Magic, Machines and the Awakening of Danny Searle

by John McWilliams

  Hours pass and, except for me and my laptop, it seems that the city that never sleeps has fallen into a deep slumber. The world out there looks cold, dark, somber.

  More hours pass.

  A can of Coke is placed next to me. I don’t have to look to know it’s David.

  Line: 2536: Instance 152 – autonomous class instantiation:

  Sometime later, under a starry night sky, a sandwich and a carton of apple juice are placed next to me. It’s my father. I keep working.

  Line 2745: Set tier array interaction rate:

  “You know,” he says, “if you starve to death, that’ll be a major setback for us.”

  “Huh?” I look up, though my eyes quickly wander back to my screen.

  “Eat.”

  “I will, I will.” Half-consciously I pick up the sandwich and take a bite. After two more bites, he leaves.

  When I hear the East Building’s automatic doors close, I look up at the lightening sky. Dawn’s almost here. How long have I been working? I’m too tired to figure it out. I need a break. Just a short one. I place the laptop next to me and lay my head down on the warm industrial carpet.

  By the time I open my eyes, it’s sunny and hot and my cheek feels as if it’s become part of the carpet. I lift my head to find David asleep against the opposite wall.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask.

  He blinks, looks around. “I was—” He yawns. “I came up here to check on you. I wasn’t sure if I should wake you or not. I guess I fell asleep.” He rubs his neck.

  “How are things downstairs?”

  “They’re working on the networking between the detector ring and the Cray. They seem to have it under control.”

  I nod.

  “What?” he asks.

  “Nothing.”

  I look over his shoulder and into the glare. I still can’t believe he isn’t hoping to get Daniella back. I guess I don’t really blame him. I just wish he’d admit it. Although maybe he hasn’t even admitted it to himself. I pick up my laptop and stand. “Well, thanks for checking on me. I better get back to work.”

  Leaving him sitting there, I head for the automatic doors.

  22

  For the next four days:

  I work.

  I eat and drink—whatever is placed in front of me.

  Sometimes, though not often, I sleep.

  Finally, in room 514, I lean back and stare at my screen. My program, presently linked to an evolutionary compiler, is processing archived data at an efficiency rate of 98.3 percent. And that’s at six hundred milliseconds out, well beyond Yuri’s target of four hundred.

  “You seem satisfied with your results,” my father says from the doorway. Apparently he’s been there a while. He enters the room, pushing a tangle of blankets and sheets aside. “You’ve become an actual lab rat.”

  “It’s done,” I tell him. “We’re ready for testing.” Saying this, I feel a sudden pang of doom. Maybe I’ve been suppressing this, but…

  What if this doesn’t work?

  23

  Minutes later, we gather in the control room—my father, David, Yuri and me—as Yuri prepares the Bourilkov System for its first trial run with my forecasting module.

  Yuri initiates a normal scan as, on the 3D brain map, the usual orange blips appear.

  He then opens the Bourilkov System’s control panel window and moves the cursor over the forecasting module’s icon: an image of two computers connected by a thin green line. “Are we ready?”

  “Yuri,” my father says, exasperated. “Just hit the damn button.”

  Yuri clicks the icon, and a loading bar appears as the two systems shake hands.

  I hold my breath.

  My father crosses his fingers.

  David stares at the screen.

  The loading bar finishes and the screen suddenly goes blank.

  A chill runs down my spine.

  “What happened?” David asks.

  “Yuri?” my father says.

  “Is strange.” Yuri sits there a moment contemplatively. He then reaches behind the monitor. “Ah, is loose connection.” He fiddles with the wires and the monitor’s power light changes from orange to green.

  On the screen, the Bourilkov System’s 3D brain map springs to life with bright green zigzags and bold red arrows.

  I start to breathe again.

  My father smiles.

  “Yuri, is this what we should be seeing?” David asks.

  “Brain State Emulator Module is in control of Bourilkov System, but—” He holds up a finger. “Okay, is moving through specified regions… as should. Efficiency rate looks good.”

  “What about Danny?” I ask. “What does this information say about her?”

  “Activity in pons…” Yuri traces the jagged green line on the screen with his index finger. “Is moving into visual nuclei of thalamus. And here, cerebral cortex.”

  “But what does that mean?” I ask.

  “She’s dreaming,” my father says.

  “Yes.” Yuri’s chair creaks as he sits back and places his face into his hands. He wipes his eyes. “Danny is dreaming.”

  My father pulls me into a bone-crushing bear hug.

  “Just incredible, Tyler,” David says, insisting on hugging me too.

  Yuri pats my arm as he composes himself.

  I take a seat.

  Danny is dreaming. A hundred different emotions hit me at once. You see, while my marathon programming session might have seemed selfless from the outside, from the inside it was a refuge from the idea that there might not be a Danny to save.

  I look at my father and David. They were the ones who had to live with this potentiality every moment of the past four days.

  “Tyler, you okay?” my father asks.

  “Four days of nonstop programming,” David says. “I’m surprised he hasn’t collapsed.”

