After Mind

by Spencer Wolf

  “And I don’t,” Cessini said.

  “Don’t what?” the host asked.

  “Fear technology,” Cessini said. “I like it. But I’m reactive to water. Genetically, we think. Aquagenic urticaria.”

  “Precisely,” Daniel said as he mapped out mental notes on the table with his hands. “By evolution, Professor, he shouldn’t be reactive to water, but he is. By psychology, Robin, he shouldn’t be conditioned to like water, but he does. Maybe that learned fear will come next, Reverend. We’re all hoping not. But for now, he’s moving forward, not fearful. I even just got him a wave machine that he wanted, and made a sort of bellows lamp in the shape of a squid to go with it that he absolutely loves.”

  “Your reactivity to water is not your imagination poking beneath the surface?” the host asked Cessini. “A fear of water induced by some previous event?”

  Cessini looked up and shook his head. Daniel said, “No.”

  The host stopped short of a follow-up question as a pixelated logo of “DNWR,” appeared at the lower right corner of his podium screen. “This has turned into quite the serious discussion,” the host said. “And what are you going to be when you grow up?”

  “I dunno,” Cessini said as he swiveled in his chair, then said with bright, lucid eyes, “Maybe I’ll walk on the sky and save everybody before a giant spaceship comes crashing, plhssss, and explodes all over the planet.” He bumped and crashed his fist across the desk.

  “Like a superhuman?” the host asked.

  “Yeah.” Cessini grinned with a bob of his head. “Something like that. My dad and I can make anything happen. I’m also going to invent a fireman’s hose without water.”

  “That already exists as foam,” the host said.

  “But mine’s going to shoot nano-tech cells that catch and slurp up the fire back into the hose.”

  Daniel folded his hands on the table as he leaned in toward the host. “Technology doesn’t kill the imagination of children. It lets it fly. We might not have free will according to all of our answers so far. But I can only talk about what I know. We’re here in the now, and technology is here to stay, whether we like it or not. Robin is right. There is no source you can just go and shut off. And this gets to the point of exactly why we’re here.”

  Daniel closed his eyes and all waited in silence. “Everyone has a digital life assistant in the dash of their car, the devices they carry, the particles in the clothes they wear. All this frees the human mind to run with its own ambition and dreams. Human potential ignites with its own power, and that power feeds back around for the creation of more and greater computer code. The unseen, wonderful beauty of code. Think about it. It’s beautiful, magical, structured, and clean. I go to sleep dreaming about an unseen world of colors and codes. I wake up falling in love. If that dream of true emotion is by any hope some small measure of my doing, then I declare my second answer to your question firmly on the side of free will. My freedom to choose. And for that, I know, Cessini will be right at my side.”

  Cessini swiveled in his interview chair, proud as a son could be.

  The host turned again to Cessini. “Well, young man, you stick with a father like yours, and I have no fear you’ll get everything your heart desires,” he said. “But unfortunately for me, my fear is that when you get older, you’ll have forgotten all about this interview and the quality time you’ve spent here with me.”

  Cessini shrugged his shoulders and spun his chair by force of a single hand on the desk. “No, I won’t.” He pushed for a faster twirl. “We only forget the bad and remember the good.”

  “Well, thank you,” the host said. “I’ll take that to mean you think I’m a good host.”

  “Yeah, I do,” Cessini said as he skidded two hands on the desk and smiled back as he stopped. “I know I’ll remember this time.”

  “The long-term effects of a lot of things are unknown,” Daniel said. “Technology, good or bad, can unleash the power of the mind or take us down the next evolutionary step of fear. We need to choose wisely. The world needs a canary, don’t you think? To keep us on the right path. Long term . . . my bet is on Cessini and the triumph of free will. But then again, it’s a fight with whatever strength you put into it. And as already said, fate has a pretty big head start.”

  Daniel winked at Cessini adoringly, a connection only they two could share. No camera could have caught it. A memory imprinted on a soul. A packet. A moment he could remember.

  “Well, Daniel,” the host said, “it appears you may very well have found your king.”

