Motherboard

 

 

Leep was playing a computer game when his two-year-old sister Fhu Fhu was killed.

The game was based on the adventures of Cholukan, the Holy Monkey, specifically focusing on his adventures in Hell rescuing the beautiful virgin who had become his obsession. But Cholukan could return to the mortal plane at various points in the gameplay, transported with the magical help of the Gold-Scaled Dragon, and visit the pretty little hamlet where the virgin Bhi Tu lived and from whence she had been kidnapped by demons.

In this village, Leep (in the form of Cholukan) could save his game progress at a temple, buy supplies or upgrade weapons at various shops, and restore his health at an apothecary. He welcomed these stays in the village, and often prolonged them, strolling the flower-bordered lanes between simple cottages with tiled or thatched roofs, playfully chasing and scattering the ducks by the edge of the pond, talking with everyone he met on his meanderings. Leep felt more comfortable interacting with these people than he did those who lived in his own neighborhood.

Leep associated many things in his life with specific colors. He found colors sometimes held mysterious significance other people were apparently not conscious of. For instance, he strongly associated green with this little fantasy village inside the Cholukan game. Green was the color of transcendent peace.

As exciting as the game was, in Hell where it primarily took place, Leep would have been quite content if all it offered were these excursions into Bhi Tu’s hamlet.

Leep’s mother had asked him to watch Fhu Fhu while she cooked, so he hadn’t put on his headphones as he normally would to properly immerse himself in the game. So it was that he heard a single odd squawk come from just outside. After which he heard his mother shout from the kitchen, before she began screaming outside in the little courtyard of their home.

That was when he remembered Fhu Fhu.

He jumped up from the computer desk and rushed outside in time to see his stepfather’s car rolling forward, to move its rear wheel off Fhu Fhu’s body. Leep’s mother was pushing the back of the car, as well. When the wheel was off Fhu Fhu, Leep’s mother swept the child’s limp body up against her chest and turned to run back inside the house. Leep’s bare-chested stepfather scrambled out of the car and raced after his wife.

Later, Leep would learn the sequence of events, for an old neighbor woman who had been sitting in front of her home had seen everything while husking ears of corn. Overhearing that her father was going to the market, Fhu Fhu had gone out to the car unbeknownst to her parents, patting at its tail end and waiting for her father to come and load her inside. But when he had slipped into the car and begun reversing it out of the courtyard, he hadn’t seen his daughter behind the vehicle.

Once the whole story was filled in for him, Leep screened it like a film in his head, countless times over the months to come. Especially in the days immediately following Fhu Fhu’s death it became a nearly ceaseless loop, seemingly running even when he was asleep. The film loop raised endless questions for him, such as: why hadn’t his stepfather put on a shirt before going to the market? Why hadn’t his stepfather thought to bring Fhu Fhu with him? Why had Leep’s panicking mother carried Fhu Fhu inside the house instead of into the car, so they could bring her straight to the hospital? Not that it would have mattered, ultimately, but her actions seemed illogical to Leep. Did she see the car as untrustworthy, at that point, a thing of menace?

And mainly, for whatever reason, Leep thought about the dress Fhu Fhu had been wearing. It was a thin little dress of a bright reddish-orange color. Sunset orange. Orange. Why had his mother selected this dress specifically that morning? Was there some significance to it, some cosmic symbolism that was lost on him? When she dressed her daughter that day, his mother hadn’t suspected it would be the last time (because others changed Fhu Fhu into her white funeral dress, after they had bathed her; Leep’s mother was in no condition to perform these duties herself). It could have been another dress, another color, but it wasn’t. So many things could have been different. But they weren’t.

In an alternate system of events, Fhu Fhu could have still been alive.

When his mother rushed past Leep into their house, carrying his crushed sister, she met his eyes and shrieked, “You were supposed to be watching her! Stupid! Stupid!” She might have hit him if she weren’t so preoccupied. Leep just stood there helplessly, saying nothing, feeling dream-like and disconnected. His shirtless stepfather chased after his wife, looking stricken and guilty…but as far as Leep knew, his mother never ended up accusing her husband. He had supported them ever since the death of Leep’s father, who had been accidentally electrocuted working on power lines.

In the days and months that followed, Leep’s mother would point at him and sob, “It should have been you killed, instead of your precious sister!”

“Now now,” his stepfather would soothe his wife, now that he was assured she didn’t blame him for their daughter’s death, “you know the boy is crazy.”

In the past, before his stepfather had come along to care for them, Leep’s mother would sometimes weep in despair, “It should have been you killed, stupid child, instead of your father.”

And though Leep could understand this sentiment, he himself didn’t wish he had been electrocuted instead of his father—a good-humored, patient man, who had taught Leep how to use the family computer. Rather, Leep wished he and his father had been electrocuted together.

