Rash (6 page)

“Nothing,” I said.

“Karlohs Mink is in the hospital wing under observation.”

“I heard he had an acne outbreak.”

“
Acne?
I think not, young man. He has some sort of rash, which I understand appeared only moments after you exchanged words with him in your Language Arts class.”

I felt myself relax a notch. If the security mikes had picked up what I’d actually said to Karlohs, Lipkin would’ve quoted it back to me.

“We bumped into each other in the doorway. I just said ‘Excuse me.’”

Lipkin glowered at me. “I think you are mistaken,” he said. “This will be appended to my FDHHSS report, of course.”

“Is Karlohs okay?”

“He is being examined.” Lipkin was almost back to his normal pasty color. “He is a sensitive boy, Mr. Marsten. Unlike some of our students.”

I didn’t say anything to that, and after glaring at me for a few seconds, he let me return to class. But I knew there would be more to come.

“Hello, Bo Marsten. How are you feeling?”

“Not great. What’s new, Borkmeister?”

Bork’s face went blank as he thought about that. I used the time to peek into the next cubicle to see how my neighbor was doing.

Keesha White’s AI image looked like a straight-haired, thinner version of herself. Most students do not create cartoon monkeys. Instead they make an idealized self-portrait of themselves. That’s supposed to make it easier to create a bond with the AI personality. I tried it back at the beginning of the semester, but it was too creepy talking to myself, so I changed my avatar into a beanie-wearing monkey.

“Hello, Keesha White. How are you feeling?” I asked, testing her for human intelligence.

“I’m fine,” said Keesha and Keesha
²
, their voices almost indistinguishable.

“Did you hear about Karlohs?”

“I heard he got some kind of rash,” said Keesha.

“Who is Karlohs?” asked Keesha
²
.

“Karlohs is a friend of ours,” Keesha explained to Keesha
²
.

“Your AI sounds good,” I said.

“Thank you,” Keesha said.

“Thank you,” said Keesha
²
.

“My little guy isn’t doing so good.”

“That’s because you made him into a monkey.”

“You think that’s it?”

“Mr. Hale says the overall appearance of our avatars is important. If your avatar doesn’t look intelligent, you won’t be able to take it seriously. You have to believe in your AI.”

“I do believe in him. I believe he’s a monkey.”

“Um, you better get back to him,” said Keesha. “We’re not supposed to contaminate each other’s intelligences.”

Maybe she was right. Maybe the monkey image I’d given Bork was making it difficult for him to take himself seriously. With these AI programs you never know. So I accessed the student database, pulled up some images, and began the virtual cosmetic surgery.

Later that day—it was in Ms. Martinez’s USSA History class—I noticed that the desk to my left was empty, as was the desk in front of me. I turned around. The desk behind me was also vacant. The only person sitting close to me was Melodia Fairweather, on my right. This was quite odd, as nearly every other desk in the hall was occupied. It was almost as though people were avoiding me.

“Looks like nobody wants to sit with us,” I said to Melodia.

“They’re just being stupid,” she said.

Matt Gelman sat two desks to my left. I tried to catch his eye, but he seemed abnormally interested in what Ms. Martinez was saying about the Soft Revolt of 2039, when millions of prison farmworkers had deliberately slowed
production, leading to a nationwide shortage of fresh seafood and vegetables. I felt in my pockets for something to throw at Gelman. All I came up with was a ball of lint, so I pulled a button off my shirt, took careful aim, and tossed it at him.

It hit him right on the cheek. Startled, he looked over at me.

What?
he mouthed.

I pointed at the empty desks surrounding me and raised my eyebrows.

He keyed something into his WindO and turned it toward me.

RASH

Rash?
I mouthed.

Matt shrugged, looking uncomfortable, and returned his attention to the front of the room. I thought about throwing another button at him but decided I didn’t want to walk around half-dressed for the rest of the day.

Rash? What he meant, I supposed, was that I was the cause of Karlohs’s rash. I was stewing over the ridiculousness of it all when I heard a gasp. Everybody was looking at Melodia Fairweather. It wasn’t hard to see why.

Her face was a constellation of red blotches.

It was
a replay of first period. Everybody backed away, Ms. Martinez called the SS&H office, and poor Melodia sat there with her hands groping her face and saying, “What? What is it? Why are you
looking
at me?”

They were all edging away from me, too.

“Hey, Ben,” I said to Ben Weisert, who was closest to me. “Am I blotchy too?”

He shook his head.

I moved toward him.

“Don’t let him touch you!” someone shouted.

At that moment the door opened. Two masked medtechs pushed through the crowd. Scrambling to get out of their way, I bumped up against Ben and a couple of other kids. Ben shoved me away, which really surprised me. Ben was a quiet kid, not a guy you’d expect to commit a physical assault.

The medtechs pulled an antimicrobial envelope over Melodia’s head, and escorted her out of the classroom. For several seconds everyone stood frozen in silence, then Ms. Martinez clapped her hands.

“Back to your seats, people.”

We all drifted back to our places.

Well, not all of us. I went back to my desk near the front of the room, but the desks around me remained vacant. Several students stood pressed against the far wall, staring at me.

“What’s wrong?” I said to them. “Is my face okay?” I asked, looking at Ms. Martinez.

She nodded, her brow furrowed.

“How come everybody’s acting so weird?” I asked.

