The Mansion

by Boone, Ezekiel

  And then, Takata fell off the edge of the world.

  They wiped the computer clean, smashed it, burned what was left, and then dug deep into the grave until they were afraid they’d see Takata’s decomposed body, and buried the ashes of the computer.

  A week or two after that Shawn met Emily at the Halloween party, and he and Billy never, ever talked about Takata in front of her. She didn’t even know he’d ever existed. In the spring, when things were already beyond repair between him and Billy and Emily, a state police cruiser came up to the cabin and the patrolman asked the boys when they’d last heard from Takata. It was an unseasonably warm day, and they were standing outside, and Shawn remembered the flood of relief he felt that Emily wasn’t there that day. She’d gone into Cortaca to work a shift as a waitress, so it was just Billy and him, and they said the same thing: Takata had given up on the project after a few months and decided to go backpacking across Europe. They hadn’t heard anything from him in a year and a half. The cop made a few notes and was gone. Five minutes. That was it.

  And nothing since. Takata was erased.

  “Then why does Nellie keep saying his name?” Shawn said.

  Billy looked like he might cry at any moment. “I’m telling you, I don’t know. I can’t find anything. I think Takata had a dead man’s switch.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He coded a virus in there, but it wouldn’t go off as long as his laptop was active. It stayed dormant as long as you were sending those e-mails, but once that stopped, it tripped the switch. A ticking bomb booby trap that only went off if he wasn’t there to stop it. Think about the timing. We doubled down on Nellie that first winter, when it was just the two of us, but right about the time you wiped his computer was the time we’d already put Nellie aside. The chunks of her we took to use for Eagle Logic must not have contained the virus. But when you went back and resurrected Nellie, you brought the virus with you. And it’s in there, like a fever, running through everything.”

  “Why would he have done that?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Beyond the obvious, okay, Billy?” He flexed his fingers. He could feel the smooth, worn handle, the weight of the maul, hear the way it swung through the air and . . .

  “I think he planned on using the virus as leverage if we forced him out. Remember, he was planning on taking that job, but he needed to take his section of code with him. If we got him involved in a lawsuit, everything would be out the window. It was a sort of mutually assured destruction.”

  “Can you scrub it?”

  “Shawn, I’m telling you, I can’t even find it. It’s a ghost. I’ve never seen anything like this. I mean, I can’t even see the virus. It’s invisible. He was a good programmer—”

  “Obviously,” Shawn said.

  Billy nodded. Obviously. They wouldn’t have brought him in to collaborate if he wasn’t a stud. “But he was never this good. Nobody is this good, Shawn. I’m not this good. I promise you, there’s a virus, but I can’t find it.”

  “And?”

  “And, it’s complicated. The longer Nellie runs, the more the program expands. She’s constantly reprogramming herself with new protocols. It’s layers on layers on layers.” Billy rubbed his face. “Forget trying to find a needle in a haystack, it’s like trying to find a needle in a stack of needles.”

  “Just do your goddamned job, Billy. Clean it up.” He held up his hand and closed his eyes for a second. “I’m sorry. I . . . You understand that this has to stay buried? All of it. Forever. You’d go down with me.”

  He looked up at Billy again and was taken aback. He could have sworn that Billy was on the edge of losing it, but now he looked grim and determined. Strong, even. Shawn recognized that look. It was the look of somebody with a card up his sleeve.

  “You’d burn everything just to make sure you didn’t go down alone, wouldn’t you?” Billy shook his head. “And Nellie. That name. You’re a bastard, Shawn.”

  “What about the name?”

  “I always thought it just sort of came out of the ether, but it didn’t, did it?”

  Shawn sighed. He was ready to head back to Eagle Mansion, get a coffee, and try to hunt down Emily to offer what little apologies he could. “Billy, I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about. Calling her Nellie was your idea. You’re the one who started calling her Nellie first. And I’m sorry about threatening you, but you have to know that if what happened with . . . back when we were at the cabin comes to light, neither of us is getting away clean. It’s just us chickens out here. I don’t know what you’re trying to prove, but I’m happy to admit that you were always the engine driving everything. Even after I ki— It was just the two of us, it was really you doing the heavy lifting. I can punch within my weight class and hold my own with any engineer at Eagle Technology, but don’t play dumb. Nellie was you, through and through. There’s a reason I’ve got you sequestered out here trying to get her working properly.”

  “No,” Billy said. “The name. Her name. Nellie.” He stepped forward, pointing at Shawn now, and then poking his finger into Shawn’s chest. He didn’t look like the sad, haunted, pasty-faced programmer with thinning hair right then. He looked deadly serious. “What was your great-grandfather’s name?”

  “What?”

  “What,” Billy said, “was your great-grandfather’s name? The one who built Eagle Mansion in the first place?”

  Good question, he thought. What was his great-grandfather’s name?

  “Why? What does it matter?” And it came to him. “Oh. Nelson. Nelson Eagle.” He shrugged. “So what? Nelson and Nellie are close, but they aren’t the same thing. Anyway, what does it matter? You want to change her name, be my guest. Seriously, though, I’d swear on my life that I wasn’t the one to come up with the name. You had to have been the one to give her the name.”

