After Mind (6 page)

“I’m sorry. I’m so late. Can you still squeeze him in?” Daniel asked.

“His name?”

“Last name, Madden. We had to stop at a vendor’s. I couldn’t get out of work.”

“Madden . . . Kassini?” the receptionist asked.

“Yes. It’s Cessini. With a C.”

Cessini lifted his head from resting on Daniel’s shoulder. A young girl was playing with toys on the floor of the waiting area. “Go over there,” Cessini said. He pointed.

“He’s just here for the booster?” the receptionist asked.

“Yes,” Daniel said as he spun around for his own look. A woman was waiting and the girl was on the floor.

“I think we can manage. Have a seat. I’ll call you,” the receptionist said.

“Thank you,” Daniel said. He walked to the waiting area. Its chairs were aligned in a half-square. Daniel settled Cessini down on a chair, but he shuffled forward and slid down onto the carpet. The girl on the floor stared at his every move.

“She must be around two?” Daniel asked the woman who was sitting on one of the wooden chairs.

“Just had her third birthday. August sixteenth.”

“That puts them about nine months apart. Cessini will be four at the end of November.”

“Is he before or after Thanksgiving?”

“Put it this way: I’m figuring on dishing out leftover turkey with every slice of cake.”

“You’re lucky.” She laughed. “We’ll be the queens of summer splash parties and August mosquitoes.”

Daniel let out a deep breath to relax. He handed the tablet case to Cessini on the floor. Cessini took it and then Daniel went right back to the woman. “I’m Daniel,” he said. “And this is Cessini.”

“Robin,” the woman said. She held out her hand. “It’s nice to meet you. And this here, crawling fearlessly on every dirty floor she can find, is Meg.”

Cessini zipped open his tablet’s case in the center of the carpeted square. He slipped out a thick, polished digital tablet. He unfurled its eight finger-tab wings from its backside, fanning four out to either side. Meg chewed her knuckles as she watched. Cessini looked at her once, but otherwise ignored her.

“Nine months is a big difference at this age,” Robin said. She reached for a communal basket of toys and offered a random one to Meg. It had only lights and recorded beeps, no imagination. Meg tossed it, and then crawled into Cessini’s carpet square with more fingers in her mouth. She watched as he fingered the wing-like tabs of his tablet until he swatted her away.

“My turn,” she said.

“No. It’s mine. I’m using it.”

“Mommy. He won’t let me play with—”

“Come on,” Daniel said. “Give her a turn.”

“She never much went for the spinning, mirror toy thingies anyway,” Robin said, and then she threw the toy back in the basket. “Probably give kids identity issues right from the start.”

Cessini looked at Robin. She talked a lot, he thought.

“I take it no daycare?” Robin asked.

“He goes. But I usually take him everywhere with me. Even to work. Especially on days like today.”

Cessini hunched over his crossed legs and protected his tablet. He curled four fingers under the feathered tabs of each side and he wiggled away. He clicked up as if on their natural notes, playing like the keys of a piano. His thumbs clacked the ruffled black keys as sharps and flats aligned on the front sides of the screen. The black skin at the top and bottom was doodled with fluorescent art.

Meg’s eyes got wider. She rubbed her palms back and forth over the wrinkles of her pants. She was ready to lunge for a grab.

Cessini scooted away. There were no sounds from his tablet other than the clacking of keys. He aligned and grouped red liquid-like dots on the screen. Each dot carried a numeral inside.

“That’s not being nice,” Daniel said. “Let her play.”

His fingers clicked away as if to music only he could hear. He combined two smaller dot groups to form a larger cloud. He pulled teardrops of rain down from the cloud into a bucket on the ground before a numbered group evaporated back up, putting the screen in balance. His fingers played, his smile intensified, and then with a twist of the screen he was done. He turned the tablet around for Meg and Robin to see all the numbered red dots balanced within a churning blue sky.

Robin leaned over. “That’s amazing. He’s really only three?”

“Scary, isn’t it,” Daniel said. “He does it all in his head.”

“What kind of tablet is that? I’ve never seen one with keys sticking out from its sides.”

“The tablet is standard. The keys on its side are mine. I made them, attached and coded them myself.”

Robin held out her hand. “I’m sorry, but I must not have been paying attention. I’m Robin. Did I already say that? It’s nice to meet you.”

“Daniel Madden.” He shook her hand and smiled.

“Like the scientist?”

