Witness-less Me

My name is Toby Williams, but I wouldn’t mind if you forgot it. When I was in fourth grade, I got called down to the Principal’s office for the first time. It wasn’t my first time getting in trouble, and it was far from the last, but I remember it as the first time that time-out wasn’t enough. The moment they knew they had to keep an eye on me. I remember the way the secretary looked down at me, nails clicking on the keyboard, and the gum. The gum. I’ve always hated gum, the way it feels and tastes and sounds to chew, and the way people stick it wherever they feel like once it goes stale. Convenience over everything, after all. But that day I could see the gum smacking between her teeth. I felt more like it than a person to her. And the same was true of the principal, who got my name wrong. I guess everyone did back then. You get what I mean. He tried to pull the “intimidating adult” card, but the first thing he said when I sat down was some random kid’s name. I had to laugh. That made him angrier. I remember thinking how hard my chair was while I waited for my dad to show up. But mostly, even then, I was running through what had just happened. The rest of the class had gone to recess. It was only a week or so before Christmas, so they went to indoor recess in the gym. I really didn’t mean to slip away from the group. It just happened. I didn’t even think about walking to the science room until I realized I was standing in front of the animal cages. (We were supposed to call them “enclosures”, but they really were just glass cages.) A lizard in one of them recoiled when I walked past it, surely expecting my presence to mean hungry eyes and greedy, greedy hands. The cage was too small for it to have anywhere to hide. It was then that I realized: I had seen the teachers opening these things up a few times. Enough, at least, to know that it wasn’t hard at all. I don’t remember if I hesitated. I just remember feeling the heat lamp warm my hands as the first cage’s latch came undone. And then I remember looking at that lizard—I later realized it was called a monitor—for the first time not through a haze of fingerprints. Its skin looked so soft. (It was scaly and wrinkly, so that took me aback.) I think the fact that it was winter occurred to me, but I didn’t put two and two together until later what that actually meant. Would cages have been better? Is it better to have a full view of the world you’re missing, or to be able to breathe its air? To feel it on your skin? To know, if only you were smaller, then you could be free. Sorry, that was dumb. A girl apparently saw me and tried to tell the teacher, but she couldn’t remember my name. (I wish I was that lucky.) They realized by then that I wasn’t at recess, so two and two were put together and I ended up at the principal’s office waiting for my dad. That was the only part of this all that got to me. I remember my heart beating out of my chest listening to his footsteps come up to the office door. But then he sat down, and he was just… blank. I had always known my dad to be a pretty stoic guy, but I didn’t think too much of it until that day. I thought me getting in trouble would finally make him do something, but he just sat down, stared at the principal, and silently listened to him explain the whole thing. Then my dad shrugged. He said he’d talk to me about it later, but that he needed to get back to work. The principal couldn’t even get a word in before my dad was back out the door. The guy gave me a look like some kind of pitied animal and let me go back to class. The rest of the day felt impossibly slow. My classmates gasped and giggled when I walked back in. My teacher shut them up, but she couldn’t stop them from staring at me. I constantly felt the prick of eyes on the back of my neck. It was a feeling I would grow to be very familiar with, and eventually learn how to avoid. Blending into a crowd. Not drawing attention. That’s how you get away with it. (And trust me, I would have a lot of “it”s to get away with.) I survived long enough to get on the bus home. It was packed and noisy, but the seat next to mine was empty. Whatever, more room for me. It was fine. I spent the whole ride back to my apartment looking out the window just because I felt like it, okay? Why would cry over getting off scot-free? Why would I cry when my dad didn’t come yell at me? I don’t know, but I did. I sat in my room and waited, and waited, and waited. I heard the TV turn on and off. I heard him microwaving something. I heard him taking a call. I never heard a knock at my door. I never even heard my name that whole night. That should have been fine. I don’t know why I needed to test fate and go to my dad’s room. But whatever reason I did or didn’t have, it doesn’t change what I found. The door was slightly ajar, and the bedside lamp was on, but my dad was nowhere to be found. It was a small apartment. If he wasn’t there, he must have been out. I was about to turn around, but something caught my eye: a shoebox under the bed. I went inside. I felt again like I was being watched, like at any moment my dad would come out furious at me. That didn’t stop me for a second. I made a beeline for the bed. The box underneath it was old and faded, covered in dust with repeated handprints around the sides. I realized that it had probably been there for years. Dad never liked