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 COMPUTER)

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

put you in the app.

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.