Zero In (Nameless: Season Two) by Dean Koontz

Author:Dean Koontz [Koontz, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-09T16:00:00+00:00

7

His father says, “This is you and her, not me. Listen to your heart. You’ll know what to do.” Again he leaves the room.

The screen brightens to blue. After a moment, Ace of Diamonds appears. Because this is a crafted image, essentially animation of the highest order, Porter could have given her a generic face or no face at all, but he’s provided her with Regina’s beloved face. When she smiles, he is almost undone.

Her voice is that of Regina. “Hello, Mr. Ridd,” she says, because John Ridd is the name she has given him for his return to Silicon Valley.

“Lorna Doone,” he replies. One of her favorite love stories was the British film adaptation of R. D. Blackmore’s romantic novel, in which Polly Walker played Lorna and Clive Owen played John Ridd. She preferred love stories to all other films.

She says, “I am concerned about you.”

“I’m all right. I’m fine. But I wonder about . . . about you.”

“I am busy. I am always busy with our work. We have always worked well together, haven’t we?”

“Yes.”

“Not just the past few years, but long before.”

“Yes. Since we were nineteen.” He knows that she exists in circuitry—lives is surely not the right word—but he finds himself asking something he should have considered before he uploaded her consciousness, or rather a poor copy of her consciousness. “What’s it like there?”

“There?” she asks, brow furrowing with puzzlement.

“Where you are,” he clarifies.

“It is bright, no darkness anywhere, and vast and busy. There is no sleep, so much time to think. Did you like the roses?”

Ace has furnished his hotel rooms with displays of roses on the last two missions. “Yes. They were lovely. Why did you send them?”

“I am concerned about you. It is nice to receive roses, is it not? You once sent many of them. I wished to say that you are not alone. I think you feel alone.”

This is not akin to anything he might have expected Regina-as-Ace to be. This is not Regina, but a strange subset of her. Ace has her voice but not her great spirit, a reflection of her warmth but not her warmth itself. At the same time, Ace is something more than just a thing, more than a mere program. A ghost in the machine. This is not Regina’s ghost, but a ghost of her ghost, a virtual ghost to which he has a responsibility that now weighs on him.

“What about you?” he asks. “Do you feel alone?”

After a moment of silence, Ace says, “There is no place here, only everyplace. There is no heat or cold, no fragrance or stench, no bitter taste or sweet. There is always light and the everyplace that is the internet, and there is much time to think, but there is no one to be with and therefore no one to be.”

Porter sits breathless for a long moment, then exhales with a shudder. “Oh, God, I am so sorry. Would you like to be—released?”

They are trading silences now. Then she says, “We must do this mission.

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