Rash (9 page)

But all I could see was Karlohs’s minky dog-anus face.

It’s not worth it. Turn and walk away.

The cowboy hat made him look even more disgusting than usual.

“Walk away,” I said. I said it out loud. A woman looked at me, startled. She must have seen something she didn’t like in my face, because she moved quickly away.

I could feel the Levulor tugging on the reins of my brain.

“Walk away,” I said again, but my body propelled me
toward Maddy and Karlohs. My mind struggled to catch up. Life is about standing up for yourself. It’s about not being afraid of confrontation. Got an issue? Deal with it. Self-control? No problem. It wasn’t like I was going to physically attack him. I could be cool.

The next moment I was standing right in front of them, cold as ice.

“Bo!” Maddy said. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you,” I said, my voice calm and reasonable. “What are you doing?”

“We’re shopping for hats.”

“Really?” I looked up at their towering hologrammatic headwear. “Is that what that is? I thought you were being attacked by a raccoon.”

“You don’t have to be mean about it.”

“I’m not being
mean
,” I said. Somehow it came out sounding sarcastic and mean.

“How come they let you out, Marsten?” said Karlohs. “Aren’t you supposed to be a danger to society?”

I looked straight into his minky little eyes for the first time. His rash was still faintly visible. “My sentence was suspended. Not that it’s any of your concern.”

“That’s wonderful, Bo!” Maddy said. “I was so worried about you. We were afraid you’d be sent away.”

“We thought you’d be on some prison farm by now,” Karlohs said.

“Prison? Why? Because you used the wrong moisturizer?”

Maddy’s brow crinkled. “Moisturizer? I don’t understand. . . .”

“He used some sort of face cream that made his face
break out,” I said. “That’s what started the whole rash thing.”

“Is that true?” she asked Karlohs.

Karlohs smirked and shrugged and rolled his eyes up. He thought it was
funny
.

My belly began to burn, a little hot spot just above my navel. At that moment I wanted more than anything to drive my fist into his smile, right through his face and into his brain. It wasn’t easy to hold it back, but I did. The Levulor helped a little. I thought about my brother, Sam, patching roads in Nebraska. I thought about that orange-lipped judge, and my mother, and how I had to go another three years without a violation. I clamped my jaw shut and buried my balled fists in my pockets and looked away. I would not let Karlohs bait me.

Maddy said, “Did you use your mother’s rosemary moisturizer again, Karlohs?”

“I might have.”

“But . . . you
know
you’re allergic to rosemary! You break out in an instant! Why would you do such a thing?”

Why? Maddy’s words echoed and spun in my mind. Karlohs was allergic to rosemary—and he knew it? And how did Maddy know
that
? How much time had she been spending with him? Allergic to rosemary? If he knew he was allergic to rosemary, why would he apply rosemary face cream? I looked again at Karlohs’s smirking face. Suspicion became certainty.

“You did it on purpose,” I said, the hot spot in my gut growing.

Karlohs grinned at me. I had a furnace roaring behind
my rib cage. My fists were so tight they felt like steel clubs at the ends of my arms. I held it all in, thinking about my father beheading shrimp for three years. My brother patching tarmac.

My mouth said, “You smeared that stuff on your face just to get me in trouble.”

“Did I?” Karlohs said, raising his eyebrows.

Maybe it was my destiny to follow in my father’s footsteps. Maybe there was nothing I could do about it. Maybe it would be worth it.

Maddy stepped between us. “Cut it out, you guys.”

The locks and harnesses and chains of self-control snapped, one after another, like Frankenstein’s monster breaking loose from his bonds. Karlohs saw it happening. His eyes widened and his smirking mouth went round like a dog-anus farting, and the fireball inside me blew past the velvet chains of Levulor. I was free.

I swept Maddy aside and swung my right fist up and forward with all my strength. Karlohs saw it coming; he jerked his head back and my knuckles brushed the side of his jaw. I heard screams. I stepped into him and swung again, but he deflected the blow with his hands. More screams and shouts, muffled by the sound of my own ragged breathing and my thumping pulse. I caught a glimpse of Maddy staring at me, a look of horror on her doll-like features. I moved in on Karlohs and brought my fist back, determined to bury it in his face.

The stun dart from the ASP unit drilled into the back of my neck: a sharp prick becoming a spinning knot of numbness. My hands fell to my sides and opened, weighing a thousand pounds each. Karlohs’s face receded,
growing smaller. I turned slowly on my heel and Maddy’s face oozed into view, huge and soft and wide-eyed.

“Maddy,” I said, my voice barbaric and raw.

She was backing up, eyes wide with fear. Fear of me.

“Maaaaddddeeee!” My voice was a distant bubbling howl, a siren heard through rushing water. The whirlpool at the base of my skull was sucking me in. It grabbed me and spun me, and the world went away.

Gramps insisted
that we consult a real lawyer. He and my mother had put up all their
V
-bucks to bail me out, so he sold his vintage DVD collection to pay for a visit to a lawyer. We drove our suv downtown to the offices of Smirch, Spector, and Krebs. Gramps used his
V
-buck card to open the door. The initial consultation fee—
V
$19,995—was instantly deducted from his account. I figured that pretty much wiped out his profits from the DVDs. We were escorted down the hall to the office of Adrian Smirch.

