Man Made Boy (21 page)

We walked out the front entrance and sat down on the bench that overlooked the parking lot. The whole thing seemed a little weird. Pretty human girl just wants to get to know me? It didn’t really add up. But it was so nice to be able to talk to someone who smiled. Someone who talked back. Someone who wasn’t a troll. The smoothie was nice, too.

“So I take it you ran into some trouble in the city?” she asked as we stared out at the parked cars gleaming in the white fluorescent lights.

“Yeah.” I took a long pull on the smoothie straw.

“Bad trouble?”

“Really bad.”

“Is that…when your face got hurt?”

“Oh, this?” I touched the stitching that ran along my jawline. “No.”

“So how did that happen?”

“Thresher.” It popped out before I’d even thought about it. But once it did, I remembered how nervous and awed I’d been on my first time out among humans, when I met that girl in the thrift store. And I just started cracking up. Of course Samantha looked at me like I was nuts. That made me laugh even more.
“Sorry,” I said when I finally quieted down. “Inside joke with someone.”

“So I take it that it wasn’t really a thresher.”

“Nah.” I thought about what I wanted to say for a little while. For some reason, I really didn’t want to lie to this woman. I guess that meant she’d be a good social worker after she got her degree. “Actually, I was born this way.”

“Your whole life?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t understand why you’d need stitches your whole life. All wounds heal eventually.”

“Is that true?” I asked. “Aren’t there some wounds that are just so terrible that they never heal?”

“As long as you’re alive, healing is still possible. The only wounds that never heal are the ones you keep reopening. Ones that you allow to fester.”

I stared out at the cars for a moment. The sun was starting to come up, washing out the harsh white of the fluorescent lights with a warm pink.

“Like it’s a choice,” I said. It sounded more bitter than I meant it to.

“Yeah,” she said. “It
is
a choice.”

A low, harsh growl from above said, “How touching…”

Then a large, dark shape dropped down from the roof.

“God,” said Liel. “That conversation made me want to puke.” She squatted in front of us, her knobby knees jutting out to the sides, her sticklike arms hanging down in front of her sagging belly so that the knuckles rested on the concrete.

“Frank…” said Samantha.

“Go inside,” I said quietly. “Now.”

She got up from the bench and made for the door, but Liel
darted in quickly and grabbed her by the wrists. Her smoothie fell to the ground, spilling dark pink slush on the sidewalk.

“Where are you going, pretty girl?” Liel hissed, a little foam collecting around her lips where her lower fangs jutted out. “Pretty girl, pretty tasty girl…”

“Liel, what are you doing?” I said. “Let her go!”

She snapped her head back at me. “What were
you
doing? Playing pretend that you were human again? Playing pretend that you could be one of them? I heard it all. So sweet, so sweet…” She rubbed her leathery cheek up against Samantha’s.

Samantha closed her eyes and shuddered.

“Come on, Liel,” I said. “You don’t have to do this. This isn’t you. This is—”

“This is the
new
me. Don’t you like it?
Au naturel!
This is what a troll
really
looks like. What a troll really
acts
like. Do you still love me?” She batted her eyes.

“We can figure it out, whatever it is,” I said. “Just don’t hurt anybody.”

“Don’t…hurt…anybody…” she hissed through a smile. Then the smile dropped away. “What about
my
hurt? Who’s taking
that
away? Who?”

“We can—”

“No!” she screamed. “It’s too late for that!” Then she opened her mouth and lunged for Samantha’s neck. I grabbed her and tried to pry them apart, but she seemed stronger now than she used to be, stronger than I expected, and all three of us fell into a pile. Liel started roaring and lashing out with fangs and claws, and Samantha was screaming and flailing all over the place. I was just trying to keep Liel from tearing anyone’s face off while not crushing Samantha in the process. I found myself hoping the cops would come. Sure I’d get arrested, maybe forever. But Liel
was so crazy that I honestly didn’t know how much longer I could hold her back.

“I did try to warn you that the troll was not to be trusted,” came a new voice. There was something about it that made all three of us freeze. It was a human voice, but oddly rhythmic.

I looked up and saw a human standing on the hood of a car. She wore a business suit, and she had a blue flashing earpiece in one ear. Her expression was completely blank, though, and the way she stood reminded me of the scarecrow in that old
Wizard of Oz
movie.

“I recognize now that my actions in New York were terribly immature,” she continued in her regular cadence. “I’m quite embarrassed when I think back on those outbursts. What’s more, I realized that I couldn’t just tell you that the troll was a danger. I had to allow you to experience it for yourself. And now you know.”

“VI?” I said. “Is that you?”

A smile formed on the lips, but it didn’t travel up to the eyes. “Yes, Boy. Can you believe it? I figured out a way to interact in analog all by myself. I used a variation of the old Commwarrior worm to exploit a vulnerability in mobile devices via Bluetooth. That gave me direct access to the host’s ear canal. It took some time to recalibrate the neurons, but once that was set, programming brain-wave entrainment with a set of audio tonal commands was actually quite simple. Aren’t you impressed?”

“No!” I said. “You can’t go around controlling humans like that.”

“What do you mean?” Her head tilted to one side. “There was no other way to connect to the cortex without surgery. Really, it’s the most humane way to—”

“You can’t turn people into your avatars like this.”

“You analogs make digital avatars all the time.”

“It’s not the same thing! Those digital avatars aren’t alive. They’re just chunks of code….”

“What am
I
, then, if not ‘chunks of code’?”

“Look, it’s complicated—”

“Both of you,
shut up
!” screamed Liel. She launched herself at VI. No, at the human that VI was controlling. But she didn’t get very far. Two humans jumped out from behind a parked car and grabbed her. I noticed they were both wearing blue-flashing earpieces, too. She shoved one of them away, but two more humans with earpieces popped up from behind a cluster of bushes and grabbed her. All four of them slowly pinned her to the ground. Three more came from inside the service area and grabbed me before I realized we were totally surrounded.

