Chapter EightThe Back Row

Gideon Abecassis was in his third year at Stanford, and he had spent most of it awake.

His parents lived in Los Angeles in a house with a mezuzah on every door frame and a framed photo of his bar mitzvah in the hall, and they had made it clear, in the loving and immovable way of people who had crossed an ocean for it, that a B was a phone call and a C was a flight home. He had never gotten either. What he had gotten, by way of compensation, was a two bedroom apartment off campus that he paid for with a scholarship and a small business he did not describe to his parents in any detail, a rack of machines in the second bedroom that kept the apartment warm in winter, and a sleep schedule that a doctor would have called a symptom.

He was a good student and a better hacker– one of the better ones anywhere, in the opinion of the four or five people who had watched him work, although he had never done anything with it beyond the occasional favor and a running war of pranks with his friends. He was good natured and a little round in the face, with a beard he trimmed when he remembered to, and he liked people and was liked by them, and he had a habit, which he was aware of, of poking at things to see what they did.

The girl in the back row was something he wanted to poke at.

She sat by the wall in the second to last row of a lecture hall that could seat two hundred and usually seated sixty, and she left a wide gap around herself, and she mumbled. Not constantly, but now and then, under her breath, with her head tilted a little, as though someone very close to her ear were saying something and she were answering. She wore a hoodie, and under the hoodie, visible at the wrists and the collar whenever she moved, was a black mesh with a seam of hard plastic running along the spine. She wore her frames in class. Nobody wore their frames in class.

He had watched her for two weeks before he went and sat down next to her.

She fidgeted in her seat and looked for an escape, and he noticed.

"Hey, I didn't mean to intrude on your, uh, personal space. I just figured, you know, this was where the cool kids hung out," he whispered.

"Uh, okay."

"You're in the game right now, huh?"

"What are you talking about?" She was a terrible liar. He liked that.

"Come on. I know a player when I see one."

"Okay." She let her shoulders down an inch. "You got me."

"Most girls just text their boyfriend, you know."

"How do you know I'm talking to my boyfriend?"

"Come on. I got into Stanford, I'm not a fucking idiot."

"Okay, you got me again." Soph grinned in spite of herself.

"Let me guess your class."

"Don't."

"Rogue. Definitely a rogue. No, wait." He looked at her hands. "Dual class. Rogue wizard."

She stared at him. "How."

"You've got a callus on your thumb from a dagger grip and you've been moving your lips in Latin for two weeks. Also, nobody who's just a rogue would take a class on protein folding. Rogues are lazy."

"My name is Gideon."

"Soph." She shook his hand.

"Are you majoring in AI?"

"Biotech. My boyfriend Atom, it's really his thing. I think it's all really interesting though."

"Oh, cool."

"Hey, what did he just say? I missed it." This was Soph's way of ending the conversation, and he let her, because he'd already gotten what he wanted. The wheels in Gideon's head were turning.

Gideon caught up with Soph as she was leaving class.

"Hey, what are you up to right now?" he asked.

"I don't know, I've got an hour before my next class."

"I was going to meet up with some friends downstairs. You should come hang out."

Soph wavered.

"Come on," Gideon insisted. "It'll be fun."

Soph acquiesced, and followed Gideon down to the basement.

It was a room that had been a lab once and was now something else. Four students sat at the table in the center of the room. On the table were two marionettes, suspended by strings, dancing around each other. They were small, only four or five inches in height, and the strings connected up to a gantry mechanism that dragged them left and right, forward and backward.

Two of the students sat in front of laptops, their fingers dancing in the air. Soph peered over the shoulder of one of the girls in front of her laptop. The screen was all console data, mostly black text with some lines of red. The green light at the top of the laptop indicated that the camera was in use.

"Quit dancing around each other and fight!" shouted one of the observers.

Gears whirred as the marionettes danced back and forth. The girl flicked her wrist and her puppet jumped forward, striking at the other. The boy at the other console flicked to the side, and his puppet dodged.

"Hey, could y'all pause for a second?" Gideon interrupted.

"Aw, but this is the world semi-finals!"

"Shut up, I wanted you all to meet someone."

The puppeteers put their hands down, and the marionettes crumpled. The girl who Soph had been watching turned around and looked at her.

"You're Soph Ehrlich," she said.

Soph was taken aback. "Yeah. Do I know you?"

"Your mother is Maxine Ehrlich?"

"Yeah."

"She's like, my hero. I hear you're pretty good at the game."

"Oh, I'm alright."

"That's Mim," said Gideon. "Don't mind her."

"I'm not going to not mind her," said Mim. "Her mom invented the frames. Do you know how the frames work? I read her paper on the light field stuff in high school and I didn't understand any of it, and I read it again every year and I understand a little more each time."

"She'd like you," Soph said, and found that she meant it.

The boy at the other console was Teo, who had built the gantry and the marionettes and most of the other things in the room that moved. The tall girl by the whiteboard was Priya, who did networks and said very little. The one who had shouted was Wes, who did everything a little and talked about all of it, and who was already telling Soph about the tournament bracket for the marionettes, which had eleven competitors, all of them in this room or adjacent to it.

"What's the game?" Soph asked.

"Hand tracking off the webcam, mapped to the puppets. It's a fighting game," said Teo. "Except it's real, so when you lose an arm you actually lose an arm."

"He hot glues them back on," said Wes.

"I hot glue them back on."

"Do you want to try?" said Mim.

Soph looked at the puppet on the strings, and then at the boy at her shoulder, whom none of them could see, who was standing with his hands in his pockets grinning at all of it.

"Go on," said Atom, in her ear. "Kick her ass."

She didn't. She lost an arm in forty seconds. But she came back the next day, and the day after that.

