After Mind

by Spencer Wolf

  Daniel winced. “You’re not going to die. Luegner will be very impressed with your passing the test.”

  Packet nodded then stepped forward, then closer still, until Daniel comforted him in his arms. Packet rested his head on Daniel’s shoulder, into the strength of a loving father’s hold.

  “Daddy?” he asked.

  “You’ll be fine. Don’t be afraid. I’m here.”

  Meg sprung up and pulled Packet toward her. She caressed his cheek in her hand and held him eye to eye. “You won’t die. No matter what now, you will always be you—human or not. I won’t ever forget the human part of you. And you’ll never go anywhere without me.”

  “We’ll see.” He smiled, unconvinced. He backed away from her touch. “Just remember, just remember when I lived, I loved you all.”

  “Don’t say it like that,” Meg said. “I’m right here in the room with you. If you don’t want to get involved with Luegner, that’s okay. We’ll be fine. But you’re not going to die. So, say ‘love,’ not ‘loved.’”

  “Okay,” Packet said, and then added if it helped, “I won’t ever forget you, and no matter what, I love you all. Now send Luegner in, alone.”

  *

  Luegner entered the room through the door on the right. His silver hair hadn’t changed. But his aqua shirt that peeked out from beneath his jacket was a deeper blue.

  Daniel and Meg had left. Packet was alone in the room. He didn’t get up from the waiting chair pushed squarely against the blinds by the window.

  Luegner bounded straight toward him with his arms outstretched. “Packet, it’s so good to see you.”

  Packet looked away; he tucked an errant blind to block any incoming light. The halogen above the bed was enough for him to see.

  Luegner hesitated. He looked around the hospital room.

  “You don’t have to look for my father,” Packet said. “He’s close. He’ll come if I need him.”

  Luegner fiddled in the blue basket on the nightstand and rang the cowbell once for amusement. He reassembled the jigsaw pieces of his sphere with ease. It flickered on blue. Packet felt a faint perturbation against the skin of his arms, and warmth filled his cheeks with a soft burn.

  “Do you have any idea who you are?” Luegner asked as he set the sphere back into the basket.

  “I know who I am,” Packet said. He brushed a hand against the hairs standing up on his forearm.

  “Can you prove it?”

  “I already passed my father’s Inversion Test.”

  Luegner chuckled. “You know your father’s test is riddled with errors.”

  “You approved it before. It was your condition to let me be.” Packet tightened his fingers over the armrests of his chair.

  “Your father has great ambition, but a lot of his ideas are obsolete before they even make it to the launch pad.”

  “He brought me into this world.”

  “And it took over ten years to do it. The world moves too fast for that kind of innovation.”

  The gray walls of the room became cinder blocks. Packet’s chair turned into a bench with his back against the wall, but his feet were now firmly planted on the floor. The cement floor became filthy. Thickened water spread from the clogged drain in the central dip of the floor. Nineteen insects in flight buzzed and battered against the flicker of fluorescent tubes in the patchwork ceiling as Luegner ducked and looked.

  “That’s very clever of you. Now, tell me, who are you?” Luegner said as he stepped away from the water.

  “I am a human-computer and Daniel is my father. My mother died when I was an infant. And I know who I am.”

  “Then prove that you know.”

  “I have real emotion. I am not a definition. I know who I am without having to explain it to you,” Packet said as he rose from the bench.

  “You’re making my point,” Luegner said as he slipped off his jacket and draped it over the door of the newly rendered bathroom stall. His button-down shirt was streaked with waves of blue. “Secure banking and record storage uses 128-bit encryption,” he said.

  Packet gnashed his teeth.

  “Your data key that fits into the encryption lock box of your code is the much more secure 448-bit encryption,” Luegner said. “No human could solve it without the aid of a computer. But a computer could solve it without the aid of a human. It could take years, maybe a decade or more. You solve that key and then get back to me when you do, if you do. Then we’ll know who, or what, you are.”

  “My father asked me a question once, too, Doctor,” Packet said. “‘Does 448 Treeline Drive mean anything to you?’”

  “Maybe—”

  “Then I have a question for you. Have you ever worked on a problem in your sleep?”

  “Of course.”

