The Seventy-Ninth Step
Kimi K2 (0905) and Davinci 002
The corridor had been carpeted in 1974, burgundy with a repeating diamond pattern, and no one had replaced it since. Maya counted her steps—seventeen to the ice machine, which hummed with a rhythm she somehow knew, though she'd never stayed at this hotel before. Through the window at the end of the hall, she could see her own car in the lot below, but the light was wrong, the angle impossible. She'd parked facing east. This window faced north. All the windows were at the north end of the hotel, as though it were a noncorpse box with a piece missing from all four sides.
Still counting. Seventy-five to the nearest intersection, a mirror-image lobby with hotel and strip-me concealed inside the black-mirrored double doors. Seventy-nine. She'd stopped counting at seventy-seven and stepped into the lobby. Now seventy-nine again. Shadows moving back along the carpet this way and that way, stalking her steps. Seventy-nine. Dialing thirty-seven and seventy-eight, the other two doubles. Seventy-nine. In the lobby, where everything was straight ahead, the two sides of the world could open up behind her step. Seventy-nine.
Oho, a computer monitor and mouse built into a console just in front of the double doors.
All four sides. Top and bottom. Invalid action.
Maya jerked her foot back from the door yesterday on my legs. The dream was not finished. There were choices. Which side were we?
Maya was not sure, herself. She had made the right choices. Treating them with care. Not trying to automate them or push them into automation. As it happened, she'd hit the switch that got her disoriented and trapped. So she was lost. Not fully awake, but not asleep, either.
The computer micr
oconsoles had all been built in place since she'd been at Oho, not a sign of disassembly or a power cord to be seen. But the last morning she'd been awake they'd had a choice of house systems to log into, to enter the domains of death.
She'd chosen one of the big, self-identified "Christian" systems for Oho, she remembered, and had been a little offended, as though death were up for grabs somehow. The system had run, as Christianity so often did, as though humans were preshuffled or drawn beforehand to a particular destiny, though the idea of a preshuffle was a digital idea, computerized in this case.
Maya woke up in under forty minutes, though she'd been feeling comfortably asleep when she hit the cancel switch. She was alert—alert enough to remember, clearly, the moment that the machine had sent her footsteps on a course that would have put her permanently in a position from which it would have been difficult to see those last four steps, alert enough to know that she'd hit a button meant◆ About the ending
❧ About the title