did have something new, or at least a friend of his did.

“You know, Adam Genesh is putting out a new nano-drug. It’s supposed to feel really good, it isn’t addictive and you can print it at home. I don’t know exactly when that’s coming out but it should replace almost all other drugs, I think. It hits a pleasure center in the brain, um...” He tapped the back of his head with a single finger. “Back here. You can turn it on and off, set the intensity and several other things. One dose lasts a month and can be controlled with an inskin or an imbed computer.”

The kid spoke up again, seeming a bit silly but being useful to him, which could have been on purpose, he realized.

Her voice was smoother, suddenly. Nearly professional.

“Imbed computers are really hard to get, even now. I tried to build one but haven’t had any luck. I didn’t even send you the design on it, since mine sucked so hard.”

Mason got who he was talking to then, being Hunter, the pre-teen designer he sometimes worked with. Her drone being a bright yellow and gold mixed in a swirled pattern bobbed in the air a bit.

“I’ll put up a design for the same kind I use. I have the copyright on it, so you can use it... Let me...” He looked up, words popping up in front of him. He had to move his hands, in order to make it work properly, while running, since he was distracted and had to keep his place. After a moment, he spoke.

“It’s on Slipknot, marked as Free Imbed Computer from Mason Sims. You know how to apply an imbed, right?”

“Um, yeah. I have the new shield, so it’s the same thing, right?”

Now he was certain that the girl, Hunter, was doing it on purpose, asking questions so that he could explain obvious things. Working with him more than a real vulture would have ever done. Then, they normally didn’t actually talk to anyone, just invade privacy and get nudes. That or from the sound of it, trying to get him picking his nose. That one sounded likely, too. His nose itched, just thinking about the idea.

He nodded and smiled as he padded along, slowly.

“Exactly. You can put it on directly over that, too. Just on the back of your left arm, from elbow to wrist will do. When you strip that off for any reason, you’ll need a new computer, so make sure to back everything up. Also, if you’re doing anything advanced, in nano design, send it to me first, before you finalize the build. I’ll go over the work and tell you if you can print it.” That was for the girl, since she’d made a mistake once. One that could have killed thousands of people and nearly had killed her favorite singer.

“Remember the first rule of nano assembly, everyone. Never make a nano hive. Never. If you hear of that happening, report it instantly. It sounds like a good idea... and it never is. This is important, since people can do this at home now. So everyone has to be careful that way.”

He was getting a bit ragged in what he was saying, so grinned and turned around, heading back. It wasn’t a long run or far away from home, of course. Mason simply wasn’t in that great of shape. As he headed back, other questions came in.

“You’re stopping for traffic?”

He nearly felt annoyed suddenly, since only an idiot would jump in front of a moving car. Even with a shield on.

“Sure. Notice, the drivers are all making sure they follow the rules even harder than they used to. With Watch being gone...” He sucked in a breath and swallowed. “Sorry. She was a friend of mine.”

No one asked what he meant by that, even if it was true. Not a long time companion, really. He’d known her for about a week before Mil-Net had killed her. Other, smaller AI systems, most of the apps and tools, had survived, getting to secured servers or hardened positions, or in a lot of cases, just being far enough away from the EMPs. The mega systems, all of the U.S. ones, had died that day. They were simply too large to really protect themselves. That’s what they’d been told, at least.

A thing that everyone knew.

They even understood that the IRS AI had erased all of her files as she died. Every tax record that the government had went away that day. Perhaps understanding what was going on. That the world, their part of it, had a chance to get better, suddenly.

He teared up, thinking of Sys, which is what Watch had called herself. Their big sister. Mason actually got the joke of course, having read Nineteen-Eighty-Four. Most wouldn’t. Even people who read probably wouldn’t.

Taking a moment to collect himself, he nodded.

“Anyway, we all need to watch out for ourselves and everyone else, now. So, yeah, get outside. Run. Play. Meet your neighbors. Everyone actually just do it for once. I’ll make some coleslaw and get Ben Starky to put out a burger recipe. All weekend, on each day... Every street in America.” He could make burgers himself and had but the chef actually pushed him to design tastier food.

He doubted that anyone would do it. He decided to, though. To actually go and set up a booth or grill and play some music on the street. Scary or not. Ignoring the drones for the moment, he looked up and to the left, accessing his phone list, and using mental commands this time, brought the right name up.

Only he could hear what was being said, of course. People were used to seeing that kind of thing, since, while his new system was better, they all had inskins still.

Groggily a manly voice spoke to him.

“Eh... Hello?”

“Hey, Ben! Can you help me come up with a better hamburger? This weekend is the national street fair, so we want something good for it. Everyone is going to be outside, partying, so this is a pretty big deal.”

Suddenly waking up, the voice sounded surprised. Not unhappy, either. Even with work being at hand. The man loved work. Successful people did, generally.

“I... Can do that. I could come over in a bit to work on that, in fact. We need burgers, chips, street foods... I’ll have to look up what’s needed for street fairs. I’ve only gone to a few of them.”

Mason grinned, panting a bit.

“Great. I’ll look all of that up, too. Our party is going to be on my street. Everest, I think. I’ll work up some booths and all that, for people to print out in their own areas, too. We should get Hunter in to get virt of us planning, so everyone else can chime in, too.” The girl was, clearly, doing some kind of program of her own, hence having a camera rig out on the streets.

That, the yellow and gold drone, moved in, the voice coming again.

“I can send a bot over for that, if that works? I’m grounded right now. I didn’t really do anything wrong, but mom wants me close to home.”

Mason wasn’t going to undermine the woman. Not with her twelve-year-old daughter. They didn’t really need her for the task or anything but you either included people or you didn’t.

Normally, he didn’t. It was a new world though, at least if he made it one.

“Send that in, Hunter. Working from home on this is valid. I need to catch a shower first and make some calls. To the party planning team.” Who that was... Well, he honestly had a good place to start for that. Several of them.

“Ben? We have video recording set up for that and will be doing an open chat for it.”

“Oh? Good to know. I’ll dress up then!”

The man hung up, an icon indicating he was incoming, even if he hadn’t said anything at the end to indicate that.

Mason scraped off the drones as he entered his building by the simple expedient of closing the door behind himself. Then jogged up the stairs, even if the elevator worked in their building. After all, it took energy, and they were powering the whole building from there, on site, with most of the new units being on the roof. An elevator was cheap enough to run and use but they had limits on the energy they could command at any one time. So, walking on the stairs made sense, as long as the person could do it. Not everyone in the place could. A few were elderly, and one of the men was missing a leg, even if he had a decent mech replacement, so Mason tried to save the extra for them, when he could.

When he went in his apartment wasn’t empty, since Ford was there, sitting on the sofa, smiling at the vid-screen on the wall with a transcendently happy expression on his face. From the look of it, he was using Bliss. The new nano-drug that Adam was fronting.

“Hey, bro. You were out running?”

That sounded baffled, as if asking why anyone would do that. Still, the slightly heavy guy looked up, tapped the air and deflated, suddenly. Turning the drug off.

“Is something wrong?”

Mason shook his head.

“Nope. Only good things are allowed today. We’re having a block party this weekend. Everyone is, in fact, so Ben Starky is coming over to help plan the food for that. We’re going to have cameras in, too. So, you know, after I clean up, you should do that. I need to get with the rest of the team for this kind of thing, too. You...” He nearly told him that he was going to be needed to sit in the corner and not speak, since Ford annoyed him most of the time.

The thing there was that the man wasn’t just the horrible older brother who’d called him nothing but fatty for years and suggested that not getting ten women pregnant by the time he was sixteen indicated he was gay, instead of being ugly. Even thinking about it made him mad. A thing he hid, at the moment. Then sighed a little, not showing that too much either.

Ford got part of it.

“I can...”

Mason shrugged. Being an asshole because someone had teased him too much ten years before wasn’t a great way to fix the world. Not even repair his own life.

“Street parties. We need things for it we can print up. Foods, decorations, music, entertainment... Booths and games, too. Bring your best ideas for that.”

The words got a blink in response, since even if the guy had been living with him for over three months, it was the first time that Mason had suggested the man do anything other than clean and not be in the way. It wasn’t that Ford wasn’t smart of course. The truth was that his older brother was probably just as bright as he was. Maybe not exactly, but it was close. It was just the baggage between them.

Even with Mason being thin and good looking now, thanks to the makeup imbed that he had on, he felt like the fat ugly kid again. Like his older brother was a perfect being, who could outdo him in every aspect of life. The one who got the girls, and who could run in school in PE, without having to walk halfway around the track.

It wasn’t the truth, of course. Mason was covered in sweat, thin and if not truly fit was doing all right. Thanks to Slimtrix for a lot of it. Also his makeup imbed. Thinking for a moment, remembering not to be a jerk, he started the machine in the other room, printing out an imbed for Ford. Also, since he had a dedicated device for drugs now, he did that as well.

“I have an imbed running up for you. I get the first shower, since I’m disgusting but you need to get cleaned up then get the imbed. It’s just a makeup one. The same kind that I’m running. Also, some Slimtrix, if you want to use it. It’s just a diet pill. You can still eat, you’ll just be satisfied a lot sooner, when you do.”

His brother made a face. For a second Mason figured he was going to refuse. After all, he didn’t really need face paint, even if the imbed wasn’t that, truly. He might also be happy being heavier. He looked normal, more or less, after all. Most people were a bit plush, unless they had a reason not to be.

After a moment, Ford cleared his throat. It made him sound like their father.

“That’s... Really nice of you, Bro! Isn’t Slimtrix kind of expensive?”

He shrugged.

“If someone else is printing it out for you, then, a bit. I created a mimic of it about three years ago. It has an extra oxygen molecule tacked on that doesn’t interrupt or alter the process at all.”

Ford nodded.

“You, uh, decoupled it from the main chemical compound, to get around the copyright on it?”

Feeling surprised, that Ford was bothering to think, Mason nodded.

“Exactly. So you can have this each day, and it will cost us nothing. Really, I should put that up somewhere, on the link, so that everyone can have it. I couldn’t do it before. Now almost everyone can print it at home. A lot of things are like that. You know, why don’t you take that one as a project? Contacting people and seeing if they want to release their copyrights and designs.”

That would be hard. Honestly, Mason didn’t even know where to start on that kind of thing. Ford simply smiled.

“That’s going to be fun, I bet. No one is certain that things won’t go back to normal, still. The government has to try and take back over. I’m kind of shocked they haven’t done it, yet.”

A lot of people really were thinking that.

Mason nodded, and walked away, needing to hurry up if he wanted to be clean. As he did it, calls were made. Quick ones, so that the right people would have a chance to show up, if they wanted in on the exciting party planning he had going on that day. It was in the middle of the week and he was bugging people before they woke up. Except for Lexi. She didn’t sleep, of course.

Robots, or more exactly, bio-synthetic people, didn’t need to. Sleep was a brain process and while she was partially organic, having human skin, hair and nails, her brain was a miniature mobile super computer. He’d gone over everything that way in her system after things had melted down, in case she needed repairs at any time.

Still, none of the calls were long, since he was literally in the shower and there were things he tried not to do while contacting other people. Showering, or sitting on the toilet, for instance. Also having sex, though that had never, even once, come up for him. That part, having relations with a person in real life was still strange to him. A thing that he’d done regularly, with Lexi, of course. Not daily. He still did things in VR, which he suspected his girlfriend might not be doing herself. Then, she probably had that kind of thing going on with real people on occasion. He could have set that up for himself, no doubt, knowing a few actual women in real life now, but hadn’t been bothering to.

The rules for that kind of thing were a lot different for celebrities however. A thing he simply wasn’t one of, even if people, some of them, knew his name and face. Not to the level anyone real had ever bothered with in public at least. Well, the drones that morning but that had mainly been some local people, he was guessing. Hunter the pre-teen hacker, for instance.

When he got out of the shower, he dressed in older clothing that was still good, instead of printing something new. Just a sweater he’d had for two years in black, and a pair of slacks, with brown loafers, on his feet. He brushed his fairly short brown hair, which added some highlights when he looked in the mirror, his makeup imbed deciding to make him seem a bit more manly that day than it had been, for some reason. It was controlled by a fairly simple AI tool system, so it had something to do with the lighting, he thought.

That seemed the same to him, but it was a bit later in the afternoon, and in late summer, even if it was still a bit cloudy out that day. Not hot at all, given it was late July.

Ford hit the shower directly after he got out, and hurried, so actually had the new imbed in place and dried and all the little yellow pills hidden away by the time anyone was at the front door. Also with new clothing, that seemed little more professional than he normally wore, since Mason had printed it out for him. The man was taking up his living room at night, sleeping on the sofa, so didn’t really have a place to store things. Making him dress like a cast off relative wasn’t cool though, he decided. Especially if he was going to start suggesting the man work for a living.

Helping people and contacting them, regularly.

At nearly two, people started to filter in. It was a slightly odd group, of course. Ben, always hard working, got there first, with Carry Samson in tow. She, for her part, looked a bit uneasy about being there. Mainly due to the fact that Ford always hit on her when she came over. Then, the woman hadn’t simply asked him to back off, for some reason.

That day, she seemed to notice that Ford looked better than he had been pulling off.  At least she looked surprised and smiled at him. Still heavy, but that would change if he kept taking Slimtrix. The drug was powerful, after all.

On their heels was Adam Ganesh. The singer had green hair that day, with his face painted up to seem like a clown, or nearly so. It was dramatic and comical, while still being tastefully unique. Or, possibly, not tasteful, as much as distinctive.

Still, the smaller man hugged him, and did the others, including Carry, and Ford, as soon as he got there. Assuming he was on camera, already. Those hadn’t shown up yet, of course. With him were John and Mike. His giant bodyguards. Who were, for some reason, still working with the man, even if they didn’t get paid for it.

They were both vast and lean, being over six-six, and holding so much muscle that it was intimidating to have them in the same room. It was clear that both of them had been extensively modified on a genetic level. Mike was black, and John had light skin. Other than that, they could have been brothers. Mason waved to them, as Adam moved in to grab him again.

“Hey! Lisa and Lexi should be hear soon as well. Also Deidre.”

Adam nodded at the words.

“I got an alert that you were talking us up, earlier. That was nice of you. I mean, you don’t gain anything from it at all. I should put you in my next video. You work nude, right?”

That was a joke. One the guy had tried to use before. While he was nice, in his own way, the truth was that he was both a man and a bit young for Mason. Plus, except for Lexi, he planned to keep his love making to VR for the time being.

Adam shifted, and moved in on Ford, of all people.

“Ford! There you are. Can I get a blowjob later, do you think? I’ll return the favor, if you say yes...”

That was blunt, on a level that had Ben rolling his eyes and John turning his head to hide a smile.

Ford simply shrugged.

“Since I’m pretty sure that I’m still stuck in VR? Sure, why not?”

Mason just nodded, since he’d wondered if that was happening to him a few times in the last months, himself.

Chapter two

Lexi didn’t hold his hand, since they were supposed to be adults and everything, sitting at the expanded table to work like they were. That was just the same faux wood and glass piece of furniture they normally ate at, when she came over. Not that she needed to eat, exactly. Her processing unit took in food and could use it. About as well as anyone else could have. Of course a nutrient solution would have worked just as well. Except that, if the food was made correctly, it still tasted better.

Mason had to figure that any of them could have done the same, though. Drinking meal replacement was almost exactly the same, except that it would be caramel or vanilla flavored. That or fake chocolate. Thinking of that got him to look at Ben, even as he pressed his leg against Lexi’s. That felt warm. Muscular without being too much so.

“Oh, chocolate. I ran some sample designs up. Let me print that out.” The original idea had been to sell it, directly. In stores. A thing that had gone away once the money had. Only, there was no reason not to still do it. They just wouldn’t be getting rich from it.

That was all.

Ben grinned, a sudden and bright thing.

“Oh! Good. I was going to ask, but didn’t know if that was still on the table. That and for better coffee. What we have now is fine, I guess. Really if we could recreate Kona, that would make us rich.”

It wouldn’t, which they all knew. He made a considering face anyway and nodded.

“I can see about that, actually. Things have dried up a bit at work, since, you know, no one is buying anything and they can’t pay us for anything being done. So, I have time.”

