Man Made Boy (12 page)

AS SOON AS I heard the theater door close behind me, I panicked. Ruthven wasn’t there to guide me. I had no idea how to do anything on my own. I had no idea what was going to happen. If I hadn’t just made that dramatic exit for Liel, I might have turned around and gone right back inside.

But obviously, I didn’t want Liel to think I was an even bigger loser than she already did. Plus, I was pretty sure the door had just locked behind me. So I took a slow, deep breath and told myself I’d be back in a day or two. Right after I made computing history.

I visualized the map I’d been memorizing for days, oriented myself with the landmarks I’d seen on Google Maps, and started toward the subway entrance. It helped that it was dark out and there weren’t many people around. I could almost pretend I was back in the caverns. Then I walked down the steps to the subway station and I felt even more like I was in the caverns. Except the caverns smelled better.

Ruthven had given me a credit card to buy tech stuff for The Show. He’d probably cancel it as soon as he found out I was gone, so this might be my last chance to use it. I bought the most expensive MetroCard I could, an unlimited monthly pass.

The turnstiles were a little tricky for someone my size, but I eventually figured out how to squeeze through. I stepped down onto the subway platform and a minute later the train came rumbling into the station. The sound and vibration were so intense I felt like my stitching was going to unravel.

The train shot through tunnels for a few stops, then suddenly popped up aboveground and rose into the air until we were level with the building tops. I turned in my seat and pressed my nose against the glass. Behind me, I saw the island of Manhattan, huge and bristling with pointy roofs and light. Now I was in Queens. The buildings were lower out here and there were fewer lights. But everything was still packed in nice and tight, which felt strangely comforting. I craned my head to look up through the window, and for the first time in my life I saw the stars. Purplish clouds swirled through the night sky, hiding and revealing bright, sparkling pinholes. Over to one side, I saw the moon, bigger than I thought it would look. Fat and full, and rough with craters.

As the train moved farther out into Queens, I watched the buildings flow by beneath me. Groceries, pizza, clothing…there was so much
stuff
. And any human could walk in and buy it all, as long as they had the money. I didn’t fully get the concept of money and I knew it was something I needed to be familiar with, since the human world seemed to depend on it.

I got off at the stop poxd had told me to go to in a neighborhood called Sunnyside, which wasn’t nearly as cheerful as the name sounded. I walked for a couple of blocks to poxd’s address. Along the way, I saw people hanging out on street corners or front stoops, but nobody said anything to me or even acted like they saw me.

Finally, I got to the apartment building. I walked through an
open courtyard, found the right entrance, and hit the buzzer, all like poxd had instructed.

“Yeah?” said a voice. It was distorted by the cheap speaker, so I couldn’t really tell anything about it.

“Boy,” I said. Sometimes when I got nervous I talked like my mom in one-word sentences.

There was a tense moment when the intercom clicked off and nothing else happened. But then there was a long beep and the door unlocked. I climbed up three flights of stairs (that definitely wouldn’t have passed trowe safety standards) and at the top I saw a tall, heavyset, older guy, kind of bald on top, with a blond ponytail. We stared at each other for a moment.

“Poxd?” I asked.

He nodded suddenly, like he was coming out of a trance. “Real name’s Gauge.” He held out his hand. I could see him staring at the stitches as we shook. “What’s yours? Your real name, I mean.”

“Uh, Frank. Frank Shelley.” I know, totally lame. But it was the first thing that came to me.

“Well, Frank,” he said. “Welcome to Sunnyside.”

He turned and walked into his apartment and I followed. It was a one-bedroom about the size of my family’s apartment. Movie posters lined the walls—
Firefly
,
The Matrix
, that kind of stuff. Over in the corner was a massive, whining server rack with some of the newest, shiniest hardware I’d ever seen.

“Nice place,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said. “I like it except the walls are paper thin. I can hear my neighbor when he takes a shit. And I’m pretty sure he’s got a meth lab going.”

“Didn’t you say you had a roommate?”

“I did, but he decided to move back to California. Sometimes that
happens to us Californians. We just get tired of the crap and head back to the motherland.”

There was an awkward silence. Meeting an online friend in real life was totally weird. I realized I had this whole image of who I thought poxd was, what he looked like, how his voice sounded. And it definitely wasn’t this guy.

“So…” I said. But I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“So that virus you made,” he said.

“It’s not exactly a virus.”

“Whatever. It’s amazing.”

“Thanks.”

“No really, I mean that literally. Like, I have no idea what you did. That little snippet you sent? It’s been doing all kinds of weird shit.”

“Oh, really? Like what?”

“What do you mean, like what? You wrote it, didn’t you?”

“Initially. But now it kind of writes itself. It does what it wants.”

“Code doesn’t have ‘wants.’”

I just shrugged.

His eyes narrowed. “Are you telling me you’ve written a sentient script?”

“Your words, not mine.”

“You really want to release it into the wild?”

I grinned.

“Hell, let’s do it,” he said. “Right now.”

“Cool.” I pulled the tower out of my bag.

“Jesus. You carried that big clunky thing all the way from midtown? It must weigh a ton!”

“Uh, yeah. It sure was heavy,” I said in a way that I hoped sounded convincing. There were a lot of little things about blending
in outside that I hadn’t considered. After we plugged in my tower, I ran into another one.

“You didn’t bring any peripherals?” he asked. “Just these…What are these, some kind of customized USB and DVI cables?”

“Oh, uh, I totally forgot my keyboard.”

“Hey, don’t worry. I have a ton of them.” He walked over to the corner by the server racks. It made me smile a little, because he had a little pile of junk, just like my mom. He pulled a mouse and keyboard from the pile, taking a few minutes to untangle the cables, and brought them back.

