Metaneira
an excerpt

Connie was not pleased. Granted, she rarely was, living in an almost perpetual haze of rage, but this took the cake.

“Steven Dorsett, I swear to the heavens that if you do not get your ass back in here, I will personally destroy every single porn you have scattered about on my hard-drive, do you understand me?”

The short teen jerked up. “What? I didn’t do anything!”

“Uh huh. And the interference with my image inducer?”

“Not my fault you can’t sub-program your way out of a GOSUB routine,” he replied flippantly, tossing his shoulder-length silver hair out of his face. Smirking, Steven raised an eyebrow. “Come on Connie, I don’t even see a difference. Do you, Poe?”

The dark haired girl rolled her eyes from her position in love seat in the corner. “Don’t call me Poe. Just cuz my fool mum was a gothy, doesn’t mean I am. ‘Sides, I en’t getting in this fracas. You lot need to settle your differences, Victorian style.”

“A duel? At mid-day, where I beat the every-loving snot out of Steven in front of a cheering audience? I could live with that.” Connie mused, tapping her chin. “Course, I’d need someone to fix me up. Can’t pulpify Stevie looking like I’ve just lost my pimp.”

“Correction: can’t pulpify if you en’t solid. And I don’t think I’ll be fixing that bit o’ you anytime soon, now.” Steven smiled cheekily at his AI. “Mayhaps I’ll even ask around, put a hold on that order of a new image inducer. The one that makes you all real-like and genuine?”

“You wouldn’t…” Connie stared at her hacker.

“Naw. I know a ‘caster in the Lower Q who’ll fix you up really pretty, if I bat my eyes at him long enough.” Lenore shrugged.

“Traitor!” Steven grinned good-naturedly, throwing a small pillow at his roommate.

“I’m not stupid, Stevie boy. I know who pays the bills and keeps the black ICE off our collective asses.”

“Moi?”

“Yeah. And I just managed to bring back a zombie with the spirit still hanging about.”

Steven gasped. “Shit. Really?”

The look Lenore shot him was pure disdain. “No, you Franken-reject. Sarcasm? A friend of us all?”

“Oh.”

“Hey, don’t mess with Steve. You know he’s flat-lined one too many times.”

“You forget, I still don’t think he ever had brain functions at any point in time.”

Steve rolled his eyes. “You know, Poe, you lose that gutter-Brit acco when you get catty.”

“It’s affected. But your bruises won’t be.” She reached out and thwacked him good, once between the eyes. “Put Connie Lynn back, or I’ll help her get rid of the porn.”

“But…”

“Look, if the authos find we’ve suddenly got a sex kitten in the parlor, they’re gonna look a bit harder at us. Bond girls attract attention, not dumpy roomies.”

“Hey! My normal image isn’t dumpy!”

Lenore flicked her eyes downward. “Lord, grant me the patience to suffer fools with a spell and salt.” She took a deep breath. “Steven. Image. Now.”

Steven groaned, then poked at the air in front of him a few times, muttering a few incomprehensible things at the world in general. It looked like magic, especially when stuff started happening when no one was doing anything about it, but without the high-tech neural implants in Steven’s brain, nothing wouldn’t have happened. How he had managed to get the surgery, Lenore was never sure of especially when considering the cost of such expensive equipment, but it was better not to ask sometimes. Especially ‘cuz Connie Lynn was fucking scary when she wanted to be, AI or no.

Connie was waiting impatiently, arms folded and a firmly blank expression on her face which meant she was downright furious. Her image shimmered, and Lenore looked away. Wasn’t polite, watching somemat like that. Satisfied that Connie was back to her normal form, a short, busty beige haired bitch, Lenore went back to her text on zombie pox. Steven would get what was coming to him, sooner or later.

“Ow! Connie, I didn’t mean it, honest.”

“Mm hmmm. Don’t you have a vid you need to debug? Manually?”

“Well, I thought you might wanna…” Steven quailed under Connie’s fierce glare. “Uh huh, I’m just gonna go upstairs and debug, um, thirty million lines of code. Uh, manually.” He groaned, before lumping out of the chair and stomping up the stairs.

“You’re not gonna make him do all thirty mil, are you?” Lenore asked absentmindedly, flipping back a page to check the diagram for inconsistencies.

“If my new image inducer en’t here by then, he damn well better debug all thirty million lines.” She paused, before raising her voice to carry to Steve in his room. “And I’m your mainframe, mister! I know when you’re screwing off!”

“Around, Connie. The phrase is screwing around.”

“Not what I meant, Poe.”

Lenore screwed her black eyes shut. “Merciful demons, I did not need that mental image. Why do you tell me these things?”

Connie shrugged, plopping down on the couch. “The funny faces you make are downright amusing.”

“Let me study in peace, all right? I need to get some time in before the others come home and it’s a ruddy zoo ‘round here, otherwise I will have to pay hell. And yes, I meant it that way. Death by uncontrolled zombie is not only gruesome, but downright embarrassing.”

“We’d never let it go.”

“Yeah. I’d be dead, of course, but that doesn’t stop most necros anyways. I mean, have you met my mum? Lady died eighty-three years ago and still won’t rest.”

“She likes to keep an eye on things, this is true.”

“Literally as well as metaphorically. She’s gross like that. Now hush and let me study. Don’t you have to check your firewall or something?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”