Man Made Boy (5 page)

“Boy.” Her thick, white eyebrows curled down. “Again.”

“Good evening, Lady Ku’lah. I have, uh, well, I went with Ruthven to pick up some clothes for the den.” I held out the bag.

Ku’lah nodded and took it from me. “Thank you.”

“Oh,” I said. “There’s a…a shirt…in there for…uh…”

“Spit it out, Boy. I have things to do.”

“It’s a shirt for Liel.”

She looked at me for moment, her face totally expressionless. I caught myself holding my breath. I was half expecting her to tell me to get lost and stay away from her daughter. But then she turned her head back inside and bellowed, “Liel, come here!”

“What is it?” Liel’s voice called back. “I’m in the middle of something.”

“Now!” yelled Ku’lah.

After a moment, Liel’s head poked around from behind the door, her slanted, diamond eyes glittering in the light.

“Hey, Boy,” she said.

“Hey.” I tried to sound cool. Not sure I succeeded.

Liel looked back at her mother. “Awesome, Mom. Thanks for conforming to trowe stereotypes yet again and being rude to guests. Couldn’t you at least invite him in?”

“Oh, it’s okay,” I said quickly. “I can’t stay long, anyway.”

“Boy has something for you.” Ku’lah thrust the bag back into my hands and went inside.

Liel and I stood for a second in silence. I wondered if she felt the same kind of crazy electricity that I did when we were alone together. She looked at me curiously as she leaned against the iron door, her long, white hair framing her smooth, dark green face.

“You have something for me?” she asked.

“Yeah, uh, I went shopping with Ruthven and—”

“No shit!” She leaned forward. “You went
outside
? How was it?”

“Oh, uh, it was cool. Kind of intense, but you get used to it.” Sure. First time out of the theater. No biggie. “Anyway, uh,
Ruthven was buying clothes for the trowe so, I, uh, picked out yours.” Before she could respond, I grabbed her shirt out of the bag and handed it to her. She held it up and examined it for a moment, then nodded appreciatively. The knot in my chest loosened a little.

“You picked this out?” She sounded surprised.

“Well, uh, this girl helped me.”

“You went shopping with a
human girl
?” Her eyes grew wide. “That’s so amazing!”

“Yeah, I guess. It was—”

“Liel!” Ku’lah’s voice came from inside.

“Listen, I have to get ready for The Show.” Liel put her hand on my upper arm. “But I definitely want to hear more about going outside and the human girl. Stop by the dressing room after the performance tonight.”

“Really?” I tried not to gush.

“Totally! We’ll go to the Cantina and you can tell me the whole thing.”

“Okay, yeah…uh, sure, that sounds awesome!”

“And thanks for the shirt,” she said.

“You like it?” I asked.

“Completely.” She smiled at me, her sharp, bright, perfect teeth gleaming in the halogen lights.

“Great.” I melted into her sparkling, colorless eyes. If I was watching myself, I probably would have been totally disgusted. But I couldn’t help it. She was just so beautiful.

After a moment, I realized I was standing there staring at her like a complete freak. “Oh, uh, here’s the rest of the clothes for the den.” I handed her the bag. “Break a leg tonight. See you after The Show.”

Then I practically sprinted up the stairs.

“WELL?”

Mom loomed in the entrance to our apartment, her misshapen hands resting on her hips, her column of black hair sticking straight up with a white streak on either side. A slight crease along her temples told me that she probably would have been frowning if the stitching on her forehead wasn’t so tight.

“Hi, Mom.” I gave her an innocent smile and tried to slip past. But she pressed her hand against my chest and held me in place.

“Where were you?”

“You weren’t around, so I had to ask Dad.” If she didn’t know yet, she’d find out when she plugged Dad back in that night. Better to hear it now from me.

“Ask him what?”

“I went shopping with Ruthven.”

“Shopping?” she said.
“Outside?”

“Yeah.”

She stared down at me. Her right eye had been giving her problems, and she hadn’t had time to replace it yet, so it looked off somewhere over my left shoulder. But her left eye was piercing.

“Don’t worry. They thought I was human.”

“A real human?”

“Sure,” I said, trying to sound soothing. “They thought I was a human who had been in an accident.”

“An accident?”

“You know. Because of the stitches.”

“And that was it? Just a human with stitches?”

“Pretty much.”

“Ah.”

She stared at me for a moment longer, then turned and walked back into our apartment. It was so hard to read my mom. When Victor Frankenstein had made her, he’d wanted her to look beautiful, like a porcelain doll. But he hadn’t taken function into account at all, so her face was almost completely immobile, frozen in this vaguely surprised look. And she wasn’t really much for talking about her feelings, either. So I couldn’t tell if she was really pissed or relieved that nothing bad had happened. I followed cautiously behind her into the apartment.

