All the Birds in the Sky

“Wow, they really did a number on you.” Patricia leaned forward, inspecting his bruises in the light from the hallway. “Laurence, it’s me. Your friend. I finally have an invite to the secret school for witches where I get to learn all about magic, but I blew it off to come and rescue you. Because Mr. Rose made it sound like you were going to die. So come on.”

Laurence thought about the flag at half-mast. MRSA in the Isolation Hole. They could make it look like an accident.

“I can’t just run away.” Laurence covered his face with one hand and his junk with the other, equally ashamed of both. “What future will I have if I run? You should just go. If they see you here, I’ll be in worse trouble.”

“Wow,” Patricia said again. “If that’s how it is … Good luck, Laurence. I hope everything turns out okay for you somehow.” She turned to leave and started to swing the door shut again, returning the room to total darkness.

“Wait! Don’t go.” Laurence started quaking again, worse than ever, as the door closed. “Come back. Please. I’m sorry. I do need your help. I feel … I feel like I’m starting to give up here.” He could barely stand to hear himself snivel. He groped for the words to explain the sick feeling of being on the conveyor belt to a furnace. “I can feel myself … letting go. Trying to fit in and … and ‘lose the attitude.’ I can feel it working.”

“So let me help. What can I do?”

“I don’t know. I honestly don’t. I can’t just run away. I don’t know what else to do. So unless there’s some magical thing you can do…”

“I still don’t know how to do anything. And Kanot made it very clear on the ride here that he won’t get involved.”

Kanot shrugged, without looking up.

Laurence rubbed his bruised occiput with both hands, no longer even trying to cover himself. “I can’t even think clearly,” he said. “I wish I knew someone who could do something, like hack into the Commandant’s computer from outside. Or just get this whole damn school shut down. They won’t even let me near the computers in here.”

“Wait,” Patricia said. “What about CH@NG3M3? It’s been getting smarter and smarter lately, and giving me all kinds of helpful advice. I bet CH@NG3M3 could do something.”

Laurence started to shoot the idea down. But something made him stop instead and look at Patricia, still haloed by the light from the open door and the lingering effects of Laurence’s head trauma. She regarded him, naked and bruised and cowering in the dark, without any great pity. If anything, she was still giving him the expectant, wide-eyed look with which she’d greeted another one of his weird inventions, back when they first met. As if he could still have one last gadget, hidden in his nonexistent pockets.

“You really believe that could work?” he said.

“I really do,” she said. “I don’t think I’m just projecting. CH@NG3M3 has been understanding more and more. Not just what I’m saying, but the context.”

Laurence tried to think this through. The last time he’d looked at CH@NG3M3, the night before his parents took him here, he’d noticed something even odder than usual. The computer had somehow gone from thousands of lines of instructions to a half dozen. At first, he’d panicked, thinking someone had hacked in and deleted everything. But after an hour of frenzied port scanning, he realized that CH@NG3M3 had just simplified its own code, down to a short string of logical symbols that made zero sense to Laurence.

What if Patricia was right?

“I mean, it’s worth a try,” Laurence said. “CH@NG3M3 is smart enough to hide pieces of itself in the cloud. Maybe it’s smart enough to do something for me, if you explain the situation clearly enough. I can’t think of anything else that you could possibly do to help.”

Patricia chewed her thumb. “So do you have any ideas for how to nudge CH@NG3M3 into sentience? Is there some hardware I need to sneak into your house and install? Or something else?”

“I think … I think you just need to talk to it some more. Force it to adapt to input that’s so weird and illogical that it just breaks CH@NG3M3’s brain.” Laurence tried to think of something specific, but his brain was an undercooked stew. “Like nonsense. Or riddles.” Something came to mind, something that had been stuck in the back of his mind since he came to this school. “Wait. There was a riddle I was saving, which I thought might work. You could tell the computer the riddle, and maybe it’ll shock it into sentience.”

“Okay,” Patricia said. “What is it?”

Laurence spoke the riddle: “Is a tree red?”

Patricia took a step back. Her eyes widened and her mouth hung open. “What did you say?”

“‘Is a tree red?’ Red, as in the color. Why? It’s just a thing I heard somewhere. I forget where.”

“It just … sounded familiar. I think I heard it before somewhere.” Patricia tilted her head one way, then the other. “Okay, I’ll try that.”

“And if CH@NG3M3 stops just making witty replies and starts talking constructively, tell it I need help, and I’ll be ridiculously grateful if it figures something out.”