me going in his bedroom, but I guess it had been pushed further under the bed the few times I did. Whatever turning point this was, I had already long passed it by the time I got here. That’s why I didn’t hesitate to open the box. Even if I wasn’t conscious of it, it was true. I don’t even know how to tell you subtly about what was inside. It was a pile of newspaper clippings. All from different papers, but all about the same story: me. Well, more accurately, it was about my family. The first thing I found out was that I was kidnapped as a baby. The second, was that I had a sister. Had. She was three years older than me, (So she’d be, what, thirty-seven now?) and she went looking for me after I disappeared. That’s why I never met her. The police never actually found a body, so the papers just said she “disappeared” too. It’s probably for the best. Even so, I learned a third thing: that my ma blamed me for what happened. Apparently, the night after my sister went missing, my parents found me back in the crib. Just sleeping peacefully, as if nothing had happened. I guess I said earlier that I was kidnapped, but that was only the leading theory before they found me. After that, there was no leading theory. The world forgot about me and moved on by that point. But I gathered that my ma wasn’t exactly part of that world anymore. She took interviews for magazines—smaller gossip ones now that the story had died down—about how I wasn’t really her baby. She seemed totally dissociated. I could almost hear it through the pages. Only problem was that I had no clue what her voice sounded like. Heck, I had never even seem her face until it was under headlines dragging her through the dirt. That was the first time I remember feeling like all the pieces just clicked together. I understood why my dad was so distant. Why my ma was out of the picture. Why I felt like I didn’t belong. Yeah, I was a stupid kid. But this was my way out. I had my taste of discovery and I needed more. I became obsessed with figuring out how the world really worked; who I really was. It started off as library books. Then, I got older, and the internet became the sore on all of our lives that it is now. I went on chatrooms and message boards, meeting all sorts, to put it lightly. I’m surprised I didn’t go missing again with some of the people I talked to. I really bought into everything they said. Luckily it was mostly harmless supernatural stuff, like any middle schooler would like, but it was conspiratorial junk nonetheless. Still, once I grew up some more and got some common sense, I started opening my eyes to the real dark secrets about the world. Did you know cigarette companies supported the bill that required them to put warning labels on their boxes? Yeah. It meant that then the people addicted to their products, dying en masse, couldn’t sue them anymore. It meant that the blame was squarely on the smokers now. It meant that people stopped paying attention to poor ol’ big tobacco. It meant they could make more money. That’s how the world works. The people on top grind everyone below them down to their last penny, and then pretend to be the good guys so everyone’ll start handing them whatever they have left. This all took years to realize, but I finally started to get it by the time I started college. In late 2007. Yep. It was hard enough for someone with my… particular transcript to find a college that would let them in. Not to mention a job to keep myself afloat once I was finally living on my own. I could barely afford groceries, much less fight off student debt. Once the market crashed, the corporation I worked for cut their losses and sacked me. Who cares about my life, right? I knew college was a mistake, and my job situation wouldn’t get any better, so I cut my losses too. I left my old life behind and moved to New York. And when I say I left my old life behind, I mean every part of it. I haven’t talked to my dad once since I left that town. I didn’t even say goodbye. I’m not happy about it, but it’s true. His baby had been gone for years. I was just the kid who used to live in his house. I also started using new names around that time. Usually more androgynous ones, but it wasn’t even really a gender thing—I also used different last names. Yeah, “Williams” won’t bring up any of my old records. That’s why I picked it. I was tired of being mistaken for the baby in the newspapers who got kidnapped all those years ago. Because really, I couldn’t think of anything else but those headlines whenever I heard my old name. I ended up getting a legal change some years later, mostly so I wouldn’t get deadnamed by the cops, but moving to New York made me realize how little a legal name was actually worth. Oh yeah, the cops. I should probably mention. I didn’t actually move to New York right away. I spent a few years wandering, doing odd jobs to keep myself afloat while I tried to find a place in the world. I also started joining in protests around that time, and in 2011 I caught wind of some brewing in New York. I settled down there for a few months to participate in what would become the Occupy Wall Street protests. They lasted for about two months, and I was one of the last stragglers as they fizzled out. It felt like I was really making a difference, you know? Getting up early, banging together pots and pans, seeing this massive movement form with