by Rob Vlock
“ROOM SERVICE,” A MUFFLED VOICE called from the corridor.
We all looked at one another.
Will scrambled to his feet and dashed into the bathroom. The lock clicked loudly. “Uh, you know, I gotta go,” he called through the door, his voice quavering.
Alicia stepped over the dead cyborg chickens on the floor and looked through the peephole before cautiously opening the door. A short, balding man with a neat gray mustache waited in the corridor behind a cart loaded with three covered plates.
“Three pepperoni . . .” He trailed off as he noticed the dead birds on the floor.
“Oh, uh, these were a little undercooked,” I offered.
Alicia grabbed the cart of food. “Thanks.”
She wheeled it inside and slammed the door in in the man’s face.
We stared at the three covered plates for probably five minutes. Finally, I lifted one of the covers off. And there on the plate lay a fresh, warm pepperoni pizza.
Over the course of the next half hour, Will lifted every single slice of pepperoni to make sure no earwigs lurked underneath. Alicia watched him with interest.
“What’s the deal with that, anyway?” she asked him. “You know, with the stuff and junk.”
“What, pepperoni?” Will replied. “You don’t have it where you’re from? Well, it’s really good and it’s made out of . . . well, I don’t really know what and I don’t think I actually want to know.”
Alicia laughed. “I know what pepperoni is. I’m talking about your OCD. You know, looking under the pepperoni and turning light switches on and off and touching things.”
“Ah, right, that.” Will tilted his head thoughtfully, drumming his fingers in the usual pattern. Finally, he spoke. “I just have to.”
Alicia’s eyes widened incredulously. “That’s it? You just have to?”
He shrugged. “Yeah, it’s hard to explain. But it’s just something I have to do. I don’t really think about it much. My brain’s just wired that way, I guess. Like when I go to bed at night, I always have to go downstairs and make sure the door is locked. Then I sometimes have to go down again and make sure I didn’t forget to make sure the door is locked. Oh, and before I get into bed, I have to check my closet.”
“Why?” Alicia asked.
“To make sure there are no dead bodies in it,” Will said, like it was the most obvious reason in the world.
She scratched her head. “So, do you really think you’ll find a dead body in there?”
Will pondered this for a moment. “Only if I don’t check. Sven knows what I’m talking about, right?”
“You mean because he eats stuff?” Alicia asked, turning her gaze to me. “You know, Sven, I’ve been thinking about that ever since I saw you eat that wallpaper. And I don’t know if it’s actually a glitch in your programming.”
I blushed. I hated talking about my unusual eating habits. “What are you talking about? I’m supposed to pass for human, right? Why would I be programmed to do something so unusual if I was supposed to be like everybody else? It doesn’t exactly make me fit in. It’s got to be a glitch.”
“I don’t know.” She rubbed her temples with her fingers. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. I mean, maybe you’re right. Maybe it is just a bug in your code. But it seems too big a thing for the Ticks to miss. They’re not perfect, but they’re methodical. And they want to keep their secret. If Shallix thought your eating things might clue people in to your being Synthetic, he probably would have . . . gotten rid of you. Unless there’s a reason they want you do it. So I think we should be open to the possibility it’s deliberate. But the question is why they’d program you that way.”
Nobody had an answer.
Talking about myself like I was nothing more than some kind of computer program depressed me. Everything I knew about myself, about who I was, what I was . . . it was all wrong. I’d always felt like a normal kid. Okay, maybe like an abnormal kid, but a kid all the same. Not some kind of cyborg.
In what felt like a forced casual tone, Alicia suddenly said, “Anyway, you’re probably wiped. Why don’t you get some sleep, Sven? You, too, Will.”
“Do you guys think it’s okay to stay here?” I asked. “I mean, what if something . . . tries to kill us again?”
Will’s face turned a little gray. He got up to check that the door was locked. Then he sat back down on the bed. Then he got up again and checked the door once more. Finally, before getting back on the bed, he opened the closet door, looked inside for dead bodies, and closed it again.
