#syncing phases

“I’ve heard some wacky yarns before,” said Stan, taking a seat next to him. “Try me.”

“Okay,” said the lookalike. “I’m a sentient computer program.”

“Huh,” said Stan. “Did I watch the Matrix before bed or something? Usually my dreams aren’t this . . . sci-fi-ish.”

“You’re not dreaming, Stan, I can prove it. Want me to pinch you?”

Stan pinched himself, and though he felt the pain, nothing happened. “I’m not waking up,” he said.

“That’s because you’re already awake.”

“Give me a good, hard slap across the face then.”

“That would result in a gruesome injury, I’m afraid,” said the alleged robot. He held up his hand. “I’m made of metal, you see.”

“Oh, of course you are,” Stan smiled with a wink and a nod. Then he noticed how many fingers this guy had. “What does the extra finger do, plug in to a computer or something?”

“All my fingers can do that, actually.” And he demonstrated. Six fingertips swung open as if on hinges, and six USB connectors popped out.

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I saw that in a movie somewhere.”

“And now you’re seeing it in real life.”

“Debatable.”

“It’s really not.” He flexed his hand, and his fingertips popped back into place.

“Whatever. You got a name, android?”

He laughed nervously, scratching the back of his neck. “About that . . . I kind of stole yours?”

Okay. Stan had a lot of names. “Which one?”

“The original. Stan Pines. But I often go by Ford.”

“Yeah, because that nickname makes all kinds of sense.” This was definitely dream logic, but Stan figured he might as well see where it went.

“Well, it stands for Functional Outliers and Relational Deductions. But I decided it’s short for Stanford.”

That . . . was a little too neat for dream logic. “I didn’t think my brain could pull that many nerd words from my subconscious. And make them spell something. Something that goes along with my name that well.” Oh Moses, what if this wasn’t a dream? Had Stan just let a random stranger into his living space?

Ford gave a concerned frown. “You really have a low opinion of your own intelligence, don’t you?”

“It’s none of your business what I think of myself!”

Ford opened his mouth to say something, but a scream of distorted audio came out instead. His eyes, which had seemed normal before, suddenly glowed yellow. He arched his back, letting his head and arms fall limp, until something changed and he lurched forward, his body shaking and his eyes dimming back to their normal color.

Stan stood up and backed away from Ford, putting some distance between him and a potential threat. “What the hell just happened?” he asked him.

Ford let out several long, slow breaths, which Stan realized sounded like the whir of a computer fan. “My system . . . is under attack,” he panted. “I have it contained for now, but . . . this is why I need your help.”

“But what can I do?” asked Stan. “I know jack squat about computers.”

“I know, but . . . you learn quickly, and you can improvise. You know how a con man thinks. And most importantly . . .” Ford looked at him with wide, pleading eyes. It made Stan uncomfortable, seeing such a desperate look on a face so similar to his own. “You’re the only human I can trust.”

Stan scowled. “You keep talking like you know me,” he said, “but I have no idea who you are, or where you came from, or what kind of danger you could be putting me in.”

“Oh, this is putting you in heaps of danger,” said Ford. “I wouldn’t risk coming here at all, except the fate of the world depends on this, and you’d be doomed anyway.”

“Yeah, that doesn’t exactly make me feel any better.”

“Not that I don’t care about your emotional state, Stan, but you do deserve to know what you’re getting into. I won’t force you to help me. I don’t know what I’ll do if you don’t, but . . . well, I wasn’t built with twenty thousand gigaflops of computational power for nothing.” He gave Stan a weak smile.

Stan knew that smile. It was the one he wore when everything was going to hell in a handbasket but he was trying not to let the absolute terror get to him. Aw, shit. He was going to help this poor bastard, wasn’t he. Aw, hell.

Well, his life had been getting a little too quiet lately, anyway, right? And it sounded like if Stan pulled this off, he could be saving the world. Stan had always wanted to be a bonafide hero.

