Throughout the piece, Currier positioned Decoded Neurofeedback as the heir to mainstream psychotherapy, “only much faster and more effective.” Solid numbers supported his claims about robustness. He downplayed the emotional telepathy angle. “The best comparison might be to the effects of a powerful work of art.” But his guided tour of the technique included just enough to make DecNef feel like the next big thing:
Well-being is like a virus. One self-assured person at home in this world can infect dozens of others. Wouldn’t you like to see an epidemic of infectious well-being?
Pressed by the journalist, Currier claimed, “The critical threshold for such a thing is probably lower than you think.”
Alongside the standard deviations and p-values and claims of therapeutic gains, Currier generally mentioned that tantalizing data point out on the end of the curve: a nine-year-old boy who came into the trials a bundle of rage and graduated as a junior Buddha. Sometimes, in Currier’s presentations, the boy had lost his mother. Sometimes he wrestled with prior emotional disorders. Sometimes he was just a boy suffering from unspecified “challenges.” Then came the video: half a minute of a pixilated Robin talking with experimenters on the day of his first session, forty-five seconds of him training on a screen while inside the tube, and another minute, one year later, of him talking to his beloved Ginny. Seeing the spliced-together clips for the first time, I gasped. My son’s posture and carriage, the melody of his voice: like the before-and-after of some experimental immunotherapy. He wasn’t the same person. He was barely the same species.
The film was a showstopper wherever Currier presented it. He showed the video to six hundred people at the annual conference of the American Public Health Association. At the reception after the talk, he let slip to a group of therapists the even more remarkable story behind the remarkable video. And that’s when Robin’s future began to get away from me.
I GAVE HIM A TREASURE HUNT about the Mississippi. Imagine you’re a drop of water as you made your way from a glacial lake in Minnesota down to Louisiana and the Gulf. What states would you float past? What fish and plants might you see? What sights and sounds would you hear along the way? It seemed innocent enough—homework I might have done myself, thirty years ago. But thirty years ago, it was a different river.
As he often did in those days, Robbie went a little over the top. The treasure hunt turned into a week-long excursion. He drew maps and diagrams, sketches of boats and barges and bridges, whole underwater scenes replete with exotic aquatics. Days in, he appeared alongside my desk in the office, holding out the enameled tablet on which he did his research. Requesting upgrade to the transponder.
“What’s wrong with it?”
Come on, Dad. You call it Planetary, but it’s just a little kiddie browser. It doesn’t let me go anywhere.
“Where do you want to go?”
He told me the things he was looking for and how he would find them.
“Fine. Use the ‘Theo’ sign-in today. But go back to your own account when you’re done.”
Goodie. You are the greatest. I’ve always said so. What’s the password?
“Your mother’s favorite bird. But flying backwards.”
His eyes pitied me for choosing such an obvious secret. But he went back to work, ecstatic.
He was subdued at dinner when we both knocked off for the day. I had to draw him out. “How’s life on the Mississippi?”
He spooned in some tomato soup from far away. Not so great, actually.
“Tell me.”
It’s pretty bad, Dad. Are you sure you want to know?
“I can handle it.”
I don’t know where to start. Like, more than half our migrating birds use the river, but they can’t because they’re losing their habitat. Did you know that? The chemicals that farmers spray on their stuff goes in the river, and that’s turning the amphibians into mutants. And all the drugs that people pee and poop down the toilet. The fish are completely doped up. You can’t even swim in it anymore! And where it comes out? The mouth? Thousands of square miles of dead zone.
His face made me regret giving him my password. How did real teachers handle this? How did they manage field trips down that river without faking the data or ignoring the obvious? The world had become something no schoolchild should be allowed to discover.
He rested his chin on his arm, on the table. I didn’t actually check this, okay? But other rivers are probably just as bad.
I came around the table and stood behind his chair. My hands reached down to take his shoulders. He didn’t look up.
Do people know this?
“I think so. Mostly.”
And they don’t fix it because . . . ?
The standard answer—economics—was insane. I’d missed something essential in school. I was still missing something. I stroked the crown of his head. Somewhere beneath my moving fingers were those cells that the training had reshaped. “I don’t know what to say, Robin. I wish I knew.”
He reached up blindly to clasp my hand. It’s okay, Dad. It’s not your fault.
I was pretty sure he was wrong.
We’re just an experiment, right? And you always say, an experiment with a negative result isn’t a failed experiment.
“No,” I agreed. “You can learn a lot from negative results.”
He stood up, full of energy, ready to go finish his project. Don’t worry, Dad. We might not figure it out. But Earth will.
I TOLD HIM ABOUT THE PLANET MIOS, how it had flourished for a billion years before we came along. The people of Mios built a ship for long-distance, long-duration discovery, filled with intelligent machines. That ship traveled hundreds of parsecs until it found a planet full of raw materials where it landed, set up shop, repaired, and copied itself and all its crew. Then two identical ships set off in different directions for hundreds more parsecs, until they found new planets, where they repeated that whole process again.
For how long? my son asked.
I shrugged. “There was nothing to stop them.”
