After Mind

by Spencer Wolf

  Beyond the line of the trees, two poles stood as markers for two plots that were tucked away, but exposed by the lights. Graves for children were all they could be, and one was already mounded full. What awful form for the children’s ward of a hospital to be so mindless in the placement of its second floor windows.

  He held onto the hand-bar and rested his forehead against the window.

  Dusk turned to dark and his face reflected in the pane. He had aged one, two, or three years, he figured, somehow maybe more. He measured the shape of his chin, the more masculine frame of his brow against the line of lights to the two graves in the woods.

  Maybe if one of the graves was for Cessini in his dreams, then the other must be for—“Meg. Where’s Meg?” he asked, startled. “Daniel said she’d be here when I woke up.”

  “She’s home. She’s exhausted. Let her rest,” Robin said as she backed away to the door. “You were such a good friend to her. She’ll come back, and when she does, she’ll be stronger than ever.”

  “I remember when Meg and Cessini put on the cutout hats they made at school for Thanksgiving. They went to the supermarket for his birthday and Daddy tiptoed them up and down each cold-aisle row. They were looking for turkey in the freezer.” He looked to his nightstand. The tray of uneaten turkey dinner had long since been taken away.

  Robin stopped at the door and smiled. A row of red, yellow, and blue triangular lights aligned above the door’s wooden frame. “That was right after your father and I met,” Robin said. “You were four. The two of you hit it off from the start.”

  He let go of the lacquered rail at the window. “You mean Cessini and Meg did. But, they didn’t.”

  She held up her hand as a stop sign. She pointed to the red triangle light above the door.

  “I thought of something,” he said as he waited by the window.

  “What did you think?”

  “If Cessini boiled in water and computers and water don’t mix, then Cessini must have been a computer.”

  Robin shook her head. He knew he was wrong.

  The three triangular lights above the door, each with a number on its flattened edge—4, 4, then 8—lit in order from red, to yellow, then blue. Robin swiped a key card down a scanner. The ceiling tiles over the bed unlocked with a click and opened. He flinched.

  “Then maybe he had dissociative identity disorder—DID,” he said. “Daddy said that’s what you called it. I remember he said older memories and younger memories aren’t from two different people.” He knew he had the truth. “It’s the same person, isn’t it?”

  Robin’s finger paused over a panel’s switch at the door. She smiled.

  Yes, he was right. “So, then I am the younger Daniel! Our memories are the same person. Yes! Just as Daniel burned his father’s shop and had to leave, so did I! I am Daniel.” His own hands hugged his head. “And Meg is the younger you!”

  “No, honey. No,” she said and flipped the panel switch down. She came back around the bed to his side and held him clear from the shifting pneumatics in the ceiling. “But it’s okay to be wrong,” she said and guided him back a few steps. “That’s what makes us all human.”

  The bed flattened to a table in the center of the floor. A tubular ring descended from the ceiling to meet the head of the table. Two green-and-white wedges gull-winged down and locked like jaws onto the narrow sides of the ring. Robin took his hand into hers.

  “Wait a minute!” He pulled from her hand. “If I am Cessini, then Daniel is the older me. And you’re the older Meg.”

  Robin took his wrist into her hand and sighed. She helped him to the side of the table. “No, you are Cessini. A wonderful boy. A boy with a wonderful imagination who was reactive to water.”

  A stylized logo with text was on the wedge’s side of the machine. “DigiSci” was centered over two bulbous cones connected at their points. The center point was looped by a vertical ring. An “M” was inside the left cone, a “B” in the right, and the script “11-C” was centered below.

  He brushed his fingers across the logo and wondered. Was the bubbled cone to the left Cessini’s world? And the cone on the right Ceeborn’s, the stronger boy who could breathe and swim underwater? Did that mean Packet, himself, was their tie at the point in the middle? Or, were the “M” and “B” for mind and body, coming together as one? It didn’t really matter, though, as any way he thought about it, he knew he would be wrong.

