by Danny Tobey
Tell it to go fuck itself.
And so they had.
And now this back: Go fuck yourself!
But they’d been surfing anonymously, through Tor. There was no way that site knew Charlie’s name, much less his cell phone. So it had to be a coincidence.
Charlie typed back:
Who is this?
This time, there was no pause. He phone buzzed almost instantly, a fraction of a second after he hit Send. There wasn’t even time for a person to type.
It’s your Daddy, God.
Mommy says hi.
I have a job for you.
3 CLASS OVER
Everything was slipping away for Tim Fletcher. Of course, it didn’t seem that way on the outside. He was the captain of the football team. The players followed him around like dumb animals and did his bidding. And the girls, well. Duh. He could pick anyone, and so he picked Mary Clark, because she was Mary Clark, perfection, a female version of Tim. Tim’s father owned a bank, so they were rich. They belonged to the best country club. Everything was exactly as it should be. Exactly as it had always been. He was a walking cliché, and fucking proud of it.
And yet …
He could feel it. He wasn’t smart, not like the nerds with their faces in books, but he wasn’t dumb either. He had inherited a Waspy understanding of power.
He could feel the power shifting. In his dad’s day, you’d graduate, play ball in college, inherit your dad’s bank, and marry a girl that looked like mom. The nerds would become your doctors and lawyers and accountants. They’d do well, but not too well. You would chat with them as they did your books or listened to your lungs, and then they’d go home to the suburbs and you’d hit the links at Oak Haven.
But now, his dad’s finances were hurting. Generations of alcoholism and mistresses had shrunk the family fortune, and they were riding on fumes. His parents kept up appearances, but through the walls he heard them fighting. At school, he was still king. Yet he saw the world change around him. At home in Austin. In Silicon Valley. The same kind of kids he dominated at Turner High were squeezing his dad’s bank with apps made in college dorm rooms. The old ways weren’t working anymore. Everything was disrupted. Where the hell did that leave him?
He watched Mary do her homework. She didn’t know he checked her phone when she wasn’t there. Why the hell was she googling Charlie Lake, that loser? They hadn’t been on student council together in years, since he flamed out. Even still, Tim had always viewed their friendship warily.
“You have nothing to worry about,” Mary would say, putting a carefully manicured hand on each of his broad shoulders. “I’m with you.”
So what was she doing now?
What Tim wanted, no, needed, was control.
He slid the silver box across the table to Mary.
“What’s this?”
“Open it.”
She laughed nervously and untied the red bow.
Inside was a rose-gold bracelet. It cost a small fortune.
“Put it on.”
“Tim, this is crazy. It’s not even our—”
“Put it on.” His voice was a little less warm.
Mary tried to clasp the bracelet around her wrist, but her fingers shook a little.
“Let me.” His thumb dug a little into the space under the bone in her delicate wrist.
She winced.
“Sorry.” Tim held has palms up to her, open. “Big hands.” As the bell rang, he smiled broadly and stood up. “It looks great on you.”
He walked to the door, past the STD poster showing how sex with one person was really sex with everyone. “You’ll always be mine.” He gave her his handsomest grin.
4 NEXT LEVEL
Charlie showed him the text.
Peter’s eyes went wide. “Do you know what this means?”
“Yeah, some freaky AI chatbot is cyberstalking me. Or you’re pranking me.”
“I wouldn’t mention your mom like that.”
For once, no irony was in Peter’s voice. He was devilish, Charlie thought, but he wasn’t cruel.
“So then what the fuck?”
Peter read it again:
It’s your Daddy, God.
Mommy says hi.
I have a job for you.
The word job was a link.
“It’s like the one I got. But different.”
“You got one, too?”
“Yeah.” Peter fished out his phone.
They were standing by the lockers outside the room of the counselor, Mrs. Fleck, with its gaudy posters about feelings and perseverance. Mrs. Fleck was the rumored owner of many cats.
Peter opened his texts.
You got ballz.
Fuck me? No—Fuck YOU!
Do you BElieve in me? I BElieve in you.
Now … SHOW ME.
The SHOW was a link, too.
“Did you click on it?” Peter asked.
“No. Did you?”
“Not yet. I wanted to do it together.”
“Fine, let’s use your phone,” Charlie said. “I’m not looking to download some rootkit.”
“I don’t think that’s what’s going on here.”
Charlie raised his eyebrows. “We insulted it. And now it wants us to click a link? No thanks.”
“Look, I found the site, right?”
“Right.”
“I told you about it.”
“True.”
“Well, maybe I didn’t tell you everything I read.”
“Oh, shit.”
Peter gave that easy smile. “It’s all good, I promise.” His excitement was contagious and hard to resist. “This chatbot, it’s more than that.”
“More than a chatbot?”
“The people who talk about it, they’re the best in the world. The most exclusive coders. Think of the chatbot as a kind of gatekeeper.”
“Gatekeeper to what?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly. They made him. And he stands watch. And it’s hard enough just getting to the website to talk to him. But if he likes you…”
“Then…”
“Then you get invited.”
“Invited to what?”
