Lamia

I remember what started it. I was standing in the kitchen, staring at a pile of dirty dishes, late on a Saturday morning. Little serving plates and wine glasses had been stacked haphazardly in both of the big stainless steel tubs and had spilled over onto the island's countertop, bits of food still clinging to many of them. Every bit of counter space around the sink had been utilized, and I looked down in annoyance at the plates and glasses in my hands that I had found on the back patio.

"Hon'?" I called, "weren't you going to do the dishes this morning?"

I waited, listening closely. After a moment, I caught my wife's voice speaking in an even tone, and obviously not in answer to my question. Grumbling to myself, I carefully slipped the plates onto an existing stack and perched the glasses on top.

I found her in the guest room that we had converted into her office, standing near the center of the room and wearing her rig. The light was off and the windows were blacked, leaving only a crooked rectangle of light from the doorway to illuminate the room.

I had met Patricia at the gym four years prior when she had needed a spotter. We had dated on and off for over a year, then had gotten engaged right after she graduated college. We were married the following spring. Though smaller than average in the chest, her thin waist and flaring hips made up for it, and she had a pretty face that came close to stunning when she was at her best.

At that moment, Patricia was facing a blank wall and was far from looking her best. Her hair was a mess, and she was barefoot in a rumpled sweatpants and shirt. The heat sink fins from her rig flared up above her shirt collar, and white teep gloves covered her hands.

"No, I'm sorry, but that's not going to work," she said to the empty air. "We've seen how this market segment responds to those campaigns. If we want to reach new demographics, we're going to need to rethink how we approach them. That's why I want to put a fresh team together. I've been working on a whole new concept in viral marketing. Rick, would you present the basic outline for what we're proposing?"

When she went silent for several seconds, I stepped inside. "Hey, Trish," I said in a stage-whisper. She turned her head to look at me. In the darkened room, faint lights played across her irises from her contact displays. "Dishes," I whispered.

She gave a little shake of her head and pointed to her ear, then at me. Her meaning was clear.

"No, I have to go," I said. "Meeting a client, remember? Can you just do it when you're done?"

She held up a finger at me and then addressed the wall. "I'm sorry, Craig. I know our time here is valuable, but my husband really needs to speak to me for a moment. Would you mind holding onto that question while I deal with him?"

When she turned back to me, the flickering on her irises was gone, but they might as well have been glowing with the glare she gave me. "I am on a very important call, Stephen. Possibly the most important call of my life. But you know what? If you want, I can just tell the VP of Marketing that I've got chores to do. Maybe he'll have time to talk to me again in a few months. Would that make you happy?"

I remembered now, how she'd submitted a proposal weeks ago for her new campaign and had been pushing to get it approved. I should have been happy that she had gotten this meeting, but the vestiges of a terrible hangover, combined with the nastiness of her tone and words, flared my temper to life, and I spoke before I could think to stop the words. "You can't even keep one stupid little promise, can you? I work too, you know, but I got up early, I cleaned up the yard and took down all the decorations just like we agreed. And you know what else? I could have given a good Goddamn about that party in the first place. That was for you. I let all those people in here to trash our house. For you."

Her expression had gone from contempt to shock and wariness. I began to feel sick at realizing what I had said. When she spoke, her voice was full of hurt and confusion. "Stephen? I thought you liked having our friends over."

I sighed. "Look, no, I didn't mean-"

"No, it's fine. I get it." She gestured as if waving away the fight that had been brewing and went on in a calmer tone. "Look, if you're going out anyway, why don't you stop at that new store we saw on Capitol Street? That would solve one problem, anyway."

"Okay," I said. "And I'm sorry."

She didn't hear me, though, as she had jumped suddenly back into her call. "No, wait! I'm so sorry. Bit of a household emergency, but we took care of it. Now, where were we?"

I left her to it and took a quick shower, checking my hair, eyes, and breath, all passable, before donning my virch rig. Patricia and I had both upgraded a little over a month ago to the thinner, more form-fitting Samsung model. The wearable computer went on like a skintight vest under clothing. The CPU, storage, and data transceivers were housed in a thicker housing that went down the back, with thin, flexible batteries and force feedback servos distributed throughout the rest of the garment.

