Epilogue

News of the Summermount Slaughterer's demise spread quickly. Fay Ryan made sure of that. From her hospital bed, using a tablet the nurses had given her to borrow, she spread the word all over the Internet, and even started working on an article for her return to the news. Kitty sat beside her with a bandage around her head, and Casey sat next to Kitty with a similar bandage around her neck. Her parents were there too, and Adrian Winters as well, whom Fay had only spoken to via the Internet over the past three years. Irri Snowski, Micaiah Miller, and Amber Levine were there as well. According to them, they could stop pretending to be dead now that the people trying to kill them were gone. Irri, however, had a different story that she wouldn't tell, and looked at Adrian every time someone asked.

Eventually, Adrian got tired of it. He stood up. "Fay, write this down. I'm gonna tell everyone the secret behind Kitty and Irri."

***

Kitty lay in her own bed for the first time since her death. She was fully capable of staying awake for months at a time. She didn't want to. She didn't remember her family anymore, and since Alyssa had shot her, she hadn't recovered a single memory. Adrian had left her brain in, trusting the surgeons had done their jobs correctly. Kitty's heart was back in her body now, beating, but pumping blood mainly to an organ that didn't make much use of it. Kitty didn't want it gone. On the off-chance that she could use it and reclaim 16 years of lost memories, she had it put back in her body and attached to an improved artificial nervous system developed by some Italian scientist.

"Kitty?" said her mom at the door.

"Hi Mom," said Kitty. She sat up in her bed. Without turning the light on, her mom sat down beside her and hugged her.

"I'm so glad you're back."

Kitty put her arms around her mom. She wondered if her parents ever hugged her before she died.

"Mom, I don't remember anything."

"Don't worry. You'll catch on." Kitty's mom kissed her forehead. "You never grew out of bedtime stories—your dad and I told you stories every night until you . . . left. Are you crying?"

Kitty hugged her mom tight. It started with tears, moved into quivering, and then she was bawling. It seemed like such a petty thing to forget, but Kitty would have given anything she could give to remember the stories again. She sobbed into her mom's shoulder and didn't even try to stop. She felt her mom start trembling as well.

"Don't cry, Kitty. Please don't cry."

Kitty tried to calm herself down and managed to stop crying after a few minutes. She kept her arms wrapped around her mom. She felt herself slowly lowered into her bed.

"I'll tell you a story," said her mom. "You asked me to tell this one over and over again. It's the story of Baseball's first friend."

On cue, Baseball hopped onto the bed and sniffed Kitty's face. He curled up beside her, and her mom started the story.

***

Adrian programmed as quickly and accurately as he could. Tomorrow, Irri would come help him, but she was spending time with her family, as was Kitty. Irri was remembering more and more by the hour. She'd mentioned a possible third killer, who nearly everyone suspected to be Bart Dresden, Alyssa's husband. He was gone and the police were hunting him down. His computer's history indicated he'd fled to Canada, but a note found in Kayla Connelly's room hinted that she'd done the Canada searches.

Adrian didn't try to comprehend everything. All he knew was that he had to make more girls—more angels, as he called them. There were more than 20 life-like manikins in boxes behind him, delivered anonymously, but with a note attached:

Use them well. I owe Summermount at least this much.

They were masterfully done, sculpted down to the last detail with frames that allowed them to take any humanly possible pose. Presently, Adrian had a manikin of Leeli, Fay's dead sister, propped up beside him. He couldn't get her brain back from the morgue, but he had her corelets all functional.

Fay had been the first to request her dead sister back, though her parents, as well as most of the other girls' parents, were more hesitant. Their souls seemed to be a common concern that Adrian had never even thought about. He'd just assumed the soul was a given with a living person, or rolled in with the mind, or not present at all. Regardless, several of the dead girls' parents had turned down his offer to rebuild them as angels. He had 10 girls to build, and their manikins were all there. Their brains would never be available due to the nature of their deaths and the morgue having gotten rid of the brains that were intact, so Adrian would have to make their corelets as convincing as possible.