“Well, that’s what we’re going to find out.”
“And you think this is our invitation?”
“No. I think this is our test to see if we should be invited. ‘I have a job for you.’ ‘I believe in you.’ ‘Show me.’ So let’s show them.”
“So we click the link, and then…”
“We see what it wants. If it’s out of bounds, we don’t do it.”
“And if it does give us malware?”
“Look, if these people wanted to hack us, we’re already hacked. Besides, like you said, we can use my phone.”
Charlie was running out of excuses, or more to the point, he was running out of easy problems for Peter to bat down. If Charlie wanted to, he could think of a million good reasons not to click the link. The truth was, he didn’t want to think of them.
But one thing did bother him.
“What about the reference to my mom? ‘Mommy says hi.’ That’s just sick. And how did they even know?”
“It’s all over your social media. It would take about two seconds for a bot to figure that out about you. And honestly I think it’s just riffing, not being cruel. Look, think about it like an AI. God equals father, then it links father to mother. It’s just connecting dots. No malice, just typical natural language processing. You know, bullshit.”
Charlie sighed. “At least test the link first.”
“That’s fair.”
Peter checked the pop-up over the link. Instead of a Web address, it showed a random string:
R29kIGlzIGdyZWF0Lg==
“It’s gibberish,” Charlie said. “They’re masking the URL.”
“Maybe, but it’s not gibberish. It’s encoded text. Probably base64.”
“How can you tell?”
“Educated guess. Multiple of four, all the c
haracters are A to Z or zero to nine. And that last part, Lg==. You see that sequence repeated all the time. It’s a period.”
“So what does it say?”
Peter googled base64 decoder, then pasted the string in and hit Decode.
In the text box below, the decoded text appeared:
God is great.
“That’s funny,” Peter said. “So they masked the Web address and hid a pass phrase in the mask. They’ve given us the door and the key. These people aren’t trying to give us a virus. They’re trying to test us. The only question now is, Do we have the guts to go stick it in?”
Charlie sighed because he knew Peter was baiting him, yet Charlie was going to do it anyway. He was curious. He went back to the original text—I have a job for you!—and clicked job.
For a moment, his screen went black.
Then, the archangel Michael appeared, in the form of a text prompt.
“Well, we already know that,” Peter said. “Better lucky than smart. You want the honors?”
“Sure.” Charlie typed:
God is great.
Then, in white font on a black screen, instructions appeared. It told them what to do, but not how.
“Oh,” Peter said.
“Huh. That’s not so bad.”
“No. Kinda fun.”
“And doable.”
“Very doable. Very Vindicatory.”
“True, but … do we really want to drag them into this?”
Peter looked at Charlie, surprised. “Sure. They’d love it. You want to hog this just for us?”
Charlie shook his head defensively. Why did he want to hog it, just for them? Because Peter had become his best friend? Because the Vindicators seemed uncool by comparison? Because being around Peter made him feel mysterious and special and—for those wild distracted moments—free from the pain that sat in his gut like a rock?
Or D, all of the above?
Charlie shrugged. “Of course we’ll invite them. We don’t have to say why we’re doing it.”
“You don’t want to tell them about God?”
“Well, not yet. I mean, we don’t even know if they’ll get invited. The texts only came to us.”
“Sure.” Peter nodded as if that made all the sense in the world. “Sure.”
5 THE AFFAIR
Mr. Burklander was forty-seven years old when the kids in his twelfth-grade creative writing class heard the story about his wife dumping all of his clothes onto the front lawn from the second-story window of their house. He had a massive heart attack and blacked out in the grass in his boxers. It was hard, looking him in the eye when he came back, but they all did, because they all loved him.
No one ever heard why his wife tossed him out, exactly, but the way Jennifer Miller wasn’t in Mr. Burklander’s class anymore, there were some rumors. But that’s all they were. Rumors.
Mr. Burklander approached Charlie as the rest of the class cleared out. Charlie was staring down at his desk, lost in thought.
“How’s it going?”
Charlie glanced up, looking surprised. “Fine, I guess.”
“You didn’t turn in your story.”
“I had writer’s block.”
“I don’t accept that, Charlie. There’s no such thing as writer’s block. You just sit down and do it, like a job, whether it feels right or not. I want you to try. I think writing could help you find a way out of this place you’re in. I really believe that.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Charlie slung his backpack and went for the door.
Mr. Burklander’s hand caught him. He pulled Charlie around, a bit brusquely.
“I’m not messing around here. This is your life.” Mr. Burklander’s eyes softened. “I lost my mother when I was in my twenties. I remember. I had this dream, for years after. She was standing under a building that was shaking. I kept pulling on her arm, trying to get her to move, but she wouldn’t. And a piece of the building came down, right on top of her. I’m almost fifty, Charlie, and I still remember how that dream felt, when I woke up. I always woke up right when the building came down. You will get past this, Charlie. You have your whole life ahead of you.”
Charlie tried to shake his arm loose, but then he didn’t.
Only Mr. Burklander was still trying to save Charlie. Burklander was the faculty sponsor for student council. He’d always liked Charlie.
