by Jon Skovron
There was a problem, though. I had no idea what would happen when I deployed it. Not really. That was kind of the point, of course. True unpredictable programming action. But as cool as that sounded, there was a possibility that the surge alone from the initial launch would take down the entire local network and possibly the power grid as well. So I didn’t want to do it at the theater. I needed another location.
A few days later, poxd, surelee, and s1zzl3 all contacted me to say how blown away they were by the samples I’d sent. They all said they wanted to help, to be a part of it. So I told them I needed a place to launch it from and also a place to crash for a night or two. That was the last I heard from surelee and s1zzl3. I guess the code didn’t scare them, but the idea of a real-life encounter did. But poxd said I could do it at his place. And it turned out, he lived nearby in Queens. It seemed perfect. I didn’t even really hesitate.
Well, okay, that’s not true. There was a moment. I was just finishing up some last bug checks on the source before I compiled it when my dad came into the room. He couldn’t see what I was doing. That’s one nice bonus about having your display plugged directly into the back of your head. But even if he had been able to see, he wouldn’t have understood what he was looking at.
“Boy,” he said quietly. He had to make an effort for his voice to sound quiet, so I knew he meant business. I unplugged and turned to look at him. He stood in the doorway, his head stooped to fit under the lintel.
“Hey, Dad.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Uh, fine. Why?”
“I want to make sure there is no problem after your…conversation with Medusa.”
“You mean when I had to get unplugged?” Maybe I sounded a little harsh, because he took a moment to respond.
“Yes,” he said finally.
“I’m fine. Now.”
“Okay.” He looked like he wanted to say something else. Or ask me something else. But he just stood there, filling the doorway for a moment longer. Then he nodded and turned, his shoulders just barely squeezing past on either side. It suddenly occurred to me what a huge pain in the ass it had to be for him to maneuver indoors, especially in narrow hallways or small, cramped rooms like pretty much ninety percent of the space in The Show. That’s probably why he lived all those years in the Arctic. At least he’d been able to stretch out a bit there.
“Dad,” I said.
He stopped.
“Why are we here?”
He turned a little so that he could look at me, but not all the way back around.
“What do you mean? My job is here. Your mother’s job is here. The company needs us. The Show needs us.”
“But we don’t need them.”
“Not true.”
“What do they give us?”
“Safety.”
“I don’t want it,” I said.
“Because you do not know the dangers that are out there.”
“How could I? I’m stuck here with people who hate me because of what I am, and they’re all so small-minded. Like they’ve got blinders on. None of them gets it. None of them sees that there’s this whole world out there.”
“We have already spoken about this.” His big, uneven face hardened. “I understand you are restless. And that is why we have devised the plan for you to go to Geneva.”
“I don’t want to go to Geneva!” I said. “That’s your thing. I want to make my own way. I want to have my own life.”
“You are just a boy.” His voice was no longer quiet, no longer gentle. “You do not know what you want!”
“Dad—”
“ENOUGH!” The sound rattled every piece of electronics in the room. “Unless you wish to go nowhere at all, this conversation is over.” He turned sharply, his shoulder taking out a small chunk of the door frame. Then he left.
I packed a duffel bag with some clothes, some self-repair tools, and my favorite computer.
The only person I said good-bye to was Liel, and that wasn’t on purpose. I don’t know whether she just happened to be hanging around the unlit lobby at two a.m. or what, but there she was, a dark silhouette with sparkling eyes and luminous hair.
We stood there looking at each other for a moment.
“Where will you go?” she asked.
“A friend’s house,” I said.
“You have friends out there?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Will…” She looked down so that her jewel eyes were hidden in the shadows. “Will you be back?”
“Maybe.”
I could faintly see her nod. “What…should I tell them?”
“Tell my mom I’m sorry. I don’t care what you tell the rest of them.”
Then I walked past her to the front doors.
“Boy,” I heard her say behind me.
I froze, hand halfway to the door handle. I knew, right then, that if she asked me to stay, I would.
But she just said:
“Good luck.”
“Thanks,” I said.
And that was it. I left The Show.
8
Hello, World!
AS SOON AS I heard the theater door close behind me, I panicked. Ruthven wasn’t there to guide me. I had no idea how to do anything on my own. I had no idea what was going to happen. If I hadn’t just made that dramatic exit for Liel, I might have turned around and gone right back inside.
But obviously, I didn’t want Liel to think I was an even bigger loser than she already did. Plus, I was pretty sure the door had just locked behind me. So I took a slow, deep breath and told myself I’d be back in a day or two. Right after I made computing history.
I visualized the map I’d been memorizing for days, oriented myself with the landmarks I’d seen on Google Maps, and started toward the subway entrance. It helped that it was dark out and there weren’t many people around. I could almost pretend I was back in the caverns. Then I walked down the steps to the subway station and I felt even more like I was in the caverns. Except the caverns smelled better.
