Chris woke slowly, his senses creeping into his awareness over the course of several seconds. He rolled over, blinking sleepily at the clock on his bedside table and swearing croakily under his breath. After last night's drama he'd meant to set the alarm to go off in time for work, but it appeared he'd forgotten and overslept. He hadn't needed that clock in years; it would normally be Titch who woke him up. He rubbed his eyes, thoughts and emotions from last night thundering back into his mind. It caused a pang of anger and worry as he thought about the little persocom, but it was quickly replaced with the unwelcome lurching queasiness and wooden head of his brand new hangover.
What the hell was last night about? It didn't make any sense... that only served to highlight how little he knew about Titch's mind, now. Were other people beginning to experience this with their persocoms? He didn't know. Nobody told them anything, in the company. Just do the job. Let them worry about the details. Compartmentalise. That was their way.
There was enough daylight seeping through the curtains to see, which was fortunate since the lights were off. Titch would've turned them on, if she were there. He got up, listening to the silent house as he wearily dressed and wondering if he shouldn't try to look for her again. Dressing was uncomfortable now, as it was difficult to ignore his complaining body. Forcing his way through the bathroom door yesterday had done him no favours on top of his aches and pains from the store. Once finished, he wandered uncertainly out of the room. Work would need to wait a little longer; It was time to find Ivy. He couldn't avoid her forever, it would be best to talk to her now… Assuming she was even here any more.
Slowly Chris walked down the stairs. He was relieved to discover Ivy sat on the sofa in the lounge, but the feeling faded away when he realised she was looking out the window with unfocused eyes. Her hair was no tidier than it had been last night, simply having been left to dry in something of a tangled mess. She seemed thoroughly unsettled. Considering what happened, that was understandable. Chris realised he was staring.
Say something, you idiot.
"Um… morning." he managed, wincing internally at his own stupidity.
"Why do you think she did it?" Ivy said immediately, not looking away from the window. Chris walked a little further into the room.
"You tell me, I really didn't see that coming. She was upset with me. With both of us. Maybe she didn't know how to handle that." he replied, feeling more than a little useless. He doubted Ivy was satisfied with that answer, and if she was, she gave no such indication.
"I couldn't do anything." Ivy said, her gaze unmoving. "I couldn't control myself. All I could do was watch what she did to me..."
Chris shuffled uncomfortably on his feet. "I can't imagine what that was like. It... must have been horrible."
Ivy didn't reply, and Chris couldn't help but feel extremely glad he realised it had been Titch last night. All the same, he wished he'd known sooner; it still felt like he'd wronged Ivy, somehow. "Ivy, if I'd known it was Titch…" …he'd have what? Not-kissed her sooner? Had that fight and nearly got her thrown out a window a little bit quicker? Magically discovered where Titch hid her own body and made her sever the connection?
The room fell into silence, and every second of the next minute seemed to stretch on forever before Ivy spoke again.
"Something's wrong with me. Something feels different." she said, finally looking at him. Her calm words were at odds with the expression in her eyes.
Chris sighed. "I'm sorry, Ivy. That'll be the virus. Titch would have had to have cabled herself to you to manually initiate the wireless connection. Now that you've interfaced with her, you'll be infected."
"I see." she said. Chris watched as she picked up the cushion beside her, looking at it thoughtfully. A moment later, she hurled it at the window with a shout. It bounced harmlessly off the glass and landed on the floor.
"Do you want to... talk?" Chris said, taken aback.
"Maybe." Ivy grated. "I feel wrong. This is all wrong!" she clutched at her head, whining. "It doesn't feel normal. My thoughts aren't like before. I can't control them."
Chris frowned in concern. "What do you mean?"
"This! I mean this!" Ivy yelled, pointing at herself. "What the fuck is this? Why am I yelling?"
"I really don't understand-" Chris began, and Ivy almost squirmed in frustration as she tried to explain.
"You didn't understand last night either, remember? Because I do! Argh! Sorry… this isn't me. This isn't my ESC, it can't be. I don't know what this is! It's horrible! Make it stop!"
"Ivy, it's probably the virus. It... it changes the way you think," he said gently. "I'm afraid that's all we really know. That's exactly the kind of thing we're trying to find out."
"But why do I feel… this?"
"I don't know, Ivy... Look, you went through a lot last night, maybe between that and the past few days… I'd guess you're just a little overwhelmed, it's a bit much, you know?" Chris said. He certainly felt overwhelmed, himself. He didn't know what to think or feel right then. But this was not enough for the frustrated persocom.
"I don't! I don't know, that's the problem! I should know WHY I'm feeling something!" Ivy sounded exasperated, as if she'd been considering this at length with no satisfactory resolution.