Gideon's apartment was a fifteen minute walk from campus, above a laundromat, and it was a mess in the particular way of a place where someone was always in the middle of something. The living room had a couch, a projector, a table covered in boards and wire, and a rack of servers in a closet with the door propped open for air. He had wired the whole place himself– the lights, the locks, the thermostat, the speakers, and a camera in the hall that he swore was only for packages. He had not named it. Everyone he knew who had a smart house had named it something, and he thought that was creepy, so his just listened.

Soph came over for the first time in October, with Mim and Wes and a bag of terrible burritos, and she sat on the arm of the couch with her frames on and her hood up and laughed at Wes, and she was, Gideon thought, easier than she had been in September. She still mumbled. He had stopped asking what to.

Then, in November, sitting on his floor with a laptop, she said, "There's something on your shoulder."

"What?"

"A bird. There's a bird on your shoulder."

He looked. Nothing. Then he put his own frames on, and there was a bird, a small brown hawk with pale eyes, sitting on his shoulder and looking at him with what he could only describe as an expression.

"What the hell is that?"

"That's Atom," said Soph. "He's my familiar."

"Your boyfriend is a bird."

"He's a mentalist. He's bound to me. He's just being a bird right now because he thinks it's funny."

"It's very funny," said the bird, in a boy's voice, and Gideon nearly dropped the laptop.

"You've got a Link. She's got a Link? Those are like, four grand."

"He's got a Link. I've just got frames."

"Where is he?"

"At home. He doesn't get out much."

The bird hopped from Gideon's shoulder to the table, walked across the keyboard, which did nothing, and looked up at him. "Hey. Soph says you're good."

"I'm okay."

"She says you're better than okay."

"She's very kind." He looked at Soph. "Why does he play The World, though? I mean, no offense. It's a game about being outside. Being a ghost in it seems like the worst possible way to play."

"He likes being with me," said Soph.

"Yeah," said Gideon, and let it go, and stored it away. Because he had Googled her, of course. He had Googled her on the first day, before he ever sat down, and he knew about her mother, and he knew about Richard Lee's son, and he knew that Richard Lee's son had been in a car accident nine months ago, and that there had been one small article about it and then nothing. He knew what a long distance relationship looked like, and he thought that was what he was looking at: a boy in a chair somewhere with a helmet on and a bad leg or a bad back, and a girl who wore her frames to class so she wouldn't have to be there without him. He thought it was sweet, and a little sad, and he was not far wrong.

"Can I ask you something?" he said, later, when it was just the two of them and the bird.

"Sure."

"What do they do at your mom's lab?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, the Link, right, that came out of The Lab. That's what everybody says. And there's a guy I know, he graduated two years ago and got a job at Solenoid, and he says there's a project in there nobody talks about. Like, a locked floor. He says the rumor is that it's AI. Actual AI. Something that acts like a person."

The bird had stopped moving.

"I don't know anything about a locked floor," said Soph.

"Come on."

"I'm serious. I'm the daughter. They don't tell the daughter."

"They tell the daughter everything. The daughter's wearing a Lab suit under a hoodie."

"The daughter's wearing a retail suit. It's last year's Second Skin. You can buy it."

"It has a spine."

"They all have a spine."

He watched her decline to lie, and grinned.

"Okay," he said. "It's a game, then."

"What is?"

"You know something. I want to know it. I'm going to find out and you're going to try to stop me. That's a game."

"That's a really bad game."

"I'm very good at it."

"He is," said the bird. "He's going to be very annoying."

"Thank you," said Gideon.

He had no way of knowing that the answer to his question was standing on his table with feathers on.

The game got out of hand quickly, because both of them were good at it and neither of them could leave anything alone.

It started with an email. Gideon sent Soph a photo of her own back, bare, from the shoulder blades to the waist, taken in a mirror in her bedroom two summers before. The subject line read "don't worry, it's not cAncerous." She sat and looked at it for a full minute with her face hot. It had been on her phone, and it had never been anywhere but her phone. She thanked God she hadn't taken any more revealing photos, and she stopped taking selfies altogether after that.

She fired back the next day with an email containing a small, curated selection of links from his browser history, going back three months, entitled "hentai? really dude?"

He sent her a calendar invite for a dentist appointment she had not made and could not cancel. She sent his mother a very polite email from his account about how much he was enjoying his Talmud study group, and he got a phone call that lasted forty minutes.

Atom's pranks were more insidious, and he never announced them. After a stunt by Gideon involving a doctored video of Soph on the arm of an enormous Nordic warrior type at a tournament she had never attended, Gideon found that he couldn't log into The Hub for a full day. The error message read, "Error: Can't log in. Reason: you are an asshole."

"How did he do that?" Gideon said, on the phone, sounding genuinely delighted. "Soph. How did he do that. That's a server side message. That's not client side. He's inside the Hub."

"I don't know," said Soph, and she didn't.

"He's inside the Hub. Your boyfriend is a bird and he's inside the Hub."

"Are you going to keep saying that?"

"Yes. I'm going to say it at your wedding."

She learned from him, though not the coding– she had never needed to be taught how to code. It was his strange approach to problems, sideways and with a kind of glee, treating a locked door as a compliment. It was his insatiable curiosity, which did not stop when it should have, and his taste for the small misadventure. She learned to talk her way past a receptionist. She learned to read a person's password off the way their hands moved. She learned that the weakest point in any system was a human being who wanted to be helpful.

Atom learned faster. By November he was better than Gideon at nearly everything Gideon could do. Gideon wasn't a jealous person, but he noticed. Atom didn't sleep much any more. He said it was the Link. Soph didn't correct him.