Amped (9 page)

“Hey,” says the boy, voice coming in loud and clear through the window screen. “I’m Nick. You’re Owen.”

“If you say so,” I say, wiping the sleep out of my eyes.

“I’m friends with Jim. Come outside. I wanna show you Eden.”

Eden is an island, according to Nick. And it’s surrounded by sharks. Real big old gnarly-ass man-eaters.

As we walk, the kid shadows me. I get the feeling I couldn’t shake him if I wanted. Eden is too small and Nick’s personality is too big. He’s telling me his theory now. Theories, actually. The little guy has collected a lot of ideas in his decade or so of life and he doesn’t mind sharing.

Nick moves like a puppy. His small brown hands are always in
motion, sometimes slow and deliberate, other times making short, eye-blurring bursts.

He can solve the Rubik’s cube in under thirty seconds.

“Yeah,” says Nick, as he leads me around the trailer park. “I mostly use the Fridrich method. Pretty advanced. With finger shortcuts and triggers I can do four-move bursts. Over ten moves a second. Of course, you gotta lube your cube to go that fast.”

Nick bursts into hysterical giggles. Eden is otherwise quiet under the growing heat of the morning sun.

“Eden,” he informs me, tongue peeking out of his narrow slit of a mouth, “is all by itself out here. I’m not sayin’ you can’t venture into shark-infested waters. But you better not be going by yourself. You got to have somebody watching your back every minute. Plus, sharks are worst at night. Nocturnal predators. So, you got to be home before dark.”

I ask the obvious question. “Is it shark week on TV or something?”

“Yeah, but that don’t change my point,” he responds. “The sharks make all of us amps stay together on our islands. To be safe, right? But Eden ain’t the only island. There’s a bunch more of ’em. Other places where poor people got the Uplift program. And the vets. Plus, out there in Pittsburgh, where they done all the original trials. Lot of test subjects out there with all kinds of crazy junk in their heads.”

Is that what we are? A nation of test subjects? Involuntary participants in a never-ending social experiment, exposed to wave after wave of new technology?

Nick points along a row of run-down trailers. “Over there’s my house. Earl. Miranda. Jim.” The kid stops at a dark trailer on the end. It has an ominous red star spray-painted on its side, paint bleeding from it in dried rivulets. “Lyle and them guys are in those boxes there.”

The laughing cowboy and his gang. I try to act casual.

“What do you think of Lyle?” I ask, peering at the rotting, graffiti-covered trailers.

Nick scratches one of his misshapen ears. “Kind of a badass, ain’t he? I like that. But mostly I’m just scared of him, I guess.”

I raise an eyebrow. “You admit it?”

Nick leads me toward the edge of the trailer park. “Oh, I’m scared of all kinds of stuff. Not the dark or monsters or nothing like that. Stuff I’m scared of is worth being afraid of. Tornadoes. Pure Priders. And Lyle and his friends. Especially Lyle. Sometimes, it’s like he can’t see you. Like he’s got shark eyes.”

“I heard the police were looking for him.”

“Everybody knows that. But Lyle’s got this way of moving. Sneaky fast. Anybody in a suit or a uniform comes around and he’s gone. Just leaves us to deal with it.”

Nick kicks the dirt, looks away.

“Do you like it here?” I ask.

“I guess. It’s hard to leave anymore.”

“What about school?”

“My mom teaches out of our house. Hardly any kids go to town for school. It’s got where you can’t even go out with your port under a hat. If a regular old Reggie Jerkwad finds out, he might mess you up good and send you home.”

“Reggie?” I ask.

“They call us amps. We call them reggie. Don’t ask me.”

Nick keeps leading me around the perimeter of the park, pointing out trailers and cars and pathways through the weeds. I follow, still sleepy, bemused by this hyperactive little creature.

Weeds suffocate the mostly fallen-down wooden fence that surrounds Eden. Through a missing section, I see a brand-new chain-link fence on the other side. Squat and solid, it wraps Eden in shining links. Looks like it was built yesterday.

Seeing me looking at the double fence, the kid goes solemn.

“Not safe to go much past the fence. Mean people live in them
houses across the field. At night, they sit out there and drink beer and turn spotlights on us. They call it the neighborhood watch. We call them spotlighters.”

“How long has that gone on?” I ask.

“They’ve come and gone for a long time. But now it’s every night. On the news, Senator Vaughn told his Priders they got to watch us at all times. And it’s even worse since new amps started showing up here. Spotlighters came out and built that fence without asking. Made a lot of people mad, but nobody did nothing about it.”

Together, we stare silently at the shining fence. It looks metallic and alien next to the organic decay of Eden. A grasshopper flitters past and lands on Nick’s arm. He brushes it off, breaks the reverie.

“Look,” he says, “I ain’t trying to get in your business or nothing. But I told you everything about me and Eden, so you’ve got to tell
me
all about you. Like what you’re doing here. Fair is fair.”

Nick looks up at me, thrusting out his pointed chin, curious and demanding. But mostly demanding.

