Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #211

by TTA Press Authors

  A week later I emailed my dad and told him I would pay to have him reduced.

  * * * *

  I work as a controller, which is one of the most misleading job titles anybody can have. I am the controller. I will use my mind-control powers to control you.

  Like most controllers, I never use my vacation days, so I had plenty in reserve to witness him being whittled down to almost nothing. We went together to the doctor's office to learn more about what, exactly, was involved in the process of reduction. The doctor I found for him—despite how I felt about him, I got him the best in the business—was named Dr Mariel Trebuchet. Hilarious name for a doctor. But maybe anyone's name becomes hilarious when you give a person so much power over yourself.

  She was to see him through the entire procedure, start to finish. The amputations themselves would be fairly straightforward: first the legs, then the arms, then slowly up the torso, up to the neck, and then—well, if everything worked out, his consciousness would migrate into the monstrance and he would achieve the closest thing to immortality we have right now.

  Risks? As with any amputation, infection and gangrene were always a concern, but they would monitor him carefully; and anyway, it wasn't as if the body had to make it very long before it became dispensable. Pain? Only phantom limbs: “Though,” said Dr Trebuchet, becoming appropriately grave, “I shouldn't minimize deafferentation pain. The pain is real—pain and the perception of pain are exactly the same thing—and if mismanaged the pain can be severe enough to jeopardize the entire reduction process. But besides the pain, there is a more philosophical concern: the more limbs we remove, the more ‘phantom-like’ the patient feels. Some patients lose their sense of self the further we go in the process. And that may threaten their ability to migrate."

  The migration itself, however, was by far the most difficult part of the entire process. Everything depended on my father's ability to learn how to keep his consciousness intact—without a body—long enough to move into the hard drive that would house his soul forevermore. There would be months of therapy and computer-assisted modeling that would help to prepare him. And each time he had a limb removed, it would be replaced by a prosthetic equivalent that he would learn to control. Eventually, his entire body would be completely substituted by a full somatum: a neck-down replica of the human body that would keep his head alive until his consciousness migrated. But some people just couldn't get the hang of it, couldn't believe enough in their own existences to insist on their own continuance without a body to anchor them. All that was left for them was to go back to the corporeal world and die from whatever it was they were dying from. The hospital, ever so kind, even had their amputated limbs reattached before they left, so they could go meet their Maker exactly as that Maker had made them.

  But Dr Trebuchet was optimistic that my father would migrate successfully. “He is imaginative, playful, resourceful and quick, without the slightest hint of depression or doubt” she said to us, flipping through the pages of his psychological profile. She looked up at him as she completed her thought: “A near-ideal candidate."

  "Near-ideal?” he said, feigning outrage. “Come on, doc! Where are you going to find a better specimen than this?” He pressed his thumbs to his chest and gave her a game-show-host smile.

  She laughed, put down his file and reached across her desk; he took the hint and took her hands in his. “Mr Fagin, believe me, ‘near-ideal’ is the highest of compliments. The only ‘ideal’ candidates out there, strictly from the perspective of making a successful migrating into a monstrance, are crazy people, psychotics, people already lost inside their own heads."

  "Huh. Lost in his own head? Yeah, that sounds about right.” I had meant it as a joke, but all of the humor and fine feeling in the room, that had been so carefully and professionally cultivated by Dr Trebuchet, died. Convulsingly. Like a housecat snacking on rat poison.

  But then, rather unexpectedly, Dr Trebuchet reached across the desk again, this time to take my hands in hers. “Mr Otero, I can only imagine how difficult this is for you, to see your father in this state, to try and be strong for him while at the same time trying to reconcile what his illness has done to him. He is your father, right? The big, strong man who carried you around on his shoulders and protected you and taught you how to be a man is now in the fight of his life. All I can say is that you are doing a very great thing for him, helping him to live beyond the time his body can allow. And that we have psychologists on-hand to assist you, should you feel the need to talk to someone."

