Sunny took a bullet to the head as we walked home from school. A stray. Straight outta left field, it charged through the side of his skull where it danced until it died — and Sunny didn’t let it bother him. There hadn’t been anything inside that noggin for a week — since his operation. He was notorious for good timing followed by bad timing.
According to the chip’s analysis, the round went in above his ear at the rim of the right temporal bone and ricocheted off the left parietal, straight back, nailing the occipital dead-center then forward with a final cough of kinetic energy. He had the analysis sent to my phone without saying a word. Looked like a bad party that ended prematurely in his nasal cavity.
That shot must’ve hurt, but Sunny said no. Stings like gettin’ beaned in the ribs with a baseball, he said. Sunny didn’t play baseball, not ever. I would know.
Just lost my breath and the computer fixed that quick, he said.
The stray shot: not that weird. Wyrd, really. It’s the way life tends to treat you if you’re unfortunate enough to be born here and masochistic enough to stay. We had gangs. Worse than the prototypical gangster, they weren’t involved for honor or money or brotherhood or even entertainment. A genuine disdain for all life, including their own of course, was their uniting trait. Like apathy wasn’t enough for them, so they started to hate. These guys sent themselves and locals to the clinic with a stray wound on the daily. Especially when a new shipment came in. I imagine they all gathered in a few spots throughout the city and stood together in a circle, firing skyward until boredom set in.
Since we lived in a distribution town, our boys got first choice of the goods before shipping them out again across the country and every couple of months, just to really stimulate the local medical economy, they planned all their deliveries on the same day. Although most hits were superficial, folks died now and then, usually with wounds like Sunny’s. Unlike Sunny, they weren’t empty-headed.
He stumbled toward me a little when it happened, barely perceivable. I juked left out of his way but he was already back on track. I couldn’t tell if it was him or the computer recovering that quick.
I told him he was lucky it didn’t smash right through the new little machine inside his head, killing him dead right there. He shrugged and muttered something about chance.
Saying it was luck would’ve meant living was lucky and Sunny was never one to think like that.
His eyes on the cusp of watering, he threw me a smile. His head turned to me in a flourish of disguising pain and an earnest wish to disgust me, and I saw the little hole right there, barely trickling blood.
The wind blew lazily and a tuft of his black hair swept over the opening to the cavern that was his head. I thought it looked like the pins of a kalimba. The mouth of a wailing cave. But no sound. I saw that hole and it tempted me to tear the head from atop his neck and put the hole to my mouth. I saw myself lick my lips and spit gently over the empty space. His nose facing my chin, my lungs inflated from the bottom up and I blew into the hole like it was a bottle of Coke. The speaker’s conch.
I’m holding the conch.
But I just stood there and looked into it — couldn’t see anything — until Sunny reached up his hand and wiggled his pinky into that hollow cavern of a head. He giggled like an idiot and got back into stride, forgetting the piece of lead in his skull. Still hot from motion.
“Can you feel it, man? Is it, like, rolling around?”
“It ain’t rolling.”
That was all I cared to know about that. We kept on walking down the center of the road, straddling the periodic yellow dashes, not giving a damn. It was afternoon and no one drove through this neighborhood until at least dark.
“A brain weighs like five kilos or something.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, I don’t really know. But it’s not light. Doesn’t it feel weird? Isn’t your neck wobbly or weak? Anything? Your whole body should be out of whack. You can’t just lose 5% body mass up top and walk around unfazed.” We hadn’t talked since he gave them his brain. This was the first time I’d got around to asking anything. He skipped classes all week and I didn’t see him for more than the two minutes I was at his house dropping off his work, forced to share air with his disinterested stepdad. I never stayed at his place long, even before the operation. And even though the bullet had scared me, it wasn’t a third as frightening or fascinating as what was going on inside Sunny’s head. That I was curious about.
“Computer says a brain’s less than two kilos. Not much.”
“Oh.”
We kept on. The sun shone hard on the palms on one side, pines on the other. It shone real hard on the asphalt. And us. I was kicking rocks in the road to stay concentrated on moving, trying to hear about his head without having to force it. Impossible with a guy like Sunny.
“Can you feel the sun?”
“For now. I can turn that off.”
“You control everything?”
