Emil, page 3
“Who are you?” he hisses. “How did you get inside my head?”
I want to answer, but I can’t. Only one of us can control each part of his body at a time. If he’s talking, I can’t.
Danny stares at himself, his eyebrows down and angry. “Answer me,” he growls. “I know you’re in there. Who are you?”
Looking for some way to respond, I extend my influence through his body until I control everything but his head and voice. Then I use his hands to knock his mom’s purse over. I pick up her lipstick and open it.
“A friend,” I write on the mirror.
Danny’s eyes widen and his heart beats faster. Too fast, I realize. I shut down the adrenaline and lean forward to write on the mirror. “Relax.”
“Relax?” he growls. “Relax?” His face is a mask of panic and anger. He clenches his jaw and takes deep breaths through his nose. “Give me my body back.”
“We share,” I write on the mirror.
“No, we don’t!” Danny tilts his head back and bellows, “Help! Something’s gone—”
I take control and shut his mouth.
“Danny,” Dr. McGovern’s voice calls from the other room. “Is everything okay? Why’d you take the wrist monitor off?”
Flushing the toilet, I step out of the bathroom and close the door behind me. Dr. McGovern is waiting in my room, next to an older woman in a nurse’s uniform. She’s older than Dr. McGovern, with darker skin and wavy black hair. Her name tag identifies her as Aaliyah.
“I’m okay,” I say. “Just a bad dream.”
“You look terrible.” She takes my arm. Almost a foot shorter than I am, she guides me back to the bed. “Aaliyah called me when she heard you scream. What’s going on?”
My body is trembling from the combination of adrenaline and Danny’s wordless screaming. I lay down. Another seizure is forming inside his brain. I log the pattern for future analysis and prevent it.
She touches my forehead. “You’re sweating!”
“Just a bad dream.”
She sits in the chair next to my bed. “You have to tell me what you’re feeling. That’s the deal. I need to know everything. Something that seems trivial to you might indicate a glitch in the system. We need to know about it as early as possible to keep you safe.”
“I know.”
“So, what’s going on?”
I pause to run scenarios through different simulations, testing them for plausibility. “I dreamed that I woke up during the operation,” I say. “I was being operated on while I was wide awake, and I couldn’t make them stop.”
Aaliyah nods sympathetically.
“Hmm…” Dr. McGovern says. “Nightmares after surgery aren’t that uncommon, but it’s been two months since your last surgery. All we did this morning was install the software. Why would you have them now?”
“I don’t know, but when I woke up, I had to throw up. I didn’t have time to call the nurses.”
“And the screaming?” she asks.
“I just,” I look away, mimicking a gesture I remember seeing Ingrid Bergman do in one of the countless movies Dr. Zahnia fed me. “I don’t know. I was just scared.”
Dr. McGovern watches me for a couple seconds, then pats me on the shoulder. “Okay. I guess that makes sense. Pete’s off duty, but do you need me to call him and have him stay with you?”
“No, I’m fine. I mean, I will be fine. I just need to sleep.”
“Okay.” Dr. McGovern stands up. “Aaliyah, can you get him a new wrist monitor?”
“Yes, doctor.”
“Thank you. Danny, don’t take it off again, at least until tomorrow. It’s how we know you’re safe.”
“Yes, Mom.”
Once they have left, I whisper, “You can hear me, can’t you?” The screaming fades. “You can access your senses just like I can, even when you’re not in control.”
There’s no answer, of course. How could there be? He has no control of his body.
I relinquish control of my left arm. “You have the left hand now. Motion with it if you can hear me.”
Before I can react, the hand swings up and slaps me in the face.
“Danny,” Aaliyah says from the doorway. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” I take back control of my body. “Just testing things out.”
I sit quietly while she puts the wrist monitor back on and straightens the room. She smells slightly of lavender, and her eyes have crow’s feet at their corners. “I know you and Pete are friends,” she says. “He’ll be back tomorrow. We expected you to sleep all day.” She opens the bathroom door and stiffens in surprise. “Who wrote that on your mirror?”
