The Rule of Stephens

by Timothy Taylor

  And when Catherine finished describing her meeting with Morris, Valerie confirmed that impression. “You know what I say,” her sister told her. “I say you go talk to Mako directly. Show them who you are. Maybe they’ll see the light, buy out Morris and work with you.”

  Maybe that was a better idea than simply hoping that the Red Pill 2.0 test would impress so much that Mako would change their mind. It was proactive and Catherine appreciated that. The only problem was that Mako was hidden behind veils of secrecy. Kate Speir. Based in Seattle. That’s all she had.

  “Mark might be able to find out,” Valerie said. “It’s all degrees of seperation with tech fund people.”

  So Catherine agreed Valerie could make a discreet inquiry. Then she went on to the story of Dr. Rostock, who had continued to text her with vague warnings and pleas that they stay in touch. Catherine had been ignoring these, not feeling she could afford to let his madness get too close. But she didn’t tell Valerie all those details. She stayed on the dinner instead, the story he told. As she spoke, Catherine could see a furrow working its way in between Valerie’s eyes. And by the time she got to her bathroom exit, her return to find Rostock gone, her sister’s expression had migrated to one that Catherine remembered from over the years. A look of glazed wonder. A trace of something childish, a wish that the world might yet have magic in it.

  Catherine, in observing this, felt herself adopt the old role, as if in that classroom so long ago.

  “It was identity theft, Valerie,” Catherine said. “That’s all it was.”

  “But all that other stuff he told you.”

  “Oh, he was messed up by the experience, which I can understand. Terrible situation.”

  “What about the other passengers?” Valerie said. “None of that happened?”

  “Not none of it,” Catherine acknowledged. “The suicides were real.”

  Here Arwen had carried out her special assignment quite brilliantly. A research job. She didn’t phone the families, of course. But she tracked down the obits, which all, in the end, had a particular kind of language. Never suicide. But words like tragic, untimely. An end to the suffering. After a short illness. It was easy enough to read between those lines, even if it didn’t get you to the vardøger or the ion dubh or whatever Rostock thought had been coaxed up out of the depths in those moments on the Irish Sea.

  “Plus there is the whole head injury aspect,” Catherine said.

  Arwen again. Delusional Misidentification Syndrome. It was well covered in the peer-reviewed literature.

  Catherine realized she’d grown oddly agitated trying to discuss these things. And she looked away, fanning herself with a paper napkin. The coffee shop was filled with tables. It seemed to Catherine that at every one of them two women of about their own age were leaned in together over biscotti and Americanos, telling stories, checking in with each other, listening so hard.

  “Delusional Misidentification Syndrome,” Valerie was saying, holding her own coffee in both hands, sipping, peering over the rim.

  “Exactly,” Catherine said. “So, you ever find yourself thinking that Mark has been replaced by an identical imposter?”

  “There was this time he lit candles that ran all the way up the stairs and into the bedroom. That was before the kids, clearly.”

  “Well, if you thought that he was inhabited by an imposter, and you thought that seriously for any length of time, then you would be suffering from what is known as the Capgras Delusion.”

  Valerie and Catherine exchanged a look.

  “Nope,” Valerie said. “Pretty sure he’s still him.”

  “Of course you are,” Catherine said. “Fregoli Delusion?”

  “I give up.”

  That was when you thought different people you met were actually the same person in disguise. Then there was Inter-metamorphosis, in which the person thought those around them were swapping identities while maintaining the same appearance.

  “I sometimes feel that way about the kids,” Valerie said.

  “No you don’t. You don’t have a brain injury.”

  “So what? You have one dinner with the guy, have an intern do a Wiki search and now you’re an expert?”

  Catherine smiled and adjusted her position in the chair. Arwen and Catherine had done a bit more than that. They’d tracked down a neurologist at the University of British Columbia who specialized in personality and mood disorders in people who have suffered head trauma.

  “Well,” Valerie said, “she certainly sounds like an expert.”

  She was indeed. And there was little doubt in her opinion on the topic of what was ailing Michael Rostock. An event killing 499 people involving a still-unexplained explosion and a rapid descent from 28,000 feet at 900 kilometres an hour to sea level at zero—she explained to Catherine, methodically and without judgment—that sort of thing would almost certainly produce a behaviour-altering brain injury or two.

  “Or two,” Valerie said.

  “I’m good, thanks,” Catherine said. Point being, Rostock’s symptoms were consistent. Mood swings, paranoia. Even the doubling delusion was right out of the diagnostic manuals.

  “Textbook,” Catherine said to her sister, whose eyes were still on her, but whose mind had clearly drifted to some new concern.

  “What?” Catherine said. “Ask.”

  “What he said about the ion dubh,” her sister said. “If you’re me, that part remains very strange.”

  Perhaps she shouldn’t have told her sister that part. “I don’t really know what to say about that,” she said to Val.

  “Well you could start by telling me if it happened to you,” Val said. “Did you see black birds?”

  Valerie waited, a look of concern on her features. Her coffee now forgotten on the table between them.

