by Spencer Wolf
“Nine months is a big difference at this age,” Robin said. She reached for a communal basket of toys and offered a random one to Meg. It had only lights and recorded beeps, no imagination. Meg tossed it, and then crawled into Cessini’s carpet square with more fingers in her mouth. She watched as he fingered the wing-like tabs of his tablet until he swatted her away.
“My turn,” she said.
“No. It’s mine. I’m using it.”
“Mommy. He won’t let me play with—”
“Come on,” Daniel said. “Give her a turn.”
“She never much went for the spinning, mirror toy thingies anyway,” Robin said, and then she threw the toy back in the basket. “Probably give kids identity issues right from the start.”
Cessini looked at Robin. She talked a lot, he thought.
“I take it no daycare?” Robin asked.
“He goes. But I usually take him everywhere with me. Even to work. Especially on days like today.”
Cessini hunched over his crossed legs and protected his tablet. He curled four fingers under the feathered tabs of each side and he wiggled away. He clicked up as if on their natural notes, playing like the keys of a piano. His thumbs clacked the ruffled black keys as sharps and flats aligned on the front sides of the screen. The black skin at the top and bottom was doodled with fluorescent art.
Meg’s eyes got wider. She rubbed her palms back and forth over the wrinkles of her pants. She was ready to lunge for a grab.
Cessini scooted away. There were no sounds from his tablet other than the clacking of keys. He aligned and grouped red liquid-like dots on the screen. Each dot carried a numeral inside.
“That’s not being nice,” Daniel said. “Let her play.”
His fingers clicked away as if to music only he could hear. He combined two smaller dot groups to form a larger cloud. He pulled teardrops of rain down from the cloud into a bucket on the ground before a numbered group evaporated back up, putting the screen in balance. His fingers played, his smile intensified, and then with a twist of the screen he was done. He turned the tablet around for Meg and Robin to see all the numbered red dots balanced within a churning blue sky.
Robin leaned over. “That’s amazing. He’s really only three?”
“Scary, isn’t it,” Daniel said. “He does it all in his head.”
“What kind of tablet is that? I’ve never seen one with keys sticking out from its sides.”
“The tablet is standard. The keys on its side are mine. I made them, attached and coded them myself.”
Robin held out her hand. “I’m sorry, but I must not have been paying attention. I’m Robin. Did I already say that? It’s nice to meet you.”
“Daniel Madden.” He shook her hand and smiled.
“Like the scientist?”
“Yes, like the ‘madden’ scientist. I get that a lot, but only on the bad days. The rest of the time, you can just call me Daniel.”
Cessini swiped his fingers down the screen and pulled in a new, higher level. A doodled font of hexadecimal notation populated the screen. He turned his back on Meg and began his clicking anew.
Meg pouted. She left the carpet to rummage through Robin’s purse.
“I’m sorry,” Robin said, “but I couldn’t help overhearing when you were at the counter. I’m not in such a rush. She’s just here for the spray, too. If you need to, you can go first, or maybe the nurse can do them together?”
“That would be great,” Daniel said.
Meg grabbed Robin’s small suede case from her purse and crossed back over the square to Daniel. She handed the tan case up to him.
“No, thank you,” Daniel said. “Do you like what he’s playing with on the floor?”
Meg didn’t answer with words but climbed on the empty chair beside Daniel. She pulled and uncurled Robin’s ScrollFlex from its case.
“Do I have a choice?” Daniel looked up, asking Robin.
“No, it’s okay. Go ahead. She misses that.”
“Misses what?”
“Reading with someone other than me.”
“I hear you,” Daniel said. He took the ScrollFlex from Meg.
Robin got up with her palm pressing her forehead. “I’m sorry, I was just—I’ll go see what’s holding them up, and if they can take us together.”
“Sure,” Daniel said. Meg scooted in closer at the arm of his chair. He tapped through letters on her fancier, semitransparent ScrollFlex screen. Images appeared. He touched a portrait of Giovanni Cassini, a man regaled in semi-profile glance and pre-Newtonian powdered locks.
