Willful Machines (5 page)

My stomach did a somersault. “He's not exactly a friend, Dad. I just met him an hour ago.”

He waved at me to be quiet. “Call him in.” His face reconfigured itself, the line between his eyebrows fading, his eyes crinkling into their friendly squint. Dad always seemed more comfortable in front of strangers than in front of family.
Like a true politician
, Mom used to say.

Nico appeared at the door. He hadn't touched his tie, which hung down his shirt in a tangle of midnight-blue silk.

Dad put out his hand. “What's your name, son?”

“Nico Medina,” he answered, activating his million-watt smile. “It's an honor to meet you, Mr. President.” He appeared perfectly unruffled, like he met heads of state every day. Probably that Latin American audacity again. Meanwhile, I lurked next to Nevermore, stayed very still, and waited for something mortifying to drop out of his mouth.

“Having some trouble with your tie?” Dad asked.

Nico glanced at his chest. “Yeah, I hear they're a little picky about ties here. It's my first day.”

“A little picky? Tie tying is practically a religion at Inverness Prep.”

“Lee was helping me, though. That's why he had my tiepin.”

“And he didn't finish? That doesn't sound very helpful. Let me show you, Nico.” He started flinging Nico's tie one way and then the other. “You have to loop it around both sides. Like this, see?”

“Thanks, sir.”

“I hear an accent,” Dad said. “Where are you from?”

“Chile.” There it was again. CHEE-lay.

“A beautiful country. One summer when I was a college student, my friends and I spent two unforgettable weeks backpacking through Chile. Listen, may I ask you something, Nico?”

“Of course, Mr. President.”

“Just a few minutes ago my son and I were having a talk.
I realize you've only known him for a short time, but would you agree that this is a young man with a lot going for him? Intelligent. Capable. Good looking. Wouldn't you say?”

The two of them, best buddies now, turned to contemplate me. Nevermore rustled her wings. My ears felt like they might burst into flames. One corner of Nico's mouth curled upward. He nodded.

“What were your first impressions after meeting him?”

“Honestly?” Nico asked.

Please don't say you thought I had cute ears
, I prayed in my head.

“He seemed shy. Quiet. Like he hangs back.” He turned his brown eyes on me again. “He should smile more,” he added.

“Yes!” Dad slapped one hand against the other. “That's what I've been telling him. He needs to step up to the plate. Take the bull by the horns. Stop letting life pass him by.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Nico said.

Satisfied, Dad went back to work on the tie. “What do you think of this place so far, Nico?”

“Still trying to get the lay of the land, I guess.”

Dad laughed as he tugged the knot of Nico's tie up to his neck. “Don't worry. Lee will help you settle in.” He plucked the silver tiepin from my hand and slid it onto the tie with a flourish. “There you go. Lee, why don't you give Nico your puck handle?”

Unseen by Dad, Nico fixed me with a triumphant grin.
My face and ears were still scorching hot, but I twitched my mouth into something that may or may not have resembled a smile.
You got me.
I waved my puck toward Nico's. The two of them circled each other like romancing birds while they traded information. I felt my blush deepen as I watched them.

“If you need something,” Dad was saying, “have a question, get lost on your way to class, whatever—just message Lee.”

“Don't worry, sir. I will.”

Dad folded his arms across his chest and gazed at the orbiting pucks. “You know, I still haven't gotten used to those contraptions.”

Nico plucked his puck out of the air and examined it. The thing lay in his palm, round and smooth like a skipping stone, with two small openings on either side where the rotors that whirled around to keep it aloft deployed. “ ‘Those that Hobgoblin call you and sweet Puck,' ” he recited. “ ‘You do their work, and they shall have good luck.' ”

I had no idea what he'd just said, but Dad's face lit up. “A Shakespeare fan, are you?”

Nico gave a modest shrug. He tossed up his puck. Its rotors whipped out and started to spin. “I'd better get to class. Thanks again, Mr. President.”

“Sure thing, Nico.”

“See you, Lee,” he said, hiking up one eyebrow, and slipped out the door.

Dad and I stared after him. The temperature in the room
seemed to drop about twenty degrees as soon as he left. “You didn't have to do that,” I said.

“
Someone
needs to help you make friends.” His face had gone back to its previous configuration, crumpled forehead and pressed-flat mouth, but for the first time all morning, he turned and looked me in the eyes. “I just want you to be happy. You know that, don't you?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”
But how?
I wanted to ask. Being happy felt like a trick I could never quite get the hang of—like juggling or something.

Trumbull knocked again. “Mr. President? It's time.”

“Have a good semester, Lee,” Dad said. “See you at break.” He put out his hand for me to shake, as if we'd just wrapped up a business meeting—exactly like I'd done with Nico thirteen minutes earlier.

I
thought about ditching the rest of second period, but it was robotics, the one class I actually liked. Plus, I wanted to find out what Dr. Singh would do when she saw me. Would she offer an explanation for what she'd said on the terrace? Or maybe I'd work up the nerve to ask her about it myself.

I reached into my inside blazer pocket and pulled out Gremlin. He was another of my Creatures, although unlike the others, I hadn't built him myself.

“How you doing in there? Having a nice nap?”

The little machine yawned, stood up on my palm, and shook out his shabby orange fur. (I'd owned Gremlin since I was eight, and I had a habit of rubbing him for luck, like a rabbit's foot, so his coat had thinned in places.) He scuttled up my arm to my shoulder, paused to tug twice on my earlobe, and broke into a mad dash, his furry lizard-shaped body tracing figure eights and curlicues over my back and chest.

“That's enough, buddy. Back to sleep now. I'm heading out again.”

