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bookishwenchHere was the Yuletide fic I wrote for 2017.
No copyright infringement is intended, and no profit is made from this work of fanfiction.
Genesis of Eradication
“Christopher Brink?” the teacher called.
“Present,” he replied, speaking as quietly as he could while still being heard by Mrs. Robertson. He slumped down low in his seat, hoping they wouldn’t notice him.
He knew it would do no good, though. They’d spotted him. It was only the first day back from summer vacation, and already he was a dead man.
No sooner had the teacher turned her back to write something on the board than the first spitball hit him, nailing him right in the ear, an impressive achievement, accompanied by guttural laughter from the idiots from last year. Mrs. Robertson turned around at once, wondering what the commotion was, but from previous practice he’d learned not to move. He didn’t even blink, just kept his head down and stared at the American history textbook in front of him, not taking in a single word and letting his eyes glaze over.
He hated history. It was a boring book full of dead people, though he supposed they at least had the advantage over live people in that Ponce de Leon and Abe Lincoln had never given him a wedgie in the middle of the hallway or thrown his backpack into the girls’ bathroom. Supposedly people who didn’t learn from the past were doomed to repeat it, but he didn’t think it was likely he was going to restart World War I by digging up the Archduke Ferdinand and stabbing him again.
As Mrs. Robertson droned on about ancient Egypt, and why exactly a book on American history was starting off there was anyone’s guess, he doodled in the margins of his notebook: dodecahedrons, the chemical formula for rocket fuel, a new computer program that could analyze his sleep patterns and get him to stop feeling groggy when he had to be up at five o’clock every morning, a fairly decent portrait of Bill Gates. Meanwhile, the idiot squad had progressed from spitballs to pencils, bouncing them off his head with practiced ease. They were all jocks, so their hand-eye coordination was excellent. If he weren’t their target, he might even have been mildly impressed by the talent it took to score a bullseye on his skull nine out of ten times.
As it was, he just bit the inside of his cheek and waited, quietly plotting how to get out of the classroom and dart down the hallway before they could catch him. When the bell rang, he wove between the desks with the precision of a perfectly launched pinball, gently and unobtrusively guiding a chair or two with the slightest finger’s touch to block aisles and send them either blundering into the walls or having to take the time to shove things out of their way, probably including people. They always thought of other people as things, stuff to use for their amusement.
By the time they were out the door, Chris was already down the hallway, around a corner, and opening his locker. For once, he’d made a clean getaway. Allowing himself a congratulatory smile, he stuffed his books back into the ridiculously skinny metal box and grabbed his lunch. He hated the cafeteria food, so he always packed his own. Technically the bag of sour cream and onion chips was contraband since the school had declared a ban on junk food. Considering they served worse junk than anything he packed, they were technically breaking their own rule. Only a fool or a freshman would eat those tacos. Even the tomatoes in the salads looked suspiciously radioactive.
As a senior now, he had the privilege of eating outside. The main tables in the courtyard would all be taken by the popular kids, but he didn’t mind. He had his eye on a grassy little spot next to the janitor’s room. It was probably the one place he wouldn’t be bothered. For one thing, it kind of smelled like floor cleaner, so most people stayed away.
He sat down on a dilapidated bench and opened his chips first, then popped open a can of Fresca. Taking a deep breath, he relaxed just enough to vaguely enjoy the kick of sugar and salt in his mouth after the seemingly interminable morning. He let himself smile. Only two more classes to go until he could get out of here. He tore a corner off his balogna sandwich and chewed while he thought about the stupid homework he had to do and the plans he was making for later that night. He was on the edge of a breakthrough in his new algorithms program, and if he could just get the bugs out, everything would be great.
“Christopher Brink?”
Automatically, he scooted away from the voice and held his hands in front of him in a gesture of surrender before he even finished processing that it sounded like an adult, not a kid.
“I apologize,” said the man. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
Chris still regarded him warily. He was wearing a very expensive suit, and there seemed to be something a tad menacing about him even though he couldn’t pinpoint exactly what. Maybe it was just that he was really tall, which made Chris feel like a bug about to be squished. The man’s smile was friendly enough, and his posture was relaxed, but something was still off. Principal Green was standing just in back of him, eyeing the man curiously and with a certain amount of suspicion, but he didn’t seem alarmed.
“Who are you?” Chris asked.
“I’m here to offer you a business opportunity,” he said, extending his hand. “Principal Green has been kind enough to furnish us with an unused classroom where we can talk. Is that acceptable?”
“Possibly,” Chris said. He was still wary but also intrigued. Not a whole lot tended to happen to him, at least not a whole lot of anything other than being beaten up and humiliated by the jocks.
“Would you prefer to have your parents present for this?” the man asked.
“If I have a choice, no,” Chris said, shoving his sandwich back in his bag but deciding to keep munching the chips. Somehow they made him less nervous. Also, he’d found sour cream breath could be a powerful deterrent in an attack.
“I don’t think that’s entirely wise, Chris,” Principal Green interrupted tentatively from behind them.
“Neither is your current extramarital affair with the bank teller at Fifth and Main,” the man said smoothly without turning around or changing his facial expression.
Chris watched as Principal Green swallowed and turned even paler than usual.
