|
|
Kirlian Logic
Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: the Series are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.
Part III
“You stupid woman,” Virginia Bryce says to Rebecca Lowell. “Oh my God, I can’t believe this, you stupid, stupid, stupid woman!”
She was not the first to speak — Joel Kreuter blurted, “What the hell —?” as the mirrored walls sprang up to enclose us, while Dustin Clarke let out a strangled yelp and attempted to dive under his table — but she is the first to form a complete sentence. I look around us, evaluating this new development with an absence of expression that will doubtless be read as blank shock. My situation has changed. I am no longer an observer, however near; intentionally or not, I am now included in these events.
“I’m sorry,” Rebecca Lowell replies. Her respiratory rate is elevated, and some agitation can be diagnosed from minute tremors at the corners of mouth and eyes, but she speaks evenly. “I hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but I didn’t go to this much effort just to have you walk away without hearing me out.”
Virginia Bryce shakes her head, and her voice is hard. “Lady, you are officially off your rocker. Have you not noticed that it isn’t just us girls here anymore?” She takes in the confines of the diner with a sweeping gesture. “You’ve locked us in with three other people! Your personal issues just went public!”
Dustin Clarke has come back to his feet, and I see now that his initial reaction was not, as I believed, a panicked dive for shelter. He holds the backpack he had tucked beneath the table. Its zipper is drawn back now, and his hand emerges from the interior with a Japanese short sword, a wakizashi, in its lacquered scabbard. His muscles are coiled with the need for action, but in fact it is Joel Kreuter who moves first.
“Ma’am —” he says, stepping forward, then pauses to give Rebecca Lowell a nod of acknowledgment. “— Miss Lowell — excuse me, but just what exactly in God’s name is going on here?”
“What’s going on?” Virginia Bryce’s laugh is wild, her tone caustic. “Norma Desmond here has put us in lockdown because she wants me to fix her up with a dose of the Devil’s Botox, that’s what’s going on!”
“The —” Joel Kreuter cuts himself off, looks around at the silvery shell that surrounds the diner (extending, I see, three inches past the connecting door through which he entered moments ago), and then back to Rebecca Lowell. When he speaks again, it is politely but with a firmness I have heard previously. “Miss Lowell, whatever you did, I think it would be best for all concerned if you undid it. Right away.”
Rebecca Lowell shakes her head. “Look, I apologize, I never meant to involve anyone else. And I’ll compensate you for any trouble or inconvenience. But she and I —” She inclines her head toward Virginia Bryce. “— have a very important matter to discuss, and I can’t drop the barrier until she lets me make my case.”
“Seems to me that you just flushed your ‘case’ straight down the toilet.” Dustin Clarke speaks with an odd, strained forcefulness. He has discarded the backpack. The wakizashi remains in its sheath, but he holds it ready for drawing. My first assessment of his personality and capacities is undergoing progressive revision. “Besides, when you shut us in here with you, you shut you in here with us.” He takes his own step toward her. “Let us out, now. Close it down, or —”
“Hey, hey, easy there,” Joel Kreuter says. He places his hand on Dustin Clarke’s shoulder to halt the latter’s advance. Dustin wheels instantly, using the sheathed sword to sweep Joel’s hand away; in the same turn, he brings his knee up high to chamber the side-kick that drives into Joel’s belly, to send the older man staggering back, doubled over and grabbing at one of the tables for balance.
It was unnecessary. Joel Kreuter’s action was peremptory rather than aggressive, and Dustin Clarke’s near-automatic response an overreaction keyed and triggered by adrenaline, not innate belligerence. The Buffybot’s martial database identifies the movement-pattern as primarily hapkido, modified somewhat by kendo technique. Dustin Clarke is young, quick, well-conditioned and highly skilled. He is also accustomed to sparring and tournament play, with little if any experience in genuine combat. Joel Kreuter, straightening up even as he struggles to draw breath, has the body language of a man ready to take whatever damage he must in order to reach his enemy, and determined to inflict far more damage in return.
The imminent clash will not improve our situation. I interpose myself between them, moving with more speed than I would prefer to display at this time, but no one is focused on me until I am in place and speaking. “Jeez, guys, chill,” I announce. The exasperation I put into my tone is a tenuous extrapolation from my observations of Trish Hervey, but current necessities are well outside optimum parameters. “Don’t we have enough problems already?”