  Catherine found herself looking around the busy room again. Eyes to the front window. Of course she’d been haunted now for two years by that precise image, birds in their hundreds, thudding and close. But her heart was not pounding this time, thinking of it. Because if Rostock coming unwound over dinner and afterwards had convinced her of anything, it was that those birds could not in any way harm her. And as a new and odd feature of her own brain chemistry, maybe they would eventually have an opposite and positive effect.

  “No, I didn’t,” she said to her sister, in a lie that she knew was untraceable and unchallengeable however many crows she just now observed to sweep through the trees in the park across the street. Valerie sitting back, looking at her. Valerie still with questions but holding them close to her chest for now.

  Catherine back in the car. Driving, driving, driving. The trees in Stanley Park blurring by. She felt her heart beating. She felt her hands gripping the wheel, her legs vibrating on the pedals as the car’s tires sang down the pavement.

  Know your body. Change your world.

  —

  Phil called the day they wrapped the test. He didn’t say it directly but Catherine knew why he was in touch again. She was now just twelve days out on the heaviest deadline she’d ever faced and probably ever would face. And yes, there was one way of reading the situation that would lead an observer to think she was ignoring reality. But what a way to ignore reality for two whole weeks.

  Your body talks. We’ll help you listen.

  “Busy?” he said.

  She was glad to hear from him, she realized. The conversation on the train was one that might have preceded a long period of leaving each other alone. He couldn’t be her lawyer any more, after all. But she was glad to know that in the middle of his afternoon, he might still occasionally pick up the phone to call her as a friend.

  “Cone of silence?” Catherine asked him.

  “Always.”

  She was brimming with excitement, which she now allowed him to hear. It was early days. And the test was admittedly short. Hard data hadn’t yet even been completely analyzed. And qualitative data from the test participants was yet to come.

  “Tell me, Cate,”
Phil said.

  Early word she was getting from the research folks and from Yohai was all positive. They’d gone down huge. The device worked. Subjects seemed to love it. There was still so much more to be done. So much more that the device would soon be able to do. So much more that they all had to offer. But as a base technology, they were there. And if you wanted the potential to track seven risk factors for Alzheimer’s, to know if your mitochondria were emanating a pulse of something troublesome, a whiff of malignancy in the germinal works, well then DIYagnosis had a device you could swallow, a dashboard you could load onto your phone, an interface with experts that was robust and reliable for a very reasonable fee.

  “Catherine,” Phil said. And he let the line run silent.

  She was rocking back and forth at her desk. She was biting her lip, smiling.

  “Thrilled,” Phil said finally. “Absolutely thrilled. You did it. You really did.”

  A prince among men, she thought. Phil didn’t say a word about deadlines or the fact that what she had accomplished might belong to someone else in twelve short days. There was no point and he realized it. She’d done this madly and would see where it went. He only made her agree to lunch that Friday. A celebration was required no matter what happened. She agreed and hung up, her eyes were drifting around the Warehouse now. Things normal enough, things buzzing almost as usual. Almost, Catherine thought, as they had before AF801 had changed things so utterly. Fingers on keyboards and low conversations, people in twos and threes along the counter in the canteen. Someone pulling together picnic tables for a management meeting she’d called herself. Everyone seemingly still in the envelope of not knowing enough to wonder if it all was about to change.

  She wanted to believe that. She wanted to believe what Phil had told her back in Chicago. That Mako would want things quiet. And that Morris would do whatever he had been told. But in front of her managers, having gathered them there to share great news, it was impossible not to sense some other presence in the room. Some invasive sentiment. They sat at those picnic tables with their teams. Yohai had his two lead engineers. Hapok and Kalmar with their people. They wanted to be excited for the news that they all of course knew was coming. But some vague worry held them back.

  Catherine, who was never long on procedure, dove right in. “Dudes, we crushed it.”

  There was a quiet whoot from the back of the room, and some hesitant smiles did appear. And when Yohai took the lead citing numbers, things lightened further. The mooring had worked. They’d deactivated the power source and the devices had flushed. Someone made a crude joke and people laughed. And Catherine sat back, relieved, but feeling the restraint.

  “Design feedback?” Hapok speaking from the far end of the tables. “I sent you materials.”

  Catherine walked through the longer test schedule. Red Pill 2.0 tests had focused on the device, on the technology. User experience would be built into the next round. And Hapok listened with his arms folded. “I guess I’m just wondering how design is supposed to respond to user input so late in the game, since it seems we’re pressing for release.”

  Catherine noted his serious expression as always. But fair point. Nobody wanted their last crucial changes made right before going to market. But they weren’t quite there yet, she said. And everybody would have time to complete changes. Everybody would be supported in making the product the best it could be. And everybody would be kept in the loop, as best she could. Starting immediately.

  Kalmar was tracking her with his eyes as she spoke.

  “Any other impending changes we should know about?” Hapok still, those arms folded, biceps bulging.

