After Mind

by Spencer Wolf

  Meg exited after Ceeborn, then Daniel at his own distance. Daniel seemed content and looked around from the inland mountain peak and back to the deep-blue waterway behind them. Their recovery craft was settled and safe beneath a rolling cloud sky. They had made it by air to their distant shore, together.

  *

  Ceeborn and Meg stood close together on a far and secluded part of the beach. They were confident yet wary, in a new and exciting place. Ceeborn had on the green Windbreaker, but left it unfastened. A crisp breeze kept the air cool and the clouds at bay.

  “How’s your neck?” Meg asked with a gentle reach. He flinched from her touch. It hurt. It had festered anew and leaked a dark spot of black through his bandage.

  “It’s good,” he said. “I feel fine.” He looked over the big divide of the bay. On the other side, there was a jut of tree-covered land that looked peaceful and calm. “I’m not sure what to do. I’m not used to sleeping on dry land. I don’t know how to live in this world,” he said, looking to the far shore.

  She looked, too, and smiled. “It kind of feels like there’s a thousand more places to go, doesn’t it?”

  “There’s a lot of water here for me to explore,” he said as his eyes misted and he took a step back. “And I’m a really good swimmer. You know?”

  “You think this is some kind of heaven, or what?” she asked.

  “It can’t be heaven. There aren’t any people,” he said. He had the whole ocean and beach almost all to himself, but unlike some hapless rivulus in a tank, he didn’t want it to be so. He hated being alone. “Maybe you couldn’t have stopped me from running,” he said, “or from hurting so many people. Or, maybe if you did, none of this would have happened. Nobody would have died.” But, he didn’t want to bury her heart any further in his guilt, so he said the only thing he could. “But, you know what? It’s a good thing you’re here.”

  He grasped his neck with his hand. His pain was intolerable. “Maybe we can go to all those thousand places together someday?” he said with a failing smile, then turned away, his eyes filling with tears.

  “Where are you going?” she asked. “Please don’t. You know you’ll miss me if you go.”

  He tried to come back to her, but couldn’t untangle the swirls in his mind. “You know if I was a bio-machine with a brain a thousand times more powerful than my own, maybe I could figure all this out,” he said, “but I’m not that machine. I’m me. I’m the me that you used to watch from up in the morgue.” He turned and left her once more. “But now that we’ve arrived, I need to figure out for myself . . . who that me really is.” He tipped back on his heels, turned in the sand, and hurried away down the shore.

  “So then what?” she asked, lifting up to her toes. “What do we do once you’re you?”

  “We stay here and settle the planet,” he said, turning back with the bravest of grins. “What else? You’ve captured my soul, what can I say?”

  Far behind her, piles of supplies were unloaded onto the beach for the rows of vehicles to haul inland. Shoreline camps were being constructed from tilt-up panels. Wrecked craft were being cleared from the shore.

  “Meg?” Robin called. She heard her mother and turned.

  Robin was back at the doors of their craft. She was helping Pace step out onto the beach. He wavered for balance at the hatch and wiped an embarrassing black run from his nose. He found his step and recovered in Robin’s hold. His posture improved with Meg’s approach.

  But Meg didn’t get far. She heard a cry. She turned back and looked. Ceeborn was also stopped in his tracks as was everyone else emerging from their downed crafts along the beach. Everyone looked up toward the sky.

  A seagull flew overhead.

  It rose up free in the gentle thermals of a warming breeze.

  Ceeborn glanced at Meg beneath the gull’s swirl. She saw it, too. But then they both saw something else. Something moved between them on the beach. It was small and dark, and it moved away from the tide. From a distance, it looked like a fish, but then it couldn’t be, not so far from the curl of the waves.

  Meg started to run toward the moving creature on the sand. The seagull circled around and dove. Its wings spiked as it dropped, having zeroed in on the dark spot on the sand.

  It was the rivulus, scurrying. It dashed on its fins back for the safety of the water.

