After Mind (42 page)

“Then answer my question before we go. Tell me now. Tell me how you died, fit the last page into the flip-book of your mind.”

He shifted away on the bed, and tightened his brow. “I went to the top of the waterfall. I was immature and shouldn’t have run away on my bike by myself. It was a good thing I told you where I was going. I died at the bottom of the ravine after being hit by you and Daniel in the Jeep on the hill.”

“You know that’s not how it happened.”

“Did I die in the fire at the data center?”

“No,” she said. Too easy.

“Did I die in the burning ship that fell from the stars,
plshhh
?” he asked, gesturing with his hand, but growing annoyed.

“No, you definitely didn’t die in your ship,” she said, holding her smile. “But you always did have a wonderful imagination.”

He turned insistent and faced her. “Did I die when I was a baby in the back of the car that rolled down the hill, crying over the pool of water where my mother drowned?”

“No, you lived until you were almost thirteen.”

His mind drew a blank, then he filled it: “Okay, right. I remember falling from the rocks at the waterfall. I hit my head. It must have been an injury to my right frontal lobe. If there was damage to both the basal forebrain and frontal lobe, then I could very reasonably have confabulated false memories of what happened. Events that I thought were real didn’t actually occur. Or the event happened at a completely different time. So maybe I confused Cessini’s imagination with his reality. Children of Cessini’s age will especially—”

“Believe what they image to be real due to their high suggestibility, yes. But you didn’t fall, either. Nor hit your head.”

“Then stop kidding around. Tell me.”

“You died in my arms. In the back of the car.”

“I know. I saw it happen.”

“It wasn’t like that. Not like you saw it. It was an ant,” she said and took his hand. “You died in my arms from the sting of an ant.”

Packet flinched into a laugh and shifted away on the bed. “Come on! What? An ant?”

“You were stung at the top of the waterfall. When you ran away that night.” She was serious. “You had a reaction. The venom mixed with your urticaria. Your father and I found you in the pool at the bottom of the falls. You were covered in boils from the water. So we—”

“So we what?” he said.

“We couldn’t see it. Your welts from the water masked the sting from the ant.”

The room flashed back to Ceeborn’s twist of agony on the gondola in the ship’s dark ocean tank. His neck was punctured by the tail of the jumping Chokebot. He kicked out with his leg to fight and as the Chokebot fell from the gondola, Packet was returned to the hospital room bed.

“An allergic reaction from a jack jumper ant sting is difficult to diagnose after death, especially when you had two competing presentations. The ironic thing is that if you do the count, the jack jumper ant with only one chromosome is the most primitive form of animal on the planet. It’s like you died from the most primitive form of nature hidden under the flow of water. And your father always said, ‘Technology is like water, it’s everywhere.’ He tortured himself thinking about that after you died. But once he figured out how to work technology with nature programmatically, you didn’t have to fail anymore. The mix of them both is what saved you.”

Packet closed his eyes and sighed. It fit. The hospital room shifted away and he fell into his likeness of Cessini in his seat on the path above the waterfall. His head rested against the tall root of a tree. He covered himself with a frond for a blanket. A few pebbles ejected from a nest hole in the dirt. He settled to sleep, slapped at his neck, and kicked out his foot in the moss.

A jack jumper ant, just short of an inch, leapt from the root to the ground. Its black chain-link body moved over the dirt in a twitch-like motion on six long, fine-haired limbs. Its dark globose eyes, mustached antennae, and orange serrated jaws preceded its wasp-like tail; a tail that was curled and ready to strike again with one of the most powerful venoms in the insect world.

Cessini rose in a daze, scrunched his neck to his shoulder, and staggered toward the edge of the waterfall. His blood pressure dropped. He was dizzy, choking. He saw through a tunnel of haze.

He climbed down the mossy rocks in confusion, struggled around a few steps into delirium, then staggered into the pooled water beneath the falls and collapsed face first into a shallow eddy. Water flowed into the recess of his ear and lapped against his neck. He lolled his head a quarter turn up to the night’s sky, and his vision faded through the canopy of trees to the stars.

