“I’ll check them later,” I said, dreading where this was going.
“Oh, no you don’t,” she said, stalking into the room, fuming. “You can’t call me a liar and then refuse to look at the evidence.” She planted her hands on her slim little hips and glared at me. She’d gone pale and I could count every freckle on her face, her throat, her collarbones, the swell of her cleavage in the old vee-neck shirt I’d given her on a day-trip to Nassau.
“Well?” she asked. She looked ready to wring my neck.
“I can’t,” I admitted, not meeting her eyes.
“Yes you can—here, I’ll dump it to your public directory.”
Her expression shifted to one of puzzlement when she failed to locate me on her network. “What’s going on?”
So I told her. Offline, outcast, malfunctioning.
“Well, why haven’t you gone to the doctor? I mean, it’s been weeks. I’ll call him right now.”
“Forget it,” I said. “I’ll see him tomorrow. No sense in getting him out of bed.”
But I didn’t see him the day after, or the day after that. Too much to do, and the only times I remembered to call someone, I was too far from a public terminal or it was too late or too early. My systems came online a couple times, and I was too busy with the plans for the Mansion. Lil grew accustomed to the drifts of hard copy that littered the house, to printing out her annotations to my designs and leaving them on my favorite chair—to living like the cavemen of the information age had, surrounded by dead trees and ticking clocks.