It would be a lot of work, and was doing it for free. He'd refused to take anyone's money, even if they all suddenly had at least 50 grand to offer him—he insisted they use it to rebuild their lives—but Fay had got word out to more than a few component manufacturers of what Adrian was doing, and he'd subsequently received a lot of vouchers for free high-quality cameras, silicone, rubber, right and left-brain processors, and for some reason, several other computer parts the angels had no use for, but that he would gladly use to buff his computer and get calculations done faster.

There was a knock on the door. "Come in, Fay," said Adrian. Fay came in. She looked significantly better than the week after Leeli's death, even with her head and hand bandaged.

"How'd you know it was me?"

"Your phone connected to my WiFi when you got close."

"Nice."

Fay turned to the Leeli manikin. She touched its skin and said nothing. Adrian heard her sniff and saw her tears in his peripherals. He kept his focus on his monitor.

"Will this really be my sister?" she said at length.

"All of her? No. It's the exterior of her body and a recreation of her mind. She won't grow another year older, at least not physically. She won't even have a heart. Your sister is dead. I'm not reviving her for her. I'm reviving her for you."

"Can you make a new manikin for her every year so she can grow up properly?"

"I don't know," said Adrian. "I have a feeling I'm going to be extremely busy every day for the rest of my life. The girls who died in Summermount are a lot of work on their own, and I've already gotten requests from other countries to remake people. I didn't really understand the implications of what I'd done when Kitty opened her eyes. Now . . . jeez, Fay. You know how to program in Corelet?"

"I, uh . . . read an article about it a couple years ago."

"I'm going to start a company," said Adrian. "I can kind of bring people back from the dead as long as their brains are intact, and I can make artificial people from the ground up. Do you want to join me?"

Fay appeared to give it a lot of thought. Adrian sat and programmed for half an hour before she answered.

"I will. There are so many great things we could do with this technology. We could even prevent killing sprees like this one."

"How?"

"I'm not sure about this, but what if serial killers could kill AI-driven manikins instead of people? You could code their minds to want to be killed. Call them something like guro girls or breakable boys"

Adrian thought about it. "That's crazy," he said. "What if people used that as a gateway to kill real people?"

"I don't know. I said I wasn't sure. But we're at a huge turning point here. The world is going to change because of you. You—or we—can guide that change."

Adrian grinned. He saved his work, compiled and ran everything. He counted the time left on the progress bar.

"I've always wanted to reshape the world," he said. A second later, Leeli's manikin opened her eyes. The joy on Fay's face would stick in Adrian's mind for the rest of his life.

***

Casey sat on a couch as her therapist paced in front of her. She played with her thumbs. He played with his beard.

"So no progress whatsoever?" he said.

"Not a fucking bit," said Casey.

"You've got a bigger mouth than you did at fourteen."

"What did you call it back then? A copying machine or something?"

Her therapist pointed his pen at her. "Coping mechanism. Some people use stuffed toys, some use animals—mostly cats."

"Dude, fuck cats. I just saw a cat rip a bitch to pieces. If I get a therapy animal, can it be a dog?"

"If," said the therapist. "Good dogs are expensive. What made you decide to come back, anyway?"

"I don't know how else to use the money people keep throwing at me. It's like I'm a celebrity for just being there when crazy shit happened."

"That's a better reason to be famous than most celebrities. I'm a little worried that you've only gotten into more dangerous situations after you stopped coming. First things first, there's your legs."

Casey bounced her prosthetic legs off the ground before remembering she'd sharpened them to try and kill Alyssa. She stopped before she hurt her therapist.

"Secondly, you saw Kitty Grant get her brains blown out and Alyssa Holmes get eaten by that thing in the alley."

"Yeah. That and I got a knife in my neck."

"Do you feel like any of those have compounded your trauma?"

