by Jen Finelli
“I guess.” Juan Carlos shoved the flier into his hoodie.
Poor kid.
“What'd they say about me, exactly?” Carl asked as they got to the basketball court by the fenced-in walking park. Juan Carlos kicked a beer can; Carl picked it up and dropped it in the recycling bin filled with trash. “You're acting like they said I eat kids or something.”
“You work for my dad, and you're studying engineering. You're a good example, or whatever.”
“Well, if that's the criteria for bein' a good example, papi, I'm in trouble.” Carl shadow-bounced an imaginary basketball and jumped to dunk it. Could he—yup, he still had it!
The boy scowled. “What are you doing?”
“Practicing.”
“Wait, what does that mean? And hold on, why are you in trouble?”
Carl caught his imaginary ball and bounced it off the backboard. “I've got a neurological...disorder.” Disease, while truer, sounded so harsh. “I can't work anymore. And in six months, I gotta pay tuition, or I can't study engineering either. But I can't afford both tuition and meds.”
Juan Carlos trotted behind him, annoyed: “Why can't you—man, come on, why are you doing that?”
Carl dribbled the invisible ball and—“Catch!”—passed. When he saw the kid wasn't going for it he intercepted his own pass: “Too slow.”
“I don't play pretend, man! I'm not some little kid!”
“Too bad.” Carl stopped to take a breath. The chilly air made him feel alive, but it couldn't hide the fact that he had no stamina anymore. He doubled over, hands on his knees. “Successful people play pretend.”
“What? No they don't!”
“It's called 'visualization.' You don't just dream about what you want, you practice it. You enjoy it like you got it, papi. Google 'visualizing success' if you don't believe me.”
“So you're...visualizing...being a basketball player?”
“No, I'm just visualizing being alive, 'mano.”
Juan Carlos smirked. “Which am I, your hermano or your papi?”
“Oh, like calling people 'mi'ijo' makes any sense,” Carl teased. “You people can't have that many kids.”
“I don't know, I think Puerto Ricans have it backwards,” the boy laughed. “You can have lots of kids and brothers, but you really shouldn't have more than two parents!”
“Fair enough.” Carl straightened. The boy dashed past him, grabbed the air like he'd just stolen the ball, and ran for the hoop.
“Hey!”
“Visualize me kicking your butt!”
Carl ran after the boy, laughing as they tousled for the imaginary win.
*
“Who's this?”
A harsh voice interrupted the walk back to Juan Carlos' house. The three young men about Carl's age didn't even look him in the eye as they swaggered up to the kid. In the coming dusk, shadows fell over their hard faces as they blocked the sidewalk.
“He's not from here,” repeated the man in the middle.
“Just a friend of my dad's, Luis,” Juan Carlos said. “He's just leaving.”
“Good.”
Luis' shoulder punched into Carl's as the men walked past.
Carl dropped Juan Carlos off at home and walked quietly to his bus stop, his shoes crunching over broken glass as he wove through a lane spotted with overflowing trash bins, scraggly bushes, and sharp corners perfect for ambush. Territorial neighbors. A kid whose dad worried about the wrong crowd. Yeah…sounded like a gang problem.
Carl stomped and rubbed his hands against his bicep sleeves. Where was the bus? It was dark already, and he usually liked the cold, but this was ridiculous. The experimental metal cuffs under his hoodie kept a frigid moistness right against his skin. He hadn't had a chance to try the 'armor' during an MS attack yet, but so far, if he let his muscles sag, and thought about doing a movement, his arms obeyed. The chip worked.
“You shouldn't be here,” growled the voice Carl now recognized as “Luis”.
Carl turned to see the hooded man holding a knife. It glinted under the moon, with nary a street light or a person around to care. A tall stray dog with ribs like a picket fence ambled across the street.
Why was he noticing that? Why wasn't he afraid? Just standing here, waiting for the inevitable, like a dead man...
“You get home alive if you pay the busman's toll.” Luis held out his palm.
“You're the busman?”
“It's a fucking metaphor, idiot.”
