Chapter 4

"Are you sure you don't want to run errands with me?" asked Ashley as she paused already halfway out the front door.

Harper's response was a little gruff and tinged with impatience. "Yeah, Ash. You go on. I've got some things to do around the house."

Ashley frowned slightly, but leaned forward to plant a light kiss on Harper's mouth. "Well, OK. I'll be back in a couple hours. Don't have too much fun without me." She waggled a finger at him playfully.

"Never," Harper replied, a slight smile forming on his lips.

After his wife was gone, Harper walked slowly to his office. Every step seemed like a mile and Harper suddenly felt weary.

I'll do just this one thing then get rid of the Master PC program forever, he promised himself. His guts churned, sending acid up the back of his throat.

The tower powered up, Harper entered the password extracted from Barry, and started up the ultimate source of his woe. The program automatically started on the same page he had been on when he'd last closed it. That last time when he'd transformed Barry back into the short, greasy man he was before acquiring the Master PC program. He'd also made sure to implant commands that barred him forever from the terrible power this program offered. Now, however, Harper was greeted with the simple message "Subject out of range" next to Barry's name.

"Hmph. Never knew this thing had a range," Harper muttered to himself. He took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. His heart threatened to beat its way out of his chest. "Let's do this thing."

Harper's uncharacteristically clumsy fingers typed his name into the search field. A slowly rotating 3-D model of himself, accurate down to the last hair on his body, rotated on the right side of the screen. Here was all that made him Harper McLain husband of Ashley McLain. It was disturbing that a human with all its intricacies, all its complexities, could be reduced to this: manipulable data on a screen.

Clicking through menus partially at random, Harper stumbled upon one he hadn't seen before. It seemed the program could password protect people, locking others from being able to alter a subject without the code. A thrill of fear ran through Harper as he realized he'd sent Barry off into the world without such a lock on him. There was, however, nothing he could do about that now. The man had gone God alone knew where and far beyond Harper's reach.

At the very least I can protect Ash and I now.

Dealing with Barry had made Harper more than a little paranoid, so he opted for overkill with a 24 character long password composed of random letters, characters, and numbers. He wrote it down on a small pad of paper and resolved to later hide in the sturdy locking drawer built into his desk. That task done, Harper returned to his own archive. He left the menus that corresponded to physical attributes completely alone, focusing his search instead on those related to mental and behavioral properties.

None of the sliders he found seemed to offer the option he was searching for. One was labeled "Sexual Preferences" and had a sliding scale from one to five. One, he read, signified fully heterosexual, five fully homosexual, and two through four everything in between. His slider rested firmly on the number one and Harper resolved never to screw around with it.

Another slider menu governed aggression. Still another the will to dominate versus the will to submit. A quick few clicks through some others revealed none of them regulated the function he sought. He could make his memory better or worse, but not blot out a specific one.

He wasn't even certain he wanted to forget. If Barry were to ever return and he had no clue what was going on...

What he needed was a way to change how he felt about what had happened, not a gaping hole in his memory or false, inoffensive ones like those he'd placed in Ashley's mind.

Abandoning the sliders, Harper began clicking through the menus with check boxes. Most of these seemed to govern very specific qualities. Curious, he clicked randomly in an unticked box labeled "Sadism". Checking it experimentally, a slider appeared underneath running from one to five exactly like the ones he saw earlier. Harper hurriedly unchecked the box and the slider disappeared again. He was growing increasingly frustrated. What he sought simple was not to be found in the native, preset options. There was one last place he knew the could turn: the command box.

It was this little box that brought his wife back from oblivion and sent Barry fleeing from the neighborhood.

The cursor blinked patiently, waiting for Harper to type something into it. To make his desires into reality. That simple, flickering caret veiled so much power he was struck by some chimeric mix of excitement and fear. Here was the ground upon which gods tread.

Harper's fingertips fused to the home keys on the keyboard. They refused to move as if he had no more conscious control over them than those of a statue.

Numbly, he forced those fingers to type. They resisted him, as flexible as a seasoned negotiator quibbling over a matter he'd already won. The words he hoped would free him forever from Barry's mocking face and words appeared arduously.