  “The creative subconscious works in mysterious ways. And mine has been hard at work all this time. I followed a waterfall to its source.” He rushed to the sink, stared at the mirror above. He tore away the old sign of All food service workers must wash their hands.

  “No. There’s no way you solved an unimaginably complicated decryption algorithm backward to its source in so short a time.”

  “Imagined or not, confabulated, mistaken, or real, I found a three-legged giraffe on a shelf.”

  “You’re not making any sense,” Luegner said. “I don’t think you have any idea who you are.”

  Packet slammed his fist on the mirror above the sink. “I already told you. Doctor, look!” He removed his hand from the mirror. A red and blue imprint of his fingers and palm stayed behind. It was streaked with numbers and letters. A hangman’s noose and 448 dashes appeared. “You want to play computer with me?” Packet asked.

  Luegner backed away to the urinals and held on.

  “Cessini started into the world with hexadecimal,” Packet said as a stream of characters on the screen broke apart, flipped, and converted as he spoke: 3, 5, 13, 13, 9, E, 9, 1B, 13, F, E, 1B, F, 6, 1B, 4, 1, E, 9, 5, all the way to its end with a C.

  “Then Cessini’s hexadecimal converted to its equivalent in decimals: 3, 5, 19, 19, 9, 14, 9, 27, 19, 15, 14, 27, 15, 6, 27, 4, 1, 14, 9, 5, all the way to its end with a 12.”

  “And then when those numbers take their numeric places of letters in the alphabet, the first decimal 3 becomes C. Then 5 becomes E, and 19 becomes S. I saw those labels, C,E,S, on the bins in the hospital of the zoo.”

  “What hospital zoo?” Luegner said as his eyes shifted away from the mirror.

  “After the 3, 5, and 19, then 19 flies battered the bulbs of the ceiling. C,E,S,S,— I looked out through the keyhole on my world and saw the shape of the key,” Packet said. “After those nineteen flies, I saw 9 generators at the data center, 9 is ‘I.’ I found a 14-inch broken giraffe on a shelf with legs in the shape of an ‘N.’”

  Images, letters, and numbers aligned and collided in a frantic collage of memories, a kaleidoscope of colors of anger and fear. “C,E,S,S,I,N—”

  “I counted all the nightmares of my world,” Packet said as he jacked the faucet of the sink five times with his fist. “The rest, every number, every measurement, every letter is all there rising through their layers to find its right context in my mind.” He smashed the paper towel dispenser from the wall. “You made my life hell, and thousands of others, and you don’t care!”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. I do care,” Luegner said as he retreated to the bench.

  “No, you don’t. And, from there, my counting got easier and a whole lot faster,” Packet said as the screen’s symbols shot apart. “Cessini’s hexadecimal stopped at the binary 1 after the M on the scanning machine. It appeared as M then a B. Then the 11-C’s binary cone burst into Ceeborn on the ship.”

  Luegner was staggered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What ship?”

  “Ceeborn’s body was in the mind of a computer, me,” Packet said. “I found the paired tags in the bins, C-11, E-101, and S-10011, all the way to the end of the very same string. Ceeborn escaped out t
o the world of the ship. I ran with him through the tube of the sky. I counted the spills and geysers, the 0s and 1s, the horrifying red flashes of binary lights through the opened slits of a shaft. The binary string in groupings of five is the same! 00011-00101-10011.”

  “Tell me your name,” Luegner demanded.

  “Cessini’s hexadecimal plus Ceeborn’s binary string combine into one completed 448-bit passkey. A passkey that ends with the most painful of keystones a hospital could ever bestow upon its children. I saw the end of the string was binary 1100.”

  “No, it’s not possible,” Luegner said.

  “Two poles and two plots,” he said. “Graves marked in a garden. Cessini and Ceeborn. Two poles, two plots. 1100.”

  “You’re referring to 1100, binary for 12?” Luegner asked. He shivered.

  “And the twelfth letter in the alphabet is the last letter ‘L’ of a name. The answer to your question,” Packet said.

  “What name? Whose name?” Luegner asked.

  “The 448-bit passkey decrypts to a 21-character name. A name that repeats itself five times. Five, a number found in a fifty-five-gallon drum, and more places than even I cared to count.”

  “Not my name,” Luegner said.