Ruthven had given me a credit card to buy tech stuff for The Show. He’d probably cancel it as soon as he found out I was gone, so this might be my last chance to use it. I bought the most expensive MetroCard I could, an unlimited monthly pass.
The turnstiles were a little tricky for someone my size, but I eventually figured out how to squeeze through. I stepped down onto the subway platform and a minute later the train came rumbling into the station. The sound and vibration were so intense I felt like my stitching was going to unravel.
The train shot through tunnels for a few stops, then suddenly popped up aboveground and rose into the air until we were level with the building tops. I turned in my seat and pressed my nose against the glass. Behind me, I saw the island of Manhattan, huge and bristling with pointy roofs and light. Now I was in Queens. The buildings were lower out here and there were fewer lights. But everything was still packed in nice and tight, which felt strangely comforting. I craned my head to look up through the window, and for the first time in my life I saw the stars. Purplish clouds swirled through the night sky, hiding and revealing bright, sparkling pinholes. Over to one side, I saw the moon, bigger than I thought it would look. Fat and full, and rough with craters.
As the train moved farther out into Queens, I watched the buildings flow by beneath me. Groceries, pizza, clothing…there was so much stuff. And any human could walk in and buy it all, as long as they had the money. I didn’t fully get the concept of money and I knew it was something I needed to be familiar with, since the human world seemed to depend on it.
I got off at the stop poxd had told me to go to in a neighborhood called Sunnyside, which wasn’t nearly as cheerful as the name sounded. I walked for a couple of blocks to poxd’s address. Along the way, I saw people hanging out on street corners or front stoops, but nobody said anything to me or even acted like they saw me.
Finally, I got to the apartment building. I walked through an open courtyard, found the rig
ht entrance, and hit the buzzer, all like poxd had instructed.
“Yeah?” said a voice. It was distorted by the cheap speaker, so I couldn’t really tell anything about it.
“Boy,” I said. Sometimes when I got nervous I talked like my mom in one-word sentences.
There was a tense moment when the intercom clicked off and nothing else happened. But then there was a long beep and the door unlocked. I climbed up three flights of stairs (that definitely wouldn’t have passed trowe safety standards) and at the top I saw a tall, heavyset, older guy, kind of bald on top, with a blond ponytail. We stared at each other for a moment.
“Poxd?” I asked.
He nodded suddenly, like he was coming out of a trance. “Real name’s Gauge.” He held out his hand. I could see him staring at the stitches as we shook. “What’s yours? Your real name, I mean.”
“Uh, Frank. Frank Shelley.” I know, totally lame. But it was the first thing that came to me.
“Well, Frank,” he said. “Welcome to Sunnyside.”
He turned and walked into his apartment and I followed. It was a one-bedroom about the size of my family’s apartment. Movie posters lined the walls—Firefly, The Matrix, that kind of stuff. Over in the corner was a massive, whining server rack with some of the newest, shiniest hardware I’d ever seen.
“Nice place,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said. “I like it except the walls are paper thin. I can hear my neighbor when he takes a shit. And I’m pretty sure he’s got a meth lab going.”
“Didn’t you say you had a roommate?”
“I did, but he decided to move back to California. Sometimes that happens to us Californians. We just get tired of the crap and head back to the motherland.”
There was an awkward silence. Meeting an online friend in real life was totally weird. I realized I had this whole image of who I thought poxd was, what he looked like, how his voice sounded. And it definitely wasn’t this guy.
“So…” I said. But I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“So that virus you made,” he said.
“It’s not exactly a virus.”
“Whatever. It’s amazing.”
“Thanks.”
“No really, I mean that literally. Like, I have no idea what you did. That little snippet you sent? It’s been doing all kinds of weird shit.”
“Oh, really? Like what?”
“What do you mean, like what? You wrote it, didn’t you?”
“Initially. But now it kind of writes itself. It does what it wants.”
“Code doesn’t have ‘wants.’”
I just shrugged.
His eyes narrowed. “Are you telling me you’ve written a sentient script?”
“Your words, not mine.”
“You really want to release it into the wild?”
I grinned.
“Hell, let’s do it,” he said. “Right now.”
“Cool.” I pulled the tower out of my bag.
“Jesus. You carried that big clunky thing all the way from midtown? It must weigh a ton!”
“Uh, yeah. It sure was heavy,” I said in a way that I hoped sounded convincing. There were a lot of little things about blending in outside that I hadn’t considered. After we plugged in my tower, I ran into another one.
“You didn’t bring any peripherals?” he asked. “Just these…What are these, some kind of customized USB and DVI cables?”
“Oh, uh, I totally forgot my keyboard.”
“Hey, don’t worry. I have a ton of them.” He walked over to the corner by the server racks. It made me smile a little, because he had a little pile of junk, just like my mom. He pulled a mouse and keyboard from the pile, taking a few minutes to untangle the cables, and brought them back.
“Thanks.” I tried to look like I was comfortable using them, but I was so painfully slow he had to be wondering how I could possibly write code when I was such a terrible typist. Once my computer booted up, I used the clunky keyboard and mouse to prepare my freshly compiled program for release. Gauge stood behind me and leaned in over my shoulder. He smelled like Doritos.
