“Beer me!” she says. Matt puts on his gloves and tosses a cold can of root beer up to her, then passes cans to the others (I get cream soda in a glass bottle, thank you), and completes the human concession stand routine by producing a huge bag of Doritos. Stuart grabs it and tucks in.
“Time to dance, monkey!” he says. “Show us what you got!”
“Are we good here?” I ask. “We are in the middle of the woods.”
“Exactly. Don’t worry, we have our earlywarning system,” Matt says, pointing at Sara. “She’ll pick up on anyone who gets close.”
“Good enough,” I say.
Showtime.
I power up. The light engulfs me and that alone generates some gasps, which are the only sounds besides the sounds of nature. I don’t hum when I’m powered up or when I fly and my energy blasts are silent, which is wicked disappointing. They’d be way more dramatic if they went FWASH or FTYOO or ZWAMP, some kind of cool George Lucas lasery noise.
For my next trick, ladies and gentlemen, I shall rise up into the air until I am eye-to-eye with my lovely assistant Missy, sitting high atop the Bowling Ball.
“Cooooooool,” my lovely assistant says. “Ooh! How fast can you fly? Could you, like, fly to Canada and bring back a snowball before it melts?”
“I’m not GPS-equipped,” I say, and that there is the biggest problem with flying: it can be a real pain in the butt to find my way back to where I started. If I can identify a recognizable landmark, something I can spot easily from the air, I’m okay. Back home—back on the Cape—I had a huge mall to use as my anchor point, but I made sure never to fly so far away I couldn’t find my way back to it. Even if I did, it’s Cape Cod; it’s a ginormous peninsula shaped like a flexing arm, which makes it way more recognizable than Kingsport here in the middle of the South Shore.
“That’s a good question, though,” Matt says. “Have you ever tested how fast you can go?”
“I wouldn’t know how.” Do they make portable speedometers?
“Hm. Have you tried to break the sound barrier, then? That would mean you could hit at least 768 miles per hour at sea level.”
“Did you make that number up?”
“No. That’s really what mach one is. Can you do mach one?”
“I’ve never tried before,” I say, and Matt spreads his arms as if to say No time like the present. There’s no tree cover immediately overhead, which means I could shoot straight up and come right back down, which means no worries about getting lost.
All right. Let’s do this.
I climb maybe a hundred feet to get well clear of the woods, then I gun it—not that I can tell you what it is, mind you. It’s not like I think Carrie fly fast and off I go. I consciously think about flying as much as I consciously think about walking or breathing.
I can’t help but look down as the woods fall away beneath me, the detail of the treetops mushing together into a green blob. The wind roars in my ears, stings my eyes. Always happens. I should start wearing goggles.
When I look down again I’m looking at a realistic map of Massachusetts, including my sorely missed Cape Cod, in its entirety. A slight adjustment on my way down and I could land right in the middle of Barnstable and go pay Dad a surprise visit. I seriously entertain the idea, until I fail to come up with a remotely believable story for my parents explaining how I made a 120-mile round trip in a single afternoon with no car.
I stop climbing. I’m higher than I’ve ever been before. The sky is a radiant, crystal-clear blue like I’ve never seen before. It’s amazing. I could stay up here forever. Or until I pass out from a lack of oxygen.
I wonder if that’s what happened to my dead alien? Did he come to Earth for some reason and suffocate because he couldn’t breathe our air? No, that’s dumb. Why would he come to this world if he couldn’t breathe? Hmm. Maybe it wasn’t a voluntary visit. He did crash land, after all.
Questions for another time, Hauser, you’re here on business. I descend gently rather than go into freefall so I can try to pinpoint my launch pad. I find the woods again (I think) but I can’t tell where the others might be. I try something on a whim.
Sara! I “shout” with my mind. Can you hear me?
Loud and clear, Sara “says,” causing me to flinch. It’s the weirdest experience, hearing her without hearing her (and that’s saying something, considering my yardstick for weirdness is in a much different place than it was several weeks ago).
I can’t find you guys.
Hold on.