each passing day, it became my life. For a little while, I was a face in a crowd. I was one of the 99%, fighting alongside all the others. It felt right. That’s not to brush past the actual protesting, but I imagine you can understand how I felt about that by now. And, either way, it didn’t last long. I stuck around New York for a little while after they fizzled out, but living in the big city and talking to the other protestors opened my eyes to a new issue: artificial intelligence. When you come back home from a long flight, the first thing you want is a coffee, and the last thing you want is for that coffee to come out wrong. (At least, so I’ve heard. I’ve never actually been on a plane before.) But people working long shifts at minimum wage for angry, tired customers tend to make mistakes. That isn’t very convenient. And that’s why, for quite a while now, the San Fransisco airport has offered coffee made and delivered by robots. Then coffee became packages. Then art. Conversation. Cars. The first public demos rolled out in late 2018. It seemed to come out of nowhere, but one day their corporate buzzwords were polluting every conversation I walked past on the street. Flynet. FASTCorp. MAL 3001. Well, it came out of nowhere to everyone who wasn’t looking out for it. I heard the early warning signs of AI takeover on the west coast. That’s why I moved to San Fransisco after I left New York. I heard the locals talking about every new technology that they’d throw out the next week. I tried to fight on the frontlines against it, but I wasn’t surprised when the thing they talked about became FASTCorp AI cars. Unlike every other “next big thing”, though, these stuck around. Every day was a new interview with Dani Olislav, which— Hold on. Can we talk about her interview with The Daily Surf? The one where they asked her about the federal safety regulations? I know she’s never really been the best on camera (and as much as I hate that pig, I’m not going to be ableist), but I swear I saw one of the FASTCorp lawyers signaling her to say yes to one of the questions asking for Dani’s own opinion on something. That’s just—I don’t even know what to call it anymore. It’s fake. It’s all fake. But sorry. Tangent. My point was just that Flynet technology (that’s the company that FASTCorp is a subsidiary of) was growing fast. Naturally, that meant it was my next target. After a few months, though, I realized it was too big of a threat to take on alone. I needed to start organizing with other anti-AI protestors. Unfortunately, that meant an even bigger threat than FASTCorp: friends. I tried to avoid talking about this, I really did, but… His name was Paul. He was born December 20th, 1990. He died December 4th, 2020. He had brown eyes and long, curly hair that he dyed a new color every month. He always acted so tough, but deep down he loved bad action movies, and trying out weird new recipies, and he… he— He was my best friend. I tried just to blend in. Focus on what needed to be done. Not let myself get attached. Attachment makes people stupid. But I’ve never been too smart in the first place. And he just wouldn’t give up. So I let him see me. I let him remember my name. (And he always called me it, no questions asked. He was the first one who called me Toby.) We stuck together through everything. I moved in with him when I lost my apartment after covid hit. He always said I didn’t need to repay him, that seeing me safe was enough. Then a few months later I had my own place, and he moved in with me after breaking up with his boyfriend. He joked that if I needed a way to pay him back for crashing with him, this was it. Even through everything, he kept his sense of humor. Well, really, he always kept on a brave face. Even on that sunny December morning. (It was so bright. And hot. It drove me crazy. If nothing else, New England winters were always a good excuse to put on a dysphoria hoodie. But they were also familiar. I was used to shutting out the bitter cold, to staying inside, staying away. I wasn’t used to feeling my skin exposed against the sunlight. But it was that day.) We were walking back from the pier to my apartment. At that point, about half of the cars on the road were AI. They had human supervisors, but the convenience principle meant that the people inside treated it like a taxi ride. None of them could be bothered to actually look out at the road. I could tell it was really making Paul restless. So restless, in fact, that he suddenly grabbed a garbage bag and threw it at an oncoming AI car. It swerved out of the way and only hit part of the bag. I was kind of taken aback and just tried to get Paul to keep walking with me. But he walked into the road to pick the bag back up. The bag, which a second car’s sensors had detected. Detected, and swerved to avoid. Swerved into Paul. I didn’t actually see what happened next, I just remember the confusion of it perfectly. And I remember a few seconds later, seeing his body hit the pavement 30 feet away. Everything else is dull, but my memory of Paul is so vivid. I half-heard the screams and the car screeching to a halt, I half-remember thinking something about how I wish it was cold. If it were cold then the bag would have frozen to the bin or the cars wouldn’t be out on the ice or we wouldn’t be walking outside at all. But if it were cold I would be wearing gloves. Then I