  And, after a calculated pause, she added, “And, of course, you have my card. You should also feel free to call me whenever you'd like."

  The whole time she had been mischaracterizing my relationship with my father, she had been rubbing my ring-finger with her thumb, as if she wanted to be sure I wasn't wearing an invisible wedding band.

  * * * *

  The one thing my father and I could talk about was the procedure. During the last months of his existence as a complete person, we signed a lot of papers and I signed a lot of checks, but, after we had done business and the doctors and nurses and Travis the physician's assistant cleared out of the room, my father's head would sink into his pillow and my chin would sink a little deeper into my palm, and he would look at the ceiling and I would stare at the floor, and nothing would get said.

  He'd try sometimes. Sometimes he'd get as far as saying, “Son, I...” But I would cut him off: “Don't call me that. You don't get to call me that.” And then he'd swallow hard and let his head submerge into his pillow like a depth charge and let himself be engulfed by the oceanic silence I created.

  But the procedure we could talk about. Turning a person into a box that thinks it's a person has to be a little bit interesting, even if you don't happen to like the person being boxed up. There was a lot to learn, a lot of newness to manage. It was interesting.

  For instance, shopping for the monstrance was interesting. My father and I went together. The place we went looked to me like some bizarre mixture of funeral parlor and cigar shop. There was an austere and reverential quality to the decor, with dark cherrywood paneling and religious iconography tastefully placed throughout the showroom—but the fact is that monstrances look quite a lot like high-end humidors. And the manager, in his nine-piece suit and shoes so polished they looked like windows to an alternate universe, seemed to me equally ready to serve as either a mortician or cigar purveyor. You could tell by his teeth he was a smoker.

  I was interested in the technical specifications of monstrances: what sort of processor arrays do they typically include? What sort of storage? Is automatic backup built into the base price? What sort of cooling system comes standard? How many terabytes of storage space are recommended? What VR interface options are available? When the next generation comes out, how easy will it be to upgrade? Is there a money-back guarantee?

  My father left the business end to me. He was shopping based on looks, which, in fairness to him, is a not-insignificant part, it's just not the part I'm good at. That's why they had attractive and lissome sales associates to escort customers like my father around. My father was strolling arm-in-arm through the men's side of the showroom with a college-aged lightning bolt who, judging by the high-end monstrances she kept pointing out to him, must have gotten a cut of the commissions. He, however, was drawn mostly to the symbols that were intricately carved into their facades: heraldic shields and lighthouses and doves and starry nights and sunny days and sailboats and military insignias and putters and caducei and gavels and fishing rods and terrible poetry celebrating fatherhood and Bible verses and crucifixes of every conceivable style.

  They kept returning to a kelly-green monstrance carved with Celtic knots, and every time they went back my father would say, “I'm part Irish, did you know that?"

  If he had said it just once. Or twice. Or three times, or four. But the fifth time he said that, the sales associate replied, “No I didn't,” which she had said every other time. But
that fifth time she turned to me and asked from across the showroom, “Mr Otero, did you know your dad is part Irish?” The stupidity of the question really bothered me: I was his son! How could I not know? But then, of course, the fact was that I hadn't really known. I might have guessed as much from his last name and his sunburn-prone complexion, but that would have been only a guess. And so I lost it. “No, Mr Otero didn't know,” I yelled at them from across the showroom, stunning the poor sales associate into silence. “Mr Otero's mom is Puerto Rican. Her whole side of the family is Puerto Rican. Mr Otero didn't even know he had a dad until a few months ago. And Mr Otero sure as hell doesn't look Irish!"

  My father unlatched his arm from the sales associate's arm and turned away from me, pretending to be suddenly interested in a monstrance that depicted Abraham poised to sacrifice Isaac. The sales associate looked at me like I had just told her that I wanted to see other people.

  I turned back to the manager, who held up a smile in front of his embarrassment. I reached into my jacket—I could feel my heart drumming through my shirt—and produced my wallet. “We'll take the Irish one,” I said to him, sliding a credit card into his hand. “And give us the works. Top of the line."