Carl smiled. In this dead calmness the details on Luis' face shone like moon runes, and the wrinkled brow, his own reflection in his attacker's empty eyes, the gold tooth and desperate clink of the “bling-bling” necklace—it read, loud and clear, “Luis can't prove dominance to himself.”
“Why you fucking smiling? Gimme your fucking wallet!”
“Don't have cash on me.”
“Fucking idiot.” With one hand Luis snatched at Carl's pocket; the knife-hand flashed at Carl's belly.
Carl's wrist clanged against the blade as he blocked. He gripped Luis's wrist, snapped back like he was winning an arm-wrestling match—he didn't know how to fight, just wanted that knife away—!
Snap! A crack, a creaking like the tendons of a turkey leg ripped off Thanksgiving dinner. Luis yelped like a kicked dog and fell back as Carl released him with a horrified gasp.
“The fuck are you, some metal fucking robotman, what the fuck!” Tears of pain twinkled in the man's eyes as he switched the knife to his other hand, grimacing and panting as he prepped to swing again. His pain terrified Carl; the man curled back, hunched over his dangling elbow, broken, and now—
Now Carl felt the panic. He jumped back from Luis' weak follow-up swing, hands up: “Mano, stop, just stop and go to the hospital!” he cried. “Please, get away from me before you get hurt!”
“Hurt? Hurt?!” Luis screamed and charged again, and this time Carl caught the knife in his augmented hand and ripped it from the gangster's grip. Luis let out one more cursing scream, the yowl of a burnt cat, before he turned to run into the shadows, elbow still jutting out at a sick angle like jigsaw puzzle forced together wrong.
Carl panted, tucking the knife into his hoodie as if hiding guilt. When the bus headlights came around the distant corner, they reminded him of police search lamps.
*
Carl didn't sleep well for the next week or so. He'd broken a man's elbow. This meant two things.
First, it meant if he wanted to sell this armored suit to a military organization, they'd probably take it. Then he could pay for his tuition, and maybe even for experimental bee sting therapy...
Second, it meant he'd broken a man's elbow! Holy crap, he'd hurt someone! Carl rolled off his mattress, onto the floor, to shuffle through the scattered papers again—in a moment of sick coping he'd calculated how much force it took to break an arm, and it wasn't little. Luis' sweating, tear-stained reduction from human man to cowering pup played in Carl's head until he thought about sleeping with the lights on: he'd made himself too strong!
The Olympic committee once kicked a man out of the Olympics for having a prosthetic leg. The runner had started with nothing, in the Special Olympics, even, but when he reached the top, people began to credit his success to the streamlined metal in his leg.
This was Carl now.
Tuition came due next week.
Or Carl could continue with phase 2.0, as planned, and use everything he had left to try to develop wiring directly to his muscles, so that he could go back to work, and earn his tuition for next year like a normal person. No fancy military sales. Complete control over what happened with what he'd made. Likely failure—top researchers worldwide hadn't yet figured this out.
Or he could try something else entirely.
This third thought scared Carl. Scared and thrilled him. The starlight trickling over his fingertips seemed to flow like magic into the designs he drew—just scribbles, he told himself, because who needed rocket shoes, or augmented vision—
and shadow blended with pencil dust as numbers and equipment lists took shape.
What if he could dig people out of collapsed houses? Rescue child-slaves from human trafficking? Tell Luis never, ever to go near Juan Carlos again? Did he want to get better and become normal, or did he want to get better and become better?
“I'm no better than anyone else,” he whispered to the hubris. “It's just an idea. A silly idea.”
He'd seen the news. All the smart people were wrapped up earning money, or building toys and video games—or developing weapons for crooks til the police couldn't even keep up. They'd arrested a teen last week who shot up a theatre and then retreated into a veritable villain's lair lined with booby traps and bomb switches. Brains so misused. How could Carl use his?
Just one problem, with all of this. With options one, two, and three, all together.
Carl glanced over to the far corner of the room, where a modified Google glass set lay open, wires protruding from it like some modern torture device. His MS attacks always involved his eyes—and there was no such thing as a prosthetic optic nerve.
