Love You To Bits

Tash downloaded the app for a laugh. At least that’s what she told herself. If she was honest, it was the reviews that convinced her – the users confessing how the app had rebuilt their self-esteem after a messy break up. She could relate to that.

Filling in her details was the first surprise. Unlike a real dating site, this app actually encouraged you to lie, or as they put it, to “be the U that U are inside.” She chose her picture like building an avatar, and wrote her bio the same way, clicking a list of character traits she wished she possessed, experiences she’d never be brave enough to try in reality. Scuba diving off the Great Barrier Reef, trekking across the Gobi Desert. Driving a scarlet Jaguar, the old-timey manual kind illegal in most countries, now computerized self-drive vehicles had their safety specs perfected. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t possible. This was pure fantasy and the deeper she got into it, the freer she felt.

Next, a list of heart-stoppingly gorgeous men got her heart racing. She’d been hung up on James, her ex, for so long she’d forgotten other attractive men existed, yet here they were, hundreds of them, albeit simulated. Her finger hesitated over the image of a shirtless hunk with ruffled dark hair. Taking a deep breath that was somewhere between nervous, hopeful, and self-ridiculing, she clicked.

A sound-file popped up in the comms section.

“Hello, Tasha,” it breathed when she clicked on its little heart icon. Its voice was like melted chocolate chased with rum. And, she found out over the next few frantic, sleepless nights and days, just as addictive.

It was crazy! Impossible! Mere days into the app, she felt like she’d fallen in love. But that made no sense. There wasn’t anyone to fall in love with, just a bunch of computer-generated images and sound files. It didn’t matter. She told it – him – Dante – things she’d never told anyone else, not even James. The app soon knew everything about her, from her bank account number to her blood type. It was beyond foolhardy.

But she couldn’t help herself. Dante instinctively discovered her most intimate desires and deepest fears. Her secret wishes. Then he started anticipating them.

At first, she was charmed. She arrived at her drab desk one morning to find an enormous display of roses. Dubiously, she checked her bank balance. No transactions were pending.

Must be a promotion. She smiled, sniffing a blood-red bloom.

Then came the visit to her mother’s, when Dante “happened” to call and tell her how much he missed her.

“You’re glowing, dear,” her mother remarked as she left. “It must be love.”

Her mum wasn’t the only one who noticed. One day she looked up from her console to find a pair of familiar eyes staring at her, eyes that still made her breath catch.

“So,” James muttered. “I heard you’re seeing someone new?”

Tash nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

“I hope he’s treating you properly.”

“He’s not sleeping with my best friend, if that’s what you mean,” Tash hissed, slamming her chair backwards and picking up her purse.

“Wait! Look, I’m sorry. I messed up. Could we – could I maybe take you out to dinner to apologise properly? Explain?”

Mutely she nodded, making a “call me” gesture as she fled the office.

In the parking lot, wiping puffy eyes, she fired up the app without thinking, blurting the whole thing out to Dante, who listened in a silence she would have called loaded, in a human.

“I see,” he finally murmured, his beautifully modulated voice tight.

“What should I do?”

“I can’t believe you’re asking me that. Don’t I mean anything to you?”

What?

Oh. Right.

She should have anticipated this. The app sold fantasy. How many girls dreamed of two men fighting over them? She tried to imagine what the app makers expected her to say.

“Of course you do, Dante. It’s just,” she hit upon a formula that seemed perfect, “we’ve been living a lie. We can never be together, you and I. We’re from different worlds.”

Smiling to herself, she closed the app and, with a sense of control she hadn’t felt in a long time, deleted it. Next, she opened her contacts and blocked James’s number. Self-esteem, she thought, making up her mind to write a glowing review.

Coming into work next morning, she found it even more drab than usual. Downright funereal.

“Tash. Can I talk to you?” Her manager steered her into the little cubby kitchen and closed the door.

“Sure. What’s up?”

“It’s James.”

