Connect

by Julian Gough

  A cigarette butt, bleached completely white by years in the sun.

  Everything has incredibly well-defined edges. She’s pulling all the visual data out of the incoming images, analysing them fast and hard, looking for unusual patterns.

  Looking (though she is not consciously aware of this) for tracks in the sand – snake, coyote, human, whatever.

  She’s looking for blood, for a weapon, for (this is a funny one) a syringe. Years ago, in college, Naomi found her roommate lying face down in the bathroom with a syringe beside her; so to see Colt’s body, face down, legs at that angle, unlocks that old pattern from memory: body + syringe = explanation, and so Naomi’s brain checks for that pattern, that explanation, and her eyes dart to where the syringe was, so many years earlier.

  But it’s not there. Relief, that it’s not there; anxiety, that there’s still no explanation. Her body produces so many chemicals in reaction to all these conflicting inputs that they begin to interfere with each other. She feels jittery and unable to think.

  He moves his arms, in a slow, swimming motion. Moves his legs. Swimming in the warm sand.

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, Colt,’ she says, and closes her eyes and all her muscles untense, and she lies down beside him.

  ‘Mama,’ he says, turning his head, his helmet, towards her. No, he doesn’t like it when she swears. She normally only swears inside.

  He used to do this when he was four, five, six years old. Swimming in the sand. He said he liked the way the warm sand felt on his skin. Then some kids at school heard about it, laughed at him, and he stopped. Stopped when he was maybe seven. He hasn’t done it in a decade.

  ‘You scared the shit out of me,’ she says, stretching out in the warm sand.

  ‘Mama, I’ve written a new level. I’ve integrated it into the game.’ His voice is dreamy, again. Far away. Happy. ‘It’s set in the desert. It feels totally real.’

  ‘It is real. You live in a desert,’ she says, exasperated, relieved, sick. And she can hear it in his voice, that she’s not really there, in his world. That he’s talking to a ghost, out of politeness.

  ‘But this desert’s better,’ he says. ‘It’s totally real. I’ve improved the sun.’

  ‘Colt, the desert in your game is not real.’ She leans forward and tries to see his eyes through the dark glass of his visor, but can only see herself lying beside him, her face bent and smeared across the curved surface. He’s disappearing. ‘There’s a difference between seeing the world, and seeing a picture of the world. Even a great picture of the world. It’s a serious difference. An important difference.’

  ‘No, there isn’t. All we can ever experience is our own nervous system. All we ever see is a picture of the world.’

  ‘But a picture based on reality, based on something that is actually there . . .’

  ‘You don’t understand.’ He turns his head away, in the direction of the sun. ‘I can see the corona. I can see the solar flares.’

  ‘I totally understand that you’re excited.’ How can she get this through to him? ‘It’s great that you’ve improved the graphics. But . . .’ He’s not listening. ‘. . . if you could just . . .’ She tries to stop herself saying it, but these words, said together so often, have welded themselves into one unit, and she’s started it, so it finishes itself automatically, ‘. . . live in the moment . . .’

  He hears that, all right. The sun flashes off his visor, as he turns fully to face her. He isn’t mapping her into the game; he can’t see her; she’s just a voice entering his game, his world, from outside, like a conscience.

  ‘Nobody lives in the moment!’ he says, and his voice is a little high-pitched, shaky. ‘We don’t have access to the moment! Where do you get these ideas! It’s bullpoop, bullpoop. Our brain just predicts what will happen next, and creates a picture of that.’ He’s not afraid to get angry when he’s inside the helmet. ‘But it’s not real, it’s a guess. We live half a second in the future—’

  ‘I know, look—’ She feels a little sick.

  ‘—because if we only saw what was already there, and reacted to that, our reaction times are so slow we’d be eaten.’

  ‘I know—’

  ‘—We live in the future, we act in the future, it’s just we’re so used to it we don’t notice—’

  ‘—I know.’ She stands up, brushes the sand off her legs.

  ‘—until our projection of the world fails to map accurately, and we step on a step that isn’t there, or we—’

  ‘—But the whole idea of a map implies there is something there to map onto—’

  ‘Sure! But we can’t know it, so who cares?’

