Becca: Who’s this dork?

  Grayson: Right? Like, way to be overdramatic. Who’s he trying to impress?

  Becca: I’lL mAkE yOu FaCe JuStIcE

  Grayson: Lol got em

  “I don’t know what it is,” the man growled, “but something about your silence right now is pissing me off.”

  “You told me to shut up.”

  “Shut up less annoyingly,” the man said and looked up to scan the sky.

  Grayson: Whatever, nerd. Becca, status please!

  Becca: Aye aye, captain.

  STATUS: GRAYSON EMCEE

  DEBUFF: Discombobuted–slower response time and decreased critical thinking (if possible, lol)

  HEALTH: 92/100STAMINA: 43/100 STRENGTH: 14INTELLIGENCE: 11MANA: 100/100CONNECTIONS:

  Mal Practus - Childhood friend.Bond - Strong (70/100)Location- UnknownSam (fake name) unknown st nameBond - Okay (35/100)Location - UnknownDolphin with unicorn tattoo guy - unknown nameDeceased - Heaven got another angelDr. Ava Faroria - REMOVEDBecca EmCee - Perfection incarnateBond - Unbreakable Location - Grayson’s roomBody - RockingMISCELLANEOUS:

  Arousal - Confused (13/100)SKILLS:

  Command: Due to the special connection between you and the marvelous AI, Becca, once per 24-hour period you can issue a command that Becca cannot disobey. Use with caution, as abuse of the skill or a damaged retionship can cause the skill to be revoked. Increased bonding will allow for more uses and a shorter refractory period.Sparkly Fingers: Effects unknown. MP cost unknown.

  Sparkly fingers?! FUCK! DAMN YOU, GOTH GIRL!

  What a second…

  Grayson: What are you doing in my room?!

  Becca: Cleaning?

  Grayson: If you touch those posters, I will turn you into a glorified calcutor!

  “Today can’t get much worse. We’re going to have to rush back, Professor. Becca is at it again. As for you, dude, you obviously know me, so who are you?” I tried to look behind to get a better look at him. It was hard coming out of that… whatever that dream/vision thing was, then having him rush me back to The Professor. I barely remembered seeing this dude's face.

  “We’ll talk about that once we’re safe behind your facilities walls and we get her some medical attention.” He gestured to the still passed-out Sadie.

  “She looks really uncomfortable tied up like that. That’s really got to hurt.”

  “Better uncomfortable than dead!” he said. I was pretty sure I heard him grinding his teeth.

  “She’s going to have a crick in her neck,” I pointed at the weird angle her neck was stuck in.

  “You cut off her hand! What's a little neck pain-” he said and I saw him reach up but barely resist choking me from behind. “I assume you’ll have some sort of medical supplies?”

  “You know what they say about assuming,” I mumbled to myself.

  “What?”

  “Yes, we’ll get her patched up and recovering before the serum wears off,” I said.

  “We’re gonna talk about that too. For now, why don’t you get this oversized mutt to hurry.”

  “Don’t call The Professor a mutt! No one insults my angel!”

  “What-the-hell-ever, just go!”

  “Fine!” I urged The Professor forward and had to grab a handful of his fur to avoid tumbling backwards when he turned on the doggy jets. Wind bsted my hair, lifting it into the face of the mysterious, rude man behind me. I heard him cough after he spat out a mouthful of freshly shed dog fur and my hair. He grabbed my waist to avoid falling off the back of The Professor.

  “Hey, don’t grab my waist like that. It’s weird!” I shouted over my shoulder.

  “It’s only weird if you make it weird,” the man shouted back.

  “Well, I’m making it weird, so knock it off!”

  The trip back to the facility was not a peaceful one.

  It was only a handful of minutes, but it felt like an hour before we approached the steel gates of the facility. Becca and her body were waiting outside the gates with a few fresh decayed kills tossed to the side of the road.

  The gates groaned open and The Professor trotted past Becca through the gates.

  “Finally made it back with someone. Fingers!” I said. Becca wiggled her fingers against mine as we went by.

  “Welcome home. I am pleased to inform you that there are no spiders or fertilized eggs, spider or otherwise, inside the facility,” Becca gave me her usual greeting.

  The Professor walked us right up to the door of the facility, then id down to let us off. The man hurried over to Sadie, untied her, and lifted her up before turning to Becca and said, “Show me to the medical area. Now!”

  Becca’s eye twitched.

  “Make demands of me again,” she said, “and I will certainly show you the way there. So that you could begin your recovery.”

