04/06/42
So I didn't kill Jason.
I wanted to, I fantasized about it. I imagined him grabbing for the manual controls on his new Lombard rig, finding himself locked out, hurtling towards a building front or plowing through a guardrail to corkscrew down into the 5th Avenue canal.
But there was Venus to get out and then an internal investigation of the SPCB during which they put our whole house through a freaking cavity search, so your pal Dwayne had to be even more careful than usual about popping wheelies through the sphere. And then one morning an announcement during school assembly-Jason killed in 'copter crash, moment of silence please, memorial service to be held blah blah blah.
I looked up the police record. He'd been out drinking on a bad forged ID, put the copter on manual over-ride. I'm surprised he even knew anyone who could write him an over-ride. Went tearing over Ellis, played chicken with a garbage scow, dropped underwater and hit a submerged steel superstructure at 200 kph. Used to be some kind of ride at Coney Island. First medic on site entered an empty chart with DRN at the top. Turns out that's DOA's big brother; it stands for Dead Right Now. 
I watched the memorial service through the security cameras at the funeral home. I zoomed right in on his face, lying in the casket. They did a pretty good job, he looked basically normal, but you could tell that he had left the building. I mean, there was no way you could think he was just "sleeping" or something. He was just matter-in-a-shape, like a table, or a ladder. Bunch of mostly carbon atoms stacked together. Nothing else.
Everybody seemed real nice. Lots of whispered conversations, nobody yelling. They laughed more than I thought they would-old friends of the family catching up after not seeing each other for a while. You could tell the old folks were better at the whole thing. Practice effect. On the whole, it was weirdly uninvolving.
Except for this one moment. His mom was talking with someone, her aunt or great-aunt or some ancient Fertoroid, and out of nowhere she turned her head and looked at the security camera in the ceiling. Staring straight at me. Frosted hair and blue eyes and the kind of good figure you get with a responsible regime of exercise and electrostim. Black dress and jacket, and a purse like the one my Mom got at Henri Couterier. 
And you could tell the world had gone fake for her. She had just figured out that it was all a play. It was all pretend. And she had these lines to say, but she didn't give a damn about them. 
She turned and walked out on the great aunt, stepping around her and walking up the aisle between the pews. Other people stopped talking and turned to watch her go. She walked out into the foyer and I had to switch cameras to follow her through the lobby to the front door, then switch again to the parking lot cam. In the time it took her to walk out of range she never looked back. Someone should have stopped her, I guess, but Jason's dad was in the bathroom in a toilet cubicle crying and by the time they found him she was gone. 
She's been offline for seventeen days.