Man Made Boy (10 page)

“Deserve better? Are you messing with me?”

She stopped and glared at me, shaking her head. “No, of course I’m not messing with you. You can leave. You proved it the other day. And you’d be an idiot not to do it!” She leaned back against the wall, looking off into the darkness. “This place is just holding you back. It’s a dead end. A zoo for freaks.”

It was difficult to see in the dim light, but after a moment, I realized she was crying. Liquid draining from colorless gems.

“What were you doing down here, just now?” I asked her. “All by yourself in the dark?”

“Nothing.” She pushed the tears away with the backs of her hands.

I waited.

Then finally she said, “Just…thinking.”

“Do you wish you could…Do you want to leave The Show?”

“You said it right the first time. I
wish
I could. But I couldn’t pass out there. Not like you can. This,” she slapped her hand on the rough stone wall. “This is all I have to look forward to.”

“Liel, I—”

“So you think about that, huh?” She turned on me, her eyes fierce, her lips pulled back in a snarl to show a mouth full of sharp teeth. “The next time you feel like whining about the opportunities your dad is fighting to give you, you remember
me
. Okay?”

Then she was gone, moving too fast through the dark tunnels for me to see.

MY PARENTS WERE both out when I got back home, which was great. They were probably going to expect me to apologize for freaking out in front of Ruthven, and I was definitely not ready to do that.

I got an energy drink from the fridge and sat at the table, chugging the cool, sticky sweetness. The PC tower I had picked up from the fly crew earlier sat on the ground in front of my bedroom door. I’d almost forgotten about that. Mom probably picked it up and brought it home at some point. She was good like that. The mystery of how part of my new virus escaped was the perfect thing to take my mind off everything else.

I took the tower into my bedroom, closing the door behind me and began testing. I guess I should have been a little concerned that the virus had gotten away from me. But really, it proved that I was on the right track. It’s impossible for a regular computer program to do something truly unpredictable. Anything a program can do can be predicted by the programmer because computers can only do the things the programmer explicitly teaches them how to do. They don’t learn or adapt or try new things. They can’t be random.

But as far as I could tell, my project had just done something totally unpredictable. It did something I never explicitly taught it how to do. It analyzed my security measures, located a breach, adapted its
own code
to exploit that breach, and escaped. And I had no idea why.

Which was…amazing. A first in computing history. I was a fucking genius.

There was pounding on the front door of our apartment. I heard my mom’s footsteps walk toward it. She must have gotten
home sometime after me. A moment later, there was a knock at my bedroom door.

“Boy,” said my mom. “Come out here please.” She never said things like “please” unless she was pissed about something and there were other people around. I quickly unplugged and went out to the living room.

Mom was over by her pile of junk in the corner, acting like there was nobody else in the room. Charon stood in the doorway, his brown robes crooked on his bony frame, like he had just been running.

“Boy! We need you!” he said.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“The Siren just had a complete breakdown onstage in front of an audience. Nearly killed them all.”

“Oh, no,” I said, wondering if she and the Minotaur had finally broken up. “Where’s my dad?”

“He’s taking care of her.”

“So what do you need me for?”

Charon looked at Mom for a moment, but she was still pretending like he wasn’t there. So he turned back to me.

“The Diva has taken this moment, while your father is occupied and Ruthven is managing the panicked audience, to pitch a fit. She wants company in her dressing room. You. Face-to-face. Immediately.”

“But…”

“Yeah. You have to switch off.”

“No,” said Mom from her spot over by the pile of junk.

“Bride…” said Charon. “You had to know it would happen sooner or later. Your husband can’t be in two places at once.”

“She can wait.”

“No, Bride. We can’t risk that. Not with her. Do you remember the last time? Twenty humans and three creatures dead. She could ruin everything. And you know she won’t accept you in his place.”

My mom still stared at the pile of junk. She picked up part of an old toaster oven and examined it.

“Please, Bride,” said Charon. “For the Company.”

She stared at the toaster while we waited for her to answer. Slowly, carefully, she compressed it into a small lump of metal. Then she let it drop back on the pile.

“For the Company,” she said. Her face was as expressionless as ever, but the stitches on her forehead vibrated with tension.

“What about you, Boy?” he asked. “Are you up to it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Wise answer. Will you do it?”

I looked at Mom, trying to see what she wanted. But then I thought,
He didn’t ask her. He asked me
.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

I sat on the stool that I had seen Dad sit on so many times. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my temples. Mom walked slowly over and stood behind me for a moment. I felt her gently loosen the stitches at the base of my skull.

“What does it feel like?” I asked.

“For most of it, it feels like nothing,” she said. “Then at the end, it feels like everything.”

I could feel her push aside muscles and tendons to locate the nerves.

