“Joff, do you remember the evening you caught Wendall Wight?”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“Did you believe the officer when he told you…well…whatever he told you?”
“No. Not really. He called Wendall a petty thief, but then he called him a separatist. I always had the feeling the officer wasn’t supposed to say that second part.”
“Good thinking.” Abid looked satisfied. “Because Wendall Wight…well…he was on your farm that night with ill intentions. He planned to bomb you and your family to bits.”
“Bomb? But—”
“We found his stash outside Donva the next morning. He had detonators, fuel cells, and remote sprites. You know what those are, right? He was scoping you out. He intended to plant bombs all over your property. You did well to catch him.”
“I...I was lucky,” I stammered. “I was outside counting stars on my skypad.”
“How ironic,” said Abid.
“Why would he, or anyone, want to bomb me?”
Abid blew a gust of air over his fingers and looked me dead in the eyes. I admitted to myself I was a little nervous. Of all the things I’d expected, someone wanting to kill me wasn’t one of them.
“Wendall Wight was never a thief, Joff.” Abid stared at me. “Wendall Wight, aka Wendall the Widower, had slaughtered, shot, and bombed more than two-hundred people in his career. He wasn’t a separatist, not exactly. He was a worshipper of Frost, as in Aidan Frost, the same man who engineered the Exodus. He thought by killing the families involved in our program, he’d slow us down. By stopping the best of us, he figured we’d either abandon our plans or be distracted enough to let his friends ship more contraband offworld.”
Program?
Plans?
Worshipper?
I felt dizzy. A hundred new questions popped up in my head. I chose the smallest of them.
“You said he was a worshipper of Frost. Does that mean—”
“Yes. Wendall was executed in secret about eighteen months ago. Not even Castyn Clarke was allowed to report it.”
“Oh.” I gulped.
“I’m trying to scare you, Joff,” said Abid.
It’s working, I thought.
“Why?”
“Because you’re not on your farm anymore. That part of your life is over, just as it was always meant to be. You’ve graduated from being a boy. You’re my student now. It won’t be like taking classes in some quiet school in Donva. Your days of fixing tractors and taking long walks with your father are over.”
“How did you—”
“You’re an investment,” he interrupted. “Remember that for as easily as you could stand beneath the stars at night and look at the sky, we could see you.”
“I feel a little sick,” I said.
It was true. It was only just after dawn in whatever faraway country the black suits had brought me to, but I hadn’t slept since before eating breakfast with my parents more than a day ago. I felt nauseous, and not just with hunger and exhaustion. Knowing that Wendall Wight had tried to kill me and that I’d been watched every day of my youth made me feel awful.
I just want to walk in an empty field.
Or turn a wrench inside an engine.
Or count the stars with my skypad.
“What happens now?” I asked.
Abid looked out the long line of windows onto the great, dark woodland surrounding the fortress. The early sunlight frosted the leaves, making everything below us shimmer like an ocean.
“It’s only seven in the morning here,” said Abid. “You need sleep, then food. I’ll take you to your room and leave a sprite to wake you. When you wake up, follow the sprite to the mess hall. We call it a hall, but since there’s only three people in this facility, it’s really more of a closet. Anyway, you’ll have griddlecakes, and then we’ll come to get you.”
Griddlecakes! The fourteen-year old in me got excited.
I’m so tired, I sagged.
“And then?” I managed to ask.
Abid stood up. He was so tall, his shadow blocked out half the light in the room.
“After sleep and food, you get to meet Callista.”
Callista.
* * *
I didn’t remember walking to my room and collapsing onto the bed. I didn’t dream of anything. All I knew was that many hours later, I awoke to a whisper in my ear.
It was soft at first, then urgent.
“Joff.” The sprite whirred around my head, its voice like my mother’s, gentle yet insistent. “Joff, it’s time to wake. You need to eat. Follow me.”
I sat up on a narrow white cot. The room they’d put me in looked like every other part of the fortress: chrome walls, white ceiling, and a metallic floor. I had two big windows peering out over the tops of a thousand massive trees. I could see the wind rippling through them, but I couldn’t hear anything. It was stunning…and terrifying.
It’s almost like they don’t want me to leave, I mused.
I climbed out of bed and dressed in the clothes they’d left for me. I’d seen people in Donva wear the same white tunics and sandals, but I’d never actually worn anything like it in my life. I was accustomed to thick canvas pants and oil-stained shirts. The things in my room were too clean.
“Joff, follow me,” the sprite whispered again.
I obeyed. In the long, chrome corridor beyond my room, I considered that until that moment I might’ve been the only fourteen-year old boy in the world who’d never used a sprite. The thing about sprites was: no one else could hear what another person’s sprite said. The tiny flying bots talked to their controllers via implants inside their skulls. Some sprites even projected images into their controllers’ minds, ridiculous things like fairies, dragons, even miniature people. The sprite Abid had assigned me didn’t look like anything special, just a tiny chrome speck with an even tinier white light for an eye.
The thing that really bothered me was:
I can hear the sprite’s voice.
Which means someone put an implant in me while I was sleeping.
