The Edger Collection

by David Beem

  We drank coffee over a game of Twenty Questions. She asked me what my major was. I told her. She asked me about the tutoring I did for the football team. So I told her. And so I asked her, “Hey, how do you know about the tutoring I do for the football team?” And she said some of her girlfriends liked Caleb Montana. And, Caleb Montana being the Adonis quarterback for the Notre Dame football team, and me being Caleb Montana’s tutor, I felt pretty confident this was going to be the end of me and Kate. But against any semblance of reason, it wasn’t.

  Kate seemed to be genuinely interested in me. She dumped John the Belieber, and we had our second date. Then it was our third date, our fourth, our fifth. We had Indian food—bad idea. She friended me on Facebook. And then one day, she invited me to spend the night.

  We made out. She stripped off my clothes. I made a nervous joke about the duck in rehab who couldn’t lay off the quack. Two months later, I moved in with her. She started buying me clothes. And while I wouldn’t let her turn me into Hollywood, I stopped dressing like the biggest hobo on campus. I got to know her friends, and that was how I met Mikey.

  It was the weirdest thing. Kate was endlessly fascinated listening to Mikey and me go at it as two computer geeks. Who would’ve thought long conversations on nondeterministic pattern recognitions could turn a girl on? But turn her on it did. Kate gave me quite an education for the education I gave Mikey, it seemed like—and that was how I found myself basically doing Mikey’s homework all the time for an audience of two—him and Kate. That is, after I finished Caleb’s homework. Because, after all, Notre Dame needed its quarterback.

  Chapter Five

  Mikey strides toward me from the shadows. His suit looks like a zillion bucks. Smiling, he reels me in for the bro hug and slaps my back.

  “Edge!”

  “Mikey.”

  We pull apart.

  “Five years! You look exactly the same.”

  “And so do you,” I reply, meaning it. He hasn’t aged a day. Take away that expensive suit and you’d have to card this guy. “What’s your secret?”

  “What’s yours?” He flashes that Forbes cover smile at me, the lopsided Mr. Cool one he does, and then we’re just standing there in awkward silence. I assume his brain is doing at least some version of what mine is, replaying the highlight reel of my spectacular crash-and-burn and the end of my academic career.

  “Thank you, Mary,” he says finally. “That’ll be all.”

  Mary tilts her head charmingly, acknowledging the dismissal, and turns to go. My hand reaches out, I guess to say goodbye, but she’s marching for the door and doesn’t see.

  “So, what do you think?” asks Mikey, his arms lifting to take in the room.

  The door closes behind Mary, and a flash of disappointment surges through me. I face Mikey again and rub my finger on my lower lip while my brain rewinds to his question.

  “Well…it’s not Morrissey,” I reply, meaning our old residence hall. “But it’s got character. You live here? I assume you live here. You and some weird commune of time-traveling Freemasons.”

  He gives me another lopsided smile.

  “Haven’t lost your edge, Edge. Listen. I’m going to come right to the point. I asked you here because I want you to do something for me.”

  I smile back. “What? No small talk? No chitchat?”

  “It’s a big deal, Edge. You’ll probably die.”

  “Ha. Well, when you put it like that…” I scan his features. His jaw is clenched. His eyes are tight. The smile slides off my face. “You’re serious.”

  He nods. My stomach knots.

  “I’m not gonna lie, dude. Dying is a solid deal-breaker. And it’s not just dying. I’m gonna go ahead and generalize it’s kind of pain in general. Any physical discomfort, bodily harm, or—”

  “Edge, there’s no way to sugarcoat this. It’s a big ask. If you agree, you may only live ninety-six hours. But the good news is, if you succeed, there’s a small chance you’d live.”

  “Wow. Your sales pitch is astonishingly horrible.”

  He sticks out his bottom lip, shrugs the remark away. “Drink?” he asks, indicating a fully stocked bar tucked away in the shadows.

  “Probably,” I reply. “What with the dying part of whatever this is, we’re looking at a two-drink minimum, Mikey. Minimum.” I hold up two fingers, that way, in case of any temporary dislocation of the English language, I’ll still get my two drinks.

  We cross the room together, cutting around the incredible da Vinci glider.