Daniel held up the screen for Meg to see, but Cessini could see straight through it. Daniel framed the man’s picture so that Cessini was superimposed with it on the floor. Meg giggled. “Giovanni Cassini,” Daniel said. Cessini looked funny with overlaid waves of white hair. “This man here is Cassini, with a ‘Ka’, not ‘C’ like my Cessini there on the floor. ‘Cee’—Cessini.” Daniel winked and Meg ate it up.
“Ceeme,” she said and pointed at him past the screen.
“Okay. Ceeme. Close enough.”
“Keep reading,” she said, grinning. Her short bangs were just falling in.
“The astronomer Cassini discovered the rings of Saturn and calculated the size of the solar system. It was his collected data that led to the calculation of the speed of light.”
“I like his hair,” she said.
Cessini listened from the floor.
“That is true. I guess he does have nice powdered hair. How about something more age appropriate, what do you say?”
“Okay.” She scooted back in the chair and pulled her knees up to her chest. She smiled.
“That’s what I thought.” Daniel touched through more letters, grinning and wiggling his eyebrows. He enlarged an image with a sepia timeline and read one of its points aloud. “The original Turing test consisted of two simple text conversations with a human judge. If the judge couldn’t tell the difference between a human’s text conversation and a computer’s, then the computer passed.”
Daniel looked at Meg. She kicked out her feet and sat back up straight. She giggled. Cessini looked up.
“The enhanced test added images and sound so it would be harder to pass.” Daniel lowered the screen. “Can you keep a secret?” he asked and Meg nodded. “I’m creating the Enhanced Inversion Test to go even further.” He winked.
She pulled her knees back up to her chest. She giggled.
“In my inversion test, the computer is the test-taker and judge and it has to determine for itself if it’s a computer or a human. An epistemology coding turned in on itself. Descartes’: ‘I think, therefore I am.’”
“Why?” She smiled and kicked out her legs to sit up straight when he looked.
“You want to know the trick? I designed the Inversion test so the taker would fail the first time. But if that very same taker comes back with a passion, a hope, a genuine force of feeling, then it won’t simply be an emotionless computer. It will have passed the test. And in my book, it’ll be a human computer.”
“Why?” she asked again, about to draw in her legs once more with her giggle.
Daniel held up a finger in front of her big eyes. She paused. “Because . . .” he said and Cessini looked up. But then Daniel dropped his finger and hand in defeat. “I don’t know. I don’t even know if the logic is correct. I asked myself what it even means to be a computer or a human, and that’s what I got—a test that’s designed to be failed. The first time.”
Robin looked back at their square from the reception desk. The receptionist peered around her, then back up, said something, and nodded.
“But I don’t know,” Daniel said to Meg. “And the last three years have been so hard for him. And I never thought it would take so much out of me. You know what I mean?”
Meg shrugged, then added with her own great declaration, “When you go to work, you need to bring a grapefruit.”
Daniel looked at her. He considered it. “For lunch?�
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“Yes.” She giggled. “A really big, juicy one, too.”
“Okay. I guess that’s a little more age appropriate, right?” Daniel said.
“When I was a little, little baby,” she said, pinching her pointer fingers and thumbs together and then down to teensy-weensy in front of her nose, “I ate four grapefruits.”
“You did, did you?” Daniel asked. He grinned. “Whole grapefruits?”
Meg shrugged. “I dunno. Cuties, maybe?”
Robin swooped in for a rescue. She held out a hand for Meg to follow her and Meg jumped down off the chair. “I’m so sorry. I’ll take her now.”
“Why?” Daniel asked. He handed Robin’s ScrollFlex back up to her. “She asks such good questions.”
The receptionist looked up from her desk. “Cessini? Meg?”
Daniel stood up, reached down over Cessini, and snapped shut the feathered tabs of his handmade digital tablet. Daniel scooped him back up into his arms, and Cessini wailed, “Mine!”
Within moments, Cessini was clacking away again on another tile floor. His feet were outstretched on the tiles in front of a black, cushioned bed table.
Meg bounced on Robin’s lap as Robin sat on one of two chairs by a nurse’s empty desk. Colored cutout posters of healthy inside kid-parts hung crooked with tacks on the walls. Daniel leaned back against the sink with its countertop jars of packets, depressors, and swabs.
