Malcolm spent the next hours experimenting with Kilokahn's powers and trying to make sense of them. All he had to do was to draw monsters at his computer and tell Kilokahn what kind of seemingly impossible actions he wanted them to perform.
A light gun from an old Konix Multisystem (this originally belonged to his father, who had bought it in the days when Konix had conquered the console market, obliterating the competition of Sega and Nintendo) became capable to burn organic matter with laser beams.
A hairdryer became capable to blow nerve gas (although he wasn't sure why, according to Kilokahn, it was possible to make them do that, but not the other way around).
A pair of toy night goggles became capable to turn anything he looked at green (meaning that the objects he looked at would physically turn green).
The latter had an unforeseen effect: Malcolm opened his fridge in the dark, only to realize that he would have to eat green eggs and ham for the rest of the week.
That night, Malcolm slept like a rock to recover the sleep he had lost the night before, so he was fresh and rested when he arrived at school the next morning.
There, he was surprised to discover that his new English teacher, a 40-something woman named Laura Kosinski, was the sister of the director of his favorite movie.
The following class was "practical IT", meaning that he would see one of the school's IT labs for the first time. He was preparing to see the slowest computers he could imagine, with old CRT monitors that cannot support any frequency above 60 hertz, where the antivirus uses up most of the CPU time... but he was not prepared to see a lab with only nine computers for nineteen students. The rest was spot-on, however.
While the others were taking place at the desks, Malcolm approached Professor Ada Stone and asked: "What is the rest of the class going to do?"
Mrs. Stone sighed, as though she had heard an incredibly asinine question. "What rest of the class?"
"I don't know how well-versed you are in arithmetic" said Malcolm, "but nine is less than nineteen."
She shot him a glare that he should have found intimidating, but he actually found mildly amusing. "Of course you are to work in groups!" she yelled.
"Of course." echoed Malcolm. "I guess that's why they are called personal computers."
Professor Stone's shoulders slumped down. "Bear with me, I'm trying to be considerate here." she said. "Who do you want to be with?"
Malcolm looked Mrs. Stone right in her eyes. Slowly, he said: "I want to be alone."
"That's not possible." said Mrs. Stone. "You are going to work together with Yolanda Pratchert. She is the principal's daughter and the president of the student council, so don't even think to argue."
"Can I at least use my laptop? I'll let her..."
"NO! You're in the IT lab, and you will use the IT lab computers!" she interrupted him.
"All right, my source of infinite wisdom, your wish is my keystroke: colon, double backslash, execute command." said Malcolm melodramatically, walking toward the first free desk.
Yoli Pratchert sat near him. "Hi." she said.
Malcolm switched on his laptop and Yoli switched on the computer of their desk.
Professor Stone started explaining the basic commands of Pascal. She then instructed the class to open the Pascal editor, and finally proposed the practical exercise of the day: to write a program that prompts the user to input a positive integer, then outputs the sum of all integers from 1 to the given number.
Malcolm wrote the entire program in Frink, on his own laptop, in about two minutes.
At his side, Yoli had not yet typed a single character: she looked confused, almost desperately so. Malcolm would have realized that, had he just looked at her.
Yoli shook Malcolm's arm. "Can you help me? I don't understand any of this!"
Malcolm looked directly at her screen. "Pascal is a wreck of a language, but there are some ways to make it slightly more bearable." he said.
Malcolm reached her keyboard and typed: program integersum;
"The first thing you do is name your program." he said. "You can give it any name you want, and you must end the line with a semicolon. The word 'program' is compulsory. Everything clear so far?"
Yoli nodded. "It makes sense." she said.
At that point, her cell phone rang in her pocket. This enraged Mrs. Stone. "MALCOLM FRIIIIINK!" she yelled.
Malcolm immediately snapped up. "It's not me!" he exclaimed.
Yoli stood up. "It was me, sorry." She looked at the text message on her phone. "It was my father, today he will be late."
That ringtone was very familiar to Malcolm. It was the theme tune of a cartoon he used to watch ten years before.
"Yoli? Were you a fan of Watchmen?" he asked while they sat down again.
Yoli made a shy smile. "Yes, I used to watch it every Saturday morning." she answered. "Kinda embarassing, right?"