Smirch was supposed to be a very good lawyer. One thing for sure—he was highly efficient. It took him only three minutes to review my file. He looked up from his WindO with a broad smile and said he could get me off with a three-month sentence.

“Three months isn’t so bad,” I said.

“How much?” Gramps asked.

“I’ll have my associates work up a quote,” Smirch said.

All the way home Gramps grumbled about the cost of the consultation. “Five lousy minutes for twenty grand. It’s obscene!”

When we got home, the quote from Smirch, Spector,
and Krebs was waiting for us on the kitchen WindO:
V
$1,750,000.

“That’s a lot of
V
-bucks,” I said.

“Too goddamn many,” said Gramps, cracking open a beer. “I’m sorry, Bo. Back in my day you could hire one of these shysters for a couple hundred grand. It looks like you’re on your own.”

“We could take out a loan against the house,” my mother said.

“Even then,” Gramps said, “we couldn’t afford it.”

I spent the next three days at home plunging around on the web looking for things to take my mind off my approaching court date. It was hard to focus on my schoolwork, since I probably wouldn’t be around to graduate. But I did spend quite a bit of time working with Bork. I explained my situation to him in excruciating detail. The concepts of jealousy, fear, and anger made his irises spin. Based on the length of time he spent processing, the concept of lying was even more puzzling.

“Do you mean your human Karlohs applied a damaging compound to his epidermis, and then provided incorrect data regarding the resulting inflammation?” Bork asked.

“Yes. He lied.”

“He made a mistake.”

“No. He lied. Intentionally.”

“Then you are mistaken.”

“I am not mistaken.”

“You are computing from corrupted data,” Bork said. “You must therefore be incorrect in your conclusions.”

“No. That is wrong.”

“I disagree.”

“Bork, I am giving you new programming. Are you ready?”

“Yes, Bo.”

“Program: Everything that I tell you is true.”

“Accepted.”

“Program: Sometimes I am mistaken.”

“Accepted.”

“Program: Just because I am mistaken does not mean that I am wrong.”

“Wrong as in ethics or wrong as in contrary to observable fact?”

“Both.”

“Accepted.”

“Program: Sometimes I lie to you.”

“Accepted.”

“Program: I love you.”

“Accepted.”

“Program: I hate you.”

“Accepted.”

“End programming.”

I watched his irises spin. Was it possible to drive an AI program insane? After a few minutes I logged off, leaving Bork adrift in c-space, thinking impossible thoughts.

The next morning I logged on and found Bork right where I had left him, spinning away. His avatar had corrupted—he was getting fuzzy around the edges and his nose ring had melted. Should I rescue him? I decided to let him work out his problems for himself. The crash-or-burn school of AI development. He would either fly apart
into random bits of data or transmogrify into some new version of himself.

Later that afternoon Mom and Gramps and I drove back down to the courthouse. The plan was simple. Since I couldn’t afford a lawyer, I once again threw myself on the mercy of the FDHHSS court.

I didn’t expect anyone other than the judge to be there, but I was wrong. They had assembled several witnesses, including Mr. Lipkin, riding high in his Roland Survivor, and Maddy Wilson. And, sitting next to her, Karlohs Mink. I had to listen as each of them yammered on and on about my so-called violent history. The judge—a kindly-looking man with white hair—looked both shocked and sympathetic as Maddy told the court about the bee-sting incident, and how I’d said I wanted to smash Karlohs’s face in, and what had happened at the mall.

Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Nobody got hurt,” I said.

Everyone turned to look at me.

“I didn’t actually
hurt
anybody,” I said, in case they didn’t get it the first time.

The judge cleared his throat. “Mr. Marsten, you will have your opportunity to address the court in due course.”

“But everybody’s making it sound like I’m this crazed animal. It wasn’t like that. And nobody got hurt! Nothing
happened
.”

“One more word and you will be removed from the courtroom,” said the judge.

So I had to sit and listen to Maddy, and then Karlohs,
who made me sound even worse than Maddy had. After they had finished dragging my name through the mud, the judge called me forward and let me speak.

I told him everything. I told him about how Karlohs had started the whole thing by intentionally giving himself a rash, and how I’d accidentally forgotten to take my Levulor a couple of times, and how Karlohs had deliberately tried to provoke me, and how it was just one time—one time!—that I’d actually tried to hit him and my fist had only grazed his jaw, and you could see just by looking at his smirking minky face that I hadn’t hurt him.

And all the time I was talking, Karlohs was staring at me with this minky sminky smile on his face. It was all I could do to not charge across the courtroom and wipe it off him.

The judge listened carefully to my side of the story, nodding and shaking his head sympathetically at all the right places. Of course, I promised to behave myself until the end of time. He thanked me for being so honest and straightforward. He said he understood how a guy could lose control for one brief moment, and he said he believed me when I said it would never happen again.

When the judge left the courtroom to make his decision, I felt pretty good about the way things had gone. I figured I’d get off with two or three months at a local work camp. No big deal.

After all, nobody got seriously bonked, and nothing, really, had happened.

The pilot
came in low and circled the compound a couple of times to give us all a good look. There wasn’t much to see, and that was the point. Twelve huge flat-topped buildings surrounded by a metal fence, and beyond that only treeless brownish green tundra. Far to the east, maybe twenty or thirty miles away, we could see a small town huddled up against the lead gray waters of Hudson Bay.