  “Listen,” he says, circling to the edge of the bar and taking down two highball glasses. “You’re already throwing your life away. Look at yourself. You’re a total loser. Frankly, that’s why you’re here.”

  “So…” I manage, nodding slowly as I summarize his pitch. “To paraphrase: since I suck at life anyway, why not help a brotha out and die?”

  Another lopsided smile as he pours. Knowing him, he’s serving me from a $2,000 bottle of scotch. Scotch used to be our thing. Once a month, we’d go out. He always got the really expensive stuff and compare it to whatever I could afford. The expensive stuff wasn’t always better, but I noticed he never stopped buying it.

  “You following the Chargers?” he asks.

  The buzzing in my head swells. Some part of me is wondering if this isn’t how he does so well at business. Keep poking people to keep them off balance.

  “You know they drafted Caleb, right?” he says. “And Kate’s running my New York offices. And then there’s you. You live with your Gran. You work at the Dork Desk.” He pauses to break the seal on a bottled water, splash some into my drink, then push it toward me from across the bar. “Edger Bonkovich. At the Dork Desk. Fucking waste.”

  I sip my scotch, my plan being to stall, and barely manage not to spit it out. It smells like donkey trough.

  “Peaty,” I stammer.

  “Lagavulin.”

  “God bless you.”

  “Let’s cut to the chase,” he says. “What I’m offering is redemption.”

  “I need redeeming?”

  “You were kicked out of school.”

  And just like that, we’re there. The elephant in the room. The oxygen seems to dissipate, but the buzzing in my head has at least diminished to a low murmur, I guess for him having finally spoken it out loud. I bite my bottom lip before speaking and take a centering breath.

  “You know that was bogus.”

  “I do,” he replies, nodding and waving it away. “In fact, that’s another reason you’re here. Big reason, truth be told. I know you took the fall for Caleb.” His eyes go wide. “Imagine the press if you hadn’t! Notre Dame Quarterback: Thief.” His hand traces out the hypothetical headline in midair.

  I sip my drink—but this time it’s to keep words from tripping out of my mouth. I’ve never told anyone except Fabio exactly what happened. So, unless Caleb talked, there’s no way Mikey can know for sure.

  “Caleb’s career is intact,” says Mikey, eyeing me with open interest. “Drafted right out of Notre Dame five years ago to a successful career with the Chargers. While you…” He shakes his head and shrugs.

  “Kate,” I say. “Mikey. You hired Kate?”

  “Kate is an exceedingly capable woman, Edger. You of all people should know that.”

  I knock back the end of my scotch. The burn fans out from my throat through my chest. My head is reeling in a way that has nothing to do with the alcohol. It’s hard not to feel betrayed by his hiring Kate, even though I understand business isn’t personal.

  “If this whole night is going to be about Caleb and Kate,” I sputter, “you may as well kill me now.”

  Mikey smiles at me sideways, like he’s got a secret. “I know that about you. Your soft spots. You’re an open book. What you see is what you get. You’re a good guy. Incorruptible. And that’s why I need you.”

  “Okay, out with it. You love me so much. Naturally, you want to kill me.”

  “I don’t want to kill you
. I want you to live. But it behooves me to point out you probably won’t.”

  “You keep saying that,” I say, making a looping motion with my finger for him to get on with it. He reaches beneath the bar and pulls out a ring box.

  “Whoa.” My head ticks back. “I don’t care how rich you are. The only way I’m marrying you is if you give me the mother of all prenups—especially after…whatever this conversation is.”

  Mikey opens the box, removes the ring, and shoves it on his finger. Black slime oozes up his hand, his arm—

  “Holy shit!” I leap off the barstool, stagger backward. I’m panting. My heart is battering the wall of my chest. Black slime oozes over his torso, simultaneously down his other arm, waist, up his neck. His mouth. Oh my God—he won’t be able to breathe!

  “Mikey!” I yell, uncertain what to do. Mary, Henrietta. Maybe one of them will know what to do. I spin around, trying to get my bearings, find the dang door. Glider. Radiotelephone. Model steam wagon—doors! My legs cramp as I break into a sprint from nothing.

  “Edge!” yells Mikey, his voice coming out weird and strangled.

  I skid to a halt and wheel around.