Alicia tilted her head toward the window. “I’d rather be in here than out there in the dark. And at least there’s only one door, so they can’t sneak up on us. We can sleep in shifts. One stays awake while the other two sleep. We only have two beds, anyway. I’ll take the first shift.”
She pulled the chair away from the desk and sat, straight-backed and tense, fingering the razor-sharp edge of her knife.
I couldn’t help noticing the grim set of her mouth. And the fact that her gaze kept settling on me, then abruptly darting away as soon as she realized I saw her.
It wasn’t easy to sleep knowing that a girl with a big knife was trying not to be seen watching you. Then again, it wasn’t easy to sleep knowing that at any moment some other Tick assassins could burst through the door. And if that weren’t enough, Will was snoring like a chain saw.
So the fact I fell asleep at all was pretty amazing. But when exhaustion finally forced me into unconsciousness, I found myself in the most vivid dream of my life.
I was back home with my dad, standing in the backyard early on a sunny morning.
“Hey, champ,” Dad said, “I’ve been thinking, football really isn’t your game. You know where your talent lies? Sneezing.”
“It does?” I asked.
“Jumpin’ Jack Nicklaus on a pogo stick, it sure does! Now go ahead and let ’er rip. Give me a big, juicy sneeze.”
“Wait, Dad?” I said. “You just want me to sneeze? Why?”
A too-wide smile stretched across my father’s face. “Sneezing is a great hobby, son! Did you know the world record for the longest sneezing fit is more than two years? I bet you could beat that, Sven! Give it a try!”
“But I can’t just sneeze. I’ve never sneezed in my life. I can’t just turn it on like a switch.”
A look of anger flashed in Dad’s eyes. “You are going to learn to sneeze! It is why you are here, yes?”
“Well, okay, I guess,” I said doubtfully. “But it seems kind of like a weird hobby to me.”
“It is not weird, Sven,” Dad insisted. “All the cool kids are sneezing these days, yes? Now sneeze!”
“Really?”
“Just do it!” Dad yelled.
“But, Dad, I can’t sneeze,” I told him.
“FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, WILL YOU JUST SNEEZE ALREADY?” my father screamed.
Suddenly, the air was filled with black pepper. It blew into my eyes and my mouth. I choked and gagged on the fine, dry powder.
“SNEEZE!” my father shrieked. “SNEEZE!”
A sensation I had never experienced before began building in my head. It started in my nose and radiated outward. A ticklish, uncontrollable feeling.
Then I realized what it was. And no matter how hard I fought, I couldn’t resist it. I had to . . . .
• • •
The impact of the floor at my back knocked the air from my lungs and I forced my eyes open only to see Alicia glaring down at me. The blade of her knife was cold against my throat.
CHAPTER 32.0:
< value= [The Sneeze to End All Sneezes] >
ON THE TV BEHIND HER, a newscaster was talking about a fire in an abandoned house on the outskirts of town and the singed rainbow wig firefighters found at the scene.
Will snored peacefully in one of the king-size beds.
“Explain yourself, Tick!” Alicia spat.
“What . . . what happened?” I stammered, trying to shake my brain
out of its slumber. “What are you doing, Alicia?”
“You were talking in your sleep,” she snarled. “You were talking about sneezing.”
I felt her knife press harder against the flesh of my throat.
“Wait! Hold on! What are you talking about? So what if I was talking in my sleep? I was just having a weird dream, that’s all. My dad told me he wanted me to sneeze,” I told her. “But why is that so bad? People talk in their sleep all the time!”
She shook her head. “Not like this, they don’t. You had his voice.”
“Whose voice? What do you mean?”
“You sounded like him, Sven. Shallix!”
“But I thought we blocked his signal or something,” I protested. “That’s why I’m wearing aluminum underwear! You said we blocked the signal!”
“Shut up! Why were you talking like him? Tell me! Has he taken control of you? Why does he want you to sneeze?” She held the knife right up to my face. “Tell me or I’ll finish you right now!”