They did have prosthetic retinal implants now for rats and monkeys, though, and Carl had read those papers until the words played back to him in his sleep. But they dealt with cracking the “code” of the retina, and sending information via that code through special man-made proteins into the nerves that took information to the brain. That wouldn't help Carl: his problem wasn't his retina, or the eye itself, but rather the nerves behind it. He'd found cortical implants online that plugged a camera straight into your cortex, skipping those nerves, but he couldn't just go stabbing around at his head until he saw things.
...Could he?
*
It was one of those shitty MS days—one of the days when Carl just wanted to lie in bed and melt. The armor worked, at least. He could make his body move by thinking, without twitching a single muscle, if he wanted. He just felt so awful. So tired! And today was one of those days when a nerve bundle somewhere decided to hurt. No reason, just the nerve running down his leg screaming that his myelin was under attack. Screaming and screaming...
Carl was debating whether to call for a ride to the hospital when his cell-phone buzzed.
The foreman jumped straight to the point. “Carl, have you seen Juan Carlos?”
“No sir—why?”
“His mother and I, we haven’t seen him for two days!”
Carl sat up. “What happened two days ago?”
“Man, we had this fight—this guy in our barrio, Luis, showed up with a broken arm, said something to him, then left. Juan Carlos wouldn't tell us what he said, so we got angry—”
“Did he leave right after your fight?”
“Yes—we thought he'd be right back! He's done this before, so we waited, but now it's been two days—I gotta go, I gotta call the police. I just hoped you'd seen him.”
“I haven't, I'm sorry. Mis...oraciones estan contigo.”
“Thanks.” The foreman hung up.
Carl's heart raced as his thoughts carried him to standing, to walking, then to the corner of the room where his armored fingers lifted the modified camera-glasses and played with the wires trailing off the ends of the cortical implant he'd built for them. He flicked a switch on the glasses; the little implant box blinked as it sent and received signals from them. Its tiny, sterile metal prongs reached out to him, just waiting to attach to some brain matter and get started...
No, no, no, don't do anything rash! His eyes worked fine, when he wasn't under attack. He didn't need to compromise—
But the fact was, he was under attack. His vision was blurring.
He couldn't find Juan Carlos without sight.
“God help me,” he whispered, as he packed his backpack and ran out the door. “Please, please, please help me.”
*
Carl had an advantage over the police, and over Juan Carlos' parents: Luis wanted to see him again. He asked around at a few houses for Luis until he found a group of guys hanging out on a street corner by an auto-shop, smoking, and with some sullen smirks they pointed him in the right direction.
He knew it was the right direction, because when he arrived at the warehouse behind the abandoned fast food restaurant he heard Luis and Juan Carlos, arguing.
Come on, vision, don't go anywhere...
“I don't want in anymore!” Ah, Juan Carlos. “You think you showing up with a broke arm don't make me scared? He tore you up, man, he'd straight up kill me!”
Some growl from Luis.
“No, man, he works with my dad.”
Crap, no matter how much Luis shouted, Carl couldn't make out his words. He pressed his back tighter against the cheap plastic siding under a cob-web-streaked window.
“Yeah, I know my parents suck now, but it wasn't always like this, and I wanna—I dunno, man, I just want out.”
“Two days in and you want out?” Luis voice sounded clearer now; a glance through the clouded glass showed the gang-leader menacing the kid, leaning right up in his face. “You sure?”
The kid's jaw twitched, and his hands trembled, but his gaze was straight and strong. You rock, kid. “Yeah,” Juan Carlos said. “I want out.”
“Aight. Let's see if you can handle 'out'.”
Luis turned, and Carl ducked back down under the window. He'd seen ten or fifteen guys in there. Now he heard them shuffling; sleeves schicked as they rolled up; a baseball bat, or something else wooden and big, thunked against the floor. Luis grunted: “Forty minutes. Starting...now.”
And with that, the tingling burn in Carl's eyes finally coalesced into fuzzy darkness...and he couldn't see a thing.
