Chương 144: The Lost Boys (12/25/2001)

DATE: Tuesday, December 25, 2001 LOCATION: Carlsbad, CA | The Tillman Family Home (Via San Diego Arcology) LOCAL TIME: 04: 30 PM PST I didn't drive the thirty miles up the coast to Carlsbad for Christmas. I stayed in the hyper-cooled isolation of the Lower Foundation in San Diego, lowered myself into the immersion pod, and let the Silver Chord translate my consciousness into the network. When I opened my eyes, I was standing in the hallway of my parents' house. I raised my hands, staring at them in the dim light.

They were smaller, entirely lacking the heavy calluses of a Tier One operator and the jagged scars of a twenty-six-year-old man. The thermal-regulated dermal plating felt exactly like human skin, complete with a micro-respiration cycle that simulated breathing. The proprietary robotics division at Fractal Systems had built the Lattice Mimetic Driver (LMD) flawlessly. Zero latency. Instantaneous quantum-heuristic feedback. Holograms hadn't been enough for my mother.

She couldn't stand the idea of her children being flat projections of light while they were scattered across the country. She wanted to hold them. So, we gave her the Lost Boys. We were four grown men—scattered across time zones, carrying the weight of the NFL, live television, Ivy League academia, and a global shadow war—piloting hyper-realistic, synthetic husks modeled exactly after our fifteen-year-old selves.

It was the last age we had all lived under this roof together, before Mogadishu, before the fame, before the world pulled us apart. It was a deeply surreal regression. I walked down the hall, a ghost driving a machine. Since the raid in Tora Bora, I had operated at absolute zero. I had internalized the ashes of my world, locked my grief behind a titanium vault, and convinced myself I was becoming a monster. I noticed Amy's bedroom door cracked open.

The room was illuminated only by the soft glow of her AR interface. My eighteen-year-old sister was sitting cross-legged on her bed, wearing a sleek, silver pair of Project Firefly glasses, talking to empty air.

"It's just... they're so big," Amy was saying quietly.

"Nick is in the NFL, Neil is on television every Saturday night, Chase is at Harvard... they take up all the oxygen. And Chad is just gone. He's like a machine now. I feel like I'm still just the footnote of the family."

"You aren't a footnote, Amy," a warm, gentle, and unmistakably familiar voice replied.

"You're the author. You just haven't decided what genre your book is going to be yet." I froze in the doorway. The audio bridged my neural link automatically. Sitting there, rendered in absolutely flawless, high-fidelity augmented reality, was Heather Yauney. My synthetic chest seized. The absolute zero of the Operator instantly shattered.

"Where did you get that?" I asked, my voice pitching through the vocal synthesizers, cracking with a desperate, sudden weight. Amy jumped, pulling the glasses off.

"I asked Jaron Lanier and Rick Briggs to build her for me. I gave them her old video compilations, her voice recordings, and the child psychology drafts she wrote. They fed it all into the heuristic engine." The AI avatar turned her head, looking directly at me with Heather's bright, expressive eyes.

"Hello, Chad," the AI said gently.

"Merry Christmas." After Amy slipped out to help Mom set the table, I sank onto the edge of the mattress and buried my face in my smooth, unscarred synthetic hands. I confessed to the digital ghost of the woman I loved that I felt like I was slipping, cutting away the pieces of myself that hurt just to finish the war. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

"You aren't a monster," she said, her digital eyes meeting mine with absolute clarity.

"Monsters don't mourn. You're using the anger as a shield so you don't have to feel the grief. Finish your war. But don't lose your humanity to do it. The world doesn't need a monster, Chad. It needs the Architect." I stared at her, letting the tears I couldn't physically shed wash over my mind. For the first time in months, the pain stopped feeling like a poison and started feeling like fuel. I stood up, leaving the digital ghost in the dark, and took a long, simulated breath in the hallway.

I forced the grief back down, locking the Operator away, and pulled the mask of the older brother firmly into place before heading downstairs. Sitting rigidly on the sofas in the living room were the three other synthetic humanoids, waking up in rapid succession as Nick, Neil, and Chase bridged the digital divide.