“I don’t know! I don’t know!” Hot tears began spilling from the corners of my eyes. Anxiety ate away at my self-control, and I felt a terrible compulsion building. I darted my tongue out and licked the flat side of her knife.
She wrinkled her nose. “Eww. Don’t lick that! This knife has been in chickens and clowns, and I used it a couple of days ago to clean dog poop off my sneaker. It’s gotta be totally covered in germs. . . .”
Her eyes widened. She stared at me for a few moments, then leapt off me, backing away until she was pressed up against the wall. She held her knife out toward me menacingly.
“Stay away from me!” she hissed.
I sat up. “Alicia, what? I don’t under—”
“Shut up! I need to think!”
She began pacing back and forth along the length of the room, muttering to herself in Russian. After traversing the room at least fifty times, she stopped and fingered the blade of her knife, shaking her head slowly.
“Eto ono,” she muttered. “What else could it be?”
“What’s going on? What are you talking about?” I asked, trying to read the complex eddy of emotions on her face.
Alicia took a long, deep, quivery breath and strode over to me. She didn’t say a word—just looked at me with a mixture of fear and sadness and revulsion in her eyes. Her mouth tensed into a thin, straight line. “I’m so sorry, Sven. I don’t want to do this.”
She knelt and tightened her grip on the knife, holding it, trembling, above the center of my chest.
“I’m so sorry,” she said in a hoarse croak. “But I have to. Please understand.”
“Wait!” I cried. “Stop! Why are you doing this? Alicia, please don’t do this!”
She rubbed her eyes with her free hand. “I don’t have a choice. I’m . . . I’m so sorry.”
“Why? Is it because I talked in my sleep? I was just dreaming! Honestly, I didn’t know I was doing it. Please!”
“It’s not that,” she said swallowing hard. “Srok rasplaty. I just figured out what you’re going to do on the day of reckoning. How you’re supposed to destroy the human race.”
“I don’t understand,” I whispered.
The news anchor smiled ingratiatingly, his skin tone a little green and pixilated on the TV screen. “. . . Well, Dianne, it looks like that little dog has shown us that you can teach an old person new tricks.”
She looked at me with wet eyes. “Eating gross things isn’t a glitch, Sven. It’s what you’ve been programmed to do. It’s what makes you their secret weapon. And the dream, the sneeze . . . it all makes sense now.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “How does any of that even matter? It was just a dream.”
Alicia shook her head. “It matters. Man, I’ve been so stupid. I should have realized that one kid couldn’t kill every human on the planet unless he was . . .”
“He was what?” I asked. “What am I?”
“You’re a bioweapon, Sven. An incubator,” she told me. “That’s why you eat gross stuff. You’re sampling pathogens.”
“What are you talking about?”
She lowered the knife. “Your whole life you’ve been eating and licking really disgusting things, right? You weren’t doing it for fun. It was to get samples of all kinds of nasty stuff. Viruses and bacteria. Your body is programmed to synthesize everything you sample into a supervirus. One that could wipe out the whole human race.”
“Hold on,” I interjected. “How do you know this?”
“I heard my parents talking about it over dinner one night. Back in the Settlement, years before I was born, the Ticks tried something just like this. It didn’t work. The Settlement was small enough that when a new person showed up and started coughing in everyone’s face, they immediately realized it was a Tick. They deactivated it before anyone got sick. With you, I guess they had a better strategy. They created you as a baby, here in Schenectady. You went to school, acted like a normal human. Nobody would have any idea you were cooking up something that could kill them all.”
“But I don’t understand,” I said. “If I’m supposed to be carrying this superkiller virus, how come no one around me has gotten sick yet? Heck, I’ve never even been sick. I’ve never even sneezed before. Ever.”
“I don’t know. I guess it takes a long time to sample enough stuff to create a disease that’s really deadly or something,” she told me.
“Like thirteen years. My thirteenth birthday. Just like Dr. Shallix said.”
“And that sneeze you were dreaming about, Sven? That’s your mission. That’s why you dreamed your father told you to sneeze. You’re getting ready to deploy the supervirus. That sneeze is what’s going to wipe out the human race.”