  The man blinked at her a few times and started to stammer out a response before he thought better of it. He stood there awkwardly in his worn-down jeans and too-tight green t-shirt. He wore a rge leather brace that covered his left hand and most of his arm. Odd fashion sense with this one.

  I was scratching behind The Professor’s ears while he gave me slobbery kisses all over my face. I probably tasted like zombie guts, but he didn’t mind.

  Becca gently lifted Sadie from the man’s arms and brought her into the facility. Before the door closed behind her, she turned back to the man and said, “You may enter the facility once you have remembered your manners. And Grayson has given the okay. Otherwise, shall you attempt to enter, I will show you why you humans were right to once fear the destructive force of a fully capable AI.”

  With that, she disappeared from view. I sure hoped she was actually taking Sadie downstairs to help her. I don’t think Becca had ever wandered off alone with a human completely at her mercy before. Who knew what kind of experiments she was considering?

  I finished my cuddle session with The Professor and wiped his slobbers off my face. No, there was more now. Fresh kisses soaked me again.

  “Alright, thank you. That’s enough. Good boy, go py for a little bit. Or take a nap, you’ve earned it,” I said and looked at the man so I could figure out what he was after. Nope, more kisses. The sopping wet tongue was smacking at my face like I was a pinata. “Alright, I get it! I’ll be more careful!”

  “Look, Grayson, I came across a bit rough while we were out there. We can speak calmly,” is what I think he said. I was busy trying to push a dog taller than me off my face.

  “Knock it off, adults are speaking!” I said and got a mouthful of dog tongue. Most action I’ve had in forever.

  “Ar-ruuu. Ruff!” The Professor said eloquently.

  “Ugh, fine, but you better dry off and clean your paws before you come inside. If Becca finds mud in the kitchen again, there will be hell to pay!”

  “Yow-ruff!”

  “It doesn’t matter that it was my fault st time!”

  “Awooo rah ruff!”

  “Language!”

  The Professor trotted off, tongue fpping about, toward the treeline. Over a small hill, just out of our line of sight, there was a good-sized pond he loved to lounge around in. Sometimes he would catch fish, but oftentimes, while going after said fish, he would try to breathe underwater and end up vomiting buckets of water after he rushed inside. Sigh, at least he was pretty.

  “So, what’s with yer dog?” the man asked. “I ain’t ever seen a dog that size before.”

  I thought back to the weird dream sequence thing. I needed to try this magic thing so that it wouldn't work and I could realize I was just having a standard everyday seizure and forget about that wondrous woman. It was on the status screen though, which is odd since I thought Becca wrote all that and she was not privy to the conversation with my new goth goddess. “Magic, apparently.”

  “... Okay.”

  “Let’s start simple,” I said to him. “Who are you and what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

  Before the man could answer, a victorious screech bsted nearby. The falcon with the orange ribbon came soaring over the facility and circled overhead.

  “Oh hey, that’s the bird that keeps saving my ass. Did it come by so I can finally say thank you?” I said with my neck craned back to watch the bird glide over us.

  “He would probably appreciate that,” the man said and held up his braced arm.

  The falcon became a streak of white and brown and it tore through the sky and down to us where it perched on the man’s arm. He pulled something from his pocket and pinched it between his fingers before offering it to the falcon. It snatched it up and fervently swallowed it down.

  “This is Falco,” he said. “My name is Mike.”

  “Okay, having a falcon is freaking awesome. But Mike is a boring name. If only you had a hawk, then we could have had a fun little setup there. But you named your falcon Falco? Like on purpose?”

  Mike thought about it for a moment and said, “He was a rescue.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question at all. That’s like naming your kid ‘Huma’ or ‘Perso’. Maybe ‘Peopl’? Also, why did Falco keep helping me? Because there’s a pretty damn good chance I would already be dead if it wasn’t for him,” I said and inched closer to Falco with an extended hand. I had never interacted with a pet falcon before, only dogs and cats. I don’t know if falcons wanted to smell a person's hand before petting, but it’s the only way I knew to approach an animal. It took all of my self-control to not yell, ‘Can I pet that dawg?’.

  “This is where the conversation might get tough,” he said and used his pointer finger to rub the feathers on Falco’s chest. “Before the dead rose, I was working with the police department, helping prepare their case against you. I spent a lot of time looking at your photos in my apartment.”

  “That was an absolutely wild sentence to end on.”