“Are you seriously saying you’ve created a…what, a virtual artificial intelligence?”
“I guess you could look at it like that.”
“What’s it going to do when you release it?”
“I have no idea.”
He stared at me for a moment. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Yep. The only thing I know for sure is that it’s going to be awesome.”
“Do it,” said Gauge. “You’re killing me here. Just fucking do it!”
I clicked the mouse button and the program began to execute. The fans on my hard drive kicked into high gear immediately as the temperature climbed. The monitor flickered for a moment and I thought suddenly how glad I was that I wasn’t plugged into the machine right now. All visual on the monitor blacked out. A few streaky lines of pixels appeared, like the logic board was failing or something, and I got a little worried that the hardware simply couldn’t handle it. But then the pixels came together into a face. Eyes, nose, mouth. It stayed for a moment, almost like it was looking back at me.
Then it was gone.
We stared at the desktop for a moment. Then Gauge said, “Uh, what just happened?”
A weird numb feeling settled into my chest. “It’s gone.”
“What, like the drive crashed?”
“No, look. The machine works just fine. But the program…it’s just…gone.” I stared stupidly at the screen. I wanted to throw up.
“No, that can’t be right.” He took over the mouse and started clicking around.
But I knew he wouldn’t find anything. Somehow, I just knew.
“Not even anything in the cache,” he said.
I nodded.
“What about the source?” he said. “You could recompile it and…” He shrugged.
I went to the directory where I kept the source code, mostly for his benefit. I did have a few lingering hopes, but those were squashed when I checked the folder and saw nothing except a single file called hello.txt.
“What the hell…” said Gauge.
I opened it, but it was blank.
“You’ve got a backup, right?”
“At home,” I said. “But why would I want to restore something that failed?”
It wasn’t just the project that failed, though. I had failed. Why did I ever think I could pull something like this off?
There was a sharp crack.
“Jesus!” said Gauge.
I looked down and saw that I had crushed the mouse.
“Sorry…” I said, the sound catching in my throat. I stood up and walked over to a window. My eyes stung as I fought back the tears.
“So…” said Gauge. “What happens now?”
A part of me wanted to just go crying back home to Mommy. But I would look like a complete asshole if I did that, everyone would be pissed, and I’d have nothing to show for it. And in the end, what was back there for me, anyway? The same old shit, maybe even worse. No, I couldn’t go back there. Maybe not ever.
“Can I…stay here for a while?” I asked
“You’re not going home?” he asked, kind of surprised looking.
“I…can’t,” I said. “This was my ticket. My golden key. It was going to make everything better. It was going to make my life better.”
“So…you want to stay here permanently?”
“Yeah, I guess so. If…if that’s okay.”
“Sure. You can sleep on the couch. But you’ll have to, you know, pay half the rent and stuff.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right.”
I COULDN’T DECIDE if my new roommate’s method of motivating me made him super wise or a complete dick. My entire life’s work had just blown up in my face and all I wanted to do was sit around, eat junk food, and watch old episodes of Doctor Who. But Gauge absolutely refused to lend me any money, so I had no time for an emo pity party of one. I had to get a j
ob.
At first, I thought about doing something that wasn’t technology related. I was so disgusted with my failure on the “big project” that for the first time in my life I didn’t even want to go near a computer. Every time I remembered that a few days before I thought I was some kind of computer genius, it made me want to crawl out of my skin. I wanted to find something totally different to do.
But the rent was due at the end of the month, I didn’t really know how to do anything else, and I didn’t really know anybody who did. So I gave up on that idea pretty quickly. Maybe I wasn’t the most amazing hacker who ever lived. But I didn’t totally suck. Someone out there would pay me for my coding skills.
Of course, hitting up online friends for jobs presented another challenge. Obviously, I didn’t want Gauge to see me plugging cables into my wrists, and I didn’t have the privacy of my own room. So I had to wait until he was out of the apartment. But the guy hardly ever left the apartment. He worked from home. He got just about everything delivered, including stuff like toothpaste and toilet paper. And all his friends were online. So I had to wait and get on the computer at night while he was sleeping.
But even with connections, I still had no college degree or professional experience. After a few days, Gauge started to get really stingy with his groceries. My standards got lower and lower, from programming jobs to QA jobs to help-desk jobs, until finally I said I’d take just about anything. At last, someone said they knew someone who worked at a big chain computer store that was hiring at a Manhattan location and they could hook me up with an interview. I wasn’t sure retail was my thing, but I wasn’t about to turn down my first real chance at a job. Maybe I’d just do it for a little while to have something on my résumé and save up some money. Then I’d have a little more leeway to look for my next, better job.
Gauge let me borrow some clothes for the interview. The button-up shirt was really tight across my shoulders, and the pants were a little too short. But I was pretty sure it would make a better impression than my usual jeans and T-shirt.