“That’s utter nonsense,” he said in what had to be the least convincing tone ever uttered by human vocal cords.
“We know,” the man said. “We also have highly incriminating photographs. Now leave and let me talk to Mr. Brink, please.”
The principal flushed with embarrassment and disappeared, and Chris found himself being escorted by the other man towards the empty geography classroom. The man, to Chris’s surprise, stood outside the door and merely pointed him inside. In fact, he seemed to look suddenly vacant, though he continued smiling calmly.
“You okay?” Chris asked him.
“He’s perfectly fine,” said a woman’s voice from inside the room. She was British by the sound of her.
Chris carefully peered around the door and found her sitting entirely alone at the teacher’s desk. A pot of tea and two cups were set in front of her on a tray, looking almost ridiculously sophisticated, and a second empty chair was pulled up to the desk, facing her. He also noticed she was hot in a refined sort of way, reminding him strongly of a statue of Athena he’d seen once. The woman stood when he entered the room.
“It’s good to meet you, Mr. Brink,” she said warmly with the polished practice of someone who made cordial small talk an integral part of her highly lucrative career.
“Who are you?” he said, feeling like he was asking that question too much today.
“That’s unimportant at the moment,” she said, taking out a file folder and thumbing through it. Chris noticed she had angled it perfectly so he could see his own name on the tab. “What is important is what the corporation I represent can offer you.”
“What corporation is that?”
“That’s also unimportant. Tea?” she asked, lifting the pot. He gave her a suspicious look, and she poured herself a cup as well. “I assure you, we aren’t trying to poison you. That would not be in anyone’s best interests.”
“My father might disagree with you,” he said, taking the cup she offered him. He was fully aware she might have poisoned his cup and not the tea, but to hell with it, he thought. You only live once, and this was at least an interesting day. Also he had already spoken to more people this morning than in the last week, and he rather liked having a modicum of human interaction that didn’t involve people screaming obscenities at him or pelting him with sharp or saliva-covered things.
“Yes,” the woman said, a note of sympathy in her voice, and he couldn’t decide whether it was genuine or a really good counterfeit. “He’s an unpleasant fellow.”
Chris grunted and took a sip of the tea. It was exactly the perfect temperature, not that he was really much for tea. He really was more of a Mountain Dew man himself, but he politely put the cup back in its saucer before stuffing his hand into the chip bag and shoving several chips in his mouth at once.
“Oh, um, want one?” he offered, remembering his manners enough to be polite but not enough to refrain from talking with his mouth full.
“No, thank you,” she declined, taking a sip of tea.
“So what’s the offer from the unnamed corporation you represent?” Chris asked.
“Why have you never skipped a grade at school?” she asked in a non sequiter. “Your records indicate that it was suggested in third, seventh, and tenth grade but refused each time.”
“It wasn’t a good idea,” he said.
“I see. Were your parents concerned about possible social issues for you?” she asked.
Chris took another sip of tea before deciding whether or not to answer her. He had no idea who this woman was, what her company was, or what she was after. There were red flags on top of red flags, and any sensible person would stop right now.
Of course, most sensible people weren’t so lonely that they’d taken to talking to plants while pretending to themselves it was a science experiment.
“My parents never saw the letters from the school,” he said, putting the cup back down a little too forcefully.
“You intercepted them?” she said, less of a question than a statement.
“And burned them,” he said firmly, looking her right in the eye. “It’s bad enough being this short and this brainy. I didn’t need to be Doogie Houser on top of it. I think one of them probably would have killed me.”
“One of whom?” she said, her eyes narrowing slightly.
“Does it matter? The jocks, the popular kids, the bullies, whatever you want to call them, they’re the same everywhere. I didn’t want to become even more enticing prey by being the youngest,” he said.
“I see,” she said, her cup clicking back into its saucer. “Your eighteenth birthday is tomorrow, is it not?”
“I’m going to assume that’s definitely listed in the folder in front of you that you’ve been making sure I notice,” he said.
“Quite right,” she said, “and for my part I shall assume that you are looking forward to being legally emancipated from your family.”
“That would be a safe bet,” he said.
“Then rather than sending another missive doomed to incineration regarding your future to your parents, I would prefer offering it to you directly,” she said.
“And that is?” he said.
“A ticket out of here,” she said. “You can leave high school and bypass college entirely. My corporation has a very advanced research department, particularly in the field of computerized intelligence.”
“Which the guy in the hallway is part of?” he said glancing back at the man.
The woman seemed to weigh her words carefully before answering.
“Partly,” she admitted.
“If you’re trying to make a robot act like a person and he’s the best you’ve got, you’re not doing too well,” he said, grinning.
“How so?” she asked, looking intrigued.
“Well, after he ran out of whatever program he had, most likely to collect me and scare off Green, he just stopped. There needs to be room for improvisation to make human behavior seem believable. He might as well be Pac-Man; once he’s out of the little white dots you’ve fed him, he just pauses until the next level begins. Still, he does look really good. Whoever’s building the casings is doing a great job,” Chris said.
“There’s no casing,” the woman said. “We aren’t, as you put it, trying to make a robot act like a person. We’re making a person act like another person.”
“What, hypnotism? You can make him quack like a duck or something if you say the magic word?” Chris said, suspecting the woman’s company was a scam now.