  Ceeborn closed in as he ran for it too. The seagull swooped with a caw and Meg ducked the flap of its wings. But with the seagull’s hop from the sand back up to flight, the spot on the beach was gone. Ceeborn watched the seagull soar. He stood on the sand in wonderment, then looked down at the edge of a wave on the beach. “It made it in a craft,” he said of the rivulus. “It lived.”

  Meg stopped for a breath before him. Then she turned and looked wistfully up the long shore, at the crashed crafts, and their fewer people emerging. Then she knew. “My father,” she said as she held her hand over her pounding heart.

  More pods streaked across the distant sky as they found their way in.

  Ceeborn counted them in and knew what it meant, too.

  “He got the doors opened,” Meg said, and cried. “My father got them all open.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  I FOUND SOMETHING

  CEEBORN SWAM THROUGH the clear earthen water of the bay with a trailing mist of red seeping from his neck. He tucked his head into his shoulder as he swam to relieve his sores and stiffness.

  He opened his eyes in a haze, a waking confusion. He had lain down on the beach and dreamed. Meg was kneeling over him. She spoke as he woke, continuing as though he hadn’t gotten far, or had never left. “I found something,” she said.

  “Your father?” he asked.

  “No, not yet,” she said. “But I’ll keep looking. Come on. I found something you ought to see.”

  Pace had recovered a healthier complexion and was riding in circles on a bicycle in the street. There was no moving traffic on the roads, no people to be found. Pace had no problem balancing, as his red and blue stripes on his suit attested.

  Meg led Ceeborn into a bicycle shop on a corner of a street. He marveled at the selection of equipment hanging from the racks. One suspended bike in particular caught his attention. The knobs of its back wheel gave it a nice deep traction and a free-sounding spin. The colors and lettering on its frame suited his taste. It was a graphite-and-white Rockhopper XPS bicycle.

  They emerged from the shop together, pushing two bikes toward Pace in his circles. They tried and tried again to ride their new and strange two-wheeled apparatus through the streets of an abandoned town.

  “A bike without a rider falls down,” Meg said and laughed as Ceeborn got back up.

  Yellow wattlebirds in trees whistled in a loud harmony of mockery, “LookatCee. LookatCee. LookatCee.”

  “We should go,” Meg said as she dismounted from her white Trailhead bike to give him a hand. “People say it’s safe to go up to the mountain and look around. We should go, too.”

  The grid of the city’s empty towers gave way to single homes that were aligned like fingers up the mountain’s foothills.

  Meg pushed her bike alongside Ceeborn’s up the hill of a drive.

  “Where are all the people who built these buildings? Who lives in them?” he asked.

  She smiled. It was easy. “Maps don’t have people.”

  “We’re not in a map.”

  “Maybe they all ran away.”

  “Maybe they all died?”

  “You think they’re all in cabinets in the sky?”

  “No, not here,” he said as he glanced up to see. “This is a real sky.”

  She stopped to rest before the end of the tree-lined neighborhood turned to forest, and lay her bike on the front yard of a home. He did the same with his, and then pushed open the home’s gate with its scripted numerals of 448.

  He walked through the small, wood-paneled home. There was a boy’s bedroom that was simple and nice. It had a few interesting toys, though its shelves were most
ly bare. Meg called from the living room.

  “They look like us,” she said, standing at the fireplace. She was hunched over a device. It was a clear piece of tablet screen that she held up to a window’s light. The sun gave it power. “There’s a show on here. It’s us,” she said as Ceeborn looked through its flexible pane.

  It was an image of the two of them together in a craft. They were sitting, she was in his embrace, and a window of a sky with clouds was behind them. Meg touched her finger across her smile within the frame. Their screen image shifted away, and a single word remained: “Passcode.”

  “Put it down,” he said. “It’s a Chokebot’s screen. It must have seen us when we came in. Put it down.” He felt dizzy, confused. She reached for his arm.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  He stumbled backward over a stack of boxes and fell to the floor. “Those boxes weren’t here when we came in,” he said.

  “Yes, they were—”

  “No. The boxes right there! Were those boxes here when we came in?”

  “Don’t yell at me,” she said. “I put them there when you were in your room.”

