by Spencer Wolf
There was only one item to grasp by its handle—an old, polished bronze cowbell.
He clanked up the bell into his hand. And he rang it. He rose up to his elbow on the bed. “Come now,” he said, stronger. He rang the bell louder and louder. “Dad, come now, where are you?” he said. “I need you now.” The bell was awful and loud.
Daniel ran into the room holding something pancaked between his outstretched hands.
“I know who I am,” he said as he rose straight up to standing in the bed. “I can live.”
Meg was ecstatic. It was true. She covered her ears from the racket of his bell.
“Packet is a computer!” He stepped down from the bed and rang, and rang. . . . “I know the cure,” he said and then slowed the bell with his hand. He stepped off the bed toward Robin. “I know how to fix Cessini in life,” he said. He muffled the bell as he stood before Daniel. “I know how to fix us all.”
His father was strong, but he could still cry. Daniel’s long-held breath slipped out as laughing tears. He separated his fingers. A run of yarn was tied between each hand. The yarn was strung with party cutout letters that spread as he opened his arms and they read, with all the love he could show by a single word:
“Welcome.”
TWENTY-FOUR
IN MY HEAD
TERRI SAT ON the dusty floor of the fire-control room in the dark basement of the DigiSci building. Her back was against a cinder-block wall. Her legs were outstretched and crossed at her ankles. She had little room to move as the iron piping of the water main rose through the floor beside her, then elbowed its way up and out to the rest of the building above.
She had done it. Packet knew who he was and had lived.
She swiped between applications on her old, hand-me-down tablet. Its side-fingered wings were all broken or missing. Its colored skin of childhood squiggles had peeled; its edges had curled into an annoying rub. She sat with an exhausted grin. Packet knew he was a computer. He knew he was Cessini.
She tapped and opened her old Sea Turtle Rescue. It still worked and she shook her head, consoled. After so many years, her turtles were still alive, but thin and faded. They survived by floating in circles, waiting in pause.
“Wake up,” the tablet said in her younger recorded voice of nine years old. “Are you lying down on the floor?” it asked. “It’s dark in here. Are you sleeping? Wake up. Let’s play. I’m hungry. If you’re on the floor, you should wash your hands.”
She held the tablet farther away as her younger recorded voice trailed to digital noise. She aligned her fingers with what was left of the tabs. She clicked, but another tab snapped off into a nub.
Packet was secure, but she was alone, and being alone hurt. Her hurt outlived her exhausted grin. She tossed the tablet toward her feet and then jostled it from her ankles to the floor. She drew her knees up to her chest. She hated being alone.
Her newer MiniFlex pinged in her pants’ front pocket. She pinched it out in her fingers. Its screen popped and unfurled to a sheet. Daniel was already screaming from his office as it flared. “He’s arguing with you!”
“What do you mean? Was he remembering something?” Terri asked.
“He was trying to find someplace to go with you, Terri, with you. He was rationalizing off of Meg. Trying to form new thoughts, projecting what you would have said. I don’t know! He was arguing with you!”
Terri sat up straight, dropped her knees to cross-legged on the floor, and then hunched over the MiniFlex screen.
“Listen,” Daniel said as she saw him on her screen reaching for the controls over his desk.
Her screen edged with a warm yellow glow. Then it rang. It rang with a loud, obnoxious, ear-cupping clank. The border around Daniel’s face shifted to a bronze metal shine. The cowbell tone clinked loud, again and again.
Then Sea Turtle Rescue flashed on her old tablet she’d thrown to the floor. Its screen flickered with four blue rings. Then it rang, fizzy, but also loud like a cowbell. She dove for its nub tab-wings. A line of text scrolled beneath the scratches of its screen.
“Where are you?” the text read. “I’m awake and have a thousand more places to go.”
Terri’s breath was gone. The white light of the screen reflected up the black iron pipe running straight up through the ceiling.
“You want to come with me?” The scrolled text stopped.
