The Future Will Be BS Free

by Will McIntosh

  Theo had a slice in his good hand, the package containing the newly arrived SQUID nestled in his lap like a beloved pet as he double-checked Rebe and Basquiat’s work.

  I learned how hard-core Theo was on the second day of the science magnet program, when I went into the men’s room carrying a comic and spotted Theo’s ratty tan loafers through the gap at the bottom of the stall. Data printouts were spread on the floor around him. I read comics on the toilet; Theo pored over data.

  Boob had opened a screen the size of a candy bar, and was taking advantage of the break to catch up on his favorite microchannel stars.

  “Who are you watching?” I asked.

  “Silhouette Lark, baby.” Boob grabbed a slice of pizza without taking his eyes off the screen. “That’s who we need to get this guy off our backs. Silhouette Lark.”

  “I like her,” Rebe said. “She’s like two feet tall, but she takes absolutely no crap.”

  I watched Silhouette over Boob’s shoulder. She couldn’t have been more than five foot one, had a gold Afro the size of a small moon, and wore matching gold lipstick. She was grocery shopping. A swarm of penny-sized screens, each with a tiny face in it, swirled in the air behind her. Silhouette had one of those state-of-the-art phone systems that allowed her followers to open screens in the air so she could see them (except Boob, whose phone was no longer interactive). It was a bizarre, amazing sight.

  Anyone could post a plea for a bully bust on her wall, but while taking down bullies as millions looked on was Silhouette Lark’s brand, her success was as much about her high-energy, take-no-prisoners personality. Every moment of her life was a performance. You could watch her pretty much 24-7. I’d often suspected her channel was computer generated, but she insisted she was, as she put it, “all natural.”

  The front door opened, and one of Rebe’s relatives came out, a guy in his thirties who rose up on his toes as he walked, like he was a bad dude. There were seventeen relatives living in Rebe’s house. Maybe more—Rebe hadn’t given us an update in a while. The guy was heading toward the street but paused to look us over.

  “What do you all do in there all day long?”

  “We’re building a time machine,” Rebe said.

  “Can I have a slice?” Rebe’s uncle, or cousin, asked.

  “No.”

  The guy snapped his fingers to express his disappointment, then headed for the street.

  “That sandbag and I share twenty-five percent of the same genetic material.” Rebe took a bite of her slice, wiped away a string of cheese that swung across her chin. “I was stunned when I found out I was smart. My whole family was stunned.”

  “My mother’s disappointed I’m not smarter,” Boob said.

  “That’s not true.” Basquiat waved at Boob dismissively. “She just thinks you’re wasting your vast intellectual potential watching Silhouette Lark every waking hour.”

  “Hoo-ha. That’s hilarious.”

  Boob’s mom hated that he spent so much time watching microchannel stars. She referred to the microchannels as “mind rot.”

  I couldn’t say my parents had been surprised when I turned out to be smart (although maybe not as smart as my friends). Both of my parents were relatively smart, although no one suspected Dad was smart, because he was one of those fun, happy-go-lucky alcoholics. A guy who never quite grew up. A boy, you might say. Last I’d heard he was living in Florida.

  Boob’s mom pulled into the driveway. Boob stood. “Who needs a ride?”

  “Oh, come on.” Theo looked pained. “I thought we were going to pull an all-nighter.”

  Boob shook his head. “It’s a miracle she lets me come over here during the day, after what Xavier Leaf said.”

  “If I’m not home to make dinner, my mom won’t eat.” Molly rose to her feet.

  When Basquiat got up as well, I stood. Mom hadn’t forbidden me from staying overnight, but I was so tired. The opportunity to throw my bike in the back and catch a ride home was just too enticing.

  Theo looked at Rebe. “Do you mind if I stay and work awhile?”

  Rebe shrugged. “Hell, no. But there’s no room inside for you to sleep.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll walk home right before curfew.” He shot us a disappointed glance.

  “I’ll be back first thing,” I said.

