But what Vera wants, Vera gets, and that is why Riki is now at Ocean Beach at six in the morning. It’s Sunday, he should be in bed, but nope, here he is, freezing his ass off and glaring bitterly at the sea as he struggles through the sand toward where Vera is standing.
“Riki!” Vera shouts, waving both arms. “Over here!”
It’s obvious he’s seen her, he’s literally walking toward her, but still Vera calls out. The corner of Riki’s mouth quirks into a smile. Vera is quite possibly the most vexing person he has ever met. But somehow, he can’t not see her as an honorary mother figure in his life. Something about her makes him feel like everything will be okay. Nothing bad can happen with a Vera in your life.
“Ah, good, finally you are here,” Vera says. “You don’t see me waving back there? Why you don’t wave back?”
“I did,” Riki says.
“Hmm.” Vera doesn’t look convinced. “Well, anyway, I am glad you are here, because I have a question to ask you.”
“You asked me to meet you at the beach at six in the morning to ask me a question? What’s wrong with texting?”
“Ah,” Vera says with a cunning smile. “If I text, then there will be permanent record of the texts, and this is sensitive question.”
Riki’s still too baffled to be nervous, but now he’s growing uneasy. “Okay . . .”
“So I look in Marshall’s computer—”
At this, Riki hears a keening sound in the center of his skull. It’s his brain shrieking, Oh nooooo. Somehow, he manages to not freak the hell out. “How did you get access to his computer?”
Vera tuts and flaps a hand at him dismissively. “Aiya, don’t ask such irrelevant questions. As I was saying, I look in Marshall’s computer and I find a folder with your name on it.”
Oh god. He’s going to have a heart attack. He knows it. This is how he perishes at the young age of twenty-five, being questioned by an old lady who must surely be an undercover CIA agent.
“I open the folder,” Vera continues, unaware of or maybe choosing to ignore Riki’s horrified expression, “and inside is something called ‘Scalping Bot 2.’ I open up the program, but of course I just a simple old woman, it doesn’t mean anything to me.”
A glimmer of hope appears in the screaming mess of Riki’s head. Maybe Vera doesn’t know after all. Like she said, she’s just a simple old woman, she won’t figure—
“So I search for it in the Google.”
Oh shit.
“And it’s very interesting result. It take a while for me to understand what a scalping bot is.”
Why hadn’t Riki thought to rename the bot to something else? But nooo, he had to name it “Scalping Bot” like a freaking idiot.
“It looks like there are many different kind of scalping bot, but they all want to do one thing: scam people.” Vera looks at Riki sternly. “Are you scam artist, Riki?”
“No!” Riki cries. But then his conscience catches up with him and he chokes on it. He can’t lie to Vera any more than he can lie to his mom. “Sort of?”
“Hmm.” Vera narrows her eyes. “Well, you better tell me everything then.”
* * *
• • •
This is how it began: with his little brother, Adi.
Adi was an oops; Riki was already thirteen by the time Adi was born. His parents had only wanted one kid because kids were expensive, but then came Adi, and that was that. For the first few years, Riki had largely ignored Adi. It wasn’t that Riki didn’t love Adi, or was jealous of him. No, it was that Riki was a teenage boy and wasn’t very interested in a wriggly, squally baby, nor an energetic toddler who got into everything. But when Adi was four, he came home from nursery school with a tennis ball, and that evening, the two brothers went outside and threw the ball back and forth. Adi asked Riki questions about what it was like being seventeen, and there was such a sweet earnestness in the way Adi talked and the way that Adi looked up to him that Riki felt a sudden surge of fierce, protective, brotherly love. He looked at Adi and thought: I would do anything for you.
Their friendship blossomed. Adi was a rambunctious kid, and Riki was always a sweet-natured boy, and somehow, the combination worked. Whenever Riki came home from school, Adi would be looking out the window, waving madly when he spotted Riki down the street. But while Riki excelled in his studies and managed to get a visa to work at a tech startup in Silicon Valley, over the next few years, Adi continuously failed his classes. Riki finally told his parents that maybe Adi had a learning disability. They looked up the right therapists and scheduled an appointment for an assessment.
The results were both a blessing and a curse: Adi did not have a learning disability. In fact, Adi was gifted, and that was why he found his classes incredibly boring and hard to pay attention to. This was only a blessing insofar as it made for a good story to tell all their friends and family, but in reality, it was more a curse, because there were so few programs in Jakarta for truly gifted kids. At nine years of age, Adi was placed in the grade above him; then when he found that too easy, he was moved up yet another grade. That was when the bullying started. He began coming home with bruises on his skinny little body. It was clear that simply advancing him ahead of his age-group wouldn’t work. He needed a proper school for gifted kids. Riki looked up international schools and began the mind-breaking process of applying to various schools all over the world: Singapore, Australia, the States.
Slowly they received acceptance letters. Partial scholarships. It turned out there were many gifted children all over the world, so many schools were only giving out partial scholarships. Even with the scholarships and grants, Riki was going to have to find a way of making more money. His job at the tech startup paid enough for him to have savings if he stuck to instant ramen for all his meals. Every cent of his savings was sent home to Indonesia. He applied for loans, but being a foreigner from what was considered a third-world country, he was rejected.
Try as he might, Riki couldn’t find a way to help finance Adi’s education, and the more time went by, the more depressed Adi became. Their video calls showed Adi getting more and more sullen, his eyes going from bright and hopeful to losing their shine. It gnawed at Riki. In addition to his day job, Riki started taking on freelance programming jobs, working through to three a.m. before waking up at seven to commute to Mountain View. After three months of this, he was so exhausted that while making instant ramen, he mistakenly poured the scalding-hot water onto his left hand instead of into the bowl. The pain had been unimaginable. He’d shrieked so loud that his neighbor had banged on the wall and gone, “Shut up!” He ran to the kitchen and placed his hand under the cold tap and cried. After he bandaged up his hand, he logged back on to the freelance website.