wouldn’t remember the way his hand felt. I wouldn’t remember the sweat and the blood. The way he gripped my hand with every ounce of strength he had. The way it slowly loosened as the life left his eyes. I was wearing a mask. I can’t imagine that. Dying and looking up and seeing no one’s face at all. Maybe I can. But he shouldn’t have had to. There was nothing pretty about it. He was mangled on the ground. No words came out of his mouth. Just blood. And the only person by his side ran as soon as they heard sirens. I was selfish to leave him there. I was selfish not to go back to our apartment. I was selfish to leave California behind. But so what? What has the world ever done for me that I should be anything but selfish? And how could I be if there was nobody else with me? I know I’m backed into a corner right now. I’m pleading not guilty, but no matter what the verdict comes out as, I just want someone to remember the fact that nobody was ever in the buildings that burned down. That way it didn’t even matter. Nobody got hurt, so maybe they were just meant to burn. Who am I kidding? I know you can’t hear me. And even if you did, I’d like to think it doesn’t change what you already knew. So I might as well say it out loud. My protests in California weren’t all exactly peaceful. People don’t listen to people like me. But they do listen to money. I didn’t exactly have a lot of that to give, though, so I settled on making people miss it. Usually that meant smashing windows and things like that. But there were a few times when I took a more direct approach: fire. It burned so bright and hot in the desert that it felt like a second sun. A few weeks after Paul died, I found myself wanting that feeling for the first time. I’m not some kind of pyro or anything. My dad never kept fire around the house, and you have to be eighteen to buy lighters, so it’s not like I spent my childhood lighting stuff up for fun. Nothing like that. It was just so cold. And it was Christmas. The lab building was empty. And right there. Looking into the light felt like oblivion. But hanging around it for as long as I did just meant I was well-lit. Visible. The click of a phone camera snapped me out of the trance I was in. The heat of the fire was replaced with a wet coldness that dropped all the way to my feet. The terror of getting caught. That night I managed to escape back into the darkness. But my luck didn’t hold. That’s what motivated me to get better at my craft. As far as I know, that was the last time I ever got caught. The cops are trying to pin me to other fires in places I’ve been, but there’s no evidence. They can’t even track down most of the places I’ve actually been to. (Tech-free living has its perks.) So that’s why I won’t tell you where I was on October 17th, 2021. Lucky you, though, it wasn’t until the next day that things got interesting. I had taken to hitchhiking by that point, and ended up in Arkansas. Normally the midwest at least has half-decent Octobers, but that day was awfully hot. So I was glad when a trucker pulled over and asked if I needed a ride. Truck drivers are the only people left who actually bother to do that. They can’t spend all day glued to screens, so maybe they just have more empathy left than the rest of us. I haven’t always had great experiences with them, though. Not to generalize, but it’s a crowd that doesn’t tend to have a lot of variation politically. Your spectrum of option tends to be “the gays are okay as long as they don’t shove it in my face” to “Trump committed no crimes”. So I keep my guard up. It’s only smart. But this person introduced himself. He said his name was C.W, but that I could call him Charlie. And for some reason I told him my name too instead of using a fake. And he didn’t laugh or question it. He just nodded and said “it’s a nice name.” He told me he was headed to Kingdom City, Missouri, so we would be driving for about four hours. I nodded. He said something like “not up to talking?” That was what caught my attention. Something about how earnestly he asked, how I didn’t feel like he wanted one answer or another. Suddenly the thought formed in my head that it was exactly what I always wished my dad did. Talked to me, actually asked what for my opinion, but been willing to listen to whatever I had to say. I realized later that I was concerned with being kind back when I decided to tell him the truth. I said I was wary of strangers. And he agreed that I ought to be. He told me he picked up a lot of hitchhikers, that he always found them to be interesting company, but that too many of them got themselves into dangerous situations. I got the sense that that was really why he picked them up: to keep them safe. The thought freaked me out, so I deflected. I asked about his story. He laughed and leaned back a little, (I still remember that laugh so well,) and asked where he should start. I found out he used to be an English teacher back in the 80s, that he got into trucking because he was almost hit by a truck, and that he was the kind of person who just seemed to be a magnet for crazy stories. Like, his truck had broken down a little ways outside of Roswell, and a group of tourists saw him walking around at night and thought it was an alien sighting. So he started yelling gibberish at them and waving his arms around until they were running away, screaming about how they didn’t