A nod that I barely saw. I couldn’t decide whether to be intrigued or disgusted so I decided to be neither. Just appalled. He wasn’t even excited. What was wrong with this dude? Not even pissed or curious. Nothing. Dispassionate as ever, even after being selected over thousands of other applicants — young kids, rich kids, smart kids, idiot kids, politicians’ kids, everybody; even me — for this barely-legal trial surgery that tested a company’s new breakthrough in neuro-tech where they put you under for a week and ice your body, probably dipping you in liquid helium, who knows, strap you down and saw off the whole top of your head.
Sunny signed an assload of release forms before being allowed to go through with it. And he didn’t read a single line of any of them. Neither did his stepdad, who cosigned since Sunny was underage. Some suit-and-tie legalese guy sat at a desk for a week being all intellectual and typing clever garbage so my dull best friend could flip to the last page and stain the paper with his name. When I asked him what they would do with his old sac of gray matter, I got a shrug and, “Who cares.” I would have cared. I would have read every line of those forms! At least I would have showed respect for the work they were doing. He just signed and waited. And they picked him on purpose, after so many applicants, ostensibly for some reason, but I didn’t, couldn’t, see a method to their choice. Out of thousands, one.
Sunny.
Say you got selected for the operation. You’re laying on a table and once the crown of your head is completely off, spinning on the table, the procedure continues. Your brain flops out onto the table looking like a JELL-O turd and they pull it halfway out. Some peon tech intern probably comes into the room with an inanimate, arthropod-looking computer with dangling filament tentacles that wrap around the stem of your thinker and embed themselves. It waits, watches, for a few minutes and copies your barely active brain. It learns everything about you. Finally it is you and that’s when it tells the nerd it’s done. The doctors come back and snip off your whole source of living and sew your head back on, leaving the light metal shrimp inside you.
I knew a hundred people who wanted the opportunity to parade around with that headscar more than they wanted their next four meals or two years in school or their younger siblings or their parents’ life insurance settlements. But the kid who got it didn’t seem to care in the slightest and he didn’t do it for the attention. I know Sunny. That he was my best friend was coincidence. You’d think the medical research company could’ve done their research and realized Sunny was going nowhere but his basement on the way to the grave — not the best candidate. But apparently not. Turns out he was the best candidate.
The doctors probably got paid three years normal pay just to pluck the brain from the idiot’s head like dandelions and walk it out on a dingy tray. From what I could gather they spent the three days after that warming him up and teaching him to function with his new, true brain, they call it.
I need to do a quick perusal of their dictionary. I always thought I knew the definitions of “true” and “brain.” If I was so wrong about those two words, I wonder what stranger words could possibly mean. “Glassy” probably deals with running speeds. And don’t ask me to guess “sanguine.”
“True Brain TM” accounted for, Sunny walked and talked and brooded just like his old self. You could only tell the difference if he stepped on a scale, and then only hardly. They did a good job, I guess.
“So how do you program something? Like you wanna taste only sour, tell me how you do that. Can you do that?”
“I just plug in.” Brief as a free fall from one story. “I can do it.” Terse on a good day, we would say. Mute when you got him high. I threw him a blank stare that said I wanted more. He was weird, but not socially stupid.
“I go home and sit at my computer. They gave me a special port. I just plug in and change my settings.”
“You’re like a real-life Case, then.”
“No.” He laughed and his chuckle was uncharacteristically lacking a dark side. He genuinely liked to imagine himself as a real, young, indifferent cyber-hacking enzyme junkie. “It’s not like that. No scrolling data, no 0s and 1s in Android green buzzing around my head, no highly advanced AIs talking to me condescendingly. More like looking at a screen. I can still see the world. Just like with a HUD and a taskbar on the side.”
“Not bad.” I always wanted a HUD. He knew that. Talking about something he had and I didn’t must have gotten him excited. It didn’t happen frequently.
There was once.
We were young, before elementary school. Sunny came over nearly every day to play and our go-to game was Guns. He would bring over his old toy gun and maybe some armor. I’d rustle up my own gun and armor from my chest and then we staked out my living room. It was the warzone.
We both had the same gun then. A Hitachi 330X Yak, I think. The commercials said it was an exact replica of the weapons used by the Yakuza to persecute their enemies and enforce their terrific reign. We loved that imagery. We loved being the baddest gangsters in my living room and shooting each other up just like the real Yaks did.
The guns probably weren’t really replicas. The marketing agents just said that because “Hitachi” sounded exotically Japanese.
