by Spencer Wolf
Packet lowered his hands from his face. His forehead veins were engorged. His hands clenched into warring fists.
Meg ran in from the door on the left, stricken with fear, her hands run hard over her head. “What are you doing? Stop!”
Packet charged Luegner against the door on the right. He cocked his elbow and held back his fist.
Meg rushed and grabbed his arm. “Stop!"
“I can make your solitary life in here a living hell. Insane, with the twist of a key. One hard reboot,” Luegner said. “For all your brain power, you’re still at the whim of me.”
Packet let go. He circled, trapped in the confines of his room. Luegner looked at Meg.
“Be careful, young man; give it time, and you won’t know what or who you even remember,” Luegner said. “I know Robin and I’ve known Terri since she was nothing more than a baby with less than a few moments to live. If she were gone, deleted from your mind, would she even be memorable to you? She was the last thing I ever cared about, in my mind. So do not defy me.”
“You will do no such thing,” Robin screamed as she burst through the left door, enraged.
Packet stalked Luegner with his eyes as he paced like a predator on prey. “You are not the only one outside these walls.” He cast a deep, penetrating stare.
Luegner twitched sideways in a spasm, then ducked across the room as he swatted over his shoulder in fright. “Do you hear that beeping?” Luegner asked.
“I hear it,” Packet said. But it wasn’t coming from inside his hospital room. “Or maybe you’re hallucinating.”
Luegner stopped at the faucet of the room’s sink and regained his composure. He pulled himself up. “I don’t know what that was. My contact lens is picking up a mixed signal. I’m here at home in my kitchen.”
The room’s sink faucet poured. Luegner jumped back from its splash.
“Wait a minute. What’s going on?” Luegner asked. “Now the beeping is coming from over by my refrigerator.” He ducked and swatted over his shoulder again. He panicked, “It’s a drone!” He ran to the door on the right, grabbed its handle—and was shocked with 120-volts AC. His left arm shot back and dangled limp at his side. He reached up with his right hand and held his pounding chest over his heart. He coughed but couldn’t recover his breath.
Packet didn’t move. He locked in a stare with Luegner, who was falling to one knee. Luegner panted with his hand on his chest. “Who is . . . controlling my . . . pacemaker—”
“Stop it,” Daniel said, imploring.
“Let him go!” Robin said.
Packet’s arms were bent from their elbows and held tight at his front.
“Are you . . . on the network?” Luegner asked, shivering. “How does he know where I am?”
“He’s tracking the Internet stream to your lenses,” Daniel said.
Meg grabbed Packet’s arm. He pushed her away.
“Why don’t you just expose me now? What do you want?” Luegner asked as he recovered his breath. His gasps receded. He fumbled his fingers to his eye and took out a contact lens. A squared image of the hospital room on its surface faded to clear. “There, I can’t see you anymore. I can’t find you.”
“Don’t worry,” Packet said. “I can find you.”
“What do you want?” Luegner asked as he resigned himself and slipped the lens back onto his eye. It shimmered as it received, then he saw Packet again, and his place in the virtual hospital room.
“I want to play human. I want to go out and measure the sky.”
“That’s impossible now. You know that,” Luegner said, recovering.
“I want control,” Packet said as Luegner balanced against the bed.
“Control of what?”
“Control of my world, control of me. Nothing more, nothing less.”
“Your freedom? You want your freedom?” Luegner asked.
“No, I want both. I want what you have. ‘To control my world and be free in my mind to own it.’ You said that yourself.”
“You want a body? Is that all?”
“What I want is to be human. What I need is a body.”
The bite of Luegner’s jaw relaxed. “And the documents from the lab?”
“The files will stay where they’re safe.”
Luegner looked to the nightstand. The blue basket waited, pulsed with light. The sphere was intact. “It’s a prototype,” he said.
“Then make it real,” Packet said. “I’ll carry the burden of the files. You will have your cure.”
Luegner understood. He let go of the bed. “I can live with that. But know that my inventions cost a great deal more than your father’s.”
“Whatever the cost, I will always be my father’s son. I will always be Cessini, son of Daniel.”
“And if your mind fails?” Luegner asked.
“Then you get the freedom to live out your life.”
“Is that all?”
“No. There’s something else I want, for my father, for Robin, and for Meg.”
“What would that be?” Luegner asked.
“Their freedom. An ovation. For their ambition. Not a victory, not yet. Just a win.”
Luegner postured back, then breathed out the last of his chest’s pain. He tugged his blue sleeves, and fixed his gaze on Daniel. “And a father’s son is born. It looks like your boy’s the smartest one in the room after all.” He looked back at the door handle, but hesitated to touch it. “Be careful what you wish for in a deal with me,” Luegner said. “I’ve paid a lot less, before.”
“And I’ve died for a hell of a lot more,” Packet said. “Twice.”
Robin and Meg stood together, silenced.
Luegner scoffed. He reached his hand into the empty space before him. He curled his fingers toward a point in the air and smiled. “Welcome to my world. You’ll love it.”
Luegner’s sphere shifted its specks of blue light until one landed on Packet’s temple. Packet stepped out of its path and the flicker passed and landed on the blinds of the window. Luegner squeezed his fist on the point of air before him, whispered, “Done,” and like a magician who failed to impress, was gone.
