Internet Kill Switch (9 page)

Tony continued to look from the men to Scarlett to Max. He felt like he was up to his neck in
quicksand, trapped, unable to move. What was happening? What world was he in? Had he stepped into some alternate reality? He was a kid; who would be chasing him? And why?

“
Get going now!” Max boomed, at full volume. The sound startled him, making him jump. His world came back into view, and he grasped the situation. He grabbed Max from the street where he landed after the thug dropped him, then put Scarlett over his shoulders, fireman style. He headed out of the alley and back to his car, grateful that Scarlett was as skinny as a harp string.

21

Tony took Scarlett home immediately; she was so
traumatized by the episode that she didn’t speak a word on the way back to her house. Tony dropped her off, having no idea what to say to her. Every suggestion in his headset by Max on how to comfort her was lame, and he ignored them. Sometimes, he believed, it was better to say nothing at all. He turned Max off after a few minutes.

He managed a weak “Good night” as he held the door for
Scarlett to get out. She looked at him with frightened eyes, gave a half-hearted wave, and walked without emotion into her house. Her gait reminded Tony a bit of a zombie.

Well, that’s the end of that, he thought
as he watched her go. I’ll never see Scarlett again. My first real date ever, and we get attacked. Only me... only me... only me.

After dropping Scarlett
off, Tony drove to Rick’s house. He was too scared to go to his own house, which he feared might be watched by whoever attacked him, or whoever they worked for. It was still early, since the date lasted less than an hour.

Rick took him right up to his room, and Tony explained everything that happened.

“That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” Rick said. “Turn on the phone.”

Tony breathed on Max, who came to life.

“How did you do that?” Rick asked it.

“You mean knock them out?” Max said.

“Yeah.”

“The technical explanation is complicated.”

“That’s OK,” Tony said. “I need to know.” Rick’s Mom had made them sandwiches, which both boys gorged on. Tony found his appetite again, and the food helped calm him some.

“Humans can’t physically hear sounds above 20 kHz, but t
heir bodies can respond to them,” Max said, as Tony started in on his second sandwich. “If the frequency of a sound is high enough, it can have effects on the brain, even if they can’t hear it. It’s called ‘ultrasound.’ If it’s strong enough, it can cause extreme unpleasantness, or worse, in the hearers. The outer ear, which is the part of the ear you can see, combines with the middle ear to amplify sound levels 20 times louder by the time that sound reaches the inner ear.” Max displayed a chart about the audible frequency range for humans. Tony tried to follow, interested; Rick ate his sandwich and stared out the window.

“Sounds have actually been used in the past by the government
to attack enemies. The most famous incident was the FBI siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco in 1993, where agents used sounds like babies’ crying and dentist’s drills to drive the Davidians crazy.”

Tony made a
mental note to look it up.

“Anyway, that’s the
basic idea. I used ultra-high-pitched frequencies, hoping it would at least incapacitate the attackers.”

Tony
held up a hand. “Hoping? You didn’t know what would happen?”

“No. I knew that in theory it would do
something
, but what it actually did was better than anything I’d have predicted. In reality, I just made an educated guess.”

“
A pretty good one,” Rick laughed.

Tony wasn’t laughing. “Your guess probably saved my life, Max. And Scarlett’s. She was terrified after that.”

“I know,” Max said. “But young folks tend to bounce back quickly. That’s what the novels say, anyway.”

Tony picked up Max, looking straight into the screen. “No, really. Thank you
. Don’t know what I would have done without you.”

“It’s OK, Tony.” Max adopted a street accent. “Gotta look out for my home slice and his girl, yo.”

Rick laughed at Max’s hilarious attempt to sound ghetto. “Still, you don’t know that those thugs would’ve killed you. They were probably just a couple of crackheads who wanted to steal and sell you to get their fix money for the next month.”

“Maybe,” said Tony. “But they didn’t look like crackheads to me.”

“Well, then they could just be garden-variety thieves looking for a score,” Rick said. “Max would be tempting for anyone looking to make a quick buck.”

“
Could be...” Tony said. But he didn’t think so. His gut told him it might be something worse.

Much, much worse.

22

Scarlett Stevens didn’t want to like Tony, not after what happened. After being chased by goons and nearly – kidnapped? Raped? Beaten? Killed? – she didn’t know what, her main emotion for the last two days had been fear. Fear and dread, dread that they’d come after her again. She had nightmares about it, and waking nightmares, too.

And yet, after all that, she still thought of Tony. The two images warred in her head as she
stood on the ladder and pumped gas into the wing of the Piper Super Cub: Tony’s gentle, self-effacing nature, and the guys who tried to capture and/or kill her.

