Man Made Boy (8 page)

“Frank.”

She stopped stirring. “Shut up, really?”

“Yep.”

Her real smile came out. “Oh my God, that is so ridiculous!” She reached out and squeezed my forearm. She probably didn’t even notice, but whenever she did something like that, I melted inside.

“How come the boss isn’t funny like that all the time?” she asked.

“I don’t know. He was definitely a little different out there. A little more…I don’t know. Open, I guess. Like a real person.”

“Seriously, Boy.” Her hand was still on my forearm. “It is really awesome that you got to do something like that.”

“Yeah.” I stared into her eyes and soaked up the heat from her hand on my arm. “I just—”

“Oh, shit, what do we have here?!” Shaun’s voice came from directly behind me.

Liel’s hand immediately let go of my arm and slipped under the table. She leaned back, a weird, trapped look on her face.

“I didn’t know they served motor oil at the Cantina,” said Ernesto’s squeaky voice.

I turned slowly in my chair. Shaun the Faun stood there with his tanned, muscular arms folded across his chest. Ernesto stood on his shoulder in almost the exact same pose. He was flanked on either side by Aello and Celaeno, the harpy sisters. Oob wasn’t allowed in the Cantina.

“Oh, hey, guys!” said Liel, like she was glad to see them.

“You tired of listening to Robo-geek talk about computer stuff?” asked Shaun. “We’re getting a card game going in the corner booth.”

I stood up slowly, staring at the smirk on Shaun’s pretty-boy face. A hot, thick anger boiled up inside me. I thought about my new resolution not to be such a good Boy. My hand balled up into a fist.

But then Liel said, “Oh, that sounds like fun!” She jumped to her feet and moved over to him, like she couldn’t wait to get away from me. Shaun led her and his entourage over to the corner booth. I stood there, watching them settle in. Liel laughed at something Shaun said and punched him playfully on the shoulder.

Seeing that squashed the anger out of me. Had I really convinced myself that I had a chance with Liel against someone like Shaun? And then I was going to start a fight in the Cantina, make my family look like the big, dumb robots everybody thought we were?

“Are you still here?” asked Meadow, or Sequoia, or Iris, or whoever the hell it was. She wasn’t all smiling and perky now.

“Was I ever?” I asked.

She pursed her lips like she’d just eaten something bad. “Huh?”

“Never mind,” I said. Then I walked out of the Cantina.

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.

“Boy. Come eat.” It was Mom.

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.