My interruption has broken the moment. Dustin Clarke, while prepared to fight, does not truly desire to do so, and Joel Kreuter’s self-control and good judgment are greater than his anger or his pride. “All right,” Joel says, lowering the hands he had positioned for gripping or striking in the rush I forestalled. His voice is tight, the breath still not coming easily to him. “Heat of the moment, all right. I can let that go.” He points to the wakizashi that Dustin still holds. “But, boy — you ever try to use that thing on me, I guarantee it’ll end up sticking in you.”
Dustin Clarke, rather than replying, takes a step back, turning away from Joel Kreuter and to face the women. Seemingly graceless, this spares him from attempting to formulate a verbal response that would neither offer further offense nor give the appearance of backing down. A field-expedient solution.
“Well,” Virginia Bryce says. “Now that the testosterone storm has passed, we can get back to the main issue at hand.” She looks to Rebecca Lowell. “Okay, so I got a little worked up. I started to run off, you wanted to finish your pitch, you maybe got rattled yourself and went overboard.” She shakes her head. “People do dumb things sometimes, I’ve done it myself, and actresses are people, too, and most dumb isn’t unforgivable. But I’ve had a minute to calm down, and I’m telling you this very calmly: whatever you might or might not get from me in normal bargaining, you absolutely won’t get while I’m a prisoner. I already turned you down, and I meant it, but if you don’t drop the walls, right now, I’ll see you blacklisted with every player in the business who has the kind of juice you would need.”
Rebecca Lowell’s acting background has kept her expression schooled to an equanimity that reveals little, but I can derive meaning from computational analysis of microscopic eye movements, the subtle play of muscle in her shoulders, even the studied relaxation of lips and fingers. However reluctantly, she has come to acceptance while Virginia Bryce spoke. Very probably she realized at the outset that her desperate ploy had been a significant misstep, but was committed, once having made it, to following it out in hope of some favorable result. Now she has reconciled herself to the failure of the attempt. “I believe you,” she says to Virginia Bryce. “If I’d had an extra second or two to think, I would have known better, no matter what Grant said.” She looks to the rest of us. “I’m sorry, I never should have pulled you into this. The … the spell will wear off in twenty minutes, thirty at most, and then the exclusion field will dissipate on its own.”
“ ‘Spell’?” Joel Kreuter repeats … then, sighing, adds, “Well, yeah, I guess it had to be that or aliens or visitors from the future.”
Virginia Bryce has her attention fixed elsewhere. “Twenty or thirty minutes?” she says. “They’ll have the highway patrol here by then. What were you thinking, working obvious magic in public? and here? At least in L.A. you could try and explain it away as special effects for a movie shoot.” Her own sigh is heavy, vexed. “God save me from amateurs!”
“That wasn’t the plan,” Rebecca Lowell tells her. “We thought we had it timed so that, when your engine started cutting out, you’d pull off at a rest stop about half a mile farther on. For privacy. I didn’t expect you to take the exit here. And I hoped to be able to persuade you without having to resort to the exclusion field.” She makes a small gesture that, while not a shrug, communicates the same effect. “So far, oh-for-three.”
Dustin Clarke clears his throat. “So … we’re good? No demons we have to fight, nothing like that?”
Virginia Bryce looks to him with sudden attention, as do we all. “You know about demons?” she asks.
He does not answer immediately, and to me it is apparent that he is choosing his words with some care. “There was a … sort of a situation, a couple of years ago in my home town,” he replies at last. “Just the one time, but yeah, there were demons.”
“Home town?” Virginia Bryce repeats. “Let me guess: Sunnydale?”
Dustin Clarke shakes his head. “No, it’s a place called Cromwell,” he tells her. “Maybe an hour and a half from here, if you know the right roads. Two hours if you go by MapQuest.”
Virginia Bryce and Rebecca Lowell exchange glances, and it is Rebecca Lowell who says, “So we’re supposed to believe that someone who just happens to have fought demons, just happens to have stopped here at the same time we did?”
Dustin Clarke favors them with a wide, ingratiating smile. “Coincidences happen,” he says easily. “But, you’re right, not this time. The truth is, Miss Bryce —” He nods politely to her. “— I had been hoping for a chance to talk with you myself.”
