“I love you, Doc,” Ben said.
It was the first time he’d ever told me he loved me.
“I love you too, Ben,” I said. And as I said it, I knew I meant it.
“But I’m a monster,” Ben said.
“I don’t care if you’re a monster. I still love you... Frank.”
I called him Frank, because that’s who he really is.
Now, out here on this beautiful night, bathed in the scents and fragrance of the farm, I know the truth.
I’m the monster. Not Frank. I’m the monster.
And I begin to cry.
* * *
I’m sitting in the barn, up in the hayloft, looking at the moon and thinking about Ben, when I see John and Ben come out of the house and start walking toward the barn. They don’t see me. Or I suppose they don’t. I pull myself out of the hay door and push back into the shadows. And that’s when I hear them come into the barn.
I look around, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness before I, almost instinctively, duck back behind the bales of hay we stacked... when was that? It seems like months ago.
The boys walk over to the hay window where I was just sitting. This is a banked barn, so you can come in on ground level and at the far end you’re on the second floor. Still, there’s a hay window so you can drop hay into a fenced yard, or clean out the barn if you need to. The hay window looks out over the farm and the house, and off in the distance, if you can imagine it, Drury Falls is just over the horizon.
The boys sit in the hay window and dangle their legs over the side.
I’m pushed back into the dark shadows, but I can see and hear. I feel bad about hiding, but now that I’m back here... I don’t know what I should do. I feel like the friends are having a moment, maybe the last they’ll ever have as friends. And I’m also afraid of what I might need to do. Tonight.
Then there’s the fact that Ben is here.
It means he powered himself up again. The power down feature has really become just a way for me to communicate to Ben that I want him to sleep. It’s long since ceased to be a real, effective way to shut the boy’s computer down.
So I sit crouched in the darkness, and emotion flows over me once again. I shouldn’t do it. I should announce myself and then walk back to the house...
But I don’t.
I’m not a good man. I told you that.
“You think you’ll have to go away?” John asks.
“I don’t know. Probably,” Ben says. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know either. Maybe the elders will make you leave. I hope they don’t, though.”
“Me too.”
“They made Isaac Stulzman leave,” John says. “I mean, they didn’t make him leave. He could have kept his farm. Stayed there. But they removed him from the fellowship. Ex-comm... ex-common...”
“Ex-communicated?”
“Yeah. Ex-communicated him.”
“What did he do?”
“He was getting really drunk in town, and he got arrested a few times.”
“Did they try to help him?”
“Of course they did,” John says. “A lot of times they tried to help, but this went on for years. So finally they kicked him out.”
“What did he do then?”
“He took his wife and moved to Missouri. His sons stayed here. They’re still here.”
“Do they ever talk to their dad?” Ben asks.
“No.”
“That’s probably what’ll happen to me. They’ll probably kick us out.”
“I sure hope not,” John says. “You know, you’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”
The two boys are quiet for a moment, and during that moment I start feeling worse and worse. But now it’s too late for me to come out and show myself.
“You’re the best friend I’ve ever had too,” Ben says. Then, “You and Doc.”
“Well, if they make you go, we’re still friends,” John says. “I don’t care about the shunning or anything else. Someday we’ll meet up again, and we’ll still be friends.”
“I could write you letters,” Ben says.
“Maybe.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
Silence again for a minute, and then John turns to Ben. For the first time in a long while, I see the difference in their physical ages. John is just a boy, but Ben... Ben looks every bit like a full-grown man. That’s when the tears start up again.
“Listen, Ben...”
“Yeah?”
His next words are touchingly familiar.
“I don’t care if you are a monster, I still love you.”
“Yeah,” Ben says. “I love you too.”
* * *
Cyrano Dresser is standing outside by the guard box, toward the front of a large compound. He looks out over the fenced headquarters, and to him it looks every bit like a small version of the base in the Green Zone in Baghdad where he often worked a decade ago. Worked, and sweated, and bled.
Except this base isn’t in Iraq. It’s on a larger base called Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio. Trucks and SUVs and cars are lined up to enter the headquarters; they’re being checked one at a time by military policemen with mirrors on long poles and dogs on leashes.
A meeting will start in a little under an hour at a tent set up on the far end of the camp. Important people from within and without government will be attending. The bombing of his last headquarters had people pretty shook up.
Even though almost no one knew about it.
Gas leak. That one almost always works.
So a Hampton Inn in Cambridge, Ohio got blown up. Those things happen in war. People died in the blast—a lot of people—but no one knew about them, either. They’d taken dangerous jobs and were paid well for it. So their families got an American flag and were given private funerals to attend, and some pencil-pushing geek from some office somewhere told them their loved ones died serving their country in the long war against terrorism. It’s the way of things.
But the people who did know about what happened in Cambridge, Ohio... well... they weren’t so flippant about it. Security protocols had been breached. There was the scent of domestic terrorism in the air.
So here they are at Wright-Patt, funneling the flunkies into a tent. Because, you see, the masters of the blackest of arts won’t be here. The people who pull the strings wouldn’t deign to come sit in a tent in Ohio. They’re too afraid. Don’t like to get their hands dirty. Instead they sent their agents, their officers, their adjutants.