  She set the tablet screen back onto the mantel and took down something much smaller from its place. It was a clear vial. “Here, I found this, too. It was in one of those boxes.” She opened the lid of the treasure chest in her palm. “It has your picks,” she said. “A dandelion petal. A beetle wing. And a fish scale. The cure.”

  He rose and balanced his back against the wall for support. His breathing was far too fast. “No, that’s not mine,” he said. The room felt way too confined. “Let’s go. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Where to?” she asked.

  “Anywhere. Out of here. I want to see the sky.”

  He lifted his bike from the yard, pushed it by the handles, and hastened from the neighborhood across a narrow bridge. She skipped to keep up and push her bike alongside his. They passed a ravine with an overturned car rusting in its lower pond. The water level was through the windows but below the rear seat.

  “We should do something for your neck,” she said and reached. “It looks bad.”

  It stung to the touch. “I’m fine,” he said as the cramp in his neck sent his chin down to his collar bone. He gagged to clear his throat. The swirling chatter of a forest’s canopy pinched the sky away. He pushed on as clearings came and went through the forest path and the rolling call of a waterfall ahead brought a certain measure of calm. A rivulet flowed by his feet. A floating leaf meandered with the flow before lodging itself into a gate of twigs at the edge of a ravine.

  He dropped his bike to the ground at the sight below of a matching, but wrecked, graphite-and-white XPS bike. Its rear wheel protruded from the embankment’s muddied side. The wheel spun with leaves in its spokes.

  He turned, but Meg was gone. The shadow of the trees flipped from east to west, and night inexplicably fell with a roll of the sky. The shadows triggered visions in his mind, and memories of a decade past bubbled up to their surface and found their right context. His body reverted to a younger version of himself. He was a year less than a teen, and it was before Daniel had fixed him for water.

  A vehicle blasted its horn and swerved on the darkened curve of the road.

  He lifted his arm to peer below the blinding power of its halogen lights. His forest-green Windbreaker was reflective. In a flash of his mind’s eye, he saw a younger Meg in the passenger seat through the front windscreen. A younger Daniel was driving. The car’s wheels screamed on the road. The Jeep slammed him head on.

  He tumbled from its strike. He landed facedown in water at the bottom of the muddy ravine. His neck, face, and body were a boil of pain. His skin became covered in welts.

  The world narrowed to a wet view through tears on lashes as he lay still in the body of a boy. As he lay, silent, he watched his fate unfold, as his earlier self, Cessini. Daniel raced from the Jeep and ran down the hill. Younger Meg jumped out of the car. Then she screamed when she saw the ravine, “Daddy!”

  Daniel skidded feet first into the mud at the bottom. His hands felt and prodded as he yelled back to Meg in a horror, “I hit him! I hit him. Why didn’t I see him? I hit him!”

  Daniel pressed his hand to the back of Cessini’s neck on his lifeless body. “I let him run away! It’s my fault.” Daniel fumbled to reach under his back and the steeled tendons of his knees. “Tell me what to do! I don’t know what to do.”

  Cessini’s eyes couldn’t scream.

  Daniel pulled the spinning bike from its lock over Cessini’s immovable legs and hoisted his stilled body up the ravine.

  Meg stopped her crying when she saw. “Cee—?” She stared a moment at Daniel rushing up the hill then recognized the limp figure in his arms. She drew in a long breath that filled her whole body with air and her scream exploded from her deepest heart. “Cee—me!”

  She held his head face up on her lap in the backseat of the Jeep as Daniel drove, crazed. In Meg’s care, a pressure tightened in his chest. The warmth of her touch under his neck slipped further away.

  “No, it’s not just the water,” Daniel shouted into a clear tablet screen. “It’s my fault! It’s all my fault!”

  Cessini’s body relaxed in her lap and then went limp in the strength of her arms. “He died,” Meg said, then turned up to the rearview mirror, fraught with an unbearable cry. “He died. He died. He died!”

  Daniel slammed the breaks and the car spun around. “I’m not going to the hospital. Meet me at your lab!” He threw the tablet screen down to the empty passenger seat as Meg’s hollowing screams of “he died” went from hoarse to dry and she looked back down into the eyes of a body.

