Rash

by Hautman, Pete

  The next moment I was standing right in front of them, cold as ice.

  “Bo!” Maddy said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you,” I said, my voice calm and reasonable. “What are you doing?”

  “We’re shopping for hats.”

  “Really?” I looked up at their towering hologrammatic headwear. “Is that what that is? I thought you were being attacked by a raccoon.”

  “You don’t have to be mean about it.”

  “I’m not being mean,” I said. Somehow it came out sounding sarcastic and mean.

  “How come they let you out, Marsten?” said Karlohs. “Aren’t you supposed to be a danger to society?”

  I looked straight into his minky little eyes for the first time. His rash was still faintly visible. “My sentence was suspended. Not that it’s any of your concern.”

  “That’s wonderful, Bo!” Maddy said. “I was so worried about you. We were afraid you’d be sent away.”

  “We thought you’d be on some prison farm by now,” Karlohs said.

  “Prison? Why? Because you used the wrong moisturizer?”

  Maddy’s brow crinkled. “Moisturizer? I don’t understand. . . .”

  “He used some sort of face cream that made his face break out,” I said. “That’s what started the whole rash thing.”

  “Is that true?” she asked Karlohs.

  Karlohs smirked and shrugged and rolled his eyes up. He thought it was funny.

  My belly began to burn, a little hot spot just above my navel. At that moment I wanted more than anything to drive my fist into his smile, right through his face and into his brain. It wasn’t easy to hold it back, but I did. The Levulor helped a little. I thought about my brother, Sam, patching roads in Nebraska. I thought about that orange-lipped judge, and my mother, and how I had to go another three years without a violation. I clamped my jaw shut and buried my balled fists in my pockets and looked away. I would not let Karlohs bait me.

  Maddy said, “Did you use your mother’s rosemary moisturizer again, Karlohs?”

  “I might have.”

  “But . . . you know you’re allergic to rosemary! You break out in an instant! Why would you do such a thing?”

  Why? Maddy’s words echoed and spun in my mind. Karlohs was allergic to rosemary—and he knew it? And how did Maddy know that? How much time had she been spending with him? Allergic to rosemary? If he knew he was allergic to rosemary, why would he apply rosemary face cream? I looked again at Karlohs’s smirking face. Suspicion became certainty.

  “You did it on purpose,” I said, the hot spot in my gut growing.

  Karlohs grinned at me. I had a furnace roaring behind my rib cage. My fists were so tight they felt like steel clubs at the ends of my arms. I held it all in, thinking about my father beheading shrimp for three years. My brother patching tarmac.

  My mouth said, “You smeared that stuff on your face just to get me in trouble.”

  “Did I?” Karlohs said, raising his eyebrows.

  Maybe it was my destiny to follow in my father’s footsteps. Maybe there was nothing I could do about it. Maybe it would be worth it.

  Maddy stepped between us. “Cut it out, you guys.”

  The locks and harnesses and chains of self-control snapped, one after another, like Frankenstein’s monster breaking loose from his bonds. Karlohs saw it happening. His eyes widened and his smirking mouth went round like a dog-anus farting, and the fireball inside me blew past the velvet chains of Levulor. I was free.

  I swept Maddy aside and swung my right fist up and forward with all my strength. Karlohs saw it coming; he jerked his head back and my knuckles brushed the side of his jaw. I heard screams. I stepped into him and swung again, but he deflected the blow with his hands. More screams and shouts, muffled by the sound of my own ragged breathing and my thumping pulse. I caught a glimpse of Maddy staring at me, a look of horror on her doll-like features. I moved in on Karlohs and brought my fist back, determined to bury it in his face.

  The stun dart from the ASP unit drilled into the back of my neck: a sharp prick becoming a spinning knot of numbness. My hands fell to my sides and opened, weighing a thousand pounds each. Karlohs’s face receded, growing smaller. I turned slowly on my heel and Maddy’s face oozed into view, huge and soft and wide-eyed.

