After Mind

by Spencer Wolf

  *

  Seven-year-old Cessini counted all of nineteen dark-spotted beetles and flies dancing and clinking against the tubes of a fluorescent fixture. He sat on a steel mesh bench against a cinder-block wall. It was the first year his shoes touched the floor. The bathroom’s stink was not so bad at the room’s hairpin entrance. The room itself was built like a square bunker of blocks.

  He slouched over Robin’s ScrollFlex. It wasn’t his tablet with side-mounted keys that Daniel designed, but it was still good. The ScrollFlex’s clear screen was a see-through magnifier of the urinals and stalls. He shook it and pictures and text appeared. He finger swiped through the pictures on the screen while Daniel and Robin gabbed outside the block wall, but within earshot of the entrance.

  “So here we are. What about you?” Robin asked Daniel outside. “How’d you end up creating these incredible gadgets for your son?”

  “After school, back in my father’s shop, when I was younger,” Daniel said, “I built the coolest robot you ever saw. I couldn’t get a job, so that’s where I fiddled. I was working on a really great one, too. Until I crossed a few wrong power cells and the whole place just about went up in flames. Also known as, ‘Son, your work here is done. You graduated, go travel. It’s time you learn to be on your own, if you get my point.’”

  “Ouch,” Robin said.

  “Right, so I figure, okay forget the robot, software is where it’s at. Couldn’t afford to go back to school, so I learned coding all on my own. Turns out I’ve got a good mind for it. I’m a systems engineer. The body’s a whole system. I figure if you lose the body, save the mind, instead.”

  “Lots of people are working on that. With a lot more resources than you.”

  “I know. Maybe they’ll all beat me to it, maybe not. But, anyway, I remember everything from those days alone with my dad when I was young. And I still love to tinker on the lathe, turn square columns of metal down to round. See what a precious piece of work comes out the other end. It may not turn into anything, but that’s okay. I build these gadgets for Cessini because it’s what I love.”

  Cessini flipped across the ScrollFlex’s images of squared tiles. The animal pictures he found seemed best. He chose the driest-looking pig he could find and started the video, volume low. On the screen, an African wild boar foraged the green shoots of a valley floor. Between the rocks and dusty trails, it still managed to find enough to eat and grunt on. “Do animals have free will?” the narrator asked. “Or do they follow their noses to the first tasty treat that keeps them alive for another day?”

  “So, are you still loving the madness of school with your little monster?” Robin asked. Her voice was more distant from the entrance.

  On the screen, a spotted hyena stalked through the tall grass of the valley’s ridgeline. “Do the hyenas choose where they lope?” the narrator asked.

  “I’ve been busy, so ‘loving,’ no. But, I’ll tell you, you don’t know what loving is until the two of you come out together on the other side of a bad bug.”

  “Has he been sick?”

  “A couple years ago. Three days of bad diarrhea and vomiting,” Daniel said. He was close to the entrance. “I bent down, wrapped my arms around him for a hug before heading to the hospital. I could feel him thinner, lighter, he’d lost so much weight. He couldn’t cry. His tears were dry. He laid his head on my shoulder and wrapped his little arms around my neck. He just rested there a moment before we left for the ER. He said ‘Daddy,’—and that was all—he fell right back asleep. And he could, because he knew I was there to make him better.”

  The boar scratched into the dirt at the end of a dry ravine where a ridgeline converged. The hyena sprang from behind. The chase was on. The boar wailed and squealed. It scrambled up the point of the ravine. The hyena nipped at the kicking heels of the boar. A hoof hit the hyena’s muzzle and the hyena tumbled down. The boar made it up to the grassy ridge. It cut left on the ridgeline, escaped.

  “I’ve been lucky with Meg,” Robin said. Her voice cracked. “So, you really burnt down your father’s shop?”

  “Yup. Guilty as charged.”

  A pack of hyenas lying in ambush sprang from the whole face of the grassy ridge. They enveloped the boar and closed in a U-shaped formation. The boar went mad with fear. The hyenas clamped tighter and laughed. A hyena took the boar over the edge. They rolled down the pebbled slope as the upper pack swarmed down. The boar scrambled for a hollow in the dirt. It kicked up dusty clouds, flailing before the ripping, tearing agony began.

