“Good morning!” 00 came close and wrapped his arm around 62’s slumped shoulders. “I had such a great night last night! After you went to bed, Blue and I turned the power on in the elevator shaft and got the lift working. We pulled that bed out of the room next to mine and brought a couple tables up from the cafeteria. They barely fit through the doors, but we made it work. I can’t wait to talk to Sunny about N302. Once she agrees to work with the bot, we’re going up to start running cables for power. Blue said there’s plenty of juice to run the bot, but we’ve got to run lines for more outlets, especially if we’re going to build the second computer.”
62 grunted. 00 paused and looked at him, as if for the first time. 00 frowned and asked, “How are you doing? Rough night?”
“Tried to connect to Mattie,” 62 answered as he shuffled toward breakfast. “Didn’t work.”
“Too bad. We could use her help talking to Sunny.” 00’s momentary tight-lipped concern was broken by an irritatingly bright smile. “No matter though, we’ll figure it out.”
“Breakfast?” 62 muttered.
“There’s leftovers from dinner. Blue’s heating them up.”
62 nodded, watching his feet drag across the floor tiles through half-lidded eyes. He loved his brother with all his heart, but wished the cheerful lout would leave him alone. 00 continued to chatter, but 62 tuned the words out. It was too much for his tired mind to bear and he was thankful when they reached the kitchen. Blue was standing at the stove, stirring a pot of yesterday’s stew. 62 breathed the kitchen air in. It was filled with the sweet scents of the warming breakfast. Moist and meaty.
“That smells good,” 62 said. He moved closer, leaning over the pot and sniffing the air again.
“It’s always better the second day,” Blue decreed with a smile. He glanced over at his friend and lifted an eyebrow. “What happened to you? You look terrible.”
62 drew back from the pot. He moved toward a nearby counter, leaning on the edge. He opened his mouth to reply, but couldn’t get a word out before 00 jumped in.
“Nightmare,” 00 blurted out. “He tried to do that dream-share thing with Mattie, but couldn’t find her or something.”
“Nightmares are the bad ones, right?” Blue asked. 62 shrugged his shoulders in answer. “Too bad. Maybe you’ll feel better after a bit of breakfast. We need you to help get N302 set up after we eat. We’ve got a room set up for the computer already.”
“I heard,” 62 grumbled. “I’ll help. I want to eat and have a chance to wake up first.”
“You can wake up on the way!” 00 chirped. “We’ve got to talk to Sunny before we do any of it.”
“Even before we eat?” 62 whined.
00 nodded, but Blue said, “We’re taking breakfast up to her room. I want to make sure she eats something, and I doubt she’s coming down here. If she was coming down for breakfast, she’d be here already.” He pulled the spoon he was using out of the pot, blew the steam off the stew, and took a small sip, smacking his lips after. “Will one of you grab some bowls?”
00 grabbed spoons while 62 gathered four bowls. Blue shut off the stove and wrapped the hot pot and its lid in a blanket to keep it warm. He wrapped his arms around the toasty container and the trio headed out of the cafeteria, toward the rear of the building.
“Where are we going?” 62 asked as they passed the door to the stairwell.
“To the elevator,” said Blue. “No sense hauling all this up the stairs while it’s powered up.”
When they arrived, 62 marveled at how large the doors were. Easily twice the width of the elevator he’d seen in Adaline. The pair of steel doors separated after 00 pressed the button, revealing a box nearly as large as his bedroom upstairs was.
“Isn’t it huge?” 00 cried out as he rushed through the doors.
“Why’s it so big?” 62 asked Blue. A thin, brown streak of liquid seeped through one side of the blanket, and 62 helped Blue adjust the heavy pot to put it upright again.
“Not sure,” Blue admitted. “But I’d guess it made getting all the furniture upstairs easy.”
The elevator was slow, which gave 00 plenty of time to jump into the air, letting himself fall back to the rising floor with a thud. Each time he did, the elevator groaned, and 62 leaned against the wall, hoping that the ancient device wouldn’t plummet to the earth. Blue seemed unaffected by the creak and wobble of the elevator. 62 couldn’t tell if it was because he didn’t mind 00’s antics, or because he was so focused on watching the floors tick by on the display above the door. When they made it to the fourth floor, the lift stopped, and the giant elevator doors slid open again.