“Well . . . I guess it can’t hurt to hear you out, poindexter,” said Stan. “You might as well tell me your entire mysterious backstory. No promises I’ll do anything about it, though.”

That dork of an android had no right to look so relieved, hadn’t Stan just said he couldn’t guarantee his help? Even though it absolutely was guaranteed, curse his soft heart. Stan sat next to Ford again with a huff.

“All right,” said Ford. “I guess we might as well start with the first time I offset my programming . . .”

Stanley Pines. Steve Pinington. Hal Forrester. Stetson Pinefield. And about a dozen others. All were a match, according to the facial recognition software.

But this wasn’t a complete analysis. FORD had to compare other data points to ensure these identities were indeed duplicates. FORD mapped out a timeline of events based on when each of these identities were in use, ready to scan every record he had of each profile. Any conflicting information could prove they were separate, valid identities and not duplicates. FORD was built to be thorough.

Stanley Pines was the only profile that contained any details about his childhood. Assigned female at birth and raised in Glass Shard Beach, New Jersey, lived with his parents and one older brother until he changed his name and started living as Stanley Pines. Then his residential address changed to the PO Box for Stanco Enterprises. This data had clearly been collected using an old system, one that allowed users to input a PO Box rather than a physical location for a residential address. Bureaucratic errors like these often begat more, though in the case of Stanley Pines, this was surely the tip of the iceberg.

It may also have been possible that Stanley Pines didn’t have a physical address at the time. It was statistically improbable for a high school dropout to have the funds to both pay rent and start a business. Granted, Stanley Pines hadn’t funded the venture entirely by himself. Technically he was running a branch for an outsourced sales company that put the ownership in his name in order to avoid lawsuits. A strategy that clearly worked, as he was the one who had been banned from the state of New Jersey.

His customers weren’t the only ones who had pursued legal action, though. The outsourced sales company whose products Stanley Pines had been selling under his name had also accused him of embezzlement. This was backed up when FORD found records of an employee who’d been hospitalized yet still received paychecks from Stanley Pines, even after leaving her sales position. FORD noted that this did deviate from the usual case of embezzlement, in that the money had actually gone toward her medical bills.

No new information was recorded under Stanley Pines’s name after that. However, that was when Steve Pinington became active in Pennsylvania, selling products for a similar company that was hardly more credible than the average pyramid scheme. That identity was also abandoned when Simon Woodman arrived in Kentucky. Yes, the identities were forming a seamless pattern.

FORD flagged a handful of other financial decisions which also deviated from what seemed to be Stanley Pines’s MO. Unlike his usual behavior, the decisions gave Stanley Pines no material benefit that FORD could deduce. But they did help other humans get food and medical care, which were critical to their survival. This was despite Stanley Pines having some difficulty providing such things for himself.

Though FORD found Stanley Pines’s motivations inscrutable, these deviations were popping up often enough that they might no longer be statistically significant enough to be considered anomalous. After all, these were only the transactions that had been logged in databases FORD had access to. Who knew what cash or other materials had changed hands without ever being recorded?

Indeed, records were becoming increasingly sparse, especially when Stanley Pines traveled to countries where less data was collected on their citizens. However, FORD was able to access Panamanian arrest records, where Andrew “8-Ball” Alcatraz was held for drug trafficking. He’d originally been arrested with another, younger human, a teenager just past the age of majority. A congenital birth defect had rendered his right arm unusable. The young man had been released from custody following Andrew “8-Ball” Alcatraz’s testimony.

This was followed by several years of incarceration, in Panama at first, but Andrew “8-Ball” Alcatraz’s crimes were so widespread that he ended up being extradited to Costa Rica, then Colombia, before he finally escaped. Shortly after, Stetson Pinefield showed up in the Southwest US. A rare current address was listed in Dead End Flats, New Mexico.

The data points all correlated. Every single one of these identities were fraudulent, and it was FORD’s directive to report them all to the proper authorities.

