Today's Reading
"Well," she says. "This is new."
"That's weird. I thought I turned it off before I went to bed."
"What is it?"
"A little magician. Riding a bicycle."
"Right, I can see that. I guess I'm asking why you'd make it?"
"It's a balance study. To see if I could get it to pedal without falling. A preliminary test for William when I build him out and give him ambulatory—"
"Can you turn it off?"
"It's probably only got an hour or so left on its battery anyway so—"
"Can you? Please? I don't like it."
She's watching the mini magician squeak around her feet in a circle, its black top hat resuming its bobbing up and down in a way Henry assumed would be cute but sees now is perverse.
Henry gets out of bed, bends down on one knee, the sides of his hands on the floor in an open V, ready to corral the toy. But when its pedaling knees and lewdly pumping hat come around the corner of Lily's shoes and start toward Henry, the magician does something unexpected. It pivots the handlebars to the right, almost toppling but not quite, veering hard away from him.
"It's trying to get away," Lily says, half alarmed, half impressed.
"It's supposed to come to me. I guess it thinks my hands are a wall or some other object to avoid."
"Huh. So can you control it? Or are we just living with it rolling around the house?"
"Its direction command is connected through the wi-fi. I'd have to login to pull it up."
"Okay. Are you going to get it then?"
"It's not going anywhere."
"Well it is, because it's out in the hall now."
She's right. He can hear it squeaking over the floorboards. Another surprise. It made it out the door much faster than it managed before during his tests.
Henry stalks out of the bedroom and into the hall, telling himself to move decisively but without excessive haste. A man in control. A man headed off to re-assert normalcy in his home. A man.
The little magician is rolling toward the bottom of the attic stairs. It's getting better at riding the bicycle even as Henry watches it. The possibility occurs to him that the toy was previously only pretending to wobble. An act, even as he knows there's no way for it to formulate that kind of strategy.
He catches up to the little magician just as it turns to avoid hitting the bottom step of the stairs. Henry looks up at the door at the top, the door from his nightmare. This one secured by a single padlock instead of a dozen. No chains. He wishes, ridiculously, that there were.
"Abracadabra!" he announces, sweeping the bicycle and its rider off the floor, its cloak flapping.
He pops up the hinged top hat and puts his thumb down on the power button he'd located in the crown of its skull. The battery must have expired at about the same time, because Henry could swear that the little magician stopped pedaling and went still a half-second before the button was pressed.
He looks back down the hall to find Lily standing outside the spare bedroom. She saw it too. The gap between the magician playing dead and Henry turning off its power.
"Got the little fucker," he says.
Lily turns and starts down the stairs, so that he can't see whether she is fighting tears or some other inclination.
4
The house is one of the enormous Victorians up the slope from downtown. It presents as old, is full of old things, and was owned by a series of old people over the years, each of whom left by way of the undertaker's box. But if you look closely the house reveals all the ways it's different.
To turn on the lights, to make the water hotter, to open, close and lock the doors—everything is done by the command of either Henry's or Lily's voice. The whole place is wired, but subtly so. Aside from discreet keypads located in the walls here and there, it appears traditional: original brick fireplaces on the main floor and guest bedroom, pine cabinets in the kitchen, furnishings bordering on old- fashioned. Yet the house is cybernated to a degree far beyond the capacity of any store-bought smart device or talking appliance.
And Henry did all of it himself.
This excerpt is from the eBook edition.
Monday, February 3rd, we begin the book The Puzzle Box by Danielle Trussoni.
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