“Yes, like the ‘madden’ scientist. I get that a lot, but only on the bad days. The rest of the time, you can just call me Daniel.”

Cessini swiped his fingers down the screen and pulled in a new, higher level. A doodled font of hexadecimal notation populated the screen. He turned his back on Meg and began his clicking anew.

Meg pouted. She left the carpet to rummage through Robin’s purse.

“I’m sorry,” Robin said, “but I couldn’t help overhearing when you were at the counter. I’m not in such a rush. She’s just here for the spray, too. If you need to, you can go first, or maybe the nurse can do them together?”

“That would be great,” Daniel said.

Meg grabbed Robin’s small suede case from her purse and crossed back over the square to Daniel. She handed the tan case up to him.

“No, thank you,” Daniel said. “Do you like what he’s playing with on the floor?”

Meg didn’t answer with words but climbed on the empty chair beside Daniel. She pulled and uncurled Robin’s ScrollFlex from its case.

“Do I have a choice?” Daniel looked up, asking Robin.

“No, it’s okay. Go ahead. She misses that.”

“Misses what?”

“Reading with someone other than me.”

“I hear you,” Daniel said. He took the ScrollFlex from Meg.

Robin got up with her palm pressing her forehead. “I’m sorry, I was just—I’ll go see what’s holding them up, and if they can take us together.”

“Sure,” Daniel said. Meg scooted in closer at the arm of his chair. He tapped through letters on her fancier, semitransparent ScrollFlex screen. Images appeared. He touched a portrait of Giovanni Cassini, a man regaled in semi-profile glance and pre-Newtonian powdered locks.

Daniel held up the screen for Meg to see, but Cessini could see straight through it. Daniel framed the man’s picture so that Cessini was superimposed with it on the floor. Meg giggled. “Giovanni Cassini,” Daniel said. Cessini looked funny with overlaid waves of white hair. “This man here is Cassini, with a ‘Ka’, not ‘C’ like my Cessini there on the floor. ‘Cee’—Cessini.” Daniel winked and Meg ate it up.

“Ceeme,” she said and pointed at him past the screen.

“Okay. Ceeme. Close enough.”

“Keep reading,” she said, grinning. Her short bangs were just falling in.

“The astronomer Cassini discovered the rings of Saturn and calculated the size of the solar system. It was his collected data that led to the calculation of the speed of light.”

“I like his hair,” she said.

Cessini listened from the floor.

“That is true. I guess he does have nice powdered hair. How about something more age appropriate, what do you say?”

“Okay.” She scooted back in the chair and pulled her knees up to her chest. She smiled.

“That’s what I thought.” Daniel touched through more letters, grinning and wiggling his eyebrows. He enlarged an image with a sepia timeline and read one of its points aloud. “The original Turing test consisted of two simple text conversations with a human judge. If the judge couldn’t tell the difference between a human’s text conversation and a computer’s, then the computer passed.”

Daniel looked at Meg. She kicked out her feet and sat back up straight. She giggled. Cessini looked up.

“The enhanced test added images and sound so it would be harder to pass.” Daniel lowered the screen. “Can you keep a secret?” he asked and Meg nodded. “I’m creating the Enhanced Inversion Test to go even further.” He winked.

She pulled her knees back up to her chest. She giggled.

“In my inversion test, the computer is the test-taker and judge and it has to determine for itself if it’s a computer or a human. An epistemology coding turned in on itself. Descartes’: ‘I think, therefore I am.’”

“Why?” She smiled and kicked out her legs to sit up straight when he looked.

“You want to know the trick? I designed the Inversion test so the taker would fail the first time. But if that very same taker comes back with a passion, a hope, a genuine force of feeling, then it won’t simply be an emotionless computer. It will have passed the test. And in my book, it’ll be a human computer.”

“Why?” she asked again, about to draw in her legs once more with her giggle.

Daniel held up a finger in front of her big eyes. She paused. “Because . . .” he said and Cessini looked up. But then Daniel dropped his finger and hand in defeat. “I don’t know. I don’t even know if the logic is correct. I asked myself what it even means to be a computer or a human, and that’s what I got—a test that’s designed to be failed. The first time.”

Robin looked back at their square from the reception desk. The receptionist peered around her, then back up, said something, and nodded.

“But I don’t know,” Daniel said to Meg. “And the last three years have been so hard for him. And I never thought it would take so much out of me. You know what I mean?”