There was one man in Bhi Tu’s green village who tended a vegetable garden in front of his cottage. His dialogue was minimal—just things like, “Have you talked to the monk yet? He can help you remember where you have journeyed thus far.” Or simply, “Good day to you, Mr. Monkey!” Leep liked to stop and talk with this villager in particular, though, because he bore a superficial resemblance to his father.

But within hours of Fhu Fhu’s death, Leep’s mother tore their computer system apart, and carried the components out into the courtyard one by one, dashing them to the ground, littering the dusty pavement with broken pieces of plastic, metal, and bare electronics. The villager tending his garden still trapped inside, unseen, like a miniature genie.

 

***

 

Leep never joined his coworkers in the large cafeteria of the Oki-Me Electronics Plant at break time. Instead, he would sit at one of the computer stations adjacent to his work area, munching a snack he’d brought with him, and making use of some private time to go online…since his family still didn’t have a home computer, even six months after Fhu Fhu’s death.

One of his favorite computer activities of late was to access a virtual globe program, which allowed one a full geographical perspective of the world via composited satellite information…viewing the planet from afar as an alien explorer might, or zooming in so close that it was as if one stood as a tourist in the street of a given city, no matter how far away it might actually lie.

In his own country, he could view the grounds of the Nia-Fa Theme Park. The gigantic monster heads one entered to experience the ten Hell attractions were made humble and small seen from far above. Sometimes he typed in his own house’s address, and could hover above it like a bird, making out the courtyard and even his stepfather’s parked blue car, but to zoom in more closely everything became blurred. There was no street level view available for his humble neighborhood.

“Trying to peek in pretty women’s windows?” one of his coworkers, Ran, teased him upon returning from the cafeteria. She was a few years older than Leep, who had just turned twenty.

“He’s trying to peek in yours,” joked another worker, an older man named Ketpo, settling in at his work station—one of many in a long double-sided row. Mostly it was young women who worked the assembly, soldering, testing, and inspection areas, but Ketpo had injured his back in an accident in the warehouse.

On Leep’s first day it was given to Ran to train him in soldering the PCBs (printed circuit boards), and at that time Ketpo had joked, “Hey Ran, who’s your new boyfriend?”

“Jealous, old man?” Ran had replied.

Leep had said nothing, but his face had burned.

Now he quickly closed down the virtual world program and returned to his own work area beside Ran’s. Before resuming her work, Ran covered her lower face with a surgical mask, like workers in nail salons used to protect themselves from fumes, or like many women used when riding motorbikes to keep from inhaling exhaust and dust.

On his first day—a month ago now—Leep had worn the spare mask that Ran offered him, but when he realized Ran was the only worker who wore these protective masks he became self-conscious and never donned one again. At the time Ran had explained to him in a cynical tone, “Besides the fact that we’re cheap labor, we make these circuit boards in our country for the same reason why you only see our people doing nails in Western countries. That is, it’s okay for us to breathe in poisons so long as white people don’t have to. People who work on these boards are exposed to lead, acid, formaldehyde, carcinogens. I’m not trying to scare you off, because I know you need the money just as much as I do, but I only want to make you aware. You see Phoop down there? With the short hair?” Ran had lowered her voice and nodded at a woman toward the far end of the assembly line. Leep had had to shift in his chair to see past all the blue telephone-style cords that hung down from overhead like jungle vines, their ends attached to the wristbands they all wore, grounding them. “She’s been here for five years now, and she recently gave birth to a son with no arms…just little stubby fingers growing out of his shoulders.”

Overhearing this, Ketpo had folded his arms up close to his chest, wiggling his fingers at his shoulders and crossing his eyes.

“Stop it!” Ran had hissed. “Do you want her to see you? How cruel!” She had then said to Leep, “Ketpo just proves my point. If he wore a mask like me, these fumes wouldn’t have made him crazy.”

Though his face had remained impassive—as it almost invariably was—Leep had flinched inside at the word “crazy.” He had heard it all his life. Terms like autism and Asperger syndrome, or schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, Down syndrome, were all but unknown in his country. At best, someone might be thought of sympathetically as “slow.” A person suffering major depressive disorder was simply “sad.” There wasn’t even really “quirky” or “eccentric.” There was only crazy. One was either crazy or not crazy.

While the others got settled back in from lunch, reaffixing the blue grounding wristbands that tethered them like prisoners, Leep snuck away to the men’s room. Seated on the toilet, he saw an ant sniffing through the channels of discolored grout between the floor tiles. This was the third day he had seen a single ant exploring these avenues. He now believed it was the same creature, unable to find its way out of this grid-like maze. He was careful, standing up, not to accidentally crush it. He considered catching the ant somehow and bringing it outside to set it safely free, but he knew he was late enough back to work as it was.

