I spent the year gazing at the back of Cyrus’s head and wishing he’d turn around and say something to me, but he never did. I just stared and stared at that glorious blond hair, so wavy it was actively greeting me. At the end of May, when we were supposed to take our final exam, Cyrus didn’t show up for class. A week later, he handed our teacher, Mr. Ruben, a large folder, and in that folder was a graphic novel titled How to Teach Geometry. Mr. Ruben was shown standing in front of the chalkboard completing the final angle of an isosceles triangle. Chapter by chapter, the book went through every lesson Mr. Ruben had taught us that year, starting with angles and ending with architectural puzzles. There were equations and formulas, drawn-to-scale buildings with intricate detail: the Chrysler with its scalloped exterior, the columns of the Parthenon, the triangles of Egyptian tombs. Mr. Ruben displayed the pages on the walls of our classroom, and we all stared in wonder. “Freak,” someone whispered under their breath. Freak was right. Mr. Ruben didn’t know what to do, so he gave Cyrus a zero for failing to show up for his exam.
The rumor was that Cyrus failed all his classes—the AP Lit class in which he’d written a story without using the letter E, the European history class in which he made a 3D diorama of the battle of Algiers, even Drama, where he submitted a short film. Everyone in school knew Cyrus, but no one could claim to be his friend; he was always alone, and he never stayed after school or turned up in the cafeteria at lunchtime, so the mystery of his final exams remained just that.
Cyrus disappeared. He didn’t come back for senior year and he didn’t graduate. Eventually I went to college and forgot about him. I blossomed. I was miles from Merrick, a world away from high school, and I stepped into my brain like I was putting on a really great pair of sneakers for the first time. My brain-sneakers and I sprinted through courses and seminars and got me summa-cum-lauded. I cut my hair very short and got the first six digits of Pi tattooed on my left shoulder. In the meantime, I made a friend—a girl called Lynn—and I had a handful of casual hookups and lost my virginity in my dorm room while Constance, my roommate, was at a double feature of Blade Runner and The Big Sleep.
Lynn was an actress who was cast as the only woman in the drama department’s all-male production of Macbeth. We bonded over our late blooming. Lynn had spent the summer before college at fat camp and emerged nymphlike just weeks before orientation, but the high school scars were still raw, and over kale chips, which she dehydrated in a toaster oven that she kept illegally in her dorm room, we put Band-Aids over all the slights, sneers, and total invisibleness we had managed to escape. I told her about Cyrus—possibly the first time I had ever said his name aloud outside of my bedroom walls—but even then I downplayed my attraction to him, noting him as just another piece of flotsam from the shark tank that was high school.
I can’t remember when I came up with the idea of the Empathy Module, only that it had been lurking somewhere in the back of my mind for as long as I could remember. Maybe it was all the apocalyptic sci-fi I was reading that made me want to figure out a way to live without a fear of machines. They were going to be smarter than we were someday, we all knew that. They were going to beat us at chess and cook our meals and drive our cars. Someday they would paint and write operas and sing them back to us in perfect harmony. But what if they also had the one thing that humans possessed only on rare occasions? What if they had an intrinsic, automatic, unflinching, couldn’t-be-switched-off understanding of other people? What if they had empathy? Then they wouldn’t be our rivals, they would just be better versions of us. We wouldn’t have to fear them, and we wouldn’t have to subjugate them. We could just try to be more like them, because they’d be the best of humanity.
I went straight to grad school and started working in Dr. Melanie Stein’s lab. Dr. Stein had pioneered the reverse engineering of the brain. She was one of those formidable women who seemed to flourish in academic departments, her awkwardness hardened into a kind of opaque, terrifying brilliance. She was not mean, she was just never nice, never talked to fill awkward silences, and always made me feel as if I had said the dumbest thing ever. Before I met Cyrus again, I wanted nothing more than to grow up and become her.
* * *
My first encounter with Dr. Stein was not terrible. It was the start of the year, and I had just moved to Cambridge and into my tiny apartment in Ashdown House. She asked to meet me at a bar on Mass Ave, and when I turned up—I couldn’t believe how cold it was, I was already in my Michelin Man jacket—Dr. Stein was sporting a sexy poncho. She said, “I need to know right now that you’re not going to drop out or slow down, because if that’s anywhere near the horizon, you should go and join Dr. Li’s lab, which is full of the well-intentioned but only moderately ambitious.”