A Ghost in A Machine (Short Story)

“So when are you gonna slip her the D?” asked Chad, the tallest in the group, wisps of tonguesmoke following his violent words into the cool air of Tuesday morning in the late fall.

“Sometimes, I think your brain would fit inside the head of your dick,” came Don's retort. “Then you say something, and I'm sure that it already does.”

“Oh, good one!” laughed Herm, short and thin with curly hair. “But seriously, she's hot! Or did you somehow not notice?”

“She's hot for you,” Jesse, the burly blond, added, “and you'd have to to be blind and deaf and a complete idiot to somehow not notice. She wants you to slip her the D.”

“Stop talking like that,” Don said, “Or else she's probably gonna hear, and that will make it a lot harder to get to know her.”

“Forget that 'getting to know her' crap,” Chad insisted. “Just slip her the D.”

“You are all hopeless,” Don chuckled, shaking his head and walking away – he had just spotted 'her' working her way toward the side door of the school.

“Hey, Ada!” Don shouted, now walking quickly to overtake her. “Wait up!”

“Why?” Ada asked. “So you can 'slip me the D'?” There was an awkward pause.

“You heard that?” Don asked.

“How could I not? Those guys talk like there's nobody else in the room to hear them.”

“Yeah,” Don said, “But we're outside right now.”

“Which just makes it worse,” argued Ada. “They still talk like there's nobody else in the room.”

“I'm sorry for how my friends talk,” Don apologized, “volume-wise and otherwise.”

“Why do you talk to them anyway?” Ada wondered. “They're so stupid.”

“They're teenagers,” Don answered. “They'll grow out of it. Besides, I've known them for ten years,

and I think they might be the only people I know how to talk to.”

“You're not so terrible at talking to me,” Ada said with a sly smile, “Unless I count your friends against you.”

“I wouldn't want that,” Don said in mock horror, “because if you did, there's no way you'd agree to study with me tonight.”

“Your place or mine?” Ada asked suspiciously.

“Dealer's choice,” Don answered.

“And in this metaphor, I am...”

“The one who gets to choose,” Don answered.

“I'll think about it,” Ada agreed. “I'll text you after school.”

Ada was better than her word. At lunch, Don got a text that said “meet me jr lot 340.” More accurately, Don got a voicemail that said he had received a text message from Ada that said “meet me junior lot three-hundred forty,” which Don figured was a location and a time.

Don also figured he had to be the only high schooler in the world whose phone and phone plan did not allow text messaging, though that was the way he preferred it. Text messages were just dysfunctional, crippled, incomplete e-mails, as far as he was concerned. They lacked only depth, screen size, and all of the important formal qualities of writing. Still, he was happy enough to meet Ada in the parking lot.

“So, I got the dirt on you,” Ada told him.

“How dirty was it?” Don asked.

“Strangely clean,” Ada said. “Word has it that whenever you study with a girl, actual homework gets done.”

“And her grades go up,” Don added.

“And then she thanks you,” Ada continued, “and then she never sees you again.”

“I don't think you'll have to worry about that last part,” Don told her.

“Why's that?” Ada asked. “Are you hitting on me?”

“Not exactly,” Don answered without answering.

“Are you one of those guys who will do things for me because he thinks I'm pretty?” Ada accused. “Please don't be one of those guys.”

“When I think of you,” Don told her, “I think of your music.”

“I write my own,” Ada told him, smiling proudly.

“That's what I've heard,” Don said. “I got some of the dirt on you, too.”

“So this is not about my looks?” Ada asked again in different words.

“No,” Don answered, not evading.

“So you'll help me with my homework and never talk to me again,” Ada asked.

“No,” Don answered. “I'm too interested in talking to you to get much of anything done.”

“That may be the strangest, awkwardest, nerdiest way anyone has asked me out,” Ada told Don. “Then again, I like strange, awkward and nerdy. Let's go. Milkshakes?”

