After Mind Read online

  The lead robot kicked a door open to a rotted hallway. The three entered with him suspended beneath their bodies, marching forward in a slanted line. Their left legs walked on the narrow floor while their right legs angled up onto the rounded wall. The tubular hall was lined with soiled porthole windows.

  Daniel was ahead. He exhaled and opened a door into a darkened cell. Inside, the patrols dropped him in a heap of shivers as the leader maneuvered and shackled him to the floor. Damp moss infested the pitted walls of the cell. Daniel peeled a flake of fleshy decay from the ceiling. The room’s opened wound bled and another ulcer was formed. A slice of flesh dropped to the floor. Its impact was grave.

  “None of us can leave here,” Daniel said, “unless I can fix this problem—or we’ll all be dead soon enough.”

  The lead robot straddled him and lowered its bulbous head to within a breath of his face, close enough to smell the tinge of its burned metallic flesh. He averted his eyes from the robot’s tablet screen, and in the distorted light through the clear dome of its head, he saw Daniel crouching to leave under the frame of the door. Daniel stopped at a porthole window along the corridor’s festered wall.

  Ceeborn lay curled and cold on the floor of his prison. The lead robot’s dome tilted to its shoulder as it reached its piped front leg forward toward his neck. Its sixteen-pronged gripper extended to choke him into a reddened haze—and away and awake from this horrid, but oddly irresistible, wet world. He opened his eyes in a bed.

  Cessini found his nights a prison cell fraught with horror, but the wetness of its walls soothed his lungs and healed the cracks of his drying skin for the moment, at least, in his mind, until waking itself had become his horrible burden to bear. His days began with mornings that burned the worst.

  He woke late, well past seven in the morning. He fluttered his eyelids through a swollen rash. He sat slumped on the edge of his bed and shivered. He rubbed his hands up and down his shoulders. He crossed his arms high on his chest and his fingertips met behind his neck. He squeezed himself a warming hug and twisted to relieve the soreness of a hard-won night.

  When he’d put the first baggie up three years before, it had been quickly noticed and removed. He had put up another, then one more fourteen days later, but neither Daniel nor any of the operations staff at the data center would stand for it. Even Meg had to defer to Daniel’s position. Cessini’s younger daredevil days of ladders and baggies were long over and gone.

  Meg swung into his room with her hand on the frame of his door. She slung her school backpack over her shoulder. “Oh, come on, you’re not even up yet?”

  “Meg,” he asked, “why did you think all of us living here was a really bad idea?”

  “Ugh, I don’t remember. Stop asking me that.”

  “Did your mother ever tell you what happened to your dad?”

  “Yes. He died.”

  “I know. . . But I bet he was a real hero.”

  “Yeah, his name was Michael. And I bet he was, too.” She smiled, then shrugged, as if that was all she wanted to say. She reached across her chest and re-shouldered her backpack. “Why are you asking? Is this about your nightmares?”

  “No. I think you have a secret you’re not telling me.” He released his hands from his neck.

  “Really? Well, then, we’ll talk about me some other time. But not today. And I’m not coming to the building after school. I got invited out with some friends and I’m going.”

  “Wait, no, you can’t. We’re starting Packet’s power cells. I need your help. You’ll miss it.”

  “What do you mean, I can’t? I’m going with my friends and you’re going to miss the bus if you don’t hurry up and get dressed.” She leaned back into the hall, and shouted, “Daniel, he’s going to miss the bus. Again!”

  “Wait, Meg. I need to talk to you.”

  “No. We’ll talk later. And not tomorrow, either. I’m going to the doctor’s. I’ll try to stop by later in the week. We’ll fix your robot’s cells then. How’s that?”

  “Meg,” he said, then he looked at her straight. “I think I’m getting worse.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re the same as you’ve always been.”

  His hands dropped to the bed, palms up, elbows exposed. “I think that’s a mistake.”

  “What, you going to start counting mistakes now, too?”

  “No. But all the little ones add up.”

  “Oh, really? ‘No’? Starting when?”

