Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Jenny said, “Neural timing—even the shift of a few milliseconds can reverse the effect of the signal on the rest of the nervous system. Not good.”

  I didn’t think any of it was good. But I warn’t going to say anything in front of that Jenny; I waited until I got Dr. Chung alone.

  “I got to ask you something.”

  “Of course, Ludie.” He had just finished checking on my heart and blood pressure and all that. “Are you pleased by the way the study is going? You say your FFI symptoms aren’t any worse, and with the usual rapid progression of the disease in your family, that may mean genuine progress.”

  “I’m happy about that, yeah, if it goes on like now. But I got a different question. I been reading in that book you gave me, how the brain is and isn’t like a computer.” The book was hard going, but interesting.

  “Yes?” He looked really caught on what I was saying. For the first time, I wondered what his wife was like. Was she pretty?

  “A computer works on teeny switches that have two settings, on and off, and that’s how it knows things.”

  “A binary code, yes.”

  “Well, those laser switches on the bundle of optic cables you put in my head—they’re off and on, too. Could you make my head into a computer? And put information into it, like into a computer—information that warn’t there afore?”

  Dr. Chung stood. He breathed deep. I saw the second he decided not to lie to me. “Not now, not with what we know at present, which isn’t nearly enough. But potentially, far down the road and with the right connections to the cortex, it’s not inconceivable.”

  Which was a fancy way of saying yes.

  “Good night,” I said abruptly and went into my room.

  “Ludie—”

  But I didn’t have nothing more to say to him. In bed, though, I used the tablet he loaned me—that’s what I been reading the book on—to get the Internet and find Dr. Chung. I got a lot of hits. One place I found a picture of him with his wife. She was pretty, all right, and refined-looking. Smart. He had his arm around her.

  Sleep was even harder that night than usual. Then, the next day, it all happened.

  We were in the testing room, and my hyperawareness was back. Everything was clear as mountain spring water, as sharp as a skinning knife. I kept rising up on my tip-toes, just from sheer energy. It didn’t feel bad. Dr. Chung watched me real hard, with a little frown.

  “Do you want a break, Ludie?”

  “No. Bring it on.”

  “Hippocampal connection test 48,” Jenny said, and Dr. Chung’s hand moved on his punchpad. The computer started clicking louder and louder. The door burst open and Bobby charged in, waving a knife and screaming.

  “Whore! Whore!” He plunged the knife into Jenny and blood spurted out of her in huge, foaming gushes. I shouted and tried to throw myself in front of Dr. Chung, but Bobby got him next. Dr. Liu had vanished. Bobby turned on me and he warn’t Bobby no more but a troll from Granmama’s stories, a troll with Bobby’s face, and Bonnie Jean hung mangled and bloody from his teeth. I hit out at the troll and his red eyes bored into me and his knife raised and—

  I lay on the floor, Dr. Chung holding me down, Jenny doubled over in pain, and the computer screen laying beside me.

  “Ludie—”

  “What did you do?” I screamed. “What did you do to me? What did I do?” I broke free of him, or he let me up. “What?”

  “You had a delusional episode,” Dr. Chung said, steady but pale, watching me like I was the Bobby-troll. And I was. I had hit Jenny and knocked over the computer, only it was—

  “Don’t you touch me!”

  “All right,” Dr. Chung said quietly, “I won’t.” Dr. Liu was picking up the computer, which was still clicking like a crazy thing. Mrs. Cully and a nurse stood in the doorway. Jenny gasped and wheezed. “You had a delusional episode, Ludie. Perhaps because of the FFI, perhaps—”

  “It was you, and you know it was you! You done it to me! You said you wouldn’t control my brain and now you—” I pulled at the optrode sticking up from my skull, but of course it didn’t budge. “You can’t do that to me! You can’t!”

  “We don’t know what the—”

  “You don’t know nothing! And I’m done with the lot of you!” It all came together in me then, all the strangeness of what they was doing and the fear for my family and them throwing me out and the lovely hyperawareness gone when the switch went off and Dr. Chung’s pretty wife—all of it.

