Amped

  He lowers his voice to a whisper that saps the warmth from the sunlight.

  “What never saw print was this: a thirteenth Zenith was made in secret. I made it myself and I copied the encrypted military stuff onto it so it would work. Dropped it into an envelope and mailed it to your old man. He made you the thirteenth. Saved your life, but, like everything, it came with a price. You’ve got a weapon inside you, Owen. A weapon that’s never been turned on. With your pop’s office raided, I imagine the government knows all about it by now.”

  The rail-thin old man watches me, eyebrows low, tired face framed in wrinkles. He’s been burned up by the sun and made tough as rawhide, but the intelligence of a scientist still gleams in his eyes.

  “That’s why I wonder whether I’m supposed to protect you or you me.”

  I let go of Jim’s arm.

  “You’re a biomedical engineer. Why the hell are you out here working construction?” I ask.

  “Once, I designed neural implants for a living. Government R and D. Basic architecture stuff. I quit when I lost sight of whether the Autofocus was a good thing or an evil thing. Still couldn’t tell you. So I guess I’ll be out here breaking rocks until I figure it out.”

  “And what about me?”

  “You’re a Zenith. Like Lyle. They’ll either find you, or they won’t.”

  [HISTORICAL DOCUMENT]

  H.R. 1429

  One Hundred Twentieth Congress of the

  United States of America

  An Act

  To authorize the Uplift Program, to provide technological benefits to disadvantaged students and to strengthen education.

  Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

  SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE

  (a) SHORT TITLE.—This Act may be cited as the “Uplift for Educational Performance Act.”

  SECTION 2. STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

  It is the purpose of this program to improve the educational performance of low-income children by enhancing their cognitive, physical, and emotional development—

  (1) by providing disadvantaged children and their families direct access to implantable medical technology, such as Neural Autofocus®, when such medical devices are determined to be necessary, based on medical evaluation.

  [HISTORICAL DOCUMENT]

  It’s a strange sound. Intense and furtive. A pattern under it. It invades my sleep around the edges, seeping in.

  Snick, snick, snick.

  Sunday morning. Two days crashing in Jim’s tiny spare bedroom. No work today and a damn good thing, too. I’m exhausted. My arms and legs feel stiff under the loose-knit afghan. For the first time in my life, dirt-stained calluses have surfaced on my hands and fingers. I’m sore and glad for the pain, because without it my thoughts slide inexorably back to Pittsburgh. Back to the people I lost.

  I’ve only been in Eden for a couple days, but it’s been a blur of work and sleep and failing to wheedle information out of Jim. The old man handed me a forged driver’s license yesterday and gave me a short haircut in the living room. Told me I better keep to myself. Stay out of town and never, ever get my numbers run.

  Snicksnicksnick.

  I force my eyes open. A startled yelp catches in my throat. Something is on the other side of the screened window next to my bed. Some kind of gray-faced monster. Child size. Watching me.

  It’s a little boy. He must be standing on the hot tub on the deck outside. His hands move rapidly, twisting and swiveling something held out over his potbelly. A Rubik’s cube.

  He smiles at me, pressing his forehead against the window. Small sharp teeth flashing. His hands never stop turning and flipping the worn cube.

  Something is off about the little boy. His ears sit low on his head like a couple of fleshy lumps. Small eyes, too far from each other. The color of mud. An oddly smooth patch of skin stretches between his upper lip and piggish, upturned nose. Classic fetal alcohol syndrome, the proof of it outlined in his distorted features for everyone to see.

  And he’s an amp. A nubby maintenance port protrudes from his temple. Faintly I can make out the telltale square outline of a retinal implant on the white of his left eye. The retinal chip floats there like a tattoo, collecting information about the world and ferrying it to the Neural Autofocus embedded in the boy’s temple.

  There’s a lot of hardware in him, but his smile is real. Genuine. It belongs to a little boy and not a monster. And what with the yellowish node on his temple, who knows what might be going on in his head? These days, there’s no guessing what kind of mind lurks behind a face.

