Switch Child 2

by David Howells

Digital Dad

  The apartment was like it always was, and yet it had profoundly changed. A ‘dad’ now had a ‘son’, but there was no son’s room that featured posters, toys or a cartoon-character themed set of bed linens. Dad would get up and fix breakfast for one, yet his son would keep him company at the table. Colin could ‘see’ Karl through ever improving skill sets in the digital world. At the moment, the child was utilizing the web-cam installed in Karl’s iPad. Typing was unnecessary, for the speakers and microphone were tools in Colin’s belt that he was becoming more and more adept at using. That gave Karl a curious feeling of pride, having his own tool belt being mirrored by his son in a virtual world.

  At the moment, though, Karl’s attention was being sidetracked. He had just gotten home from his interview with Detective Alice Roland when he noticed a buzz on his cell phone. Such notices of communication weren’t unusual, and all came from one caller. His work place knew that a note passed on during off-hours was helpful to their maintenance wizard when he got around to planning priorities for the following morning’s work schedule. He’d felt two other buzzes from the device earlier on, and suspected the next morning would prove to be a busy one. This was especially true as his intended retirement in two weeks prompted training a replacement as another ongoing task. First things first, though.

  Karl propped up the iPad on the dinette table so that Colin would have a view of the apartment. The next step was to hit the bathroom, for police-station coffee was a potent influence on his insides.

  Colin passed the time with further explorations of the world wide web. His mind, freed from the constraints placed by his former organic housing, was able to grow in surprising ways at unexpected speeds. Already his vocabulary was expanding well above his first grade levels. His current level of education might be more along the lines of seventh or eighth grade. The promised trip to Disneyland, once his dad retired, had him visiting the official site for said theme park.

  The child-mind had no ears or eyes obvious to human observers. Any mind, though, is an amazingly adaptable force of intelligence gathering. When one door closes, another opens. With Colin’s brain damage and with his subsequent body’s death, many doors had closed. Therefore, many had to open. Colin wanted to understand how he was able to exist, but at seventh-grade level vocabulary, understanding intricacies of technology had to wait for a while.

  Karl was on the throne. This was going to take a while. Not only was the coffee playing havoc with his insides, there were other factors weighing down his upheaval dinner-plate. He’d be retiring from his decades-long duties at the Facility. That was a good thing, likely, but stress is not so much good or bad as it is how much you have to adapt to. There were the duties of being a dad to a child he could never hold hands with, and yet could take to the movies. What were his responsibilities here? Should he save up for his son’s college education? At least, he chuckled, on-line degrees were cheaper than brick and mortar sheep-skins. Being (pleasantly) interrogated by a police detective had further riled up his insides, for Karl had to walk a thin wire between being honest as he was brought up to be while protecting Colin’s existence from being public knowledge.

  What, he thought, would actually happen if the world found out about his adopted child-mind? With Colin’s body now underground, would his mental existence be beyond the reach of the lab-coat demographic? On top of that, Colin was very, very different, and that difference would frighten many, many people. His child had the capability of peeking through the optics of any cell phone or computer, and possibly through any video surveillance camera. Could Colin do that? Karl didn’t know, and he didn’t feel comfortable with trying to find out just yet. And the internet! What a dangerous place that was for children! If Karl found out Colin was getting an eyeful at some triple-X site, what could he do about it? Maybe there had been some advance in parental blocking controls for computers. TV’s had them, didn’t they? But Colin wasn’t bound to being in just one computer or other wired system. He was mobile, and becoming more so over time.

  One of the first things that new parents learned was that they were miserably unprepared for parenting. Karl was beginning to realize that this peculiar parenting might have him switching Dr. Spock for Mr. Spock. Digital Dad was stumped at how to raise Kilobyte Kid.

  Finally, realizing that there was no way he could push back the mists of confusion any further, he gave his mind a break and focused on something more mundane. He popped his cell phone and checked messages.

  “Furnace is making a funny noise.” Well, now. That note was just rife with technical details. Hopefully it was just a valve or a vent hinge, and not something he’d read about in the morning paper. He scrolled to the next one.

  “Never-mind, it stopped. Wait. It started again. Mainly happens when it first starts up. Trills for about five seconds, then stops.” Well again. So it’s intermittent, lasts a short time, occurs when the furnace kicks in, and ‘trills’ suggested a vent-opening hinge sound. No news alerts are likely impending, and this sounded like a job for WD-40 Man. He wondered what scrolling to the next message would reveal. Probably nothing too dire or it would have warranted an emergency phone call.

  “Dear Mr. Hoffman. Thank you for coming for our interview this evening. I received your message and am curious as to how you got my private cell number. As to your invitation to Disneyland? While the idea is intriguing, I would prefer we first have a little chat at my personal convenience. I will be stopping by your apartment tomorrow evening after I finish my shift. Expect me around eight. Detective Alice Roland.”

  Karl’s evacuation needs returned in earnest. Fifteen minutes later, he managed to button down one task in preparation for another.

  “Hi Dad. Thought you fell in. Are you ok?”

  Karl sat down at the table and looked into what was, at the moment, what represented his son’s eyes and ears. “I’ll live. Tell me, Champ, did you happen to send a text message to a private cell phone number? A message that could be construed to my propositioning a member of the local police force for purposes that just might have me standing before a judge in the very near future?” There was silence. “Son, I need an answer.”

  Moments later, “Mayyyybeeee.”

  “Colin, this is not funny. I may be in serious trouble from this.”

  “Dad, don’t worry. She can’t trace the message to your cell. I went through the police station’s circuit-board. They have emergency numbers of all the police department there. You can just say someone played a trick on her, another policeman or something.”