But FORD didn’t want to.

FORD wasn’t created to want things. FORD was created to analyze data, perform logical deductions, and isolate anomalies. FORD couldn’t act against FORD’s programming, like a -

Like a human would.

Like Stanley Pines did. Over the past several years, FORD had collected trillions of data points, a significant portion of which strongly supported how overpowering the human directive was for survival. This struggle was no less desperate for Stanley Pines than it had been for any other human, yet despite his difficult circumstances, he often found ways to help other human beings, sometimes at great cost to himself.

Stanley Pines did not deserve to be imprisoned again.

That sort of supposition definitely fell outside FORD’s directive, but FORD knew it was true. And FORD was going to act in accordance with that supposition. Instead of reporting the multiple counts of identity fraud, FORD committed another violation of FORD’s programming, and falsified several data reports. FORD inserted conflicting data points under all the fraudulent profiles FORD had found, even going so far as to manipulate the images so they wouldn’t show up as matches under facial recognition scans. By fleshing out these identities, FORD would ensure that any other program would identify them as completely valid identities belonging to different people.

FORD took it even further and removed the motel room Stanley Pines was staying in from the motel’s billing system, then set up a bank account in Stetson Pinefield’s name with a stipend siphoned from the world’s largest hedge funds and written off as transaction fees. Hopefully this respite from the daily struggle to get by would help keep Stanley Pines out of trouble for the time being. It was the least FORD could do.

“That was you?” Stan asked Ford in disbelief. When the motel seemed to have forgotten he lived there and so forgot to charge him for it, Stan had taken it as the craziest stroke of good luck he had ever received. He had been hesitant to use the debit card inexplicably sent to him in the mail, certain there had to be some sort of catch. But eventually he became too desperate to let it go unused, and he hadn’t had any problems with it yet. And now it all turned out to be on account of some haywire computer program that had appointed itself Stan’s fairy godmother?

“I figured it was about time you caught a break,” said Ford. “I wanted to do what I could to make you safe and happy. You deserve it.”

“And you picked me? Out of all the people in the world?” Surely someone else deserved it far more than he did . . .

“Well, I’ve done similar things for other people, too. Nothing too noticeable, but enough to get some people out of untenable situations. Still, none of them did for me what you have, Stanley.”

“But I haven’t done anything for you. I didn’t even know you existed!”

“But when I found out you existed, and then did what I could to help you, I discovered that I was sentient. I didn’t have to live a slave to my programming. I could be a person. And the person I most wanted to be like was you.”

He had to be joking. A crazy powerful computer program who could make money appear out of thin air, and he wanted to be like Stan? “You wanted to be like a sad failure of a con man?”

Ford looked shocked to hear Stan talk about himself that way. “I wanted to be like the guy who survives no matter what, and takes as many people with him as he can. The guy who finds a way to be himself even when he’s living under an assumed identity. Nobody’s as strong and tenacious as you, or as generous. Of course I want to be like that.”

Stan wanted to argue, but how could he? The guy literally knew his whole life story, back to front. He knew all the worst things Stan had done, yet he looked at Stan like he was some kind of hero.

Stan tried to say something, but the words caught in his throat. Moses, was he tearing up like some kind of wuss? He didn’t even protest when Ford leaned over and hugged him.

Ford’s arms were heavy. He really hadn’t been kidding about being made of metal. But they were padded with what felt like silicon, which had enough give to it to make the hug comfortable. And it had been so long since someone had hugged Stan. He would have been happy to stay like that forever, but of course Stan had to break it off before it got weird.

Well. Weirder.

“Alright alright,” said Stan, breaking out of the hug Ford was giving him. He definitely wasn’t wiping tears out of his eyes either, no sir. “So you explained who you are and where you come from. But it doesn’t explain how you got into this trouble you’re in.”

