Willful Machines

by Tim Floreen

  “Excuse me?”

  Wrong thing to say, the underdeveloped section of my brain that monitored social interactions informed me. I tried to smile, but it probably made me look even creepier. “I just meant you don’t have to worry. I’m not going to try anything funny, I swear.”

  He crossed his arms. “Really? That’s disappointing.” He motioned at the gate with his chin. “After you.”

  The darkness of the tunnel enfolded us, and we told our pucks to turn on their lights. Every once in a while I’d glance back at Nico, and he’d grin. I imagined his gaze on my back, on my butt maybe. Did I really have a nice butt, like Bex had said? We emerged from the tunnel on the far side of the highway, where the canal became a natural river. The night felt brisk—not as cold as it could sometimes get in October, but not flip-flop weather, either. Nico didn’t seem to mind. We climbed to the top of the riverbank, where a trail ran alongside the river into the forest.

  Nico pulled up next to me as we hiked up the trail. “So you pick locks and make robots. Is there anything you can’t do?”

  “Yeah. Pretty much everything else.” On impulse, I drew Gremlin from my pocket. He scampered up to my shoulder and tugged twice on my ear. “But when it comes to anything mechanical, I’m your guy.”

  “You made that one, too?”

  “No. But he’s my favorite. I’ve had him since I was little. His name’s Gremlin.”

  “What does he do?”

  “You know those little mascots the heroes in Disney cartoons always have, the ones that mostly just sit on the hero’s shoulder and look cute and occasionally get into mischief? That’s what he does. He can also obey a few simple commands. I usually make him bring me my socks in the morning. Here, take a look.” I lifted Gremlin from my shoulder and dropped him into Nico’s hands.

  “He’s soft.”

  “Sometimes I rub his coat for luck.”

  “In that case.” Nico gave Gremlin’s orange fur a vigorous rub.

  The forest grew thicker around us. The trees blocked out much of the moonlight, but our pucks continued to light our way. I thought of that line of Shakespeare Nico had recited in front of Dad yesterday. I’d looked it up, and it came from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play that took place in an enchanted wood and featured a fairy servant named Puck. I’d always assumed pucks had gotten their name because of their round, flat shape, but it turned out the name also referred to the character from the play. I could see why now, as I watched our pucks bob over our heads like actual woodland spirits.

  An owl hooted, and Gremlin, startled, sprang from Nico’s hands back to my arm.

  “Sorry,” I said. “He likes to stay near me. Or I guess I should say he was programmed to stay near me.”

  Gremlin ran up to my shoulder and tugged on my ear again.

  “Why does he keep doing that?” Nico asked.

  “What?”

  “Pulling on your ear.”

  “Oh.” I plucked Gremlin from my shoulder. “He was programmed to do that, too.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s sort of embarrassing. Are you sure you want to hear this?”

  “If it’s embarrassing, then definitely.”

  Out of habit, I glanced around, as if someone else might be listening even way out here. “When I was about six, my dad was elected to Congress and my mom got her job at the lab in Bethesda, so the whole family moved to DC. I was a shy kid. Transferring to a brand-new school halfway through the school year had me completely terrified. On my first day my mom walked me into the classroom, gave me a kiss, and told me she loved me. Not such a weird thing for a mother to do, but for some reason the other kids teased me about it all day. Probably they could see how scared I was, so they must’ve decided I’d be an easy target.”

  “Did you have glasses and cute ears back then, too?”

  “Oh, yes. That probably didn’t help either. When my mom picked me up that afternoon, I told her she was never allowed to kiss me or tell me she loved me in public again. So she tapped her chin and thought about it. I remember she always did that when she was thinking. Tapped her chin. ‘Okay, I won’t,’ she said. ‘How about this, kiddo: from now on, whenever I say good-bye to you in front of other people, I’ll just tug on your ear, and you’ll know that means I love you.’

