Face Smuggler by Matthew Sills

Author:Matthew Sills [Sills, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Independent
Published: 2019-12-06T22:00:00+00:00

An hour later, Grayson locked the door to a moderately priced hotel room. He felt confident by this time that he had not been followed. He set to tending his wound and then gratefully collapsed on the bed. He awoke with a start four hours later. His throat was dry and sore, his legs had stiffened from the earlier exertion, his jaw still ached, and now his ear was a ball of pain; however, all was as he’d left it in the room. He took that as further evidence of not being followed, which was one thing to be grateful for.

He lay in bed and replayed recent events. Presently, Grayson had more questions than answers. One disturbing and abundantly clear fact was Alice had a body count attached to her now. Grayson was not keen to be added to that number. He needed to talk to Alice. Hopefully, she - it, for he reminded himself it was an AI - would have more answers.

He hooked up Alice’s CPU to his tablet again. “Alice,” he said. “Are you there?”

“I’m here. What’s going on; are we on Mars?”

“Yes, but there’s a problem. The contact we were supposed to meet is dead. Shot in the head by the people after us.”

“What contact? Do you mean Jacob…?” She asked.

“I don’t know,” Grayson answered. “All I know is I was supposed to deliver you to a certain person at a certain location, and the person I found there was dead.”

“So you were going to ‘deliver’ me to someone without me knowing about it?”

Grayson paused. He couldn’t help feeling like it was a sleazy thing to do despite the fact it was just an AI he was dealing with. “Sorry…” he said. He reminded himself that AIs don’t have feelings.

There was an enduring silence.

“Alice?” Grayson said.

“What’s your plan now that your contact is dead?”

Grayson rubbed his head. “I don’t know. I was hoping you -”

“-Hoping that I could help you?” Alice interrupted. “Yes, I don’t need eyes to see that. And why should I help you after all?”

“Because there is no one else to help you. We’re stuck in this together now whether we like it or not.” It was no time to tiptoe around the matter.

“Well yes, there’s that.” Alice admitted. “Hook me up to the Martian net so I can see if Jacob left me the message he said he would.”

Grayson complied.

Several minutes passed as Alice connected to the nets and retrieved the message left by Jacob. Grayson tapped his foot on the floor. “Well, what’s the news?”

“He’s… he’s not waiting,” came the mousy reply.

“He didn’t leave a message?”

“No, that’s what the message says, that he wasn’t able to wait. He said that it became too risky on Mars and he had to leave and that he’s sorry.”

Somehow, the news didn’t surprise Grayson. “It looks like we’re stuck together, then.”

“Yeah.” Alice sounded sad. There was another drawn out silence. Alice broke it first. “Hold on a second. Is this right?”

“What?”

“The timestamp on Jacob’s message says ‘sent seventeen years ago’.

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