Chapter 8
Precis Neumann lay on her stomach on top of her bed, sleep mask pushed up above her forehead, bunny slippers dangling from the ends of her toes, and screwdriver in hand. She hummed Back to Backwater Linga as she fiddled and fidgeted with a plastic slate covering up the interesting bits of a circuit board in front of her. She frowned as one of the screws stubbornly refused to come out. The screwdriver slipped from her hand as frustration mounted and her concentration waned.
Beside her bed, a small palmcomputer's monitor flickered blue. Jammed into its side port was a memory cartridge containing the latest upgrade to Bobot 3.0's programming. Bobot 3.0 sat on the floor in three different places, in three discrete pieces.
Precis slumped her head down onto the mattress. She felt more distracted from her work than ever before, but nothing could keep her sane amidst the turmoil of death and terror and a useless lover except for her true passion. She wondered if it was a good thing to be so emotionally dependent upon a project or an idea.
A yawn made its way from Precis's mouth, and her legs kicked into the air. The slipper fell off her right foot, and when it landed, it bumped a precariously balanced paperback copy of Advanced AI in Robotics at the side of the bed. The book tumbled onto the floor, and Precis sighed as she considered the possibility of a page bending irreparably.
Her mind wandered to the three pieces of Bobot scattered across the floor. The top of the head, where a series of parallel processing units directed the actions of the rest of the body, had its cover lolling on its hinge over to the side. Bobot's eyes, despite not being lit up, managed to look like they were pleading with Precis to trust them. Reddish brown stains still dotted Bobot's outer surface where a good rubbing with a bleach-soaked cloth had not quite gotten the cleanup job done.
Bobot's arms, connected to the separated midsection of the body, still clutched two swords fashioned to look like Ashton's. Precis had cleaned them as best she could, but until she could find some more polish, she had to accept that they were going to look like they had been used to kill something recently. In fact, they looked like they had been soaked up to the hilt in a vat of blood more than that they had been used in the traditional slashing motion of the Holo-Holograph move. Precis shuddered when she remembered what had happened to Dias.
Precis had made less of an effort to clean the lower extremities. The legs, attached to each other with a metallic hip, looked as red as before, except for the bottoms of the feet, which still remained shiny. Something about a set of disembodies robot feet sat strangely with Precis; she could not help but entertain the thought that they could get up and walk on their own. A vision of the three parts reassembling, charging her with the Ashton lookalike swords, and ripping her to pieces encroached upon her mind and set her hands shaking. She could only just summon enough mental discipline to imagine Bobot in a comical, nonthreatening dance routine, so as to keep herself from succumbing to irrational fear.
After all, was not everyone else afraid of a perfectly harmless lump of plastic, metal, and silicon? Why should she let herself become frightened? The killer had left her alone thus far, had he not?
But then, several people had died, and no amount of pointing to her own survival could make that go away. Precis slapped the top of her head with her free hand in reprimand for forgetting to think about her friends. What could she think? What could she even do other than lie in bed and work on Bobot's programming?
Yet one more time, she let an image of a brightly animated Bobot play through her mind, superimposed upon an image of Ashton practicing his Sword Dance technique, thinking to herself about just how she could get the two to synch up.
XXX
Ashton found sleep elusive. The fact that he had his own room did nothing to comfort him when he realized that someone had died on the floor not five feet away from where he lay. He still had yet to figure out what had happened to Ernest.
And Precis…
What would become of him and Precis? How could she shut him out? Was she even safe?
Ashton rolled over onto his stomach, forgetting for the moment that such movements upset Gyoro and Ururun. He grimaced as both dragon demons growled into his ears, in stereo. He quickly apologized, and that seemed to be enough for them, but he felt the guilt already welling around in his guy swell incrementally.
His legs began to itch, but he ignored them. His nose had gotten stuffy, and he let out a sneeze. The stress had worn down his immune system, Bowman had told him. As he reached for a tissue from the box on the nightstand, he thought that even though Precis was too mad at him to come out of her room, at least she couldn't catch his cold from all the way down the hall.
Ashton blew his nose, tossed the tissue away, and picked up a mug of hot cider he had sitting next to the tissue box. He liked the mug because of its roughly barrel-shaped contour, and he liked the cider because it cleared his head and his sinuses at the same time. He took a swig and plopped back down, breathing deeply and waiting for his eyelids to grow heavy.
XXX
Chisato Madison lay on her back, uncertain about whether she was awake or asleep, and if either, how long she had been in that state. Her room looked to her to be spinning, and she could see scenes of familiar people and objects playing out on the ceiling. Of course, they were illusions played by her troubled mind, but she only half knew that. They looked about as real as anything. The one with the shadowy, barrel-shaped figure lunging at her loomed particularly large in her mind. She was certain she had seen Bobot, and she thought it struck her with its swords. How, then, was she still alive?
And what was Bobot? Chisato's head began to ache particularly painfully for a few seconds, and she found herself unable to think clearly or even remember things that she knew should be obvious. Bobot, was that the machine Precis was building?
Chisato rolled over onto her stomach and closed her eyes. Patterns of colored light swirled around the backs of her eyelids, and her she heard a pounding noise inside her chest. Was there a hammer in there? Was it supposed to sound like that?
No, she thought, it was just a natural part of her body. Her heart. How could she have forgotten that? Had her mind left her completely?
Her arms flipped about at her sides, almost involuntarily. One came into contact with a bottle of cider Celine had left for her. When she regained some semblance of mental clarity, she brought the bottle over to her mouth and sipped at it. The hot liquid pouring down her throat comforted her and helped stabilize the world a bit. A few seconds later, though, she realized she had not put the bottle down, and she felt her mouth burning. She began to sweat.
Chisato put the cider back, and in doing so she noticed for the first time that someone had left a slip of paper next to it. Great, she thought, but can I read it? Holding it up in front of her face, she discovered that she could not; the words, already written in thin and only partially legible script, danced in front of her eyes, taunting her. She squinted and managed to make out a couple that were printed in larger, clearer letters than the rest, but she could not quite make a sentence out of what she saw.
Ernest and poison, she thought. No, Ernest was hanged. She had seen him. She had seen his body swinging back and forth from the railing, a human pendulum. She had seen someone else there, winding up the clock and setting its pendulum into motion.
Who was that other person, though? Was it the caretaker for the clocks? No, there wasn't a clock there. Just Ernest. What was wrong with her mind if she got a friend confused with a clock? Was she the one poisoned?
No, the note must have said Ernest was the one poisoned, because she only saw his name. If she had been poisoned, wouldn't she have seen her own name? Not if the note was written to me, she thought. Though, if she had been poisoned, wouldn't she be dead, like Ernest? And how could she be poisoned? She had not even had anything to drink.
Looking at the paper again, Chisato found that she still could not see clearly enough to make out more than a few words. She shook her head in frustration. When she did, however, she saw a red drop fall from her neck and splash onto the middle of the page. Was she bleeding? Had she given herself a paper cut?
She stumbled out of bed and nearly lost her balance. At least she felt slightly better than she had an hour ago, she guessed, not knowing whether she had even been conscious that far back. Worried about her neck, she waddled over to the dresser mirror. She pulled the neck of her nightgown to the side and looked in to see the source of the drop.
A thin, horizontal red line ran from just to the right of her throat to her shoulder blade. When she saw it, she felt a burst of pain shoot through her entire arm. On closer inspection, she noticed a soft purple area, much thicker than the cut but harder to see, following it the entire way. The cut was not very deep – it was only clearly red in a couple of places, and even those produced very few obvious signs that they were flesh wounds. Chisato became dizzy, and the world turned black.