Rash

by Hautman, Pete

  For three heartbeats I stared at the angry red spot growing in the center of my palm, then Maddy screamed, and I took off running, holding my hand tight to my belly, throbbing with pain and shame.

  My mother pried my fist open and sucked in her breath. “Oh, Bo,” she said.

  I hated it when she said that. Oh, Bo. I loved it when Maddy said it, but I hated to hear it from my mother.

  My hand was on fire. It was the worst pain I had ever felt in my life. I was glad that wild honeybees were almost extinct.

  “Oh, Bo,” she said again. “You’ve left the stinger in.” She found the tiny bulbous end of the bee stinger and, using tweezers, plucked it from my palm.

  “It still hurts,” I said.

  “We’ll put some baking soda on it.” Any normal mother would have called an ambulance, but not my mother. She’d rather give me one of her witch-doctor cures.

  “What if I’m allergic?” I said. “I could die.”

  “You’re not allergic to bees, Bo.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because if you were, you’d already be swollen like a blimp.”

  She was mixing a paste of baking soda and water when Gramps shuffled into the kitchen.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I got attacked by a bee,” I said.

  My mother pressed a tablespoon of cool white paste into my palm, then wrapped it with tape. The sharp pain eased to an uncomfortable throbbing.

  Gramps said, “Where? On your hand? Whatcha do, take a swat at it?”

  “No. It just stung me.”

  “Ha! Likely story! Bees don’t sting for fun, y’know.” He opened the refrigerator, reached into the back, and came out with a bottle of his home brew. “I oughta know. I been stung lots of times.”

  “Take this, Bo.” My mother handed me a glass of water and a small white pill.

  “What is it?”

  “Aspirin.”

  “I don’t have a prescription.”

  “I’m prescribing it for you right now.”

  Obediently I swallowed the pill. Another law broken. We Marstens were scofflaws all.

  I decided to not mention my little problem with the FDHHSS. My mother would find out about it soon enough—if she hadn’t been notified already. Maybe she wouldn’t check her WindO for a day or so—Mom was pretty lax about things like that.

  Dinner at the Marstens’ was a crazy generational triangle. My mother always had her line of quiet chatter going, aiming it straight into my left ear: what she did that day, how many more months Dad was going to be beheading shrimp, the precarious state of the family credit lines, and so forth.

  Meanwhile, Gramps would be broadcasting his own conversational thread, usually something about when he was a kid, his voice booming in my right ear.

  As for me, I never had much to say, and even if I did I probably couldn’t get a word in edgewise. So I used the time to practice what I call stereophonic listening.

  Left ear: Our Visa representative thinks we’ll be able to borrow seven thousand V-bucks a month against Al’s prison wages.

  Right ear: What the hell ever happened to real money? Use to be people only spent what money they earned. Nowadays it’s all Visa bucks. Used to be money was something you could fold and put in your pocket.

  Left: Al says one of the men on his shift sliced off his own thumb. Can you imagine? All those knives!

  Right: Wasn’t a kid in my school didn’t have a pocketknife or two at home. Guns, too. All illegal now.

  Left: I just thank God you’re still here, Bo. I swear there’s a curse on the men in this family.

  Right: One time we went out, me and Pops, drove all the way to South Dakota and bagged nine pheasants. Shot three of ’em myself.

  Left: I just wish your brother would write more often.

  Right: South Dakota. I bet they got a ton of pheasants there now, with hunting illegal.

  Left: Last time he wrote, he said they had his crew doing roadwork west of Omaha. I do hope they’re not making him work too hard. Poor Sam, out there on that highway, trucks rushing past. . . . I worry about him.

  Right: Nebraska? They use to have lots a pheasants too . . .

  I made a game out of trying to find the places where their conversations intersected. Sometimes they could go the entire meal without really connecting.