Puñeta! Carl heard blows begin to fall with muffled crunches; he dialed 911 on his cell and left it hanging, but he knew the police couldn't get here fast enough, and the skinny child wouldn't last even five minutes of the gang's exit ritual.
And Carl wasn't a good blind man.
Carl's fingers tapped along his head to the little cut he'd made to mark his scalp—it stung—to where, the neurologist said, the textbooks said, and the papers said his visual cortex could hook up to an implant. He flicked on the glasses, and dug the implant out of his pocket to cradle it in his palm. He took deep breaths, in and out, choking down the fear, and felt around in his backpack for the bottle of rum. He chugged it. The swill burned his throat, hell, he didn't even like drinking, and here he was drowning in it while a kid whelped in the background...
Carl tossed the bottle aside, drew the electrical drill out of his backpack, held its point to his skull, felt the hard, thin bit press against his scalp—
And drilled in.
His own scream of pain didn't stop the robotic arm from ripping out a puzzle-piece of skull; the motors on his fingers couldn't feel the pulsing piercing anguish he felt as they drove the implant into his grey matter through a bleeding head-wound. Carl couldn't do it, but the suit could. The suit didn't care. It obeyed his thoughts while he roared.
“Holy shit!” Carl heard voices, gang members who'd run outside at his first screams. He blinked as his vision returned, and as the suit replaced the piece of skull and wrapped bandages around his head with unceremonious speed, he saw them gathered around him, leaving the boy moaning inside.
“Did you see that? Loco just drilled a hole in his head!”
“The fuck are you?”
“Ho-leee shit!”
Luis hung back, one arm in a sling, head lowered with the glare of a wolf as Carl rose. The gang-leader wasn't impressed. He spat on the ground, and drew a gun.
“I wanna know what you want,” he said.
“I want you to leave Juan Carlos and his family alone.”
“Juan Carlos has a new family now.” Luis spat again. “If I just let anyone leave my family, without consequences, well, where would I be, eh?”
“I'll be the only one handing out consequences today,” said Carl. It wasn't like him to come up with something like that, but the suit couldn't do everything fo
r him. The gang parted around Carl like the Red Sea around Moses as he cut a path to Luis.
“With your head dripping like a ketchup fountain?” The gang-leader scoffed. “The hell did you just do to yourself, Robot-Man?”
Carl raised his finger to his glasses. “This.”
A blinding, illegally-bright light flashed out of Carl's lenses into the gang-leader's eyes. “Gah, fuck—!” Carl dove into the whiteness as Luis fired, once, twice, three times, struggling to aim; a bullet impacted Carl's chest with a loud gong sound, and Carl felt like a jackhammer'd gone off in his sternum, but the armor and its bulletproof vest did its job and the robotic body marched on. He reached the gang-leader, ripped the gun out of his hand, crushed it in his grip.
Luis began to scream.
The rest of the gang pounced to defend their leader. Carl thought hard about flying, willing his boots to activate like any other body part—and yes! He roared into the air, carrying Luis with him.
Dios mio, what was he even doing?
Carl was tired. Agonized. Wind rushed over his face and heat from the rockets surged up his shins. He tumbled past the logo of the abandoned restaurant—steering sucked—steering—focus—aaaaaah—and crash-rolled on the warehouse roof with the gang-leader in his embrace.
He climbed to his feet as his robotic suit lifted his puppet-like form, forcing him on. He hated it. His throbbing head wanted him to die. He hated—
“You listen to me,” Carl said, holding Luis by the collar over the edge of the roof. “You will leave Juan Carlos alone. And not just Juan Carlos. You're not recruiting kids anymore.”
“I'd be ruined, man, I'd—”
“Hey. Hey, listen.” Carl snapped his fingers in front of the man's face. “I can fly.”
Luis stopped whining and stared at him. Yes, yes, he could fly, and Luis had no idea what else he could do.
“I'll keep 'em away from kids.”
“Good.”
Carl flew Luis back down to the lot and tossed him to his gang. They backed up as Carl's boots crunched against the dirt. They stood in awed silence as his armor marched into the warehouse, picked up Juan Carlos, and zipped into the sky again just as the police pulled into the neighborhood.