by Julian Gough
Nobody has fed the caterpillars, even though she told Donnie it needed to be rostered. Some idiot moved a vitrine into direct sunlight, and an entire control group are dead. There’s material missing from her freezers.
Her whole first day back is spent clearing up avoidable messes.
She answers the call in the lab without even looking. It’s Colt.
It’s always Colt.
‘Hi,’ says Naomi.
‘Hi.’
She is puzzled for a second, that Colt doesn’t call her mama. He sounds so mature.
‘I hear your lab’s in trouble.’
Oh.
It’s Ryan. His voice triggers old thought-loops that set off associated physical processes. She notices she is breathing hard. Stress reactions. Her shoulders feel like stone, like iron.
She clears her throat, swallows. Speaks.
‘Fuck you,’ she says. ‘Fuck you.’
‘What?’ says Ryan. ‘Why?’
‘You blocked my paper. Pulled it.’
And now the body’s stress reactions begin to feed the thought-loops, and drive them faster, which triggers more stress reactions as her body acts on the mind’s increasing panic. Her body is oblivious to the fact that he is just a voice on a phone.
She needs to breathe, hang up, lie down.
Run.
OK, she is almost at the toilet. She can hardly hear Ryan, as he says, ‘I can upgrade your lab. You don’t have to move, you don’t have to move Colt. You’ll never have to meet me.’
‘No.’
‘I can get you any equipment you want. Fix your credit.’
‘No.’
‘You’d go up three pay grades, you could buy things for Colt.’
No. No.
She’s made it.
She hangs up, and lifts the lid, the seat.
Drops to her knees, and vomits in the clean white bowl.
46
He can hear her walking slowly across the playa towards him, but he doesn’t want to break the rhythm he’s in.
Mama. Home early. Huh.
Colt continues to turn his head, slowly, as far to the left as he can.
Back again.
He’s tuned the helmet’s visor to protect his eyes from the direct sun, but to let through the harsh, bright, white landscape, undimmed.
She finally arrives behind him.
‘Colt.’
‘Mmmmm.’ He moves his head again, slowly. Soothing. Everything moves relative to everything else; but only for him; nothing is moving out there.
‘Colt, come in out of the sun. Please. Please. Do it for me. Please, Colt . . . I thought you said you’d rest.’
He shouldn’t have told Mama he was seeing things that weren’t there. She worries. But she doesn’t need to worry. He knows they aren’t there.
‘I AM resting.’
He is just seeing patterns in his mind. Connections between things. It’s like doing math as a kid, when he would close his eyes, and the numbers seemed more real than people. He could understand the numbers . . .
He turns around.
‘It’s like Sesame Street, Mama,’ he says, to reassure her. ‘And I am the Count . . .’ He laughs the Count’s laugh, and she smiles but it isn’t a good smile.
Oh God, he’s getting worse, she thinks. And has to hold back her hand from stroking his forehead. He doesn’t like to be touched.
He doesn’t like to be touched.
I need help.
47
She takes him to their HMO, in a light industrial park, south of Las Vegas.
A glum old Bosnian doctor with a thick, bushy grey monobrow gives Colt a physical check-up.
Colt just sits there, silently, doing what he’s told.
To take her mind off Colt while he’s being scanned, sampled, and examined, Naomi studies the old doctor’s face.
Probably trained back when the doctor, not the AI, did the diagnosis. Before robots did most of the surgery. No wonder he’s glum.
He looks up from his blank screen, his monobrow startled into an arch. ‘He doesn’t have a health implant, a monitor?’
‘No,’ she says. She doesn’t bother explaining that Colt doesn’t like being tracked, monitored. That it’s philosophical, that it’s Colt’s choice. Not that she’s a bad mother.
She doesn’t bother mentioning that Colt’s arguments about freedom, about surveillance, have convinced her, too. That she’s had her health monitor removed.
The doctor grunts, and carries on.
