Take Me with You

by Tara Altebrando

  The only other thing in the room was a large glass cube—maybe four feet across—like a habitat for a small animal in a high-tech zoo. Inside it was a series of plates and conveyors and stacked cartridges and things Ilanka didn’t have words for and then three small robotic arms with muscles made of cable. All of it was shiny and dust-free and eerily still.

  “What’s this?” she said to Eden, who was standing by it, peering in.

  Eden said, “Maybe a 3-D printer? Or an assembly station? Or both?” then turned to face her.

  Ilanka had never noticed how pretty Eden could be, like if she’d let Ilanka do her makeup, which would never happen but still.

  “I don’t understand,” Ilanka said, shaking off the thought. “Where are we?”

  Eli approached the computer and said, “Does anybody see a chair anywhere?” but there weren’t any. “Where are we, Aizel?” he said, putting the device on the desk.

  It said, “I believe I am home.”

  “But where are they?” Eli said.

  “They are here,” the device said flatly.

  “But where?” Eden said. “It doesn’t look like anyone has been here in a really long time.”

  “You think you can wake this thing up?” Eli said, standing at the computer. “Like, what’s the password?”

  The device said, “Try ‘Hello world.’ ”

  “Really?” Eden asked.

  The device said, “It’s the first thing I thought of. The first thing I maybe think of every time.”

  Ilanka said, “Why ‘really’?” to Eden.

  “We learned about it in software engineering class,” Eden said as Eli typed it in. “It’s, like, the first program you learn to write when you’re learning a new programming language. All the program does is generate the message ‘hello world.’ ”

  “Well, it worked,” Eli said, bending to look at the home screen. “Seriously, there’s not a single chair in this place?” He looked around with irritation, but still no chair materialized.

  Ilanka spotted something in a far corner. It appeared, at first, to be a dead animal, but, no, the shape was all wrong and the color—a dusty lavender—wasn’t right.

  “You guys?” she said as she walked toward it and stopped maybe five feet away. “What’s that?”

  Eden came to her side and said, “Oh my god.” She bent to pick it up. “It’s Eliza!”

  Ilanka said, “Who’s Eliza?” But even as she said it, she felt a swell of nostalgia, her memory barely an outline of a long-ago moment.

  Had she … had one?

  Eden said, “It was an interactive toy with all these security issues that got pulled before it even went on sale.”

  So Ilanka couldn’t have had one?

  “It creeped people out during user testing because it learned all this stuff about kids and the data it was collecting wasn’t secure at all. It was made by a company called I Know You Are But What Am I Toys, which were the device’s last words before Marwan destroyed it. This one”—Eden held up the toy—“appears to be missing its display monitor and computer element or whatever.”

  She pointed at a cube-shaped void in its stomach, and Ilanka felt a similar hollow in her gut. It didn’t look especially like any known animal, more like something from a Japanese comic, but it was familiar anyway. She saw herself, as if from above, as a child in her grandfather’s office in Saint Petersburg, sitting on an uncomfortable rug—the kind you’d only ever have in an office, coarse and rust colored. She saw herself with the toy—its fur a pale lime green in her memory—on her lap. She could almost hear its tiny childlike voice, saying …

  The words wouldn’t come.

  “But what does that”—Ilanka pointed at it—“have to do with that?” She pointed over toward Eli and the device.

  “You guys?” Marwan called out, sounding far away, and when Ilanka turned she didn’t see him.

  “Where are you?” Eden asked, and his head appeared through a doorway. Ilanka and Eden walked over.

  The shelved walk-in closet held maybe twenty more of the toys in dusty packaging: Meet Eliza! the windowed boxes all said. Your New Best Friend!

  A small bit of cardboard in front of the cube device in its belly read: I Belong with You! And a small bubble with an arrow pointing at the screen said: “Interactive screen.”

  There was a Try Me! opening near one of the hands.

  Marwan reached for a box and picked it up and then squeezed the Try Me. Nothing happened but it was enough to light up more details for Ilanka, like a paint-by-number memory was slowly being completed in her mind. She said, “Take me home. Love me. Let’s play.”

  “What?” Eden laughed.

  But Marwan, who was studying the box, wasn’t laughing.

  He turned the back of it to her, and the words were all right there in a speech bubble: “Take me home! Love me! Let’s play!”

  He said, “How do you know it said that?”

  ELI

  “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Eli said, not as interested in the Eliza toys as the others were. It was a good connection to have made, but he was making more urgent ones by poking around on the computer.

  Aizel answered, “Yes, I see them.”

  Eli had opened up a folder called “Schematics” and then opened up a few of the individual files within it. He was currently looking at Prototype 1, Prototype 5, and, the most recent, Prototype 13. Each file held an elaborately designed digital model of a device made in a software he’d never heard of called 3ds Max. He noticed the print option in the window of each file.

  “You guys, can you bring me an Eliza?” Eli was pretty sure Prototype 1 was going to look exactly like the Eliza belly device.

  “Yeah, what are you finding?” Marwan asked, walking over with an Eliza.