  ‘But if you don’t even see the real world, how can you live in it . . .’

  ‘I do see the real world, you’re not even listening, I’m trying to explain . . .’

  They’re shouting at each other now. But the louder she gets, under this empty blue sky, the smaller she feels. Loud sounds go nowhere, change nothing. They just wander off into the desert to die.

  ‘Colt . . .’

  ‘I can see the real flares,’ says Colt. He looks up at the sun, and it seems to calm him. ‘I see the real flares, in realtime. That’s why it’s so cool.’

  She takes a breath.

  Another.

  Another.

  Tries to step back from her emotions. Just concentrate on the breath.

  But thoughts are looping and firing, and he’s so like his father, and her memories of shouting are attached to so many other memories that the thoughts take over her breathing and she’s not concentrating on her breathing she’s just gulping big breaths and saying no to the memories. She realizes her visual centre has pretty much switched off, that she’s been seeing and reacting to nothing but memories for ten, maybe twenty seconds.

  Stop.

  Be here now.

  The world leaps back into focus. Her son. The desert. The sky.

  He has stood up too, and he’s putting his clothes back on, starting with the stretchy, skin-tight micromesh suit.

  The red boxers.

  Jeans.

  Road Runner T-shirt.

  His favourite . . . Oh, it’s so small now . . . Jesus, he’s cut the seam in the neck, so he can pull it on without removing the helmet . . .

  She can’t see his face, so she concentrates on his hands. Watches his fingers flexing as he dresses.

  It’s real, I’m here, this is real. Talk. Calmly, calmly.

  She remembers why she wanted to talk to him.

  Tomorrow . . .

  One downside of living in Nevada is the chronically underfunded school system.

  One upside of living in Nevada is the chronically underfunded inspectorate.

  She’d pulled him out of school nearly a decade ago, and this was only the fourth inspection.

  She really had intended to home-school him, but they’d driven each other crazy. And what with hanging out in the lab, and working on his own projects, he’d done pretty well. It just wasn’t a standard education, that was all. And it would take a little prep to fake one.

  ‘We’re going to have to play at home-schooling on Thursday.’

  ‘Oh, Mama.’ He turns away and stares at the sun through the visor.

  ‘I know. Shannon says the inspector should be . . .’

  But it’s hard to derail Colt’s train of thought once it’s got moving. He turns back to her.

  ‘Wait, I haven’t explained yet—’

  ‘Colt, this is serious. If they think you haven’t been getting a proper education, they could . . .’ She debates whether to say it. Says it. ‘. . . Order you back into the school system . . .’

  ‘I’m not a kid! I won’t go. I won’t go.’

  ‘I know! I know! But we need to go over what we’re going to say to the lady.’ How to get the importance of this through to him without scaring him, without closing him down? But he’s not even listening.

  ‘OK. Later. OK,’ says Colt. ‘I need to explain. I’m getting d
ata from . . .’

  ‘Jesus, Colt.’ Her voice comes out with too much power, anxiety, adrenalin.

  ‘Mama, I am trying to explain! I thought you’d be pleased. I thought about what you were saying. That I was spending too much time ingame, and losing touch with crapworld . . .’

  ‘DON’T CALL . . .’ Calm down! Too loud, too sharp. ‘Please . . . don’t call it that.’

  ‘OK, OK, losing touch with the “real” world.’

  ‘But you are . . .’

  ‘OK, OK, OK, OK. Stop saying it.’ He rocks back and forth on his heels a few times, mutters a few words, she can’t catch them.

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ she says. Just go with it. Let him finish his thought.

  ‘So I built more of the real world into the game.’

  ‘The sun?’

  Colt nods. ‘I’m getting pictures from the new ESA solar orbiter. It’s sending back realtime images in the ultraviolet, and I’m taking the data and doing a realtime mapping of that into the graphics of the game. Adjusting for latitude, time of day, my head angle. All that. And I’ve built in a 300 per cent zoom, and gone for low intensity, high contrast, so I can see detail. Sunspots. The corona. Ejections. It’s nice, a bigger sun in the sky.’ He’s getting calmer now. She’s listening to him. ‘You should try it. The original ESA images are fairly high definition anyway, and mapped into the gameview, onto the original sun, even blown up they’re only 3 per cent of the visual field, so they end up ultra-high def. And it’s all real; you just can’t see it normally with your eyes.’