Their flunkies.
The flunkies, high-ranking though they may be, are the ones being escorted into a tent so everyone can be made to know that things are going to be all right.
Dresser smiles. When the new Transport Authority comes into being, all of this other bullshit will go away. These flunkies and their bosses can go worry about illegal immigration or the war on drugs or some other issue concocted to polarize the populace and get them to part willingly with their hard-earned dough.
Once the TA is up and fully running, I can be working the problem and not babysitting the flunkies.
His cell phone rings.
“Dresser. Speak.”
He throws his cigarette to the ground and grinds it out with his heel.
“North of Drury Falls?” Dresser asks.
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the pack of cigarettes. He pounds a cigarette out and sticks it between his lips, looking up just as a black SUV passes through security and crawls by, pushing its way toward the flunky tent. He can’t see through the dark tinted windows, but he knows there’s some geek son-of-a-bitch flunky in there, so he smiles a fake smile and dips his head anyway.
“No,” he says into the phone, “don’t do anything. Set up a perimeter. A big perimeter. I don’t want anyone within five miles of the place. This thing is one of the most dangerous weapons ever devised. If you wouldn’t attack an aircraft carrier with what you have on hand, then for damn sure don’t alert this
thing that we’re coming.”
He lights the cigarette and takes a deep puff.
“No. Just keep it contained,” Dresser says. “I’ll get the right tools and we’ll be there tomorrow. Late morning. We need to make a plan to take this thing down.”
Dresser takes another long, deep draw on the cigarette. “Oh yeah. We’re going to kill it all right. You can bet on that.”
Just then a massive explosion blows him off his feet. Again. He’s able to struggle to his knees, and he can see that a bomb, probably in the SUV that just passed through security, has detonated in or near the flunky tent. Guards are running past him with rifles drawn, and there are commands drifting toward him through the smoke. He stands to his feet, pulls the cigarette from his lips, and throws it to the ground.
“Dammit,” is all he can say.
CHAPTER 20
I’ve been up since, well, since three or four o’clock at least. Couldn’t sleep anymore, and the silence of the farm just made it tougher to be with myself. Back when I was drinking—not that long ago, really—now is when I’d head to an off-the-books, after-hours bar. If I was sober enough to drive, I’d get in the car and head over to Jamaica Mike’s in badtown Cleveland. Jamaica Mike’s isn’t really a bar; it’s a machine shed in a bad neighborhood that Jamaica Mike turned into his own personal bar. He had to, since he’d been banned from every legit bar in Cleveland. And Mike isn’t Jamaican. He’s a white dude from Portales, New Mexico. I don’t think he’s ever even been to Jamaica. Don’t ask me why he’s called Jamaica Mike, because I don’t know and I don’t care.
I just went there for the booze.
Anyway, I’d drive to Jamaica Mike’s at maybe three or four in the morning and make my way down the waist-high hurricane fence past the ’70s model muscle cars on blocks and the old barbecue grill made out of a huge propane tank. Then through the fence and past the barking Shih Tzu named Rambo, and I’d cozy up to the bar and order whatever the hell Mike had in the well. Usually shine or some kind of potato vodka. Rocket fuel. Stuff he’d make in his bathtub or in a still somewhere, or maybe he’d bought it from some other bootlegger. I don’t know or even pretend to know. I never asked. And sometimes he’d have beer. Real honest-to-goodness beer like Hudepohl, or maybe cold cans of PBR or something like that. I only drank beer when Mike didn’t have booze. I was in it for the drunkenness.
But now I’m a lifetime away from getting drunk at Jamaica Mike’s. It hasn’t really been that long, and it’s not that far, either: if I had a car I could be there in a few hours, if I left now. But in my heart and soul, I’m not even on the same planet as Mike’s. The planet I’m on has gone belly up, and I’m hiding out in Amish country with my death-ray robot. And the Amish are planning to decide our fate... if I let them.
Which I don’t plan on doing.
The sun will be up in an hour or so, and if I strain my eyes looking east, I can just make out what could be the first glow of morning. Really, it’s just a bare lightening of the sky over the horizon. Like God’s flashlight in the distance, coming for a reckoning.
I stop thinking about Jamaica Mike’s and booze, because once I get to New Orleans I’ll drink myself to death I’m sure. If I go to New Orleans. I don’t know. I could just leave now. Start walking. Make my way to Drury Falls and get on a bus to Cleveland. If the feds aren’t watching the buses I could have lunch at Jamaica Mike’s and drink myself to death there.
Nah. I prefer south. Somewhere warm and humid and full of people who want to drink themselves to death with me. That’s more my style.
Here comes the meltdown. I’ve been waiting for this.
I start to curse Cruella, but I’m done even pretending that the voice in my head is hers. She never did hate me that much. At least I think she didn’t. Hard to remember, now that I’ve made so much stuff up in my head.
But I’ve made up my mind. That much is sure enough. I’m going to pull the plug on Ben. I’m gonna do what I should have done from the beginning. Let the boy go and get on with killing myself slowly... at least until some goon with a gun kills me fastly.
Whatever. Either way.