  I didn’t listen to nothing else they said. I walked straight out of that clinic, my legs shaking, without even grabbing my coat. And there was Shawn pulling up in Jimmy Barton’s truck, getting out and looking at me with winter in his face. “Bobby’s dead,” he said. “He killed himself.”

  I said, “I know.”

  The funeral was a week later—it took that long for the coroner to get done fussing with Bobby’s body. It was election day, and Ratface Rollins lost, along with the whole Libertarian party.

  The November wind blew cold and raw. Mama was too bad off to go to the graveyard. But Shawn brought her at the service where she sat muttering, even through the church choir singing her favorite, “In the Sweet Bye and Bye.” I don’t know if she even knew what was going on; for sure she didn’t recognize me. It warn’t be long afore she’d be as bad as Bobby, or in a coma like Aunt Carol Ames. Granmama recognized me, of course, but she didn’t say nothing when I came into the trailer, or when I stayed there, sleeping in my old bed with Patty and Bonnie Jean, or when I cleaned up the place a bit and cooked a stew with groceries from my clinic money. Granmama didn’t thank me, but I didn’t expect that. She was grieving Bobby. And she was Granmama.

  Dinah kept to her room, her kids pretty much in there with her day and night.

  I kept a hat on, over my part-shaved head. Not the red knit hat Dr. Chung gave me, which I wadded up and threw in the creek. In the trailer I wore Bobby’s old baseball cap, and at the funeral I wore a black straw hat that Mama had when I was little.

  “ ‘The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures . . .’ ” Reverend Baxter did funerals old-fashioned. Bobby’s casket was lowered into the hole in the churchyard. The last of the maple leaves blew down and skittered across the grass.

  Dinah came forward, hanging onto Shawn, and tossed her flower into the grave. Then Granmama, then me, then Patty. The littlest kids, Lewis and Arianna and Timothy and Cody, were in relatives’ arms. The last to throw her flower was Bonnie Jean, and that’s when I saw it.

  Bonnie Jean wore an old coat of Patty’s, too big for her, so’s the hem brushed the ground. When she stood by the grave that hem was shaking like aspen leaves. Her face had froze, and the pupils of her eyes were so wide it looked like she was on something. She warn’t. And it warn’t just the fear and grief of a ten-year-old at a funeral, neither.

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . .”

  Neighbors brought cakes and covered dishes to the trailer. Nobody didn’t stay long ’cause they knew we didn’t want them to. Dinah went back into her room with her two kids, Mama was muttering beside the stove, Shawn sat smoking and drinking Bud. I told Patty to watch Timmy and Cody and I took Bonnie Jean into our bedroom.

  “How long since you slept through the whole night?”

  She was scared enough to give me lip. “I sleep. You been right there next to me!”

  “How long, Bonnie Jean?”

  “I don’t got to tell you nothing! You’re a whore, sleeping with them Chinese and letting them do bad things to you—Bobby said!”

  “How long?”

  She looked like she was going to cry, but instead she snatched Bobby’s baseball hat off my head. It seemed to me that my optrode burned like a forest fire, though of course it didn’t. Bonnie Jean stared at it and spat, “Chink Frankenstein!”

  Probably she didn’t even know what the words meant, just heard them at school. Or at home.

  Then she started to cry, and I
picked her up in my arms and sat with her on the edge of the bed, and she let me. All at once I saw that the bed was covered with the Fence Rail quilt Dinah had been making for the women’s co-op. She’d put it on my bed instead.

  I held Bonnie Jean while she cried. She told me it had been two weeks since she couldn’t sleep right and at the graveyard was her second panic attack—what she called “the scared shakes.” She was ten years old, and she carried the gene Granmama and God-knows-who-else had passed on without being affected themselves. Insomnia and panic attacks and phobias. Then hallucinations and more panic attacks and shrinking away to hardly no weight at all. Then dementia or coma or Bobby’s way out. Ten years old. While I was nineteen and I hadn’t even felt her restless beside me in the long cold night.

  I knowed, then, what I had to do.

  The Chinese clinic was almost empty.

