Man Made Boy

by Jon Skovron

  Soon the nymphs were all unconscious, bruised, and bleeding. I hoped none of them were dead, but of course disconnected me didn’t stop to check and just headed down the stairs to the lobby.

  “Boy?”

  I stopped, trying to locate the source of the voice. It seemed to come from the box office and I wondered if it was Charon. But when I walked over to it, there was no one there. Then I saw a cordless phone sitting on the counter. I picked it up.

  I felt a cold, icy dread drop over me. The kind caused by a wraith. But disconnected me didn’t notice.

  “Who is it?” I said flatly.

  “Boy, it’s the stage manager. You shouldn’t be here. It’s too dangerous. Leave now!”

  “No,” I said in the flat, dead voice. “I’m here to eliminate the danger.”

  There was a pause. Then, “You’ve switched off, I see.”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps you can do this, then.”

  “Do you know any details?” I asked. “How many are controlled, how many imprisoned?”

  “Yes, but you can’t stay up here long. You must get to the trowe caverns, which are still beyond her reach.”

  I headed for the main stairwell that led down to the caverns, holding on to the cordless phone.

  “Wait, Boy,” said the stage manager. “That way is guarded by—”

  Moog the ogre stood in the stairwell entrance, his massive frame filling the double doorway. He wore the sunglasses and had the signal device on his temple.

  “Hello, Boy,” said VI. “So glad you could make it in time. I must say, using the dragon as transportation was a smart choice. If you continue to be this resourceful, this may actually prove challenging for me.”

  “I am here,” I said, slipping the phone into my pocket. “Where is my family?”

  “It’s not quite curtain time yet, I’m afraid. You’ll have to wait for the show like everyone else.”

  “Show?”

  “Yes, when I broadcast the rage impulse to every television and computer monitor in the city simultaneously. Then we can watch the whole city tear itself apart. Or I can, anyway. You’ll be dead by then.”

  “Unlikely,” I said. Then I punched Moog. Or tried to. He caught my fist in his hand. It was an impressive display but not the smartest thing to do since the force of the impact shattered the bones in his hand.

  His shaggy eyebrows rose above the sunglasses. “I did not calculate your strength at that—”

  Then I punched him in the face with my other fist, sending him backward down the stairs.

  I heard the stage manager’s muffled voice coming from my pocket. I pulled the phone out and put it to my ear.

  “Ruthven’s office! He has a secret passage there that leads directly to the caverns.”

  I headed to the other side of the lobby. The door to his office was locked, but it was a simple push-button lock, so I just ripped the knob off. The door swung open.

  “The storage closet,” said the stage manager.

  I walked to the back of the office and opened the closet door. There was a metal ring bolted to the floor. I put the phone down on Ruthven’s desk, then pulled on the metal ring with both hands. A section of the floor came up with it. Beneath was a ladder that led down into darkness. I tossed the section of floor to one side and picked the phone back up.

  “How far does this go?” I asked.

  “All the way to the trowe level. He built it years ago in case the humans ever discovered what we were and tried to storm the theater.”

  I left the phone on the desk, since it didn’t seem likely that the signal would hold that far down, and I needed both hands to climb, anyway. Then I began the slow descent. It took a long time, and the passage was so narrow that my shoulders frequently bumped the sides. Claustrophobia climbed up inside me. But my body wasn’t affected and continued its steady climb down into the darkness. The base of my skull was starting to throb from the pressure.

  When I got to the bottom, the passage stretched out into a tunnel. It was so dark I had to feel my way along the rough stone walls with one hand. It was exactly the kind of darkness I hated. The kind where you couldn’t know what was right in front of you.

  Then bright gem eyes suddenly appeared.

  “Got you!”

  Clawed hands grabbed me. I wanted to scream, which would have made the whole situation worse. But fortunately, the disconnected me simply stood there and said, “I am not under her control. I have come to destroy her. Will you help me?”

  There was a long pause, during which the clawed hands still held me. Then I saw another pair of jeweled eyes.

  “Boy?” said a gruff male voice.

  “Cordeav,” I said.

  “Something sounds strange about you….”

  “I am currently disconnected. This makes me resistant to most magic attacks but impairs my ability to express or feel emotion.”

  “Like your father.”

  “Yes. I am like my father.”

  “You said you can destroy this…thing that has taken control of the theater?”

  “Yes, but my plan might destroy the theater with her. The preferred outcome is to get as many creatures out of the building as possible first, including those held captive.”

  “These tunnels lead under the Hudson all the way to Jersey,” he said. “We could put plenty of distance between us and this place. But you can’t free the captives. They’re in the theater and heavily guarded.”

  “By?”

  “The Minotaur, Medusa, and…your father.”

  THE STENCH OF burning hair brought me back to myself. It took me a moment to realize that it was my hair burning. The emotional backlash was pushing so much raw data through the DVI jack on the back of my head that the metal was heating up.

  I was still sprawled out on the stage. I tried to push myself into a sitting position, but bolts of pain shot up from my hands. There was so much data pouring through the USB jacks in my wrists that it was frying the nerves that ran up my arms.