  "Splendid!” said the manager. And, just like that, everyone felt better: the manager, the sales associate, my dad, even me. Maybe money can't buy happiness, but it sure as hell can buy off unhappiness.

  * * * *

  Travis wasn't straight, and he wasn't gay. He called himself ‘stray'.

  "I hate the term ‘bisexual',” he said to me the first time we drank coffee together in the hospital cafeteria. Upstairs, my father was having his first amputation: the left leg. I had just wished him luck, and left his room feeling like I didn't know who I was anymore. That's when I bumped into Travis, who took one look at my beleaguered face and suggested coffee. And the best thing to do when you don't know yourself anymore is to get to know someone else.

  That's how we got on his theory of sexuality. “'Bisexual’ is the most unsexual-sounding word I've ever heard. And anyway, it's not accurate. I'm not ‘bisexual’ every day. Some days I'm homo, some days I'm het, and some days I'm somewhere in between. Some days I'm nowhere at all. The term ‘bisexual’ is just shorthand for ‘I don't know what the hell you are, so I'm just gonna call you bisexual and hope you don't hit on me.’ I just wish people didn't get so hung up on labels. Every day of my life I'm a different person. My sexuality changes from moment to moment.” He batted his eyelashes and concluded, “I like to ‘stray.’”

  I pushed the sugar caddy toward him and answered, “So really, you're just fickle.” I had known Travis a total of twenty minutes, and already I knew he was the sort of person who would take a joke like that the right way.

  And embellish it: “And perverted. Oh, and very, very promiscuous. I'm bisexual, therefore I will fuck anything.” He sucked a little coffee through his smile. “Good thing I work in a hospital, huh?"

  "They can't cure everything. You be careful out there mister."

  "What are you, my mother?"

  "Hardly."

  "Good. ‘Cause I have an Oedipal complex. Big time."

  I let out a big laugh, but Travis didn't join me for most of it. He was already on to the next thing—he was adding sugar to his coffee a pack at a time, stirring each one in slowly and getting ready to start a much less amusing conversation. “You and your dad. You're not very close, are you?"

  "No. No we're not."

  He looked at me. “Crappy childhood?"

  "Nope. Pretty good childhood, all in all. He just wasn't a part of it."

  "Ah. You met as adults?"

  "Just a few months ago."

  "Ah.” He took a taste of coffee; he had added too much sugar and made a face. “And now, now he's dying, and so he's trying to make up for lost time?"

  "To be honest, I don't really know what he's thinking. We don't talk that much. Or that freely."

  "People,” he said, shaking his head. “They'll break your heart every time. But you got to love something, right?"

  "So they say."

  "No. It's really true. It's the truest thing in life.” He put his coffee aside and folded his hands on the table and looked only at them as he spoke. “Look Mr Otero, your dad's going to tell me stuff. Everyone who goes through this procedure—hell, anyone who's dying—they all tell me things. I'm going to see him several times a day almost every day, from now until he migrates, at every stage of this process. I'll be in the room when he is going through the worst of the pain, and he's going to grit his teeth and talk to me. I'll see him when he's so high on morphine that he'll think I'm you, and he will talk to me. I'm the one who will check on the stumps where his limbs have been severed. I'm going to stick a light in his eyes and a thermometer in his mouth and a stethoscope to his chest. That stethoscope is going to feel cold, but he'll feel the warmth of my hand surrounding it, and he's going to mistake that for intimacy. For love. He won't be able to help it; everyone does. The natural, biological reaction when someone takes care of you is to feel loved. And so he's going to share a lot with me. Maybe everything."

  It was my turn to try my coffee. Bitter. “Why are you telling me this?"

  "Because I need to know if you want me to tell you. Because my ears might be the last to hear the things you need to know about your father."

