After Mind Read online

  Aiden hopped up the first few rungs of the ladder. The gangway jerked and shook. “What’s the matter?” he said. “Afraid of heights, you two?”

  “We’re okay,” Meg said.

  Cessini balanced. The skywalk rattled. If a wall of water rose up the side of the glass, it would never reach their height up on the skywalk—but the mist? What about the mist? If the skywalk nicked the window, one hole in the glass would be enough. Droplets would land on his arm, or worse, his face.

  Aiden stomped on the steel. “Is what I’m showing you not good enough? You don’t want to look anymore?”

  “It’s not the height!” Meg said.

  Cessini breathed in his nose and out of his mouth. He focused on Meg. “If I could bear all the clouds in the sky,” he said to her caring, patient smile. “I still would never want to come back to this world. Nothing here is good for me anymore.” He inched his way along the railing toward the stairs.

  Meg managed her poise so well. She held on. What he said was wrong, and he knew it.

  “But,” he added, “I’d most likely come back for you. Come on, let’s go down. Get out of this old rusty box. What do you say?”

  “One step at a time. Okay?”

  Aiden hopped clear from the bottom of the ladder. Daniel pushed past him. “He’s okay. We got him,” Daniel said.

  Cessini’s feet were back on the ground. “Sight of all that water,” he said, “makes me feel like I’m falling, or worse, that’s all.”

  “Worse?” Aiden said. “What could be worse? We’re upgrading as fast as we can. Water out there. Power in here. You seen it. You like it. But you ain’t gonna fall. What’s the matter with you?”

  “He doesn’t mean anything by it,” Robin said.

  “I’m fine. Don’t worry,” Cessini said.

  “What happened?” Robin asked as she handed Meg back her old tablet.

  “Take a guess,” Meg said.

  “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” Aiden said. “If you like to fix things, we got every tool you can imagine out in the shop. We’ll get you some whatnots or a souvenir to go.”

  “Sounds good,” Daniel said.

  Cessini nodded.

  Outside the main hangar, Cessini covered his eyes from the sun and turned to the right. He skipped a few steps to avoid the spill from the fifty-five-gallon drum. He was safe. The workman of watch number one and his mini truck were gone. His hose was coiled on the ground.

  Watch-point number two, with its four-count drop, was right on schedule. The condenser above the annex door was okay. After the count of one-two-three, and then a slow four, a drop fell to the asphalt. Its growing puddle broke through a sand-pebble damn and trickled toward him. It was easy to step over. Then the fan of the condenser bucked with a loud grind. It sputtered and the old, clogged unit shut off.

  “Your air conditioner coil is plugged,” Cessini said. It kicked on with a bang and spit its condensate out from above.

  He wrenched his neck forward to dodge an instantaneous blur. A single droplet struck below his left temple. He threw himself against the rusty corrugated wall and slammed his fist for a sheet metal’s pang. He hid his face. He bottled a scream. The single water drop had evaded his count. He failed to control. He spun away from under the conditioner box. He was outside, but caged. What else did he miss? Right then and there, he knew, counting was as useless as dead.

  “I said you have to clean it!” He kicked the pebbles of the worthless dam on the ground. He paced back and forth. Meg gave him his room. He cupped his hand over the side of his face. Robin broke away toward the lot; her hand was over her mouth. “I can’t do it anymore,” he wailed as Meg came back. “I can’t.” Anguish turned to his body’s physical reaction and he doubled over in pain. He muffled a frightful cry. He bounced his foot on the ground.

  Aiden grinned. The corner of his lip was raised halfway up toward his squint. He gave the puddle on the asphalt a swift, limped-in stomp. “Come on, kiddo, it’s only water. I’ve been necked a hundred times before from that crotchety old box. No harm.”

  “What is your problem?” Meg asked. She shoved Aiden against the warehouse wall.

  “Hey, go on then,” Aiden said as he held up his hands. “You called me to do a favor for a sick kid, remember?”

  “Hey, he’s not sick,” Daniel said. “You’ve got no idea what kind of sick we’ve been through. Don’t talk to him like that.”

