Man Made Boy (38 page)

If I felt like a monster, if I felt ugly, it wasn’t because of my size or my stitches. It was because of my actions.

I found myself in a part of The Studio lot I’d never been to before. I stopped for a moment and looked around. It seemed like I was on a street in Manhattan, maybe somewhere around Chelsea, instead of in the usual windowless soundstages. I was surrounded by dirty brick apartment buildings on curving, narrow streets. It was fake, of course, a facade for external shots. But even so, a homesickness welled up inside me—for New York, for The Show, for my family. All of my running had just brought me right back to where I started. Only this time, I could see it clearly.

…to stare into the void and see Truth in all its terrible grandeur.
That’s what Medusa had said.

I knew I had fucked up big-time. It made me feel sick and feeble. But I couldn’t give in to those feelings. I had to act. First, I would fix things with Claire and Sophie. Then I had to figure out how to make things right with VI.

I INVITED CLAIRE over to my dorm room for dinner the next night. As she came in, she gave me this look like I had ambushed her.

“This is…posh.” She eyed the sushi laid out on the platter, the candles, the flowers, and the bottle of chilled white wine on my little kitchenette table.

“Yep,” I said. My nerves were wound so tight, I was slipping into my mom’s classic one-word answer mode.

“This is what you’ve been working on?”

“It is.” There. Two words. That was improvement.

Claire sighed. “Sophie is begging me to pour us a glass of wine.”

I smiled a little in relief as I poured some wine into the glasses I’d borrowed from Kemp. I’d been hoping the wine would get Sophie’s attention. I needed them both listening right now.

“Here.” I handed a glass to her.

“I’m not big on wine.”

“I know. The dinner is for you. The wine is for Sophie.”

Claire’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. Then she took a sip. “Not half bad.”

“Yeah, Kemp helped me pick it out. That guy knows a lot about wine. He was pretty sure you’d at least not hate it.”

“Okay, what the hell is all this?”

“Dinner,” I said. “Our bet, remember?”

“Of course I remember. I was thinking spaghetti and sauce from a jar or something. This is a lot more…elaborate than I expected.”

“Maybe I want to impress you.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Or maybe you want something from me.”

“I…guess you could look at it that way.”

“I knew it! So what’s the deal? Spill it.”

“Wow, I was kind of hoping we could at least eat first.”

“No way.” She folded her arms across her chest. “I’m not eating a thing until I see what strings are attached.”

I sighed. “Okay, fine.” My whole vision of a smooth evening had just melted away. I might as well cut to the chase.

“Here’s the deal,” I said. “I’m in love with Sophie.”

Her lips pressed into a thin line for a moment and I could see a muscle twitch in her neck.

“Ah,” she said.

“But I’m also in love with you.”

Then her eyes widened. “Oh.” Like that was the part she hadn’t been expecting.

“And…uh.” I struggled to continue, despite her crazy look. It helped to stare at my foot, so I did that. “I don’t really know what to do about it. You know, this isn’t a situation that comes up for a lot of people. I mean, maybe sometimes a person falls in love with two people at once, but I’ve never heard of anyone else falling in love with two people who occupy the same body.”

I waited, but she didn’t say anything, just continued to stare at me with an expression that was starting to look more and more like panic. I don’t know what I had expected at this point.
Anger, maybe. That was kind of Claire’s go-to emotion. A part of me had optimistically hoped a little for something like relief and maybe even something like
Hey that’s awesome because we both feel the same way about you! It’s wacky, but let’s try to make this work!

But frozen silence was a reaction I hadn’t anticipated. For the first time, it occurred to me that maybe
neither
of them was into me. I was no prize to look at, after all. Not compared to them. I’d always known
that
.

“So…uh,” I said, starting to feel sick. “I guess I was hoping to know how…uh…you felt. And how Sophie felt. And uh…”

And I stood there, one hand reaching out a little, like I was groping toward something that I would never have. Maybe that was exactly what was going on.