  "Travis, wouldn't that violate a certain oath that you medical-types take? Doctor-patient confidentiality and all that?"

  "Hey man, I'm no doctor! I'm just a lowly physician's assistant. And anyway, I wouldn't tell you anything until after he had migrated. Once that happens, I can tell you anything I want about him. The laws governing exvisibility are very clear—if you choose to become exvisible, then, by definition, you can't have any more secrets."

  "But see, Travis, that's where I get confused. After the migration, I'm going to bring my dad home and put him on my desk and plug him into the wall-jack and connect my VR interface to him, and then I will proceed to read him like a goddamn book. And I'm pretty sure he's going to make for a very boring read. But whether or not it's entertaining, the fact is that I am going to have complete access to his mind. Complete. I mean, that's exactly what exvisibility is, right? It'll be like reading the source code of what makes my father tick. No more head games, no more hiding behind language, no more debating what the definition of ‘is’ is—just a perfectly transparent consciousness that is no longer capable of deception or camouflage. I'll get to know my father better than I ever could by talking to him, or by hearing stories about him: no disrespect to you. I mean, if that isn't what exvisibility is, then I've just wasted a lot of money on this procedure, haven't I?"

  Travis was a good listener; he smiled and nodded and encouraged me to go on as I gave my little speech. But when I finished, he looked demurely at his thumbs again and asked, “So you think you'll just ‘read’ your dad and know the truth?"

  "Isn't that how it works?"

  "Kind of. But mostly no. See, Mr Otero, you're not going to get the truth, you're going to get a truth. His truth. His side of the story. You get the chance to walk a mile in your father's moccasins—which is pretty incredible, don't get me wrong. But it's not exactly truth. He's just exvisible; he's not omniscient. If we reduced God and made Him exvisible, well, then maybe you would get the truth. But with mere mortals, all you get is a point of view."

  I answered Travis as if I had known him since college, as if he'd already heard me say so many stupid things while we'd been high together that what came next couldn't change our years-long friendship: “But if you don't believe in truth, Travis, if you just believe that life is just a series of competing points of view, and if you don't believe in God—because, my God, how could anyone believe in God anymore?—then exvisibility is the closest thing to truth you're going to get, right?"

  "No. It's not. That's what I'm trying to tell you. It's a good start, but it's not the whole story."

  "So you're saying that what you hear in hospital
rooms, when people are out of their minds with pain and grief and fear, that's the truth then?"

  "No. We never get the whole story, Mr Otero. But what you'll get is a different point of view. See, once he's reduced, his whole existence depends on just how narcissistic and self-centered he can be. The only way you can hold yourself together without a body is by being an unadulterated egomaniac. And so you'll be seeing his mind from the inside, true, but a mind modified to survive without a body to ground it. But see, right now, while he still has a body, he can afford to be self-critical. Self-deprecating. Humble. Repentant. And that's what I'm going to hear: all the regret and self-loathing and weakness and insecurity and pleas for forgiveness. That's what I can offer you. But only if you want them."

  I leaned back in my chair; when I did, I was surprised to find I had tears perched on the edge of my eyelids, ready to leap like paratroopers out of my sockets. I ordered them to stand down before I continued. “You know what, Travis? I don't really want to hear him plead for forgiveness. I honestly, really could not care less. What I want ... you're going to think I'm a terrible person for saying this."

  "No I'm not."

  I utterly believed him, but I might have continued even if I didn't. “What I really want is for him to know my story. I want to inject it into him like a vaccination or a disease, I don't know which. And for him to know. Finally. To know what he did, what it meant when he left me before I ever knew him, left me with only the specter of a vanished father to raise me, make me a man. How do I do that, Travis? How do I make myself exvisible to him?"

  Travis gave me the most tender smile I've ever gotten from anyone who wasn't my mother or a lover. “We don't have the technology for that, Mr Otero. Science hasn't gotten that far. You'll have to do that the old fashioned way."

  "And what way is that?"

  "Talk to him."

  * * * *