After Mind Read online

  Daniel’s few steps to his right took him out of view of her screen. A simple, wooden door at the left side of the wall’s CRAC buzzed and unlocked at its frame. Daniel entered the data hall and held out his hands in an offering of peace. “I set him up in a hospital room, a safe environment for him. He’s accepted it so far, free form.”

  The tall metal cabinet was waiting, its processors churning inside.

  “Are you ready to go inside? Do you want to see him?” Daniel asked, finding a way to lift a tiny smile.

  Terri thought of every reason to say no, but then found an ember of “yes” that trumped them all. “Only if he can see me.”

  TWO

  NOTHING MORE, NOTHING LESS

  CESSINI MADDEN WAS twelve when the family bumped up the Tasmanian central highland hill in a Jeep. His father, Daniel, drove with an exaggerated bounce in his seat as he kept to the road. Robin Elion Blackwell wrung her hands in the front passenger seat. Her preteen daughter, Meg—short for Margaret Theresa—lowered her window to its final quarter and finger-cupped its top for a view of the construction. The bumps would soon be over, or so the sandbagged signs said.

  Bouncing his feet on his rear-seat mat, Cessini thought that this place could be different, or better. The refreshed Tungatinah Hydroelectric Power Station wasn’t far from the place they had recently started calling home, but they had been driving around the island of Tasmania for most of the day. The plan was simple: to get to like their new homeland that placed them forever and a mile from where they had come.

  Cessini caught the wind through his window, the sweet smell of the world. “Hey, Dad,” he said, “you and me, we could fix this road. Give us a shovel and a couple of machines, and it’s fixed in no time flat. This is the best place ever already. You’re going to love it. All two hundred megawatts of power. Pesky water doesn’t stand a chance.” He bounced his feet on the mat. This was going to be great.

  Tungatinah revealed its industrial self as they cleared the final switchback in the road.

  Meg looked at him, shook her head, and then went back to her window.

  “Okay, so what’s it look like to you?” he asked. “’Cause the sun’s shining on my side for sure this time.”

  “Hope,” she said. Then, with the side of her head on her window, she laughed at the height of the sun, obviously still on her side of the car.

  “Hmm, hope,” he said. If Meg said it, then it must be true. He poked her and she scooted farther away.

  He reached for the ScrollFlex case in the netting attached to the back of Daniel’s seat. He unrolled the soft clear screen from its suede capsule case and swiped by a picture of him and Meg traveling halfway across the world in a plane. He held the clear screen up to the windshield as it registered their location. A photo journal from Tungatinah’s brochure appeared, which he flicked larger and read aloud:

  “‘After its third overhaul in seventy-five years, Tungatinah had a weathered dignity and resolve. Five penstocks dropped water nine hundred fifty feet from the head lagoon.’”

  He looked out his window and found the long pipes. They were orange.

  He continued: “‘The latest upgrade was a transition to superconducting coils and zero-resistance transmission lines that delivered a hundredfold benefit to life. The old clearances that were cut two hundred feet wide through centuries of conifers for the run of overhead power lines could now grow back to the welcome width of a family walking side-by-side on the grass. Once complete, the new buried run of conduit will have a hidden width of only six feet underground.’” He looked up from the screen. “Hey, Dad. They’re burying cables six feet under. What if they hit a few dead people?”

  “I don’t know. I guess a few of them would wake up with a shock,” Daniel said with a whistling haunt as he brought the Jeep to a halt in the Tungatinah lot.

  Cessini chuckled, got out, and stretched his legs. The metal transmission towers that crowded the paved lot were covered in rust. They looked far older than the brochure’s enticing photo. Robin hesitated and stayed in her seat, her fingers pinched over her brows.

  Cessini read on: “‘Three decades earlier, the mainland over the strait to the north was the largest net exporter of coal in the world. Then the people voted to have the greatest proportion of renewable energy per capita on a world-leading par with Norway and Iceland.’”

  Robin relented and came out of the car. Meg stood at her side on the curb.

