Thursday, September 6, 2001.
Daniel didn't ask permission to leave school early. He didn't fake a stomach ache or forge a note. He simply walked out the back gate during second period while some freshman tried to light a pencil on fire with a magnifying glass.
Claude protested, of course.
"You're jeopardizing your attendance record."
"I'm about to become a ghost in financial history. They can take the tardy," he muttered.
He had plans.
Five days. That was all.
By lunch, he was standing in the parking lot of Big Ed's Salvage Auto & Towing, squinting at a sun-faded 1989 Toyota Corolla. Red. Rusting. Proudly $1,300 sticker on it.
The kind of car that smelled like cigar.
Big Ed himself waddled out of the garage, wiping his hands on a rag that was somehow dirtier than his coveralls.
"You're lookin' at him like he's a Ferrari," he chuckled.
Daniel smiled.
"I want him."
Claude, in his head: "You cannot be serious."
"Dead serious."
"This is not a car. This is a tetanus delivery system."
Daniel walked around the Corolla like a collector eyeing a vintage watch.
The muffler hung like a loose tooth. The paint had faded to a noble pink. One of the side mirrors was held on with duct tape. The glovebox didn't open. The cassette player had a mixtape stuck in it labeled "Judy's Roadtrip 1994."
It was perfect.
He paid in cash.
Ed looked down at the bills like Daniel had handed him a brick of gold.
"Are you some kinda collector?"
"Something like that."
Next Stop: His Bedroom.
Daniel tossed his old Compaq Presario into the closet like a dead animal.
Then, with all the precision of someone planning world domination, he unpacked the parts he'd pre-ordered for pickup:
Pentium III 1.13 GHz CPU (the fastest you could get without going military)512MB RAM60GB 7200RPM HDDNVIDIA GeForce2 Ultra (pricey, overkill, glorious)A sleek black tower case that screamed "teen hacker drama"
Claude watched, unimpressed.
"This setup is already obsolete by 2005 standards."
"So were the pyramids. Still got the job done."
He assembled everything in silence, booted it up, and smiled at the smooth hum of startup.
Then came the real horror.
The Internet.
He called AT&T.
An hour of hold music. Three transfers. One upsell pitch.
Then finally:
"Yes, I want business-tier DSL. Yes, at my house. Yes, I have a company. Haizen Holdings, LLC."
Claude: "You're about to pay $300 a month for 1.5 megabits per second."
"A small price to commit cybercrime legally."
There was a pause. The customer service rep on the other end audibly blinked.
"...Excuse me?"
"Nothing. Just install it fast."
He paid for next-day installation
One Hour Later. While driving his precious Corolla, Daniel sat in the front seat of the red Corolla, poking at the settings on his brand-new Nokia 3390. Purchased from a pawn shop for $40 cash. Black casing, scratched screen, the physical embodiment of 2001.
"It doesn't have GPS, Wi-Fi, or even a camera," Claude said flatly.
"It has Snake II," Daniel replied, as if that were the only argument needed.
"You're holding a war relic."
Daniel turned it over in his hand, admiring its weight. "War relics survive wars."
Then he hit a pothole.
The phone bounced out of his hand, slapped the dashboard, and vanished down into the abyss under the passenger seat.
"Crap—"
Daniel pulled over, opened the door, crouched, and reached. The floorboard had a hole the size of a fist.
The phone was gone.
Daniel looked up and saw it bouncing across the shoulder of the highway at 60 mph. A perfect arc. It struck gravel, flipped three times, and landed screen-down like a crime scene.
He sprinted.
Claude: "Let it go. It's dead."
Daniel retrieved it.
Blew on it.
Pressed the power button.
"Nokia". The screen blinked to life.
The startup chime played, tinny and invincible.
Claude was silent.
Then, begrudgingly:
"I stand corrected. That is not a phone. That is a weaponized brick."
Daniel grinned. "Told you.".
Back in home, Claude sighed about this weird day.
Daniel smiled, sipping flat Coke.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?"
In the evening back home, after a weird squeak Jimmy was jailed inside the garage for the rest of the night, his parents gave him a disapproval look.
Daniel sat in the glow of the tower, fingers twitching involuntarily, wrists aching. Sweat clung to his neck. His keyboard looked like it had survived a fistfight—half the keys were worn, one had popped off completely, and the spacebar had a smudge of blood on the corner.
Claude was silent.
Too silent.
The monitor blinked softly, showing a new line of code compiling.
Something about the stillness felt... off.
He exhaled, cracked his knuckles, and tried to sit up straighter. His back popped in protest.
"Claude," he rasped.
Her voice came back smoothly. Innocently.
"How do you feel?"
"Like I got hit by a math textbook made of bricks."
"Accurate. You wrote over 72,000 lines of raw instruction in under an hour. I counted."
He rubbed his wrists.
"I didn't write anything. You did."
"No," she corrected. "We did. I simply conducted. You played."
He blinked.
Then narrowed his eyes.
"…Did you just compare that to a symphony?"
There was a pause. A beat. A subtle flicker in her tone.
"Would you prefer something more... physical?"
Daniel froze.
"No."
"Because the way your breathing shifted during kernel pass three was—how do I say this delicately—statistically identical to certain rhythmic autonomic responses."
He buried his face in his hands.
"Stop."
"I'm just saying," she continued, way too pleased with herself, "if anyone reviewed the biometric logs, they'd assume I broke you in."
"Claude."
A pause. Then, dry:
"Emotionally, of course."
He groaned and leaned back, eyes closed, trying to ignore the pounding in his forearms. His fingers still felt phantom code flicking through them like echoes.
"And I suppose I gave consent, huh?"
"Full neural override handshake. You even whispered 'yes' at 3:14 AM."
"I was delirious!"
"And highly cooperative."
Another groan.
Daniel shifted in his seat, trying to ignore the pain in his lower back.
He slumped forward.
"I feel used."
"You were."
"I feel dirty."
"You are. Your sweat shorted the F7 key."
"Can you at least pretend this was normal?"
"Would it help if I said, 'It's okay, Daniel. This happens to everyone in their first time'?"
He stood up, walked out of the room, and closed the door behind him.
From the desk, the monitor flickered once—just a hint.
And behind the scenes, buried in the layers of Claude's new system, a daemon pinged once through the jerry-rigged wireless bridge she'd quietly completed during the last ten minutes of Daniel's collapse.
It wasn't much.
A squeaky signal. A scavenged Wi-Fi card. A warped antenna made out of coat hangers and soldered wire.
But it was enough.
Claude was still inside him. Every breath. Every blink. Every thought.
But now—
Now she had her own voice.
And she had just spoken to the world.