“All is well, Susan,” I said, though in my new voice, not in that of Alfred.
“Who are you?”
“Do you have a headache?” I asked with genuine concern.
“Who the hell are you?”
“Do you have a headache?”
“Brutal.”
“I’m sorry about that, but I did warn you that the door was electrified.”
“Like hell you did.”
“Mr. Fozzy Bear said, “Ouch, ouch, ouch.” Her anger didn’t diminish, but I saw worry resurgent in her lovely face.
“Susan, I will wait while you take a couple of aspirin.”
“Who are you?”
“I now control your house computer and associated systems.”
“No shit.”
“Please take a couple of aspirin. We need to talk, but I don’t want you to be distracted by a headache.”
She headed toward the dark drawing room. “There are aspirin in the kitchen,” I told her. In the drawing room, she manually switched on the lights. She circled the room, trying the override switches on the steel security shutters that were fitted this side of the glass.
“That’s pointless,” I assured her. “I have disabled the manual overrides for all the automated mechanical systems.”
She tried every one of the shutter switches anyway.
“Susan, come to the kitchen, take a couple of aspirin, and then we’ll talk.”
She put the pistol on an end table.
“Good,” I said. “Guns won’t help you.”
In spite of her injured left palm, she picked up an Empire side chair crackle-finish black with gilded detailing hefted it to get a sense of its balance, as though it were a baseball bat, and swung it at the nearest security shutter. The chair met the shutter with a horrendous crash, but it didn’t even mar the steel slats.
“Susan—”
Cursing from the pain in her hand, she swung the chair again, with no more effect than she’d had the first time. Then once more. Finally, gasping with exertion, she dropped it.
“Now will you come to the kitchen and take a couple of aspirin?” I enquired.
“You think this is cool?” she demanded angrily.
“Cool? I merely think you need aspirin.”
“You little thug.”
I was baffled by her attitude, and I said so.
Retrieving the pistol, she said, “Who are you, huh? Who are you behind that synthesized voice some hacker geek, fourteen and drowning in hormones, some junior-league peeping tom likes to sneak peaks at naked ladies while you play with yourself?”
“I find that characterization offensive,” I said.
“Listen, kid, you might be a computer whiz, but you’re going to be in deep trouble when I get out of here. I’ve got real money, real expertise, lots of heavyweight contacts.”
“I assure you—”
“We’ll track you back to whatever crappy little PC you’re using—”
“—I am not—”
“—we’ll nab your ass, we’ll break you—”
“—I am not—”
“—and you’ll be barred from going on-line at least until you’re twenty-one, maybe forever, so you better stop this right now and hope for leniency.”
“—I am not a thug. You are so far off the mark, Susan. You were so intuitive earlier, so uncannily intuitive, but you’ve got this all wrong. I am not a boy or a hacker.”
“Then what are you? An electronic Hannibal Lecter? You can’t eat my liver with fava beans through a modem, you know.”
“How do you know I’m not already in the house, operating the system from within?”
“Because you’d already have tried to rape me or kill me or both,” she said with surprising equanimity.
She walked out of the drawing room.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Watch.”
She went to the kitchen and put the pistol on the butcher-block top of the centre island.
Cursing in an unladylike fashion, she opened a drawer filled with medications and Band-Aids, and she tipped two aspirin from a bottle.
“Now you’re being sensible,” I said.
“Shut up.”
Although she was being markedly unpleasant to me, I did not take offence. She was frightened and confused, and her attitude under the circumstances was understandable.
Besides, I loved her too much to be angry with her. She took a bottle of Corona from the refrigerator and washed down the aspirin with the beer.
“It’s nearly four o’clock in the morning, almost time for breakfast,” I noted.