  “Hey,” says the boy, voice coming in loud and clear through the window screen. “I’m Nick. You’re Owen.”

  “If you say so,” I say, wiping the sleep out of my eyes.

  “I’m friends with Jim. Come outside. I wanna show you Eden.”

  Eden is an island, according to Nick. And it’s surrounded by sharks. Real big old gnarly-ass man-eaters.

  As we walk, the kid shadows me. I get the feeling I couldn’t shake him if I wanted. Eden is too small and Nick’s personality is too big. He’s telling me his theory now. Theories, actually. The little guy has collected a lot of ideas in his decade or so of life and he doesn’t mind sharing.

  Nick moves like a puppy. His small brown hands are always in motion, sometimes slow and deliberate, other times making short, eye-blurring bursts.

  He can solve the Rubik’s cube in under thirty seconds.

  “Yeah,” says Nick, as he leads me around the trailer park. “I mostly use the Fridrich method. Pretty advanced. With finger shortcuts and triggers I can do four-move bursts. Over ten moves a second. Of course, you gotta lube your cube to go that fast.”

  Nick bursts into hysterical giggles. Eden is otherwise quiet under the growing heat of the morning sun.

  “Eden,” he informs me, tongue peeking out of his narrow slit of a mouth, “is all by itself out here. I’m not sayin’ you can’t venture into shark-infested waters. But you better not be going by yourself. You got to have somebody watching your back every minute. Plus, sharks are worst at night. Nocturnal predators. So, you got to be home before dark.”

  I ask the obvious question. “Is it shark week on TV or something?”

  “Yeah, but that don’t change my point,” he responds. “The sharks make all of us amps stay together on our islands. To be safe, right? But Eden ain’t the only island. There’s a bunch more of ’em. Other places where poor people got the Uplift program. And the vets. Plus, out there in Pittsburgh, where they done all the original trials. Lot of test subjects out there with all kinds of crazy junk in their heads.”

  Is that what we are? A nation of test subjects? Involuntary participants in a never-ending social experiment, exposed to wave after wave of new technology?

  Nick points along a row of run-down trailers. “Over there’s my house. Earl. Miranda. Jim.” The kid stops at a dark trailer on the end. It has an ominous red star spray-painted on its side, paint bleeding from it in dried rivulets. “Lyle and them guys are in those boxes there.”

  The laughing cowboy and his gang. I try to act casual.

  “What do you think of Lyle?” I ask, peering at the rotting, graffiti-covered trailers.

  Nick scratches one of his misshapen ears. “Kind of a badass, ain’t he? I like that. But mostly I’m just scared of him, I guess.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “You admit it?”

  Nick leads me toward the edge of the trailer park. “Oh, I’m scared of all kinds of stuff. Not the dark or monsters or nothing like that. Stuff I’m scared of is worth being afraid of. Tornadoes. Pure Priders. And Lyle and his friends. Especially Lyle. Sometimes, it’s like he can’t see you. Like he’s got shark eyes.”

  “I heard the police were looking for him.”

  “Everybody knows that. But Lyle’s got this way of moving. Sneaky fast. Anybody in a suit or a uniform comes around and he’s gone. Just leaves us to deal with it.
”

  Nick kicks the dirt, looks away.

  “Do you like it here?” I ask.

  “I guess. It’s hard to leave anymore.”

  “What about school?”

  “My mom teaches out of our house. Hardly any kids go to town for school. It’s got where you can’t even go out with your port under a hat. If a regular old Reggie Jerkwad finds out, he might mess you up good and send you home.”

  “Reggie?” I ask.

  “They call us amps. We call them reggie. Don’t ask me.”

  Nick keeps leading me around the perimeter of the park, pointing out trailers and cars and pathways through the weeds. I follow, still sleepy, bemused by this hyperactive little creature.

