Dustin felt his lungs constricting. It took effort for him to say, “This is temporary, right? It's just till things patch together?"
She slumped. “If it makes you feel better to believe that, sure."
In the empty time after she left, Dustin pushed the send button repeatedly, not really looking at the monitor, even when he got a good shot of the new star. He saved the image mechanically. No planet. Send. Send. Send.
A half hour later, Dad delivered almost the same speech, except it was an apartment with a great view of the mountains.
* * * *
Dustin had lined the double-A batteries on his desk like bullets. Every couple of hours he popped two used ones out of the Peek-a-boo. Spent casings, he thought. They dropped to the carpet.
His hands trembled on the keyboard. He swallowed dryly. Somewhere around this star, maybe, circled a planet the same distance from its star as Earth. He'd found the system's Jupiter about eleven PM. So many systems had a Jupiter, an oversized lump of a planet, always about the same distance from the center. Star system evolution turned out to be remarkably similar, time after time. Many stars formed planets, and they formed them in about the same way, and it was because of their Jupiters that the inner planets were shielded. Jupiters inhaled planet-busting comets and shepherded the loose debris into tidy orbits that would otherwise careen about unchecked. But the inner planets were so much smaller. The giant planets protected, but they also overwhelmed with their size and strength. They distracted.
Where was the tiny glimmer of the inner planets? Dustin fine-tuned the coordinates, kicking the Peek-a-boo from one side of the star to the other, always taking a half-dozen pictures from one coordinate before shifting again. Even at the same coordinates, though, the unit might appear millions of miles from the last spot. A three-dimensional graph of the appearances would eventually surround a location, but there was no fine control. He could only keep trying.
At three in the morning, the Peek-a-boo felt slick and cool under his fingers. A twitch on the keyboard sent it out again. Stars appeared on the monitor. “Thank you for participating.” He sent it out again. The Peek-a-boo never failed him. It always came back (but Slade's hadn't!). Graveyard silence filled the house. Out the window, clouds covered the night sky, so all he saw was his own shimmery image, like he was someone else: a small boy's spirit, his elbows planted on his ghost desk in a ghost world looking at his ghost computer. Dustin almost waved, but something stirred behind him in the reflection. He was too tired to be startled. Standing at the door, illuminated by the monitor's faint light, his dad in pajamas looked in. His face had no color, no life, and two shadowed pits marked where his eyes should have been. Dad leaned against the doorjamb, watching Dustin, or he might have been looking beyond him, or his eyes could have been closed. The pose held for a marble moment.
Dustin blinked, and the apparition was gone. Had he really seen him? A few seconds later, the stairs creaked; Dad going down.
For a hundred heartbeats, Dustin stared at his reflection, and then through the ghost boy to the maple tree he couldn't see, and beyond that to the clouds that covered the stars, and through them to the stars themselves, trying to understand. Dad had appeared and disappeared without a sound except the squeak on the stair. Everything done in silence. No noise that Dustin didn't make himself in the perpetually quiet house. He pressed the send button again, and the key's cricket click seemed big in the muffling stillness.
The image of himself in the glass and the wavery memory of his dad behind him defined Dustin's universe. Nothing else existed. Then a new image began forming on his monitor from the top down. Not black. Yellow from side to side, like candle flame. Not a starscape. Not even a distant planet hovering in the velvet abyss. On the screen's left side, a corner of something red appeared. A straight line built toward the screen's bottom, and then an orange sphere formed on the screen's right side. The computer pinged three times. A new popup message flashed across the image: “DO NOT TOUCH YOUR PEEK-A-BOO OR TURN OFF YOUR COMPUTER!” At the same time, his phone rang. A second later, his cell phone, recharging on the nightstand, chimed for attention.
Dustin jerked back. Who could be calling at three in the morning? They'd wake his parents! He picked up the phone. A recorded announcement said, “This is a Peek-a-boo priority communication. Information from your Peek-a-boo unit indicates a unique contact. Please do not attempt to send your Peek-a-boo device out again or switch programs on your computer. Representatives from Peek-a-boo will communicate with you immediately.... This is a Peek-a-boo priority communication...."