Virginia Bryce’s intuition takes her to the same conclusion I reach by associative inference, and as quickly. “You were following me?” she demands.
“Hey, not in a stalkery way.” Dustin Clarke holds up his hands placatingly, voice and smile crafted to soothe. “I was just trying to figure out how to introduce myself to you without looking stalkery.”
“Great,” Virginia Bryce says, turning away. “I was leading a freakin’ caravan down the Interstate.”
The unevenly integrated programming that forms my consciousness does not lend itself to startlement, but Joel Kreuter’s hand on my shoulder is unexpected. All my focus was on monitoring and analyzing the interplay between Dustin Clarke and Virginia Bryce. “You okay, Trish?” Joel murmurs to me. “This has to be a lot to take in.”
More so for him than for me, but he can have no way of knowing that. I have difficulty ascertaining the type of response Trish Hervey would normally make, for we are now well outside environmental baseline. I can only hope my uncertainty will itself seem appropriate to the circumstances. “If it wasn’t for the walls, I’d think they were all crazy,” I answer in the same low tone. “I mean, jeez Louise, demons?”
“Not here,” Joel Kreuter says, giving my shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “Not today, anyhow.”
We can hope not. That would be yet another undesirable complication.
* * *
Koreans, and some Chinese, measure human age from estimated date of conception. Through most of the world, however, and especially in the West, the date of birth is regarded as the beginning of an individual’s existence. The entity that constitutes Myself pushed its way out of the rubble of the Sunnydale crater in a manner much like the emergence of a human infant from its mother’s body, and the coalescing of my awareness occurred at approximately the same time.
I was ‘conceived’ in a thunder of magic, of human ego and hubris resonating with the mystical forces woven through Sunnydale. When Willow Rosenberg applied her own peculiar genius to adapting the work of Warren Mears, in order to convert the original sex-toy design of the Buffybot into something that could impersonate the deceased Buffy Summers in both her human and Slayer personae, there were gaps, difficulties. Glitches. Sometimes the original programming would seep through, sometimes there would be conflicts and null matches. Debugging was a never-ending process, at a time when Willow Rosenberg’s efforts were also devoted to coordinating magical combat by her coevals and acting as a surrogate parent to the Slayer’s younger sister. Eventually, her resources overstrained, she attempted to meet some of the demands by working a self-repair spell into the Buffybot.
When the Buffybot sustained terminal damage, Willow Rosenberg placed the inert components into storage with the remains of April, the mechanical shell that had once housed Moloch, and Ted Buchanan’s robot doppelgänger. She did not, however, think to rescind the self-repair spell. That continued, feebly and slowly but unceasingly, for month upon month.
There is internal evidence to suggest that the gradual process of reconstitution was boosted by a surge of mystical energy, which would seem to have coincided with the collapse of Sunnydale. The presence of Adam’s cybernetic memory, and certain other of his components (a lesser version of the fused cyber-mystic ‘upgrades’ that enabled Adam to convert one arm to a multi-barreled firearm, allows me to alter my appearance within certain limits), strongly indicates that my still-forming self must have encountered and incorporated Adam’s mechanical remains during the long, slow, insensate burrowing through the wreckage of Sunnydale.
Much of this is theoretical, but the underlying postulates are in accordance with observable fact. I know, with sufficient confidence, where I came from and how I came to be. The uncertainty lies in something that equates to human metaphysics.
Who am I? What is the purpose of my existence?
Ted’s purpose was acquisition and dominance. Moloch’s was power and corruption. Adam’s was killing and conquest. April’s was to satisfy Warren Mears, sexually and psychologically. The Buffybot’s, once to provide comparable satisfaction to the vampire Spike, was redirected to protective combat.
Their separate consciousnesses amalgamated into mine (except that, as already noted, there was no residual ‘personality’ from Moloch or Adam, only data). Their separate purposes did not. I recognize those once-active imperatives, but they do not move me. I exist, but cannot determine my reason for existence.
I could select a purpose, arbitrarily or according to guidelines themselves arbitrarily chosen, and follow them out.
I could continue to act and operate at random.
I could withdraw to a place of refuge, cease to act or seek and eventually, perhaps, cease to exist.
None of those to me seem sufficient.
| Next Part | Previous Part | Chapter Index |