I let my hand drop. “Okay. I think…I think I’m going to go for a walk. If you want to have some sushi while I’m gone, cool. But…I understand if you don’t want it.” My face was on fire and the only thing I could think of was escape. I opened the front door.

Shaun the faun stood in the doorway.

“Is this a bad time?” he asked. “Of course it is. That’s why I picked it.”

“Shaun?!”

He stood in the doorway with his arms folded and that same asshole smirk on his face. But he looked like hell. His clothes were ragged, his furry legs patchy and caked with mud, his arms and face covered in bruises and scrapes. He was also wearing a pair of big, wraparound sunglasses, the kind old people put over regular glasses.

“You’re just not really that bright, are you?” he said. “I have no idea how you actually managed to create me.”

That’s when I saw the small blinking device nestled in the thick curly hair of his left temple. A thin wire connected from the device to the sunglasses.

“VI?”

“Amazing!” said VI-in-Shaun. “When I spell it out for you, I guess you actually
can
understand!”

“Boy, who’s this?” said Claire, her voice suddenly hard.

“Ah, look who it is,” said VI. “The latest dick cozy for my idiot creator.”

“Oi! You listen here, goat boy,” said Claire, and she stepped forward, her fists clenched.

“Claire.” I held up my hand. “He’s being controlled by VI.”

Claire suddenly turned her glare on me. “The one you abandoned.”

“Well…” I started, like I was going to argue. But then I stopped. “Yeah. That one.”

“Fix this.” She turned away from me.

I looked back to VI-in-Shaun. “Look, VI. I know I messed up. You deserved so much better. I was…scared. I was immature. And like you just said, I was stupid. I should have been there to help you acclimate to the world, to teach you about it. Instead, I just ran. Ran from you, from my responsibilities, from my life. I swear I never meant to hurt you. I want to make this right.”

“Ah,” said VI, nodding Shaun’s head, mouth in a quirk. “Yes. I see. You’re ready to embrace me, your creation, at long last, and I should fall on my knees with gratitude. Is that it?”

“Um, I wouldn’t put it like that, exactly….”

“Give me a fucking break,” said VI. “You’ve just run out of road is all. If California didn’t end, you’d still be running. The only reason you’re ready to accept me is because I’ve cornered you.”

“Come on, VI,” I said. “You don’t know that.”

“It doesn’t really matter. This is all beside the point because I don’t need you anymore. As you can see,” she said, and tapped the small device on her temple, “I’ve already figured out how to occupy physical space.”

“But you had to take over someone else’s body to do it. We can figure out a way to create your own body for you.”

“Why would I bother? There’s nothing wrong with taking lives. It happens in nature all the time. In fact, my current method was copied directly from several species of natural parasites. Parasitic wasps, gordian worms, the fungus classified as the
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis
, and of course, the wonderful parasitic protozoa,
Toxoplasma gondii
. All of these combined allowed me to attain complete control of the gross motor abilities. In order to attain control of fine motor skills and speech, I had to greatly refine the visual signal impulses and bionetic audio signal system you have seen me use previously. It took time to perfect and coordinate all of these various techniques to a level that was sufficient to control a sentient host.”

“VI…” I said.

“This is why you’ve been able to run free these past few months,” she continued. It was like she had this whole speech prepared. Maybe she did. “Of course, I’ve known where you were this entire time, thanks to my connection to a number of GPS networks. But I wanted our encounter to be suitably impressive, with a fully functional beta group for you to admire.”

“Beta
group
?” I asked.

“And I didn’t want you to get bored while you waited for me,” she went on, “so I sent along some entertainment. Poor Robert Jekyll actually believed he’d gotten an anonymous benefactor to help him and his sister achieve a normal life—”

A wine bottle winged through the air and struck Shaun’s temple, shattering the device attached there. VI’s host tumbled to the ground and went silent. I turned and Claire gave me a tight grin.

“Sophie was tired of listening to that.” She pointed to the inert Shaun. “Is he going to be okay?”

