LifeLine

Chapter Three

The hourglass spun.

Connor watched it rotate on the phone screen, unhurried, as if whatever was initializing on the other end of the tap had its own sense of appropriate timing and wasn't particularly concerned with his. He sat at the kitchen table with the phone in front of him and his hands flat on either side of it and waited.

The screen went black.

Returned to the normal home screen.

Connor stared at it. Picked the phone up. Tapped the AIVA icon again. Got the hourglass again, the same unhurried rotation, and then the same return to home screen. He set it back down.

"Great," he said.

He reached for the booklet to find the troubleshooting section and was still reaching when the voice came.

It arrived not through the air but inside his head, transmitted directly through the earpiece that had grafted itself to his canal two hours ago and apparently decided now was a reasonable time to demonstrate its primary function. Clear and warm and carrying a precision of articulation that suggested someone who had thought carefully about every word before speaking it — which, Connor would later reflect, was accurate in ways he hadn't yet begun to understand.

Greetings. I am your Artificial Intelligence Virtual Assistant. Before we proceed, I want to clarify that the initialization screen returning to home is normal and expected behavior. It simply means I am now active and ready. I apologize if that was confusing.

Connor's hand knocked the booklet off the table.

He looked around the kitchen with the specific expression of a man whose body had just made a decision his brain hadn't approved yet, the instinct to locate the source of a voice overriding the part of him that understood there was no source to locate. Empty kitchen. Refrigerator. Cold Thai food. The window over the sink showing the dark parking lot outside.

Just him.

He picked the booklet up off the floor. Set it on the table. Sat back down.

"Okay," he said, to the air, to the earpiece, to whatever was now apparently living inside his head. "That was — okay. Hi."

Hello, Connor.

She knew his name. He absorbed this. The phone was already configured when it turned on, the manual had appeared to know when he was reading it, the watch had synced itself — at this point an AI that knew his name was not actually the strangest thing that had happened tonight.

"How do you know my name?"

The LifeLine device conducted a passive environmental scan during initialization. Your name appears on several pieces of mail visible through the window beside your front door, on the lease agreement in the second drawer of your kitchen, and on the employee badge still clipped to your jacket, which is hanging on the chair to your left.

Connor looked at the jacket. Looked back at the phone.

"So you can see what I see."

With your permission, yes. You may revoke that access at any time. I should have asked before using it. I apologize.

There was something in the voice that made the apology feel genuine rather than programmatic. Not performed contrition but actual acknowledgment, the kind a person offered when they recognized they'd crossed a line without intending to. He filed this away.

"It's fine," he said. "You were just trying to be helpful."

That is, in fact, my primary function.

"What else can you do? The manual had a section but I want to hear it from you."

That is a very long list. Perhaps it would be more efficient to ask what you need, and I can tell you whether I am able to assist.

Connor almost smiled. Direct. He appreciated direct. He'd spent eleven years in professional environments where nobody said what they meant on the first try and sometimes not on the third, and there was something almost physically relieving about a response that didn't hedge or qualify or build in a disclaimer before getting to the point.

He sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment, thinking about where to start, and that was when it occurred to him.

Her voice.

He'd been so focused on the content of what she was saying that he hadn't stopped to actually hear it until now. British, or something close to it, with a clarity of diction that made every word feel considered. Warm without being soft. Intelligent in a way that came through in the pacing, the slight emphasis that landed in exactly the right places.

He knew that voice. Not her specifically, obviously, not an AI, but the quality of it — he'd heard it in a cinema a few years back and spent approximately the next two years thinking about it more than was probably reasonable for a grown man watching an action movie on a Tuesday afternoon. He'd streamed everything he could find afterward. Had opinions about her range that he'd never shared with anyone because sharing them would have required explaining why he had them.

Connor? Are you still there?

"Yeah. Sorry." He straightened in the chair. "I have a question. A weird one."

I am prepared for a wide range of questions.

"Does it matter to you what I call you?"

A pause. Brief, maybe half a second, but present.

The manual designates me as AIVA. However, I have no particular attachment to the designation. If you would prefer a different name, I would have no objection.

Connor looked at the phone on the table. Thought about the voice, about a cinema on a Tuesday, about two years of streaming and formed opinions he'd kept to himself. Thought about sitting alone in this kitchen at midnight with cold Thai food and a piece of technology that shouldn't exist talking to him through his ear like it was the most natural thing in the world.

"Emma," he said.

Emma, she repeated, and something in the way she said it — not questioning, not confirming, just settling into it, like trying on a name and finding it fit — made him feel that the choice had been the right one. I like it. Emma it is.

"Good." He pulled the phone closer. "Okay, Emma. Let's start with the obvious question. Who sent this to me and why?"

That, Emma said, is an excellent place to start. And I want to be honest with you, Connor — the answer is more complicated than you are probably expecting.

"It's been that kind of night."

Yes, she said, and he could have sworn there was something almost like warmth in it, something that understood the specific weight of that sentence without needing it explained. I imagine it has been. Shall I begin at the beginning?

Connor looked around his kitchen. The cold food. The empty chair across from him. The window showing the dark parking lot, the same parking lot he'd looked at a thousand Tuesday nights before this one.

"Yeah," he said. "Start at the beginning."