Prototype Ch. 01

"I deserved that," I admitted. "And I have the day off today." I lied. "But I'm serious. I... I have something here that can help. Can you trust me enough to just give me a chance?"

"I don't know, Benji. I really need to... oh alright." She finally relented. I could hear the annoyance slip from her voice. "Listen Benji, I'll be over in a half hour, alright? And I'll bring the play with me, god knows I could use the help of a friend right about now."

"Great!" I said, not even trying to hide the growing excitement in my voice. At least it was enough to overshadow the budding resentment that she couldn't see me as a grown man. "Oh- one more thing. Think you could pick up a pizza on the way? I don't have much here. I'll spot you the cash."

There was suspicion in her voice when she responded. "For breakfast? This isn't just some excuse to hang out, right? Most pizza places will deliver, you know, if they're even open this early. I'm serious, Benji. This could be my big break and I can't afford to throw it away. Even on you."

"Serious as a hole in the head, Maggie. I swear. And if this works like I think it will you won't just know your own lines- you'll know everyone's lines and the original author's thoughts as well."

"Right.." She said, her suspicions not exactly curtailed by my burst of honesty, which- of course, she could only take as empty boasting.

"Scouts honor," I told her, a small inside joke. We both knew I had never been a boy scout. "Which play is it? I'll see if I can have it all ready by the time you get here."

It was only as an afterthought that I remembered to call in sick to work. Once the small excitement of discovery had worn off, the fatigue of pulling an all nighter was heavy enough on my voice. Sounding ill enough on the phone was quite easy to pull off without a hitch.

Then I hastily tried to tidy up my apartment a bit. It had gotten worse since I'd brought the machine home- not better. And if that was the first thing Maggie laid eyes on she might just turn around and leave before I got out so much as a single word.

Maggie had told me the name of the play but I had never heard of it before. Something some new playwright had written as an adaptation of something or other. I wasn't much of a connoisseur of modern theater. Unfortunately it was new enough that I couldn't find a digital copy of it that I wouldn't have to pay for. I wasn't quite ready for that. Otherwise I'd have had to scan Maggie's copy into the machine and either count on text recognition or just chop up the pages into image puzzles. That would take time. Thankfully, Amazon did have the first act of the play available for digital download as a teaser. That would have to do for now. By the time Maggie arrived with the pizza in hand I already had everything lined up and was ready to go.

To say that Maggie was dubious of my offer once she had arrived would have been an understatement.

"Damnit Benji!" She cursed at me the moment she laid eyes on the machine and before I could even get out half of an explanation. "I told you this was serious. I don't have time to play around with your computer games! The rehearsal is tomorrow!"

"It's not a game!" I said, a little louder than I intended to. Perhaps inviting Maggie over to make up for being an asshole to her earlier while I was still suffering from mild sleep deprivation hadn't been the best of ideas. But it was too late to go back now. I forced myself to swallow once more the aggravation of her not so subtle disrespect for me. Her obvious disbelief that I could actually do what I had promised. I really couldn't blame her for that last bit. I wouldn't have believed me either.

"Look. I can prove it to you. Just..." I fumbled for a moment, my thoughts jumbled by more than just the fatigue I was still feeling. For some reason, proving myself to her there, in that moment, had become incredibly important to me. "Here. I can prove it." I moved quickly, not quite a run, into my bedroom and plucked up one of the research papers I had memorized during the previous training. "Here," I said, as I thrusted it into her hands once I was back in the main room. "Pick a paragraph. Any paragraph."

With the expression she was wearing on her face as her eyes darted back and forth between me and the paper even an idiot could have read her mind. I was wasting her time.

"Just do it." I pushed her, unable to hide the edge of aggravation in my own voice anymore.

"What the fuck is all this about, Benji? I told you I don't have time for this!" She said, but she didn't drop the paper. She just continued to stare at me, as if she expected the other shoe to drop and the real explanation to be immediately forthcoming.

I took a breath, swallowing everything as best I could, and slowly wrapped her hands in mine. With my eyes still closed, I asked her again. "Please. Just pick a paragraph and I'll prove it works. I am trying... to show you. You are already here. If I can't do it- then you can just go. And all you'll have wasted was the half hour it took to get here and back."

Maggie sighed, resigned to play it out rather than just leave. "Alright fine..." She said, removing her hands from mine. She started leafing through seventeen pages of small print, in two columns, with pictures and tables interspersed between them, full of words that neither of us really understood. "Page 7. Third paragraph down." She said smugly.

I rifled through the mental copy of the paper that was now permanently etched into my brain. How many times had I gone over it during that marathon training session, I wondered absently as my mind indexed the page, and then the paragraph in question. How many would it have taken to stick in the first place? Then I started reciting it aloud.

Maggie's face slowly went from obvious belief that I had no chance in hell, to disbelief that I was managing it. Then, slowly, it morphed into complete incredulity that such a thing were even possible. It took another two paragraphs, one from a second paper of her choosing, to force past her resistance into a begrudging acceptance that, somehow, I had memorized them all.