Sure enough, his team leader Moop was waiting for him upon his return. Scowling as always, arms folded across her chest, severe in her white smock. Ran had whispered that Moop had marital problems of some kind. Moop said to him sharply in front of the others, “Why don’t you ever go to the restroom during your break? Why do you wait for break to be over to go?”

“Sorry,” Leep muttered, taking his seat and fixing the shackle of his wristband.

Moop moved closer to him, and watched him as he resumed working. Her presence close behind him made Leep nervous, and he was afraid to make an error, but after a few minutes Moop said, “You’re doing very well at this.”

“Thank you,” he said without looking up from his section of the long table.

“I understand this is the first job you’ve held?”

“Yes,” Leep said. “My mother said it was time I helped my family.”

“Very good. I’m sure she’s proud.”

 

***

 

When he had handed her his first week’s pay from Oki-Me Electronics, his mother had said, “It’s the least you can do. Do you know what a good worker your sister would have grown up to be? Do you remember how she would pretend to paint my nails? Only two years old! She could have had her own salon one day. So smart! She would stand behind me and pretend to brush my hair. She might have been a hair stylist!”

Leep himself remembered how on several occasions Fhu Fhu had stood up behind him on his computer chair while he played, and rubbed his shoulders as if to give him a massage…but he didn’t bring this up. He didn’t remind his mother how Fhu Fhu would cry when he went to the market to buy some things for their dinner, if she couldn’t go along with him. “Brother!” she would be calling after him as he left her behind.

“Now now,” Leep’s stepfather comforted his wife, eyeing the money in her hands wistfully but not daring to ask for it, “our precious baby waits for us to rejoin her one day in the Jeweled Heavens.”

Leep himself did not believe in the Jeweled Heavens as described in holy texts. They were an outdated product of an ancient faith. It was illogical that there would be no progress in the spirit realm, while things here on the humble mortal plane were ever surging ahead. To him, beliefs should change with the times…become updated for a modern age.

Yet he said nothing about his sister or his opinions on obsolete religions, after having given his mother the money. He only turned away to go upstairs to his small bedroom.

There, he sat cross-legged on his mattress on the floor, and watched a cartoon on his little TV with its poor reception. His sister had always enjoyed this program. He watched it for her…hoped that somehow she could see it through his eyes.

He was silent as he watched the cartoon, his face mask-like, but tears flowed down both his cheeks.

 

***

 

“I’ve got another headache,” Ran moaned through her mask, soldering green PCBs beside Leep. “I tell you, this place will be the death of me.”

“Poor dear,” Ketpo teased. “Kiss her, Leep—make her feel better.”

Leep kept his head down to hide his flushed cheeks.

Ran said, “Shut your rice hole, old man.”

“Oh, it’s just a little smoke from the solder you’re smelling!”

“You’ll believe me on your death bed. Do you see how poor people who live near this plant and other electronics plants in our country bake old circuit boards to melt them down, just to collect tiny amounts of precious metal? Have you heard how sick these people get?”

“Yes!” cut in another of the assembly workers, a woman named Lhut who wore her fashionably auburn-dyed hair clipped up in a rooster tail behind her head. “Have you ever seen that family that sits begging on a bench in the park by the river?” She pointed in what she felt was the park’s direction. “Mother and two children! They were poisoned from the mother melting down circuit boards, and because they sleep in one bed, one night all three of them fused together into one wretched creature!”

“Oh, I know who you mean,” Ran said. “Yes, it’s terrible, but that’s a gigantic tumor, Lhut…people can’t blend together like that.”

“I’m telling you, they did! I’ve seen her…it’s more than a giant tumor.” Lhut shuddered.

“Anyway, yes,” Ran said, “I also heard she was one of those who melt down circuit boards for metal.”

Their talk made Leep want to go to the park at the earliest opportunity, to look for this monstrous beggar woman. He hoped it truly was that she and her two children had merged together into a single being. He liked that idea.

 

***

 

The various assembly teams at Oki-Me focused on different types of computer components—these utilized by foreign corporations, banks, and even government agencies in their data storage systems. An assembly line might be dedicated specifically to 3.5” disk drives, or 2.5” disk drives, and so on. The line that Leep worked on assembled input/output modules containing expansion cards, these cards being the circuit boards he and Ran soldered.