  The next morning I woke up feeling pretty good. That lasted about three seconds. Then I remembered arguing with Maddy, getting stung, the report Lipkin was filing with the FDHHSS, and the existence of Karlohs Mink. My stomach started to hurt.

  I considered taking a sick day. Gramps claimed he used to skip school all the time by faking stomach pains. My pains were real. But if I complained, I’d have to visit our local Philip Morris Wellness Center to get a Certificate of Health before they’d let me back into school. I hated Philip Morris. The lines were long, and it would mean another V$900 charge to our family Visa account.

  I’ve never understood why anybody would want to become a health-care worker, but there must be something to it, because one third of all non-incarcerated adults in the USSA are employed by the health-care industry. Philip Morris Wellness Centers is the second largest employer in the nation, right after McDonald’s Rehabilitation and Manufacturing, the company that runs most of the prison farms, factories, and restaurants.

  I forced myself out of bed, took a quick antibacterial shower, and got ready to face the day. My pill dispenser was beeping, telling me to take my Levulor. I silenced the dispenser. I had taken a pill yesterday afternoon in Lipkin’s office, so I figured I could skip my morning dose. It’s not like I turn into a monster without it.

  I bumped into Karlohs, literally, on the way into my first class, Language Arts. We both tried to go through the door at the same time and smacked shoulders.

  “Hey,” he said. “Careful!”

  I leaned close to his ear. “Careful yourself, ass mouth,” I whispered. I guess yesterday’s Levulor had already worn off.

  Karlohs jerked away from me, almost losing his balance. His face turned red and his dog-anus lips writhed. I knew it was stupid of me to attack him like that, but at the time I didn’t know how stupid.

  I took a seat near the front so I wouldn’t have to look at Karlohs. Mr. Peterman, older even than Gramps, sat at his desk up front reading an old paperbook called Brave New World.

  We were studying the “novel,” a twentieth-century media format that nobody under the age of sixty cares about anymore. Novels are long documents containing nothing but page after page of black font on a white background: no photos, no graphics, no animations, no audio. Gramps had a whole bookcase full of them in paperbook form. He once tried to get me to read one called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I tried but couldn’t make any sense of it. The paper pages felt strange and dry and crisp and like they were sucking all the moisture from my fingertips. Later I found out that the book was banned, so it was just as well I never read it.

  The novel we were reading for Mr. Peterman’s class was called Harry Potter and the Power Stone, an abridged and updated version of a book that was popular in the late twentieth century. Gramps claimed to have read it when he was eight years old. He said it was better back then. It had had a different title, and in the original version some characters actually died.

  I opened my WindO. Chapter five of Harry Potter snapped into view. Black type, white background. I fiddled with the controls until I got a fuchsia font on a pea green background. A Sam Q. Safety popup appeared in the upper left corner:

  Sam Q. Safety was a benign Artificial Intelligence created back in 2064 by an FDHHSS ad agency. It had been designed to self-extinguish after six weeks, but the program mutated and became a webghost. Now anybody who uses a WindO, which is pretty much everybody, gets about a dozen messages from him every day. It’s irritating, to say the least. The government has a bounty out on him—anyone who can come up with a way to eliminate Sammy Q. from the web will get paid V$10,000,000. So far nobody’s
had much luck. Webghosts are notoriously difficult to exterminate.

  Matt Gelman, sitting at the desk next to me, leaned over and said, “Hey, Bo, take a look at Karlohs.”

  “Why?”

  “Just look.”

  I turned around and searched the hall for Karlohs’s smirky face. There were about 120 students in the class, so it took me a few seconds to pick him out. There, three rows back, on the right.

  Karlohs’s face looked as if he’d been stung by a dozen angry bees.

  “What happened to him?” I asked Matt.

  “I don’t know, but I’m not getting anywhere near him,” Matt said.

  Karlohs was rubbing his cheek with long, pale fingers. Some of the students sitting near him got up from their desks and moved away. Mr. Peterman noticed the disturbance. He closed his book, stood up, and squinted in Karlohs’s direction.