Our Yaks were almost as old as we were, but we were evenly matched. Still I almost always won. I was better at arguing than Sunny was. And sometimes I covered my gun’s sensor with aluminum foil so it couldn’t tell when I’d been shot.
One morning Sunny called me. “Matt,” he said. “Play Guns tomorrow?”
He sounded more enthusiastic than typical.
“Sure. Come over in the morning.”
“Okay, I got something to show you.”
“Cool. Did you draw some new armor for us?”
“It’s my new Drake. Got it from my cousin.”
Not possible. The Drake 11S, they only started making them the year before. They were a handsome silver bit, heavy with a rounded silencer attachment on the barrel. The Drake 11S was made with real metal, not like the Yak. A powerful little pistol, only one other kid from the neighborhood had one. Nobody invited him to play Guns anymore.
“Hey, Sunny, come tomorrow wearing your armor.” Then I hung up.
I ran straight to my mom and begged her to take me to the store. I pulled at her pant leg and fell to the ground and rolled around and yelled and she said yes.
When Sunny came over the next morning the warzone was prepared. The couch ran from wall to wall in the middle of the room. It was always our stronghold. The couch provided cover that Sunny wouldn’t need today.
He entered in full regalia, same old armor but a beautiful piece of machine snug in his hands. I watched him from under the skirt of the large red armchair that I’d moved into the room. It was a new addition to our battleground but Sunny didn’t notice. Maybe the empty room threw him off. Maybe he was waiting for me to come out so he could show me his new haul, rub the Drake in my face. He moved further in slowly, toward the couch. I’d hoped to make him think that’s where I was.
“Matt?”
He was closing the gap to the couch and with a couple feet left, I crept out from my lair and stalked up to him. I wasn’t wearing my battleboots, my socks were silent on the carpet. He reached the couch and jumped onto the cushion, looking over the edge to where he thought I was, gun prepared. I pulled out my Drake 22, like the Drake 11S but brand new and longer and heavier and with two barrels and two golden stripes running down each side. The electronic sight zeroed in on Sunny’s hairline and I cocked.
“Off the couch, Sunny. Gun down, turn around.”
He looked at my gun and slid off the couch. Sunny’s arms went lax and his gun slipped like molasses from his palm and thumped on the floor.
I looked him in the eye, leveled my gun to his heart, and shot.
We were still friends after that, he was only mad for a month. But that was years before Sunny’s surgery. I beat Sunny in everything back then. Now he had a leg up on me, a single advantage, but I was still better than him. The computer, the machine in his head didn’t change that.
I wondered if he still remembered that incident. I’m sure we could laugh about it.
I would have asked him but we were at my house then, where I had won countless rounds of Guns, in that empty block off to the left—no one who had moved into the neighborhood in the last 17 years had decided to buy on this block but my family—and I turned to walk away. My light yellow, two-story, same-as-every-other house was right in front of me. 40 feet away and closing. This was the way we had done things after school for the last twelve and a half years. I see my house, I hear his disappearing steps, and I go about my day. No farewell, I just walk away and he goes on his way alone, without hesitating a second. Just as if we didn’t care. Probably because we didn’t. I’d started my part of the ritual and now it was his turn to fulfill the archetypal role of dude who doesn’t give a shit and just keep walking.
“Matt.” What? I turned to see him standing there, hoping he actually wouldn’t be. He was breaking our tacit, conscious habit. He had on that weird look. It frightens most people, it just made me wonder what could happen next. He leaned forward imperceptibly, imploring me to ask.
“What,” I asked slowly.
A couple small coughs were his only response, deliberate but not accusative, almost genuine like he was clearing the phlegm from his throat. I just wanted him to say whatever it was and leave already.
“What.”
His lips pursed like an angry child and his face contorted into some evil, thrilled look and a wad of spit launched from his mouth right at me. He walked away before it even hit. When it did, it connected with my sternum and it hurt. I heard a small thud and felt something rolling into the tip of my boot. I bent down and picked it up. A small little cylinder of lead, nose flattened by impact.
Brontë Christopher Wieland is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Raised in Wisconsin, he now lives in Spain. In August Brontë begins the Creative Writing and Environment MFA at Iowa State University. Responsible for his every success is Star Wars and whoever invented the pen. Follow him on Twitter @beezyal