“You fucking asshole,” I whispered.
“What?”
“Sneaking up on me. What the hell are you doing?”
“I was just coming to—” he started, talking regularly.
“Keep your voice down,” I whisper shouted.
“It’s the middle of the night, man. No one’s here. No one’s coming. The only bad thing that could happen is if you freak out.”
I tried to take deep breaths walking past him back into the darkened hallway. The golden retriever’s eyes seemed like they were changing colors at its end. A light was blinking in one of the guest bedrooms. Had it been doing that before? “Like you did at the Moores’?”
“Did not.”
I opened my mouth to remind him, then stopped. I’d let him have it later, but this wasn’t the time. We just needed to leave before something went wrong.
“You got everything in here?” I asked, moving through the dining room again, careful not to disturb any of the chairs in the gloom.
“Everything that you’d let me.”
“We both made the plan, remember?”
He was silent.
“Remember?” I asked, as loud as he’d been talking moments before, taking a step toward him.
“Take it easy.” Then, to my surprise, he added, “Of course I remember. It’s just hard to be patient, you know, with PLACEs coming up again and everything. I’m just sick of being a moron.”
“I . . .,” I started, about to say what I’d been building toward, but stopped as his words sunk in.
My muscles loosened. The house was silent again. Harmless. The longer no one knew we were taking things, the longer we could keep doing it, but it was tough staying restrained. “I know. Me, too. What do you say—want to get out of here?”
“Might as well give the dog his steak. He’s been such a good doggie.” Ethan reached down and petted the retriever’s outline. He’d always been great with dogs. Kids. My parents. They kind of thought he was a bullshitter, and he was, but despite all the bravado he was gentle.
“You’ve been so good, Buzz, letting us do quite the number here with not so much as a yip. Not everyone’s cut out to be a guard dog. But that’s okay. The world needs more lovers than fighters anyway.”
The dog licked him.
“And the kicker: no frickin’ PetPerspective.”
PetPerspective was a wireless ocular implant people gave to their pets that let them see everything they were seeing, and post it on social media. I thought it was ridiculous—the animals were the ones in the cages after all—but people seemed to eat it up. “You done yet?” I asked.“We gotta give him his food, man,” said Ethan. “Good behavior gets rewarded.”
“It’s going to make a mess.”
“Not in the grass,” he said, starting to get up, the cooler in hand. “Not with the sprinklers.”
“The neighbors’ll . . .”
“Dude, its 3.am. It’s dark. And the porch blocks their angle.”
I was about to say something else, but paused and settled for a sigh, and another quick sweep of the house.
Chapter 5
I couldn’t see her at first because of the glare, but immediately recognized Sydney’s high-pitched cheeping and opened the window sash the rest of the way.
“I hope you had a better day than I did, bud,” I said, untangling the tentacle-like uplink cord from the pile of wires strewn over the floor. She wriggled and pecked as I brushed back a few feathers and inserted it just under her breastbone, but she was mostly used to this routine by now. We’d probably logged two or three thousand flight hours in the last couple months.
After toggling between menus and dumping files into the save folder, I brought up the raw footage of her flitting around the park with a cluster of other spiderhunter birds. “Didn’t I tell you that you’d make friends?” I asked aloud, glad to see the new socialization algorithms were working. I’d pasted them into her subroutines, in part because I didn’t want her to be lonely, but mainly so she’d seem real enough not to be flagged by the Aerial Security Agency (ASA.)
Three years ago, after a long, winding decline, the population of North American honeybees finally crashed entirely. Much more critical to humanity than just their honey, these bees also spread around pollen that fertilized plants from fruits and vegetables to nuts and beans, prompting the government to scramble to come up with something that could take their places. Since delivery and recreation drones were already wildly popular, the USDA started issuing tradeable tax credits for building ones that could pollinate, too, and when that seemed too eerie, changed it to drones that had to closely resemble animals that already pollinated, like birds, bees, and butterflies. This gave us the perfect cover for building Sydney.
The problem was that any drone with an attached camera was required to have the recording fed into a community network that could be accessed by anyone on the link. Privacy advocates had tried to ban cameras entirely, but given that ship had sailed, the idea was to at least give people the ability to see if they were on film or not. This was great because it helped us circumvent the cameras, but troublesome because Syd’s camera feed might get flagged by a security algorithm if it looked too suspicious. That’s why we had to tediously send her everywhere we weren’t going, too, injecting enough odd data points for it to appear random. And that’s why we had to take so little that people wouldn’t notice they’d been robbed. There was nothing we could do about the dots, we just couldn’t let them get connected.
I sped the footage up fifteen-fold and leaned back in my seat. The owners of the home I was casing still hadn’t returned as dusk fell, but the constantly flipping images made the empty house seem to jerk or twitch like some large, nervous animal every time a passerby entered the frame. “You like the ledge but we need you on that porch to see what kind of locks we’re working with. Just don’t make it obvious when—”
A light turned on in one of the front rooms and I fell silent. No one had pulled into the driveway, so maybe someone like a housekeeper had been home all along, or maybe the light was time-activated. I rewound the footage back to the aerial shot when Sydney was making her dawn approach, this time paying more attention to the open field behind the house.