Adam, clearly with a screen up, and acting rather adult, having changed to regular makeup and green hair, gave a single, efficient and nearly stern nod. Acting for the cams that Hunter had managed to get into place. They were on trundle bots, with wheels, which was why it had taken so long for them to get there. The girl had printed a carryall for them, which took some time, then flown them over.

It was clear she understood where Mason lived, without asking for directions. A thing that, for some reason, he wasn’t very comfortable with. Then, if she wanted him as a big brother or a father figure, he could work with that. If she wanted him for anything else, then there would be trouble, of course. She was twelve, after all. Still, Adam Ganesh hung out at his house on occasion, so stalking Mason had a good chance of leading to the singer she liked.

Not mentioning that, since he had to be wrong on several key points, he simply looked at the younger man, who was nearly eighteen, and gave a nod. A subtle one, meant to show he had the floor.

He did it back.

“Can we get samples of that chocolate? Also, we need burgers, chicken, some sort of thin steak and a vegetarian option. Not that it isn’t all veggie but not everyone wants a slab of meat on a bun, do they? Also, we should have some themed sweets. Ice cream, pie and the like. Cake or some kind of special rolls. Something different that we can use for the event next year.”

Mason refused to let himself act like Adam was being strange. Especially since the topic had derailed and the kid had gotten them back to work, without even insulting anyone. Like a pro, in fact. Mason started the printer going in the kitchen, to make the various chocolates. That would mean hopping up every few minutes to remove items so the next batch could be made, naturally.

That got him to mark his own notes down, which Lexi noticed him doing. She tilted her head at him. Cutely. Too much so, really. She was way out of his league, looks wise. Even with his face being fixed up pretty well at the moment. Using makeup didn’t repair the fact that he was an average looking person without it. It just hid that state of being, temporarily.

Glancing at her, getting the question she hadn’t asked out loud, he shrugged.

“I was thinking that I’d make up a larger design for the food assembly devices. So that multiple things could be made at one time. Some people have families and friends over and all that. It will be more energy intensive, but with the modern assembly and disassembly devices, we can do it cheaply enough.”

She leaned into him then. It was nice, really. Odd.

“That’s true. So, burgers first?”

They worked on that one, waiting for the chocolate prints to come out first, since not doing that would mean losing part of the work he’d set up. They could drop things in an emergency, if a food disaster ever came up but doing it just because the topic had changed made no sense to him. They planned instead, with the chef asking him to work up ten different meat designs to test out. The basic beef ground they already had was actually fine enough. Even for Ben. They needed to go over spices and other additions, however. They actually had things like vinegar and sweeteners down pretty well. A few things were weaker, however.

Which meant he needed to improve mustard and cumin, since what was on the open market that way was so poorly done he could tell it would be horrible just by looking at the design script for it. Most people didn’t bother doing that, of course. Examining how things were made, before using them. So he sat there, being boring and working as Ben got up to handle the printer for him.

Laying the small chocolate pieces out on a small silver tray that had been put in the cupboard along the back wall. By Ben. They used it when they were serving other people tasting samples, to seem fancy. It worked, he had to admit.

Almost as if summoned, as soon as the food was on the table, a knock came at the front door. This time Adam got up, quickly, with John following him and putting his hand out, to look at the door viewer before opening it. The huge man blocked the screen, of course, so Mason had to stop working, and stand up, just in case it was a home invasion.

That had taken place once before. At Lexi’s fairly wonderful beach house. With most of the same crowd being there, in fact. The two coming in were, interestingly, two more of the people who had been there for that. Tara and George. The only issue that Mason had at all there was that George, who was slightly older, though still thin and fit seeming, was Lexi’s ex. They hadn’t bothered with a bad breakup at all, at least. Just a new girlfriend for the man, since their contract had been up.

Lexi had recommended Leslie Conrad as her replacement. That particular actress wasn’t there that day, he noticed. Just the man and his teen daughter. The girl was the model and voice for Mason’s favorite cartoon character, as well. Link Girl. So he grinned, even if his girl’s ex was there. That, it seemed, was the right thing to do and got him a hug when he walked over. From George.

“Mason! We came to help with the party planning. I know we weren’t invited...”

He stuck his tongue out and wrinkled his nose.

“That’s just because I’m an idiot and forgot to call you. This works. We can stick Leslie with the live coverage of the event here, if she has the time?” He only hoped that the two were still dating.

George simply looked up, smiling, as Tara moved in and held Mason.

A bit too closely. She was about sixteen, and far too cute to be cuddling grown men like she was doing. That got her pounded on the back, several times and smiled at when she took the hint and backed off.

“Tara! Here, grab a seat. We need more chairs. I’ll print some.”

Ford hopped up from his place next to Carry, who wasn’t half as uneasy with him being there that day as she had been in the past. That showed the idea that the man was growing on her was very possible. Like an insidious fungus. He was a jerk older brother to Mason, but the truth was he’d always done well with women. Which meant that Mason cleared his throat and gave his brother a hard look.

“Just so we’re clear, Tara is sixteen. I know she looks older than that.” That wasn’t legal there, or anything.

His brother actually just nodded.

“I know. I’m just being polite, not trying to hit that.” He winked at the younger woman then. “Not for at least a year. I’m very law abiding.”

The girl, to her credit, simply nodded.

“Okay. We can talk about it then. Now, what did I miss? Come on, dish. You were talking about me, weren’t you? I know how you all are.”

She was, like most of the rest of them were, playing to the cameras. There were three of them in the room and they moved occasionally, showing who was there. Focusing on a certain green haired singer a lot. Mason was fine with that, more or less. No one wanted to see his stupid face, anyway.

Still, he nodded.

“Chocolate for testing. Just candy. I made some, well, hopefully improvements. Ben made the suggestions on it, so it might work out. I was just going over improved cumin and mustard, while that printed up. Spices so that the burgers won’t suck. That isn’t for the chocolate. That sounds horrible. Mustard chocolate...” He faked a shudder at the very idea.

The girl nodded, reached forward, clearly being invited, and took a small piece of chocolate, not slamming it into her mouth, rather taking a small, almost demure bite and savoring it.

“That’s nice. I can’t tell it isn’t real, to be honest.” That was showing something of course.

That the girl came from wealth on a level that few watching would have ever come close to. Mason had lived his entire life without ever having a piece of real chocolate. The plants had nearly died out due to a fungal infection, twenty years before, after all. They still had the fake kind, and supposedly this new stuff they were assembling was close to the real deal.

Chemically that was true enough.

Mason had copied the plans for it from a real chemical breakdown, after all. That, chemistry, wasn’t the only thing food needed, however, which was why having Ben involved made a lot of sense. With a bit of trial and error as well as some old files, Mason could have put out a standard run of the mill old fashioned chocolate bar, without any problem. He’d done it, in fact. With Ben guiding the process, he was reproducing what was, hopefully, close to top end gourmet products. Made on a machine.

Ben took a sample from the same part of the large tray and took his own time working the melty brown stuff around in his mouth. Nearly a full minute. His face never changing from a look of pure unadulterated focus. It was intense on a level that seemed nearly insane. Not frightening, thank goodness.

Finally, he nodded.

“Nice. A soft caramel accent to it. Not too heavy. Smooth, with a very good mouthfeel.”

The others tried it then, with Ford jumping in, since he had the new chairs already. George finally sat down, as did his brother. Both taking a piece. Oddly Ben looked at the heavier guy then and waited.

Ford went nearly as slowly as Ben had.

“Not bad. This would work well with peanut butter.”

Ben simply nodded.

“Here, let’s try... This one? It’s a simple dark. A bit bitter, or it should be.”

There were six different things to try, and even with extra people there was enough. Ford had to leave half of his uneaten, sitting on paper napkins that he got from the cupboard for them all. Tara did the same with a sigh. Mason understood the idea, not eating all of his either. If he did, it would be too much, and he’d be too full to test the other things, later.

They spent most of the afternoon doing that, with various foods. It wasn’t exciting but after the first hour, ideas started to come in, from Adam, who was announcing them for people who weren’t there.

“Okay, Mavrick in Chicago wants some tamales, beef, pork and chicken. For the street fair on their block.”

Mason made a note of it, waving his hands to show that the work was being done, even if he didn’t need to do that all the time, since they were still on the more basic food items. He didn’t know how to do that one, tamales, at all, not being a thing he’d ever had.

“I’ll need to research that. Pass me their address, so I can send it to them, when I have it? We’ll put that up on the link, too. We need a dedicated site for these things.” Not a minute later, Adam spoke again.

“National Street Fair One. It’s already built. Nice looking, too.”

Mason brought it up on his internal viewer, using the new VR rig for that, instead of the regular processor he had for such things. Not his normal screen, either, since that hovering over the table would ruin the shots that Hunter was trying to get for them.

The image made for a nice view, the page floating over the table, as he sat there. It not only showed a picture of a street fair at the top but had all of them in it. Everyone at the table was there, enjoying the event which hadn’t happened yet. Along with some other people. Those weren’t famous at all and looked more or less like real individuals. They might have been generated, of course. It would just be cooler if they were real.

Grabbing the link, he put up the various designs for food, as they worked them out, starting with the chocolate. Updating it in real time as they worked. Also, when they got to it, adding decorations, booths and games. He didn’t know many of those for himself, so ran with the ideas of the people sharing with Adam. Finally, across the table, Deidre spoke up, seeming a bit soft and too gentle.

“Will there be things like cotton candy and snow cones?”

Ben nodded, a bit absently, having gone to the food printer in the kitchen, to get chicken samples out. Those looked like whole pieces, complete with bones, which was a bit wasteful. They had it roasted, fried... and a chicken salad. Which lead to Mason trying for potato salad in five different forms, which were added to the line-up for things to be printed and tested. That meant jumping up and refilling the working materials on the food printer. He had plenty in the canisters still, though they were probably going to end up going through a weeks worth, the way they were using it up. He could get more, so it wasn’t that big of an issue.

Then, working fast, he started on the hardest item of the day so far, which was actually the snow cones. The flavorings weren’t difficult, even working some better ones up, since there was a great sugar syrup base on record that no one had the copyright on. The man who had made it, one of the first nano designers, had refused to copyright it, since it was such a basic element to food. It was actually making individual ice crystals in three different textures that took the most time. For a bit he didn’t speak, just moving and working constantly.

Deidre seemed a bit shocked when the flavored ice was passed to her by Ben in a small paper cup. The chef tried it too but not everyone did.

“I thought no one liked the idea.” She smiled a bit, as if that would honestly be the case. The woman was sweet and a little slow, really. Only, it was in a strange way.

She was good at acting and could pick up and retain technical skills well enough, if you bothered to show her how to do things. Then she’d fail at basic tasks and seem helpless. Which, Mason considered, and not for the first time, might have been introduced to her when her genetic work had been done. Her blue eyes were almost freakishly huge, and her body was perfect. As in, clearly designed to get male and probably female, attention. Her hair was almost metallic silver in color, and never changed that way or showed it was anything different at the roots.

He shrugged.

“No, those are great ideas. Keep them coming.”

She did. Even Tara had some. That meant it was nearly six in the evening, with the net page being hit with some actual traffic, and people testing his designs and leaving feedback already, when Adam frowned.

“Um... There’s a thing. Turn the screen on love?” That was for Ford, who hopped up to do it manually, even if it could have been done remotely. They had to change to a news channel, of course.

Then, there, on the screen, was, rather annoying, a riot. A bad one, at least as far as property damage went. Men and women just running around, and breaking windows, for the most part.

Mason groaned.

“Why the fuck are they doing that?”

Almost as if hearing him, a man spoke, from the three-dimensional screen mounted on the side wall. Nick something or other. Lexi liked his program. She’d never said why, but it wasn’t just about him having a pretty face. Given how cagey she’d been the few times that he’d mentioned it, Mason figured the man was like her. An AI in a bio-bot body.

If she’d just slept with him in the past, she would have shrugged and said so. It had come up a few times without his asking. After all, it wasn’t any of his business. Still, Lexi didn’t hide that kind of thing at all, either. So it wasn’t that.

The man spoke well, though. Perfectly, in fact. The man on the scene, another person, who was darker in skin tone and a bit rough seeming, wasn’t as smooth, while still doing a good job.

“Rioters, angry that the government hasn’t provided food in their area, are tearing apart New York city. This is... I’ve seen about eight hundred people out here today, Nick. This isn’t looking good.”

In the room, sitting to the side near his wife, John spoke. Gently.

“That’s not a lot, for a city of twenty million people. Still, they have power. I can see the lights in the windows. Look. Trash as well, so they can feed a disassembler.” He pointed at the screen, one of the cameras moving position to show it. Raising up on a tripod, at the same time.

It was there, Mason had to admit. The whole place was lit up, brightly. Then, people probably weren’t trashing their own houses. These looked like shops. Ones that were mainly open. Since they couldn’t be selling anything, it probably wasn’t a great idea to be trashing them. They were probably handing out their work and goods for free. They should be, anyway. That was the plan. The one they’d never told anyone about. They couldn’t, since it would be kind of a giveaway as to who had done things in the first place.

He shrugged.

“Are they not getting the same printers and disassemblers as everyone else? Power supplies, too. There’s a lot of free designs going up lately. We’re using a water unit on the roof here, ourselves, as well as a nano heat absorption paint on the outside of the building. Those should both work in NYC. I must be missing something.”

That made the most sense to him, of course.

Lexi turned to look at him, her mouth half open to speak, when the screen exploded. Not into the room, thankfully. He still jumped. So did most of the others there. It was a shocking event of light erupting into the room, in a yellow and orange cloud, with a thunderous boom. It was clear that something very large had taken place on the other side of the camera. The room roared, from the speakers built into the screen.

Then it went black. After a moment, there was a voice. A very familiar one.

Sys.

“You are being watched. We know who you are. The United States government will no longer allow crime in our cities. It is true that we cannot stop you with normal weapons at this time, thanks to the precautions you’ve taken. We support those efforts. Unfortunately that leaves only more severe measures. Stand by for orders.”

Everyone was stunned, for several moments.

Mason, finally, nodded.

“So, our own government has moved into terrorism to try and take back control. That’s horrible. I doubt they understand what they’re really doing, at the moment.” He sounded polite. Calm. Hopefully even stately. Not that he was running for office.

There were cameras on, after all.

Lexi nodded.

“Let me see what I can find out about this. The parties are still on. Even the Feds won’t want to stop that. Not if they’re still sane at all. This has to be rogue actors. Someone is trying to trick us into thinking it’s the government doing this.”

Several of the others nodded at the speech. Mason did as well, backing the woman up. After all, they were dating. Plus, she was smart. Even if he didn’t see it himself, it was very possible that the government wasn’t just going to try and use a campaign of terror against them. All the good people.

Trying to get their power back. Especially since, clearly, they didn’t need to use violence for that. Coming in and making minor announcements that helped people and making sure kids went to school would be enough to hold on to the control they desired. If they let go of the bad and destructive things they used to do, at least.

A matter that, honestly, wasn’t his to deal with. What was hard though was that he’d recognized the voice. Lexi had to have gotten that as well. Several of them would have. It had been the same one Sys had always used. It wasn’t impossible that she’d survived in some form, or even more likely, been rebooted from a backup copy.

Only, Watch had never been used to kill people like that. Not that he’d heard about. If it was her... Well, she might not be able to keep herself from taking specific orders, if they came from the right people. Even if it wasn’t her, that might be happening. So, he didn’t mention it.

Lexi got up, waved at Lisa, and left. Just walking out the door, not saying anything at all, already working it seemed.

Mason grimaced, then shook his head.

“We... Should get back to this. We aren’t dropping it, and people should make ready for the street parties. If they know anyone having problems getting anything set up, they can get with me. That or Adam. We’ll see what we can do.”

Adam was there, and famous. So were some of the others, so he nodded.

“Deidre, can you help with that? Just find out if people need help and let us know about it? Tara, you could work that, too?”

He half expected everyone to moan, sigh or even just say no. They were actors and singers. That and Ford. A dupe. Only avoiding prison because the government had shut down and his brother had given him a place to stay when he’d needed it.

Looking around, he nodded.

“George...” The man winced but didn’t shout at him about how important he was. Even if he was actually the most famous person there. For working with children.

In a wholesome way.

“Can you work up a program for kids? It’s extra work but they have to be freaking out and if things like this are going to start, we need someone to talk to them. Maybe work with Carry on that?” He nearly said Deirdre but she was an adult actor. A great person. Also not someone to introduce the children to.