  “Maddy,” I said, my voice barbaric and raw.

  She was backing up, eyes wide with fear. Fear of me.

  “Maaaaddddeeee!” My voice was a distant bubbling howl, a siren heard through rushing water. The whirlpool at the base of my skull was sucking me in. It grabbed me and spun me, and the world went away.

  Gramps insisted that we consult a real lawyer. He and my mother had put up all their V-bucks to bail me out, so he sold his vintage DVD collection to pay for a visit to a lawyer. We drove our suv downtown to the offices of Smirch, Spector, and Krebs. Gramps used his V-buck card to open the door. The initial consultation fee—V$19,995—was instantly deducted from his account. I figured that pretty much wiped out his profits from the DVDs. We were escorted down the hall to the office of Adrian Smirch.

  Smirch was supposed to be a very good lawyer. One thing for sure—he was highly efficient. It took him only three minutes to review my file. He looked up from his WindO with a broad smile and said he could get me off with a three-month sentence.

  “Three months isn’t so bad,” I said.

  “How much?” Gramps asked.

  “I’ll have my associates work up a quote,” Smirch said.

  All the way home Gramps grumbled about the cost of the consultation. “Five lousy minutes for twenty grand. It’s obscene!”

  When we got home, the quote from Smirch, Spector, and Krebs was waiting for us on the kitchen WindO: V$1,750,000.

  “That’s a lot of V-bucks,” I said.

  “Too goddamn many,” said Gramps, cracking open a beer. “I’m sorry, Bo. Back in my day you could hire one of these shysters for a couple hundred grand. It looks like you’re on your own.”

  “We could take out a loan against the house,” my mother said.

  “Even then,” Gramps said, “we couldn’t afford it.”

  I spent the next three days at home plunging around on the web looking for things to take my mind off my approaching court date. It was hard to focus on my schoolwork, since I probably wouldn’t be around to graduate. But I did spend quite a bit of time working with Bork. I explained my situation to him in excruciating detail. The concepts of jealousy, fear, and anger made his irises spin. Based on the length of time he spent processing, the concept of lying was even more puzzling.

  “Do you mean your human Karlohs applied a damaging compound to his epidermis, and then provided incorrect data regarding the resulting inflammation?” Bork asked.

  “Yes. He lied.”

  “He made a mistake.”

  “No. He lied. Intentionally.”

  “Then you are mistaken.”

  “I am not mistaken.”

  “You are computing from corrupted data,” Bork said. “You must therefore be incorrect in your conclusions.”

  “No. That is wrong.”

  “I disagree.”

  “Bork, I am giving you new programming. Are you ready?”

  “Yes, Bo.”

  “Program: Everything that I tell you is true.”

  “Accepted.”

  “Program: Sometimes I am mistaken.”

  “Accepted.”

  “Program: Just because I am mistaken does not mean that I am wrong.”

  “Wrong as in ethics or wrong as in contrary to observable fact?”

  “Both.”

  “Accepted.”

  “Program: Sometimes I lie to you.”

  “Accepted.”

  “Program: I love you.”

  “Accepted.”

  “Program: I hate you.”

  “Accepted.”

  “End programming.”

  I watched his irises spin. Was it possible to drive an AI program
insane? After a few minutes I logged off, leaving Bork adrift in c-space, thinking impossible thoughts.

  The next morning I logged on and found Bork right where I had left him, spinning away. His avatar had corrupted—he was getting fuzzy around the edges and his nose ring had melted. Should I rescue him? I decided to let him work out his problems for himself. The crash-or-burn school of AI development. He would either fly apart into random bits of data or transmogrify into some new version of himself.

  Later that afternoon Mom and Gramps and I drove back down to the courthouse. The plan was simple. Since I couldn’t afford a lawyer, I once again threw myself on the mercy of the FDHHSS court.