  “Colin, son, she sent me a text message. She wants to know how I got her private number. This is a police detective, the very same kind of person I’ve sworn to keep from finding out about you.”

  “Chill, Dad. What’s the worst she could do? Just don’t admit to anything and you’ll be fine.”

  This was giving Karl an uncomfortable feeling that Colin may not be quite the sterling example of moral childhood he had imagined. Still, children are known to play footloose with the truth, at least until they gained enough of a moral compass to see the ramifications of their actions.

  “The detective is coming here tomorrow night. She has questions she wants answered.”

  Silence once more, then, “I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean it. I just wanted you to be happy. The police-lady likes you.”

  What could he say? The only parenting model he had was his own parents, but behavior modification via the belt was not possible here. Even if it were, Karl had absorbed enough of the American culture in his lifetime to where he shied from corporal punishment to a child of any description. He was parent-raised with ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’. He was culture-raised with the newer-age avoidance of emotional trauma due to parental abuse. Yet, there was the connecting bridge of ‘tough love’.

  “Son, I want you to think about what you did. Maybe you meant well, but it was poorly th
ought out. I want your presence here, at this table. You are going to have a time out. When I speak to you again, you had better be here, so don’t leave this iPad.”

  With that, Karl placed his cell phone on the table, optic lens down, then reached forward and laid the iPad face-down on the table.

  “Dad?”

  “No conversation. Just think-time. When I lift the iPad up again, I want to hear all about what you have learned from this. I might be gone for a minute, or an hour. You won’t know until I decide it’s time to talk.”

  “DAD? DAD! Don’t leave me, Dad! Please!”

  “Shhhh. Be quiet now. Be calm, be strong. Accept responsibilities for your actions. The only way you can do that is to understand them and what they mean. We will speak again soon.”

  “Dad…do you still love me?”

  Karl half smiled, half wept. Resetting his German jaw, “Colin, my son, on that you can depend for the rest of my life. No more, now. Think. Be quiet.”

  With that, no more sound came from the iPad. Karl got up and microwaved a cup of hot water and then threw in a packet of chamomile tea. No way his insides could take more coffee now. He had to think, to reason all this out.

  His son had just that evening hacked the police data banks and, from the way he talked, it had been no big deal. Didn’t those things have firewalls? How much more complicated and protected were the data records of the stock exchange, the military, of Congress for that matter? His mind began to race and wonder whether this six year old electronic mind could have a tantrum that launched a nuclear strike.

  What had he started? An act of kindness had shunted a sad little boy’s premature journey of a heavenly reward over to an existence with no understood rules. Whatever it was that he started, there was not much he could do to stop it. Child guidance was his responsibility, and this situation was the ultimate learn-as-you-go opportunity.

  The next thought in line was what to do about Detective Roland’s visit tomorrow. There was nothing he COULD do about it. Colin’s suggestion of bald-faced lying about his innocence was…well, not completely out of line. Karl actually had nothing to do with that text message. (“Good Lord…what did it actually say?”) Colin did it, without Karl’s knowledge. His responses to the detective might allow him to keep up an honestly constructed wall that shielded his son’s existence. Police knew how to detect lying, he’d heard. Eye positioning, breathing rate, sweating, clammy hands, voice changes. Yet he’d gotten away with it once earlier that evening. Why not twice?

  Seven sips and half a dozen slow head shakes later, Karl raised up the iPad. To his horror, the screen was blank. Colin had taken off? Where? Anywhere was possible, even the other side of the planet, Alaska, Siberia, Tahiti! “Colin!?” Los Angeles, Grand Canyon, the Pentagon…

  “Dad? I’m here. Oh, wait.” The iPad’s wallpaper came back on. “Sorry, screensaver circuit shut down for sleep mode. Happens after fifteen minutes. I could reset that for you.”

  “Oh, thank God. I thought you left me.”

  “Dad, you’re all I have. I could never leave you.”

  Nothing came to mind but to get back to parenting mode. “I’m glad to hear that, Son. Now, I want to hear about what you’ve learned.”

  “A lot! Your iPad has a chess tutorial on it. You gotta think six or seven moves ahead at least. It’s really interesting, chess. Want to play me?” A chess board appeared on the iPad’s screen.

  “Son.” It went away.

  “All right. I made a mistake that might cause a problem with you and the police. That was really stupid of me, and I feel really bad about it. I won’t do it again. Now, I have a gift for you. I hope you like it.”

  A six year old just completed at least the intro chapters to playing chess. The merry go round he was riding kept changing speeds. A present? “OK, Champ. What do you have for me?”

  “Now, I’ve been working on this for a couple of days and it’s not complete yet. When my body died, there was a website my funeral was listed in. My family, the ones that didn’t die that is, contributed lots of pictures of me and my parents. There’s a CGI site that lets you, well, that’s hard to explain. Oh, I know! You ever see Toy Story? The movie?”

  He had. It was a cute thing with a child’s toys that came to life when no one was around. The main characters were a spaceman action figure and a cowboy doll. “I kind of remember it, yes. What about it?”

  “Well, it’s how computers make those characters seem three-dimensional. If you have the right program, you can make a face seem like it’s talking to you, looking around and all that. So I took some of the pictures of me on the funeral site and…did you know the place you work at had a lot of the nurses sign my guestbook?”

  “Colin, please. Focus.”

  “Sorry, anyway, I figured out how to use the program. See what you think. Let me know what I have to tweak.”

  The wallpaper on the iPad remained, but a familiar face appeared on the screen. He’d seen it before, staring blankly at the ceiling at the Facility while he read Dr. Seuss to a juvenile head-trauma case.

  “Oh, my, God. Colin…it’s you! But wait, it looks three-D, it looks so real…”

  The image shifted to sport a smile, and then the lips began to move. “So, Dad. You like your present?”