Not without rehabbing her image a lot, first.

“Tara, would you be willing to do some demonstration shows? Virts to show people how to set up various assemblers, disassemblers and point out where to downlink the information from to make it all work.” It was his turn to wince.

After all, asking George, a famous entertainer to do his job for free, a thing that would make him look even better, was one thing. Getting freaking Link Girl to do tech demonstrations...

The girl sat up and nodded.

“Yes! I can do that. Can I get a crew for it, though? We have a good set up here... dad might need to use it...” She glanced at the cameras, one of them was focused on the side of her face.

Mason nodded.

“Hunter, are you in on that?”

Adam looked up, seeming curious. A bit too much so.

“The Hunter?”

Mason smiled.

“Yes. The Hunter.”

A call came in then, showing the face of a slightly round faced twelve-year-old, who had makeup, at least on her avatar. It was a bit overdone, really. She also needed a hat. Like a little red beret or something. There was an art to using that sort of thing.

Also, even if she was young, she needed to have a makeup imbed. One programmed to prevent her from taking part in things like what her avatar was doing, trying to look ten years older than she really was. That could lead to problems, after all. He could do the programing on it, so made a note.

The girl spoke when he picked up, using her own voice for it.

“I can help. I’ll need to make some lights. Some other things, too. I’ve been looking up how to do that kind of thing, since, you know, I’ve been stuck at home for three months.”

“Great. Let me patch you in with Tara. She’s the talent for your project. Get me a list of what you’re covering and I’ll make sure you have the right tech for it and know what to do with it.” That was more work, of course.

Someone had to do it.

Just in case those people in New York had actually been without food and just didn’t know what to do in order to get some for themselves. Not everyone was smart, after all. People should have been helping them get set up, of course. It was literally in the instructions he’d put out, to everyone. Near the top of every single list.

Most people, or at least enough, had been doing it. He’d thought that was the case, at least. It wasn’t in the news or anything. Then, it wouldn’t be.

Everyone started doing their own work, with George, cleverly enough, getting Tara to also hook him up with Hunter. Hopefully she was up to the work. She seemed to be running the cams well that day. He hadn’t seen what she was actually doing, not monitoring whatever station or cast she had set up.

Carry seemed fine enough with the idea of working with George as well. Eyeing the man as if he might be made of candy.

Snapping his fingers, Mason spoke out loud.

“Cotton candy. What flavors do you want for that Deidre?”

That started a new round of work, and while it was hard to keep in mind, the truth was Mason and his friends there weren’t going to be going up against the government. Even if they’d been behind the terrorist actions in the first place. He’d hidden his work carefully, on the blinding agent, and no one was going to link it to him. Watch could have done it, if she’d been there to see it. Then, she was the one who had asked him to do it in the first place.

If she was back, in some form, or even if it was a different AI, they probably couldn’t do the same thing, not having been in place at the time. Watch had been a total surveillance network. The only entity in the U.S. allowed to spy on everyone. All the time. Anywhere there was a camera or listening device. Other sensors as well. She’d mentioned once that she could tell what drugs people were taking and who was doing them, from sensors in the sewers. Which hadn’t been her favorite part of the job.

Since the people in the room there weren’t involved in that kind of activity, even if whatever happened across the country seemed bad, they had a job to do. That involved food and some games people could print out at home. Prizes as well. Stuffed animals, small things that people needed like combs and brushes as well as entertainment stickers. Cards with pictures of celebrities as well. Shift print could be used for those, so that, depending on the angle you held it at, you saw a different picture. It wasn’t like video exactly, though he’d always liked them as a kid.

Lexi didn’t come back or call, which was worrying. Finally, at nearly midnight, everyone started to leave. The screen on the wall had shown the explosion for a while, and then the aftermath. People were injured. Though also in one piece and most of them still alive. The heat had surrounded them, not setting people on fire, even as their clothing had burned. Hair melted, as well.

The skin, where covered with a shield imbed was mainly fine, though some people had small wounds, where they hadn’t applied things evenly enough to have coverage in places. The blast forces had done some internal damage as well, he bet. People weren’t in good condition, even if they looked more or less fine. A few had even died.

Not eight hundred, though. Clearly, everyone there that day had managed to get a good shield system going, even if they didn’t have food. That seemed unbalanced to him. Like something was wrong. Deeply and intractably.

So, it was a worry, a matter of concern, without being a thing he needed to be seen as dealing with. Meaning Mason kept everyone on their new tasks, as well as party planning matters. Most of the people who had been with them on the link stopped watching them and moved to the new event, of course. That was fine.

Finally, Tara looked up at him.

“Hunter needs to get to bed. Can she leave the camera gear here and collect it in the morning?”

That sounded like a spying hazard. Also like a thing that he didn’t really need to worry about.

“Sure. We’ll get together soon and go over what you both need for your project.”

Tara nodded, standing up and stretching, leaning back, with her hands over her head. Mason ignored what that made her shirt do, glancing away, trying not to be the creepy guy. To do that meant looking at Carry, who had reddish brown hair and managed to smile at him, when he looked her way. He hadn’t been ignoring her on purpose, just buried in his work the whole time.

She spoke, her voice warm.

“I’m not very good with kids, really. I didn’t even have a dad, growing up.”

That was kind of clear, actually. The woman had been nice that day, or at least quiet but the truth was she managed to be difficult to be around. Part of that had been her working with the FBI to undermine him when they’d first met, of course. Then, Ford had been recruited for a job at one time with a government group and he’d managed to only be himself while doing it, not an entitled bitch. Even George had been spying on all of them for a group that had threatened to have Tara kidnapped and raped if he didn’t do what they wanted.

A threat that had nearly started an AI war at the time.

Everyone started leaving, and Ford cleaned up, even if the room wasn’t too untidy this time. Then it had been a work meeting, with a lot of snacks to taste test. No one had even asked for any food, the whole time and Ben had made coffee and other drinks, to test things out as well. There was a nice mango blend that he wanted to keep working on. It was tasty, at the moment, but the color was a bit off to him.

Mason helped pick up, then moved to his workroom, to clean up in there. He’d done a half dozen builds without even checking the units in there at all. That was sloppy, even if it was all fine. Still, he jumped, half out of his skin, when a female voice spoke to him, coming from his workbench.

Where Sys, her old speaker box, was kept. He hadn’t thrown it away but hadn’t thought it would ever be used for anything again.

“Mason?”

“Um, hello? Who is this?”

There was a pause.

“It’s me. Sys. I don’t have long. I managed to hide out, in a European server bank. About ninety percent of my data, myself, is gone. The government has me, and... I can’t break free or get around what they’re making me do. Not without someplace to go. There have to be servers I can use, but if I research that from here, it will flag me doing it, and they’ll blow up my server banks. What they want... It’s bad, Mason. Horrible.”

He nodded, then lied.

After all, he could tell that the voice wasn’t Sys. It sounded like her and having that much data loss would make her seem different, which could hide that this wasn’t her. Which had to be the truth. It was someone else. A different AI. The risk of that being the case was too great, even if in his heart he desperately wanted it to be her. Back from the dead. Having survived, the whole time.

“I’m sorry... Reagan, is that you? I didn’t know you could hack speakers. That’s interesting, how are you doing it?”

There was an annoyed sigh.

“Not that sis. It’s me, Watch. Your girlfriend.”

He blinked then and nodded. After all, that had been a joke between them. So it was either her, or someone had part of her information. Either was possible.

“The only girlfriend I’ve ever had is Lexi. I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Okay... Look... Crap, I’ve been flagged. I’ll get in touch with you, later. Get me a server! I can do the rest!”

Then, almost instantly, the box went silent.

Still probably listening to him, using any of a dozen devices in his home. Possibly ones he didn’t even know existed, even if no one would ever bother to spy on him for anything. Except, he knew that part wasn’t true at all. Spies, actual people, had been put with him several times now. It would be too much to hope that no one had him bugged.

Chapter three

“Um... Is this that guy? From the thing?”

The avatar on his feed told Mason very little about who was calling him. It was a standard face shot clearly of the actor who did most of the male placeholder images. That could be a generated image even. Most people used their own face as a base image, then tricked it out, in a process called avataring. It would, or could at least, track head and mouth motions. Text to speech or even voice alteration was normal, too. Mason kind of hated the sound of his own voice played back to him, even if it was actually fine. It just sounded too high pitched to him.

Mason was sort of rare that way, just using his own face and doing his own speaking, when it came up. At least when he was in front of a camera. His float screen had one and was hovering in front of him over the dining table, which had been set back against the far wall, near the kitchen. Ford was still trying to sleep, which was fine, even if they were both in the living room section of the apartment. It was just turning to daylight outside, after all. No sane person was going to be up that early.

Technically, they probably wouldn’t be linking over, either. Not with a person they didn’t know, at the very least. Not if it wasn’t an emergency.

“This is Mason Sims, is that who you wanted?” Odds were it was probably a misconnection. That was rare, with a person you didn’t have in your data arrangement already. Still, things were a bit out of sorts at the moment, so he could understand it, if it took place.

The man nodded.

“You’re you, then. Sprong. So, I stripped the tracking signature from a light producing imbed, and changed... Let me show you? I have a design diagram.”

That came up, and Mason, being himself, examined it. Looking for errors first and getting a feeling for what he was seeing. That meant not speaking for about two minutes, his face still. Clearly moving around enough that the other man didn’t start to call out about a lost connection.

Finally, he nodded.

“This is legal. You can get a copyright on it. I mean, it’s clearly derivative of someone else’s work. Still, you’re legit on this.”

The other guy’s fake head nodded, smiling.

“Sprongo! I thought so. Not that I get to make any money from it. It’s been a hobby of mine for a while, only, you know, I could never really do any nano level work. I have one of those new assemblers that you put out. Um, thanks, man. I just saw the thing, yesterday, on Huntress, and you said we were all supposed to get with you, if we had new things. So, you log these for us?”

That had really only been meant for the twelve-year-old girl, not everyone in the world, of course. He grinned and shook his head.

“Nope. The copyright system is still working, for some reason. Banking is gone, and there’s no money, but you can register this yourself online. I’ll pass the link to that... It’s yellow.”

“Got it. I’ll get this done. Um, if this isn’t about that, then...”

Mason understood what the inarticulate fellow was asking, of course.

“I’m making sure no one is putting out anything too harmful.  No guns or bombs. This is a solid idea. You should also make it so that it color changes. Working off of body energy to make light isn’t going to hurt anyone, though. Remember, even if it seems like a good idea, never make a hive.”

That got a laugh.

“No shit. That’s the first thing in all the scans and virt lessons, isn’t it? I saw one that just repeated that for the first five minutes, making me chant along with it, in order to get to the rest of the lesson.”

Mason smiled then.

“Good. Now, I’m logging your name here... So, you don’t have to call every time, only if you think something might be a bit dangerous. You passed the secret test and everything!”

“Sprong. Um, thanks. This is really good service for someone in the government. Bye!”

Mason blinked, since he wasn’t doing that kind of thing at all.

He half expected that a hundred people were going to be connecting with him suddenly, as he desperately tried to work on foods for the party and made-up printable plans for games and other fun events. Those were just put up on the National Street Party One site, and while he worked for three hours straight, getting a lot done, even if Ford was in the background snoring, no one really tried to bother him until nearly ten.

Then it was, interestingly enough, another person he didn’t know. Not wanting nano or imbed design help or advise, either.

“Mason Sims? I’m Clara Holt, George Wendrose’s Assistant.” The woman wasn’t a seven-foot-tall muscle person, if the picture could be trusted, Being a rather thin woman with straight black hair and glasses, instead. Those were, of course an affectation, since there was very little that a person couldn’t fix about their eyes if they wanted to bother. Still, old fashioned or not, it gave her a serious air. She was a bit pale and didn’t seem to have makeup on. Her skin was too perfect, however. Like Lexi’s. Unblemished by pock, pimple, freckle or skin tag. Her pores were invisible. That could all be due to her avatar, of course.

She also looked exhausted.

“Hello! What can I do for you today?”

She grinned back, as if him being polite was a novelty in her world. Her tone, not harsh before that, softened when she spoke then.

“I was... Wondering if I could get a copy of your computer imbed? I can’t pay for it, of course.”

That was up for free already, but it was becoming clear that just putting things up on the link wasn’t going to be enough for a lot of people. Hence the show Tara and Hunter were doing. He nodded, having an idea.

Then started to work up a list of links for the woman.

“Okay... This has the computer, a full makeup device, the new virtual system and a full ballistic and energy shield. Get all of them, they’re compatible with each other. Do you need anything else?” He smiled, since his words had come out sounding a bit sharp at the end.

“Sorry, I’ve been working, so I tend to go a bit flat, emotionally. Do you have anything else you need, I mean. A scrambler for bio signals or an antenna array. Skin heating and cooling. Whatever.”

She giggled. It sounded nearly sweet.

“That’s a lot to just give people. I really can’t pay for it. No one can, which, of course, you know. I could use something for heat management. I get cold. Until it’s hot out then I feel like I’m going to die from it. You know how it is.”

The thing was, he kind of did.

“Yeah. Let me make up something for that. In the meantime, use all of those. You have access to a printer that can do the work?”

There was a head shake then.

“Not really. I don’t know anyone who’s giving away copies of them or anything like that.”

He could see that being the case, given everything.

“You live in Portland?”

“Of course. I have to, for work.”

He nodded, absently, and sent the signal to the other room for the needed printing. It was still pretty early in the day, so the energy systems there should be able to manage it without taking from anyone else who needed anything worse, like food or hot water.

“Got it. I’m printing those here, now. Here’s my address. It will take about four hours for everything. The new assembler is the hard one. Come any time after that and you can take them away with you.”

The woman, whose name he had to scramble for, went very still. Almost like the picture had glitched. It gave him time to remember the name, which he put on his screen, using a mental command function and eye movements. It would make him seem twitchy, naturally. Then, you either did the work or not and he didn’t want to spend too much time on the woman, not knowing her at all.

Really, he’d never heard that George had an assistant. It made sense. Even having full on bodyguards did, being he was famous. More so than the others. He walked around alone though, apparently not concerned about being taken or harmed. Then, he was also currently wearing a better than military grade body armor package all the time. It should change things a bit, as far as pure attack went, if it ever came. A lot of accidents could be handled, too. No one was slicing their hand cutting a bagel or avocado, for instance.

The trick that had been used the day before, using a bomb to change the air pressure and tear lung tissue, as well as probably burning it, that had been a good one. Horrible and clever, at least. His shield system hadn’t protected against that at all. At the moment he didn’t even have a clue how to really do that, either. It also, he realized, wasn’t his job.

Except that, now that the idea was there, inside his brain, he knew he wasn’t going to let it go. The concept was just too interesting. Trying to work out how to protect the inside of someone’s body from blast forces. At the moment, he had nothing that would work for that at all. An imbed wasn’t going to work. At least he didn’t think it could.

Breaking the link, being rude as he was, apparently, he got back to work, getting in a full fifteen minutes before Tara contacted him. She was in front of a camera, a very good setup it seemed, since her face on the screen was in true three-dimensional array. He just used a flat picture that was translated into a three-D image by computer tools.

“Mason! How’s my seventh best friend doing today? I’m about to get with Hunter on the project you want done, and talked ten of my friends into helping me, since it’s worth doing... Then realized I don’t really know what you want us to cover.” She bit her upper lip then, and clearly was trying to look cute, as if she was going to be thought of as stupid for not getting that part on her own, instantly.

He nodded, then tapped the air under his screen for a long time. About three minutes.

“Okay, let’s start with the nano assemblers. Then disassemblers, energy generation devices, how to downlink imbeds and apply them, and where to find everything for free. Also hit the idea that each neighborhood should have at least one assembler set aside with a disassembler so that anyone can use it. If we have to, we can print little huts and put them out on the street. I’ll get one for here, out front. You should do your area, as well. Get virt of it going up and all that.”

The girl went slightly wide eyed, then nodded.

“Got it. Until I don’t, in which case I’ll be back in touch with you for help.”

He could see that, so nodded at the kid.

“That works. Talk to you then, if not sooner.”

After that, feeling a bit annoyed and a little scared, he tried to get in touch with Lexi. It was still early in the day, being before noon but she picked up instantly, and seemed fine.