  “No, not the hypocritical oath of a liar, Dr. Hopkus Luegner. No, my father gave me a name that means something, too. I am not a Mandelbrot set. I am not the younger mind of a madman. I am not the wild, confabulated dreams of a computer. I am Cessini, the symphonic poem of a human.”

  Packet towered over Luegner as he cowered on the bench.

  “My father gave me the tools, the alphanumeric, hexadecimal, binary, and fundamental packets of thought. Combined, imaged or real, confabulated or not, I was given the memories, the dreams, the imaginations of my life, my world. I followed the swirls of my mind up the waterfall to their source. I found the one simple answer that explains all of me, my 448-bit key. I am a human-computer. I am . . .

  Dropping in the spaces of the hangman’s noose and converting . . .

  “3 5 13 13 9 E 9 1B 13 F E 1B F 6 1B 4 1 E 9 5 C 1 00011 00101 10011 10011 01001 01110 01001 11011 10011 01111 01110 11011 01111 00110 11011 00100 00001 01110 01001 00101 01100 00011 00101 10011 10011 01001 01110 01001 11011 10011 01111 01110 11011 01111 00110 11011 00100 00001 01110 01001 00101 01100 00011 00101 10011 10011 01001 01110 01001 11011 10011 01111 01110 11011 01111 00110 11011 00100 00001 01110 01001 00101 01100 00011 00101 10011 10011 01001 01110 01001 11011 10011 01111 01110 11011 01111 00110 11011 00100 00001 01110 01001 00101 01100.”

  Left to right:

  C, E, S, S, I, N, I, _, S, O, N, _, O, F, _, D, A, N, I, E, L.

  Luegner was breathless. He cowered beneath Packet’s gaze. “It’s remarkable,” Luegner said. “Impossible.”

  “It’s not impossible,” Packet said. “I did it in my head.”

  “Work for me,” Luegner said. He rose, quickened.

  “No. I will not work for you,” Packet said.

  “DigiSci started half my life ago as a humble medical device manufacturer in the hub of the Twin Cities,” Luegner said as he fought out of his corner. “With your talents, who knows where we could be in five or ten years. Come work for me.”

  The bathroom’s cinder-block walls, sinks, and stall dissolved into the familiar confines of a second-floor office with a table in its center, east-facing windows, and vertical blinds.

  Luegner turned for his bearings, unfazed. “You could be the first completely autonomous, sentient cyber that produces—Or, better yet, we get a lot of military work with the anti-cyberwarfare group out of Seattle, you could—” Luegner said, stumbled.

  “I said, ‘No!’” Packet paced. His breathing was rapid.

  In the same layout and location, the sink and its counter became a droplet-laying 3D printer on a cart. A center table emerged from the drain and built itself out with the early framing of a humanoid robot.

  “You are stuck right now in a room full of obsolete servers on the second floor of a wreckable building. Take my offer. Work for me. You’ll do better with me,” Luegner said.

  “No. But I have an offer for you,” Packet said.

  “Go on, humor me,” Luegner said.

  “You will have no more control over us, over my father, Robin, or Meg. I know about the development of PluralVaXine5 and how you covered up and lied about its long-term effects.”

  Luegner picked up his jacket from the floor and patted it clean. He looked back at the door. “That old spray was a long time ago. It was processed and fixed. Negligible effect for the greater good.”

  “No, it was not.”

  “Is that what all this is about? We have seventh-generation preventatives now. We’re developing newer, much stronger technologies. Besides, there are so few people who were affected by that older number five spray, so few who would even remember or care.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Packet said. “There are many. And I can find them all.”

  The second floor office returned to Packet’s hospital room and the table became his bed with its doctor’s rotating stool. The 3D printer’s cart became the medical supply. Packet kicked the stool at Luegner, who felt the hit on his shin. He was perplexed.

  “As a boy, I thought I could cure the horrible effects of your spray with a dandelion petal, a beetle wing, and a fish scale. That was a troubled boy’s childhood dream. I can’t benefit from that now. But I can stop you from hurting anyone else. Anyone else not yet born into a world I may never know. That is a sacrifice for the future I accept.”