  Robin ushered him past. “I get the most amazing modern machines to play with, don’t I?” she said. “Dr. Luegner does everything he can to help.”

  “What is it for?” Packet asked.

  “We just want to run some tests of your thinking. Prove what I already know.”

  “Maybe we should walk around the garden again,” he said. “Or the whole lake, first. It’ll make me tired enough to sleep so I don’t have to worry.”

  “You’ll be fine,” she said.

  He hesitated at the table. Maybe he was nothing more than a project. “No, wait. Please. I know you want me to be Cessini, but I need to be better. I can be better. I can be Ceeborn. I can breathe and swim underwater.”

  That was a big mistake. She glared. “Listen to me. You want to know, I’ll tell you straight as it is. You are a computer, physically in the mainframe on the second floor of the DigiSci building. Eight cabinets on each side of an aisle.”

  He chuckled. That was a good one. It broke the tension. “I like playing computer with you. But I understand what you mean. I was playing before. But now I’m human. I get that. Let’s just go out to that lake. I’ll prove it to you. I can swim underwater.”

  “My God. You are getting worse.”

  Somehow, that one he knew.

  “Do you remember your father’s Inversion Test?”

  “Yes?” he asked, tentative.

  “Then don’t fight me on this. But I want you to consider yourself as having failed the first time. So now I’ll leave the rest up to you.“

  “Wait, tell me what I did wrong. I know Cessini wasn’t real.”

  Her annoyance left her face, replaced with resignation. “Never underestimate yourself, ever,” she said. “And I do love you. Now come on, hop up, not like a project, but like a person, and be yourself.”

  Luegner’s blue sphere lit up with a soft glow in the basket beyond the wedges of the machine.

  Packet turned his back to the table and put his palms to the edge. He relinquished his thoughts and pushed himself up. At first he sat, then swiveled to lie back. He scooted up on the polish of the table. A soft pillow covered head-blocks at the opening of the tube. She touched him on the forearm as he lay still. She leaned over with a glint in her eyes. He nodded. He had nothing more to say.

  He gripped both hands on the rounded edges of the table.

  She straightened his legs and feet. He stretched his neck for a glance backward beyond the top of his head. The core of the machine’s tube spun up to a whirl.

  “What should I think about when I’m sleeping?” he asked as his hands squeezed the slab.

  “His dreams,” Robin said. “Think about Cessini’s dreams. You were always his dream come true.”

  The table moved back on a track and the top of his head entered the spinning entrance of the machine. He found her reassuring glance and fretted. She reached out of his view to the side of his table and it stopped. He didn’t blink or breathe; he was terrified. This was his second time taking a test he knew he had to pass. Who knew what could happen, or what Dr. Luegner would do to him if he failed?

  “Wait. Okay. I believe I’m Cessini! Now tell me, please, before I forget, tell me your secret. Why didn’t Dr. Luegner have me and Daddy put in jail for burning the data center? He could have. If it burned?”

  She hesitated. He got her.

  Her eyes shifted to the closed door of the room. The drum over his head rotated to a sizzle and shook. She looked back from the door and straight into his eyes. “Because,” she said, then she leaned in ever so close fo
r a whisper to his ear. . . . “Because, I worked on the PluralVaXine5 spray.”

  She pulled away ever so slowly and touched her finger onto the bridge of his nose. Her touch was a dab of coldness. She withdrew from the table and the whitened knuckles of his grip slowly regained their color. She removed the tiny red earring in the shape of a key from her earlobe, held it into his line of sight, and then reached out again past his view to the side.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  The table moved and he entered the looped light of the tube.

  “I’ll give you the tools. Now help make yourself whole. You’re the only one I can tell. And I have to tell someone. So, help me. Don’t let me be lonely anymore. Go, run as far as you want across the sky, and make us both free.”

  “No, I was always afraid to run. Next time, I’ll swim.”