  Cessini scrolled down to two bulleted highlights: “‘The islander’s first phase initiative was the superconductor upgrade to the heritage site of Tungatinah and also to her five sister plants in the lowland western catchment. The second phase was the upgrade of the remaining fifty hydroelectric power stations throughout the five remaining northern and eastern catchment generation systems.’” But the second bullet was best: “‘The target of the entire system was fifteen thousand gigawatts of clean, deliverable power to the whole of the greater island grid. Any excess would be routed to feed the new Basslink-B undersea power cable to the mainland.’”

  Cessini stopped reading as a man limped to greet them curbside. He figured it was the man his dad had called earlier about coming out to see the place, and he watched him.

  Gerald Aiden stepped with an oddly stiff-sided gait that punctuated his walk, ruined the drape of his uniform, and twitched his pile of under-eye wrinkles.

  The ScrollFlex snapped back into its windup capsule case.

  “I hear you’re the one with all the power around here,” Daniel said.

  “Good one,” Gerald Aiden said, his voice hoarse. He secured his cordial shake with a hand to Daniel’s shoulder. “Haven’t heard that one before.”

  Cessini held out his hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  Gerald Aiden took it. “And you are?”

  “Cessini—spelled with a ‘C’ and ‘e’ so you say it like the water. Like sea. Not the astronomer. He’s a hard ‘C’ and ‘a’ as in Ka—Cassini, but I’m ‘Cee’ like the sea. Cessini.”

  “Okay, steady there, kiddo, you’re way too quick for me.” Aiden laughed and pivoted for another introduction. “Mrs. Madden?”

  “Blackwell,” Robin said. “I still go by Blackwell.”

  “Okay, then.” Aiden winked at Daniel. “Your problem, champ, not mine.”

  Meg offered a wave, but received no notice in return.

  “Well, all right, then,” Aiden said to Daniel, “shall we go have a look?”

  Meg stepped up, insistent and loud: “Why are the big pipes orange? Those ones coming down from the hill.”

  Aiden stopped. “Name of this place means ‘falling water.’ And those, my gal, are penstocks, water inlet pipes from the lagoon. But it’s not the pipes that are orange.” He pivoted and restarted their walk to the main assembly building. “They’re covered in lichen. A living, breathing, composite organism of fungus and algae. A body and its feeder. It’s pure symbiosis. Can’t live one without the other. They’re what you see as the orange, not the pipes.”

  Cessini picked up his pace and followed Aiden across the lot. He twisted up backward as he walked to see the tops of the metal high-voltage towers and their live power lines. They were huge from underneath. Straight ahead lay the imposing four stories of the rusted, corrugated main assembly hall. Two smaller bay buildings attached to the hall on its left and right. The power station sat beside a bed of frothed water. The spill-off roared.

  The boil kicked up an arched spectrum of light, a rainbow-refraction of water drops in the air. A rainbow was to everyone else a beauty of nature, but to Cessini it was a warning, a cage in the sky held in front of his walk, like a dead canary in a coal mine. He flinched at the sight of its glistening arch, but continued ahead. The nightmare of water had returned.

  “Let me know if you have something in particular you want to see,” Aiden said as he turned and noticed Cessini lagging behind.

  Cessini knew himself to be smart—maybe not as smart as some, but definitely braver than mos
t. Who else, he thought, could walk as tall through life while afraid of the rain from above and the pain of their own tears from within? If there was anything he’d learned from his dad, it was that all things could be fixed, and by God if he could still crawl, he would find a fix for the run of his fear, and his days of nightmares with water.

  He straightened his shoulders and soldiered on. Meg elbowed him back to center. The door of the hall was fifty yards afield. Cessini bucked up as Daniel tousled his hair.

  “I think he’ll want to see the turbines first,” Daniel said. “He’s my number-one engineer.”

  “Got me a boy just like that,” Aiden said. “Thinks he can run this place better than me.”

  Meg walked beside them, but with her head scrunched down, preoccupied. She was unfurling the winged tabs on the side of her hand-me-down, digital tablet.

  “How do you protect the power’s transmission?” Cessini asked.

