(L.O.V.E) Lost over the Virtual Expanse

By M.D. Butler

Within this collection of short stories by M.D. Butler are eight tales of horror, suspense, and mystery.

An inventor goes beyond the boundaries of morality and science to bring back the woman he loves, but each reiteration just seems to take her farther away from him. Does he even know what he’s truly searching for anymore?

A late-night pit stop in a diner of death leads one man to question his resolve of finding a better life.

As a merchant ship sets sail across the open waters, there might be someone among them with a thirst for more than delectable wines.

This and much more awaits you in (L.O.V.E) Lost Over the Virtual Expanse. Be prepared when curling up with this book before bedtime, as not even the covers can prevent you from getting chills.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jun 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638298960

M.D. Butler

M.D. Butler grew up in Chandler, Arizona, where he still resides. It took a lifetime to develop his style of rhyming literature; not a unique take on writing but definitely rare. Between trials of life, he found a way to channel those events into something useful, maybe something beautiful.

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About the Author

M.D. Butler grew up in Chandler, Arizona, where he still resides. It took a lifetime to develop his style of rhyming literature; not a unique take on writing but definitely rare. Between trials of life, he found a way to channel those events into something useful, maybe something beautiful.

Copyright Information ©

M.D. Butler 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Ordering Information

Quantity sales: Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.

Publisher’s Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Butler, M.D.

(L.O.V.E) Lost over the Virtual Expanse

ISBN 9781645361893 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781638298960 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021916396

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street, 33rd Floor, Suite 3302

New York, NY 10005

USA

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Acknowledgment

First, I would like to thank Austin Macauley Publishers for their outstanding work on this small piece of literature. And secondly, I would like to thank you, the reader, for your continued support. An unread book is a terrible waste.

(L.O.V.E) Lost over the Virtual

Expanse

As I softly asked her to sit still and to please look away, I remember how much she loved to paint. There was so much we had planned to do, and by that point I almost wondered: what was the use? She said she trusted me, I told her I loved her. I counted down from three, two, one…

Behind the left ear, a switch clicks, revealing a soft teal light from circuit boards and gears that piston and wind. The act perhaps is relevant to opening the skull, exposing the seat of the soul. Wondrous magics of invention, personality traits stored in digital files, and behavioral patterns calculated to determine an action’s probability in future encounters. From the beginning, her independently driven artificial intelligence possessed its own highlight reel of uncomfortable situations, but foolishly, my heart had already embraced the unforeseen future consequences without thinking. My mind should have held out for more seasoned reasoning.

Sadly, my love has begun to feel as artificial as The Android’s skin, which perfectly imitates my wife’s rosy vanilla tint and Nordic blonde hair – but lacks her smooth touch and warmth. I bury the cold stiff reality deep within my subconscious where only night terrors still find them. The Android’s epidermis is made of a soft outer layer of super-resilient plasticine that protects a sturdy infrastructure of graphene plastics with titanium casings, all surrounding the delicate circuit housings. Designed from images from before my wife got sick, The Android has her exact features with every detail imaginable, from the number of brow hairs to the circumference of each mole. The only thing this machine lacks is my beloved’s departed soul.

It’s the uncanny valley of our unique situation and its stilted interactions that prompts me to shut her down and take her back into the lab. Despite this technology, The Android has been given the unfair task of trying to fill the role of my life partner, and yet consistently does things that remind me it will never come close to replacing her. One byproduct of my sophomoric attempt to give The Android a comparable intelligence – while limiting it within a vacuum of curbed ingenuity – is how she will follow my words far too literally. For example: standing frozen on the spot when I casually ask her to wait while I get ready. I’ll turn around to find her as still as a statue right where I left her, with only the whirring lens of her cyan eyes following my movements until instructed further.

Or when I ask her to grab something, I have to add in ‘and bring it back to me,’ or else she will simply stand there across the room, holding the item in her hands indefinitely. I only just recently fixed a problem that had her sleep schedule often interrupted by me muttering in my dreams, which would start her morning routine. She’d prepare the home for another full workday, then wake me up to pristine surroundings with fresh coffee and a full breakfast tray at 2:30 in the morning. And by fixing the problem, what I actually mean is that I no longer sleep next to the damn thing.

She is mainly autonomous besides when she’s helping me with work. At first, I could not comprehend a subservient version of her. I loved her too much in life to redesign her as an Igor or utilize as a ‘fetch-tool.’ I created this machine with my wife’s looks and personality out of a pained effort to avoid loneliness, all while staying productively busy with the one person who always brought out the best in everything. I get distracted enough in my craft that the coldness of the wide-open château often goes unnoticed behind me. I dismiss its somber presence as a chilling draft, but when I retire for the night, it is nice to have her representative here to pass the quieter times with.

The Android and I are both just as independent in our daily routine as me and my wife used to be; we always cherished the ability to comfortably exist side by side, doing completely separate tasks on the same piece of furniture. I could be writing poetry while she watched a movie, but nothing else seemed to matter as long as we were close together. This castle we bought was far too large for just the two of us, especially at the beginning; we hardly ever used more than one room during the week, and our furnishings were sparse.

Spacious staircases led up to galleries filled to the ceiling with my wife’s paintings; she created such quality of work that we lived for years at a time only occasionally selling two or three. Our shared passion in life was creating artwork as a team – which The Android still attempts to do – but a deeply disturbing theme has begun repeating through every new canvas, speaking volumes of damnation and rue. Paintings of just solid black backgrounds with the same recurring image of a melting steel cage, rusted and cramped, represented to me feelings of such repressed discontent.

Some of the paintings are truly hard to look at, since I personally know the artist’s intent. Though I am afraid to say it, the soul is trapped somewhere unpleasant.

Outside of art and craftsmanship, The Android’s ability to do as it pleases is perhaps not refined enough to permit full usage, a failure entirely on my end. Although, when she first went online and seemed to be operating fine, I promised I wouldn’t go back inside her head to change her again; ‘perfect with her imperfections’ was the motto back then.

Yet as time went on, I found that certain favorable traits were not appropriately balanced. An eternal smile made her appear more like a doll than a person. Her nonverbal communication skills were nonexistent. And her ability to recite information like it was straight from a Wiki page gave me a mortal unease deep in my stomach that I could not describe in a literal or metaphorical way. She stores details like the dates, time, and entire minutes of conversations going back to her creation; I never have to write anything down again. And yet, hidden within all that information, there might be tidbits of manic-fueled rants that I’d rather not have exposed to the public should The Android ever be seized and decommissioned.

In accordance with guidelines set to protect not only my physical body but also my emotional mind, The Android never criticizes an idea I come up with unless