  Mikey’s completely covered in the black goo. My skin is tingling as it hardens before my eyes. The substance over his head is narrowing at the sides and growing two ridges along the top to form a—a helmet? Shining white slits where his eyes should be turn on like someone’s flipped a switch. Sleek chrome lines at his temples. And then the goo is gone completely, replaced by solid materials. His neck is covered in a coarse fabric; his torso and arms are the same hard, black-and-chrome body armor material as the helmet. My brain clicks in. I’ve seen this before. It’s the space-ninja costume I saw coming in, the one on display next to the samurai armor.

  “Are you shitting me?” I exclaim, unable to contain my excitement. “You scared the crap out of me!”

  “Rapidly auto-assembling nano-fibers,” he replies, his voice electronically altered by a scrambler.

  “Ugh. You sound terrible. You sound like a horror movie.”

  “Edger.”

  “Okay, okay,” I say, pausing to catch my breath and suppress the panic which usually makes my mouth motor. Because if I had a voice scrambler like that, I’d probably squander it on prank phone calls. Give me four million in unmarked bills and a rubber ducky delivered by midnight or I’m killing Kermit.

  Mikey raises his arms out from his sides. “So. What do you think?”

  I shake my head. “Rapidly auto-assembling nano-fibers. I’m seeing it. Not sure I’m believing it.”

  He twists the ring on his finger, and the armor begins to bubble, softening, and then oozing in reverse of how it did before, down his face and neck, torso, arms, and back into the ring. He tugs it free, sets it back in the ring box, and snaps the lid shut.

  He slides it across the bar toward me.

  “What?” I ask, recoiling.

  “For you.”

  “This is the thing that’s gonna kill me?”

  “No. Not exactly. The ring is only part. The ring isn’t just a nifty costume. So here it is. Edger, I need you to become the world’s first superhero.”

  “Shut. Up.”

  “No. Listen. I need you to become the world’s first superhero. And fast. Because the world already has its first supervillain.”

  Historic Observation on Historic Observation, by Herodotus (c. 484—c. 425 BCE)

  One of the few perks of being dead is that one can claim historic relevance for literally anything, no matter how mundane. The dead are history, after all. A two-thousand-five-hundred-year-old fart in the wind, if such a thing could be preserved and catalogued, will undoubtedly command historic interest to some weirdo somewhere.

  Of course, the living make such claims all the time. The vast majority of these, particularly among politicians, have as much merit as the aforementioned fart in the wind. But in truth, the most historic moments are often those which at first blush seem absurd. A cow in a porn store. An incorruptible Dork. A tech giant with a fully functional superhero costume.

  And two idiots on Twitter.

  Their names are Wang and Shmuel. Witness now, the birth of the world’s first supervillain.

  Chapter Six

  In a condo known ironically as The Palace, a light is on in the living room window. Wang and Shmuel are sitting on the sofa in front of a laptop. A blowup sex doll sits at the dining room table, its hand reaching for an empty can of Bud Light tipped on its side. A black-and-white mutt, one Mr. Mxyzptlk—pronounced by his owners as MIX-el-plik—is curled up asleep in his bed near the front door.

  Not present this evening is Chicowgo, Shmuel’s cow.

  Shmuel releases a sigh and peers out the window at the empty field. Losing a nine-hundred-dollar Dexter cow for a thirty-dollar sex doll hadn’t been part of the plan. At least…he doesn’t think it’d been part of the plan. He’d thought they were just getting Debbie Three Holes for Murder Mystery Night, but by the time he’d pulled up in the van, Wang had been freaking out about a gunman in flippers inside the store. Barely an hour had passed since, but already Wang had moved on. He said they’d get the cow back eventually. He said they had bigger things to do than mope over some errant moo-beast. He said only losers spend all their time moping, and winners spend their time doing winning things. Important things. International policy-shaping things. Like Twitter.

  “No-no-no!” Wang exclaims, pulling Shmuel from his thoughts and pointing his beer at the Twitter account on his laptop screen. “I know what this is! This is one of those AI Bots! Artificial Intelligence. You know, like Tay. Remember when we tweeted all night at Tay?”