  “What seems to be the problem?” he asked. He moved closer to Karlohs. “What have you got on your face, son?”

  Karlohs’s hands went to his cheeks. “What do you mean?” The spots on his face seemed to get brighter. “What are you looking at?”

  More students were getting up and moving away from Karlohs.

  Mr. Peterman leaned closer, frowning, then straightened abruptly and returned to his desk. He typed something into his WindO. Karlohs was on his feet, his hands crawling over his face.

  “What’s wrong?” he said, his voice going all high and scared. Everybody was backing away from him, staring with expressions of horror and disgust.

  “Now, Karlohs, there’s nothing to worry about,” said Mr. Peterman, who looked about as worried as a person can look. “I’ve called Safety and Health. Please remain calm.”

  Karlohs was anything but calm. He jumped out from behind his desk and ran to the back of the room, where a small mirror was mounted on the wall. He stared into the mirror and made a croaking sound, then whirled and pointed his finger at me.

  “You!” he screeched. “You did this to me. It’s your fault!”

  “Me?” I said.

  “Bo Marsten did this,” he said to Mr. Peterman. “Bo did this to me!”

  “Karlohs, please take your seat.”

  “It was Bo!” Karlohs said. And suddenly instead of gaping at Karlohs’s speckled face, everybody was looking at me.

  And I started to get really bonked. Anger welled up like an old-fashioned toilet about to overflow. I could feel it slow down when it hit the Levulor—instead of rushing across the room and jumping on Karlohs’s head, I stood and pointed my finger at him.

  “That’s right,” I said. “I made your face break out. I secretly sprayed chicken pox germs on you, Mink. You better watch out or next time I’ll dust you with bubonic plague.”

  I thought I was being funny and ironic, but everybody in the classroom was staring at me as if I’d grown antlers.

  “Just kidding,” I said.

  A few seconds later two masked medtechs arrived and escorted Karlohs out of the classroom.

  The insanely dangerous antics of Harry Potter seemed tame after that. All through class, kids were glancing at me, and at one another, looking for red spots. We were all glad to leave the room when class was over.

  By the time I reached Artificial Intelligence, my second class of the day, word of Karlohs’s affliction had spread throughout the school.

  “What did you do to him?” Matt Gelman asked me.

  “Nothing!” I said.

  Melodia Fairweather, one of the pre-med crowd, suggested it might have been an allergic reaction.

  “What about smallpox?” said Halston Mabuto, another pre-med student.

  “The smallpox virus has been extinct for a century,” Melodia said. “And we’ve all been vaccinated for measles and chicken pox.”

  “What about acne?” I asked, naming an old disease of teens I’d read about but never actually seen.

  “I was there,” Halston said. “The spots appeared just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Acne wouldn’t show up so fast.”

  “Maybe it’s something new,” I said. “The Red-Speckled Doom.”

  “That’s not funny, Bo,” Melodia said.

  Matt said, “I’ll tell you what I saw. Bo here said something to Karlohs before class, and Karlohs turned all red, like he was embarrassed, or mad, y’know? Then, fifteen minutes later, these red bumps showed up all over his face.”

  “What did you say to him?” Melodia asked me.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Did you touch him?” Halston asked, edging away from me.

  “No!” They were all looking at me. “I had nothing to do with it,” I said.

  “People!” Mr. Hale, our AI coach, stood up from his workstation and raised his voice. “Only four more weeks to prepare your AIs for the Turing test. Let’s get busy!”

  I was glad for once to get to my work cube. I opened my WindO and typed in my AI code. A cartoon monkey wearing a beanie with a gold propeller appeared on my screen.

  “Hello, Bork,” I said.

  “Hello, Bo Marsten,” Bork said in a voice that sounded very much like a mechanical monkey might sound if mechanical monkeys could talk. “How are you feeling?”

  “Not great.”

  “This information is not new. You have never been great.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “You are welcome.”