  “I’m fine,” I tell them. “Yuri, what needs to happen next?”

  “Next we test system with probes and new calibration subroutines turned on—I just need minute to configure. Then, if works, I will sample Danny’s response characteristics and create computer-managed therapy session. Will take two, maybe three hours.”

  “How long do you think it’ll take for her to respond?”

  “Is new detection method, but accuracy is high. I see no reason she should respond differently than other neurofeedback cases.”

  “Some people respond in minutes,” my father says. “Some take hours. A few take days.”

  “I have feeling we will have her back in hours,” Yuri says confidently. He flips a switch on a metal box to the right of his monitors, activating the pulse-charged magnetic probes. “But first we test. I do not want to put cart in front of horse.”

  My father, David and I look at each other and laugh.

  Yuri selects one of the red targeting arrows on the screen and types in a command. The green bolt of activity the arrow is pointing at swells into a thick, hazy blue line. My father and Yuri seem pleased.

  Yuri probes five more targets before proclaiming the test a success. He tells us that with this data he can now design Danny’s therapy session, and he immediately sets to work.

  “Should I call Susan?” David asks.

  “Yes, yes, you must get her here immediately,” Yuri says, not looking up from his screen. “We will need her when Danny wakes up.”

  David rushes out of the room.

  “Where are you going?” I ask my father.

  “To call your mom and the twins.”

  A pair of nurses go in to tend to Danny and, with Yuri glued to his screen and me not wanting to disturb him, I wander out into the hall. I pass the kitchen. My father is on the phone, but after a few words I realize it’s not with my mother, so I take the elevator up to the skywalk.

  Stepping through the automatic doors, I’m greeted by the glare of sunlight reflected off the West Building’s windows. It’s morning. I had no idea.

  At the center of the
tube, I rest my head against the glass wall and breathe in the West Building’s cool, antiseptic air. Below, beyond the courtyard, pedestrians rush about. Just another day, doing their jobs, playing their roles—each one the writer, director and star of their own autobiographical production.

  Danny, when you wake up, we need to talk about all this… magic.

  “How you holding up?” My father’s voice startles me.

  “Anxious.” I smile.

  He walks toward me carrying two Styrofoam cups. He hands me one.

  “Hot chocolate?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  He stares at me a moment.

  “What?”

  “You seem… older.”

  “Lack of sleep will do that.”

  “Indeed it will.” He sips his drink. “I’m really proud of you. You dreamed this project up and designed and implemented it entirely on your own.”

  “That’s not exactly true.”

  “True enough.” He looks out at the cars and people on the road.

  A minute passes.

  “You know what’s weird?” I turn to him. “If Danny hadn’t sought us out, she would never have survived this coma.”

  “If Danny hadn’t sought us out, she wouldn’t have been in the accident in the first place.”

  “True, but…” I drink some hot chocolate.

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking. You know how David describes Daniella as being this resourceful, ambitious genius?”

  “I’m not sure those were his exact words, but okay. So?”

  “Nah… nothing.”

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking…” I look out the window. “Maybe it wasn’t Danny who sought us out. Maybe it was Daniella.”

  24

  Two hours later, my mother and the twins arrive, and Susan is on her way in. She’s expected any minute.

  I’m in the kitchen with my mother, Tara, Jasmine and David, when my father appears at the door and informs us that we’re about forty-five minutes away from starting Danny’s recovery session.

  “Anyone interested in a quick breakfast?” he asks.

  “Sure,” my mother responds. “What are you making us?”

  “Allow me to rephrase that: Is anyone interested in making me breakfast?”

  “Can we have Eggos?” Tara asks. She and Jasmine are seated together in one of the white plastic chairs.

  “We just happen to have those.” My father opens the freezer. “And just the right flavors: strawberry and blueberry.”

  He then proceeds to burn them.

  “Who sets a toaster on full?” He adjusts the knob as my mother pushes him aside.

  “Take a seat,” she tells him. “I swear you do these things on purpose. But I also know how far you’ll take it, and I’d really hate to have you burn the building down.”

  David offers to help my mother, and the two of them cook us a breakfast of bacon and eggs.

  “How come Danny can’t just tell her brain to wake up?” Jasmine asks a minute later, biting into her Eggo.

  “Because Danny is her brain,” my father explains. “If she could, I’m sure she’d tell herself to wake up.”

  “But maybe she’s not trying because she already thinks she’s awake,” Jasmine says.

  “But then she could pinch herself, like this.” Tara demonstrates on her forearm.

  “But what if she’s dreaming she’s pinching herself?” Jasmine counters.

  “Well,” Tara says. “I think she’d know she was dreaming because real life makes more sense.”

  “Not necessarily,” my father says. “Have you ever heard of the man who mistook his wife for a hat?”

  The girls roar with laughter.

  “I’d imagine it was probably a little less funny when it happened.”

  “Did that really happen?” Tara asks.

