Chapter 20: The Glass

The ballroom went silent in the dark.

On the screens, a man walked unsteadily down a corridor and leaned his head against a door.

The door opened from inside, and nobody was there.

Someone near the front said, "Is that the hotel?"

A woman gasped when the man went in.

The clock ran forward.

At 1:02 a.m. the elevator opened on the screens, and a woman in a dark coat stepped out and walked to room 1412 with a key card in her hand.

She lifted her face to the camera.

It was forty feet tall.

"That's Sylvia," a man said, loudly, and the crowd made a sound Iris had never heard a crowd make.

Sylvia stood on the stage in plum velvet and did not move.

"Turn that off," she said.

Nobody moved.

On the screens she stood in the doorway of the room for six minutes, and watched, and folded her hands.

Three hundred people watched her do it.

Then Philip stepped out of the elevator in his party suit, and his mother took his face in her hands.

The sound from the speakers was clear in the quiet.

"It worked, Mom."

The sound of it filled the ballroom, and Sylvia's hand on his hair filled the screens.

"Fake!" Philip shouted.

His voice cracked high.

"It's a fake, it's made by a program, she is not my mother!"

"Stop talking, Philip," said Sylvia.

The words came out of her sharp and cold, in front of everyone, and the room heard the voice she had used in the video.

Iris stepped to the front of the stage and took the microphone from its stand.

"Daphne," she said. "The next one."

The picture on the screens changed.

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