“I don’t have any other place to go,” I say. “Same as the others. Things are complicated right now. Luckily, there are a lot of people in Eden who are like us because of the Uplift program.”

“You mean the government cheese?” Nick points at the yellowish nub on his temple. “They came and gave these yellow ones to everybody around here and then they got all mad at us for having them. Pretty stupid.”

“I agree.”

Nick stands quietly, watching the distant low houses beyond the brown grass. It might as well be the shoreline of another world.

“So that’s it?” he asks. “You’re hiding, like all the rest?”

“That’s it,” I say, wondering if it’s true.

“I don’t believe you,” he says.

“Really?”

“Nah. I get the feeling you’re here to do something.”

I don’t say anything. I’m a little taken aback by how confident the kid is. Nick’s hands go back to fluttering over the Rubik’s cube in little spurts of speed. He solves it, smirks at it. Starts mixing up the squares again.

“Do you ever wish that you were a regular kid? A reggie?” I ask.

Nick snorts. “I could barely see before I got the retinal. Could barely think without Autofocus. And you’re asking me if I
want
to have the dumbs? No thanks. I’d rather be weird and know it than be a stupid ass.”

I can’t help but feel like I’m speaking to an adult.

“What about you?” asks Nick.

“Me?”

“Yeah. You want to be a reggie?”

“It would make life a lot easier.”

Nick stops, frowns at me. “Would it?” he asks.

When night hits Eden, the close-packed trailers light up with ratty old strings of paper lanterns, citronella candles, and the fleeting streaks of kids playing with flashlights.

I sit with Jim on his dimly lit deck, a crusty folding chair biting into my ass. The old man hands me a cold beer and we watch the nightlife of the park settle into the shadows. He doesn’t speak and by now it doesn’t surprise me.

Jim was right—battle lines are being drawn. Every third trailer or so lurks dark and empty. There are hardly any unmarked temples left in Eden—all the pure humans have packed up and moved on. In their place, harried families of amps have arrived from miles around. Renting the empties. Their gleaming new cars stud the parking lot. Newcomers are coagulating here at random, many of them with nothing in common except those little flecks of metal in their
brains.

They’re not here because Eden is safe or even welcoming. They’re here because there’s no other place to go. Nowhere else to rent or go to school or work. No more options. We’re all running for our lives, in one way or another. Being left alone is the best we can ask for.

And we can’t even get that.

I’m startled by how soon I get used to the spotlighters. The winking scrape of their lights over our trailers seems to live in my
peripheral vision. Occasional gunfire and hooting laughter come from beyond the fence.

The local amps seem unimpressed. Across the way, a stained slab of concrete sits where some repossessed trailer used to live. A shirtless guy has got a clamp light hanging from a tree branch, the extension cord running to his trailer. It illuminates an old door supported by two sawhorses. Tools and empty beer bottles are scattered around the makeshift workbench. The guy is ignoring the field, busily fixing the knees of a plastic exoskeleton that’s sprawled out
like a corpse.

A fiery red dot sizzles across my vision. It’s a teenager in a hoodie, jogging past. He’s carrying a crummy old boom box that amplifies music from a portable player tucked in his pocket. The node on his temple throbs in time to the beat. A neon attachment the kid has made himself. I don’t know if he’s proud of being an amp or just oblivious to the stigma. Either way, the implant is impossible to miss.

All the ephemeral sounds of Eden—the low hum of campfire conversation, kids panting and laughing, the occasional shriek of an air tool, and even the distorted thump of bass lines—combine into a familiar babble. Human lives unfolding. It’s comforting. Somehow, Eden is an honest-to-God functioning community. Pushed out here to the margins of society and huddling together for sanity but operating nonetheless.

Almost normal people living almost normal lives.

“I’m getting tired of the silent treatment, Jim. Why am I being hunted?” I ask. “What is the Zenith?”

Jim hushes me.

“Don’t say that word so loud. Only a handful of people in the world know what it means. If you were smart, you’d wish you weren’t one of them.”

Jim looks around, suspicious. He continues, voice lowered.
“It’s an implant like any other. Won’t make you a superhero. Just helps your brain process the world.”

“I need to know more than that, Jim. A lot more.”

“I can’t be responsible for you if you get hurt. I already done enough damage. Look at this place,” says Jim. “And we thought we were helping these people.”

Eden may feel calm right this instant, but tension crackles just beneath every movement. Every sound. It’s a fragile picture of normalcy, wavering in the reflection of a soap bubble.

“My dad said you would explain. It was the last thing he said.”

The old man sucks on his beer and sits quiet for a moment, thinking. Finally, he swallows a last mouthful of beer and starts talking.

“I only built the amp hardware—the army programmed them and your pop installed them. All thirteen. That was the whole run, but I don’t have the whole picture. Before activation, it oughta be doing basic Neural Autofocus tasks. Pushing your mind in the right direction. But it also knows things. Military skill sets, probably. I don’t know—I didn’t program that part. All I do know is that when you turn it on, the amp takes over.
You go faster. No time to think. If you’re a good man, you’ll do good things. If you’re not, you won’t.”