Meg shrugged, then added with her own great declaration, “When you go to work, you need to bring a grapefruit.”

Daniel looked at her. He considered it. “For lunch?”

“Yes.” She giggled. “A really big, juicy one, too.”

“Okay. I guess that’s a little more age appropriate, right?” Daniel said.

“When I was a little, little baby,” she said, pinching her pointer fingers and thumbs together and then down to teensy-weensy in front of her nose, “I ate four grapefruits.”

“You did, did you?” Daniel asked. He grinned. “Whole grapefruits?”

Meg shrugged. “I dunno. Cuties, maybe?”

Robin swooped in for a rescue. She held out a hand for Meg to follow her and Meg jumped down off the chair. “I’m so sorry. I’ll take her now.”

“Why?” Daniel asked. He handed Robin’s ScrollFlex back up to her. “She asks such good questions.”

The receptionist looked up from her desk. “Cessini? Meg?”

Daniel stood up, reached down over Cessini, and snapped shut the feathered tabs of his handmade digital tablet. Daniel scooped him back up into his arms, and Cessini wailed, “Mine!”

Within moments, Cessini was clacking away again on another tile floor. His feet were outstretched on the tiles in front of a black, cushioned bed table.

Meg bounced on Robin’s lap as Robin sat on one of two chairs by a nurse’s empty desk. Colored cutout posters of healthy inside kid-parts hung crooked with tacks on the walls. Daniel leaned back against the sink with its countertop jars of packets, depressors, and swabs.

“Is she getting her spray for a preschool around here?” Daniel asked.

“Silver Springs,” Robin said as Meg climbed back down to the floor.

“Us, too,” Daniel said.

“What are you teaching him with all his clicking?” Robin asked.

Meg sat at Cessini’s side and stretched her legs out to copy.

Cessini looked up for approval and Daniel nodded. “Look,” Cessini said as he flipped his screen around and back again so fast that no one could see it. “Hexadecimal.”

“No, seriously. What?” Robin said. She sat up straighter to see.

Cessini clicked the tablet’s keys. Graphical wheels of numbers and letters filled a four-space hangman’s row. The first wheel over the left space had numerals one through nine. He settled on the numeral two. He spun the adjoining wheels and replaced a twelve with the letter “C” and a fourteen with an “E.”

He pressed both thumbs on the black keys at the side and locked in his wheels in the screen. He smiled and nodded when done. He enlarged his completed four-spaces into the center of the screen and held it around. “2CEE.”

“I get it,” Robin said. She sat back. “To see. That’s cute.”

“That’s us. Me and Meg,” he said, then held his tablet’s screen higher.

“How is that you and Meg?” Robin asked.

“Plus them,” he said. “2,C,E,E.” He told her without looking back at his screen: “2+C+E+E. That makes 2, plus 12 for C, plus 14 for E, and plus another 14 for E. Plus up all the numbers. 2 plus 1 plus 2 plus 1 plus 4 plus 1 plus 4. That equals 15. Fifteen is 1 plus 5. That equals 6. Six is two of three. The two of us, her and me, are three.”

Robin collapsed in her chair, astounded. She looked across and found Daniel’s nonchalance, his arms folded loose at his chest. “How? How could he—?” she asked.

“I just taught him the tools. The rest he does in his head.”

Cessini turned his screen back around and cleared it.

“That was excellent, Cessini. I liked it,” Daniel said.

“In his head?” Robin asked, shaking hers in disbelief.

Meg’s drool ran down her knuckles.

“Don’t worry, he makes mistakes,” Daniel said. “He’s almost four now, yes, but he’ll make plenty more mistakes before he’s older, too. But that’s fine. We all do. Isn’t that right, Cessini?”

Meg grabbed the tablet at her first open chance. He held like a bear. “It’s my turn, Ceeme! It’s my turn.”

Cessini yanked harder and with a young mind’s instant flip of a switch, he was a toddler once more, a screaming three-year-old no more precocious than raw. “No! It’s mine. I’m not done,” he said.

She fought. Her screams were shriller than his. “Mommy! Ceeme won’t let go,” she said as the tablet’s feathered tabs bent upward toward breaking.

Daniel swept down and broke away both their grasps. “Stop, don’t pull. You’ll break it.” He jerked it up high to above his shoulder. He stood out of both their reaches.

Robin snatched Meg back up to her lap. “I’m so sorry,” she said beneath Meg’s ear-splitting cry.