"Alright. I give. If it's a trick, you've spent weeks building up to it. And, since I don't think pulling my leg is worth that much effort, even to you- I give. How'd you do it." She asked.

"With this." I said, gesturing to the two computers and the wire mesh atop them next to my bed.

"What. The hell. Is that?" She asked. "Where did you even get that?"

"Its uhmm..." I stalled, not wanting to admit it to her just yet. "That's not important right now. The important thing is that it works. I know it's hard to believe but I memorized all of those papers in one night."

"Benji, come off it." Maggie said, rolling her eyes. "I already said I gave in- you don't have to keep feeding me this BS to-"

"Maggie, damn it just listen to me!" The words burst from my mouth before I knew what I was saying and shocked the disbelief right off her face like I had physically smacked her. "Look, I'm tired. I'm short tempered. And even on a good day there's still a good chance I'm going to be an ass. Can you please just give me the benefit of the doubt and let me show you?"

"Alright." She nodded after a moment of thought. "This is obviously important to you. You have my co-operation, Benji. For now. Show me how your contraption works its magic."

I ground my teeth for a moment, but if that was all she would give me for now I'd have to take it. A decade of friendship wasn't worth risking over a bad temper and some injured pride.

"Sit here," I instructed her, gesturing to the chair in front of the monitor station.

"Alright." She said, following my instructions. "What next? Do I put this thing on my head?" She asked, picking up the wire mesh helmet and inspecting it dubiously.

"Exactly. It's like an EEG. It reads your brainwave pattern and gives the feedback to the first machine so it can measure your mental state. This machine here shows you where you're at and give you problems to work through."

"How is any of that supposed to help me memorize my lines, Benji?" She asked, trying and failing to keep any of her condescension from her voice.

"I'm getting to that," I said with as little of my own aggravation at her impatience in my voice as I could manage. I started placing the helmet on her head, adjusting the electrodes so they were evenly spaced and the wires didn't get in the way of her movement. "I've already downloaded the first act of the play from Amazon and loaded it into the machine. It is going to give you chunks of text that are out of order, along with other bits of text that are meaningless. You re-organize the text by dragging the fragments into position on the screen and dragging the outliers, the ones that don't belong, off to the side where they will disappear."

Maggie nodded. "Seems easy enough. What if I get the order wrong?"

"The problem will reset and let you try again." I told her from experience. "If you think lines from your play are going to be a challenge, imagine me doing it with fragments from those papers!"

Maggie tilted her head for a moment as if considering, before nodding in agreement. "And how long will this take?"

I had finished putting on the crude helmet and moved over to the training station to sit down. "That depends on you. Have anywhere you have to be this morning?" I tried grinning with that question, mainly to hide the fact that I honestly didn't know.

She raised an eyebrow at me. "Well- if it works I'm free for the rest of the morning. My shift doesn't start till one. If it doesn't..." She let the sentence trail off.

"Then you need to be working on your lines the old fashion way. I got it." Her lack of faith was really starting to annoy me. I wasn't asking her to trust me as I waived crystals around her and chanted in some weird language. This was science, not some hedge magic bullshit. Damnit. What did it matter that neither of us understood. Have a little faith! And stop treating me like a damn child, woman!

Yes. I know none of that made any sense. I was tired. And angry. And my pride was still feeling a little wounded after being poked in the jibbly bits so many times that morning.

Maggie must have noticed my hesitation and mistook it for... something else I didn't care enough about at the time to identify. "Look, Benji- I'll give it a try. Thirty minutes, okay? If it's not working after that I really should-"

I didn't look at her as I interrupted her attempt to placate me. "No- no, you're right. I get it. I appreciate you humoring me. Just let me do something here real quick and we'll get started." She seemed to accept that and sort of shifted in her seat to get more comfortable.

I took the time to open up the fragment list. It was impulsive, I know- but at the time it seemed perfectly reasonable. I mean it's not like it was going to do anything, right? I looked at all those meaningless definitions she'd be sifting through. So what if she came across a few others like "Benji is a child's name" or "Benjamin is a man and deserves to be treated respectfully" .

I must have started spacing out a bit while I was staring at those additions. Maybe some part of me knew what I was doing and was trying to stop me. Maggie's question brought me out of it with a start. "Earth to Benji. We gonna get started anytime soon?"

Any part of me that had reservations evaporated. I decided I right then I was going to tell her, forcefully, to stop calling me Benji. After she had spent at least two hours training. I quickly added "Benjamin knows what he is doing. Show some appreciation" and saved the list

"Yep- here we go." I said as I entered my own fragment file name when the system prompted, with its own password; webster. Keep it simple, right? "Now just hit enter on your end."

The monitor station lite up with the first problem as I walked around to watch for a bit. "See the radar screen behind the problems?"

Maggie nodded. "And the blip- oh! It moved!"

"It'll do that as you move along. After a few problems the outlier fragments will start appearing as well. You'll see it move around even more then until you get it to the center. Try and keep it as close to the center as you can- but don't try too hard." I told her.