  “And that was what she did from then on. It sort of became our thing. For my eighth birthday, she gave me Gremlin. She’d made him herself. ‘So now,’ she said, ‘even when I’m not with you, you’ll feel him tug on your ear, and you’ll know what it means.’ Then she died a year later, so I guess Gremlin makes me think of her.” Nico didn’t say anything. I glanced at him. “Am I being a downer? Tell the truth. I think I may have a tendency to do that.”

  “Not at all. I was just wondering how someone like your mom ended up with someone like your dad. I hope that’s not rude of me to say. But maybe he was different back then. Not so antirobot and pro-stay-at-home-mom.”

  “He wasn’t that different. But Headmaster Stroud was my mom’s father, and he’d been best friends with my dad’s father. I’m sure he had a hand in getting my mom and dad together.”

  “So it was like an arranged marriage?”

  “Well. Not exactly.”

  The truth was, unlike just about every other person on the planet, Mom had never had a problem standing up to Stroud. She hadn’t even let him enroll her at Inverness, and she certainly hadn’t taken his wishes into account when she’d chosen her career path. Maybe Stroud had pushed her toward Dad at first, but in the end, she must’ve really fallen in love with him.

  Still, Mom and Dad had always seemed like a mismatched pair. For instance, he went to church every week, but she never did. They’d trade off Sundays: one week Dad would bring me to services with him, and the next, Mom and I would have what she called Appreciation Days, where we’d go on a hike or visit a science museum or do experiments in her little lab in the garage. The whole arrangement was odd—like shared spiritual custody.

  Once, on one of those Sundays, I asked Mom, “How come you don’t go to church?”

  She shrugged. “I had enough of that when I was a kid.”

  “Is it because you don’t think there’s a God?”

  “I suppose that depends on what you mean by ‘God,’ ” she answered, tapping her chin. “Do I think there’s a God like in the Bible? No. I’m a scientist. I value hard evidence, and all the hard evidence argues against it.”

  “And heaven? Do you believe in that?”

  “Same answer, kiddo.” It didn’t seem to bother her, though.

  But I didn’t tell Nico any of that. Instead, I stowed Gremlin in my hoodie and said, “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “I don’t know, everything. You’ve met my dad, you’ve heard about my mom. Tell me about your family.”

  “There isn’t a whole lot to tell.”

  “I don’t believe that for a second. Come on, what’s your life story?” I stepped over an exposed tree root. “Or maybe you prefer being a man of mystery.”

  He waggled his eyebrows at me mysteriously.

  For a while the trail had slanted gently upward. Now it curved to the left, still following the river, and another path, steeper and more rugged, cut off to the right. I guided Nico that way.

  “I grew up in Santiago,” Nico said. “The Medinas have lived there for generations. My great-great-grandfather founded one of the most successful investment banks in Chile.”

  “And you were sent to Inverness Prep to get a top-notch education so you can go back home and take over the family business?”

  “Something like that. My dad had been trying to get me into Inverness for years, but it’s practically impossible if you’re not a legacy. Then a few weeks ago, out of the blue, I got a last-minute admission. I guess my dad had finally found the right person on the board to bribe. So here I am. But I can tell you right now, I’m not going to be a banker.”

  “Oh, yeah? What are you going to do
then? Because if you’re considering a career as a food critic, you might want to work on that palate of yours. I hate to break it to you, but the food here really does suck.”

  Nico laughed. All our hiking had turned his cheeks reddish gold. I could see it even in the low light from our pucks. He’d been right about his flip-flops, though: so far he hadn’t stumbled once.

  “Or do you want to be an actor?” I asked.

  “Nah.” He held up a low-hanging branch, and I ducked under it.

  “Seriously, what do you want to do?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, Lee. I just want to live. Like really live. Make every second count, you know?”

  “Okay. Admirable, but vague. Not that I have a better answer to that question.”

  The trees had thinned by then. The trail had grown even rockier. A chain-link fence, warped and rusted with age, appeared in front of us, with barbed wire draped across the top and a battered yellow sign that read, DANGER! NO TRESPASSING! Behind that loomed the mountain, blue in the moonlight, its blunt peak wedging itself into the starry sky.