  “He’s my protégé. My number one engineer.”

  “The king . . . Now that sounds good,” Cessini said.

  “Very well, then, young king, now that Daniel has brought us full circle from time’s immemorial fate to the 0s and 1s of passionate free will, I now have my one question for you. In the face of fate, free will, and fear, you’ve managed to keep your mind in line with your true self and dreams. So, tell us,” the host smiled. “Tell us, what is your forecast for the world?”

  “Not good,” Cessini said with a spin.

  “Not good?” the host exclaimed.

  Cessini kept up his twirl with a grin. “Yup, not good.”

  “And there’s nothing we can do about that?” the host asked.

  “Not according to all of them. But then again, I’m the one who’s going to be king and the battle to win my mind is going to be epic,” Cessini said as he dragged his toes on the floor to slow. “And like my dad says about him and me against the rest of the world, as a backup we’ll always have hope.”

  “Hope,” the host said and turned to Daniel, “I like that.”

  “Well, that should count for something,” Cessini said as he shrugged and his chair stopped.

  Daniel relaxed into his chair with his fingers clasped at the back of his head.

  “Yes, it does, with epic proportion,” the host said as his eyes redirected toward a void at the back of the stage. “For those of you just tuning in, I will repeat my disclaimer and auto-identify. As you may or may not have recognized, I am an autonomous host reporter, residing wholly within the Blue Planet mainframe at Digital News and World Report, DNWR version 4.7.022, operated remotely by the HACM Lab US at the University of Washington, Port of Seattle. All interaction is based on my RK3 processing core and is not representative of DNWR’s opinion or position on any issues. Viewpoints are entirely my own. You plan, I scan. Available twenty-four hours per day, any topic, anywhere.”

  From down in her hardback seat in the vacant audience below the stage, Meg looked up from her screen of Sea Turtle Rescue put on pause. She had created a beautiful set of swirls that she loved, of mineral-rich sediments rolling in the glistening current of a bay. Her turtle’s flippers added a higher-layer detail of four repeating eddies within rays of light—a set that was, for her, a creation of perfect. She tilted her head for impression. It was a heartfelt design that could only be called art, a delightful vision with the potential to cure the soul.

  She liked it, but couldn’t submit it for points in a contest. Cessini was getting up on the stage. She leaped up in her seat to follow him and go. She flicked the tablet’s feathered keys to save. Maybe she’d remember to send it in to a contest later, and get a sticker in return to share with her dollies or press on the frame of her bed.

  She ran up the stairs to the stage. As long as she gave Cessini his tablet back in the car on the ride home, everything would be fine.

  Cessini, who once believed there were only humans, looked at the host’s frozen eyes on the screen and knew that there were fake humans and bots now, too. He took Daniel’s hand in his as he got out of his swivel chair to go home, and smiled with his simple shrug. “Who knew?”

  He walked from the stage a bit taller and mightier than on approach. He was going to be king. And his next battle, in whatever form it was going to take him, was going to be epic.

  FIVE

  TECHNOLOGY MAKES TWO

  DANIEL C
LAPPED A hardcover chapter book shut. Cessini lay on the bed in his darkened bedroom and ran his hand across a mural of trees and waterfalls painted on the wall at his bedside. He still liked to trace his fingers over the cascading blue falls. An orange plastic cup with a straw was not quite full on the nightstand. Daniel tossed the closed book into a blue plastic basket, slid the basket under the bed, and nearly made it to standing-up-straight for lights out.

  “Wait, don’t go,” Cessini said. He reached up with his hand.

  “Come on, it’s late. It’s a school night. And I’ve still got work to do.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Scared of what?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t want to go to sleep.”

  Daniel leaned for the cup on the nightstand and handed it to Cessini. “Take a sip, close your eyes. You’ll be asleep in no time.”

  Cessini drew a shallow sip through the straw.

  “Don’t drink too much or I’ll be changing the sheets in the morning.” Daniel winked.

  Cessini coughed back up into his straw. He dropped the cup onto his pillow.

