Crux

58 ALONE TOGETHER

Tuesday October 30th

The bad men came for Bobby two days after Alfonso and he knew that if he let them take him away they’d take the Nexus from his head and he’d be no one he’d be dead he wouldn’t be a person anymore, so Bobby tried to KICK the bad men and BITE them and SCRATCH them, but they were too strong and one of the men slapped him in the head and it HURT and then they dragged him out, through two doors into the special testing room.

The door closed behind Bobby and then his friends were gone. They were gone from his head. He couldn’t feel them at all. The bad men put Bobby in a chair and they strapped his hands down to the arms of the chair which they’d never done before and which scared him and he knew this was it, they were going to push the Nexus out of his head like they had to Alfonso and things would be like they were before, before his daddy Derik had given Bobby Nexus and given himself Nexus and then Bobby could feel his daddy for the first time and know that he was a PERSON – a person like Bobby and not like all the other fake people who didn’t have anything in their heads at all. And since that day Bobby hadn’t been so alone. He could feel people now, his daddy and then the boys here Tim and Alfonso and Jason and Tyrone and the other boys, and for the first time he had real FRIENDS even if they were in a bad place; he had other boys he could feel and understand and who could feel him and understand him and now he was crying and crying – and he knew that only little boys cried only babies cried and he was twelve and he wasn’t supposed to cry – but he knew what was going to happen, they were going to make him like Alfonso and Alfonso was all alone now and Alfonso just cried, and Alfonso MIGHT AS WELL BE DEAD because he’d never feel anyone again and no one would ever feel him and he was just empty like all the other STUPID PEOPLE who didn’t have Nexus and weren’t really people at all.

They lowered something metal onto Bobby’s head in the chair, and he cried and asked them please please please let me go please I need it to feel other people, please I need it to be real, please I need it to have friends please please please don’t be mean, don’t make me stop being real I’ll take a test, I’ll learn Spanish I’ll learn French I’ll do TRIGONOMETRY I’ll do anything, please please please he cried and cried and cried.

Rangan felt the chaos as the orderlies took Bobby from the room next door, and he knew what it meant. He was untied again, uncuffed from the gurney. He sat in the corner, head down, in defeat. The ERD didn’t have the real back doors. But that was academic. Eventually they’d succeed in reverse-engineering the code. It would be difficult, with the passcodes buried among hundreds of millions of parameters of the neural nets, among blocks of synaptic weights and neural interconnectivity graphs that looked like so much random numerical garbage, that would mask the passcodes for quite a long time. Deciphering that would be a harder problem than building Nexus 5 in the first place. But the ERD had resources. Sooner or later, after months or years, they’d crack it.

And even if they didn’t? They still had the guns. They could still arrest kids like Bobby, take them away from their parents, kill their parents. They’d found a way to force Nexus out of Alfonso’s brain. And now they’d do to the same to Bobby. They’d cripple a little boy because it didn’t fit their ideology.

Rangan shook his head. Tyrone came and lay down in Bobby’s bunk, reached out to Rangan, and Rangan did his best to send soothing thoughts, to try to calm the boys down, even when what he felt inside was despair.

Bobby cried and begged and then one of the men spoke to him.

“Bobby, that’s your name, right? Bobby, we’re not going to hurt you. We’re trying to help you, son.”

Bobby stared at the man. He was old and had a mustache and he was smiling like the teachers told Bobby to do to show that he was nice but there was nobody there in the man’s head and he had Bobby tied down to a chair with something on his head so he definitely wasn’t very nice at all.

“Bobby, you know how to run Nexus commands, don’t you?”

And even though the man wasn’t nice, Bobby nodded his head because there was always the chance that he was wrong and that they weren’t going to push the Nexus out of him – and maybe if he was good and did what they wanted they’d let him go back to the other boys and still have Nexus and still be a person and still have friends and…

“We need you to run a command, son. There in your Nexus. On the screen inside your head. OK?”

