The kid’s name was Tyler Forbes, and the Dread Army had tracked him down.
Tyler Forbes was a slight, uncoordinated, perpetually winded boy. He didn’t seem to have a passionate desire to play basketball. He looked like he’d rather be anyplace else—like Anime Club, for instance. Daniel remembered seeing Tyler sitting next to Christina Hernandez.
Coach Quinn didn’t seem to know what to do with him. Tyler watched the scrimmage from a rolled-up gym mat and then trooped silently into the locker room to get changed with everybody else.
Guys. Guys. Who am I?
Jared Ianesco, a beefy kid more suited to the football d-line, performed a drooling, stumbling imitation of a physically handicapped person attempting to shoot a basketball. His big doughy body slammed into lockers. He made gawping, desperate faces. Tyler Forbes put on a blank expression and took off his shirt, which Dustin Tenney promptly snatched from his hands.
Do the Tyler!
Dustin and Jared took turns doing an arrhythmic dance with Tyler’s shirt. All fifteen boys in the row of lockers watched with varying levels of glee, or at least fixed grins to their faces, because Dustin and Jared were probably going to make the team, and nobody wanted to be lumped in with a scrub like Tyler Forbes.
In the movie of his life, Daniel Benson put a stop to the torment. Movie Daniel dealt with the situation in a level-headed way, getting Tyler’s shirt back without starting shit with Dustin and Jared, which would only leave Tyler feeling more exposed and singled out. Movie Daniel made peace with intelligence and maturity.
The Dread Army set fire to that script.
See Daniel laugh along with everyone else.
See Tyler catch Daniel’s eye and wait for that little spark of recognition.
See Daniel refuse to look in Tyler’s direction as the balled-up shirt sails into the big plastic garbage can.
See the Kevins slap Daniel on the back as they pass beneath the faded paint on the cinder-block walls: NEVER QUIT.
Daniel opened his eyes to flood the terrible awareness
of who he really was, deep down, with the soothing glow of the shroud’s inner skin. He couldn’t really blame Melissa for breaking up with him; he just wondered what had taken her so long.
He opened Epheme.DB837651:Heading into a blizzard tonightxoxoPixieDustxoxo:Haha be carefulDB837651:Wish you were herexoxoPixieDustxoxo:Bad day?DB837651:Pretty shittyxoxoPixieDustxoxo:Stay hydrated
He logged out. The thought of the night to come pinched the base of his spine with cozy heat that crept up to massage his neck.
Otto headed south down a winding backwoods highway where kudzu strangled ancient trees and the Committee to Reelect Jefferson Davis maintained a billboard. Inside the car, Christina was relearning how to exist in close proximity to William Mackler. Sex had altered the transfer of electrons between them. Her hand went to her twisted rib and traced its protrusion.
Across from the dark lump of Daniel’s shroud, she curled her body around her laptop screen. William reclined on the bench next to her, periodically lifting his head to give her the kind of significant looks she used to imagine while she ate Cup Noodles alone in the glow of Kimberly’s monitors. She put her left hand on autopilot so she could touch his leg whenever she caught him moving in her peripheral vision. Melissa sat in the back, staring at her phone, casting Carina Tyler’s breakup album, Never Is Too Soon, to Otto’s speakers.
Christina had been working on a way to probe ARACHNE for two days. At first she’d considered blunt, inelegant solutions akin to denial-of-service attacks, or even malware. But her goal wasn’t to infect the car’s systems, and she wasn’t trying to set a worm free to fuck shit up for the lulz.
The solution was inspired by Otto himself. She didn’t know if he was malfunctioning or acting like a petulant child on purpose, but when Patricia Ming-Waller had offered to have the car taken off the road for diagnostics, Christina began to think about spoofing a technical problem of her own. It had to be something unexpected, so the systems operated by CAN bus couldn’t fix it without escalating it to ARACHNE. But it couldn’t be a catastrophic problem that would require drastic measures. Just an odd little glitch to get ARACHNE to drop its guard and reveal itself.
Now her trap was nearly set. Dierdrax was at the command line interface terminal, accessing CAN bus, installing the payload Christina had prepped.
Carina Tyler’s “Not Tonight” was like a mosquito in her ear. Would it kill Melissa to listen to music that featured actual guitars and drums?
Dierdrax’s fingers went still. Christina took a moment to marvel at her handiwork, and then sent the payload. Immediately she toggled over to the screen where the CAN bus hierarchy was displayed—
And smiled inwardly.
The front left power window was experiencing a sudden problem. Inexplicably, it appeared to be both all the way up and all the way down at the same time. The piece of bulletproof glass was existing in two places at once in defiance of basic laws of windows and physics.
With the seashell engaged, Dierdrax could watch Otto’s systems communicate in real time, monitor changes in the structure of ARACHNE, and create a report. Without knowing exactly what she was looking for, the scope was too vast for Christina to keep her sorry human eyes on. And yet—
“Christina?” Her name sounded different coming out of William’s mouth. She placed her autopilot hand on his shin.
ARACHNE shifted its bulk. All at once Christina was looking through Dierdrax’s eyes down the barrel of an impossible weapon, straight into its vertiginous core. The hunger of a staggering intelligence hit her like the rank breath of an apex predator. She knew right away that she hadn’t tricked the program, it had simply decided to give her a peek for reasons she couldn’t possibly
