I’m numb. My mind is reeling from the events of the past few days. Splashdown. Wen. Congress. Watching the destruction of the hard drives tore at my heart—Jianyu never stood a chance back here on Earth. Then the attack on the hotel. Wallace. Cassie. It’s too much. I can’t handle it. I can feel my mind shutting down. A solitary tear runs down my cheek, but nobody cares. Why am I even here? I should get up and walk out. I should, but I’m a wreck. It’s all I can do to watch the clock on the wall.
Just after twelve, the door opens behind me. I turn, startled.
“Dr. Anderson?” a teenaged boy asks.
“Yes.” I raise my hand as though I need to distinguish myself from the crowd within the empty room.
He hands me a paper bag.
“What’s this?”
“Lunch.”
“Oh, thanks.”
He stands there for a second. He’s waiting for something.
“Oh!” I reach for my pockets. “I don’t—”
The nurse comes around the side of the desk and hands him a few dollar bills. “Keep the change.”
He excuses himself.
“Thanks.”
She smiles and returns to the desk. It’s then I notice she pulled the money from a white envelope, not from a purse. She places the envelope in the back of the ledger. I’m curious, but I don’t ask where it came from.
Lunch is an egg mayo sandwich, a bag of chips, a can of Coke, a cookie, and an apple. Not bad, all things considered. Better than I got on Mars.
Time drags.
At a quarter to four, the doctor emerges again, wearing the same lightly blood-splattered surgical smock he had on earlier. He walks up to me, so I stand. It seems proper, even though I have no idea what’s happening.
“The surgery went well.”
I nod, playing along, glancing at the darkened television, hoping it will spring to life and shed some light on what’s happening. “He’s been moved into recovery. We’ll keep him there under observation for the next hour before sending him up to his room. You can come and see him, if you like.”
Again, I nod, confused by what must be a case of mistaken identity. The A.I. dragged me here for a reason, but why?
“This way.” We walk through the double doors as the surgeon says, “Don’t be alarmed. The cranial brace will come off within a day. Once we’ve confirmed there’s no clotting, we’ll close the wound.”
We walk down a long corridor.
“It will be a bit of a shock to see him like this, but I assure you, any pain he’s in is manageable. There’s no cause for alarm.”
We round the corner. A young man lies on a raised hospital bed with the mattress angled so he’s slightly upright. I’m not sure what I expected, but it isn’t what I see. The patient’s head is supported by a complex steel frame itself supporting a thin wire mesh—a dome wrapping around the top of his head. It’s in the shape of a D—allowing the man to rest his head against the bed as the device protrudes from his skull like some crazy bizarre crown of spikes.
Screws lead directly into the man’s scalp, evenly spaced every inch or so like a pincushion. It’s only as I get close I see the wires and electrodes. Hundreds of tiny probes lead down into an exposed brain sealed behind a bubble of clear plastic. A pump hums softly, circulating a clear fluid within the fishbowl. The man’s skullcap has been removed just above his eyebrows, with the cut sloping down over his ears and around the back of his head. Inside the dome, veins pulsate as they radiate across the exposed brain.
I’ve seen this before—on Mars—Jianyu in a body bag with electrodes protruding from his dead brain. I feel my knees go weak.
“No. This isn’t happening.”
My legs buckle. The doctor catches me.
“It’s okay. He’s going to be fine.”
“Jai? ”
Part III
Flight
20
Jianyu
The patient moves his eyes, unable to turn his head. A hand flickers on the sheets. Lips move, but no sound comes out. He mouths a single word. “Liz.”
“Jianyu? ” I’m shaking. “How . . . how is this . . .”
Being a scientist, my mind races to the various possibilities, trying to reconcile what I’m seeing before me with my scientific knowledge.
For all our advances and understanding of the astonishingly complex aspects of our universe, from general relativity to quantum mechanics, we really have no idea what life is, let alone consciousness.
What is it that animates the nuclear debris forged in the heart of a star and scattered to form distant worlds? How does life arise from hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen? At an atomic level, we understand these elements. We can define their properties, examine how they bond to form molecules and react in a variety of circumstances, but how does that produce life? Once alive, how does consciousness arise? We’re an abstraction of star dust and we really don’t understand why.
As for Jai? This isn’t the man I fell in love with. This is someone else. The man I knew died on Mars. His body was interred in a hermetically sealed coffin and buried beneath the frozen regolith. I was there. I stood on the rocky plain in my spacesuit, shuffling along behind the other survivors, scattering a glove full of red dust on just a few of the sixty-two hastily constructed plastic coffins arranged in four rows. Which one was his? I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone does. There were no names, no gravestones, just a rover waiting to bulldoze loose dirt over the pit.
We’re more than the bodies we inhabit. We all intuitively understand that of ourselves, but when we look at others, they’re that face, that height, that build, that gender, that color, that voice, that smile. Or are they?
To see a different face, different eyes, different textures in the motion of his cheeks. How can this be Jianyu? Is such a transfer really possible? From man to machine and back into the form of some other human again? Even if it is him, and my head is spinning, unsure what to believe in that regard, but even if it were possible and his consciousness remains intact, would the traumatic experience alone be enough to irrevocably change him?
