The Rule of Stephens

by Timothy Taylor

  Catherine was close to visible emotion and angry with herself for it, wheeling finally into Monroe Street, crossing again under the El tracks at Wabash, timed on this occasion to a passing train which thundered overhead, a chaos of metal on metal, the sound of something very large shuddering and dismantling itself into a million constituent bits. The Art Institute was closed. She stood in front of the building, on the steps next to the lions, who’d been seasonally adorned with wreaths of spruce and red ribbons, their pedestals wrapped to look like gift boxes, striped paper and festive bows. There was moisture threatening at the corners of her eyes just as a woman stepped from a cab at the curb, alighting, a theatre-goer, but seeing her clearly. And she was so stung with embarrassment to be seen close to tears that she sharply turned her back and walked up Michigan towards Millennium Park, past the looming video pillars of the Crown Fountain, children’s faces in LED loops, smiling, laughing, pursing their lips to synch with the water that issued forth from the face of the monoliths at regular intervals. It was possible to be mesmerized by this rotation of citizens on statuesque display. The children seemed to Catherine as if they wanted to speak and were being constrained across time and distance, whispering inaudibly from within the matrix of colour and shape and moving shadows.

  In the park there were walkways lined with lights that spiralled up towards the Cloud Gate sculpture, a mirrored aluminum kidney bean that reflected and distorted the city around it, bending the bristling skyline to form a brilliant circle, like an iris around the black pupil of the Chicago nighttime sky. No stars. Never stars in the city, whose own light darkened the heavens, making a black hole into which Catherine found herself staring.

  “Would you like me to take your picture?” asked a woman, who stepped just that moment to her elbow.

  Catherine started and turned. And though it was irrational to think so, she did think for an instant that this was the same woman who’d watched her earlier, though she’d had no more than a second to even see her features. Catherine never answered. She pushed herself off in the opposite direction instead, a gloved hand to hold her scarf to her face, to hide and warm herself.

  Michigan Avenue was flowing. A river of buses and taxis and cars. The light took forever to change and Catherine stood there in the swirling snow as it turned to angling sleet and pulled her coat tighter around her just as her phone began to buzz in her pocket. She snatched it out, gasping, again near tears. Valerie, please. Only it wasn’t her sister. Not Phil either. It was a text from Rostock.

  I’m sorry. I went too far. Do stay in touch. It’s important.

  She deleted it angrily. She stepped into the street and crossed. What did he want her to do? She didn’t want to know. Confront and defeat. Enter the place where they live. It was craziness. She crossed the continent to meet with the proof that all of the other survivors had lost their minds.

  She was walking in circles. She’d walked east and then south, then north and west. She was now heading south again, freezing. She’d just pulled up in front of the Chicago Athletic Association, which advertised a rooftop bar and an evening hot toddy special. As she pushed through the revolving door, she found herself looking up the street behind her, scanning the approaching faces for the woman she now thought she might have seen twice before. What had she even looked like? She could hardly pull a detail back. About Catherine’s age, fine features, long hair. Reddish? Maybe. She couldn’t be sure.

  In the elevator there was a party of six going up. It wasn’t their first bar. They were talkative and loud and they heated the tight confines of the elevator so that Catherine was hot again almost instantly, opening her coat now, loosening her scarf. The men of the group were talking about college basketball. The women were checking their reflections in the mirrored walls of the car. Catherine felt invisible among them. And when they spilled out of the elevator and into the wide room on the top floor of the building, Catherine saw that it was filled with groups and pairs of people, heads close over shared plates and steaming drinks.

  On the patio outside couples were kissing. She wandered to the railing and stared down and found again the Cloud Gate, crowds gathering around. And as she gripped the railing over those glittering lights below, her eyes drifted out towards the blackened lake, and something seemed to rise in the funnel of darkness, a flickering, shuddering column or cloud, composed she realized suddenly of thousands of individual marks of blackness, a swarm, a cloud, a flock, a murder. Black crows in their thousands. The product of a long ago falling and two perplexing, defeating years.

