Chapter EightThe Back Row

By September Soph had transferred to Stanford. Atom followed the lectures through her frames. Gideon Abecassis, two rows in front of them, was starting his third year and falling asleep in the same class.

Gideon was a bright kid who had come to Stanford expecting to find a lot of other bright kids to do things with. He had found them easily enough, but it was harder to get anyone interested in a project which wasn't going to count toward a grade. By his third year he had assembled a small circle of friends who would come over to help him build something, and usually stay to argue about it. He lived above a laundromat. His scholarship paid most of the rent and he made up the difference doing computer work that he described to his parents as tutoring.

Soph sat two rows behind him, by the wall. The room could seat two hundred and there were usually only sixty students in it, so she had plenty of room to herself. She wore a hoodie over a black mesh suit, which he recognized as a Second Skin, and kept her frames on throughout the lecture. That was unusual. The professor hated the things and most people at least made a show of taking them off.

At first he thought she was muttering about the lecture. She would tilt her head a little, say something he couldn't hear, and then go back to writing. Occasionally she laughed. Gideon tried to work out what was funny about the part they were on, until it occurred to him that she was having a much better conversation than he was.

He had watched her for two weeks before he went and sat down next to her.

She fidgeted in her seat and looked for an escape, and he noticed.

"Hey, I didn't mean to intrude on your, uh, personal space. I just figured, you know, this was where the cool kids hung out," he whispered.

"Uh, okay."

"You're in the game right now, huh?"

"What are you talking about?" She tilted her frames up.

"Come on. I know a player when I see one."

"Okay." She let her shoulders down an inch. "You got me."

"Most girls just text their boyfriend, you know."

"How do you know I'm talking to my boyfriend?"

"Come on. I got into Stanford, I'm not a fucking idiot."

"Okay, you got me again." Soph grinned in spite of herself.

"Let me guess your class."

"Don't."

"Rogue. Definitely a rogue. No, wait." He looked at her hands. "Dual class. Rogue wizard."

She stared at him. "How."

"You've got a callus on your thumb from a dagger grip and you've been moving your lips in Latin for two weeks. Also, nobody who's just a rogue would take a class on protein folding. Rogues are lazy."

"My name is Gideon," he added.

"Soph." She shook his hand.

"Are you majoring in AI?"

"Biotech. My boyfriend Atom, it's really his thing. I think it's all really interesting though."

"Oh, cool."

"Hey, what did he just say? I missed it," Soph asked.

Gideon had missed it too. He copied the equation from the student on his left, and Soph checked it against her notes before copying his.

Gideon caught up with Soph as she was leaving class.

"Hey, what are you up to right now?" he asked.

"I don't know, I've got an hour before my next class."

"I was going to meet up with some friends downstairs. You should come hang out."

Soph wavered.

"Come on," Gideon insisted. "It'll be fun."

Soph followed him down to the basement, checking the time on her phone.

It was a room that had been a lab once and was now something else. Four students sat at the table in the center of the room. On the table were two marionettes, suspended by strings, dancing around each other. They were small, only four or five inches in height, and the strings connected up to a gantry mechanism that dragged them left and right, forward and backward.

Two of the students sat in front of laptops, their fingers dancing in the air. Soph peered over the shoulder of one of the girls in front of her laptop. The screen was all console data, mostly black text with some lines of red. The green light at the top of the laptop indicated that the camera was in use.

"Quit dancing around each other and fight!" shouted one of the observers.

Gears whirred as the marionettes circled each other. The girl flicked her wrist and her puppet jumped forward, striking at the other. The boy at the other console flicked to the side, and his puppet dodged.

"Hey, could y'all pause for a second?" Gideon interrupted.

"Aw, but this is the world semi-finals!" Wes said.

"Shut up, I wanted you all to meet someone," Gideon said.

The puppeteers put their hands down, and the marionettes crumpled. The girl who Soph had been watching turned around and looked at her.

"You're Soph Ehrlich," she said.

