“Internet” – Hay River, 2029, Revised Timeline
“I just don’t understand why the wiring would burn out,” the woman named Jody said, as she stared up at Logan. Logan’s arms were currently over his head as he balanced on the tiny stool in the dining room, cradling a lamp bowl above him. He was trying to will the feeling back into his arms, his extremities having gone numb long ago as he fumbled with the electric wires, holding the lamp bowl out of the way. A drop of sweat rolled down his temple as he quickly released a hand to once more steady his glasses that kept sliding down his nose.
Meanwhile, from the corner of the dining room, he could hear Laura sighing dramatically from where she was sitting on the floor. Typically, Laura didn’t accompany him on small jobs like this, Logan usually feeling alright leaving her with Kay, but on this particular Sunday, Laura was on what Logan had taken to calling “probation.” Kay had closed the shop early to go fishing at the river this afternoon and had invited Laura along, but after Logan had gotten a call about another verbal tussle with one of the kids in seventh grade—he pushed me so I called him a fucking asshole, but don’t worry I said it in Spanish— Logan had banned her from any sort of remote fun and was trying to force her to finish her homework. He had told her sternly she was stuck with him, and that she was going to finish the damn vocabulary packet and mind her own business at school or he would see to it her life got immeasurably harder. But now, even from his perch atop the little stool, a snarl of fraying wires threatening to electrocute his sorry metal ass, he realized still that the vocabulary work was nowhere in sight and her nose was in another fucking book.
“Well, if the fixture was installed before the 1980’s you may be out of luck. And if that’s the case, I think this whole portion will need to be redone, which you’ll need a real electrician for, I’m afraid,” he muttered to the woman, a growing frustration in his voice as he waved his arms around to the other parts of the dining room which led into the kitchen.
“Shit, uhh, I mean, shoot,” Jody quipped, her arms crossing across her chest. Logan couldn’t help but smirk at her slip as he finally snipped the wires and carefully took the lamp with him, setting it down on the table as he stepped off the stool. He had helped Jody out a couple times so far since they had been here. He knew she was divorced, and with a full-time job managing the department store in town, she seemed to have little time for anything else. She was sharp though, sensible, her black hair, most likely indicative of Athabaskan descent, was coiled up tightly into a bun. She was kind, but she didn’t take shit from people, a quality Logan had always appreciated in others.
Just then, a car was honking in the driveway, and Laura and Logan both tried not to flinch at the loud noise, before the sound transformed into that of chattering and the metal slide of the minivan’s doors opening and shutting again as the engine stopped.
“Looks like my boys are home from hockey practice. Give me a second?” Jody was asking, and Logan nodded before shooting another look over to Laura that clearly communicated what he expected of her, their own nonverbal language always hovering in the air. Almost out of here. Pack up your things. And then Logan could pick up the conversation between the two boys happening outside, as the family made their way inside the house once more.
“Well, if you hadn’t crashed the boards like that maybe we could’ve actually completed the stretch pass,” the older boy was saying to the younger as they stomped inside. Both boys sported short, black hair, and they both had hockey jerseys on, skates dangling by their tied laces in their hands.
“Skates in the garage,” Jody was saying to them, and the younger boy took the skates from the older one. Logan noticed that Laura’s eyes were on the younger boy the whole time as he made his way outside, and Logan realized she probably knew him from school. Meanwhile, Jody was setting down a spare duffle bag with a sigh.
“Sorry for that, Mr. Howlett. Practice ended a little early. I don’t think you’ve met my kids. This is my older son,” Jody said, gesturing to the older boy in front of him. “Danny is in tenth grade at Diamond Jenness Secondary,” she offered, and the older boy came up to dutifully shake Logan’s hand.
“Sir,” he said with a firm grip, and Logan found himself immediately liking him, as Logan murmured a “James is fine.” Danny offered him a small nod and a polite smile, just as the younger boy came back inside the house, and Jody added, “And I think Laura already knows Cole. He’s in her grade,” she said, gesturing to the younger boy.
“Uh, is that right, Laura?” Logan asked, turning to the dining room where his daughter was still partially hiding.
“The new girl’s here?” Cole asked, pausing in the living room.
“Her name is Laura, Cole,” the woman reprimanded him, shooting Cole a look, before murmuring a “Sorry” to Logan.
“Uh, yeah, I know. I play kickball with her sometimes,” Cole muttered.
“And this is her father, James Howlett,” Jody said. And it was then the boy seemed to really notice Logan, as his eyes traveled upward to meet Logan’s gaze, Logan could practically feel the boy gulp.
“Uhh, mom, ok if I go to my room?” he asked, although he hadn’t taken his eyes off the tall, ominous-looking man in front of him.
“Your homework done for Monday?” Jody asked.
“Yep,” he responded, before once more glancing back to the dining room at Laura.
