After Mind (17 page)

Meg stood in the doorway like a soft, crying ghost.

“What is it?” Robin asked her, no more than a stitch above being a wreck herself.

“What did you do?” Meg asked Cessini.

“Nothing. Looks like now we both have a secret.”

“No, stop, I don’t. Talk to me. I could have—”

“Go back to bed,” Cessini said.

“Mommy?” Meg asked.

“It’s okay, honey. Go back to bed.”

Cessini rolled onto his side and hid against his wall.

“It’s late,” Robin said to Meg. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

Meg stood a moment for answers Cessini couldn’t yet give. He hurt. She didn’t go with him to the data center when he asked. Maybe she could have stopped him. Maybe there was nothing she could have done. Or, maybe they would have died together. In all, there was only one thing left he could say. “It’s a good thing you weren’t there.”

She turned away from the door, silenced, then left to go back to her room.

Robin rolled her palm on Cessini’s back as tears welled in his eyes. “Don’t cry,” she said. She dabbed another spot of cream from her finger to his cheek.

“What are we going to do?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Robin said. He bunched up the sheet to rub at his eyes. “No, don’t. You’ll smear the magic.” She dried his cheek with the cuff of her sleeve and begged him, “Please don’t cry. It’ll get better. Your father, he’ll get better. You’ll see.”

“How?” He sniffled.

“I don’t know. But he will. Tell me. Please tell me what’s the matter?”

“This safe room. It’s pure, but I have to pass the four-watch to get to the front door.”

“What do you mean four-watch?” she asked.

“The kitchen. The bathroom is a five-watch with a three-count drip.”

“I don’t know what you’re telling me.”

“The shower drips if you don’t turn it off all the way and I don’t want to reach in by myself. What if I fall?”

“How are you going to fall? It’s right at the tub. Wait, you keep track of all these . . . counts, when you leave the house?”

“Ever since I was little.”

“Every place you go, wherever you are?”

He did.

“That must be exhausting,” she said and sat closer. Then he saw something he hadn’t noticed before. Her whole body shook, ever so slight. Her hands trembled, even as she sat still. “Well, if counting works for you. It sounds like you have everything figured out.”

“Why do your hands shake?”

She raised her eyebrows in surprise. She laughed. “They don’t. I put cream on your spots because I feel bad.” She tried to rub again. “Because I love you. I want to take care of you. Make you feel better.”

“But why do your hands shake?”

She hurried her hand behind her back. Then she brought it out front and level. “You want to know? Well, to tell you the truth, I swore on Meg’s life I would never tell anyone. And that means most of all you.” She dabbed a finger to his nose.

“Don’t,” he said. “You can tell me.”

Her words were stuck in the purse of her lips. She couldn’t say why. She covered her mouth with a hand that shook.

“Do you want to know my secret, then?” he asked and pressed up on his elbows.

She looked toward the sky and shored up her nerve. Then she looked back down with a nod that was clearer than the muffled cry of her single word, “Please.”

His words were far easier to say. “I hurt so many people and have no friends to tell. I’m lonely.”

She choked out a breath and dropped the tube to his sheets. Then she fell into his arms for a long-needed hug. “Me, too. And so did I.”

He wouldn’t have known. “How?”

She laughed a bit, maybe somehow relieved. Maybe not. Her hair tickled his nose. She rubbed her eyes and sat up straighter. She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead. “Lonely is a terrible place to be. What about your friends at school? Isn’t it getting better?”

“They still call me Packet.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

“The wet wipe.”

“Well, you are not a wet wipe. That’s not you. They don’t know you. And they don’t know what greatness you are going to achieve.”

“I know.”

“Good. So you want to play computer with me before bed?”

“Sure.” He sat up straighter.

“Tell me what you believe? What do you know?”

“I believe I need a new skin. I know I can’t have one.”

“So how do you resolve that?”

“What do I want? What do I need?”

“Nice. Okay, you tell me.” She seemed happier still.

“I want to be a computer. I need to be a human.”

“Ah, I can see now why you’re lonely. Anyone ever tell you you talk like your father? Anyway, you are a human. Humans are born with the skin they’re in. You know you can’t do anything about that, right?”