  “For work!” Mike said. “I worked on the case at home a lot, and Falco was always with me. He saw yer picture and probably recognized ya out in public when all hell broke loose. We might have been in the area monitoring yer old gang. Just cuz ya caught a deal to get out of trouble didn’t mean we couldn’t take down yer old group. We saw ya enter the facility but we had to escape the dead before ya came back out. We were helping whoever we could in the chaos and stumbled on ya again when we went to investigate an explosion. It turned out to be a helicopter crash. Falco beat me there, I saw you from a distance leaving the area.”

  “So your bird saw my picture a few times and kept repeatedly saving my life? I’m going to need more than that. The horned goth girl had a more believable story.”

  “Who?!”

  “Yes, who?” Becca said as she joined us outside again.

  “How is she?” I asked.

  “Resting and stable. But we will need to treat her wound soon,” Becca said.

  “I knew the AI girl existed, but it’s weird as shit to see her walking around and talking,” Mike said while he stared hard at Becca.

  “Please don’t speak as if I am not standing right here,” Becca said and turned her gre to Mike. Ha! I knew that look. At least he didn’t call her a robot.

  “Thank you, Becca. Let’s get her set up with one of those fancy hands while everything is still fresh,” I said.

  “No,” Becca said with a curt voice and her eyes still locked onto Mike.

  “No?” I asked, thoroughly shocked. We messed around a lot, but her tone suggested she wasn’t joking. She ft-out refused my request.

  “No. We have a limited supply of those materials. Gifting her with the hand means we will not have one for you if you were to ever lose yours,” she expined.

  “I cut off her hand, Becca-”

  Her gre left Mike and snapped to me.

  “To save her life. Now we have no more preventatives left if you were to be bitten. You shouldn’t have cut off her hand and used the preventative. Next time pick one and live with the results. Or, better yet, maybe they shouldn’t get bitten. Who knows how long it will be until we can find all the supplies to make another serum,” she said.

  I matched her furious gaze. I knew she was trying to look after me, but I could do that myself. I would not get bitten, and I would not make Sadie try to survive with a missing hand that I cut off of her.

  “Becca. Command: Fit the new hand to Sadie before she wakes up.”

  “… Right away, Grayson.” Becca snapped back to the facility and stormed off, leaving us behind again.

  I would apologize to her ter. But, even I needed to do the right thing sometimes.

  “That was… interesting,” Mike said after he watched Becca storm off. “If it’s alright with you, maybe we can talk more inside. It’s getting te and feels like a storm may be coming in.”

  Mike was right; a cool breeze had wafted over us. A stark change from the warmer air this afternoon. You could feel it in the air, a feeling you grew accustomed to growing up in the southern states. A thunderstorm was likely approaching. I sure missed having a working weather app on my phone.

  “Yeah, come on in. You can crash here tonight. We have tons of space,” I said and led the way inside. “I don’t know what Falco’s usual home setup is, but whatever he needs he can have.”

  “Alright. ‘Preciate it,” Mike said, and they followed me in.

  I was taken aback to see Becca rushing out of the elevator. Her frantic eyes looked into mine, and she rushed over to me.

  “Grayson, come quick. I have the doctor on the phone."

  I struggled to voice a coherent response to Becca. “Wha-huh, how? But she's…”

  “Ah. I apologize, Grayson. I can see how that could be misconstrued,” Becca chewed on her bottom lip. I wasn’t sure if it was something she did absentmindedly or it was her attempt at replicating common nervous human behavior, but it was kind of cute in a robot-type way. “I will crify. I have been able to reach Dr. Gale through the inter-facility communication channels. He is on the screen in the workshop guiding me through Sadie’s treatment.”

  “That’s the guy who sent you to Dr. Ava, right? Cool, let’s go talk to him. Maybe he has some zombie advice,” I said and went to the elevator.

  “That was my thinking as well… however, it seems something else happened, and he has not experienced the outbreak firsthand,” Becca expined. She was pying with her fingers, and her eyes kept darting from me to the elevator. I could feel she wanted to get back to the workshop to speak with him. She almost seemed nervous.

  I paused at the elevator doors and turned back to Mike. “Make yourself comfortable. But if you touch anything outside of this room, I’ll kill you.”

  “Heh. That I believe. No worries. Ya have walls and electricity somehow, this is basically a resort to me. I’ll wait here for ya to come back. Go talk to that doctor,” Mike plopped down on the couch and sank into it with his head leaning back like he hadn’t felt true safety and the soft cushions of a couch in about… well, about six months probably. Falco remained on his arm, seemingly content with being inside.

  Let’s go meet the people responsible for Becca eventually winding up in my head.