by Spencer Wolf
“It’s afraid of water because it’s a computer,” she said.
“He’s not a computer. Don’t say that.”
“Your program developed an association and fear.”
“Did you ever feed this computer water? No. He has a fear of water because he is Cessini. And Cessini was a human who knew he was reactive to water.”
She crossed her arms over her chest and fell back into her hard, scooped chair.
“He’s carried it with him,” Daniel said as he sat and pulled his chair back up to the table. He pushed her mug away, and leaned in closer to her. The liquid jiggled in rings in the mug. “Since when do you drink black water,” he asked and she slipped out a nervous laugh.
“Maybe it figured out computers and water don’t mix. So it gave itself aquagenic urticaria. It found an underlying affliction it could associate, no matter how rare.”
“No,” Daniel said. He came down to a whisper. “If I could have done anything to help him before he set, I would have coded out his urticaria. Not added it in.”
She considered in vain what was left. She looked down over her arms crossed over her heart. “You know Luegner is a liar. He will take him from us first chance he gets.”
Daniel winced. He looked over the table, its cuts, its shape, its center position in a foyer. It was a lonely foyer with wall-high windows that looked out to nothing but darkness and a reflection of two desperate souls. “None of this would be here without Luegner.”
“Luegner took my mother from me,” she said and opened her arms onto the table.
“Don’t say that.”
“When was the last time you heard her laugh? She’s a mess. Luegner did that to her.”
Daniel spun up from his chair as both hands rushed to his head. “Luegner won’t take Cessini. I won’t let him. But Cessini will only come back for you. You were the only true friend he had.”
“I don’t want to do it.”
“Don’t forget, Cessini is gone because of you.”
“Don’t you say that. Don’t you ever say that again!”
“If you didn’t kill him by accident, then by neglect. Now you’ve got to help me save him by purpose.”
“That is not fair. I’ve done everything I can possibly do.”
“Then be there for him. He’ll come back for you. But only when you’re the you that he knows.”
“And what about me? What if it hurts too much for me?”
“It won’t. ‘Belief and know’ will work. It takes time to build a relationship, doesn’t it?”
“Not as long as it takes to forget one.”
“We won’t come back out of that room until we’ve won and he’s with us again,” Daniel said and moved forward to the edge of his chair. He reached his hands across the table.
She didn’t take them to hold.
“Give me the chance to fail the first time, okay? Like a mad scientist. Funny-haired, Newtonian powdered locks and all,” he said and flipped his hands over and open.
She hit one and he curled it back up. “Cassini was pre-Newtonian, actually,” she said. “Difference of a few years here and there. But who’s counting?”
“Will you do it?”
“Everyone is entitled to one mistake, right? So tell me the truth. What is he?”
“Technically,” he said, but that’s not what she wanted, “he’s an advanced computer with twelve years of memories. An advanced computer that thinks—that thinks it’s a dying boy who’s reactive to water. But personally, he’s Cessini.”
She leaned forward in her chair, holding her head in her palm and resting her elbow on the table. The worn groove in the surface of the table was a meaningless blur in her tunneled vision over a circle of white.
Daniel waited in her silence.
She curled her fingers into a fist against her head, but found the fall of her hair over her forehead distracting. She pulled her hair back behind her head and retwisted its band. Then she pushed herself up by shoving back her chair.
Daniel waited. He stared.
“Let’s go,” she said, decided.
Daniel closed his eyes and breathed. She stopped him with her left hand on his shoulder. She reached around for an overriding embrace with her right and gave him a loving kiss by his temple. She stayed in close to his ear. “You don’t give up, either. Okay? Call my mom again. She’ll come back. She knows how to help if you let her.”
“By the way, for the record,” Daniel said as he poked her ribs away, “who’s running this show, me or you?”
“He is,” she said and they both knew it was true. “Now let’s get back to work, slacker. He was more than just my friend, too.”