Maggie turned to look at me like I was an idiot. "Try, but don't try."

"Eyes on the screen," I scolded her as I turned her back around. "I know it sounds tricky, but once you figure it out it's like riding a bike. You just do it."

A small handful of problems went swiftly by. As the first outlier fragments started appearing on the screen she reminded me. "A half hour, remember?" Her voice had already taken on an almost far away sound too it.

I nodded absently, knowing she wouldn't see me. She may have had her doubts, but I didn't. She'd thank me for this after she was done. It didn't take long at all after that. Within 20 minutes her little blip was hovering just left of center and wasn't moving anymore. And so I sat down to wait for Maggie to finish her training.

The only problem was that watching someone stare at a computer screen wasn't exactly the most engaging thing in the world. Add to that the fact that I had now, officially, not had any sleep in more than 24 hours and things were getting tough. At first I thought about sticking it out. Just watching her.

The wire mesh helmet wasn't exactly flattering on her at the moment, but from my seat at the training computer I could get a good view of her face and what little she had going for her down below. Her expression seemed a mix of day dream and concentration. Even so, she was breathing steady and staring straight ahead, her attention riveted to the screen. She looked... almost like an angel.

The lizard part of my brain took the opportunity to remind me that this was the girl I had dreamed about since I was old enough to have those types of dreams. I had made a pass or two at her, but she had always rebuffed them and left me squarely in the friend zone. Eventually I had given up hoping something would happen- some spark would light in her and she would finally see me as someone worthy of dating. In some of my more lonely nights I still tried to imagine what life with her would be like. Those nights usually ended with me needing to clean off with a towel and a fresh shower, and then another fresh towel- before finally hitting the sack.

She might have ruined me, in a way. Sure, we had our ups and downs in our friendship but she had been such a rock for me most of my life. Because of that, any girlfriend I ended up with either suffered greatly in comparison or ended up becoming irrationally jealous of our friendship. I couldn't ever understand why. It's not like I would ever have a shot with her.

And that was back when I was still a college student and thought I was going somewhere. After I had been forced to drop out, my self-respect had plummeted. But even then she hadn't just let me sink. Even after I picked up a few other... bad habits, she still stuck by me.

Don't worry. We'll get to those soon enough. But all of that reminiscing wasn't helping me stay awake. So- I set an alarm for 2 hours and laid back on my bed. Just going to rest my eyes for a bit, I told myself. Yeah. I was an idiot.

"Benjamin. Hey... Benjamin." I could feel a warm hand on my chest, and another one softly touching my face.

"Wha... what time... Maggie?" I couldn't quite get clear of the cobwebs. Why am I so tired?

"Yeah. Your alarm just went off. You didn't wake up." She said softly. "You let me go for over two hours."

Suddenly it all came back like a splash of cold water on my face. I nearly shot up into a sitting position on the bed. Maggie was sitting next to me- evidently having already extricated herself from the cap. "Yeah. Sorry. I just couldn't stay awake I guess."

She smiled at me- with a warmth that I suddenly realized I hadn't seen in... well, in all honesty- ever, at least from her. "It's okay. You were right. I've got it all now. The entire first act. It's amazing! Where did you find this thing?"

I tried to listen to her, I really did. But I couldn't get past the warmth of her hand. It was resting, gently, on top of mine now. "Sorry, uhm... what?" I managed to blubber out.

Her smile broadened and she turned to look at the machine for a moment. It couldn't have been because she was acting shy and had to look away from my blushing face. Nah. She was just still curious about the machine. Right?

"Look, you are obviously tired and act one is as far as I can get right now, right?" Her face turned back to me with that warm smile still making it glow. "Right?"

"Yeah. I uh... I'd need the rest of it in digital format to uhm..."

Then Maggie did something she almost never did in my presence. She giggled. Just a tiny bit. It was all just too confusing.

"You rest," She said. "I'll call you after the rehearsal tomorrow and let you know how it went. And I'll see what I can do about getting you a copy of the play. That is," And then she was looking away again. What the hell was wrong with her? "You know, if you're willing to let me use the machine again to learn the rest of it."

"Yeah, uhm... sure. I guess." Was all I could manage. And she was looking at me again with... that look. "What?" I asked her- unable to fathom what was happening. I had gotten so used to her pissed-at-me face, I wasn't sure what to make of this one.

"Nothing Benjamin. I just... Well, I owe you one." Her eyes took me in from head to toe as if appraising me for something. Her smile broadened again. "Now get some sleep. We'll talk later."

Then she kissed me. Not the hot, wet, porno type of kiss. Just a brief and feather light kiss on the lips. But it sent my heart racing nonetheless. "Wha... what was that for?" I stammered, feeling the blood rushing to my cheeks again.

She stood up from the bed, her hair bouncing a bit from the near nervous energy of her movement. "Just a... token of my appreciation." She said with a glint in her eye before she near all but teleported out of my apartment.

I sat there, dumbfounded, on my bed. I couldn't process it all. So I took her advice and slept. Although, I probably should have gotten undressed first.