  “I was being sarcastic.”

  “Why were you using language intended to express contempt or ridicule?”

  “Because you look like a monkey.”

  “This information is not new.”

  Bork is my AI program. He is not very smart.

  “What would you like to talk about today, Bork?” I asked.

  Bork’s face froze and his propeller began to spin. He always had trouble with open-ended questions. I waited and watched his prop slowly rotate.

  Our goal in AI is to build an intelligent personality using a small section of the school’s central computer. Each student is given a few million megs of memory and access to enough of the central processor to perform several trillion operations a second. In theory, enough power to create an AI personality sufficiently intelligent to pass the Turing test.

  “Answer me, Bork.”

  “I do not know the answer to your question, Bo,” said Bork.

  “I was stung by a bee yesterday.”

  “Venomous communal insect. Painful. Careless.”

  “Answer in sentence form, please.”

  “How are you feeling, Bo?

  “Not great.”

  “This information is not new. You have never been great.”

  “Vary your response, please.”

  “I regret to inform you that you are not great.”

  Back in the early days of computers there was much discussion as to whether machines could ever become truly intelligent. A man named Alan Turing proposed a test. He said that if a machine could have a conversation with a human and convince him that it was also a human being, then it had proven itself to be intelligent. By Turing’s measure, we’ve had intelligent machines for more than forty years. What we were trying to do in AI class was coax a relatively small, basic program into self-aware intelligence by teaching it as you would teach a child.

  At the end of the six-week section, our programs would be evaluated by the school computer’s primary AI personality. In other words an AI intelligence would decide which of our classroom AI creations were best able to pass as human. I made the mistake of trying to explain that to Gramps one time. He laughed so hard I thought he was having a seizure.

  With two weeks to go I didn’t think Bork had much chance of making it as a phony human, but I kept trying.

  “Give me three human responses to the following question: What makes you happy?”

  “I am happy when I am joyful. I am happy when my avatar smiles. I am happy when I feel great pleasure.”

  “You are not great,” I said to the grinning monkey.

  “This inform
ation is not new.”

  “Tell me something. Do you—”

  The monkey’s face flickered, the propeller stopped turning, and Bork said, “Bo Marsten, please report immediately to Mr. Lipkin at Security, Safety, and Health.”

  This time Lipkin didn’t make me wait.

  “Bo Marsten, what have you done?” His face was bright pink. His Roland Survivor was probably pumping all sorts of drugs into him, trying to lower his blood pressure and heart rate.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Karlohs Mink is in the hospital wing under observation.”

  “I heard he had an acne outbreak.”

  “Acne? I think not, young man. He has some sort of rash, which I understand appeared only moments after you exchanged words with him in your Language Arts class.”

  I felt myself relax a notch. If the security mikes had picked up what I’d actually said to Karlohs, Lipkin would’ve quoted it back to me.

  “We bumped into each other in the doorway. I just said ‘Excuse me.’”

  Lipkin glowered at me. “I think you are mistaken,” he said. “This will be appended to my FDHHSS report, of course.”

  “Is Karlohs okay?”

  “He is being examined.” Lipkin was almost back to his normal pasty color. “He is a sensitive boy, Mr. Marsten. Unlike some of our students.”

  I didn’t say anything to that, and after glaring at me for a few seconds, he let me return to class. But I knew there would be more to come.

  “Hello, Bo Marsten. How are you feeling?”

  “Not great. What’s new, Borkmeister?”

  Bork’s face went blank as he thought about that. I used the time to peek into the next cubicle to see how my neighbor was doing.

  Keesha White’s AI image looked like a straight-haired, thinner version of herself. Most students do not create cartoon monkeys. Instead they make an idealized self-portrait of themselves. That’s supposed to make it easier to create a bond with the AI personality. I tried it back at the beginning of the semester, but it was too creepy talking to myself, so I changed my avatar into a beanie-wearing monkey.