Man Made Boy (40 page)

The wind screamed in my bloody ears and it was so cold icicles formed in my hair. Exposed in the claws of a dragon, hurtling through the upper stratosphere at several hundred miles per hour, there was a chance I could freeze to death before we even got there.

But the other disconnected me remembered that I had calculated all of this ahead of time and knew I was tough enough to handle it. I played at being human, but I wasn’t. My father
lived in the Arctic for a hundred years. I was his son. I could take it.

Time stretched on interminably. I began to wonder if I would go insane up there among the clouds. I wanted to babble to the dragon, but nothing came out and my body was stiff with indifference and cold, aware of little more than the slow buildup of pressure at the base of my skull.

I looked down, and through the clouds, I thought I saw Pittsburgh. I could have been wrong, of course, but it was a triangle-shaped city with an excessive number of bridges. Far below, somewhere in that industrial steel town reborn into academia and insurance was a broken-down machine man who saw the beauty in Claire that I could not see at the time. His chipped, worn head must have been filled with the things that might have been. Perhaps it was true, that suffering brought wisdom. He had certainly suffered enough. Yet still perhaps one day, when the world was a better place—when we had made the world a better place—Claire, Sophie, and I would go back to that warehouse and awaken him and he would be so glad that he would suddenly be able to weep despite his lack of tear ducts. And he would turn into a real man. And I would become a real boy, and we would all live happily ever after….

No. That wasn’t possible. I wasn’t making sense. The emotional pressure was building too fast. I didn’t know if I’d even be able to make it to New York at this rate. The air was so thin up here it was getting hard to think and my head felt ready to burst with pressure.

But wait, there it was down below. I would have known that bristling pack of concrete and vibrancy anywhere. That was New York fuckin’ City. My city. And that mistake of a program
was down there trying to destroy it. I would kill her. I would erase her.

We were still about fifty feet above the roof of The Show when the Dragon Lady shouted, “I can’t get any lower!”

“Drop me,” I heard my dead voice say.

I couldn’t even scream as the world that seemed so peaceful from afar now hurtled toward me.

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

A shrieking, endless gash of pure noise coming from VI’s hosts brought me back to the present for a moment. As the emotional backlash tore through me, it funneled into the cables at my head and wrists and into VI’s mainframe computer, maxing out her already taxed CPU, which in turn caused all her systems and hosts to freeze up.

I lay on the stage of the theater, my body so rigid it was shaking. Above me, the stage lights flickered in random spasms, and in the wings, the fog machines belched up noxious clouds of dry ice.

Someone tried to pick me up, but I pushed them away.

“Boy, it’s Ruthven! VI seems to be stunned momentarily, but I don’t know how long it will last! Let me unhook you before—”

“No!” I said through clenched teeth, my voice pinched and shaking. “Have to…see this…through to…the end.”

“But it’s killing you!”

“Hopefully, it’s killing her, too,” I said.

Then another wave of emotion sucked me into its memory.

WHEN I LANDED on the roof, ice broke off my body in sheets. The impact shot pain up my legs and into my spine, but I didn’t even
break stride as I walked toward the edge of the roof. I never realized how much of the response to pain was emotional. And again I was surprised at just how tough I was. The disconnected me had calculated it correctly, I just hadn’t been able to believe it.

Once I reached the edge, I jumped over the side and landed with a clang on the rusty fire escape. I kicked in the closest window and climbed through into the dark hallway by the mezzanine bathrooms.

The nymphs were there waiting for me. I didn’t realize there were so many. Ten beautiful, identical females. Thank god they didn’t have the sunglasses and implants yet. But they had the crazy, violent look that the humans had at the mall. As soon as they saw me, they swarmed in, biting, scratching, kicking, pulling, gouging. My fists swung fast and hard and suddenly the hallway was filled with the sound of pounding meat, breaking bone, and wails of pain. And none of it was mine. I wanted to stop hitting them or at least pull my punches a little. They were innocents. They didn’t deserve this. But the disconnected me didn’t see them that way. To him, they were only obstacles to be dealt with in the simplest manner possible. I hit one in the face so hard she flew back ten feet. I didn’t even know I was capable of that much force.

Soon the nymphs were all unconscious, bruised, and bleeding. I hoped none of them were dead, but of course disconnected me didn’t stop to check and just headed down the stairs to the lobby.

“Boy?”

I stopped, trying to locate the source of the voice. It seemed to come from the box office and I wondered if it was Charon. But when I walked over to it, there was no one there. Then I saw a cordless phone sitting on the counter. I picked it up.

I felt a cold, icy dread drop over me. The kind caused by a wraith. But disconnected me didn’t notice.