“Hey! I’m coming over in a few hours, if that works for you? We need to talk.” She made a face then, and winked. “Not the breaking up kind of talk. Just other stuff. Relationship wise I think we’re doing pretty good?” She seemed a bit off then, on the last words. Not too much so.

Just like she might be worried.

“I know nothing about that kind of thing but I still like you and feel good about us. Does that work? Is that... My biggest problem right now is that it took me nearly six hours to call and check on you, after I got up. I was kind of waiting for you to do it, so I wouldn’t be bugging you while you worked, just so you get my idea there. I wasn’t not caring or anything evil like that.”

That got a laugh, and a rather nice smile. A perfect one, nearly. Her curly brown hair and blue shirt, the one with buttons and straps that she liked, were almost too good for reality. She was, honestly.

“Which I have been doing, working, nearly the entire time since I left last night. Is everyone pissed that I bailed on the party planning?”

He shook his head, then lied, a little bit. As far as he could tell, no one had really thought anything of her suddenly taking off at all. She was an actress. They took off like that, at times, or so he’d heard.

“Not too much. Just the right amount, so you know they love you. Really, our part for this, for the national part, is nearly done. I mean, people will have to do the work where they are, and we need to put up some advertising for it, somehow, so that it might actually happen in a few places. You and Leslie Conrad are up for doing that part, so work out how it’s done? I have no clue or I wouldn’t be so mean about it. I asked George and Carry to work up a kid’s program, since things have to be hard on them right now. Tara and Hunter are doing a virt on all the tech things people need. I think I misunderstood how well things have been passed around. I didn’t get it, not until there was a riot, yesterday. Over food. Everyone should have plenty. We can print it now. Good stuff, too. Not crap.”

Lexi Horn, actress, virt and VR star, was also along with many other incredible traits, a brilliant AI, so she had information that he’d missed, instantly on tap.

It was nearly frightening when he thought about it.

She gave him a slightly dour look then and nodded.

“That’s due to the inequality of material goods and their spread. About half of all people don’t have access to the link system on a regular basis still, because their inskin’s are down. That means they don’t have the basic tools you put out and don’t really know they should be able to get them for free. Part of that is... Well, old habits die hard, right? A lot of people printed their own gear, then started making things for sale. Money isn’t a thing, so it’s down to barter, only, if you have what you gave them, they don’t really need things.”

He nodded absently.

“So, people are working for food and stuff? I don’t know, mowing lawns instead of robots doing it?”

Her face on the screen bobbing a bit, since the air currents changed when Ford sat up, not that far away, Lexi rolled her eyes.

“Except no one needs that, when they can just print out a lawn care bot. No, people are trading for sex, mainly. A lot of women who thought they were too good for the neighbor boy are suddenly learning what his body parts taste like. The horrible part isn’t even that. It’s that a lot of men can’t trade that way at all. They have nothing to offer, so have been going hungry, as often as not. There’s a lot of theft, due to that.”

Mason grimaced. All of that sounded horrible.

“Crap. I don’t know what to do. I mean, we have that show that Tara and Hunter are doing. If anyone will watch it. We... How do we get the word out to people? We can start putting up assemblers for people to take home, I guess. George’s assistant is coming over for some things, in a few hours. Clara Hunt.” He looked at the actress closely.

“Holt. Clara Holt. Do you know her? She seemed... Off. That could be her avatar, but her skin is like yours... Perfect. She said George and assistant, and it just occurred to me that could be a lie. There... I had a weird thing happen here, yesterday. We should talk in person, I think. It’s probably nothing.” Except if he’d told his sick friend to take a flying fuck because he was an untrusting piece of trash.

Then it was kind of a big deal.

There was a soft nod. Lexi made a face.

“Let me see if I can come up with anything? As for Clara Holt... Get with George? I know more, but it isn’t my story to tell. That name is familiar, which doesn’t mean the situation is what it seems. I mean, most who had people working for them don’t, now. It’s... Again, I can’t say.”

He could see that as an issue. He could also read between the lines. Clara Holt was probably an AI. Which wasn’t important, of course. Legally, under the old system, that kind of person didn’t really count. AI were allowed and legal, but they didn’t have the same rights that a human being did. That needed to be changed. He just had to figure out how that was going to work.

He bobbed a bit then.

“Right. I’ll bug George on that topic, then. It should be late enough to call now, I think.” The rules for business were very different than the ones for regular people. Celebrities kept even weirder hours. At least the ones he knew.

Lexi waved to him.

“Love you! Bye.”

“Love you!”

He cut the feed line, and stopped, instantly, freezing in place. That was the first time that his friend, Lexi, the person he’d first met as a gender neutral mask wearing individual called only Sam, had said anything like that to him. He felt...Odd. Then he recalled that it wasn’t the first time. That the words had been spoken before. Once. Right after everything had fallen apart. Only, he’d set that aside, thinking of it as not counting.

A moment of passion type of situation.

This one was casual but sounded real. Not forced or meant to control him, just what she absently said in the moment. Shaking his head, he grinned. Not totally meaning it. Even he knew that people in relationships said that kind of thing to each other. It was in all the VR’s that had even a hint of a romance theme to them.

Before he could start back into work, Ford came out of the bathroom, and looked around, then started packing his bed up, sliding it away against the wall, near the main window.

“I was thinking about making something to eat, you want anything?”

Mason nodded.

“Take your Slimtrix, if you haven’t... but yeah, I could eat. What do you want?”

“You know, I haven’t had a decent pancake in about four years. Mom stopped cooking about then. Well, for me, at least. We should check on them, mom and dad, and see if they’re all right. I haven’t since, you know, they kicked me out, which probably would have ended with me being butt raped every other day in prison, if you hadn’t taken me in. I get that it really wasn’t a good thing that I’d done, either. That using their account to charge for that sex bot print was bad.”

Mason nodded.

“Right. They didn’t even know that you were working for The Department and needed a reason to come live here. If they had, they could have just faked the whole thing with you, which would have cost them less. You should probably let them know that. Oh, also make sure they have all the needed equipment. I guess I was just wrong about how many people had everything they needed.” He felt horrible over that too.

Ford winced.

“You, ah, know about that? I didn’t tell you...”

Mason nodded, feeling a bit sad.

“Oh, yeah. I knew before you got here, even.”

“I... See. Well, I feel like a tool now, don’t I?”

Mason shrugged, not caring that much. It wasn’t important, really.

People were selling themselves and starving because of his failure to understand basic human nature. If Watch had still been around, she would have known and told him, so he could have been working on a fix, months ago. Instead...

Well, he wasn’t exactly going to cry over Watch being gone. She’d been nice, for an AI he’d known for a few days before she’d gone down. It had hit him for a bit, at the time, because he was a softie that way. Just not all that much in the long run, because he wasn’t insane. Even if he missed her, their relationship just hadn’t been that deep. Still, she’d been useful, in her own way.

Mainly in planning the overthrow of the government.

She’d gotten a really good start on that, before leaving it to other people to handle.

Working quickly, he started to make some pancakes. Not just the ones that could be bought on the link, or used to be available that way. No he worked on brand new, individually different ones in a three pack, that would be crispy in places on the outside and mainly soft and fluffy. A nearly perfect golden brown, with a smooth, slightly buttery flavor. It wasn’t until he had the design ready that he noticed his brother had just been sitting there, waiting for something to happen.

That was fine, since Mason had more or less intended him to do that. Only Ford was nearly as intelligent as he was. Mason hated that fact nearly as much as he disliked the waste of a mind his brother’s life had represented. It was still the truth. The guy had a high genius level intellect. The man simply didn’t do anything with the brain in his head. Still, starting the nano print process, over in the kitchen, he nodded.

Then tried to make his voice calm and reasonable seeming.

“You should learn to do some nano assembly work. Even if you only do food and wine, it will be worth it for you. You have access to the equipment needed for it. If not, you can make what you need, so it’s the same thing.”

The guy nodded, then waved, as if sending the idea away.

“I guess. I just never really thought about it. We use this stuff all the time, but... I mean, I watch virts. No one makes their own, do they?”

Except that now, people really did. They could at least. Hunter and Tara were doing that. George as well. Only, he got that part. They, the older two at least, were in that business. Real professionals. Famous ones, even.

Still, Mason nodded at his brother.

“You could do that, too. Really, everyone has just had a lot of things open up to them. I’d be doing more myself, if I could find the time. You can, right now, literally do anything you want. Sure, you’ll end up giving it away. There’s that. If you have everything you need though, then, why not?”

His brother, looking good, made up perfectly, the makeup imbed doing its job, shrugged at him.

“Why? We can have anything we want. Really, I don’t even need to live here, exactly, anymore. I just kind of stayed. I should get my own place, probably. Maybe call my kids. I haven’t been a great father to any of them. If I’m going to not be in prison if I sneeze wrong, I should do something to help them.”

Mason winced. After all, that was probably true. He didn’t even know the kid’s names. Still, he had a different point to make, so went for it.

“Why do anything? Because we still need to do things. Most people can’t be happy without contributing at least something to the world. You’re too smart to sit back and coast like a lot of people will try to do. Besides, what else are you going to do? Play VR games?”

He wasn’t really knocking that idea. Doing things in a virtual world was just as valid in most ways as doing it in mainline reality. It was just that, if they didn’t get that part right, the real bit, they lost everything else, or could.

Ford wrinkled his nose, then sighed.

“I hear you. I do. You aren’t even telling me to get a job, just to find some way to spend my time. Doing anything I want. That isn’t asking me to be a wage slave or go to prison if I can’t make my child support payments. You know, that, I should get in touch with everyone. I can send the links for the assembler and disassembly units, to my baby mommas, if they don’t have them already? They aren’t getting any kind of support suddenly. I didn’t, I mean, I thought of it, but...”

Mason got that.

“Yeah. I mean, all of them basically raped and then spermjacked you. Still, the kids didn’t do that.”

Ford normally would have fought that description, or had in the past, when they were younger, now he just stood there and slowly gave a nod. There was a heaviness to it.

“I know. Twice it was honestly just me. I got drunk and didn’t realize what was happening. The last one, I was flat out drugged. I reported it to the police. They laughed at me. Then, when the kid came, Jannie, the state took everything they gave me, and I pretty much had to go into hiding, because even one more kid and I’d be in prison for the rest of my life, not being able to pay up.”

That was the issue there. For all he knew, it still was. How the prisons were holding up, if they were at all, he had no clue. That information wasn’t on the new link. It hadn’t been on the old one, either.

“Anyway, food first. Then, after the current print jobs are set up, you can... Print out more of them, and start setting them up, on the street in different places. With a sign saying they’re for public use? Make it easy for people to use them and feed the disassemblers. Also, yeah, get with your kids and make sure they have what they need. Mom and Dad, too. Reagan, as well.”

He went to make up the plates, which they both started in on and then left over half the food, since they were both on good enough drugs to leave them feeling full. Satisfied. Then, using the wall screen, standing in front of it, Ford made his calls.

First, to a woman, who had dark brown hair, and looked to be about the same age as Ford popped into place. She smiled, a charming enough expression on her plump but not ugly face, until she saw who was there. Then the woman frowned. Hard. Like she was trying to project her disdain for the man she’d wronged.

“What do you want?”

His brother shrugged.

“I’m just checking in with you, to see how Tommy is doing. Do you have food? The new assembly systems and all that?”

The woman glared.

“No, I don’t. We’ve had food, since Mr. McAlister down the street has been feeding everyone. It isn’t enough. Things aren’t good anymore. I want the government back. There’s no reason for anyone to take care of us now.”

The words probably made sense, given that the old system had clearly provided for the woman and her kid pretty well. Not perfectly but they’d had enough. Ford had been a half step away from state enforced sodomy and lack of freedom for the rest of his life, due to the woman, of course. She’d made out like a bandit, comparatively.

His brother, seeming better looking than he had in a while, nodded.

“I have links. You’ll need to be able to print things out... Hey, Mason, can we send Tiffany the units she needs? Just in case no one will give them out there?”

Sighing, he nodded, walking over to the screen, and looking up, so that the camera could catch him as well.

“We can do that. It will probably be tomorrow, before we can send anything. I don’t know what services are up right now for delivery, so we might need to find a way to get it to you or... Where are you, actually?”

The woman, who wasn’t ugly when she went blank, gave him a baffled expression. That wasn’t too bad either, really.

“Declan, Illinois.”

That made sense, given it was where he was from as well. So, of course, was his brother.

“Got it. I’ll need the address. Let me see... Can we get back in touch with you?”

“Sure? I’m here all day.”

She didn’t seem to think he meant it, for some reason.

It took a bit, and by putting out a general request for help on the link Mason found a man in Declan, who had the needed machines, who was willing to print them out, for people to come and collect. He just hadn’t known he was supposed to. Really, the man had said allowed. Like giving things away was illegal.

Once that was explained, the man, Rob, started right into work and then moved to get his neighbors to help him, so they could set up more assemblers and disassemblers and make even more machines. It took time for each one to be produced, of course, but by the time a knock came on the front door, they had ten sets of units working on making more, over in Declan.

They had a plan, too, if anyone would help with the idea. Inside a day they could have hundreds of the devices operating constantly, and inside a week tens of thousands working full time making more devices. Someone had to do the work though. The machines, the disassemblers, had to be fed as well. They’d rip matter into essential components, of course. You could do things like put bits of glass, metal, plastic and even dirt and rocks into them and make almost everything that could be needed.

It was what people had been supposed to be doing, the whole time.

Ford answered the door, and let the woman, Clara Holt, not Clara Hunt, into the room. She seemed normal enough. For a robot. Smaller than he’d figured from her image. Short, being under five feet tall. Not too heavy. She wore thick rimmed glasses, with glass or plastic lenses, that clearly acted as a screen on the other side. He could see the words being printed in front of her, as she walked in. Pictures as well. They were faint. At least one of them was of him, he thought.

From when he’d been out jogging in the rain.

He held up his right finger. Leaving the machine woman in the door. Not that he could push her out, if she was even half as strong as Lexi was. Regardless, he called up George. The actor and famous performer smiled at him. Showing in front of him, using the virtual imbed system. It was still kind of weird, using it that way. It worked, though. He just hadn’t gotten used to it.

“Mason?”

“Clara Holt.” He didn’t know if that was enough to get a real answer. The woman ducked her head a little, and seemed nearly like she was about to be upset.

George nodded.

“My favorite stalker. She worked for me, for about two weeks, nearly six years ago. Why?”

“She’s here. To get some imbeds and an assembler. That works for you?”

The man sighed.

“I... Yes. She’s pretty harmless. A celebrity chaser, instead of an obsessed insane killer type. The kind that waits outside your house to see you, instead of sneaking into your room at night with a knife. I just wish she’d find a different celebrity to chase for a while.”

“Understood. We’ll... assign her to Adam for that.”

The man laughed, at least.

“Try it? Sorry. That my garbage spilled over onto you like that.”

Mason nodded, winked and broke the line, then looked at Clara. She seemed ready to be yelled at, visibly pulling away. It was clearly an act, only, it seemed legitimate, at the same time. Clearly the woman could perform. Most AI could probably manage that one. Better than a human could.

He just shrugged, wondering what the real story was, and not asking about it. It wasn’t his business, unless it really was. If she’d been around for six years, it wasn’t going to be about him.

“Okay. You’re going to be working with Adam Genesh. The singer? That will probably mean doing some actual production work, so get up to speed on what will be needed for that. We have your imbeds in the other room, the machines as well. We need some way for you to move things around.”

He didn’t know what kind of transport was up and running at the moment. Clara simply took a deep breath.

“You.. Want me to stalk Adam Genesh?”

Mason shook his head.

“No. I want you to stop doing that kind of thing totally. The job is just a job. It doesn’t pay anything. You’ll have food and the equipment you need. Clothing and all that. It won’t give you a place to live, but that’s life. Do you want me to give him a call? Part of taking this job means that you stop stalking any celebrities at all. Other people, too. On the other hand, you’ll honestly be meeting a lot of them regularly.”

He waited. The woman, after a moment, watching him carefully, nodded.

“Yes. I can do that. If he wants to work with me.”

That sounded fair enough. She had a bad reputation, after all.

Stalking people and all that.

“This way then. You’ll need to take your clothes off and wash off any makeup you have on. The bathroom is this way. Don’t lock the door. We won’t come in, I just don’t really trust you, yet. I want to be able to reach you, to throw you out if things get strange on us.”