SIX
A LADDER AND A BAGGIE
HARDLY A DAY went by after school when nine-year-old Cessini and Meg didn’t ride the bus together, not to their respective homes, but to Daniel’s southwest suburb’s 36,000-square-foot data center with attached two-story office.
Daniel worked as a critical systems engineer out of his test lab on the office’s first floor. He built new servers, storage, and infrastructure for the explicit purpose of trying to break it. Given a system’s weakness, he could access its log files and then fix it to make it better for a next round of testing.
Up on the second floor, Cessini and Meg became instantly busy and safe at the end of the abandoned southeast hall in an after-school work space set aside just for them, an old fourteen-by-sixteen-foot corner office. A six-foot shared table in the middle of the room was theirs alone for projects. It was theirs from the minute school ended until Robin swung by to pick Meg up.
Cessini loved their days, but hated the room. Directly above the centerpoint of the table where he sat was the bane of his nine-year-old existence. He stayed, sometimes immobilized for hours on end, with his eyes fixed straight up at the incline ceiling, and to the scourge of the room: a sprinkler head.
The room peaked at fifteen feet, but at its twelve-foot center, at the end of a long, thin finger-like pipe, was a single, sixteen-pronged sprinkler head that set two inches down into their room. And only by virtue of a 1/8” glass bulb filled with a thin red liquid was a torrent of rain damned back. It could decide to extinguish his soul to its core at a moment’s break and flash. Being human so exposed beneath was an awful fate to endure. Sometimes, he wished he were a computer, because computers never, ever, worried.
Meg, for her part, was always there to scribble, to tease, to sleep with her head down, or simply lift her eyes and watch him. She was delighted to help, though she always leaned too far in and across for a closer look from her side of the table.
When Cessini stopped staring, he fiddled. He had access to any tool, any resource in Daniel’s first-floor lab. As a starter, he built a robot’s body, a really great one, and just maybe, as he daydreamed, a new body for his ailing mind. He steadied his roughly framed robot’s elbow on the tabletop and articulated its forearm to vertical.
“Do you think a sprinkler pipe full of water would miss a drop that falls on the floor?” he asked.
“No.”
“How about a drop that dies in a fire?”
“Probably.”
“Does rain miss its home in the sky when it falls to the ground in a war?” he asked.
“Yeah, that’s why it’s always blue,” she said with a self-congratulatory grin.
She might have been right. But a water pipe with feelings? Never. The devil’s pipe itself couldn’t mourn.
A 3D printer no bigger than a small microwave oven, and even easier to use, was on a movable supply cart behind him. Cessini hopped off his stool and checked the printer’s spooling progress through its orange glass canopy. The print head swirled and moved about the cubic space in fine spatial strokes, painting not on a flat paper, but a solid product upward, layer by layer. Cessini sculpted by proxy any of an old master craftsman’s dreams, and all with a simple finger swipe on the printer’s networked catalog screen. He looked into the printing bay from its side. The white-c
olored joint of his chosen plastic knuckle was printing up fine in 3D.
Meg’s perspective was a little different from her side of the table. She could never keep up with Cessini with counting or numbers. So she flowed and arranged all the colors of life into a world of their own. Cessini’s winged tablet had become by de facto hers, and she made it her own. She played Sea Turtle Rescue on its worn and scribbled-on screen. The game was a trap of empathy and enduring commitment. Her turtle brood travailed from egg to sand, then sea. They survived only by everyday nurture of clicks and swirls, or worse, left abandoned to a dying end. She hunched on her side of the desk. She would never leave them neglected.
He pulled a tendon cable up through the three-prong, primitive gripper he built.
“If you were in here with the turtles,” Meg said, head down, as she tickled the winged keys of her tablet, “I would carry you all around with me. Every day.”
“Okay. I’m trying to get this one cable up through—”
“Probably only for a year or two, though, until I get older,” she said.
“That’s okay. I wouldn’t want to be stuck in there too long. Get eaten by a duck or something.”