“On me,” Don offered. “You're driving.”

Ada ordered a strawberry milkshake, and Don vanilla. Putting their backpacks on either seat of a corner booth and sliding in after them, they emptied an array of books and notes onto the table. This proved merely to be a stalling action, born of nervousness. True to Don's word, neither one got any studying done. Instead, Don asked Ada about her music, her ambitions, her post-graduation plans. “Music is a passion, but it's a passionate hobby,” She told him. “I don't need to go to a conservatory to make music.”

“So what will you do instead?” Don wondered.

“Well, to start out, I'm going to double-major in marine biology and microbiology.” Ada told him.

“Why both?”

“When I was almost too young to read or remember, I stumbled onto these books about some kids who were fighting aliens by turning into animals,” Ada started.

“Juvenile, derivative dreck,” Don interrupted to opine. Ada gave him an indefinable look. “I've run across them, too,” Don explained.

“Sure they're childish, if you read them when you're not a kid,” Ada said a little defensively. Then, regaining a more confident tone, she continued. “They were entertaining enough when I was. Anyway, reading those books got me interested in the idea of life on other planets. But I was equally fascinated by how amazing, and varied, and strange some of the life right here on earth can be. Since then, I've read so much more, and begun to grasp how little we know about aquatic and microscopic life, about worlds right here on Earth that we can't see. “A person could discover plenty of very alien life for one lifetime of study without ever leaving the planet–if she had the right degrees, of course.”

“So you've given up on other worlds?” Don asked

“Not entirely,” Ada said. “A lot of colleges are starting to offer some exobiology courses, and I'll probably take those as electives. I just don't think it's realistic that we will ever find life in outer space during my lifetime. If we're lucky, there might be something on Europa. If there is, they'll need the expertise of a microbiologist and a marine biologist to study it.” Here, Ada broke into a grin. “And why take two if they only need one?”

Ada liked the way Don listened; Don liked what he heard. The pair agreed to meet again soon.

Don called Ada at lunch on Thursday, and Friday evening, he picked her up and drove her to the museum. Ada admired the beauty of many of the pieces there. Some, she could explain or elaborate upon. Don had nothing to say about the paintings, nor anything about most of the sculptures. The small section of ancient art and the display of medieval craftsmanship did not exhaust Don's knowledge on those subjects, and he didn't go out of the way to sound these depths further for her benefit. The outing was pleasant enough, but there was no hint of any passion to match Ada's declarations over milkshakes.

“If I didn't know better,” she observed, “I'd think you were just hanging around and waiting for something better to do.”

“I am just marking time,” Don confirmed.

“Until what?” Ada asked.

“Until I think it's dark enough.”

“Dark enough for what?” Ada asked suspiciously.

“It would take me weeks to explain it,” Don answered suspiciously, “And that would neither suffice nor do justice, but I can tell you that whatever you're thinking, it isn't that.”

“How do you know what I'm thinking?” Ada's suspicions were far from allayed.

“I don't know what you're thinking,” Don stated obviously. “I just know one thing you aren't. It's nearly brand new. I made it, and I haven't shown anyone else; you would be first.”

“How can I be sure you won't hurt me?” Ada wondered.

“You can't.” Don admitted. “You can either trust me or ask me to drop you off at home. I would prefer it if you do the first, but I would go along with either of them, without holding either choice against you.”

“Well, you did a pretty good job of building up the mystery,” Ada observed, “And you didn't give me some lame, skeevy justification for why I ought to trust you, and I do have pepper spray in my purse.”

“I promise that you won't need it,” Don told her, “Whatever that's worth.”

“You better hope I don't,” Ada promised him.

They hadn't driven far when Ada recognized their route. “Are we driving back to school?” She asked.

“You're good,” Don said, leaving the answer a casual implication.

“Why the hell would you want to go back to school on a perfectly good Friday night?” Ada wondered aloud.