I shuddered and walked on. The wall to my right was polished chrome. To my left, floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over a river valley. I didn’t mind heights, but the corridor was narrow enough that I found myself walking closer to the wall.
Humming a tune only I could hear, the sprite led me down the corridor. It felt like we walked around a quarter of the mountain.
And then we came to a door. On its shining black surface, there was a silver pad about as big as my hand.
“Press your fingers to the pad, Joff,” the sprite urged.
“Ok,” I mumbled.
Dad would’ve hated all this technology.
I touched the door-pad. The black metal slab slid open, and the sprite zoomed ahead. I hesitated before following. I had the strangest sense that once I did, everything would change.
I took one step forward and stopped again. The room beyond the door looked unlike the rest of the fortress. There were no windows, only stark black walls. I couldn’t tell where the room’s pale light came from, only that it existed, spreading throughout the shadows like twilight.
“Joff, this way.”
It wasn’t the sprite who summoned me.
It was Doctor Abid.
Through the shadows I walked. I came to Abid and a woman I’d never met. When I saw her standing there in a lab coat, smiling at me, I realized something:
Other than Mom and maybe Castyn Clarke, I’d never seen anyone as beautiful.
“Joff,” said Abid, “this is Doctor Tiana. Doctor Tiana, you know about Joff Armstrong.”
Tiana was younger than Abid, but her skin was the same golden brown. She must’ve been from the same part of the world, I thought, from a place I’d never heard of. Her eyes were bright and lustrous, green as the leaves beyond the fortress windows.
More than anything was her smile, which melted something inside me.
I had to admit; I fell in love with her at firs
t sight.
“Good evening, Joff.” She spoke in an accent I’d never heard.
“Um…good evening?” I stammered. “Is it night already?”
“Oh my.” She wouldn’t stop smiling. “You’ve slept the whole day away. It must’ve been hard, all that driving and flying. Do you even know where you are?”
“Um…no. Not really.”
She looked at Abid as if to scold him. “We’re in the Honaz Mountains. The nearest city of any size is about fifty kilometers away. You might remember it, the old world village you passed through on the way here. This country is called Turk-Menatan. It’s a part of the Europan Hegemony, which is of course allied with the W.E.G.”
“W.E.G.?” I squinted. “Is that the Western Elite Government? The people who control the whole world?”
“Yes. See, Abid? I told you he’d know at least a little about the world.”
“I heard Castyn Clarke talking about it on my father’s skypad.” I confessed. “Though I don’t know much else about it.”
“It’s ok, Joff.” Tiana took my hand and tugged me toward the far side of the room. “None of that matters right now. We’ll teach you everything you need to know. We promise.”
Her hand on mine made my body tingle. It occurred to me that I’d never been touched by a woman other than my mom and a few stray punches and hugs from Aly. This was different. Tiana made me nervous, mostly in a pleasant way.
I gulped hard and commanded myself to keep it together.
Tiana walked me toward a pillar of black marble standing at the room’s far end. Abid didn’t follow. He just stood behind us with a grin that meant he knew what I was thinking.
“There’s someone I want you to meet, Joff,” Tiana brought us to a stop at the pillar.
I looked at her. My tongue didn’t let me say anything.
“For many years, we’ve been working on something.” Tiana reached out and keyed a sequence into a keypad on the pillar. Little blue lights flickered beneath her fingertips, and a panel slid open on the pillar’s side. “I think you’ll like this. I heard your father wasn’t too impressed by our gadgets, but maybe you will be.”
“What is it?” I asked. All my usual confidence was gone.
A soft blue light glimmered from the open panel. The opening was about as big as my hand and as high on the pillar’s side as my chest. I stared at the light, waiting for something to happen.
Tiana keyed a second sequence onto the keypad.
The blue light danced.
I didn’t know what was happening. I’d seen interesting tech on my skypad back home, but I’d never really been exposed to much of it in-person. The blue light wavered and broke into little glowing particulates. My eyes widened. I couldn’t blink. I couldn’t talk.
I just watched as the light took the shape of a tiny blue Tiana.
I looked at the real Tiana, then down at the hologram. Except for the size and the hologram-Tiana being made of soft blue starlight, they were identical. The hologram was just as pretty as the real Tiana. I felt even more flustered than five minutes ago.
“What is she?” I asked the real Tiana. With a grin and a shrug, she backed away.
“Hello, Joff,” the hologram said to me in a woman’s voice.
“Um…hello…tiny Tiana?”
The little blue woman put her hands on her hips. I imagined if the real Tiana had done it, it would’ve looked exactly the same.
“I’m not Tiana.” The hologram sounded ever so slightly miffed. “I’m Callista.”
“Callista,” I repeated.
“I can see how you could confuse us. We look the same, except I’m ten centimeters tall and made of blue nano-light.”
“Nano-light?” I’d never heard of such a thing.
“Like sprites, but smaller.” Callista’s voice sounded just like Tiana’s. “Think of me as being four-hundred thousand tiny computers. Doctor Abid tells me I’m the most powerful intelligence ever created, but I try to stay humble.”