“Hmm.” I GPSed Syd’s coordinates and, seeing it was Midland Park, zoomed out a little more. About seven blocks north from there was the elementary school, which reminded me that they had a daughter. Maybe she’d walked through the park and entered from the backyard. “Tomorrow, you’re gonna have to stay by the garden, Syd, to see how she gets in.”
I’d already stumbled upon the open source code for “ranging,” but in order to not trip any ASA security algorithm, I’d need my friend Michael to help me customize it.
“Why does that matter? You’ll get the pollinator credit regardless,” Michael had said the last time he’d helped.
“It’s a hobby. You know, you build something so you want it to work. You want it to look good. What’s the point otherwise?”
He’d studied me skeptically, but it was half-hearted, a fog that would burn off as soon as I said anything even remotely plausible. The expression fit perfectly on his face, which was soft and twelve-year-old looking, earnestly persisting while the gangly, boy-soprano-demolishing puberty twisted its way through the rest of him.
“But you don’t have hobbies. You only do something if there’s a—” he said.
“A what, Michael? Jeez, when did you get so cynical?” I asked, cutting him off, knowing how much he hated being called that. “I found the parts, learned all the basic code, now I just want it to . . .”
“Dorian.”
“What?” I asked.
“What are you up to?”
It was funny because in some ways Michael was the most perceptive guy I knew, rattling off stunningly nuanced observations like they were nothing, and in others it was like he’d never actually met another person before. Like right now, you’d actually think he was on to me. He was asking the right que
stions, but his problem was he wouldn’t know what to do with the answers.
“I need it—” I corrected myself. “I need her to stay in one place, but not look like . . . not look like she’s just hanging around.”
“Isn’t there pre-written code you can paste for that?”
“Yeah, but all the open source stuff’s written by, like, weird avian enthusiast types who try to make them realistic—moving between perches in two or three mile ranges, where we only want thirty or forty feet.”
“Shouldn’t be too hard,” said Michael. “What are you planning, like a stakeout or something?”
I looked around my room. “I wouldn’t call it that.”
“What would you call it, then?”
“Look . . .” I trailed off, grasping for something that would sound palatable. “This isn’t like my first choice or anything—just sometimes when the deck’s stacked against you, you got a stack it back a little.”
He blushed slightly, shaking his head in a self-conscious kind of disagreement. “Are we talking like a girl here?”
“Maybe.”
“You could just talk to her.”
I laughed ironically, my stomach in ropes just thinking about it. “And then what? She’s from Lawrence Prep. It’d be like a third grader picking her a flower. At least if I found out what she was reading, I’d have something to say. I’d have something to go off of.”
“That’s worse than spying.”
“Oh, yeah?”
He nodded, looking back over at me. “Because you’re actively putting yourself into it. You’re affecting things.”
“The world’s a freakin’ confusing place, Michael. People want fate-like moments that make it a little clearer.”
“Yeah, but want them to be real.”
“It would be. In some parallel universe it could be happening right now. I’m just making sure it happens in this one.” He started to interrupt, but I talked over him. “Because the thing is, man, every love story ever written has some kind of accidental meeting. Relationships are the most important things we have, but they’re all left to chance. Or dating-site algorithms that we don’t even show up on.”
I hadn’t known where I was going with this when I’d begun talking, but I was caught up in it now, and the best part was at least half of it was true.
“But how’ll you keep up with her if she’s from Lawrence? What if her book’s about metaphysics or something? Even if you read it—you’re a smart guy and everything, but you probably wouldn’t understand it that well.”
My face warmed. “Maybe. But does that mean I shouldn’t try?”
“No, but—”
“All I’m asking for is a chance. That’s it.”
He was right, of course; she’d swim circles around me. But that’s exactly why this was the fake plan.
I reached into my desk drawer and pulled out the wire-framed spiderhunter, its long, curved, flower-assaulting beak making it one of the best pollinators around. “Here. This is what I have so far.”
“Whoa,” he said, picking it up and inspecting it—his awkwardness evaporating instantly at the sight of something technical. “This is really good, Dor. It’s come a long, long way.”
“Well, you got me started and . . . Ethan’s been helping a lot, too.”
Michael scrunched up his face. “With what?”
“He found the circuit board, the wiring, the frame, the—”
“I thought you said you got that scrap.”
God, I’d forgotten how many questions he asked. They were thoughtful ones and everything, but what was the point of asking if you were just willing to swallow a bunch of bullshit answers anyway?
“Yeah, his uncle was throwing it out and Ethan asked if we could have it.”
“You’re too good of a guy to be hanging out with him. I’m serious.”
“I’m not that good of a guy.”
“Sure you are,” he said, suddenly looking crestfallen.
It was so funny. He was really tough on me sometimes, but if either me or anyone else hinted that I wasn’t the person he thought I was, he’d come rushing to my defense, downplaying the very faults he’d himself just spoken of. Like now, his cheeks were reddening. His eyes moist—shaking his head like he’d found out I’d contracted some tropical, degenerative disease.