  He may have meant nothing. He may have been fishing for an answer to a question he was not quite yet bold enough to ask. Still, the question did not sit well with her. And as the meeting tables cleared, Catherine remained sitting, absorbing the moment and unsure what the next thing was that she should do. Kalmar, a table away, likewise did not rise. They exchanged a glance. She thought of how long it had been since they’d spoken alone together. She missed him, a wayward feeling. It wasn’t what she wanted to feel, but there it was.

  “Coffee?” he said to her. And she felt an undeniable surge of pleasure on hearing the request.

  They got coffees from the canteen and walked outside, through the railyard warehouses to Main Street, from there past the SkyTrain and across the grass north of the Science Centre’s geodesic dome. It had been raining earlier. But the clouds had broken and the shadows had sharpened. There was a crispness in the air along the seawall that traced the perimeter of False Creek, and they headed south and down into the new neighbourhood that had sprung up there: glass condominium complexes with aluminum and wood accents, huge bollards on the walkway, a nod to the area’s maritime history. A full-colour sculpture of two enormous sparrows in the main square that Catherine loved for being whimsical and because the DIY Warehouse had its own resident sparrows.

  They talked about user registrations for a while. Kalmar gave her the stats, which netted out to the reality that when they opened for business, they might well be swamped. But then he stopped talking, and he chuckled, staring up at the birds.

  “Swamped,” he said. “Makes me think of something. You know about this sculpture?”

  He was gesturing with the coffee cup in his hand. And when Catherine shook her head, he told her. The artist had intended to dramatize the hostile virility of the introduced species. The sparrow was brought from Europe to New York in the mid-nineteenth century, probably because farmers wanted them to control agricultural pests. Didn’t work out exactly. They liked cities, it seemed. And since they had the evolutionary advantage of not migrating, they were able to take the best nesting sites before native birds returned from the south each spring.

  “We feed them crumbs in the café, yeah? But then they take over nests and kill chicks in their shells.”

  “I really enjoyed this piece better before I knew that,” Catherine said.

  “No, no,” Kalmar said. “I’m making a point.”

  All new technologies were invasive species, in their own way. They all displaced. They all killed some part of what came before. But you either believed in the future or you lived in the past. You either advanced or fell back.

  “I feel fairly sure that metaphor is flawed, somehow,” Catherine said. “But your point?”

  Grow or die, Kalmar said. He had nothing against chickadees or robins or swallows. But you had to appreciate that this new neighbourhood—the shiny buildings, the café opposite with that fantastic crusty bread, this very sculpture and the implied statement of what it might represent—could not exist were it not for the aggressive, expansive impulse of the invasive species itself.

  None of this exists but for that which once wished to destroy it.

  They walked back, a long silent stretch. Kalmar was not typically so philosophical. And Catherine pondered his words, wondering what all he might know. Yet still she appreciated this new candour from him, the implication that a connection was still possible between them, the subtle push that he was giving her without perhaps being fully aware. And a block short of the Warehouse, as if to prove out these impressions, Kalmar put out a hand to stop her. There on the corner near a tire store, they turned to look at each other. His blue eyes steady in hers.

  “We’re all proud of you,” he said. “Don’t worry about nobody fist-bumping or high-fiving or whatever. People are proud. I’m proud.”

  She nodded, not quite sure what to say. But there was more.

  “I owe you an apology,” Kalmar said. His expression was serious but entirely certain. He’d thought about this next part. “For the night we went to dinner.”

  “Don’t say anything,” she said.

  “I’m not apologizing for feelings,” he said. “Only that I should have known better.”

  She took a breath. “Me too,” she said.

  Catherine was not a hugger, but she accepted one now. It was warm and full, and it smelled
of leather, wool and a trace of lilac.

  Back to work. Back with something like a new spring in her step. She didn’t need Kalmar to give her confidence in herself. She didn’t need the sparrows to give her permission to fight on, even though the sight of five or six of them just then flitting to a far roost on a rafter high above did make her smile. But the feeling was there. And it was a feeling that she carried back to her workstation, back to her task list, as she refocused on all those things that must come next, as she descended back into the maelstrom of work in the midst of what might be the most important phase of DIY’s history, thinking: there might yet be a way that I outplay Morris with my week plus a few days remaining.

  Or at least that’s what occupied her mind until she caught the intern Arwen looking at her from way across the room, peeking out from behind her monitor in a quadrant of the space the kids called Furry Land for the proliferation of stuffed animals—pandas, cheetahs, a big pink elephant—contributed by who knows who and perched all along the window ledges and even some of the high steel roof members.

  Catherine smiled and nodded. Arwen looked as though she’d been caught doing something and waved, slightly manic. Then, realizing how ridiculous that looked, she stood and shrugged. Sat down again.

  She crossed the space to Arwen’s workstation. She peered over the monitor. “Real quick,” she said, motioning with her head that Arwen should follow. They went out past the front desk again and the wall where everybody hung their bikes, out onto the street. The breeze was up. Catherine pulled her coat around her and stood for a few seconds, thinking.