  It was still dark outside as I pulled on the same jeans I’d worn yesterday, and the day before. I smiled grimly as it occurred to me that we’d lost another million dollars. Tomorrow we’d be below a million dollars each.

  Leaf’s threats didn’t seem as serious now that they were a day old. He was just trying to intimidate us into selling. What had they done, really? Hacked our phones like a bunch of immature trolls. The next time Leaf showed up I was going to tell him to give us a year and we’d make an offer to buy out their company.

  I went out through the garage, hopped on my bike, and headed down the driveway.

  “Sam!” Mom rolled out the front door.

  I hopped off my bike. When I saw her face, my heart started thumping. She was wide-eyed, her mouth a tight line.

  “What is it?”

  Mom swallowed hard. “It’s Theo. He was hit by a car on his way home.”

  I let my bike clatter to the ground and sprinted up the driveway. “Is he all right? Where is he?”

  “He’s gone, Sam.”

  I stopped in my tracks. “Gone?” The word came out as a strangled whisper, like I was trapped in a nightmare and couldn’t get my lungs to work.

  Gone? That couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be.

  My knees gave out and I dropped to all fours, my palms slapping the asphalt. That just couldn’t be.

  “I’m sorry, Sam. God. Poor Theo.” Mom was slumped forward in her chair.

  “Who runs into someone walking on the side of the road?” A tear dropped from the end of my nose, onto the driveway. “How does that even happen?”

  “Some drunk, probably. Whoever it was just kept going.”

  Of course they didn’t stop. Theo would have stopped, but these days there seemed to be a hundred Xavier Leafs for every Theo.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a shiny black Lexus pull away from the corner, up the block.

  These are serious people. I heard the words in Xavier Leaf’s voice. I’m trying to step in before you guys get creamed.

  “Leaf. It was that bastard Leaf.”

  We huddled together, in our sneakers, at the cemetery like a tiny herd of gazelle, wide-eyed and shell-shocked. Mom had been right about my dress shoes. Sneakers were not appropriate for a funeral, but that was all we had.

  The truth kept slipping away from me. It couldn’t possibly be real, that my friend was dead, maybe murdered over new technology, so I kept falling back into thinking it was something I’d seen on TV, or dreamed, or imagined. Theo couldn’t be dead.

  Only he was. Each time I wrapped my mind around it, it was like a shot of acid sliding down my throat and blooming in my stomach.

  Theo’s mom staggered by us, a forty-year-old woman who suddenly looked sixty, the rings under her eyes like bruises. People went up to her, whispered condolences. Everyone seemed to want any excuse not to look at Theo’s coffin hanging from a winch, hovering over a freshly excavated grave.

  “This is the one place he knows we’ll be.” Boob looked like he’d lost ten pounds in the past two days, his cheekbones sharp. “Leaf could be pointing a rifle at one of us right now.”

  “We don’t even know for sure that it was him,” Basquiat repeated for the tenth time.

  I glanced toward Mom, who was parked in the grass ten yards away, scanning the tree line, my late grandfather’s .22 hunting rifle across her titanium legs. It was the only firearm we owned, and all but useless against someone with a real gun.

  “Rebe!” Rebe’s mom scr
eamed, although she was only ten feet away and closing. “You’ve paid your respects. It’s time to go.”

  “He was my friend. I’m staying for the service!” Rebe shouted back.

  “We’re going.” Rebe’s mom turned to me. It looked like she hadn’t brushed her hair that morning. “I want all that stuff out of my garage by tomorrow, or I’m throwing it away.”

  I nodded. My friend was dead. I didn’t want to talk about the stuff in her garage.

  “Every day that stuff is still there, we’re at risk.” She made a chopping gesture. “I want it out.”

  “All right. I heard you.”

  “Don’t speak to me in that tone,” Rebe’s mom said.

  Basquiat got between Rebe’s mom and me. “Mrs. Walsh, if you don’t mind, we’re mourning our friend. We’ll move the equipment.”