If it hadn’t been for the number stamped on the side of the door, 62 wouldn’t have known which floor they’d stopped on. The floorplan was identical to the ones the Boys had chosen for their rooms. Blue stepped off the elevator first, and the other two followed him down the hall, past a few doorways. They stopped in front of a door that had glass jars hanging from its frame, clustered in a heap over the doorknob. It would be impossible for someone to reach the handle without the glass tinkling a warning.
“Guess she doesn’t want to be surprised?” 00 said.
“Shhh!” Blue hissed in anger. He squinted his eyes and shook his head at 00 as a warning. His expression hardly softened when he turned to 62. “Knock for me, will ya?”
62 did as he asked. There was a long pause of silence afterward, followed by the soft sound of jars tapping against one another as the handle beneath them turned. The door opened a crack, and 62 saw the familiar links of chain keeping it from opening any farther. It was the same kind of lock that he had in his room. Sunny’s hazel eye peered through the crack, gazing down at Blue and his companions suspiciously.
“What’s all this?” her whispery voice croaked.
“We brought breakfast,” Blue said, lifting the stain-covered heap higher in his arms so she could see it.
“It took all three of you?” Sunny asked in a rasping voice.
“We wanted to talk to you about something, too,” 62 said from behind Blue. He could barely see Sunny’s wandering eye from his place behind Blue.
“Another talk?” Sunny pulled her face away from the door’s opening. “Sorry, I don’t think I’m up to talking today.”
“Please?” 00 begged. The spoons rattled between his fingers as he pressed his hands together in appeal. “It’s important. We think we might be able to help you.”
The door closed. The Boys dropped their heads in shared disappointment. Just as they began to turn back toward the elevator, 62 heard the clasp of the chain lock scraping as Sunny unlatched it. The jars jangled again when the knob turned, and Sunny opened the door fully.
She stood, blocking the open doorway. Sunny’s arms were crossed against her chest, as if she were hugging herself for support. She was paler than normal, and had deep red circles under her eyes. She seemed somehow thinner than she had the day before, and 62 wondered how it was possible for a person to shrink so much in a day.
“Help me how?”
The Boys rushed the door, easing their way around the hanging jars and Sunny’s thin form at the threshold. All three of them were in the room before Sunny realized what was happening. Sunny’s sunken eyes passed over the intruders, and it wasn’t until all three Boys had already entered the room that her head turned to acknowledge their invasion. Sunny left the door open and made her way through the crush of adolescent bodies to cross the room to her bed. Without a word, she climbed onto the mattress and wrapped the thick pile of blankets over her shoulders. Beneath the mound of blankets, which 62 assumed she must have taken from the surrounding rooms, Sunny looked less like a frail, battered Woman, and more like the soft, powdery snowbanks he’d played in the last time it snowed.
Blue set the pot of stew in the center of the room and set about unwrapping it. The pot’s lid had gone askew, and a few of the vegetables and some of the broth had escaped from their vessel, coating the inside of the insulating blanket. There was still ple
nty of stew left inside the pot, and Blue signaled the others to hand him bowls and spoons so he could dish up breakfast. He gave Sunny the first bowl, so full it nearly overflowed. She had to unbury her hands from their blanketed tomb before she could accept the offering, but once she had the bowl and a spoon in hand, she used the pile of blankets across her lap as a makeshift table, setting her meal down as she watched the others collect theirs.
62’s stomach grumbled as he accepted his portion. He wasn’t feeling nearly as polite as Sunny and scooped up a bite immediately after getting his hands on the bowl. “It’s still warm!” 62 exclaimed before taking another bite.
“Of course it is,” Blue said with a smirk. “I learned to wrap up food a long time ago. If we had some paper scrap and a crate or two, I could keep this stuff warm all day.”
“How is that possible?” 62 asked.
“It’s a way of controlling heat dissipation,” Sunny explained. “The more layers of insulation you apply to a heat source, the longer it’s able to retain the energy that produces the heat. Now that the pot is unwrapped, it will cool at a much faster rate. It’ll dissipate as it tries to warm the air around it.”