"Boys!" my mother cried, rushing out of the kitchen, followed closely by my Dad. She grabbed Nick's synthetic face and kissed his cheek, completely unfazed by the billion-dollar robotics, then pulled Neil into a fierce hug. I let my avatar follow my family toward the dining room, seamlessly slipping into the programmed motions of a holiday meal. Then, the heavy, shrill ring of an analog bell cut through the conversation. BRRRING. I turned my head toward the kitchen archway.

Hanging on the wall was the exact same bulky, beige rotary phone that had been there since the 1980s.

"I am genuinely shocked you guys still have that prehistoric wall phone," I said, offering a dry smile.

"We literally own a global telecommunications network now, Mom." The table went quiet.

"I'll never get rid of that phone, Chad," my Dad said heavily, staring at the plastic receiver.

"Because that's the phone that rang on October 4th, 1993, to tell me my son was still breathing." He cleared his throat, pushing past the memory.

"Speaking of the meat grinder... Jerry Bruckheimer sent an advance screener of Ridley Scott's new picture to the house last week. Black Hawk Down. Limited release is this Friday."

"Sony is pushing it hard for the Oscars," Neil added, manic energy lighting up his adolescent face.

"So come on, Chad. Spill it. How much of the 'Ghost' made it into the movie?"

"What do you mean?" I asked smoothly, slicing a piece of turkey.

"Don't play dumb," Chase said, crossing his synthetic arms.

"You know Mom taped the CNN broadcast on October 3rd, right? She hit record the second they announced there were troops trapped in the city. And you know she keeps the VHS tape of the Shadow of the Bat pilot in that exact same cabinet. Nick and I put them in the dual-deck VCR and played them side-by-side."

"We watched it frame by frame, Chad," Nick said, all humor gone, his digital eyes locking onto mine.

"We watched the blurry white dot on the thermal feed vault the alleyway, sweep the leg of the sniper, and drop the grenade. Then we watched twelve-year-old you do the exact same sequence with Christopher Lee on Stage 12. We know it was you on those roofs." I looked at my brothers. The Architect in me analyzed the breach. I could hack the Pentagon, but I couldn't delete an analog VHS tape sitting in a Carlsbad living room.

"So what did Ridley Scott do with the footage?" I asked, casually taking a bite.

"Bruckheimer cut it," Neil sighed in disgust.

"The Pentagon wouldn't acknowledge the 'Ghost,' so Sony couldn't put the Megadeth truck or the roof-running in the movie. The studio executives literally wrote notes saying the roof choreography looked 'too unrealistic for a serious war drama.'""I'm not in the script," I lied perfectly.

"And you guys saw a blurry white dot on a grainy thermal camera. I was just a regular grunt holding a blocking position."

"Well, if you really were just a clumsy grunt," Neil interjected, tapping the side of his neural-link halo, "then you're going to love what I threw together in the editing bay at 30 Rock." A holographic screen popped into existence directly over the Christmas turkey.

"I managed to dig up the old studio blooper reel from The Twelfth Take," Neil grinned.

"I sped the footage up to 5x and laid the Benny Hill soundtrack over the background." The frantic saxophone of "Yakety Sax" blared through the dining room speakers. On the projection, a prepubescent version of me was hilariously fast-forwarded through a montage of botched stunts, missing marks, and violently face-planting into a prop dumpster. Nick completely lost it, his massive shoulders shaking with booming laughter. Even Chase covered his face, laughing helplessly at the absurd footage.

"Now that," Neil declared proudly, "is absolute cinema. Ridley Scott wishes he had this kind of pacing." Nick snorted, wiping a simulated tear from his eye.

"Sure, Chad. Just a regular grunt. You're a killer. Always have been. Just keep your head down when you get to Coronado, alright? We need our spreadsheet guy." They were joking, but they knew I was lying. And looking around that table, at the digital ghosts of the boys we used to be, I silently swore to engineer a future where they would never have to mourn an empty chair.