I PLUGGED MYSELF into my computer, into limbs and eyes better than my own. I dove into my project, burying myself under layers of code. I didn’t belong chatting up girls in the Cantina. This was where I belonged.
I didn’t write code in flat, two-dimensional text files like other programmers. Because input and output were parsed by my nervous system, I was able to create a true virtual reality, three-dimensional, with textures, smells, and tastes to complement the visual and audio.
That was a good thing, because I needed all of my senses to wrangle this code. It wasn’t static text in a line, but distinct operations that wrote and rewrote themselves constantly. It was to the point where I was less of a code writer and more of a ringmaster, trying to bind this piece to that, separate one from another. You could almost think of each chunk of process as a living cell and I was making a body of code.
But I couldn’t really concentrate tonight. Right in the middle of some crucial binding, I’d remember seeing Liel laughing with Shaun, and it suddenly felt like I had this hot fist in my stomach squeezing so tight it made me nauseous. Then the code would slip away and I’d have to chase it down again. After a while, I decided I wasn’t accomplishing anything, so I switched over to my chat client.
poxd: well finally somebody’s here
b0y: where r the others?
poxd: surelee is UK, so it’s crazy late there. or early, depending on how you see it. no idea about s1zzl3
b0y: what u doing?
poxd: trying DDoS to take down this stupid porn site that canceled my membership
b0y: how’s that going 4 u?
poxd: it’s not. their firewall’s pretty tight. so how’d your not-a-date go?
b0y: shitty. jock guy came and took her away
poxd: i’m serious, dude, some day you gotta just punch that guy in the mouth
b0y: ha, yeah right! i’d get in so much trouble
poxd: whatever. it would be worth it.
b0y: maybe…
poxd: even if he kicks yer ass, at least u might get a couple good shots in and how good would that feel?
b0y: well, i don’t know if he could kick my ass. i’m actually bigger than him
poxd: ha, yeah, me too, right, but fat doesn’t help much in a fight
b0y: no, i’m not fat. i’m just really big.
poxd: really? that’s not how i picture u at all.
b0y: how do you?
poxd: *shrug* some skinny little goth kid, i guess. the way you talk about monsters and vampires like some fking expert.
b0y: nah, that’s not really me. i don’t even wear black
poxd: so if you’re bigger than jock guy, why don’t you just kick his ass?
b0y: i don’t know…everyone here knows each other…
poxd: right, right, that weird communal living your parents are into…freaky hippie shit. so?
b0y: so everyone would know. my parents, my boss, the girl…
poxd: yeah. they’d know you finally grew some balls and stood up for yourself.
b0y: *wince*
poxd: i just call it like i see it
“Boy. Come eat.” It was Mom.
b0y: gotta go. dinnertime.
poxd: aren’t you east coast? kinda late for dinner
b0y: i told you, my family works for a theater. they don’t get off until midnight.
poxd: weird life
b0y: u got no idea. l8r
I unhooked myself from the computer, then trudged out into the family room.
“Here.” Mom put a plate of spaghetti on the table.
“Thanks.” I sat down and started to eat. She just stood there and watched me. Sometimes it annoyed me when she did that.
After a few minutes of silence, she said, “You saw the Diva tonight.”
I stopped chewing. “Who told you?”
“Stage manager.”
That made me feel a little better. It would have hurt if Laurellen or Mozart had told on me.
“So?” she asked.
“She wanted me to watch her act. I was worried that if I didn’t, she’d do something bad. I was just trying to keep her happy. Like everybody else.”
“Not everybody,” she said. “Why did you talk to her at all?”
“I had to deliver the rats we got at the pet store.”
She looked at me for a moment, the stitching on her forehead quivering slightly. Then she turned and walked over to her pile of junk. She stared at it for a while and I ate my spaghetti.
“Did you like it?” she asked finally. “The act?”
“I don’t know…I mean, at the time, it seemed…like I was learning something important. Like my life would change forever after that moment. Everything just…made sense for once. But as soon as it was over, it all went back to normal.”
She prodded a small pile of scrap metal with her foot. “Normal. Not making sense.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s why I love machines,” she said quietly. “They make sense.”
The door to our apartment opened and Dad stood in the doorway.
“Hello,” he said in his flat, “off” voice. He walked slowly over and sat down at the table, folding his hands in front of him.
