Tesla blushed and smiled shyly.
‘I think you are being too kind, Margaret. I’m sure I wouldn’t stand out.’
‘Don’t be so modest, Tesla! You’re a real smart kid. You’d do great in America.’
‘What would I do there if I had free time to myself?’
‘A lot of stuff! Why, you’d have a bunch of free time!’
‘How much is “a bunch”?’
Margaret chuckled gently at this.
‘Well I’d guess at least a good few hours a day. And weekends you’d have most of your time free, aside from track meets and sports matches and such. I’d think that on weekends you’d be learning to drive, and you might play video games, watch movies, hang out with your friends at the mall, you know, those kinda things.’
‘What’s “video games”? What’s a “mall”?’
Margaret smiled warmly and sympathetically, the creases around her eyes deepening, and she cocked her head to the side.
‘You know a lot of academic stuff, young man, but there seems to be a lot about real life that your General hasn’t taught you. Okay, you know what a television is, right?’
Tesla nodded.
‘We have one in the school here, yes, but it’s just for learning about things. But people in other places use them for entertainment, don’t they?’
‘Yeah! And for video games, which I think are terrible by the way. Ugh, but all the kids love ‘em. And in case you were wondering, a video game is a game that you play on a television.’
Tesla looked rather confused.
‘I don’t understand how that can be. What kind of a game could people play on a television? You have to guess what image will be shown next?’
Margaret laughed loudly, but without judgment or mockery.
‘No silly! Look, there’s this virtual world, it’s created on a computer. A game console, that’s like another kinda computer, is hooked up to the TV, and then you use this thing, this controller device, to move a character in this virtual world.’
Tesla leaned back, staring at Margaret with a sceptically raised eyebrow, and folded his arms across his chest.
‘Why wouldn’t I just do something in the real world instead? And this world that you’re talking about, it’s created by someone else. So, everything is made up by them, and, well, it’s their vision, not yours. When I read stories, you know, when I read novels, I create my own vision of what the novel’s world is like. I think that’s more entertaining than being in someone else’s world with everything, uh, with everything already laid out for you.’
Margaret smiled and leaned forward, cupping her chin in her hands and putting her elbows on the table to support her head.
‘I think you’d change your mind pretty quick if you actually tried a video game out. I don’t know of a single kid who can resist those damn things, you know! I agree with you about reading though; I sure wish more people did it these days instead of watching TV and playing video games, and staring for hours at their phones.’
Tesla nodded, although the look on his face told Margaret that he remained unconvinced.
‘Tell me a bit more about what my life might be like,’ he said after eating a bit more of his meal.
‘Like I said, you’d probably spend a lot of time with your friends at the mall. Oh yeah, I didn’t explain what that was. Well a mall is this place, see, it’s got a whole bunch of stores that sell a whole lotta stuff. Anything you might want, from clothes to toys to food to toys and games, sporting goods, heck, you name it, a mall’s probably got it.’
Tesla looked confused.
‘Why would my friends and I “hang out” there? Would we really be buying that many things all the time? That sounds terribly wasteful, and well, kind of sad too.’
‘Teenagers don’t really go there just to buy stuff, Tesla,’ Margaret explained. ‘There are plenty of other things to do there too, like eat at a fast food place, sit around at a cafe, go to the movies, that kinda thing.’
‘It sounds like it must be very expensive to be a child in America,’ Tesla remarked dryly.
Margaret shrugged. The kid did have a point there.
‘I guess it can be, depending on how you do stuff. But you’d have freedom, Tesla, true freedom.’
‘Freedom?’
She immediately noticed that a fresh glint of longing had entered the boy’s eyes and realised that she had hit something significant here.
‘Sure! You could do whatever you wanted, whenever you felt like it – within reason of course. You wouldn’t be doing this, at least; serving in an army, taking orders, carrying a gun everywhere. No American kids do that.’
Tesla looked genuinely surprised at this.
‘I wouldn’t?’
‘No sirree, you totally wouldn’t! You’d go to school, and you’d have your friends and family, and you’d be chasing happiness … and finding it, I’ll bet. None of this army, “yes sir no sir” bullcrap, excuse my French. You’d be able to do whatever you wanted with your life, and go wherever you wanted. Anything at all, anywhere at all!’
‘That sounds … why, that sounds quite amazing.’
A glow of quiet wonder seemed to emanate with gentle warmth from the boy’s dark skin.
‘It is, Tesla. You’d fit right in there! If you could, you know, get out of this army, somehow, that is.’
Tesla suddenly looked as if he had become quite uncomfortable, and he squirmed and shifted awkwardly in his seat, looking down at the table and once again avoiding eye contact.
‘This is my life,’ he said flatly, as if repeating oft-rehearsed lines. ‘I owe everything I am to the General, and I would never leave him. Not for anything, ever.’
Margaret knew she had made a breakthrough with this mention of freedom, but she also understood that she was treading on thin ice at the moment. She could work on widening the crack she had opened later; to