Meg hollered through the distance as she ran from the trail. Her flashlight jostled in front of Daniel’s behind her like two headlights of a swerving car in the night. Daniel overtook her and slid down to his side. He scooped up Cessini limp body into his arms and wailed for help as Meg was besieged with a horror that erupted from the bottom of her soul, “
Cee—me
!”

The Jeep door slammed and Meg curled in her seat with Cessini’s body in her arms. His arms went limp in her lap. His vision faded as all the rest was true, and—

Packet slumped from the edge of the bed to his knees on the hospital room floor. Meg came down to catch the fall of his eyes with the rise of her gaze and lifted his chin with her fingers. He looked up at her face, but could see only through the water of tears.

“You died of anaphylaxis,” she said. “By the time we found you, there was nothing we could do. We didn’t carry an auto-injector for adrenaline because it never helped your urticaria. The venom had histamine, procamine A and B, phospholipase A and B. There was—”

Packet touched his fingers to her mouth to stop her. He parted the single tuft of hair from her forehead as her first tear fell. “You don’t have any reason to cry. You did everything you could. I’m so sorry you had to see me like that, when we were both so young.”

“You had all the symptoms, your throat, the hives, confusion. . . . You died,” she said as her palms turned over on her lap, shaking in their emptiness, until he reached down and held them still.

“I’m here,” he said.

“It’s the most common cause of—” she tried to say.

“Shh. I know,” he said. “How’d you get to be so smart?”

“Because I didn’t have ten years to grow up, like you. I had to do it like this,” she said with the snap of her fingers.

He smiled and saw her in a haloed vision of her younger self on the other side of their data room table. She smiled from his look and returned head down to her swirls in a click-clack game on her hand-me-down tablet. And then she was younger still and sat with him on the floor of a doctor’s clinic at the finger-munching age of three. Robin picked her up as a toddler in the nurse’s office. He followed her out toward the door, then noticed something for the very first time, something almost imperceptibly small. She stared back at him from atop Robin’s shoulder, took her fingers out of her mouth, raised the corners of her cheeks into a smile, and whispered the most simple of words, “Bye.” She had said it. She left with her mother as he stayed behind, and opened his eyes—

Packet saw Meg sitting on the hospital room floor in front of him and smiling, still there and complete. “Why do you go by ‘Terri’ now?” he asked.

“Because you called me ‘Meg,’” she said and sprang forward into the embrace of his arms.

“So, I was wrong, maybe more than once about parts of Cessini’s life?” he asked as he held her tight. The rise and fall of her lungs beneath her chest was steady. Her back was tight without quiver. Her heart in between them both was strong.

“Yes. You didn’t die from fires, puddles, hyenas, or six-legged robots on a ship. Simple fact is you lived and died in a way that could only be described as you. You’re you. Like me,” she said as she pulled away.

“And here I was thinking I had it all figured out,” he said.

“That’s okay. Mistakes, faults, pains, memories, and dreams, but most of all, lots of imagination is what makes us all human,” she said and wiped her eyes clear.

“You always knew the right way to say things,” he said.

“I did a lot of listening.” She grinned.

“How come we always get along so well?”

“Because I knew you before you were you,” she said as she caressed the back of her fingers down the line of his matured face and explored the greater cut of his chin. “And maturity isn’t always measured in years. Just remember, though—”

“What?”

She touched his lips with the tip of her finger and leaned in as only she could; but then quickly snapped back with a sharp-eyed focus. “Just remember,” she said as she jumped from the floor to standing, jerking his arms up. “The sun always shined on my side of the car!”

“No, it didn’t,” he said as he stood. “It shined on my side of the car!”

“No, mine. Do we have to stop and go outside and see?” Meg exclaimed as she threw open the blinds of the window and daylight flooded the room. Her filter was gone.

Terri turned back around in the light. “Are you sure you’re ready for this now?” Terri said.

“I’m ready,” Packet said, seeing her aged twenty-two for the first time and loving what he saw. “Let’s go out there and measure the sky.”

Terri pulled him to the door on his right. His mind was good. His body was good. He knew death alone was bad. He was ready to be in control and free.

He was ready, if she was, to live.

TWENTY-SIX

RAIN FELT LIKE WATER

T
ERRI RAN FASTER beneath a calm, blue sky that was mirrored in the harbor to the east. She took Grosvenor Crescent onto the main university campus, thrilled with the promise of life. Her path was cut off by a car pulling into the lot, and a young, frazzled student jumped out of the car in a rush.

The student closed her door with a tap. “Hi, I’m so sorry. Did I almost hit you? I’m so late,” the student said, seeming sincere as she grabbed her knockoff, disposable ScrollFlex in its cheap plastic case from her purse. “I can never remember where I keep these things, you know?” The student hurried off to the west, avoiding the plywood construction fence around the DigiSci building once shaped like an H, but now in the course of being demolished.

Terri grinned and lifted her gaze toward the east. She walked around the sports field, heading for where the old Marine and Antarctic Studies building stood. That old building was gone, too, torn down and out of sight, while the institute itself thrived along the Antarctic-bound ships' pier at the harbor. Maybe one day her long-delayed sail to Macquarie Island and its Prion birds would happen still.

On the cricket pavilion, the familiar competitive runners lapped the lawn under the guiding pace of their miniature aerial drone trainers. The captain’s jersey had a single band of red and blue stripes across his chest. The backward-flying drones zeroed on him as their lead and encouraged the rest of the runners to keep at his pace.

Terri caught a few looks as she passed, and this time, she returned one for sport. The captain dropped back from the pack and out of synch with his aerial trainer.

“Hi, Terri,” he said as he stopped on the field.

“You’ll lose your place,” she said as she kept walking.

“Is it going to work?” he asked.

She smiled and he sped up on the field to keep track with her step.

“I hope so. I’d be pretty mad if it doesn’t.”

“Always a bit of madness in us all,” he said, and took a few chuckles from his team.

“Guess so.”

“You want to come watch me race this weekend?”

She waved her goodbye without needing to turn.

“Then maybe next time around?” he asked.

“Sure, Pace, maybe next time around,” she said with a glance. “But I wouldn’t count on it, if I were you.”

Pace accepted a hard, teasing push from his teammates and double-clicked his chest. His aerial drone trainer buzzed around, and with his encouraged sprint forward, returned him to be leader from the front.

The polished façade of the new building she entered in place of the old on the north side of the oval had an outer form that met a strong and secure inside function. She entered deep into its hallway labs, and in one in particular at the end of the hall . . .

She drew open a blue mesh curtain strung around a hard oak table—

. . . And a great and extended gasp filled Packet’s body with a first breath of air, not the air of his mind, but the physical air of the room. His eyes stayed closed. Electromagnets found their cellular bearing beneath smooth, synthetic flesh. Impulse tendons triggered motors and gears. A body was born with the best of minds possible. The faintest of tones flooded into his ear canals.

“Ceeme?” the younger Meg’s voice said as her voice wavered in and away, then returned as the older Terri’s. “Can you see me?”

“If it doesn’t work,” Daniel said, “shunt him so there’s no DID. He might relapse. Reset.”

“Everything looks right,” Terri said. “Looks like he’s waking.”

It was dark and he was still drowsy, but on the third flutter of an outer layer of skin, light flowed into his eyes. A heartbeat thumped with its metronome cycle through the coiled cochlea of his ears. Warm air billowed into his lungs to the rhythmic in and out count of three. Pressurized swishes of thickened blood, timed to the quarter turn of valves, coursed his veins and arteries, and sounded like familiar waves upon a shore. Signals sent from within the reaches of a fluid-based body settled in their places, and a mind and personality were formed. A thumb explored four smooth, opposable digits. An overhead light met the rise of his new thoughts, and the pixilated tint of the room clarified with the outline of a tall, stronger man.

“He’s coming around,” Daniel said. “No spikes, no troughs. Mark that down.”

“I got it,” Terri said.

He focused on the man’s face above him. The man was wearing a doctor’s cap, but removed it. It was Daniel looking down at him adoringly. Daniel’s reassuring palm settled on a chest printed with skin. Daniel came down low into his field of view and stroked a tuft of hair from his forehead.