“Time to switch you back on, dear,” said Mom.
“Yes,” he said.
I got up to go back to my room.
“Boy,” said Mom. “Stay.”
I slowly sat back down at the table. I usually didn’t have to watch this. Was it my punishment for seeing the Diva tonight?
Every day before The Show, Dad sat on a kitchen chair in our tiny apartment while Mom opened the flap at the base of his skull and put tiny clamps on the nerves that triggered chemical emotional reactions. For the rest of the night, he was a cold, unfeeling creature that could handle any situation without panic, listen to the song of the Siren without being moved, and stare directly into the eyes of Medusa when she was in a rage. But when Mom took off the clamps at the end of the day, it all caught up with him. About six hours’ worth of intense emotions all at once.
Mom pulled the stitching loose on the back of Dad’s head, then opened up the double flap of skin. He sat there, totally motionless, staring straight ahead. She reached inside with her long, crooked fingers and removed the clamps.
From my vantage point, I could see Dad’s scarred, misshapen face switch from blank to twisted agony immediately. Then his mouth opened wide and he let out a long, deep bellow, like a wounded bear. His hands clutched the table, which was reinforced with steel to prevent him from cracking it in half every night. Then he curled in on himself, his face writhing and twitching. His sound tightened up until it came out in short, wrenching gasps from his throat. He squeezed his eyes closed as tears streamed out. Then he let out a long, shuddering moan and slid sideways into my mom’s strong arms. She held him, stroking his mottled, patchy hair while he sobbed into her shoulder for the next five minutes or so.
Finally, he got quiet and lifted up his tear-streaked face. Mom already had the handkerchief ready. It was so routine for them. Dad wiped his eyes and blew his nose loudly. Then he slowly sat back up in his chair, looking tired. He gave me a wan smile.
“Hey, buddy. What’s for dinner?”
“Why?” I asked.
“Well,” he said. “Because I am hungry.”
“No, why do you have to go through that every night?”
“Not every night. We are dark on Mondays.”
“You know what I mean, Dad. This…it’s just…they treat us like crap!”
“Now, Boy.” He held up his massive hand. “It is not that bad.”
“It’s awful, Dad! What they do to you is awful. And the worst part is, nobody even appreciates it. They think of us as these lesser creatures. Like we don’t deserve any better than this.”
“That is simply not true, Boy.” His eyes started to harden. “Ruthven is fully aware of the…toll my job takes on me. On us as a family. And he is extremely grateful.”
“But—”
“Boy.” His voice got that tone to it, each consonant emphasized. “This is what is best for us right now.”
The conversation was over. So I stood up and headed for my room.
“Boy.” His voice was a little more gentle.
I stopped.
“You know…” He frowned, like he was trying to decide what to say. “Things will work out. I have a plan. For you.”
“What plan?”
“I will tell you at the proper time. Until then, you must trust me.”
“Yeah, okay, Dad.” I shut the door behind me.
I didn’t trust him, of course. The guy lived in the Arctic for fifty years. I bet if Ruthven hadn’t tracked him down and dragged him out of there, he’d still be bunking in some ice cave with a bunch of polar bears. And now he made a living as a doormat for a bunch of snobby, spoiled performers. He’d dropped hints about some secret plan in store for me before. I was pretty sure it would be something like, “How would you like to be my assistant?” Yeah, well, I was not going to end up like him.
I got back to work on my project, and this time I was hyper focused. I worked for a few hours, slept for a few hours, then got back up and worked some more. This was what made me different from him. This was how I was going to escape his fate. Nobody could do what I was doing.
It’s time I admitted something. Maybe past time. My project wasn’t just some cool application or new scripting language. Technically speaking, it was a virus. But I didn’t think of it like that. Sure, it was viral in the way it developed, but it wasn’t malicious. It wasn’t out to damage anything. In fact, I hoped it would improve systems that it infected. Essentially, it was a hacker virus. Not as in a “virus made by hacker,” but as in a “virus that can hack.” A fully autonomous virus that could assess and understand any new situation and make its own choices and adapt accordingly based on that information. And I was so close. In fact, there was this little bit that seemed to have changed from just a minute ago when I—
The phone rang.
“What?” Getting pulled out of the code flow always made me grumpy.