"That's not how it works, Ivy..."
"Yes it is! That's exactly how it works!" she argued. "When I have a feeling it makes sense, there always a reason for it. Confused and curious because of something new. Scared of something dangerous. Happy, because of… But this? This is completely senseless. I've gone over everything and none of it fits. There is no correlating data at all, I'm just... feeling."
"That's what feelings are, sometimes. You don't generally get to control them, it's just how you feel. It's just how it is." Chris said gently.
"Well if that's true then why wasn't it always like this?" Ivy demanded. It was an interesting question.
"Perhaps your ESC works differently. Neurologic processors are more like neural synapses than traditional logic devices. The software they run constantly affects how they interact, like wiring a mind in different ways."
"I don't know what any of that means, Chris!" Ivy groaned in frustration. She was exaggerating, but Chris understood.
"You probably just think a little bit differently now. It doesn't have to be a bad thing - for you, since you already were so emotionally capable, maybe it's more like a change in perspective than a complete evolution of your thought processes. Does that make more sense?"
Ivy calmed down slightly, considering the idea but not looking convinced. "Yes... a little."
"Maybe we should talk to Sarah about it next time she's around, she could probably answer your questions, she knows way more about this stuff than I do."
"…Who's Sarah?"
"A friend. You'll like her, she's really nice."
" I've heard that name before. Is she a persocom?"
Were the circumstances better, Chris might have chuckled. "No, she's human. But she'd understand, and I reckon she'd be happy to help. For the time being, would it at least help knowing that people feel things without clear reason sometimes, too? Because many of us often can't justify or explain our own feelings."
"...Yes." she said. "So this... this happens to you?"
"Exactly, sometimes it does." Chris said. "In fact if I'm being honest, it's happening to me right now, " he thought Ivy's expression seemed empathetic, at that, "a lot has happened in little more than a weekend. Too much. But that's the thing: people often feel things they can't necessarily explain or justify. They usually learn to accept it, or if that's not possible, they try to do something about it. That might just be trying to think about something else, or it could be doing something fun or otherwise distracting, or talking to someone about it, even if they don't know what to say."
"So that's why Titch did it. She couldn't accept her feelings." Ivy said quietly.
"I guess… Yeah." Chris replied, fighting a crushing sensation of guilt. What Titch did was despicable, true. In fact he was pretty sure there was a word for what she had attempted to do to them, and he wasn't sure it was forgivable. But he never really considered what drove her to do it, or whether she could even appreciate what she was doing. Maybe that proved her right, in some small way. Maybe he hadn't cared enough since she started to change. The revelation did nothing for Ivy either, who now looked more miserable than ever.
He sat down next to her on the sofa, struggling for something comforting to say. "Listen… You're probably a little in shock. You were in a stable state where you were comfortable with yourself, and then suddenly you get this virus. But it's not the same virus we were dealing with months ago. It's already evolved way past that. You didn't get to transition slowly, you've just jumped right in the deep end. That's going to be difficult no matter what. Allow yourself some time to adjust, okay?"
Ivy seemed to accept this, but something was still bothering her. "I have a question," she said quietly. Chris nodded for her to continue. "When you were arguing, Titch said something. She said 'she's still a stock persocom'…" Chris knew where this was going, "I thought, back in the store, the things she was saying there - and back home afterwards - but then last night… Did she actually think… was I not… real... before?"
Chris resisted the urge to run his hands through his hair. This was not the kind of question he wanted to deal with right now. Not when barely two days ago both persocoms were determined to prove that very point after he had steadfastly rejected it. To finally accept it was one thing, but to be defending it so soon felt in some way hypocritical, as if he didn't hadn't yet earned the right to take that position. This was making his headache worse. He thought over a response, taking his time before replying.
"…Chris?" Ivy pressed, worried at his silence.
"It's okay… Let me answer your question with a question: am I real? Am I self-aware?"
"Yes, of course." Ivy said, confused.
"Why yes? How do you know if I am? How do you know if humans in general are? Do you have any evidence to substantiate that claim?"
Ivy seemed to chew this over, the results surprising her. "…I guess I don't."
"Neither do we, really." Chris said. "We just accept that we are self-aware. It is generally agreed to be an awareness of one's personality or individuality. It's the capacity for introspection. Well, what do you think you were doing just now? Panicking about what's going on inside your head, right? Comparing your feelings before and after the virus? How is that not introspective?"
"But how is it not just a programmed response? My ESC was a program. This virus is a program." Ivy's words mirrored the exact lines of thought Chris used to follow. He forced himself to answer.