  I didn’t expect anyone other than the judge to be there, but I was wrong. They had assembled several witnesses, including Mr. Lipkin, riding high in his Roland Survivor, and Maddy Wilson. And, sitting next to her, Karlohs Mink. I had to listen as each of them yammered on and on about my so-called violent history. The judge—a kindly-looking man with white hair—looked both shocked and sympathetic as Maddy told the court about the bee-sting incident, and how I’d said I wanted to smash Karlohs’s face in, and what had happened at the mall.

  Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “Nobody got hurt,” I said.

  Everyone turned to look at me.

  “I didn’t actually hurt anybody,” I said, in case they didn’t get it the first time.

  The judge cleared his throat. “Mr. Marsten, you will have your opportunity to address the court in due course.”

  “But everybody’s making it sound like I’m this crazed animal. It wasn’t like that. And nobody got hurt! Nothing happened.”

  “One more word and you will be removed from the courtroom,” said the judge.

  So I had to sit and listen to Maddy, and then Karlohs, who made me sound even worse than Maddy had. After they had finished dragging my name through the mud, the judge called me forward and let me speak.

  I told him everything. I told him about how Karlohs had started the whole thing by intentionally giving himself a rash, and how I’d accidentally forgotten to take my Levulor a couple of times, and how Karlohs had deliberately tried to provoke me, and how it was just one time—one time!—that I’d actually tried to hit him and my fist had only grazed his jaw, and you could see just by looking at his smirking minky face that I hadn’t hurt him.

  And all the time I was talking, Karlohs was staring at me with this minky sminky smile on his face. It was all I could do to not charge across the courtroom and wipe it off him.

  The judge listened carefully to my side of the story, nodding and shaking his head sympathetically at all the right places. Of course, I promised to behave myself until the end of time. He thanked me for being so honest and straightforward. He said he understood how a guy could lose control for one brief moment, and he said he believed me when I said it would never happen again.

  When the judge left the courtroom to make his decision, I felt pretty good about the way things had gone. I figured I’d get off with two or three months at a local work camp. No big deal.

  After all, nobody got seriously bonked, and nothing, really, had happened.

  PART TWO

  the 3-8-7

  The pilot came in low and circled the compound a couple of times to give us all a good look. There wasn’t much to see, and that was the point. Twelve huge flat-topped buildings surrounded by a metal fence, and beyond that only treeless brownish green tundra. Far to the east, maybe twenty or thirty miles away, we could see a small town huddled up against the lead gray waters of Hudson Bay.

  “There it is, boys. Number three-eight-seven, the jewel of the north,” said our FDHHSS escort. “Up here they don’t even bother to put razor wire on the fence. They let the polar bears take care of anybody decides to take a walk.”

  “Are there really polar bears out there?” asked a stocky afro kid.

  “They’re out there.”

  “Polar bears are extinct,” I said. I thought I’d read that somewhere.

  “There’re still a few,” the escort said.

  “You’re just trying to scare us,” said the afro kid.

  “Take a look for yourself,” said the escort, pointing out the right-hand side of the airplane.

  All of us strapped into the right-hand seats looked out the windows. Just outside the fence, at the end of the airstrip, were four huge dingy yellow brown creatures standing around a pile of something red and brown.

  “Polar bears are supposed to be white,” I said.

  “Not these bears,” the escort said.

  “How do we know they’re real?”

  The escort laughed. “You’ll know they’re real when they rip your arm off, kid.”

  Ever since the USSA annexed Canada during the Diplomatic Wars of 2055, McDonald’s Rehabilitation and Manufacturing has been moving their factories north. They have about 200 plants in Ontario alone, making everything from cheap survival chairs to synthetic chocolate to walking helmets to suvs. I had no idea what I’d be doing.

  According to Gramps, McDonald’s used to only sell food, back when French fries were legal. But in the 2020s, they merged with a suv company called General Motors under the name the McMotor Corporation of America. A few years later, McMotor was bought by a Chinese company called Wal-Martong. In 2031, during the Pan-Pacific conflict, Wal-Martong was nationalized and privatized by the USSA government and renamed the McDonald’s Rehabilitation and Manufacturing Corporation.