Dad's voice interrupted. “What have you done, Dustin? Do you know what time it is?"
Mom said sleepily over the phone, “What is going on? What is going on?"
The image finished forming on the monitor behind the popup message. Dustin hesitated, the phone still to his ear. “Please do not attempt to send your Peek-a-boo device out again or switch programs on your computer,” repeated the voice. Dustin closed the popup window; the screen glowed yellow, orange, and red in crisp lines and shapes.
“I didn't do anything,” he said. “I don't know."
“I'm coming up,” said Dad.
The stairs creaked beneath his mom's slippered feet.
Mom arrived first, then Dad. They gathered behind his chair.
Dad said, “Why are they calling you in the middle of the night?"
“I don't know, Dad. Something about this.” He gestured toward the monitor.
Mom said, “Is that a screensaver?"
In the distance, a police car siren sounded, coming closer.
Dustin's face flushed, the phone still in his hand, repeating the message over and over. “No, my Peek-a-boo took it."
“What is it?” Dad leaned over Dustin's shoulder. The upper half of the monitor showed colored shapes in sharp geometry. A mottled grey and yellow texture filled the bottom half, but all the angles were skewed so the image seemed to be sliding off the screen's left side.
The siren turned onto Dustin's street, its flashing blue and red lights reflecting off the neighborhood trees until the car parked in his driveway. The siren wailed to silence, and a few seconds later, a heavy knocking came from the front door.
His parents looked at Dustin first, and then toward the pounding downstairs. “Don't touch your computer, son,” said Dad.
Another car without a siren or flashing lights pulled into the driveway. Doors opened. Voices jumbled together outside.
Minutes later, his room full of strangers, Dustin sat on his bed's edge and said, “I just kept sending it out.” An earnest older man whose shirt was tucked in on only one side wrote Dustin's comment in a notebook.
“Had you seen a planet on that coordinate earlier?” he asked. Dustin shook his head. At Dustin's desk, two women, one in a bathrobe, and the other in a nice pantsuit, whispered vehemently back and forth about the image. “We'll need his hard drive. It could be a fake,” Pantsuit said. “I don't see how,” replied Bathrobe.
A man in uniform, but definitely not a policeman, carefully rolled Dustin's Peek-a-boo into a plastic bag that zipped closed when the unit plopped to the bottom.
From the hallway, Mom's voice said, “He's always been a determined boy."
Dad said, “So, you think he really found something, do you?” His tone was skeptical.
Someone in the hallway said, “He'll be famous."
“Look at this,” said Bathrobe. She moved the cursor to the menu bar at the top of the screen. A few clicks later, the image reoriented itself. Now the grey and yellow texture moved to the top and became sky. Dustin blinked, then blinked again. What had seemed abstract before suddenly made sense. “Is that...” he said, and swallowed. “Is that a building?"
Pantsuit pointed to what had been a red blob before, “Yes, and that looks like a tree to me...” she bent close to the screen, “...with a park bench under it. It's only a yellow slab on what appears to be concrete legs, but what else could it be used for?"
/> “I don't believe it,” said Bathrobe, in a voice that made it clear she did.
The older man sitting on the bed with Dustin said to himself, “It's such a big universe. What are the odds a Peek-a-boo would appear close enough to a planet's surface, oriented just the right way, to take a picture of a park bench?"
Bathrobe said, “A park bench 380 million light years from Earth."
* * * *
Dustin lay in his bed. The clouds had cleared, and early dawn lightened the sky enough through his window to dissolve the stars and show the blank area on his desk where his computer had sat earlier that night. Now, though, only a clean square outlined by a fine dust film showed that anything had been there at all.
“We'll replace this computer,” Bathrobe had said as she left with the CPU. Pantsuit added, “And a new Peek-a-boo, even better than your old one. Later today, there will be a news conference."