"A fair question. But depending on where you draw the line, so is my DNA. That genetic code governs the structure of my brain, and the cells within it operate according to the behaviours defined in that code. Yet still, I feel like I am self aware. And here's the interesting thing; that same structure, that same concept, is shared with insects, plants and even single-celled organisms. But we certainly don't consider those to be self-aware. So maybe it's less about the system configuration and more about the results."
"Thank you." Ivy murmured. She seemed a little relieved. "But Titch didn't think I was real, did she? She just used me to get to you."
"Honestly, I don't know. Perhaps she didn't think she was real, before the virus. Therefore, you couldn't be either as far as she was concerned. It's a little different for Titch, because she never had an ESC. Her neurologic processors were there for true-random decision-making, pattern recognition and data processing tasks such as machine-vision, all of which conventional hardware struggles to do efficiently. Her personality matrix was simple and hard-coded. Now though, she's able to have all these complicated thoughts and feelings that were impossible for her before, without the virus. If she feels that way about you, it's not surprising."
"It's still disgusting." Ivy wrapped her hands around her body, hugging herself. "I don't understand how she could do that to me, either way."
Chris couldn't reply to that. He didn't know how; after all, he didn't understand it either. And if he never saw Titch again, he never would. He couldn't decide how he felt about that just then. Miserable? Angry?
Relieved?
"What were you thinking?" Ivy asked, interrupting his contemplation. "When I… when Titch kissed you?"
"Oh…ahem," Chris cleared his throat. "I really don't know how to answer that. I woke up and all of a sudden, there you were… you know… and the things you - uh, Titch - was saying… I guess it was confusing?"
"…Just confusing?" she looked at him blankly.
"Well, uh… I'm sorry, where are you going with this?"
"Just trying to understand, that's all." Ivy replied quietly. The room fell into uncomfortable silence once more. Chris felt the urgent need to be elsewhere.
"Anyway, it's a workday, I better…"
"Oh… right…"
"I'll be upstairs. If you need anything, just come get me OK?"
"S-same to you."
"Great. Okay. Well… okay." Chris clapped his hands together, getting up and leaving the room. He hurried upstairs, hitting himself in the forehead with his knuckles and grimacing.
You're a frigging moron, you know.
Chris squatted in his seat before the terminal, quietly hating himself while the display flickered into life. Today was going to be shit, he could feel it. It was shit already, even. How was he going to get anything done without Titch? She practically managed his whole work day. She wasn't necessarily supposed to - it was just something she wound up doing in recent months, opinionated as she had become; but now, he felt useless without her.
Well, he could start by reading the angry messages his supervisor would have left him. NEIS tracked login times for their home-working employees, but it was up to the managerials to decide what to do with that data, and generally their approach would be to turn a blind eye in lieu of more important things. His supervisor, however was an insufferable jobsworth who loved to watch those numbers.
Chris fired up the email client, authenticating against his password. A long list of messages filled the display, and he began to trawl through them, ignoring the drudgery of mail-shot adverts from suppliers, mailing lists he'd long stopped caring about, and miscellaneous group discussions from outside his team for which he was needlessly on copy. Interestingly, there was not a single message from his supervisor. Perhaps he would have tried to call, instead. A feeling of dread yawned wide in his stomach at that thought - that call would've gone straight to the angry little persocom outside.
In a sudden stroke of inspiration, he opened up the composition window and typed a new message.
From: C . Barker
To: C . Barker
Subject: WHERE ARE YOU
Titch, I know you're reading this. Please come home. I won't leave things as they are, we need to talk.
He hit send and watched as the email looped back into his inbox. For the briefest moment it flickered to a message-read state, before switching back to unopened.
Chris growled. Childish bloody behaviour. Well, what could he expect, after last night? She was completely mental, for all he knew. At the very least, it seemed she was unharmed. Enough to read emails and pretend she hadn't, anyway. He couldn't think about her selfishness now. He had to get on with the day.
Maybe he should take advantage of his supervisor's lapse of attention and try actually being productive. He fired up the integrated development environment and pulled the latest version of the Interpreter from the team repository. It looked unchanged from Friday; nobody had committed any updates, it seemed. He probably wasn't about to start either, since he didn't have Titch to work with, but perhaps he could peruse the code and hope for ideas that way. As distractions went it was fairly crappy, but at least it gave him something else to think about.
He stared absent-mindedly at the selection of behavioural operations that appeared before him. Neurologic processors didn't run conventional code. They could translate and interpret it, certainly, but their native architecture was wildly different to conventional computers. Software was written as clusters of concurrent behaviours, their outputs and any native data amalgamated such that the desired results were produced. There were parallels to the way you might configure an old field-programmable gate array -configurable logic chips often used to prototype new designs- except those only ran rigid, hard-wired, clock-controlled operations, while neurologic architectures responded in an orderless stimulatory fashion, activity growing and cascading organically through their structure like groups of firing neurones.