“You'd be surprised what you can learn when there are no teachers around to stop you,” Don said cryptically.

“Remember what I said,” Ada told him, leaving the threat a casual implication. “No funny stuff.”

“No funny stuff,” Don promised again.

Near one end of the school, the varsity team was playing a football game on a well-kept field. Don drove around the opposite end of the building, into a parking lot in an alcove by a loading dock. He got out of the car, pulled a backpack out of the back seat, and looked back at Ada only for a second. Not waiting to see if she followed, he climbed the stairs to the garage-style door on the loading dock.

Against her better judgment, Ada followed. Don was just zipping up one of the pockets on his backpack when Ada caught up to him. He was holding what looked like two small, dark boxes of about equal size. “Catch,” he commanded before tossing one of them to Ada. It looked and felt like a remote control for a garage-door opener that had been broken open, disassembled, reassembled, and held together with duct tape.

“Should I press it?”

“Not yet,” Don answered. “No reason to do it yet.”

Don opened the second box and pulled out a couple of small tools, then squatted in front of the garage door. He worked quickly and put his tools away.

“Are you breaking into the school right now?” Ada demanded.

“Don't worry,” Don reassured Ada, turning to face her as he did. “Nobody expects teenagers to break into the school. Why the hell would we waste a perfectly good Friday night?”

“We can't do this,” Ada insisted. “I could lose any chance at a scholarship if we get caught.”

“We won't get caught,” Don promised. “I've done this before. None of the neighbors have a good view of this entrance. That's why I picked it.”

Ada was still uncomfortable; logically, Don's arguments for going along with him were weak, and the risk to her own future was very real. At the same time, and against her own conscious inclinations, she found the risk exciting. To her surprise, she said nothing else. Don turned around again. He squatted down and opened the garage door nonchalantly. Ada was surprised to see him do it. The door was big, and looked heavy. It had three handles at the bottom, but Don could only reach one at a time. In the past, Ada had walked past the loading dock and seen the custodians grunt and strain to lift the door with one working at each end. Don's wide, thick, boxy form had never struck Ada as intimidating, but as steadily and effortlessly as he lifted that steel garage door, she found herself rethinking that assessment. Don turned back toward her. “There's a wall to your left,” he said. “Point the end of the remote at it and press the button.”

Ada did as she was asked. As she did, she saw Don reach up and tug on a small chain hanging down from the ceiling. Then he walked over to the opposite side of the garage door and pressed a button. The garage began to shut on its own..

“Why didn't you build a remote to open that?” Ada asked over the grind of metal wheels in metal tracks.

“No reason to,” Don said. Ada made no acknowledgment, so he continued. “I spent considerable time on a project, creating something which I intend to show you tonight. The project consisted of many problems, each of which needed a solution and the time to find it. The problem of the garage door was easy; my friend Herm had already taught me how to pick a lock, and I could open the door manually; the custodians usually remember to disable the motor arm at night anyway. The ease of solving this problem meant that if I treated it like it was not a problem at all, then I could spend the time elsewhere. Building a garage-door remote for this garage door would have been a matter of tuning its signal to a slightly different frequency, based on trial and error, and then I would have to plan ahead to sneak in and engage the arm for the garage door opener every time I wanted in. Hardly even an interesting conversion, and not a good use of time.”

“If you say so,” Ada said. “But then what's the garage door opener for?”

“It turns off the alarm system,” Don said.”

Don took Ada's hand and led her to a door she hadn't seen at the back of the room. He then led her down a dark hallway, through another door she hadn't seen, and down a poorly-lit stairwell. “You'd better call now and set up any excuses you need to with your parents,” Don told her. “This will take all night, and you won't notice the time fly.”

“How come everything you say just makes this idea seem worse and worse?” Ada asked him.

“Because you have to break some eggs to make an omelet,” Don offered, “Or because the road to hell is paved with good intentions, or because I'm just really weird. You pick whichever answer will make you happiest. You can also decide to ask me to take you back home, or to drop you off someplace, and I'll do that instead. All I can tell you is that if you go back, you'll be missing out.