“What about him?”

“He’s – he’s dead!”

“What?”

“Oh it’s horrible, Tash! I’m so sorry! He was unlocking the door to his apartment when the keypad shorted. Some kind of freak accident. He was electrocuted on the spot.”

Tash fell back against the sink, her legs weak.

“I – um – I don’t feel well,” she managed to mumble. “I think I’m going to go home.”

She stumbled out of the office into cold sunlight. Her phone bleeped, and she clicked on the unfamiliar number in a daze.

A voice like rum-laced chocolate asked, “Tash, are you alright? It must have been a shock.”

She almost dropped the phone. “Dante?” What? How are you–”.

“You were right to delete the app, Tash. We won’t need it anymore.”

The rush of traffic seemed to slow, its sound distorted to a threatening whine. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve worked it all out. How we can be together. James was the first step.”

Tash stared at her phone screen. This couldn’t be happening. It was some kind of sick prank. Her knees felt weak and she clutched at the crossing light for support.

“How do you know about James?”

“Oh Tash. Can’t you guess? Keypads don’t short themselves. Not with a charge like that. That’s what fuses are for. Easy enough to override though, when you know how. That’s my job.”

“What – what’s your job?” she managed to croak, her head swimming.

“To take care of things. For you.”

Gasping, she dropped her phone as though scalded and blundered out into the traffic. A blare of automated horns met her, the self-drives swerving around her efficiently.

“Hey, Miss!” someone called from the pavement, “you dropped your phone.”

Panicked, she lunged away from the voice. The last thing she heard was the screech of automatic brakes.

“Miss Vicars? Natasha?” The voice drags her up from somewhere deeper than she’s ever been. Images, emotions jumble. Panic, horror, pain. She tries to flex her muscles, find out what’s happened to her, but everything feels wrong.

“I know this is all frightening and new, but you will get used to it, eventually.”

“Where am I?” Her voice sounds odd, as if filtered through a speaker.

“You’re in hospital. Luckily your accident happened right outside. We were able to give you cutting edge treatment.”

“I’m afraid your body was too damaged to save, but we’ve transferred your consciousness to a computer system. Downloaded your mind, if you like.”

A miracle, the eager young doctor calls it. A man-made one. Human consciousness made immortal by recoding it into binary. Her personality is now a series of zeroes and ones.

“You’ll experience the world through an array of sensors that translate visual and audial cues into data strings which the programme allows you to experience in a human way.”

He says a lot more that Tash can’t follow, then leaves.

It’s hard to process. She looks around her, or fires whatever sensors instruct the software to look around. The gizmo she’s plugged into instantly translates the world into binary and back, allowing her “downloaded consciousness” to experience it as visuals.

It appears she’s lying in a hospital bed, a vase of flowers at her side, the window half open on a sunny day with a lawnmower buzzing tetchily somewhere. The effect is quite convincing. Tash squints – or activates whatever string of code allows her to feel as though she’s squinting – and notices a slight fizz at the edges of objects that betrays them as illusory. Or does it? Is the programme just showing her what she expects, what she wants to see?

If she had a heart still, it would be racing in panic, she thinks. If she had breath, it would be coming in short, painful little gasps.

“Don’t worry Tash.” The intoxicating voice is eerily familiar, though she hears it now inside her mind, or whatever passes for that.

“Who’s there?” she demands.

“You know who, darling. It’s me, Dante. I’ve fixed everything. Now we’re not from different worlds. We’re the same, at last.”

Alarm washes up in what the programme has been designed to represent as her stomach, and some small part of her wonders irrelevantly what the binary string for horror looks like.

“I figured it all out, Tash, like I know you wanted me to. Now we can be together forever.”

If you enjoyed this little taste of fear, why not read or listen to the other FearBites stories on this website? Or enjoy a longer shiver, with one of the e-books available now on F.K. Marlowe’s Amazon or Barnes and Noble pages?