  “I won’t count. But I know how to fix everything at the office. You should come and see. I’ll fix it up perfect for us both.”

  “Great. I’d like that. Do it,” she said. Daniel popped in for a peek. “He’s all yours,” Meg said as she ran out and down the hall. “Good luck driving. He missed it again.”

  “Oh, come on. Hurry up!” Daniel shouted at him.

  He stared at the empty door and sighed. She was gone. “Starting now.”

  “All right, get dressed and I’ll take you,” Daniel said.

  Cessini rose slowly and dressed himself dry. He hurt like a young warrior grown weary of war. His plan to fix everything at the office was simple. And he would end his war with water later that day after school when he would be back under the sprinkler head, and fix it all for good.

  *

  The 12,000-square-foot office attached to the east side of the data center was old. Its wall insulation was dried out. It had been built fifty years earlier to house a uniform supply center. As the decades passed, wall-to-wall workspaces and cutting-room floors had become offices and labs. The adjoined warehouse was constructed of concrete masonry unit blocks to a clear ceiling height of twenty-three feet. In the old days of the uniform supply center, it had stored tens of thousands of cottons, wools, pantsuits, and dress blues, and circulated them in and out on chained railings and racks.

  The same warehouse space, later reengineered as a data center, circulated trillions upon trillions of data bits per second. If profit margins were measured per bit of material, the data center would lose to the uniform supply. But in absolute dollars, the value of digital bits that flowed through its cables and walls far surpassed the old, needle-to-cloth warehouse.

  Only one part of the old business remained. And it was completely unseen to the eye, but it was everywhere. In the warehouse’s decades-long heyday, the uniform business grew in fits and demanded tighter office cubicles and remodeled floor plans. When one wall was in the way, it was moved. Walls that looked solid and permanent came down with a crew’s easy slice of a reciprocating saw or swift swing of a sledgehammer. When the pipe end of a clothes rack punched through a three-eighths-inch wallboard, then that hole was patched in under an hour if the job was called in. But too often it wasn’t. The dry-waller’s trip cost more than the patch, so holes stayed open until their numbers made the service call worth the expense. Eventually, all businesses decline and the holes and tears became more and the calls became less. The decades’ net result of remodels and shifts was the trapping of all the old bits of lint, fine fibers, and frayed fabric cuttings that wafted, or were brushed, and settled behind white gypsum walls. They stayed behind patches, forgotten.

  Years later, the dried, withered bits of the building’s old business lay piled, covered, and unseen within its framework of new office walls. The bits that should have been counted lay hidden instead, as ready tinder for a new power-hungry tenant’s small probability of fire.

  When viewed from above, the data center was laid out like a firebird-in-waiting, nestled among suburban neighborhood fields. The window eyes of Daniel’s office structure faced east off a body, which was made of three data processing modules. Modules One and Three formed the north and south shoulders, while Module Two was their extended neck in the center. Nine generators trailed as wings and twelve transformer boxes fanned over the lawn as the resting firebird’s embers spread out to the west. Twenty air-conditioning condensers aligned on each of the three Modules’ roofs, cooling the precious data servers that humm
ed away inside.

  In the center of the adjoining second-floor office, seventy-five honeycombed cubicles were aligned for remote disaster recovery. Their virtual seats were seldom filled, only occasionally warmed by techs or traveling business-types. But more often than not, Cessini and Meg had the whole floor to themselves.

  Cessini passed the otherwise staid, gray-paneled work area and entered his southeast corner space, alone. A fourteen-inch blue giraffe lay fallen on the lower shelf of the 3D printer’s cart. Its fourth leg had broken off. Its remaining three left it hobbled. A front leg had snapped back to its one remaining hind, melding them together as an “N.”

  He leaned forward on his stool, eyes fixed on his robotic work, mind taut and calculating. But with each puff of solder smoke, he tilted his head and eyed up through his periphery. The flanged-neck demon of the sprinkler head was un-bagged. It watched and micromanaged his every gesture, and criticized his every touch of iron heat to flux core wire. The pipe’s hooked sprinkler finger could shower acid rain upon him at the whim of the building’s beast. It could spew fire at any moment from its sixteen silvery nails.

