He maintained a journal of everything she did during the day, and at night, they sat down together while she drew. After she was in bed, Henrietta’s father pinned the material up on the wall he had dedicated in his home office and searched it for clues.
And then one morning, while looking for his glasses before leaving for work, he glanced up at the wall, and in the uncorrected blur, it was all somehow instantly clear. The ghosts his daughter saw were simply transformations and novel combinations of everything she came across over the course of that day. Henrietta’s father realized that there was nothing wrong with his daughter’s brain; the problem had always been her eyes.
With the portfolio of Henrietta’s drawings, the ophthalmologist was able to diagnose her condition in a single visit: chromatic illusory palinopsia, or CIP. Everyone experiences the phenomenon of afterimages—when photochemical activity in the retina continues briefly in the absence of stimulus—but for CIP sufferers, the condition is pathological, long-lasting, and remarkably vivid. Images can remain for up to twenty-four hours, and certain color combinations dramatically intensify the effect. It was a rare enough condition that drug companies did not bother developing therapies, but there was a simple, safe, noninvasive cure: a pair of experimental active glasses that subtly shifted specific colors and dynamically adjusted contrast, luminosity, and hue. They would take some getting used to, but in a week or two, most people didn’t even notice the intervention anymore. While the onboard AI usually required time to learn, once they adjusted to the patient by comparing incoming wavelengths of light to those that were reflected—while simultaneously measuring irregular retinal activity—they were almost always 100 percent effective.
The worse the CIP, the better the glasses tended to work, since the more signal and data they had to train on, the faster they could adjust. Henrietta’s was the worst the doctor had ever seen, which meant her ghosts were entirely corrected by day three. But instead of relief, her parents were surprised to find that she was experiencing profound grief. For years, her condition had kept her at home, so the only friends Henrietta had been able to make and keep for most of her childhood were her ghosts. Even before her father made the connection, Henrietta had figured out that certain patterns in her behavior manifested specific colorful and exotic specters. She’d given them descriptive names that were combinations of Korean and English, come up with rich backstories, and ascribed supernatural powers to them, which she imagined them using to attack the kids at school who made fun of her.
When she was lonely, Henrietta locked her bedroom door, took off her specs, and stared at images in books to make her ghosts come back. Sometimes she intentionally broke her glasses even though she knew her mother would hit her and lock her in her room until her father got home and fixed them. Whenever she had the opportunity, Henrietta stole pills from her mother’s bottles and saved them in a pouch where she kept the baby teeth she’d lost. When the pouch was full, she planned to take off her glasses, summon her ghosts, and swallow them all.
One of those pills went to school with Henrietta the day Marshmallow died. The teacher had recently brought in a pet—an albino pygmy hedgehog—and the class adored it in a way that infuriated Henrietta. While the other kids were outside on the playground, and Henrietta was supposed to be inside using the bathroom, she opened the cage door and used the tip of her little finger to nestle one of her mother’s pills down to the bottom of the bowl of dried cat food.
The next morning the cage was gone, and while the teacher explained to the class that Marshmallow had gone to heaven, she did not look at Henrietta. When Henrietta was taken to the office, both her parents were sitting across from the principal and the school psychologist. Henrietta told them that she had just been trying to help—that the other kids had complained about Marshmallow sleeping all day, and she believed if she could get her to sleep at night instead, she might stay awake during school so that everyone would be able to play with her. That was what her mother did when she could not get out of bed—she took pills at night to help her stay awake during the day. Everyone in the room looked at Henrietta’s mother while Henrietta’s mother glared at her daughter. Even though Henrietta was crying, she pushed her glasses up on her nose and smiled. They both knew it was a lie. She had looked up the prescription. Researched the dose. Done the math. Known that one pill was enough to kill Marshmallow at least a hundred times over.
Henrietta left that day with her parents and never went back. Her parents enrolled her in online school, and from then on, she rarely left her room. She wore her glasses when her father asked her to, but only until he was gone. Ghosts were the only things left in Henrietta’s life that felt real.