  “Hyenas devour from the rear,” the narrator said. “They rip hind legs from sockets.”

  A hyena’s muzzle clamped onto the boar’s nose. It lapped the blood with a curdling snicker. The boar’s eyes widened and froze. Its forelegs were splayed by the pack. Its movement was choked. Its body was drawn and quartered.

  “The animal’s body has a merciful shutoff switch,” the narrator said, “A trigger for an end, a tether to death when the anguish and pain of life is too great. Does an animal have free will? In its pursuit of life? Acceptance of death? In an instant, its choice was carved in blood. The carcass beneath the ravenous pack was once a wild boar. Now heartless, it was nothing like that anymore.”

  Cessini put the tablet on his lap with the giggles of a hungry pack quieting into the end of the video’s play. He was scared but he couldn’t run, not like at school. At school, he would have been the boar.

  Daniel was laughing as he was close again at the entrance. “I’m not making this up,” he said to Robin. “In the year eighteen ninety-five, there were only two cars on the road in the state of Ohio and they crashed.”

  “Come on, everybody says that one, but I heard it’s not true,” she said.

  “Okay, then how about this one? The first person to die in a car accident was Mary Ward. She got run over by her very own car that she was driving at the time of the accident.”

  “Now that sounds ridiculous,” Robin said.

  “No, seriously. Steam-powered. In 1869. She was driving, fell out, and landed underneath her own car. She ran herself over. And that was that.”

  Cessini tapped his feet. He had to go, bad. A small boy finished in the stall. “I’m done,” the boy said. His voice was young. His legs were too short for his feet to touch the floor. The shoes of a man facing him shuffled. There was nothing wrong with a man helping his boy in a stall. At school they said no strangers. He knew that. But this was different. His daddy was helping.

  The sink’s faucet dripped. And so his mind went back to the water—always the water that burned. Why did he have to be so afraid?

  “Okay, you got me,” Robin said. “What’s the story with knowing historic car accidents?”

  “You want to hear another one?”

  “Sure, why not. One more.”

  “Two victims in the car,” Daniel said.

  Cessini rested his head against the cinder block wall. The small boy stood up onto his toes as he turned around. The toilet paper roll sounded like it spun out easy. The paper’s tail touched the floor.

  “Bad accident,” Daniel said. “Neither of the two victims remembers any of it. On a networked piggyback lane. The network controlled the cars bumper-to-bumper—on 169 North about to pass the loop of the 101 East on-ramp. Supposed to be immeasurably—‘immeasurably,’” he quoted, “safer than human-controlled cars at their tight distance. The baby was less than a year old in a rear-facing car seat. His mother was driving. It was a beautiful day. Their windows were open. A hacker took control of the network.”

  “I didn’t hear this,” Robin said.

  “A hacked car darted in from the loop of the 101 East on-ramp into traffic. The mother’s car instantly overrode the network to get its control back. It cut hard right to avoid the incoming car. The internal control sent her tumbling over a fifty-foot embankment. Sixty miles per hour. Rolled the car, the baby, and his mother three times. They landed in a catchment pool. The airbags deployed. The mother was knocked out. They
were upside down, with the windows open, her head below the water level of the pond. It wasn’t deep, but enough. The baby was safe. He was buckled tight in his car seat in back. He stayed inches above the water. He could breathe,” Daniel said.

  Cessini looked to the opening of the bunker. Daniel’s voice trailed away. His shadow got smaller on the wall.

  “When the fire rescue got to the baby,” Daniel said, “he was screaming hysterically, hanging upside down in his seat, staring into the water just below his face. He was completely out of his little mind. His mother drowned at the scene. She died. But Cessini, the baby, lived.”

  Cessini shook his legs and knees together. He rocked himself on the bench. He looked back to the door. Daniel wasn’t coming. His eyes started to tear.

  “But I’m sure he doesn’t remember any of it now,” Daniel said.

