Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13
INT. DIRK’S ROOM — MORNING
Dirk, no longer slumped lethargically by his sleepiness, rushes into his room so quickly that he nearly strikes his shins across the low corner of his bed frame. He dodges the bed, shuts the door behind him, and practically jumps to his desk, where his laptop sits closed and foreboding.
Dirk opens the computer quickly and respectfully, like an explorer swiping a forgotten artifact. Flori floats sleeping on the screen. She stirs and squints her eyes.
FLORI (IN COMPUTER) (yawning)
You’ve got to give a girl some warning before
you toss the curtains back like that.
DIRK
It’s important.
FLORI (IN PHONE)
What’s going on?
DIRK
Do you still want to help
Hannah out?
FLORI (IN COMPUTER) (playfully)
Don’t answer questions with
a question.
Dirk stares at the computer, trying his best to convey his seriousness and missing Flori’s sarcasm.
FLORI (IN COMPUTER) (CONT’D) (spelling it out)
Of course I do.
DIRK
Then we’ll help her out.
The screen around Flori lightens, registering the shock of this sudden change.
FLORI (IN COMPUTER)
You think
we’ll be alright?
Dirk is so agitated, and Flori so engrossed, that neither notices the growth of muffled music pulsing outside the window or the sound of slamming car doors, which signal that someone has pulled into the driveway.
DIRK (weighing the consequences)
I don’t know.
FLORI (IN COMPUTER)
Well, I’m still in.
Suddenly, and still unbeknownst to Dirk and Flori, the front door down below is thrown open. By the sound of it, Shelly and Leo have walked in.
OFFICER SHARP (yelling up as promised)
Dirk! Your sister wants to talk to you.
Dirk looks up, noticing all the commotion for the first time. Distracted, he forgets to close his laptop. Flori watches helplessly as he walks out his bedroom door and yells downstairs to his father.
DIRK
What’s she need? I’m busy now.
Shelly and Leo are already upstairs and bearing upon him, though.
DIRK (desperate now, maybe after realizing that he forgot to power his computer down)
Hey —
SHELLY
We need to talk.
LEO
For sure.
DIRK
Don’t — stop!
SHELLY
I’m sorry, but —
Dirk, Shelly, and Leo come crashing into Dirk’s room. Leo slams a leg against the bedframe and falls onto the bed, cursing Dirk’s name and anything else he can think of while the pain rattles his shinbone.
LEO
Fuck you, Dirk. And your bed!
And that electronic girlfriend trapped
inside your phone…
Leo, like everyone else, stops when he glances at Dirk’s computer and realizes what he’s looking at.
DIRK (gesturing to Flori)
She’s not my girlfriend.
SHELLY
No —
FLORI (IN COMPUTER)
Definitely not.
LEO
Then what the hell
is that?
SHELLY
Is that her — Dirk?
DIRK
Who now?
FLORI (eyeing Dirk)
Questions…
LEO
So what’d you do? Kill her and make it look
like an accident, then put her in?
SHELLY
I know what she looks like, Dirk. I read
all the papers after you had the wreck.
Her face was everywhere.
LEO
Did you make her answer all the questions
before you knocked her off? Or was this the best
you could do?
DIRK
I don’t know what you mean by that —
SHELLY
And this is what you tried to do to Hannah.
This exact same thing…this awful thing…
that’s not a person in there —
FLORI
Hey!
SHELLY
You would
have killed her. Hannah would’ve died if you tried.
She almost did…
DIRK (getting frustrated)
You know that wasn’t me.
LEO
You’re fucked,
man. I thought that we were friends, but now
it makes me kind of sick to think about it.
SHELLY (pointing at Flori)
Then what is that?
LEO
I can’t believe I let
you borrow Super Mario. Just like that…
DIRK
Dagnabbit — stop!
Everyone is silenced by the magic of dagnabbit. Dirk, partially ashamed at sounding so suddenly like his father, or maybe even his grandfather, hangs his head in embarrassment. After a moment’s pause, he smiles and waves a hand at Flori.
DIRK
Just let her tell it. But promise, though,
you won’t tell anyone.
LEO
Or what?
DIRK (smiling devilishly, unable to avoid making a joke out of it)
Or I’ll
let her fry your brains.
It is obvious, by the way Flori literally beams with light, that she has been waiting for this moment. Shelly and Leo watch her intently, evidently frightened by their own curiosity.
FLORI (IN COMPUTER)
So this is how
it goes. I’ll be as simple as I can.
Dirk didn’t kill me. It was an accident.
We were working on Hereafter for
our senior project. We didn’t know it at the time,
but Neverland reached out to Rose to see
if they could help develop a process that
would let you mimic a personality
with artificial intelligence. Both Dirk
and I, well mainly me, since Dirk didn’t seem
to know what he was doing, were focused in
machine learning, and everything was random.
We didn’t get to choose. We got assigned to work
on the project, is all. But by the time
we got into the wreck last spring, we knew
what we were working on. Of course, we had
to sign a bunch of NDAs and junk like that.
But we knew. And when I died, Dirk put me in
a beta-version of the app.
DIRK
She’d done
the work already, anyways. All I had
to do was run a script she wrote to put
herself into the app that we were using
to test it earlier. I couldn’t have done it
by myself — she was always the one who did
the heavy lifting.
FLORI (IN COMPUTER)
And then, when Hannah found out that we worked
on the app —
DIRK (looking at Shelly)
Someone went and spilled the beans.
FLORI (IN COMPUTER)
— she came to Dirk to ask if he
could help her out.
LEO (apprehensively intrigued)
What’d she want you to do?
FLORI (IN COMPUTER)
She wanted us to kill her dad.
SHELLY
You mean…?
DIRK
In the app.
Everyone appears to turn towards some inward dispute as the strangeness of the whole situation settles over the emptiness their fleeting excitement and blame has left behind.
DIRK (CONT’D)
Look — I really wanted to help.
But I couldn’t. Flori was the one who wrote
all the code in school. The truth is that
I’m worthless for the most part. I couldn’t help
Hannah if I tried. And Flori can’t
do anything…
FLORI (IN COMPUTER)
The engineers at Neverland are bent
on making sure the only people on
the app are sanctioned afterversions of
people that are really dead. If they
discovered I was leeching off their software,
then I’d be good as dead.
DIRK
But now, I feel like we
have got to try.
Dirk looks to Flori.
DIRK (CONT’D) (finally explaining his change of heart)
Hannah was in a wreck
on the way to school today.
FLORI (IN COMPUTER)
You think
it was the afterversion of her dad?
SHELLY
So you know?
DIRK
Dad heard about it on
the radio this morning.
LEO
Could a person
in the app do something crazy like that?
FLORI (IN COMPUTER)
I mean,
it’s possible.
SHELLY (to Flori, and awkwardly, like speaking to a high-tech microwave)
You don’t have to risk it…
DIRK (painfully mistaken)
Well,
this wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t tell Hannah
what I was working on at school.
SHELLY (looking square at Dirk for the first time since she entered the room)
I had
to talk to someone…
A metaphorical mold, quick to grow on hidden things, takes root in the empty silence.
LEO
Hey — let’s focus on
the task at hand.
SHELLY
Right.
DIRK (self-deprecating)
At the least, I can do
what Flori tells me too.
Everybody looks at Flori, who smiles from where she floats in the computer.
FLORI (IN COMPUTER) (satisfyingly sarcastic)
I guess that we
can start by finding out what really happened.
CUT TO: