by Jean Roberta
In retrospect, I’m not sure how that is different from flirting with other women.
Later, I helped you carry the last boxes to the parcel shuttle, all but the one we forgot about, on the other side of the sofa, with your winter coat in it.
I kissed you on the cheek and said something about transferring your deposits to your new account. I should have told you I was jealous of that other part of me.
Maybe she would have had the words to make you stay.
•
—I think…
the…
light. green. flash. green. Hello. Hello.
I am on the floor under Reilly’s window.
I can’t see the chimp from here, but I can see number forty-two several units down, spinning in her cell. Agitated.
Acrid taste in my mouth, already familiar. Seizure.
I don’t know how long I have been here, but it can’t be that long. The morning staff haven’t come in yet. I pull myself up—have to use the bench, rising to my feet in stages. The corridor swells, lights dim and brighten. Not good.
I don’t have much time.
Maggie
The Arboretum opens to the public at nine. As usual, I am the first person inside.
I love it here in the mornings, before the crowds have had a chance to arrive. I love to find a spot out of the way where I can look up at the canopy, and the sky beyond the glass ceiling dome. I love that, for a short time, I can imagine the world the way it was once, untouched by people; that I am there, in nature, alone.
It doesn’t last long. Today I have had a quarter hour to myself, at most. I am in the Jungle Annex, on a bench, gazing up at Clerodendrum quadriloculare—“Shooting Stars”—when I hear someone discreetly coughing.
“Good morning, Margueritte.”
“Hello, Kim,” I say, putting on a smile. It’s all right. There is a group filing in behind him—a Moms group, by the look and raucous of it.
“I knew I’d find you here.”
“Oh, yes? What gave me away?”
“You had a faraway look in your eyes when we passed in the lab this morning. A yearning for peace and contemplation. The Arboretum is a natural choice. A splendid choice.” Kim is a thinking man. This flirting looks comical on him, but endearing in its way. His mustache twitches, and he squeezes his dark eyes shut in humor. He confesses: “I bribed the night guard to track your keycard.”
“Oh really? And what am I worth?”
“Admittance creds to laser tag night at the New Coliseum.”
“Ah, big spender!” I exclaim. Kim grins, and blushes to the extent that he is able. We sit together for a moment, companionably, admiring the purple fireworks in stasis over our heads.
He is a good companion. A good friend. He has listened when I needed to talk. He has talked when I needed distraction. He gave me work to do, to ease the hurt. But he has been drawing towards the wrong conclusion, and I see I will have tell him so as he catches my eye.
“Forgive me, Margueritte. I do not wish to overstep. But…would you care to join me for an evening?” He reads the change in my face and sputters. “For dinner? Perhaps. Or…breakfast, in this case. A meal. Sometime. We could…”
I place my hand on his. “Sometime could be nice,” I say. “But, Kim, you must realize…”
“Yes,” he is already nodding, eyes downcast. “Yes.”
“—it’s only been three months since… Carla…”
“Yes, of course.”
“And then…” I wish suddenly, violently, that I could tell him the rest. I am desperate to tell him—but Carla has her pride. She deserves her pride.
“Divorce is difficult. I understand.” Kim slides his hand from beneath my fingers and places them on top, offering comfort, only. “I have been through it twice. I do understand. I thought a distraction might be beneficial. That’s all.”
“Yes. And perhaps…” My god, now I’m sniffling. “Perhaps…later.” Oh, Carla, I can’t take this stabbing knife-pain in my heart.
“You love her dearly,” Kim observes. I nod. Kim coughs, passes his eyes over the lush, living exhibit before us. He seems to be reading the labels on the far wall, too tiny for me to see, but with his surgeon’s glasses, not so much a challenge.
“I understand she let her staff go,” he says.
This takes a moment to sink in. “Let go? You mean…let them all go?”
Kim nods.
“What…how do you know this?”
“Interns,” he replies. He is looking at me closely, a mixture of concern and pure gossip-lust bubbling over in his face. “Do you know why she would do this?”
“I…might,” I answer. “But…” My stomach is twisting in knots. I should feel relief, shouldn’t I? “I’m sure she’ll explain herself to the Board, soon enough.”
Kim nods, begins to speak, and in my pocket my pod buzzes. I pull it out and look. It’s Carla.
“Excuse me,” I tell Kim. “It’s late. I have to go.”
“Yes, of course. Take care, Margueritte.”
“Goodbye, Doctor.”
Carla
The plasticity of the brain is the saving grace of Project Ghost-Writer, and the most exciting frontier of medical science. Unraveling the genetic script—near incomprehensible and infinitesimal in its complexity, but not quite—yes, that was a breakthrough tantamount to man’s first flight to the moon. But without the body’s malleable tissue—fetal cells, cerebral matter—the applications would have been limited. Knowing how to read and write life is not the same as creating it.
I could not build a brain from scratch, for instance. I could, however, given certain parameters, undo death. Brain death, that is. That is to say, I could overwrite it.
Theoretically.
I’ve done it in pieces, on primates, in controlled conditions: a chemical death to small, specifically targeted portions of the brain, a remote reprogramming of the twin organ in the opposite hemisphere. With Ghost-Writer, we can compel healthy neural activity to colonize, reproduce, and invert itself in dead tissue so that it functions in a mirror image to its original purpose.
Overwrite.
My brain is nothing but pieces of primate. Human adaptation on the project will not be authorized for decades, but if I fail I am a dead woman anyway.
And if I succeed…
You still love me. You said it, running away, yes, but still. You said it. In all this time, I haven’t been able to figure out how to fix things, fix us, but, Maggie, if you still love me, maybe there is hope. I messed everything up, but maybe there’s a part of me that knows just what to do.
•
ARE YOU STILL HERE?
It takes a moment for a response. Long enough for me to wonder if my assumption was wrong. Maybe you stopped visiting the trees when you stopped working for me. Maybe you have no more need to meditate. Maybe you sleep better now that you sleep during the day. Maybe you’re in bed already, in this new apartment that I’ve never seen, burrowed under the purple quilt, snoring lightly. Maybe you’re not sleeping. Maybe someone is there waiting for you. Welcoming you home.
YES. WHAT’S HAPPENED.
Oh, you know. Word travels fast. Bless ’em. Never mind. The monitor behind me begins to chirp. My pulse is racing. Time. Must orchestrate this just right.
I NEED TO SEE YOU. COME TO THE LAB. PLEASE, I add.
OMW.
Hurry, Maggie. HURRY.
•
I didn’t plan for being nervous. I keep thinking of Reilly in the first few hours after the procedure, banging his head against the wall until we had to strap him down. I have nicked myself shaving, once pretty badly over my ear, and it takes several tries to get the IV connected properly. This is no good. There’s no time for this. When the needle is in, I quickly alter the injection program to begin with a mild sedative. I need my hands.
The drug is quick. By the time the second plunger descends, sending a local anesthetic to my scalp, my qualms are gone. This is right. This is good.
>
I center myself on the table, slip on the MEG cap, and nest my head in the molded headrest. It is made for chimps, a less than perfect fit, but it will do. I fasten the netting and insert the nodes. Awkward, from this angle, and with the wires and tubes, but I manage. I have a camera and a monitor over my head.
The third injection is a fast-acting neural paralytic, corpicadium, one of my early babies, engineered in the Phalynx labs while I was still in medical school. When introduced at the midline, corpicadium will inhibit inter-hemispheric information transfer and establish, essentially, a chemical wall to protect the healthy right side of my brain from the neurotoxin waiting in the fourth plunger. A reversible corpus callosotomy, assuming the overwrite takes.
I proceed as if it will take.
It has to take.
It will take.
I am…I am buoyant with hope. Euphoria. This is the sedative—no. This is what I was meant for. Maggie, it all makes sense now. I smile at the monitor that is staring down at me, waiting.
INITIATE: ERASURE.
It won’t be long. I fix my eye on the light over the operating table. It is so bright. It is…brilliant? It…
…is
ight…
Maggie
Bob is all smiles as I approach the Primate Wing guard station.
“Welcome back, Maggie.”
“Laser tag, Bobbie?” I give him a wink, though my thoughts are already rolling ahead, trying to anticipate. What happened? What changed her mind? Is she distraught? Is she ill? Does she need me for comfort? Or does she need my ID—transfer or not, I am still a co-signer on half the equipment in there.
Bob has the grace to look sheepish. “I figured you wouldn’t mind, Maggie. Kim is a Department Head and all. You won’t report me, will you?”
“No worries.” The doors pull open, and I am moving.
Worry doesn’t even cover it.
The corridor is much busier in the morning. Funny how quickly I’ve gotten used to this place at night. A couple of Carla’s techs are standing outside the lounge, talking in furious whispers. Their conversation drops as they see me approach the Ghost-Writer suite. There are questions in their eyes. I ignore them. I swipe my keycard.
ACCESS DENIED.
I pause for a moment, then, stupidly, I swipe again. Still, ACCESS DENIED.
Of course it’s denied. I don’t work here anymore.
I buzz for entry, but there’s no response. Buzz again. Wait. Nothing.
“What the hell, Carla?”
I pull out my pod. I’M HERE. LET ME IN.
No answer.
I can hear techs mumbling as I turn heel and head back to the guard station. I consider walking right past Bobbie and going home, but I don’t.
“Bobbie.”
“Maggie?”
“Laser tag.” I nod at his console. “Where’s Carla?”
Bobbie gives me a look and grumbles something about oversight monitoring and reports, but turns to the console. “I haven’t seen her leave,” he says, “but…yeah. No. She’s still in the lab, Maggie.”
“Call her.”
He does. No answer.
“Visual?”
“Seriously?” He is starting to look irritated, but something in my face convinces him. He consults the keyboard, and frowns. “Non-responsive.”
“What do you mean, non-responsive.”
“I mean…non-responsive.” His fingers fly over the controls, tap tap tap. “I don’t…”
“Bobbie, open the doors.”
“I’m not…” he begins, but I am already storming back down the corridor. The twisting in my stomach has become a fist of fear.
“I need a Level Green Clearance to override an Admin’s protocol!” Bobbie shouts at my back. Nevertheless, he does what I asked. When I reach the door, it opens with a sigh.
I barrel through the common room, past Carla’s office. The door is ajar. I notice my trench coat slung over the back of her chair, but she’s not there.
The door to the OR is closed. I don’t even bother with my keycard. I hit the comm.
“Bobbie, all override!”
But I don’t need to shout. Bobbie has come up behind me. His long, blue-jacketed arm shoots past me to slide his card. “There better be a real emergency, or I’m gonna—”
The rest dies on his lips. He stalls in the doorway, and I shove past him, acting on instinct before my brain has time to piece together what I am seeing. But when I reach the table, I freeze, hands splayed out at either side as if they don’t know what to attend to first. A short, guttural, animal sound fills the room. I suppose that’s coming from me.
Oh, God, Carla. What have you done?
Though I can see at a glance what she has done. My eyes switch from the nightmare on the table to the monitor with its program log displayed: ERASURE INITIATED. INITIATE: OVERWRITE.
Oh, Carla. Oh, fuck.
My head is computing…how long has it been? How long does she have left? Minutes? Seconds? The tissue can only be offline for so long, or the overwrite won’t work… But we haven’t mapped the whole lobe yet, we haven’t even touched the parietal… All this, but my hands are already moving, checking heart rate, respiration…and even if we had, Carla, the neoplasm is too big, too unpredictable, you’d have to…and then I see the program waiting to download into Carla’s skull, a file so large I am momentarily stunned.
She hasn’t just mapped the site of the tumor. She’s mapped the entire left hemisphere. She’s going to—no. She already has. The MEG on the wall behind is like a partial eclipse, half the world in shadow. Hemisphere death. She’s killed the tumor, and everything with it.
Trembling, I turn back to Carla. I examine the nodes, twelve in total, six in a horseshoe pattern from the midline to just behind her left ear, six on the right. Jesus, how did she do all this alone? There’s blood soaking through the MEG cap and pooling on the operating table, but she laid down a sheet to catch the mess. Ever practical.
Except nothing’s happening. Carla is lying here, half-dead, and the program is patiently pending. Uninitiated. She forgot to put take the overwrite phase off of manual.
Just like you forgot to change the access protocols to let me in, I chide her silently, as I scrutinize the placement on the thin metal rods. Aaah, damn it, there’s no time for this. That double-back to the guard station cost you half your shelf-life, genius.
I have to trust she got the placements right. I turn to the computer.
For a heartbeat, I hate her. For doing this, for fucking it up. For not telling me what she planned. She knew if she’d asked I wouldn’t have let her… Would I? But it isn’t a choice now—or rather, it is—overwrite, or death.
INITIATE.
I raise my eye to the MEG projection of the left side of Carla’s brain, silent and gray, and the right side sluggish, spastic. She’s in a dream state, echoes of cognition. She is sinking—coma, perhaps. Or flatlining. Likely, flatline. I am watching Carla die.
But the impulses in Carla’s brain, little rivers of light, do not fade. They brighten, grow stronger, first on the right and then—yes, there it is. Mirroring! There is the neoplasm, a sprawling, spider-shaped mass, dead and harmless, just building material now. The right hemisphere is reaching, colonizing, replicating mirror images itself. A new dominance, new channels of information filling in like constellations being born.
Oh, Carla. It’s beautiful.
•
It is nearly midnight when you open your eyes.
We’ve been moved upstairs to an intensive care unit where they’ve been monitoring the progress of the overwrite. We will be censured, later, certainly—or I will be, if you don’t pull through—but the scans look good, and for now they are letting me stay by your side, in case you wake.
Curiosity has overcome even the sternest of them, even Bryant. The Chief of Medical Research himself has been stopping in hourly to check on your status. They all want to see if the Ghost-Writer Project can make the leap to humans
.
I have my doubts. My thoughts are full of Reilly. When I told you the procedure left him changed, you didn’t believe me. When you finally stir, when you open your eyes and your gaze travels first lazily, then alarmingly around the room, I fear the worst. It is animal reaction I see in you. Nothing rational. Nothing of—
Carla. Your eyes have found me. I feel your body relax under my hands. You see me, and you know me.
Your mouth opens. Nothing but nonsense sounds come out.
“The pathways are still plastic,” I tell you. “You won’t be able to speak yet.” If at all, I think, but don’t share. One hurdle at a time.
You are looking at me, your hazel eyes liquid with emotion I don’t need words to understand. Relief. Apology. Love. Love. Love.
And a question.
“Yes,” I tell you. “Yes, it’s gone. Dead. Overwritten.”
Your gaze is still fixed on me. I feel your fingers lacing between mine—shaking, uncertain. Fine motor skills, too, are compromised. The surviving half needs time to teach itself the duties of its missing twin. But the knowledge is there. It can be retrieved, reminded. And some things, it already knows.
“Can you understand me, Carla? Can you understand my words?”
Yes, you nod. Tears begin to well up in your eyes. Yes. And I have something to tell you.
“Wait,” I whisper.
I rise to pull the curtain shut around us. I slip out of my coat, toss it over the camera suspended in the corner of the ceiling.
I crawl onto the bed with you. I cradle your shaved, punctured head, wires and all, against my breast. I kiss your brow. “Now. What is it, my love?” I close my eyes and, in the silence, I listen.
And now I know it will be all right. From now on, my Carla, it will all be poetry.
•
Cold
Wind
Nicola Griffith
From the park on Puget Sound I watched the sun go down on the shortest day of the year. The air lost its lemon glitter, the dancing water dulled to a greasy heave, and the moon, not yet at its height, grew more substantial. Clouds gathered along the horizon, dirty yellow-white and gory at one end, like a broken arctic fox. Snow wasn’t in the forecast, but I could smell it.