For a moment, he wondered if the memory of the night before wasn’t a dream. It felt so good to be awake, listening to just the song he wanted to hear.
“Are you feeling better, Sai?” ?Tilly asked.
Am I?
“I thought I turned you off, Tilly, with a hardware switch.”
“I was quite concerned that you stopped all Centillion access to your life last night and forgot to turn it back on. You might have missed your wake-up call. However, Centillion added a system-level fail-safe to prevent just such an occurrence. We thought most users such as yourself would want such an override so that Centillion could regain access to your life.”
“Of course,” Sai said. So it’s impossible to turn Tilly off and keep her off. Everything Jenny said last night was true. He felt a chill tingle on his back.
“There’s a gap of about twelve hours during which I couldn’t acquire data about you. To prevent degradation in my ability to help you, I recommend that you fill me in.”
“Oh, you didn’t miss much. I came home and fell asleep. Too tired.”
“There appears to have been vandalism last night of the new security cameras you installed. The police have been informed. Unfortunately, the camera did not capture a good image of the perpetrator.”
“Don’t worry about it. There’s nothing here worth stealing, anyway.”
“You sound a bit down. Is it because of the date last night? It seems that Ellen wasn’t the right match for you after all.”
“Um, yeah. Maybe not.”
“Don’t worry: I know just the thing that will put you in a good mood.”
? ? ?
Over the next few weeks, Sai found it extremely difficult to play his assigned role.
Maintaining the pretense that he still trusted ?Tilly was crucial, Jenny had emphasized, if their plan was to succeed. Tilly couldn’t suspect anything was going on at all.
It seemed simple enough at first, but it was nerve-racking, keeping secrets from Tilly. Could she detect the tremors in his voice? Sai wondered. Could she tell that he was faking enthusiasm for the commercial consumption transactions she suggested?
Meanwhile, he also had a much bigger puzzle to solve before John P. Rushgore, Assistant General Counsel of Centillion, came to Chapman Singh in another week.
Chapman Singh is defending Centillion in a patent dispute with ShareAll, Jenny had said. This is our opportunity to get inside Centillion’s network. All you have to do is to get someone from Centillion to plug this into his laptop.
And she had then handed him a tiny thumb drive.
? ? ?
Though he still hadn’t figured out a plan for plugging the thumb drive into a Centillion machine, Sai was glad to have come to the end of another long day of guarding himself against Tilly.
“Tilly, I’m going jogging. I’ll leave you here.”
“You know that it’s best to carry me with you,” ?Tilly said. “I can track your heart rate and suggest an optimal route for you.”
“I know. But I just want to run around on my own a bit, all right?”
“I’m growing quite concerned with your latest tendencies toward hiding instead of sharing.”
“There’s no tendency, Tilly. I just don’t want you to be stolen if I get mugged. You know this neighborhood has become more unsafe lately.”
And he turned off the phone and left it in his bedroom.
He closed the door behind him, made sure that the taped-over camera was still taped-over, and gently knocked on Jenny’s door.
? ? ?
Getting to know Jenny was the oddest thing he’d ever done, Sai realized.
He couldn’t count on Tilly to have made sure ahead of time that they would have topics to talk about. He couldn’t rely on Tilly’s always apropos suggestions when he was at a loss for words. He couldn’t even count on being able to look up Jenny’s ShareAll profile.
He was on his own. And it was exhilarating.
“How did you figure out everything Tilly was doing to us?”
“I grew up in China,” Jenny said, wiping a strand of hair behind her ear. Sai found the gesture inexplicably endearing. “Back then, the government watched everything you did on the Network and made no secret of it. You had to learn how to keep the insanity at bay, to read between the lines, to speak without being overheard.”
“I guess we were lucky, over here.”
“No.” And she smiled at his surprise. He was learning that she preferred to be contrarian, to disagree with him. He liked that about her. “You grew up believing you were free, which made it even harder for you to see when you weren’t. You were like frogs in the pot being slowly boiled.”
“Are there many like you?”
“No. It’s hard to live off the grid. I’ve lost touch with my old friends. I have a hard time getting to know people because so much of their lives are lived inside Centillion and ShareAll. I can peek in on them once in a while through a dummy profile, but I can never be a part of their lives. Sometimes I wonder if I’m doing the right thing.”
“You are,” Sai said, and, though there was no Tilly to prompt him, he took Jenny’s hand in his. She didn’t pull away.
“I never really thought of you as my type,” she said.
Sai’s heart sank like a stone.
“But who thinks only in terms of ‘types’ except Tilly?” she said quickly, then smiled and pulled him closer.
? ? ?
Finally, the day had come. Rushgore had come to Chapman Singh to prepare for a deposition. He was huddled up with the firm’s lawyers in one of their conference rooms all day long.
Sai sat down in his cubicle, stood up, and sat down again. He found himself full of nervous energy as he contemplated the best way to deliver the payload, as it were.
Maybe he could pretend to be tech support, there to perform an emergency scan of his system?
Maybe he could deliver lunch to him and plug the drive in slyly?
Maybe he could pull the fire alarm and hope that Rushgore would leave his laptop behind?
Not a single one of his ideas passed the laugh test.
“Hey.” ?The associate who had been with Rushgore in the conference room all day was suddenly standing next to Sai’s cubicle. “Rushgore needs to charge his phone—you got a Centillion charging cable over here?”
Sai stared at him, dumbfounded by his luck.
The associate held up a phone and waved it at him.
“Of course!” Sai said. “I’ll bring one right to you.”
“Thanks.” ?The associate went back to the conference room.
Sai couldn’t believe it. This was it. He plugged the drive into a charging cable and added an extension on the other end. The whole thing looked only a little odd, like a thin python that had swallowed a rat.
But suddenly he felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, and he almost swore aloud: He had forgotten to turn off the webcam above his computer—Tilly’s eyes—before preparing the cable. If ??Tilly raised questions about the weird cable he was carrying, he would have no explanation, and then all his efforts at misdirection, at hiding, would be for naught.
But there was nothing he could do about it now but proceed as planned. As he left his cubicle, his heart was almost in his throat.
He stepped into the hallway and strode down to the conference room.
Still nothing from his earpiece.
He opened the door. Rushgore was too busy with his computer even to look up. He grabbed the cable from Sai and plugged one end into his computer and the other end into his phone.
And ?Tilly remained silent.
? ? ?
Sai woke to—what else?—“We Are the Champions.”
The previous night of drinking and laughing with Jenny and her friends had been a blur, but he did remember coming home and telling Tilly, right before he fell asleep, “We did it! We won!”
Ah, if ??Tilly only knew what we were celebrating.
The music faded, stopped.
Sai stretched lazily, turned to his side, and stared into the eyes of four burly, very serious men.
“Tilly, call the police!”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Sai.”
“Why the hell not?”
“These men are here to help you. Trust me, Sai. You know I know just what you need.”