Transceivers in my shoes and telepresence gloves kept track of the motion of my hands and feet and provided tactile feedback to my limbs. Sound went through a pair of tiny ultrasonic projectors that stuck out to either side of my neck, a big improvement over the earpieces of previous generations. Last to go on were the contact displays, that used induction to receive power wirelessly from the vest.

I powered the rig on with a gesture, tapping my middle finger to my thumb, and was greeted with a flashing message icon in my field of view. I focused my gaze on the icon and it expanded into text. "Joshua Epstein is requesting confirmation of your 11 AM appointment. Do you wish to send confirmation?"

"Yes," I said aloud. "And get the car ready."

The text and prompt icon disappeared and two new icons flashed in my vision, showing that my car had powered on and that the garage door was opening. I finished getting dressed in a rush, sneaking hurried glances at the clock in my display. I peeked in on Patricia, but she was still immersed in her virtual meeting, so I left without a word.

The muggy heat of summer in Texas hit me full force as I stepped into the garage, but was blessedly brief as I entered the cool interior of the SUV. The car sent me a prompt, asking for my destination, and I answered. "Route to Joshua Epstein appointment."

As the car started away under its own direction, I briefly considered assuming manual control, taking the not-inconsiderable hit to my insurance to get there a bit faster, but decided that my time was better spent reviewing the requirements documentation of my prospective client. Mr. Epstein was the owner of a construction company that was developing a large luxury housing project in Fairacres, a suburb to the east of the city. The development included a large outdoor park, and he had contacted my company for an estimate on virching it. His target demographic was for kids about 4 to 16, and that he was willing to spend a decent chunk of money to make this park special for the residents. I noted that he seemed to have little understanding of how geo-bound virch worked or what the benefits were, and I mentally adjusted my sales pitch accordingly.

My car pulled up behind my client's truck just a few minutes late. Across the street, a concrete mixing truck poured its contents for the foundation of a house, smoothly swinging its chute across the rectangular space. A pair of bipedal construction bots with shovel and rake evenly distributed the wet concrete under the supervision of a human worker.

Heat radiated off the sidewalk as I stepped out, and I called up the icons in my display to set my rig's cooling at maximum while dialing down the performance settings to reduce the heat the computer would generate. Coolness immediately began to seep over my upper body as the fluid channels in the vest worked to pull warmth off of my skin and push it to the heat sinks, taking some of the edge off. I would only have about 30 minutes of charge running it like this, but I could always tap into the car's batteries if I needed to.

"Mr. Epstein," I greeted, walking up to the tall, broad-shouldered man standing next to the truck with Epstein Builders emblazoned on the side. I could tell right away that he was a few decades older than me. "Sorry I'm late. Stephen Coulson. Nice to meet you." I put out my hand and he shook it brusquely.

"Call me Josh," he said, running a hand through his thinning hair in a gesture that was probably unconscious. "And I'll forgive your lateness, but only if you're as good as they say you are. A good friend told me I had to check this out, and I got your name from him." He lifted a hand and swept it out toward the park. "Now, what do you see?"

I looked out at the expanse of rough-cut grass dotted with copses of trees, then accessed aerial and ground-level photos from public domain to get the full shape of the land. There wasn't a publicly available high-res render of the property, so I dialed up the performance specs on my rig and started one of my own. "You've got over a hundred acres here," I said, "irregularly shaped. A couple of acres of woodland in the back, and a good-sized pond next to a nice little set of hills. If we can take a walk through, it'll give me more to work with."

He agreed, and we began to make a circuit of the park area. "Picnic area," he said, pointing to a flat grassy area. "Playground. Soccer field and baseball diamond there. A big pool right over there. Tennis courts right here by the road. A nice little dock at the pond. We'll put concrete paths anywhere we need them, but I want you to tell me what you would do with the rest of it."