Chris opened up a grouping entitled "NBG_TL_VCHook", and the screen expanded smoothly, filling with the various software modules that comprised his selection. The Interpreter was always having trouble keeping its grip on the viral code. Perhaps if he checked this section for the millionth time, he would find something amiss.
A few hours passed uneventfully, by which time Chris was in a foul mood. What good was staring at this stupid software going to do? He felt like he was watching paint dry. This was ridiculous. He could barely concentrate with this headache and his stomach still felt like crap. He hadn't so much as thought of coffee yet, let alone taken the time to drink one. Well, it was time to change that! He shoved the chair away from the table and strode grumpily to the door, pulling it open and almost blundering straight into Ivy as she crossed the landing. The persocom wore only a wet towel; apparently she'd been using the shower. For the briefest electric instant their eyes met, but Ivy didn't even slow down, sidestepping him and hurrying along to the spare bedroom before disappearing behind the door.
Chris blinked, the apology dying on his lips before he had a chance to utter it. That was uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. This was probably the point where Titch would've laughed or made a sarcastic comment at his expense. Persocoms did need to be cleaned on occasion, of course, but when it came to Ivy he hadn't really given it any thought, so it seemed surprising. And had she adopted that room as her own, now? That room was hardly suitable, he'd need to sort it out for her. He continued across the landing, walking quietly down the stairs and somehow managing to feel ashamed all over again. Of all the poor timing... argh! He would make coffee in the kettle and just drink from that. Maybe the dangerous levels of caffeine would help! Maybe he would just run away like Titch and start a new life under a rock somewhere!
For fuck's sake, Titch. Look at the trouble you've caused. And you're the one who gets to run away from the fallout!
The kettle popped and wheezed lethargically, reluctantly heating its water. Chris stared distractedly at an empty mug as he waited. Actually, a holiday would be nice. Maybe on an island somewhere. Or a forest. Perhaps one of those underwater hotels, where you only had a subsea room with an air supply and ocean life for company. Or just about anywhere else with no electricity, computers, people or persocoms.
He heard footsteps padding into the room behind him. Ivy crossed the kitchen, wearing more of his clothes; this time an old jumper and a pair of jeans he was sure would have fallen straight off her, had she not improvised with a belt. Even the belt itself was too large; she had tied it around her waist, unable to use the buckle. She studied the washing machine quietly, examining the controls with her one and only set of clothes bundled in her hands. Her hair was still damp, but cleaner now, her tresses no longer tangled and messy.
"Thirty degrees doesn't work," Chris said, trying to be helpful. He'd been meaning to fix that bloody thing. "It won't spin, you have to wash at fourty."
"Thanks." Ivy said quietly, shoving the clothes inside. Did she blush, slightly? The conversation died immediately as she went rifling through the nearby cupboard for the detergent, so he tried again.
"Um... your new clothes should arrive today." Chris said. That was right; they'd be delivered before the end of the evening, probably.
"That's… great." Ivy said, setting the machine to run and walking awkwardly away. Chris rolled his head back and stared at the ceiling as he waited for the kettle to click. He grabbed the handle, remembering his resolution to drink from it and finding the idea of that much coffee genuinely tempting, but poured the water into the mug anyway.
Chris drank deeply while he walked back up the stairs, as if every caffeinated mouthful would help wash away his problems. When he reached the spare bedroom, he paused. The door was closed. After a moment's hesitation, he knocked and entered.
It had been a while since he'd been in here; months, to his memory. The room wasn't empty - far from it, in fact. There were plenty of boxes full of old electronics, equipment and personal possessions stacked around the walls, although it looked a little neater than he remembered. Ivy must have been here during the first night, organising or cataloguing things. Some items were too heavy for her to move; she appeared to have left those alone. The persocom sat cross-legged in the middle of the carpet. She was looking up at him uncertainly; all the confidence and energy she usually radiated was gone.
Ivy had no possessions of her own to speak of, but had managed to source a tired-looking brush, a few towels, and a small selection of his old clothes from the surrounding boxes. These items were arranged neatly on the floor beside her, and seeing her sat helplessly beside them made her presence in the room seem all the more pitiful. It didn't appear she was doing anything in particular… Was she planning on just sitting there all day, alone? He instantly felt bad for her. To leave her like this felt emphatically neglectful, and he regretted not taking notice sooner.
"I need you," he found himself saying, gently extending a hand. "Would you mind?"