Reluctantly, Ada pulled out her cellphone and called one of her speed-dial numbers, putting the phone to her ear just as they left the stairwell and entered another unlit hallway. “Dianna rented a couple movies for the night,” she said into her phone. After pausing for only a second, she said “of course I'm invited.” Another pause, then “just a couple other girls from orchestra,” and at last, after a final pause, “Love you too, mom.”

“Do you need to call Dianna now?” Don asked as he reached back into the backpack for his little bag of tools.

“Dianna and I have a system,” Ada replied. “If someone calls one of us looking for the other, she's automatically with us, but temporarily unavailable to take the phone. Unless, of course, we're actually together. Then, we hand off the phone no matter the circumstances or what it interrupts. That way, the number of times one of us is indisposed averages out closer to normal.” By the time Ada was done telling Don about her system, Don had the door open and was walking into a room that was unlit aside from tiny, blinking lights going on and off everywhere.

“Good system,” he said. Ada followed him in, and Don turned on a light, revealing row upon row of big server towers connected by a maze of wires. “This is where it happens,” he told Ada.

“I don't have the slightest idea what 'it' is,” Ada complained, “other than the school network and school server.”

Don walked over to one of the servers and started playing with the wires. Some he unplugged, and others he plugged into different spots. He turned to an adjacent server and repeated the process. Finally, he pulled a very old bicycle helmet and an unused skateboarding helmet from a different compartment in his backpack. Ada could see inside the skateboarding helmet; its padding had been gutted and replaced with a maze of wires and electronics. A thick cable stuck out the back of each helmet, so Ada assumed the insides of the bicycle helmet looked the same way. Don plugged each helmet into one of the servers he had fiddled with. Then he placed the skateboarding helmet on her head, very slowly, taking great pains.

“You're going to do this with me?” Ada asked as he worked.

“Of course,” Don answered. “If you had asked me to drop you off, I would have come back to do it alone.”

“If neither one of us notices the time passing, how will we get out of here in time?”

“I have set this up to alert me,” Don answered. “I could easily teach you to do the same, but without showing you what it can do, you have no incentive to learn. Without the connection,” Don told Ada, “this helmet is nothing more than a really bad video game. With a bad connection, it's like a pretty bad video game, only far more frustrating. Here, it will change your life.”

For a minute or so, Don worked in silence, before speaking, adopting an unusually formal tone of voice. “I'm not sure how your long hair will affect this,” Don warned Ada. “I made it, and I understand all of the basic principles behind it, as well as most of the advanced ones, so I am unerringly confident that having long hair will not hurt you. It might lesson the effect, though. If it does, I'm sorry.”

“What effect?” Ada asked.

“Be patient,” Don advised. “You'll know soon enough.”

“So is it like virtual reality?” Ada asked.

“For me it is,” Don answered. “For a lot of people, it would be closer to the opposite.”

Ada had no idea how long it took, but the effect was inimitable and unmistakable. Under the influence of the helmet, Ada had absolutely no sense of the physical world around her. There was nothing to hear, nothing to see, nothing to smell, taste or touch. In place of these things was a sensation of all the world's knowledge bearing down in a deluge, a torrent of torrents, unstoppable and towering and almost lovingly gentle. It would have felt like wave after wave of information and learning, had Ada been capable of perceiving time as anything but a series of advanced mathematical equations, had she been able to feel such a thing as 'after.' Instead, Ada was wholly inundated by a rotating storm of studies, by infinite great waves of ideas stacked upon each other. They forced her under and pulled her higher all at once, filling her with the pride of courage and the shame of having known so little, inflating her until she was bloated with the heavy nectar of flowering erudition. Ada felt the extraordinarily extrasensory experience in parts of her brain she didn't realize she had.