  “Warrior ants. Little digital packets, actually,” Aiden said. “The ants scuttle around the network, always on, eyeing for threats. Like real ants, they put out a scent that others from the colony can follow. So on the monitors, when you see a cluster of them little digital buggers somewhere, something’s wrong in the grid. But no matter if it’s only one ant by itself or more running in to attack, they’ll always sting the threat until it is dead. Power transmission secure. Roger that?”

  “Cool,” Cessini said, then elbowed Meg at his right.

  She scowled and turned her eyes back into her game. The main roaring spillway of water to his left was contained in its distance.

  The pinpoint of a dreaded sound drew his attention straight ahead to the front of the building. A worker had attached a garden hose to a wall-mounted faucet. The knob squeaked as he turned it. The water sputtered and then gushed from the loose end of the hose. The worker opened the cap to a fifty-five-gallon drum resting on the bed of his mini-truck. He swung the loose end of the hose and the water splashed, overflowing the lip of the drum before he stuffed the nozzle through the open cap. His water care was an absolute wreck.

  A smaller puddle on the asphalt lot also grew ahead to the left. An air conditioner mounted in the wall above the western bay door dripped with predictable timing. In a few summer months, the clogged overhead fan would spill out a couple of gallons of water a day. The spill could be prevented, he thought, if only these locals could unclog the copper condenser pipe. Two workers strolled through the parking lot with crumpled bag dinners. They sipped from cups with straws. Their cups were only ounces each—nonetheless a measureable number to watch. But the man with the hose out front and the fifty-five-gallon drum could be devastating. That careless man would be watch-point number one.

  Gerald Aiden thrust his fingers into Cessini’s chest. Cessini stopped and blinked when he saw what he’d nearly run into. The main assembly bay’s mammoth hangar door was directly upon him.

  “Watch yourself there, son,” Aiden said. “You don’t see forty-odd foot of this door in front of your face, you ain’t gonna see much inside, neither.”

  Cessini disengaged his mind from the man working the hose and sidestepped through the adjacent, man-sized entry door.

  Inside the turbine hall, five inverted cones sat like tips of icebergs atop a polished concrete floor.

  He marveled behind Meg, then pushed forward to see. “Now those are turbines!”

  “Those tops are the exciters,” Aiden said. “The guts of the turbines are under the floor.”

  Under each assembly sat a vertical shaft with rotating blades. The blades spun from the high-pressure water that poured down from the orange pipes. The spinning shaft generated power in motors—motors that were now upgraded and wrapped with superconducting coils. The power of water filled the air and it was alive. He drew in a sweet, tangy smell. It was one he would never forget, it was the sweet smell of shop oil, and it filled the air of the power station humming with well-lubricated machines.

  Cessini scanned back for Meg. She followed a step behind, missing it all. She clacked away with a deft touch at the side-mounted finger tabs of her tablet. The skin of her hand-me-down tablet was a mangle of color over old, childhood scribble. Her tablet was not the sleek, modern ScrollFlex that retracted into a suede case, but her old tablet was still somehow better. Her tablet used to be his.

  “Hydroelectric power is power from water,” Aiden said as he led from the front. “Not power by water itself, but by the entire system. How we catch it, control it, and convert its potential energy into kinetic energy that we see and use every day.” He tossed a casual nod up toward an LED-light basket hanging from the roof.

  “Yes!” Cessini slapped his palm atop his fist. “Control the water before it takes control of you.”

  Aiden stopped and shifted his weight. “Son, water don’t ever control you. Weren’t you listening to me? Here is where we control the water. It’s what I do. I help people get control of their lives. You young kids need to get your mind out of them ScrollerFlexes and pay attention.”

  “I was. I notice everything. And I didn’t say—”

  “Whoa, kiddo,” Aiden said. “Stop right there. I’m just saying, with lights on I don’t fall down. ScrollerFlexes can drop free from the sky and I’d have no more use for them than a dead boy bouncing. You get me? I like things simple and easy.”

