Beautiful Shining People by Michael Grothaus

Author:Michael Grothaus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orenda Books
Published: 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

11 – We all look completely ordinary.

It felt like an early dawn. Whenever I glanced at Neotnia in the growing light, I couldn’t get over how her skin looked. It was now as black as ink – not the lighter ashen colour of prior electrocutions. If she’d stood naked in the dark hallway, she’d have appeared as nothing more than a face floating in the void. Not that she could stand. By seven, she could barely sit up.

Last night, after the second toaster, any way I tried opening the splinter inside of her had no effect. As the timer ticked down, I thought I was going to fail. But that wasn’t what scared me. It was knowing Neotnia would ask to be electrocuted three times in a row next. Yet after seeing what the second toaster did – hearing that horrible scream cut short – I knew even if she survived the second electrocution, she wouldn’t survive a third.

But as the timer ticked, it suddenly hit me how stupid I’d been. Everything about Neotnia’s being had been protected so far. Her quantum firewall keeps her hidden from networks. If you get past that, her codebase is sealed off from manipulation by presenting itself as one scrambled layer instead of three distinct layers. Even the pattern-recognition keys need additional compiling before they’ll give up access to what they’re protecting. Her father had to be the architect of all those security measures. And this splinter? If it’s a container – if it’s a file he hid in there – of course it’d have a security measure, too. It’d be encrypted. It’s why I couldn’t open it. At twenty-three seconds left, I realised I’d been trying to attack a quantum-encrypted container.

The thing is – I took the most foolish risk possible. As the timer ran down, I hardly thought before I acted. It was only after we carried Neotnia to bed that it hit me how much I’d played Russian roulette with her existence. I could very well have destroyed her by extracting the splinter, simply because it may have contained some vital thing she needed to function. I felt the same horror pass over me as when she winced in my arms in the darkness of my apartment, and I trembled and damned myself for the risk I took – and damned her, too, for having me do any of this.

Just past eleven this morning I was bent over my screen in Goeido’s room, engrossed in my work on the splinter, when I heard a padding of soles. I turned to find Neotnia wearing a sumo-sized sweater. It hung past her knees, so only her inky-black shins and feet showed.

‘Hides my skin pretty well, huh?’ she said. ‘Sweaters can be a lifesaver.’

Tell me about it, I thought. ‘Good to see you’re on your feet.’

Her body stiffened at my reply, and for a moment she was quiet.

‘That’s it?’ she said, seeing the splinter on my screen.

I nodded.

‘I can feel it’s gone.’ She gazed at it, a cautious lightness in her voice.

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