Marlowe and the Spacewoman Read Free Page A

through the usual routine, waiting for his pajamas to completely dissolve and the stream to switch to water before wetting his hair and then squeezing out some shampoo into his hand.  He lathered his hair, rinsed it, and repeated for good measure.  Marlowe watched in fascination as his alter-ego picked up the new bar of soap off the soap tray and then jerked back violently.  With the sudden spasm of his body, he sent the bar of soap careening into the shower wall, and then collapsed against the door, which swung open as he fell, momentarily leaving his body a spray of swirling pixels until House reversed the Clear algorithm.  When the image cleared, video Marlowe was lying on the floor of the bathroom.  But Marlowe’s attention was fixed on the bar of soap.  After hitting the shower wall and sliding down to the shower pan, it bubbled explosively and dissolved down the drain.  A moment after the bar of soap had vanished, there was a fluttering around the edge of the video image, and then the screen went black.
    “House, where’s the rest of the surveillance?”
    “Searching.  Hmm, very strange.”
    “What?”
    “One moment.  I’m verifying that the logs are correct.”
    “What’s going on, House?  I need those surveillance DVs.  I’ve nothing else to go on.”
    “I don’t know what to say.  It appears that while you were lying dead on the bathroom floor, you issued a verbal order for me to shut down and restart.  According to the log, your voice print matched and you gave the proper override emergency code.”
    Marlowe was silent.  House was silent.  Only the grinding of Marlowe’s molars could be heard in the otherwise deathly stillness.  The nano probes began making enamel in preparation for a new deployment.
    “House, new priority order.  You are never, ever, ever, to shut down or restart if I am dead, dying, feeling faint, have a pasty complexion, or it looks very likely that I will be dead, dying, feeling faint, or having a pasty complexion in the span of time it takes for you to shut down and start up.  Clear?”
    “Yes, quite.  I do apologize.  This is most embarrassing.  My Common Sense subroutines must have been somehow overcome.  I had been lax about updating them -  there has been a security patch or two that has come out since my last upgrade, but because installation requires me to shut down and restart-”
    “House, enough.  So someone else was in the house while I was dead?”
    “I am unable to ascertain whether or not the command was issued remotely or locally within my walls.”
    “What about the surveillance DV from the other rooms, prior to your shutdown?  Do they show anything?”
    “Those videos have been erased.”
    “Undelete them.”
    “Attempting.  Hmm.  Very interesting.”
    Marlowe was getting testy.  “House?”
    “Whoever initiated the deletion used a reverse-HUE scramble deletion algorithm.”
    Marlowe groaned.  The acid levels in his stomach elevated to dangerous levels, causing ecstatic nano probes to pour into his stomach to combat the dropping pH levels.  HUE, or Heisenberg Uncertainty Erasure, was the most secure form of quantum deletion available.  He could try and recover the file, but any attempt to look at it would cause the data bits to randomly change state, becoming even more scrambled.
    “Well, let’s look at what we do have.  Zoom in on the soap that killed me.  Let’s see if we can identify the scum.”
    While House re-queued the video, Marlowe reflected on the hazy events of the morning.  He found it eerie to see what happened to him on the surveillance videos, but not have any memory of actually experiencing the events.  Maybe now he knew what an out-of-body experience felt like.  He decided if that was indeed how such an event felt, he was glad to have very mundane sensory perception.
    The tampering with House and the surveillance system was what gave him the most concern.  The attack by the soap was the easiest thing