“Michael, you just don’t get how good works.” I stopped and tried to find the right words. “You need power to be heroic, but there’s no way to get it if you’re shackled. So, you have to start out bad, grab power, and then put the shackles on.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“How many heroes do you know who’ve gotten on any differently? Any real ones? In fiction, it’s either inherited wealth or some kind of chemical accident that gives them their means. There’s a reason it’s contrived.”
Michael shook his head. “What’s the point in telling me this?”
“Because it’s freaking rough out there. And I know that you know that, though sometimes it’s like you don’t want to believe it. So, you don’t.”
“Dorian . . .”
“But it’s not like you’re alone; you’ve got Chris and me, and shit, even Ethan to watch out for you,” I said, trying to sound earnest, looking into his eyes as I laid down the ace. Michael was the friendliest, most thoughtful guy I knew and, while he loved hanging out, he had such crippling anxiety that he needed us around, even if it was with people he’d known for years. At parties he’d just loiter by the refreshments or sit alone on a couch watching movies until we came and got him. It was sweet and endearing in a puppy-like kind of way, but we knew he wanted to get over it and did everything we could to break him out of his shell.
It was very much a work in progress, though.
“So . . . are you going to help me, or am I on my own?”
Chapter 6
We’d finished Sydney two months ago, and as soon as we’d sent her out—and I saw what Lena was reading—I knew the fake plan wasn’t going to work. I’d figured it probably wasn’t going to, but there was something final about knowing that it could never work and knowing what I was going to have to do as a result. If it’d been anything even remotely possible for me to understand, I would’ve done it. Worked. Studied. Learned a new language. Unfortunately, it was like sliding my calculus homework in front of our cat, Mr. Bosworth. When I’d gone through Syd’s footage and zoomed in on the book’s title, it had been like the curtain was pulled up before the magician could disappear through the trapdoor. The impossible was still impossible. My parents were frauds when they told me that I could be anything I wanted to be. My heart wasn’t something that made me brave, just a slab of animal tissue. And my brain, far from being this mystical, soul-harboring vessel, was like the clunky Commodore 64 computer behind a mountain of boxes in Grandmother’s attic. For the second time in as many months, I realized that I wasn’t good enough.
For an hour I just sat in my chair, and watched the sun get lower and lower in the sky, disappearing and reappearing between the clouds. Once my eyes were sore and sun streaked, I went to the refrigerator, yanked out a carton of ice cream, and dumped scoop after scoop into the largest bowl I could find. Then I unlatched the liquor cabinet and filled a tumbler full of vodka.
Just as I was about to carry it all back to my room, Jaden came into the kitchen. His hair was matted and his skin was slick with sweat, probably from wearing his VR haptic suit playing his favorite game, Counter-Insurgency 5. He’d sometimes stay locked away for five, six, seven hours on end, every once in a while running out and piling food on a plate to take back.
Jaden looked at the bowl and then at the glass before opening the fridge and knocking three cubes out of the ice tray. “I know it’s a hot one, but a little early for the hard stuff, ey?”
“Yeah. This is just . . .”
“Don’t worry—I’m not a rat.”
His eyes locked on mine, full of concern, yet vaguely intrigued at the same time, like he was filing away th
is information for later use. Just the fact that he’d said he wasn’t going to tell was a subtle reminder that he could.
“Are you okay? You’ve seemed worried about something lately. I mean, you’re always worried about things, quite the old worrier. But really worried. You know?”
“Thanks, man—I appreciate it. But I’m fine. Really.”
“I just want you to know I’m here if you ever want to talk to someone.”
I knew on some level he cared about me in his own way—he’d done some pretty nasty things to people who’d badmouthed me before—but Jaden wasn’t the kind of person you wanted to go spilling your secrets to. And this wasn’t something you could just talk through, either, or where getting your feelings out would be enough. Besides, I just wanted to be alone.
“I’m serious,” Jaden said. “You listen to all my crazy dreams. Sort out all my problems with me. It’s only fair I return the favor.”
I thanked him and went back into my room, shutting the door. Eying my own VR gun and goggles hanging on the wall by my closet, I thought about playing Wolftac R8—I was in the middle of a heist, and there’d likely be a massive firefight that might help me blow off steam—but doing that seemed so obvious. So pedestrian. Escaping into a video game. I didn’t want to escape anywhere. I wanted to feel like I was supposed to feel.
Realizing that, I dumped the bowl in the bathroom sink, and went outside instead.
Sweat blurred my vision as I started walking down the street, imagining that I was turning into a liquid, spilling onto the asphalt. I walked across kids’ chalk drawings on the sidewalk a couple blocks down where the houses got nicer. They weren’t the squiggly-lined animals of my childhood anymore but textured cathedrals and hieroglyphs beyond my comprehension. Fucking little geniuses. What I wouldn’t give to be something other than an insect scurrying across someone else’s picture.
Sunlight 24 Page 5