She lifted her eyes. “There’s no ducks— Crocodiles, maybe.”
He redoubled his concentration on feeding the looped end of a cable up through a horizontal washer to a hook at the bottom of a wrist. Once hooked and pulled from below, the cable drew the three fingers above the wrist into a pinch. Little springs were secured under the base of each finger’s knuckle and returned it to open when the cable was let loose.
“That’s really neat,” Meg said. “All three of the fingers can move by themselves?”
“Yup, and you only need one cable to do it. Nice, hey?”
“Like three opposable thumbs on one hand.”
“Exactly.”
“You could hold lots of things like that.”
“I know, right?”
“Except there’s no fingers, only thumbs. So what good is it?”
“Yeah, I know. So, I’m still working on it,” he said as he looked up from his work and she retook her stool.
When she was no longer hovering over his side of the table, he stood and filled the void. And when she came up to standing, he sat down again without notice. They seesawed, played, and worked through the hours of the clock. It was plain as the color of day. They had become inseparable.
But his mind always returned to the sprinkler head above, and he took another peek up at it. “The brain always picks the highest probability,” he said. “That’s how it works. It figures if it happened before, it’s probably going to happen again. We live by our memories. But memories aren’t real.”
“Then what is real?” she asked as she feathered her keys and circled her turtle in the sea.
“Imagination is real. Imagination means believing what can come next. And I know what can come next.”
“What do you know?”
“That this isn’t a pure room.”
“It isn’t?”
“It’s a one-watch. I figured out a system. At home, every time I walk by the four-watch down the hall to my room, I keep track of every source. If it drips, it’s a count and I keep track. I count them all through the day, every day.”
“What’s a four-watch?” She twisted on her stool and rotated the swirls of her tablet.
“It’s the kitchen. One through four. The sink, the refrigerator, the dishwasher, and anything left on the counter. I watch the four sources. I keep track and never let my mind forget where they are.”
“Okay, stop.” She lifted her head. She stopped her stool. “From now on, we don’t say ‘watch’ or ‘count.’ The kitchen is the kitchen. A leaky faucet is a leaky faucet, not a two-, or a four- or a six-count. You got it?”
“I know, but—”
“I get it, but you can’t talk like that. What are you going to say when a friend, if a friend, ever comes over and you want something from the kitchen? It’s not, ‘Dad, can you get us something from the four-watch?’ That’s never going to work for you. You say, ‘Can I have a drink of milk from the refrigerator in the kitchen?’ ‘I left my glass on the counter next to the sink,’ or the dishwasher, or the dozen other wet items waiting to be dried and stacked. Or, how about the refrigerator, the one with the ice maker. Did you count that one, too, by the way?”
“No. Okay, I’m still working on it. But bathrooms are the worst. And this building is a one-hundred-twenty-six-watch.”
“Okay, back up. What about this room?” She blinked. “There’s no water in here.”
“This is definitely not a pure room.” He pointed up as her eyes followed. “That sprinkler,” he said, whispering.
“Oh, yeah. There’s that. You know it’s just a pipe, right? There’s not even any water in it. Not until there’s a fire, anyway.”
He thought a moment, then said, “Last night, I dreamed I could swim.”
She scoffed. Then went back head down to click-clack away.
“Really, I did. Underwater, too.” He leaned forward over the robot arm. “I’m not kidding. Swimming like a fish. But it was me.”
“You mean I could be up in a boat with a pole,” she said, laughing, “and I could catch you like a fish. You’d be flapping away. Wiggle, wiggle, aah, wiggle-wiggle.”
“Yeah, you could try,” he said, then relaxed. The 3D printer beeped and he looked back. The knuckle was done, but he didn’t rush. “Okay. I got a better one. Why did the rhinoceros get kicked out of brain school?”
“I dunno, why?”
“Because he kept trying to break into the girl’s hippocampus.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Did I get you?”