Even when he wasn’t soldering the printed circuit boards—only placing the finished i/o modules atop rubber mats on the shelves of wheeled racks, to be brought for testing and inspection—the complex mosaics of their surfaces fascinated him. Standing apart from his assembly line, with no one nearby and piles of cardboard boxes on wooden pallets forming a screening wall, he would often pick up one of the modules to study it up close, turning it this way and that, flipping it over to view its underside. Ran had told him just one of these light, seemingly flimsy little modules averaged six hundred dollars in value overseas, but that wasn’t what fascinated him.

What intrigued him was how similar their surfaces looked to cities and towns as seen from a great height, on the virtual globe program he visited during his breaks. He imagined this was how cities looked from an airplane. How they looked from space. Eventually, he had come to imagine that these circuit boards were cities…not miniature cities, and not terrestrial cities, but full-sized cities afloat in outer space.

There had been some cataclysm, a catastrophe that had destroyed their home world, but these people had seen it coming, had had enough time to prepare. They had launched a fleet of cities into space, and the city-craft had scattered like dandelion seeds to the depths of infinity.

Each craft was its own unit, self-sufficient, the star colonies varying in size and configuration but sharing common features. Designed purely for interstellar—not atmospheric—flight, they did not need to be aerodynamically streamlined in design. Take this craft, for instance…this rectangular i/o module he held in his hands. Its raised edge, by which it was slotted home like a bureau drawer, was a vast metal wall to help shield the city from particulate radiation in the event the electromagnetic shields faltered.

The city itself was primarily green. That is, the foundation upon which it had all been laid out was green, though of course it was not grass or any other vegetative matter but a glossy synthetic surface, its color chosen to soothe the colonists with memories of their dead home world. The conductive pathways of the circuit board’s copper “traces” became streets and roads. These streets connected numerous silvery dwellings for the individual colonist families, arrayed in dense rows like suburban neighborhoods, with occasional open areas that served as parks. Transformers, transistors, resistors, capacitors, potentiometers, inductors, fuses, diodes, oscillators, the battery: all were structures of varying size and function. The general uniformity of the little silver houses was broken up by the larger components, and these became water towers, factories, food production facilities. Huge complexes that helped generate the breathable atmosphere, or the artificial gravity, or helped power the city’s platform on its course through the cosmos. A microprocessor or a gray RAM square might be a gigantic shopping mall where the colonists could purchase new clothing and other necessary articles, dine in restaurants, and divert themselves with any number of entertainments, including cinemas. (Leep had seen Western shopping malls on television, though nothing quite like them existed in his country, not even the so-called Ruby Mall downtown: a glorified department store. Malls were as exciting a concept, in themselves, as an alien world.)

Because there is no “up” or “down” in space, the so-called underside of the city platform was inhabited, as well. There were no large components here, this being the “solder side” of the PCB, but “through-hole paths” from the more complex surface of the board to this flatter side enabled the colonists to travel freely from one surface to the other, perhaps when they commuted to and from work. The underside of the city was devoted primarily to more housing.

Staring down from on high, Leep came up with a name for this particular city adrift in the void. He dubbed it Motherboard.

“Leep?” he heard a voice call for him, somewhere on the other side of the wall of stacked boxes. The voice caused him to jump, and he almost dropped the module with its expensive expansion card.

He quickly set the module back down on its rack. He wasn’t tempted to stash Motherboard away so that he might view it again later (and he certainly wasn’t tempted to smuggle it out of the building when he left for home tonight). After all, there were so many identical i/o modules on this same rack, and there would be more of them on the racks tomorrow. Any one of them could be Motherboard.

He would be patient. Just as he waited for his breaks to open the virtual globe program, when the time was right he would visit Motherboard again.

 

***

 

Later that afternoon, Leep listened with his head lowered over his work as Ran—in one of her extra-animated, extra-vocal moods—prattled on to him, “Everything can be broken down into the data it’s composed of…everything. Even a rock is composed of data, do you know that?”

“Maybe you’re right about these fumes being poisonous,” Ketpo remarked.

“See what I mean, Leep?” Ran said. “Even Ketpo’s rock of a brain is made of data. Though very little.”

“Har har,” Ketpo said. “Everything is data, huh? I think that’s a video game you’re thinking of. In a video game, rocks, trees, houses, and silly young girls are made from data.”

Keeping his voice low in the hope that Ketpo wouldn’t hear him, and without looking up at Ran, Leep asked, “Are people’s souls composed of data, too? Do you think our souls could be stored and transferred like computer data?”

Ran swiveled in her chair to stare at Leep for a few speechless moments, as if she couldn’t believe these words—so many, and of such a nature—had come out of him. At last she replied, “I don’t know about our souls. But our minds, yes, one day I think so.”

Leep couldn’t understand how she differentiated between the mind and the soul, but he didn’t ask her. He was embarrassed he had asked her as much as he had, especially when Ketpo snickered derisively, having overheard his questions.