Were they scouting out places to invade or something?
“Maybe.”
And they kept dividing? There must have been a million of them!
“Yes,” I told him. “Then two million. Then four.”
Holy crow! They’d be all over the place!
“Space is big,” I said.
Did the ships report back to Mios?
“Yes, even though the messages took longer and longer to arrive. And the ships went on reporting, even after Mios stopped responding.”
What happened to Mios?
“The ships never learned.”
They kept going, even though Mios was gone?
“They were programmed to.”
This gave my son pause. That’s pretty sad. He sat up in bed and pushed at the air with his hand. But it might still be okay for them, Dad. Think of what they saw.
“They saw hydrogen planets and oxygen planets, neon and nitrogen planets, water worlds, silicate, iron, and globes of liquid helium wrapped around trillion-carat diamonds. There were always more planets. Always different ones. For a billion years.”
That’s a lot, my son said. Maybe that’s enough. Even if Mios was gone.
“They split and they copied and they spread through the galaxy as if they still had a reason to. One of the great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren of the original ship touched down on a rocky planet with shallow seas, in a small, weird stellar system rotating around a G-type star.”
Just say it, Dad. Earth?
“The craft landed on a level plain in the middle of wild, waving, towering structures more complex than anything the crew had seen. These elaborate, fluttering structures reflected light at various frequencies. Many of them sported astonishing forms at their very top that resonated in lower frequencies—”
Wait. Plants? Flowers. You mean the ships are tiny?
I didn’t deny it. He seemed equal parts skeptical and fascinated.
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sp; Then what?
“The ship’s crew studied the gigantic waving green and red and yellow flowers for a long time. But they couldn’t figure out what the things were or how they worked. They saw bees fly into the flowers and the flowers track the sun. They saw the flowers wilt and turn into seed. They saw the seeds drop and sprout.”
My son held his hand up to stop the story. It would kill them, Dad, when they figured it out. They would get on the communicator and tell every other ship from Mios in the galaxy to shut down.
His words gave me gooseflesh. It wasn’t the ending that I imagined. “Why do you say that?” I asked.
Because they would see. The flowers were going somewhere, and the ships weren’t.
r
I BROUGHT HIM TO CAMPUS WITH ME on days when I taught. He spread out his books on the desk in my office, and while I lectured or sat on committees, Robin taught himself long division and solved word problems and decoded poems and learned why the trees outside the office window turned carroty and gold. He wasn’t studying anymore. He was simply toying with things and enjoying the unfolding.
The grad students loved to tutor him. Checking in after a long October morning seminar, I caught Viv Britten, who was working on the small-scale crisis inherent in the Lambda-CDM model of the universe, sitting across the desk from my son, holding her head.
“Boss. Have you ever considered what is going on inside a leaf? I mean, really thought about it? It’s a total mind-fuck.”
Robin sat smirking at the havoc he’d unleashed. Hey! Curse word!
“What?” Viv said. “I said freak. It’s a total mind-freak, what you’re telling me.”
It was all that, and more. The green Earth was on a roll, assembling the atmosphere, making more shapes for itself than it could ever need. And Robin was taking notes.
We were down on the shores of the lake over lunch, fish-spotting. Robbie had discovered that polarized sunglasses let him see into a whole new alien world beneath the mirroring surface. We were looking, hypnotized, at a school of three-inch intelligences when someone called, four feet from my shoulder.
“Theodore Byrne?”
A woman my age stood clutching a brushed-silver computer to her chest. She wore a fair amount of turquoise hardware, and the folds of her gray tunic fell over skinny jeans. Her controlled contralto voice seemed baffled by her own boldness.
“I’m sorry. Have we met?”
Her smile hung between embarrassed and amused. She turned to my son, who, in a favorite animist ritual, was patting the almond butter sandwich he was about to eat. “You must be Robin!”
A flush of premonition warmed my neck. Before I could ask her business, Robin said, You remind me of my mom.
The woman looked sideways at Robin and laughed. Alyssa’s and my ancestors had come from Africa, too, only from somewhat further back. She turned to me again. “I’m sorry to intrude like this. Would you have a moment?”
I wanted to ask: A moment for what, exactly? But my son, trained up on ecstasy, said, We got a million moments. Right now we’re on fish time.
She handed me a business card spattered with fonts and colors. “I’m Dee Ramey, a producer for Ova Nova.”
The channel had several hundred thousand subscribers, with individual videos topping out at a million views. I’d never watched a minute of it, but I still knew what it did.
Dee Ramey turned to Robin. “I saw you in Professor Currier’s training clips. You’re amazing.”
“Who told you about us?” I couldn’t keep the anger out of my voice.
“We did our homework.”
The penny dropped. For a guy who’d grown up on science fiction, I’d been amazingly naïve about what artificial intelligence, facial recognition, cross-filtering, common sense, and a quick dip into the planet’s aggregate brain could do. At last I freed myself of stupid civility. “What do you want?”
My rudeness to a stranger shocked Robin. He kept patting his sandwich, too hard and fast. Ova Nova, Dad. They did that story about the guy who let the botfly hatch under the skin in his shoulder?