  “This evening just gets more and more interesting,” Nico said.

  “You told me you wanted to live.” I hunted around the base of the fence until I found the place where someone had dug a hole under it. I shimmied through. “Your turn.”

  Nico took off his yellow windbreaker, balled it up, and tossed it over. “Catch!” He slithered after me. I tried not to imagine all those muscles I’d seen last night swelling and shifting under his T-shirt as he moved.

  The trail continued on this side of the fence, broken in by decades of trespassers. It skirted the base of the mountain for a while and ended at the mouth of a tunnel. A ramshackle barrier of wood planks blocked the opening, with another yellow NO TRESPASSING sign nailed to it. A few of the planks had fallen away, though, leaving gaps like knocked-out teeth.

  “What is this place?” Nico said.

  “It used to be a mine. Copper, I think.” I peeked through one of the gaps in the barrier, but I could see only darkness beyond.

  “And we’re going inside?”

  I looked back at him. For the first time all evening—for the first time since I’d met him, in fact—he appeared hesitant. “That’s the plan,” I said.

  “Through here?”

  “I believe so.”

  “You believe so? You mean you haven’t come here before?”

  Oops. I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to admit that so soon. “I’ve never had the chance. My Secret Service detail is always hovering around me.”

  “So you don’t do this all the time? Sneak out of your room in the dead of night?”

  I shook my head. “The truth is, I haven’t been this far away from my detail in years.” Only now, as I said it out loud, did I realize the enormity of it: I hadn’t had even a moment on my own like this since before Dad had started his run for the presidency. Except for that one other time, two years ago. But of course I didn’t mention that now.

  Nico laughed and knocked me on the arm. “And here I thought you were this outdoorsy adventurer type.”

  “Nope. I’m about as indoorsy as they come. The pasty skin should’ve been a tip-off.”

  He crossed his arms and looked back down the trail. “So you’ve never ditched your security before. Never come up here before. But you did it for me?”

  For the umpteenth time that night, I blushed. “I guess you could say that. I mean, I’ve wanted to check this place out for a long time. Bex has been inside, and she told me all about it. It sounds amazing.”

  Nico’s eyes returned to the barrier. His face clouded over again.

  “If you’d rather not, though, I totally understand. I get freaked out and decide not to do things at least seven times an hour.”

  It felt strange being the brave one. I wondered what had him spooked, this guy who did handstands on cliffs and talked about making every second count. Was he claustrophobic? But I didn’t want to be a jerk and ask him.

  “I think this might be fun, though,” I added.

  He rocked back and forth in his flip-flops, his arms still crossed, his mouth twisted to one side. “At least I know you’re not a serial killer. So I don’t have that to worry about.”

  “It’s true. I’m not.”

  “Okay, then. That being the case, let’s do it.”

  12

  I motioned my puck through a space between two of the planks. It illuminated a low, narrow tunnel with rutted walls held up by thick wooden supports.

  “I’ll go first,” I said.

  I squeezed through the opening. The air smelled like mushrooms, and it felt ten degrees cooler in here than outside. Nico followed. Our heads bent low, we made our way single file through the tunnel. It stretched off into the distance, as straight and precise as a perspective drawing. We didn’t speak much now. The only sound was the flapping of Nico’s flip-flops, which echoed off the walls and produced a complex, appropriately ominous rhythm. Our pucks floated just ahead of us, their light carving out sharp-edged shadows in the rugged rock. “Network signal lost,” they murmured at one point, almost in unison.

  After we’d walked for what felt like a mile, the echo of Nico’s flip-flops shifted downward in pitch, and a soft exhalation of cold air blew into my face. A few steps later the tunnel walls vanished, and we found ourselves in a space so huge the light from our pucks couldn’t reach the far side. The two little devices surged upward, as if they felt as happy as we did to be out of the cramped passage.

