Laurence had a line he wouldn’t cross: He would never say anything bad about Patricia or laugh at anyone else’s burn. He wouldn’t sycophant his way into the outskirts of anyone’s group by burning his onetime friend. Mostly, he tried not to think about the Patricia thing. She could look after herself. He was in a cocoon, pupating and incommunicado. There was nothing he could do either way. Six months from now, if everything went to plan, Laurence would be a freshman at the math-and-science school.
And in the meantime, Laurence poured every spare minute into upgrading CH@NG3M3, which claimed more and more space in his secure closet, until he had to throw out most of his clothes. Every time he added more processing power, the computer seemed to chew it up right away. Laurence had built a neural network with just a handful of layers, but somehow this had grown on its own to over twenty layers, as CH@NG3M3 kept refactoring itself. Not only that, but the serial connections had gotten more confusing—instead of sending data from Machine A to Machine B to Machine C, it was going from A to B to C to B to C to A, creating more and more feedback loops.
One day, Patricia was in line next to Laurence at the cafeteria. She looked messed up—dark hair falling into her face, circles under her eyes, uniform disarrayed, socks mismatched—and she wasn’t looking at anything in particular. She didn’t even notice what sort of crap they slung onto her tray. Someone who doesn’t care if they get Tater Tots or turnip slurry is a person who has given up on life.
Laurence had a powerful conviction he should say something to Patricia. Nobody would notice. He wouldn’t stand up and shout that he was on her side or anything.
“Hey,” Laurence muttered in Patricia’s general direction. She didn’t seem to hear him. She stumbled, zombie-like, toward the desserts.
“Hey,” Laurence said, a little louder. “Hey Patricia. How are you, like, doing?”
“I’m doing,” Patricia said without looking up.
“Cool, cool,” Laurence said, as if she’d ended that sentence with an adverb. “Me too, me too.”
They went their separate ways—they were both eating alone, but Laurence had the privilege of eating alone in a secluded nook of the cafeteria, behind the milk pumps with their sawn-off rubber tubing. Patricia, meanwhile, ate alone in a dim corner of the library, behind the geography shelves, where Laurence barely noticed her when he dropped off a book on his way to class. She was so shrouded, she looked like Batman.
At home, Laurence studied his parents, who had forgotten that he’d yelled at them for being defeated by life a few weeks earlier. Laurence’s dad kept complaining about his car sound system eating his CDs.
There was an article online about problems with the aerospace company that Isobel, the rocket scientist, was helping to run. Launches getting canceled over and over, minor accidents. He read it three times, cursing each time.
Laurence got a letter saying he’d been admitted to the math-and-science high school for the fall. He kept it on his dresser, next to his grandmother’s old ring and his three different combs (for different parts of his head) and he looked at it every morning as he got dressed for school. The two crinkly folds in the paper started to look like the lines of Laurence’s palm after a while. Life lines.
One night, Laurence was already in his PJs, but he wound up on his hands and knees in front of his closet, staring at the skein of crossover cables running between all the jury-rigged parts of CH@NG3M3. The instructions had gotten much more numerous and complicated than Laurence could possibly understand, covering eventualities that he couldn’t envision. And CH@NG3M3 had thousands of accounts on free services all over the world, where it was storing data or pieces of itself in the cloud.
And then Laurence noticed something: Every time Patricia had one of her conversations with CH@NG3M3, the computer’s code base took another exponential leap into greater complexity right afterward. Maybe just a random correlation. But Laurence kept staring at the dates and times of the logs and thinking about Patricia breathing life into his machine, while he was blowing her off.
Laurence found Patricia on the front steps the next morning. She stared at the school, maybe trying to decide if she should even bother. “Hey,” he said. “I just wanted you to know that I got your back. I don’t think you’re a Satanist.”
Patricia shrugged. Her dark hair had grown longer, so it almost ran into her jumper. “Why would anybody be a Satanist, anyway? I don’t get it. You can’t believe in Satan without believing in God, and then you’re just picking the wrong side in a big mythic battle thing.”
Everybody else had gone inside. They were ringing the second bell. “I guess if you’re a Satanist, you believe that God is the bad guy, and He rewrote history to make Himself look good.”
“But if that’s true,” Patricia said, “then you’re just worshiping a guy who needs to get a better PR team.”
Laurence and Patricia sat together at lunch—in the library, but not in the dark corner, because there wasn’t enough space for two people in there. Laurence tried to ask Patricia about how she was dealing, and she just shut down, like the whole topic of conversation put her in a coma.
“Maybe,” Laurence said, “maybe you should talk to Mr. Rose.”