Cody Williams - Deceased Volleyball Player

Alex groaned as his phone buzzed, interrupting his attempt to troubleshoot a persistent Wi-Fi issue in one of the high school classrooms. He checked his device's display:

-Alex, we need you back at your office. Cody Williams is having trouble with her ID again.

Sighing, Alex gathered his tools and made his way back to the closet the school called an office.

Entering his tech office, Alex found the offender, Cody, leaning against the counter, her short hair tousled and her athletic frame clad in an old short-sleeved volleyball jersey and a pair of jean shorts.

Cody Williams, the tomboyish star of the school's volleyball team, was a frequent visitor to his IT desk. The girl's friendly, boyish charm and infectious laughter made her a favorite among students and staff alike.

Except for Alex. Cody was not Alex's favorite. Because Cody was jinxed.

Every school-issued computer assigned to her wound up run over, water logged, or burned to a crisp in an electrical fire. Lightbulbs flickered when she passed by. Phones dropped service, routers reset. Suffice to say, there was no girl in the universe who was unluckier with technology than Cody Williams.

"Hey, Alex!" Cody flashed a bright smile, which momentarily eased Alex's irritation at being pulled away from his troubleshooting.

He sighed. "What's the issue this time, Cody?" He was already moving towards the terminal where he'd pull up Cody's ID data and figure out what else had gone wrong with her.

"I can't get into the gym. It's like the ID doesn't recognize me anymore," Cody explained, her tone a mix of frustration and confusion.

Alex made a give-me gesture and took Cody's ID when offered. He ran it over the diagnostic scanner by the terminal. Unsurprisingly, the ID triggered a red rejection light and negative beep.

Expecting to find a common connectivity or hardware issue, Alex scanned the ID logs. He was surprised to see no obvious reason why Cody's ID wasn't working this time. Once it was because she'd bent the card in half (and broke the chip inside) but the card was reading fine and showed no visible damage.

Alex delved deeper into the ID database and trawled through the actual SQL file housing the data.

CODY WILLIAMS: ACCOUNT DISABLED.

Geeze. A disabled account? What did the little jinx manage to do this time? He read further and further. Then stopped. What he saw sent a chill down his spine.

STATUS: DECEASED.

The ominous word stood out from the noise.

"That's weird," Alex muttered, trying to mask his shock. "Says here you're dead, Cody."

Cody hesitated, looking like she'd seen a ghost, then laughed. "What? No way."

He laughed too. "Must be a system error. I'll fix it right away." A couple keystrokes rectified the bug. "And there you go. Back to the land of the living. You can thank me later."

He proffered Cody's ID, she snatched it back, and skipped out from the tech office with a wave. "You're a lifesaver, Al!"

Alex smiled, then huffed, turned back to his terminal, and got down to the real work.

As much as Alex liked to blame Cody for all the problems she attracted, the truth was that her misfortune brought all kinds of gaps in the school's systems and security to his attention. Over the length of her four-year career at the high school (Cody was a senior now, just turned 18 at the beginning of the school year) she'd singlehandedly **** Alex to disaster-proof everything that came close to touching a power socket.

So much so that when a drunk trucker caused a citywide blackout by crashing into a power junction downtown last year, the school didn't even know it'd happened till after the power was back on.

Alex treated each of Cody's 'mysteries' as a challenge to discover and root out the true cause. This was no different. If it could happen to Cody, it could happen to anyone (or so Alex told himself). So for the next several hours, Alex traced back the strange DECEASED status up through the system logs. The ID system had for some stupid reason, automatically flagged Cody as deceased, triggering her inability to unlock secure areas in the school.

Alex had seen a lot of things through his years of IT troubleshooting, but this was a first.

The sun was already down and all the kids were home for the day by the time Alex tracked the problem to the source. Somehow, the school ID database's automatic update procedure had been triggered by an odd push from an external city government server.

Finally, sitting back in his big leather computer chair after hours of labor, Alex picked up the phone to call the town's data center to inquire about the bug. The problem had to be something on their end on their end.

Five minutes later, he hung up and set the phone down in a cold sweat.

No. It couldn't be.

Alex searched furiously on the net himself, hunting for the truth. He started digging into the jinx's personal information, and then... oh no.