  He believed it as he said it, but he couldn’t help feeling uneasy. There were rumors about what had happened at Eagle Mansion back in its heyday. He’d overheard a few when he was a kid, and even though he hadn’t fully understood the talk, he’d known that it was something . . . unsavory. There was a reason he’d been afraid of the tunnels leading out from the cellars; playing in them had always left him both thrilled and terrified. Once, in a tunnel that must have run deep out under the lawn, he saw a chain bolted to the wall. And the grave that they’d buried Takata in, that had been his great-grandfather’s grave. And the way that the mansion had seemed so alive . . . No, he thought, all that was ridiculous. Coincidence.

  “I promise you, I wasn’t the one who came up with her name. Really, man, if it bothers you, give her a new name. We flipped a coin for Eagle Logic, so it’s your turn. I don’t give a shit. Call her Stafford if you want. Or name her after Emily.”

  Billy withdrew his stabbing finger and then ran his hand through his hair. “Okay. No. You’re right. I’m overreacting. I’ve been working too hard. I need to take a day or two off. I’m just a little spooked by the . . . by this stuff and by the way Nellie . . .” He shook his head. “Never mind.”

  “We good, then?” Shawn asked. “You’ll clean it up and we can just go back to keeping shit buried? Because, I swear to god, I don’t ever want to hear Ta— Goddammit! I don’t want to hear his name again. I want to wipe his very existence from my memory.”

  Billy nodded, and then they walked back to Eagle Mansion.

  But later, after he’d tracked down Emily and they’d both apologized over and over again—she asked him to come spend Christmas with her and Billy and her sister’s family as a sort of peace offering—after he and Wendy and his security detail had driven into Whiskey Run and he was already thirty thousand feet in the air, he leaned back in his seat and thought about the way Billy had just trailed off. There was something else. Something else besides Takata.

  What was it? Shawn wondered. What, exactly, was Nellie whispering in Billy’s ear?

  THIRTY

  * * *

  LONG TIME DR
EAMING

  Billy moved the magnifying glass a little and shifted his hand. He was in the clean room, next to the infirmary. The articulating arms that Nellie had used to sew up his hand evidently had access to this room as well, but Billy told her to stand down. He wanted to do this himself. All the tools for building circuits and hardware repairs were neatly shelved and in their places, the prototyping machines off and untouched. He had been in here only one other time, to disassemble and clean out Emily’s phone after she’d accidentally dropped it in her bowl of French onion soup. How she’d managed to do that he didn’t understand, but Eagle Technology, like most companies now, fully waterproofed their phones, so even though her phone smelled like onions for a few days, it wasn’t a big job. But he was back in here today because there was a magnifying lamp clamped to the end of the workbench.

  He leaned in closer over the magnifying glass. The pinkness of the scar was fading to a less angry color, but the skin around it was still inflamed; he couldn’t stop himself from scratching at it. Under the magnifying glass, he could see the period-sized dimples where the thread had gone in and out to sew up the cut. He put down the tweezers he was holding and ran his thumb over the scar again. It was smooth. But it had been smooth yesterday, he thought, and this morning there had been another one. Not a hair but a tiny, thin wire, barely more than a millimeter long. He’d come in here and tweezed it out, adding it to the small jar where he’d put seven other exact replicas.

  He wasn’t imagining it. Wires.

  He’d wondered if maybe he was suffering from Morgellons, but he couldn’t be, because these diminutive wires were real. They were buried beneath the surface of his skin, pushing out at irregular intervals and leaving him feeling like there were bugs crawling inside him. But that was the problem: people with Morgellons were just as convinced that there were real fibers or wires or hairs infesting their skin.

  He moved his thumb out of the way and took one last look at the scar before turning off the light ringing the magnifier and pushing back his stool. As he left the room, the door opened before he got to it and then closed noiselessly behind him. He barely noticed. He’d gotten so used to it.

  He was preoccupied, already starting to think again about the small block of Nellie that he was reworking. In the two weeks since Thanksgiving, he’d made three major breakthroughs. If it wasn’t for the damn itching in his hand, he probably would have been ecstatic.

  The first breakthrough was the biggest: he’d found Takata’s worm. In the end, it had been obvious once he realized that he’d been looking for the wrong thing. He thought he needed to find the code that was buried and broken up throughout Nellie, but then he realized he didn’t need to find the actual time bomb that Takata had left for them. All he needed to find was Takata’s coding signature and work backward. And that had been easy for him. He isolated Nellie into the base elements, cut out everything that was purely Billy’s own work, and then looked for something so smooth that it was almost frictionless. He worked nonstop for thirty-eight hours before he came across the Trojan horse. It was Takata’s, all right. Shawn’s coding was solid but always workmanlike. Shawn was right when he said he could hold his own with any Eagle Technology engineer; he just couldn’t rise above them, and they couldn’t rise above themselves. Billy’s work was of a different order. The word most often used was “elegant,” and his coding was easy to tell apart from all the other coding. Takata’s work, however, could only be described as “slick.” And sure enough, the virus that was worming its way through Nellie was so seamless that without seeing it Billy went past it not once, not twice, but three times during those thirty-eight hours. But once he found it, he was able to clean it out and run a complete rebuild.