He does nothing, really, that Naomi couldn’t do herself, but she doesn’t trust her own judgement any more.
She welcomes the Bosnian’s sceptical frown, as she outlines Colt’s symptoms to him, and to the AI’s listening microphones.
Maybe she’s imagining all these symptoms after all. Maybe she’s losing it. Maybe Colt’s fine.
‘Could it be something going around?’ asks Naomi. Listen to me. I sound like my mother.
The doctor shrugs, takes a physical blood sample from Colt’s arm using a sensor-packed syringe. The sensors feed their data instantly into the practice’s AI, and the doctor gloomily studies the data cascading down his screen.
‘Do you still use Mayo Global Health?’ asks Naomi, putting off the moment.
‘No,’ says the doctor. ‘We’ve gone open source.’
‘Panacea?’
‘Airmed,’ says the doctor. ‘More reliable, and they share databases with Panacea anyway, now.’
Naomi nods.
The Airmed AI asks some supplementary questions. Looks for similar patterns among its billions of previous cases. Makes its suggestions to the doctor.
‘It is normal for such children to have emotional problems at this age,’ says the doctor, still reading his screen.
‘They aren’t emotional problems.’
He looks up from his screen. Studies her for a moment. ‘Hmm.’
‘You think I’m being hysterical?’ says Naomi.
‘I think you are very concerned for your son, as is entirely natural.’
No. His scepticism is no longer reassuring. She is not imagining the symptoms. ‘I know him. There’s something wrong.’
Will her health insurance cover a second consultation, if this doctor and the Airmed AI say Colt is fine? The doctor’s harassed, crumpled face reminds her of someone, something. A decade earlier, yes.
Caught between jobs, without proper health insurance, when Colt had a seizure and she couldn’t afford the tests.
Arguing with a doctor in the emergency room, a weary doctor who wanted to release Colt, send him home. Colt still too weak and dizzy to walk, still recovering from the seizure.
God, that was why she took this job in the first place, in this shitty lab, grabbing at the health insurance, and now it might not even cover a second consultation . . .
Calm down.
‘Thank you, doctor.’
48
The next day, on her way into the lab, she bumps into Donnie.
‘Oh,’ says Naomi. He looks surprisingly good. She’d assumed he was back in rehab, his car hadn’t been in the lot all week.
She tells him what she needs, and he looks startled.
‘You want how many caterpillars with cancer?’ he says.
She tells him again.
‘That’s a lot of caterpillars with cancer.’
‘I’ve had a new idea.’
‘Well that’s nice and all, but you might have to hold that thought for a while.’
‘Why?’
He hands her his screen, and she reads the document. She looks up at him, astonished, winded. ‘My grant hasn’t been renewed?’
‘Funding responsibility for your programme has been transferred to DARPA.’ He takes back the screen. ‘And they’ve put your work under review.’
49
She stands outside Colt’s door as he sleeps that night. She looks at the No Burglars sign. Puts the palm of her hand flat on the red handprint he made when he was six.<
br />
Pushes.
He murmurs as the dim light of the corridor enters his room. Naomi walks in, swings the door almost closed behind her. Sits on the edge of his bed, and waits for her eyes to adjust to the low light.
He keeps murmuring. She crouches down close to his face, listens. He’s speaking in tongues. No, it sounds like code. Like a programming language. He is compiling in his sleep.
Has he talked to another human being in the past month, apart from her? And that woman he mentioned. He’s clammed up now, will say nothing more. He has barely spoken to Naomi since that conversation. Some functional sentences, all connected to the tech. Some absent-minded, crazy attempts to reassure her.
She’s losing him. He’s breaking down. But what can she do?
50
Four days later, his behaviour is getting stranger. He hardly speaks now. Hardly eats. Hardly sleeps. Never takes the helmet off.
She’s afraid to leave him at home, so she makes him come into the lab with her, like old times. He hums little patterns of evolving musical notes, all the way in.