She burst through the door of the fire control room, slamming the crash-bar into the stairwell. She flew up the stairs to the second floor of the building. She ran through the aisle of the data room between its two rows of eight cabinets. The lights of the tall, single cabinet at the end of the row were flashing. She glanced at its cold, steel frame.
Daniel held open the door to his office behind the southern wall. “Where do you think he wants to go?” Daniel asked.
*
Packet sat troubled on the edge of the bed in his hospital room. His likeness had further matured to match his hard-fought self-image. He had definitely grown. He was stronger and smarter. The cabinets of the data room were projected as an image on the screen mounted on the wall above the supply cart. He smiled as best as he could as Meg entered from the door on the left. She was a teen at her best like she was on the ship, in no way twenty-two; but mostly, he thought as she approached, she had just gotten rid of her bangs.
In a way, through Cessini and Ceeborn, he had extended himself out for a look from his hollowed out log of a room. But in all, he knew from inside, he felt better in the company of others after all. He could love and be loved in return. He was used to the technology, he was used to the water. He was ready to live, if he could.
He welcomed her, contented, but he was nostalgic. He glanced back up to the screen above the supply cart and its self-reflective image of the data room he was in. “You know, funny thing is,” he said, “I remember when we were installing that cabinet—this cabinet, my cabinet. It arrived up here on a pallet.”
“I remember, too,” Meg said. “I helped Daniel set it all up after you—arrived.” Their wording was awkward and she knew it, and she smiled in return.
“Do you still have the mirror?” he asked.
She held up the tortoise-shell hand mirror from behind her back. “Like magic,” she said.
He brought the mirror closer. His face wasn’t reflected. She nodded permission and he punched straight through the mirror’s virtual screen. The plastic loop of its frame became a matte cutout, a spotlight view. It was its own window to the data room. He held the frame’s handle, looked through the loop, and pivoted. Wherever he turned, he could only see his seated perspective of the data room’s aisle and its two rows of eight blinking cabinets.
The hospital room wasn’t real. The data room was. He walked around his bed, only needing a few feet in any direction. The view through the mirror was always the same. It was the same four walls, the same ceiling, and all from the perspective of a cabinet in the southwest corner.
He slipped down against the wall to sit on the floor against the window and its drawstring blind. He crossed his arms atop his raised knees. The mirror frame dangled in his fingers. It was its own form of heavy burden.
“Not much of a world to see,” he said.
Meg sat on the floor at his side.
“You know, I can’t be Cessini,” he said. “Cessini breathed in the air of his lifetime. I live in the shadow of his dreams. The only thing we have in common is that we were both raised in a data center.”
“So, what do you want to do?” she asked.
“I can imagine. Can I wish?”
“What do you wish for?”
“I wish I could go outside again and measure the sky with you.”
“You live in here now with me. Outside is one place you can never go.”
“I’ve been thinking. I want to speak to Robin about the PluralVaXine5 spray.”
“Okay. She’s here. Whatever you want,” Meg said.
In the turn of a moment, Robin entered, wringing her
hands. Daniel entered behind her. They came around, sat on the edge of the bed, and faced him as he sat on the floor.
“There is a sickness,” Packet said and closed his eyes. “People are dying; a hundred-twenty have died so far. Boosters worked for countless numbers of people, for years. But then the stronger PluralVaXine5 began affecting more people than expected by probability alone.”
“Are you talking about the spray on your ship?” Meg asked.
Packet opened his eyes. Robin had closed hers, but must have seen his wave coming.
“You were terrified,” Packet said to Robin as he rose from the floor. “I understand. You worked on the cure as best as you could. You tried everything you knew how to do.”
“I didn’t do enough,” Robin said and opened her eyes.
“Dr. Luegner knew he afflicted hundreds, maybe thousands of people,” Packet said.
Robin and Daniel sprang from the bed as it became a black lab table beneath them. Then the one lab table became the center of three in parallel. The walls pressed out to enlarge the room. A waist-high shelf wrapped around the walls. Terrariums and lab books filled the shelf. The hospital room had become the interior of Robin’s lab from the ship. The lab books multiplied in their stacks to fill every crevice of the room.