  “It did. And it’s actually the name of a book that Dr. Saito loaned me: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. Apparently, one of Dr. Sacks’s patients had something wrong with his brain, and he couldn’t identify certain objects correctly. So he actually tried to put his wife on his head.”

  “Sure,” my mother says from the stove. “But it’s not as though he thought he was married to a hat. He just couldn’t identify which thing in the room was his hat.”

  “And, in all fairness”—my father smiles at the twins—“his wife did have a pretty big mouth.”

  “How could anyone think a person was a hat?” Jasmine asks, furrowing her brow.

  “Because our brain’s programming is the thing that tells us what things are, and this guy’s programming got messed up.”

  “Programming—like what Tyler does?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Our brains are programmed?”

  “They are.”

  “Who programmed our brains?”

  “Well, your mom and me and your teachers—and TV advertisers and newscasters. Just about anyone you’ve ever seen or listened to. But you can do your own programming too, if you want. You can change your own brain.”

  “As in your sexual orientation?” my mother asks as she and David bring over four plates of bacon and eggs.

  “Obviously some programming is burned in at the genetic level,” my father says. “But consider the programming we can alter. In some regions of the world, for example, people are programmed to enjoy eating big, juicy grasshoppers.”

  “Eww!”

  “You could be programmed to enjoy grasshoppers, too.” My father bites into a strip of bacon. “Or—think about what vultures drool over: roadkill.”

  “But they’re vultures,” my mother says, taking a seat.

  “And vultures are programmed too. Besides, in some cultures a sundried roadkill would be quite the delicacy. And”—he lifts a yolk-dripping forkful of eggs—“have you ever considered what our culture regards as appetizing?”

  My mother and David stare at their food. I poke open a yolk and watch it bleed. My father keeps on eating.

  “Then what’s the point?” I ask, laying my fork down. “If the world is nothing more than what we’ve been programmed to see it as, what’s the point to any of this?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, since everything we find desirable is merely what’s been programmed into our heads—and, presumably, with a little tweak, Romeo and Juliet could have been written as Romeo and the Roadkill—then what’s the point? What’s the point of our existence? The only underlying truth, it seems, is that there’s no underlying truth.”

  “Well…” My father runs a napkin across his lips. “I know what Danny would say. She’d say that, while our intelligence is rooted in a fixed reality—meaning a child can’t learn about gravity if his toys periodically float off into space—our minds must be flexible so that we can reach beyond our falling toys.

  “Programmability is actually what allows us to learn new things, build new paradigms and create new stories—including the never-ending story of the wizardry of science.

  “She’d say if you were going to cast a spell to create a world of intelligent beings with an infinite supply of tales to tell, this is exactly how you’d do it.”

  “Jeez, you almost sound like a convert,” my mother says.

  “Me? No. If I happen to come across a rock that’s shaped like a potato, I don’t ascribe it to some sort of intentional wizardry. Nature did it, quite unintentionally.”

  “But then who or what designed nature?” I ask.

  “That’s the point: something unintentional.” My father looks around the table. “Or… I could be wrong.”

  ****

  A minute later, Susan comes into the kitchen and, after introducing herself to my mother and the twins, informs us that she’s just come from the control room and Yuri is ready.

  Leaving our breakfast plates uncleared, we rush out into the hall.

  “This may actually take a while,” my father says as we file in aroun
d Danny.

  “Yes,” we hear Yuri’s voice over the intercom. “Is good to interact with her, but process may take while.”

  And Yuri is right. Two hours later, we’re still waiting.

  I collapse into the chair next to my mother.

  “We could start reading to her again,” David suggests from the other side of the bed. The twins, at Danny’s feet, have been singing Raffi songs for about a half an hour now.

  “How many books have you already gone through?” my mother asks.

  “Seven,” David says.

  “Seven books?”

  “Not just me.”

  “It was mostly him,” I assure her.

  At that moment, my father and Susan charge into the room.

  “She’s coming around,” Susan says.

  “Big spike in activity,” Yuri calls out from the control room.

  “Danny?” Susan, standing in front of my father and me, shakes Danny’s arm. My mother is at the foot of the bed with the twins, and David is on the other side.

  “We really shouldn’t overwhelm her,” Susan says as my father and I try to squeeze in. “She’s opening her eyes.”

  “Danny?” I edge Susan out.

  Danny blinks. She looks up. Her eyes lock with mine and her faint smile tells me all I need to know. Danny is back—not Daniella. A wave of relief crashes over me as I kiss her lips and press my cheek to hers.

  “Where am I?” she asks. Her voice is hoarse.

  “You’re back,” my father tells her.

  “Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz,” Tara says.

  “Tyler, give her a chance to breathe, would you?” My father places a hand on my shoulder, encouraging me to step aside.

  Reluctantly I pull away from her, wiping my eyes. I know Susan needs to check her out, and in all fairness my father should have a moment to see those big blue eyes. I glance at David, alone on the other side of the bed. His hand is on Danny’s shoulder, but with all the commotion, she doesn’t seem to notice.

  What a bittersweet moment this must be for him. I feel his pain. It could have gone the other way, I remind myself.