“Who is it?” I said flatly.

“Boy, it’s the stage manager. You shouldn’t be here. It’s too dangerous. Leave now!”

“No,” I said in the flat, dead voice. “I’m here to eliminate the danger.”

There was a pause. Then, “You’ve switched off, I see.”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps you can do this, then.”

“Do you know any details?” I asked. “How many are controlled, how many imprisoned?”

“Yes, but you can’t stay up here long. You must get to the trowe caverns, which are still beyond her reach.”

I headed for the main stairwell that led down to the caverns, holding on to the cordless phone.

“Wait, Boy,” said the stage manager. “That way is guarded by—”

Moog the ogre stood in the stairwell entrance, his massive frame filling the double doorway. He wore the sunglasses and had the signal device on his temple.

“Hello, Boy,” said VI. “So glad you could make it in time. I must say, using the dragon as transportation was a smart choice. If you continue to be this resourceful, this may actually prove challenging for me.”

“I am here,” I said, slipping the phone into my pocket. “Where is my family?”

“It’s not quite curtain time yet, I’m afraid. You’ll have to wait for the show like everyone else.”

“Show?”

“Yes, when I broadcast the rage impulse to every television and
computer monitor in the city simultaneously. Then we can watch the whole city tear itself apart. Or I can, anyway. You’ll be dead by then.”

“Unlikely,” I said. Then I punched Moog. Or tried to. He caught my fist in his hand. It was an impressive display but not the smartest thing to do since the force of the impact shattered the bones in his hand.

His shaggy eyebrows rose above the sunglasses. “I did not calculate your strength at that—”

Then I punched him in the face with my other fist, sending him backward down the stairs.

I heard the stage manager’s muffled voice coming from my pocket. I pulled the phone out and put it to my ear.

“Ruthven’s office! He has a secret passage there that leads directly to the caverns.”

I headed to the other side of the lobby. The door to his office was locked, but it was a simple push-button lock, so I just ripped the knob off. The door swung open.

“The storage closet,” said the stage manager.

I walked to the back of the office and opened the closet door. There was a metal ring bolted to the floor. I put the phone down on Ruthven’s desk, then pulled on the metal ring with both hands. A section of the floor came up with it. Beneath was a ladder that led down into darkness. I tossed the section of floor to one side and picked the phone back up.

“How far does this go?” I asked.

“All the way to the trowe level. He built it years ago in case the humans ever discovered what we were and tried to storm the theater.”

I left the phone on the desk, since it didn’t seem likely that the signal would hold that far down, and I needed both hands
to climb, anyway. Then I began the slow descent. It took a long time, and the passage was so narrow that my shoulders frequently bumped the sides. Claustrophobia climbed up inside me. But my body wasn’t affected and continued its steady climb down into the darkness. The base of my skull was starting to throb from the pressure.

When I got to the bottom, the passage stretched out into a tunnel. It was so dark I had to feel my way along the rough stone walls with one hand. It was exactly the kind of darkness I hated. The kind where you couldn’t know what was right in front of you.

Then bright gem eyes suddenly appeared.

“Got you!”

Clawed hands grabbed me. I wanted to scream, which would have made the whole situation worse. But fortunately, the disconnected me simply stood there and said, “I am not under her control. I have come to destroy her. Will you help me?”

There was a long pause, during which the clawed hands still held me. Then I saw another pair of jeweled eyes.

“Boy?” said a gruff male voice.

“Cordeav,” I said.

“Something sounds strange about you….”

“I am currently disconnected. This makes me resistant to most magic attacks but impairs my ability to express or feel emotion.”

“Like your father.”

“Yes. I am like my father.”

“You said you can destroy this…thing that has taken control of the theater?”

“Yes, but my plan might destroy the theater with her. The preferred outcome is to get as many creatures out of the building as possible first, including those held captive.”

“These tunnels lead under the Hudson all the way to Jersey,” he said. “We could put plenty of distance between us and this place. But you can’t free the captives. They’re in the theater and heavily guarded.”

“By?”

“The Minotaur, Medusa, and…your father.”

THE STENCH OF burning hair brought me back to myself. It took me a moment to realize that it was
my
hair burning. The emotional backlash was pushing so much raw data through the DVI jack on the back of my head that the metal was heating up.

I was still sprawled out on the stage. I tried to push myself into a sitting position, but bolts of pain shot up from my hands. There was so much data pouring through the USB jacks in my wrists that it was frying the nerves that ran up my arms.

Not that it mattered. At this point, there was nothing I could do but lie there and hope that by the time the backlash ran its course, VI would be vulnerable to attack and I would still have enough of a brain to attack her.