  *

  Robin threw a white paper roll off a table in a chilled, barren lab. She was younger. She was rushed, quieter, efficient. She worked, as if not on a person, but a project.

  A panel of red, yellow, and blue triangular lights aligned above a frame by the door. Robin swiped a key card down a scanner and the room’s ceiling unlocked with a click. “We’ve got to go below the connectome to the synaptome. Do it fast. His brain will die in five minutes if we don’t get his blood under fifty-five degrees.”

  The needle prick into his limp arm didn’t hurt.

  Daniel dumped a bag of ice in a bucket. Robin sloshed a blood transfusion tube running from his arm into the cold ice bath.

  A smooth torus ring descended toward the head of the table. Two green-and-white wedges gull-winged down and met the ring’s narrow sides. The jaws of the machine locked in place over the slab. A logo on its side was scripted with an “M,” then “B,” and beneath it, 11-C. He felt a tingle high in his head.

  “They’re in. Scan him. Start it now!” Daniel said. He was frantic.

  “He has to be calm,” Robin said. “We’ll scan in spikes we won’t be able to control.”

  “He’s calm enough. He’s dying,” Daniel said.

  “No, he’s not,” Robin said. She leaned over, her eyes were close to his. “His mind is still alive. But it’s peaked. He’s listening. If we scan him now, it will capture his fright, his pain. It’s not his natural state. It won’t be him.”

  “I’ll fix him,” Daniel said. “I know my son. I know him. I’ll calculate the correction factors. I’ll scale the MEPc’s back. I’ll code it to be him.”

  Robin leaned over and stared again directly into his eyes. The slip of her hand into his was a warm, peaceful touch.

  The core of the machine’s tube turned up to a whirl. The table moved on a track. The spinning entrance of the machine surrounded his head. The tube’s chamber revved up to a continuum of glow. The brain wave monitor went flat. His head lolled to its side.

  “We’re losing him,” Robin said.

  “Cessini!” Daniel yelled.

  Meg collapsed into her chair in a stare, watching Daniel and Robin at work.

  “Meg, wait outside,” Robin said without turning.

  Meg stayed still. She was staring, unwavering, in shock
, into the still of Cessini’s eyes. Hers—he stared back into hers—were hazel and pure.

  “Meg,” Daniel said, “outside!”

  The room fell to silence. Splices of talk broke the wait. Daniel or Robin, or both, yelled, or instructed, or moved to sit with Meg. She sat still, exhausted. She didn’t blink. Her hands were on her lap. She looked down at her empty palms.

  “Meg,” Robin said, but Meg didn’t respond. “Don’t worry about the machine. It’s not hurting him. It’s measuring by magnetoencephalography—MEG,” she said. “MEG, like you.”

  “DC SQUIDs,” Daniel said. He was instructing, fixing. He sat next to Meg.

  Robin straightened his head in blocks on the table. A light shone from the spinning ring.

  Meg’s presence was comforting.

  Daniel and Robin were talking. “The machine around his head uses SQUIDs, superconducting quantum interference devices,” Daniel said.

  He stared out through lifeless eyes, observing movements and Daniel’s attention to Meg. She didn’t respond.

  “The SQUIDs use Josephson junctions,” Daniel said to her, “to measure bit-by-bit changes in his mind’s electromagnetic energy field. They’re so sensitive that the individual electrons they measure become qubits, zeros or ones or a superposition of both at the same time. A quantum computer, 3D data. We’re only storing his mind’s data now. I’ve got to put it all back together later with code.”

  “Don’t worry,” Robin said. “It’s reading now. We’ll get him back.”

  Time flickered by with measured packets of thought ebbing and surging with the rhythmic spin of a light.

  “Think of what’s happening to him as a nondestructive pair,” Robin said to Meg with a gentler tone. “A thrower and a catcher. Like the two of you, inseparable. Nano blood-cell-sized throwers follow a map to exact positions in his brain. They already filled his head to about two-fifths of its blood volume. They detect picotesla-sized neuron triggers nearby, fifty million times weaker than the magnetic field of the planet at its surface.”