  A waitress arrived with a drink, which Catherine did not precisely remember ordering. Hot apple cider with a sluicing of good rum. She felt the warmth taking her, spreading through her limbs. Her phone buzzed again but it did not startle her. She knew who it was. She knew he would press to tell her what he thought he knew. She’d crossed the distance towards him, stepped up onto a pebbly far shore.

  Please be careful. I do believe that the danger is real.

  In the park below, the children’s faces on those video monoliths were elongated by the angle, distorted and mysterious, like distant, silent gods. Catherine thought of the children that had died the day she survived and she pitched forward, leaning out, feeling the cold air rising from the street below. Some static charge had taken her. And her vision adjusted bird-like in response, her eyes narrowing and zooming, and she thought she was able to look right down to the street with clarity, to see a woman standing there, staring up: about Catherine’s age, fine features, long red hair. Eyes locked on Catherine’s alone.

  Catherine on a rooftop staring down. Catherine in a taxi, crossing a river, heading north on Michigan under the glittering towers, the twinkling lights in a thousand trees, the shuddering shadow of a million black birds behind her. The ion dubh who had borne her down to the water, slowed her fall, dropping her gently into the Irish Sea. Not unscratched, but only scratched.

  In her hotel room she sat cross-legged on the golden textured bedspread, Catherine Bach in possession of some new sense of herself. She had not beaten the past. And she hadn’t come to understand the future beyond the fact that she was hurtling into it, and that Morris and Kate Speir now waited in some way for her ahead, a step farther down the trail, around a bend, advanced already some crucial increment towards whatever would ultimately happen.

  But she was centring, somehow. And when she heard a knocking at the door, she calmly rose, did not consult the peephole because she knew who it was. Door open. Hallway completely empty.

  She was alone.

  THREE

  “Bow or not? Call back or not? Recognize him or not?” our hero wondered in indescribable anguish, “or pretend that I am not myself, but somebody else strikingly like me, and look as though nothing were the matter. Simply not I, not I—and that’s all.”

  —FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY, The Double

  SUBJECTIVE DOUBLE DELUSION

  THE RULE OF STEPHENS.

  Catherine was reviewing what she knew to be true about the rule. She thought it was worth reminding oneself from time to time, repeating the principles in play, confirming your own deliberate choices. Effects have causes. Dr. Rostock as she encountered him was a curious effect of a cause called AF801. But to have this peculiar effect, AF801 did not have to depend on any kind of Kingsian paranormal aberration. There was a Hawkingsian explanation that Catherine might not yet fully understand, and that gnawed at her still a day after their encounter, but that she was forced to remind herself must be there.

  On the train home, Catherine turned her attention to the challenge of her immediate future. Morris’s notification was supposed to be confidential for the duration of those thirty days. So all Warehouse eyes would be on her in the ordinarily expectant ways. Thinking about that, Catherine registered that Rostock was also a cause in his own right, which could of course have different effects. She could let it preoccupy her, drive her crazy. But she wasn’t going to allow that. She’d had her lifetime quota of crazy in the past tw
o years. It was surely time for a little cold-eyed, Hawkingsian rationalism.

  She called Phil from the train. Might as well get things rolling immediately. “So thirty days,” she said. “How convenient of Morris to bring this whole thing to a head the week before Christmas.”

  “Twenty-nine days,” Phil said. “But I’m glad you’re counting.”

  “My big announcement,” she said. Then she told him. On her return to Vancouver, they were going to go straight to feature testing. Two hundred human subjects. They were going to prove out the technology and push towards beta release.

  “Whoa,” he said.

  “Hasn’t Morris been telling me to do exactly this, Phil? Telling me I’m stalling? Telling me I brought Mako on myself?”

