After Mind

by Spencer Wolf

  “Feel better?” Robin asked again, her hand poised over his light switch.

  He’d once believed his control over another’s fate stopped with the hapless fish living alone in a log. He was wrong. In his mind, the fire still smoldered in the remains of the data center, and sprinkler water still soaked the ground at his knees. Daniel was ruined. The twist of their lives was forever his. An earlier belief that was wrong turned to a know of his greater ability to control the lives outside the walls of his world. There was no contradiction. He was the same person in the performance of both. His mind had made the connection over the long term. He could control.

  “Come on, let me know you’re okay,” she said with her finger on top of the switch.

  He stared up at her through the distortion of the glass tank and at her finger so ready to take his command. He whispered, “I’m okay,” and her finger went down on the switch.

  She smiled and pulled the door’s knob. The light along the frame narrowed to a pinch. She withdrew her hand through the sliver of light out to the hallway. The door shut and the room was dark. Maybe he and the rivulus were equals after all. In light or dark, eyes opened or shut, he learned there was so much more to the world of control.

  TEN

  THE FAIR

  THE COUNTY THEY lived in was big enough, but after what Cessini had done, in his mind, as he, Daniel, Robin, and Meg walked alone through the crowd of the August fair, it seemed like everyone’s eyes were smaller than theirs. Everyone stared at the fair. The clouds loomed large, but the fairgoers paid the sky little mind. Everyone was so singularly focused on him, they eavesdropped and he hated it, for what good could it possibly bring? He caused the destruction of the data center, but the full scope of effect had not yet been seen. Like a punishing rain that leads to a flood, he felt whatever was coming would soon strike with the full drowning force of a wave.

  The demolition derby and its rip-roar sound was a spectacle behind a tall, gated grandstand. Cars with their network avoidance systems removed were a great hit and would have been terrific fun to see. There would be plenty of parts to fix in that ring, but it was one place Daniel never wanted to go. The cheers over the gate and a walk by the fence sufficed. Admission was extra to sit in the stands, and it wasn’t the time to ask for more money. But still, the crashes, screeches, and roars were tempting, if not to see through the fence, then to keep turning back to hear.

  Once they were in quieter spaces along the row of the promenade, Daniel put the ScrollFlex case to his ear and took a call. They all kept walking with the flow of the crowd. Daniel glanced at Cessini a moment too long. He knew the call was about him.

  Water drops speckled the dirt at his feet. A water balloon game was an aisle over on the promenade. An errant toss exploded another balloon. Two players crouched in their booths, opposite of each other, each pulling down with their hands on a rubber-band pouch. One boy loaded a water balloon into the pouch and shot it through a hole in his wooden overhead shield. His proper trajectory swished his balloon straight through the hole of his opponent’s shield. His opponent was soaked, thrilled. Then the return volley went askew. Other kids lined up for their turn were splashed as well and erupted in cheer.

  It was an accident at the side of the road, but Cessini couldn’t watch any more of it. He turned as Daniel carried on. The voice from the ScrollFlex case got louder as a litany rattled. It was Daniel’s comeuppance. He took it with his chin up the best way he could: He found a place to hide behind a prize schedule board. The llama-judging in the dirt tent was over. Four rows of flat wooden benches were all that remained in the mouth of a U-shaped arena. Robin sat in the second row as Daniel stepped over the bench and paced its aisle. Cessini and Meg kept a distance inside the plywood fence that wrapped the arena. The overarching white tent had an acoustic effect.

  Daniel unrolled the ScrollFlex and set it face up on the bench. “You know I hate to do this,” his boss said on the screen, “but it’s my job, as well as yours.”

  “What did they conclude?” Daniel asked. He looked at Robin.

  “Number one, house power should have had its own transformer,” his boss said as he read from a list. “Number two, there was also a fault in the electrical design. Mechanical and electrical were on the same circuit, the same panel board.”

  Daniel seemed somehow contented with what he heard. He even agreed with nods. “There wasn’t one single point of failure,” Daniel said. “There were many.”