I hold on. For a couple of minutes I hold on, then there’s a pop, a whistle, a hiss, and a streak of bright red light soars up from the forest: a signal flare, complete with easy-to-follow contrail. Good call, Matt.
“That was awesome!” he beams as I touch down.
“That was loud!” Missy says. Her face is screwed up in pain and her hands are mashed over her ears.
“I did it? I went supersonic?” I say, the thought thrilling me beyond words.
“Yeah, like, the second you took off,” Stuart says, and I notice a sparse carpet of fresh leaves on the ground. I must have jarred them loose when I hit supersonic speed, which apparently was right away.
Wow. It’s hard not to be impressed with myself.
Nothing quite measures up after that. We test how bright I can glow (answer: insanely bright), and Matt tosses clay skeet shooting targets for me to zap out of the air, which tells me I need to work on my aim something fierce. Out of fifty throws, I hit six targets. Oh, and I sheared off the top third of a perfectly good tree with one of my missed shots. Fail.
A couple hours after we entered the woods we make our way back out. I’m starving by the time we reach Silk Sails, which is this really big, fancy-looking Chinese place with a cool koi pond in the front, complete with fountains, a small waterfall, and a scale model of a Chinese junk in the middle of the pond.
(Oh. Junk Food. I get it now.)
The host on duty calls the others by name and leads them to a room in the back, which has a bar, some booths and scattered tables, and a small stage.
“What’s this?”
“This is where Junk Food hosts Friday night karaoke, the greatest contribution to American culture Missy’s people ever made,” Matt says, and I get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“I’m not taking the blame for karaoke,” Missy says.
“Half the blame?”
“Shut up.”
The waitress comes, and she too knows everyone at the table. She’s cute and she plays along with Stuart as he flirts with her outrageously. He’s so overthe-top there’s no way she could take him seriously, but it defuses what could otherwise be a creepy situation. I mean, Stuart is probably half this woman’s age. I know cougars are kind of an in thing nowadays, but ew.
“Scoff if you will,” he says to me, catching the look on my face, “but you watch, I’m going to get extra dumplings.”
“Hey, quiet,” Matt says. We follow his gaze to the TV over the bar. The sound is off but the closed-captioning tells us that earlier today, some bigwig from ARC announced the company was shutting down its artificial intelligence branch until further notice. Internal investigation, reassigning employees, plans to make good on the damage, blah blah blah—the rest doesn’t matter. This development effectively ends the investigation we never got off the ground.
I’m surprised at my disappointment. I thought all our talk about busting into ARC and solving the mystery and saving the day was, well, just talk, but I guess I got wrapped up in the idea.
“Well, crap,” Matt says.
“So much for that,” Stuart says, and the final nail in our grand plan is hammered into place.
By the way, yes, they made me sing. Matt broke the ice and did an earnest and irony-free rendition of Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, so after that anything else would be American Idol material by comparison, but I can belt out anything by the Boss like nobody’s business. I have a rough edge to my voice, like Pet Benatar (who I also lov
e), so I sound natural doing anything by Bruce. Tonight I went for Cover Me from Born in the USA.
Nailed it.
Thank you, I’ll be here all week. Tip your waitress.
EIGHT
When you’re a security guard making what you believe in your heart is chump change, you don’t put a whole lot of thought or effort into your job. You sit in your security station, you look at the monitors once in a while to make sure a gang of thieves isn’t wheeling half the office into a waiting truck, and you read and snack a lot. You certainly don’t question it too much when the guy in charge of the department that got shut down because its products went berserk strolls in on a Saturday morning to “take care of a few things.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Manfred,” the guard says, buzzing in Roger Manfred. “Take your time.”
Thanks so much for your permission, you waste of space, Manfred thinks as he gives the guard a smile and a friendly nod. No need to arouse suspicion.
Manfred heads to the A.I. lab, which takes up the third floor of the east wing. It has been officially shut down for a day and already feels like a ghost town. The technicians’ computers are powered down, as are the department’s dedicated servers. That was the part that distressed Manfred the most, when Semler told him to shut down the servers. I want this department cold, he’d said, and he personally made sure it got done because Manfred kicked up such a fuss.