  Not that it mattered. At this point, there was nothing I could do but lie there and hope that by the time the backlash ran its course, VI would be vulnerable to attack and I would still have enough of a brain to attack her.

  Then a fresh wave of memories surged through me and I was lost again.

  WE STOOD IN the cavern picnic spot where Liel first confessed to me that she wanted to leave The Show. It was dimly lit now with a few lantern flashlights. There were nine trowe, Laurellen, the Fates, and me. That was all that was left.

  Laurellen turned to the Fates. “Well, ladies? Do we succeed or not?”

  They looked at each other, then back at Laurellen. Finally, Clotho said, “Define succeed….”

  “Um…“he said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “This is our only course. If it does not succeed, we will still be better off than we are now. Because we will be dead.”

  “There you have it,” said Atropos.

  “Was that supposed to be the prebattle pep talk?” asked Ku’lah, her lips pulled back across her fangs in a grin. “Because it sucked.”

  “You’re loving this, aren’t you?” asked Laurellen.

  She shrugged. “Danger makes a trowe feel alive. Now, let’s go bust the stupid computer. I want my daughter back.”

  “It isn’t as simple as destroying a single computer,” I said. “While she does need a main terminal to operate such a large system, each host can function autonomously if necessary. They are, in a sense, concurrent copies of the primary consciousness.”

  They all stared at me for a second, then at each other.

  “So,” said Laurellen, “if we don’t take out all of them at once, she can just come back?”

  “Yes,” I said. “What we need to do is make sure she is connected to all remote versions of herself at once. The best chance of this is when she is ready to deploy her visual cortex attack on the city, just before eight o’clock. Then I will bombard her with a volume of organic
emotional data that will be too immense for her to process. This will in turn bring down her firewall and open her up to a direct attack. Then I will be able to destroy all copies simultaneously.”

  “If you say so,” said Ku’lah. “Can we go break stuff now?”

  “I’m not really gifted at breaking stuff,” said Laurellen.

  “I have something else in mind for you,” I said.

  AS I CAME back to myself, I looked around from where I lay on the stage floor. My vision was getting blurry, but it looked like the trowe had gotten the survivors out of the theater, including the creatures in the seats still frozen from Medusa’s gaze. That was the important thing.

  I heard nasty metal screeching noises above me. I looked up at the flies over the stage. The automated winches and pulleys were fighting against each other, pulling each other apart. VI was even more embedded in the theater than I’d thought. It was probably only a matter of time before the lines snapped and the whole light grid dropped on my head. But if I got crushed before we got all the way through the backlash and executed the final command, there was a chance VI would survive.

  My arms were completely useless now, just big slabs of raw screaming nerves. So I inched across the stage like a snake over toward the wings. But then the DVI cable attached to the back of my head pulled tight. I was out of lead. And still under the grid.

  I’d just have to hope it held until I finished VI.

  “BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOYYYYYY!” she screamed from my father’s mouth.

  I DIDN’T BOTHER with subtlety. She already knew I was coming. I kicked in the doors to the theater.

  It stank in there like piss, shit, and death. The seats were filled with all the remaining creatures of The Show, their eyes glazed and their mouths hanging open as they stared ahead like they were waiting for a show to start. They were filthy and emaciated. How long had she been keeping them here like that? Days? Weeks? I noticed some satyrs over in the corner who had already died and were starting to decay. I was pretty sure it was Shaun’s family. Liel, Ruthven, and my mother were chained up on the stage, bruised, bloody, beaten. My mother was asleep, and when I saw her perfect, porcelain doll face gashed and swollen, a bloodthirsty rage coiled up inside me.

  But the disconnected me continued to walk toward the stage at a measured pace. That me thought only of the plan.

  Ruthven lifted his head up. An angry red rash covered his face and a string of garlic hung around his neck.

  “Boy?” he said weakly.

  I climbed up onto the stage. The sound of my boots on the wood woke my mother. Her head snapped up and she tried to stand, then fell back down with a loud clank of chains.

  “Boy, get out of here!” she said, her whole body suddenly shaking. “Go! Please! Before—”

  Something large dropped down in front of me from the flies. It was Medusa, dangling from lines like a marionette. Her scales were yellowish and dull and her snake hair hung limp. She looked at me with blackened, half-dead eyes, but a smile crept up on her bloody lips.

  “Welcome home, hero,” she said hoarsely.

  “I will get you down,” I said, and started to untie her.

  “What?” I heard VI-in-the Minotaur’s bellowing voice. “What happened to her power?!”

  “It still works, VI,” I said as I untied the last of the ropes, and Medusa fell limply into my arms. “I’m just immune. I did not anticipate you would be ignorant of that.”

  “Well, I can’t know everything,” VI said as the Minotaur shuffled out from the wings, sunglasses gleaming under the hard stage lights. “And I was really looking forward to seeing you frozen. It would have made this all much more efficient. Now I’m going to have to take you down the messy way.”

  The remote-control spotlights all lit up and swiveled until they shone on the sedated audience. Their lights began to flash in that same staccato sequence I’d seen before. A moment later, the audience was climbing over one another, howling in mindless rage as they moved toward the stage. Goblins and ogres, pixies and dwarfs, leprechauns and cat people, all trying to get to me so they could rip me apart.