  “Yes, there was a single point of failure,” Daniel’s boss shot back as the thin bezel frame spiked red with an emotive glare. “Your son. Your son is the single point of failure!” And the wave rolled in hard.

  “My son?”

  “Yes, the OSY valve should have been monitored in the fire control room. Whose responsibility was that?”

  Daniel’s eyes ticked to Cessini. “A lot of things should have been monitored.”

  “And don’t forget the mistake of bringing a twelve-year-old boy to play at a data center,” his boss shouted. “Even if what happened was nothing but a match stick on fire, we cannot have you back. It’s a matter of perception. Look at me so I know you understand.”

  Daniel stepped over the splintered gray bench. He gestured for Cessini and Meg to leave from the fence.

  Then the man let loose. “We are a concurrently maintainable, mission-critical data center operator. We cannot conclude that our property—with a hardened concrete shell, 206-mile-per-hour F3-tornado resistant walls, dual-power substation feeds, multiple points of connectivity, six-nines, that’s 99.9999 percent successes without a failure, which hasn’t gone offline for more than a minute in eight years—was suddenly and entirely destroyed by an out-of-control twelve-year-old boy and a girl who had even less right to be there than he did.” The screen’s bezel froze.

  “Meg wasn’t there,” Daniel stated. “And everyone knew they stayed in their assigned space. They hardly ever left it.”

  The bezel’s red glow searched for an orange, tried a yellow, but kept dialing back up to red. “So now we have a problem,” the man said. Meg pulled Cessini away. “We cannot prosecute a rescued boy who was captured crying in your arms on every street-level, truck-mounted, and handheld camera brought out to the scene.”

  Cessini came back into the ScrollFlex’s view along the cusp of the benches. “Your son is a single point of failure. Do you hear me?” the man said, blasting him on sight.

  Meg grabbed his arm. She pulled him away.

  “You had the key to the fire control room,” the man said to Daniel. “We can’t prosecute for stupidity, but we can for negligence.” The bezel stopped on black. “If that boy of yours didn’t destroy us through liability, then you did. And it’ll cost you. Big.”

  “I’ll leave,” Daniel said.

  “Yes, you will. You will leave for jail. All of you. Him in juvi—” the man flustered as fairgoers passed by the fence and stared. The bezel dropped to within visible range. “In juvenile detention. I don’t care.”

  “There was A and B power,” Cessini said as he returned. “Circuit breakers would have stopped the fire from spreading. Why were there no circuit breakers?”

  “There were plenty of circuit breakers,” Daniel said. He held up his hand.

  “I don’t know,” Cessini said. He fumbled. “It must have started with a short through its legs. Mechanical and electrical were connected. It went into the wall. The fire. It spread. What I built, the robot, Packet, it’s gone now. It can’t happen again—”

  “I said go. Now! Cessini. Leave,” Daniel said.

  “That’s right, you tell me what happened to your robot,” the man yelled after him. “You tell me how it all burned.”

  Cessini was mortified. He had never seen such wrath.

  “Get out of here. The both of you,” Daniel raged. He jumped up from his bench.

  Robin picked up the ScrollFlex and stood. She spoke directly to the screen. “Ruined is a data center taken down by a twelve-year-old boy
. You want a test and repair lab? You just got it. You want the world to know all of your facilities, everyone’s memories, everyone’s dreams can all be destroyed by one boy?”

  Cessini slipped his arm from Meg’s pull. Robin locked him into her narrow gaze as she held the screen beneath her tensed face. “You think your obsolete facilities will last? You don’t think I’ll sue you for negligence? That boy, whose name is Cessini by the way, and everyone who worked there, could have died in that preventable fire.”

  Meg pulled Cessini away from the tent into the middle of the walkway.

  “What didn’t you do to protect all of them?” Robin backtracked into the tent. “What was in the floor, the walls? What did you know about that building that you did nothing to fix, and you let it all burn?”

  Daniel stood. His eyes found Robin’s as she sat before him, straddling the bench.

  “DigiSci is your largest lease tenant,” she said. “I work for DigiSci Corporate. Dr. Luegner is a close friend of mine.”

  Daniel’s boss paused. “They’re going to file a massive claim against us,” he said.