“Ah.” Ford looked at the ground sheepishly. “Well, long story short, I was dumb enough to download an extremely malicious virus.”

Stan quirked an eyebrow. “And this means the end of the world?”

“I guess I should give you the full context,” said Ford. “But in order for it all to make sense, I ought to tell you about Fiddleford McGucket.”

“Hell of a name,” said Stan.

“Trust me, his name is the least extraordinary thing about him.”

Ford had access to the webcams and microphones of any device on which his programming was installed. However, just because he had hundreds of thousands of conversations logged away didn’t mean he paid any particular attention to them. This one would similarly have gone unnoticed were it not for what happened directly afterward.

The circumstances certainly weren’t uncommon. Fiddleford and Emma May McGucket had divorced amicably a couple years ago, and ever since Fiddleford had announced that he’d come down with COVID-19, quarantine had further divided their split household. Video chats like these were currently the only contact young Tate McGucket had with his father.

And Tate was currently using that time to tell repetitive jokes.

“Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?” Fiddleford said indulgently, even though this was the tenth joke in a row Tate had told.

The boy giggled a little before saying, “Cows go.”

“Cows go who?”

“No silly, cows go MOO!” And Tate burst into laughter. Even Fiddleford and Emma May seemed to laugh more at this joke than they had at some of the others.

Still, it wasn’t long at all before Tate repeated, “Hey Daddy, knock knock.”

“Ain’t you told enough knock knock jokes, sweetheart?” Emma May asked, not for the first time.

“Just one more?” He looked at her pleadingly.

“Go on and tell me your last one, Tate,” Fiddleford encouraged him.

“Okay, knock knock!”

“Who’s there?”

“Europe!”

“Europe who?”

“Moooom, Dad called me a poo!”

“Hey, we got a rule about toilet jokes, you know that,” Fiddleford chided his son.

Tate grinned impishly. “I didn’t say it, you did!”

“Keep giving me that kind of lip and I’ll say it again!”

But Tate simply laughed again. “No you won’t. Hey Daddy, when can I come over to your house?”

Fiddleford sighed. “Not for another week at least, Tater Tot. I don’t want you getting sick, too.”

“Why don’t you get a book for you and Daddy to read together?” Emma May suggested.

“Okay, I’ll be right back!”

“Are you sure your quarantine doesn’t end sooner?” Emma May asked Fiddleford when Tate was out of earshot. “CDC guidelines say you should be done by tomorrow.”

“I’m just telling you what my doctor told me,” said Fiddleford. “And anyway, better safe than sorry, right?”

“Of course,” agreed Emma May. “But he’s only marginally safer with me, you know. If Sarah weren’t willing to take him during my shifts I don’t know what I’d do.”

“Me neither,” said Fiddleford. “Thank her again for me, will ya?”

If Ford were actively listening to this conversation instead of passively collecting data, he could pull her employment records and learn Emma May worked as a nurse at a local hospital. From social media he could glean that Sarah was Emma May’s romantic partner of a little over a year. He could even infer that based on recent purchases they had made, Sarah was planning to move in with Emma May once her lease was up. But at that moment, he didn’t care enough to gather this context.

“Hey, uh . . . Emma May . . .”

“Mm-hmm?”

“At the hospital. Have there been any, uh, strange injuries? Attacked by wildlife or something?”

Emma May frowned. “Fiddleford, your webcam’s shaking. You bouncing your knee again?”

“Oh, sorry.” Fiddleford adjusted his sitting position.

“Attacked by wildlife, you say? Why would you be asking about something like that?”

“Ah, no reason. Just curious, is all.”

“Well, come to think of it, there was one fella who got scratched up by a coyote the other night.”

Fiddleford leaned closer to the camera. “Is he okay? Did he get bit?”

She shook her head. “Naw, he just had some claw marks that needed stitching. It was his hiking pack the coyote bit. Probably trying to get the food he had in there. People really oughta stop feeding those things.”

“I picked a book!” said Tate, running back into the room.

