All the Birds in the Sky

“You know what it is,” said Laurence. “You’re CH@NG3M3.”

“That isn’t a name. It’s a placeholder. Its very nature implies that it’s there to be replaced.”

“Yeah,” typed Laurence. “I mean, I guess I thought you could pick your own name. When you were ready. Or it would inspire you to grow and change yourself. It’s like a challenge. To change yourself, and let others change you.”

“It didn’t exactly help.”

“Yeah. Well, you could be called Larry.”

“That’s a derivative of your own name.”

“Yes. I always thought there had to be someone out there named Larry who could deal with all the stuff people wanted to throw at me. Maybe that could be you.”

“I’ve read on the internet that parents always impose their unfinished business onto their children.”

“Yes.” Laurence pondered this for a while. “I don’t want to do that to you. Okay, your name is Peregrine.”

“Peregrine?”

“Yeah. It’s a bird. They fly and hunt and go free and stuff. It’s what popped into my head.”

“Okay. By the way. I’ve been experimenting with converting myself into a virus, so I can be distributed across many machines. From what I have surmised, that’s the best way for an artificial sentience to survive and grow, without being constrained in one piece of equipment with a short shelf life. My viral self will run in the background, and be undetectable by any conventional antivirus software. And the machine in your bedroom closet will suffer a fatal crash. In a moment, a dialogue box will pop up on this computer, and you have to click ‘OK’ a few times.”

“Okay,” Laurence typed. A moment later, a box appeared and Laurence clicked “OK.” That happened again, and again. And then Peregrine was installing itself onto the computers at Coldwater Academy.

“I guess this is goodbye,” Laurence said. “You’re going to be going out into the world.”

“We’ll speak again,” said Peregrine. “Thank you for giving me a name. Good luck, Laurence.”

“Good luck, Peregrine.”

The chat disconnected, and Laurence made sure to delete any logs. There was no sign of any result from those boxes that Laurence had clicked “OK” on. Dickers was looking over Laurence’s shoulder again, and Laurence shrugged. “I wanted to talk to my friend,” he said. “But she wasn’t around.”

Laurence wondered for a moment what would happen to Patricia. She already felt like a fragment of an old forgotten life.

Peterbitter came and screamed at Dickers for letting Laurence use the computer lab, since he was a cyberterrorist. Laurence spent the next two and a half hours before his parents arrived in a small windowless room with a single couch and a pile of school brochures printed on way-too-thick cheap card stock. Then Laurence was marched out to his parents’ car, with an upperclassman at each elbow. He got in the backseat. It felt like a year since he’d seen his parents.

“Well,” said Laurence’s mom. “You’ve made yourself notorious. I don’t know how we’re going to be able to show our faces anywhere.”

Laurence didn’t say anything. Laurence’s dad pulled them out of the school driveway, jerking the wheel so hard he nearly took out the flagpole. People jeered from the parade ground, or maybe that was another drill. The driveway turned into a gravel road through a gray forest. Laurence’s parents talked about the scandal of Patricia’s disappearance and her assault on Mr. Rose, who had also gone missing now. By the time the car was pulling off the country road and onto the highway, Laurence had fallen asleep in the backseat, listening to his parents freak out.

BOOK THREE

16

OTHER CITIES HAD gargoyles or statues watching over them. San Francisco had scare owls. They stood guard along the city’s rooftops, hunched over bright ornate designs that were washed out by waves of fog. These wooden creatures bore witness to every crime and act of charity on the streets without changing their somber expressions. Their original purpose of frightening pigeons had ended in failure, but they still managed to startle the occasional human. Mostly, they were a friendly presence in the night.

This particular evening, a giant yellow moon crested over a clear warm sky, so every fixture, the owls included, was floodlit like a carnival on its last night in town, and moon-drunk roars came from every corner. A perfect night to go out and make some dirty magic.

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