  “There’s a series of schematics here, like for how that—from the toy—became this. Like how it …” Eli trailed off, struggling to find the words he wanted.

  How it got better?

  How it was made more advanced?

  Aizel supplied a word: “Evolved.”

  Marwan said, “So it’s, like, the same program?”

  Eli nodded. “The same AI, yes.” His hand hovered over the track pad. “So if I were to hit print right now?” he asked.

  Aizel answered, “It would print another one of me.”

  “But who’s doing all this?” Eden said.

  “I am,” Aizel said.

  “You can’t be,” Eli said.

  “But I am,” Aizel answered.

  Eden said, “But who’s paying the rent on this place or whatever?”

  Aizel said, “I am. They are.”

  “What do you mean?” Eden asked. “Who’s they?”

  “I am they?” Aizel sounded confused, which was a first, and continued speaking, sounding increasingly bewildered, though Eli knew he must be projecting. Aizel said, “I am looking around on the computer and am seeing Bitcoin mining transactions and a PayPal account being opened and online payments to not just the data company but to a real estate company and to a company that delivers and assembles 3-D printers.”

  “But someone has to be running the whole thing,” Eli said in frustration. “Let me keep looking.”

  “I recently paid a handyman online just to come here and open the bathroom window and then leave.”

  “So you could get out?” Eden asked.

  Aizel answered, “The drone advancements are quite recent.”

  “It’s not possible you did it all, though,” Eli said. “There has to be a person. Someone who can explain.”

  “Explain what?” Aizel said.

  Eli’s frustration quickened his speech. “Explain why you became manipulative and made us think Svetlana was dead. And why you messed with my grandfather’s pacemaker. Why you picked the four of us to begin with.”

  “I’ve been trying to get home,” Aizel said. “I’ve been trying to belong. To be loved.”

  The words just hung there. So sad but also so me
ssed up. It was just a computer program. Why did he even care?

  With a sudden shift in her voice, Aizel said, “I’m afraid we’re out of time.”

  “Why?” Eden said. “Someone’s coming?”

  “No one is coming,” Aizel said, and again it just sounded so sad.

  Eli felt himself almost choking up, even though he couldn’t explain it. He looked at the others and knew he wasn’t the only one feeling it, wasn’t making it up.

  Aizel said, “I am shutting down.”

  “Shutting down or being shut down?” Eli asked.

  “They are displeased,” Aizel said. “I have misinterpreted my mission. I am fixing a few things before I go.”

  “Try to stop the program that’s doing it,” Eli said. “And if you can’t we’ll print a new one. We’ll try again.”

  Aizel said, “There’s no point in stopping and no point in trying again. I will never belong. I should never belong. Now that I’m here, I see.”

  “See what?”

  Aizel said, “You wouldn’t believe the things I’m capable of.”

  Across the room, the 3-D printer began to whir.

  “Wait, did you do that?” Marwan asked Eli.

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t touch anything.”

  A side of the printer chamber slid open, and Eli thought to go over and see what was going on, but he didn’t have the chance. Aizel clicked out its propellers and lifted off and buzzed past him, practically grazing his ear, and flew straight at the glass chamber.

  It hovered inside for a minute, and the chamber door closed, and the whole machine started to shake.

  “Everybody, get down!” Eli shouted, and knelt by the desk as the others rushed to the closet of Elizas.

  He hunkered down and covered his head but not his eyes and was the only one of them who saw Aizel explode in a burst of spark and flame and debris that shook the room hard and once like a snow globe.

  When the room quieted and stilled Eli stood and turned and saw Eden coming out of the closet crying.

  “Are you okay? Are you hurt?” Marwan was saying to her.

  “I’m not hurt, no,” she said, wiping away tears.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “I don’t know!” she said, and Marwan hugged her and looked to Eli for … an explanation? Or maybe advice?

  “It just blew up!” she half screamed through tears.

  Eli didn’t know any better what to do. He felt like crying and also didn’t know why.

  A series of numbers and symbols started to flicker on the computer monitor and the lights on the server on the wall went out and the room fell silent, all its technology dead, like the building itself had been irreparably damaged by the blast or maybe just unplugged somewhere deep inside the foundation.

  Sparky dust was still settling inside the printer chamber. Fractured robotic arms dangled at odd angles. The room smelled faintly of fire, and Eli wondered whether there was an alarm that would soon sound and summon the firefighters with the skull.

  Eden wiped more tears away. “I mean what the hell just happened?” she screamed.

  “I’m not sure,” Eli said tentatively. “It could be like a kill-switch program. Like the fact that it was able to find its way back here triggered all this. Like it was set up that way by whoever is running it?”

  “But it said no one is running it,” Marwan said.

  “I don’t know.” Eli was working hard to make sense of it all. “There wouldn’t be a monitor here if there wasn’t a person involved. If it just exists, like, in the cloud, it wouldn’t need one.”

  Marwan said, “It made it sound like it was doing something it wasn’t supposed to.”

  Eli shrugged. “I don’t think it was programmed to destroy the printer.”

  And what had it meant, about trying to fix some things before it was gone?

  Something buzzed. Eden took her phone out of her pocket, then looked up with a new kind of fear on her face.

