“Theo! What a pleasure!” He must have meant something different by the word than everyone else did. Every syllable the man spoke irritated me. I needed a stint or two in his empathy machine. “How’s the boy doing?”
I made the case for guarded optimism. Martin listened, his face reserved.
“He’s probably generating a fair amount of auto-suggestion.”
Of course Robin was auto-suggesting. I was auto-suggesting. The changes might be entirely imagined. But brain science knew that even imagination could change our cells for real.
“Is there anything new about this round of training? Changes in the AI feedback? Was Alyssa’s recording of different neural regions?”
“Different?” Currier’s shoulders rose; his mouth approximated a smile. “Sure. We’ve boosted the scanning resolution. The AI keeps learning about Robin and getting more efficient the more Robin interacts with it. And yes, Aly’s scan is of an evolutionarily older part of the brain than the target templates we worked with in the earlier session.”
“So, in other words . . . nothing at all is the same.” I’d asked what I came to ask. Everything except what I wanted most to know. And I was pretty sure that Currier wouldn’t be able to tell me what Aly herself had refused to say.
But then I thought: Maybe he could. The idea crept across my clammy, conductive skin. Maybe Robbie wasn’t the first to visit Aly’s brain print. But I was afraid the question might make me look crazy. Or I was too afraid of the answer to ask.
ROBBIE EVEN ENJOYED INFLATING THE BOAT. Usually he gave the foot pump two minutes of half-hearted kicks before giving up. That day, he didn’t even ask for help. The watercraft rose from a puddle of floppy PVC without a complaint from my son.
We put in near a sign that gave the fishing limits in Spanish, Chinese, and Hmong. Robin slipped off the dock while getting into the boat. He wailed as his shoes sank into the mud and the lake soaked up to his knees. But the instant he scrambled back into the boat, he looked at his legs, puzzled. Well. That’s weird. Getting so worked up about water.
We paddled out in the flat-bottomed dinghy, taking forever to go a hundred yards. He scoured the shore as he rowed. I should have known what he was looking for. Birds: the creatures that had kept all his mother’s demons at bay. He’d always been interested in them. But interest had turned to love, deep in his spine, as he trained on the print of her brain.
A sleek, gray form shot across our bow. He waved me to stop paddling. The first notes of distress in days tinged my son’s voice. Who is he, Dad? Who is he? I couldn’t see!
A resident so common even I knew its name. “Junco, I think.”
Dark-eyed or slate? He turned to me, sure I could tell him. I couldn’t. His mother spoke, up close to my ear. The robin is my favorite bird.
We rowed some more, the slowest form of transportation known to humankind. In deeper water, he lifted his paddle. Could you take over, Dad? I’m kind of preoccupied.
I worked from the stern, passing my paddle from side to side to keep us from spinning. A butterfly more staggering than any stained-glass window landed on Robin’s downy forearm where he rested it on the boat. Robin held his breath, letting the visitor stumble, fly, and land again on his face. It walked across his closed eyes before flying away.
Robbie lay back against the gunwales and appraised the sky. His eyes sought out all the thousands of points of light from our night in the Smokies, every one of them still up there but erased by the light of day. The two of us glided underneath invisible stars, crossing the placid lake in an inflatable boat.
I’d imagined we were alone. But the more I watched Robin, the more I joined the party. Flying things, swimming things, things skating across the lake’s surface. Things that branched over the shore and fed the water with rains of living tissue. Chatter from every compass point, like some avant-garde piece for a chorus of random radios. And one enormous life in the boat’s bow, a thing that was me but wasn’t. When he spoke, I startled so hard I almost capsized us.
Do you remember that day?
He’d left me far behind. “What day, Robbie?”
The day you two recorded your feelings?
I remembered it with weird precision. How Aly and I craved each other afterward. How we locked ourselves in our room. How she wouldn’t tell me the source of her ecstasy. How she’d called through the closed door to reassure our son that everything and everyone were so okay.
There was something funny about the two of you. You were both acting strange.