Cody Williams, the vibrant and athletic girl who'd been standing in his office not 5 hours ago, had been declared dead after an extended hospital stay.

What he found was astonishing and chilling. Images of Cody's hospitalization flashed across the screen – a fragile figure confined to a bed, surrounded by machines. It was an existence Alex couldn't reconcile with the vibrant girl he knew.

It hadn't been a glitch. The update from the city came because Cody's **** certificate had finally been processed on city hall's end.

She'd been dead for more than three years.

And yet... Cody. She was definitely alive the last time Alex saw her. Forgetting the clock or the hour, Alex kept searching for more details. He needed to understand. Needed answers.

After a thorough investigation, Alex uncovered the truth.

Emulated. It's what they called them. Alex had even met one or two. Everybody had. But this... Cody had been Emulated nearly the entire time he'd known her.

Had he ever met the real Cody?

The procedure was pretty straightforward - they scanned your brain. Turned all the pathways into a precise, simplified AI model that could predictively act and even think like the original - or at least, give a convincing enough impersonation to fool humans.

Behind the neural net, an Emulated worked the same way any non-Emulated android did. Big math. Transformers. Numbers, calculus, and clever programming. Trained on an unimaginably large dataset and following complex prompts to dictate their final behavior. In the end, it was the Chinese Room. A crazy expensive piece of hardware running off an XML document.

Was an Emulated the true continuation of the deceased's existence? Theologians said no - no soul, no continuity. Physicalists argued that if it walked and quacked like a duck, it was a duck. Proponents of metaphysics claimed consciousness couldn't truly be emulated, and all we were looking at was a convincing puppet.

Alex had never bothered to have an opinion, but the government's stance was clear: so long as we didn't know for sure, Emulateds only counted as half-human.

Their 'lives' were protected by law. They were allowed almost identical rights to living human beings. Almost being the operative word. The big difference was, Emulateds were the responsibility of their legal owners - just like parents or guardians were responsible for their children. Legally, their rights were those of the deceased individual who was used as the blueprint for their AI model, inherited by the machine to ensure continuity.

Non-Emulated androids weren't that lucky. It didn't matter how realistic they looked or how convincing their behavior seemed; if they weren't running on the scanned personality of a real person, an android was treated the same as a Roomba. As a computer guy himself, Alex didn't think that was fair - why did androids deserve to be treated as simple machines, while some of them acted more human than some humans he knew?

But the law was the law.

Cody's consciousness had been emulated after her ****. The lively girl he thought he knew was actually a sophisticated AI neural network running on an android chassis. The revelation shook him to the core. No wonder she'd caused every tech system to go haywire - she was probably made of fucking magnets or something.

But who knew other than Alex? Certainly not Cody's friends, or her teachers, or there'd be rumors. Did the principal know, at least? Maybe not. How could she let a robot compete in high school volleyball otherwise?

At the very least, Cody's parents had to know. Someone had to have ordered Cody's brain scan, and someone had to have paid for Cody's Emulated body. Android chassis weren't cheap - hundreds of thousands of dollars, easy. But what parent wouldn't give up everything for their child? More to the point, someone had to be Cody's guardian - not in the sense that 'she' was an 'adult', but rather in the sense Cody was an Emulated - she was half human at best, if you were being generous.

Alex felt like he was flying through a storm. He knew a secret he shouldn't know - that perhaps nobody knew other than Cody and her family. A secret that could shatter the illusion of Cody's continued existence - and the rest of her life to come. The lengths her family probably had to go through to keep this under wraps boggled the mind.

Would the school kick Cody out if they found out what she was? She had rights, didn't she? But she wasn't who she said she was, either. Or was she? At the very least, Cody couldn't be allowed on any more sports teams, or so Alex thought. She was a robot, right? Could she even get tired? Or lose focus? Though it's not like Cody was an unassailable ace - the team won games, it lost games. Everything before today had seemed so normal.

Alex had to admit he wasn't an expert. He knew networks and simple hardware. Androids and AI...? If he had a handle on topics that advanced, he wouldn't be stuck working IT for a high school, that's for sure.

The one thing he did know was that he had to do something about this. And whether that meant taking this secret to the grave with him, or speaking up and speaking out, Alex would be choosing to do something. Inaction simply wasn't an option. Half measures just wouldn't cut it.

What was Alex going to do?