She entered her bedroom to find a man she couldn’t recognize drinking coffee on her bed with the million-yard stare of somebody working with his neural implant. The man gave her the barest of acknowledgments, an uninterested half-raised hand while most of his mind was in some constructed non-space.
She heard a voice coming from nowhere; it had all the interoceptive tags of an implant-to-implant audio call, but, maybe the most unsettling thing of all, it had come through without her accepting it.
“We have locked your access to your engrams about your husband. You’ll never recognize him again unless you authorize the proxy agent attached to this message.”
She looked at the man on her bed. He was unknown to her and the first impression he gave wasn’t of somebody you would be very interested in knowing more of.
The voice talked again, the menacing impatience in its tone as carefully engineered as it was utterly cliche. “Make your choice. I have other vectors, and it benefits me too to make an example out of you. So, what will” She stopped it – the gptbot might have had override access to much of her implant, but there was nobody and nothing she couldn’t interrupt even without using her vocal chords.
“I want to hire you for five times the NPV of the contract you sent.”
The voice took enough to answer for her to know the strategic branch had been briefly routed to and approved by a human. “I’m listening,” it said.
She smiled. The man on her bed was still ignoring her, deep in whatever uninteresting-seeming thing was holding his attention. “Lawyers say prenups can’t be hacked. Is that true?”
The voice only she could hear didn’t come from anything that could smile. Yet the way it kept silent for a few seconds had the same intangible quality that it would have had.