Willful Machines (6 page)

A deafening chug pounded into the lab. We glanced up through the leaf-covered glass ceiling. Dad's helicopter cruised over us like a whale cutting through water. I ran my palm over my robot's sleek back. “Dr. Singh, do you mind if I ask you a question? On the terrace, when that new kid was doing a handstand, you said—”

“Class is almost over, Lee.” She grabbed her cigarette from the window. “Don't you think you should get some work done?”

Dr. Singh expressing concern about one of her students doing work: that was a first. Her eyes fixed on the trees dripping in the drizzle outside, she took a drag and exhaled a narrow shaft of smoke. Her other hand had gone to her chest, where a gold pendant shaped like a dancing, four-armed Hindu god hung. I never saw her without it.

“Right.” I cleared my throat again and tucked Nevermore
under my arm. “I probably should. It wasn't important anyway.”

I retreated to my worktable and spent the last few minutes of class hunched over Nevermore's access panel. One thing I liked about robots: they always made much more sense to me than people did.

Next came English. Bex arrived a few minutes after I did. She slid into the spot in front of mine and turned to lean across my desk. “What was going on between you and the Loudly Laughing Latin?” she whispered.

I glanced around. Nobody listening. Trumbull had gone off to his corner. “Something. I'm not sure what, though. He sort of asked me for my handle.”

Her smudgy eyes popped. “Like with amorous intentions? Is that what you mean?”

“I'm pretty sure. He also said I have cute ears.”

“Intriguing. So what did you do? Did you give it to him?”

I shook my head. “Not at first. But then my dad made me.”

“Wait. What?”

I didn't have a chance to explain, though. Nico walked in, and the words stopped in my throat.

It was like I felt him before I saw him: the weather in the room suddenly got warmer again. Everybody else turned to look at him too, which caused all the pucks hovering overhead, programmed to follow their owners' gaze, to swivel in his direction. We didn't get new students at Inverness Prep often—and we never got ones who did a handstand on the
terrace wall. Nico seemed not to notice, though. He crossed to the far side of the room, his stride loose and confident, and dropped into a desk near the front. I didn't think he'd seen me.

“You're the new boy?” Miss Remnant, our English teacher, pumped hand sanitizer from a bottle on her desk and rubbed her palms together. Glancing at her puck, she added, “Mr. Medina?”

“That's right,” he answered. “You can call me Nico.”

She appeared immune to the Nico Medina grin. “We're studying
Hamlet
, Mr. Medina. Please follow along.” She crossed to her lectern at the front of the room, her skirt rustling around her skinny calves, and cleared her throat. “Today you all heard the president give an impassioned speech about 2Bs. What you may not realize is that—”

One of the FUUWLs threw up his hand. “The 2Bs' name was inspired by that famous line from
Hamlet
, ‘To be or not to be.' ”

Miss Remnant pursed her lips: she didn't like being interrupted. “That's correct, Mr. Harris.”

“It's an interesting story, actually,” the FUUWL said. “May I?” Without waiting for her to respond, he turned around in his desk so he could address the rest of the class. “Originally, the 2B project went by some other name. Dr. Singh had just finished her first attempt at artificial consciousness—a computer program modeled on the human brain. For a while the program seemed to work like it was supposed to. Then it started
acting . . . discontented, I suppose you'd say. It felt like a prisoner because it didn't have a physical body or any connection to the Supernet. In the end, it terminated itself. Dr. Singh was pretty upset, but the director of the lab—Dr. Waring, I think his name was—tried to spin it as a success: they'd built the first program capable of contemplating death and committing willful suicide. He called it a man-made Hamlet.”

“And can you tell us why he did that?” Miss Remnant asked, still annoyed by the interruption but resigned now.

“When Hamlet makes his ‘To be or not to be' speech, he's trying to decide whether to kill himself. To live or not to live,
that's
the question. So Dr. Waring started using the name 2B, and Dr. Singh built a human-shaped fleshjacket body for the second consciousness she created, which was Charlotte. We all know what happened after that.”

He glanced at me and gave an unconvincing nod of sympathy. My stomach twisted. I looked down at my desk.

“That's fine, Mr. Harris,” Miss Remnant said. “We'll be studying the ‘To be or not to be' soliloquy later. For now, let's return to the speech from act two we were looking at yesterday.” She scanned the class, her eyes moving over faces until they settled on mine. My belly cinched itself even tighter. “Mr. Fisher, would you reread the speech for us?”

I stared at the white, angled surface of my desk, on which my puck, hovering just over my shoulder, was projecting the relevant passage. Speaking in front of large groups of people
ranked just below heights on my list of phobias. “ ‘I have of late—' ”

“Speak up.”

I cleared my throat and tried again, more loudly. “ ‘I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory.' ”

“Stop there, Mr. Fisher. I think you've butchered Shakespearean English enough for one day. Now tell me: there's an adjective famously associated with Hamlet, an adjective we discussed yesterday, an adjective this speech exemplifies. Do you remember what that is?”

I glanced toward Nico's side of the room, but other heads blocked my view of his. “Sad?”

“Sad,” Miss Remnant repeated.

“Well, Hamlet's father just died, right? So he's sad. That's what he's saying here.”

She leaned her elbows on the lectern, making herself comfortable. “I see. So why doesn't he just say, ‘I'm sad'?”

“Because this sounds better?”

A titter rolled through the class. A couple FUUWLs in the front row exchanged looks. Bex squeezed one fist on her desk in a discreet show of solidarity.

“The adjective is not ‘sad,' ” Miss Remnant said. “Try again, Mr. Fisher.”