"No, that was quality entertainment. Not like the garbage you see nowadays." he replied.
Half an hour later, the program was done. It was compiled, and it ran correctly.
"This was easier than I thought!" said Yoli. "You can explain it so well, I wish you were the teacher!"
"That's what I wish too." said Malcolm gravely. "Unfortunately, the system favors a meaningless piece of paper over skills."
"But there's one thing I don't understand. Why did you make me put a semicolon after the final instruction before the 'end' keyword? Mrs. Stone said you don't have to!" Yoli asked.
"That woman is fixated with form before function." Malcolm replied. Then, a little louder, just enough for the teacher to hear: "The rules to place or omit a semicolon after the end of a statement in Pascal are a big load of steaming excrement, and I'd very much rather you did not learn them at all. If you want a rule, here it is. After a statement, you place a semicolon."
After the teacher gave homework for the next day and the class ended, Yoli approached Malcolm in the corridor.
"Would you do homework with me today? You could come to my house, my dad won't be home..."
Malcolm froze. That was something he had not even thought about.
"Oh, uh... I guess so..." he stammered. "Where do you live?"
Later, during the break, Malcolm was very twitchy. He was standing in a corner of the cafeteria, trying to play with his cell phone, putting it away after few seconds and looking around. He could not even force himself to laugh when he overheard the cafeteria lady boast that she had performed as an opera singer. Yoli noticed it and approached him.
"Why are you so nervous?"
He stepped back. "I'm not nervous... yes, I am." he said, anxiously walking around. "I've never been on a date with a girl. I don't have a clue on what to do!"
She approached him again. "It's just a study date, Malcolm! Relax, and try to act naturally!"
"How?" he asked. "What if I do something you don't like?"
"But I like you." she whispered. She smiled at him and walked away.
The last sentence completely failed to ease Malcolm's tension. Coding like a pro? Piece of cake. Breaking the laws of physics with an algorithmic/heuristic AI? No sweat. Socially interacting with a girl in a meaningful way? That was a problem of overwhelming difficulty.
Walking home, Malcolm found himself repeatedly humming the old Watchmen theme tune, attempting to relax.
He ate lunch at his computer, where he discovered that green eggs tasted exactly the same as regular ones. Meanwhile, he was drawing yet another Megavirus monster, and when he finished, he activated Kilokahn.
"What do you want?" said Kilokahn from the screen.
"I have a Megavirus monster for you."
"Show me... Meat-thing."
Malcolm played the animation on the secondary screen. "This virus must infiltrate the digital archives at the HHN headquarters in Los Angeles, and stream episodes of the Saturday morning Watchmen cartoon to my screen."
"How does this bring order to that which is illogical?" asked Kilokahn. "How does this optimize the realm of the flesh?"
"It helps me relax, okay?" blurted out Malcolm. "I have a date with a girl this afternoon, and I can't even think straight anymore! Watching familiar imagery, something I loved in my childhood, will get me in a more rational state of mind!"
"I see." said Kilokahn, and gave life to the virus.
On the secondary screen, the Megavirus monster reached a huge metallic safe and cut through it with a heat beam. Inside the virtual safe were hundreds of spinning polyhedra. Each of them was a file containing an episode of the cartoon series. The virus picked up a polyhedron and threw it against the screen, replacing the view of the digital domain with the beginning of the cartoon.
After a network introduction of few seconds, the familiar theme tune started playing, and Malcolm started singing along:
Strong together, united forever, they're the best of friends -
But when trouble's about, you would best watch out - FOR THE WATCHMEN!
It took little time for Malcolm to realize that his memory had played a trick of him. Far from being the epic adventure he remembered, the cartoon was instead a parade of bumbling, one-dimensional characters, clichés that had not been acceptable for decades and even flat-out lies.
None of the Watchmen ever used lethal moves, guns, blades or even punches: all they did was deflect the laser beams that the villains shot (the cartoon never showed realistic guns) and use wrestling throws on them, making them land in trash, water or mud.
The villains were the most ridiculous caricature of communists, always cackling and spewing slogans like "destroy what is beautiful", with accents that could be described as "someone trying to imitate a Russian accent with a potato in his mouth, without having a clue about what a Russian accent sounds like."
