He didn’t have a plan yet. But he was working on one.
Levi stripped in what passed for the laundry room. He tossed his soiled clothes into the sink, turned on the hot water and added soap to cover the pants and shirt.
After spreading out the pages of his notebook to dry, he lay down, pulled the blankets over his head, and cried himself to sleep.
Darkness descended, and M screamed.
“Clear.”
The darkness was eternal. An endless ocean of dark. Black upon black upon black. Nothing and nothing and nothing.
“Clear.”
Nothing existed. Nothing to see, nothing to remember, nothing to learn, nothing to know. There was blackness. There was darkness. There was emptiness.
Blackness. Darkness. Emptiness.
“Clear.”
M couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, couldn’t anything. He was trapped, caught, entombed in the blackness.
“Clear.”
In the darkness.
“Clear.”
In the emptiness.
“Clear.”
M screamed.
“Clear.”
The computer chimed.
“Eight minutes, thirty-three seconds.”
L stopped pacing, rushing to M’s side.
“Eight minutes, forty-five seconds.”
“What’s happening?” L asked.
“Clear.”
M’s body arched off the chair.
“Nine minutes.”
L stared at the notebook she held, the top page blank, as though expecting answers there. Then at the medpod, with M attached to the sensor array. The empty vial sat in its needle, hanging out of his port.
“Nine minutes, thirty-two seconds.”
One minute past resurrection.
L’s heart spiked against her chest, beating for both of them. “What’s happening?”
“All systems operating within recommended reboot parameters.”
She massaged her forehead, smacking herself on the side of the head. “What? Is he alive?”
“All systems operating within recommended reboot parameters.”
“Reboot? What does that mean?”
“That information is not located in any accessible databases.”
“Do something.”
“Clear.”
M’s body arched off the chair.
The computer chimed.
“Ten minutes.”
After eternity, something knocked.
M fell silent.
Another knock.
Light, diffuse and lost in the distance, rushed in, overwhelming him where he cowered in the shadows.
Levi moved the blankets, blinking against the glare of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.
M cried.
“Go answer the door,” Levi’s mother yelled, the words slurring together.
He threw on a pair of shorts and a shirt and made his way downstairs.
M stared at the dingy staircase, the paint peeling like dandruff and floating to the floor. Two wires poked out of an empty light socket. A fire alarm dangled uselessly from the ceiling. Despite the despair, everything seemed a miracle after the unknown ages of darkness, alone in the emptiness with nothing to do or see or think.
Levi opened the door.
She didn’t smile. She never smiled. Not for him, at least. She just demanded.
“I need that paper,” Cathy said, pushing her way into the living room, brushing against him, trailing a fragile scent of vanilla, but when he breathed it in it merged with the stench of shit still infecting his sinuses.
She paused, halfway past, letting him smell, knowing he smelled her. Maybe she leaned forward, just a little, her shirt collar hanging open. Or maybe he imagined it, the way he imagined the fragrance of her.
It overloaded his thirteen-year-old senses, everything about her overloaded him. Her presence making him more awkward than usual.
She kept walking, not waiting to see if he followed. He always followed.
Long black hair hung past her shoulders, and when she spun to face him it moved in slow motion, exposing then hiding her neck, her cheeks, her eyes.
He studied the floor to keep from staring at her. She didn’t smile, but she laughed. The same laugh she’d laughed when someone stood on his head and she sort of tried to help.
But these brief meetings in the privacy of his house must remain their little secret, she’d whisper to him, letting him smell her hair, letting him look when she appeared at his door. Sometimes demanding for her own homework, sometimes her boyfriend’s. And always, she’d find a reason to visit on those days the bullying went too far.
She let him smell. Let him look.
Tonight, she needed a paper on thermodynamics. He’d written a similar paper in fourth grade for a scholarship application to a ‘camp’ for genius elementary prodigies. Five weeks at the Smithsonian, studying with other brilliant kids from around the country. He’d made actual friends. Real friends.
Still kept in touch with a couple of them.
Mostly just Billy.
And Stephanie.
Yasmeen.
Amy.
Devid.
His only real friends. They understood him, his righteous indignation, his hurt and anger. His pain.
Cathy lingered, reading the paper with a practiced eye. Making sure he’d spelled her last name right. Her parents had simplified the original Korean spelling long before, but she insisted on the original. Nothing simple about Cathy. She’d little doubt Levi spelled it the way she wanted. He did everything the way she wanted.
Anything.
“Good boy,” she said, almost but not quite patting his arm on her way past. Not smiling, but lingering, close enough for the scent of vanilla to overload his senses.
The memory burned into M, replacing the loneliness and blackness with an adolescent crush.
She never stopped laughing until after walking out the door, waving the report clutched in her hand.