There was a burst of harsh static. Then a quick chill ran through me as I felt more than heard the stage manager’s thin, reedy voice.
“Boy, could you come backstage? The crew is having some trouble with their station again.”
“Okay,” I said quietly. I was pissed about the interruption, of course, and not in any mood to stumble around in the dark trying to figure out why the fly crew couldn’t stream ESPN on that ancient PC of theirs that they refused to upgrade. But hearing the stage manager’s voice took the fight right out of me. Wraiths are like that.
“STAGE MANAGER SAID you needed me,” I said to the Minotaur when I got to the backstage area where all the props and set pieces were stored.
“Hmm?” He turned his bull head toward me. “Oh, hey, Boy. Thanks for coming.” I guess he used to have a temper way back in the day, but he seemed pretty chill these days, except when he was in a fight with his girlfriend, the Siren.
“It’s this one again.” He walked to the little cubby set into the back wall. Inside was a PC that I had set up for him and his guys forever ago to give them something to do between set changes.
Moog the ogre sat at the computer, playing solitaire. Moog was Oob’s dad and probably only a little smarter. He was one of those guys who celebrated the whole “big equals stupid” stereotype that I was trying to fight against.
“Hey, nerd,” he said. “This stupid machine don’t work.”
“Maybe if you’d stop torrenting hi-def femdom clips all day long, it would work better,” I said.
He blinked at me, then turned to the Minotaur. “What the hell’d he just say?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said the Minotaur. “Just get up and give the kid some room to work.”
Moog slowly got up and moved to one side. I sat down at the chair and pulled my cables out of the duffel bag I brought with me. I plugged the DVI cable into the back of my head and the USB cables into my wrists, then plugged everything into the computer. As my senses slipped into the computer, I heard Moog say, “Damn, that gives me the creeps.”
“I can still hear you,” I said.
“So?” he said.
I was about to snap back a reply that I would probably regret, when I saw something in the computer that surprised me.
“Okay, that’s weird,” I said.
“What?” said the Minotaur anxiously.
“You’ve got a virus.”
“Can you get rid of it?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “But…”
“What?”
I unplugged. “I’ll need to take it back to my room and work on it.” I wrapped up my cords and shoved them back in my bag. “It’s a little complicated.”
“What?!” said Moog. “No games? For how long?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Until I fix it.”
“Listen, you little droid—”
“Moog,” said the Minotaur. “Let the kid do his job.”
“Yeah, whatever.” Moog stalked off to some other part of the backstage area, grunting to himself.
“Sorry,” said the Minotaur. “What can I say? He’s stupid.”
“Sure.” I picked up the PC tower and hoisted it on to my shoulder. “See you around.”
The reason I wanted to take the fly crew’s computer back to my room was not because it was complicated (although it was). It was because I recognized the virus signature. It was mine. That itself wasn’t totally crazy. I’d written some nasty viruses back in the day when I was into that kind of stuff, and it was probably inevitable that at least one of them would come back to haunt me. The weird thing was, it looked like a piece of the project I was working on right now. But of course, I hadn’t released it. So how did it get out?
“Oh, shit, it’s Robo-freak.”
I had been thinking so hard about the virus that I hadn’t noticed Shaun coming down the hallway toward me. He stopped and stood in the middle of the hallway, his hands on his goat hips, blocking my way.
The second I saw him, I forgot about the virus and all I could think about was the way he had smirked at me last night as he took Liel to his table.
“I could smell that combo of rotting human flesh and motor oil before I even saw you, Robot,” he said. “Or do you prefer the term cyborg?”
“Come on, Shaun,” I said. “There’s no one around to impress. Just leave me alone.”
I tried to get around him but he shifted back and forth to block whichever way I tried to go.
“Hey, what’s that?” He pointed to the PC tower on my shoulder. “Your new girlfriend?”
“Aaaah, good one, Shaun. Hilarious,” I said, trying to push past him.
“This one doesn’t have legs. Maybe she won’t walk out on you like Liel did last night.”
Anger burned its way through my arms and into my hands. I needed to get away before I did something stupid.
“Shaun, seriously. Just let me go.”
“Seriously?” he asked. “I can’t believe you ever thought you had a chance with her.”
