Ethan nodded.
“Everything seems tinted now, even when it’s off. I can’t tell what’s what. If I’m seeing something or thinking something because I’m actually thinking it or not. This isn’t fucking right, man. I don’t know . . . I don’t know anymore.”
“So, what do you want to do?” he asked, the quiver in my voice bleeding into his.
I stopped. The hurt faded away, giving way to a yawning coldness. It was an especially strange feeling because half of me wanted to just say “quit.” And never mention any of this again. But instead, something entirely different was tumbling out. “He’s not going to let this rest, Ethan. We’ve got to keep going like we were going before, but secretly we gotta go five, ten, twenty times as fast. We gotta be hitting houses every night. I don’t know how much more Revised he is, but it’s at least a little—maybe more—and we’ve got to close the gap.”
“So, one a night?”
“Two. More if we need to.”
“Who’s being reckless now?” he asked.
“Us, if we don’t get going.”
The bell rang.
“How are we going to have time to case that many houses?”
“That’s the beauty; Jaden already cased them for us. He put a bunch of them on my computer thinking the police were coming to search it. And that’s not the only thing. You know Chemtrex Home Security?”
“Isn’t that what the Gruensteins had, but . . .”
“Jaden knocked it out. He’s got a backdoor into their network and he left that on my computer, too. He deleted it as soon as he knew I got the BASIC card back, but not before I copied it.”
A few minutes later, just as Ethan was leaving, I heard a voice behind me.
“Hey man, I’ve been meaning to talk to you.”
When I saw it was Spencer, I tilted my head and raised my eyebrows in a faux show of interest before starting to walk past him. “I’ve gotta get to class.”
“Are you guys alright?” he asked, watching Ethan walk down the hall toward first period physics.
I stared him down. “Why wouldn’t we be?”
“I don’t know,” he said, not making eye contact. “I just . . . I just wanted to say that I didn’t start hanging out with Jaden because of anything you did. I honestly didn’t even know he was your brother until—”
“Spencer, you don’t have to explain yourself. I’m not your keeper.”
“No, I, I do though, and . . . and I just wanted to say that we’re not friends, we’re just helping each other.”
“Helping each other,” I repeated, as I slung my bag over my shoulder and began walking. “Jaden doesn’t help people. He makes deals. But I doubt you’re going to like the terms.”
This made Spencer pause and lose a few steps on me.
“You can’t be this naïve.” I said. “In fact, did Jaden put you up to this?”
“Up to what?”
“I don’t know and I don’t want to find out, either.”
“Hey, Dorian. Dorian,” he said, louder the second time as I was about to turn a corner. There was a hoarseness to his voice, like a cold had descended deep into his throat, his lungs even, making every fifth or sixth word split open in the air. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you. Your brother’s been acting really strange lately. He’s changing.”
“You don’t say,” I said, drawing out the last word.
“No, really.” Spencer took a long breath and looked around to see if anyone was watching us in the hallway, but save for someone turning into a classroom twenty meters down it was deserted. “I mean, I know you know he’s Revised. But it’s more than that. His Revision’s Revising itself now. It’s some program on his BCI.”
“Some program?” I asked, immediately thinking of the ‘Road to Camelot,’ the biggest file that I’d been unable to crack.
“And it’s changing the way he thinks, too. He’s always been intense, but lately he’s said some things that you really wouldn’t think someone would say.”
I still thought Jaden had sent him, but this last part got my attention. I stared at him again, looking for a tell—probing for a break in composure. “Like?”
“Like he’s talking about how the world’s starting to seem small. And that he wants to . . . I can’t really say. If he found out, he’d . . .”
“You think I’m going to rat you out after what he’s done to me?”
“No, not you, but I . . . I should get to class.”
Now it was me trying to get him to stay, blocking his path ever so slightly. “Spencer, no matter what he’s promised you, once he gets what he wants it’s not going to matter.”