  Basquiat’s parents appeared, heads down, walking slowly over the rise. For a moment I couldn’t understand why they would have taken a stroll in the cemetery just before Theo’s funeral, and then I realized: Basquiat’s little sister, Trina, was buried in the same cemetery. They must have gone to visit her grave. Sometimes I forgot Basquiat had had a sister. He almost never talked about her.

  Looking at him standing beside Molly, suddenly I felt so petty for being angry at them for getting together. I went over to them, wrapped them both in a hug.

  “I love you guys. I wish you the best together.”

  Basquiat squeezed me tighter as we stayed with our heads close, crying quietly for Theo.

  My phone rang. I reached for my pocket, then remembered Mom had my phone on her wrist. As she answered, her other hand went for the rifle in her lap.

  “Stop talking,” she said into the phone, her voice low and threatening. “Stop talking and listen. If I catch you anywhere near these kids again, I’ll kill you, you sack of shit.”

  She listened, her fingers tightening on the rifle’s muzzle.

  “Oh, you just watch how much damage I can do with it.” Leaf was watching. Just like he must have been watching Rebe’s garage when Theo started walking home. It had been him.

  I turned in a circle, scanning the landscape for a figure lurking behind a tree or something. Nothing.

  “You think you scare me?” Pause. “I will end you!” she screamed into the phone. “I will hunt you down and slice your fingers off and cut your balls off and end you.” Her eyes went wide. “You think that’s funny? I’ve seen the sky on fire. We took on ten thousand walking guns and lived to—” Mom turned her face toward the sky and screamed in rage and frustration. Leaf had disconnected.

  Everyone at the funeral had stopped talking. They were all staring at her like she was an escaped mental patient. Most of them still believed this had been an accident, like the police report said.

  Mom scanned the landscape, rifle half raised. Her eyes scared me. She was looking through the people around her like they weren’t there, like she was somewhere else.

  “We’re in way over our heads,” Boob said.

  Rebe swept back her long hair. “We should have taken the damned money.”

  Boob turned to me. “We have to give him everything and walk away.”

  My head was spinning. I didn’t want to give in to these bastards, but how could we stand against them? We were six kids and a mom with one .22-caliber rifle. Five kids. Who couldn’t even afford dress shoes for our friend’s funeral.

  Basquiat put his hand on my shoulder. “I don’t think we have a choice.”

  I looked to Molly. Her cheeks were tearstained, fresh ones tracing new tracks. “I want to hurt them. I want to hurt them so bad for what they did.”

  “I do, too,” Basquiat said. “But that’s a fantasy.”

  Over by Mom, I heard Basquiat’s father say, “The police won’t help us.” He spit the word police.

  People moved out of the way as Mom spun her wheelchair and headed toward us. “We have to go. We’re too exposed here.”

  “No, Mom, I’m not leaving until the funeral is over.”

  Mom closed her eyes for a second. “Fine. Then let’s get this service over with.” She swung her wheelchair and raised her voice. “Let’s get going.”

  This was not my mom’s voice. This shrill, panicked voice was not Mom’s. As far as I knew she’d never had flashbacks from the war, but if this wasn’t a flashback, it was something close.

  “Call Leaf,” Boob said. “Tell him we give up. I’m not going to sleep until this is settled.”

  I looked from one face to another. I didn’t want to do this, but what if I refused and tomorrow I found Molly’s body by my mailbox?

  “All right.” It hurt to say it. The thought of calling Xavier Leaf and hearing him gloat made me want to pull my ears off. Everything we’d worked for, none of us harder than Theo, would go into the greedy claws of Leaf’s employer, whoever the hell that was. I guess I’d find out when the truth app hit the market, if it ever did. “Does anyone know where Theo’s safe drives are?”

  Everyone looked at each other.

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Basquiat said. “They must be in the garage, or in Theo’s room. We’ll need time to locate them. You have to tell Leaf that.”