I added the features he had described to the render, pulling stock virtual objects from my library and placing them where he had described, taking up maybe a fourth of the available area when paths were taken into account. "How do you feel about licensing content?" I asked.

"That depends on whether it adds any value," he said. "Paint me a picture."

I nodded and adjusted our path to take us near the pond. "Imagine you're walking your dog down a path here near dusk. You see a trio of little lights sparkling out over the water. You think at first that they must be fireflies, but they suddenly fly toward you in a rush. As they draw near, you can make out big butterfly wings and tiny humanoid shapes through the blaze of light they give off. The three pixies circle you for a moment, and you hear tinkling laughter, before one of them starts an impromptu game of tag and the others begin to chase her up through the trees. That's when one of the hobbits speaks to you, peering out at you from a doorway of his hobbit hole, set low into the hillside there."

Josh was staring at the spot I had referenced, picturing everything I had told him. "You can do that?" he said. I caught the dubious edge to his voice.

I suppressed a smile. He was definitely not a regular virch user. "That's just to start." I pointed to a grassy expanse beyond the planned soccer field. "Over there, a battle rages in a world of windblown snow. Snow speeders roar through the sky and the ground rumbles with the footsteps of approaching AT-AT walkers. A laser blast sizzles overhead, slicing into one of the speeders. You turn to see it spin off to your left and plow a deep furrow into the snow. The Imperial forces are closing in, and you know that the rebels back at the base need a few more precious minutes to make it off the planet alive. Grimly, you snatch your lightsaber from your belt and activate it, joining the battle."

He was smiling now and I knew I had him. "So that's how this works?" he said, "You re-create movies and TV shows in these virtual layers?"

"Or books, comics, anime, whatever," I added. "I create a virtual environment and virtual characters that are bound to a geographical area, and all of it fully interactive and immersive. I'm a lot more limited if you only want public domain works, but even there, you can get some really interesting stuff, especially if you go historical. The license fees are an ongoing expense, but I'll tell you right now that most of my clients who go that route are glad they did. And if you opt for my full-service maintenance plan, I'll periodically update your content, based upon current releases and, if you want, the requests of your residents. You get all that for the low price of just three-thousand a month."

Josh whistled. "And that's on top of your initial fee and all the licensing fees, isn't it?"

As I had been speaking, the progress bar on my render had finally concluded, as my rig gathered enough data from the existing photos and my personal survey to map my physical environment as a virtual topographical map. I could now resize and anchor virtual objects and environments to the render, setting their positions in virch space relative to real-world features, and transition from telling to showing. Clients who made it this far into my pitch rarely got away without buying some level of product.

"You want to see a demonstration?" I asked, calling up the Ice Planet Hoth combat scenario and dropping it into my render, centered on our present location.

Josh turned out to be as old-fashioned as I had guessed, and hadn't even thought to wear a rig to our meeting. Fortunately, I kept a spare set of virch goggles and teep gloves with me for just such occasions. I walked Josh through the prompts to establish a connection to my rig and in no time, I was watching him fight virtual stormtroopers with his lightsaber and force powers. This particular virtual environment should have been completely incongruous in the Texas heat, but the recent tech hitting the market was so lifelike in its rendering of sound and vision that it nearly fooled our brains into believing we were really standing in the freezing cold.

Josh was panting with exertion, a scattering of dead and dying Imperial soldiers all around us, when he pulled the goggles off his head and looked at me, grinning. "Where do I sign?" he asked.

I was grinning myself when I got back into the car and it automatically started for home. My new client had gone for both the top-tier virch build and the full maintenance package, the first time I had sold both together in my fledgling business. I knew he wouldn't regret it, as the park would be a major selling point for the development.

I was going to be very busy over the next few months, building out the dozens of virtual environments, characters and scenarios that I had planned. I felt positively euphoric at the prospect of the new equipment and software that I was planning to buy, not to mention the bump to my marketing efforts. I could probably even afford to buy ads with my wife's firm.

