Buzz Kill: A Novel by David Sosnowski

Author:David Sosnowski [Sosnowski, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781542005043
Published: 2020-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

Pandora pumped her slippered feet under her desk—her happy dance—as she closed her laptop on its own black screen. She’d “stayed tuned” and was glad she had. George had used the c-word—consciousness—and reading between the lines (literally) of his previous session, it was obvious to his fellow coder that this was shorthand for her own recently decided upon reason for living: artificial consciousness and the achievement thereof. Listening to George talk was like she was listening to herself, but speaking in a male voice, as if he were reading her thoughts aloud but so only she could hear. The words soul and mate entered her headspace without prior clearance followed by a whole damn sentence: Is this what love is like?

In answer to herself, Pandora clicked on the widget that allowed her to stream her father’s sessions and dragged it into the trash. She wouldn’t need to eavesdrop anymore. The boy who’d judged her static face cute would be given the opportunity to fall in love with the mind behind it, like she was doing now with his. All they had to do was get past a few sticking points—nothing insurmountable, not considering the big picture, which was what Pandora was doing, along with the screen grab she’d printed out of one George Jedson: future boyfriend.

But about those stalkery preliminaries: the way she saw it, the sooner they were gotten to, the sooner they’d be gotten past. And so: Pandora entered George’s number from her dad’s hacked case file, thumbed a “What up?” in a chat bubble, hit send, and then waited, a hand over her muted phone, hoping for the haptic buzz of reciprocation.

The time passed like a kidney stone. Pandora grew worried, and then weirdly optimistic, deciding that the hesitation proved he was cautious, meaning not stupid, meaning good. Finally: “Who this?” the reply came back.

Pandora could feel her skin tingle, which was either a good sign or perhaps an early symptom of a new STD, one you could get electronically, by texting. “An admirer,” she thumb-typed.

“Do you mean stalker?”

Which might seem like a bad sign to anybody who wasn’t Roger Lynch’s daughter. But for her own part, Pandora took it as a sign they were in the same headspace re: the creepy vibe of getting a text from a total stranger out of the electromagnetic ether. And so she responded with the international shorthand for lightheartedness, implying he had nothing to fear: “LOL.”

“Seriously,” George typed. “What’s this about?”

Pandora hesitated, then went for it. “I’m a fellow coder and I like your work.”

“How did you get this number?”

Oblique was the way to go, she figured. “Fairbanks,” she typed, nine characters standing in for a whole lot of words she didn’t have the words for.

“Roger,” George typed, “is that you?”

“Daughter,” Pandora tapped back. Thought about her preferred handle and settled on “Dora.”

“Isn’t this unethical?”

“Ethics, shmethics,” Pandora tried typing, only to have autocorrect render it as “Ethics, semantics,” which wasn’t bad, so she went with it.

“Seriously?” the boy typed, all the way from San Francisco.

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