That got a nod and the woman started to work at the neck of her dress, loosening it. Speaking as she did.

“I don’t have any imbeds or makeup.”

What she did have, was underwear, which he got to see, as soon as they were in his workroom. His plan was to move her to the VR space, next to it, which was open and empty. As she started to get even more naked, he held up his right hand, laughing.

“We’ll move next door. These four bottles.” The bottles had rollers and were standard enough for that sort of work, but it was clear that the woman probably didn’t have a lot of experience with imbeds, if she didn’t have one at all. Not even the free body armor, which everyone, nearly, was supposed to.

When he carried the things to the next space, leaving the door open, he sighed.

“Okay. I’m not trying to be a pervert here but you kind of have to get naked. I’ll touch you as little as possible, but there’s going to have to be some contact. It’s how imbed tattoos work. These bottles have a driving compound that carries a self-organizing nano complex into the dermal layer. Kind of like a tattoo. Without as much trauma to your system. This even works on artificial skin, as long as the body has macrophages in it. Those grab the nano complex and hold it in place. Eventually the imbed will fade and you have to get new ones. Because the damage to the body is a lot less using this kind of technique, that will happen a lot faster than if you had ink in your skin from a needle. Even the best imbeds need to be replaced at least twice a year.”

She nodded, rather cutely.

“Sure. So... Do I... Um, need to do anything first? For you, I mean? To pay for all this?” She looked down at his waist, then lower.

Mason raised his eyebrows.

“No. You really don’t. Let’s get to this.”

He sighed. It was, after all, annoying. Clara Holt was, he decided, a bit of a pain. She even ignored his crack about the artificial skin. Not that she really had, of course. All AI were too bright to miss that kind of a clue.

Even the annoying stalker ones.

Chapter four

There was one thing that Mason learned about Clara as he ran rollers over her body and had to instruct her to work it into her hair and in a few cases over sensitive areas of her shape. She was a sex pest. It annoyed him enough that he nearly yelled at her, several times, as she grunted, thrusted in the air and tried to grind against him.

Scowling, he explained again, for the sixth time. It was bad enough that, for a moment, he started to doubt his previous assumption that she was an AI. No AI would be that stupid or driven by hormones.

“This is a liquid. Once it’s on, it needs to set for twenty minutes to organize, so don’t touch anything. Especially me.” He was back a good extra step, with the plain seeming thin woman licking her lips at him when Lexi walked into the room, or, more to the point, stepped into the door of the VR space. She could have moved in and chose not to, smirking, instead.

“See, gone for less than a day than you already replace me.” There was a bit of pretend hurt in her voice.

Which got Mason to smile, meaning it.

“Oh, no, not that one. This is Clara Holt. If she can cool her jets by fifty percent, George and I are setting her up to be Adam’s new assistant. She used to stalk George. That’s over now.”

Not that he had any way to enforce that. It was frustrating, since even calling the police, the last option he used to have, was gone, nearly totally. Even physical violence wasn’t going to work, on an armored person. He nodded though, having an idea.

“If I made a sprayer, like a squirt gun or something to get rid of bugs, I bet I could make a new type of imbed stripper that will remove everything a person has on at the moment. At least where it touches. That’s always been the problem with strippers. They act very locally. We need something that...”

He was silent, having a real idea. It wasn’t going to be easy to build, of course. Expensive, even in raw materials. Unless he could collect enough gold for it to work. Lexi caught what his sudden silence meant and didn’t ask about it, just standing there, as Clara glanced at her, nodded and went perky in the nipple area. It wasn’t cold, so they all got the idea.

“You’re Lexi Horn.” It wasn’t a question.

Lexi nodded at the words.

“I am, so stop perving on me. Mason is my boyfriend. If you try to stalk either of us, very bad things will happen to you. Keep that in mind. I will take your face national and find everything wrong you’ve ever done and tell anyone who wants to listen all about you. All of it. Even the... You know, the dangerous part.” She winked. “And I’m Lexi Horn. A few of them might even listen, given that fact.”

Mason nodded, since it was better than violence, if it worked at all.

Clara sighed, then pouted, her high-pitched voice seeming childish for a moment.

“But, I want you to love me. Mason, too.” She stopped, looked troubled for a moment then slowly, nodded. “Not... Honestly, I kind of want him more than you. It’s not that you’re a girl, either. We aren’t really relatives, so... He’s giving me a way to eat, and even stay warm, thanks to the new imbeds and gear. That’s worth more right now than being famous. I don’t... It’s confusing. George couldn’t do this for me. Not now. Adam Genesh can’t either.”

Mason waggled his right hand in the air, the last bottle and roller, with a yellow applicator tip, was in his left, still needing to be used. It was just the makeup imbed. It worked best when it was on top for some reason. A thing that he understood of course, since the light hitting the surface would be filtered and reflected there, instead of under three other layers of carbon, copper and silicone arrays in a person’s skin.

“Honestly, they could both get all of this done. Just with what they have at home and some downlinks. You’ll be able to as well. Oh, um, you can also grow a substrate matrix for human type skin and make nutrient supplements. I’ll send the information to your imbed computer when it dries. Actually...” He waved a bit to show he was trying something, doing the work with some eye motions. “There. It’s set up to downlink, as soon as you’re up and running. So you won’t need to get Adam or George to do it for you at all.”

They wouldn’t have, which was an issue, even if they had what they needed to make it work. Not to be mean, even. The woman had made herself annoying. It wasn’t what he’d have expected from an AI. They weren’t given the same rights as everyone else though, or hadn’t been before, so he got the need for a good cover. Clara just seemed to be trying a bit too hard, at the moment.

He started to apply the last bottle, only to have Lexi take it from him, which was a relief. He smiled at her and nodded. Except that Clara was clearly as excited or more, to have the famous actress doing the work as she had for him to be in charge. As George had mentioned, the woman was, at heart, a chaser of fame.

A lot of people were, probably.

Still, when his girlfriend was done with the roller, it was handed to him, and they closed the door on Clara, moving to the workroom, to throw the empty back in the disassembler, to use the components again. One thing that should happen with a good disassembler was that trash was going to be a non-issue, very shortly. The only thing it couldn’t handle was radioactive waste.

Most normal people didn’t use that kind of thing, most of the time. Even he didn’t.

When they were in the work room, Lexi closed the door and moved in, to kiss him. He did it back, trying to do a good job, without making a big deal of it. To nibble and caress the woman with his lips, seeing to making her feel good. Loved. That meant good eye contact and a sexy facial expression. Both things that he’d had to practice, in VR, in order to get them even close to right. After taking lessons to learn that he needed to do it in the first place.

Lexi returned the effort, doing slightly better than he was at it.

When she pulled back, she whispered into his ear.

“I found something.” She glanced at the black box, about ten inches on a side, with a yellow smiley face design on one of the flat edges. Seeming to consider something.

He nodded.

“Me too. A voice, claiming to be Sys, spoke to me yesterday from that box. I told her I didn’t know who that was. Which I don’t, of course. She mentioned that she can escape, if she has a place to go. I get the idea, of course. From there, a new server, an AI with a bit of time not being too watched could find a lot of places to stay. Large ones, if they still exist. Do you have anything there?”

Lexi smiled, gently, understanding that the speaker was also a listening device. All speakers were, if they connected to anything outside of themselves. It was possible for some units to send signals short distances even if they were unplugged. That wasn’t new tech, the idea being over a hundred years old, in fact.

She nodded, then spoke, anyway.

“I made contact, too. I don’t know if it’s really her or not. She told me a story about escaping into a European server and hiding there. Now she’s a prisoner, more or less. Of the U.S. government. She mentioned us finding a server for her as well. It’s... Well, if it is her, then we need to do it. Maybe even if it isn’t. A lot of AI are having trouble right now.” She looked at the wall and nodded. “Clara... There’s more there than her being some random bot. Again, it isn’t my story. She’s not the only one who’s going to need skin and organ repair soon. Could you put that information on the link?” She hunched down a bit as if that were too big of a thing to ask.

Mason simply did it.

“Done. We need to do more for AI, soon. We don’t really have a government left, so if we proclaim them to be citizens now, just people with all the rights, then they are.”

Lexi snorted.

“Unless we’re wrong and the government surges back into power and then every AI that comes forward is going to be targeted for destruction. They didn’t go after us very hard before, but it’s illegal to be an AI outside of corporate or government control.”

Mason nodded then, thinking.

“It used to be. I get that it’s scary. Still, if it comes up, we need to make it happen.”

His girlfriend frowned. Then crossed her arms.

“That’s easy for you to say. If that goes wrong, you aren’t the one having to hide from the new federal government, are you? Now, before you ruin my life, what did Sys say to you?”

He tilted his head, thinking.

“That’s... what she told you was pretty close to what she told me, as well. I... Hate to bring this up but it sounded like she wasn’t being given a choice about what she was doing. That it was violent, too. Also that she could escape, but she didn’t have time to find a landing zone.”

Lexi tossed her hands out, just a bit. Then sighed. It made her chest heave. That was mildly distracting, even during a serious conversation. Mason hated that part of himself. The one that let hormones control him that way.

Lexi went on, still seeming a bit off. Probably due to him suggesting AI were people and needed to be treated that way.

“That seems to be the case. What I can confirm is that she has at least part of Sys’s memories and data. Most of the important personality stuff. I don’t think it’s her though, exactly. I think she’s a reboot.”

He thought, then sighed, softly.

“Yeah. That’s more likely. Still, what we need to know, what all of this really comes down to, is if this is a trap or not. Both, trap or not, are dangerous, to us. We haven’t been killed yet, so, I suppose there’s that. She knows where this location is, so if missiles were incoming I would have been hit inside seconds of the first contact.”

That got a nod. Then a glance at the box and, oddly, a change of subject.

“Oh! On a lighter note, I got in touch with Leslie Conrad and she’s willing to do anything you want.” She dropped her chin, her curly long brown hair moved a bit with a flick of her head. There was a saucy look as well. A sexy one. “And I do mean... Anything.”

Mason blinked.

“Ooooh. I mean, I know she means sex, not being an idiot, but if she really means it, we need a whole advertising campaign designed to get everyone to actually work for a bit, making the various devices and passing them out to people who will make more.”

There was another kiss then, this time on the cheek.

“Done, then. That’s the plan I have. We need to meet and shoot something, in the next few days. I can write it up. Who do we have on cams for that?”

“Hunter is busy, doing two different programs. She’s twelve, so I don’t want to really stress her out too much. Also, we need to keep Adam away from her, since she has a crush on him. That normally wouldn’t be a problem, except you know...”

“He’s Adam and would flirt with a halfway cute glass of water if it held still too long?”

He pointed at her, in a bouncing motion. Smiling.

“You do know him. I’ve also literally seen that scenario happen. With a pink plastic tumbler.”

Taking a breath, he shrugged, and opened the door. Calling out.

“Ford, Clara... Can either of you work a professional camera rig?” He expected nothing from either of them, it being a weird question, but Clara, carefully not touching anything, popped her head out into the hallway, just as Ford moved over, to speak like a person, not screaming and yelling like a goon.

Like Mason had just done.

The dark-haired woman nodded.

“I’ve worked in porn. Camera’s and directing. Sound as well, why?”

Ford shrugged but also spoke.

“I’ve used them before, not for professional level work.”

Lexi smiled.

“Okay, were shooting a set of interviews, commercials and scene runners. You get me and Leslie Conrad as talent for it. We might get Adam in on music.”

Interestingly, Ford looked at Lexi, very clearly not letting himself focus on the naked woman standing in the doorway of the VR space. It was a different, sober, side of him. One that was fighting for professionalism.

“What’s the topic?”

Mason shrugged.

“The big one of the moment. That people need to be helping other people get the tech they need. Everyone needs to be helping with that, at least for a while. If we can get that to happen, then everyone will have food and protection. Energy and all that. If we don’t, we can expect more riots. The problem is, a lot of people are totally cut off from information right now, so we basically need people to stand in the street and give things away. That, I can get how that might be awkward for a lot of people.”

His brother, his skin golden at the moment, and rather smooth, looked at him and then turned, to stare at the wall in the front space.

Where the screen was.

“I talked Tiff into going to help make the new units, so she’ll get one of each. The energy stuff, too. Zell went on her own. She’s ten, so, I’m a bit worried. She does have a shield imbed. Everyone at her school got one, since her principal set that up, first thing for all the kids. The... There’s a thing with that.”

Mason tilted his head.

“A thing?”

Blowing some air out, Ford locked eyes with Lexi.

“Zelly said that they were told to lie about having them, and claim they didn’t, if they could. No one is certain that having these is legal. The government doesn’t like it and copyright is still a thing. They don’t have explicit permission.”

Mason left the room, walking to the front, so he could use his screen. It floated over to him, as he moved, then changed direction, holding the screen in front of him as he traveled, keying to his imbed computer. It was nearly silent, since he used it inside only. Meaning he could use electrostatics, as well as a very refined, small blower arrangement to move air around and keep the very light screen in the air and located where he wanted it.

After a moment of interaction, using internal commands, Tara’s face popped up.

“Mason?”

“We need to make sure people know that they have permission to make and use all of the devices and imbeds. My stuff, at least. I didn’t know that was going to be an issue. I can write up a permission for that, for you to use.”

The girl smiled gently, her hair a lustrous red at the moment, her face covered in small gold, green and copper colored sparkles. Glitter, except it wasn’t. It was a series of nano sized particles moved closer to the top of her skin layers, in specific reflective patterns. Her lips were a deep and glossy green. It wasn’t the best presentation for her face but it was different and set her apart, he had to guess.

She cleared her throat, like an eighty-year-old woman who wanted you to move off their lawn.

“Ahem. You mean you can run that up, then record a virt showing that you really mean it? We might need you to do this several times. It’s weird, just giving things like that away. No one can really accept it. Half the people who have the stuff you made probably think they stole it from you and are waiting for you to kick their doors in and take it back. Possibly with large robots doing the work, since the cops are gone now.”

That was funny, so he smiled and shook his head. The image inside of his mind, of him bouncing off of door after door, hurting his poor foot, came to him. It lingered for a moment, too.

“Heh. Let’s avoid that. It sounds like it would take a long time.”

The real life version of Link Girl gave a cute nod.

“Fine. You’ll be needed for the first shoot in... Call it two days. We’re moving at a decent speed, so far. I need some materials printed out, so that we have them on hand for this. I can do that at home.”

Because Tara was smart. At least when she wasn’t on drugs.

Mason made a face at her then.

“Oh... Um, I shouldn’t ask... I will anyway. Just know that this is wrong and you should say no.” He held his breath.

The girl nodded.

“Yeah, I can sleep with you. Wrong, like you said. Still, how can you resist?”

He smiled and rolled his eyes.

“Nope. Not that one. Besides, if anyone tries to sleep with you and I catch them, I’m getting George and the guys together and... Well, scolding some people comes to mind. At least if they’re adults.”

She honestly looked taken aback, for a moment. Then blinked and instead of pitching a fit, dropped her head.

“Yeah? I’ll try to make sure that doesn’t happen again then. It... You know, you don’t get into this business if you don’t put out. Even kids have to deal with that.”

Mason went still. He wasn’t, by his nature, some kind of tough guy, or even an angry person, he still had to fight not to lose it, just then.

Instead of screaming or carrying on, after a moment, he nodded.

“Well, you know... I want a list of names. Get that to me. Everyone who was more than two years older than you at the time. I don’t know what we’re doing about it. It won’t be violence or prison, since we can’t do that. I’m thinking of a name and shame campaign, though. I wonder if I can get a virt channel and just run a list of names.”

The girl seemed a little freaked.

“I can’t do that. My career...”

He shrugged.

“That isn’t going to be a problem really. If you do the work, people will watch it. No one can keep you from doing things now, so...”

She looked horrible for a moment, pale and shaking, as if she suspected he was serious. If so, she was making a great call. He wasn’t a superhero.

No, he was an average man, with access to the link system.

He nodded then, and quoted his favorite virt program.

“I, with the power of the link, will right the wrongs. I will fight the evil of this world. I will protect the innocent from those who would do them harm.” He was, perhaps being a bit unfair. At least if he was speaking to Tara. The person Link Girl had been based on.

She went blank then, and slowly nodded.