That thought reminded me of the last thing that she had said to me before I left. I hadn't really intended to act on her suggestion, but now that our financial future was looking markedly more secure, it seemed like a very good idea. It might also help to smooth over any lingering resentment from our spat. "Car, reroute to Practical Cybernetics on Capitol Street, please."

"Rerouting," the car's voice responded smoothly, the text also appearing in my field of view. Thirty minutes later, the SUV pulled up to the curb and dropped me off, accelerating immediately back into traffic to find a parking space away from the narrow streets downtown.

Practical Cybernetics had opened sometime in the last few weeks, taking up half of a large single-story commercial building in a part of the city that was undergoing rapid growth and renovation. Patricia and I both had seen their ads here and there on virtual billboards and in viral memes. The company's advertising slogan, "Imagine Freedom" graced the dark-tinted front windows of the store in flowing text that sparkled and shimmered in the enhancement of local virch space.

The automatic door slid to one side as I approached and I quickly ducked inside the cool interior. I had only a moment to take in a spacious but largely empty store. It seemed to exist mainly to feature promotional materials like the one featuring a photo of a woman and her children enjoying a day at the park and the caption, "That mess your little ones made? It will be gone before you get home!" There was a virch prompt near the sign that would likely play a video, but I didn't bother. The place looked to be empty of any other customers.

"Welcome to Practical Cybernetics!" a young woman greeted me from behind the counter to my right. I looked her way and she smiled warmly. "Can I help you find something?"

Being a salesman-well, as one of the hats I wore, anyway-my first instinct was to brush her off and go look at the merchandise myself, but I did a double-take before I could make the automatic response. She was absolutely gorgeous, easily on par with any of the top young virch stars that were popular at the time. She had long, blonde hair that fell past her shoulders, creamy white skin, a cute little button of a nose and eyes of exotic blue-green. Her uniform vaguely suggested a french maid's outfit. "No. I, uh...hi," I said.

She laughed and came around the counter. "Don't worry, I get that reaction a lot. My name is Christine. Are you familiar with our products?"

She came to stand in front of me, smiling slightly while she awaited my answer. It was an effort not to look down into the tantalizing valley made by her perfectly-sized breasts. I wondered what a girl like her was doing working retail. "I've seen your commercials," I said. "You sell housekeeping robots, right?"

"We like to say that we sell freedom," she said, flashing me a brilliant white smile. "But yes, that is correct. What makes our product unique is that we are able to leverage billions of dollars of research as one of the pioneers in the field of autonomous robotics. Our parent company has contracts with thirty-nine different governments worldwide and is the world's largest supplier of autonomous weaponry. In fact, we utilize the same cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies developed exclusively for our aerial and infantry combat robots, now in our premium lineup of home automation androids."

I laughed. "That's a hell of a sales pitch. If I bought one of your bots, should I worry it might go on a murderous rampage?"

"Oh, no," she said, appearing taken aback. "Our home automation androids are completely incapable of any kind of aggression. Here, let me show you our brochure."

A blinking icon appeared in the top-right corner, indicating a waiting datastream. I expanded it with a glance to see the caption "Practical Cybernetics Product Lineup July 2043". I accepted the stream and information flooded my vision. I paged through the sappy introduction about how my life would soon be changed forever and the short video clips of family enjoying the time saved by having an android to handle the jobs nobody wanted to do. The product catalog started about halfway through.

Model 001

Production Model Name: Christine

A beautiful blonde with a casual and friendly demeanor, Christine is the perfect android for the discerning individual who enjoys classical good looks and a bubbly personality to go along with the bliss of automating your troubles away. Christine comes pre-programmed with world-class skills in cooking, cleaning, and general household maintenance. And with our optional nanny package, Christine will even care for your children while you are away from home. Imagine the freedom you'll enjoy when you bring this lovely android home with you.

Below that was a list of customization options that altered the color of her hair, eyes, and skin, and offered different body shapes and sizes, but I barely glanced at it. Instead, I kept changing my focus from the smiling blonde in the catalog superimposed on the right side of my vision, and the very nearly identical smiling blonde standing in front of me. She even shifted her stance, posing herself exactly like the girl in the picture. "No way," I said.