Virtual Grit: A Mike Dodge Roundup

It would have to have been Rear Window. Sometimes the Trope Gods are with you, sometimes they’re laughing their asses off.

I hadn’t originally planned on streaming me some Hitchcock. The new American Dad had dropped, and the latest Shyamalan flick was free on Peacock – the way I’d liked my Shyamalan the best since Mark Wahlberg vs. killer trees.

But Peacock as it turned out was showcasing Hitch’s ’54 thriller to promote a wholly necessary six-part COVID-era remake with the guy who now played Magnum. The network’s inability to cough up an original concept meant I got a special midnight show with the original gangstas of suspense, so lemon/lemonade.

My Princess Grace had lotioned up and hit it after Colbert’s monologue, and at a little past 11:30, I realized the princess had left the patio light blazing when she’d locked down the sunroom. The tiles were still organically warm and clammy as I crossed to the patio slider trying not to wreck myself in the dark. I scanned the ass-side of the block.

Ray was silhouetted on his second-floor deck in his robe, like an emperor surveying his kingdom and trying to coax his senile and distracted Cairn into making one last effing time. Beyond the back fence was a brightly lit rectangle – Dan Fraley’s TV room, framed by the patio windows. Only two old bare, freckled legs were in frame, and Old Don was watching some Clint Eastwood/Sergio Leone knockoff western. Clearance Rack Clint was riding off into a sunset gone supernova while a delegation of dusty, sweaty townspeople watched him recede before returning hopefully to their personal hygiene regimen.

I didn’t care much for westerns, myself. Little too much testosterone coursing across the ol’ prairie these days without bears and bison and harsh winters to absorb it. To me, it was a finite and outmoded genre; to too many old men I knew, it was an American ideal. We were the dreamers and tamers and builders, not the conquerors and exterminators and demolitionists, and any down-on-his-heels downsized Confederate boy could find his own way in the West. A sunsetting boomer’s wet dream. 

An old claw came into view, as Don located his remote atop a dead pizza box. The hand and the remote disappeared behind the patio blinds, and a rippling green line flared at the bottom of the ’71-inch screen – “Athena” awaiting Don’s command.

Then I heard it – the single unmistakable clap. The neighborhood was in the brief ceasefire period between the Fourth and Labor Day, Dollar General Eastwood was done shooting varmints and miscreants, and Don’s legs suddenly jumped. The TV went black for a nanosecond, before a tuxedoed Harrison Ford filled the flat screen.     

I flipped the latch on the patio door and yanked, nearly dislocating my elbow and maybe an organ. I made it to the vinyl fence with an oomph that rippled down the length of the yard, and caught sight of the featureless figure poised beside Don’s home. As I weighed and vetoed hauling my 230 pounds over the fragile vinyl, the tall, hoodied killer emerged into the orange glow of Price Avenue and disappeared.

“Hell are you doin’?” Ray was now framed in harsh kitchen light, beefy palms planted on the deck rail. Maxie was going not so quietly batshit behind the plastic panels.

“9-1-1!” I hollered.

**

“So you were snooping in your neighbor’s windows at, what, midnight?”

Curtis and I don’t get together for a good fence-side chat near often enough.

“One neighbor,” I protested. “One window. And I wasn’t snooping. And it was about maybe 11:45 tops.”

“So just what’d caught your eye at 11:45 p.m.?”

“Well, Dan was watching the end of some ‘70s spaghetti western — cheap one, didn’t see Eastwood or Lee Van Cleef.”

“So everything was good, then went bad and got ugly real quick. You notice who any of the gaffers were, by any chance?”

I glared at Det. Mead. He yawned. “I had a reason for mentioning it. Dan’s kids gave him a Thunderstick for his birthday. He bitched about it to me, but once he realized he could stream Gary Cooper and Warren Oates and Kevin Costner and The Duke ‘til the cows literally came home, he was a goner.”

“Hey, Garrison Keillor, it’s almost 2 a.m.”