  Someone called for everyone to circle round for the service. We headed over to say goodbye to Theo.

  Mom pulled my phone off her wrist and handed it to me. “Do it.”

  Xavier Leaf answered in a subdued voice. “Hey, Sam. I’m sorry about your friend.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure. Shoot.”

  “How did you find out about our project? When no one else was even taking us seriously, how did you figure out what we were doing?” I was so angry I had a headache. My head was pounding in time with my heart.

  Leaf sighed. “Let me give you some advice for your next project—and I have no doubt there will be many more. If you tap into other organizations’ computers for your processing power, those organizations can see what you’re utilizing that processing power for.”

  Someone had noticed Rebe borrowing processing power from their system, and figured out what we were doing based on the data being processed. It was so obvious, now that I knew.

  “Theo kept everything on a safe drive. It’s going to take us time to locate it and figure out how to open it.”

  “Not a problem,” Leaf said. “Take a day. Two if you need it. Keep me in the loop.”

  “I don’t know if two days will be enough.”

  “I’ll tell you where to bring everything once you’ve got it together,” Leaf said, ignoring me. “Good call. And, Sam?”

  “What?”

  “Get your mother some help.” He disconnected.

  Head pounding, I called the others to tell them it was done.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t know why I was playing Theo’s music. Maybe I was a masochist, or maybe it fit my mood. For the first time in my life, music that oozed despair fit my mood. I had to get out of my head. I’d never felt so miserable, so hopeless.

  The only thing I could think to do was call Molly.

  “It’s so good to hear your voice.” She was still crying, or maybe she’d started up again. “I can’t sleep. It’s like I forget what it would even feel like to sleep.”

  “Me too.”

  She took a long, ragged breath. “I can’t believe it really happened. Over a thing, a product, a bunch of wires and code.”

  “I keep thinking about what Theo’s last seconds must have been like. I don’t want to think about it, but I can’t help it. I hope it was instant.”

  “I’ve been going through Theo’s public pages. Music links, photos, blog. There’s so much of it—I had no idea.”

  “He was always writing. Mostly about politics and philosophy.”

>   “Listen to this.” Molly paused, then began to read. “ ‘Lying is how you get power in this world. Powerful people aren’t smarter or more capable than the rest of us; they’re just more willing to lie, cheat, steal, even kill. The true currency of our economy is deception. If deception ever becomes impossible, the wealthy and powerful will fall, and the honest will rise.’ ”

  Powerful people aren’t smarter or more capable than the rest of us; they’re just more willing to lie, cheat, steal, even kill. It was true. Xavier Leaf’s people hadn’t been smart enough to come up with the idea for the truth app. They hadn’t developed it. The only reason they were taking it was because they were willing to kill for it.

  “Theo said he didn’t think the company Xavier Leaf worked for would release the truth app to the public. He thought they’d use it on the public,” Molly said. “In that case we’ll never know if they were successful.”

  “I know.” I hated them so much. I was going to be haunted by this for the rest of my life; I couldn’t imagine sitting in class when school started, and caring about anything my teachers had to say. Not because of the money I’d lost, but because of Theo. If they got the truth app, they not only killed Theo, they killed his vision as well. Everything that mattered to him would die with him. But we were still five seventeen-year-olds and a disabled veteran.

  “Mr. Chambliss didn’t show up for Theo’s funeral. Did you notice that?” Molly said.

  “Well, he did say he didn’t want us bringing our personal problems to him.”

  “His best student died. That’s not a personal problem.”

  I didn’t know what to tell her. I liked Mr. Chambliss, but I didn’t think I’d ever understand him. “He probably had a reason. It might not make sense to anyone but him, but he probably had one.”

  Suddenly, I missed Mr. Chambliss. He had a strange, refreshing way of looking at things. He also never treated us like kids, although there were pluses and minuses to that. He wouldn’t hesitate to laugh right in your face in class if you said something stupid.