Watson
Caden gazed at the boxy smile on the screen. He had already been impressed by Clops’s computer, but that was just a bunch of numbers and letters. This one, this metal box, had spoken to him. And it had a face. Just like Tooby, this Iltech was alive.
“What did it say?” Annika asked.
That was apparently the wrong thing to say. The box emitted a horrible screeching alarm. Caden and Annika winced as the blocky white face contorted into a scowl and the screen flashed red.
“please phrase your question in the form of a statement!”
“Why is this box yelling at us?” Annika whispered to Caden. She said it quietly, so that the machine wouldn’t overhear them and think they were daring to ask it a question again.
“I don’t know,” Caden answered. He remembered Clops had said Watson got mad easily, something about only giving answers as questions and hearing questions as answers. Caden still couldn’t wrap his head around it.
“This is a waste of time,” Annika mumbled. Watson overheard her. The face on the screen transformed back into a smile and spoke.
“What is the vast majority of human existence?” it said.
Caden and Annika exchanged confused glances. Even though the machine was asking them a question, it didn’t seem like it was waiting for an answer or anything. Rather it felt like the box was answering their statement—with a question.
“I think I get it,” Caden whispered to Annika. “Here, I’m going to try something.”
Annika shrugged and Caden cleared his throat. He wanted to start off with something easy.
“The number four,” he said. Annika gave him a weird look, but Watson understood.
“What is the integer between three and five?” it said in its metallic voice. Caden grinned. This was working. He decided to try something a bit harder.
“The Home outside of Salem run by Mother Mildred.”
Watson didn’t miss a beat. “What is an orphanage for Nobodies with a total of twenty-four slots for the children of parents arrested by the Church?”
“Gotama’s Ant,” Annika whispered to Caden. “This thing is giving us answers, but as questions.”
“Yup,” Caden said, excited that they’d figured it out. “And it seems to know a lot. It even knows about the Home.”
“But why does it have to be so … strange?” Annika asked. She stepped closer to Watson and asked her own statement. “Answering in the form of a question.”
“What are the rules?” Watson stated simply. Annika flopped her hands to her sides in defeat.
“Well, just because it can answer everything, even as a question, that doesn’t mean we’ll understand it, I guess.”
“Maybe.” Caden rubbed his palms together in anticipation. “But it’s time to see what this thing really knows.”
Caden had been waiting for this opportunity his entire life—a treasure trove of information about anything he wanted to know. Who cares if he had to phrase it a little weird? It was time to start digging. Caden shivered with excitement as he spoke the words he’d always wanted to hear the answer to.
“My father, the person who created me.”
Caden held his breath as he waited for the response. But once the box spoke it aloud, he didn’t know what to think.
“Who is Caden Aire?”
“What?” Caden asked in confusion. That was a bad idea. The screen blinked red and the angry face returned.
“please phrase your question in the form of a statement!”
“Why did it tell me my own name?” Caden asked Annika quietly.
“Maybe it’s trying to confirm who you are,” she suggested. “Maybe it can’t see you.” Caden wasn’t sure, but it was worth a shot.
“Yes, my name is Caden Aire.”
Watson’s calm blue screen and smiling face returned. “What were you told by Spyder unit 20219-B after finding you?”
Caden sighed. He wasn’t getting very far with this thing. Maybe it was time to change subjects.
“Okay, how about … the reason I was created.”
“What is to destroy the world?”
“I already knew that,” Caden mumbled under his breath. “The way I will destroy the world.”
“What is by utilizing Metl?”
Caden groaned in frustration. Watson hadn’t told him anything they didn’t already know. He was supposed to be getting answers from this thing, not more questions! Before Caden knew it, he was yelling at the metal box.
“The reason I’m part human and not just a weapon that someone can pull the trigger on and use however they want!”
Caden almost expected Watson to get angry back. But it replied in the same calm, robotic voice.
“What is to communicate with Metl?”
Now they were getting somewhere.
“What does that mean?” Annika whispered.
“Don’t know,” Caden admitted. “Maybe I’m supposed to talk to Metl somehow? My dad would tell me how to do that, I guess.”
“Maybe this thing knows too?”
“I can try.” Caden cleared his throat again. “The way I communicate with Metl.”
“What is by talking like a normal human?”
