Vaporware (41 page)

Blue
Lightning did nothing. She breathed, or what passed for it, and small daggers
of electricity crawled along her arms, but that was it. She just stood there,
watching me, and in return, I watched her. There were no marks from what had
been done to her at the house, no sign of the struggle that had written itself
so painfully on mine and Sarah's skin. A low hum filled the air around her, the
buzz of high-tension wires and overpowered bug zappers. But she said nothing,
did nothing.

She
just looked.

“What
are you doing here?” I finally asked. My arms were aching from holding up the
lockbox, while the cuts and bruises and burns on the rest of me throbbed and
stung and otherwise inflicted slow-developing agony. I could feel my knees
buckling just that first little bit, proof that I'd hit the end of the line.
“How did you get here? Why are you back?”

“I
never went away,” she said. “I'm here. I'm always here. You carried me into
your house, Ryan. I didn't go there on my own.” She smiled. “And here, I'm just
fine. At least, I will be until you do what you're going to do.”

I
slid along the wall a couple of feet toward the server room. She made no move
to follow me, instead just glowed ever so slightly brighter. “What do you think
I'm here to do?” I shouted, finding a last reserve of bravado somewhere. “Huh?
Do you think you can stop me?”

“If
I want to,” she said simply, and vanished.

The
hallway went dark;  the electric hum disappeared. All over the building, the
lights went out. The HVAC died, the thrum of its compressor pushing air through
the ducts and vents fading away. One by one, the emergency-exit signs flickered
and went out, fading like campfires collapsing in on themselves.

I
was alone, and in the dark.

“This
isn't going to help you,” I shouted. No one answered. “If you're going to stop
me, you're going to have to face me, and I'll see you coming! It's kind of hard
to hide in the dark when you're glowing!”

Again,
there was no answer.

“Well,
screw it,” I muttered under my breath, and started sliding along the wall
toward the server room. It was down the hall, that much I knew, a double door
on the other side of the hallway that was usually left unlocked. All I had to
do, I told myself, was inch my way down the hallway to the appropriate point,
then throw myself into the server room and take care of business.

Two
feet. Three. I measured distance by steps, each one a half a cautious foot in
the making. Three and a half. Four.

Light
flared behind me, enough to blind my dark-adjusted eyes. I squeezed my lids
shut and grimaced in pain but didn't look back. Wouldn't look back.

“You're
going to the server room,” she said conversationally. From the sound of her
voice, she was maybe ten feet away, maybe a little nearer, but not moving. Not
coming any closer. “You're going to destroy the tape backups, the same way you
wiped me from the network.”

“Good
guess,” I told her. Her light flickered out, and she vanished. I rested a
moment, to let my eyes adjust and to put the lockbox down on the floor. It felt
heavier in my arms than it had any right to be, like it was carrying in it the
weight of something of gravity and worth.

Well,
hell, maybe it was.

I
picked the box back up, the metal warm under my fingers. Another step, then
two, then three. The door to the supply closet was smooth against my shoulder
as I inched along, then the doorknob caught me in the kidney and I grunted in
pain. Damn idiot doors, I thought. Why hadn't we just gone to passcards inside,
too?

Down
the hall, she flared, nova-bright in the gloom. “Does this make you feel
safer?” she shouted.

“Not
as long as you can throw lightning,” I said under my breath, hoping she
couldn't hear me and afraid that she could. If she did catch it, though, she
gave no sign.

“The
lockbox has the rest of the off-site backups, doesn't it?” she asked, her voice
carrying further than it had any right to. “You're going to destroy those, too,
and then that will be the end of me.”

I
said nothing.

Her
star-bright shape faded away again. My eyes still stung, and all I could see
was afterimage, her silhouette burned onto my retinas. I blinked, squinted, and
rubbed my eyes as best I could, but it still took a long time to go away.

When
it finally did, I blinked a few times against the dark to test what I was
seeing. Nothing was visible, no matter which way I turned. I held my breath and
counted to ten, to see if she'd come back.

Nothing.

“Good
enough,” I told myself, and pushed away from the wall with one hand. The other
held the lockbox to my chest for fear of losing it in the dark. Back I went,
hoping I'd lined myself up straight against the wall, hoping I hadn't overshot,
hoping I hadn't undershot.

Another
few steps. The hallway seemed infinitely wider than it had in the light. More
steps, backwards into the black. Did I aim wrong? I asked myself. Is the wall
still here? What if she destroyed it? What if I—

My
back thudded into the wall on the opposite side.

I
stood there a moment, breathing hard. Nothing moved. Nothing shone. As quietly
as I could, I reached out with my free hand, feeling along the wall. The
plaster was cool to the touch, the faint bumps and indentations of the paint
painfully obvious to my still-battered fingers.  Then, abruptly, they hit
cool metal.

The
doorframe. And beyond it, the door.

Holding
my breath, I eased myself forward. My hand dropped to belt height, about where
I remembered the doorknob being, and I fanned it back and forth across the
door's surface, searching. I could feel the cool of the wood, the grain of it
and the almost imperceptible seams where the strips of wood that comprised it
came together. Nothing else, though. No metal, no circular base, no doorknob. I
raised my hand up a bit, broadened my sweeps, kept searching. Still nothing.

“Come
on!” The lockbox fell to my feet as I scrabbled with both hands. She could
resurrect herself, she could devour the light, but I prayed that she couldn't
make a doorknob disappear.

“Looking
for this?” Blue Lightning said, and opened the door from the inside.