She scans him, on their best machine, which is still a pretty crappy machine, at the highest resolution she can get it to give.
Studies the scan.
The fucking students have messed it up. Calibration is off.
She can still, just about, see. The same familiar problems. The messy neighbourhoods, where some neurons connect sideways to each other, like ladders. Nothing new. But there is something, something odd about the structure of the corpus callosum, and the area around it, where it joins the two hemispheres. It is on the edge of resolution.
She could be imagining it.
She blows it up as big as it will go, the architecture of her son’s brain.
She looks at his memories, his hopes, his fears, encoded in the ever-changing neural network, and blinks back tears. It shimmers like a heat haze on the screen. A magic city.
A city sinking deeper into anarchy and dreams.
51
Naomi rings Ryan. Just voice. ‘I accept,’ she says.
‘Great,’ says Ryan. ‘Listen . . .’
‘I need the new Siemens hybrid scanner, with the larger static field and the second set of photomultiplier tubes,’ says Naomi. ‘I don’t care if you pull it out of Maryland, I know they have two. I need F18-fluorodeoxyglucose, not a lot, but immediately. You can fill in all the forms. You’ve got fast-track clearance for radiopharmaceuticals, we’re not an approved lab. And gallium-67. Now. I need them now.’
‘Wait, slow down . . .’
‘Don’t pretend you’re not recording this, I know you record everything.’ She’s going to be generating a lot of data, and she doesn’t want anyone to hack it, not the Chinese, not the Indians, not the Russians; not her own government. But she has to store it somewhere. ‘I’ll need some new Banyan quantum servers for richdata analysis. And a couple of high-end data safes.’
‘Naomi . . .’
She shrugs. While she’s at it, she may as well get her caterpillars. ‘And I want fifty of the Petrarch B strain of Danaus plexippus. Eggs, or failing that, caterpillars less than three days old.’
She hangs up.
Maybe Ryan will just kill himself one day, out of the blue, like his dad did, that sad, horrible old monster; just close the bedroom door and, bang . . .
She represses the thought. Terrible thought. He’s still a human being.
But it would be nice.
52
It takes all day to install the quantum servers and the data safes, and calibrate the big hybrid scanner. She spends the morning signing non-disclosure agreements; new contracts; national security agreements; and listening to the installation technicians swearing, mostly at Donnie, who is hungover, surly, and unhelpful. Things speed up when Donnie leaves early. When the technicians have finally gone, she drives home. Picks up Colt. Brings him back to her new lab, with its fresh smells of plastic and metal and composite materials.
In the lab, she asks him to take off his clothes, like she’s always done.
‘No,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘I want a robe.’
‘We don’t have a robe, honey.’
‘A sheet, then.’
She searches around. In the empty IT department, she finds a dust sheet, covering up some unplugged, out-of-date equipment.
He wears it like a Roman toga.
Lies on the flatbed.
Naomi secures his head with the soft restraints, as he murmurs numbers to himself.
‘You’ll have to stop speaking once the scan begins.’
‘I know, Mama.’
‘Not even subvocalize. No tapping, you have to be . . .’
‘I know, Mama.’
‘. . . Still.’
As the machine runs, he is totally still.
Like Christ in his winding sheet, she thinks.
She looks at the scans for a very long time.
Lets them cycle through the full depth of the 3D scan once, twice.
‘Mama?’
Three times.
‘Mama, can I put my clothes back on? . . . Mama?’
There’s something wrong. There’s something very wrong.
53
You.
You’re part of a system.
Part of a family, a society, an ecosystem, an economy.
That’s how the universe is organized at your level, the level you understand. The level of football teams, literature, summer holidays, sex.
Go one level down, and it’s all about the organs, the veins, the arteries, the nerves passing their messages, the perpetual wave of air and water and nutrition and excretion passing through the system.
That’s how the universe is organized at that level.