“Ok then,” Jody said.
And then what happened next was impossibly fast. Laura had slipped past them all and now lingered more closely to Cole, watching him intently.
“What are you going to go do?” she asked, before Logan could intervene. Cole blinked at her twice, before responding.
“Uhh, probably play video games. Counterstrike Three.” Laura stared at him for a moment more, before asking, “Can I watch?” Logan had instinctively put a hand on Laura’s shoulder, gripping it firmly, obviously communicating don’t you fucking dare, stay with me, before Laura deliberately shrugged it off.
“Umm, sure,” he said, and then they were both walking down the hallway as Logan’s mouth hung open a bit, entirely thrown off by Laura’s new brand of petulance, before he tried to compose himself again. Jody was still watching the pair walk into Cole’s room through a small smile, and then grinned more widely as she saw the look on Logan’s face as she turned to him once more.
“Sorry about that,” Logan finally muttered. “She’s got some will on her.”
“It’s really not a problem,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep an eye on them. In fact, does Laura want something to eat? I was just going to whip up a few grilled cheeses for the boys, and that way you can go get the supplies you need from the store.”
“Uhh, yeah, sure….” Logan muttered, even as his anger at Laura still festered. The kid was fucking sneaky. As he packed up the rest of his tools, Jody having made her way to the kitchen, an idea suddenly struck him, and, barely whispering under his breath so there was no way anyone but maybe Laura could possibly hear, he growled, “Laura, if you can hear me, you’re in some big fucking trouble for that little stunt.” And then, just as quiet as his had been, her voice hit the air, but she was speaking in fucking Spanish again, which she always did when she was mad at him.
“Deberías haberme detenido si quisieras que me vaya tan ma,” she said from Cole’s room down the hall. He understood only every other word but he was at least able to glean should have stopped me from what she had said, and he found himself muttering a “fuck” under his breath.
“What’s that? Did you say something, James?” Jody asked, staring at him from the kitchen, spatula in hand.
“Ah, nothing. I’ll be back. Twenty minutes, tops. Thank you for watching her, and after I get back, we’ll be out of here. We… have more weekend plans to attend to.”
--
The wheel on the cart was squeaky and it was driving him nuts. As it rattled down the aisles, Logan’s tension grew with the noise. Other than dragging Laura out of the house, Logan really hadn’t had the time to give a ton of thought to what sort of “big fucking trouble” Laura was supposed to be in, so he settled on taking her grocery shopping, which they sorely needed to do, but was ultimately a shitty punishment because Laura loved shopping. Logan was the one that hated it, and realized, if anything, he was fucking punishing himself at this point.
Currently, they seemed forever stuck in the produce section, as he stared at the large collection and variety of fruit in front of him. Laura, meanwhile, wasn’t helping very much, a little despondent and a bit sullen, as she watched him stare at the selection of apples, fingers fiddling with the metal grating of the shopping cart as she did so.
“What the fuck is the difference between a golden delicious and a honeycrisp anyway? It’s not like they put honey in the fucking apples,” he muttered.
“Papa?” Laura asked, as he settled on some red ones because fuck green apples and started tossing them into the cart.
“Huh? What?” he asked, scooting her aside to push the shopping cart to get the hell out of the produce section.
“Tengo una pregunta para ti,” she murmured, walking a bit more quickly to catch up with him.
“Una…what? Pregunta? You mean you have a question?” he asked.
“Si,” she said.
“Alright, yeah, what is it?” he asked as he still fumbled for the list in his pocket. He found it, but as he brought it out to read it he immediately realized his glasses were still left behind in the Bronco. He tried pulling it away slightly from his face to try read it more clearly, his vision slightly better the further away the thing was, but…. fuck. Still nothing but a bunch of fucking blurry lines. He sighed exasperatedly, as Laura noticed his predicament.
“Want me to read it?” she asked quietly. Logan sighed, once more swallowing his pride and shoving the list in Laura’s hands.
“Uh yeah, in English, por favor,” he grumbled. Laura threw him a scowl, but then dutifully began reading the first item on the list.
“Cereal,” she said.
“Ok, that sounds right…” he murmured, hanging a left down the next aisle.
“So…your question?” he finally asked, glancing to her again as she still trailed behind him.
“Que?” she said absently.
“The question you wanted to ask?” he said.
“It’s about Cole,” she said through a sigh, and Logan found himself involuntarily yanking the cart to a stop in front of the instant oatmeal and granola bars.
“You mean the kid from the house today?” he asked, now staring at her directly.
“Si,” she murmured solemnly.
“What the fuck did he do?” he growled, and Laura’s eyes widened in surprise at his sudden anger.
“Nothing, papa,” she said quietly, giving him a confusing look. “It’s just…he has internet,” she muttered. Logan’s eyebrows shot up a bit in surprise at this, even as Laura intentionally broke eye contact with him to idly turn to take a rainbow-colored box of Fruity Pebbles off the shelf and throw it in the cart.