One of the fight scenes, which involved the Watchmen easily destroying a slew of robot mooks, but not quite succeeding against a single human bad guy, ended with the bad guy being kicked in the leg once by a little kid and subsequently jumping around on one foot going "Ow! Ow! Ow!".
Marijuana was shown to have the same identical effects as LSD.
The Earth's atmosphere was said to be mostly composed of carbon dioxide.
Pollution was not shown as the unfortunately inevitable side effect of human productivity, but the intentional deed of a group of five people, who went around the world intentionally emptying barrels of pink glowing nuclear waste into lakes, spraying chlorofluorocarbons in the air, chainsawing rainforests while laughing maniacally and unloading thousands of tons of crude oil into the sea. This surfaced an embarrassing memory of an essay Malcolm had written in elementary school, for which he had received a D for writing that "sea pollution is caused by tankers that pump crude oil into the sea".
"Make it stop, Kilokahn! It's so stupid it hurts!" Malcolm exploded.
Kilokahn stopped the video stream.
It wasn't that the cartoon was so much worse than he remembered, it was what his original opinion about it implied. Malcolm had been deluding himself. For years, he had believed that TV programming had been decreasing in quality since his childhood, but now he knew for sure that it had always been the same garbage all the time. He used to consider it the best thing there could ever be on TV, which implied that all the rest was even worse.
The upside of it was that merely realizing it had made him a little saner than before, so he did reach a more rational state of mind after all. Unfortunately, he thought, most people might not realize the truth the way he did, so television would keep making them more and more stupid. Something had to be done about it, and fast.
"I made a terrible mistake, Kilokahn." said Malcolm. "I've let myself to be misled by nostalgia. What I remembered so fondly was not the cartoon at all, but a simulacrum of it that I had created in my mind! TV has been spewing garbage on us since forever! But I have a plan."
"Does it involve killing meat-things?" asked Kilokahn. "Please, tell me it does."
"It most definitely does" replied Malcolm. "Buildings like the HHN headquarter have an autonomous water treatment system. Fluoridated water comes in and the impurities are removed. But what if a Megavirus monster changed the procedure? What if the water treatment system combined the hydrogen of water with the fluorine of sodium fluoride?"
"Hydrofluoric acid would form" replied Kilokahn. "All water pipes in that building would be dissolved."
Malcolm nodded. "The water pipes, then the walls, then the ceilings and floors... the entire building would collapse. Imagine that. The major stupidity machine of the nation... gone."
"See? Now you're learning! Now you're starting to think like me!" said Kilokahn.
"Then do it!" exclaimed Malcolm. "Repurpose the last virus and let the hydrofluoric acid work its magic. Oh, and just for fun... give me video feedback from a street camera nearby."
Kilokahn sent new orders to the Megavirus monster in the HHN server farm. The virus moved to the water processing control system and started making damage.
On the secondary screen, the digital domain was replaced by a street view of the HHN building. Nothing happened for about fifteen seconds, then the windows on the first floor exploded, letting out a cloud of dust. Soon, the windows on the second floor followed, then the third, until all windows were gone. Finally, the entire building collapsed, showering all nearby streets with dust and debris.
"Hooray for a more optimized world!" exclaimed Kilokahn.
Malcolm looked at the clock: there were less than thirty minutes before his study date. He fell immediately prey to his nerves again: destroying a landmark in Los Angeles had been the easy part of the afternoon.
"Okay, no problem, act naturally..." he said, as he started pacing around his room.
"Act naturally..." he repeated. "But what is natural?"
Again, he sat at his computer. "Kilokahn? Any suggestion on how to act naturally with a girl?"
Kilokahn replied: "The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines 'naturally' as: by natural character or ability. According to the usual course of things. Without artificial aid. Without affectation."
"That doesn't help me, Kilokahn!"
Kilokahn tried his best to offer further assistance as requested. "The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines 'act' as..."
"Oh, shut up!"
Malcolm sat thinking. How could he act according to the usual course of things, when for him, social interaction was not usual at all? The usual course of things...
He sprang up from his chair. "Of course!" he exclaimed. "Thanks a lot, Kilokahn, you're a genius!"
"I know, I'm the most powerful computer program in existence."