The older man patted Dustin on the head as he left. “There will be a lot of news conferences, I'd say, now that you showed us where to look."
After all the bustle, after the doors slammed below and the cars departed, Dustin finally climbed into bed, but he couldn't sleep. For the longest time he stared out the window, his sheets pulled to his chin, hands locked behind his head. A few days ago, the Moon had preceded Mars to the horizon, but now the red planet set first, while the Moon followed, dragging Pleiades like star babies close behind. He thought about the stars passing by his window as if they were friends: Hamal, of course, and Menkar, and the sprinkling of tau stars, omi Tau, xi Tau and f Tau, then Aldebaran and Algol, and Betelgeuse, who faded last in the lightening sky. They all seemed so comforting that he didn't notice at first that the house had changed. For the longest time he tried to place the difference. Not just the missing computer. Not just the strangeness of the night's events. Something else.
He gasped in surprise, then silenced his breathing so he could hear. Below him, in his parents’ room, he heard voices: his mom and dad, talking. The conversation rose and fell. It had been going on since they'd left his room. Once, he could swear, he heard laughter. Long after the morning sky had brightened to blue and the maple tree cast its shadow on the fence and their neighbor's house, Dustin listened, and not once, that morning, did his parents quit talking. Not even when they moved into the kitchen. Not even when they began fixing breakfast. Their voices broke the long silence, and Dustin knew he wasn't alone in the house.
He wasn't alone, and it was time to eat.
Copyright © 2006 James Van Pelt
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF
by Greg Beatty
* * * *
* * * *
I was a teenage werewolf!
It was intense, lurid, shocking!
But as an adult werewolf,
I got tired of all the stalking.
Middle age comes for werewolves too,
and the full moon's no longer enough.
At old age, what's a wolf to do?
Fangs fail; even baby skin's too tough.
Rather than moonlight, I seek sun,
suck bird bones and curse my ills.
“Teenage werewolf! I was one!"
“That's nice dear. Now take your pills!"
—Greg Beatty
Copyright © 2006 Greg Beatty
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
1 IS TRUE
by Ron Collins
Ron Collins's writing has appeared in Analog, Dragon, Writers of the Future, and several other magazines and anthologies. He holds a degree in mechanical engineering, and has worked on developing avionics systems, electronics, and information technology. Ron lives in Columbus, Indiana, with his wife Lisa, and their daughter Brigid. His unsettling tale about the ultimate in software and why “1 Is True” is his first for Asimov's.
The boot loomed inches from Gordie's face. Scuffs marred its surface like kill strokes on the side of a fighter aircraft. He focused on the boot, trying to breathe. The cracked cement floor pressed unmercifully into his cheekbone.
The brown boot moved.
Whumpf.
Gordie sucked vacuum.
“You gettin’ the idea that I don't give a rat's fuck for your piss-ant hide?” The inspector's voice echoed through the room.
Whumpf.
Muscles cramped. Fire flared like fluid on charcoal. Chromium pain came with each swing of the inspector's leg, a leg that right now winched back like a battering ram.
Whumpf.
Gordie's vision went gray. The boot squeaked against the floor.
“I already said I don't know nothing,” Gordie croaked, thinking about pulverized ribs, imagining himself bruised and bloated up with internal bleeding like a grotesque balloon in a holiday parade. He didn't code anymore, hadn't run his fingers over a keyboard since he'd left the company. But telling that to the inspector was like telling the pope Jesus was Buddhist.
A lighter clicked. A fresh layer of cigar smoke overpowered the rotted smell that had been the first thing Gordie had disliked about the interview room.
He rolled, blinking into overhead lights.
The inspector was the size of a Frigidaire. Wrinkled stripes marked the back of his shirt. Pools of sweat ringed his armpits. His face absorbed the room's purple fluorescence as if he were a Mesopotamian stone idol, his eyes dead beads of shadow, his cheeks pockmarked like freshly laid asphalt.
A wooden table sat in the center of the room.