Soph was taken aback. "Yeah. Do I know you?"

"Your mother is Maxine Ehrlich?"

"Yeah."

"She's like, my hero. I hear you're pretty good at the game."

"Oh, I'm alright."

"That's Mim," said Gideon. "Don't mind her."

"I'm not going to not mind her," said Mim. "Her mom invented the frames. Do you know how the frames work? I read her paper on the light field stuff in high school and I didn't understand any of it, and I read it again every year and I understand a little more each time."

"She'd like you," Soph said. "She keeps making me read that paper."

Teo was the boy at the other console. He had built the little fighting men and was pleased to have somebody new to show them to. While he explained the hand tracking, Gideon introduced Soph to Priya, who was working at the whiteboard, and to Wes, who had been shouting at the puppets. Wes was trying to fill the last place in a tournament he had organized. There were eleven people in it already, most of whom Soph would meet over the next few days. He asked if she wanted to play.

"I don't know how."

"You'll pick it up. Teo, show her," Wes said.

Mim moved her chair over and Soph sat down at the laptop. Teo stood behind her and showed her how to hold her hand in front of the camera. Bending one finger brought up the puppet's guard, and another made it swing. The whole thing was pretty simple, although she kept trying to move her arm instead of her fingers. When she leaned forward to see the strings, the camera lost her hand and the little man fell over.

"What happens if I break it?"

"He hot glues them back on," said Wes.

"Only between rounds," said Teo.

Atom was standing behind the laptop where only Soph could see him. He told her to kick Mim's ass, and kept up a running commentary on what she was doing wrong until she told him to shut up. Mim looked up, startled.

"Sorry. Not you," Soph said.

Soph lost in forty seconds. By then she wanted to try again. They glued the arm back on and Teo showed her what she was doing with her little finger that kept making the puppet turn around. She was late for her next class, and went back downstairs as soon as it was over.

In October Gideon invited them over to his apartment. Soph brought burritos and Mim brought the video they were supposed to have watched before the next lecture. Wes had brought his notes, but they weren't much help. None of them could agree on what the lecturer meant, and every time they stopped the video to look something up they found another thing they didn't understand. They got through half of it before the food was gone.

Gideon had made the apartment into a workshop. His servers filled the spare-room closet, so he had to leave the door open, and Soph soon learned to bring a sweater because he liked to keep it cold. Everything in the place was connected to his computer. He had started by automating the lights and kept thinking of other things it could do for him. His latest addition was a camera in the hall, which let him check for packages from the couch. He showed it to her with considerable satisfaction.

"You've got all this stuff and you still have to do your laundry downstairs?" Soph asked.

"I'm working on it," Gideon said.

"No he isn't," said Mim. "I've seen his bathroom."

Soph liked them. It was good to be somewhere that she wasn't the clever one, and where being Max Ehrlich's daughter meant being asked a lot of questions that she couldn't answer. She wore her frames, as she did everywhere, and sometimes had to tell Atom to be quiet because she couldn't listen to two people at once. They had learned who she was talking to by then. She had told them his name and that they played together, and let them think he was at home avoiding his homework.

One evening in November he turned up as a bird on Gideon's shoulder. Soph was on the floor with her laptop and couldn't stop looking at it.

"What?" Gideon asked.

"Put your frames on."

He found them under a sheaf of papers. There was a small brown hawk on his shoulder, peering around his neck as if trying to see what he was working on.

"That's Atom," she said.

"Your boyfriend?"

"He's my familiar. He's a mentalist, so he can bind to another player."

"Does he have to be a bird?"

"No," said Atom. "But I like the view."

Gideon startled and Soph laughed. The bird hopped down to the keyboard. Its feet went through the keys.

"You've got a Link?" Gideon asked it.

"Yeah."

"Those cost four grand."

"I know."

Gideon knew a little about Atom. After he met Soph he had looked her up and found the article about the crash in January. It hadn't said much about what had happened to the boy. He had supposed that Atom was recovering from something and would eventually come to visit. He was only now realizing how much of Soph's day the boy shared, and how carefully she had avoided explaining why.