“Thanks.” I tried to look like I was comfortable using them, but I was so painfully slow he had to be wondering how I could possibly write code when I was such a terrible typist. Once my computer booted up, I used the clunky keyboard and mouse to prepare my freshly compiled program for release. Gauge stood behind me and leaned in over my shoulder. He smelled like Doritos.

“Are you seriously saying you’ve created a…what, a virtual artificial intelligence?”

“I guess you could look at it like that.”

“What’s it going to do when you release it?”

“I have no idea.”

He stared at me for a moment. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Yep. The only thing I know for sure is that it’s going to be awesome.”

“Do it,” said Gauge. “You’re killing me here. Just fucking do it!”

I clicked the mouse button and the program began to execute. The fans on my hard drive kicked into high gear immediately as the temperature climbed. The monitor flickered for a moment and I thought suddenly how glad I was that I wasn’t plugged into the machine right now. All visual on the monitor blacked out.
A few streaky lines of pixels appeared, like the logic board was failing or something, and I got a little worried that the hardware simply couldn’t handle it. But then the pixels came together into a face. Eyes, nose, mouth. It stayed for a moment, almost like it was looking back at me.

Then it was gone.

We stared at the desktop for a moment. Then Gauge said, “Uh, what just happened?”

A weird numb feeling settled into my chest. “It’s gone.”

“What, like the drive crashed?”

“No, look. The machine works just fine. But the program…it’s just…gone.” I stared stupidly at the screen. I wanted to throw up.

“No, that can’t be right.” He took over the mouse and started clicking around.

But I knew he wouldn’t find anything. Somehow, I just knew.

“Not even anything in the cache,” he said.

I nodded.

“What about the source?” he said. “You could recompile it and…” He shrugged.

I went to the directory where I kept the source code, mostly for his benefit. I did have a few lingering hopes, but those were squashed when I checked the folder and saw nothing except a single file called hello.txt.

“What the hell…” said Gauge.

I opened it, but it was blank.

“You’ve got a backup, right?”

“At home,” I said. “But why would I want to restore something that failed?”

It wasn’t just the project that failed, though.
I
had failed. Why did I ever think I could pull something like this off?

There was a sharp crack.

“Jesus!” said Gauge.

I looked down and saw that I had crushed the mouse.

“Sorry…” I said, the sound catching in my throat. I stood up and walked over to a window. My eyes stung as I fought back the tears.

“So…” said Gauge. “What happens now?”

A part of me wanted to just go crying back home to Mommy. But I would look like a complete asshole if I did that, everyone would be pissed, and I’d have nothing to show for it. And in the end, what was back there for me, anyway? The same old shit, maybe even worse. No, I couldn’t go back there. Maybe not ever.

“Can I…stay here for a while?” I asked

“You’re not going home?” he asked, kind of surprised looking.

“I…can’t,” I said. “This was my ticket. My golden key. It was going to make everything better. It was going to make
my life
better.”

“So…you want to stay here permanently?”

“Yeah, I guess so. If…if that’s okay.”

“Sure. You can sleep on the couch. But you’ll have to, you know, pay half the rent and stuff.”

“Oh,” I said. “Right.”

I COULDN’T DECIDE if my new roommate’s method of motivating me made him super wise or a complete dick. My entire life’s work had just blown up in my face and all I wanted to do was sit around, eat junk food, and watch old episodes of
Doctor Who
. But Gauge absolutely refused to lend me any money, so I had no time for an emo pity party of one. I had to get a job.

At first, I thought about doing something that wasn’t technology related. I was so disgusted with my failure on the “big project” that for the first time in my life I didn’t even want to go near a computer. Every time I remembered that a few days before I thought I was some kind of computer genius, it made me want to crawl out of my skin. I wanted to find something totally different to do.

But the rent was due at the end of the month, I didn’t really know how to do anything else, and I didn’t really know anybody who did. So I gave up on that idea pretty quickly. Maybe I wasn’t the most amazing hacker who ever lived. But I didn’t totally suck. Someone out there would pay me for my coding skills.

Of course, hitting up online friends for jobs presented another challenge. Obviously, I didn’t want Gauge to see me plugging cables into my wrists, and I didn’t have the privacy of my own room. So I had to wait until he was out of the apartment. But the guy hardly ever left the apartment. He worked from home. He got just about everything delivered, including stuff like toothpaste and toilet paper. And all his friends were online. So I had to wait and get on the computer at night while he was sleeping.

But even with connections, I still had no college degree or professional experience. After a few days, Gauge started to get really stingy with his groceries. My standards got lower and lower, from programming jobs to QA jobs to help-desk jobs, until finally I said I’d take just about anything. At last, someone said they knew someone who worked at a big chain computer store that was hiring at a Manhattan location and they could hook me up with an interview. I wasn’t sure retail was my thing, but I wasn’t about to turn down my first real chance at a job. Maybe I’d just do it for a little while to have something on my résumé
and save up some money. Then I’d have a little more leeway to look for my next, better job.

Gauge let me borrow some clothes for the interview. The button-up shirt was really tight across my shoulders, and the pants were a little too short. But I was pretty sure it would make a better impression than my usual jeans and T-shirt.

I was nervous about getting there. It was my first time traveling in Manhattan since I’d left The Show, and it was to a completely different part of town. Plus, I had to change trains at Grand Central halfway through the trip. So I studied the subway map for a while, planned my route, and left ridiculously early, just in case there was a train delay or something. Fortunately, there wasn’t a delay, which meant I got there an hour before my interview.