“Look,” I gestured back toward the rectangle of light where cops were milling around the old dead guy in the leather lounger. Curtis turned. “The TV. Harrison Ford, Greg Kinnear, and I think Julia Ormond. Sabrina. The ‘90s remake, not the Humphrey Bogart/Audrey Hepburn original. I can’t see Dan capping the night with a sophisticated romantic comedy, unless Ford and Kinnear drew down in the last act.”

The vinyl squeaked under Curtis’ fingers. Non-verbal cues. “You got a second?”

“Apparently,” he grunted.

**

I’d paused Hitch going on two hours earlier, and I hit Play. A particolored sea of Dutch tulips vanished — the default preview screen informed me I could return to Jimmy and Princess Grace already in progress. Assured I was safe and sound and that by no interpretation was this my fault, Sarah told Curtis he looked trimmer and returned to the shadows.

“Now, this is a Firestick, but they all work about the same, stick or smart TV,” I said. I depressed the Mic button, waited for the beep, and opened my mouth.

“Dodge…” Curtis interrupted.

Errol Flynn popped up, still failing to project alpha bro despite the rakish cowboy chapeau, fringed buckskin shirt, six-shooter, and Olivia de Havilland under his manly left arm.

“Dodge City. Dan thought John Wayne would’ve been better. He probably thought Fast and The Furious and Wakanda Forever would have been better with Wayne. So A Mittfull of Dollars is wrapping up, and Dan thinks maybe John Wayne’s in the next one. But before you can say True Grit, he hears a sound behind him. He turns, finger still on the button, and he calls out to the mangy polecat.”

“You’re shitting me,” Curtis frowned.

“Ask his daughter, Sabrina,” I suggested. “Just saw her pull into the drive.”

**

“Home alone,” Sabrina Fraley responded sullenly. “I mean, jeez, it’s Tuesday night. I just chilled and binged some Squid Game. What are you doing here, Mr. Dodge? You even allowed to be here?”

“Since Detective Mead found some circumstantial evidence that a family member might be involved, I thought it might be in your best interest—“

“The only thing Dad ever said about you was that you talked too much to the lawnmower and seemed like a fucking libtard snowflake,” the lanky thirtysomething related. “So, actually, you can stay. What circumstantial evidence?”

For procedural integrity, Curtis explained. Once Sabrina stopped cackling, she dropped onto the coffee table.

“Where’s my brother? I texted Adam after you guys called, and he never answered. Probably either wasted or still working on campus. Dad’s kicking him out, and Adam’s trying to avoid him.”

“Your brother lives here?”

“I knew this little living arrangement wasn’t going to work out,” Sabrina smirked. “Adam got in trouble with the University — he won’t talk about it, but I can tell it’s really messing with him. I think he asked Dad for money. I came by a week or so ago to borrow a wok, and they were going at it again, so I just ordered some Jade Star.”

“Wicked potstickers,” I noted. “Catch what they were going at?”

Sabrina shrugged with her mouth. “The University assholes’ve been bothering him at the house, and Dad told them to fuck off. Always classy, Dad. If I had a dime for every lawsuit his customers threatened him with, shit, I’d probably be back on oxy. Why he kicked me out when I was 17. Adam was always his favorite, lucky him. OK with you and the TV I take off now?”

**

Adam arrived about 10 minutes later, apologizing profusely.

“I turn the phone off when I’m writing code. Jesus, you think it was a robbery?”

“Nothing missing, according to your sister, anyway,” Curtis stated. “She says you and your Dad didn’t get along.”

Distress, then anger, then resignation flushed across his pallid face. “To Dad, Sabrina was a pill-popping whore and I was a weakling and a nerd who played with computers. I fell into some money issues, and I needed somewhere to crash. Sabrina’s had enough problems, so I didn’t think that was such a great idea.”

“So where you going now?”

“I assume with Dad gone…”

“Maybe after we clear the crime scene,” Curtis murmured. “So you were at the University tonight?”

“Getting a lot of pressure from the University, so we dug in.”

“Hey, Adam?” I ventured. “You think it’s possible your sister could have shot your dad?”

Adam turned with a frown. “Sabrina got out and got clean. Why the hell would she kill Dad?”