Spencer looked around at the row of lockers and then at a couple of straggling students rushing down the hallway, before re-adjusting his backpack and returning his gaze to me. “Yeah, you’d know that more than anyone, wouldn’t you?”
Chapter 34
As soon as school was out, we headed straight to Uncle Richard’s to work on more drones. The blue morphos went faster this time, now that we had ironed the kinks out, but in order to make anything smaller we needed the kind of specialized parts you wouldn’t just find in the yard or around town. So we started setting up fake accounts, getting anonymous storage lockers, and paying people to pick up things. Before long we had two more blue morphos, then three, then five—as well as everything we’d need to start building cockroaches and flies.
It was harder tracking all the new drone feeds in real time in our films, but the thinking was that with nanobots strengthening our neural wiring and sending more blood around our prefrontal cortexes, we’d grow into them. And we needed to. Not just because we’d get better intel, but we’d be able to get more pollen for the pollen drops, freeing up lanes for us to hit better neighborhoods.
I went home for dinner, then spent a few hours going over footage in my room and checking on the backdoor to Chemtrex. We didn’t want to abuse it because if enough Chemtrex homes reported irregularities they’d figure something was up and audit their system, but it would be the same old plan—take little enough that they wouldn’t know. But do it more often. And do it in nicer houses.
I set a silent alarm inside my head for 2 a.m. The adrenaline made it hard to fall asleep and I managed only forty-five minutes before I was leaving again, this time through the window so I wouldn’t have to deal with Mr. Jefferson.
There was a knot in my stomach, but there was a knot in my stomach so much now that I was numb to it. It was a different kind of scared. Routine, yet desperate. One that knew there wasn’t any going back. It made the pollen drop and the lock picking of the first house seem like I was running an errand.
People were at home sleeping in the second house, so it was scarier, but since we had sent Taurus and his new sibling, Orion, in beforehand to find the scores, we were out in just five minutes.
Ethan was mostly quiet, a shadow of himself. It was probably better that way, but it was also a reminder of how many close calls we’d had and how fast things were moving. That if we stopped, we’d be easy marks for Jaden, and the only reason he hadn’t nailed me last night was because we’d had the twins and saw the card. And the only reason he didn’t try something else today was that I’d become a credible enough threat to at least give him pause. He’d deleted all the stuff I’d put on his workstation, but there was always the chance he hadn’t gotten it all. Maybe I’d buried something in the yard. Maybe there were jump drives I’d entombed in my room somewhere. Maybe they were in Ethan’s room. Who knew? We had to at least keep it close. Keep him from having first-strike capability. That was the term Mrs. Randall had used during our Cold War unit earlier this year.
“Say we make it a hat trick?” I suggested, after we’d hit the second house.
Ethan was tugging on the leash, trying unsuccessfully to get his dog, Wilfred, to keep walking. The idea was that since the reported robberies all involved heavy, big-ticket items, us out in jogging shorts walking a dog wouldn’t fit the profile. Altho
ugh the animal, an ancient, diabetic basset hound, was hardly the perfect prop.
Ethan stopped fighting it for a moment and looked up at me in disbelief.
“There’s still an hour before we’ve got to be up for school.”
“You’re crazy,” he said.
“You were the one who—”
“I know, I know.” He winced and let the leash go slack. “And I know we have to, it’s just . . . you remember how I thought the glass cutter in the yard was like the sword that Joan of Arc found? Like it was meant to be and everything? But the part I didn’t think about was that Joan of Arc was fucking nuts, wasn’t she? Hearing voices and having visions . . .”
“Eth, come on.”
“And maybe I am, too. Or maybe we all are. Maybe we’re all trapped in the dark side of the multiverse, walking off a plank.” Ethan looked around the neighborhood, and then down at the leash in his hand. “And . . . I don’t want to keep doing it. And I don’t think Wilfie does, either . . . he’s tired.”
“We’ll shoot him up with some nanobots.”
“Stay away from my fucking dog, Dorian,” Ethan snapped as I took a step forward, hardly in the mood to joke around.
