I held the phone with one hand and poked a search into my tablet with the other. Three common words, in quotes, and there Robbie was, looking and sounding like a visitor from a galaxy far, far away.
“Shit.”
Laughter trickled from Robbie’s room. I heard that!
“What do you suggest I do about this? What am I supposed to tell him?”
“Theo. The thing is, we’re also hearing from journalists.”
Which meant they’d be on my front stoop in another few heartbeats. “No,” I said, almost spitting. “No more. I’m done with this. We’re not talking to anyone else.”
“That’s fine. I’d advise you not to, in fact.”
Currier sounded almost composed. But then, he stood to profit massively from the flash fad. Robin did not.
I couldn’t tell how much trouble we were in. Maybe the whole viral thing would blow over as quickly as it had blown up. Most of the people who were thumbing the clip and passing it along probably didn’t even bother watching it all the way through. It was just a bit of weather, and there would be several more clips to thumb and pass along before the day was out.
But while Currier told me not to worry, mass cascades of error-correcting bits surged in waves of electromagnetic radiation around the planet’s surface. They blasted in vertical geysers 35,786 kilometers upward into space and rained back down at 300 million meters per second. They coursed in bundles of parallel light through fiber conduits only to fan out in bursts of radio across the open air at the whim of tens of millions of grazing fingers coaxing electrons from hundreds of millions of spots on capacitive touch screens a few inches high. Robin’s streams were the slightest blip in the race’s desperate search for mass diversion. As a fraction of the feed produced and consumed that day, a few hundred billion bits of information were like a single pip on the surface of a strawberry at the end of an eight-course dinner. But these bits were my son, and, reassembled, they held the record of his face on a late afternoon by the side of a lake telling a perfect stranger, Everybody’s inside everyone.
Currier said, “Let’s stay calm and see how this plays out.”
Hanging up on him got easier with practice.
COG CAME TO MADISON. They’d been through before, but not for a few years. Back then, they filmed my elevator pitch about using absorption lines in the light passing through a planet’s atmosphere to detect life from a quadrillion miles away. Since then, COG had gone from being the poetry slam of academic lectures to becoming the chief way that most of the world learned about scientific research.
Every COG talk was delivered to a live audience in less than five minutes. The highest user-rated filmlets in the COG Madison site bubbled up to a site called COG Wisconsin. The tops in COG Wisconsin percolated up into COG Midwest, then COG U.S., and finally the coveted COG World Class. Only viewers who made it through a whole minute of a given clip could vote on it. The voters themselves climbed leaderboards for giving out the most evaluations. In this way, knowledge democratized and sciences went crowdsourced and bite-sized. My own talk topped out at COG Wisconsin, held back from the regional round by thousands of users furious that I could talk about the universe without ever mentioning God.
The organizers for COG MAD 2 sent me an email. I skimmed the first few lines and shot back my regrets, reminding them I’d taken part the last time. Two minutes later, I got a follow-up, clarifying the email I’d rushed through too quickly. They weren’t recruiting me. They wanted Robin Byrne to make a cameo in a talk by Martin Currier on Decoded Neurofeedback.
I was furious. I ran a quarter mile across campus to Currier’s lab. Luckily, the trot left me too winded to attack him when I found him in his office. I did manage to shout, “You stupid shit. We had a deal.”
Currier flinched but held his ground. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You gave COG my son’s identity.”
“I did no such thing. I never even talked to them!” He pulled out his phone and punched up his email. “Ah. Here they are. They want to know if I would like to join your son onstage.”
The penny dropped for both of us. COG had come straight to me. They had done nothing more than what Dee Ramey and Ova Nova had already done. Discovering the real Jay was now trivial, with so much to go on. My boy was outed. So many ships had sailed.
My hands were shaking. I picked up a logic toy from his desk—a wooden bird you were supposed to free from a nest made of a dozen sliding wooden pieces. The only problem was that nothing wanted to slide. “He has become public property.”