  Cessini followed Meg away in the relative calm of the backwash after the first wave. She smiled as he accepted the pull of his arm. The prize fowl barn was only ten yards away. She seemed to know it was the best time to leave. The massive tide was about to return.

  “I can speak directly with Dr. Luegner,” Robin said. “I can tell you he won’t.”

  “Come on, Ceeme,” Meg said. “Let’s go see something nice. The birds always made us laugh.”

  Back in the opening of the acoustic U, the ScrollFlex was silent, its bezel paused. “I’ll get back to you,” Daniel’s boss said, then was gone.

  Robin’s hands shook. She snapped the screen back into its case and held it up for Daniel. He refused it. “Dr. Luegner wouldn’t want to see me and Meg broken,” she said as if that were all there was to it.

  Meg stopped.

  “Now is the time, Robin. If there’s something you’ve never told me,” Daniel said.

  “Go on,” Meg said to Cessini. “I’ll be right there. See the birds. You go. I’ll stay.” Her few steps ahead couldn’t hide what she wanted to hear. She hooked around to the left of the prize schedule board and onto the trampled grass by the plywood fence.

  Cessini let her go and entered the barn’s doorway.

  She slipped down the outside of the fence, squatted onto her heels, and rested the back of her head on the plywood. She looked toward the barn.

  He rolled back from the door into a shadow. He could still hear if Robin and Daniel spoke up, but he could no longer be seen. The soft and fluffy silkies were the quietest birds caged at his end of the barn. The loud ducks and geese were at the far end of the two long shelves. A low table of incubated chicks was tucked away beyond the shadow of the entranceway for children to see, but not touch.

  The familiarity of Daniel’s voice was easier to read by watching his lips. “Is he Meg’s father? Is that her secret?” he asked, unsure.

  Robin gazed from the tent. She didn’t look over the fence. “No. I told you before. Her father was Michael Longshore. She knew him. She met him. He was a foreman. He died trying to save someone at work. That’s it. There’s nothing more.” Her hand trembled the ScrollFlex back into her purse.

  Meg rolled the back of her head against the wood fence. She glanced across to the barn, but couldn’t see. Cessini was in the dark. So maybe that was it, Cessini thought, she wanted to be strong, to be like her father, to watch over him like her father did selflessly for someone else. That had to be it. It was her secret revealed. Cessini was flattered, accepting of her. But he kept listening and then realized as Robin kept trembling and looked away from Daniel that, no, that wasn’t all, there was more.

  “Then what could Luegner possibly owe you so much that he would turn his back on all this without a fight?” Daniel asked.

  “Nothing,” Robin said, then she slammed her purse on the bench. “I owe him.”

  “You owe him? For what? Tell me. What in the world could you be so indebted to him for?”

  “For Meg,” she said, relenting. “He’ll do it for Meg.”

  Meg cupped her hands over her ears. She squeezed her eyes shut as fairgoers passed.

  “What about Meg?” Daniel paced, looked toward the barn but saw nothing.

  Cessini forced himself to hear. He came an inch out of the shadow and stared across the walkway.

  “Luegner saved her once and he’ll do it again,” Robin said. “But swear you’ll never ask me what he gets in return.”

  “How can I swear—I don’t know what you’re asking of me.”

  “Nothing. Just swear it! I’m the one who has to live with what I did,” Robin said. She shot up from the bench. “Just me, so swear it.”

  Meg tightened her fists over her ears and buried her elbows between her knees.

  “I swear I won’t ask,” he said. “But what do you mean, he saved her once?”

  “Her heart,” Robin said at the light of the entrance. “It’s her heart. Or, no heart.”

  Cessini zeroed in on Meg. She was rocking in a seated fetal position.

  “She was born without a heart.”

  Cessini looked up at Robin. What he thought he heard or read on her lips was impossible. Meg rocked in pain, her knees drawn tight up into her chest. Her pose was familiar, but she was never further from the sweet little girl of three curling her knees up on a doctor’s waiting room chair. If he went out there to her, Robin would see him, stop talking, and he had to hear on his own.