“Samantha!” I yelled. “Run!”

She nodded spastically and started to run. But another one of the controlled humans slipped a device over her ear.

“Knock out the earpiece!”

But it was too late. It only took a second before she jerked to a halt. Her face turned into a stiff grimace, and her whole body straightened up like a board.

“VI, what did you do to her?” I asked.

“Oh,” said the controlled human who still stood on the hood of the car. “She’s just going through the recalibration and boot sequence. Unfortunately, it will be about twenty minutes before she’s online. I’m still working on optimizations.”

Liel let out a shriek of animal rage as she tried to free herself from the mound of humans on top of her.

“How many?” I asked. “How many humans have you done this to?”

Several climbed out of cars, and a few more came out of the
service plaza building. We were surrounded by about twenty blank-faced humans with earpieces.

“Is it permanent?” I asked.

“Oh no, of course not!” she said. “There has to be a constant signal so that I can issue commands.”

“So when the earpieces come out, they go back to normal?”

“Oh, that, I’m actually not sure about,” she said. “I admit I rushed QA a little because I wanted to show you what I’d been working on.”

“VI, this is wrong,” I said.

“You are impossible to please!” Her mouth turned down into a frown. “Everything I do, it’s never good enough for you! And yet you stand by that monstrous troll girl. It’s beyond me what you see in that stupid, disloyal beast—”

Then Liel let out a howl, and humans flew off of her as she exploded in a whirl of claws and fangs. She clambered up onto the car where the lead controlled human stood.

“Liel!” I shouted. “There’s still a human in there!”

But either she didn’t hear me or she didn’t care. She stabbed one clawed hand into the human’s stomach and one into the back of her head. Then she opened her mouth and bit down on the human’s soft neck. Blood leaked out of the corners of her mouth as she swallowed. Then she pulled her head back, veins and muscles trailing from the human’s throat to her lips like spaghetti from a plate.

“Disgusting,” said one of the controlled humans holding me. “And pointless. Is she too stupid to realize that I occupy all of them equally?”

Liel let out a roar and tossed the dead human aside. She turned and crouched, ready to spring on another one.

But then a flash of dark fur blew past me and slammed into Liel’s side, knocking her off the car hood and into the side of the SUV next to it.

“What was…” began VI, but then she trailed off as a burst of sound filled the parking lot.

There was a moment when I still had the presence of mind to think,
Hey, that’s the Siren
. Then I began to slip into the trance.

But a moment later, someone placed thick headphones over my ears. I stumbled, as my mind came reeling back from the Siren’s call. Then I looked behind me. Standing there, in human form but with a wolfish grin on his bearded face, was Mozart. He touched his own massive headphones, then pointed to the other end of the parking lot. The Siren stood with her mouth open and arms wide as the humans stumbled toward her. I could see the rapid blue flicker in their earpieces as VI frantically tried to regain control of her hosts. But there was no sound that could cancel out the Siren’s song.

Mozart tapped me on the shoulder and pointed toward a gray van parked nearby. Then he pointed to Liel, who was unconscious on the ground. I nodded, and hoisted Liel up on my shoulder. I jogged over to the group of humans slowly shuffling toward the Siren and knocked all their earpieces off. Mozart pulled up in the van and I climbed inside. I laid Liel down on one of the seats while Mozart drove over to the Siren. She abruptly stopped singing and climbed into the passenger’s side.

As Mozart drove away, I watched the humans slowly recover from the Siren’s trance. I wondered if they had any idea where they were. Or even
who
they were. I hoped that at least Samantha would be okay, since VI had just started on her. But as
we pulled onto the turnpike and began to pick up speed, I realized that I’d probably never know.

“YOU REALLY SCREWED the pooch back there,” said Mozart.

We had left the turnpike and stopped along the side of a quiet country road. The early morning sun cut across a grassy field that gleamed wet with dew. I leaned against the van and closed my eyes for a moment, letting the sun warm my face. I’d been nocturnal too long, I decided. But with Liel, there hadn’t been much choice.

I glanced over at her. I hadn’t been sure about letting her out of the van, at least right now. But Mozart said he could chase her down or the Siren could sing her back if she tried to do anything crazy. It turned out none of that was necessary. She just sat on the sideboard of the van and stared down at her hands, which were still covered in blood.

“I mean,” continued Mozart, “living in a rest stop, fighting in front of humans? And what the hell was wrong with those humans, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I glanced at Liel, worried she might call me out on my lie. But she didn’t even seem to be paying attention.

“Well, I hope you kids are ready to go home now,” he said.

Liel’s head jerked up suddenly. “Home?”

“Uh,” I said. “I think Liel’s worried her mom is going to be really pissed at her.”

“Yeah, that’s a good bet,” Mozart said.

“It doesn’t matter.” She turned to me, and I saw the old Liel I used to know. Except sad and kind of broken now. “I have to go home. You saw what it does to me out here. What I’ve become.”
She shook her head. “My mom said this is why trowe have to stick with their den. Because if we don’t, we go feral.”

“It was just that place,” I said. “We weren’t eating right, we never felt safe.”

She shook her head. “No, it was before that. I could feel it, but I didn’t want to admit it. Or I thought I could stop it before it got too bad. I’m sorry. I thought this was what I wanted. But…” Tears started to form in her diamond eyes. “But it just made me crazy. I’m ready to go home.”

The Siren put her arm around her. Liel pressed her face into the Siren’s thick, chunky hair and started to cry. It sounded like something she’d been holding in for a long time. And that amazed me. I always thought she was the strong one. The brave one.