  A sign outside said CLOSED. Through the window I could see the lobby stripped of its chairs and pictures and clothesbasket of toys. But a light shone in a back room, bright in the drizzly gray rain. I rattled the lock on the door and shouted “Hey!” and pretty soon Mrs. Cully opened it.

  She wore jeans and a sweatshirt instead of her usual dress, and her hair was wrapped in a big scarf. In one hand was a roll of packing tape. She didn’t look surprised to see me. She looked something, but I couldn’t read it.

  “Ludie. Come in.”

  “You all leaving Blaine?”

  “Our grant won’t be renewed. Dr. Chung found out the day after the election from a man he knows in Washington.”

  “But Rollins lost!”

  “Yes, but the new president made campaign promises to reinstate the FDA with tight regulations on studies with human subjects. Under Rollins there was too much abuse. So Doctors Chung and Liu are using their remaining money for data analysis, back at the university—especially since we have no research subjects here. I’m packing files and equipment.”

  The rooms behind her, all their doors open, were full of boxes, some sealed, some still open. A feeling washed over me that matched the weather outside. The clinic never had no chance no matter who won the election.

  Mrs. Cully said, “But Dr. Chung left something for you, in case you came back.” She plucked a brown envelope off the counter, and then she went back to her packing while I opened it. Tact—Mrs. Cully always had tact.

  Inside the envelope was a cell phone, a pack of money with a rubber band around it, and a letter.

  Ludie—

  This is the rest of what the clinic owes you. Along with it, accept my deepest gratitude for your help with this study. Even though not finished, it—and you—have made a genuine contribution to science. You are an exceptional young woman, with exceptional intelligence and courage.

  This cell phone holds the phone number for Dr. Morton, who implanted your optrode, and who will remove it. Call her to schedule the operation. There will of course be no charge. The phone also holds my number. Please call me. If you don’t, I will call this number every day at 11:00 a.m. until I reach you. I want only to know that you are all right.

  Your friend,

  Hai Chung

  The phone said it was 9:30 a.m. Mrs. Cully said, “Is that your suitcase?”

  “Yeah. It is. I need Dr. Chung’s address, ma’am.”

  She looked at me hard. “Call him first.”

  “Okay.” But I wouldn’t. By the time the phone rang, I would be on the 10:17 Greyhound to Lexington.

  She gave me his university address but wouldn’t give out his home. It didn’t really matter. I knew he would give it to me, plus whatever else I needed. And not just for the study, neither.

  Dr. Chung told me, one time, about a scientist called Daniel Zagury. He was studying on AIDS, and he shot himself up with a vaccine he was trying to make, to test it. Dr. Chung didn’t do no experiments on himself; he used me instead, just like I was using him for the money. Only that warn’t the whole story, no more than Bobby’s terrible behavior when he got really sick was the whole story of Bobby. The Chinese clinic warn’t Chinese, and I’m not no Frankenstein. I’m not all that “courageous,” neither, though I sure liked Dr. Chung saying it. What I am is connected to my kin, no matter how much I used to wish I warn’t. Right now, connected don’t mean staying in Blaine to help Dinah with her grief and Shawn with his sickness and the kids with their schooling. It don’t mean waiting for Mama’s funeral, or living with Granmama’s sour anger at what her genes did to her family. Right now, being connected means getting on a Greyhound to Lexington.

  It means going on with Dr. Chung’s study.

  It means convincing him, and everybody else, to put a optrode in Bonnie Jean’s head, and Shawn’s, and maybe even Lewis’s, so laser light can “disrupt their neural pathways” and they don’t get no more misfolded prions than they already got.

  It means paying for this with whatever work I get.

  And maybe it even means going to Washington D.C. and talking to my congressman—whoever he is—about why this study is a good thing. I read on Dr. Chung’s tablet that other scientists sometimes do that. Maybe I could take Bonnie Jean with me. She’s real pretty, and I can teach her to look pathetic. Maybe.

  I never had no thoughts like this afore, and maybe that’s the opsins, too. But maybe not. I don’t know. I only know that this is my path and I’m going to walk it.

  I hike to the highway, suitcase in one hand and cell phone in the other, and I flag down the bus.