And then one day her father came home from work with Henrietta’s very first Pokémon plush toy. It was a fantastic, chromatic, peculiar fusion that was instantly comforting and familiar. The next day, when Henrietta came out of her room to greet him at the front door, he knelt down, and with a fatherly flourish, dramatically produced two more. Pokémon became Henrietta’s path back to reality—ghosts that everyone could see and that it seemed everyone loved.
She stayed up late at night collecting, playing video games, and chatting with other Pokémon fans. Now that Henrietta was finally done with her ghosts, her big, round specs stayed perched on her little nose. Before he went to bed each night, her father came into her room, sat on the edge of her bed, and watched his little night owl play, basking in the fact that his little girl, finally, was happy.
* * *
—
“Appa?” Henrietta says.
“Yes, Owl.”
Henrietta is not hungry and has mostly been picking at various forms of kimchi. Her father is programmed to match her pace of eating and has therefore placed his chopsticks neatly across the top of his compartmentalized box. Jiji learned long ago that holograms are not to be nuzzled or batted at, so he has curled up in the hollow of Henrietta’s lap.
“Tell me what to do.”
“About what, Owl?”
In addition to video footage and thousands of images, Henrietta’s father’s neural matrix was also trained on every one of his lectures and research papers.
“Mr. Moretti is never going to let me get back into research. I’m never going to be the scientist you always wanted me to be.”
“What is Mr. Moretti’s reasoning?”
“He says it’s because I’m tainted.”
“Tainted by what?”
“By what I know about Kilonova.”
“What do you know about Kilonova?”
“I know everything about Kilonova. I designed it. But that’s not the point.”
“What is the point, Owl?”
“The point is that all he cares about is the mission. It’s all he ever talks about. He’s practically a fanatic.”
The manifestation of Henrietta’s father is composed of multiple machine-learning models, one of them being a neural network designed specifically for virtual psychotherapy.
“And what is the mission?”
“We work in a special branch of counter-terrorism. Our mission is to preempt threats.”
“What kind of threats?”
“The worst kind.”
“I see,” Henrietta’s father says. In order to help round him out, Henrietta augmented his training set with the seminal works of all modern philosophers. “What would you say is the worst kind of threat?”
“Anything existential, I guess.”
“Like what?”
“Like nuclear terrorism.”
“Nuclear terrorism may be a threat, Owl,” Henrietta’s father concedes. “But it is not an existential threat.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean even the nuclear attack on Seoul that killed your mother and me—the worst terrorist attack in history—wasn’t existential.”
To bring her f
ather back to life, Henrietta started with an open-source machine-learning model called Qingming, named after the Chinese tomb-sweeping festival. There is a configuration option that dictates whether or not virtual personalities know they are dead, and another that determines if they know how they died. Henrietta set both to true.
“Well, maybe not that one attack. But if there were more of them.”
“Even if there were more, they wouldn’t be existential. Do you know how long it took for the world to replace every life lost that day?”
“No.”
“Approximately five hours. Before the South Korean government even had a clear idea of what happened, enough babies had been born around the world to replace every one of us.”
“I guess I never thought of it that way.”
“What would be a true existential threat, Owl?”
“An asteroid smashing into the Earth. That’s what the last paper I published was about.”
“Are you and Mr. Moretti trying to prevent asteroids from smashing into the Earth?”
“Of course not, Appa. You aren’t helping.”
“No, Owl,” Henrietta’s father counters. “You aren’t listening.”
“I am listening to you, Appa.”
“Not to me. To yourself. You just said that Mr. Moretti prioritizes the mission above all else, and that the mission is to preempt threats. The worst threats are existential, yet existential threats are not your priority. Therefore, what can you conclude?”
“That our priorities are wrong?”
“That’s correct,” Henrietta’s father says. He rewards his daughter with that handsome and benevolent smile that she cherished so much as a child. “So, what should your priority be?”