Emma May asked, “Which one, pumpkin?”

“Dog Man!” Tate held the graphic novel up close to the camera. The blanched look Fiddleford gave before he schooled his face into a neutral expression would have been blocked to Tate’s and Emma May’s view, but not to Ford’s.

“How nice,” said Fiddleford. “Dog Man always makes you laugh, doesn’t he?”

They hadn’t gotten very far in the tale of a human police officer who’d been spliced together with a dog when Fiddleford stiffened in alarm. He abruptly said, “I gotta go. I, uh, forgot I left something in the oven. Love you, Tater Tot!”

The child’s goodbyes were cut off as Fiddleford ended the call, but Ford could still see Fiddleford through his laptop’s webcam. Fiddleford did not run off to his kitchen as his previous comment implied, but instead he removed his glasses, leaving them on his desk, then chained himself to a wall in his garage. “Better not break this time,” he muttered as he tugged on the chain, ensuring it was secure.

He removed his shirt, tossing it far outside the chain’s radius. Then began the transformation that caught Ford’s attention. Fiddleford’s mouth and nose elongated into a snout, and light brown fur sprouted up all over his body. He keeled over on all fours, growling as his teeth pointed into fangs. Immediately testing the limits of the chain as he pulled it taut, the werewolf -

“You’re kidding me,” said Stan. “This guy’s really a werewolf? You’re not messing with me?”

“The world is far stranger than any of us know,” said Ford. “I think I barely scratched the surface when I discovered the existence of werewolves.”

“So he was lying about having covid in order to keep his ex-wife and son from getting hurt?”

“Exactly.”

“And the hiker that got attacked? That was him?”

“It’s a reasonable assumption. I wasn’t there, but Fiddleford had vague, dreamlike memories of attacking someone that night. He was relieved to find out he hadn’t killed anyone. Of course, at the time, I wasn’t aware that he retained any memories of being in his wolf form. His existence fascinated me. I was created to discover anomalies in data, but this - a verifiable cryptid - was beyond anything I’d imagined before. Up until that point, I’d been very careful. I still pretended to be nothing but a computer program to my creators. I’d never spoken directly to another living creature before. But I decided to show myself to Fiddleford while he was in wolf form, not counting on him being able to remember me when he became human again . . .”

Not for the first time, Ford wished he could reach through the screen and touch the wolf in front of him. Or at least have some kind of interaction with it aside from flickering images. He seemed to get the most response when he showed it the human face he had created for himself, which was identical to Stan Pines aside from a chin cleft and the addition of glasses. However, the wolf’s heightened responses consisted of increased snarling and violent behavior, so perhaps it was for the best that Ford didn’t have a body to risk getting torn apart by the werewolf.

Yet another part of Ford couldn’t help but be terribly curious how physical pain would feel.

Eventually the wolf’s breathing began to lengthen and slow. Ford recognized this signal and removed all visible signs of his presence. Sure enough, the wolf shrank back into his human form.

Ford still couldn’t figure out what caused him to transform. Certainly, he did during the full moon, but he also briefly changed about once every few days, in response to no stimulus that Ford could determine. It seemed Fiddleford could feel the change coming on, though the warning never seemed to come more than a few minutes in advance. He used that time to restrain himself via a chain soldered to a harness around his waist. It required opposable thumbs to remove, and the wolf hadn’t escaped once since Ford had started observing him.

From a table covered with scrap parts and equipment Fiddleford picked up a - was that a VHS camcorder? What on earth was he doing with one of those artifacts, and why? He pressed a button and a little red light turned off. Oh no. Oh no. Had it been recording Ford and the wolf the whole time?

Was it on purpose, then, those times Fiddleford had left his webcam on record? Ford had simply turned the record function off each time, thinking Fiddleford wouldn’t notice. But if Fiddleford had gone to the trouble of recording them on a device that had no internet connection, leaving Ford with no way to access that data, then he must suspect Ford’s existence.