“She’s an A.I.” I glanced back at Abid and Tiana.
“I’m right here.” Callista crossed her arms again. “It’s rude to talk about someone as if they’re not present.”
I blinked, and when I reopened my eyes, Callista was floating right in front of my face. I’d assumed she wouldn’t be able to leave the pillar. Turned out I was wrong.
“If we’re going to be partners,” she said with a look that melted me as much as Tiana’s, “we’re going to have to get along. That means you treating me like a person, not a computer. Understand, Joff?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“I think I do.”
The Only Kid in Class
One week into my reeducation, I’d forgotten every routine I’d ever known.
They woke me each day before dawn, but not with hot breakfasts and light conversation. Having replaced the simple little sprite from my first day’s sleep, Callista stood on my chest every morning and thumped against my ribs with her tiny blue feet.
“Wake up,” she’d announce. “The universe doesn’t care if you need sleep. The world isn’t waiting for Joff.”
And so I would wake.
And wonder what I’d gotten myself into.
The first seven days, my training was all physical. I’d expected classroom learning like the bald, black-suit man had threatened me with, but I spent exactly zero minutes sitting down and learning.
Instead they put me on a treadmill for an hour at a time with Callista standing on my shoulder, urging me to run faster.
They locked me in a room full of iron weights and equipment, and used angry little sprites to shout instructions at me about when and how to lift heavy things.
My usual three meals per day became six, each smaller on its own, but overall a much larger amount of food than I was used to.
I slept ten hours every night, not seven.
I ran. I lifted. I jumped.
And more than anything, I hurt.
Worse still, they didn’t let me talk to Mom or Dad.
Not until the fourteenth morning, when Callista wooed me awake with a song instead of stomping on me, did I voice any questions about what was happening.
“This isn’t what I expected.” I sat up and rubbed my head. My shoulders still hurt from lifting weights for two hours the previous day. I was already starving.
“I knew you’d say that.” Callista floated into the air and did a tiny pirouette.
“That’s because you know everything,” I complained.
She split herself into two smaller Callistas, each one identical, both of them annoyingly beautiful. I’d learned that splitting herself up and dancing in the air were among her favorite things to do. “Not quite everything,” she said. “Technically it’s impossible to know everything. The variations of physics and human behavior prevent it.”
I rolled my eyes. I liked it when she talked about science, but sometimes it felt like all she was doing was boasting.
“All I’m saying is…I’ve been here for weeks and I’m not any smarter than when I started.”
The two Callistas rejoined and drifted down to me as one. I had to remind myself why she insisted on playing and dancing so much.
Only a month old, according to Abid.
Just a child.
“You want answers?” she asked me.
“Obviously.”
“Guess what? You’re getting them today.”
“Today?” I doubted it.
“Just get dressed.” She rolled her little blue nano-eyes. “We’ll get you some breakfast. Maybe then you’ll be less cranky. Oh, and I promise not to watch you put your clothes on,” she added with an all too human snicker.
I rolled out of bed, rubbed my face, and changed into a grey tunic and a pair of smooth-bottomed sandals. I looked behind me to see if Callista was watching. She wasn’t, but it didn’t matter. She saw everything she wanted whether she looked or not.
Perks of being the most advanced, but least mature computer girl
ever.
Fully dressed, I let her lead the way out of my room and to the mess hall. I tried not to let my excitement show. If I really was going to learn more than just how to run fast and lift things, it promised to be a far more interesting day.
Doctor Abid met us at the mess hall door.
“Morning, Joff,” he greeted me. I was surprised to see him, and even more surprised to see him wearing light grey robes in place of his stuffy black suit.
“Morning.” I looked at Callista. For once, she seemed just as surprised as I was.
Abid put his hand on my shoulder. For as hard as I’d exercised, he was still far stronger. I could feel it in his hand.
“Callista, would you mind waiting in Doctor Talia’s office for a while? Joff and I have something to discuss.”
Whoever had programmed my little blue friend had done a wonderful job. Dejected, Callista made a face that reminded me exactly of a face Aly had made as a girl.
“Yes, Doctor Abid.” She floated away with none of her usual vigor. “I’ll wait there until you summon me.”
Once she was gone, I walked into the mess hall. I had to admit; I missed my little blue friend as soon as she was gone. We’d spent every moment of the last fourteen days together. She’d become my one and only friend.
I sat across from Abid at a polished chrome table. The mess hall looked much the same as my bedroom. It was small, too clean, and its windows looked out over a forest that never seemed to end.
“Adjusting well?” Abid asked me.
They’d made me griddlecakes. They’d learned how much I liked them. A huge platter stacked high with steaming cakes sat on the table right in front of me, accompanied by a cup of dark syrup. For the life of me I couldn’t guess how they’d made them. I’d yet to see anything resembling a kitchen.
“Ok, I guess,” I said while stuffing my face. “Thanks for the griddlecakes.”
“We used your mom’s recipe.”
For a single breath, I stopped eating. I was almost angry, given that Abid had everything to do with taking me away from my mom. But I swallowed a mouthful and said nothing. I knew getting angry wouldn’t help me.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” he countered.
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