Whispers in the Dark

3

“Ow!” Ptolemy Bent yelled.

“You’ll need a haircut soon,” Kai Lin told him as she dragged the large brush up from the back of the child’s neck. “There’s more hair than there is little boy.”

Misty hissed her paralytic laugh and held a gnarled hand up to shoulder level. She was sitting straight, thanks to her mechanical bed, watching the squat Vietnamese woman torture the poor boy’s head.

“He don’t wan’it cut,” Misty said.

“He’ll look like a girl then,” Kai said, giving a hard tug.

“Ow! I don’t care,” Popo said. “I want my hair like the Jewish man who made relatively. Bushy and big.”

“By the time you’re his age all we’ll be able to see will be your feet.” Kai tickled Ptolemy’s skinny ribs and the boy doubled over in her lap.

Misty rocked back and forth in sympathy with the boy’s glee. Even Kai’s impassive face broke into a smile.

Popo grabbed Kai’s brush hand trying to wrest away the implement of torture. But Kai laid him flat on her lap and bent over to blow a loud kiss against his belly.

“I give! I give! You can brush, you can brush.” All of the air rushed out of the boy’s lungs, making him too weak even to sit up.

“No,” Kai said. “All done.”

The boy cheered and jumped down, hurrying over to the radio corner as Misty called it. By then he had deconstructed fifteen old radios, putting their parts together again on every available space. The wires and transistor chips resembled some new form of technologic life growing like fungus down the sides of the vanity onto the floor. There were three old-time laptop computers connected here and there. One of these cast indecipherable images of color and light. The forms sometimes seemed to have an alien sense about them, but mostly they were abstract events appearing for a nanosecond or an hour, changing imperceptibly or faster than the eye could follow. Another screen flashed strange characters at various intervals and in differing colors. These characters were being printed horizontally across paper, slowly unfurling from a two-hundred-foot roll on an antique dot matrix printer that Chill had brought home from a yard sale in Jackson, he said.

The final screen was connected to a HondaDrive AE storage system. The three-foot-high canister, encased in crystalline green plastic, was one of the two new pieces of equipment that Popo owned. The HondaDrive was a micro-level storage system that held trillions of bytes of information. It also had an I-crunch that could encode data, making it possible to exponentially expand its capacity. Three years ago a HondaDrive AE would have cost a million dollars. But within the past year, General Electric had stunned the scientific world — and the stock market — with the GE-AI-Drive, with its virtually unlimited storage capacity.

Now a HondaDrive AE was only ten thousand dollars. No one wanted them, so security had dropped to the point where Chill had been able to steal one from a Radio Shack in Memphis. Along with the drive Chill stole a LIBCHIP library box: a series of two hundred library chips containing over a million volumes.

“Let’s see you read your way outta that,” Chill dared his nephew.

“I will,” the star-eyed boy replied.

The computer connected to the HondaDrive was taking information from the radio receivers, translating it into mathematical codes, and storing the equations. Ptolemy sat naked, in lotus position, between the screens, watching them and making adjustments to the radio dials now and then.

Kai sat behind the boy and pulled him into her lap. He didn’t resist. She usually came to the Bents’ house last on her rounds as visiting nurse for the state. She told her supervisor, Horth Stone, that it was because Misty needed to take her walk late in the day, but really it was to be able to spend more time with the child.

“What is all this?”

“Computers,” the boy said. “Computers and radios and electricity and — and — that’s all.”

“But what are they doing?” Kai asked the same question every day. And every day Ptolemy said that it was a secret.

“It’s readin’ what the radio says and then it’s puttin’ it into numbers and then it’s puttin’ the numbers on the HondaDrive.”

“But how do you know how to do all that?”

“I don’t,” Ptolemy said as he leaned over to turn a dial. The clicking from the speakers changed tempo, and the boy nodded his head as if he were listening to a piece of music.

“But how can you do something and not know how to do it?” Kai asked.

“You use words that you don’t know what they mean sometimes. You drive a car but you cain’t make one.” Ptolemy was talking but his attention was on the screens. The image screen showed an eerie landscape of pastel greens and metallic blacks interwoven and slipping away into a distant red maw. “I just count the numbers in the radio waves and then use a equation that I got from the math lib’ary on the net. It makes up the numbers and then I look at ’em later.”

“What are you looking for?” Kai asked almost timidly.

Ptolemy turned to the visiting nurse. His deep brown eyes were like polished stones.

“It’s God, I think,” he said. “It’s God sangin’ through radio waves.”

“What do you mean? How could that be? I mean why hasn’t anybody else heard it before?” An instant hysteria bloomed in Kai’s chest. Something about the boy, his eyes, drew her but frightened her too.

“Maybe they did,” Ptolemy said in a matter-of-fact tone. He had turned back to his screens. He wasn’t really thinking about his nurse. “Maybe they did and then when they talked to him they lefted.”

“Left where?”

“To God, I guess. Maybe not though. Maybe they went to heaben.”

“Isn’t that where God is?”

“No,” Ptolemy said, turning again to the squat, mask-faced woman. “Heaben is between here and Him.”

“But, Popo,” she said. “Why hasn’t anybody else heard these messages?”

“’Cause they don’t play with the radio like I do. They all wanna make things but they don’t listen too much, you know?”

“No. I don’t know.”

“When I listen to the radio waves I can hear little pieces of him talkin’. And then, when I turn the knob I hear a little more. His words comin’ through in pieces all over. They think it’s static. They made the digit-thingy to block it out. Nobody wanna hear it in they music, so they miss it.”

“What does God say?” As Kai heard the words coming from her mouth she realized that she meant them.

“Hi,” answered Ptolemy. “How are you and can you hear me.”

“Could it be some alien race and not God at all?”

“I guess. But I don’t think so.”

“We should tell somebody about this,” Kai said. Behind her Misty Bent had fallen asleep.

“I did.”

“Who? Who did you tell?”

“Chilly.”