“Is she getting her spray for a preschool around here?” Daniel asked.
“Silver Springs,” Robin said as Meg climbed back down to the floor.
“Us, too,” Daniel said.
“What are you teaching him with all his clicking?” Robin asked.
Meg sat at Cessini’s side and stretched her legs out to copy.
Cessini looked up for approval and Daniel nodded. “Look,” Cessini said as he flipped his screen around and back again so fast that no one could see it. “Hexadecimal.”
“No, seriously. What?” Robin said. She sat up straighter to see.
Cessini clicked the tablet’s keys. Graphical wheels of numbers and letters filled a four-space hangman’s row. The first wheel over the left space had numerals one through nine. He settled on the numeral two. He spun the adjoining wheels and replaced a twelve with the letter “C” and a fourteen with an “E.”
He pressed both thumbs on the black keys at the side and locked in his wheels in the screen. He smiled and nodded when done. He enlarged his completed four-spaces into the center of the screen and held it around. “2CEE.”
“I get it,” Robin said. She sat back. “To see. That’s cute.”
“That’s us. Me and Meg,” he said, then held his tablet’s screen higher.
“How is that you and Meg?” Robin asked.
“Plus them,” he said. “2,C,E,E.” He told her without looking back at his screen: “2+C+E+E. That makes 2, plus 12 for C, plus 14 for E, and plus another 14 for E. Plus up all the numbers. 2 plus 1 plus 2 plus 1 plus 4 plus 1 plus 4. That equals 15. Fifteen is 1 plus 5. That equals 6. Six is two of three. The two of us, her and me, are three.”
Robin collapsed in her chair, astounded. She looked across and found Daniel’s nonchalance, his arms folded loose at his chest. “How? How could he—?” she asked.
“I just taught him the tools. The rest he does in his head.”
Cessini turned his screen back around and cleared it.
“That was excellent, Cessini. I liked it,” Daniel said.
“In his head?” Robin asked, shaking hers in disbelief.
Meg’s drool ran down her knuckles.
“Don’t worry, he makes mistakes,” Daniel said. “He’s almost four now, yes, but he’ll make plenty more mistakes before he’s older, too. But that’s fine. We all do. Isn’t that right, Cessini?”
Meg grabbed the tablet at her first open chance. He held like a bear. “It’s my turn, Ceeme! It’s my turn.”
Cessini yanked harder and with a young mind’s instant flip of a switch, he was a toddler once more, a screaming three-year-old no more precocious than raw. “No! It’s mine. I’m not done,” he said.
She fought. Her screams were shriller than his. “Mommy! Ceeme won’t let go,” she said as the tablet’s feathered tabs bent upward toward breaking.
Daniel swept down and broke away both their grasps. “Stop, don’t pull. You’ll break it.” He jerked it up high to above his shoulder. He stood out of both their reaches.
Robin snatched Meg back up to her lap. “I’m so sorry,” she said beneath Meg’s ear-splitting cry.
Cessini slumped quieted on the floor. He stared up at the tablet and waited. Daniel paused him with a finger, and then lowered his tablet back down to his grasp. He took it. Daniel was good.
Meg’s kicking and wiggling stopped as her lower lip pouted once more.
“So there you have it,” Daniel said. Cessini turned his back and hid the tablet from Meg. “And the funny thing is,” Daniel said as he rubbed his forehead, “Meg and I just started talking about this in the waiting room. If you ever want to make a computer more human, make sure it’s coded to be full of screaming mistakes.”
Robin’s eyes brightened. “Don’t worry. It does get easier, or so I’ve been told.”
Then with three taps on the door, a nurse entered their exam room. With her smooth, green clothes rounded the way she was, she looked like a big green apple with a little medicine basket in her hand. Zoo animals were all over her shirt.
“Hey, kiddos,” the nurse said. “Looks like it’s going to be two for the price of one today.”
“Thank you so much for squeezing us in,” Daniel said.