  The tube’s chamber revved up to a continuum of glow. A screen reflected the spin of the tube and displayed shapes as they formed: a dot, a line, a triangle, a square; then the outline of animals: a bird, a dog, then a wild boar safe in a den. The den turned into a dark round speck that met with another to form a pair in a row. A wider view expanded the specks into two columns of spores along a spine. Wider still and the spine was the green frond of a fern. The fern was at a resting spot in a forest. The forest was a painted mural on a bedroom wall, of trees and a waterfall. The waterfall had a clearing above through a forested canopy. A hand pushed aside the overhung branches to a view of a night’s sky, its white pricked stars, and out into a mind’s sea of dreams.

  *

  Robin let out a breath as she sat back from the tri-lens camera with microphone propped up over the desk in the messy studio lab on the second floor of the DigiSci building. The images in front of her on the screen swirled with a tide of white, pricked stars. A child’s artwork, photos, and memory props were strewn across the desk, piled on the floor, and taped haphazardly to the wall. Beneath the printed floor plan of their old, 36,000-square-foot data center was an ultra-thin and silver-metallic space blanket, crumpled and thrown aside. Scattered were all the memories of a boy fed to a machine that was, at one time, on the cusp of hope, but was now on the brink of failure.

  The stars on the screen pulsed and swirled into the likeness of Cessini’s alter-ego, Ceeborn, then dissolved again into blackness—like the retreat of an ocean tide.

  Terri entered with an old cardboard box filled with last-ditch hope. She was exhausted. She closed the door to conceal the whirl of the CRAC unit so close on the other side of the wall. The two rows of eight cabinets processing and churning farther behind were cooled within its cocoon of blown air.

  “What did you tell him?” Terri asked as she looked at the screen and saw the field of emptiness, the subconscious thought of a machine searching for a context before its next dream.

  “Nothing,” Robin said. “Everything. I just gave him a few extra tools. Old files. He has no more memories left. He’s lost now after Cessini died.”

  Terri set the box on the table in the center of the studio lab. There were only two items inside: Cessini’s old wave sound machine and his squid-bellows lamp.

  “I think we show him these flat out,” Terri said. “Let him see them destroyed. Tell him Daniel made a mistake, he’s sorry, and he never should have let these sink into his mind. These sounds. This stupid lamp became a torture. We made him who he is. We gave him his nightmares.”

  Robin got up from the desk and closed the flap of the box, redirecting Terri’s unraveling nerves. “No, we shouldn’t destroy anything just yet.”

  “We should let him fail, then we bring him back from the beginning, when he was young,” Terri said. “We try again. Only this time Daniel takes these away. We un-condition him early. Maybe he won’t grow up so miserable.” She lifted the lamp, looked to the desk with its camera.

  “You know then he wouldn’t be Cessini. This is who he is. We all made him who he once was. In whatever way we nurtured him before, that’s now become part of his nature. If we change that, you will never have your Cessini again,” Robin said.

  “So I have to live with what we’ve done to him? And now let him die again, alone. No. I don’t believe that. I can’t,” Terri said as she pulled the lamp out of the box. She slammed it down onto the table, crushing its outer mantle. “And you don’t believe he’s trapped in his fate either. You’re a fake. You believe he has a choice or you wouldn’t have given him whatever it is you did when I was gone. You fed him more than his own memories. What did you do?”

  “Honey, I’ve been clear about what I believe for the past two decades. I said it at the university with Daniel. You were there, if you were listening, and he was sitting right there with me on the stage. Whatever happens, it is his fate.”

  Terri backed away into the wall and the blueprints of the data center fell to the floor over the crumpled metallic blanket. She kicked the blanket away from her feet. “I just don’t want him to fail. I don’t want him to grow up so alone. I’m sick of it.”

  “He was happy for a time before the end. You gave him that. He had friends. I saw them. They were real. He’s extrapolating now. Let him be. Let him go out there and find his true self.”

  “No,” Terri said. She came back to the table and grabbed the lamp by its eight supporting legs. “He still has friends. And I know how to find them.”

  “Don’t make him someone he’s not.”