“Son,” the inspector said, puffing on the stogie and squatting on a rickety chair. He ran a rag over his forehead. “This goddamned city sees ten goddamned murders every goddamned day. My job is to put a man in the hole for every goddamned asshole who gets himself chilled."
Blue smoke settled over Gordie like conformal coat on printed circuit.
“People feel safe if a man goes to the clink, see? And when people feel safe, they vote for my boss's boss's boss, unnerstand?” He pulled the cigar out of his mouth and examined the smoldering tip. “You're right about one thing, though. I ain't got nothing on you, and that means I got no choice but to let you go. Course, truth is I believe you. I don't think you done it. You ain't got the nerve."
Gordie nodded warily.
The inspector shoved the cigar into the corner of his mouth and leaned forward. The white skin of his neck bulged, making him look like a demonic beluga whale. “But, let me ‘splain something. I don't give a rat's shit about that. Yulani Morav is dead, and her processor is clean as the governor's rap sheet. I need a perp, and I ain't fuckin’ stupid. You and her used to do the dirty, you got ties. I figure a fancy-ass code grunge like you knows something about guys who are good at stripping processors. And since I figure you know something about it, you best know something about it, unnerstand? I get paid for putting guys in the hole—whether they're the right ones or not. Bring me something I can use, otherwise you're going down ... even if I gotta make shit up."
If Gordie had learned anything in the last six hours, it was how not to argue with the inspector.
“You got two weeks."
* * * *
Gordie first met Yulani in an arcade.
He was dressed in his brother's army shirt and a pair of ratty pants. His short hair left his face open. He and Stango had already sold a few Net games, and had just begun developing structure for what would later turn out to be optical push. They weren't rich but the money was beginning to flow, and it suited Gordie fine.
Yulani wore a yellow shirt that hugged her body. Dark lipstick made her face exotic, but she would have been just as stunning without it. She sat at an Avenger terminal, holding the controls with a light touch and molding herself into the game's cockpit. Her gaze was fixed on the wide concave screen where ninja aliens armed with nuclear grenades fell around her. She did the usual dodge routine, then threw everything she had against the group to the right.
It didn't work, of course.
She che
wed her lip.
Her expression smoldered with black fire and her body arched with frustration. Her wild scent was immediately memorable. For the first time Gordie wished he knew something about perfume.
“You shoulda taken out the middle pair,” he said. “They're the leaders. Once they're gone you can handle the rest."
“Like you would know.” Her accent was eastern bloc.
“Ought to.” Gordie leaned over the cockpit with a grandiose smirk. “I programmed the damned thing."
Her gaze softened into a real smile. “I'm Yulani Morav,” she said, extending her hand over the cockpit's edge. “I work for the guy who bought the damned thing."
Check and mate.
They went to the burger joint across the hallway. She ate like a prospector, pushing individual fries around to find the best ones and leaving the rest behind.
He talked about meeting Stango for the first time, how he blew the Brit away with a multilevel fractal encryption scheme. Stango was already a legend in code circles back then; he was still living in London, but had made it across the pond to present ideas at the more prestigious gak-cons. Stango was a few years older than Gordie, but they hit it off perfectly.
He talked about Avenger, how Stango hadn't been able to overcome the single-screen interface until Gordie developed the concave shell. He was surprised to find himself telling her how money changed things for them, and how they were working on something even bigger. He talked too much, probably, but Yulani seemed interested and once he started he found he didn't want to stop. She was beautiful, smiling quickly and speaking in her thick voice that roused his animal instinct with every syllable.
Finally, he asked for her node. Her card was gray stock emblazoned with the logo for Cassetti Tech. “Yulani Morav, Investment Manager,” the card read.
“I'll be damned,” Gordie said with a sheepish grin.
“What?"
“I figured you were lying when you said you worked for the guys that bought Avenger."
Her gaze flared with photoelectric charge. “I never lie about business, Gordie."
Asimov's SF, October-November 2006 Page 19