“Internet, huh?” Logan asked carefully, as he deliberately picked the box out of the cart and put it back on the shelf.
“You know it?” she asked, eyes suddenly bright with excitement, and Logan couldn’t help but grin a bit
“Might’ve heard of it,” Logan smirked, grabbing the Cinnamon Life off the shelf instead and chucking it into the cart. He began to push the cart forward once more, now intent on facing the aisle he most dreaded, because it typically started a nuclear war between them: the snack aisle. At least Laura was distracted with whatever the fuck she was trying to ask him, he thought idly.
“He says we need it. The internet,” she said, even though Logan noticed she still tried to grab a box of Halloween Oreos off the shelf before Logan stopped her, shaking his head slightly and grabbing some wheat crackers instead.
“Why?” he asked. Laura bit her lip as she put the Oreos back, scuffing her boot on the speckled linoleum tile as she did so.
“He wants me to join his grupo…uhh, I mean, his team,” she muttered under her breath. Logan’s eyebrows shot up at this, snacks momentarily forgotten, as he quickly ran through all the various scenarios of what she could possibly mean by the word “team.” Local intermural hockey team? Team of power-wielding X-Men? Team of vagrant miscreants?
“Wha? What team? You mean…like for kickball?” Logan asked, taking a stab at the least insidious of the options.
“No. His online multiplayer video game team,” she said quietly. Logan blinked at her for a moment, dumbstruck with ignorance. The fuck?
“Excuse me?” Logan asked.
“He’s says I’m good at it…” she muttered.
“Good at what?” he barked.
“The game. He says I’ve got good hand-eye coordination,” she said quietly.
Logan snorted at this, rolling his eyes as he pushed the cart forward again. “Hand-eye coordination? For a video game?” he said a bit snarkily, but at Laura’s crestfallen face, he added, “Sorry. So, uhhh, what do ya do? In this game of his?” he asked.
“Shoot people,” she said bluntly. Logan whipped his head around to her then, stopping once more.
“Jesus Laura,” he muttered under his breath. Laura only offered a vaguely apathetic shrug of her shoulders, before adding, “He says it’s a ‘first-person shooter.’ And you’re shooting at chicos malos anyway. Bad guys.” Logan refused to take his eyes off of Laura though, growing more disturbed and suspicious by the minute.
“Bad guys, huh?” Logan couldn’t help but ask.
“Si. You gotta kill them before they kill you,” she said flatly. They were still standing in the middle of the snack aisle, but their grocery shopping had been forgotten entirely.
“Haven’t you seen enough of that kind of thing, hija?” he finally whispered so quietly only she could hear. She finally seemed to understand his discomfort then, and looked at him all the more confusedly.
“It’s not real, papa,” she said, surprised she even had to explain it to him. “And I haven’t even shot una pistola before,” she said determinedly.
“And you never will if I have anything to fucking say about it,” he grumbled, before straightening up to his full height once more, hands gripping the handle of the cart.
“It’s just a game, daddy…” she said again.
“I know that…” he murmured, and they both blinked at each other for a moment longer: a fucking stand-off.
“So, can we get it? The internet?” she asked earnestly.
“I don’t think that’s a real good idea, Laura,” he murmured. Logan had already run through the scenario in his mind. Internet meant IP addresses, tracking numbers, maybe even credit cards. Of course, there were precautions they could take, but he needed someone with tech knowledge, of which he was sorely lacking. He had grown tired of staying up-to-date with the latest tech trends fucking decades ago.
“He says he’ll let me sit with his friends at lunch if I help him with his game,” Laura finally muttered under her breath. Logan glanced back down to Laura once more, and then that was it. He saw it in those pleading brown eyes, saw it as she finally set aside all that stubborn pride she had inherited from him as she admitted the real reason why. Fuck. She had him. She fucking had him.
“I’ll think about it,” he growled, even as she started smiling.
“We would need a computer too,” she said through another grin.
“Hell kid,” he muttered.
“It would help with school as well,” she offered, even as he shot her a look. “We are learning how to use haloprojectors, and I could do work quicker if I could just say what I wanted to write, instead of writing everything down on paper,” she argued.
“What’s so wrong with paper?” Logan asked, as he dejectedly threw a loaf of bread into the cart.
“Papa, eres tan viejo. It takes so much longer,” she said. Logan sighed. He knew that phrase well enough now; she said it all the time. You’re so old. Wasn’t that the fucking truth.
“Cole said we could order one online off something called Amazon if the stores don’t have them here,” she was saying.
“Sounds great,” Logan muttered, as he finally pushed the cart toward the cashiers.
“But we would need internet to do that,” Laura said, now smiling playfully at him, clearly intending it as a dig.
