Amped (5 page)
Authors: Daniel H. Wilson
It takes a little while for my legs to listen to me.
A harsh ringing in my ears already combines with a cacophony of sirens. Fire trucks, ambulances, police. I stagger toward the smoke, an urban zombie. Flames are eating the rind of the building. Its heart is a burned-out mess. The parking lot is wiped empty, the pavement cratered where the white van sat.
The realization gently nudges into my mind: my father could not have survived.
A heap of smoking gray rubble smolders where his office was. Nothing recognizable, just twisted rebar and concrete and ash. I don’t stop advancing when the surging heat starts to prick my face or when my throat goes raw and stinging from the smoke.
I stop when I see the flashing blues and reds.
Under
no
circumstances,
my father said. Tears well in my eyes as I survey the wreck. I blink them away, searching for some sign of life. The clouds of smoke throb with police lights, ring with sirens. The silhouette of a police officer drifts through the haze and comes into focus.
“Hey,” she calls.
I turn and stumble away. Ignore her shouts as I duck around a corner. Eyes leaking, I accelerate until I’m sprinting down the alley—running blind, breath rasping, away from the noise and turmoil and death.
STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA, by and through
Attorney General Sam Pondi, et al.:
Plaintiffs,
Defendants,
In this case, we define capacity to contract to exclude individuals with artificially enhanced intelligence.
As has long been established, those with diminished capacity (e.g., minors and people with mental disabilities) lack the capacity to contract as a matter of law. Similarly, we find that individuals with artificially enhanced intelligence possess an
enhanced
capacity to contract, which necessarily creates an unlevel playing field.
We saw evidence that these enhanced individuals may prey on those with inferior “natural” intelligence of the sort belonging to what we have known heretofore as the “average man.” In other words, individuals with artificially enhanced intelligence implicitly confer diminished capacity to others.
In an effort to remedy the growing disparity between natural and enhanced levels of intelligence, and in an effort to create a level playing field, we hereby find that individuals with artificially enhanced intelligence lack the capacity to contract as a matter of law.
As a result, we thus find that the contract entered into between John Sizemore and Tammy Rogers is considered null and void.
The toaster misses my face by about a foot, then explodes into shards of white plastic on the sidewalk. I blink at it once or twice before a wooden napkin ring clips me across the bridge of my nose.
I catch sight of a scrawny forearm lurking in the second-story window of my apartment. Charles, my landlord, is throwing my belongings out the window in neat little parabolas. He’s already packed and dragged out a haphazard pile of cardboard boxes that rest on the grass next to the sidewalk. A couch and a chair sit incongruously in the yard.
“Charles!” I say. “What the hell are you doing?”
He pokes his gaunt face out of the window and glares down at me, breathing hard. He swallows and his Adam’s apple bobs. Muttering, he flings a handful of silverware at me and ducks back inside.
The front door flies open as I reach for the handle. Charles, all hundred and twenty pounds of him, charges out. He slams the door shut, locks it.
The lock is bright as cut copper, new.
“I don’t have to talk to you,” says Charles in the clipped, broken accent of a lifelong Pittsburgher.
“What?”
“Back up. To the sidewalk. You’re trespassing.”
Charles advances, eyes narrowed. Confused, I put my hands
out and step back. “Charles, I don’t know what’s going on. What happened, man?”
“Thought you were so smart. Well, who’s smart now? Score one for the Yinzers, asshole.”
Charles kicks a box, and what looks like my college textbooks spill out onto the wet lawn. I stoop down to push the books back into the damp cardboard box. A young guy walking up the sidewalk carefully inspects a pile of my kitchen stuff.
“Hey,” I say. “This isn’t a garage sale.”
The young guy doesn’t respond, looks past me and makes eye contact with Charles.
“That means take off,” I say.
Charles taps his temple. “Don’t have to listen to him,” he says.
No reaction. No sympathy or anger. The guy just stands there, watching me warily, the way you’d watch a crazy person at a bus stop.
It hits me that something fundamental has changed. Whatever empathy glues society together is somehow drying up, becoming cracked and brittle. This guy standing over my stuff—he’s looking at me and what he sees is person shaped, but I don’t think he’s seeing a person.
Charles is all pumped up. His face is flushed with blood and I can see a vein in his neck throbbing. His hands are shaking from adrenaline as he speaks. “Joe Vaughn’s been on the TV, warning us about you people for years. Taking our jobs and messing up the schools and blowing up buildings.”
“You can’t kick me out. There’s still five months on my lease.”
“Not no more. State law says you amps can’t go into contracts with normal people. Just like I can’t sign no contract with a retard, you can’t sign one with me. You’re too
smart
.”
“That law is being challenged, Charles. It’s not official.”
“Highest court in the country thinks it is. The Supreme
goddamn Court of the United States of America says you ain’t protected. So I guess it
is
the law.”
The word “law” rings in my ears. Dominoes are falling. No contracts? Meaning no lease, no marriage, no job. No life.
A few more people have stopped to rubberneck. A couple. An older guy. Most are just curious. Others are scrutinizing my stuff, sizing it up.
Charles curls his hands into fists, lets them hang by his sides like rotten fruit. Through clenched teeth he says, “You gotta go
now
.”