  Cessini lay down his glove. He rose from his stool and followed his eyes without fear.

  The sprinkler head taunted him from the end of a one-and-a-half-inch diameter pipe that ran up along the sloped ceiling. It elbowed forty-five degrees at the ceiling’s peak and went through the room’s west side wall into the north-south, second-floor hallway.

  Outside his door, the finger pipe joined into the top left of a “T.” He followed the feeder right until it turned again, elbowing ninety degrees west across the hall. The pipe’s shoulder disappeared through a round fitting above a utility closet door.

  He needed Daniel’s key to enter.

  Daniel was in his first-floor break-it-to-fix-it lab, sitting hand to forehead over his messy desk.

  Cessini barely had to speak to know. “Is it working?”

  Daniel jerked upward and covered his papers. He relaxed when he saw it was Cessini.

  “Not yet,” Daniel said. “But I think I got it this time. I think it could work.” Daniel peeked at the door. “I’ve been slacking. Don’t tell.”

  “Did you put in all your simulated memories?” Cessini asked.

  “Typed in all the old ones, this time at age fifty, and the younger ones, too. The simulation keeps crossing, though, getting them confused. It keeps thinking the older you and younger you are two different people in the same room talking to each other. Like you and me, right now. Can’t figure it out. But you know what I’m going to call it?”

  “What?”

  “Poly-Algorithmic Compression, Kerneling and Exo-Transference.” He grinned as Cessini hit on the letters. “PACKET.”

  “I like that,” Cessini said.

  “We’ll make this together. Your robot, my code. What do you think?”

  “I think it sounds like a plan. Why not?”

  “’Cause I’m not sure,” Daniel said. He returned to his papers. “I think it’s my algorithms that are killing it. The main algorithm has a matrix of subs for each specialized brain function. I figured to use parameter constants. I called them my Madden Equation Parameter constants, MEPc’s one through six. Play them like the keys of a piano, a person’s sensitivity to each determines predisposition to music, painting, or maybe counting, like you and me.”

  “And you think the spikes from some combination of six coefficients are going to make it all work? Make a person a person?”

  “I don’t know. You’re right. Maybe my PACKET code’s all wrong. Exponentials, instead? I don’t know. Maybe that won’t work, either. Maybe it’s as simple as correlating time. The brain processes bits at a rate. Align that with the scan speed into the computer. That’s much simpler. Yes, align the two speeds right, and the computer thinks on its own. A mind that ‘knows thyself.’”

  “Isn’t that’s just an emulation mode? Clock speed or something?”

  Daniel dropped his pencil and sat back. “Right. Nothing special about that. Okay, forget that. I’ll keep at it. Don’t you worry.” He pinched his fingers above his brow in frustration, then drew them down into a fist over his mouth. His thumb’s knuckle found its way to a rub back and forth across his teeth.

  “You should get a job at some fancy lab or something, not here.”

  “It’s quiet here,” Daniel said in the isolated room. “I can get some work done.” He glanced at Cessini and tried to smile. “Lots of greats started out as clerks. Then straight to the top. You, me, and PACKET. What do you say?”

  “Can I have the keys?”

  “You know, Robin would say you’re my dissociative identity disorder,” Daniel said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Two identities. One mind in conflict with itself. DID.”

  “So, are you my DID or am I yours?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we’re both Robin’s.” He picked up his pencil. He had an idea.

  “Maybe we’re Meg’s,” Cessini said.

  “That doesn’t make any sense. How could we be . . .?” Daniel trailed off as he returned over his work.

  “I was kidding.”

  “Cessini, what do you want? I’m busy,” Daniel said without looking back.

  “I need the keys.”

  “What for?”

  “Utility closet. The slop sink. I got some paints. I’ve got work for school.”