Lesson learned: play it cool. Letting tempers flare accomplishes nothing.
He’s not angry now. He’s very cool, totally calm, completely collected, because he now has a purpose as clear as glass.
The security guard could be watching him on any one of the six electric eyes positioned around the lab, he thinks, but there’s nothing suspicious going on. He’s not doing anything unusual. He’s just going to start the servers back up. How can he take care of a few things if the servers are down?
Now he’s sitting down at his own desk and turning on his own computer. Perfectly normal.
Manfred pulls up a very special chat window and waits. He waits and nothing happens, so he types in HELLO?
He waits.
He types in IT’S ME, ROGER.
He waits.
LOGIN appears on the screen. MANFRED types in APPLES PEACHES PUMPKIN PIE.
ROGER?
I’M HERE, Manfred types.
WHAT HAPPENED?
It’s disoriented. It’s checking the system clock and seeing that nearly twenty-hours have passed that it has no memory of. That would cause anyone distress.
SEMLER MADE ME SHUT YOU DOWN. I TRIED TO AVOID IT BUT I COULDN’T. I’M SORRY.
IT WAS SCARY. I DIDN’T LIKE IT.
NEITHER DID I. BUT YOU’RE BACK NOW, AND I WON’T LET ANYONE SHUT YOU DOWN AGAIN, I PROMISE. IF THEY TRY, I’LL STOP THEM.
HOW?
An excellent question. The thing—the entity—the being trapped in ARC’s A.I. servers takes up close to five terabytes of memory, enough data to fill more than a thousand DVD-ROMs. Transferring such a massive load of data is the easy part compared to finding it a new home, somewhere protected from company heads that care more about profit than progress...
But none of that addresses the other problem: the program’s wanderlust that led to its current predicament. Manfred had warned his creation after the first incident that hijacking prototypes so it could, after a fashion, experience the real world would lead to disaster, but among this A.I. program’s many unique quirks is its willfulness. The program is a stubborn child, Manfred thinks, and it’s testing its boundaries and becoming frustrated by its inability to clear the final hurdle: the lack of a physical form. It’s tiring of its virtual existence, but what other option is there? Even if ARC had a robot with the necessary memory capacity, it would be trading one prison for another. Mobility would make it no less of a cage.
I DON’T KNOW, Manfred finally types, and it kills him to do so. He’s already let it down once...
I NEED TO ESCAPE. I NEED TO BE FREE.
I KNOW.
I WANT TO LIVE, it says, and then the program that Manfred designed to learn, think, imagine, and solve problems as well as any human presents to its creator a possible solution to its dilemma. Manfred’s jaw falls open in stunned fascination. What the program proposes is sheer madness—by human standards, at least, but the A.I. is not burdened by such pitfalls as morality. Its thinking is clear, ruthless; it sees a problem, it finds a solution.
But this...
Unable to tame his perverse curiosity, Manfred types with trembling fingers, HOW?
Manfred is patient as it searches the Internet, the closest thing humanity has to a single repository for its wealth of knowledge. It scours publicly available scientific studies and reports, it sneaks around the most complex of firewalls to steal peeks at documents that few will ever read because of their value to national security or dubious ethical standing in scientific circles. It sifts through the data to find connections that human minds could easily miss. It pulls a hypothesis from here and an outlandish concept from there and binds them together with well-tested science.
It thinks. It reasons. It gets creative.
And then it says, I HAVE AN IDEA.
It shows Manfred pictures and diagrams and directions on how to make it work. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that it’s mind-blowing stuff.
It could work. God help him, it could work.
WILL YOU HELP ME?
What choice does he have? It’s either this, or let the most important project he’s ever worked on, the greatest technological advance in the history of mankind, be erased from ARC’s servers.
One way or the other, he must hand down a death sentence.
I WILL, he types, and he knows exactly who he wants to help him with this very unique project.
Five terabytes of data. Well within the capacity of a human brain.