“No, not hypnotism. I said computerized intelligence, not sideshow tricks,” she said, then barely suppressed a smile before adding, “though I suppose we could program him to believe he was a duck now that you mention it.”
“Wait. You’re telling me whatever ridiculous secret Skylab-esque tech company you’re working for is figuring out how to program people’s brains?” Chris said.
“By implanting them with alternate personalities that can be transferred from one person to the next, yes,” the woman said. “I realize it does sound like a recipe for hubris, but—“
“Hubris? Ha! Who cares? That’s awesome!” Chris said, running into the deserted hallway to stare at the man who was still standing there.
“Well, at least the morality aspect isn’t an issue for this one,” the woman murmured to herself as she followed him.
“This could still be improved, though,” Chris said, poking the man’s face but receiving no response. “The program isn’t complete. Pinocchio isn’t a real boy yet, but I grant you, it’s getting there.”
“Would you like to take us the rest of the way, Mr. Brink?” the woman asked, and he grew nearly as still as the man in front of him.
“You want me to work on this?” he said.
“That is the offer, yes,” she said. “We’ve seen your work with computers, and it drew the attention of the highest levels of our company.”
“How?” Chris asked.
“As our friend just told your principal, we have our ways. We are offering you a position with a six-figure opening salary and access to the most advanced technology on earth, beyond even your imagination.”
“What do you want in return?” Chris said. “My soul or something?”
“Nothing so dramatic. We require your silence. A very tight non-disclosure contract. Complete discretion under severe penalties, but I assure you, I highly doubt you will want to leave us. People so rarely do,” the woman said.
Chris’s brain was firing rapidly, putting two and two together and coming up with the first three hundred digits of pi as an outcome.
“You’re the Dollhouse,” he said finally. “Everyone’s heard of that urban legend, but it’s actually real?”
She said nothing, and the silence was all the confirmation he needed.
“This is kind of a lot to take in,” he said, slumping against one of the lockers.
“Yes, it is,” she said, and there was that note of sympathy again, either real or very cleverly feigned. It suddenly occurred to him there was no reason she couldn’t be one of the company’s projects herself, but he dismissed the idea because she was far more realistic than the other one had been.
“So, what happens next?”
“You can’t agree now,” she said firmly. “You don’t legally become eighteen until midnight. If you decide to join us, then yes, you can sign the contract. I will leave it with you until then.”
“And if I don’t?”
“I doubt anyone would believe this story, don’t you agree?” she said with another polished smile.
“And if I do?”
“Then sign the contract and someone will be by to bring you to us,” she said simply.
“Do I even want to know how you guys will figure that out?” he asked warily.
“Even if you did, I couldn’t disclose that information,” the woman said, “but you are entirely free to make your own choice. There is no penalty for a refusal. You can continue living your life as you always have.”
“Yeah, like that isn’t a penalty,” Chris said with a snort. “Okay, I’ll take the contract, read it, and get back to you.”
“Excellent,” she said, going back into the room and collecting the paperwork. “Here you are Mr. Brink. I certainly hope that you will join us.”
“Right,” he said, looking at the paper. “Of course.
At that exact moment the bell rang to end lunch. It was over five minutes late, something that had never happened before. He was positive it wasn’t a coincidence.
The paper sat in Chris’s backpack all day, an innocuous bundle of cotton bond papers tucked inside a Star Wars folder, and he valiantly resisted the urge to look at it. On the bus home, he stared into oblivion, so lost in his thoughts that he didn’t have to pretend not to notice the constant barrage of things that were being thrown at him. His mind was somewhere else.
Everyone had heard of the Dollhouse, but like the guy with the claw for a hand or saying “Bloody Mary” into a mirror, it was always just a myth. He would have suspected he was being played, but nobody here had this much imagination. It was real.
And they wanted him.
Chris thought of a lot of different things as he sat on that bus, the apparently mythical shock absorbers doing nothing to keep him from bouncing several inches into the air and then crashing painfully against the sticky plastic upholstery. One more year and he would be out of this place. Ten months, actually. June wasn’t insanely far away, and the more he waited, the closer it would get. Then there was college, and a career, and who knew what else. He could sit it out, wait for another offer, be smart.
He was always smart, and look where it had landed him so far.
At last he finally tripped his way down the bus steps, wondering why they were so ridiculously high and reminding himself it was probably the same reason as the bad shocks and the plastic upholstery: whoever designed buses undoubtedly hated children. For a few brief seconds he breathed in the air as he walked towards the Brink house. With each step, though, it felt like more life was leeching out of him. Finally he stood in the doorway and inhaled the scent of home: mildew, rotting wood, stale beer, and the cheap, cloying air freshener his mother sprayed to try to disguise the smell of whatever drug she and dear old dad were using that week. No one was home, which was his best bit of luck today even if the hot British lady was on the level, so he was able to get to his bedroom and lock the door, hopefully avoiding them entirely for the rest of the day.
In lieu of dinner, he pulled out another bag of chips, this time emblazoned with the letters “BBQ,” not that he really believed they had ever been anywhere near an actual bottle of barbeque sauce. He ate half the bag, then stared at his backpack. The edge of the Star Wars folder was just visible through the open zipper. Taking a deep breath, he grabbed it.