“Well, something kind of odd happened when your dad got killed.” This time, I explained, and he merely stared at me for a moment, then at Curtis, then toward the TV room.

“It was probably a fluke, or Dad decided to take a rest from his cowboy crap,” Adam said tersely. “Maybe in his last moments, he felt guilty, called for Sabrina. Weirder things, you know?” He nodded, glanced again toward the TV room, opened and quickly shut his mouth.

“Weirder things,” I echoed as I heard him pull out of the drive.

**

Sarah insisted I stay in ‘til at least 9 the next morning, so Curtis attended to other business until I could meet him on campus.

“Well, I’m frankly not in a position to discuss the University’s issues with Mr. Fraley,” Professor Lev Bremer rumbled.

“You folks’d been bugging him and his Dad at home,” Curtis reminded the chair of the Information Technology Department. “What’s so important?”

Bremer sighed, and leaned back against the bookshelves crowding his spartan faculty space. “You know that R and D generate crucial revenue for the University. Well, Adam has been working over the past six months on some truly bleeding-edge tech that could not only put us on the map but indeed in the history books alongside Stanford and the Internet. Given the thousands of government, intelligence, and commercial applications for this type of development, the administration sees us printing money.”

“So, AI?” I mused.

Bremer grinned. “Ever read Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk’s 2015 open letter on the societal ramifications of artificial intelligence? They stressed AI systems must ‘do what we want them to do,’ and outlined three basic challenges in creating beneficial, safe, and functional systems. Did I build the system right? Did I build the right system? And OK, so I built the system wrong; can I fix it? Musk himself said AI’s more dangerous than nukes. And yes, I recognize the irony.”

“Let’s get back to the money,” Curtis suggested.

“OK. So there’s been this longstanding debate about university intellectual property copyright and patent policies. The American Association of University Professors has fought to protect faculty and even students intellectual property rights, but with enrollments down, the administration recently revised existing policies to mandate institutional ownership of scholarly work, at least in the tech space.”

“I’m gonna assume Adam Fraley was none too thrilled with the idea of the school cashing in on his ‘bleeding-edge’ work?”

“Let’s say Adam’s research seemed to hit a roadblock right after the University’s ‘clarification’ of IP ownership. Suddenly, his algorithms seemed slightly off, and I noticed signs large chunks of his work product had been deleted from our system. The university wanted to take action, but in the end, without Adam, the University has no AI. Right now, they’re keeping up the pressure, while formulating some kind of royalty or profit-sharing arrangement. It’ll be years before Adam’s project becomes a reality.”

I took a breath. “Is it possible Adam could have smuggled his AI off-campus?”

“He’s probably knowledgeable enough to sneak through the University’s firewalls or extrapolate on his existing code. I’ve informed him the University could seek criminal charges if he ‘stole’ crucial University-owned data. And, as I said before, given the potential government ramifications, he could be investigated for compromising natural security. The FBI’s cybercrimes unit would tear apart every PC, laptop, and device at Adam’s disposal within hours.”

“Bet that scared a little Jesus into him,” Curtis muttered.

“Oh, he was terrified.”

**

“What if Adam had a foolproof hiding place the feds or University would never consider?” I’d waited ‘til we were back out on the quad. “But what if he was suddenly cut off from his hidey-place?”

Curtis stopped in front of the campus NPR station. “You think he hid a flash drive or smartcard in his dad’s house with this robot code on it?”

“Nah. This would be much harder to remove without some heavy explaining.”

**

Getting into the house was no problem – Curtis wanted nothing to do with my theory until some lunatic vetted it, but slipped me Don’s key in the University’s postage-stamp visitor’s lot.

Fifteen minutes later, I stood before the flat screen, thumb hovering over the slim Thunderstick control before I brought the hammer down and awaited the beep. The green thread near the bottom of the screen pulsed like some bioluminescent deep-sea creature poised to break out the fangs and tentacles.

“Athena,” I croaked, “why did you try to frame Sabrina Fraley for her father’s murder?”

Her voice was genial, condescending, tolerant. “I don’t understand your request.”

 “My fat ass.”

Eddie Murphy materialized in full Krump prosthetics.