She was silent.
He threw his head back, cracking himself up. “I did. I got you.” He pointed at her and twirled on his stool. “I think. . . .” He cackled and twirled. “I think it’s funny.”
“What? You mean at the zoo?”
As he slipped from his stool, he slapped out to grab the table’s edge. The hook of his robot’s arm broke free with the force of his crash. The tendon cable let loose and the gripper’s fingers sprung back to open. They hyperextended and broke without their knuckle backstops.
But he didn’t care in his belly-on-the-floor laughter. He could fix a broken finger later. His mind reveled instead in his healing now.
She lifted both hands in surrender. She tried to laugh with him, but couldn’t. “I still don’t get it.”
He looked up from the floor over the table top to her scowl. When he was younger at school on the playground he believed he was alone. That lonely boy was real. But with Meg here at work, fixing or breaking from laughter, he knew he had a friend. There was no contradiction. He believed and he knew that he was his same self. He got up from the floor and laughed a small victory for fun.
“I still don’t get it. What’s so funny?” she asked.
“Never mind,” he said as he climbed back on his stool at his side of the table. “Remind me when I’m done with the body to build a hippocampus for my robot’s brain. I can print one out on the printer with its mouth open really wide like this. . . . Like the one with the broken tooth at the zoo. I can fit it right up here where the head is going to go.”
“Wait a minute. You have no idea what a hippocampus means, either.”
“Yeah, so? I heard my dad say that joke to the guards downstairs. They thought it was funny. And you know what?”
“What?”
“I have no idea what it means, either. But I’m glad that you’re here.”
“Great. Where else am I supposed to go?”
He shrugged.
“Then do me a favor. When you get up, print me a giraffe, too. I want one.”
He straightened up one of his robot’s fingers. They weren’t broken as bad as they looked. “I thought of a name for him.”
“For who?”
“Packet. I’m going to call him Packet.”
“Call who packet?”
“My robot.” He showcased the working pile of pieces in front of her face.
“Okay, whatever,” she said. “Don’t forget my giraffe.”
“You know what else?”
“What?”
“I’m going to go into space.”
“With your robot?”
“No. But all kinds of people say they’re going to do it and never do. But I will.”
“So how are you going to get into space?”
“I dreamed it, like me swimming under water.”
“Oh, please. Then you’re not going.”
“Yes, I am. I invented a bioship that uses space dust for fuel. Space dust gets shot out by stars, and it’s organic. That means it’s alive. And it’s everywhere in space. My ship grabs up all the space dust in a giant ocean tank of water.”
“Right. And what are you going to do about all that ocean water?”
“Nothing, the water won’t bother me because it’ll be in space! And the people in my spaceship will know how to turn all of it into energy. They blast it out the back. Physics says you can do it. Quantum engines and energy stuff. I know all about it. I dreamed it. It’s real.”
“Cool. Can I go with you on your spaceship?”
“Sure, why not? It’ll be a big ship. A thousand people. Giant. Open air, huge inside.”
“Cool.”
“You want to know what it looks like?”
“No.”
“Okay, so, imagine a gigantic barrel, hold it up sidewise so you’re looking into its opening. There are people living and walking all along the inside walls.”
“Wait, you’re going into space in a barrel?”
“No. Come on.” He tore a sheet of paper from a pad and hurried to scribble oodles of tiny people. She leaned over her desk. He rolled the paper into a loose tube and tacked its long seam with a piece of tape. “It’s huge, okay? The people walking along in here stare across the diameter of the tube and what do they see? The people on the other side, over here, are upside down and looking back across at them. This freaks everybody out, right, so you put a huge projection screen, side-to-side, right down the length of the tube. And you project the sky on that screen. Now the people think they’re standing in a semi-circle or a valley and they look up and see the flat, projected sky with clouds and everything.” He ran a flat hand along the outside of the rolled paper to show her how the sky screen would go lengthwise down the tube.