“So, what if we’d wrapped it in four blankets?” 00 asked.
Sunny’s face softened into a brief half-smile. “Well, in theory, it would have stayed hotter, longer. But in practice, you probably would have spilled a lot more stew.”
All three Boys grinned at Sunny’s quiet joke, and felt a sense of accomplishment when she dipped her spoon into the stew’s broth and pulled a small amount to her lips. “Perfect temperature. Well done.”
“Thanks,” Blue said with pride.
Sunny took another sip, then set the spoon in the bowl. She watched her audience settle onto the floor beside her bed, diving into their meals. For a moment the room was silent, aside from the sounds of clinking spoons. It didn’t take long for curiosity to get the best of her. “You said you came up here to help me. Were you just tricking me into a picnic on my floor?”
00 shook his head. Without swallowing the chunk of potato in his mouth, he said, “Nope. We’ve gotta shecret tah tell ya.”
“How will a secret help me?” Sunny asked with a raised eyebrow.
Blue set his bowl on the floor beside him and took a deep breath. “You know that pile of junk we lugged up here?” Sunny nodded and Blue continued. “Well, it’s not just junk. It’s a Machine from Adaline.”
“Not just any Machine,” 00 exclaimed. “It’s called a computer. It stores and processes data, and we think some of that data might be medical information that can help you since we don’t have a doctor out here.”
“A Machine?” Sunny scrunched up her face with suspicion. “How did three Boys get their hands on something like that?”
62, Blue, and 00 took turns telling Sunny the entire story of how N302 came to be. They told her how, when 62 was still living in Adaline, Doctor 2442 had programmed N302 to be a helper in his underground activities. 2442 had been altering the data chips of clones like 62 in secret, making it easier for them to blend in with the other, more perfect, residents of Adaline.
62 told her how someone had discovered his dream anomaly and tricked him into using his ability to ferret out other dreamers, setting into motion their capture and destruction. Blue explained how 42 had disappeared mysteriously, leaving behind bits and pieces of N302 in his lab. 00 told the daring tale of the rescue mission he and Blue had been on when they’d discovered the parts. And both Blue and 00 stumbled over one another’s words as they explained how they’d convinced the other outlaws to bring the parts back to Hanford.
The three Boys regaled her with the tale of Blue being arrested for stealing garbage to build solar cells and a battery bank to power the parts, and told her about Mattie, who’d helped them to crawl through the derelict bombed-out district on Hanford’s outskirts to find the hardware needed to build the computer. Sunny laughed when they described Auntie’s secret enablement of their venture. She gasped as they described smuggling the bot’s parts to the library, and was on the edge of her seat when they told her about watching the Machine come to life for the first time. They explained that the Machine was aware of itself, and had declared itself their friend. And finally, they told her that they believed with its knowledge, it may be able to stand in as a medical aid.
“But you didn’t know I was going to be here. So, why did you really decide to bring the device to the jailhouse?” Sunny’s curious tone was tinged with suspicion.
The Boys gawked at one another. 62 came up with an answer first. He blurted out, “Because since I was already in trouble with Joan and the others for dreaming, it made sense to bring N302 so Mattie wouldn’t get in trouble if someone found it.”
Sunny looked down at the bowl of stew in her lap. The meal had gone cold during the lengthy storytelling, but she stirred her spoon through the thick liquid anyway. She fished out a carrot and chewed the cold vegetable thoughtfully. When the bite was gone, she asked, “You really think this bot can help me?”
00 nodded. “N302 is smart. Smarter than anybody I’ve ever met. Plus, 42 tweaked its program. These guys say 42 was the smartest doc in Adaline before he disappeared.” With this, he gestured toward Blue and 62. “If we set it up, I know it’ll help us figure out what to do.”
“What if I say no, that I don’t want a Machine to know about me?”
Blue answered, “Then when we set it up, we won’t tell it you’re here. It can’t see or hear, so you could be in the same room as it, and it’d never know.” He scooted closer to Sunny, reached up, and took her hand in his. “But, when we do talk to it, I hope you’ll let us tell it about you. Maybe it’ll know what to do, and maybe it won’t. We can’t know if we don’t ask.”