  The top mesh door of the incubated chick cage popped open with a pang. Cessini’s bully tormentor, now grown, had flipped it open. In defiance of a “Look but don’t touch” sign, the boy reached in past his elbow for a sleeping yellow chick. Then he stopped and looked up into the darkened frame of the entranceway.

  “Oh, hi, Cessini,” the boy said, stilled. “I heard about what you did at the data center. That was really tough. Stay strong, big man. Stay strong.”

  Cessini’s eyes were still shocked from the sunlight outside, but he knew through the shadow the sound of his once-bully’s voice. The boy stroked the back of the chick’s head with his knuckle, and then returned it gently to its lamp.

  Cessini turned back to the sun.

  “You couldn’t tell from looking at her,” Robin said. “But when she was born, she looked so beautiful to me. She breathed. But blood flowed directly into her lungs. She was drowning as soon as she started breathing. They grabbed her away for an ECG, but they didn’t come back for hours. I knew something was wrong. They told me what she had was so incredibly rare.”

  Cessini squinted. Did he hear right? Could she have? The bully was quiet and moved on down the line of the shelves. “Goodbye, Cessini. Take care.”

  Cessini ignored him, and edged out into the sunlight.

  Meg butted the back of her head against the fence.

  “The doctors just stood there,” Robin said. “‘Just tell me what’s wrong?’ I asked. She had a complete antrioventricular septal defect with a double inlet left ventricle.”

  Meg bit onto her crossed arms to muffle her cry.

  “All I could say was, ‘What?’ Her lips were blue. She was so small. They told me to take her home and let her die in my arms. I begged them. I said, ‘I can’t do that, I can’t. Do something. Anything, but don’t let my sweet baby girl die in my arms.’”

  Daniel said nothing.

  Robin opened her soul. “I swore an oath,” she said, smiling a bit. “And Dr. Luegner approved an experimental surgery. DigiSci had developed a valve. It was small and round, made of organic material that would grow with the patient, with Meg. It had particles infused that would glow blue when oxygenated, or warn red on a scan if it failed.”

  Cessini clung along the outside wall of the barn. He approached the mouth of the arena. All they had to do was look up and out. Meg was hidden from view behind the schedule board and side of the fence.

&
nbsp; “To her, on her earliest scans,” Robin said, “she said it looked like four round grapefruits glowing blue inside her chest. And so she used to tell everybody that when she was a little, little baby, she had eaten four grapefruits. I never dared to correct her. It was just so beautiful to hear her voice alive and able to say anything like that at all.” Her fingers shook uncontrollably as she wiped a tear from her eye. “Now Luegner monitors her heart remotely. Controls it.”

  Cessini came forward through the waves of the crowd like driftwood finding its shore.

  “Why didn’t she tell Cessini?” Daniel asked. “She could have told him. What was she thinking?”

  Robin laughed and slapped Daniel’s shoulder. “She was thinking the same as she always does. Sea Turtle Rescue. She thinks she’s the turtle; she’s trying to rescue herself, make herself feel better. She’s conditioned herself to play every day, thanks to you and that old, beat-up tickle tablet, or whatever you want to call what you made. She thinks if she stopped playing, her heart would, too. We should take that thing away from her already. It’s not healthy.”

  “Cessini, out of anybody, would understand.”

  “She doesn’t want him to know. She says she doesn’t want him to think that ‘Only a defective girl could love him.’ Her words, not mine. So, please, for her sake and mine, don’t you tell him. Okay?”

  Meg rose up at the edge of the fence, horror-stricken with both hands clenched into fists against her chest. “Don’t you tell him!” she yelled. “Don’t you ever tell him!”

  Cessini walked out from the drift of the passing crowd. His narrowed eyes locked with hers that were frozen wide in panic. He broke her stare with the swiftness of a calmed and controlled omission. “Tell me what?” he asked.

  And on the electric tram ride through a field back to their car in a faraway lot, not another word was spoken. They drove away under a gray swirled sky that passed into night. Cessini closed his eyes in prayer that no more ill would come over their home. Daniel opened their front door with his rattle of keys that broke the silence.