  Daniel tipped his head at the shelf behind his desk, and returned to his code. The metal keys were an odd sight of old, but jingled as a tool that still worked. “Be careful, that sink splashes. Water bounces when it hits the drain.”

  “I will. It was nice talking to you, DID,” Cessini said. He offered a smile.

  Daniel grunted, engrossed. He was gone.

  Back on the second floor, Cessini opened the utility closet’s door. The entering sprinkler pipe commingled into a twist of eight other tubes. The tubes turned down and ran behind the basin of the slop sink like organ pipes wrapped in sleeves of white insulation, stained from drippings of rust and decay that had seeped from the roof. There was no minor shutoff valve for the sprinkler pipe. He had to go downstairs.

  His feet burned, sweaty from what he was about to do. The pipes emerged from under the first floor’s ceiling in an offset north-south hallway. He ignored the wrapped tubes and the slop sink drain that went north and picked up the trail of the black iron sprinkler pipe that headed south. He followed the pipe to where more ribs of the beast joined from other hallways into its six-inch, iron pipe spine, like a double-sided “E.” The pipe elbowed west in an “L” and thickened along the southern wall of the Network Operation Center, at the center of the office’s floor plan. He pressed on, staring up; one pained foot in front of the other, as if each one set forward onto its bed of glowing coals. Then the pipe disappeared ahead into the cinder block wall of the main data center’s Module Two. A dead end. He had to retrace his steps.

  He tapped on the glass of the NOC and gestured toward the door in the data center wall. The watchman slid open his half-panel window.

  “Sorry, Cessini. Can’t let you in,” the watchman said.

  “Come on. For school.”

  “Two words,” the watchman said as he held up two fingers in succession. “Compliance and insurance. You stay on this side of the wall until you’re eighteen. Talk to your father.” Then he slid the panel shut.

  Cessini stared through the glass, emboldened. He backed away on his own. He knew how to go around. And if he were to summon his courage as the mighty Ceeborn, he knew there would be nothing to stop him.

  The first-floor northern storage closet had an access panel in its floor. He put his finger in the panel’s D-ring and gave it a half turn counterclockwise. He lifted the panel, felt the cool air breeze from a higher pressure tunnel, and slipped in head first. A tight two-by-two foot tunnel ran a short distance, and then intercepted a perpendicular stretch of boxed-in tunnel that ran lengthwise beneath the NOC and straight into the da
ta center. A six-inch-wide cable tray hung along the full distance of the tunnel. It carried the NOC’s in-house communication cables directly to the main data center Module Two on the other side of the cinder block wall.

  He stopped midway through. He was lying on his back. His elbows brushed the tunnel’s walls. The cool airflow was drying and sweet. He paused to dry his body and recover his mind in his hidden spot of an under-floor world. He clicked his penlight and held it in the bite of his teeth. The gray, pebbled ceiling was exposed between the grate of the tray. It was the rough underside of a three-inch-thick, poured-concrete slab floor. It looked like a roughened beach of stones, a cosmic swirl of pebbles. People who walked on the floor above would have no idea he was there. He was in a world only he could imagine and he was only halfway west to his goal.

  Once through the tunnel, he popped aside a square cover that fit into a cut in the concrete slab on Module Two’s side of the wall; there was more darkness above the slab. He twisted up above it, but still beneath the module’s main access flooring. The flooring was a grid of composite tiles raised thirty-six inches up from the slab. The tray and its cables went their way beneath the raised floor, Cessini went his. The floor’s two-by-two-foot square tiles spanned all eight thousand square feet of the data module above—one hundred feet east to west by eighty feet north to his south. The whirl from above the floor shattered his ears with a deafening howl.

  The tiles stood on a grid of aluminum pedestals set apart like a forest of thin silver trunks extending as far as he could see with the penlight in his teeth. The far west side of the module was spanned by a twenty-by-eighty-foot mechanical and electrical—MEP—corridor that supplied the massive consumption of power. A triangle of shorter pedestals to his right rose up and supported the underside of a pedestrian ramp that joined with the leveled data center floor.