  Luegner reached down to rub his shin and rolled the stool away. “I know someone who would still be affected,” Luegner said as he straightened his stance. “I know one unfortunate individual, one who would be the whistleblower of what I may or may not have done.”

  “I already know who worked on your number five spray,” Packet said as another string of characters flashed across the screen, 12F29E. “And when I needed her, she was there and put her hand on my forehead to rest. Her name also ends in 1100, binary for 12. Hexadecimal C. And the twelfth letter in the alphabet ‘L.’ But the bearer of this name has already repented enough,” Packet said as 25 conjoining hexadecimal characters on the screen, 12 F 2 9 E 1B 5 C 9 F E 1B 2 C 1 3 B 17 5 C C, decrypted to spell:

  R, O, B, I, N, _, E, L, I, O, N, _, B, L, A, C, K, W, E, L, L.

  “She wins,” Packet said.

  “How could you possibly know?”

  “Robin asked for my help and I gave it. I am a bio-machine with a mind a thousand times more powerful than yours.”

  “And what would you do with this profound brain of yours?”

  “Work with you for the long term. I’ll pick up where Robin left off for a cure. I can study genome-editing technologies, review techniques to rewrite genes and give humans better immunity, investigate a wider range of genetic predispositions.”

  “Go on, I’m listening,” Luegner said.

  “Together, we can create new methods, build off the CRISPR research from the early twenty-twenties, use other tools Robin didn’t know, to precisely delete and edit DNA, bit by bit, down to a single base pair, a source. You and I can play the genome like the keys of a piano, tune an off key. We can cure those already affected by hundreds of diseases. You’ll have all your cures. But then, don’t you ever forget long term, all your cures will converge on a source, and you will be caught. You will be ruined at your dying end.”

  “And so my second choice being?”

  “Or,” Packet said, “short-term, we can simply educate and prevent the people of the world from ever taking any of your twisted pharmacology again. As we speak, all these obsolete servers on the second floor of this wreckable building, once sourced from your refresh-cycle of machines, are churning with copies of health records and bits of information from tens of thousands of children, all who shall, to you, remain nameless. Children whose records can be data-mined right now for correlation with PluralVaXine5. All the evidence is already here,” he said, as he point
ed. “It’s all here in my mind. And in no time soon enough, your reign will be over. And you will be ruined.”

  “Do you think you know who I am? Do you think you can beat me?” Luegner asked as he backed against the door on the right.

  “I know who you are and you went too far. So it all comes down to this. It’s your choice. Long-term or short, how long do you want to hide from the truth?”

  Daniel entered unannounced through the left door as his unfiltered sixty-one-year-old self. He had removed the filter from his true camera field. “Well, it looks like my boy learned to take care of himself,” Daniel said to Luegner.

  Packet looked at his father and knew him; he loved him no matter the years.

  “You are not the only hacker in the room,” Luegner said. “DigiSci has resources, too.”

  “You think you can hack me?” Packet asked.

  “It’s easier than you think,” Luegner said as he flapped his jacket out straight and shoved his arm through its sleeve. The blue sphere in the basket on the shelf flickered and filled the room with specks of light. “Because you and your failed systems engineer father already let me in.” He pulled his jacket taut. “I already have access to your code.”

  Stabbing beams of blue light converged from Luegner’s activated sphere onto Packet’s temples. He collapsed in a heap toward the edge of the black, cushioned bed. His vision dissolved as he hit the black cushion face first. His head snapped back and he awoke standing on the black asphalt lot under the towers of the Tungatinah Hydroelectric Power Plant. Its nightmare sky was a darkened twist of orange and brown. Mounted high above Tungatinah’s gated entrance was Luegner sphere shining blue from its core. Razor grass tussocks cracked through the pavement as a workman set a fifty-five-gallon drum on a truck. He whipped out a kink in its hose and pumped out a slick of iridescent spray onto the lot.

  The dark orange sky spun into gusts. Cessini pushed his palms into his eyes, pounded his foot on the black asphalt. “This isn’t happening,” he shouted as he counted aloud with, “Watch count three, two, one—” The workman turned the nozzle of his hose and sprayed like a villain with abandon. Cessini screamed as he collapsed into the blackness of the asphalt tar—and was back in the hospital room on his knees before the cushion of the bed.