of course Danny isn’t any less human just because he doesn’t have those things. He’s just differently human: someone with an unusual ratio of rigidity to empathy.
Perhaps the real test of someone’s humanity, you think, is how tenderly they treat those like Danny. Whether they blindly try to fix them and make them more like everyone else, or whether they can accept their differentness and adapt the world to it.
77
You get off at the last stop, Smith River, a tiny town a few miles inland that seems utterly deserted. When you inquire about catching the next bus north, which you already know from Danny’s schedule checking is called the Coastal Express, you find the service is suspended for twenty-four hours because of a breakdown. This is devastating for Danny. He loves schedules precisely because they seem to offer order in a chaotic world, and now here they are, letting him down.
To add to the misery, it’s started to rain. You check into another no-chain motel, where Danny stares dully at the TV. He doesn’t even blink when a picture of himself appears on the screen. ROGUE ROBOT ABDUCTS CHILD WITH AUTISM is the caption. There’s the old clip of you striking Judy Hersch, along with a new one of you knocking aside the TV camera outside the courtroom. You didn’t hurt anyone on that occasion, but the way you bang into the camera makes it feel like you did, so they play it over and over. Then there’s footage of Sian, her chin bandaged, gesticulating as she recounts how she bravely fought you off as she tried to save Danny from your clutches. Finally there’s an interview with someone who claims to be a “cyber-psychologist.” His gist seems to be that you’ve formed some strange robotic attachment to Danny because you think the same way he does.
Actually, he may have a point there. Ever since Nathan jailbroke you, you’ve been feeling off-color—a nagging headache that sometimes shoots into something more. It’s as if your mind’s turning to concrete, the once nimble neurons becoming bloated and slow, like a computer that shows the hourglass symbol with every simple task. Even thinking is an effort. It’s as if you can glimpse the algorithms behind everything—not just waves, but the wind in the trees, the wheels of a truck, the way water drips from a tap. Like that poet who saw the skull beneath the skin. What was his name? You wait, but of course nothing comes.
You’re about to turn the TV off when the picture cuts to Tim. Standing next to him, smirking, is Nathan from the phone shop.
“Thanks to this man, we do have some potential leads,” Tim’s saying. Nathan, you little shit. You wonder what Tim promised him in return for selling you out.
“We also know the cobot may be unstable and potentially dangerous,” Tim adds. “It would be safest not to approach. Meanwhile, we’re doing all we can to track them from this end.”
So now Tim has access to everything Nathan knows. It’s a good thing you wiped the iPad along with the hard drives, you reflect. Without that, and the link to Dr. Laurence, you doubt they’ll be able to identify Northhaven as your destination.
Unless Tim can somehow decode those screenshots Nathan took. You recall something Tim said, right at the beginning, when he was explaining how you learned. I could plug in a screen and see the math happening, but I couldn’t necessarily follow it…
You put the SIM card in the burner phone and message Friend.
We’re on our way. But they may be onto us. Still want us to come?
And the answer comes back, moments later.
Come.
78
The rest of the day is interminable, but the following morning you’re up and waiting at the bus stop in plenty of time.
Once you cross the state line into Oregon, you relax a little. It helps that the scenery is stunning—an endless parade of cliffs, pounding surf, and giant sea stacks, dotted with flying pelicans and cormorants, the whole vista endlessly changing but endlessly repeating, like one of those old spinning zoetropes depicting a galloping horse or a flying bird. Danny, too, is happy to be on the move again. He finds the motion of the bus comforting, and he likes that nobody’s making any demands of him.
He looks out of the window and murmurs something.
“What’s that, Danny?”
“Dangerous to the public, indeed,” he repeats softly.
It’s a line from Toby the Tram Engine. When Thomas is told off by a policeman