 

***

 

Leep teleported onto Motherboard.

It was how an individual was able to travel between one colony ship and another—within certain limitations of distance, of course. The scattered fleet’s scientists were ever trying to perfect the technology, so that one day all of them might teleport to a brand new planet and leave the space craft behind.

In his case, though, he wasn’t teleporting to Motherboard from another ship, but from a blighted world that had not proven satisfactory for the colonists to settle. He had been sent there as a scout, and was grateful for leaving it behind, if only for a time. He still had business to conduct on that unhappy world, and wasn’t looking forward to going back there.

But right now he was deeply pleased to be walking these placid, ordered streets again. Up close, the pervasive green foundation for the multitude of little silver houses and assorted larger structures no longer appeared like grass, but its hue put his heart at ease all the same. A sunny-faced colonist walking along the spotless, plastic-perfect street in the opposite direction beamed at him as they passed each other and chirped, “Good day to you, Mr. Leep!”

In his unhurried meandering Leep came to a park where little robotic ducks waddled ridiculously, cutely, by the edge of a pond of languid liquid mercury. Here he found a woman sitting with her two children on a bench, watching the ducks. Leep stopped before them, for a moment a tad confused; from a distance, seated as close together as they were, he had thought the three of them were a single being.

The mother looked up, grinned and exclaimed, “Hello, Mr. Leep! Welcome back!”

“It’s good to be back,” he replied.

“Good news, perhaps,” the mother said, as her children giggled at the ducks, some of which bumbled into each other comically, while others bobbed on the mercury’s reflective surface. “I hear our scientists have scanned a distant planet, which seems capable of supporting life. They are calling it Oasis. It could prove our future home!”

Leep asked, “When do they think we might reach it?”

“Oh, it could still takes years for that, I’m afraid. It’s so far off.”

This pleased Leep. Though he didn’t want to admit it to the woman, he was quite content on Motherboard, and rather preferred that the ship never ceased carrying all of them through the peaceful, silent expanse of space.

His wrist comp beeped, and he lifted his arm to gaze down at the device’s tiny viewscreen. A familiar, angry face was framed on the screen. “Oh,” Leep said, with a new sense of urgency, and much regret. “I have matters to attend to. I have to go back.”

The mother frowned sympathetically. “Already? Poor boy! It must be so hard. Good luck.”

“Thank you,” Leep said. And he vowed as much to himself as to the woman, “I’ll be back soon.”

He touched a key on his wrist comp, sending a signal to the city’s teleportation facility. Immediately his location was established, and in an unseen flash he was disassembled and whisked back to the blighted world like an attachment to an email. His molecules and his mind transferred like data…and his soul along with them.

 

***

 

“Where were you?” Moop fumed. “You’ve been gone from your station over an hour! Look at the work backed up! Were you in the restroom again? Do you have some problem I should know about? Chronic diarrhea?”

With his face pulsing hot inside, Leep sat at his section of the long table and bent low over his work. He heard Ketpo snort, suppressing laughter.

Moop went on, “You can stay home if you like. I’m sure you have a toilet at home, right? You don’t need to come here if you’d rather shit than work.” Then she turned on her heel and stomped off.

Leep poised his soldering gun above a circuit board but didn’t dare lower its hot tip. His hands were subtly trembling, a disharmonious vibration only he would have noticed. He could feel Ran’s eyes on him, and he said very softly without looking over at her directly, “I wasn’t gone for over an hour.”

“Leep,” Ran said in a sympathetic tone, “please be careful. Maybe Moop is exaggerating a little, but it was about an hour.”

“I was only loading parts on the rack,” Leep protested. Already he had said more than he usually uttered in an entire day at work. At work and at home. “Maybe fifteen minutes.”

“It was an hour, Leep,” Ran insisted gently. “Just watch out, all right? You don’t want to get on that little tyrant’s bad side.”

“Daydreaming too much,” Ketpo remarked.

 

***

 

This time Leep was careful to use the restroom during his lunch break, closing the virtual globe program earlier than he usually did, to assure that he would be back to his station on time. He had angered Moop enough for one day.

As he sat there, he spotted a tiny ant wandering between the tiles. It had to be the same one he’d been seeing in here lately. Would it never find its way back to its nest, poor thing?

But he noticed another ant, not far from the first. And then, a third. Three of them. So, the creature wasn’t all alone after all.

Leep smiled.

 

***

 

His father had used to bring him down to the park by the river, to see water puppet shows or simply to sit and have a cold drink as they watched lazy rafts of leaves glide by on the current. Aside from walking along the park’s periphery on some errand for his mother, Leep hadn’t actually visited it for several years now, until this bright weekend afternoon.