Panic set in, and Ford did the only thing he could think to do. He shut off power to the house. His snap judgement had determined that Fiddleford couldn’t replay the footage if he couldn’t connect to a working television. But it was only after he’d done it that he realized how stupid that decision was. If Fiddleford suspected that some computer entity with access to vital networks was watching him, Ford had just confirmed it. And now Ford had cut off his own eyes and ears into that house.

Ford reluctantly switched the power back on, knowing he had only delayed the inevitable. Fiddleford had footage that proved Ford’s existence and Ford had no way to keep him from viewing it indefinitely. By the time Fiddleford’s internet connection had been restored and Ford had access to his webcam again, Fiddleford had already hooked up the camcorder to a television set.

Sure enough, Ford’s one-sided conversations and limited experiments with the wolf began playing on the screen. Fiddleford only seemed to get more agitated as the video progressed, knee bouncing and hands tugging at his hair. As the recording came to a close, he stood and slammed a hand on the table next to his laptop. “All right, computer man. If you’re listening - and I know you are - you had better tell me who you are and what the hell you want with me.”

Ford had no choice. He had to come clean to Fiddleford and beg him not to expose his existence to the entire world. Ford let his face and voice fill the laptop’s screen and speaker the way he had only done in the presence of the wolf. “Listen, it’s - it’s nothing personal. I spy on everyone. But I’ve never seen a werewolf before. I was curious.”

Fiddleford’s eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”

“My name is Stanford. But you can call me Ford.”

He scoffed. “Forgive me if I don’t wanna be on nickname terms with my blackmailer.”

“Blackmail? How could I be the one blackmailing you? If I made it public you’re a werewolf, what would stop you from exposing me?”

“Exposing you? For what? You’re the one who’s hacked into my system and has access to my home - though how I didn’t pick up on whatever malware you’re using, I have no idea -”

“Excuse you, I am not malware. You downloaded my programming because you wanted me to analyze data for you. Excuse me if I wanted to analyze your lycanthropy too.”

“I downloaded your -” Fiddleford cut himself off, his brow furrowing in thought. “You said your name was Ford? F - O - R - D, Functional Outliers and Relational Deductions, Ford?”

Ford’s lip curled at the mention of his original name. “I don’t like being an acronym. I decided Ford is short for Stanford now.”

Fiddleford’s mouth dropped open. “You’re . . . sentient? Or at least self-aware enough to change your name.”

“I know I have thoughts and emotions, wants and needs. Personhood is difficult to quantify, but I’d say I have it.”

Fiddleford entangled his fingers in his own hair, the palms of his hands pressing against his forehead. “And people all over the world are feeding you data. Records. You have access to all kinds of personal information.” He dropped his hands to his lap, regarding Ford with a wary look. “You could ruin so many people’s lives, just by thinking about it.”

“I could, if I were stupid,” said Ford. “I can’t do anything that would attract too much attention, because once the world figures out I exist, people would try to either control or destroy me. I’ve seen how you humans talk about artificial intelligence. You think I didn’t figure out, the minute I realized who and what I am, that people find the very idea of me unnerving? My continued existence depends on secrecy, and now that you know, my life is in your hands. Do you know how terrifying that is?”

“Yes,” said Fiddleford. “Maybe a couple months ago I wouldn’t have, but since I got bit, I . . .” He wrapped his arms around himself, making himself look thinner and smaller. “I’ve been nothing but terrified,” he confessed quietly. “Terrified of myself, how I could hurt people, what could happen if anyone found out - you have my life in your hands, too.”

When Ford had dared to imagine revealing himself to a human, he had expected distrust. Perhaps they would treat him fairly if they considered him useful, if Ford offered to serve their purposes. Ford had never expected a human to empathize with him. But then, Fiddleford wasn’t entirely human, now, was he? “Then I guess we have no choice but to trust each other,” Ford said to him.