“Actually . . . actually never mind—the house’s just up there. No pets and the owners are both doctors working the night shift.” I stepped back and looked up from Jaden’s casing notes. “And they’re liquid since the guy trades vintage woodwinds on the side.”
Ethan shook his head. “What makes you think Jaden hasn’t hit him already?”
“There would’ve been something in the police blotters,” I said. “Jaden’s not subtle.”
“But he could be trying to trick us again.”
“Could be.”
“Do you think he knew about the twins and figured we’d be able to get the card in time?” asked Ethan after a few moments.
I’d puzzled on that endlessly myself in the past twenty-four hours, wanting so bad to believe it, but honestly not knowing. Honestly not sure I wanted to know. “The thing is, even if he had, I barely got it. Right? He couldn’t have known that I’d have gotten it for sure.”
“But he knew we were really trying to bust him, didn’t he?”
I nodded. “That’s why we’re here. He’s not going to let this go, Eth. Maybe soon, maybe later, but he’s going to get us back.”
“Us? Does that mean he knows . . . shit, there’s a cop coming. It’s up on S’s cam about five blocks down turning now.”
“What kind of approach?” I asked.
“Uh, the algo says it’s a patrol, ‘scouring’ level 2. Let’s . . .” Ethan looked around. “Let’s go in their yard.”
We didn’t have to hide, but the less the cops saw us out the better. So I nodded and we climbed behind a flower garden.
After twenty seconds headlights emerged on the street, shining through the bluish purple predawn. This wasn’t the kind of neighborhood you tore through, but the officer was really taking his time, as if looking for something in particular. We’d moved about fifteen blocks up once we’d figured out how to hack the CDN and delete our metadata, but considering how many burglaries there’d been, there’d still be occasional police patrols even out here.
“Do you think someone called this in?” Ethan whispered.
“Either that or they’re just on high alert.”
The police car passed. As soon as its tail lights were out of view, I went into the Chemtrex network and shut the house’s security down. Then I went to the front door and jimmied the lock with a screwdriver.
Chapter 35
There was a soft ringing in my ear and a picture of Michael popped up in the corner of my film display. We hadn’t spoken in a while and I missed him. He was the kind of person who could fall off the radar because he was so quiet and never got involved in any drama, but you’d start to feel it eventually when he wasn’t around.
“Hey man, I’m grabbing stuff at the store and just wanted to make sure you’re still coming.”
“Coming to what?” I asked.
“The barbeque. Remember?”
I had remembered. I’d just filed it away as such a low priority that my brain relevance module hadn’t even cached it, but now that it was relevant again, it returned in perfect clarity. The more memory upgrades I got, the less economical it would need to be to remember everything. “What time’s it, again?”
Michael hesitated, then sounded a little disappointed as he said, “Grilling at 6:15, but we’ll be there for a while since NASA does these really cool projections highlighting the constellations on Friday nights. You don’t need ’em for the Big Dipper, Orion, and Gemini, but they really come in handy for the farther ones like Equuleus and Lynx.”
I hadn’t even considered going, but we didn’t have our session at S24 until 7:00 (Dr. Griz worked some pretty strange hours, presumably because he didn’t need to sleep) and there wasn’t enough time in between to hit another house. I’m not sure I’d want to anyway. I’d been feeling pretty queasy and Ethan had been increasingly removed—sometimes saying only a few words the whole time we were together. The stress layered, with each successive risk covering up a little more of what had come before.
“Sure, sure. I’ll be there,” I said, decelerating after seeing that I’d made it up to 27 mph in a 25 zone.
“Really?” asked Michael, his tone instantly transformed.
“Really. Do you need me to pick up anything?”
“Nah, nah. Chris and I’ve got it handled. I’m just wondering if I’ll recognize you when you get there.”
“Dude, don’t be such a little drama queen.” This wasn’t fair because we didn’t have any classes together and I’d largely stopped eating lunch so we could rob a house over the noon hour, but I knew he could appreciate the tease.