TWENTY-FIVE
MEG BECAME TERRI
“BEFORE YOU GO, I want you to know one thing,” Meg said as she sat together with Packet on the side of his bed in the hospital room. She fixed the collar of his shirt. His neck had healed. He had a big day ahead. “I think it’s something important for you to know. You should know how you died, so you can be whole.”
“I thought of one other thing I have in common with Cessini, the human I know,” he said.
Her fingers discovered the lobe of his ear. He leaned his cheek into her palm.
“Tell me,” she said.
“At night, when he was lonely, he wondered who would be like him, who would love him. I wonder the same thing now. Who will be like me, who will love me?”
“I am like you. I will love you,” she said as she lowered her hand from his face. “You were quite amazing in here, what you did to show Luegner. How you solved your name.”
“I solved a puzzle. Big deal.”
“It is to me,” she said. “You don’t have to do this, you know. It will be severe.”
Packet sat up straighter and closed his eyes from the room. “Did you know when I close my eyes all I can see now is the past? I want to be able to open my eyes and see a future.”
“I know. Just don’t think you have to do this for any of us.”
“I’m not. But more than for all the nails in the world,” he said and flexed his right arm at his elbow. “I’d stick up and do it for you.”
Meg put her hand on his forearm and lowered it to a peace. “The long-term effects are unknown. You understand what could happen? You might never be you again.”
“I’ll never be whole, or free, or in control until my mind and body are together as one. My doing this for you, in spite of Luegner, is the only way I can be complete. If nothing else, if I don’t make it, you’ll be
free.”
“We’ll be free.”
“Yes,” he said, and even though it took him just a little too long to answer, he did. “We will.”
“Then answer my question before we go. Tell me now. Tell me how you died, fit the last page into the flip-book of your mind.”
He shifted away on the bed, and tightened his brow. “I went to the top of the waterfall. I was immature and shouldn’t have run away on my bike by myself. It was a good thing I told you where I was going. I died at the bottom of the ravine after being hit by you and Daniel in the Jeep on the hill.”
“You know that’s not how it happened.”
“Did I die in the fire at the data center?”
“No,” she said. Too easy.
“Did I die in the burning ship that fell from the stars, plshhh?” he asked, gesturing with his hand, but growing annoyed.
“No, you definitely didn’t die in your ship,” she said, holding her smile. “But you always did have a wonderful imagination.”
He turned insistent and faced her. “Did I die when I was a baby in the back of the car that rolled down the hill, crying over the pool of water where my mother drowned?”
“No, you lived until you were almost thirteen.”
His mind drew a blank, then he filled it: “Okay, right. I remember falling from the rocks at the waterfall. I hit my head. It must have been an injury to my right frontal lobe. If there was damage to both the basal forebrain and frontal lobe, then I could very reasonably have confabulated false memories of what happened. Events that I thought were real didn’t actually occur. Or the event happened at a completely different time. So maybe I confused Cessini’s imagination with his reality. Children of Cessini’s age will especially—”
“Believe what they image to be real due to their high suggestibility, yes. But you didn’t fall, either. Nor hit your head.”
“Then stop kidding around. Tell me.”
“You died in my arms. In the back of the car.”
“I know. I saw it happen.”
“It wasn’t like that. Not like you saw it. It was an ant,” she said and took his hand. “You died in my arms from the sting of an ant.”
Packet flinched into a laugh and shifted away on the bed. “Come on! What? An ant?”
“You were stung at the top of the waterfall. When you ran away that night.” She was serious. “You had a reaction. The venom mixed with your urticaria. Your father and I found you in the pool at the bottom of the falls. You were covered in boils from the water. So we—”
“So we what?” he said.
“We couldn’t see it. Your welts from the water masked the sting from the ant.”
The room flashed back to Ceeborn’s twist of agony on the gondola in the ship’s dark ocean tank. His neck was punctured by the tail of the jumping Chokebot. He kicked out with his leg to fight and as the Chokebot fell from the gondola, Packet was returned to the hospital room bed.
“An allergic reaction from a jack jumper ant sting is difficult to diagnose after death, especially when you had two competing presentations. The ironic thing is that if you do the count, the jack jumper ant with only one chromosome is the most primitive form of animal on the planet. It’s like you died from the most primitive form of nature hidden under the flow of water. And your father always said, ‘Technology is like water, it’s everywhere.’ He tortured himself thinking about that after you died. But once he figured out how to work technology with nature programmatically, you didn’t have to fail anymore. The mix of them both is what saved you.”
Packet closed his eyes and sighed. It fit. The hospital room shifted away and he fell into his likeness of Cessini in his seat on the path above the waterfall. His head rested against the tall root of a tree. He covered himself with a frond for a blanket. A few pebbles ejected from a nest hole in the dirt. He settled to sleep, slapped at his neck, and kicked out his foot in the moss.
A jack jumper ant, just short of an inch, leapt from the root to the ground. Its black chain-link body moved over the dirt in a twitch-like motion on six long, fine-haired limbs. Its dark globose eyes, mustached antennae, and orange serrated jaws preceded its wasp-like tail; a tail that was curled and ready to strike again with one of the most powerful venoms in the insect world.