“I know this is hard.” Charon sat on one of the chairs at the table. “I’ll talk to Ruthven about some extra food vouchers, or maybe a special trip to the junkyard.”

Mom didn’t reply to that. I could feel her working deep into my spine now, slowly, methodically exposing the nerves.

“Okay, Boy. It’s time.”

I couldn’t breathe or see or hear. Emotion crushed down so hard that it blocked out everything else. I’d heard people talk about “emotional pain” before, but I didn’t realize it could be literal, like my guts were getting wound up around a spiked pole inside me. I caught visual flickers of myself falling from the stool and hitting the hard floor, but compared to the relentless pressure
inside, I barely felt it. My mom tried to pick me up, but any touch, even hers, made it worse, so I pushed her away. All I could do was lay there, dimly aware that my body was convulsing, as I lived through the emotional experience of the past half hour but compressed into a short, hard burst.

I LEFT THE APARTMENT and walked unhurriedly down the main corridor. I could tell my posture was different. Straighter, more purposeful. People stopped and looked at me as I passed them, like they could sense something was off. And they were right. Something was way off. It was almost like I was two separate people in one, the acting me and the feeling me. I was having the emotions but they hit the back of my skull and just sat there, while the acting me—the disconnected me—just kept going.

This time I didn’t hesitate when I knocked on Medusa’s door, and I wasn’t quiet or tentative about it.

“Yes?” I heard Medusa say. But this time no chill ran through my body, no ice-cream brain freeze.

“It’s Boy.” Internally, I recoiled at the flat, robotic sound of my own voice. It sounded so much like my father. But that emotion pooled up at the disconnection point, just like all the rest.

“Wonderful,” said Medusa, her voice silky smooth. “Come in.”

I jerked the door open immediately and stepped inside. All the same sensual elements were there: the smell of cedar, the dim lighting, her lounging silhouette behind the white curtain. I stood there with dumb indifference, waiting for my next instructions.

“My, my. Your mother fixed you all up, didn’t she?” said Medusa, her voice teasing.

“Fixed me up? Clarify.”

“I just mean that now we can talk face-to-face.” She pushed the curtain aside and I saw Medusa for the first time. The pressure on the back of my skull spiked as I took it all in. Her smooth snakeskin gleamed white except the green and brown diamond patterns that ran from her neck, across her shoulders and ended halfway down her upper arms. Her thick head of snake hair writhed slowly and her body swayed with the same motion. Her face was absolutely perfect, with full red lips and glittering black eyes. She was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. But her waist tapered off into a long, thick snake tail that coiled up under her, supporting her back as she lay on her purple velvet divan.

“I always thought you had legs,” I said.

“Yes, I imagine it must be a frustrating realization,” she said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you want to have sex with me but now you know it’s a physical impossibility.”

Deep inside my own head, I was screaming. Out of embarrassment. Out of horror. And okay, sure, maybe a little out of disappointment, too. But all I said was yes.

“Some say sensual lust is the root of my power,” she said. “Lust unfulfilled.”

“Is it?”

“It’s merely a facet. Others say my power is feminine rage, but that, too, is but an aspect. Scholars have always tried to fit me in their tiny boxes and they always fail.”

“What is the root of your power then?”

“To look into my eyes is to stare into the void and see Truth in all its terrible grandeur. Now that you have seen my performance, you have at least a vague understanding of that. That
even veiled, Truth is tremendously powerful and dangerous.”

“Why does truth turn people to stone?”

“It doesn’t. Not literally. But they are frozen for a time, locked in a despair so all-consuming that it’s as if their hearts, their minds, their very muscles have turned to stone. Lesser creatures, like human men, usually can’t survive the experience. And yet they long for it. Truth. Or perhaps death, since death is the ultimate truth. This is why all heroes have tragic endings. They use Truth as a weapon, as Perseus used my likeness to defeat his enemies. But the hero can’t understand, or perhaps can’t accept, that in worshipping Truth, they are consumed by it.”

“Why does it not freeze me now?”

“Truth is more than mere facts. In your current limited state, you look upon Truth, but you don’t know it.”

She slowly rose from her divan and moved toward me, her eyes never breaking contact with mine.

“Did you talk to any humans while you were out shopping with Ruthven?”

“A man and a girl.”

“A girl?” She stroked my cheek with her fingers, smooth and cool on my skin. The pressure in my skull increased with her touch. “How old was she?”

“Approximately my age.”

“Did you like her?”

“Yes. She was nice.”

“Were you attracted to her?”

“Yes.”

“More than Liel?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t get to know her well enough.”

“Such a sweet boy.” She patted me on the head. “I’m going to miss you.”

“Miss me?”

“Yes. When you leave The Show.”

“I do not know if I want to leave The Show.”