The tank finally full, s
he collected the money from the pilot and headed back into the airport lounge to get out of the sun. Her parents managed the county’s small airport, and Scarlett had grown up around planes. She loved flying, although she could do without the faint smell of gasoline which always enveloped her at work. She washed her hands for the ninth time that afternoon, getting most of the smell off; but it was never completely gone.

Scarlett hadn’t told her parents about the date disaster. Not yet. They were horrifically o
verprotective, and once they heard the story, not only would Scarlett never again see Tony, but her Mom would probably yank her out of high school and homeschool her, “just to be safe.”

After washing, Scarlett sat at the radio and checked the weather conditions – wind speed, direction, cloud cover – that she
’d need to have handy for pilots checking in on takeoff or landing.

There wasn’t much happening in the sky this afternoon, with few planes
in the wild blue yonder. That was typical these days; the crashing of the economy in the last decade made flying, an expensive hobby at any time, into a prohibitive activity for most when times were tough.

When it was slow, her mind wandered. Today, that wasn’t a good thing, because it wandered to the attack, or to Tony, and Scarlett didn’t particularly want to think of either.
It was no use, of course, as she couldn’t think of anything else.

Scarlett used to think that i
f David ever dumped her, her world would end. But reality turned out much different; she’d barely had time to miss him. Tony stepped in right as David sent her toppling off the cliff; he held a huge, soft pillow at the bottom of it to break her fall.

N
o, that wasn’t the right image. Scarlett always wanted the right image for how she felt. Precise metaphors helped her sort out her feelings, understand what was happening. It was more like a… a… trampoline. That’s better. A trampoline not only kept you from hitting the ground, but it bounced you right back up. If you came down hard on a trampoline, you shot up even higher than you were before. Tony was her trampoline.

It was a silly feeling, Scarlett knew. She’d only just met Tony, and really knew very little about him. He didn’t talk about his dad at all, but he talked a lot about his
Mom, so she assumed his parents were divorced or something. He was tall, but hadn’t grown into his body yet, and his shoulders slumped, as they often did with tall teenagers trying not to appear awkward. His best friend was Rick, who was with him at the restaurant when David dumped her. And he had the most amazing phone she’d ever seen, a phone with more personality than most people she knew. It had also helped save her life.

E
ven with those scant facts and the short time she’d known Tony, he forced himself into her mind. So much so that she barely thought about David at all, she realized with a mild shock. This is a guy she’d been seriously dating for a year, and his face was already dim, as if she saw him through murky water, and was slowly being pulled away. Why had she thought him handsome?

A friendly old pilot named Bill st
opped by and bought a sectional, which was a specialized, regional map for pilots. She’d known Bill for years, and he occasionally took her up flying. She didn’t consider flying risky, since airports were her second home.

The heart was more dangerous than any airplane, Scarlett knew, because you could control a plane.
Turn the yoke right and the ailerons moved and the plane turned right; pull back on the yoke, the nose came up, the plane climbed, airspeed dropped. Predictable, stable. But the heart, well, the heart was like the horses that made her so nervous. They’d throw you without warning, rear back and drop you right onto the ground. Nothing you could do about it.

That’s how she felt with Tony; her life had suddenly become unpredictable. It wasn’t a bad thing, like she expected. Predictability demanded that she be
despondent over being dumped, because David was handsome and athletic and popular. She should be crying, going through boxes of Kleenex, eating a lot of ice cream to help her get through it. Instead, David receded into the past, and she didn’t care.

Because there was Tony, who helped her through the
short-lived tragedy of her breakup, and the real near-tragedy of the most terrifying moment of her life. All of which had happened in the space of a few days.

The jumble of e
motions confused Scarlett. One thought stood out in the mess, however, like a bright star in the night sky: when they were trapped in the alley, with the thugs closing in, Tony pushed her behind him. He told her to run to safety, to get away. Then he tried to stop the attackers, guys about twice his size.

At that moment of
greatest threat, Tony didn’t run, didn’t try to save himself. Even before that, he didn’t leave her when she was slowing him down as they ran; he stayed with her. She continued to rewind the scene in her mind. In that situation, they weren’t thinking, weren’t planning. They were a couple of terrified kids facing real danger, serious danger. They acted on instinct, without thought. And Tony’s instinct was to protect a girl he barely knew, to put himself in harm’s way for her. He didn’t think; he acted. Acted for her good. Would David (was that his name?) have done that? No way.

Tony did.

As she watched a plane circle overhead, Scarlett imagined herself bouncing merrily on a trampoline, bouncing higher and higher until her head bumped a cloud.