The park was mostly green, but not green. It was littered with trash and with humans. As he walked its paths, he passed young lovers, and laughing children who reminded him of Fhu Fhu. He tried not to remember her right now, not out here in the open like this. He preferred to conjure her in the solitude of his room when he watched her cartoons on TV. But even as he pushed thoughts of Fhu Fhu away, perversely memories of his father blossomed like flowers growing from a grave.

Just as he hadn’t actually witnessed Fhu Fhu’s death but had replayed it in his head innumerable times, so had he done with his father’s death—actually, before Fhu Fhu’s accident and on to this day. His mind had made a movie of the incident based on the script he had learned from those who had witnessed the event. He saw his father, a field worker for an electric power supplier, brace a ladder against a wooden street pole: a former telephone pole made obsolete by cell phones. From the top of the pole branched a mad tangle of power lines, so abundant it seemed they upheld the pole rather than the other way around. But the top of the metal ladder accidentally touched one of the drooping black cables. His father stood there still gripping the base of the ladder in both fists, staring ahead and seeming to tremble, for a terribly long few seconds before he finally slumped down to the ground, where he lay with waves of black smoke coming off him.

Leep liked to think that his father felt no pain in those long seconds. Instead, that he experienced his spirit being transferred out of him…maybe into the power lines themselves, to be spread throughout the web of the entire city. To go on living as a vibrant current, this electric ghost lighting homes and illuminating TV and computer screens. Leep’s own computer screen.

Feeling saddened by this mental movie, which had begun to loop around and around, Leep considered returning home, but he was uneager to do so. When he’d left on his walk, his stepfather had been out in their little courtyard—shirtless—washing his blue car with a sudsy sponge. Did he still think there might be bloodstains on its surface, a year later? Leep had avoided riding in the blue car since the accident. The rear of the car to him resembled the red-eyed hateful face of a locust.

Just as he was considering whether or not to return home, however reluctantly, at last he spotted the woman he had hoped to find. As he had overheard his coworkers say, she was seated on a park bench. He quickened his pace as he approached her.

Surely someone else, a family member or friend, helped transport her here every day to do her begging. Her tumor was too enormous for her to be able to walk easily on her own. Leep thought it must weigh as much as the woman herself, pinning her down, splayed across her lap and spilling to either side of her onto the bench’s seat. Much of the tumor was exposed, her clothing—though apparently adapted to accommodate her deformity—not sufficient to cover it all. These two overflowing mounds of flesh flanked her tightly but in no way resembled children, Leep was disappointed to find. They put him more in mind of shapeless masses of raw protoplasm, undifferentiated matter from which something had yet to take proper form.

The woman noticed that Leep was standing over her, staring, and she mutely lifted a hand to him.

Leep found a few coins in his pocket, and stepped forward to place them in her upturned palm. She nodded at him and withdrew her hand.

“Don’t worry,” Leep said to her in a lowered, confidential voice, “we’re still on course. We’ll reach Oasis someday.”

 

***

 

Leep was soldering a PCB at the shared work table when he became aware of a barely discernible moving dot upon its green surface. The moving dot was orange, a shade close to red.

He felt an urgent impulse to dive down into the circuit board, as if plunging from a high cliff into the sea. To project his imagination into it…to teleport to Motherboard right there and then. But no, not in front of the others. So rather than give chase to the orange something, he swung a mounted magnifying lens toward him, one of those that other workers with less keen eyesight than himself used to do their soldering. But when he looked through the lens, the orange dot was already gone.

He had thought it had legs. A tiny mite, then? And if so, had it crawled inside some crevice of the circuit board, perhaps sensing his scrutiny?

When Ketpo and some of the others became engaged in a noisy conversation, Leep used the opportunity to angle a little closer to Ran and murmur, “Can insects live inside circuit boards?”

“Insects?” Ran repeated. “Well, yes, I’ve heard of bed bugs in computers. And cockroaches, too—they like being inside anyplace warm. I’ve even heard people say they saw bugs crawling right inside their LCD screens.”

“And mites?”

“Yes, I think I’ve heard of mites in computers, too. Why, Leep? Did you see a bug on your circuit board?”

“Maybe it wasn’t a bug,” he muttered, but more to himself than to the pretty young woman.

 

***

 

Leep had been careful to set aside the circuit board on which he had thought he’d seen a crawling orange speck. At lunch break, when the others had all gone to the cafeteria, he sat at the computer as he did customarily, but instead of exploring the virtual globe program he held the circuit board in both hands and stared down at it intently.

 

***

 

Returning to Motherboard, Leep encountered an alarming scene, disrupting the colony’s usual placidity and distracting him from his search for the mysterious orange something-or-other.