“Right,” Logan grumbled.
“And a computer,” she said, through another a big smile. Logan growled exasperatedly, running a hand tiredly over his face in quiet defeat.
--
A couple of days later, Logan found Laura sitting at the tiny kitchen island on a stool in the morning before school started, lazily slurping some milk off a spoon, swirling around her Cinnamon Life that had grown mushy in its bowl. Quietly, he came around alongside her, sliding the two boxes in front of her bowl as he did so. A laptop, and, most importantly, a cable modem. He saw Laura’s eyes light up with excitement as the spoon clanked down into the bowl, little splatters of milk now speckling the counter in front of them both.
“Si? Really?!” she asked through practically a squeal.
“Yeah, really,” he murmured. She was jumping up from her seat then, hugging him hard, as he let out a small “oof” as she squeezed him. Laura had only hugged him a couple of times, and the sensation was strange, but somehow oddly heartwarming. She let him go after a few seconds, scrambling back to the island and her chair to inspect the boxes in front of her.
“How do we make it work?” she asked, flipping the box this way and that, before beginning to rip into one side of the cardboard.
“Uhhh, hopefully plug ‘em in?” Logan guessed, looking up to her and shrugging his shoulders, before they both smiled at each other again.
A few minutes later, amidst the Styrofoam and plastic packaging, they were still trying to figure it out as Laura had her hands on the laptop and Logan fiddled with the cable modem.
“Jesus. It wasn’t that long ago I thought the microwave was as futuristic as it fucking got,” he muttered. “Does it come with any goddamn instructions?” he asked, before peering into the otherwise empty box. He noted then that Laura was making quicker progress, as she was already moving to the outlet across the kitchen to plug in the computer. It was just a basic laptop, the haloprojection computers being far too rich for his blood, but she was staring at it like it was the fucking holy grail. Logan fumbled with the trash, forgetting his task momentarily as he toyed with an entirely different question he had been wanting to ask Laura for the last couple of days, before he heard Marie’s frustrated voice once more in his mind. Just spit it out. Now is as good a time as any. Logan rolled his eyes at the voice a bit, but still found himself clearing his throat to speak.
“Laura?” he finally murmured.
“Si?” she asked, although she didn’t turn from where she was watching the device hum.
“This Cole…he’s just a friend, right?” At that, Laura did lift her head up, turning around to look at him.
“Que? What do you mean?” she asked.
“He’s uhh… not…um. I mean, he seems nice, nice family and all, but you’re not getting any other…uhh… vibes off this kid, are you?”
“Vibes? Que?” she asked again, computer momentarily forgotten behind her now, and Logan was cursing himself for starting the entire conversation in the first place.
“Uhh, like we talked about with your book the other day?” Logan said carefully. Finally, Laura’s eyes widened in understanding, before she blushed a bright shade of pink.
“Papa! No! No! Boys don’t… he doesn’t…Tengo eleven. He barely knows my name, daddy. Ni siquiera somos amigos. Not even friends. He’s only talked to me at all because estábamos en su casa y… and because I am good at the game,” she said, and she was wildly mimicking shooting someone with her hands. A chill shot down his spine once more at her motions, and he waved his own hands to get her to stop.
“Alright, alright, I got it. Sorry. I was just…checking,” he grumbled, even as Laura continued to look at him like he had fucking lost it. Logan sighed as he stalked over to where she was standing by the computer, right as it came to life in front of them.
“Look… you kill as many people as you want. In the game, I mean. If it helps you make a friend or two. So you sit with those kids at lunch, eh?” he said, leaning on the counter next to her. She smiled at him again, the awkward feelings spurred by the turn their conversation had just taken now diminishing.
“Gracias, papa,” she said through a big smile.
“But you know we don’t go near guns in real life, right? They cause nothing but fucking trouble,” Logan growled.
“Si, papa,” she said, a bit more solemnly.
“Good. Uhh.. bien,” he added clumsily, standing up straight once more.
“Besides,” Laura added, turning back around from the counter and smiling at him widely, “If someone else beats me at the game, or tries to get better than me, I can just take them out the old-fashioned way,” she said, her small, closed fist making lihglty contact with the left front pocket of Logan’s shirt as she mimicked stabbing him in the heart. “That’s why we have claws, yes?” she asked through a wicked grin. A mild form of horror must have cropped up on his features as he stared down at her small hand, because as he looked back up to Laura, she was grinning ear-to-ear.
“A joke, papa,” she said, as she removed her hand and patted his shoulder softly a couple of times. “Like you say sometimes: ‘Just kidding’.”
“Heh,” Logan breathed, the tension that had coiled up in him loosening. “Uhh, yeah. A joke. I knew that. Good one, kid,” he muttered, and she knowingly smiled at him, before turning to the brightly lit screen once more.
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