Hefty Wheelie Boy

The Hefty Wheelie Boy is a small, commercially marketed telepresence device that turns a camera, tablet, and self-balancing wheeled base into a remote point of view. Macon obtains one for Flynne Fisher, adds encryption, and uses it to connect her with Wilf Netherton. More than a precursor to the anthropomorphic drone Flynne operates, the Wheelie Boy makes their distant relationship tangible: it can carry a face and a conversation across worlds, but its clumsy body, limited view, and conspicuous camera keep the mediation in plain sight.

Design and Uses

Macon finds the Wheelie Boy as new old stock on eBay, still mint in its box, and gives it to Flynne along with a new phone. The device is an old-fashioned design by the standards of the story’s technologies: a mini-tablet and camera mounted on a red plastic stalk, balanced over a round base with two black wheels and gyroscopes. A handwritten note on a yellow Forever Fab sheet identifies it as a doctor’s order and instructs her to keep it charged and encrypted. The encryption runs in the background, but Macon still tells her to change her passwords and avoid obvious ones such as her birthday or name backwards.

The device was once sold as a toy, baby monitor, platform for long-distance friendship or romance, and inexpensive virtual vacation. A user could rent or buy one in a place such as Las Vegas or Paris, drive it through a casino or museum, and see through its camera. A separate headpiece with a camera captured the remote user’s reactions; the Wheelie Boy’s screen showed that face to people on site, allowing them to talk with the person they were seeing. The arrangement makes the device a two-way social interface, not simply a camera on wheels: it transmits the environment to one person while displaying that person to everyone around the machine. Leon had told Flynne that people also used them sexually, a possibility she had hoped he had invented.

Flynne’s First Connection

When Flynne opens the box in bed, the Wheelie Boy initially refuses to stand. She lifts it out, tries to balance it, and watches it topple backward, its tablet dark in the moonlight. Pressing a white button on the bottom of the red ball starts the gyroscopes with a small squawk. The stalk springs upright, and its wheels move independently over the sheets, turning the screen left and right. When Flynne pokes it and knocks it over, the gyroscopes right it again. The machine’s self-correction gives it a modest physical agency, but the scene also shows the limits of its balance and scale: it can recover from her touch, yet it remains a lightweight object moving awkwardly across a bed.

The screen then lights with Netherton’s face too close to the camera: his eyes appear wide and his nose enlarged. He calls her name through the cheap speaker. Flynne recognizes him at once, laughs in surprise, and pulls the sheet over her legs because she is wearing only underpants and a sweatshirt. The greeting is an encounter, but not an unmediated one. The face that makes the connection possible is also distorted by the camera’s proximity, and the small machine can be knocked backward by a fingertip.

Netherton sees the other end through a binocular-like feed that reminds him of older still images, though he cannot recall the platform’s name. Flynne reaches toward the camera, her fingertip swelling across his view as she flicks the device backward. The image briefly catches what he assumes is the ceiling, with a horizontal seam that looks as if glued paper is peeling; then the Wheelie Boy rights itself with an audible whirr. Their first exchange makes the device’s material constraints part of the conversation. They can see and address one another, but their view is shaped by a camera on a stalk, a low-resolution feed, and the machine’s vulnerable position in the room.

Between Telepresence and Peripheral

The Wheelie Boy belongs to an earlier, inexpensive version of a technology that the story’s more advanced systems make newly consequential. When Flynne sees the toy-like device, she thinks it may be part of where peripherals were going to come from. Its commercial history already contains the basic premise: a remote person moves through a space by means of a local machine, sees from the machine’s position, and is represented to others through a screen. The later anthropomorphic drone offers a more embodied form of that arrangement. Flynne’s first experience of such an avatar is unsettling: she sees unfamiliar hands, hears an unfamiliar voice, and is told by Ash that she is accessing input from an anthropomorphic drone and need not consciously control it. Against that sophisticated system, the Wheelie Boy looks crude, but the underlying separation between remote operator and local body is recognizable.

That difference matters because the Wheelie Boy is never invisible. Its users and observers can see the stalk, screen, wheels, and camera, and its limited movement repeatedly intrudes on the image it carries. The peripheral, by contrast, can make remote embodiment feel immediate enough to unsettle Flynne’s sense of her own body. The cheap device therefore offers an informal, legible version of telepresence before the book’s more advanced interfaces make that experience bodily and disorienting. Its shortcomings are not incidental: they show that remote access remains dependent on the capacities and failures of a physical object.

A Shared, Imperfect Presence

The Wheelie Boy becomes part of the growing closeness between Flynne and Netherton. Later, as they walk together through Hyde Park, Flynne teases him about how ridiculous he looked on the device, and he accepts that he had probably looked as bad as she says. The joke refers back to the awkwardness of their remote encounters, but it also confirms that both have inhabited the same improvised channel of communication. The device has carried not only an image but a shared memory of how each appeared to the other.

Their use of it continues when Netherton searches beneath Lev Zubov’s grandfather’s desk for the Wheelie Boy headband. He finds it in the carpeted well beneath the desk, among the room’s concrete traces, including flattened pieces of gum on the marble underside. Flynne advises him to adjust the camera because he had held it too close to his nose before. He puts on the band, centers the camera, and opens the emulation app; her blank sigil disappears as her image comes through. This time he leaves the machine on the table and does not try to steer it or change the camera angle. Their familiarity has turned a novelty into a routine, but the device still requires practical negotiation: where it sits, how its camera is aimed, and how its user appears.

The Hefty Wheelie Boy’s significance lies in this combination of intimacy and friction. It gives Flynne and Netherton a way to meet across distance, yet it never abolishes the distance or the machinery that bridges it. Its balancing wheels, oversized close-up, headband camera, and conspicuous screen all remain present in the exchange. As a cheap consumer object that anticipates the novel’s far more capable peripherals, it makes telepresence both ordinary and strange: a means of seeing another person, and a reminder that every such meeting is mediated by a body that is not quite one’s own.