Levi slammed the door closed. His mother yelled something, but she was too drunk for the words to make sense and he really didn’t care. Not since the day she’d told him he’d been a mistake, had never been wanted, would never be wanted.
Not by her.
Not by anyone.
L stood next to the medpod, resting her fingers on M.
“Can you hear me?”
Dead, but not dead. Or, maybe, finally dead.
“He can’t be dead, right?”
“All systems operating within recommended reboot parameters.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
On the medpod, she scrolled through the menu of options, searching for something that might make sense of whatever had happened. Her fingers twitched.
L put her hand into a pocket, ignoring the twitching.
Her arm twitched.
The computer chimed.
“Twenty-three minutes.”
She leaned into the pod, placing a kiss on his forehead, the skin cold, clammy. L climbed into a different medpod, placed the sensor array on her chest before inserting a yellow vial and leaving it in her port.
“My time?”
“Forty-eight hours, thirty-one minutes.”
“How is he?” L tried to see but the walls of the pod blocked most of the view.
“All systems operating within recommended reboot parameters.”
“How am I?”
“All systems operating within recommended initializing reboot parameters.”
“Initializing reboot?”
“That information is not located in any accessible databases.”
“How do you not know anything about words you just used?”
“That information is not located in any accessible databases.”
“Of course not. Anything new out there?”
“Negative. No radio or wireless signals indicative of human habitation. Sensors detect no biosignatures above the microbial level.”
“68.792%. Running diagnostics and repair protocol again now.”
“How is he?”
“All systems operating within recommended reboot parameters.”
“Is he alive?”
“All systems operating within recommended reboot parameters.”
L pulled the rolling monitor with M’s flatline closer. Then, she pushed the plunger and died.
Levi flipped through the notebook, brushing tired tobacco leaves off the pages.
M read, but nothing made sense. English letters, but not English words. He tried making sense of whatever code Levi had created, the blocks of text meaningless, tightly packed together with meticulous precision. Each so-called paragraph the same exact five college-ruled lines. Each line filled from one edge of the paper to the other with an apparently random assortment of letters, spilled out like someone had opened a can of alphabet soup and placed the individual pasta shapes into obsessive-compulsive rows.
Levi turned to the first page, wiping off the last bit of garbage. The sheet was blank except for one word, each giant letter formed of other random letters as though he’d embedded some code within the code. M read the word. Read it again, until it burned away every memory. Nothing mattered more than that one word.
Levi’s fingers traced each letter, soft and gentle on the paper, reverent.
M stared.
Yasmeen sneezed, the formaldehyde tickling her sinuses.
“You’re such a pig,” someone said, pointing at the frog she’d just sneezed on.
Her mask hung around her neck, tired of the bands ripping on her braids ever since her aunt had insisted on doing the giant weave. It itched, and the colors didn’t match, but when she complained to her mom she got yelled at. They’d no money for a real hairdresser and she should be grateful for what little of her family remained and stop being an ungrateful bitch. The braids were too tight, uneven, with a strange smell to them and at night they’d get wrapped around her face and she’d breathe the stench in until it woke her.
Random kids tugged them in the hallways, hard enough to hurt, never enough to rip the things out. Better than snapping her bra strap or the occasional wedgie where everyone laughed at her ‘granny panties’ that actually had been hand-me-downs from her mom, or her aunt, or her grandmother.
In Bio, the mass of hair screwed with her mask, making it too tight and uncomfortable to wear, turning her favorite class into an absolute mess of experiments and labs she wasn’t allowed to perform without a mask and goggles. With the final today on dissection, Mr. Chambers couldn’t deny her the scalpel. He’d no choice but to let her operate without the safety equipment.
Around her, classmates muttered, complaining about the stench, or the work, or using notes to make each shaky cut. Yasmeen tuned it all out and pulled on her latex gloves.
Step by step, she examined the frog, the first incision at the cloaca steady and precise. Her teacher preferred a basic X pattern, but Yasmeen found that simplistic and less beneficial than the H. It helped to know Mr. Chambers wasn’t going to fail her for not following his directions.
L tried to close her eyes, tried not to watch, but she’d no choice but to see what Yasmeen saw. She hoped not to remember any of this, but Yasmeen burned with excitement. L’s worry for M paled beneath the onslaught of emotions Yasmeen experienced in this classroom, with a scalpel in hand, with this teacher.
He’d mentored her for years, since freshman year when she kept bugging him to give her the materials he used for his advanced placement bio-medical program. Three months later, when she’d finished all of them, she returned to bugging him. By her sophomore year, he’d told her she knew enough to teach the course.
But she didn’t want to teach. She wanted to learn. She wanted to climb inside the human body and figure out the answers to all the questions science had yet to answer. Hell, she wanted to find answers to questions science had yet to ask.
She wanted to know everything.
Hated knowing she’d never know everything.