And they were back to square one. It looked like they were going to have to wait until they found Caden’s dad before they’d get anything besides a headache from Watson.
“I have one that’s been on my mind ever since that weirdo woman mentioned it,” Annika said. “Back when she explained all that stuff that happened two hundred years ago.”
“Go for it.” Caden offered Annika the space in front of Watson. She faced the machine’s smiling screen and stood up tall.
“The meaning of life.”
Caden had almost forgotten about that one. His heart leaped in excitement, until he remembered who they were talking to. Watson gave his monotone answer.
“What is Gotama’s Second Revelation?”
“All right, I’ve had enough,” Annika said. She was glaring at Watson and looked about ready to kick its screen in. “Let’s go down to the second floor. I’m itching to try this magnetizer out.”
“Wait, I still need to ask about my angel weapon.”
“You really think you’re going to get anything useful out of this thing?”
“I have to at least try.”
Annika crossed her arms. “Whatever. But let’s not waste much more time.”
Caden nodded in agreement. He held up his glowing red palms to Watson, not sure if that would help him identify anything, but it couldn’t hurt.
“My angel weapon,” Caden said. Watson had the question ready right away.
“What is telekinetic consciousness using Planck probes?” it answered. Caden and Annika looked at each other and shrugged. Those were a lot of words Caden didn’t understand, but he asked about the one that sounded most important.
“Telekinetic.”
“What is the ability to interact with objects without physically touching them?”
Caden felt his fingers tingle. “Okay, the way I use my angel weapon.”
“What is by using your human part?”
Caden looked down at himself—his hands, his arms, his torn gloves, his overalls with the arrow hole in it. Which parts of him were human and which weren’t?
“What does that mean?” Annika asked.
“I don’t know.” Caden thought back to the two times he’d ever used his angel weapon. The first was to protect Annika from the butcher, and the second was to protect Deber from being used as bait. Was wanting to save someone how he used his “human part?”
“Maybe it means doing something robots can’t do,” Annika said sarcastically, “like making sense, for starters.”
“That’s it!” Caden said. Annika looked at him suspiciously. “Well I mean, not the making sense part, but doing something that Iltech can’t—feeling emotion. I can only use it when I’m feeling something.”
“How does that work?” Annika asked, not sounding convinced. “You just think about a sad story, and then you can blow things up?”
“I don’t think so.” Caden flexed his fingers and stuck out his palms. “But I’m going to try and see what happens.”
Caden concentrated on the only thing in the room: Watson. If what it had told them was true, then Caden should be able to move the machine without touching it. It was taller than him, three times as wide, and probably weighed a couple hundred pounds, but so had Evan the butcher and Caden had sent him flying into a building. Just a little budge should be easy.
Caden focused on moving Watson. At the same time, he tried to summon as many emotions as he could. He thought about the terror of being chased by the Holy Police on horseback. He thought about the shock of seeing Mr. Stercus turned to dust on stage. He thought about the warm coziness of Mother Mildred bringing him a piping hot cup of apple cider in the stable on a cold winter’s night. He thought about the Iltech paradise all around him, his father who he was going to find inside the church, and not knowing if he was truly going to be able to do it. And he thought about Tooby, his spider friend, who had sacrificed everything for him to be here right now.
“Uh, Caden?” came Annika’s voice. Caden hadn’t realized his eyes were closed. When he opened them, his arms were still outstretched, and Watson was floating a foot above the ground.
“Am I doing that?” Caden asked, not believing what he was seeing. But he’d said it just a bit too loud. Watson started flashing red again.
“please phrase your question in the form of a statement!”
“Sorry, sorry,” Caden whispered with a grin. He was too excited to care. He visualized Watson going up even higher, and the machine rose right up along with his thoughts. How high could he get it? All the way to the ceiling?
“I think you should put it down, Caden,” Annika said worriedly. “You don’t want to break it.”
Caden didn’t hear her. “What?”
He turned to Annika for just a second, but in that moment of distraction Watson crashed to the floor, causing the room to shake.
“Sorry!” Caden and Annika apologized together. Watson looked unfazed. Aside from a small dent in the bottom of the box, it hadn’t been damaged. The happy white face reappeared on the blue screen.
“What do most people say when they accidentally drop Watson, the smartest computer on Earth?”
“Well at least it has a sense of humor,” Caden said with a nervous laugh. He didn’t want to test Clops’s kindness by accidentally breaking one of his machines.