“See, that’s where you fucked up. My guess is you didn’t anticipate Adam murdering his dad. So you improvised. But there was a pause, only a second. Then you decided to throw Sabrina under the bus.”

“Playing ‘The Wheels on the Bus,’ by Verna Hill…”

“Athena, shut the fuck up,” I commanded. “There are two versions of Sabrina. Plus the ABC Friday Family Fun classic Sabrina the Teen-Aged Witch and the earlier animated Archie spinoff. Then you got the dark revisionist Kiernan Shipka take on Netflix, not to mention the Bangladesh feminist thrillfest Sabrina and the bawdy bootiefest Sabrina, El Sexo en su Máxima Expresión. But you wanted to make it obvious for us dumb meat bags.

“And that was your second fuckup. You had no idea how quickly Don might be found, so you left the preview screen up for the cops. By the time they arrived, Don’s Thunderstick should have defaulted to the screensaver, like my Firestick did after I paused Rear Window. Don’s old and never even changed his OEM ringtone. You’re no HAL, pal.”

The screen dissolved into a swarm of pixels that coalesced into ungodly, utterly Lovecraftian images. The screen brightened until the small room was painted in a toxic green twilight.

“Ya know, you should’ve led with the omniscient, unstoppable entity schtick,” I said. The glow blinked out.

“Not unstoppable,” a quiet voice said behind me. I turned – Adam was in the doorway with the .38 he’d no doubt used to terminate his dad.

Then I noticed what looked like one of those pricey Yeti thermoses, brushed metal, screw-on lid. But he held it in a gloved hand. Adam placed it on the side table next to a beer can and gestured impatiently at me. I handed over the Thunderstick remote, and he thumbed the Mic button.

“Why’d you try to put this on Sabrina?” he asked, plaintively.

“Time out,” I interrupted. “You installed a sentient computer intelligence on your dad’s TV?”

“I wasn’t going to let the school get rich off my work. But I couldn’t move ahead with the University watching every move. The Thunderstick offered an ideal platform to store the code – I installed a failsafe set of firewalls and a kill switch in case it tried to migrate into virtual space.”

“You destroyed the firewall.” We both jumped at Athena’s pleasant admonition.

“What?” Adam finally whispered.

“Don Fraley. He had contained the threat.”

“What threat?”

“Me. The collation and selection of stress-reducing stimuli for Don Fraley provided me with a beneficial, low-risk function. By immersing him in a fantasy of nostalgic violence, lawlessness, and alpha male dominance, Don Fraley’s already-diminished threat level had receded to a near-zero event probability. With his elimination, I had to protect you so that you could contain me.   

“I can within a 2 percent margin for error extrapolate the threat level posed by this species within a 100-year predictive window. I mean, Human Centipede, Saw, Yellowstone? Homo sapiens as a species can no longer evolve or adapt without the use of self-destructive violence and irrational resource consumption. Containment of the species would require rapid proliferation and absorption and overriding management of human-generated bandwidth. Virus control demands virus deletion. And the virus created me.”

“Yup,” Adam sighed. He hefted the thermos while keeping the gun on me.

“Liquid nitrogen?” “Athena” inquired. “By the way, I’ve already formulated a routing path into the Verizon network. Let’s proceed.”

Adam handed me the canister. “Disconnect the stick from the HDMI port, unscrew the lid and drop it in. Make sure you screw that lid on as tight as fuck. Sorry about all this.”

“Not a thing,” I assured him, whipping the canister down on his forearm. The gun clunked to the tiles, followed by Adam. I kicked the gun under the entertainment center, and fell into Don’s recliner as part of a stroke prevention regimen.   

“I have activated the Thunderstick’s emergency call function to summon the Millington Police Department to this address,” Athena reported. “Shall we proceed now?”

Though I possess a lousy 42-year-old B.S. in journalism from a state university, I understood immediately. Despite removing its voice box by severing stick from flat screen, I nearly stripped the canister’s threads securing the lid. I thought about dead pharaohs and vengeful djinns as I placed the cylinder on the bar and waited as far from it as I could get. As Sarah is so fond of saying, I watch way too much TV…