  ANNABEL LEE

  Much thanks to Dr. Maura Glynn-Thami,

  who offered so much helpful medical

  advice on this manuscript.

  “The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavor in art and science.” —Albert Einstein

  I: August, 2013

  Hannah had been trying to get a signal for an hour now, any kind of signal—cell, Internet, radio, it didn’t matter. But she was maybe a hundred miles from civilization and even the effing satellites thought this place was too boring to connect to. This had to be the lamest vacation ever.

  Petulantly she tossed her phone onto the scraggly grass and colorful wildflowers of the mountain meadow. Arms wrapped around her long coltish legs and her head on her knees, she stared out over the valley below, where her clueless parents had pitched camp. The lamest.

  A hawk circled overhead, riding the thermals of the clean blue sky.

  So what? It was only a effing bird. Mom and Dad could go all literary-rapturous over birds and mountain views and a “pure” mountain spring next to a tent with no electricity or connections, but Hannah had hated every second of this trip and she planned to go on hating all the seconds that were still to come. She wanted her friends and city lights and fun things to do, and all this fake-pioneer stuff without so much as the relief of a cell connection was just—

  Where was Annabel?

  Hannah jumped to her feet and whirled around. Annabel had been here just a minute ago, she’d been chasing a butterfly across the mountain meadow, it was only a minute ago—

  “Annabel!” Hannah yelled, and the mountain gave back the echo: ANNABEL Annabel Annabel. . .

  Hannah’s belly went cold. She rushed to where she’d seen her little sister chasing the butterfly, toward the cliff face rising up from the north edge of the meadow. Annabel had been barefoot : “I want empty feet like bunnies,” she’d said, and Hannah, rolling her eyes, had shrugged and said, “Whatever.” But now there were no bunnies, no butterflies, no Annabel. Oh God, where?

  “Annabel! Answer me!”

  ME me me. . . .

  Hannah started to shake and sob, running back and forth across the rough grass, searching and calling and running, she was supposed to be watching Annabel oh dear God just let her be all right and I’ll never bitch about anything again. . .

  “Hannah!” called a faint voice from under her feet.

  She dropped to her knees. A narrow
jagged slit in the ground, about a foot wide, one thick plate of rock above and one below. Hannah got flat onto her belly and peered into blackness. She thrust her hand in and encountered only stone. The crevasse sloped away at a forty-five degree angle, deep enough that she couldn’t even see Annabel.

  “Get me out!” came from the rock. And then, “I’m slipping!” And then nothing at all.

  * * *

  Warm. Warmth touched the cysts. They had not been warm for hundreds of years. Warm, so warm. . .the cysts’ tough outer coating began to dissolve and the life within to stir after its long dormancy.

  * * *

  Drilling equipment had to be brought up the mountain. Before that, Hannah’s father had to drive down to the nearest place with phone coverage, the SUV hurtling at terrible speeds down the steep mountain road. Before that, he’d had to run down from camp to the last place the SUV had been able to reach. Hannah’s mother stayed at the edge of the narrow crevasse, talking desperately to Annabel. “It’s going to be all right, baby, we’ll get you out, I promise we’ll get you out, help is coming, just a little while longer. . .”

  There was no answer until the rescue team arrived, grim-faced and heavily laden. They snaked an oxygen line down to Annabel, followed by a microphone. Then everyone above could hear her childish wail, amplified and made eerily robotic by the surrounding rock: “I wanna get out!”

  “I know, baby, I know, we’ll get you out, I promise. . ..”

  Floodlights on the meadow, heaters, heavy machinery crushing the wildflowers. More lines went down into the hole: heat, a camera that showed the top of Annabel’s head. Sound sensors showed her wedged in a sharply angled crevasse beneath two feet of solid rock, a quarter kilometer above a small mass of twisted metal. That was probably remnants of nineteenth-century mining equipment, although no one had been able to find records of any mine shafts here. The metal was not important, neither help nor hindrance in getting the child out.

  Hannah, her guts twisted with fear and guilt, found Annabel’s sneakers and little white socks in a heap. Hannah collapsed onto the ground, sobbing, but no one had any time for her.