Dee Ramey shouted, “Wow, you watch us!”
Just the ones about how cool the world is.
“Well! We think what’s happening to you is one of the coolest things we’ve seen.”
Robin looked to me for explanation. I looked back. Realization spread across his face. Influencers wanted him for the perfect three-minute episode, one that could earn a million thumbs from strangers across the globe: Boy Lives Again, Inside His Dead Mother’s Brain. Or maybe it was the other way around.
LIFE ASSEMBLES ITSELF on accumulating mistakes. By the time Dee Ramey showed up with plans to turn my son into a show, I’d lost count of how many parenting errors I’d already made.
Robin thought it would be fun, to become an episode alongside all of Earth’s other strange inhabitants. He put his case to me over ice cream, hours after I sent Dee Ramey packing. Honestly, Dad, think about it. I was super-miserable for so long. And now I’m not. People might like to know about that. And it’ll be educational. You’re all about education, Dad. Besides, it’s a cool show.
Two days later, Dee Ramey called me. “You don’t understand my son,” I told her. “He’s . . . unusual. I can’t have him turned into a public spectacle.”
“He won’t be a spectacle. He’ll be a subject of legitimate interest, respectfully treated. You can be there as we film. We’ll avoid anything that makes you uncomfortable.”
“I’m sorry. He’s a special child. He needs protection.”
“I understand. But you should know that we’re going to make the film, whether or not you want to take part. We’ll be free to use all the materials already available, in whatever way that makes sense to us. Or you can participate and have a say in things.”
Smartphones are miracles, and they’ve turned us into gods. But in one simple respect, they’re primitive: you can’t slam down the receiver.
My son was still technically anonymous. But what the Ova Nova researchers had discovered, others could soon find out. I’d made a mistake, and doing nothing now would only make it worse. At least I could still try to manage the way the story went public. Two days later, when my anger subsided, I called Dee Ramey back.
“I need a say in the final edit.”
“We can give you that.”
“You are not allowed to use his real name or say anything that would make him easier to identify.”
“That’s fine.”
My son was a troubled boy, hurt by seeing what the sleepwalking world could not. An offbeat therapy had made him a little happier. Maybe showing him on camera being himself could beat whatever sensationalism Ova Nova might create out of Currier’s clips and sales talks.
Robin sat curled under my arm on the living room sofa and explained it to me, on a night when we decided to stay home on Earth. Like Dr. Currier says. Maybe it could be useful.
I DIDN’T GRASP WHAT WAS HAPPENING TO ROBIN until I saw the rough cut. In the video, his name is Jay. He comes into the frame, and the shot begins to breathe. He turns to look at the ducks and the gray squirrels and the lindens along the lake, and his gaze turns them into aliens for the camera to reappraise.
Next, he’s lying in the fMRI tube in Currier’s lab, moving shapes around on his screen with his mind. His face is round and open but a little devilish, pleased with his skill. Dee Ramey, in voice-over, explains how Jay is learning to match another set of frozen feelings laid down years before. But her explanation is beside the point. He’s a child, in the full grip of creation.
Then he’s sitting across from Dee Ramey, on a bench under a spreading willow. She asks: “But how does it feel?”
His nose and mouth twitch a little. His excited hands twist with explanation. You know how when you sing a good song with people you like? And people are singing all different notes, but they sound good together?
The journalist looks sad for half a moment. Maybe she’s thinking how long it has been since she sang wi
th her friends. “Does it feel like talking to your mother?”
His brows pinch; he doesn’t quite like the question. Nobody’s saying anything out loud, if that’s what you mean.
“But you can feel her? You can tell it’s her?”
He shrugs. Vintage Robin. It’s us.
“You feel like she’s there with you? When you train?”
Robin’s head swivels on the stalk of his neck. He’s looking at something way too big to tell her. He reaches one hand above his head to catch the lowest branches of the willow and let it slip back through his fingers. She’s here right now.
The video blinks first and cuts away.
THEY WALK ALONG THE LAKESHORE. Jay lifts one hand to the small of her back, as if he’s a doctor breaking news that’s delicate but not disastrous. She says, “You must have been hurting so much.”
I want to scream at her, every time. But he’s paying attention to the world, not her question.
“When did the hurt start? When your mother passed, or before?”
He frowns at that word passed. But he figures it out on the fly. My mother didn’t pass. She died.
Dee Ramey stutter-steps and stops. Maybe his words stun her into listening. Maybe they excite her, their weirdness promising a couple thousand more thumbs-up. Maybe I’m being cruel.
“But you’ve learned to match the patterns of her brain activity. So now that part of her is inside you, right?”
He smiles and shakes his head, but not in disagreement. He knows now that no grown-up gets it. He holds out his hands to the grass and sky and oaks and lindens lining the lake. Paws up in the crisp air, he waves them to include our distant invisible neighborhood, the university, the houses of friends, the Capitol, and states beyond our state. Everybody’s inside everyone.
Bewilderment Page 16