“I’ve got one for you. Computers burn in water. I burn in water. Therefore, I must be a computer.”

She weighed her head side to side, like measuring the thought with a balance. “Well, now that is a good one. I’ll have to give you that one for now.” She recapped the tube of cream and set it down on his nightstand. She turned the wave machine and squid-bellows lamp back on. “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

“The—”

“Shh, I’m just kidding you.” She brought up his covers and leaned in for a kiss goodnight.

Meg’s holler from the other room broke their silence. “When is it my turn? Tuck me in.”

Robin kept her eyes on Cessini, and smiled at Meg’s nerve. She settled her hand on the top of his blanket. “We’ll talk more tomorrow?”

But there it was again. He could feel the tremor of her hand through the blanket on his chest. He nodded without words.

“Okay, good,” she said. “Hey, what’s the one time in your life it’s good to be a chicken?”

“I don’t know, when?”

“Thanksgiving,” she said and crinkled her nose. “Remember, computer or human, I love you very much.”

“Are you coming?” Meg screeched through the wall. She tested their patience. “It’s my turn!”

“And Meg adores you,” Robin said.

“I know, like glue.”

“Mom!”

“I’m not coming if you don’t stop!” Robin said with a tsk then stood from the bed. “Feel better?” she asked Cessini as she went to the door.

He rolled closer to the edge of his bed and watched her. She stopped. Her image was distorted through the glass walls of his rivulus’s tank. She had tended to the aches of his skin so dutifully with the cream. He thought he should do the same for his drying rivulus. A rivulus that lived in its tank and managed to control beyond the walls of its world. It got what it needed; it wanted water from a dropper.

“Feel better?” Robin asked again, her hand poised over his light switch.

He’d once believed his control over another’s fate stopped with the hapless fish living alone in a log. He was wrong. In his mind, the fire still smoldered in the remains of the data center, and sprinkler water still soaked the ground at his knees. Daniel was ruined. The twist of their lives was forever his. An earlier belief that was wrong turned to a know of his greater ability to control the lives outside the walls of his world. There was no contradiction. He was the same person in the performance of both. His mind had made the connection over the long term. He could control.

“Come on, let me know you’re okay,” she said with her finger on top of the switch.

He stared up at her through the distortion of the glass tank and at her finger so ready to take his command. He whispered, “I’m okay,” and her finger went down on the switch.

She smiled and pulled the door’s knob. The light along the frame narrowed to a pinch. She withdrew her hand through the sliver of light out to the hallway. The door shut and the room was dark. Maybe he and the rivulus were equals after all. In light or dark, eyes opened or shut, he learned there was so much more to the world of control.

TEN

THE FAIR

T
HE COUNTY THEY lived in was big enough, but after what Cessini had done, in his mind, as he, Daniel, Robin, and Meg walked alone through the crowd of the August fair, it seemed like everyone’s eyes were smaller than theirs. Everyone stared at the fair. The clouds loomed large, but the fairgoers paid the sky little mind. Everyone was so singularly focused on him, they eavesdropped and he hated it, for what good could it possibly bring? He caused the destruction of the data center, but the full scope of effect had not yet been seen. Like a punishing rain that leads to a flood, he felt whatever was coming would soon strike with the full drowning force of a wave.

The demolition derby and its rip-roar sound was a spectacle behind a tall, gated grandstand. Cars with their network avoidance systems removed were a great hit and would have been terrific fun to see. There would be plenty of parts to fix in that ring, but it was one place Daniel never wanted to go. The cheers over the gate and a walk by the fence sufficed. Admission was extra to sit in the stands, and it wasn’t the time to ask for more money. But still, the crashes, screeches, and roars were tempting, if not to see through the fence, then to keep turning back to hear.

Once they were in quieter spaces along the row of the promenade, Daniel put the ScrollFlex case to his ear and took a call. They all kept walking with the flow of the crowd. Daniel glanced at Cessini a moment too long. He knew the call was about him.