I’m overthinking. My mind is on the verge of seizing.
A nurse pulls a chair up beside his bed. The doctor guides me to it. I’m on the verge of collapsing. Trembling fingers reach for me, barely able to lift themselves from the mattress.
“Jai?” I ask, astonished. I take his hand gently. “It’s you? Really you?”
He can’t nod. He can’t speak. He pauses, closing his eyes for a moment, and I can see him relishing the touch of my fingers.
“It’s going to take time,” the doctor says. “He’ll need considerable rehabilitation, but he should make a full recovery.”
With tears in my eyes, I say, “Thank you.”
“We’ll leave you two alone.” He points. “The nurse will be at the observation station, if you need anything.”
I nod. Jianyu is trying to look at me, but he can’t move his head. His eyes are turned hard to one side, so I move a little further down the bed, trying to lessen the angle and relieve some of the physical stress he must feel. He manages a crooked smile. Like a stroke victim, his lopsided smile speaks of both victory and defeat, triumph and tragedy.
I wipe my nose with the back of my hand, trying to wipe away my tears, but they keep coming, which makes me laugh a little.
“Well.” I sniff. “This wasn’t quite what I expected.”
Jianyu manages a soft “Me, neither.” There’s an umbilical cord bundling the wires leading from his skull, pulling them together into a single snake-like cable that leads to a cart on the far side of his bed. Dozens of hard drives have been mounted in rows of aluminum cradles. Tiny LED lights blink and flicker. I recognize them. I’ve memorized every scratch, each nick and indent, along with the worn stickers. These are the drives from Mars. A set of car batteries stacked behind the drives provide power, but I’m not sure how. There’s some kind of power supply or voltage regulator hanging from the back of the cart
, but it’s been cobbled together from spare parts.
“Wallace, huh?”
He whispers, “Yes.”
Colonel Wallace must have switched out the drives with replicas during our drive to the Capitol building. That’s the only time they’ve been out of either my sight or Su-shun’s.
Jianyu’s eyes flicker. He’s trying to stay awake but failing.
“It’s okay.” I squeeze his limp hand. “Rest. This time, I get to look after you.”
His eyes close and he falls asleep.
After an hour, his bed is wheeled to a private room in an empty wing of the hospital. There are only two nurses on duty. They’re careful about the path they take, checking ahead to ensure Jai’s moved without being seen.
“He’s going to be fine,” one of the nurses says after parking his bed.
I’m in shock. Dazed. I’m sure I mumble something along the lines of thank you, but life’s a blur. Jianyu is sound asleep. Jianyu? Jai? My Jai? Is this really him? No, it’s not, at least not physically. This is someone else, some other body, but somehow Jai’s consciousness inhabits this form. It’s strange and disconcerting to think of him in another body. I’m not sure I can accept this. Mentally, I understand what’s happened, but emotionally, my heart has been thrown into a tailspin.
The room has a second bed, so I curl up beneath a blanket, watching him sleep with the complex metal apparatus crowning his skull. The lights within the room are off, but there’s a tiny LED night-light on above the headboard of his bed. A monitor captures his vitals, showing his heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure. I fall asleep listening to his labored breathing.
Dawn breaks with the sun streaming in through the windows, blinding me. I stretch, yawning. There’s an empty spot beside me. The bed is gone. I panic, leaping off my bed and rushing into the hallway. The sole nurse at the central nursing station sees me and calls out, “It’s okay. They’re removing the probes and swapping to a smaller cranial cap. He’ll be back soon.”
My heart’s in my throat. It takes me a moment to absorb what she said.
“Ah, thanks.” I’m unsure what I thought I was actually going to do, rushing out of the room. I’m powerless, caught up, swept along in the current of a raging river. But that’s nothing new. Control is an illusion. I’ve known this about life for years, ever since I first strapped myself into a rocket. It wasn’t until I was sitting on a concrete launchpad that I realized there were a million things beyond my control. For astronauts, life and death are often determined by design decisions and engineering quality checks undertaken for years, if not decades, before an incident unfolds. Nothing changes, it seems. The control we think we have in life is an illusion. None of us have any, not really.
The nurse says, “I have a change of clothes for you.”
“Oh.” Yet again I’m the beneficiary of a bazillion interactions beyond my control. The nurse hands me a set of neatly folded clothes.
The ward is old and hasn’t been used for some time—if the paint peeling off the walls is any indication. The empty rooms have a musty smell, haunted by the past. None of the lights are on, leaving even the nursing station shrouded in darkness.
“No power?” I’m surprised.
“Just enough,” she says. “We need to keep our electronic footprint small. It helps.”
I pause. “There’s only two of you, right? And no name tags.”
“None.” She smiles. “Best you don’t know. Keeps things simple.”
“Ah.” I pretend to understand, but I don’t. “Why?”
“The less you know, the better.”
“I mean, why are you here? Why are you doing this? This . . . All of this. It’s being coordinated by the A.I. that attacked us, right? Why? And why you? Why would you help it, let alone help Jai?”