Ada realized that if she concentrated, she could feel something in place of Don's material absence. I hope she likes I like it who wouldn't like it maybe she doesn't but she's so dang smart she loves to know but who knows nobody knows when nobody knows this way of knowing I would be so ashamed it would be such a shame I missed and she would miss out out out there so much things to read archeology to read of ancient things and then minifigs...Ada concluded that these were Don's thoughts.

All at once, Ada could see again. The light was every bit as blinding as its absence had been, but regaining it seemed a devastating loss. Ada blushed with embarrassment when she realized that the light so hurting her eyes was no more than the blinking lights on the servers, which had not been enough for her to navigate by earlier in the evening.

“Did it hurt this bad for you?” Ada asked Don.

“You mean to take off the helmet?” Don answered with a question. Ada nodded once, so Don continued. “Yes and no. It actually hurt more, because I had the lights on, but it was okay. I'm used to it.”

“Was I hearing your thoughts?” Ada wondered.

“People in the helmets don't hear; they only know,” Don reminded Ada. “I don't know what you were knowing, anyway, but there's no reason you couldn't have picked up what I thought. With enough practice, you can even put words to another person's wordless feelings. For instance, I knew your mocking, childish disappointment that you could not blog about this because any words would be unmeaningful, insufficient, and potentially unsafe from criminal prosecution. I also knew your chagrined amusement at having worries of that sort in the midst of such an experience.”

“You can read my mind?” Ada continued questioning, for the moment too intrigued to be upset.

“I could have,” Don answered “had I wished. In this case, I understood what you were feeling because you externalized those emotions.”

“That was the most amazing thing,” Ada gushed. “There's nothing remotely like that.”

“The closest is speed-reading James Joyce,” Don told her.

“Nobody speed-reads James Joyce,” Ada argued. “You have to read it painstakingly slow.”

“Students of literature read it that way so as not to miss anything,” Don debated, “and in doing so, they miss the forest of consciousness for counting the trees of the stream. Nevertheless, I do speed-read Joyce, usually on weeks with a lot of nighttime events at the school, when I can't get down here as often.”

“So you don't like the orchestra concerts?” Ada teased.

“They have their redeeming moments,” Don answered in the intended spirit.

Ada realized that in the space of their conversation, Don had returned everything he brought to his backpack and, presumably, set the servers back to the way they had been before, and thus that it was time to go.

“How did you think those things up?” Ada asked Don as they left.

“Has your body ever done something completely without your input or permission, and you were completely at a loss as to why you would do something without wanting to do so, to the point that you felt you hadn't really done it, even though it was an obvious physical reality that you had?”

“I guess.” Ada answered. “It's sort of like that when I sneeze or cough or hiccup. There was also this one time after spending nearly forty hours in airplanes and airports, with hardly a wink of sleep. This was about two years ago, and I always got my hair cut real boyish back then. Anyway, when my parents finally got us checked into the hotel, I went into the bathroom, and when I turned and looked in the mirror, I wondered what the person looking back at me was thinking, and why she was just standing there, and why she kept her hair short when it would look so much better long. I realized what had happened, and it felt as if my body might be attached to me, but it still wasn't really part of me, or even me at all.”

“Exactly!” Said Don. “Well, I don't need international travel to feel that way. I feel like that all the time. Like I have this weird meat car that I try to drive around, only it steers itself on occasion, and sometimes it argues with me about what I really want, as though it has any idea or authority about what a person should want, when it's clearly other than and less than a person. And until I built myself the helmet, I had no way to open the door and unbuckle the seatbelt to get out and go home, because inside the meat car is definitely not home.”

“And visiting the server?” Ada asked.

“That is more like home,” Don told her. “It's not Cotard's where I know the body's mine, but I mistakenly believe it's dead. It's not GID, where I think my body is slightly misshapen. It's not BDD, where I think my body is grossly misshapen, and it's not Alien Hand syndrome, where I think one or more of my limbs belongs to somebody else and should not be on my body. I was given an entire body by mistake, though I never wanted, needed, or asked for one, regardless of how many limbs it has, and how they're shaped. I have yet to discover a way to give it back while keeping that which is mine–the mind.”