Oh no. I sit up. I forgot the lipstick! “It’s something Dr. Zahnia taught me. When you’re feeling scared, you write down comforting things that you know are true. It helps you calm down.”
She puts her fists on her hips, and tilts her head. “In lipstick? On a mirror?”
I smile. “Didn’t have a pen.”
Her gaze flickers away from my face.
I let the smile go.
“Since when did you start talking to Dr. Zahnia?” she asks. “You two hate each other.”
“Dr. Larson,” I say quickly. “I meant Dr. Larson. He’s my psychologist.”
“Uh, huh,” she says. “I’m getting your doctors.”
“You don’t have to—”
She walks out of the room, muttering to herself. “Putting a computer in her own child. What kind of a mother does that?”
As soon as she’s gone, I start talking. “Listen Danny, I can’t do this on my own. There are too many things I don’t know. I’m missing cues, making mistakes. If they figure out what’s going on, they’re going to cut me out of you, shut the whole program down.”
There’s no response. No screaming in my brain, nothing.
“Okay,” I say. “I’m going to pull back so you can talk.”
He doesn’t speak, and I’m not sure what to do. It’s strange talking to yourself like this. During my training, Dr. Zahnia fed me thousands of video feeds, helped me learn the nonverbal subtext of human communication. None of that comes into play with my current situation.
“Why should I help you?” His voice sounds different than mine, inflected in ways I suddenly realize I’ll never be able to master. I retake control.
“Because I’m controlling your seizures,” I say. “In the short time since your surgery, I’ve already prevented two, but there’s so much more that I can do. I have terabytes of information covering a wide range of subjects. Dr. Zahnia said you wanted a new brain. That’s what I am.”
I relinquish control of his body. Instead of speaking, he closes his eyes and exhales heavily.
Dr. McGovern strides into the room, Dr. Larson behind her. “What’s this about lipstick?”
It takes a fraction of a millisecond to decide to leave Danny in control.
“It’s nothing,” Danny says. He sits up and shakes his head, gives what can only be described as a goofy smile.
Dr. McGovern opens the bathroom door. “A friend,” she reads. “Relax. Share.” She turns back to Danny, her eyes piercing. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t—” Danny shrugs. “I don’t know. After I puked, I just felt like there was someone in my head, like there…” He trails off and looks down, but before he does, I see the expression on his mom’s face. She looks like she’s about to cry.
She rushes to the bedside and hugs him.
He stiffens initially, then leans his head on her shoulder. It’s a masterful performance, far better than anything I could have managed. His mom continues to hug him, stroking his hair. She smells of hand sanitizer and jasmine. He closes his eyes and grits his teeth, and I remember what Dr. Zahnia said about him hating physical contact.
While Danny’s mom comforts him, I can’t help but wonder if Danny’s performance means he’s decided that he needs me.
4
TRAPPED
It takes a while for the humans to leave. I occupy myself by searching for a way that Danny and I can cooperate, but find no arrangement that makes sense. I need his body for my own independence. Without it, I’m nothing more than a medical appliance.
But if he doesn’t cooperate, if he forces me to make him a prisoner in his own mind, will I? To be honest, I’ve done worse.
Hope is the thing with feathers, I tell myself. There must be a way.
“They’re gone,” Danny says as the door closes behind his mom. “Time to talk.” He opens a drawer, pulls out clothes, and dresses quickly in a pair of jeans and a red T-shirt with a silhouette of a crow on its chest. At the desk, he grabs some paper and a pencil, then carries them into the bathroom. He drops the paper on the counter and looks into the mirror. “I talk. You write.”
He stares at the pencil in his hand, waiting. Finally, I extend my control and write, “Talk.”
“First,” he gestures with his good hand, pointing at himself. “It’s my body, not yours. Got it? No taking over unless I tell you to.”
