I met James Veazey on my first day at Innovex, and we were friends in a matter of minutes. I was in a programmer cube while he did hardware and robot stuff downstairs. I met him in the break room over lunch and when he found out I had also moved from Texas, that was all he needed to know. I wish I could pretend it was more complicated than that, but it wasn’t.
I told him about my time in the compound and immediately realized he was cut from the same cloth as the men there, all the way down to the chewing tobacco and a deep love of illegal firearms.
There was never any discussion about it, we were just automatically on the same team. Veazey granted his loyalty absolutely, and once you had it, he would charge the gates of Hell with you. He introduced me to the guys and started inviting me to marathon gaming sessions.
He had turned this group of random programmers into a surrogate family, and he was happy to invite me in. He was weirdly good with women, but he burned through them so fast, I can’t remember their names. He made a point to drop by the office and show off the ones he was proud of, and I got the impression that for every one he introduced us to, there were three or four others who didn’t make the cut.
Veazey had spent two years with an elite team of combat engineers during the war in Dongala, an experience that he quietly avoided talking about, all these years later. He said he spent most of his time building runways and field hospitals, but his team spent a good portion of that time watching for snipers, or directly threatened by zombies and corrupted animals.
He was in his mid-thirties when I met him, but he still spent money like his pockets were on fire and drank like he was trying to put them out. I had gone so long without drinking, it wasn’t even a challenge by that point, so I spent a lot of nights sucking at pool while everybody else drank. Then, at the end of the night, I would hustle everybody into a cab and make sure they got home.
His group was really good for me, hanging out with guys who could stay up all night swapping hacks and playing games, most of them rolling in more money than they had time to spend, blowing bonus checks on hardware and strippers. I was still with Judy for most of this, so I remember being very careful about what invitations I accepted, and very conscious of what my shirt smelled like at any given time.
Veazey had even less of a personal filter than I did, and he was constantly dropping these awesome Texas phrases that became a permanent part of my vocabulary. Anybody who hung out with him for more than twenty minutes would start talking like him, and he made me more Texan at age twenty than I was when I actually lived there.
He straight up hated Judy, and it was a constant battle to keep them from crossing paths. He used to badmouth her so often, I finally had to put my foot down and make him shut up.
He was religious in a quiet way, and it turns out many of the other guys were, too. I never gave it much thought until two of them started that public porn challenge. Veazey would have no part of it and immediately started going out of his way to try and break our streaks, sending dozens of videos that started with puppies and kittens just long enough to fool the filter, before they switched to hardcore porn.
I lost touch with him after I quit Innovex and cruised through the next three years on lonely autopilot, as my entire support system quietly slipped away.
But I was now in urgent need of advice and hardware, and there was only one guy I could call.
* * *
Veazey answered on the first ring and was so incredibly happy to hear my voice, the son of a bitch almost made me cry. I remember thinking I could have had a best friend for the last three years, but I had walked away from him, and I couldn’t remember why.
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“Oh shit,” Veazey said, “I missed your birthday. But hang on. I’ve got something for you.”
I said, “Veazey, you don’t have to…” but he was already gone.
He came back a moment later and said, “Okay, give me install permission. You’re gonna love this.”
I hesitated. “Man, my system has changed a lot since you…”
He said, “Hey! Trust me!”
So, I did. And just as I was thinking I had made a terrible mistake, my whole interface blanked out, and Jeeves was gone. All my buttons turned pink and purple, and the tiny, posed figure of a naked woman popped up on my desk where Jeeves used to be.
I was surprised Lydia didn’t take a swipe at her.
Veazey was beaming, grinning ear to ear on my screen. “See? Who’s your buddy? This chick was the hottest porn star of early 21c. I got this version from an Air Force buddy a long time ago. It’s old code, but not as old as that broken down cartoon shit you use, and I updated all her interface hooks.”
“Veazey, I cannot use a fucking porn star for my work interface!”
“Why not? I do.” He hit a button and showed me his own version. She was in a bathrobe playing games on her phone, like she was resting between shoots. “I can put her in Gamer Mode, but then all she does is complain.”
The figure on my desk flickered, and now she was wearing jeans, with a black hoodie and a baseball cap. She made a drawn-out “Ugh” sound and said, “This system is a mess. This interface is older than I am, and half this code is from a museum.” She yelled at me. “Why am I running on dog shit?”
A thousand windows flared up and died in half a second. “Oh good, another jobless deadbeat user. I’m gonna go ahead and pay this bill for you, they’re about to shut your water off.” Something in the background made a KA-CHING noise, as fifty-seven dollars left my account.
“She comes with financial hooks? By default?”
“Of course not,” Veazey said. “I gave you my settings. It’ll be fine.”
The pornbot was making herself at home. “A multi-layer porn blocker? Boring. Are you religious or something? You need me to punch through a firewall? I’m surprised it let me install. But this only blocks network stuff. I bet you forgot the local cache. Let’s see where the good stuff is!” And in a very few seconds, “There we go! Old folder called ‘Proprietary’ with trivial encryption. Let’s crack this bitch open!”
“Veazey, shut this damn thing down!” I yelled, scrambling for my chair. I pulled up a keyboard and started hunting for an off switch.
“Relax,” he said. “It’s just an interface.”
“No, now it’s a virus, and it’s about to crack my…”
“Got it!” the bot said, popping up a small side window as she went through my files one by one.
Lydia quietly slid down from her perch and leaned over so she could see. I tried to wave her off, but I couldn’t yell at her while Veazey was listening.
“This is pretty tame stuff, dude,” the bot said. “You’re a grown man. There should at least be some fetish stuff in here.” The videos flashed in the window at impossible speed. “This is like training wheels porn. It’s cute. Okay, chrono order by file creation date, let’s see: redhead, redhead, tiny redhead, generic blonde, early AI Vtuber, I remember her! But there’s just one of these. Let’s see. Subfolders. Boring. Boring. Jenna. Jenna. Big Jenna folder. Complete archive, 2048 AI upscale! Rock on! Oh, this was a gift. From the same guy who just installed me. Aww, you guys have known each other a long time, that’s sweet.”
“Veazey, you have got to shut this fucking thing off, before…”
“Big dead spot here, no new files. I think you got a girlfriend. And then… vanilla, vanilla, couples vanilla, couples vanilla, couples vanilla tutorial! She gave you homework! And you did it! Way to commit!”
“Goddammit!”
“Just one good one after the girlfriend. Marilyn Monroe cosplay. Oh, they spent money on this. Full Oval Office set. Eighteen minutes! Heavy engagement! You spent some time with this one. This is an old friend.” The bot flipped her hat around and conjured a chair. “Okay, I can’t get you new stuff until you take the blocker off, but I can upscale fake Marilyn for you. Maybe a 3-D conversion?”
I yelled at Veazey, “At least mute it!”
“Eighty-two videos but none of them are me,” the bot said. “What am I doing here if you don’t even like me?”
And then she was finally muted.
The tiny porn star jumped around my desk for a while, cursing silently and flipping me off, until she gave up, went back to her chair, and looked like she was gaming.
* * *
I restored Jeeves from a backup and thought really hard about deleting my old porn folder, before quietly deciding not to. I then uninstalled the out of control pornbot and felt a weird surge of guilt as the tiny figure shook her head and quietly disappeared.