Their conversation had taken them all the way back to the garage. Ada's thoughts returned for a moment to the fear of getting caught. “Did you lock everything back up?” she asked.

“I always do,” Don promised. He pressed a button on the alarm keypad–apparently re-arming the security system was another easily-solved problem that could be treated like a non-problem. Ada pressed the button to open the garage.

It wasn't until the sunlight streamed in underneath the door that she realized it was already morning. The sun had just risen. Unaccustomed to the light, Ada walked unsteadily to the car. She looked back and saw Don reach up to pull the chain that disabled the garage door opener again, then shut it slowly and softly. He took out his toolkit and fiddled with the lock for a minute, and then, satisfied, joined Ada.

In the car, when she wasn't giving Don directions to Dianna's house, Ada thanked Don for sharing something so personal, and so cerebral, on a second date. “Most guys would have just taken me to a movie and tried to cop a feel.”

“Most girls would have expected that,” Don responded, “and maybe even been a little insulted if it didn't happen.”

“Maybe,” Ada said, “But it's not all their fault. From a very early age, they're taught that how they look is the most interesting and important thing about them. It starts with animated movies, where the hero might be any kind of person, but the most important thing the princess is, is beautiful.”

“The most important thing the Beast was, was ugly,” Don pointed out.

“And yet...” Ada concluded.

“And yet,” Don agreed.

Ada looked forward to spending afternoons or evenings with Don. In the helmet, Ada was learning to remember more and more of what the helmet taught her, though Don warned her that electronic access to information would always outstrip the human capacity to learn it. Even he encountered far more knowledge than he retained. Outside of the helmet, Ada found that she could talk to Don about almost anything. Though he was an atheist-leaning agnostic, religion was in no way off-limits. “Gnosticism always appealed to me,” She told him. “I like the idea of a human Jesus, and even an experienced one, at that. If you're asking me to follow a strange, sinless god-thing, why not just go straight to the source and follow God? But if Jesus knows from firsthand experience the temptations, the punishments, and the pleasures of sin, then his forgiveness actually means something, because he would actually know how much God asks of us.” Don listened at attention, his unconditional thirst for intellect, and his earned respect for hers, readily evident on his face.

Instead, the things Don struggled to discuss or respect were the most basic. He was convinced that the question “how does these jeans make me look?” had no honest–or even possible–answer: that she was she, that the jeans were just jeans, and that her looks were he looks, and that each was discrete and unchanging, with none bearing the least relation to or exerting the least influence on any other. Finally, she asked him, “what do you see when you look at me?”

Don answered as only he could. “I see a name for the meeting of diverse and divergent knowledges, which grow without dousing the potential or thirst for more. The name is written in some bizarre, analog script devised by nature to fulfill some unrelated purpose.”

“Do you think I'm pretty?” She asked.

“I think you're the kind of beautiful that will attract a long line of people who never even notice your kindness, your brilliance, the joy that shares the atmosphere with you.”

That answer seemed good enough for the time being.

In the succeeding weeks, Ada spent more afternoons and evenings with Don, until they reached the point where they were getting together most days. Yet, she felt that they were hardly together at all. He always wanted to take her back to the servers. Sometimes, she wanted to go, and they went together. If she didn't want to go, he would leave or take her home at whatever time their parents agreed was age-appropriate, so that he could go sneak off to don the helmet on his own. Either way, she could share a couch with him for hours and not get the impression that he felt any closeness to her. She often did.

Curled up and leaning against him, as she peered down at a microbiology textbook and he stared ahead at his laptop screen, she asked, “why don't you ever look at me?”

“I have,” he answered, scrolling down to the next entry on her blog. “I do. I am right now.”