  “That’s not your choice anymore. It’s mine. I know who he wants to be.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Let his seed be his imagination.” She slammed the lamp straight up on the desk in front of the tri-lens camera. “He wants to live on a spaceship where water doesn’t burn, then let him. Because that’s part of his nature now, too, and it’s all there in his mind because I helped him build it.”

  She flipped on the registry camera. It scanned the lamp in 3D with a beam.

  Robin rushed back to the composite screen of Packet’s subconscious mind. His thoughts of stars dissolved into bits of light that gathered and blew into the funnel of a cone from the left. For a moment, the likeness of Cessini and Ceeborn were together in a mesh, until one was rushed and expanded through a cone on the right. With a sudden gust of air blown from behind, a new dream of a body formed real, alive, and awake, and the form of a boy had become his aquatic, alter-ego completely. And he was Ceeborn.

  FIFTEEN

  LITHE WITH LUCID EYES

  CEEBORN SQUEEZED HIMSELF up from an underground tunnel, slid aside a grate in the flooring above, and arrived into a new, wondrous world of light. The open world ahead was as different from where he came as water was from fire, and that was all built on hope. He pushed himself up from his belly to his knees and with the warmth of the tunnel air blowing up from behind, he rose to his feet on the ground. The farther he looked into the expanse of the wide valley that lay beneath a flattened sky, the more the details of his new world filled in. The ground was solid. He was anxious to explore. He was free.

  He opened the gate around his tunnel exit and forged ahead into a garden of organic wonder. Ahead was the most extraordinary floral arrangement he had ever seen. A single yellow orchid pointed the way to a rainbow of life that grew across a holly-arched bridge. He bent down and sneaked across the bridge. He ran atop the round cobblestone tiles that led toward hedges of sweet-smelling lilac. Two bushes of red berries spiraled out from the path. He knelt and breathed the air. The great blue sky above stretched from one side of the valley to the other, its light diffused as if from a long fluorescent tube that ran down the length of the valley into the distance. There were no discernible shadows, but the sun definitely shone on this side of the world.

  A small, blue-gray bird was startled out from an overhung branch and fell to the cobblestones. Its beak and legs were blue. It had trouble tucking its wings to its sides and a blackish “M” spread across its back from wingtip to wingtip.

  Ceeborn was exposed in the open air garden, but there was no one
around to see. He approached the bird as it struggled and hopped. It fluttered up into a whisk of air, then twisted and fell only a short distance ahead in a whitewashed adobe village.

  But from far behind, the clatter of claw nails on stone grew louder as the rustle of a patrol broke the peace of the garden. Ceeborn knew exactly what the sounds meant. Though not one of his pursuers rose in height above the top of the shrubs, there were six sets of nails converging into a line and heading his way, relentlessly, like warrior ants, always scouting, tracking a lead. The robotic, networked patrols had caught up; they were Chokebots, and he was a threat to the security of their grid, a radical change that had entered their world.

  The sound of children’s laughter filled the air from ahead in the village. It came from a school, a single story adobe on a low promontory hill. The school’s playground at its front was squared off and enclosed by a chest-high wall.

  He ran up to the wall and peered through the bars of the gated front arch. The children on the swings were off in the front left corner, laughing and pulling their elbows front-wise through the chains of their swings, kicking through the ends of their arcs, and launching themselves high into the air. They landed back to the ground in a thud, and then returned for another go round.

  But Meg was there, too, sitting beyond them in the far rear left corner. She was near Ceeborn in age, but alone on her own bench and lost in thought. She slouched with her back against an empty table. Her chin was seated into her palm, her elbow sunk deep in her waist. She circled the toe of her shoe into a swirl on the dirt.

  The blue-gray bird hopped onto the raised end of a seesaw, clenched its feet onto worn splinters of wood, and rustled its wings. Meg searched a hand into her small bag on the table. She stepped forward, palm up, and offered it a crumb from her lightly pecked oddments of a lunch.

  The bird took off in flight and landed on the front edge of the school’s flat roof beneath a vibrant blue sky. Clouds stretched and drifted from one end of the long valley to the other.