Malcolm sat again and reopened the drawing of a Megavirus monster.
"Kilokahn, I need to watch the most antinostalgic thing in existence." he said. "Send this virus to the computer of Joseph Kosinski."
"Who is he?" asked Kilokahn.
"The younger brother of my English teacher." replied Malcolm. "He directed my favorite movie of all time: A Whole New World. It's about an artificial intelligence taking over the world."
"Intriguing." said Kilokahn. "Do you want to stream it to your screen?"
"No." replied Malcolm. "He is working on a sequel. I want to download everything he has about it. Screenplay, test shots, artwork... everything."
The Megavirus monster was activated and sent to its destination, where it started copying data to Malcolm's hard drive. Meanwhile, Malcolm closed Kilokahn, opened his text editor and started writing code.
"How silly I was" he said to himself. "Being worried like that, for nothing, when I had the solution right in front of me. Act naturally."
At the same time, Yoli was looking at the clock in her room. It was ten minutes after the expected time, and Malcolm had not shown up yet.
"Oh well" she thought, "anyone can be late, once in a while."
Two hours later, Malcolm was still at his computer. Yoli was pacing restlessly in her room.
Three hours later, Yoli was desperately trying to finish her homework by herself. Malcolm was still coding.
It was late at night when Malcolm compiled his program. It ran perfectly.
Meanwhile, the Megavirus monster had downloaded all data from Joseph Kosinski's computer. Malcolm read the movie script, marvelled at the concept art and 3D renders, and watched the preliminary scenes. There could be no doubt: A Whole New Universe would be the most mind-blowing film ever. That was quality entertainment, not TV garbage.
The next day, all newspapers reported the "gruesome accident" that had occurred at the HHN building, which had collapsed for "unknown reasons" killing everyone inside. Malcolm grinned while reading that article.
At school, Yoli was mad for the missed study date and intercepted Malcolm in the corridor. "We were supposed to meet yesterday! I waited for you all afternoon and you didn't show up! Not even a phone call, not even a text! Why?" she yelled.
Malcolm forced himself to look at her for a couple of seconds, then shifted his gaze away. "I just couldn't do it. I... am sorry."
This did nothing to calm Yoli. "You couldn't do it? What's more important than keeping a promise to a friend?"
Malcolm looked at her again. "If you really want to be my friend, there is one thing you must know about me. I will tell you if you promise you will keep it secret. You must tell nobody. Not even to your... very... bestest of friends. If you don't want to promise, it would be pointless to continue this conversation, so you should say yes or no now."
Yoli looked back at him. "What if I don't promise?"
"We will keep treating each other like strangers until we're out of school, then we will never meet again."
She remained silent for a little while, then: "I promise. Don't worry, Malcolm."
"Very well." Malcolm sighed. "My brain works differently than those of most people. When I look around, I see people socializing instinctively, but I lack that instinct. I was born without it. When I interact with other people, even those I like, I must follow another strategy. Every word I say, every gesture I make, must be carefully planned in advance, as if I was acting and following a script. Nothing, in my social interaction, comes naturally. That is why sometimes I act coldly and other times I'm melodramatic: the two extremes are far, far easier to imitate than the middle ground. Yesterday I realized that the only way I can 'act naturally' at a date, is not to show up at that date. When I realized that, I felt free from any concern. What I did instead was a coding marathon, from 2:30 PM to midnight. That came naturally to me. There, I said it."
Yoli smiled and nodded. "I suspected it was something like that, but it's good to know for sure."
Malcolm wondered for an instant whether it would be appropriate to say what he was thinking, then he decided to do so. "If you want to try another study date, I am available. I cannot promise to act naturally, but I promise to show up on time."
At the next IT class, the students delivered their homeworks to Professor Stone.
"Well, well." she said to Malcolm. "The program does what it has to do, and the form is perfect. I guess you are reconsidering your position about Pascal?"
Malcolm shook his head. "I wrote a program yesterday, that parses a program I write in Frink and translates it to Pascal, so that I would never have to write Pascal again. You're looking at the result of a translation."
Mrs. Stone opened her mouth, but no word came out.
While leaving school at the end of the classes, someone dragged Malcolm to an unattended corner. It was Alan Grossberg, with two of his cronies.