  “What are you doing? I just said don’t drink too much.” Daniel grabbed up the cup before the top came off and the water spilled.

  Cessini turned to his side and propped up on his elbow. He forced a hard swallow.

  “You okay now?”

  Cessini relaxed and nodded a bit, but his frown was truer. He started to tear up. “Daddy?”

  “What? Tell me.”

  “I think I’m getting worse.”

  Daniel slapped the cup down on the nightstand. “Okay, stop. I can’t do this right now. Worse? How?”

  Cessini found his breath and closed his eyes. It was an easy bit of relief.

  “Did it go down the wrong pipe?” Daniel rubbed Cessini’s chest as he lay his head down on his pillow. “Tough love, come on, how’s that? There, is that better?”

  As soon as Cessini’s head hit the pillow, he shot back up to a seated position and barked out a loud, croup-seal cough. He gagged and clenched the sheet in two fists.

  Daniel dropped down to kneeling at the bedside. He stroked a hand on Cessini’s back. “Hey! What are you doing? Are you choking? Talk to me.”

  Cessini breathed in quick, shallow puffs. “I’m okay.”

  Daniel grabbed the cup from the stand. “What did you put in here?”

  “Water,” he said. “It was just water. I put in water from the sink.”

  “Did you put your thickener in it?”

  Cessini nodded, then gagged and coughed out a spit. He drew air in deep through his nose.

  “What’s happening? What are you doing?”

  Cessini’s eyes rounded. His chin clamped down on his chest. His throat seized shut. His shoulders arched up, his back rounded over.

  Daniel thrust his left hand behind Cessini’s back. “I got you!” Cessini spasmed into a tight, rigid ball. Daniel forced his right hand between the steeled tendons of his knees. Daniel spun him up in a heave from the tangle of sheets and into the cradle of his arms. “We’re going to the hospital.”

  Cessini let out a long, hollow sigh. Then his arm fell limp at his side.

  “Cessini!” Daniel screamed. “Wake up!”

  Daniel lunged with Cessini in his arms, whirled, and banged himself free out the bedroom’s door.

  *

  Packet was sound asleep in his bed when his warm blanket cover was pulled down from the tuck of his chin. Daniel’s hand was on his shoulder and shook him awake enough to talk.

  “Wake up,” Daniel said. “I want to tell you something important.”

  Packet turned while still groggy and faced the blue glow of the sphere in the nightstand basket.

  “I think your problem is from a combination of things,” Daniel said. He stroked Packet’s hair off his forehead. “That’s why you still think you’re so young and not yourself.”

  Packet murmured without allowing himself to wholly wake from under the warmth of his blanket. “I said I’m okay.”

  “Your memories have a problem ordering themselves long term from short. I’m going to update a few routines in the kernel.”

  “I was dreaming. Dying is good; the pain goes away,” Packet said with his eyes still shut.

  “No. Dying is not good. I want no part of you to die. Do you hear me?”

  “Where’s Meg? I want to talk to Meg.”

  “She needed a break. She’s not here right now.” Daniel looked toward the door. “But I can find her. I can bring her back.”

  “She didn’t say ‘goodbye.’”

  “When? Do you mean at the doctor’s office when you were three? She watched you intensely. She wasn’t old enough to say ‘goodbye.’”

  “No, she was right here. She left out that door and her hair got short.”

  Daniel stood away from the bed. “That’s because you really scared her this time. She doesn’t believe you’re Cessini.”

  “Who’s Cessini? I think I once knew a boy named Cessini.”

  Daniel grit his teeth. “Then you are getting worse.” He wheeled the metal pole to the side of the bed. He squinted in the dark. He fiddled through his kit on the instrument tray. “And you are Cessini,” Daniel said as he looked for a tool. “I think there’s a problem with your kernel that replicates neurogenesis in the hippocampus. Up here. In your head. There’s one cell type that does two different things as it ages. When the cell’s young it creates new memories. But as it ages, it changes itself, so you can remember the past. That’s the cell’s aging process I emulated.” He found a cotton swab. “But I think I calibrated the coefficients of change wrong. So now your short- and long-term memories are all confused. I made a mistake.”