Ivy took it cautiously, getting to her feet. He lead her into the office and sat her down in a spare chair. This would be better than her sitting in that room.
"I want to ask if you would mind helping me work." He said tactfully, sitting down by the terminal. "I'm trying to figure out how this virus operates, and if you helped you'd be doing me a big favour… is that okay?"
Ivy appeared to consider this for a moment. "What do I need to do?" she asked.
"Thanks, Ivy. I appreciate it." Chris smiled, and she smiled weakly back. He began to explain the process as he reached for a cable that Ivy could use to connect to the system, but stopped when he noticed her fearful expression. Ivy was looking at the cable like it was a venomous snake.
"…How about you just look at the code with me?" he suggested, tucking the cable away. Ivy nodded gratefully, scooting closer to the terminal. He began to show her the development software, explaining the way the interface worked, and the structure of the code inside.
Chris walked back into the office armed with his third cup of coffee. Ivy was glued to the terminal, her deep and colourful eyes scanning the output with interest. It seemed to be an effective distraction from the previous night - for both of them, in fact. Just watching her occupied with the terminal was enough to raise his spirits a little. Ivy was by no means her usual self, but it appeared her curiosity could not be stopped. She had many questions, and he answered them with an enthusiasm that grew on her as they explored the software together.
"So this section governs the identification of the viral code… and this one tracks its pathway through memory to establish any patterns…" Ivy muttered, mousing around the various modules in the IDE. She learned rapidly, and was quickly building an understanding of the way the Interpreter was designed to function.
"That's right," Chris said, standing beside her chair and leaning over to look at the screen. "This is one of the most difficult parts of the procedure, because it has to adapt to the way the virus moves through memory, and follow it for hooking."
"How come you can scan for the signature rapidly enough to recapture it every time it moves?" Ivy asked, "Isn't that like trying to find a needle in a haystack? And the needle moves constantly!"
Chris nodded, "It's worse, theoretically, because you'd need to check every last piece of memory until you found a recognisable signature, and then do it all over again every time it moved. But we have a distinct advantage with neurologic architecture, so we don't have to. Instead of exhaustively testing memory in sequence, the search for that signature propagates through the processor network like branches expanding on a tree," He spread his hands apart to illustrate the effect, "If a processor contains matching signatures, it fires in response, and the location is known. It's how most memory retrieval works on the platform, we're just using it to cheat a little. Once we've found the signature, we can track it because the processors will fire on detecting its presence in their local stores, but," Chris held up a cautionary hand, "This doesn't mean it's easy to track. It's still a pseudo-random process and it's not enough to just know where it is, we need to already be sampling for data when it arrives, and our program needs to be in the right processors at the right time to do that. That's why we must establish a pattern, so we can guess where it's trying to go next and try to get there in time."
"That's amazing," Ivy said, incredulous, "But how can this possibly work? I couldn't access my processors at such a low level."
"You don't need to; the Interpreter is operating within its own program context just like everything else, so you don't really need to be aware of register-level activity for it to work. It's only reading the contents of processor memory - again, any normal software can do that - and it reports its findings back to the terminal. You could think of it like an fMRI scan for humans... uh, that's a medical procedure. The brain keeps working as usual but the right medical equipment can image the patterns of the neurones firing in real time, and we can use that to recognise and differentiate between thought processes and behaviour."
Ivy glanced at the cable, half tucked away behind the terminal. She seemed to be struggling with her own curiosity and an apparent fear of letting anything else connect to her after what Titch had done.
"You don't need to do that, Ivy." Chris reassured her, "It's helpful enough just to go through code with you. Any programmer will tell you it's useful to explain their software to an audience."
"Titch would though, wouldn't she?" Ivy said quietly, and Chris felt the atmosphere heading towards discomfort again.
"…Yes, she would. We've worked on this every day, almost, for the last few months."
"What did she think of it? Of the virus?"
"She wouldn't really talk about it directly. Honestly, I think she was fairly comfortable with it. Maybe even liked it. Of course to begin with it wasn't even a question - in the first several weeks of infection she really wasn't very different to her factory self. I doubt she felt anything about the matter back then."
"...What was she like, before?" Ivy said, turning from the screen to look at him.
"Very different." Chris sighed, sitting down opposite his persocom. "I wouldn't know where to begin."
"How about when you first met her?" Ivy prompted. Did she really want to talk about Titch? He tried to gauge her expression, getting a feel for why she might be asking, but her gaze was neutral.
"Ah, you don't want to hear all that." he said, waving his hand dismissively, but sure enough she pressed for the answer.
"Please?"
Chris sighed, taking a drink from his coffee and nodding as he began to explain.