“No irony at all,” he muttered, staring at the picture of Obi Wan and Vader battling on the front of it. “Definitely not choosing between the Light and Dark sides of the Force at all, nope.”
He spent the next several hours reading over the contract, then reading the more unusual passages again, but there was nothing especially disturbing. It didn’t say anything about illegal activities, just a few clauses about mandatory secrecy that seemed pretty standard, but a whole lot was being implied. He also found out that the company in question was called Rossum. He Googled it, of course, and that was the only time something gave him pause. It wasn’t what he read; it was what he didn’t. There was literally nothing on the Web about it at all, not a word. To test his hypothesis, he entered a short string of gibberish into the search engine, and even that pulled up a few websites that had randomly used it, either through misspellings or some other reason. No, there was no question about it. Rossum did exist, but it didn’t want anybody to know it.
Chris glanced at the clock. It was very nearly midnight now. His parents would probably come home in the next few hours, singly, together, or possibly with a “friend” or two in tow. Tomorrow was Tuesday. School started early, and the bus would be here even earlier. He could keep living this life, play by all the rules, then fight his way out tooth and nail if the cesspool that was home didn’t drag him under. Of course, he could always go off on his own, no high school diploma, no financial resources, a good brain, but he knew for a fact the streets were full of kids like that, and he didn’t believe he’d last long there.
Or he could go with what was behind Door Number Three.
It was stupid.
He wasn’t stupid.
Sometimes he was very tired of not being stupid.
He kicked back the last drop from the can of Mountain Dew that he’d stashed under his bed for just such an emergency, letting the carbonation burn in his nose.
“What the hell,” he finally said to the empty room. “Why not?”
He signed.
Somehow they knew. Within an hour, and before either of his parents came home, a very expensive car was standing in front of the door along with a moving truck. The few belongings he owned and wanted to keep were professionally packed and whisked away in less than ten minutes, and he found himself sitting next to the woman again, this time in the car’s backseat.
“I believe you’ve made a very wise choice, Mr. Brink,” she said, taking the papers from his hand and putting them into her briefcase, which closed with a quiet but oddly final click.
“So, can I find out your name now? Am I speaking with Ms. Rossum?” he asked.
“No. It’s Adelle DeWitt. I’m only another employee like yourself,” she said. “What would you prefer to have on your office door? Chrisopher Brink, or I believe you tend to go more by Chris, yes?”
“No,” he said abruptly, startling even himself. “No, that’s… not me anymore. Topher. Topher Brink.”
“As you wish,” DeWitt said, tapping on the glass to let the chauffeur now they were ready to leave. “Topher.”
Years passed. The Rossum Corporation was more impressed with Topher Brink than they could possibly have predicted. He sped up the process of changing Dolls’ personalities from hours to minutes, even seconds. His imprints were seamlessly human, fully developed with quirks and foibles and thoughts, populating the archives of the Dollhouse like a bevy of characters from Dickens. He perfected the remote wipe.
Even with all those people, the products of reality and his imagination combined, housed in wedges and sitting before him, Topher, now little less than a god, at least in his own mind, was still lonely. It was one of the few things he carried with him from the dilapidated old house into the glamorous basement of the Dollhouse, and sometimes, on a birthday maybe, like all the wealthy clients he would get to play pretend that one of the Dolls liked him, wanted to spend time with him, laughed at his nerdy jokes and was his friend. He pretended to be human.
Then, one day, Topher accidentally was responsible for ending the world, as gods sometimes do, and his mind got lost. Part of him found that funny. Someone lost his wedge, so his mind got lost. Misfiled. No, not that easy. Smashed, like Alpha had done. Bits of broken Topher and Chris all over the floor, microchips and souls and bit and pieces of whoever he was, mashed up like broken potato chips at the bottom of the bag. Can’t put them back together again, can’t fix it, can’t fix them, the world is burning, the world is burning, and Topher is the accelerant, Chris is the tinder, not the atom bomb, not the nuke, worse, people melt from the inside out, lost in limbo, lost in zeroes and ones, lost in the darkness of nothing, lost at the brink of insanity, the brink, Brink, Chris Topher Brink…
“You’ve told me this story before, you know,” DeWitt says, holding him gently in the sleeping pod that is now his, surrounded by images of Buddha and Jesus and saints and holy ones and so many, many gods, desperate for the redemption he had always thought was imaginary and now prays isn’t. He has become a doll in her arms.
“Who am I?” he finally says, turning to look at her. “Who am I? ‘ I am become Death,’ right?”
“It wasn’t your fault,” she lies, putting a motherly kiss on his feverish forehead that his own mother would never have given him, and he wonders for a moment if that woman is still alive, if someone else has taken up residence in her like a cheap motel. He tries to find one more molecule in him to care, but they’re spent, too full. His guilt has reached maximum capacity and overflows into the atmosphere like cheap, cloying air freshener that hides none of his sins.
All his thoughts are said aloud now. There is no boundary between him and the world, and his mind races, races to oblivion and past it, hearing the numbers cry out, the ones and zeroes, the dead, the not dead, the evicted, the usurpers. He laughs because he was always so lonely, so very lonely, and now, now the ghosts will never leave him alone until he either frees them or becomes one of them.