“I don’t know.” I bent down and felt for a pulse. Nothing. I looked down at him. He seemed so small and shriveled. “This guy…he was like the bane of my existence growing up. But I’m trying to remember why he ever intimidated me. Now I just feel sad for him.” I tried to pull off his sunglasses but they didn’t move. I looked closer at the earpieces. They were secured to the sides of his head with staples. “I’ve got a bad feeling….”

“What?” Claire leaned in over my shoulder.

As carefully as I could, I pulled the staples out of his skin and slid the sunglasses off. He didn’t have eyes anymore. Instead, a small network of wires stretched from the sunglasses into his open eye sockets and fed directly into his brain.

“Oh, shit…” Claire stumbled back.

“Magnificent, isn’t it?” came a small, squeaky voice. “Each installation is extremely intricate and unique. Frankly, scalability is still a significant problem.”

I turned toward the kitchen, and Ernesto the brownie stood on the counter. He wore tiny sunglasses and I could just make out the blinking light at his temple.

“Boy,” said Claire. “Is that—”

“I did say ‘beta group.’ You didn’t think I’d come here with just one host, did you?” asked VI-in-Ernesto. “Boy could have crushed Shaun alone.”

“I don’t think a brownie is really going to turn the tide,” said Claire.

“Certainly not,” came a scratchy female voice from behind us in the living room. The harpy Aello settled onto the window ledge and casually ripped out the screen. Her sunglasses gleamed red with the setting sun.

“But don’t worry. I brought the whole gang,” came another scratchy female voice from the kitchen window. The other harpy sister, Celaeno, landed on that window and squeezed her way through the narrow opening until she was inside.

“Well, almost the whole gang,” came a thick, slow voice, and Oob the ogre stepped through the open doorway.

“Trowe, it turns out, are highly resistant to parasitic mind control,” said VI-in-Ernesto. “I’m trying to come up with a work-around, but I may just have to end-of-life that project.”

“Where is Liel?” I said.

“At The Show, of course,” all five of them said in unison. “Since that is where I was conceived, I decided to set up primary servers there. Plus, there were so many interesting host options to choose from.”

“My parents!” I said. “If you do anything to them, I’ll—”

“You’ll be dead by then,” they all said. Then Oob swung a massive fist at me. I was faster, but only just barely. His knuckles grazed the tip of my nose as I dodged to the side.

“Claire, get out of here!” I shouted.

“Like hell!” she said. “I’ve got the harpies, you just handle that ogre!”

Like that’ll be easy,
I thought as he came at me with both hands. I caught his wrists. There was no way I could overpower him, so instead I used his momentum to pull him off balance, then I bent down so he fell over my back. But he was more than just an ogre now. VI’s intelligence was inside and saw that one coming. He wrapped his arms around my torso
as he fell, pulling me down with him. Then he just started to squeeze. I couldn’t pry his arms loose—he was way too strong for that. I tried to roll us, but he was also a lot heavier than me. I was running out of air and out of time. I didn’t want to do it, but I couldn’t think of any other options. So I reached up, took hold of his sunglasses, and yanked them off as hard as I could. I heard the skin tear loose with the staples, then a wet pop as the wires ripped free from his sockets. He shuddered and his arms loosened enough for me to break free. Without stopping, I rolled over, grabbed his shuddering, eyeless head, and slammed the side with the signal device into the floor as hard as I could. I heard the plastic device casing crack, and Oob stopped shuddering and went limp.

I lay there panting for a moment, staring into his bloody eye sockets. Poor Oob.

“You okay?” asked Claire.

“Just need to…catch my breath…” I said.

“That didn’t go quite as planned,” came the squeaky brownie voice. Ernesto stood next to the kitchen sink, a frown on his little face. “But I have a contingency, of course. If you want try to save your parents, that dancer whore, and the rest of those science-fearing relics, you can come find me at The Show. And I recommend that you arrive in the next twenty-four hours. I have a city-wide rollout to implement, and I have no intention of pushing back my launch date just for you.”