I readjusted my glasses. On my desk, the words “sterile promontory” seemed to stand out from the others. “Depressed? Clinically depressed?”

“I don't believe they had a diagnosis of clinical depression in Shakespeare's day.”

The wooden seat back pressed into the knobs of my lower spine. The desk chairs in the classrooms at Inverness Prep were almost as painful as the seats in the auditorium.

“Well, Mr. Fisher?”

I kept staring at those two words, “sterile promontory,” until they collapsed into meaningless shapes.

“I think ‘clinically depressed' is an interesting choice, actually,” someone said. Across the room, Nico had shifted into view. He slung one arm over the back of his chair and wagged his finger at the words projected on his desk. “I mean, sure, the concept may not have existed when Shakespeare was alive, but hundreds of years later, when Sigmund Freud was formulating his theories about depression, didn't he use
Hamlet
as one of his main literary touchstones? As far as Freud was concerned, Hamlet was pretty much the poster boy for clinical depression, right? Just listen to how the speech continues.” He sat forward again and peered at his puck's projection. “ ‘What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties.' ”

The moment he started reading, his whole manner shifted. His voice became low and resonant, and the lilt of his accent added to the dramatic effect. His body changed
too: he held his back straighter, and his hands were very still.

“ ‘In action, how like an angel,' ” he read, “ ‘in apprehension, how like a god.' ”

My stomach uncoiled little by little. I didn't move a muscle as I listened with my big ears and the whole rest of my being to the words Nico spoke—words that seemed to apply to no one better than Nico himself. This stranger who could do handstands and quote Shakespeare from memory, this goof with the huge grin and inappropriately loud but nevertheless charming laugh: how like an angel, how like a god. And he'd asked
me
for my handle, apparently with amorous intentions. Me, a dud of a First Son with a robot obsession, poor social skills, and enough baggage to sink a freighter: how like a loser, how like a freak. What in the hell was Nico thinking?

“ ‘The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals, and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.' ”

His voice sank to a despairing whisper at the end. He gazed glassy eyed at his desk, his eyebrows knitted together. The room had gone dead quiet. Bex glanced at me, eyebrows raised. Then Nico looked up, his forehead cleared, and a bigger grin than ever erupted across his face.

“See? Hopelessness. Antisocial feelings. An inability to appreciate the beauty of the world. All classic symptoms of clinical depression.”

Miss Remnant's cheeks had turned distinctly pinkish. She
hurried over to her desk and pumped more hand sanitizer. Rubbing it into her palms, she said, “You read like a seasoned actor, Mr. Medina.”

“I acted a little at my last school. Shakespeare was always my favorite.”

“What a lucky coincidence. As it happens, I'm also in charge of Inverness Prep's dramatic society. We're putting on a production of
The Tempest
, and our Ariel had to step down at the last minute. Would you be interested in taking his place?”

I'd never seen Miss Remnant like this. She was practically
smiling
.

“Sure,” Nico said. “I love
The Tempest
. At my school in Chile I played Caliban.”

Miss Remnant nodded. “It's settled, then.” She glanced around at the rest of us as if just noticing we were still there. Her face settled back into its usual scowl. She returned to her lectern. “And by the way, the adjective was ‘melancholy.' Which is how you make me feel, Mr. Fisher.”

W
hat cheer, good lord? How dost thou?

The message flashed up on my puck's small circular screen after math. Bex and I were on our way to the dining hall for lunch. I nudged her and pointed up at my puck.

“Cute,” she said. By then I'd filled her in on the details of the Nico saga.

“Should I message him back right away or wait a little?”

“Don't play games. Just message him already.”

I waved my puck closer and spoke my return message. The words sprang up on the screen:
Thanks for saving my butt in class today.

“Do you think the reference to my butt is too flirty?”

Bex rolled her eyes. “It's fine, Lee. And anyway, lucky for you, you have a nice butt to back it up.”

I glanced at her.

“What? I notice these things.”

I sent the message. Right away my puck chimed again.
My pleasure. Miss Remnant's insane. I think I'm on lunch break. Any idea where a guy goes to get some food around here?

“He's asking where he's supposed to go for lunch,” I reported.

“Ooh, invite him to eat with us.”

Dining hall
, I messaged.
Bottom floor, across from the auditorium. Bex is asking if you want to eat with us.

Bex, glancing at the message, muttered, “You're pathetic.”

Prithee tell Mistress Bex 'twould be an honor.

“I'm not pathetic,” I told her. “You know I have to be careful about this kind of stuff. I already had one close call freshman year. I can't afford another.”

“A close call? Please.” She grabbed my arm and yanked me to the side of the corridor. The other students jostled past us on their way to the dining hall. Trumbull stopped a polite distance away. “Get a grip, Walk-In,” Bex said. “You kissed Jeremy exactly
once
. Nobody saw. Neither of you told anyone. He doesn't even go to this school anymore. That's not a close call.”

“But he
could
tell someone. Any time he wanted. And it's not necessarily true that nobody saw. Remember?” I pointed at a security camera sliding by above us.

“So you thought maybe you saw a camera.” Bex shook her head. “Stop being paranoid. It's unattractive. Not even your nice butt can make up for that.” She seized my arm again and pulled me back into the stream of traffic.

Nico was waiting for us next to the dining hall entrance. I reached into my blazer and gave Gremlin's fur a quick good-luck rub.

“Congratulations,” Bex said, knocking him on the arm with her fist. “Miss Remnant's going to make you a star. Just be warned: she forces her actors to wear period costumes. In other words, tights.”