Water drops speckled the dirt at his feet. A water balloon game was an aisle over on the promenade. An errant toss exploded another balloon. Two players crouched in their booths, opposite of each other, each pulling down with their hands on a rubber-band pouch. One boy loaded a water balloon into the pouch and shot it through a hole in his wooden overhead shield. His proper trajectory swished his balloon straight through the hole of his opponent’s shield. His opponent was soaked, thrilled. Then the return volley went askew. Other kids lined up for their turn were splashed as well and erupted in cheer.

It was an accident at the side of the road, but Cessini couldn’t watch any more of it. He turned as Daniel carried on. The voice from the ScrollFlex case got louder as a litany rattled. It was Daniel’s comeuppance. He took it with his chin up the best way he could: He found a place to hide behind a prize schedule board. The llama-judging in the dirt tent was over. Four rows of flat wooden benches were all that remained in the mouth of a U-shaped arena. Robin sat in the second row as Daniel stepped over the bench and paced its aisle. Cessini and Meg kept a distance inside the plywood fence that wrapped the arena. The overarching white tent had an acoustic effect.

Daniel unrolled the ScrollFlex and set it face up on the bench. “You know I hate to do this,” his boss said on the screen, “but it’s my job, as well as yours.”

“What did they conclude?” Daniel asked. He looked at Robin.

“Number one, house power should have had its own transformer,” his boss said as he read from a list. “Number two, there was also a fault in the electrical design. Mechanical and electrical were on the same circuit, the same panel board.”

Daniel seemed somehow contented with what he heard. He even agreed with nods. “There wasn’t one single point of failure,” Daniel said. “There were many.”

“Yes, there was a single point of failure,” Daniel’s boss shot back as the thin bezel frame spiked red with an emotive glare. “Your son. Your son is the single point of failure!” And the wave rolled in hard.

“My son?”

“Yes, the OSY valve should have been monitored in the fire control room. Whose responsibility was that?”

Daniel’s eyes ticked to Cessini. “A lot of things should have been monitored.”

“And don’t forget the mistake of bringing a twelve-year-old boy to play at a data center,” his boss shouted. “Even if what happened was nothing but a match stick on fire, we cannot have you back. It’s a matter of perception. Look at me so I know you understand.”

Daniel stepped over the splintered gray bench. He gestured for Cessini and Meg to leave from the fence.

Then the man let loose. “We are a concurrently maintainable, mission-critical data center operator. We
cannot
conclude that our property—with a hardened concrete shell, 206-mile-per-hour F3-tornado resistant walls, dual-power substation feeds, multiple points of connectivity, six-nines, that’s 99.9999 percent successes without a failure, which hasn’t gone offline for more than a minute in eight years—was suddenly and entirely destroyed by an out-of-control twelve-year-old boy and a girl who had even less right to be there than he did.” The screen’s bezel froze.

“Meg wasn’t there,” Daniel stated. “And everyone knew they stayed in their assigned space. They hardly ever left it.”

The bezel’s red glow searched for an orange, tried a yellow, but kept dialing back up to red. “So now we have a problem,” the man said. Meg pulled Cessini away. “We cannot prosecute a rescued boy who was captured crying in your arms on every street-level, truck-mounted, and handheld camera brought out to the scene.”

Cessini came back into the ScrollFlex’s view along the cusp of the benches. “Your son is a single point of failure. Do you hear me?” the man said, blasting him on sight.

Meg grabbed his arm. She pulled him away.

“You had the key to the fire control room,” the man said to Daniel. “We can’t prosecute for stupidity, but we can for negligence.” The bezel stopped on black. “If that boy of yours didn’t destroy us through liability, then you did. And it’ll cost you. Big.”

“I’ll leave,” Daniel said.

“Yes, you will. You will leave for jail. All of you. Him in juvi—” the man flustered as fairgoers passed by the fence and stared. The bezel dropped to within visible range. “In juvenile detention. I don’t care.”

“There was A and B power,” Cessini said as he returned. “Circuit breakers would have stopped the fire from spreading. Why were there no circuit breakers?”

“There were plenty of circuit breakers,” Daniel said. He held up his hand.

“I don’t know,” Cessini said. He fumbled. “It must have started with a short through its legs. Mechanical and electrical were connected. It went into the wall. The fire. It spread. What I built, the robot, Packet, it’s gone now. It can’t happen again—”