  It couldn’t be true, Cessini thought.

  “And technology makes two. A once happy three became two,” Daniel said.

  Robin didn’t answer.

  The stall door opened and the small boy came out with his father. He was a preschooler. He climbed the stepstool at the sink. His father stood behind him and helped every inch of the way. The boy pushed the knob on the faucet for a timed water flow. He pumped the soap dispenser. “Rub, rub, rub, before the water stops,” the boy’s father said as they pushed the water knob again, together.

  Cessini’s lip quivered. His dad was too busy with Robin and she wasn’t his mother. His had died and now he knew how. She was gone and wouldn’t wake.

  “And when you’re done,” the boy’s father said as he reached, “you push this lever for a paper towel to come out. I always use the back of my hand in case there’re germs on the handle. That way, you don’t have to wash your hands all over again.”

  The father lifted the boy off the stool. A sign was taped over the mirror. It read, “All food service workers must wash their hands.” The small boy waved to Cessini, then took his father’s hand as they left.

  “Hang on,” Daniel said, “I just want to check on him a second.” Daniel popped around the corner of the hairpin entrance. “How’s it going? You ready?”

  “No. Not good. I don’t want to go anymore.”

  “Looks like the stall is empty now. You know how to go. So, go on, try before we get in the car. Hurry up. It looks like clouds are coming. I’ll get us some cotton candy for the ride, okay? Now go. I’ll be right out here if you need me.”

  Cessini nodded and scooted forward on the bench. Daniel was nudged from behind. Two older boys skirted by to enter. They were laughing by the time Cessini shuffled back onto the bench.

  “Oh, hey, Packet. How’s it going? Got a wet wipe?” the older bully sneered.

  “Hey, wet wipe,” the other bully said.

  Cessini wiped his nose on the cuff of his sleeve as the two boys shoved each other over to the urinals. Daniel was gone, again. The boys snickered as they stood and went.

  “I bet you miss her terribly,” Robin said outside the wall.

  “Like burnt shop oil,” Daniel said.

  “Like what?” Robin asked.

  “At my father’s shop,” Daniel said. “I made hundreds, maybe a thousand axle pieces on a lathe. About yea big, finger to elbow. Started off square. I turned each down into intricate detail, layers of curves. As the lathe spun with the right amount of shop oil, my chisel ground away the corners and burrs to reveal the shaped axle hiding under the steel. And I only ever broke one. I pushed too hard with the chisel and that one axle broke through. The one I couldn’t fix.”

  “What’s the matter, wet wipe?” the older bully said as he zipped. “Ain’t you going to go like your daddy said?”

  “He can’t. Remember?” the other bully said.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s right. He probably goes like a girl.”

  “I do not.”

  “Don’t laugh,” Daniel said, “but his mother reminded me of all the beautiful, perfect parts you could make with the right amount of shop oil. And when she died, the thought of that one broken axle, the one I pushed too hard and broke, came back into my mind, like the burning smell of shop oil. She was broken and gone. And there was nothing I could do to fix it. Cessini doesn’t remember her, but sometimes I think he misses her more than he knows.”

  The older bully stopped at the sink, but he didn’t wash his hands. He jacked the knob five times with a hammer fist. He cupped a handful of water from the faucet and threw it at Cessini on the bench. Cessini flinched, drawing his head into his shoulders. The splash didn’t reach. He froze, afraid.

  “See you later, wet wipe,” the older bully said. He flicked his fingers with a splash of water as they passed and left.

  Cessini put on his bravest face, but only when no one was left to see. “My name isn’t wet wipe, it’s Cee—I have super powers,” he said. He touched his shoes to the floor then looked up at the sinks. “My name is Ceeborn. I can breathe and swim underwater and I’m so not afraid of you.” His watery eyes settled on the fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling that hummed and the flying bugs that clanked on the tubes.

  Where was his dad when he needed him most?

  Then a muted flush sounded from the other side of the wall.