“Please,” the nurse scoffed and sat on the revolving stool at her desk. She unrolled her own tablet screen and entered some notes. “Something good’s got to come from being a single dad,” she said.
Robin grinned as she stroked back the bangs from Meg’s forehead.
The nurse whispered behind the edge of her hand. She pointed at Robin, then winked and smiled at Daniel. “She invented PluralVaXine5.”
“I didn’t invent it,” Robin said. She nestled her face into Meg’s soft hair and gave her a kiss on the back of the head.
The nurse disappeared behind the cabinet door above her desk, and by rote handed Daniel a couple sample tubes of cream.
“I just worked once for the man who did,” Robin said.
“Thank you,” Daniel said to the nurse. He uncapped a tube and kneeled in front of Cessini. He squeezed a white dab onto his finger and checked Cessini close up, especially his neck and behind his ears. He dabbed on a few circles of relief. Cessini paid him little mind and unfurled the keys of his tablet to play again.
“I’m sorry,” Robin said with a tsk to the nurse. “I guess keeping secrets isn’t one of our strongest suits, now is it?”
The nurse rolled on her gloves. “Oh, go on,” she said and huffed. She ripped open two clear plastic packs with a nasal-spray applicator in each, and then collected two little brown bottles from her medicine basket. She unscrewed the cap of one bottle, screwed the sprayer top on, and shook the bottle and cap hard between her two fingers and thumb. A rubber stem stuck out from between her two knuckles.
“If I didn’t know you both so well,” she said as she wheeled herself closer on the stool, “I’d sing a different tune, but boy oh boy, do I feel like the hand of fate today.”
“I think you made your point,” Robin said.
“Oh, please. ‘Minnesota Nice’ still exists, doesn’t it?”
“You betcha,” Daniel said.
The nurse pushed a hand on Daniel’s shoulder as she wheeled passed. “Good. Because I broke all the rules just to get you both in here at the same time. For that, you can thank me later.”
Meg was steady on Robin’s lap. The nurse was prepared and leaned in. She had the readied brown bottle of PluralVaXine5 in hand. She placed her pointer and index fingers on the tabs along both sides of the nozzle, opposed her thumb under the bottle’s base for se
ating, and shook the contents once more. She placed it under Meg’s nose.
“Ready, sweetie? I’ll count from three and you go like this.” The nurse showed her with a sudden and deep breath in through her nose, her head tilted back.
“Why?” Meg asked.
“This is the last booster you’ll need. It will fix you for all kinds of things. It will make you feel better if you’re sick, keep you better if you’re not.” The nurse moved the bottle up beneath Meg’s left nostril, then in. “Ready? On three, two, one. . . .”
Meg jerked her head back in exaggerated imitation of the nurse’s precise example. The back of Meg’s head butted Robin’s lip against her teeth and Robin yelped enough for them both. The spray entered Meg’s nostril at its periphery, but enough.
“Got it,” Robin said. She reached around and wiped Meg’s sniffle with her cuff.
Cessini was a perfect patient on the floor where he watched and waited. The nurse took the other applicator from her desk, leaned down, and placed it under his nose without his interest or movement. He didn’t care as long as it didn’t interfere with the clicking and clacking of his tablet.
“And three, two, one. . . .”
Cessini breathed in a wicked breath, far too deep. He winced. He felt the rush of moist heat high in his sinus. His interior cavity burned and prickled the backs of his eyes. He coughed out his breath and squinted away the burn with a quick shake left, then right of his head.
Then he went back to counting.
“All done,” the nurse said.
“So, I guess we’ll see you around preschool, then?” Robin asked Daniel.
The nurse sat back at her desk and fastened rubber caps on the nozzles of the bottles. She dropped the secured bottles into two bags, and snapped off her gloves into the trash. “Final dose in twenty-four hours,” she said. She handed the marked bags to Daniel and Robin. “Call me if you need me.” She got up, cocked her head, pointed at them both, and saw her way out the door. “Take your time. No rush.”
The door clicked and Robin stood up with Meg. “I’m sorry,” she said as Meg grabbed the bag from her hand. “If you’re not too busy running around inventing magical play things for your son, maybe we could get together sometime for a coffee?”