Maybe, just maybe, he’ll do both.
No copyright infringement is intended, and no profit is made from this work of fanfiction.
“Christopher Brink?” the teacher called.
“Present,” he replied, speaking as quietly as he could while still being heard by Mrs. Robertson. He slumped down low in his seat, hoping they wouldn’t notice him.
He knew it would do no good, though. They’d spotted him. It was only the first day back from summer vacation, and already he was a dead man.
No sooner had the teacher turned her back to write something on the board than the first spitball hit him, nailing him right in the ear, an impressive achievement, accompanied by guttural laughter from the idiots from last year. Mrs. Robertson turned around at once, wondering what the commotion was, but from previous practice he’d learned not to move. He didn’t even blink, just kept his head down and stared at the American history textbook in front of him, not taking in a single word and letting his eyes glaze over.
He hated history. It was a boring book full of dead people, though he supposed they at least had the advantage over live people in that Ponce de Leon and Abe Lincoln had never given him a wedgie in the middle of the hallway or thrown his backpack into the girls’ bathroom. Supposedly people who didn’t learn from the past were doomed to repeat it, but he didn’t think it was likely he was going to restart World War I by digging up the Archduke Ferdinand and stabbing him again.
As Mrs. Robertson droned on about ancient Egypt, and why exactly a book on American history was starting off there was anyone’s guess, he doodled in the margins of his notebook: dodecahedrons, the chemical formula for rocket fuel, a new computer program that could analyze his sleep patterns and get him to stop feeling groggy when he had to be up at five o’clock every morning, a fairly decent portrait of Bill Gates. Meanwhile, the idiot squad had progressed from spitballs to pencils, bouncing them off his head with practiced ease. They were all jocks, so their hand-eye coordination was excellent. If he weren’t their target, he might even have been mildly impressed by the talent it took to score a bullseye on his skull nine out of ten times.
As it was, he just bit the inside of his cheek and waited, quietly plotting how to get out of the classroom and dart down the hallway before they could catch him. When the bell rang, he wove between the desks with the precision of a perfectly launched pinball, gently and unobtrusively guiding a chair or two with the slightest finger’s touch to block aisles and send them either blundering into the walls or having to take the time to shove things out of their way, probably including people. They always thought of other people as things, stuff to use for their amusement.
By the time they were out the door, Chris was already down the hallway, around a corner, and opening his locker. For once, he’d made a clean getaway. Allowing himself a congratulatory smile, he stuffed his books back into the ridiculously skinny metal box and grabbed his lunch. He hated the cafeteria food, so he always packed his own. Technically the bag of sour cream and onion chips was contraband since the school had declared a ban on junk food. Considering they served worse junk than anything he packed, they were technically breaking their own rule. Only a fool or a freshman would eat those tacos. Even the tomatoes in the salads looked suspiciously radioactive.
As a senior now, he had the privilege of eating outside. The main tables in the courtyard would all be taken by the popular kids, but he didn’t mind. He had his eye on a grassy little spot next to the janitor’s room. It was probably the one place he wouldn’t be bothered. For one thing, it kind of smelled like floor cleaner, so most people stayed away.
He sat down on a dilapidated bench and opened his chips first, then popped open a can of Fresca. Taking a deep breath, he relaxed just enough to vaguely enjoy the kick of sugar and salt in his mouth after the seemingly interminable morning. He let himself smile. Only two more classes to go until he could get out of here. He tore a corner off his balogna sandwich and chewed while he thought about the stupid homework he had to do and the plans he was making for later that night. He was on the edge of a breakthrough in his new algorithms program, and if he could just get the bugs out, everything would be great.
“Christopher Brink?”
Automatically, he scooted away from the voice and held his hands in front of him in a gesture of surrender before he even finished processing that it sounded like an adult, not a kid.
“I apologize,” said the man. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
Chris still regarded him warily. He was wearing a very expensive suit, and there seemed to be something a tad menacing about him even though he couldn’t pinpoint exactly what. Maybe it was just that he was really tall, which made Chris feel like a bug about to be squished. The man’s smile was friendly enough, and his posture was relaxed, but something was still off. Principal Green was standing just in back of him, eyeing the man curiously and with a certain amount of suspicion, but he didn’t seem alarmed.
“Who are you?” Chris asked.
“I’m here to offer you a business opportunity,” he said, extending his hand. “Principal Green has been kind enough to furnish us with an unused classroom where we can talk. Is that acceptable?”
“Possibly,” Chris said. He was still wary but also intrigued. Not a whole lot tended to happen to him, at least not a whole lot of anything other than being beaten up and humiliated by the jocks.
“Would you prefer to have your parents present for this?” the man asked.
“If I have a choice, no,” Chris said, shoving his sandwich back in his bag but deciding to keep munching the chips. Somehow they made him less nervous. Also, he’d found sour cream breath could be a powerful deterrent in an attack.
“I don’t think that’s entirely wise, Chris,” Principal Green interrupted tentatively from behind them.
“Neither is your current extramarital affair with the bank teller at Fifth and Main,” the man said smoothly without turning around or changing his facial expression.
Chris watched as Principal Green swallowed and turned even paler than usual.
“That’s utter nonsense,” he said in what had to be the least convincing tone ever uttered by human vocal cords.