  He looks straight at the sun, through his visor. The glass goes black. His mother vanishes from his peripheral vision. The enhanced game sun reappears.

  Strong sunspot activity, he thinks. Crazy strong for this part of the cycle.

  He watches a small flare, just coming into sight around the curve, high on the northern flank. It had started about two hours before. Hardly making it free of the surface, before being sucked back down into the magnetic pole. A flare big enough to envelop the earth.

  He turns in the direction of his mother, because she likes him to face her when speaking. The game offers to map her onto a game character; bring her ingame as a beggar, or a pedlar, or a prostitute; but he silently declines. He knows where she is and what she looks like. There’s no need to have her spoil the empty desert.

  ‘I see more than you,’ he says, ‘not less.’

  ‘Yes. I get it,’ says Naomi. ‘About the inspection . . .’

  The nightmare that had woken her the night before comes back; Colt standing alone beside her dead body, ticcing, tapping patterns, talking to himself, alone in the world, about to walk out the door and be destroyed.

  She shakes her head as though a fly has landed on her face, and suddenly, very vividly, for the first time, she imagines him dying before she does. The thought – the image of his empty room, the silence of the house – leaves her shaky, exhausted.

  ‘But did you listen to me, Mama? Did you hear me? It’s good, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m really glad you tried . . .’ she says. ‘But this wasn’t what I meant.’

  Suddenly he turns away.

  ‘What? Because I like it . . . No. You don’t have to . . . I don’t care.’

  ‘Who are you talking to?’

  ‘Some asshat,’ he mutters.

  ‘Why do you play that game, if the other people upset you so much?’

  Colt shrugs. ‘You wouldn’t let me kill him, so now he’s here upsetting me. What can I do?’

  ‘Just walk away, Colt.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘It’s . . . use your own judgement.’

  ‘Your way doesn’t work, Mama.’ And he hesitates. He knows she doesn’t like him mentioning his father. She says it’s OK, but he knows it isn’t. But he has to say it, to be understood. ‘Dad always said it was important not to show fear.’

  ‘And look how well that turned out,’ says Naomi. Fights every day, till she’d pulled him out of school. ‘Your father is not a good guide to social skills.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘I’ll get dinner ready,’ she says. ‘Ten minutes, all right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. He takes the thin bio-feedback gloves out of his pocket, pulls them on, and lies back down in the sand. He wants to test some physical-feedback mapping. And it feels nice.

  She doesn’t walk away just yet. He turns his face in her direction, but he doesn’t lift his head. The helmet rotates in the sand until the minimal faceplate is pointed at her. The dry sand hisses as the helmet rotates. She bites back an impulse to say, don’t scratch it. It’s his, he built it. She can’t see his face through the opaque glass and plastic.

  He’s looking in her direction but she knows he can’t see her.

  ‘Mom, I haven’t written you into this level. If you want to hang out, I can write you into it.’

  ‘No, it’s OK,’ she says. There is a pause. Her eyes are watering. Must be the sun. It’s low in the sky, but still hot, and it’s right in front of her. She moves around till the light comes from behind her. That’s better. Her shadow falls across him.

  ‘Could you move?’ he says. ‘Please? You’re spoiling the game.’

  ‘It’s rice and peas. I’ll get it ready. Come in when you’re done.’

  7

  The next morning, Colt is in the kitchen early. As she walks in, he is busy doing something with the eye controls, inside his helmet. From the angle of his head, from the tension in his shoulders, from experience, she suspects he is writing something in there. Code? No, a message; now he sends it, she knows that head gesture.

  ‘Colt?’

  He turns to face her, and clears his throat.

  Guilty sign. Very guilty. Probably has a guilty look on his face, but you can’t tell, because he’s still wearing that fucking helmet so you can’t see his eyes.