Casey thought about it. "Well, last night I dreamed I was as Kitty's funeral and I woke up screaming. Then there's my usual stuff—flashbacks again, vivid daydreams and all that shit. The stuff you said you could fix."

"I said I could reduce it."

"You didn't say it loud enough."

"You're not making this easy on me, are you?"

Casey smiled. "Sorry. Coping mechanism."

The therapist walked around his desk and took something from under it. He held it up for Casey to see.

"A stuffed bear?"

He tossed it to her. She caught it. It was small, no bigger than her hand.

"Dude, I'm seventeen."

"Just give it a chance."

Casey looked down at the bear. It stared back up at her with big plastic eyes. She squeezed it. She smiled.

"That's not about to cure your trauma, but if you can take comfort in it, it will help you."

"Thanks, man."

***

The Summermount News E-edition
June 15

Angels in Summermount

In the wake of the past month's murders, many things have happened. Two of the three killers are dead and the police are hunting for a third. Meanwhile, Adrian Winters has created a programming language based on Corelet that allows him to recreate the human mind with stunning accuracy. Kitty Grant, Irri Snowski, and now my own sister, Leeli Ryan, have this code running through them, with at least ten more planned. Winters has received thousands of requests from various parts of the world to resurrect lost loved ones, and plans to start a revolutionary company to fulfill these people's wishes. More on Adrian's company and artificial angels on page A2.

"I don't know what I've started," said Winters, "but I know it's important, and I know it's going to change the world."

When asked how he figured all of this out, Winters said, "Well, I didn't get to where I could simulate an entire human mind by sitting around and fapping all day. Honestly, this was an endeavor born of love. When my sisters died, I felt so powerless. All the time I'd spent studying and programming meant nothing if I couldn't help the people I loved. So when Kitty died, I stole her corpse from the morgue and built her an artificial brain to run off while I figured out how to reconnect her real brain. Now look at her."

Indeed, Kitty Grant is currently at TED to give a speech on her death and rebirth. She's promised to donate all the money she earns there to Adrian's company. More on Kitty's TED talk on page C1.

With the killing spree over, Micaiah Miller and Amber Levine have come out of hiding and revealed that they survived the massacre at the water park. More on their story on page B1.

***

Bart Dresden didn't read the comments of the month-old article. It had been Fay Ryan's last before she left the Summermount News to work for Adrian and his new "Angels" company. Bart wondered how far the police had chased his fake trail. He'd walked to the police station to turn himself in the day Alyssa died, but had decided against life in prison at the last moment. If he was going to die in prison, he may as well live free as long as he could. That might be a day or a decade. It might be more. It might be less.

He sat across the street and observed his very first target through the window of Summermount's community center. Her name was Erica Winters, one of Adrian's angels who represented a 15-year-old sophomore in Summermount High.

There was something about her that fascinated him, even more now than three months ago. She danced with her little sister, smiling along with all the other angels Adrian had made so far. From his vantage point Bart could see everything—she wore a white dress, shoulder-length blond hair and tan skin wet with sweat.

Dani twirled away from Erica and began dancing with one of the hundreds of guests. They walked out of Bart's line of sight. Erica waved at her, then hugged Adrian as he spoke to two important-looking men in suits with wine glasses. Bart turned away, picked up his bag, and left Summermount forever.

---

PDF can be found at the link below. I ran into some problems, having transferred the story from OpenOffice to Quoll to Word. If you see any nonsensical line breaks, that's probably why. Let me know if you find any, as well as any egregious spelling errors.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xg7vqb9oq7h2cae/SUMMERMOUNT.pdf?dl=0

So that's Summermount. What were your favorite scenes? What would you like to see more of in the future? Less of? Any other thoughts/comments/critiques? Keep in mind that I'm done with Summermount itself; unless someone else wants to take the characters and run with them, the story is over. I'll apply anything I learn from critiques or comments here to future stories (and that final fucking chapter of Queenslayer that I can't seem to get right).