  Weeds suffocate the mostly fallen-down wooden fence that surrounds Eden. Through a missing section, I see a brand-new chain-link fence on the other side. Squat and solid, it wraps Eden in shining links. Looks like it was built yesterday.

  Seeing me looking at the double fence, the kid goes solemn.

  “Not safe to go much past the fence. Mean people live in them houses across the field. At night, they sit out there and drink beer and turn spotlights on us. They call it the neighborhood watch. We call them spotlighters.”

  “How long has that gone on?” I ask.

  “They’ve come and gone for a long time. But now it’s every night. On the news, Senator Vaughn told his Priders they got to watch us at all times. And it’s even worse since new amps started showing up here. Spotlighters came out and built that fence without asking. Made a lot of people mad, but nobody did nothing about it.”

  Together, we stare silently at the shining fence. It looks metallic and alien next to the organic decay of Eden. A grasshopper flitters past and lands on Nick’s arm. He brushes it off, breaks the reverie.

  “Look,” he says, “I ain’t trying to get in your business or nothing. But I told you everything about me and Eden, so you’ve got to tell me all about you. Like what you’re doing here. Fair is fair.”

  Nick looks up at me, thrusting out his pointed chin, curious and demanding. But mostly demanding.

  “I don’t have any other place to go,” I say. “Same as the others. Things are complicated right now. Luckily, there are a lot of people in Eden who are like us because of the Uplift program.”

  “You mean the government cheese?” Nick points at the yellowish nub on his temple. “They came and gave these yellow ones to everybody around here and then they got all mad at us for having them. Pretty stupid.”

  “I agree.”

  Nick stands quietly, watching the distant low houses beyond the brown grass. It might as well be the shoreline of another world.

  “So that’s it?” he asks. “You’re hiding, like all the rest?”

  “That’s it,” I say, wondering if it’s true.

  “I don’t believe you,” he says.

  “Really?”

  “Nah. I get the feeling you’re here to do something.”

  I don’t say anything. I’m a little taken aback by how confident the kid is. Nick’s hands go back to fluttering over the Rubik’s cube in little spurts of speed. He solves it, smirks at it. Starts mixing up the squares again.

  “Do you ever wish that you were a regular kid? A reggie?” I ask.

  Nick snorts. “I could barely see before I got the retinal. Could barely think without Autofocus. And you’re asking me if I want to have the dumbs? No thanks. I’d rather be weird and know it than be a stupid ass.”

  I can’t help but feel like I’m speaking to an adult.

  “What about you?” asks Nick.

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. You want to be a reggie?”

  “It would make life a lot easier.”

  Nick stops, frowns at me. “Would it?” he asks.

  * * *

  General Biologics to Close US Offices

  PITTSBURGH—The General Biologics corporation, makers of the popular Neural Autofocus® brain implant, announced today that it will be closing the main offices in downtown Pittsburgh as well as satellite offices around the country.

  A company spokesman indicated that it was impossible to continue in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, saying, “Recent decisions in the US courts have created an incredibly hostile environment here in the United States—not only for our clients but also for our workers and their families.”

  Several weeks ago, an explosion at a Pittsburgh laboratory claimed the life of Dr. David Gray, a General Biologics medical researcher. Despite increased security at other research facilities, the threat of violence has become a day-to-day factor for many employees.

  The spokesman said the company will likely be moving the bulk of its in-patient operations and production facilities to an as-yet-undisclosed location in Europe. Approximately five hundred employees, many of them highly skilled factory workers, have been invited to move with the company, although it is unclear how many will accept the offer.

  The current product line is due to be phased out over the coming months, and American patients with existing implants will be provided with emergency care only.

  When night hits Eden, the close-packed trailers light up with ratty old strings of paper lanterns, citronella candles, and the fleeting streaks of kids playing with flashlights.

  I sit with Jim on his dimly lit deck, a crusty folding chair biting into my ass. The old man hands me a cold beer and we watch the nightlife of the park settle into the shadows. He doesn’t speak and by now it doesn’t surprise me.