“Let’s head downstairs,” Annika said, bouncing with anticipation. “You got your chance to test out your weapon, now I want mine.”
“Just one more question,” Caden said. He could spend all day—the rest of his life, probably—asking statements and getting questions from Watson. But they had a time limit. Metl was on its way, and Caden didn’t want to be down here talking with Watson when it slammed into Earth.
“All right, that’s … fine,” Annika said with a surprising yawn. For someone who was so excited just a second ago, she suddenly seemed to be getting tired very quickly.
As Caden thought about his last question, he couldn’t shake the feeling of exhaustion either. He had to blink constantly, as if fighting to stay awake. Jadice had mentioned that angel weapons drained their users mentally, but all he’d done was lift Watson a bit. He tried to shake it off. This was his last question. He had to make it count.
“The thing I need to do next.” Caden was proud of his statement. There was no way Watson could be cryptic or confusing about this one. The blocky face was quick with its response.
“What is escape the poison filling up this room?”
Caden and Annika went silent. They looked at each other and Annika forgot about the no-questions rule for a moment.
“Excuse me?” she said to Watson. But its screen didn’t flash red. It accepted her question as a statement and gave its smiling reply.
“What did the two people in masks behind you not say when they entered this room?”
Any exhaustion that Caden and Annika had been feeling vanished. They swiveled toward the elevator shaft. Standing right at the entrance were two figures—one tall and one short—dressed in identical black robes. The tall one had a white mask with a smiling face, and the small one had a mask with a frown. The short one’s palms were out, revealing glowing purple Xs.
Caden’s blood turned cold. Was it Eleven? He tried to remember how Watson had told him to use his angel weapon, but fear paralyzed him. The taller masked figure made the first move.
“Caden,” he said in an icy voice. “I’ve been waiting for this.”
There was something about watching the cloaked figure raise his hand that made Caden suddenly want to move very much. He couldn’t remember how to use his angel weapon, but he could remember how to run. He burst toward the side of the room and pushed Annika along with him.
And not a second too soon. Just as Caden crashed into Annika, a crunching sound came from Watson. Dents and cracks with wires sticking out erupted all over it, as if a giant invisible hand had wrapped itself around it and squeezed.
“pl-please phrase your q-q-question in the fo-fo-form of a statement,” Watson warbled. Its screen flickered between blue and red then finally gave out as the glass exploded into shards on the floor. No more sounds came from the crumpled metal box.
“Let’s go!” Caden yelled to Annika.
“Where?”
“Out the window!”
It was their only chance. They couldn’t get past the two Apostles to the elevator, and they couldn’t fight them either, not if they had angel weapons like Jadice. Their only shot was to jump for it and hope that Caden could use his weapon to guide them down.
“Are you crazy?” Annika yelled.
“I’ve caught you once and I can do it again! Just go!”
The window wasn’t large. It was just a crudely cut hole in the plastic wall.
“Caden, I can’t do this!” Annika said, panicked. The cold voice of the Apostle came howling from behind them.
“Stop right there, Caden!”
Caden didn’t have a choice. One second of hesitation and they’d be crushed like Watson. Still sprinting, he wrapped his arms around Annika and dove through the window out into the Basement.
Ten stories above the ground.
Annika tried to scream but nothing came out. Her eyes and mouth hung open as the two of them plummeted in free fall through the webs of rope and pulleys in the air straight down toward the concrete ground.
Caden thought he could use his angel weapon to glide them down safely, but the ground was rushing up at them far faster than he’d imagined. He panicked—seven stories left—what was even the name of his weapon again? They snapped through a wire and—five stories left—they were going to smack into the ground any second. Two stories left—time for Plan B!
Caden extended his legs and his feet slammed into the concrete floor with the full weight of two people. The boom of their impact echoed through the Basement. Caden let out a gasp and his eyes felt like they were going to pop out of his head. Sweat dripped down his face, and he collapsed to his knees. It was like a boulder was crushing his legs, grinding and yanking his muscles, snapping them apart. Annika rolled out of his arms unharmed.
“Caden! Can you stand up?” She held onto his wobbling torso and looked him over. Caden could only barely hear her over his ringing ears.
“I … I don’t think so,” he managed to eke out. He tried shuffling his legs. Nothing.