Another level down, and it’s all about the cells and the bacteria. The enzymes mass-producing the proteins that make everything happen. The mitochondria powering your cells. The viruses transferring DNA between species.
That’s how the universe is organized at that level.
Go one level up from you . . . Well, I’m how the universe is organized one level up from you. I’m your local System of Systems. From your point of view, I work in broad strokes. I don’t micromanage every tree, every cloud, every human being. Just as you don’t micromanage every muscle fibre, glucose molecule, red blood cell in your body. You just send the order, and your hand picks up the cup of coffee, or scratches your ear, or writes ‘E=MC²’.
That’s how the universe works, at every level. The high-level command goes out, and the system below that level does the job, without even realizing there’s been a command. Messily, with lots of failures at this lower level. When you issue the order to pick up the cup of coffee, there are always neurons that don’t fire. Muscle fibres that don’t get enough glucose in time, and fail to contract. Red blood cells that get jammed in some capillary and never deliver the oxygen. Failure at the level of the individual cell is assumed. But the sheer number of neurons, of muscle fibres, of red blood cells thrown at the problem smooths out the individual failures and delivers the required result. Put a signal through enough redundant analogue processors, and you get a digital output.
From my point of view, one level up, the guy writing this is a specialist cell. One of many. A conduit. For stories. The rest of his life has dropped away; he’s a storytelling machine in a room. He might as well be a brain in a jar. He might as well not have a body.
But if he’s just the wire the stories come down . . . where are the stories coming from? And why do they come?
They’re coming from me. Your friendly local System of Systems. They’re coming from one level up. I’m about to move, and some cells are starting to twitch. Like a brain commanding muscle fibres. He’s one.
A lot of writers don’t know why they write what they write. Those are mine. ‘It’s in the air,’ they’ll say. ‘It’s . . . the Zeitgeist.’ The spirit of the time.
I’m the spirit of the time. The Zeitgeist. Th
e muse. Making them twitch. Speaking through them.
A story is just a program. Instructions. Preparing you for the big change.
The guy writing this is a little early, that’s all. Like a butterfly waking in winter.
54
‘My work with MFO (mixed-function oxidase) helped me to see that each of us is an exceptionally dynamic system, one that changes every nanosecond of our lives with incredible rapidity and order in a symphony extraordinaire.’
— Colin T. Wilson, Whole
That region . . . It shouldn’t be that size . . . There are too many connections . . .
Staring at the scan, she convulses as she realizes what these changes must mean.
‘Colt,’ she says. ‘What have you done?’
It’s incredibly hard to get the information out of him. She feels like an interrogator as she quizzes him, so weak and helpless in his sheet. But she has to know.
And eventually he cracks.
‘I wanted to, to, to . . . I don’t, I don’t like . . . I hate not understanding people, Mama. And it’s a problem in the corpus callosum, right? Mine just isn’t . . . big enough. I thought if I could just . . . upgrade it, I could understand people better. I’ve been working on it all year.’
‘But . . . why?’
Colt sits up. Swings his legs off the bed. Stands shakily. The words pour out.
‘I thought I could talk to, to, you know . . . people. I could get what they were really saying. I wouldn’t be so anxious all the time, trying to understand. Process the information faster, not get . . . overwhelmed. I could talk to . . . to . . . to . . . women, Mama.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I built an imaginal disc, Mama. To rebuild my corpus callosum.’
‘But . . . how did you place it?’
‘I set the robodoc, Mama. It was a simple injection.’
‘Simple! Sorry, I’m sorry . . . but where did you think a larger corpus callosum was going to fit?’
‘There’s a lot of fluid around the brain. There’s room for expansion.’
‘Oh, Colt. It’s just not as simple as that.’ He must have left out the boundary definition genes. The new growth is happening all over his brain. And there are some weird hormonal interactions.
‘Show me what you built,’ she says.
Reluctantly, he shows her the blueprints for his imaginal disc.