  “Tour around by yourselves all you want. I can’t fix you, nobody can,” Aiden said.

  Cessini breathed to himself. He rose back up and straightened his shoulders, then lowered his hand from his face. A ringed welt radiated from the strike point at his temple. It stung down past his cheek. A red streak looped around to the back of his neck and disappeared below his collar.

  Aiden stumbled back. He glanced up to the condenser. “You know, you people scare me. I don’t know if kids like you should be held closer, or kept away.”

  Daniel shuffled Cessini away from the building, and then stepped forward toward Aiden. He raised his elbow, cocking his fist. “Listen old man, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Aiden cowered away from Daniel’s turn. Robin wrapped Cessini into her arms, but he pushed her away, and instead took in the rudeness of a man he had only just met. He walked alone toward the high metal towers in the lot.

  “Aw, come on now,” Aiden said. “I was just having a go at you.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t. Not at his expense. That was completely rude,” Robin said.

  “Didn’t mean nothing by it,” Aiden said. He softened his weight on his hip. “We all right?”

  “We’re right,” Cessini said as he kept walking. Meg caught up but he pulled away his arm.

  Aiden reached out for balance against the red rusted wall of the building. For a moment, he looked like a sad, crooked old man. He stumbled off, then around, not really knowing where to turn. “Hey, kiddo,” he said as he limped with a pivot and called out with a bite, “You need to toughen up!”

  Cessini stopped under the first tower and stared at the man. Aiden gave in first, waved him off, and then left.

  Cessini fell into the seat in the back of the Jeep and slammed his door shut. Meg slipped in at his side. He couldn’t look.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  He covered his neck with his left hand. He pounded the door with his fist. “Why does this only happen to me?” He throttled the headrest of Robin’s seat to his front. “Tell me why? Tell me how to fix me.”

  Daniel squeezed the top of the steering wheel, and then rested his forehead on his knuckles. “Don’t you worry about him. You’ll never see that man again,” he said. Then he relaxed his once fisted hand and turned the key in the ignition. “I don’t know what happened. I would never have hit that man.”

  Cessini calmed his own thrash. “A memory,” he said. “Nothing more. Nothing less. Let’s go. Just drive.”

  Robin sank deeper into her front seat and pulled her door shut. Her head fell back. Her eyes longed for a clear prayer view to the sky, but were stopped by the roof of the Jeep. She wrung her hands into the pit of her waist and cried out a desperate sob.

  Cessini’s window was closed as they drove farther away. He rested his forehead on its tempered glass and overlooked the dry hills of the valley below. Only a growing distance through silence could drown out the power and percussion of the water they had left behind.

  *

  Packet sat up straight against his pillow on his hospital room bed and buttoned his pajama shirt for the night. An uneaten tray of turkey dinner and gravy congealed on his nightstand. The tube and its watery bag that dripped from the pole were gone.

  Meg was on the edge of his bed and dabbed a cotton ball into a jar of cream. “We brought you back. You’re in the mainframe. You think you’re sitting here in your own self-image. Your dad thinks it worked. He said it was true. But I’m not so sure. I think you’re just running, reliving sad, old home movies. And
no one likes to watch the same old stock ten years in a row, least of all me.”

  He stared, as blank as a slate.

  “I need more. I want the real you. And from where I’m sitting, out here, I can see you imagining yourself in this hospital room.” she said. “I can even see the memories you dream.”

  “What do you mean? You’re sitting right here,” Packet said.

  Daniel reached up from beyond the foot of his bed and took down the festive “Welcome” letter cutouts that drooped from the curtain’s rail.

  “You remember Tungatinah, that’s great,” Meg said. “I know you saw the pipes. Do you remember what color they were?”

  “Orange.”

  “Do you remember the condenser that dripped? Was it broken or fixed?” she asked.

  “Easy. Broken.”

  “Okay, good. Now, if I put this cream on your temple,” she said as she dotted the cotton ball over his left ear, “tell me, where did the owie come from that I would be touching right here?”

  He flinched as she reached. “Can we go home now?”