My free hand shot out and grabbed him by the throat. Then I slammed him into the wall. It felt so good, I did it again. And again. Until I guess the Minotaur and Moog finally heard the screaming and came running. It took the two of them to pry the bruised and bleeding Shaun from my hand.
“You’re no monster!” Shaun yelled, his goat hooves clacking against the floor as Moog dragged him away. “You’re just a fucking ROBOT!!!”
“Come on, dumb-ass, let’s get you fixed up,” said Moog. “Don’t you have better sense than to pick a fight with somebody twice your size? And people call me stupid.”
The Minotaur held my arm as tight as a C-clamp.
“Sorry, Boy,” he said. “You know you can’t go beating on people like that. I’m gonna have to call your parents. And Ruthven.”
RUTHVEN SAT BEHIND his desk, the harsh glare of the lamp gleaming off his red eyes. I stood in front of the desk with my parents behind me. I felt like I was on trial. And I guess I kind of was.
“Boy,” said Ruthven, his hands folded in a steeple. “I believe you are a valuable member of this company. And I trust you in many things. I wouldn’t have taken you outside with me yesterday if that weren’t true. But this…” He began to rub his temples. “This is a problem that is not going to go away. There will always be those in the company who are threatened by your ties to science, even as they reap the benefits of it. Some of them, inevitably, will say things that hurt your feelings. For the good of the company, you have to learn to deal with that in a nonviolent way.” He looked at me for a moment, his expression unreadable. “Or we will have to find some other solution.”
“If I may,” said my father.
Ruthven gestured to him and he stepped forward to stand next to me.
“I think it is time to share with Boy the plan for his future.”
“No!” my mother said. “He’s too young—”
“You have delayed it long enough,” he said to her. Then he turned back to Ruthven. “I believe Boy’s misbehavior today is a symptom of something bigger. I have felt it building for months now. He talks back, he questions authority, he ignores his chores. I believe it is because he grows restless. He needs to be challenged. He needs something to work toward.”
“Hmmm.” Ruthven leaned back in his chair. “Perhaps you’re right, my old friend.”
“Dad, what is this big plan you keep mentioning?” I asked.
Dad looked to Ruthven, who nodded. Then he turned back to me.
“Your desire to get out and explore the world is a credit to you. And as much as the risks worry us, it would be cruel to deny you that experience, particularly after your first trip outside, where you proved that you can indeed fit in with humans.”
“Dad…” I almost couldn’t believe what he was saying. “You’re going to let me live outside? With humans?”
He held up his hand. “Under certain conditions.”
“Like?”
“You already received your high school diploma from homeschooling.”
“Last spring.”
“Another condition is that you must wait until you turn eighteen.”
“That’s only in, like, six months.”
“Yes. Until then, Ruthven will continue to take you outside, more and more often, for longer and longer periods, so that you can get comfortable with humans, learn how to fit in not just physically, but socially.”
“Okay…” That didn’t sound too bad, either. Maybe we could even go somewhere for a weekend. Like a road trip. I always wanted to go on a road trip.
“Then,” continued Dad, “in the fall you will go to college.”
“A human college?” I’d thought about college, sure. But I just never imagined I’d be able to go.
“Yes.”
“I bet MIT would give me some money. Maybe even a full ride!” I’d chatted with a few people on hacker boards from MIT, even a couple of professors. It sounded like geek utopia. “Dad, this so awesome! With the resources they have there, I could—”
“Your school has already been decided.”
“O…kay…” Maybe I’d gotten ahead of myself. Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a bit far away, after all. But Princeton was just in Jersey. Or even Cornell or Columbia right here in the city. Those schools all had great computer science programs….
“You will attend the University of Geneva.”
“Wait, what? Where’s that?”
“Switzerland.”
“Why am I going to Switzerland for college?”
“Because I am very good…friends with a family in Geneva. They have already pledged to assist in any way they can. Tuition, room and board, whatever you require. They will be like a second family to you. Indeed, I have sent them pictures of you throughout your childhood and written to them about you extensively, so they feel as though they already know you. They, too, are great lovers of science. They are very eager to help you make the most of your life.”
“Who is this family?” I asked. “Why haven’t you ever talked about them before?”
“Their name,” he said, his mismatched, watery eyes locked on mine, “is Frankenstein.”