Currier’s eyes asked for forgiveness in advance. “We need to think about technology transfer while we can. This is a technology very worth transferring.”
“You want to license it.”
“The entire process. As a highly adaptable mode of therapy for multiple psychological disorders.”
My son didn’t suffer from a disorder. “Just tell me the favor.”
“We’re showing the work at professional gatherings. To journalists and people in private industry. Can we include a clip of him?”
I stumbled on private industry. I don’t know why. Everything on this planet had been commodified, long before my time. Currier wouldn’t meet my eye. The Japanese puzzle box had his full attention. “We can use the videos of the trainings we’ve been making since the beginning.”
I couldn’t recall his having mentioned video to me. I must have agreed to it, on some form.
“He’d be anonymized, of course. But we’d like to mention what makes his progress so singular.”
Boy learns bliss from his dead mother.
My brain was too slow for the rash of calculations. I believed in science. I wanted Robin to be part of some larger useful thing. I wanted people to see what was happening to him. He might become a virus of well-being, like Ginny said. But this plan of Martin’s tripped a warning buzzer.
“That doesn’t sound very safe.”
“We’d be showing two minutes of pixilated and voice-altered video to researchers and health professionals.”
I felt petty and superstitious. Worse: self-serving. Like I’d had the meal and now refused to pay my share of the check. “Can you give me a couple of days?”
“Certainly.” He was more relieved than felt right. Perhaps to ingratiate me, he asked, “Does he glow as much at home as he does in the lab?”
“He’s been beatific for weeks. I can’t remember the last time he had a fit.”
“You sound mystified.”
“Shouldn’t I be?”
“Imagine what he’s inhabiting.”
“I’d like to do more than imagine.”
Currier frowned, not getting me.
“I’d like to train as well.” I’d become more and more obsessed with the idea after each of Robin’s sessions. I needed access to my dead wife’s mind.
Currier’s frown turned to an embarrassed grin. “Sorry, Theo. I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to justify the cost of that. Right now we’re struggling to pay for the legitimate experiment.”
Flustered, I veered away. “I wanted to ask . . . The more Robin trains, the more he resembles Alyssa. The way he taps on his temple and chews on the word actually . . . it’s eerie. He’s learned half the birds Aly knew.”
The idea amused him. “I assure you. He can’t get that from the training. He can’t get anything from her brain print at all except a feel for that one emotional state of hers that he’s learning to emulate.”
And yet she was teaching him, one way or the other. I didn’t insist. I felt like a superstitious hunter-gatherer in a magic cargo cult. Instead, I said, “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure that emotional state really was her.”
“Ecstasy? Not Aly?”
A spark passed between Martin and me. I read it without any feedback training at all. The man’s eyes shied away from mine, and I knew. My whole program of willful ignorance fell apart, revealing the truth beneath a suspicion I’d nursed forever. It wasn’t just my own bottomless insecurity: I never knew my wife of a dozen years. She was a planet all her own.
THAT NIGHT, ASTRONOMERS AROUND THE WORLD COLLECTED more information about the universe than all the astronomers in the world collected in my first two years of grad school. Cameras five hundred times larger than the ones I’d trained on swept arcs across the sky. Interstellar consciousness was waking up and evolving eyes.
I sat in front of the large, curved monitor in my study, tapping into oceans of shared planetary data, while my son lay belly-down on the carpet in the other room, browsing his favorite nature sites on his Planetary Exploration Transponder. Around the country, my anxious colleagues were preparing for war. And I was being recruited.
For eight years, I’d crafted worlds and generated living atmospheres, gradually assembling something my fellow astrobiologists called the Byrne Alien Field Guide. It was basically a taxonomic catalog of all kinds of spectroscopic signatures collated to the stages and types of possible extraterrestrial life that might make them. To test my models, I’d looked upon the Earth from far away. I saw our atmosphere as pale, fuzzy pixels of light reflected off the moon. I’d fed those pixels into my simulations, and the black lines written into their spectra checked the validity of my evolving models and helped me tweak them.