“We know,” the man said. “We also have highly incriminating photographs. Now leave and let me talk to Mr. Brink, please.”
The principal flushed with embarrassment and disappeared, and Chris found himself being escorted by the other man towards the empty geography classroom. The man, to Chris’s surprise, stood outside the door and merely pointed him inside. In fact, he seemed to look suddenly vacant, though he continued smiling calmly.
“You okay?” Chris asked him.
“He’s perfectly fine,” said a woman’s voice from inside the room. She was British by the sound of her.
Chris carefully peered around the door and found her sitting entirely alone at the teacher’s desk. A pot of tea and two cups were set in front of her on a tray, looking almost ridiculously sophisticated, and a second empty chair was pulled up to the desk, facing her. He also noticed she was hot in a refined sort of way, reminding him strongly of a statue of Athena he’d seen once. The woman stood when he entered the room.
“It’s good to meet you, Mr. Brink,” she said warmly with the polished practice of someone who made cordial small talk an integral part of her highly lucrative career.
“Who are you?” he said, feeling like he was asking that question too much today.
“That’s unimportant at the moment,” she said, taking out a file folder and thumbing through it. Chris noticed she had angled it perfectly so he could see his own name on the tab. “What is important is what the corporation I represent can offer you.”
“What corporation is that?”
“That’s also unimportant. Tea?” she asked, lifting the pot. He gave her a suspicious look, and she poured herself a cup as well. “I assure you, we aren’t trying to poison you. That would not be in anyone’s best interests.”
“My father might disagree with you,” he said, taking the cup she offered him. He was fully aware she might have poisoned his cup and not the tea, but to hell with it, he thought. You only live once, and this was at least an interesting day. Also he had already spoken to more people this morning than in the last week, and he rather liked having a modicum of human interaction that didn’t involve people screaming obscenities at him or pelting him with sharp or saliva-covered things.
“Yes,” the woman said, a note of sympathy in her voice, and he couldn’t decide whether it was genuine or a really good counterfeit. “He’s an unpleasant fellow.”
Chris grunted and took a sip of the tea. It was exactly the perfect temperature, not that he was really much for tea. He really was more of a Mountain Dew man himself, but he politely put the cup back in its saucer before stuffing his hand into the chip bag and shoving several chips in his mouth at once.
“Oh, um, want one?” he offered, remembering his manners enough to be polite but not enough to refrain from talking with his mouth full.
“No, thank you,” she declined, taking a sip of tea.
“So what’s the offer from the unnamed corporation you represent?” Chris asked.
“Why have you never skipped a grade at school?” she asked in a non sequiter. “Your records indicate that it was suggested in third, seventh, and tenth grade but refused each time.”
“It wasn’t a good idea,” he said.
“I see. Were your parents concerned about possible social issues for you?” she asked.
Chris took another sip of tea before deciding whether or not to answer her. He had no idea who this woman was, what her company was, or what she was after. There were red flags on top of red flags, and any sensible person would stop right now.
Of course, most sensible people weren’t so lonely that they’d taken to talking to plants while pretending to themselves it was a science experiment.
“My parents never saw the letters from the school,” he said, putting the cup back down a little too forcefully.
“You intercepted them?” she said, less of a question than a statement.
“And burned them,” he said firmly, looking her right in the eye. “It’s bad enough being this short and this brainy. I didn’t need to be Doogie Houser on top of it. I think one of them probably would have killed me.”
“One of whom?” she said, her eyes narrowing slightly.
“Does it matter? The jocks, the popular kids, the bullies, whatever you want to call them, they’re the same everywhere. I didn’t want to become even more enticing prey by being the youngest,” he said.
“I see,” she said, her cup clicking back into its saucer. “Your eighteenth birthday is tomorrow, is it not?”
“I’m going to assume that’s definitely listed in the folder in front of you that you’ve been making sure I notice,” he said.
“Quite right,” she said, “and for my part I shall assume that you are looking forward to being legally emancipated from your family.”
“That would be a safe bet,” he said.
“Then rather than sending another missive doomed to incineration regarding your future to your parents, I would prefer offering it to you directly,” she said.
“And that is?” he said.
“A ticket out of here,” she said. “You can leave high school and bypass college entirely. My corporation has a very advanced research department, particularly in the field of computerized intelligence.”
“Which the guy in the hallway is part of?” he said glancing back at the man.
The woman seemed to weigh her words carefully before answering.
“Partly,” she admitted.
“If you’re trying to make a robot act like a person and he’s the best you’ve got, you’re not doing too well,” he said, grinning.
“How so?” she asked, looking intrigued.
“Well, after he ran out of whatever program he had, most likely to collect me and scare off Green, he just stopped. There needs to be room for improvisation to make human behavior seem believable. He might as well be Pac-Man; once he’s out of the little white dots you’ve fed him, he just pauses until the next level begins. Still, he does look really good. Whoever’s building the casings is doing a great job,” Chris said.
“There’s no casing,” the woman said. “We aren’t, as you put it, trying to make a robot act like a person. We’re making a person act like another person.”
“What, hypnotism? You can make him quack like a duck or something if you say the magic word?” Chris said, suspecting the woman’s company was a scam now.