  He could tell she was tired by the way she twisted slower from her waist and tossed the spent swab onto the instrument tray. “Not until you tell me so I know it’s you,” she said. She took a tortoise-shell hand mirror from the tray and showed it to him.

  “I don’t know.” He looked in the mirror. “Did I scratch myself?”

  “No, you didn’t,” she said.

  “Is that the boy who splashed me?” Packet asked, pointing at the boy in the mirror.

  Daniel laid the letters on the tray, but by their weight and tangle they fell into a scattered chain on the floor. He didn’t bother to pick them up. He must have been tired, too.

  “No,” Daniel said. “It’s not. But that boy in the mirror is like an infant with twelve years of memories.”

  “Then how’d you get that boy in this mirror to look like me?”

  “You are that boy in the mirror,” Meg said. “It’s you, Cessini. We’re on the second floor of the DigiSci building. Remember the cabinet on the pallet?”

  Packet tilted his head and squinted at the mirror’s screen. It simply didn’t make any sense. “But that boy is so much older than me,” he said. He humphed and rubbed the cream from his head.

  “Don’t do that.” Meg hurried in with her hand. “You’ll smear the magic.”

  The cream dissolved between the rub of his finger to thumb. She held up the mirror again. The boy in the mirror looked back and smiled an innocent grin. He had no cream on his head. Packet laughed himself into a wonderful temper. “Are you a magician?” he asked.

  Meg slouched forward over her knees at the edge of the bed. She flopped the mirror’s rectangular stem between the roll of her fingers, then looked toward the door, then Daniel. “No way can I do this in real time. From toddler to twelve. I won’t wait that long. I can’t,” she said. Her eyes were glassy and tired.

  Packet cupped his hands over his eyes. “If you’re a magician, can you make yourself disappear?”

  Meg didn’t like that at all. She looked up. She was far more than tired. She was angry. “I’m not here right now,” she said. She sprang off the bed and stormed toward the door on the left. “It’s only you in this fabricated room of your mind.”

  Daniel grabbed her arm as she pulled the door handle.

  “Even an eighteen-month-old recognizes himself in a mirror,” she said. “It’s failed.” She twisted free from his grip. “It’s not even close. I can’t do it. I won’t.”

  Daniel skipped to her side and blocked her from opening the door. “This is my fault. Please,” Daniel said. He pleaded. “I need you. And he needs you more than me.”

  “He can’t even pass basic questions,” she said. Her voice cracked deeper as she began to tear up.

  “If it wasn’t him, he wouldn’t know you here in this room. Not like he does.”

  Meg’s hand fell from the door handle and a tinge of her loneliness crept through the room.

  “If you’re not here right now,” Packet asked her, “then where are you?”

  “She’s close,” Daniel said as he turned. “We’re inputting through a set of controls in the lab next door. Meg is holding the implant.”

  “What implant?” Packet asked.

  Meg rushed over to the instrument tray and slammed it loud with her two open palms. She held up an implant with its dangling magnetic coupler that had appeared on the tray like magic. She cocked her head and hollered, “Cochlear!”

  He laughed. “That’s not even close to my ear,” he said. What in the world could have made her so angry? He stuck his fingertip deep into his ear and twisted a silly face.

  A knock rattled the wooden door on the right. Packet lowered his finger from his ear.

  “He’s here,” Meg said, setting the implant back on the tray.

  “Who is?” Packet wiggled himself farther upright on his bed.

  “The man who paid for all this,” Daniel said. He took a big breath and exhaled. Meg quieted, too. “Dr. Luegner wanted to see you before you went to sleep tonight,” Daniel said as he straightened himself and went over to answer the door. “He won’t be here long. Be yourself. Be good. Just . . . don’t be too much of yourself right now. Okay?” Daniel asked.

  “Okay.”

  The door on the right creaked open and a silver-haired man peeked through. Daniel’s stance blocked the man’s face.

  “Can I come in?” the man whispered.

  Meg moped back to the nightstand and fiddled with the bed sheets. She feigned a smile without raising her head. Her smile was truer as a frown.