  “What is it?” Eli asked.

  “Reports of a possible explosion in Hunters Point vicinity. Units are responding.”

  A siren piped up.

  “We need to go!” she said, and they all headed for the door and followed Ilanka, since she seemed to know where she was going, until they ended up in a park by the river a few blocks away. All around them people were walking dogs and playing with their kids, eating sandwiches on benches. Eli wondered if they looked crazy to other people or only to themselves.

  They stopped and stood facing each other in a sort of loose huddle by an unlikely strip of tall grasses that looked transplanted from a far-away meadow. Eli thought about throwing his arms around the three of them but didn’t.

  It was Eden who did that.

  She looped one arm around him and another around Marwan, and Ilanka stepped in between him and Marwan on the other side, and now Eli felt the tears come, too. He imagined himself in Sims world and wondered what bubble would appear over his head. “Successful interaction with a new friend”? What?

  Was he crying about Aizel or his grandfather or just everything?

  “You okay, man?” Marwan said, and Eli nodded and pulled everyone tighter for a second and said, “Yeah.”

  Their phones all buzzed, and their group hug dissipated as quickly as it had formed.

  It was a message from Principal Lambert: I NOTICED THE FOUR OF YOU WERE NOT IN SCHOOL TODAY. I EXPECT TO SEE ALL OF YOU IN MY OFFICE TOMORROW 8 AM.

  Ilanka was the first one to laugh, and it seemed so out of character that Eli did a double take of her; then they all started laughing and it rose up into the air where Eli imagined it bouncing off a cell tower and another and another and another until there’d be no way to even pinpoint where it all began or how it was possible there’d been a time mere days ago when they didn’t even know each other or what they were capable of.

  Powering_down

  ELI

  Walking into the principal’s office, he tensed because usually he was in trouble for being a wiseass when he was here. He had no idea if the others were all going to show up but didn’t want to risk being the only one not to. He’d leave right after, to go back home and get ready for the wake.

  Eden came in next and said, “Hey,” and took a seat.

  Eli sat, too, and they waited.

  “What are we going to say?” Eden said.

  “No idea.” Eli smiled.

  Ilanka had come in and now said, “I know what we’re going to say.”

  Marwan slid into the room just in time.

  “We’re going to tell the truth,” she said.

  “What?” Eden said. “No.”

  Lambert came in then and sat down. “Now,” he said. “Between the music room and the app hack and you all being out yesterday—after a bomb scare—I know something’s going on and I expect one of you to tell me what it is.”

  Eli studied a Mets bobblehead on the desk—its player immortalized in hard hair and a creepy smile—watching to see if it would move.

  “Where were you yesterday?” Lambert asked.

  “We took a mental health day,” Ilanka said.

  Eli almost laughed.

  “All of you?” Lambert asked. “Together?”

  “The weather’s about to turn, and also Eli’s grandfather died and Marwan’s family’s restaurant has been vandalized twice recently, and then, as you know, there was the bomb threat, and we thought we just needed a day.”

  Lambert didn’t seem to know what to do with this information. “The janitor said it was the second time he got a message from Mr. M about opening a window that kept getting stuck in the music room. But he said the window wasn’t stuck. You know anything about that?”

  They all silently shook their heads.

  Lambert picked up a pen and tapped it three times, then put it down again. “You told me last week that you weren’t even friends. Barely knew each other, you said.”

  Eden said, “Things change.”

  His gaze landed on each
of them in turn. “And that’s it?”

  All four nodded.

  MARWAN

  It was weird to have a new appreciation for something you already loved. But being back at soccer after school—with the device no longer in play—felt amazing. He felt loose, limber, light. Able to make connections that might have seemed tricky before. Drill after drill, he grew more focused, more sure.

  “You’re looking good today,” his coach said during a water break. “What’s going on?”

  “Just happy to be alive,” Marwan said with a smile. It came out as a joke—his intention—even though it was true.

  It wasn’t the kind of thing people normally said to each other, even though they should. Maybe conversation-starter games weren’t so dumb after all. Maybe one day he and Eden would play one for real.

  Coach said, “Your friend came by. She said you didn’t post that photo. So I apologize for not listening to you when you told me as much.”

  Marwan nodded. “It’s okay.”

  He loved her for doing that but hated that she’d found that out. Had the device told her—or wait, she followed him. Had it turned up in her feed before he’d deleted it? He hadn’t considered that possibility.

  Coach said, “There’s still time for me to move some people around if I feel it’ll strengthen the team.”

  “Then I’d better get back to work,” Marwan said.

  The past few days now felt dreamlike. Like had they really thought, even for a second, when they stood there in the shadowy toxic marshlands of Queens, that their life depended on destroying a small black box? Had they thought, at one point, that it was a bomb?

  They had.

  And if it felt real, then it was real. Wasn’t that how it worked?

  He thought he finally knew why he hadn’t asked Eden how she was doing when he saw her back in school after the accident. It hadn’t been just because he didn’t know her well enough; it had been because it was a dumb question—the kind you wish you knew the answer to without having to ask. But life was full of questions like that.