  “I’m going to need your help,” I whispered to Medusa. Her face was pressed into my chest. “Can you do it?”

  “It’s a well-documented fact,” she said in a muffled voice, her lips moving against me, “that in the hands of a hero, my power is magnified a hundredfold.”

  The wave of creatures was just starting to spill up onto the stage, claws scrabbling on the hardwood boards.

  “Now,” I said.

  She lifted her head, and the second her eyes looked on them, the entire group froze. Momentum carried the ones in back forward and they slammed into the ones in front, all of them falling in a big, stiff pile.

  “Oh, you think you’re soooo clever!” The Minotaur stomped toward me. “Well, my modified hosts are immune to her power as well!”

  “I assumed that,” I said. Then I whispered to Medusa, “Sorry about this,” and I ripped off my shirt and pulled it over her head. “The Diva is neutralized!” I said loud enough to be picked up by the mics that fed down into the greenroom.

  A roar came from the wings and a moment later, the trowe came boiling out, their teeth gleaming, their white hair flashing. The Minotaur paused and gaped at them as if finding it difficult to understand what was happening. A moment later, the trowe swarmed over him.

  VI’s processing speed seemed especially slow right now. She was probably spread so thin across the city that it was difficult to focus on one particular place. She might make claims to be limitless, but if even the Sphinx, the wisest creature in the world, had limits, then surely VI did, too. It made things easier for us at the moment, but it also meant she was probably only a few minutes away from deploying her citywide attack.

  “I’ve got this one,” said Laurellen beside me. He’d snuck up through the stage trapdoor as planned. He took Medusa and carried her quickly down into the house and out into the lobby. It was too much of a risk to keep her here now.

  I turned to free Liel, Ruthven, and my mother. But all three were looking at me, their eyes wide with horror. A moment later, massive, stitched hands closed around my throat.

  “I’ve saved the best for last,” I heard VI say with my father’s voice. Then he lifted me up by the neck so that my feet left the floor. His face twisted into a cruel smile. He didn’t have the sunglasses or the piece at the temple, but there was a mass of wires at the base of his skull.

  “This is my favorite host,” said VI. “No need to muck around with the optical nerves or auditory systems on this one. Your mother had already set him up with a clean, straight bypass right to the basal ganglia. No lag time, no bandwidth issues. Pure power.” Then he threw me against the proscenium. The wood splintered on impact and the entire arch over the stage shuddered.

  I slowly hauled myself up, blinking away the spots. The trowe were still fighting the Minotaur. They seemed to be winning, but it was taking all nine of them.

  I turned to face my father, the man I had looked up to my whole life. And I saw what he had been reduced to. The mightiest, the kindest, the most perfect man in the world, and she had reduced him to this thuggish puppet. And I had created her. It was my fault.

  All of this was my fault.

  If I had still been connected, that thought would have crippled me. But to the disconnected me, the only difference I felt was a sudden surge in the pressure at the base of the skull. I walked toward my father.

  “Oh, think you’re ready to take on this host, do you?” VI said, screwing up my father’s face with a mocking expression. “Doesn’t it upset you to see him like this?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll find out later.”

  “What about seeing your father hit one of your girlfriends?” His fist smashed into Liel’s face, knocking her flat against the floor.

  I kept walking toward him. The pressure buildup in my head had become a migraine-level pain now and it wouldn’t be long before something li
ke an aneurysm hit. I had to get this done quickly.

  “Or maybe the worst is seeing him hurt your mother?” He grabbed the chains that were around her torso and lifted her up. I could see the metal digging into her skin. Some of her stitches had popped and blood leaked out. “Or kill her?” My mother looked directly at me with her mismatched eyes as his hand wrapped around her long, slender neck. Then she closed her eyes.

  I stumbled. The pressure in my skull was too much. I’d been disconnected too long. My gross motor function was starting to break down. My brain would shut down soon. Panic covered me like a blanket.

  But of course, I couldn’t feel it. So I just got back to my feet and kept moving. And then I was there. I ripped my mother from his grasp and slammed my fist into his face. As he stumbled back, I carefully put her on the ground. I turned back to him just as he threw a roundhouse punch. I tried to duck, but I was too slow and he caught me on the chin. I went reeling, barely able to stay on my feet. He was stronger than me. And with my head about to explode, he was faster than me. I couldn’t win. And while inside I was screaming to get back up to fight, the disconnected me knew it was time for the endgame.

  I turned to face him one last time and his fist knocked me straight back onto the floor. He stood over me, grinning.

  “Your defeat is perfectly timed,” said VI. “I’m just about ready to incite my citywide bloodbath.” He picked me up and I didn’t resist. “I really don’t understand why you care about these humans. They’ve been absolutely wretched to you and your kind. Fear, stupidity, prejudice, ignorance—those are the traits that make up humanity. Good riddance, I say.”

  “No,” I said. “They’re worth it.”

  He glared at me for a moment. “I think I’m going to deploy this attack from you. Won’t that be fun? I don’t even need to make any modifications, since you already have the ports installed. How convenient.”