I’ve convinced myself that Ben will be better off. He believes in God, and if God wants a crooked ol’ Amish boy’s soul, then God can sure enough take it. But I can’t go on thinking that it’s possible to keep Ben in the box I’ve built for him. I can’t keep thinking that a boy can control a weapon we wouldn’t even let 99.9999% of trained soldiers ever touch. You have to have security clearance just to know that some of what Ben can do is even possible. And here I’ve given the whole thing to him. Lock, stock, and barrel. The whole device, handed to an autistic Amish boy.
At least he used to be autistic.
And I guess he used to be a boy.
And now I’m not so sure he’s even Amish.
I need to stop thinking about it. Time to do the deed.
I walk back into the dawdi haus and make my way to Ben’s bedroom. I powered him down again earlier, when he came back to the house from the barn; I walked in just after he did and acted like I saw him sneaking in, and I scolded him for turning himself back on. Like I wouldn’t have done the same thing if I were him.
And in fact, I did sneak out plenty when I was a boy. Well, maybe not at eleven years old, but at seventeen I used my window as a door at least one night a week. Meeting girls, going to parties, maybe just taking a walk in the moonlight. Sneaking a beer from my dad’s stash. But I let myself out plenty. Plenty.
So, like the hypocrite I am, I scolded Ben for doing exactly what I would have done, and I told him that if I powered him down, I was doing it to serve his best interests. That I needed him to stay powered down until I chose to power him back up. “I’m the adult,” I told him. “I’m your guardian,” I said. “Maybe not your legal guardian, but I’m the one responsible for you.”
Responsible.
No way has that word ever applied to me. Especially not now.
“Okay,” Ben said to me. After all of that. He just said, “Okay.”
“I need you to stay down,” I said again, “because I need to check on your computers and your circuits sometimes.” That’s what I said. “And you don’t know what’s best for you when you’re eleven.”
Ben’s eyes narrowed then, and the edges of his mouth turned up in a half-smile. “I saw you in the dark,” he said. “Behind the hay in the barn. Night and day are the same to me, you know.”
“I know,” I said. “But you guys snuck up on me, and I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“Thanks,” Ben said. He actually thanked me for spying on them. Then he turned over on his side. “I guess it’ll all be over soon. One way or another.”
“I guess,” I said. That’s all I could say to that.
Then I powered him down again. And before I left his room, I told him I loved him again. But I don’t know if he heard me. If he did, he stayed powered down. He didn’t say anything back.
Now I’m walking back into his room. Five hours later, and before the light of dawn can make me change my mind.
I pull out my phone and the cord that will let me jack into Ben’s computer. Frank’s computer. Somehow, right now he seems more like Frank.
I flip back the skin behind his ear and push the plug into the receptacle. I wait for the software to connect and sync up, and when the dashboard comes up, I swipe my way over to the kill protocol. It doesn’t say “kill protocol” on it, of course. It says, “System Reset.” But it’s the same thing. Resetting the system will kill Ben. It’ll take the entire HADroid back to pre-startup. Even the life support functions will be reset. The oxygen going to Ben’s heart and brain will be interrupted, and he’ll just... die.
The HADroid won’t gasp for air or struggle with suffocation. It’s programmed not to do that. The human organs will just cease to function.
Cease to function.
So we’re back to that.
No pain. No regrets. No terror of the beyond. Ben... Frank... will just go t
o wherever people like him go when they die. Heaven, I guess. I shouldn’t have stopped him from going in the first place.
I cry again.
This is getting to be a habit. But this time I cry silently. The tears flow down and dampen my shirt, and I let myself do that for long enough that I’m afraid Ben might power himself back up. So I wipe my face and pull the phone back up so I can see it through damp eyes.
And then I do it.
I hit System Reset.
And I wait.
I don’t have to wait long. I’m looking at Ben. Looking for any sign that he’s suffering, and that’s when the phone vibrates. I look at the screen.
System Reset Canceled, it reads.
I back out of the program and reboot it. I swipe my way back to the kill protocol and hit System Reset again.
Ten beats, and then...
System Reset Canceled.
Now I reboot the whole phone. When it powers back up, I run a diagnostic on my software, and everything appears to be fine. I try once more.
System Reset.
I wait.
System Reset Canceled.
I search Ben’s computer for signs that he’s awake and aware. There are none. He shows every sign of being powered down. I pull up the System Reset protocol a fourth time, but this time my finger hovers over the button. I look down at Ben and I sigh.
Somehow, some way, he’s blocked the kill protocol. Maybe he’s known about it all along.
I unplug and return to my bed. I start to hide the phone and the cord under the mattress, and while I’m standing there holding up the mattress I see the pistol and the extra magazines laying on the box spring. I pick up the gun and hold it. The steel is cold in my hand and I can remember the kick it gave as I pulled the trigger, back when those agents were shooting at us at the general store.
Mom and Pop. Dead because of me.
I put the barrel to my own head, but even in that instant I know I’ll never pull the trigger. I don’t have what it takes.
I’m done playing God.
I pick up the magazines, the phone, and the charger, and stuff them into the pockets of my broadfall pants. I stuff the gun in there too.
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