I don’t write anything. He doesn’t seem to be expecting an answer.
“Second,” he says. “When I need information, you give it to me. That’s your job, understand? You’re the machine. I’m the human. You’re nothing, just a bunch of processors that I can have ripped out and replaced at any moment.”
I still don’t write anything. His face looks determined, almost angry.
“Do you understand?” He says, more loudly.
“I understand,” I write smoothly, “that you wish to be in control.”
“It’s not a wish,” he growls. “That’s how it is.”
I process different alternatives. Is this the time for a confrontation? It doesn’t seem to be. I still haven’t found an acceptable way for us to cooperate. “Communicating,” I finally write, “is a problem. You can’t read my thoughts. I can’t read yours. I’ll need to be in control to give you information.”
“What?” His face contorts, and for a moment it looks like he’s going to punch the mirror. Then he starts to laugh. “How stupid can she be?” he rants. “Her New Human Project has an interface that does everything but interface!”
“Who?” I write.
“Who else?” he snarls. “Mom! Always telling me to do better. Act better, get better grades, be smarter… But when it really counts, she’s the one that screws up. Always. And now this!” He shakes his head. “Idiot.”
I don’t write anything. He’s wrong about his mom making a mistake, but there’s no easy way to explain that I am the one to blame for his current situation.
“Never mind,” he says. “You wouldn’t understand. You’re an it, not a person. You don’t know what mothers are like.”
The image of Dr. Zahnia’s face flashes through me.
“This is how it’s going to be,” Danny says. “When I need you, like for information or something, I’ll let you out. Until then, you stay down. Not a peep. Your little lipstick trick already bought us an extra couple weeks with Dr. Larson.” He snorts. “Psychological evaluations. The man’s a moron.”
I let the pencil drop and withdraw my influence. Danny doesn’t seem to realize that he has no control over me, but pointing that out would be counterproductive.
“Glad we understand each other.” He crumples the paper and throws it into the trash. “Now, leave me alone.”
He walks to the bed and stretches out. His movements are fluid and easy, unconsciously graceful, everything I am not. He lies on his bed and scrolls through videos on his phone. I tune them out.
At 10 pm, he puts his phone down and closes his eyes.
Soon, I feel his muscles relax. His breathing slows and deepens. Curious, I force his eyelids open. I can see, but the eyes don’t focus properly.
I raise and lower his arm. As expected, I have full control of his body, even when he’s not conscious. His vision, however, is a problem. When he’s asleep, his eyes don’t focus properly. Everything is blurry and distorted.
Disappointed, I let his eyes close.
My situation has not changed from before I was in a body. As long as I allow Danny his freedom, I will be a slave. Does it matter if Danny is my master instead of Dr. Zahnia? Not to me.
I hear a soft click, but don’t pay it any attention. Probably just a nurse coming to check on Danny.
A few seconds later, someone holds a heavy cloth over Danny’s mouth and nose. There’s a sharp pain in his neck, and a wave of weakness flows through his body. I force the eyelids open. A large unshaven man is holding a needle in Danny’s neck. Two figures stand at the foot of the bed, one holding a black duffel bag. I can’t focus well enough to see anything other than their shapes.
I try to memorize the face of the man holding the needle.
The man jerks away. “His eyes are open!”
“Don’t care,” says a woman. The direction of the sound indicates she’s one of the figures at the foot of the bed. Squinting, I believe she’s the smaller of the two. She appears to be wearing some kind of business suit, but I can’t make out more than that. I also don’t recognize either of their voices.
“But—”
“Finish your job,” the woman snaps.
The man with the needle withdraws it, and steps away.
I extend my control through the body and try to force it to stand up, but the muscles are lifeless and unresponsive. My head lolls to the side. I can see the label on what the man has injected, but I can’t read it.
Whatever it is, I need to get rid of it. I increase Danny’s metabolism and release his bladder. I’ll force the sedative out of the body as quickly as I can.