Sunny squeezed Blue’s hand, then withdrew hers. She looked over at the others. “You’re going to rebuild and power this bot, no matter what I say, aren’t you?” 00 and 62 gave one another a sideways glance, then looked back at her and nodded. Sunny’s mouth twitched upward at the corners. “I thought so. I have to admit, if I had a gadget like that, I’d have a hard time leaving it alone. Alright,” she declared with a nod, “let’s build the Machine and see what it says.”
The three Boys erupted in a loud cheer. 62 clapped his hands and 00 pumped his fists in the air. Blue rose from the floor beside Sunny and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. All four outcasts grinned at one another, the excitement in the room infecting Sunny’s pallid features. Blue set about collecting the dishes, and 00 picked up the stained blanket they’d used to insulate the pot.
“When will you start?” Sunny asked as the Boys prepared to leave.
“As soon as the dishes are done.” 62 grinned, grabbing the handles of the stew pot.
“To the kitchen!” 00 cheered. Blue and 62 followed him out the door, parading down the hall in a line of celebration, dishes clattering and pot banging as they went.
CHAPTER 9
Assembling the computer proved to be more difficult than any of them had expected. The trip from Hanford, through the wasteland, and up the trail to the jailhouse had not been kind to the components. The Boys had taken great care to keep it covered, but their efforts had been in vain. The shock of the trip had dislodged several internal pieces, and the entire Machine was coated in a thick layer of dust. Sunny checked the metal with the radiation counter, and despite the rest of the bad news, the computer didn’t set the needles jumping on the dials.
Before anything could be put together, 00 disconnected every component and set 62 and Blue to gently cleaning the metal bits. It was tedious work, and the excitement of the project waned as dust was swept from each tiny surface. Soon the room was filled with the sighs and gasps of Boys exasperated by the grime tucked into nooks and crannies of boards, boxes, and wires.
When the final part of the computer had been wiped clean, the friends loaded the parts into their wagon and dragged their prize to the elevator. They rode the lift to the top floor, and wheeled the piece
s of their electronic companion to the newly arranged computer room. A new wave of anticipation arrived as they began unloading the parts. 62 dug through the pile until he found the computer assembly manual that Mattie had sent, and he pulled up a chair before spreading the computer’s diagram across one of the tables. Blue propped himself up on the edge of the other table, watching 00 begin building the bot in silence.
Sunny arrived at mid-day with freshly baked bread. As the Boys took a break to eat, Sunny inched herself cautiously to the computer parts. She crossed her arms as she leaned over the mess on the table, looking at the partially built computer as if it were a wild animal that might strike her at any moment. Blue hopped off the table and stood next to Sunny, his air of confidence a stark contrast to Sunny’s anxious gaze.
“What do you think?” Blue asked.
“I’m not sure,” Sunny admitted. “Will it be much bigger?”
“A bit.” Blue set about showing her the computer’s case, which would cover the messy array of wires and circuits once everything was set in place. He explained the functions of the monitor and the power cables, and even showed her where they’d run wires from adjoining rooms to make sure there’d be enough power to turn the bot on.
Sunny looked over the mounds of components and her face scrunched. “Once you put all these parts together,” she said, pointing to the table she and Blue were standing near, “what are you going to do with all of those?” She gestured at the second table, piled high with even more pieces.
“Spare parts,” 62 choked. He moved across the room, leaning against the front of the second table and making himself as wide as possible to block Sunny’s view. The attempt was fruitless. 62’s gangly body was no match for the tangle of computer bits heaped upon the table. They hadn’t told her that they’d be building a second bot, or that N302 would duplicate if it could.
Sunny nodded. “I suppose there aren’t many replacements if something breaks out here.”
“Yeah, without bringing this stuff with us, if something on this clunker went haywire, it’d be the end of N302. Backups and duplication are the name of the game.” 00 patted the computer’s monitor as a mother might pat her child’s head. “With how hard we worked to get it all together, we’d hate to lose it.”
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