He blinked up at me with his huge black eyes and released a whimper. Then he burrowed under my blazer and into my pocket. I put Nevermore back to sleep too, zipped her into a duffel, and carried her out to the hall, where Trumbull waited with folded arms. I wondered again if he'd found all the back-and-forth between me and Nico this morning odd, but his expression, as usual, gave nothing away. And if he had, did he care? Another good question. To tell the truth, I didn't really even know the guy. He wasn't exactly big on small talk. I could never shake the feeling, though, that he could see right through me, and that he found me as big a disappointment as Dad and Stroud did.

One time, for instance, Bex and I had just watched one of Dad's speeches about “traditional human values” on the Supernet, and it had sparked one of her rants. “Human values? Try
cave
man values. He's just using this whole Charlotte scare as an excuse to drag us back to the Stone Age. Women. Gays. Religious minorities. He's quietly stripping rights away from everyone.” She'd noticed Trumbull standing nearby and flung her hand in his direction. “African Americans.” She'd turned to him. “I mean,
you
can't possibly believe all that Human Values junk, can you?”

“I believe it's none of your business what I believe,” he'd said, his voice never rising above its usual low, measured growl.
Then he'd turned his frown in my direction, as if to make it clear he considered me at fault too, for choosing to hang out with someone like her.

“Robotics,” I said now.

He nodded.

I headed for the stairs. On the way down, I paused on the landing, where a large window overlooked the lake. I tipped myself forward and leaned my forehead against the cold glass. Looking down at the terrace below, I experienced an echo of the vertigo that had grabbed me while I'd watched Nico do his handstand. I listened to the rumble of the waterfall and felt the window vibrate against my skull. That relentless smashing was a noise you forgot to hear at Inverness Prep, because it was always there, underneath every other sound. As I listened, I imagined I could make out the whispering voices chanting along with it:
Leap. Leap. Leap.
Outside, above the lake, inky clouds clotted the sky. I thought of a line we'd studied in English yesterday. We were reading
Hamlet
, and although I couldn't usually quote Shakespeare off the top of my head the way Nico could, that line I remembered: “This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory.”

I felt Trumbull watching me, probably wondering what I was doing. I turned away from the window and kept moving.

Robotics class took place in a conservatory jutting from one side of the main building. The lab had a permanently dingy appearance, partly because that section of the school hadn't
been renovated in decades, and partly because Dr. Singh, fearing the nine Spiders that serviced Inverness Prep might disturb her robotics equipment, insisted they never clean in there. She didn't seem to like the Spiders much—ironic, considering she'd designed and built them herself—but given her history with robots, I couldn't blame her for having mixed feelings. Panes of warped glass made up the conservatory's walls and ceiling. They gave a contorted fun-house view of the trees outside. No matter the time of year, those trees seemed to continually shed slimy leaves, which dropped on the glass roof and lay there for months, their black silhouettes biting leaf-shaped chunks out of the perpetually gray sky.

Only fifteen minutes of class remained by the time I got there. About a dozen students stood around worktables or sat on stools, a few of them with plastic safety glasses and aprons on. (We were all supposed to wear safety glasses and aprons while we worked, but Dr. Singh never said anything to the students who didn't.) The class was a mix of nerds—who'd apparently missed the memo that you didn't come to Inverness Prep for robotics—and slackers—even at Inverness, we had a few of those. The slackers mostly sat around talking or staring into their pucks, knowing they wouldn't get in trouble, and sure enough, Dr. Singh never said anything to them, either.

Right now she sat in her usual spot near the back of the room watching the rain, her hand dangling out an unlatched window, a Camel clutched between her fingers. Stray wisps of
her long salt-and-pepper hair hung down on either side of her drawn, grayish face. Her ceremonial gown had disappeared, replaced by sweatpants and a ratty T-shirt emblazoned with the words
TIME IS AN ILLUSION—LUNCHTIME DOUBLY SO
and, below that, the details of some scientists' luncheon that had taken place ten years earlier. (The dress code at Inverness Prep, like the no-smoking rule, somehow didn't apply to her.) While Trumbull trudged off to a corner to make himself “unobtrusive,” I grabbed a chair and set it down next to her wheelchair.

“About time you showed up,” she said in her croaky smoker's voice. She nodded at my duffel. “How's the bird coming?”

No mention of her weirdness on the terrace. Had I just imagined it? I cleared my throat, unzipped the duffel, lifted out Nevermore. “Pretty well. I finally got her airborne last night. I still have to make a few tweaks, but she basically works.”

I'd labored over Nevermore for months. Any idiot could build a robot that flew like a puck. You just had to buy a rotary-wing apparatus on the Supernet. Building a robot that flew like an actual bird, on the other hand—
that
took skill.

Dr. Singh balanced her cigarette on the window frame and put out her hands. “Let me have a peek.”

She turned the machine upside down on her lap, felt for the seam hidden under the orderly feathers, and pulled the skin covering Nevermore's chest apart, revealing a rubbery, slightly translucent layer of artificial muscle. My robot raven had pretty much the same structure as an actual raven did, muscle for
muscle, bone for bone—except the bones were made of a lightweight titanium alloy and the muscles of synthetic contractile tissue. Only deep inside Nevermore's rib cage, which housed her power supply instead of lungs and a heart, and deep inside her skull, where her microprocessor and sensors lodged in place of an organic brain, did the visible resemblance to the real thing stop.

“Nicely done,” Dr. Singh said. She drew the skin over the muscle again. The magnetic closures caught, and the seams disappeared beneath the shiny feathers. She handed Nevermore back to me. “Just don't get into trouble with that thing.”