Our entire home was about the size of the Diva’s dressing room. The common living area was all one space. In the kitchen section, there were a mismatched refrigerator, stove, and sink, all rebuilt with parts reclaimed from late-night trips to a junkyard. My mom was amazing at fixing and rebuilding things. She didn’t get people. They made her uncomfortable, and she only ever talked to me, Dad, Charon, and when necessary, Ruthven. But she understood gadgets and machines almost like she spoke their language.

In the center of the space was a table big enough to fit the three of us. In the corner was always a small, neat stack of metal and plastic odds and ends salvaged from junk. My mom spent a lot of time trying to assemble these parts into something useful. That was where our television came from, as well as the toaster oven, the stereo, and all my computers. But even though my mom had built all these things, she had zero interest in using them. When Dad and I watched television, she sat and watched us watching the television, as if her only real enjoyment was seeing us enjoy using it.

After my adventures in the real world, I felt like I’d earned some serious computer time.

But then my mom said, “Boy.”

I stopped and looked back at her. She stood over the sink, staring into the drain. She did that a lot. Like she expected to see something in it. The only things I ever saw in the drain were roaches.

“Yeah, Mom?”

“Were you scared? Outside?”

“At first. But after I got used to it, it wasn’t so bad.”

“Wasn’t so bad…” she echoed. “I wonder if it’s changed. Since I was outside.”

“Sure.” I tried to sound encouraging. “You haven’t been out there in over twenty years. I’ll bet the humans have changed a lot.”

She nodded once, slowly, but didn’t say anything else.

There were a lot of creatures in the company, like Shaun and his crew, who just thought of humans as the audience who paid the bills. There were some, like Charon and my dad, who were comfortable with humans but distrusted them. And there were some, like my mom, who totally hated them. I couldn’t really blame her, after what Victor Frankenstein and other humans had done to her and my dad over the years. But I knew it meant she would never understand why I was so interested in them and their world.

MY ROOM WAS crammed with computers. Not all of them worked anymore, and of those that did, not all of them worked well. But I never threw any of them out, because inevitably, Mom or I would find some use for them, either as salvage for spare parts for another computer or as something completely different, like the remote-controlled spotlights for The Show. There wasn’t much else in my room except an unmade bed with camo sheets and an old wooden dresser stuffed with clothes.

I took off my hoodie and nestled down into the heaping mass of electronics. I rolled up my sleeves, then tugged the stitches loose on the undersides of my forearms. I lifted up flaps of skin to expose USB ports just below each of my wrists. Then I pulled out two USB cables that were connected to the back of my favorite computer and plugged them into my wrists. My hands were strong, but my fingers were too thick and clumsy to type with any precision. A few years ago I realized that I could type much faster if I just bypassed my fingers completely. So I wrote a program that decoded neurological impulses and converted them into digital commands. Then Mom helped me install some custom USB ports that connected directly to my nervous system at
the wrists. So all I had to do was think about typing, and the text appeared on the screen.

Well, it would if I
had
a screen.

I pulled a DVI cable from the same computer. I lifted my hair up in the back and screwed the cable into the jack on the back of my head. When I first started using computers, I wore out eyes really quickly staring at monitors all the time. Eyes were relatively easy to replace, but hard to find in good condition. So, since things worked out so well with my USB hand bypasses, I just had my mom install a DVI jack at the base of my cortex and bypassed my eyes, too. Of course, it wasn’t nearly as easy as the USB bypasses. The jack installation took mom several hours to complete. And writing the conversion program was a lot more complex because I had to translate flat, digital binary into straight-up rich analog. It took forever to code, and even once it was done I still had to tweak the color calibration on a regular basis. Still, it saved Ruthven a lot of trips to the morgue for fresh eyes. And, you know, it was just cool that I could interface directly with my computer.

I booted up the PC tower, then leaned back, rested my arms on my thighs, and closed my eyes. I could “see” the computer display in my head and, with just the tiniest twitch of muscles in my forearms, I logged on to the network.

As soon as I started my IRC client, I got slammed with a ton of messages. I guess you could say I was kind of famous within the hacker community. But I wasn’t one of those lame identity theft crackers. Sure, when I was a kid I liked to show off and mess with stuff. But true hacking isn’t about stealing credit card numbers and taking down websites. It’s about figuring out how something works—software, firmware, networks, hardware,
whatever—and then using that knowledge to improve it, to make it better than originally intended. All technological evolution comes out of hacking. It’s the pure pursuit of making things more awesome.

I shut down my chat client and opened my text editor. Then I began to type. My fingers twitched, and letters and numbers flew across the screen in my mind, as I sank into the beautiful simplicity of code, commands, and if/then statements.

I know it might be hard for some people to understand, but code is a lot like poetry, with its own elegance and nuance. I can type out a bunch of boring-looking plain text characters and feed them into a web browser, and they become beautiful designs. Somewhere in that conversion between simplicity and richness, there’s a kind of magic.