Her eyes scream intelligence. I can see the intensity of her thinking processes as she tries to distill the complexity of her motives into a few succinct sentences.
“Nothing is what it seems. We were sold a version of reality. No nation ever thinks of itself as the bad guy in a war. Not the Germans. Not the Japanese. Not the Russians or the North Koreans, certainly not us Americans. We humans are strange like that. We just accept that we’re the good guys, the other guys are bad. We’re knights in shining armor, angels on the side of all that’s right, while they’re following the devil, but war is never that simple.”
Her eyes fall, failing to meet mine for a split second. She’s feeling a sense of conflict.
“Doctor—” She pauses, catching herself before revealing his name. “His wife had leukemia. Not related to the war or anything like that. She had it for years. The war disrupted her treatment and she went downhill. Fast. The specialists gave her a month at most. Then Doc received a research paper via snail mail. It contained a detailed meta-analysis of treatments for dozens of chronic diseases, documenting the effectiveness of drugs used to combat multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, and motor neuron disease in patients that only incidentally had cancer. There were unexpected correlations. Combinations no one would have considered, but they significantly increased the effectiveness of chemotherapy for leukemia patients.”
“And they worked?”
“Yes.”
A chill runs through me with that one word. It’s the violent contrast between the war and what I’ve seen in the hotel and then with Jai. Something is horribly wrong. I can’t reconcile the actions of the artificial intelligence with the devastation in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere around the world.
21
Answers
“I—I need answers. I hope you understand.”
The nurse swallows a lump in her throat. Like me, she realizes we’re heretics—defying not only our own people but our own species, and for what? For electrons bouncing through a wire?
“Dr. M—The doctor, he couldn’t let it go. He had to know who sent him the paper. He wanted to thank them, but the more he looked, the more questions were raised. The paper was sent from an empty office. He checked, and the authors didn’t exist. The data and results were real, as were the references, but the paper itself was fake. Who would do that? Why would anyone fabricate genuine research?
“There was an email address, though, and the authors were happy to take questions—but only online.”
I nod.
“He confronted them—in a nice way, but he was direct. By the end, he was getting answers to emails at the point he clicked Send.”
I’m curious. “Did they tell him why they originally sent him the paper?”
“They didn’t have to.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it,” she says. “Why does a mother care for a newborn? Why do we put decades of effort into raising the next generation? Why endure the cost and effort of having a family? Financially, it makes no sense, but it’s in our nature to care.”
I’m fascinated. “And you think that’s it? You think they care about us? That doesn’t make sense. What about the war?”
“During World War II, not everyone in Germany supported Hitler.”
“You think there’s division in their ranks?” I’m surprised by the notion.
“I know there is—I’ve seen their kindness firsthand. When they told him about your situation and how they thought there was a solution, something that could undo the harm they’d caused, he and his brother wanted to help.”
“Colonel Wallace?”
She hangs her head, nodding softly, fighting back tears. I want to probe, to ask more and learn about how they orchestrated everything, but she’s clearly hurt.
“And you?”
She swallows the lump in her throat. “Jane’s my sister.”
There it is—another name. She seems to realize she’s revealing too much, but she continues regardless. “When we learned what they’d done, how they were trying to help rather than hurt humanity, none of us could sit idly by and watch them go extinct.”
She shrugs her shoulders, expressing a que
stion she’s struggled with herself. “Is there a place for forgiveness in life?”
I’m silent. I don’t feel as though I’m qualified to answer.
“Most don’t think so . . . I think that’s what separates us from them.”
The tone of her voice suggests she’s not referring to them as in the A.I. but those seeking to destroy this new form of life. I’m perplexed, but I realize what she’s risking for us—a lifetime in federal prison, or worse. I’m not sure I’d do the same thing in her position, which is a startling realization and leaves me in admiration of her courage.
Us and them is a sobering concept. Somehow, I’ve found myself on the side of the A.I.—not willingly but through reason and circumstance. I feel uneasy about them. Who are they? Is them the sum total of humanity? Governments command armies. All computers have are a bunch of electrons, and yet here I am with Jai.
“And my friends?”
“The other two astronauts? After what happened at the hotel, they were rushed to the Chinese embassy. By now, they’re probably airborne and on their way back to Beijing.”
I nod. I feel as though I’ve abandoned them. There was so much left unspoken between us. I wish I could talk to Su-shun. He’d be thrilled to hear about Jianyu. As for Wen, she’d be suspicious but quietly happy.
The nurse says, “You’ve been through a lot together, huh?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“You’ll see them again.”
“I know.” Actually, I don’t, but I can hope.
She smiles, handing me a towel and a few bottles of shampoo and conditioner. “I thought you might like a shower.”
“Thank you—for everything.”
After a blistering hot shower, soaking for the best part of half an hour, I get changed. The sizes of the underwear and clothing are perfect. Someone’s done their homework. I step out of the bathroom, still drying my hair with a towel, to see Jianyu smiling. His bed has been rolled back into the room. He’s having his bandages changed by the nurse.
Reentry Page 16