“Oh steel, oh steel,” Annika said frantically. She dashed over to a nearby pile of Iltech and yanked something out of it. It was a rusted metallic version of a wooden tool they’d used quite often at the Home: a wheelbarrow.
Not wasting a second, Annika scooped Caden off the ground and tossed him in. A crowd was gathering around the two of them, people in helmets murmuring and asking questions that Caden couldn’t hear over his pounding head. He tried to look around for Jadice and Clops.
“We need to … find Jadice …” Caden panted.
“No time,” Annika said. She grabbed the wheelbarrow handles and started running. “We’ve got to go. Now. They’re coming after us.”
Suddenly the mountains of Iltech around them started shaking violently. Was there an underground earthquake? Not now, Caden silently pleaded, please not now.
It was no earthquake; it was worse. The piles of vibrating Iltech began hovering above the ground, slowly floating up into the air. Bits of metal and plastic came raining down on top of the helmeted population. Screams rang out as people ran for cover, and Annika wheeled Caden toward the nearest exit as fast as she could.
Then it all came crashing down. The mountains of Iltech crumbled and metallic parts flew across the Basement, banging against walls and buildings, tearing down pulleys and snapping ropes. Glass light bulbs, plastic crates, and rusted scrap metal showered down over the entire Basement. It was pandemonium as lights flickered and sharp clangs and smashes rang out, blending with the cries of people trying to escape.
“They’re trying … to find me,” Caden said, wincing through the pulsating pain in his legs.
“I know! I know!” Annika said, running head-first through a stream of falling dirt and metal filings. “I’m going as fast as I—”
A huge plastic box the size of a shack crashed right in front of the wheelbarrow. Annika veered out of the way just in time. Caden spotted something curved and metallic on the ground behind a shattered television ahead of them. It looked familiar.
“It’s Clops!” Caden said as loud as he could. “I see his magnifying glass! Go over there!”
“Got it.” Annika pummeled full-force straight ahead.
Caden sat up and tried to get a closer look but the pain was excruciating. Still, he gripped the sides of the wheelbarrow and peered over. Maybe Clops had something they could use to fight back. At the very least Caden had to help him get out of here.
“Clops!” Caden yelled. But they were too late.
Clops lay motionless on the ground, his wheel legs and the rest of his body unmoving. His face was a pallid yellow and his lips and one good eye were purple. The Apostles had already gotten to him. Caden turned away and Annika didn’t slow down.
“There’s an exit over there!” she said. “Let’s get out of here!”
Caden shook the image of dead Clops from his mind. They’d be joining him if they didn’t escape. As soon as Annika pushed the wheelbarrow inside the passage, all the lights in the Basement went dark. It was like they were leaving behind a tomb of screaming and metallic scraping as Annika plowed upward through the tunnel of blackness.
The echoes of destruction grew fainter as they pushed farther up. Even if they couldn’t see anything, the yells and crashes turning to whispers in the distance behind them meant they were heading in the right direction. Annika ran full speed ahead through the darkness, pushing Caden along as the wheelbarrow squeaked.
Until she slammed into something with a clang.
“Sorry!” she said.
“It’s okay,” Caden said, shaking off yet another spasm. “I think we just ran into the door out of here.”
Caden grit through the pain to lean forward and hold out his shining red palms. Sure enough, they had reached a door. It wasn’t the same one they’d come in from; this one had a circular metal lock with numbers written on it. There was a spinnable dial in the middle. It looked like you had to know a code to get out. Annika fiddled with it but after a few tries slammed it against the door in frustration.
“I don’t know how to unlock this thing,” she said. Caden tried to think, but all he could feel was throbbing pain in his legs. And he wasn’t sure if he was imagining it or not, but he thought he heard faint footsteps quickly approaching.
“We need to get out of here,” Caden said.
“Yeah. I know. I know.” Annika looked around for anything to use, but all they had was dirt and darkness. Caden was sure he wasn’t imagining the footsteps now. They were getting louder and closer.
“I don’t think … I can do anything about the door,” Caden said. He tried visualizing breaking down the door with whatever power Watson had told him he had, but he couldn’t hold a thought for more than a second before his legs gave him an agonizing reminder that he’d just fallen ten stories.
“Don’t worry,” Annika said. “I’ve got this.”