  He slipped down off the bench and stepped across the paved floor to the sink. The ScrollFlex’s screen had caught a few drops of water from the bully’s splash. He pushed the towel dispenser’s handle with the back of his hand and tore free a paper towel. He wiped the screen dry with care. He tucked the ScrollFlex under his arm and looked back at the empty room.

  The stall door was open. The bunker was his. But he didn’t have to go anymore. He was only seven, but already so alone. If Daniel wasn’t there when he needed him most, then when? No wonder he always missed his mother more.

  Outside the wall, Daniel and Robin were gone. They were already far away. They were standing by a cotton candy vendor in the crowded fair street. Daniel bought a swirl of candy, but at his distance, it didn’t look so good anymore.

  Meg exited from the other side of the bathroom’s dividing wall. Cessini’s handmade tablet with its side-mounted keys was tucked under her arm. With both their parents so far away, she came to his side, took his elbow with her hand, and led him away from the entrance.

  “Come on, Ceeme,” she said. “I’ll take care of you now.”

  She must have heard everything, he figured, so he let her hold his arm. She walked at his side as they made their way to the candy cart under the skies grayed with clouds. The vendors along the row raised their umbrellas in anticipation of rain. But the life of the Summer Festival and their play-date had already turned a painful corner.

  “Do you want your tablet back?” Meg asked as they walked.

  He wiped a sniffle before the tears fell. The lower lids of his eyes were red and started to sting. “No,” he said, “you can have it. My dad made it for me. I don’t want it anymore.”

  “I’d give you the ScrollFlex. But I can’t. It’s my mom’s.”

  “I know.”

  They reached Daniel and Robin at the cart and Meg turned even nicer. “I don’t feel much like staying for the fireworks,” she said to Cessini. “Do you?”

  “No,” he said with the touch of her arm in his. “But I could probably win you an animal before it rains.”

  “I’d like that,” she said. “That would be nice.”

  And to think, by the look of their parent’s grins, Daniel and Robin on their own date thought everything was great at the fair.

  *

  The windows of the second-floor break room in the DigiSci building were black well past the dark of night. Terri slouched over a small, white mushroom-stem table. Her mug was untouched. She drilled her mind down into a worn groove as she rubbed the edge of her thumbnail into the layers of the Formica top. A dark-brown resin was layered over a pressed-wood core. She didn’t start the scratch, but its ridgeline felt right to her touch. Daniel broke her focus by dragging up a chair that screeched against the f
loor.

  “The only memories stored were those powerful, dying ones he had during the upload. He’s exaggerating, thinking he’s worse than he was,” Daniel said. “Only his frightened, traumatized packets came through. That’s why it’s not him. We didn’t capture his natural state. But you need to see what I saw. At the festival. He needed you.”

  Terri slouched back into her chair, lost from rest. “He needed me then, or now?”

  “Both. Long-term and short. I adjusted the coefficients of change for the code of his cells, to speed up their aging so he remembers the past. If it works, he’ll remember more detail, mature faster; connect the past with the present. The whole nature of his thinking will change.”

  “Listen to yourself. You have no idea, do you? You’re guessing. Hoping.”

  “He thinks he’s safe in the hospital. He’s confabulating who he thinks he is. It’s not him, but it’s a start. I think ‘belief and know’ will work—”

  “Dashboards of cars have better chatbots than this wreck,” she said as she sat straighter up. “And ‘belief and know?’ It first came out thinking it was a blob of numbers, then, ooh and ah, a human, but barely. Okay, now it imagined the body of Cessini. It’s his face represented, old memories stored, but it’s still not him behind the eyes. And it’ll never be. It can’t be. He died. It’s going to crash itself and die, like all the others. I can’t go through that again. I won’t.”

  “This wreck is Cessini,” Daniel said and slammed his hand on the table, then he lifted and pointed his finger to her face. “I am not leaving my son. My son! He needs me now. He needs me. Not you.”

  She froze.

  Daniel was flustered, enraged. He kicked back his chair and circled away from the table. “I’ll work on his critical thinking. Filter out contradictory ideas. I’ll temper all the spikes we scanned. But don’t quit on him. Please. He’s afraid. I know it’s him because he’s afraid of water.”