  I guess I learned something in school after all. For all the good it would do me. For the next three years, I would be a worker drone for McDonald’s. They would use me however they saw fit, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  The pilot circled again and brought us in for a landing. The bears looked up as the plane passed them. We came so close I could see the red stains on their faces and paws.

  “What are they eating?” I asked.

  “Same thing you’ll be eating, kid. Leftovers.”

  The first thing I noticed when I stepped off the plane was the smell of garlic, oregano, and cooked tomatoes. The tundra smelled like an Italian restaurant.

  “They’re all yours, gentlemen,” said the FDHHSS escort as he turned us over to four stone-faced, blue-uniformed guards with stun batons.

  The guards herded us along a narrow walkway protected by chain-link fence on either side, then through a set of gates and out onto a field of trampled brown grass and dried mud. One side of the field was bounded by the metal wall of one of the windowless factory buildings. On the other side was a twelve-foot-tall chain-link fence that surrounded the entire compound. The guards lined us up against the fence, instructed us to stay where we were, then walked back across the field to stand in the shelter of the building.

  A chilly wind swirled around us and cut through our thin shirts. None of us were warmly dressed. We hadn’t been told we were being sent halfway to the North Pole.

  We were a motley crew. There were browns, whites, and every-shade-in-betweens. One kid was the largest human being I had ever seen. He was average height, but he must have weighed at least 400 pounds. All we had in common was that we were all male, all teenagers, and all guilty of crimes against society. And everybody was carrying a ton of bad attitude. You would think that since we were all in the same rotten situation, we’d try to get along, but instead we exchanged tough-guy stares.

  I ended up standing next to the fat kid. He was so bulbous his arms wouldn’t hang straight down at his sides. He kept shifting and bumping his hand against my arm. I got tired of that real fast. The next time he did it, I slapped his hand away.

  “Hey!” he said, looking at me through little red pig eyes.

  “Keep your hands to yourself, Chunko,” I said.

  The kid stared at me so long and with such red-eyed intensity I began to get a little worried. He really was enormous. But I figured I could always outrun him. When I couldn’t stand his staring anymore, I left the lineup and walked over to ask the gua
rds what was going on.

  “Hey,” I said, “how long you gonna make us stand out here?”

  One of the guards smiled and jabbed his baton into my belly. I fell gasping to the hard-packed turf.

  “Any more questions, asshole?” one of the guards asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Then get your punk ass back in line.”

  I staggered back to the fence, clutching my gut. The fat kid didn’t say anything, but he had a little smile on his face.

  More minutes passed. The pain in my belly eased, but the shivering increased. We were hugging ourselves and stamping our feet to stay warm. My teeth started to chatter. I thought that only happened in cartoons.

  I don’t know how long they left us out there. It probably wasn’t more than twenty minutes, but it felt like hours. Finally we heard the sound of an engine. A six-wheel atv came skidding around the corner of the building and rolled up between us and the guards.

  A man wearing insulated coveralls with the McDonald’s logo on the front climbed off the atv. He was a big man—tall, broad-shouldered, and thick-necked, with bristly white hair, black eyebrows, and a red face. His hands were big and red too. The only thing small about him were the deformed, shapeless lumps of cartilage he had for ears, and his tiny blue eyes. He walked slowly down the line, pausing in front of each of us individually, looking us up and down, then moving on. I had the distinct impression that we were a disappointment to him.

  When he had finished his inspection, he stood back and crossed his thick arms over his massive chest.

  “My name is Hammer,” he said in a deep, hoarse voice. “You are my nails. Do you think you can remember that, nails?”

  Most of us nodded.

  “You get out of line, Hammer pounds you down. When Hammer speaks, you listen. When Hammer tells you to do something, you jump. If you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions about the way I run my plant, feel free to keep your thoughts to yourselves. Now, are there any questions?”