  “Yeah, okay.” Phil sounded genuinely confused. “But I never thought you were stalling. I thought you had technical reasons for thinking the test was too soon. All that’s suddenly changed?” Besides, he said, a two-week test was much shorter than the three or four months she’d been talking about. It was also incredibly short notice for the team to pull off. Her mooring technology wasn’t where she wanted it to be. “You told me all these things,” Phil said.

  “Yeah, I did,” Catherine said. “But I’m tired of being blamed for holding things back. And if tests do go well then we’ll have great data to justify a beta release and we could be generating revenue inside a year.”

  Maybe so, Phil was saying. But all that upside would belong to Mako by month end.

  Maybe not, Catherine said. Maybe month end would turn out differently than people were assuming.

  Catherine was standing in her train suite now, rocking back and forth with the motion of the car, enjoying the sense of herself streaming through the landscape. This was absolutely the only way to go, she was explaining. Because if they killed at test, maybe she could raise the money herself.

  “What if the test doesn’t go so well?” Phil said.

  Well then maybe Mako walks away.

  “Or sues you,” Phil said. “For rushing it, for forcing the matter, for affecting the results and valuations.”

  Why was he being so negative? Why wasn’t he pleased for her? For the first time in years, Catherine felt a tick of irritation with Phil. Now would be a good time for him to say something encouraging and here he was telling her that a safer bet might be to just hold the course, not try anything too spectacular.

  “What does that actually mean, Phil?” she said. “Nothing too spectacular.”

  She had exactly the spectacular in mind because DIY deserved it. The people who worked there. All those millions of potential users, waiting and pre-registered, longing to regain some kind of control over their own bodies.

  “Listen,” Phil said, “I admire your energy, your commitment here still, under these circumstances.”

  There was a pause, during which Catherine heard Phil calculating the countervailing factors. The reasons why her energies were in this situation misplaced or unwise. But then he seemed suddenly to lose energy himself. As if what most crucially had to be said that moment wasn’t something that he wanted to be the one to tell her: that she was making this decision in a high-strung state, fuelled by emotions, in denial about some bigger, more looming issue. And putting his finger uncannily close to what that bigger issue just might have been, he then asked her, “So, how was your dinner?”

  She sat down suddenly, put her feet up on the other seat. Perhaps in a strange way, dinner had inspired her. Obvious clinical issues aside, Rostock was a survivor. They had that in common. And his intensity in the end might have been subtly infectious. Challenges seemed suddenly best met head-on. Problems demanded action, not capitulation. Perhaps it had been Rostock who’d awoken her to the bloody-mindedness required, which in her case seemed to have been steadily muted over the past two years.

  She didn’t tell Phil any of that. She saw that going forward he couldn’t be expected to be there for her in quite the same way as before. So she said very little. Dinner had gone fine. Old friend, good to catch up. She suggested lunch sometime after her return, after she got the test up and running. In the meantime she had many more calls to make. She had to get going.

  “Safe travels,” Phil said quietly. “Please take care of yourself.”

  Twilight. The train was hurtling through the northernmost Chicago suburbs now, stations flashing by in the lowering sun. But still afternoon in Vancouver and the Warehouse would be buzzing. So she signed off with Phil on that faintly sorrowful note and started to work the phone. That evening. First thing the next morning and all through that day. She activated the team, gave them each their task lists, fielded questions. Yohai, crucially. He was going to have to build out the prototype Red Pill 2.0 at long last, getting those diagnostic modules and the mooring tech loaded as best they could. Functionality would still be limited, Catherine had decided, poring over the data with Yohai on their separate screens, connected in phone space as she bounced across Montana. They’d build in the base suite of vital stats. They had stable test data for the diagnostic modules on gout, diabetes, hep A, malaria and cirrhosis. Catherine thought user experience, the website, expert advice feedback could all be tested in later rounds. So Hapok and Kalmar could take a back seat during this phase. They all met in a final conference call as Catherine crossed the Continental Divide going westward. And by the time she got to the Warehouse the next morning—two and a half days after making the decision to go—they had the test online, subjects recruited through the lab, the Red Pill 2.0 swallowed and moored and monitors in place. Two weeks of real data and they would know something about DIYagnosis that they had not been able to know before. They’d have a glimpse of their own future.

