Willful Machines (17 page)

“Meaning?”

“You'll be free to leave your room this evening. We just ask that you don't go outside. Between the raven, which we still haven't located, and the threatened terrorist activity tomorrow, we feel it would be safer to keep you indoors for now.”

“Oh.” I straightened my glasses. “Okay. Thanks, Trumbull. Sorry for snapping like that.” I turned toward my door.

“You've been spending a lot of time with Nico lately.”

My hand froze on the knob. I looked over my shoulder. Trumbull's dark lenses mirrored back to me my pale face. “My dad told me I should help him settle in. Anyway, I'm sure
you've already done a background check on him. Am I right?”

He nodded.

“And?”

“He checks out.”

Inside, some tiny muscle that had knotted up tight during my fight with Bex relaxed a little. He checked out. Of
course
he checked out. “There you go, then.” I went into my room and shut the door behind me.

I threw myself across the bed. My shoes clunked on the floor as I kicked them off one by one. I could see Nico tonight. That should've made me happy. But inside my head, other thoughts kept getting in the way. Like that comment Trumbull had made about Nico just now—I thought for sure I'd heard a note of suspicion in that almost inflectionless growl of his. And then there was Bex. The one person I'd thought I could talk to about Nico. It turned out I didn't have her support either. Dinner would start in half an hour, but I had no desire to see her and no appetite anyway.

No appetite: whenever that happened, I always knew what would come next. I'd watch the dark mood roll in, as unstoppable as bad weather. At those times more than ever, my brain reminded me of a black box, a machine I didn't understand or know how to operate, and I—the part of me that wasn't my brain, which I realized didn't quite make sense—seemed to stand outside of it, struggling with the buttons and switches, trying to regain control.

I rolled onto my back and pulled Gremlin out of my pocket. For a while I let him crawl over me, his fur skimming across my skin. I listened to the soft ticking of my watch and the creaks and groans of the building and, underneath everything else, the low rumble of the waterfall. I'd been doing so well lately too. Last night—I hadn't felt happy like that in a long time. Maybe ever. Definitely not since Mom died.

Even though I knew I shouldn't, even though I ordered my brain not to, I said to my puck, “Show me video of Charlotte.” My puck's projector ticked on, and the ceiling above me lit up, showing me the same image Bex's puck had projected a little while ago: Charlotte, wearing the oversize gray cardigan she'd loved. In her hand she held five playing cards. She stared at them, her brow furrowed, her dark eyes focused, as she chewed on her left thumbnail.

The camera zoomed out. Charlotte sat at a table littered with poker chips, bags of Doritos, and half-empty bottles of Diet Coke. In spite of the Picasso print hanging on the wall and the vase of blue flowers standing on a sideboard, the room still had the atmosphere of a laboratory. Maybe because it lacked windows. To Charlotte's right sat Dr. Singh, who looked younger, and not just by seven years, either. More like twenty. Her hair was still black. Her brown skin hadn't taken on its grayish tinge. And of course she didn't have a wheelchair underneath her.

On Charlotte's other side sat my mother. She wore a sweatshirt with the words
JUST HAPPY TO BE HERE
printed on it. I
could still picture her wearing that thing around the house sometimes. Stray strands of her wiry red hair made a fiery nimbus around her head. She studied her cards too, and tapped her chin, but her eyes also flicked up from time to time to watch Charlotte. Dr. Singh had already folded. She sipped her Diet Coke and watched both of them.

“I think you're bluffing.” Mom pushed a few more chips into the center of the table.

Charlotte smacked her cards down. “I've got nothing.”

Mom's poker face turned into a smile. “I knew it.” She spread out her hand: two pair.

“I don't understand how you keep doing that,” Charlotte snapped. She pulled Mom's cards closer and scrutinized them, as if to check their authenticity.

Before Charlotte's escape, Bethesda National Laboratory had released several hours of video as part of a publicity campaign—premature, in retrospect—trumpeting their new creation. At the time, just about everybody on earth had watched the footage, probably most of them with their mouths hanging open. Many had insisted the whole thing must be a hoax. You could see why. The only visible difference between Charlotte and the two human women sitting on either side of her was that they had pucks hovering over their heads and she didn't.

Of course, she had her quirks. For example, she found the word “elbow” hilarious. She couldn't stand it when anybody
near her laughed at a joke she didn't understand. Conversations with her tended to include abrupt shifts and non sequiturs. Her moods could be as jagged and strange as the Picasso prints that decorated her small apartment. But in a way, her idiosyncrasies were exactly what made her seem so human. Each time her temper flared inexplicably or she burst out laughing for no apparent reason, you could see something happening behind her eyes, even if you didn't understand it.

“Tell me, Ruth,” Charlotte persisted. “How do you always know when I'm bluffing?”

Mom glanced at Dr. Singh.

“It's okay.” Dr. Singh's voice had only the beginnings of a smoker's rasp then. “You can tell her.”

“You bite your nails. That's how I know.” Mom fished in one of the Doritos bags for a chip. “And now that I've told you,” she added with a cheerful sigh, “you'll probably stop doing it, and I'll never win again.”

Charlotte frowned. She sat back in her chair and regarded her fingers.

Dr. Singh set down her Diet Coke. “What is it, Charlotte? What are you thinking about?”

“My father used to hate it when I bit my nails.”

To help an eleven-month-old machine more effectively approximate a human in her early twenties, Dr. Singh had supplied her with a lifetime of human memories—in the form of the complete puck archive of a twenty-three-year-old
female donor. Twenty-three years of photos, messages, and, most important of all, nearly continuous video coverage. But Dr. Singh had also told Charlotte from the start that those memories didn't really belong to her. She believed her creation deserved to understand the truth about herself. That decision had resulted in some complications.