  “Why do you and Terri look so much younger?” the man asked Daniel, blinking one eye. “The video feed of my contact is receiving. I can see this whole room fine.”

  “We’re streaming images from the mainframe’s perceived visual field, live as it processes and thinks them, out to the receptors in your lens. Terri and I are in the studio next door with the camera on us and we’re transmitting our images back into the mainframe’s simulated visual cortex. This room that you see is the composite in his mind; him sitting in his own self-image, us the way he last remembers us, and you, the way he sees you now. Except that I have our privacy filter on.”

  “Your youthful age?”

  “I don’t want him to see the real us just yet. You’re seeing the way he remembers us. Last time Cessini saw me, I was fifty. Terri was twelve. He’s only going by what he knows,” Daniel said and stepped away from the door. “Here, move to your left, more into the frame of your camera.”

  The man entered the room from the door. He had an aqua-blue collar and darker blue cuffs that stuck out from under the sleeves of his navy pinstripe suit. He stared at first then made a seemingly random search with his eyes: up, down, left, then right as he oriented himself, taking in the full scope of the room.

  So why do I look like that, also so young?” the man asked. “I haven’t worn that suit in a decade.”

  “I’d rather you say, ‘Why do I look like this?’ Not ‘like that.’ You have to imagine we’re in the same room. It’d be rude otherwise. He can hear you,” Daniel said. “Besides, you have your camera filter on. We’re feeding in your general movement, your body and obscured face. But he’s clarifying you in his mind, visualizing you from the last memory he has of you. It’s natural perception.”

  “So he’s hallucinating the parts of me he can’t see?”

  “It’s what we do instinctively, as humans,” Daniel said. “He knows you’re not simply a shape.”

  Packet shied away as his dad and the man talked. If he stared any more, they’d realize he could hear every word, so he fiddled with Meg’s tuck of his sheets instead. Meg’s smile was nice.

  The man leaned back against the door. He crossed his polished black shoes.

  “He remembers that suit when he thinks of you,” Daniel said. “A decade ago for us was only yesterday for him. You had called our home. You were wearing that suit.”


  “Okay, fine, so this room is a stage in the software theater of his mind,” Luegner said. “And this hospital room is—?”

  “The seed I gave to the code. It’s what made it finally work. Imagine waking up with no sensory inputs—you can’t see, you can’t hear, there’s nothing but the swirl of your thoughts. You need an orientation. For Cessini, it’s this room. I situated him. I seeded a human mind that’s now recreated and processing away in the two rows of eight server cabinets of your lab. This virtual hospital room is a safe environment for him. He feels comfortable here.”

  Packet overheard, but Daniel wasn’t making any sense, so he took another good, long look at the man who pulled at the dark blue cuffs of his suit. The man raised his hand as a greeting and smiled. He had nice teeth for being much older, and hair that didn’t move. His face looked perfect. Too perfect? He had a nice suit. He stood with his black shoes apart. But there was no way he was as strong as his dad.

  “So, there you have it. You can see from this composite image of his mind that he’s taking us in,” Daniel said with delight. “He simply knows my younger face and that of Terri’s, but he sees her as twelve-year-old Meg.”

  Meg stayed distant at the left door, her forehead on its frame, gripping her hand on its lever.

  The man held out his hand as he approached the bed, and Packet took it to be polite. “My name is Dr. Hopkus Luegner,” the man said. “It’s an absolute pleasure to meet you.”

  Dr. Luegner came down to Packet’s eye level. He glanced back over his shoulder at Daniel. “You’re telling me I can interact with my younger self through the memories of someone who knew me? That’s remarkable.”

  Meg turned around at the door, rolling the back of her head on its frame. Her bottom lip quivered.

  “Technically, yes,” Daniel said, “but only now at first because you have your privacy filter on. Don’t turn it off, you’ll surprise him, and I don’t want that now. But obviously the interaction is not the real, physical you. There’s no physical connection between your two hands. It’s the perception of code.”

  Meg slid down the wall and sat on the floor. She pulled her knees up to the front of her face.