Two members of the colony’s security force, in their neat white uniforms and helmets, and carrying bulky white rifles, stood to either side of a large blue robot. Their guns were trained on it, ready to fire. The robot had the red-eyed hateful face of a locust.

“Mr. Leep!” one of the security officers exclaimed, when he saw Leep nearing. “Please advise! We caught this robot invading our city.”

“I wasn’t invading,” the robot protested in a deep-chested, metallic voice. “I was drifting through space without a home, abandoned by my makers. I hoped to settle here with you humans.”

“It could be lying, sir,” the other security man warned. “Perhaps we should take no risks, and destroy it.”

“Please!” the hulking machine rasped.

Leep held up a palm. “Wait. This is a city of peace. We don’t want violence here.”

“Please trust me,” the robot begged. “I will work hard to earn my keep.”

“We should give it a chance,” Leep said.

The guards looked at each other, and slowly lowered their weapons. One of them said, “If you say so, sir. If you trust this robot, we have to trust you.”

“Harmony is our way,” the other guard admitted.

“Thank you, kind people,” the robot said, and maybe its red-eyed face wasn’t actually hateful-looking, after all.

“But just be careful where you walk,” Leep advised the automaton. “You’re so big, and we have many children playing about. I don’t want you to accidentally crush any of them.”

“I promise to be very careful,” said the robot.

“Then welcome to Motherboard,” Leep said.

“We’ll help it get settled in, sir,” one security guard said. “And we’ll give it a tour.”

“Wonderful,” said the robot. It started tramping away with heavy, clunking footfalls, the guards escorting it on either side, and swiveled its head around to wave back at Leep as it departed.

Satisfied with how he had handled the situation, Leep tilted back his head and smiled at the heavens. The artificial atmosphere tinted the sky a faint blue, but beyond its translucency was the blackness of space and its myriad pale stars, just barely visible. As he gazed upward, Leep became aware of something else looming behind the thin blue haze of atmosphere. Gradually he realized it was a great face, vast as a god’s. Its features were ghostly, rather vague, but the longer Leep stared the more it became evident the god-like face behind the sky was smiling benevolently. And then, holding the face’s gaze, Leep realized something else.

The face was his own.

 

***

 

A woman’s shriek startled Leep, and he was jarred so badly that he felt as though he had been dropped from on high into his chair in front of the computer. He gripped the circuit board in his hands more tightly, so as not to drop it, its hard edges pressing into his palms like knife edges. For a moment, he thought it was his mother’s voice, crying out in the driveway while he sat in front of his computer game.

He looked up to see his coworker Lhut standing nearby, staring at him with ballooned eyes. Lhut, with her auburn-dyed rooster tail, who believed the woman in the park was a conjoined family.

“What is it?” Ketpo asked, startled by the woman’s scream as well, swiveling around in his chair to look.

Lhut pointed a quivering arm at Leep, her eyes still wide. “He wasn’t there a moment ago! I blinked and then he was there! ”

Ran jumped up from her chair and rushed to Lhut’s side, gently holding her arms. “Lhut, what are you saying? Leep must have just come back from the men’s room.”

“No,” Leep spoke up. “I was here. I’ve been here through lunch.”

“Lunch was finished a half-hour ago,” Ketpo told Leep. “Don’t lie and say you’ve been here all along. We all know better. Where do you think Moop is right now? She’s looking around for you.”

“I was here,” Leep insisted softly.

“You can’t lie, boy. You haven’t been here until just now.”

“He’s a ghost!” Lhut sobbed, as Ran put her arms around her. “A ghost!”

Ketpo tapped the side of his head behind Lhut’s back. “You win, Ran,” he said. “These fumes are poisonous.”

“Come on,” Ran said to Lhut, walking her away, “let’s get you a drink of water.” She glanced back at Leep oddly over her shoulder.

Leep looked down at the circuit board in his hands. In the past, any of the i/o modules could have been Motherboard, but this unfinished PCB was the one with the orange mite. He had been jolted out of Motherboard before he could search it out. So he surreptitiously turned his back to the others and slid the board into the front pocket of his loose-fitting trousers. He started to walk away from his work area.

“Hey,” Ketpo called, noticing him, “where are you going now?”

Pausing for a moment without looking around, Leep said quietly, “To the restroom.”

“Again? With all this work backing up, and Ran and Lhut already gone off who knows where?” The man wagged his head. “Boy, when Moop catches up with you you’ll be out of here.”

“Yes,” Leep said in a slow and thoughtful tone, thinking about what Lhut had seen. “I think I’ll be out of here.” Then he walked away.