“No, not hypnotism. I said computerized intelligence, not sideshow tricks,” she said, then barely suppressed a smile before adding, “though I suppose we could program him to believe he was a duck now that you mention it.”
“Wait. You’re telling me whatever ridiculous secret Skylab-esque tech company you’re working for is figuring out how to program people’s brains?” Chris said.
“By implanting them with alternate personalities that can be transferred from one person to the next, yes,” the woman said. “I realize it does sound like a recipe for hubris, but—“
“Hubris? Ha! Who cares? That’s awesome!” Chris said, running into the deserted hallway to stare at the man who was still standing there.
“Well, at least the morality aspect isn’t an issue for this one,” the woman murmured to herself as she followed him.
“This could still be improved, though,” Chris said, poking the man’s face but receiving no response. “The program isn’t complete. Pinocchio isn’t a real boy yet, but I grant you, it’s getting there.”
“Would you like to take us the rest of the way, Mr. Brink?” the woman asked, and he grew nearly as still as the man in front of him.
“You want me to work on this?” he said.
“That is the offer, yes,” she said. “We’ve seen your work with computers, and it drew the attention of the highest levels of our company.”
“How?” Chris asked.
“As our friend just told your principal, we have our ways. We are offering you a position with a six-figure opening salary and access to the most advanced technology on earth, beyond even your imagination.”
“What do you want in return?” Chris said. “My soul or something?”
“Nothing so dramatic. We require your silence. A very tight non-disclosure contract. Complete discretion under severe penalties, but I assure you, I highly doubt you will want to leave us. People so rarely do,” the woman said.
Chris’s brain was firing rapidly, putting two and two together and coming up with the first three hundred digits of pi as an outcome.
“You’re the Dollhouse,” he said finally. “Everyone’s heard of that urban legend, but it’s actually real?”
She said nothing, and the silence was all the confirmation he needed.
“This is kind of a lot to take in,” he said, slumping against one of the lockers.
“Yes, it is,” she said, and there was that note of sympathy again, either real or very cleverly feigned. It suddenly occurred to him there was no reason she couldn’t be one of the company’s projects herself, but he dismissed the idea because she was far more realistic than the other one had been.
“So, what happens next?”
“You can’t agree now,” she said firmly. “You don’t legally become eighteen until midnight. If you decide to join us, then yes, you can sign the contract. I will leave it with you until then.”
“And if I don’t?”
“I doubt anyone would believe this story, don’t you agree?” she said with another polished smile.
“And if I do?”
“Then sign the contract and someone will be by to bring you to us,” she said simply.
“Do I even want to know how you guys will figure that out?” he asked warily.
“Even if you did, I couldn’t disclose that information,” the woman said, “but you are entirely free to make your own choice. There is no penalty for a refusal. You can continue living your life as you always have.”
“Yeah, like that isn’t a penalty,” Chris said with a snort. “Okay, I’ll take the contract, read it, and get back to you.”
“Excellent,” she said, going back into the room and collecting the paperwork. “Here you are Mr. Brink. I certainly hope that you will join us.”
“Right,” he said, looking at the paper. “Of course.
At that exact moment the bell rang to end lunch. It was over five minutes late, something that had never happened before. He was positive it wasn’t a coincidence.
The paper sat in Chris’s backpack all day, an innocuous bundle of cotton bond papers tucked inside a Star Wars folder, and he valiantly resisted the urge to look at it. On the bus home, he stared into oblivion, so lost in his thoughts that he didn’t have to pretend not to notice the constant barrage of things that were being thrown at him. His mind was somewhere else.
Everyone had heard of the Dollhouse, but like the guy with the claw for a hand or saying “Bloody Mary” into a mirror, it was always just a myth. He would have suspected he was being played, but nobody here had this much imagination. It was real.
And they wanted him.
Chris thought of a lot of different things as he sat on that bus, the apparently mythical shock absorbers doing nothing to keep him from bouncing several inches into the air and then crashing painfully against the sticky plastic upholstery. One more year and he would be out of this place. Ten months, actually. June wasn’t insanely far away, and the more he waited, the closer it would get. Then there was college, and a career, and who knew what else. He could sit it out, wait for another offer, be smart.
He was always smart, and look where it had landed him so far.
At last he finally tripped his way down the bus steps, wondering why they were so ridiculously high and reminding himself it was probably the same reason as the bad shocks and the plastic upholstery: whoever designed buses undoubtedly hated children. For a few brief seconds he breathed in the air as he walked towards the Brink house. With each step, though, it felt like more life was leeching out of him. Finally he stood in the doorway and inhaled the scent of home: mildew, rotting wood, stale beer, and the cheap, cloying air freshener his mother sprayed to try to disguise the smell of whatever drug she and dear old dad were using that week. No one was home, which was his best bit of luck today even if the hot British lady was on the level, so he was able to get to his bedroom and lock the door, hopefully avoiding them entirely for the rest of the day.
In lieu of dinner, he pulled out another bag of chips, this time emblazoned with the letters “BBQ,” not that he really believed they had ever been anywhere near an actual bottle of barbeque sauce. He ate half the bag, then stared at his backpack. The edge of the Star Wars folder was just visible through the open zipper. Taking a deep breath, he grabbed it.