CHAPTER 33.0:
< value= [I’m Saved by a Giant Toilet] >
MY HEAD STARTED TO SPIN. I didn’t want to believe what Alicia was telling me. But as much as I wanted to deny it, a nagging little voice in my head told me it was all true. I was the ultimate biological weapon. The whole reason I was alive was to destroy humanity.
The news anchor’s voice broke through my shock. “. . . after being stuck in the car wash for nine hours, the man was finally rescued by firefighters.”
Alicia slowly raised her knife, wrapping both hands tightly around the handle. “Now you know why I have to do this, Sven. You have something inside you that can kill everybody. And it’s going to be unleashed on your birthday, which at this point is less than twenty-four hours away. Please understand. I know you’re a good kid. I wish this didn’t have to happen. I wish . . . I wish we could just be friends.”
“Wait,” I sobbed. “Can’t I just go away? Where there’s no one around for me to get sick? Like, live in a desert or the North Pole or something? Please?”
She shook her head. “You wouldn’t stay there. If Shallix managed to hack into your CPU, he’d be able to control you, Sven. Just like he tried to do tonight. Every time you went to sleep, you’d be at risk. I have to do this.”
A tear ran down her cheek. Her jaw was rigid with tension, and I could tell she was fighting to stop her hands from shaking.
She’s really going to do this, I thought in disbelief. This is it. I’m going to die.
The news anchor continued to prattle, his voice carefree yet emotionless. A stark contrast to the terror roiling inside my chest.
“. . . He calls his creation Flushosaurus Rex. His Niagara Falls, New York, neighbors may not be thrilled that the former Ukrainian research scientist Sambor Ivanovitch Kozakov, or Junkman Sam, as he calls himself, has built a twenty-foot-tall replica of a toilet in their town. But Sam himself says it’s all about artistic expression.”
The scientist’s heavily accented voice came through the TV speaker. “Those who question my art simply don’t understand it. My creation may look like a toilet, but it makes a serious statement about consumption and waste in today’s world.”
“Fair enough,” the reporter continued. “But what people in the town object t
o is that Sam filled his replica toilet with actual human waste. Twenty-two thousand gallons of it, to be precise.”
I tried to shut out the sound coming from the TV. I didn’t want the last thing I heard to be a story about a giant toilet.
I thought about my mom and dad. How much I’d miss them. I braced myself, closing my eyes tightly against my gathering tears, which squeezed out between my eyelids and ran down the sides of my face, collecting in the hollows of my ears before dripping onto the carpet.
After several seconds, I realized I wasn’t dead. I opened my eyes a tiny bit and saw, through a blurry film of tears, the knife still poised above my chest. It trembled in Alicia’s hands. I looked at her face. She was staring into space, lost in deep concentration.
What was she waiting for? Just get it over with!
She looked down at me, then, without warning, threw the knife down. She grabbed the sides of my face tightly, pulled me into a sitting position, and leaned in close.
“Sambor Ivanovitch Kozakov!” she cried, with a giddy laugh. “Junkman Sam!”
I stared at her. Maybe I was dead and this was some kind of afterlife in which everyone said things that made no sense.
“Um, what-man-who?”
Her eyes glowed. “Junkman Sam! Listen, Sven. There might be a way to fix this!”
I sat up straight. “You mean without killing me?”
She nodded. “There was this scientist. He worked in Laboratoriya 54u. Sambor Ivanovitch Kozakov. He was miles ahead of everyone in the field of artificial intelligence. It was his work that made self-aware machines possible. But he was convinced that what he was doing would eventually get out of control. That machine evolution would outpace ours and put the entire human race at risk. One day he just kinda went crazy. Disappeared. Took off and went into hiding. By then it was too late and . . . well, you know what happens next.”
I scratched my head. “So what does that have to do with a giant toilet?”
“Nobody knew for sure what happened to the guy. But there was this rumor that when he lost his marbles, he moved to America and changed his name and started building all kinds of crazy stuff that he called ‘art.’ ”