Cessini rose in a daze, scrunched his neck to his shoulder, and staggered toward the edge of the waterfall. His blood pressure dropped. He was dizzy, choking. He saw through a tunnel of haze.
He climbed down the mossy rocks in confusion, struggled around a few steps into delirium, then staggered into the pooled water beneath the falls and collapsed face first into a shallow eddy. Water flowed into the recess of his ear and lapped against his neck. He lolled his head a quarter turn up to the night’s sky, and his vision faded through the canopy of trees to the stars.
Meg hollered through the distance as she ran from the trail. Her flashlight jostled in front of Daniel’s behind her like two headlights of a swerving car in the night. Daniel overtook her and slid down to his side. He scooped up Cessini limp body into his arms and wailed for help as Meg was besieged with a horror that erupted from the bottom of her soul, “Cee—me!”
The Jeep door slammed and Meg curled in her seat with Cessini’s body in her arms. His arms went limp in her lap. His vision faded as all the rest was true, and—
Packet slumped from the edge of the bed to his knees on the hospital room floor. Meg came down to catch the fall of his eyes with the rise of her gaze and lifted his chin with her fingers. He looked up at her face, but could see only through the water of tears.
“You died of anaphylaxis,” she said. “By the time we found you, there was nothing we could do. We didn’t carry an auto-injector for adrenaline because it never helped your urticaria. The venom had histamine, procamine A and B, phospholipase A and B. There was—”
Packet touched his fingers to her mouth to stop her. He parted the single tuft of hair from her forehead as her first tear fell. “You don’t have any reason to cry. You did everything you could. I’m so sorry you had to see me like that, when we were both so young.”
“You had all the symptoms, your throat, the hives, confusion. . . . You died,” she said as her palms turned over on her lap, shaking in their emptiness, until he reached down and held them still.
“I’m here,” he said.
“It’s the most common cause of—” she tried to say.
“Shh. I know,” he said. “How’d you get to be so smart?”
“Because I didn’t have ten years to grow up, like you. I had to do it like this,” she said with the snap of her fingers.
He smiled and saw her in a haloed vision of her younger self on the other side of their data room table. She smiled from his look and returned head down to her swirls in a click-clack game on her hand-me-down tablet. And then she was younger still and sat with him on the floor of a doctor’s clinic at the finger-munching age of three. Robin picked her up as a toddler in the nurse’s office. He followed her out toward the door, then noticed something for the very first time, something almost imperceptibly small. She stared back at him from atop Robin’s shoulder, took her fingers out of her mouth, raised the corners of her cheeks into a smile, and whispered the most simple of words, “Bye.” She had said it. She left with her mother as he stayed behind, and opened his eyes—
Packet saw Meg sitting on the hospital room floor in front of him and smiling, still there and complete. “Why do you go by ‘Terri’ now?” he asked.
“Because you called me ‘Meg,’” she said and sprang forward into the embrace of his arms.
“So, I was wrong, maybe more than once about parts of Cessini’s life?” he asked as he held her tight. The rise and fall of her lungs beneath her chest was steady. Her back was tight without quiver. Her heart in between them both was strong.
“Yes. You didn’t die from fires, puddles, hyenas, or six-legged robots on a ship. Simple fact is you lived and died in a way that could only be described as you. You’re yo
u. Like me,” she said as she pulled away.
“And here I was thinking I had it all figured out,” he said.
“That’s okay. Mistakes, faults, pains, memories, and dreams, but most of all, lots of imagination is what makes us all human,” she said and wiped her eyes clear.
“You always knew the right way to say things,” he said.
“I did a lot of listening.” She grinned.
“How come we always get along so well?”
“Because I knew you before you were you,” she said as she caressed the back of her fingers down the line of his matured face and explored the greater cut of his chin. “And maturity isn’t always measured in years. Just remember, though—”
“What?”
She touched his lips with the tip of her finger and leaned in as only she could; but then quickly snapped back with a sharp-eyed focus. “Just remember,” she said as she jumped from the floor to standing, jerking his arms up. “The sun always shined on my side of the car!”
“No, it didn’t,” he said as he stood. “It shined on my side of the car!”
“No, mine. Do we have to stop and go outside and see?” Meg exclaimed as she threw open the blinds of the window and daylight flooded the room. Her filter was gone.
Terri turned back around in the light. “Are you sure you’re ready for this now?” Terri said.
“I’m ready,” Packet said, seeing her aged twenty-two for the first time and loving what he saw. “Let’s go out there and measure the sky.”
Terri pulled him to the door on his right. His mind was good. His body was good. He knew death alone was bad. He was ready to be in control and free.
He was ready, if she was, to live.
TWENTY-SIX
RAIN FELT LIKE WATER
TERRI RAN FASTER beneath a calm, blue sky that was mirrored in the harbor to the east. She took Grosvenor Crescent onto the main university campus, thrilled with the promise of life. Her path was cut off by a car pulling into the lot, and a young, frazzled student jumped out of the car in a rush.