Within a few minutes, a police cruiser rolled into the parking lot. A huge officer cracked open one of the discarded beers and guzzled it down.
Stanley drove his finger hard into the window.
“Despicable.”
The big man looked up, scowling.
Stanley’s heart froze.
The man smashed the bottle against the ground, crossing the empty road toward the condo.
Stanley pulled out two cigarettes. “Oh, my God,” he said to himself. He stepped backward, stumbling over a chair and face-planting on the carpet as he tried to break his fall. Looking around frantically, he lit one of the now-crooked cigarettes and took a deep drag. His mind raced thinking about what weapon to grab, where to hide — as if he had forgotten about his secret entrance to the condo below or the dull voice telling him the officer wasn’t out to get him. That voice was crushed by the main condo door slamming shut. The condo shook, and the footsteps from the stairwell reverberated through the hall.
“Leticia, make him stop. Make him stop.” Stanley’s legs were barely working. He didn’t understand why he wasn’t escaping below.
“Command not understood. Analyzing.” He hadn’t expected his AI to do anything productive — not without being more explicit — but he was so scatterbrained, he could barely function.
The footfalls intensified like earthquakes before a volcanic eruption. Stanley focused, summoning his tremendous brainpower to think of a way to make the big, bad man go away. Scenarios flashed through his mind, but none of them were realistic. Like some caveman, he reached for the hardest object he could find — a pestle — and guarded the door. His body was shaking; his teeth were chattering.
“You like looking out the window, don’t you, Daffy Duncan?” boomed the man’s deep voice.
The words pissed Stanley off. It wasn’t because he was being made fun of — he was used to that. Stanley was as self-deprecating as they came. What really annoyed him was feeling so helpless. He had created machines that could destroy a small army, algorithms that powered the nation’s transportation, yet he was cowering behind a door with a pestle. And it wasn’t even a big pestle.
“Why don’t you open the door up so I can see that pretty face of yours?”
“I built the wall, but I made it four feet instead of three.” The words came out of Stanley before he could register what was happening.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Stanley paused. He wasn’t crazy; he was using a hypnosis technique that he had read about years ago. “The animals all respected it except for that German Shepherd — what was his name?”
The man’s radio transponder blared out. He swore and said, “You saw nothing.” The seismic assault faded in the distance.
With his back against the front door, Stanley listened to the officer’s retreat. He scurried over to the window and peeked out. The officer jogged to his car. Standing next to the door, he hesitated ever so shortly, glancing down at the prone man. For a second, Stanley thought that the officer was feeling sympathy. When the officer bolted toward the man, Stanley suddenly feared an attack. Finally, he realized, as the officer guzzled down another beer, that both of his assumptions were wrong. The officer tossed the man into the back seat. The screeching of the car as it shot out of the parking lot jolted Stanley back from the window. The pronounced beating of his heart continued for a long while.
Stanley wondered if Leticia had somehow intervened, leading the officer away. He had updated his household AI with the prototype code he was going to use for the cyborg, but without the synthetic-data-production capabilities of the dual-brain system, its functionality was extremely limited. The software would freeze, never converging on a result. It had to be a coincidence. “Leticia, what action was taken from the last command?”
“Memory overload. Core dumped.”
Stanley sighed. He noticed something outside the window and rushed over. A familiar family of four were walking down the street, brimming with happiness. Stanley knew the times they passed by his complex by heart, but, with all the excitement, he had almost forgotten to watch for them. The playful children stopped every now and then to clump together snow, toss snowballs, make frozen sculptures, and create other snow-filled bits of mischief. The parents stood by, watching. Not patiently — that word didn’t apply. They weren’t waiting; they were living.
Stanley was done waiting.
The light shifted; his eyes refocused. From the window, his own terrible image emerged. Half his face looked like it had been plastered together with crudely cut pieces of leather. He was blind in one eye, which was half covered by his drooping brow. Stanley had refused to get it replaced with a modern cybernetic enhancement, which would have restored his vision to normal — he did not deserve it.
This gruesome face was the price he paid for what he had done. His unforgivable failures. Regrets haunted him; calculations spun relentlessly through his mind. It had been a laboratory experiment gone horribly wrong. While he had survived, his student did not. Stanley’s scars, nightmares, and isolation were the cross he had to bear.
His finger streaked down the cold, moist window. Vibrations shook his body, shattering his thoughts. The family of four were gone, and all that was left of their presence were the barely perceptible tracks in the snow. The footprints slowly filled with fluffy snowflakes, quickly disappearing like all the little joys the world had ever given him, like the brief months of being engaged to one of the most beautiful and intelligent women he had ever met — before the accident.
Sucking in a half-dozen cigarettes, hours of eternity passed before a small blip showed up on the GPS map, indicating that the flight had landed safely at Logan Airport, thirty-seven minutes away.