Bobby nodded again and this wasn’t so bad if they just wanted him to run some sort of command, which meant running some sort of program or executing some sort of script or changing some configuration and Bobby understood how Nexus was kind of a computer in his head because he’d learned about it from Rangan, and he understood about computers because they made sense they made way more sense than people especially the fake people that…

“The command is Nexus Purge,” the man said. “It’ll make you feel better.” And then the man started to spell out “Nexus” and “purge” for Bobby, like Bobby was an idiot – but Bobby wasn’t listening because he understood computers and he had a good vocabulary, and he knew what Nexus was from Rangan and he knew what purge meant and sometimes it meant something about your body like if you pooped or threw up a whole lot, but now it meant the other kind, to rid, clear, or free, and so the old man with the mustache was telling him to rid, clear, or free Nexus and Bobby didn’t want to do that at all, and they were trying to trick him and that made him mad.

“NO!” he yelled. “I need Nexus I need Nexus please please please.”

“Son,” the man said, “This won’t hurt your Nexus. It’s just gonna fix some problems and make you feel better.”

And he was lying to Bobby and treating Bobby like he was stupid that made him even more mad and so he yelled at the man “I’M AUTISTIC – NOT STUPID!” and he kept yelling it and kept yelling it, and the man shook his head and nodded at someone else, and then something hit Bobby’s head hard, something different like noise, like static, like ALL THE STATIC IN THE WORLD and he saw static and he heard static and he tasted static and he felt static and he smelled static and it was SO LOUD he couldn’t think, couldn’t think, and it HURT it HURT it HURT and he SCREAMED at them…

And then it stopped.

Bobby was crying when it ended, crying and crying and crying, and he thought maybe he’d peed himself, but he wasn’t sure because everything was so confused and he couldn’t tell what was happening anymore and then the man spoke again.

“Son, you’re sick. What you just felt… that was you being sick. We want to help you. We want to make that go away. Just run the command. Nexus Purge. And then you’ll feel better.”

And Bobby cried, but he knew the man was lying. He wasn’t sick he hadn’t felt that way because he was sick, he’d felt it because of the metal thing over his head and it was because these men were doing it to him because they were so so so so bad, and he kept crying because he didn’t want to feel that way again, didn’t want it to happen again, but if he PURGED Nexus then it would be even worse and then he thought of something, LOGIC told him something, and suddenly he felt different because he understood, he had an ADVANTAGE like his daddy used to say, because if these men were trying to get him to run Nexus Purge and get rid of his Nexus himself, then maybe that was because THEY COULDN’T DO IT TO HIM!

And then they did the awful static thing to him again and he couldn’t think and his hands were twitching and his feet were twitching and he bit his tongue and nothing worked, and he definitely peed himself this time and maybe pooped himself and everything hurt so bad and everything was so confusing and when it was over he was crying again – but he remembered he remembered what he’d figured out and when the man said, “Son, please, you have to run Nexus Purge! You have to help yourself or you’ll keep getting sick!” then Bobby just looked at the man and he was still crying, but he yelled at the man, “YOU CAN’T MAKE ME! YOU CAN’T MAKE ME! YOU CAN’T MAKE ME!”

And he kept yelling it, every chance he could, in between the times they hurt him.

Rangan sat slumped in the corner, trying to find some way to keep hope, to keep the boys hopeful, even when they all seemed doomed.

And then a ripple went through the boys. Something shocked them. Something spread out through them, and into Rangan.

Bobby. Bobby.

Rangan could feel the boy’s mind, reflected through Pedro’s. Bobby was back. He felt exhausted, stunned, drained. But he was there. His mind was there. Somehow he’d beaten them.

The other boys led Bobby in to the night room, and onto his bunk, and Bobby reached out for Rangan, and Rangan put his mental arms around the boy, and pulled Bobby in close, and wept in relief.