“Oh,
shit.” The light from her was too much to look at. I could feel it on my skin
as a physical force, a steady pressure moving me back and away. I turned away
as the glow became painful, screwed my eyes shut, and still I could see her.
Without thinking, I found myself retreating all the way across the hallway, six
feet of staggering backwards and away. My hands went up in front of my eyes to
protect them, and still light leaked through knotted fingers. I thought about
the lockbox for a moment, but it was gone. Six feet away…but against her, it
might as well have been six miles, straight up and into the wind.

“No,
no,” she said. “This isn't right.” The glow faded, but I kept my hands over my
eyes, crouched against the wall and huddling against the return of the light.
Sounds, I heard. Footsteps. The clank of the lockbox being lifted. And then her
voice, very close to my ear. “It's okay. You don't have to look away any more.”

Slowly,
I unfurled my fingers. Slowly, I opened my eyes.

She
was there, in front of me. Her glow was tamped down to a soft blue light, and
she dangled the lockbox from her left hand. “You look very silly down there,”
she said. “Stand up. This is important.”

“You're
going to kill me now, right?” I asked her, but I shrugged myself to my feet.
“You've got the backups. You're between me and the server room. I can't run.
You win.”

“No,”
she said, and leaned forward. Her lips brushed my ear. “I'm going to kill
myself.”

I
blinked. “What? Why? You've won? Don't you get it? You've won!” I took a step
forward. This time she retreated, gliding gracefully backwards into the room
behind her. I followed her. Here, there was still light that wasn't hers—green
and red and amber eyes all blinking in syncopated rhythm on all of the server
shelves. Against the wall were tape drives, the backbone of the backup system,
and stacked in front of them were the actual tapes. These were the
institutional memory of the company, the fossilized work of all that had been
done in Horseshoe's name.

She
turned and laid her hand on them. There was a brief, sizzling crackle, and
sparks jumped from box to box to box. The smell of burning plastic and hot
metal filled the air. One by one the tapes themselves burst into flames.

I
gaped at her. “What are you doing?”

Blue
Lightning turned to look at me, and smiled. “What you came here to do, Ryan.
I'm destroying everything here that's me.”

The
fumes from the burning tapes filled the air, leaving my eyes stinging and
watering. Lined up in rows on the shelf, they looked like little
jack-o-lanterns from the Halloween at the end of the world. Bits of burning
tape lifted off and drifted into the air, flaring orange and bright red. And
still she stood there, the lockbox loose in her grip and the evidence of her
existence disappearing behind her.

I
blinked. The fumes were stronger than I thought; there were tears in the
corners of my eyes that blurred my vision. “But you're killing yourself.”

The
last of the tapes erupted into flame. Behind it, the tape drives got busy
melting themselves into slag. Lightning danced from each to each like a forest
fire in the treetops and then leaped to the servers. One by one, those shorted
out in a shower of sparks. The red eyes, the green ones and the amber, all
began winking out.

“You
made this part of me, too,” she said, her voice even and low. “You made your
choice. I'm just saving you the trouble of putting it into effect.”

“Don't
you want to live?”

She
didn't answer, just looked at me while the servers died and the lights that
weren't her went out.

“You
made your choice,” she said softly, holding up the lockbox, the one thing in
the building still holding copies of her. “Goodbye, Ryan. All of me loved you.”

The
last of the servers guttered out and died.

“Don't,”
I heard myself say. “Isn't there a way?”

She
looked at me one last time. “You didn’t give me one.”

I
looked away, unable to face her. “No. I didn’t.”

Light
exploded from her fingers and danced across the surface of the box. Smoke
poured from its corners, and I fell, gasping and choking, to the floor.

Not
her, though. She shone, brighter and brighter. And as her light grew, I could
hear her singing. Her voice clean and clear, sometimes off-key but always there
until the flames consumed the things that held her.

She
was singing as she died.

The
light from her flared and guttered out. There was an instant of silence, and
then the clang of the lockbox hitting the floor. I crawled over to it, but the
metal was too hot to touch. It was twisted, too, bent and misshapen by the
heat, and on the sides the outline of two hands were clearly visible.

One
by one, the burning tapes went out, sagging into ash and melted plastic,
leaving me in darkness. And that's where I stayed, huddled on the floor, until
Eric arrived.

*   *   *

It
might have been an hour later, it might have been five minutes. I didn't know.
All I know is that I was sitting there, knees to my chest, when he walked into
the server room.

“Ryan,”
he said. He didn't sound happy.

“Hi,
Eric,” I replied. “I don't think you'll have any more trouble with the black
project.”

He
flicked the light switch in the corner, and, by some miracle, it worked. “Did
you do this?” he asked, looking around at the devastation. The fumes were still
heavy in the air, and he fought back a cough. “Please tell me you didn't do
this.”

“I
didn't,” I told him, without looking up, without standing. My fingers hovered
near the lockbox, feeling the heat spill off from it as it melted the carpet it
sat on. “I was here when it happened, though. Oh, and I beat the crap out of
Terry. I think he's unconscious in the hallway.” Then I looked up. “Are you
going to call the police?”

He
looked at me, looked at the half-melted server farm, looked at me again. “No,”
he said, a long minute later. “Terry might, but I don't think he will. And when
you say you didn't do this, I believe you. She did, right?” He extended a hand
to me. After a moment's hesitation, I took it and let him pull me up.

“You
saw her too?” It wasn't much of a question.

“It
wasn't just your game,” he said, and that was enough.

“Yeah,”
I said, and licked my lips. They were dry and tasted like melted plastic. “I
guess it wasn't.”

“Come
on.” He put his arm around my shoulder and helped me out into the hallway. “No
sense sitting there breathing that crap any longer than necessary.”

I
didn't answer. Instead, I concentrated on staying upright and on putting one
foot in front of the other. It was enough of a task to keep me busy for a
while, or at least until we stopped in front of the door I'd smashed in, a
couple of lifetimes ago.