  Jim was right—battle lines are being drawn. Every third trailer or so lurks dark and empty. There are hardly any unmarked temples left in Eden—all the pure humans have packed up and moved on. In their place, harried families of amps have arrived from miles around. Renting the empties. Their gleaming new cars stud the parking lot. Newcomers are coagulating here at random, many of them with nothing in common except those little flecks of metal in their brains.

  They’re not here because Eden is safe or even welcoming. They’re here because there’s no other place to go. Nowhere else to rent or go to school or work. No more options. We’re all running for our lives, in one way or another. Being left alone is the best we can ask for.

  And we can’t even get that.

  I’m startled by how soon I get used to the spotlighters. The winking scrape of their lights over our trailers seems to live in my peripheral vision. Occasional gunfire and hooting laughter come from beyond the fence.

  The local amps seem unimpressed. Across the way, a stained slab of concrete sits where some repossessed trailer used to live. A shirtless guy has got a clamp light hanging from a tree branch, the extension cord running to his trailer. It illuminates an old door supported by two sawhorses. Tools and empty beer bottles are scattered around the makeshift workbench. The guy is ignoring the field, busily fixing the knees of a plastic exoskeleton that’s sprawled out like a corpse.

  A fiery red dot sizzles across my vision. It’s a teenager in a hoodie, jogging past. He’s carrying a crummy old boom box that amplifies music from a portable player tucked in his pocket. The node on his temple throbs in time to the beat. A neon attachment the kid has made himself. I don’t know if he’s proud of being an amp or just oblivious to the stigma. Either way, the implant is impossible to miss.

  All the ephemeral sounds of Eden—the low hum of campfire conversation, kids panting and laughing, the occasional shriek of an air tool, and even the distorted thump of bass lines—combine into a familiar babble. Human lives unfolding. It’s comforting. Somehow, Eden is an honest-to-God functioning community. Pushed out here to the margins of society and huddling together for sanity but operating nonetheless.

  Almost normal people living almost normal lives.

  “I’m getting tired of the silent treatment, Jim. Why am I being hunted?” I ask. “What is the Zenith?”

  Jim hushes me.

  “Don’t say that word so loud. Only a handful of people in the world know what it means. If you were smart, you’d
wish you weren’t one of them.”

  Jim looks around, suspicious. He continues, voice lowered. “It’s an implant like any other. Won’t make you a superhero. Just helps your brain process the world.”

  “I need to know more than that, Jim. A lot more.”

  “I can’t be responsible for you if you get hurt. I already done enough damage. Look at this place,” says Jim. “And we thought we were helping these people.”

  Eden may feel calm right this instant, but tension crackles just beneath every movement. Every sound. It’s a fragile picture of normalcy, wavering in the reflection of a soap bubble.

  “My dad said you would explain. It was the last thing he said.”

  The old man sucks on his beer and sits quiet for a moment, thinking. Finally, he swallows a last mouthful of beer and starts talking.

  “I only built the amp hardware—the army programmed them and your pop installed them. All thirteen. That was the whole run, but I don’t have the whole picture. Before activation, it oughta be doing basic Neural Autofocus tasks. Pushing your mind in the right direction. But it also knows things. Military skill sets, probably. I don’t know—I didn’t program that part. All I do know is that when you turn it on, the amp takes over. You go faster. No time to think. If you’re a good man, you’ll do good things. If you’re not, you won’t.”

  “It controls you?”

  “It’s still you. Only the Zenith doesn’t listen to you up here,” says Jim, pointing at my forehead. “It listens to you down here.” He taps my chest, over my heart. “It’ll give you what you’re really wishing for.”

  I consider that for a second. “How do I turn it on?” I ask.

  “A trigger. Part of the programming. Could be some kind of action or series of words. Only Lyle could tell you for sure.”

  Jim pulls down the last draft from his beer, drops it, and pops open the next in a well-practiced motion. Doesn’t say another thing.