“Whatever you say, Dor. But I’ll . . . see you there?” asked Michael, the disquiet in his voice returning.
“You’ll see me there.”
Just as I was about to shut down the feed, Michael blurted, “Actually, bring Syd since Julie’s bringing her badger drone, Bisby. Who’s a friendly badger so they’ll be friends—don’t worry. And Chris is bringing his buddy bot, Arthur, that just got an upgrade, so hopefully he’ll tell better jokes than last time. And—”
“Julie. Who’s this Julie?”
I could feel Michael blushing. “Oh, she’s a friend. Girlfriend actually.” He said the g-word softly. I couldn’t tell if he was embarrassed, or was just apprehensive I’d tease him about her, too. “We met at this drone park. Rex actually collided with her. She has this octocopter and the operator assigned us both the same airspace by mistake, so their maneuvering algorithm’s sensitivity was set too low and—”
“That’s great, Michael. I’m happy for you,” I said.
“Really?”
“Of course.”
Unlike Jesup Park, Midland Park was quaint and mostly prairie, filled with the kind of flowers and cherry blossoms that made it a magnet for pollinators, lighting up my CDN overlay in a solid shade of red. I recoiled just like I did at anything red now, stowing my red and maroon shirts in the back of my closet and changing the settings on my film so that anything with a dominant wavelength of 625-740 nanometers would show up as dark orange instead. I would’ve turned the map off completely more often, but I always worried I’d forget to turn it back on.
It was easy enough to automate cycles for school and sports practices, but we were doing so much stuff now that the algorithm was having trouble keeping track of what was what, and the last thing I wanted to do was have a drone see me somewhere questionable. However, since I was just at the park with my friends doing what anyone my age would be expected to be doing, I put on a manual re-initiation timer for 6:45, when we’d need to leave for the clinic, and toggled over to normal vision.
“Well, well, well. Look what we’ve got here,” said Chris, beaming, acting like he couldn’t believe his eyes. “Arthur, go take a blood sample, will you? I just want to make sure he�
�s real.”
Even though I knew he was joking, some part of me was anxious given how many nanobots were in me, and the fact that he’d called me on a lie at the beginning of the year. Even in the most innocuous places with the people I trusted, I had to have my guard up.
“Okay, Christopher. But he would need to fill out the Muir Diagnostics consent form, which can be found at www.mu.”
“I was kidding, Arthur. I thought you had your humor upgraded?”
Arthur turned slightly. “Apparently I was being too dry for you. Perhaps I should go into child-mode and do pratfalls.”
“Ooh, it’s mouthy,” said Michael.
“Told you it was the real deal, didn’t I?” said Chris, squeezing the transparent casing above Arthur’s shoulder joint as he reached down to pet Syd, who was puttering around a few feet away. “Well looky there, a fellow synthetic. Can I hold it?”
“Be my guest,” I said, uncomfortable with how similar Arthur looked to Mr. Jefferson, who immediately reminded me of Jaden. “You guys know he’s just doing it because people think robot-animal interaction’s cute.”
“And he’s right,” said Michael, as Arthur started stroking Syd. “I could watch that forever.”
“Aside from humor and keeping an eye on the pets, my primary role here today will be barbeque safety,” said Arthur. “When using lighter fluid, always make sure to point the nozzle directly on the tinder, applying only 1.6 ounces of fluid for every pound of charcoal. Optimally, we would’ve chosen propane or natural gas as our heating instrument, but since you preferred the park’s ambiance to somewhere better equipped we’ll have to make due.”
“He’s grill master, too?” asked Tony.
“No, that’s me. I figure robots already have to do enough slave labor, so we’ll give him a break,” said Chris. “But he will be on mosquito duty. It’s pretty crazy that they’re still out this time of year.”
Michael looked over at the grill. “Maybe if we would’ve burned less coal they wouldn’t be.”
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