  My foot clanged against something: an empty beer bottle. “Be careful. There’s garbage on the floor. And then somewhere up ahead . . .”

  “. . . there’s no more floor.”

  Nico had pulled ahead of me. He strode right up to the spot where the ground dropped away and left an enormous black void. I stayed where I was and hid my hands in my hoodie pockets and squeezed them into tight, tight fists. You chose to bring him here, I reminded myself. You knew this was coming.

  “How far down does it go?” When he glanced back at me, his face seemed to glow in the low light. Whatever had scared him before we’d entered the tunnel didn’t trouble him now. Meanwhile, I was barely holding myself together. In other words, things had gone back to normal.

  “Something like three hundred feet,” I said, with only a slight tremor in my voice. “The cavern formed naturally. The miners didn’t make it. I’ve heard you could fit the Statue of Liberty in here. Although as of a month ago I guess that’s not saying as much.”

  Nico had already gone back to directing his puck one way and then the other to light up more of the cavern. “Is there a way to get to the bottom?”

  “Jumping, I guess. Apart from that, I don’t think so. There’s a story kids tell at Inverness, though. One time, years ago, I’m not sure how many, a group of students came here to hang out. They were drinking. One of them fell over the edge.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “But he survived. Apparently there’s a ledge about thirty feet down. He landed on that.”

  Nico leaned way out to peer into the chasm. “I can see it.”

  My heart thumped harder. I forced myself to focus on our pucks as they explored the dark space. The cavern walls, smoother than the ones in the tunnel, draped downward in graceful folds, like curtains.

  “What did the kid do?” Nico asked.

  “He shouted up to his friends. He didn’t think he’d broken anything. They told him to stay there while they got help. But he’d been using his flashlight to look around, and he said he could see a tunnel leading away from the ledge. He wanted to try following that first to see if it would take him back to his friends. The kid disappeared into the tunnel. And his friends waited. And waited. And waited.”

  As the pucks moved around, the walls seemed to shift in front of us like the surface of a vast, vertical sea.

  “They shouted down to him,” I said, “but he didn’t answer. They couldn’t call him on his phone, either—this was before pucks—becau
se the mountain blocks the network signal. The kids finally contacted the police and told them everything. A search party went down to the ledge and found the tunnel. But that tunnel split into more tunnels, and those tunnels split off too. Supposedly, there are hundreds of miles of passages down there, some natural, some man-made, and all the maps from the copper mine days are lost. The search party looked and looked, but they never did find him. His body must still be down there somewhere.”

  “That’s some story,” Nico said.

  I sensed I was being a downer again, but at least my fists had loosened a little. “Hey, you want to see something cool?”

  “Sure.”

  I took a few steps closer to the edge. “Turn out your light,” I told my puck. It blinked off. “Now you,” I said to Nico.

  He wagged his finger at me. “Remember, I’m trusting you.”

  I put up my hand, as if to swear to my good behavior. He gave his puck the command. The cavern collapsed into blackness.

  “Whoa,” Nico said. “It’s dark.”

  That was an understatement. This was the kind of dark that made you sure you’d gone blind. The kind of dark that made you doubt your own existence. The silence in the cavern seemed more complete too, aside from the steady cycling of Nico’s breathing and my own. As I stood there, I noticed—or maybe imagined—that strange heat radiating from his body again.

  “What happens now?” he said.

  “Just wait a second.” I pulled off my backpack and groped around inside before finding the lighter and the box of sparklers I’d packed. I pulled out a sparkler and flicked the lighter. Nico reappeared in front of me, squinting against the sudden light, his face orange in the lighter’s glow. I touched the flame to the end of the sparkler. It flared and hissed as it caught. Sparks gushed from the tip. They poured over our feet and bounced on the ground. A few landed on my skin but didn’t hurt. When I threw the sparkler into the cavern, it fell and fell, shedding particles of light, illuminating the undulating rock walls. Nico took a few steps forward to watch it drop, but I stayed glued in place. Then the chasm swallowed it up, and darkness wrapped itself around us again.