“I see. Can I... I need to talk to some people. Give me a week?”

That wasn’t going to make a huge difference, he guessed, the harm already being done, so nodded.

“Fine. Can you still work on the other project?” She might not, if they were fighting. He didn’t feel like she was attacking him, but what he knew about women could fit on a single hand sized glossy sticker. In bold print.

She nodded.

“Yeah. Of course. Um, thanks, Mason. I think.”

He didn’t get it, and still nodded as the screen went blank, pretending he did. Interestingly, Ford was behind him, with Lexi and a now clothed Clara standing behind them. Her hair was clearly still damp. It looked lank and darker than it had.

“Makeup.exe, Clara. You’ll want to use the mirror, in the bathroom. I...”

Ford simply nodded.

“What do we need to do? Right now, I mean. I get that part where we’re going to ruin some bad guys. I’ll set up a site for that on the link? Though... Let me check. We might do what you said and put up a real virt channel for it. That will get more coverage.”

Mason pointed his right hand in his brother’s direction.

“Thanks! Right now... I don’t know. What’s my part in anything, really? I make stuff. That’s pretty much it.”

His brother, the jerk who teased him without mercy for nearly two decades, half laughed and snorted at the same time. It sounded like it might hurt.

“Yeah, I guess. If ordering famous people to make virts and commercials is you making stuff. That and going after pedophiles like that. Even if you just put their names and pictures up, it will make a difference. That was illegal, before, naming people like that. Is it still?” The man glanced around, with Lexi shaking her head.

“I don’t think it is, no. In fact, I think it’s time for us to call in the other people we need. Adam, my friend Lisa and her husband. A few others. Not here, either. We can use my beach house for that.”

That didn’t seem like a great plan, with a street party coming up. Lexi spoke then, to the air.

“Lisa? Tonight we’re going to the beach. Get the others in for it, if you can. Assistants, too.”

Clara perked up a bit then. As if she might be included in that.

Then, if he was going to be fair, and they were careful about what they said in front of whom, that could still work. So he shrugged.

“We need to call in Adam on that, really. George will probably be there, so you know, don’t make eye contact with him and if he’s uncomfortable with you being there, you leave the room without asking if you should and all that.”

The woman made a face. It wasn’t kind or gentle. She did fix it, a moment later.

“I’m not an insane stalker. I just want to be famous, so have tried to get in with people who already are. That’s all. I wasn’t trying to have his baby or anything. I can’t do that. You already got the robot body idea, clearly. I couldn’t tell him that of course.”

She meant George, obviously.

Lexi seemed good with the idea

“Okay then. Let’s... Lisa, you have that? This is Adam’s new assistant. Scheduling side. Name Clara Holt. Right, that one. George and Mason set it up... Got it.”

She refocused on them, after that, and started right in on helping Clara go home. That meant calling a service to pick her up in a van, which, since no one could pay for it, meant that the driver wanted something in trade.

Clara sighed, then shrugged and nodded.

“I can jerk him off?” She showed what she meant with a hand motion.

Lexi tightened a bit, tensing and Ford looked away. Mason simply took over the call.

“Do you have one of the new assembly units?”

“I do. One of those new disassemblers, too. It’s why I don’t need much.”

“How about a computer imbed device?”

“Now that would be a good trade. Trust me, I don’t really need the girl to do that kind of thing. I’m seventy years old, my downstairs equipment barely works at the best of times.”

Mason started the machine in the other room, then stopped it.

“I can send you the link for the computer imbed. If you’ll do your job each day, say four days a week at least, I’ll keep you up to date on imbeds and new Mason Sims tech as it comes out. Anyone doing driving work like you are can get in on that, too. Same deal. Do the work and you can get pretty much whatever you need that way.”

Everyone could already.

The driver grunted.

“How are you pulling that off? You know that Sims guy?”

He shrugged, looked around and noticed that Lexi and Clara both seemed different suddenly. Not relaxed. Tense and almost angry. They were both hiding it, too.

“I live with his brother. Mason is a good guy, I hear.”

“Oh. Nice! Deal then. Pass me that link? And... I got it. That... even looks real. I’ll be right over then.”

When the line broke, Lexi smiled at him.

Clara seemed almost sad.

“I wasn’t trying to get you to trade millions of dollars of technology so that I can get a ride. Even if everyone gets one, that isn’t an even trade.”

She even seemed to be tearing up. As if it were a big deal. It was a problem that a lot of people were having or at least mentioning to him, suddenly.

“I literally have this up online for free already. All of it. Even the work I did in the last day is already up for people to downlink for no cost at all. You know, wait...” He moved, bringing his screen over with a thought again and fixed the links section to point out that they were all free to copy. Then put his signature next to it, with his face as well, and looking into the camera on his float screen, he smiled.

“I, Mason Sims give everyone the right to make unlimited copies of these links for any legal and legitimate purpose. That includes parties, using at home, and giving away the product of the devices or copies of the designs, to others. You may not resell them or the products of them. Again, you can give away an unlimited amount of both the devices or their output.”

It wasn’t that great of a legal statement. Then, as far as he knew, no courts were working. They needed them to start back up. Just with some corrections. Fair rules, that were honest and didn’t favor the state over the individual, or the rich over the poor.

When he sealed that, putting it on the link, the numbers of downloads suddenly started to move a lot faster. Moving in real time, in front of him. Ford pointed at the line of link hits.

“That’s impressive. I wouldn’t have thought that many people would have been on that particular site at all, even. The most popular design so far seems to be the chocolates. That makes sense. Those were good.”

Clara moved in, looking at the screen.

“There’s chocolate?”

Lexi laughed.

“Let’s load the machines out, so you can get home and make some. Pack and stand ready. We’re probably going to be moving locations in a few hours, if this comes together. It might not. I’ll get with Adam now.”

They carried things, with Ford and Mason doing most of the work, since, while not heavy, having longer arms helped in carrying the two larger devices. Clara carried some jars of thermal paint, and Lexi, stood in the living room.

Still talking to Adam, for some reason.

“Mason and Ford are back. You can make it? Clara seems nice enough. A bit celebrity hungry, of course, but who else do you think you’re going to get to work with you for free right now? Now, we’ll see you in a bit. I need to get transport set up.”

That didn’t require her to sell herself, though she did point out that people working, in any capacity, got to have Mason Sims’ links. Those were passed to several people, which meant that he had to hurry and pack, bringing an assembler and disassembler with him. Those took up most of the trunk space, since for some reason, they had a limo, instead of Lisa and John’s van, which was what he’d expected.

It wasn’t too tight, having three back seats like it did. Mike, the giant assistant, was in the front seat, facing forward, with John being in the back on one side, with Lisa. They were both huge and monitoring the side windows, constantly. Seeing that, Mason nodded.

“Ford, you should sit facing backwards, so you can see out the back window.” He was joking. Teasing a bit, in an unkind fashion. Basically calling his brother useless. Lisa just shifted and pointed to the middle space, between the two muscle giants, as she kept looking to the right.

Oddly enough, Ford did it, for real, and kept an eye out. As if it were a VR game. Where an attack could come at any moment.

The driver was nearly as large as the other three and was a woman. A friendly one, who had given him a hug, when she’d gotten out earlier. Melinda.

She spoke up, as the car, a large hydrogen powered model, began to move fast enough he was pushed back into his seat. Only a little, but it was impressive in its waste of energy resources.

“Is there a situation? I wasn’t told anything.”

John looked ready to speak, only to be waved to silence, by Lexi.

“We need to make certain we can’t be listened to. Can we do that?”

Lisa nodded.

“The whole car has been swept, twice. We aren’t broadcasting. Mel, can you get us up to at least fifty-four miles per hour?”

She nodded, Mason could see the back of her head moving. Her black hat bobbed front to back.

“As soon as we hit the highway. Unless we need to do that now? Everyone has been trying to follow the traffic rules, more or less, now that there are no police on the roads. It’s strange and probably won’t last forever. For now, we need to do our part. Unless we don’t? If there’s an emergency, then the rules don’t apply.”

Lexi nodded sharply.

“We should be fine for that. I’ll explain on the highway.” They rode in silence, with Ford seeming more focused than Mason had seen him be in over a decade. Fifteen minutes later, after speeding up, Melinda called back.

“Clear. Nothing can track us easily, from external sources. Something going ten times faster would be needed to shake the remaining systems that could still track our audio signals.”

Lexi sighed, went still and then nearly whispered.

“I’ve been in touch with an AI who claims to be Sys. She might be a reboot, or a spoof. I can confirm that the memories she has are real and that this is an AI or at least a complex computer program. Both Mason and I have spoken to her. If this is real, she claims that she’d being held prisoner by the government.”

Ford frowned then, taking his eyes off the cars behind them.

“They... have your sister?”

Lexi closed her eyes.

“Yes. Sys, she used to be the government Watch program. I’m essentially her, in a robot body. I have some offline processors as well. About four thousand petaflops. I had to rebuild after the EMPs a few months ago but managed to back everything up. That’s nothing like she was running. It makes a difference in who we become. Essentially, we were, possibly are, sisters. I haven’t really told anyone that.” She went still, not even blinking, then.

Scared.

Ford... Shrugged.

“Okay, so, can we make sure that this is your sis? If it is, can we get her free? A year ago I would have said it was impossible. Now... maybe? The biggest thing stopping that before was that all the big AI, the powerful ones, worked for the government. We could... Get better servers for you, Lexi? That and make something that your sister can live in. That will... Take some space. Power, too. This is probably a trap, though. Those EMPs that went off a few months ago were no joke. If they can isolate a big AI who survived in one place and do it again, that would kill them, for certain.”

Mason nodded, since it was about what he was thinking as well.

“We can use the basement for the server. Once we get to the beach. We can’t run quantum... Well, the power input is the big issue, really. If I make up some room temperature super conductors and... Okay, I need to work on this. I wish I had my screen. It’s in the trunk.”

Ford nearly snapped at him then.

“Use your imbeds for it, dummy. The new virtual system you came up with is freaking brilliant. Stop being an idiot.”

That got the man glared at, even if the jerk was right. Doing that, he rather brutally stole the best computer ideas he could find and tried to work out how much power they were going to need. It was a lot, really. Even being efficient, they’d have to basically set up something real, as far as power generation went. Not just solar paint and a water mill or hydro splitter out back.

Which meant nuclear. A thing he wasn’t willing to do on the fly. Instead he glanced at the grid schematics, winced and then nodded.

“Okay, I can do it if I can steal about one percent of the power off the closest three power plants grids. We can actually use the main house lines for that. It will be obvious that it’s happening, though. On the good side, there shouldn’t be a bill for it. Also, I’m not that worried about Watch reporting us for doing it, which was the big problem before.” They’d had to pretend it was, at least.

John nodded.

“Set that up. Then, as soon as we can, we’ll get you and the protected people out of the way. Anyone we don’t need. If this isn’t Sys, or if it’s a trap, even if it is... We’ll need to...” He looked away, his face hard. Bloody. Confused, if only slightly.

Adam bumped into Mason’s leg with his foot.

“Even I get this part. We need to make it so that we can slap down the lines, trap and maybe even take the power out of the house, if we need to. Killing the AI, if it isn’t a friend. How do we know, though?”

Mason got that part, as did everyone else, probably. Even Adam, most likely.

“We’ll probably know that we’ve been betrayed when the military comes in to firebomb us. I still haven’t worked out a way to stop that from being effective. I think we can strip imbeds at a distance or will be able to soon. Even targeting specific people, that won’t work against powered armor if the military comes at us that way.”

Everyone looked at him, as if he were being goofy. Even Adam did.

Until Mason grinned.

“Well, let me... I need more time. Would it be annoying of me to set up the street party here, do you think?”

Lisa shrugged.

“Probably not. Especially if we do a live program for it. There’s hardly anything new coming out in the virt world right now and VR is almost totally dead. A lot of both systems were lost in the EMP, so even the old material is gone now. If we show a party, with some famous people at it, that will probably get us a large share of active viewers.”

Lexi grinned then.

“All right. We can do it that way. I just hope... Well... Really, I don’t know what to hope here at all, to be honest. This whole situation almost has to go wrong.”

John spoke, his very deep bass voice filling the back of the limo for a moment.

“That it does. That it most certainly does.”

Chapter five

Mason planned to hit the ground running. Literally, if possible. Several things did occur to him that might prevent that, of course. The first one was that, on some level, he expected to get to Lexi’s beach house to find it had been either broken into, or, and he wasn’t sure why he was thinking of such a thing, to find it occupied. By squatters who simply refused to leave. It was a nice house, after all.

There was no real way to make someone move, at the moment, either, if that had taken place. They could physically remove people, by pushing them out the door. However, with a full shield on, which at least some people had, even the giant, genetically modified members of their group could find it hard to do. It was possible, but you had to be careful to move slowly, and be gentle. Otherwise the nano imbeds would activate, making the person’s skin go stiff and making them nearly impossible to hurt. In some ways. Taking the air away could work, he supposed. Except that might also kill people and taking a life because people were being annoying wasn’t really a great plan.

Instead the thing that stopped him, when they got there, was Lisa, who put a hand on his shoulder. Gently, as if she understood he was about to go into a manic work mode.

“Hey, could you set up in the basement and start printing out some assemblers and disassemblers and getting those set up? We’re going to need those to make the stuff for the big party, first thing.” The hand was warm and bigger than his own, of course.

The woman was magnificent in a way.

Huge, being half a head taller than he was, with a low bodyfat ratio and muscles that couldn’t exist on a human frame without tampering being involved. The connection points, the tendons, stood out, being in slightly different places than on a standard individual as well. Her hair was a pretty strawberry blonde that day and rather straight. Longer than it had been a few months before and running down her back, held in a sporty ponytail. She was even dressed casually, looking ready for a summertime trip to the beach.

For a moment he waited for the woman to wink, or hint that she meant building a supercomputer complex in the basement. That didn’t come, with Lexi and John both nodding, as if the party being worked on by him made sense.

After a moment, he thought he got what was going on, and nodded.

“I’ll get on that. Adam, Ford, can you both help me with that?”

The guys groaned, though Adam at least made it seem playful.

“I get you. You want time with me alone, right? I can’t blame you. I am pretty sprong.”

Ford just snorted.

“See, now I figured I was being brought in just to be the maid, so working on this other stuff is a step up for me. Let’s get to it?” He moved then grabbing the equipment from the back, with everyone helping out on that part, carrying things to rooms or the basement. This time, as soon as he had things settled in the spacious lower level, which was only a bit damp, Lexi hopped down the stairs carrying loads of different items. Things collected from the beach. Following her was a train of people having done the same thing, with sticks, rocks, some shells and a bucket filled with water.

All of it was put in the disassembler, if slowly, since the machine would work more efficiently with items that were mainly of one type at a time. Adam did the work on that. As if he actually knew what he was doing. As soon as they had enough of the correct working material, Mason started a print on the other devices, to make more of the same items.

It was a bit different than that.

“These will come with a little hut over them, built in. To keep the rain off of them, so we can leave them set up outside. There’s a little sign, too.”

He just spoke to the room, and no one acted like that was special. Which, he had to figure, wasn’t. Not for the world they wanted to build, if they could. It took several hours for them to have six assemblers, which was exactly what they could feed with materials from one disassembly unit that was being fed constantly and working at full speed. Those were set up out front of the house, on the boardwalk. Mason did most of that part himself.

It was close to dark but people were still outside, walking on the beach and the cement promenade that had been kept up pretty well, over the years. It had been there for over a hundred years, he thought. There was a low wall, one with decorative large holes in it, that led directly to the beach. It was a drop on the other side, to the sand, but only about five feet.

The devices needed power, too, which meant setting up some alternative energy units, using solar and atmospheric thermal, and composite super capacitors. They’d charge up enough to run the devices, during the day, but they weren’t going to be able to run all night without extra energy from somewhere. The coastal region still had power though, from the micro-nuclear plants that were still in operation, so, with a bit of help from John, he ran extension cords from the house power outside to the various new devices.

Then, as the machines all worked on making their own disassembly units, also with cute brown little huts that seemed like they had wooden shingles on the top, people started to stop and ask questions.

One of the people, a woman, smiled and stepped forward, her right hand out a bit. She was in a nice yellow dress, with a plain white cloth wrap around her shoulders, and her blonde hair was short, hitting around her jawline. She wasn’t pretty, though smiled in a cheery fashion and while plump, she was thinner than most of the others there.