I lean over and scrabble through the box, dig out an old duffel bag. “Give me a damn minute—”
Now a couple of people are just grabbing stuff. Others watch, blinking slowly. The thieves walk away without looking at me. The old guy carefully steps over my hand like it was a crack in the sidewalk, holding my lamp.
“I’m calling the goddamn cops,” says Charles.
I drop to my knees and start shoving things into the duffel bag. Clothes, shoes, a box of granola bars. Appliances are too heavy to carry. Laptop is gone. Forget the furniture.
As pedestrians gawk, silent people carry away the puzzle pieces of my life. They see through me, hear past me. The expressions in their eyes are unreadable. I wonder why this is. Do they pity me? Or are they afraid? Is it possible that they really feel nothing at all?
I hope this scene isn’t playing out all over the nation. People like me struggling to grab what they can. Whole families, even. Grasping at the leftover shards of their lives. If that’s the case, it doesn’t really matter what these vulture people around me are thinking or feeling. Whether I’m less than human or more than human—animal or god—it’s all the same.
I’m not a real citizen anymore. Rules no longer apply.
When my bag is full, I move on. Leave Charles on the sidewalk,
staring at me with clenched fists and a tight grin. I push past the onlookers and get myself on down the road.
It’s all on little pieces of paper. Thou shalt not. Thou shalt. The rules are there so that we can remember them and follow them. If the rules were obvious, we wouldn’t have to write them down.
I let my hair hang over the nub on my temple and step inside my bank and wait in line. I can feel the stares like cigarette burns on my skin. A security guard watches me, his back to the wall, beefy hands resting on his belt. I look around without seeing anything, push my breaths in and out through my nose. The teller is cautious but she lets me withdraw everything in my account. She stuffs about eighteen hundred dollars into an envelope.
I walk out of the bank, forcing myself not to run. Keep walking. Thinking.
In a frigid fast-food restaurant, I take my phone out of my pocket and call Allderdice High School. The administrative assistant tells me that all amps, I mean implantees, have been placed on unpaid leave. And the police called to speak to me, again.
“Hey, buddy, let me see your temple,” calls a chubby guy a few seats over. He and his friend wear painter’s caps and overalls, eat burgers with stained fingers.
I ignore him, hang up my phone. Then, I methodically dial my friends. Nobody answers. Must be a busy morning.
“What’s the matter? You can’t hear me, buddy?” asks the painter.
It’s the Joseph Vaughns of the world who have given regular people license to act like this. Talking heads on television who have repeated the incendiary words again and again until the insane has become commonplace. This guy sitting here wearing his work clothes isn’t a monster, he probably has a wife and kids and—
“Hey!” he shouts.
The cashier walks over, shoes squeaking on tile. Puts a hand
on my shoulder. “We don’t want trouble. You got to go,” he says quietly.
“I’ll go when I’m ready,” I say.
“Let’s see your temple, buddy,” calls the painter again.
I hang my head lower, studying the meaningless TV-fuzz design on the countertop. Looking for a pattern in noise. This day has been coming for years and I had front-row seats but I never let myself see. Samantha bounced around the courts, trying to find a legal ground for her own existence, but every time things took another turn for the worse, I convinced myself it was someone else’s problem. Well, it’s sure as hell my problem now.
“You a fucking amp or something?” asks the painter, voice rising.
The cashier puts his hands on his hips, motions with his head toward the door.
I get up and leave.
My friend Dwayne lives a few minutes from here. I’ve known him for a few years and he’s the kind of guy who can see things from another person’s perspective. I sling my duffel bag over my shoulder and walk in his direction. Cars blow past me, scattering candy wrappers and damp paper cartons of iced tea. A crucifix of sweat stains my T-shirt by the time I trudge through Dwayne’s toy-strewn yard and knock on the door.
“You’re on TV, Owen. That sucks about your dad,” he says.
I swallow salty tears.
“But did you kill that girl?” he asks, half hiding behind the door.
“What?”
“News said the cops want to talk to you. They got your face up there with a bunch of other guys. Soldiers or terrorists or something.”
“She was a student—”
“That’s what they said on the news. She was a former student of yours. What was going on between you two, man? This is serious.”
I don’t even know how to respond. “I need a place to stay for a couple nights. My dad … I’ve got no place to go.”
“I don’t know. I think you need to get on the move, man. Let this all blow over.”
“Tomorrow.”
Dwayne orients his body to block the door. “Owen, man, I’ve got to think about Monica and the kids,” he whispers urgently. “Your face is on the news. I can’t let you in here.”
“How long have I known you, Dwayne?”
He pauses for a second, then answers, “No.”
“What?”
“No. I’m sorry, Owen. You have to find someplace else to go.”
Dwayne is standing there, chin set, blocking the doorway. I get the strange feeling that this is all a joke, that we’re together onstage and any minute he’s going to burst out laughing and welcome me inside.
“It’s a mistake. A mix-up,” I say, taking a step forward. “I’m still me.”
Dwayne doesn’t move, but his eyes get hard. The door swings open a little wider and I see he’s got a splintery wooden bat clenched in his other hand. The one he keeps in the umbrella stand by his front door.
“It’s my family. There’s a lot of bad shit going down—what am I supposed to do?” he asks.