  “Nervous?” Yohai said at his desk, watching the first data sets flow in and collate. User profiles and the dense matrix of numbers signalled their activity within.

  Catherine stood at his shoulder. “What could possibly go wrong?” she asked. And here she lifted her eyes to find them locked immediately with Kalmar’s, on the far side of the Warehouse. He’d been looking at her steadily, and now nodded a slow greeting from where he stood, raising three fingers to his temple in a Cub salute.

  “Well it could not work, for example,” Yohai said. “We are pushing it here.”

  “So far, so good,” Catherine said, looking at those profiles populating with data on the screen.

  “The mooring could fail,” Yohai said, deadpan. “These screens could go blank any second.”

  “All right, all right,” Catherine said. “I’ll leave you alone.”

  Yohai grinned just as Hapok arrived at the workstation. He put his hand on Catherine’s shoulder. He never really smiled, as Mr. Clean himself might have under the circumstances. But he shook her hand solemnly and nodded his head. She felt the bulk of him in that shake, his enormous arms. “Good luck, boss,” he said.

  “Hey, you too,” she said. Though the expression on his face as he withdrew indicated that her need was the greater.

  Catherine returned to her own workstation. She knew she couldn’t hover over Yohai, who was probably going to sleep at his computer for the next two weeks. As for her, the bet was down. The croupier had spun the wheel. The ball was in the track where it would spin for a while before the drop. Tense, sure. But also a hovering sense that not much more could immediately be done. Catherine felt passingly weightless. Though only briefly, as she spied intern Arwen just then and waved her over. There were, of course, other outstanding matters that needed to be resolved.

  They walked outside for the few moments they spoke. Arwen was wearing a denim shirt pulled over a T-shirt with a picture of a large, anatomically correct brain. Text: The Brain. Curly long dark hair. Thin, intelligent face. A special assignment, Catherine told her. It would only take her a day or two and maybe a trip to the library.

  Arwen was looking at Catherine intently as she spoke. The assignment had an unusual shape and the young woman seemed to relish the opportunity.

  —r />
  She went to see Valerie at her shop a few days later. Valerie had been phoning since Catherine got back from Chicago. Catherine hadn’t had a minute to think and then—Yohai hunched over his screens with her own number on speed dial—it was clear she could afford the time for a coffee.

  “Take a day,” Yohai had said to her. “Take two. I’ll call you with anything big.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “I’ll be honest,” Yohai said, not looking up, eyes still on his screen. “You’re kind of making me tense.”

  Valerie gave her a sisterly hug full of all her typical compassion and concern. The shop had been decked out for Christmas and looked very Valerie, Catherine thought, noting the silvery green ornaments and dusty blue vases with dried flowers. Pine cones and lichen strewn on the painted tables. Folded piles of printed textiles and racks of craft bath products, tubes of hand cream. Her sister’s touch was evident everywhere. And the shop was bustling too. Valerie had to stop and chat with customers several times just on the way to the door.

  In the coffee shop next door Catherine told Valerie about Chicago, starting with her meeting with Morris. She felt herself rushing a bit through it, not sure she really had the time to dwell, but on the other hand telling Valerie because telling Valerie anything over the years had been an opportunity for them to mutually check and balance one another. They needed each other’s opposing tendencies and understood it without having to discuss the dynamic. Valerie’s flair and emotion, her passion for expression. Catherine’s pragmatism, or whatever it was that Catherine had always had. Catherine could well see that in the past year the dynamic might have shifted slightly with all her own volatility. And for the first time, visiting Valerie in her busy shop impressed on Catherine not just her sister’s passion and dramatic flair, but the reservoirs of common sense, the stable sense of the world and the future that were also reflected. She ran the show well in genteel West Vancouver, in the shop and in her home. Valerie’s was not a flaky success.