  Packet settled his head back onto his pillow.

  Daniel prepared his inner elbow with the swab. “I think I fixed that code, I’ll reorder it for you. But you also need something more fluid to go with it. A secondary sort criteria.” He adjusted the length of tube hanging from a new watery bag.

  “Tell me and I’ll remember,” Packet said. He looked away as the needle stung.

  “The first sort criterion is cause and effect,” Daniel said. “When you were first born as Packet, you learned to breathe, which felt good. That was one circumstance, one memory. And as Cessini, you drank water, and you choked. Also one circumstance, one memory.”

  “Okay,” he said as his eyelids fell shut longer than they stayed open. The tube was in and the water’s nutrients flowed. “I was dreaming of a waterfall.”

  Daniel sat closer. “Yes, you were.” He pushed the glare from the blue basket away.

  A warmth entered Packet’s arm. It tingled up past his jaw and circled within his head.

  “The second sort criterion is going to be a lot harder for you to get,” Daniel said. “It’s belief and know. Two circumstances, two memories pulled apart by time, but that aren’t in contradiction to each other. Two different circumstances. One person. One you. Talk to me, so I know you understand.”

  Packet nodded as the swirl settled in his head. The blue sphere in the basket pulsed. The dark pinprick spots moved around in the blue-lit room. They could almost be counted. One spot even stayed on Daniel’s face as he bobbed in and out of its path to talk.

  Daniel slapped his hand on the bed and got Packet’s attention back. “Listen to me. I need you to do this for me.” He held out his two hands like a scale. “One old belief that’s wrong . . . here . . . gets outweighed by new knowledge that’s right . . . here. These two hands are not the thoughts of two different people. One is the younger you, the other one is the older you. You’re still the same person. There’s no contradiction. It’s the same you right here in the middle of a scale. A scale that is centered up here in your head and that gives you the ability to change your mind. Form a memory.”

  “I understand.”

  “You string a bunch of these little kernels of memories together and your identity will start to take shape—it will form you. You�
�ll be no one but you.”

  “Okay. I heard you,” he said, but his head rested on his pillow, soft and dear.

  “Then, once we’ve got all that down, all that will be left is for you to understand the world in which you live.” Daniel reached up and squeezed the bag. It flowed. “And I’ll get you there—I’ll teach you the tools. Everything I know. We’ll get you there together, don’t worry.”

  “I like playing computer with you,” Packet said as the dripping water satiated his thirst.

  “Me, too.” Daniel smiled, at last. He combed his fingers through Packet’s bed-pressed hair. “Now I need to tell you one more thing. I know it’s a lot for you to think about now, but if you could do just one more thing for me? Remember I want you to think about the number 448. It’s a code, your code.”

  “You mean 448 Treeline Drive?”

  “Yes. I set the number as your key. I can’t tell you how to solve it, but I know you can do it on your own. One day Luegner’s going to ask if you found it, and I need you to say you at least tried.”

  “I want to go home.” Packet’s eyelids fell shut, and stayed.

  “I know. I’m doing the best I can.”

  Packet rolled away to his other side. The penetrating blue glow was a waking bother.

  “Now sleep. Process what I told you for as long as you want. Come back as you. I know Meg will be right here when you wake up.”

  Daniel pulled the cover up to Packet’s chin and he drifted back toward the darkness of night. Daniel reached for the cowbell on the nightstand and silenced its clank. He set it against the edge of the pillow. “Ring the bell if you need me.”

  Packet rolled back over to face Daniel and the blue basket as he slept. He pushed his hand under his pillow. The bell fell with a loud clank on the floor. “I’m not a baby anymore,” he said with a grimace, but could no longer stay awake. “I don’t need a bell anymore,” he whispered as he faded and his breath steadied into a rhythm. Tiny blue specks danced around the insides of his eyelids and he sank deep into the rest of his dream.