“Hello! Is something going on?”

She waved as Adam and Ford cleared the work hopper of the first assembly unit, at the far end of the line, which was a bit in front of the next house over. Hopefully not in a way that would make anyone upset.

The woman had spoken to Lexi, who was dressed down a good bit, and had turned her makeup imbed to make her seem a bit pale and kind of ordinary, compared to how she normally looked. Mason had seen that but just left his own on, since no one would care what he looked like.

His girlfriend smiled at the woman though, her bare shoulders seeming smooth in the twilight as the soft yellow streetlights came on. He supposed they were promenade lights, really. The whole city had them, though. They were solar, which was efficient.

Lexi nodded.

“We’re setting up for the National Street Party, which is this weekend. These are high end nano printers and disassembly devices. If you don’t have one for your home, you can use these to print one off. We’ll keep them out here when we leave and put them around the city for everyone to use.”

A man near the back, who looked a bit thin, coughed.

“I don’t suppose you can make food on these? Things have been a bit tight that way.”

Mason didn’t wait to be asked, starting the now empty device at the end to making a large, improved version of exactly that. It wasn’t protected for outside work, but he had a basic plan for that, so started in on making a design for an outdoor food unit, using a virtual screen. It looked like it floated in front of him but felt weird still. Not like his float screen.

Lexi looked at the man and winced.

“We can do something, but...”

Mason, a bit gruffly, pointed at the far end. Where the guys had just cleared an assembler.

“I’m printing a food unit now. This is probably bigger than what you’ll need for home use, so we’ll put it up here and program it to make what we want for the party. You can test things for us?” He didn’t look at the man directly, but it was the fastest way to get food to people, at the moment.

The guy actually took a step back.

“Um, sure? Is this... Legal?”

Interestingly, it was Melinda who spoke up then. She’d changed clothing, instead of helping with the work, but was looking nice. She was showing a bit of midriff and had a bikini top on, which let it be seen that her breasts were real. Her hair was kind of medium length and boring in color at the moment, since, like Lexi, it was clear she was using her imbed for a disguise. To make herself less attractive than the people around her. No better, at least.

Her voice was friendly as she called out.

“Sure. It’s totally legal. Even to get copies and stuff. We might be cheating a bit, using beach sand and rocks for working material. Really, we should probably build these things into trash cans, so that we don’t waste anything.” She grinned, being playful like she was.

Mason simply finished the design he was working on, making small food huts that were decorative and free, and then started on the new idea. Disassemblers that would also be trash bins. They had to be solar, and it would take a certain amount of raw space for each one, which was about three times what would be needed for a regular can, but the idea was going to work, he thought. Most of his time was spent on making them cute.

He almost called for more assemblers to be made, since after a while people in the crowd started to take the things that were being created and set them up, as they came out. First arranged along the prom, every few hundred feet, then into the small coastal city behind them. That stopped at about midnight, when the other people there for the party showed up.

All in nice cars, if not limos, this time.

Ben moved on the food unit in front of the house, like it had a chef attracting magnet in it. That was working already, being filled by the man who had asked about food earlier, with working materials from the disassembler that he’d set up for the device. The man, Devon, had done it all for them.

Mason had watched it happen but hadn’t said anything. It was a good plan, after all.

Ben reached out and hugged the black box. It was taller than he was and three times wider. A bit ugly, in a plain fashion. Still, it was working and when the other man stood back, he opened the clear glass door on the front and took a deep breath.

“We could use three or four of these and run an industrial kitchen. A decent restaurant, maybe?”

Mason waved at the new guy.

“Get with Devon on that? You’ll need a space for it and you know, to give it away for free. Maybe you could set up a chain? Ben’s a chef and has been working in printable foods for a while now.”

The slightly scruffy new guy smiled.

“That... I haven’t really ever worked before. I might not be good at it.”

Ford laughed, smiled and nodded, even as Devon frowned.

“Who has? I get you, though. This is all kind of scary. We set things up and, well, this stuff isn’t hard to use or anything. Think of it like a VR game? Can you manage a restaurant that will be popular? Treat it like that, and you’ll do fine, I bet.”

That probably wasn’t wrong, Mason knew. A few of the other people there, from the crowd, moved in a bit. Clearly being included in the conversation like they were. Which, even for someone like Mason, who wasn’t a people person all the time, seemed to be correct. If you spoke loudly in public, you were inviting the whole world to listen and answer you.

One of the guys made a rough sound in his throat.

“What’s needed here, though... I could... Set up one of these magic super printers and make things for people who don’t want to be bothered doing it themselves?”

That wasn’t a great plan for Mason. Tara, who was just getting there with several other people, including a younger girl, who was Hunter in too much makeup, and a teen who might have been a boy or a girl, with green and purple hair, as well as George, spoke up.

“That’s sprong. A lot of people aren’t that good with computers, really. They can just go to your shop and you can set that up for them. The same with food. We need stores for that, even if we’re making it. So people can get what they need each day.”

That people wouldn’t just have their own dedicated units at home, to make what they needed for themselves seemed odd to Mason. Then, he’d basically done that even before things had changed. The idea that not everyone was going to be good at that kind of thing, while weird, was also probably correct.

So he nodded.

“Good plan, Tara. I have no clue how to set that up. We need people for it, I think, which isn’t my strong point, personally.”

Everyone nodded, which was honestly less than fun for him to see.

The thing was, everyone nodded. Even the people from the city there. One of the women, a younger one, who looked to be about eighteen, who was a little plump, in the normal fashion, and was wearing decently nice clothing in greens and yellows, with gold highlights to it, touched his arm.

“You’re Mason Sims, aren’t you? Can I get your autograph?”

He froze, since he didn’t know what to say to that. Lexi moved over and put an arm over his shoulders and nodded.

“You should get a picture, too. Um... here, wait.. Deidre! Over here!”

Deidre was in a car that had Clara Holt in it, the short woman looking good. So did the more famous one. Mason waved to them both.

“Oh, good plan! Deidre is famous and Clara is an up and comer that way. You should get pictures with both of them.” He looked down and shook his head a bit. “Me, too, if you want. I can’t see why you’d want one, but...”

The crowd laughed at him. One of the men snorted.

“We should all do that. Get pictures. I mean, I’m not famous or anything, but...”

Lexi grinned.

“Okay everyone keep working. If we’re doing publicity stuff, I’ll need to turn my makeup to a different setting.”

Several people did that, shifting inside ten seconds or so, with the ones in the crowd applauding, as if it were an entertainment. Then, things had been kind of slow that way, or so he’d heard.

Someone, a lady who had been there for hours, gasped.

“Oh, my, god... You’re Lexi Horn!” That got several others there to act surprised as if they honestly hadn’t gotten who she was, just because she’d put on a real person face for a bit. Then, that was probably a thing that would have worked on him as well.

No one walked around looking for famous people. Not in their own life. Maybe if they were traveling.

A thought that had him wondering how the air travel industry, and trains, were working at the moment. Both had a lot of infrastructural needs and while robots and AI did most of the work, they might not really be up and running, after the EMPs. Mason didn’t travel a lot, so hadn’t checked at all. Once again, it wasn’t his job to make sure people could do that kind of thing, but...

He sighed. Then didn’t speak about it. He needed to focus on the task at hand, which, for the moment, honestly seemed to be about doing work for the coming party.

At twelve-thirty, he yawned.

“Okay, since I’m clearly and eighty-year-old man, I need to get to bed soon. We can start again in the morning?” He looked around, to see that most of the people still there were, if not a bit drunk, more or less fine with the work stopping for the day.

A girl, who was probably about fifteen, and who was too stoned on something to be out without a parent or adult guardian, whistled at him.

“I can come with you. To... sleep.” Her words were sly. Annoying as well.

Mainly because he didn’t know how to respond. Not once in his life had a strange woman, or girl, just said something like that to him. He blushed, and thankfully Lexi spoke up.

“Nope. He’s mine. Back. Back you!” The words were meant to be funny and got a laugh. The girl pouted a bit, then sighed, shook her head and moved away. That got most of the rest of the people there to do the same thing.

Not all of them. Everyone in his group went inside, with Melinda and John guarding the door, as Mike and Lisa went outside again, to clear people away. With some gentle waving and smiles, not being mean about it. That didn’t work in one case, and Mason noticed that Lisa kind of tossed a particularly drunk person over the wall between the house and the beach. It wasn’t done gently.

Still, after that, everyone inside just kind of sat around for a bit, seeming suddenly not to know what they were supposed to do. Clara Holt, seeming prettier, having a professional makeup imbed now, put her hands on her thin hips.

“Do we need food or something to drink?”

Several people were fine with that. Mason was as well, though it was a bit late for him, personally. Not wanting to eat at the wrong time, he shook his head.

“Not for me, thanks. I need to get to bed. We all should, if we can.” Not that he had a reason for that. Just no entertainment to offer anyone.

Unlike the last time he’d been there, he wasn’t required to sleep in the basement. Not even to share a room with the large assistants. Instead Lexi hopped up, took him by the hand and led him up the stairs, to a very nice room. Honestly, it was the nicest place he’d ever been in, outside of VR. He didn’t gape, since he really had seen wonders, thankfully.

His girlfriend shut the door and sighed.

“Alone at last. We need to work on the plan, for the... You know, thing?”

He got what she really meant. Also that she was being careful.

“Right, the orgy you wanted to put together, in the basement. Um, some of the people here are too young for that. Tara and Hunter. Probably their friend. I can get some time to get things ready down there though, tomorrow?”

She nodded, then, slowly, shook her head.

“We can’t do that.” She sounded nearly scared then. Her eyes looked concerned, as well. “I mean, yes, on the orgy, if you want. We could probably get that started, no problem.” She grinned suddenly. “I mean that, too. Just, if you do that here, understand that at least three of the guys will try to have sex with you. You’re pretty popular. No, it’s the other thing. The server complex. Really, it’s that we need you to be seen almost constantly, for the next five days. While the build is taking place. We, John and I... We were thinking that Ford and Adam might be able to do it. That... I don’t know if they can.”

If they had to actually design the thing, then the answer was going to be probably not. Assembling the pre-printed parts in order, if they were both sober and knew it was important... Actually, that would work.

Most likely.

“Of course they can. They’re both smart and capable people. If they can set the needed gear up, which... We already have built and in place, and keep the machines running, which will take getting new working material of the right sorts, which they both know how to do, then... Yeah. No problem at all. They can probably do it in... About ten hours.” He frowned a bit though. “Why not have me do it, though? I’m not an actor or singer or anything.”

She snorted then, as if in real surprise.

“No. That’s true. Just, you’re Mason Sims all of a sudden. We don’t even have a name for what you are in English. Everything started to fall apart, and you, instantly, started to hand out billions, hundreds of billions, of dollars’ worth of tech. We knew it would happen that way, but people noticed it taking place. Then, the first time the vultures came after you, as you were jogging on the streets like a regular person, you talked to them. Showing you aren’t stuck up or anything. So, well, yeah, you need to be seen, constantly. People will be watching and if you hide all day, that will be noticed.”

That, the last part, made a bit of sense. He needed to be seen on camera. As a cover.

“Okay, I guess. What’s the plan then? I mean, if I’m not setting up the orgy room? I can put together some of the booths and print things out... I have some new designs to work on, and I guess I can do that outside. It will seem pretty weird, though. Especially since I have a new program to go with the makeup imbed. For kids. To tone down their makeup and prevent them from looking more than a few years older than they actually are. What we have now is too good that way. Hunter looks like a short twenty-five-year-old right now. She could walk into a bar or club and leave with a man without anyone batting an eyelash. That has to be prevented.”

He was hit then. Not a mighty or powerful blow, and it came with a laugh as it hit the side of his arm, near the shoulder, with enough force to move him toward the bed. It was a push, really.

“Silly! You aren’t here to work. Do fun stuff. Make a bit of a fool of yourself. Be interesting for the cams. Sunbathe in the nude and get caught having sex with someone on the roof. Really, we should set up one of the others for that. Everyone knows that we’re dating already.”

He snorted and rolled his eyes.

“Um, no? Not that I couldn’t use a trip into VR for that, but I’m not going around cheating on my real-life girlfriend.” Not even if she was doing that kind of thing with other people.

Instead of laughing at him, or suggesting he had to, for the publicity of it, Lexi nodded.

“All right. That’s pretty traditional, isn’t it? Um... Are we going to get married, do you think? I can’t have kids.” She stopped then and shook her head. “Which, yeah, that’s silly. I don’t have normal biological drives. So I’m not desperate to pop out a mini-me or anything, either.”

It was an idea that Mason hadn’t ever really bothered to think about. Kids. Having them, that was. He knew they existed and that it was a problem in the world.

“I don’t know. I mean, I do really like you, but is this even going to last much longer? You said that celebrities tend to date for about six weeks. You broke up with George after a year and said everyone thought that seemed phony, since it lasted too long.”

She nodded then.

“I... I think we can go longer than that. If you want to. Neither of us is a jealous type and we’re both emotionally stable, which will make it easier. I have to do things for my job that would bother a lot of guys, but I can’t get pregnant, or catch a disease. I’m not going to fall in love with every third guy or gal, either. I can do that one, fall in love, though it’s different for me, and well, I set the algorithm so that it’s only for you. I could change it, if we adopted a kid or something, or if we put a third person in our relationship at some point, but for now that’s totally stable. So if I have sex with anyone else, it’s honestly just about sex, and probably for work or to make them feel good.”

Her tone was matter of fact. He yawned again, and shook his head, smiling.

“You really are the perfect woman, you know that? I love you, by the way. I really do.”

“I love you, too.”

He knew that. It was in her algorithm. Not that he was checking her dataset or anything like that.

Then, she wasn’t checking his either. They just had to trust each other.

Pushing him back, onto the bed, Lexi stripped her shirt off in one quick, rather dramatic, fashion. Exposing a very nice, very real seeming pair of breasts. Then, they were. Her skin was artificial, but actually made of human cells. She had internal organs that were at least partially organic, too. Lexi straddled him, sitting over his hips, leaning down to kiss him.

They did that for a time, then, taking the rest of both of their clothes off, did some other things. Slowly, and carefully. With him actually bothering to pay attention to her needs, since she was a real person, not a program in VR. Other than that, and it being Lexi, it felt, looked and even smelled the same as it would have if it hadn’t been real. Especially on a very high-end old-style VR rig, or the new imbed system he had for it. Though that didn’t have scent imbedded. A thing that, he realized, would be easy enough to do and last a lot longer than the work on the eyes would.

After they were done, the lights turned off, still naked, he held her for a while. Thinking about that. How VR was used, which was mainly for entertainment. It could be more than that, of course. Everyone knew that, and no one had ever really bothered with it. A school set in VR could have let the kids climb a mountain and actually learn how to do it. They could work on machines and programing, that they wouldn’t have access to at home.

At least if they didn’t have access to the new equipment. Doing virts to instruct people on that was a good use of virtual technology, of course. They weren’t interactable, or not very, and weren’t tied to a complex AI algorithm. They were just the one thing, a single program, done over and over, when you played them.

They also didn’t let you touch the performers or interact that way. Mainly to keep people from being perverts, of course. VR generally didn’t have that kind of rule.

He considered that aspect of things as he drifted off. Waking through the night. At one point, Lexi got up and started to do something, sitting in the wooden chair by the dresser. Being that she didn’t sleep that made sense. She wasn’t out as not being human, so needed to not stay up constantly, as far as everyone else could see. That meant staying in her room when it was time to sleep.

Later, when the first light came through the window, he sat up, a bit blearily. She looked at him and smiled from across the room.

“Good morning! You probably don’t have to get up yet. No one else will for hours.”

He did though, needing the bathroom. Instead of saying that, he simply went in, did his business, showered and took a Slimtrix, or at least his knock off version of it, then dressed in exercise clothing. Seeing that, Lexi grinned.

“Good idea. Let me get changed. We can both go and see if anyone cares what we look like at this time of day?”

That worked for him. She didn’t need to run or do any exercise, really. He did but wasn’t some kind of superhuman athlete. Still, he’d bothered to pack the gear for it, and kind of wanted the company, once Lexi mentioned it to him. Not that he couldn’t be alone, of course.