“Everyone in the modern world is given a cocktail with three hundred types of vaccines, starting at age three,” Packet said, circling the lab. He picked up Robin’s book from the middle table, flipped to a page, and read aloud. “‘The probability of serious adverse effects was determined to be only zero-point-zero-zero-three percent.’”
He tossed over a rack of tubes and read, “‘So, mathematically, even if the entire eight-and-half billion population of the planet took PluralVaXine5, deemed highly unlikely, then theoretically, there would be no more than 255,000 affected.’”
He turned on the gas of a Bunsen burner, and then continued reading aloud. “‘But if there was anything greater than zero-point-zero-zero-three percent chance of adverse effects, then there would be millions more affected.’” He stopped and glared at Robin. Files and books crammed the shelves. “Cessini wasn’t the only one who suffered.
“‘It could be especially harmful to a child’s development,’” Packet continued. “‘. . . Others afflicted with Thanatophobia, the wide-open fear of death, the underlying fear of all others.’”
He flipped to another page: “A list of susceptible compounding pre-conditions: All of them exceedingly rare, but very real. Aquagenic urticaria is on this list. And all of these pages of notes and warnings are: ‘Signed, Robin Elion Blackwell.’”
He hurled the lab book at Robin, smashing a wall of glass beakers and chemicals. The beakers shattered, vile liquids splashed. He shielded his eyes away from the burn, red welts streaking his cheeks. He came back up stronger and the welts subsided. Daniel shut off the Bunsen burner. Packet opened another pressure valve. “The spray,” he said, “PluralVaXine5, made me who I am. Luegner knew and didn’t care, but you knew and didn’t say anything!”
“You said those files on the ship were not real. Why didn’t you tell me?” Meg asked.
“I was never going to tell anyone.” Robin shuddered. “But I had to tell someone. And Cessini understood.”
“I would understand,” Meg said, pounding on her own chest. “I would understand like no one else. That’s what you said!”
Robin’s shelves full of books exploded into a scattered shower of papers. An endless trove of lab notes, documents, data dumps, and confidential internal DigiSci memos. As they settled, Packet snatched one from the air and read aloud, “‘Fear signals will no longer be moderated to the lateral amygdala circuits. A susceptible person would be flooded with conditioning signals. And through long-term potentiation, hallucinations would lead directly to synaptic plasticity and the long-term storage of fear, paralyzing fear. Doctor, don’t you think we should do more tests or warn these innocent people? Dr. Luegner, can I come see you to talk about it and get it out in the open, before I go on maternity leave?’ Signed: Robin Elion Blackwell.”
Meg fell with her back against the door. Her palms squeezed her temples; her fingers curled into the roots of her hair. She slid down to the floor, staring horrified at the scattering of journals and warning signs all around.
Daniel gathered a handful of pages and skimmed with nerves that fretted a future instead of a past. Robin rose from her cover behind the center lab table as Packet squeezed a metal striker in his fist. The squeeze of its rod against coil sounded a click-clack and fired off sparks.
“Wait,” Robin said. “I made a terrible mistake. I owed it to you to tell you. And I did. So please, now that you know, can you forgive me? . . . As a human-computer . . . Do you think you can treat me not like a project, but like a person?”
“It’s the only way I know how,” Packet said.
He squeezed the striker and a throw of sparks ignited a bubble of gas from the burners that exploded the room into light—and then all the papers rained back down as cinder.
The hospital room that remained after the blast was quieter. The bed in the room’s center was softer, familiar.
“It’s not you I’m after. Not you I blame,” Packet said to Robin.
“You can’t let Luegner know you have all of this data, these files,” Daniel said. “He can still track Meg. He’s threatened her—”
“He’s right. You can’t expose him,” Robin said.
“I’m not going to yell from across a crowded room and call him a liar. But I know how to stop him,” Packet said.