 

***

 

On his way to the men’s room, Leep changed his mind and turned instead toward the cafeteria. He wanted to see Ran first, and she had pulled Lhut away saying their coworker needed a drink of water.

“Leep,” he heard Moop call out from an aisle that adjoined the one he was walking down. The aisles in this section of the plant were bordered by racks containing plastic bins filled with cables and other parts, and so far the racks had shielded him from Moop’s view.

Swiftly, unnoticed by anyone in this fairly empty area, Leep moved to a nearby corner of the sprawling work floor and backed himself into it until his shoulder blades touched the meeting of the walls. There, he dug the oblong circuit board out of his pocket. Gripping it in both hands, he stared down at it fixedly…even as he heard Moop’s voice calling his name again, nearer and louder.

He stood in this same pose on a street of Motherboard, but now instead of the circuit board he was staring down at his wrist comp. On the mini computer’s little screen, sandy with static, he saw Moop walking toward him. Was she looking straight out of the screen in his direction? He doubled his concentration. The static cleared, the image sharpened, and Moop kept on walking right past him. Over the device’s tiny speaker he heard Moop cry out once more, “Leep, you better have gone home! You better have quit! If I find you, you’ll be sorry your mother brought you into this world!”

But her words grew fainter as she stomped farther away, and then Leep transmitted himself back to the unsuitable planet.

 

***

 

Lhut screamed again, and dropped the bottle of water she’d been drinking from to seize hold of Ran. Ran whipped around to see that Leep had entered the cafeteria. He hesitated just beyond the threshold, afraid to proceed further and frighten Lhut more. Surely her cry would attract Moop and others.

“Keep him away!” Lhut pleaded, frantic. Then she let go of Ran to point at Leep accusingly, and commanded, “I banish you, ghost! Be gone!” But when Leep only stood there blankly, Lhut abandoned her exorcism to bolt for another doorway at the opposite end of the cafeteria, leading out to the shipping department and loading docks.

Without even understanding the situation, the teenage girl who worked behind the cafeteria’s counter took in Leep’s admittedly ghost-like, immobile face and dove into the kitchen.

With Lhut gone, Leep started toward Ran again, walking between the empty tables. She stood waiting for him to reach her, unblinking.

“Leep,” she began uncertainly. Then she seemed to falter. Lhut’s terror had apparently infected her. She managed to get out, “What are you doing?”

Standing before her shyly, he said, “I just wanted to say goodbye. Thank you for teaching me. You were nice to me.”

“You’re…leaving?” Ran stammered.

“Maybe you can come with me, if you want. I think I could teleport you, too, if I tried.”

Leep wasn’t always good at reading the expressions of other people, but if he were to guess, he would have thought that Ran’s face conveyed both fear and awe. Still unblinking, she stared at him for a long second and politely shook her head. “I have to stay here, Leep. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” he said. He lifted a hand. “Bye.”

Ran mirrored his gesture. “Bye, Leep.”

Then he turned back toward the doorway, hoping to make it to the men’s restroom before Moop or anyone else spotted and intercepted him. He didn’t look back as he left the cafeteria, but he sensed Ran still standing there, watching him depart.

 

***

 

“I know you’re in there, you crazy boy—I saw you go in!” Again Moop pounded her fist on the restroom door. It wasn’t locked, but she was clearly afraid to come in. Still, it could only be a matter of minutes, at best, before a man came into the restroom looking for him. “I’ll see that you’re fired—do you hear me?”

Leep understood that in being incomprehensible to Moop, he had made her into the crazy one. Poor earthbound Moop, so violently unsettled. So representative of her blighted realm. She made him grateful he wasn’t one of its indigenous race.

Seated on the closed toilet lid, Leep stared with full focus at the narrow circuit board gripped in both hands. Its green surface so dense with miniature detail. But now that detail started rushing up toward his eye, as if he were piloting an airplane that was plummeting from the sky toward a glittering city below.

The last sounds he heard from the unsuitable world were the restroom door slamming open, followed closely by a fading voice that said, “He’s not in here.”

 

***

 

Motherboard was generous in size, considering it was a city that floated like a dandelion seed through space, and so the giant blue robot had scooped Leep up into its hand and carried him along as it clomped heavily through the neatly laid-out streets. Leep was always happy to reacquaint himself with the city, and he would have been content to be carried along in this manner for a much longer time, but suddenly he noticed a certain silvery cottage up ahead and commanded the automaton to stop and set him down.

A man was tending a little vegetable garden in the front yard of this cottage, and when he saw Leep walking toward him he stopped working, and grinned warmly with recognition.

“Welcome home,” the man said.

Leep saw a figure move into the shadowed threshold of the cottage. A very small figure in an orange dress. She waved to him, inviting him inside.

He went to her.