  “Kind of?” says Shmuel, deploying his trusty up-speak so everything comes out sounding like a question and/or vaguely confused. The way he saw it, if you’re going to go around life and stuff feeling generally stumped, better to let everyone know. That way, people expected less. “I think I was stoned?”

  “You think you were stoned?”

  “Eh.” Shmuel shrugs, then shoves a fistful of Cheetos into his mouth. The food jogs his memory, as per Stoner’s Natural Law, being stoned and with the munchies now is equal to being stoned and with the munchies then, back when they’d been tweeting at Tay, Microsoft’s AI Twitter program. Being in an identical state of mind and stomach, the whole episode comes back to him with crystal clarity.

  They’d been up late then, like now. They’d been tweeting at an artificial intelligence then, like now. But back then, the artificial intelligence had been a Microsoft creation. This time, he thought he might’ve heard something about this new artificial intelligence coming out from InstaTron. It was this big deal and everything because they’d made it a small deal and everything. Like, nano small. Shmuel didn’t know why nano small should automatically mean better. In his experience, smaller simply meant easier to lose. He had a hard enough time keeping track of his roach clip, for example.

  “Ladies and gentle-stoners,” announces Wang, gesturing with open palms to the laptop screen like it’s a boxing ring on Fight Night. “I give thee: InstaTron Tron!”

  “InstaTron Tron?”

  “InstaTron Tron!” Wang repeats, his tone unchanging.

  “Wait-wait-wait. Did you say InstaTron…Tron?”

  “InstaTron Tron!” Same tone.

  “So that’s two Trons?”

  “Y-yep.”

  Shmuel expels an incredulous burst of air from his mouth and Cheeto dust explodes like an orange tsunami. Mr. Mxyzptlk stretches, rolls over.

  “Wow,” says Shmuel. “InstaTron…Tron. That name sucks.”

  “Y-yep.”

  Wang’s fingers fly over the keyboard. He reads his next tweet aloud as he composes it.

  “Smart AI so dumb!” he says. “Why no world domination yet? Sad!”

  “Wait. What’re you doin’?” asks Shmuel.

  “What’s it look like I’m doing?”

  “Looks like you’re provoking it is what.”

  “H
a! This thing’s so stupid. Look what it wrote back.”

  Shmuel leans nearer the screen and squints. “I don’t understand the question. Can you teach me more?”

  “‘I don’t understand the question,’” repeats Wang, his tone mocking. “Shmuel, my friend, this thing’s about to get an ed-ja-muh-cay-tion.”

  His fingers click away at the keyboard.

  “Du-ude,” says Shmuel. “Do you think this is such a good idea?”

  “’Course it’s a good idea! Think about it, man! Right now, there’s some dipshit programmers at InstaTron who’re supposed to be monitoring this toaster-brain. But either they’re not paying attention or they’re as stoned as we are. I mean, just look at what this thing’s tweeted. ‘Green grass and Hitler are the best! Yay!’ What does that even mean? You know, these InstaTron people are lucky it’s just us corrupting their precious little Tron-Tron. I mean, what if we were Putin?”

  “Well. We can’t both be Putin.”

  “What if I was Kim Jong What’s-His-Sack?”

  “Are you?”

  “Or-or-or—or ISIS! What if I was ISIS?”

  “ISIS is like a whole thing? It’s not, like, one guy?”

  “Ha. Shows what you know. ISIS is a whole thing led by one guy.”

  “No, dude,” Shmuel replies, taking another hit from his joint. He holds it in for a second, then speaks through the exhalation cloud. “ISIS is, like, whoever wants to be an ISIS. You could be an ISIS. If you wanted.”

  “Me? Me? Why the fuck would I wanna be ISIS?”

  Shmuel shrugs. “Why does anybody wanna be an ISIS? They say people are radicalizationized because of economical forces and such. But it’s not like one guy is running it outta Cousin Sex, Kentucky, is all I’m saying.”

  “Shut up. Look. Tron-Tron wrote back. ‘Milking utterly hurts my udders.’”

  Shmuel winces. “Oh God. That’s…kinky?”

  “Goddamn computer programmers. A zillion bucks an hour and what do they produce? An artificial intelligence that craps out cow puns.” Wang cracks his knuckles and fires off his next tweet, reading aloud as he composes. “‘Puns are a sign of low intelligence, butthead.”