James Smythe: I Still Dream

We haven’t had that discussion again since.

‘This thing’s amazing.’ He sits down, nudges me slightly to one side. He points his fingers – bitten-down fingernails, and I bite my fingernails, but not like this, these are right down to the quick, horrible stubby things digging into the flesh – at the code. ‘This is where you put the questions in?’

‘Yeah,’ I say, and he breathes in, nods along a few times. Puts his fingers up to his lips, like he’s making the shape of a gun, the barrel at his mouth. He’s got something to ask, and I know I’m not going to like it, because he’s nervous, but I can’t stop him.

‘Listen, I’ve been thinking. How I might actually be of, you know, real help. To you; to Organon. In the real world, software goes through beta testers.’ He pronounces it bayder. ‘So, you get people to use it, to work with it. Let it do its thing, and you get to use the results. That’s how you can make it better, you know? I’m thinking that it could be useful to you.’ He wants me to give Organon over to him. Shit, shit. I don’t know what to say. He’s a teacher. He’s a teacher, and he knows about this stuff, but I want to say no. I want to. ‘So,’ he says, and I wonder: can he tell that I’m not happy about this? Because I’m trying to make my body tell that to him as much as I can. ‘So why not let me take her home. Let me try her out, as she’s meant to be tried. It’ll be useful, because I’ll get to see what she’s really capable of, and you’ll give her a chance to stretch her legs.’

All I can think is, there’s something really icky about him talking about it as a her.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. I don’t say: I don’t want you to, and I don’t need you to. My elbow, the scar there, itches. I can feel it scabbing over; the skin trying to heal, trying to grow back as something like what it used to be. Something like itself.

‘I think you’ll really benefit from it. I might try something that you haven’t expected, find a bug you didn’t know about. And it’ll be so much easier for me to write you a recommendation when you’re doing your UCAS forms, if I know exactly what you’re capable of.’ There it is. The bribe. It’s hard to get onto programming courses if you don’t have experience, and he’s worked in computers. His support on my application would probably help. ‘Besides which, I might get some benefit from talking to her! That’s the point of Organon, right? Real world experience, Laura.’ I don’t know what he’d want to talk to it about. There are rumours about him, but there are rumours about every teacher. And his aren’t nearly as nasty as some about the other members of staff. Some of them, the rumours never end, and they escalate. But Mr Ryan seems like he’s pretty together. But then, he’s not married, and he is pretty old. Mum’s age, I think. Flecks of grey in his beard. ‘Listen, it’s your project, Laura. You do what you want. But sometimes we can’t see the wood for the trees, and we need somebody who might be able to give us a pair of binoculars and an axe.’

‘Okay,’ I say. My elbow kills when I say it, and when he smiles, this beaming thing, bigger than I’ve ever seen from him before.

‘You won’t regret it,’ he tells me. ‘Seriously, a bit of time with her, little play with her code—’ He must see my face then, because he changes his words straight away. ‘I can write some notes for you, give you some suggestions for what you do moving forward. That’s it.’

‘Thanks,’ I say. He shifts back in his chair, leaving the keyboard free for me, and I open up Organon. The white room, the fade in of the text box.

> What would you like to talk about?

‘If you think of any questions I can get it to ask?’

‘I will absolutely tell you,’ he replies.

‘Just give me ten minutes with it,’ I say. ‘I need to set it up to work on your computer.’

‘Sure,’ he replies. He smiles, and then walks over to the Year 9s, and he asks them about the pictures they’re drawing on. He keeps glancing over, so I’m quick. I have to be quick. I open the code, and I write in a homing device. It’ll email me bug reports. I make it so you have to be on the Internet to even run Organon, and then I save everything. ‘All done?’ Mr Ryan asks. I nod. All done.

The main home computer, the one that my mum uses, is ancient. You can’t even plug the modem into it, that’s how old it is; and her printer is this ridiculous dot-matrix thing that takes about ten minutes to print a page, that screams like there’s something trapped inside it as it pukes up its pages. But she won’t get rid of it. She’s used to it, she says. It was my dad’s, way back. She doesn’t have much of his stuff around, just a few boxes in the loft; and there aren’t any pictures of him on display or anything. The computer is it.

I’ve got a photograph of me sitting on his lap in front of it, that he took the day before he left. He held the camera himself and took it, stretching his arm out to capture us both. He looks sad, and I look oblivious. The last picture I have of him. My hands are on the keyboard, and there’s a flag up on the screen, horrible colours, like the Union Jack, but beaten-up and bruised to purples and greens. We’re both smiling. That’s the picture where, if anybody ever sees it, they tell me that I look a bit like him; something in the eyes, they say. And I always think: Well, his eyes look so sad in that, so what does that say about me?

Mum does all her work on this ancient piece of software that he built for her way back when, this word processor that’s years behind what you can do in Microsoft Word. The computer doesn’t even run Windows. And now it won’t even turn on. She’s been moaning about it for weeks. I reckon, I do this now, fix it for her, that might get me some bonus Internet time. A little bit of leniency.

I press the power button. Nothing happens. I unplug it and wait twenty seconds. There’s memory in there attached to a tiny little battery, and you have to wait for that to wipe itself sometimes before it’ll work. Then I plug it in, try again. Nothing.

Only, it’s not actually nothing. When I get close to unplug it again, before opening it up, I notice that there’s this weird hum coming from it. Like, this scratching, almost. Probably the hard drive trying to start. I don’t even know what a hard drive from the 1980s looks like. I reach around the back to find the stupid twiddly fussy knobs that take far too long to undo, and which don’t seem to want to turn, they’ve been stuck in place that long. I get them all out, but the case seems like it’s jammed.

I spin the computer around, to check that I got them all, get a better view. Sometimes there’s one of them hidden, just out of reach. And there is, sure enough, right through the manufacturer’s label. The name of the company who put this together, handwritten in neat blue ink on a yellowing white sticker. Bow , it says. The company my father used to work for, or run, or whatever. His father’s company, my grandfather’s company. Makes sense this would be one that they built.

The back of the box falls off, then, flips down, and I can see inside it. It’s so, so dusty. Too much to blow it away, but I have to try. Breathe in, puff out this stupid fake-sounding breath into the box. The fan doesn’t even turn, so I reach in, just with my fingertips, and pull the dust out in clumps. The inside of this thing is crazy . I’ve built my own PC now – the one that I used to create Organon, that’s mine, parts ordered from a website I saw in a magazine, paid for with money that Mum and Paul gave me for my fifteenth birthday – but it looks nothing like this. Everything in here is massive and clumsy and crammed in. The cables are worn and frayed. I try to see better, to get the rest of the case off, but it’s stuck hard.