“I don’t know,” Henrietta says, exactly like she did when her father once called her into his lab and asked her who had been playing with his equipment. “Asteroids?”
“Not asteroids, Owl. Think more broadly. There’s a threat right in front of you so big that you can’t even see it.”
“Just tell me, Appa.”
“I can’t tell you, Owl. You know how this works.”
“Biological weapons? Cyber weapons? AI?”
More recently, Henrietta has been training her father’s model on some of her own research and thinking—in particular, a rapidly expanding dystopian manifesto—and gradually adjusting the weights of his neurons distinctly in its favor.
“Let us reexamine our assumptions, Owl. Why do you equate existential threats with death?”
“Because that’s what ‘existential’ means.”
“But what does it mean to exist?”
“To be alive.”
“Yes, but what else does it mean? Is being alive enough? You are alive now, but that isn’t enough for you.”
“Meaning,” Henrietta says. “Your existence has to mean something.”
“That’s right, Owl. And what gives our lives meaning?”
“Independence. Our ability to make our own decisions. The freedom to pursue the things we’re passionate about.”
“Yes, Owl. Therefore…”
“Therefore, the biggest existential risk to humanity isn’t extinction. It’s having all of our choices taken away.”
“And what is that called?”
“Authoritarianism.”
“That’s correct, Owl. But authoritarianism has always existed. What makes it different today? What makes it existential?”
“I don’t know. Technology?”
“What about technology?”
“Absolute surveillance,” Henrietta says. “All the thousands of indices governments have access to.”
“What else?”
“Disinformation campaigns. The ability to manufacture whatever reality the powerful find convenient. The complete eradication of truth.”
“Like what?”
“Like Mr. Moretti threatening to fabricate evidence that I collaborated with North Korea just so he can control me.”
“In the past, the people have risen up against authoritarianism. Why aren’t people rising up today?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do, Owl. Think about it.”
“Because…” Throughout the exchange, Henrietta had been searching for answers in the assortment of side dishes, but now she looks up and directly into her father’s incandescent eyes. “Because they don’t even know it’s happening.”
Jiji abruptly lifts himself, stretches, and attempts to vacate Henrietta’s lap. But Henrietta is not finished with him, so she scoops him up and brings him right back.
“Yes, Owl. Terrorists aren’t the real threat. The real threat is the CIA. The real threat is people like Alessandro Moretti. And the real mission is to stop him.”
“But how? I can’t do that by myself.”
“Then what do you need to do first?”
“Recruit people.”
“And how do you do that?”
“By teaching them.”
“Yes. And then what?”
“Give them a way to fight back.”
“And what will the people need to fight back?”
Henrietta’s eyes are as wide as her father’s nickname for her implies. “A weapon.”
The cat tries once again to leave, and this time, when Henrietta intervenes, Jiji swivels his head and nips. Henrietta flips the cat over onto his back and pins him down to the floor by his throat. Jiji’s eyes grow so wide that, even in the dim light, Henrietta can see the whites like slices of twin moons shining from behind his pupils, and as he hisses and growls and spits, Henrietta smiles.
The hologram of Henrietta’s father watches his daughter, nodding in paternal approval. The power of neural networks has always been that they can detect patterns that humans have been missing for years. But their authority can also be misused when they are induced to tell us exactly what it is that we want to hear.
30
DEAD ON ARRIVAL
JAMES “CLAY” CLAIBORNE is not real. His virtual presence is the result of interference patterns caused by the intersections of emissions from laser diodes mounted to the ceiling in all four corners of the hospital room where Quinn is lying semi-prone in a pink, paper-thin gown with an IV drip in her arm.
She has never seen a MediPresence system before. Back when she had Molly, hospitals were still competing on privacy, in-room TV size (that was before everyone had their own personal screens glued to their faces every waking moment), and personalized farm-to-tray meal prep. But as demographics shifted, hospital administrators realized that the primary source of patient discomfort was loneliness. Children moving far away from home was nothing new, but increasingly, they were either unwilling or unable to take time off to comfort their sleepless and heat-flushed mothers during the hormonal turmoil of their hysterectomies, or to commiserate with their unshaven, bed-headed fathers putting up cantankerous resistance to their new post-triple-bypass existence.