When Charlie’s mom died, his grades went from A’s to C’s. He had been on track for valedictorian. He and Vanhi had a pact to go to Harvard together. Now he just wanted to run in the opposite direction of anyone trying to remind him of who he once was. The school tried to help. He couldn’t blame them for any of this. They tried to hook him up with counselors. They offered him a semester off, then a year off. But he refused their help, in ways big and small. It was insulting. It made him feel weak. If he wanted to throw it all away, they couldn’t stop him. Screw them. Screw it all. He didn’t want to go to Harvard anyway. He just wanted to be left alone. Eventually, the teachers got tired of taking his abuse. Most of them, anyway. He didn’t know whether to love or hate the one who was still trying.
He considered Mr. Burklander for a second. Could he really have slept with a student? Was it possible? He was everyone’s favorite teacher. The kind that told off-color jokes and wrote Fuck on the chalkboard when they were discussing Catcher in the Rye. Could he really sink so low? Why would he still have a job? Did the school cover it up somehow?
But all he saw now, looking in Mr. Burklander’s eyes, was kindness. And genuine concern.
So Charlie just said, “Okay,” which was about the most cooperative thing he said these days, agreeing to nothing.
* * *
Charlie went to the portables. They were the buildings beyond the south end of the school. Like any big, sprawling public high school, it was overcrowded. People bustled in the hallways shoulder to shoulder, knocking against each other. The city passed a bond issue to expand the school southward, past the Embankment, but then the economy collapsed and the school was left with rows of portable buildings, glorified trailers, surrounded by construction materials, just waiting for the economy to pick back up and the bond funding to come through. Charlie passed piles of bricks and remembered another version of himself, on student council, petitioning the school board for more space. It felt like another life.
Charlie found Alex where he expected him, sitting on the steps of a portable, eating his lunch. He was all alone. His hair flopped down in his face, his baggy jeans and vintage Metallica shirt looking worn. He was reading Vonnegut and eating a sad-looking bologna sandwich, as if there were any other kind.
“What are you doing out here?” Alex asked.
“Looking for you.”
“Why?”
“You haven’t been around much lately.”
“Been busy.”
Charlie made a show of looking around the empty lot. “I can see that.”
“Fuck off.” Alex managed a weak smile.
Charlie wondered what he was doing out here. The truth was, he wasn’t sure how he felt about Alex anymore. When Peter arrived, Alex had become, well, less relevant in Charlie’s world. Alex and Peter both veered toward nihilism, but Peter’s brand of nihilism was sleek and exciting. Alex’s was lonely and misfity—Peter, as harsh as it seemed, was just more fun. He was easier. And something about Alex, lately, was unsettling. It was hard to put a finger on it exactly. It was just that sometimes, looking in his eyes, Charlie felt as if he were gazing into a bottomless pit. He could draw a line back to the boy who sat outside parties in middle school, drawing with chalk on the pavement about his real home back on Mars.
But then again, the Vindicators were a place for people who didn’t have a place. Wasn’t that why they started it?
“Come on,” Charlie said. “Come eat with us.”
Alex shook his head. “Nah, I’m okay.”
“Why not?”
“I just feel like reading.”
Charlie noticed s
omething on the wall behind Alex. Some graffiti, written in pen, in Alex’s handwriting.
The sentence was incomplete: ALL MUST …
“‘All must’ what?”
“Huh?”
“That graffiti. ‘All must’ what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I was just bored.”
Charlie wanted to call bullshit, but he let it go.
“You’ll come to the Tech Lab after school? We have something important to discuss. A new project.” Project was their code word for pranks and other official tasks of the group. Back in the day, that was part of their raison d’être—pranks for truth and justice, never mean, just once-a-year social commentaries, such as rearranging the football fund-raiser, a pumpkin patch, into a giant phallus. But with Vanhi and Kenny obsessing over college applications, and Charlie neck-deep in his own grief, no one had even thought about a senior-year prank yet, until the God AI presented its challenge to Charlie and Peter.
Hearing the word project, Alex’s face lit up. For a moment, he looked like the old Alex. Charlie wondered if Alex had drifted because of them—because they’d all been too preoccupied with their own lives to notice? When had Alex first misstepped, and how far gone was he now? For a fleeting moment, the veil of Charlie’s grief lifted, and he asked himself, What happened to the sweet, goofy Alex, and what happened to me?
“Sure,” Alex said. “I’ll try to stop by.”
“Cool. Watch out for ice-nine.”
“Yeah,” Alex said, already back in his book.
* * *
Mary Clark hated her mom. No, that wasn’t fair. She didn’t hate her mother. She hated what her mother stood for. That morning, Mary had tried to leave the house exactly the way she wanted. No makeup. Sweats. She knew she would look horrible without all her fancy clothes and subtle makeup—that’s what her mother had always told her—but she didn’t care. She was trapped in a box and didn’t know how to get out. She thought of Tim and shuddered.
Her mother caught her on the way out the door. “Dear, run back upstairs.”
“I’m going to be late.”