"Soph says you're good," Atom said.

"At what?"

"Computers."

"Oh. Yeah, I'm alright."

"Show me something."

Gideon opened the program that ran the apartment and explained how he had connected it to the lights. Atom asked a couple of questions. By the time they got to the thermostat Gideon had forgotten to be embarrassed about showing his code to a bird.

Later, when the others had gone, he asked Soph about The Lab. A friend of his had graduated two years earlier and gone to work for Solenoid. He said there was a floor of the building he couldn't get into, even though his job regularly took him through the rest of it.

"He thinks they've got an AI in there. A real one, I mean. Something you could talk to."

"I don't know anything about that."

"Your mom never talks about work?"

"She talks about work all the time. I just don't know what she's talking about most of the time. If you want to know how the Link works, you should read her papers."

"I've read them. There's nothing about this."

"Then she probably doesn't want people knowing about it."

Gideon seemed to take this as encouragement. He said he was going to find out anyway.

"Don't go bothering my mom," Soph said. "I'm serious. She'll be mad at me."

"I wasn't going to ask her."

"Then how are you going to find out?"

He wouldn't tell her. Soph suspected that he hadn't thought of a way yet. Atom was being unusually quiet, and she made a note to ask him about it when they were alone.

Gideon had an unfortunate habit of taking an interest in things that were none of his business. Soph had enjoyed competing with him, and had laughed at some of the things he found ways to get into. Later that November he sent her an email with a photograph of her own bare back attached. She had taken it in a mirror two summers earlier. She read the subject line again. Was that supposed to be funny? He'd been in her phone.

Downstairs, Gideon had a cable apart. He was still working on it when she came in.

"Gideon, what the fuck?"

"What?"

"The picture. Why have you got that picture?"

"Oh. I was going to tell you how I did it."

"I don't care how you did it. Delete it."

He got up to open his computer. She stood beside him while he deleted the message and the file he had downloaded.

"The deleted folder too."

"Soph, I'm not keeping a copy of it."

"Then you won't mind."

He emptied the folder. "You should change your password, though."

"You think I don't know how to change my password?"

"I didn't say that."

"I didn't know I needed to keep you out of my phone. What else did you look at?"

He said that was all. She wasn't sure she believed him, and she went home before he could explain any more.

Mim came to her room a few days later with a puppet and the glue gun. Soph had been going straight home after class, and was glad to see her. They attached the strings to the desk lamp and practiced for a while. Soph complained about Gideon, then worried that Mim would go back and repeat it all, and asked her not to.

"I won't. He knows you're pissed off."

"He thinks I'm being stupid."

"I don't think he does."

His apology arrived on paper. Soph put it away in a drawer, took it out again, and finally went to talk to him after a week. She missed the little group. She didn't want to give up her other friends because he had been an asshole.

"I'm not playing on my own computer anymore," she told him.

"Okay."

"And no phones. Anybody's phone, not just mine. We can have a couple of computers that are for this, and you can do whatever you want to them."

"We've got two in the cupboard that nobody's using."

"Good. I'll use one of those."

Teo painted the cases yellow. They kept them off their personal accounts and their phones. Soph still checked her phone permissions regularly; Gideon had given her a reason to, and she wasn't going to pretend he hadn't just to make him feel better.

Atom put a bird over the login box on one of the yellow machines. It wouldn't let anyone type until it had been fed. Gideon spent an evening trying to find the part that made it hungry, and eventually had to ask him.

"Oh, it's just a counter," Atom said.

"Where? I looked for a counter," Gideon asked.

"I'll show you."

Gideon was annoyed at how simple it was. Atom made him feel a bit slow sometimes, finishing in hours the exercises that took him days. But the following week Atom couldn't get the same bird to land on the right window, and complained about the interface until even Soph was tired of hearing it.

"Maybe it just doesn't want to," she said.

"It's a bird, Soph."

"So are you half the time. It has your manners."