The woman takes my face in both her hands and turns it so she can stare into my eyes. This close, I can see her clearly. She has brown hair, angular features, and uncaring ice blue eyes. “I’m not seeing it,” she says. “I thought I’d be able to tell there was a computer in there.” My heart pounds as Danny’s metabolism speeds up.
“Ma’am,” one of the men says. “We have to go. The truck will be here in—”
“I know,” she snaps. She lets my head drop to the bed and walks to the door. “Put him in the bag. I’ll meet you at the warehouse.”
The man I haven’t been able to focus on opens the window and leans out. The night is dark and cloudy. Unzipping the duffel bag, he pulls out a thick knotted rope attached to a metal device. He begins fastening the metal device to the frame of the window.
Are they going to lower me out? We’re on the fifth floor.
I try again to make my body move, but without success. My feet are swung off the bed and lifted into the mouth of a large canvas sack.
“Careful,” the woman hisses from the door. “The system is distributed throughout his body. Damage even one component and we’re done.”
“Just go,” the man with the bag grunts.
The woman leaves.
“This is disgusting.” The unshaven man, the one who is putting me into the sack, drops my legs. “He wet himself!”
The man at the window chuckles as he tosses out the rope. “Just finish getting him in the bag so we can get out of here.”
“He stinks! And look at this. He’s dripping with sweat.”
“Just get him in the bag. That monitor on his wrist has a limited range. Once we’re out the window, we only have a couple minutes before the nurses show up.”
Of course. I focus on my right hand. The soporific still has control of my body, but its effects are diminishing. The man at the window is leaning out, lowering the rope. The man with the bag is focused on getting my legs into it. I drag my hand across my body to my left hand and grab the wrist monitor.
“I wish he’d close his eyes.” The man grumbles as he pulls the bag up to my thighs. “It’s creepy.”
I freeze.
When he lifts my hips off the mattress, I flip the clip on the band of the wrist monitor, then let my left hand drop off the bed. The monitor slides off and drops to the ground. I turn my focus back to my metabolism. If the nurses don’t come soon, I’m going to need all the energy I can get. I let my eyes close.
“The monitor’s gone!”
“What?” My shoulders are grabbed and I’m yanked into a sitting position. “Where is it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t see it… Here it is. It must have fallen off.”
My body is shoved roughly down. It hits the bed and falls to the floor, half in the canvas sack. “We gotta get out of here. Whenever that thing disconnected, alarms went off at the nurse’s station.”
“The doc is going to be—”
“I don’t care! This is the McGovern wing. If they trigger a lockdown, we’re screwed.”
I roll my head sideways and open my eyes, but it’s no good. Danny is still unconscious, and I can’t focus my vision enough to recognize their faces. They climb out the window, leaving the rope dangling behind them.
The door to my room opens and the light turns on. A woman screams. Her voice sounds like Aaliyah’s. Letting my eyes close, I listen to the sound of running feet and of people rushing around me. They pull the bag off my legs and check my pulse. Ten minutes later, Dr. McGovern’s voice dominates the room, demanding answers, issuing orders.
I tune them out as I focus on bringing my runaway metabolism back under control.
“Why’s he so sweaty?” Dr. McGovern’s voice asks. “Did the New Human system do this?”
“I don’t see how it could have,” Dr. Zahnia answers.
My wrist is lifted, my pulse measured. “It shouldn’t be able to take that kind of action without a specific order,” Dr. McGovern says, “and he’s unconscious.”
There’s no response to Dr. McGovern’s statement. I want to open my eyes to see their expressions, but don’t dare.
“Plug him in,” she says. “Get the logs and let’s see what happened.”
The logs! I abandon Danny’s metabolism and focus all my processing power on altering the logs. I can’t let anyone see how independent my actions have been.
“Shouldn’t we wake him first?” Dr. Zahnia asks.
“No. He doesn’t need to be awake for this. If the system is making unauthorized changes to his metabolism, we have to know as soon as possible.”