Still studying her fingers, Charlotte said, “I think I chew my nails so I can watch them grow back. It makes me feel like I actually exist. My nails grow, my hair grows, my skin sloughs off. They're the only real parts of me. Everything on the inside is fake.”

“That's not true, Charlotte,” Mom said, her voice low and gentle, but also firm. “You're real. Just different.” She'd used that same tone with me when I'd demanded she never kiss me good-bye again.

“I'm not human, though.” Charlotte tapped the five cards laid out on the table in front of her. “All I can do is bluff.” She lunged to her feet and swept her arm across the table, knocking over a soda bottle and sending Doritos and cards and poker chips clattering to the floor.

“Charlotte!” Dr. Singh rose too.

“I'm tired of this game,” Charlotte said. “Let's do something else.”

“Remember we talked about your temper? Just calm down.”

At the time, people had found it strange that Dr. Waring would release video showing Charlotte at such a dark moment,
but he'd seemed to regard her existential angst the same way he'd regarded the suicide of her predecessor: as a sign of the project's success.

Charlotte sank back into her chair. On the table in front of her, the Diet Coke bottle dribbled out the last of its contents. “I miss him, Geeta,” she said in a small voice.

“He's not your father,” Dr. Singh said. “You know that.”

“Of course I know that. But I can still miss him, can't I?” She hugged herself, running her fingers over the gray wool of her loose, ratty cardigan. “That's why I like to wear this old sweater. It looks like one he used to wear. I pretend it was his.”

At around this point in the video, I'd sometimes feel my chest tighten.
What about my mother?
I'd want to yell at the projection.
She
did
exist, and you took her away from me.
But then I'd remember it didn't make any sense to blame Charlotte. If Mom had died in a shooting, would I get mad at the gun? Because at the end of the day, I did agree with Dad: Charlotte was just a machine. An extremely sophisticated robot that later became some extremely sophisticated malware polluting the Supernet. In fact, sometimes I thought I believed it even more than Dad did. As much as he insisted she wasn't a person, he sure hated her like one. I didn't have such a convenient focus for my anger. I understood the real reason for Mom's death was that there wasn't a reason at all. It was just something that had happened. It was just how this ugly, unfair universe worked.

I
woke to the sound of my puck chiming. I blinked, straightened my glasses, and squinted at the words my puck was projecting on the ceiling.

I missed you at dinner. Are you still coming tonight? You'd better be.

And just like that, the black cloud pressing down on me lifted. I wished I'd known it sooner: apparently the cure for one of my dark moods was a sweet message from a boy. I checked the time. Nine fifteen. I jumped out of bed and messaged,
Be there soon!
as I tore off my school uniform. Gremlin, catching some of my energy, scurried back and forth along the top of my headboard, his body going up and down and up and down like a sine wave.

Good
, Nico messaged back.
And bring your Swarmbots and those lock-picking tools of yours.

I threw on my other uniform—jeans, black T-shirt, black hoodie—and stuffed Gremlin, my pouch of tools, and my jar of
Swarmbots into my pockets. I unstrapped my retro-but-not-in-a-cool-way watch and dropped it into my nightstand drawer. I figured I could survive the night without it, and anyway, the thing creeped me out a little.

When I opened my door, I found Ray standing guard alone this time. “How's it going, buddy?”

“I'm heading over to Nico's room. Trumbull told you about that, right?”

“Don't worry, you're cool.”

I headed down the hall, my nervous energy making my fingers twitch, and knocked on Nico's door. When he opened it a few seconds later, he wore his usual bright grin. “Thanks for coming over. I need all the help I can get with these lines for the play.”

I didn't understand at first, but then he flicked his eyes in Ray's direction. “Oh,” I said. “Right. Glad to help.” I turned to Ray. “We'll probably need a couple of hours. Don't disturb us, okay?”

He saluted. “Copy that. Have fun.”

Nico ushered me in and closed the door. We hadn't had a moment alone together since last night. My heart had started banging so hard I could feel it in my ears. He grabbed me by the neck, gave me a quick kiss, and put a finger over my mouth. “Okay, Lee,” he said, his voice raised so Ray could hear him, “are you ready to run some lines with me?”

“Sure,” I said, playing along.

“Just give me a second. Sorry about the mess.”

He bent over his cluttered desk to fool with what looked like a small speaker. It felt strange standing here for real after having seen this room projected on my wall. The memory of that night already made me wince. How could I have done something so creepy? The potato chip bags and Coke bottles lay just where I remembered them. The drifts of towels and clothes on the floor had grown. He hadn't bothered to clean up for me, but I understood, at least on an intellectual level, that some people didn't have an insane obsession with neatness the way I did. Anyway, I felt pretty sure I could overlook the mess for him.

I noticed the view from his window—the one thing I hadn't seen two nights ago. Through the branches of the tree outside, the mountain's blue crags shone in the moonlight.

“Not bad, huh?” Nico said.

“It beats looking out on a stone wall.”

He laughed. “Okay, I'm reading from Ariel's first scene. Stop me if I make a mistake.”

Nico grabbed his puck and whispered a command. From the speaker on his desk came the sound of his voice. “ ‘All hail, great master, grave sir, hail! I come to answer thy best pleasure.' ” He kissed me again and mouthed the words along with the recording: “ ‘Be't to fly, to swim, to dive into the fire, to ride on the curl'd clouds.' ”

“Now for step two,” he breathed into my ear. On his way to
the window, he shrugged on a backpack and stepped into his flip-flops. He slid the window open and waved me over.