The door opened and another pair of medtechs entered the classroom, heading straight for me.

This time Lipkin didn’t even bother to talk to me. The medtechs just threw me straight into quarantine, where I spent the next two hours and fifty-six minutes. That might not sound like such a long time, but try sitting in a six-by-eight room with nothing but two plastic chairs and a wall clock for company. Three hours is just a skosh shy (as Gramps would say) of eternity. By the time the bull-necked, bearded triage nurse arrived, I was
bored to near incoherence and my bladder was about to explode.

Fortunately for both of us, he let me use the toilet right away. When I’d peed away half my body weight, he led me back to quarantine.

A few minutes later a jolly-looking fellow with red cheeks and thick fingers entered my cell. He sat down and consulted his WindO. “Bo Marsten.” He looked up. His lively rust-colored hair bounced. “So you’re the one who started all this. How are you feeling today?”

“You sound like my virtual monkey,” I said.

His head jerked and his red hair seemed to stand up straighter. “Excuse me?”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“My name is Staples. George Staples. I’m with the Federal Department of Homeland Health, Safety, and Security.” He entered something in his WindO.

“What are you writing?” I asked.

He turned his screen toward me so that I could read what he’d written.

ATTITUDE: Feisty

I noticed then that George Staples wasn’t wearing a mask.

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll give you the dreaded red speckles?” I asked.

“Not really.” He grinned, showing me his small, neatly arranged teeth.

“Is Melodia okay?”

“She’s been sent home, along with seven other
students.” He smiled. “You really started something, Bo.”

“What? I didn’t do anything.”

“Said Typhoid Mary to the judge.”

“Said who?”

“Typhoid Mary. You never heard of her?”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Back in the early nineteen hundreds, Typhoid Mary was a cook who carried the typhoid bacteria in her body. She made dozens of people sick. Some of them died. The health department tried to stop her, but she didn’t believe that she was a carrier. She kept moving from job to job, changing her name, and infecting more people. They finally caught her and put her on an island where she lived out the rest of her life.”

“You think I’m Typhoid Bo?”

Staples laughed. “In a way, yes. Every one of those kids with the rash had some contact with you, Bo. Or at least they were in the same room with you.”

“But I’m not sick.”

“That’s what Typhoid Mary said.” He laughed again. It was getting irritating.

“I don’t see what’s so funny.”

Staples sobered. “I guess it really isn’t very funny,” he said. Then he smiled. More of a smirk. “The fact of the matter is, Bo, that they
think
you did it.”

“Think I did what?”

“They think you made them sick, Bo.”

“Well, they’re wrong.”

“Actually, Bo, they’re right.”

“Do you think you could say one sentence without plugging my name into it?”

“Sure . . . Bo.” He laughed, thinking that he’d made a pretty good joke. I managed to not laugh.

“Sorry . . . ,” he said. I appreciated his restraint—I knew he wanted to add, “Bo.”

“Look, I called Karlohs some names, okay? Guilty as charged. But I didn’t give him that rash.”

Staples shrugged. “You might be right. As a matter of fact, Karlohs’s problem was caused by an allergic reaction to a skin moisturizer he was using.”

“Face cream gave him the rash?”

“Apparently. But the situation got out of hand when you publicly claimed responsibility for Karlohs’s affliction—”

“I was being sarcastic. He accused me of giving him the rash, and I said—”

“I know what you said, Bo. I’ve reviewed the recordings. It doesn’t really matter what your
intent
was. The bottom line is that your actions precipitated a psychogenic reaction in the student body.”

“A what?”

“An emotional response that manifests itself physically, in this case as an epidermal inflammation. In other words their brains made their bodies sick. It’s called MPI. Mass Psychogenic Illness. What they used to call ‘contagious hysteria.’”

“What about Karlohs’s actions? He started it by accusing me. And by using some bad face cream.”

“Karlohs Mink is not without blame, but he had reason to be upset. His face was covered with red blotches.”

I sat and stared, hating Karlohs Mink with every cell of my body. Staples waited me out.

“So now what?” I asked.

Staples was looking at his WindO. “Sam Q. Safety says, ‘If you aren’t part of the solution, you might just be part of the problem,’” he read. He smiled. I didn’t. He frowned and said, “In most cases of MPI—we have several every year—we’ve found it most effective to remove the source of the infection.”

“You take out everybody’s brain?”

“We’ve tried that.” He laughed. “Just kidding. No, there are only two ways to stop something like this. One, we could bring in an intensive program employing biofeedback education, psychopharmaceuticals, and relaxation therapy. Of course, we would have to treat every single student here at Washington.” He grimaced. “Very expensive. Very time consuming. Not practical.”

“What’s number two?”

“We get rid of you.”

One advantage
of home quarantine was that I didn’t have to deal with people like Karlohs Mink or Mr. Lipkin or any of the rest of the hysterical mob. My classes were pretty much the same, except it all came in through my WindO. Sometimes I almost forgot I was sitting in my bedroom staring at a screen.

I decided to try out this concept on the redesigned Bork.

“Hello, Bork,” I said.

“Hello, Bo Marsten,” Bork said. “How are you feeling?”

“I am feeling as though I put a little too much cyan in your hair.”

Bork, now a green-haired grinning troll, took several seconds to reply, his gold irises spinning rapidly.

“Green is my favorite color,” he said.