Took classes she didn’t need in order to access the lab after school. Sometimes before, when she was alone in the building with a stolen copy of his keys.
Through repeated donations, Levi had turned this one particular high school biology classroom into a research center worthy of university acclaim. Mr. Chambers sometimes helped, assisting her research, never asking questions, trusting her. Levi had bought his trust. Yasmeen had earned it.
On the paper now, she listed the major organs of the frog, finding each one without difficulty, without notes. She’d lost track of how many dissections she’d done. With and without guidance. In and out of school. Frogs. Cats. A dog, once, after it died in their apartment complex and someone tossed it next to the garbage container.
Yasmeen used the scalpel to lift the intestines, the blade steady in her fingers. So sharp, yet she didn’t cut anything she didn’t mean to cut, wielding it with confidence and precision.
L tried not to see the open cavity of the frog
Someone slammed against Yasmeen’s shoulder, laughing when the blade twitched, slicing through the frog.
“You’re gonna fail,” they said, turning it into a chant.
Her fingers tightened, but she stayed silent and still. She’d never fail, not even if she hadn’t bothered to take the final. Hell, she’d have passed if she’d skipped the whole year. But, the ruined frog angered her. A waste of valuable research material.
The anger burned through L, imprinting the severed half of a partially dissected frog into her memory.
“Clear.”
L took deep breaths, but the smell of formaldehyde and frog lingered.
“How is he?”
“All systems operating within recommended reboot parameters.”
“Time?”
“Thirty-four minutes, fifty seconds.”
“Any change?”
“After diagnostic and repair, sensor functionality has stabilized at 70.324%.”
“Any change in M?”
“All systems operating within recommended reboot parameters.”
L removed the sensor array but remained in the medpod. “Have you run diagnostics on him?”
“All routine scans were completed during the standard eight minute, thirty-two second reboot procedure.”
“Are there any other scans?” L wrote ‘reboot procedure’ in the notebook she kept handy in case she remembered anything from her death. She’d no intention of mentioning the whole frog thing or, for that matter, ever thinking of it again.
“A complete medical diagnostic is performed every month. M is not due for another three weeks and two days.”
“Please run it.”
“Running complete medical diagnostic now.”
“Can I see?”
The monitor next to L’s medpod flickered from M’s flatline to a rapidly changing array of charts, diagrams, numbers, and scans.
“Slowly, please.”
The monitor settled into a snapshot of M’s overall state of health. No heartbeat, other than what the medpod itself provided to keep his blood flowing. No blood pressure. No brain activity. A bunch of flatlines and zeroes.
“Next.”
An image of veins, twisting through a human body, color-coded for identification purposes.
“Next.”
Bones.
“Next.”
Each slide flipped by until his skull filled the monitor.
“Next.”
The skull dissolved, showing the brain within.
“Next.”
The camera position changed, circling the brain, making it appear to move on the monitor.
“How is he?”
“All systems operating within recommended reboot parameters.”
“Time?”
“Forty-one minutes, eight seconds.”
On the monitor, the brain scan sliced it
self into sections, examining details that meant nothing to L.
She started to say ‘Next’ when the camera jumped, like a hiccup, the brain fuzzy and out of focus for a moment. Maybe she’d blinked? Did M move?
L jumped out of her medpod, scrambling to M. He lay just as she’d left him, dead.
Pulling the monitor closer, she studied the brain scan.
“Can you rewind this?”
The scan flipped backward, before resuming at normal speed.
Nothing happened.
“Rewind farther, two minutes.”
Second by second M’s brain revolved on the monitor, before it sliced into sections.
Hiccup.
“Stop.”
The brain sat there, glowing and meaningless.
“Rewind, slowly.”
Image by image, the brain unsliced itself.
Hiccup.
“Stop!” she said. “What is that?”
“Please repeat your request.”
“It’s out of focus.”
“That information is not located in any accessible databases.”
“Can you zoom in?”
The out of focus brain became cloudier, even less focused, filling the screen.
“What is that?”
“That information is not located in any accessible databases.”
“Where is that?”
“Medial temporal lobe, hippocampus, part of the limbic system.”
“What is that?”
“The limbic system supports a variety of functions, including emotion, behavior, motivation, long-term memory, and olfaction.”
“Olfaction?” L said, writing on the page with ‘reboot procedure.’
“Olfaction refers to the sense of smell. Olfactics are mediated by specialized sensory cells of the nasal cavity of vertebrates—”
“Enough, shut up.”
L rested her fingers on M’s neck, checking for a pulse she didn’t expect to find.
“Scan me,” she said, moving the monitor before sitting in her medpod and attaching the sensor array.
“All systems operating within recommended parameters.”
“Complete medical diagnostic, please.”
Eight Minutes, Thirty-Two Seconds Page 5