  Meg glanced up without lifting her head from her game. She snickered and nudged Cessini with her shoulder. Then she returned, head down, to her Sea Turtle world.

  Aiden leaned against the framework of a black, metal ladder. He folded his arms and raised his brow, waiting. A horizontal gangway ran high above his head across the midline of the four-story warehouse windows.

  “Okay. I get you. Simple. Can we go up there?” Cessini asked.

  Meg paused for a look. “You sure? It’ll be high.”

  “If it suits you,” Aiden said. “My leg don’t let me go. But you’re free to power on up.”

  Meg folded in the wings of her tablet and handed it to Robin, who took it and nestled her arm into Daniel’s. “Go on up. We’ll be fine,” Robin said.

  Cessini ascended first, clinging to the almost vertical rails of the ladder as Meg followed. He stood up onto the gangway’s platform and held tight to the hand bars. His back was to the windows over the valley and spill-off water below. He focused on the warehouse’s floor, the power potential of the five turbine sets. The sight of their tops from his height was an uneasy perspective. He turned around. Through the windows and down below was the water’s rush. Its mist rose, passed through a rainbow of fear, and condensed on the window. On the outside of the glass was a smacked hand and finger smear. The wet imprint hovered high and exposed out over the pool of water. Beads held and then dripped from the tips of its fingers—fingers from a ghost that hung in desperation outside of the window’s pane. He was jostled.

  “Close enough to walking through clouds for you?” Meg asked.

  He braced himself on the rail. “I just need to stand here a second. Get used to the height.”

  “Tell me, what’s the count of this place?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I stopped counting after the fire,” he said.

  “Come on. What is it?” She knew him too well.

  “It’s a five-number watch with a four-count drip on two outside.”

  “What’s the drip?” she asked. She didn’t know.

  “Outside, the condenser above the annex. It’s clogged. It drips to the pavement. A slow one-two-three, then a long four and a drop falls.”

  “I didn’t notice it when we came in,” she said.

  “There’s also a workman with a tank and a hose. He’s careless.”

  Gerald Aiden hollered something from the floor below. He gestured out the windows. “The power runs out onto the grid through the new superconducting cables,” he yelled as loud as he could. “Each carries a hundred times the power of copper.” He spun his right pointer finger around his outstretched left pointer. “The superconducti
ng cable’s wrapped with liquid coolant running at minus a hundred and fifty degrees Celsius.”

  “You want to play ‘Without?’” Meg asked as she turned back to Cessini.

  “Without what?” The window-side railing dug into the small of his back. He gripped as tight as he could, both sides. The knuckles of both hands were white. The spill water’s flow increased, if not in his mind, then by its raging sounds from below. The turbines revved up into a high-pitched whirl.

  “You have to keep the thin wire coils chilled or they lose their superconducting properties,” Aiden shouted.

  “You know,” Meg said, “a bike, a car, a truck, a train. Whatever you want.” She came closer. She was right in front of his view. She blocked out the height. “Go bigger and bigger or smaller and smaller. But at each, you have to say what happens without—like a bike without a rider falls down. A car without a family goes nowhere. Your turn.”

  Aiden widened his arms out from his sides and shouted “From here, you can see. . . .”—but no one was listening.

  Cessini braved a smile at Meg. “Three seconds without a brain and you die.”

  “Seriously? That’s lame. But okay. Three minutes without a heart and you die.”

  “Three hours without checking Sea Turtle Rescue, you die. Three days without water, I live.” He turned around to the window.

  “Hey, that’s not nice. And you took two turns.”

  “Three years without sunshine,” he said. He wavered. A droplet’s vein of water ran down the pane. Was it inside or out? He closed his eyes. “Three years. That’s 94,608,000 seconds. Is that good?”

  “No. And you don’t have to show off to me.”

  “Three millennia—”

  “Come on, stop it. You’re ruining the game. Open your eyes or I’m not playing.”

  “A civilization dies and its souls perish with it.”

  “That’s not true,” she said, miffed. “All the old souls come back when the next civilization comes along. They pick up where they left off.” She caught him as his knees buckled.