“He has the cover of DigiSci corporate,” Daniel said. “What can you do? Sue the company? Leak a story to a news crawler?”
Packet settled down on the floor beside Meg. He wrapped his arm over her shoulders and pulled her in closer. “No, I have a better idea. Luegner doesn’t care about the past. Luegner wants credit for the cure.”
“There is no cure,” Meg said.
“Maybe not one that can help the thousands who are already born and might be suffering. But we can save all future generations of children from the spray and stop Luegner in the process.”
Robin dropped to seated on the bed.
“Meg conditioned herself to play Sea Turtle Rescue. It was her virtual release, a nurturing focus to make herself feel better. Thousands of other kids can do the same. We can extend its functionality.” He paced as he thought. “Not just stirring sediment into curling tides of an ocean, but folding proteins, creating combinatorial swirls. Make the game be its own work center. We’ll crowd source for a cure.” He was encouraged, excited, on the cusp of a new beginning. His enthusiasm was infectious. Meg got to her feet.
“Other kids will play. We’ll make the visuals of the game work with new genetic algorithms, multiple configurations of an equation,” he said.
“That doesn’t exist. It’s just a game,” Daniel said.
“No, it’s not. We’ll make it better than itself,” Packet said. “We’ll seed the algorithms with data from Robin’s research.”
“Yes,” Meg said. “I love it.”
“I’ll submit more than my fair share of possible solutions. But it won’t be only me. There’ll be hundreds, thousands of people working together from all around the world.”
Robin stood up, clasping her hands, inspired.
“Robin, you’ll be the original author. And we’ll give credit to Luegner as the sponsor. Let him take credit for the cure. In time, enough pointers to disparate cures will emerge, but all correlated, all leading back to the same source: PluralVaXine5. And Luegner, the sponsor, will be held accountable.”
“But he’ll still know where it came from,” Meg said.
“And I’ll tell him. Robin’s data will stay safe with me. I’ll carry that burden,” Packet said.
“He’ll use it against you,” Robin said.
“Don’t worry, I have a few tricks up my sleeve.”
Meg smile broke free. “Who knows, Mom, you could get a Nobel for what h
e discovers.”
“It’d be the first Nobel awarded to a discoverer that isn’t human,” Robin said.
“The judges would be fooled,” Daniel said. “They’d have their scientific discovery conversation with a computer and never know it.”
“I think I could pass that test,” Packet said.
“Wait a minute,” Daniel said. “If you get a Nobel for what you do, what would be the proof of greatness for my life’s work?”
“Me,” Packet said.
“So, let me see if I understand this,” Daniel said. “Robin’s recognition in life comes from Meg, and mine through you?”
“Well, since you put it that way,” Packet said, “maybe Meg and I are the younger versions of you two, after all.”
“Wait a minute. Wait a minute.” Daniel shook his head. He stared up to the ceiling, his mind already at work. “Will that even work? Crowd sourcing the swirls of Sea Turtle Rescue?”
“Actually,” Packet said, “I have no idea. But probabilistically, I’d say it has a way better chance of working than a dandelion petal, a beetle wing, and a fish scale.”
Robin slipped out a laugh and covered her smile with her hand as she coughed. “Then, let’s do it,” she said. “Let Luegner know who is boss around here.” Her cough was a mere tickle in her throat, but most of all, when she pulled her hand from her mouth, her fingers were tremble-free.
*
Daniel took in a stiffened breath. Packet sighed. All their tension returned with a knock on the door on the right. Meg pulled her knees up in her chair.
“All right, he’s here,” Daniel said. “What do you want to do?”
“I want to see him,” Packet said.
Resigned, Daniel went to answer the door.
“Wait. Dad?” Packet asked. “If you had been able to restrict my memories to those only before Cessini died, if I had no memory of my death, would my life be happier now?”
“I don’t know. Maybe if I trimmed the spikes further. What are you asking?”
“I’m my father’s son. I want to be true to Cessini. Can I still have a happier life if I die again?”