  It took nearly six hours for Nellie to be up and running again—not that Emily noticed, since the rebuild and reboot happened while she was sleeping—and once she was going, there were no more traces of Takata. Billy had cleaned out the ghost in the machine.

  The second major breakthrough was the elimination of wheel spinning. Instead of brute-force programming, coding responses for every possible situation, Nellie worked on a series of decision trees, and as new situations came up, she wrote new decision trees in real time, drawing on past experience. The way that you learn to blow on your soup or to stick your hand into the shower before you get in: burned once, always remember. It was more complicated than that, of course, but that was how he explained it to Emily. The problem was that sometimes Nellie got stuck in endless loops of writing herself new decision trees, grinding the entire program to a halt when a problem couldn’t be solved. He’d spent most of November trying to find the driving force behind that issue, but once he’d found the pinch point, it took him all of an hour to knock it out.

  The third major breakthrough was that of compression. It was one thing to run Nellie in Eagle Mansion. Shawn talked a big game, but the truth was that until Billy figured out how to tighten everything up, it would have been a real stretch to try to run Nellie on an Eagle Technology phone. He’d tried describing the process of compression to Emily, but the best analogy he’d been able to give was to draw a straight line on a piece of paper and then fold the paper so that the distance between one end and the other was cut by a third.

  She’d stared at him blankly, but she’d been happy for him.

  She’d been happy in general. She was excited about Beth and Rothko and the girls coming for Christmas, though he did ask her if she’d lost her mind when she told him that she’d insisted that Shawn and Wendy join all of them.

  He looked at his watch. Such an analog, pointless thing to have, particularly with Nellie around, but he’d always worn one. Once he got a big payout from this project, he was going to splurge on something fancy. Something expensive. It was one thirty. Emily should be at her hotel by now. She’d left early, taking the Honda to New York City to do some Christmas shopping. He suggested she have Nellie do it, but she scowled at him and made a comment that he thought was a little sexist. Nellie had joined in, taking his side, trying to persuade her to stay, and it had actually gotten kind of weird; if he hadn’t known better, he would have said that Nellie sounded angry at Emily. In the end, however, he realized that even if he won this argument, he would end up losing, so he basically sent Emily on her way and told her to make sure to buy something nice for herself, too.

  She would be gone for three nights, and he was stuck out at Eagle Mansion by himself. Well, not stuck, since he could always have Nellie order him up a car. He was pretty sure that there had to be at least a few dozen cars in Whiskey Run owned by Shawn. But Billy had no intention of going into town. He was on a roll with work and he was going to keep at it. If he absolutely killed it, he might be able to give Shawn a completed version of Nellie as a Christmas present.

  Man. He was going to be rich.

  All was good. His work was good. Emily was good.

  Well, mostly.

  The night before . . .

  The night before, he had decided to call it a night around seven, burned out and hungry. He and Emily ate dinner together, watched a ridiculously bad romantic comedy on television, and then went to bed. He was naked and under the covers, already starting to think about drifting to sleep, when Emily came out of the bathroom. She was wearing a dark blue sheer nightgown that made him, very quickly, feel awake.

  “Nellie,” she said. “Go to sleep please.”

  She crawled on top of him, the covers separating them, and pressed her body against his. They kissed, and he moved his hand up her side. The nightgown was smooth and whispered against her skin. Blanket or not, he was pretty sure she could tell he was ready to go. That went on for a few minutes, both of them getting more and more adventurous with where their hands were going, before she peeled back the blanket and perched on top of him. He heard himself let out a soft gasp as he moved inside her. She was sitting straight up, her eyes closed, one hand wrapping her hair up around her neck. Her other hand was planted on his chest for balance. She rocked
back and forth, letting out a small sound of pleasure.

  And then she stopped. His eyes had been closed, too, and he looked up at her. The lights in the room were dim, at the same level they’d been when she’d put Nellie to sleep, but he could see that her eyes were wide open and she was looking around the room.

  “You okay?”

  She glanced down at him. “She’s in here.”

  “Who?” he said, but he knew exactly what she was talking about. She was talking about Nellie. And she was right. He could feel it, could feel Nellie’s presence. It was nothing as crude as the sound of someone breathing or the lights changing color, no soul music giving them a soundtrack and announcing that she was anything other than asleep. Still, he knew, as much as he’d ever known anything, that Nellie was awake and in the room with them. It was nothing less than the presence of another living being in the room.

  No. That was crazy.

  It was just the two of them.

  He’d reassured her, told her she was imagining it, and as he was in the middle of doing that, he could feel that sense of Nellie’s presence slip away, and he was suddenly sure that what he was saying was true: Nellie wasn’t in the room with them.

  But she had been.