want to be abducted. I nudged the truck and said “I don’t think this object is exactly flying or unidentified,” and he laughed again. I realized that making him laugh made me happy. That I wanted him to think that I was smart, and capable, and doing a good job. I tried to fight the feeling, but there wasn’t much I could do. So we just kept talking like that for hours. He was halfway through a story about a parade when we started cresting a big hill. We were in Missouri by now, and the sun had set. I noticed this sort of glow over the top. Something about the light struck me immediately. It was cold, and unnerving, and deeply familiar. I couldn’t place the feeling exactly, but I felt the fear down to my feet. I immediately asked Charlie about it. He said it was just headlights coming in from the other lanes, and told me not to worry. I thought I kept my voice even, but I guess he could tell I was scared. I figured he was right, that I was just being paranoid. And I wanted him to think I wasn’t scared. So I didn’t say another word about it. And I know you’ve heard the story after that a thousand times, but let me tell it again. Everyone is so concerned with hearing about what I did or didn’t hear, what the cops did or didn’t ask me, that they won’t listen to what I’m actually trying to tell them. I know you will, though. When we crested the hill, I saw a truck stopped across both lanes of traffic. I looked to Charlie, but he was just as scared as I was. He shouted “what the—!” before we hit the truck, but it all happened too fast. Too fast for him to stop, or to swerve, or to even finish his sentence. Then we were out. I came back after a few seconds, but Charlie was out cold. He was slumped over the steering wheel. Clearly something was broken, but I couldn’t tell what. I was terrified. I fumbled for what felt like forever trying to find a pulse, but I eventually found one. Then, my fear crystalized into anger. I marched out of the truck, ready to fight the other driver. I’m not the strongest, but I felt like I could be to whoever had done this to Charlie. The headlights were cold LEDs. They guided me in the dark, a beacon to amplify and direct my fury. I threw open the doors, and didn’t see the driver inside. This got me even angrier. This reckless idiot was cowering somewhere in the back of the truck. I called for them to come out, but while I was waiting I noticed a voice. Not the driver, but a computer. It was spouting an error message. Then I noticed a light on the dashboard. It was like a cold, red eye, slowly strobing. I didn’t want to believe what I was seeing. I called again for the driver to come out. I searched around for a way to turn the truck off. But there was nothing. Nothing at all. I couldn’t deny it anymore: this was an AI truck. Those monsters at FASTcorp didn’t have enough in California. They needed a thirty-thousand pound death machine on the road too. It must have made them money. Better money than Paul’s blood did. I think I dissociated for a little while after that. I don’t remember anything until I heard the police sirens. That’s a sound that would snap me out of anything. Every part of me said to run. But I needed to stay. For Charlie. He would have done the same for me. But I never ended up seeing him being taken to the hospital. The cops talked to me and, still being stupid with anger, I talked back. The guy tried to make himself seem all friendly. Said I could call him “Pooch.” Yeah right. As soon as he got my name, he ran it and got back a warrant for my arrest. Then he wasn’t “Pooch” anymore. You want to know something about the lab I torched? It was Los Alamos. The one in New Mexico, that worked on the nuclear bombs. Obviously they didn’t tell people what they were doing, but people are curious. The leading theory at the time was a death ray. A beam of light, just light, that could kill anything in its path. I think about that a lot. Just light spelling death. I was shuffled around for a while. They have a trial date set for me. But the bigger concern always seemed to be my testimony in Charlie’s suit against FASTcorp for what they did to him. I was able to get back in contact, and— And now, here I am, back in Missouri again. You told me that it usually only snows here in January and February. And you were right. It started in slow, fat clumps that melted as soon as they hit the ground. But then it picked up into a flurry. It was like a grey mist over the whole sky and the ground and everything. It’s the first time I’ve seen snow since I left New York. It’s not the same as I remember it. I don’t know why I’m talking to the sky like you’re dead. In a few hours, I’m going to go to the courthouse and see you there. I’m going to say everything I can to clear your name. But I don’t know you. You aren’t the man I met in Bentonville. There. I finally said it. It took me this long, but it’s true. And I feel so horrible saying it because you seem like a good person. But the man I met would have done anything to help me, and there’s no one left who will do that. The light took them all. And all I can remember was how cold it was. The darkness was warm. But you have never known the dark. You are doctors and lawyers and media. You are the light that exposes the black-cloaked figure standing in the snow. And I wish more than anything that you would forget me. And that I would forget you, too.