“No irony at all,” he muttered, staring at the picture of Obi Wan and Vader battling on the front of it. “Definitely not choosing between the Light and Dark sides of the Force at all, nope.”
He spent the next several hours reading over the contract, then reading the more unusual passages again, but there was nothing especially disturbing. It didn’t say anything about illegal activities, just a few clauses about mandatory secrecy that seemed pretty standard, but a whole lot was being implied. He also found out that the company in question was called Rossum. He Googled it, of course, and that was the only time something gave him pause. It wasn’t what he read; it was what he didn’t. There was literally nothing on the Web about it at all, not a word. To test his hypothesis, he entered a short string of gibberish into the search engine, and even that pulled up a few websites that had randomly used it, either through misspellings or some other reason. No, there was no question about it. Rossum did exist, but it didn’t want anybody to know it.
Chris glanced at the clock. It was very nearly midnight now. His parents would probably come home in the next few hours, singly, together, or possibly with a “friend” or two in tow. Tomorrow was Tuesday. School started early, and the bus would be here even earlier. He could keep living this life, play by all the rules, then fight his way out tooth and nail if the cesspool that was home didn’t drag him under. Of course, he could always go off on his own, no high school diploma, no financial resources, a good brain, but he knew for a fact the streets were full of kids like that, and he didn’t believe he’d last long there.
Or he could go with what was behind Door Number Three.
It was stupid.
He wasn’t stupid.
Sometimes he was very tired of not being stupid.
He kicked back the last drop from the can of Mountain Dew that he’d stashed under his bed for just such an emergency, letting the carbonation burn in his nose.
“What the hell,” he finally said to the empty room. “Why not?”
He signed.
Somehow they knew. Within an hour, and before either of his parents came home, a very expensive car was standing in front of the door along with a moving truck. The few belongings he owned and wanted to keep were professionally packed and whisked away in less than ten minutes, and he found himself sitting next to the woman again, this time in the car’s backseat.
“I believe you’ve made a very wise choice, Mr. Brink,” she said, taking the papers from his hand and putting them into her briefcase, which closed with a quiet but oddly final click.
“So, can I find out your name now? Am I speaking with Ms. Rossum?” he asked.
“No. It’s Adelle DeWitt. I’m only another employee like yourself,” she said. “What would you prefer to have on your office door? Chrisopher Brink, or I believe you tend to go more by Chris, yes?”
“No,” he said abruptly, startling even himself. “No, that’s… not me anymore. Topher. Topher Brink.”
“As you wish,” DeWitt said, tapping on the glass to let the chauffeur now they were ready to leave. “Topher.”
Years passed. The Rossum Corporation was more impressed with Topher Brink than they could possibly have predicted. He sped up the process of changing Dolls’ personalities from hours to minutes, even seconds. His imprints were seamlessly human, fully developed with quirks and foibles and thoughts, populating the archives of the Dollhouse like a bevy of characters from Dickens. He perfected the remote wipe.
Even with all those people, the products of reality and his imagination combined, housed in wedges and sitting before him, Topher, now little less than a god, at least in his own mind, was still lonely. It was one of the few things he carried with him from the dilapidated old house into the glamorous basement of the Dollhouse, and sometimes, on a birthday maybe, like all the wealthy clients he would get to play pretend that one of the Dolls liked him, wanted to spend time with him, laughed at his nerdy jokes and was his friend. He pretended to be human.
Then, one day, Topher accidentally was responsible for ending the world, as gods sometimes do, and his mind got lost. Part of him found that funny. Someone lost his wedge, so his mind got lost. Misfiled. No, not that easy. Smashed, like Alpha had done. Bits of broken Topher and Chris all over the floor, microchips and souls and bit and pieces of whoever he was, mashed up like broken potato chips at the bottom of the bag. Can’t put them back together again, can’t fix it, can’t fix them, the world is burning, the world is burning, and Topher is the accelerant, Chris is the tinder, not the atom bomb, not the nuke, worse, people melt from the inside out, lost in limbo, lost in zeroes and ones, lost in the darkness of nothing, lost at the brink of insanity, the brink, Brink, Chris Topher Brink…
“You’ve told me this story before, you know,” DeWitt says, holding him gently in the sleeping pod that is now his, surrounded by images of Buddha and Jesus and saints and holy ones and so many, many gods, desperate for the redemption he had always thought was imaginary and now prays isn’t. He has become a doll in her arms.
“Who am I?” he finally says, turning to look at her. “Who am I? ‘ I am become Death,’ right?”
“It wasn’t your fault,” she lies, putting a motherly kiss on his feverish forehead that his own mother would never have given him, and he wonders for a moment if that woman is still alive, if someone else has taken up residence in her like a cheap motel. He tries to find one more molecule in him to care, but they’re spent, too full. His guilt has reached maximum capacity and overflows into the atmosphere like cheap, cloying air freshener that hides none of his sins.
All his thoughts are said aloud now. There is no boundary between him and the world, and his mind races, races to oblivion and past it, hearing the numbers cry out, the ones and zeroes, the dead, the not dead, the evicted, the usurpers. He laughs because he was always so lonely, so very lonely, and now, now the ghosts will never leave him alone until he either frees them or becomes one of them.
Maybe, just maybe, he’ll do both.