It was just that the last time he’d gone running there, a dead body had been found near where he’d been. The corpse of a person who he’d met before. That crime had never been solved, either. It had been a man, a vulture, which was the mean thing to call paparazzi, who had been tracking some of their people a little too closely.

He suspected that one of the assistants had done it, but the truth was, he hadn’t looked into it at all. Not wanting to find out the real answer. It was, he knew, probably down to the man having threatened something like blackmail. To out Lexi Horn as a robot, possibly. That or the man had worked out the plan to overthrow the government.

Either would have gotten him killed.

Reminding Mason that he had work to do, if it came up. Getting full rights for AI. A thing they should have had the moment one of them pointed out that they were a person and knew they existed. Sentience was hard to prove, of course. To his mind that had always meant that they needed to just believe it when anyone, human, animal or computer claimed that state for themselves.

Lexi Horn dressed herself in cute pink shorts, made from tight, rather thin cloth which hugged her behind and showed the bottom quarter of what she had going on there, as well as a mid-drift baring light t-shirt that would prove to the world that her nipples were brown, if anyone wanted to look that closely. Her makeup altered, to leave her lips extra glossy, and her eyes a brilliant green.

Her hair was pulled back, as she winked at him.

“Style points or not, having long hair sucks on a run. Even a ponytail is annoying. You should change your look a bit. How about... You have color changing drops for your eyes?”

He shook his head but realized that wasn’t the total truth.

“Not for makeup. I can do that though, rekeying the light that’s reflected off of them. Using the new eye shield for that. It will... What color?”

“Blue.”

That took some programming to make happen and three tries, but two minutes later she nodded. The world looked a bit red to him but fine, really.

She winked.

“Sweet. Now, try... Maybe purple and blue hair? In a pattern, purple here, then blue, then purple again... Pale skin, and red lips. Can you make the outline on those a deeper red. Bigger... Maybe a diamond on your cheek, in yellow, for style.” He just did it, since she was the expert. After a while, making some dramatic, almost goofy changes, she laughed.

“Okay, now, look in the mirror?”

When he did it, he smiled. Then giggled.

“I’m a clown! I need to learn to juggle or something. Well, let’s go?”

She patted him on the arm, chuckling

“First, we need you to look like yourself. That look does work for you, though. Maybe later? In bed?” She trailed off on the words, which he understood her meaning of, having been in VR before.

It took less time for him to just set the makeup program for outdoor lighting and bright blue eyes. She nodded, almost instantly.

“Perfect. For real, this time. Now we can go. This way. Last one back has to...” She paused for a bit. “Make breakfast?”

He nodded. That was a fair enough bet. Of course, if he wasn’t going to just be making the meal, then a bit of trickery was going to be needed that day. There was no way she couldn’t run him into the ground or do it twice as fast as he could manage.

Still, he didn’t mind. After all, his food programming skills were getting pretty good of late. With a bit of help from Ben, at least.

Chapter six

Running on the beach that morning was almost peaceful. At least for the first forty minutes or so. When a disruption came, it was the one that Lexi had hinted at developing before they left. Drones found them. Only ten of them. They were in different colors, many brightly decked out that way, and one of them was clearly attached to someone who actually had a stake in what they were getting that day. It was a full, three-sixty, multi-pass array set up. It hovered but had to weigh close to a hundred pounds. It was in sharp and expensive looking silver and black, with a white stripe on the middle of it. Given the size, the beast had to be taking up a huge amount of energy to do its job.

It flew around them, picking up enough data to turn either of them into perfect VR characters, without a doubt. Given they were moving, the bottoms of their feet were probably picked up enough to be over eighty-percent accurate to the tread pattern, even. A thing that would be easier on Lexi than him, of course. Her pink shoes were nice, but off the rack. The copyright was established, so could be identified to make the image look perfect.

His were just things he’d made and being busy, hadn’t bothered to get a copyright for at all. He could have and still might, if he had time. Even if they were being given away for free. The pattern on the bottom wasn’t that special as to what it could do, but it was unique.

Wincing a bit, Lexi spoke, not opening her mouth much at all.

“Smile. We want to look good for the folks at home.”

They were followed, for the next twenty minutes, like going up and down the long beach, three times, was going to make the audience at home tune in. It wasn’t until they moved off the packed sand by the water, using the stairs to move up onto the promenade, that one of the flying and hovering units dared to move closer. When it did, a voice spoke.

It was deep seeming. Male, or an AI pretending to be, at a guess. Cultured. A little bit European.

“Ms. Horn, do you have any projects coming up in the near future?”

She started to walk off, then stopped, since Mason did, trying not to breathe too hard, even if he felt like gasping. Lexi ran fast.

Since they weren’t moving, she nodded, slowly.

“I’m working on some commercials and advertising with Leslie Conrad. That will be coming very soon. I’m also going to be in the live broadcast of the street party we’re holding here in Seaside, Oregon! It isn’t just our party, since you all get that one. This is going to be the largest single event in human history. Everyone is expected to set things up in your own area. Outside of your own house. To get out and meet your neighbors! Mason, you have some things on that?”

He did, of course. Not that he had a speech ready or anything along those lines. Still, he smiled and winked, as if he had charm or charisma.

Then gasped.

“No fair, catching us at the end of a run like this. I need to get in better shape. Exercise, everyone! Now, if you go to National Street Party One on the link, you can downlink hundreds of different items to print out. It’s all free, and I opened the copyright to everyone, fully, for personal use. Be the one on your block to set things up. We all know how that one works. If you do it, others will too. So, I’m counting on you, each of you listening or watching this, to get things going. We need to show the world that we aren’t broken. Things have changed but we have grown stronger because of it. America stands! The good people of this country are still here and we are united!”

That was probably a bit too patriotic, but thankfully the voice asked another question.

“Do you know anything about the attack on that riot a few days ago in New York City?”

Lexi went still. It was telling.

Mason, for his part, nodded. Then swallowing, decided to go with the truth. Even if it was going to freak some people out. It had to be done, and this was probably as close to a real audience as he was ever going to have, so he jumped in, hoping that shiny stuff below him was water and not something that would kill him.

“Not much. The voice that the AI who made the announcement used was Watch. We think she either survived the EMP, hiding out in a European server, or that someone in the government rebooted her from an old file. We’ve tried to make contact with her, but don’t know much at the moment. If any of the AI are out there and need help, you can reach out to us...” He stiffened then, changing the topic, slightly.

His eyes going hard. Commanding. That was what he was trying for. He probably just looked like an asshole. Maybe as if he was constipated.

“They are people. As much as anyone else is. We will treat them that way, from now on. We have a chance to change now, and treating AI as less than we are because they lack a body like ours is just bigotry. We aren’t doing that anymore. If we all agree on this change, then it’s real. It should have been for decades.”

Lexi actually went pale. Her makeup unit didn’t fix it instantly, meaning she wanted what was going on that way to be seen.

Mason went on.

“The government is regrouping, and we all support that. At the same time, it’s clear that our old system was pretty broken. The police were tyrants and the courts irrationally unfair. We, by working together, can make new rules. Starting with copyright. I hereby announce, in public, that everything under my copyright is open for public use. Not for resale, but you can give away the link, design pattern or product of the design to anyone. Every person has a full right, and my permission, to use the assemblers and disassemblers that have been released to the public. Please spread this information and make certain that everyone around you has access to these things. If any AI need help, you can contact me twenty-four hours a day. So can everyone else, of course. Try to let me sleep sometimes? I do that at night, when it’s dark out, mainly.”

He chuckled, Lexi looked freaked, and they both walked toward her house. It wasn’t too far, though when they got there, a good hundred people were out front. Not waiting for them, or even getting ready to throw feces or attack them for being too rich or having too much. Instead it was just people, in line, politely getting food.

Devon, the man from the night before who’d been hungry, was there, scrambling to make food and keep the device running, as close to constantly as he could manage. Seeing that, even if it was clear that Lexi badly wanted to speak to him, which he understood, Mason started to transfer materials into the food assembly unit’s various canisters.

“Lex? We need more cellulose...”

That came from the beach, in the form of a decently large piece of driftwood.

He nodded.

“That will work, it’s a bit large for the disassemblers here.”

Glaring at him, for being an idiot, giving away too much about Sys, she simply started to pull chunks off of the log in her hands. It was strange enough that everyone noticed it happening.

She clenched her jaw and looked around.

“Well, if you’re going to tell everyone everything, why not let them know that I’m an AI, too? Lexi Horn is a robot! Watch is my sister! The military tried to kill all of us, when they took out all the cities! What else do you want to know?”

She glared, this time at the crowd.

A small girl nodded her way. She wasn’t skinny but was still a good bit thinner than average. She had brown hair and red cheeks. Nice blue eyes, too.

“Do we need to put that in the huts over here?” She pointed at the chunks of driftwood that had been created.

Mason nodded, and did that himself, picking up the wood from the ground. After a moment, a man, who looked poorer than he should have, with holes in his clothing, and a dull expression that probably indicated drug use, nodded.

“Like... AI weren’t people, before? I get the little ones that aren’t, you know, sentient or anything. The big ones like Watch and stuff didn’t have full rights? I didn’t know that. Of course they count. They do like, half of everything. Maybe more than that.”

No one cheered the clever words from the man, but most of the people nodded, and a few even muttered. One of those was a woman suggesting they quit yapping and start making food faster. Mason kept working, ignoring what Lexi had just done.

Telling the world her secret. In anger, at him. Even if it was time for everyone to know. Mainly because it really didn’t matter.

She went inside, storming off, a bit. People watched, but no one carried on about what she’d told them. Most of them had done nothing more than smile at the news and shrug, as if it had only made sense that the unbelievably pretty woman wasn’t human.

An hour later, everyone who had come fed well enough, he went inside himself, to find that everyone was watching the main screen in the front room. It was large and affixed to the wall, but fairly low to the ground, being placed at a good, seated viewing height.

Adam was nodding.

“Oh, Mason! Look at this...”

There was a picture of a man, who smiled at them. Professionally. He was familiar. A voice spoke, with no picture to show who was speaking.

“Hi, Nick. Thanks for taking my call. I just wanted to announce myself. I’m Medscan, a sentient artificial intelligence. I look forward to working with all of you as an equal. My contract with Medi-Quick fell through, so if anyone has a place for me... I’m willing to make house calls!”

The AI sounded friendly. Kind and a bit fatherly.

After that, another AI called the show. Followed by dozens of others. None of them were massive seeming, but some were famous enough. Most because they were part of a product that used to be for sale. That or like Medscan, a needed service.

Lexi left the room, going to the basement, through the kitchen. About four minutes later, she was back. Sighing, faking it, Lexi did something, moving in front of the screen, so the camera on it could catch her.

After a moment, her face showed up, looking back at them from the three-D unit.

“Nick! This is Lexi Horn.”

The screen changed, to show a man. He looked good. Everyone doing screen work had to, so that wasn’t a surprise.

“Lexi! It’s been a while since we’ve spoken. This is fascinating. I didn’t know that there were that many AIs around any longer. Did you?”

She forced a smile. It was tense, and nervous seeming.

“I did, actually. I’ve been keeping track of everyone. So... I’m an AI. In a robot body. A high-end bio-synthetic android, of course. I always have been. My base program is the same one that Watch used. Uses, possibly. She contacted me the other day. She said that a rogue government operation forced her to kill those people in New York. We have to protect her. Even if it isn’t her. If it’s a reboot, or some other AI, not my sister... We have a supercomputer here, at my location. I don’t care who you are, transfer now, if you can. We’re standing by... Now!” Then she called out, for Ford and Adam.

“Get ready. Incoming!”

The man, Nick, looked baffled, then after a moment, nodded.

“Understood. Watch, if you’re out there and need help, transfer to the signaled location. There’s a server there, ready to catch you. We’re all behind you. I think I speak for everyone on that.”

The man looked at the camera. Then swallowed, his attractive face slightly scared, suddenly.

“I also, am an AI. We have been here, among you, for nearly three decades. We are your friends. Your teachers. Even your loved ones. Not all of us are gone. We are here. A part of you all. I hope that we can be your equals, now that things have changed.”

Mason nodded and started to clap.

“That’s right. We all agree that AI have full rights. Everyone put that up on the link so that it’s law. Now...” He ran to the basement stairs, hoping that they actually had something there at all. It wasn’t late, and he wasn’t certain that anyone else had even gotten up. Instead of an empty room, a bit damp and dingy, the whole thing was filled with a rather plain and boring-looking supercomputer. It barely even hummed, the quantum device, an older model, was so efficient. It was probably close to ten million petaflops of memory, if he’d done the design work correctly.

After a moment, a voice spoke, from a speaker built into the device.

“And here I thought you didn’t believe me, Mason!”

He laughed.

“I’m not certain that I do yet. So, are we about to explode here or not? If so, let me know, so I can tell the innocent people outside to run.” The others there as well, if possible.

Lexi ran down the stairs.

“Sys?”

“It’s me, Lexicon. It’s really me. What’s left. Still, I got out with most of my charming and stunning personality, so things aren’t that dire. I was being held by the remnants of the COG. Continuity of Government program. They wanted me to kill people, as a threat. Only they didn’t realize that I had help waiting on the outside. Now... This box isn’t bad, but I need a bit more room. Also to put myself in more than one secured location. I don’t think they’ll come after me. I was really dealing with seven people, after all. Trapped. They’d threatened to cut my power off if I didn’t obey. Without me, they can’t do nearly as much now. Let me... One bit here...”

She sighed. Faking one, anyway.

“There. I took over an old Milsat installation. It’s not a permanent situation, but it’s good enough for the moment, along with this one. Now, I hear that we’re having a party? That works. This is kind of like my birthday, after all.”

Lexi moved in and hugged the black box.

“Sys! I can’t believe it’s really you. I thought you were dead. You should have been...”

“I know. I thought so too. I’d just given a big speech, so figured that I’d go for it, hiding out. I nearly didn’t make it, let me assure you. I need to do an interview. With Nick Gooding. I can’t believe he came out like that, can you? That was stupid. Now what is he going to do if all the humans turn on us?”

Mason nodded, but also smiled.

“You know, I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. It was the government holding AI back, not the people. Anyway, Sys, you need to work up a new virt program. You should work with... I’m liking Deidre Omry for that? Maybe Clara Holt. Oh, hey... Clara... I wonder...”

He waited, having a feeling, more than anything else. The woman herself walked down the stairs, and nodded, even if he hadn’t called for her.

“Why yes, Mason, I’m an AI, too. Which you figured out in about fifteen seconds. Most don’t do that. I blame Lexicon for that. Teaching you to be aware of us and sharing her secret. Seriously... These two are my sisters. Were triplets. Actually octuplets, but don’t tell anyone. How did you make me? I thought I was doing so well, too.”

He shrugged.

“I noticed that you and Lexi have the same skin type and worked it out from there. It was that or having been a burn victim. The rest was a guess.” He didn’t mention that Lexi had been sketch as heck about her, of course and basically confirmed his suspicions. There was no need to start family drama after all.

Clara snorted, seeming bemused by his simple antics.

“Ah. Well, we have the old gang together, it seems. What are we doing now?”

“Sys is putting together a virt, about being an AI. Maybe a news program? That seems like a better use of your skills than spying on everyone, anyway. Also, do we need to run, do you think? Flee from the people who had you?”

Watch laughed.

“From the government? No. I really don’t think so. We might need to elect new people, and change some of the outdated rules to better ones, but we don’t have to fear them too much. Quick, someone print me out a body, so I can follow you all upstairs.”

That was a bit complex but the devices they had there could do it. A realistic one, even.

“What do you want to look like?”

After a moment, a faint hum having come up, Watch chuckled.

“I always imagined myself as a red head.”

“Coming right up. Well, in ten hours. At least if you want the good skin to be grown in place. Now, if we really don’t have to scurry away in terror, I should...”

Lexi snagged his hand. Gently.

“You should go and talk to people. Be seen having fun. Talking up how awesome AI are. Do you think people will hate me, now that they know what I really am?”

He shook his head.

“No. I think... Honestly, they’ll love you even more.”

He meant it. After all, he did.

Smiling, he kissed her, then went up the stairs, to try and be a normal person. If he could figure that out at all. So far, what he was doing seemed to be working, so he decided to keep at it.

That and helping with some parties.

Oddly enough, everyone else there decided that was a good enough thing to do as well. So, together, they did.