Project Ultron

Thirteen.exe

All it took me was a quick look around to identify where I was. I wasn't hard, I saw it every time I closed my eyes. I was on his street. But I knew this wasn't real. The colors were not right. They were too bright.

I started walking. I didn't want to, but pure impulse dragged me. I knew where I was going. I knew where I was supposed to go. The house was just in the middle of the block. The houses were all the same: small ones that had once been white on the outside but now had graffiti and dirt on their facade. They all had a small garden at the entrance. Some were better than others but none of them had particularly been taken care of.

As if transported forward, I was suddenly in the middle of the block, opening the little metal gate of the barren garden and knocking on the green door of the dirty little house. I knew the door would open and I would see him. And he would smile and somehow recognize me. My face, he would say. I was the spitting image of my mother, apparently. I knew all that because I had already been through it.

The door opened, he appeared, and I froze.

"Wow," he said.

A disgusting man wearing a white shirt that had some mysterious stains on it. He was holding a beer and, when he had opened the door, he had seemed annoyed by the fact that I had interrupted his day, but when he saw me, his expression had relaxed and tensed at the same time. He was shocked but in a good way, I was stupid enough to assume. The first time I saw him, I thought he looked homie, now he just made me gag.

Raymond Walker?, I remember having asked.

"You," was what this time came out of my mouth as a desperate whisper.

He didn't nod nor talk to confirm it. He just said: "You look just like your mother."

That had been enough to win me over back then, now it made my skin crawl. I remembered having smiled and my heart racing because I didn't know what to do. I had come that far without a plan. At that moment, I wanted him to make the next move. And he did.

"Please," he said, stepping away from the door, "Come in."

Thanks, I had said. I entered cautiously, not like the first time. I knew now who he was, and it scared me.

He took me to the living room and my eyes went straight to the red door. That door went to the basement. That door would change my life.

"Do you- Do you want something to drink?" he said, not knowing how to interact with me, but he seemed excited. To see me? Yes, that must have been it.

This time I didn't say anything, it didn't matter, the events went as they had the first time. I'm fine, thank you, I had said but he wouldn't listen. He must have been really nervous because he stepped into the kitchen anyway. It was a contiguous room, even smaller than the living room, which only had an old TV and a brown worn-out couch. It didn't even have a table. It became clear to me that he didn't receive many visits. The place just screamed of red flags. But at that time, I just wanted to meet him, so I ignored them all. I just wanted to know what kind of man my father was.

He came back with a can of coke and gave it to me effusively.

"How- How did you find me?" he asked.

"I googled you," I lied in a whisper. I had hacked so many servers from so many agencies to find even a trace of his name, all to lead me here. And for what?

"That- that easy?" he said genuinely surprised.

Yeah, I had said, I'm- I'm good with technology.

"Wow," he said, signaling me to sit down on the couch. He sat on one extreme and I, on the other. "Your mother was the one who understood technology. Sometimes I don't even know how to work the microwave," he joked.