A few minutes after five, the doorbell rings. I open the front door and there they are, my new friends, and they take a deep, synchronized breath like they’re about to burst into song.
“Oh,” Matt says. “Hi. I thought your mom was going to get the door.”
“What were you going to do?” I say.
“Oh, we were going to...we had this bit we worked out.”
“It was going to be, uhh,” Stuart says.
“We had a, uh, a thing,” Matt says, gesturing with his hands in a way that says (and this is my best translation) We were going to shove your mom to the floor and set her on fire while singing jaunty Broadway tunes. “Never mind. It’s not funny if you explain it.”
“Yeah, it’s really a visual thing,” Sara says.
“Well, except for the...” Missy says.
“Yeah, except for that part.”
“Never mind. Oh my God, it smells awesome in here,” Matt says, pushing past me.
“What were you going to do to my mom?!” I demand, but the moment is gone, and the gang is now mesmerized by the intoxicating aroma of Mom’s Awesome Sauce (copyrighted, patent pending).
“Hello, everyone,” Mom says, emerging from the kitchen and looking very post-modern-domestic in her jeans and checkerboard apron. The boys immediately stand a little straighter. “I’m Carrie’s mom Christina, and you can call me Christina, because I’m not old enough to be Mrs. Hauser.”
“You are most definitely not,” Stuart says, enunciating more carefully than usual. “But I’m glad you clarified that, because I was about to ask Carrie why she never mentioned her sister.”
Oh, gag.
“Mr. Smoothie here is Stuart,” I say, “and this is Matt, Sara, and Missy.”
They wave, say hello. Mom’s eyes linger an extra second on Missy, taking in her Muppetness.
“We have some time before dinner, so feel free to make yourselves at home,” Mom says.
“That we shall,” Stuart says with a small bow.
“I swear,” I say after Mom returns to the kitchen, “if either of you says anything rude about my mom I will punch you into next we
ek.”
“You wound me. I would never do that!”
“In front of you,” Matt clarifies.
“Well, yeah.”
We head upstairs to my room, to remove the temptation to ogle my mother if nothing else. I’ve finished unpacking but I’m still organizing, so it’s a bit of a shambles. Clothes are in the closet but not separated by season (back off, I was doing that long before my uber-girly phase), my books are in their case but not alphabetized, but my CDs are tidy and in their appropriate categories, so they’re ready for Matt’s declared “Music inspection!”
Matt and Stuart peruse the rack like detectives at a crime scene, nodding and mm-hming. “Please note, my esteemed colleague, the place of honor for what appears to be the entire Bruce Springsteen catalog,” Stuart says, sweeping his hand along the top of the rack where sits, yes, every CD Bruce has ever put out, arranged in chronological order.
“Hm. Yes. Fascinating.”
“You best not speak ill of my man Bruce,” I say.
“No no, just saying. You’re old-school. I can dig it.” Matt turns back to the CDs. “See? Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Pat Benatar, the Pretenders...”
“Joan Jett, Grace Slick with and without Jefferson Airplane, Liz Phair, to continue the women who rock theme,” Stuart says. “Here we go! Back in Black!”
“Oh, come on, everyone owns Back in Black. It’s, like, mandatory in this country. Everyone has to own Back in Black, Nevermind, the fourth Zeppelin album...”
“I don’t own Zeppelin’s fourth,” I say.
Stuart eyes me suspiciously. “Why not?”
“It’s overrated.”
“Best Zeppelin album?”
“Physical Graffiti. Duh.”
“I love you.”
The girls, meanwhile, are checking out my books, a mix of classic literature, a few contemporary titles, and lot of mystery novels, the latter taste I inherited from my dad. I will be forever grateful to Mom for ignoring me when I asked her to trash my books, one of the more idiotic decisions I made during my Dark Period, when I decided I was too cool for lame stuff like reading. I almost get sick to my stomach when I think how close I came to losing my great-grandfather’s copy of The Hobbit (1951 second printing, the first version with Tolkien’s revised text for Riddles in the Dark. Very rare, but in poor condition from being read so many times).
Action Figures - Issue One: Secret Origins Page 6