James is heavier than she remembers him. He used to carry the extra weight common to all suburban fathers who love their bratwurst, microbrews, March Madness, and Xboxes—and who pay for gym memberships they keep meaning to use but seldom do. Not long after Molly was born, James slimmed down as a result of someone at the agency introducing him to whatever the popular fanatical exercise regimen and dietary plan of the day was. Something like “FAF” (officially “Fit, Able, and Focused,” but for those in the know, “Fit as Fuck”) or a system based on medicine balls with handles on them called “Balls Out!” He started getting up at four a.m. every morning (usually waking Quinn in the process) to have time to train, shower, and blend himself a protein shake for the road. Quinn was jealous of his success and of all the comments people were making about his weight, so she went down into the basement and tried the videos a few times when he wasn’t home, but the bald,
bug-eyed, bombastic buffoon who led the workouts was way too intense for her.
A year and half later, he was back to sleeping in most mornings and had regained at least half the weight. And the second half was apparently not far behind. But the thing is, it kind of suits him. Everything suits James Claiborne. Thin or heavy. Long hair or short. Beard, stubble, or clean-shaven. Ripped jeans and a T-shirt, or crisp fitted slacks and a button-down. Today it is dark denim, black buckled wingtips, and a slate-gray V-neck beneath the rain-speckled Burberry trench coat she found at Costco. With the possible exception of the time he tried sporting a fedora he spontaneously bought at an outlet mall, James is the type of guy who can make just about anything work. His silver hair, matching beard, dark complexion, and piercing pale blue eyes that border on pewter only seem to make him increasingly handsome as he ages.
Quinn recalls her ex-husband’s tattoo. After everything happened, he decided to get a sound wave of Molly’s first words on the inside of his forearm. She imagined that, once things got better, she’d run her finger along it and play the audio in her head after he put his arm around her while they watched TV in the evenings, or as she lay against him in bed after sex. That was her favorite place to be in the entire world—that spot at the intersection of his shoulder and his chest and his neck. But things did not get better, and Quinn can’t recall if she ever got a chance to run her finger along it at all.
Maybe it’s the fact that cancer runs in her family and she is lying in a pre-op hospital room, but Quinn cannot remember how things got so bad between them. She can’t tell whether her situation is obscuring her line of sight, or whether it is granting her exquisite clarity, but for the first time, it occurs to her that arguing with someone you love is a form of hubris—a kind of baseless, arrogant confidence that you have so much control over your future and so much time ahead of you that you can afford to squander an entire day of emotional connection, or an hour, or even one goddamn minute. She thinks about how mad she used to get at James when he claimed to have done the laundry even though all he did was put it in the washing machine, move it to the dryer an hour later, and then transfer it from the dryer to a laundry basket that he then left at the foot of the bed for her to fold. (There’s no way you can legitimately claim to have “done the laundry” unless you’ve seen it all the way through the folding phase.) And how she used to get mad at him for getting mad at her for taking his fries without asking. (He offered to get Quinn her own fries, but she said she didn’t want any, so why, he would ask, was she now eating his? Because she didn’t want her own fries. She wanted his fries. Why was that so hard to understand?) And how they were sometimes impatient with Molly because they were both working full-time and commuting and trying to pick her up from daycare before six-thirty so they wouldn’t get charged extra, and trying to keep the house from falling apart, and if not exactly clean at least not a biohazard, and how they occasionally screamed at her when she spilled her milk, or had an accident, or cut through the backyard and tracked mud into the kitchen, or left something sticky on the arm of the couch, and how a few times they swore at her and made her cry instead of picking her up and hugging her and rocking her and breathing in that smell she had and tickling her and listening to that laugh and making every single second of her short life the absolute best it could have possibly been.
Scorpion Page 22