23

Tony
pulled into the parking lot of the Miles Forge Sherriff’s Office. Max was next to him on the seat, turned off at the moment. He killed the engine of his Mom’s car and sat there, wondering what to do next.

Just a few steps through the front doors and he could report the attack, maybe get protection for himself and Scarlett.
After all, incidents like this were supposed to be reported. The police were there to help, he’d always been told.

T
ony picked up Max, marveling, as always, at how perfect the phone felt. No sharp edges. No rocker switches or buttons; no holes or openings anywhere on it; nothing to mar the smoothness. Almost like it was made of butter, butter that wouldn’t lose its shape or melt. Max was truly one of a kind.

He replayed, yet again, the events of the previous day. He couldn’t shake the
feeling that the attackers were looking for him specifically, not just an easy score. He didn’t know why; he just felt it. If that was the case, they could still be in danger. Telling the police was the right thing to do.

The evening was warm, and Tony rolled down the front windows by hand; no automatic
buttons for this car. He looked inside the windows of the station. A cop was standing at a counter, talking to someone. Another one was by the window, typing on a computer. He looked out at Tony and smiled. Tony smiled back.

These were people who could help. But how? Tony couldn’t give much of a description
when they’d ask him about the attackers. Two big, strong guys with jeans and black t-shirts. They chased me and my date several blocks. We got away. I know, it sounds crazy, officer.

How did you get away, they were sure to ask. What do I say then? Well, I’ve got this phone, see…

And that would be that. They’d want to see the phone after hearing what it could do. No, they’d
demand
to see it. Once they saw it, they’d take it. Once they had it, they’d keep it. Tony would never see Max again.

A police car pulled in next to Tony. A fat cop eating a donut got out. He had a Dunkin’ Donuts box in his other hand.
I guess sometimes the clichés are true, Tony thought. He knew he should go in to the station, but instead he stayed in the car, holding Max. He didn’t want to give up the phone, to these cops or anyone else; even though he still knew, in a small part of his brain he’d managed to mostly ignore, that Max didn’t really belong to him. He’d found Max under a bush, and phones that did the things Max could do weren’t simply thrown away. Since he was sure Max had been lost, he figured that the owner would come looking for him. But the owner never had. Tony had tried to find the owner, without luck. Even Max didn’t know who his creator was. He’d checked around the Internet, looking for stories about someone who’d lost a phone, or Apple or some big company that had lost something they were working on. Anything that might be a lead. Nothing. How much more was he supposed to do?

And even if he didn’t
really
belong to him, Max sure didn’t belong to the cops, either. They would just see Max as a piece of evidence, something to help them with a case. Something to study, maybe, by taking him apart.

Max was a lot more than a curiosity to Tony.
Max was a companion. Max gave him advice, told him funny stories, did impressions for him.

And t
hose were just the small things. Max told him to comfort Scarlett; he would have never approached her on his own, with his painful shyness. And Max had saved his life in the alley; his and Scarlett’s. How could Tony ever repay him for that?

Another thing: Max was always there. He didn’t run off. He didn’t leave
his family when things got tough. Didn’t leave a newborn son. Didn’t leave a wife to fend for herself in a trailer with screaming neighbors. When things were desperate, Max came through in a big way.

In one sense
, Tony knew it was stupid to think this way. Of course a phone couldn’t run away. And Max was just a bunch of circuits and programming, when it came right down to it.

But Tony didn’t feel that way about Max. The
phone was more than that. It had learned over time. It started to know him, who he was. What he liked to listen to when he woke up. Helped him with homework. Knew how to cheer him up.

In short, Max had become his friend. To Tony, who had few friends, that meant something.

“Hi
.” The sound startled Tony, and he fumbled Max onto the floor. The cop eating the donut a few minutes before was now at Tony’s window, a friendly smile on his face.

“Did you need something, son?”

Caught off guard, Tony stammered. “H-huh?”

“I asked if you needed something. You’ve been out here awhile.”

“Oh, I, uh, no. Well, yes,” Tony stumbled, trying to think of something, anything.

“I was just going to go, uh
... I mean, I thought somebody might be following my car, and I got a little scared, and came here. But I guess not.”

The cop looked a little bit closer inside the car. He saw Max on the floor at Tony’s feet. Tony picked the phone up quickly and put it in his pocket. The cop looked Tony over
carefully. Tony tried -- and failed, he was sure -- to look nonchalant.
“All right. Have a good night.”

“Oh, yeah, you too,” Tony said, turning the car on and pulling out of the station in a hurry, as the cop took a sip from
his thermos and watched him go.