Caden shone his palms on her. She was holding her magnetizer with both hands. It was already powered on and a green light at the end was glowing.
“Let’s see if this thing actually works!” Annika pointed the magnetizer at the metal lock, pressed the button for “five,” and hit enter.
pshew!
The blast that came out felt like it kicked Caden in the side of the head. His ears were ringing, static electricity tingled all over, and dirt crumbled from the ceiling. The metal lock disintegrated into shards on the ground, and the door opened with a creak. Annika nodded in approval.
“Not bad at all,” she said, putting the magnetizer away. “Now let’s go!”
If Annika’s ears were hurting too, she showed no sign of it. She grabbed onto the wheelbarrow and thrust it through the door.
This was definitely not the shack they’d come in from. They were inside someone’s one-room house. An old woman was sitting in her straw bed, reading a book by candlelight, gaping in shock at the two people who had just come wheeling into her room.
“You’re not Ned,” she said.
“Sorry, lady!” Annika piped as she wheeled Caden past the woman. “But I’d get out of here if I were you!”
Annika swung open the door to the dark outside, driving them back into the streets of Salem. No one was out except the Holy Police. The clopping of their horses’ hooves was the only sound throughout the empty town. None of them were patrolling nearby, but the lights of their torches bounced up and down through the cracks between houses on neighboring roads.
The massive statue-church was lit up with candles in windows running all the way from Gotama’s foot to the tip of the human-ant’s antennae. It stood against bright gray Metl and the glow of its menacing X, now filling up a quarter of the night sky.
“We need to get back to the woods,” Annika whispered. “That’s probably where Jadice would expect to meet up with us.”
Caden nodded and tried to push himself out of the wheelbarrow. All it took was one budge to the side for him to be overwhelmed by sharp, blinding pain.
“I don’t think I can walk yet,” he groaned.
“Don’t worry,” Annika said. “I can push you to the slope and then we’ll figure something out.”
Without wasting a second, Annika sprinted down the street with the wheelbarrow.
“Do you know where we’re going?” Caden asked.
“Uh, yeah,” Annika said. “I think so. There’s a few more buildings and roads now since the last time I roamed around here at night, but I think—”
“Get out!” came a raspy screech from behind them. It was the old woman. She was standing outside her house in her nightgown yelling at the darkness. “I’ve had enough of you people coming through my—”
They didn’t get to hear the rest. An explosion and heatwave blasted out of the old woman’s house. Flames burst out of her roof sending smoldering wood up into the sky. Her house wasn’t the only one. Pillars of flames lit up the night all over town. The ground beneath them rumbled, as if there were thunderclouds underground.
“What the steel was that?” Annika yelled. The church bellrock started clanging. Holy Police and residents alike flooded the streets and started dousing the flames with buckets of water.
Caden’s mind raced. Did Eleven do this? Had he caused an underground storm somehow? Caden thought of Deber, Jadice, even Evan and everyone else who lived down in the Basement. He hoped that they were safe, but he knew not all of them could have made it out in time.
The one thing the flames did do was make it easier to see. The town was lit up bright as day as everyone struggled to keep the fires under control. Silhouetted against the blaze, Caden could make out two shadowy figures wearing white masks. As soon as he made eye contact with them, he gasped. They ran toward him and Annika.
“We need to go!” Caden shouted.
“I’m on it!” Annika dashed forward, sweat dripping down her face. If they could just make it to the woods, maybe they’d find help there.
Only a moment into her sprinting, something strange happened to Annika. She froze, as if she’d turned into a human photograph. Her terrified eyes still moved as she struggled against the invisible force holding her, but the rest of her was as petrified as a statue.
Caden tried to ask her what was wrong, but to his horror found that he couldn’t move his lips. He couldn’t move his arms or head or anything. He tried to scream but nothing came out. He and Annika were stuck in place, only able to watch in horror as the two cloaked strangers strolled up to them amid the frenzied inferno in the background.
“Thirteen years …” the taller one hissed. “I’ve been waiting a long time for this.”
Caden tried to focus on using his angel weapon, but it was useless. He was completely immobilized. The taller figure spoke to the shorter one.
“Do enough for the both of them,” he said. The small one nodded and held up glowing purple Xs in front of Caden and Annika’s faces.
So, this is how it ends, Caden thought to himself as he faded into unconsciousness.