  Clears it again. And again, a couple of times.

  Uh oh . . .

  8

  Meanwhile, in Boston, a young man swipes open a document. Starts reading, frowns. Reads on a little. Chuckles. Reads some more. Laughs. He sends it onward to a young woman in San Francisco. She reads, frowns, chuckles, laughs, reads some more. Sends it to an older man in New York. He reads, frowns, keeps reading, keeps frowning.

  All three of them keep reading. Now they are all frowning. And reading. Frowning and reading on both coasts. The transmission has taken about three minutes.

  Two hundred years ago, it took three weeks to get a single message from one coast to the other.

  Five hundred years ago, you couldn’t get a message from one coast to another. No matter how much you wanted to. No matter how rich you were. How powerful. Nobody had ever made the journey.

  Eight hundred years ago, there was nobody on earth who knew the shape of this continent and the distance from coast to coast. Not even the people living on it.

  The previous five billion years? Nothing.

  You think it’s some kind of coincidence that you are here now, in the only moment in the history of the universe when we could have this conversation? You think it’s a coincidence there’s suddenly eight thousand million of you, building a brain for the world?

  9

  Back in Nevada, Colt clears his throat three more times. ‘Yes?’ Naomi says, and leans forward to hear what he has to say. He clears his throat again, five times. ‘Cough it up,’ says Naomi, ‘it won’t kill you.’

  He clears his throat eight times, an identical noise each time. Pause. He clears his throat thirteen times.

  ‘Jesus,’ she says, ‘this must be a bad one.’

  ‘Got to BALANCE them,’ says Colt.

  ‘I know, I know,’ says Naomi. ‘But there aren’t usually so many to balance.’

  He keeps clearing his throat for another couple of minutes. She eats her granola, idly counting the coughs, while a bad feeling rises and slowly overwhelms her.

  So, no coughs, then one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen . . . Fibonacci nu
mbers. Each number is the sum of the previous two numbers.

  Twenty-one coughs, then thirty-four . . . Oh God, it’ll be fifty-five next, then eighty-nine, his poor throat. This is a bad one. What has he done?

  But the next one is twenty-one again.

  He’s counting back down. Oh, thank God. Yes, thirteen again . . . It’ll be eight next.

  It is.

  Could be worse. Like last Christmas, when he coughed the first seventeen prime numbers, and lost his voice for three days.

  When he has balanced his sequence, she puts down her spoon. She knows she should wait for him to start; that if she shows any anger, he will retreat again.

  She can’t wait.

  ‘You were doing something,’ she says. ‘When I came into the room. It’s something to do with that, isn’t it?’

  He can’t lie. Doesn’t try. ‘I sent your limb regrowth paper to StemCellCon.’

  ‘COLT! It isn’t ready!’

  ‘I explained all that.’

  ‘All WHAT?’

  ‘I explained that you were afraid to finish it, or send it, because of, you know, your personality . . .’

  ‘My PERSONALITY? You . . . MY personality is . . . Sorry, sorry . . .’

  He puts his head down, and grinds his teeth in a rhythm as he speaks, she knows that one – an old one he hasn’t done in a while – but he keeps speaking. ‘. . . And that therapy hadn’t helped you.’

  ‘It helped me . . . sorry, sorry . . .’

  ‘. . . And that I was your son, so they wouldn’t think I had stolen it, and that I thought the paper was already good enough.’

  ‘But it really isn’t ready . . .’

  ‘You said that last year. You would have said that next year. It’s ready.’ He ground his teeth for a few seconds, in a new pattern she couldn’t recognize. ‘YOU’RE not ready. The paper is good.’

  ‘But it’s after the deadline. I missed the deadline.’

  ‘I told them it was an emergency, and to read it as a priority. I said you were sorry for being late and you wouldn’t do it again.’

  ‘Honey, that’s just for kids, you don’t need to say that . . .’

  ‘It’s a great paper,’ says Colt, his head bent over so far that his throat is constricted and his voice comes out gruff. ‘People drop out, they add stuff, all the time, right up to the conference.’