Dark Designs

by Flowers, Thomas S.

  Just one letter and she would consider the day well spent.

  "Come on, Dad… Let's make today a good one."

  The software launched on her laptop, a combination word processor and image manipulation program she'd "borrowed" from the Academy. The cursor blinked on the white page. On the opposite side of the screen was a three-dimensional wireframe ball.

  The idea was that her father could either type a word or move the ball, depending on his mood or mental landscape. Her thought was that just using a word processor might be too restricting. This way her father could work at his own level. She wondered though, if giving him too many choices had been the wrong way to go.

  "How are you feeling today, Dad?"

  His moist, jaundiced eyes twitched toward her. He blinked hard.

  One for yes. Not exactly the response she was hoping for.

  "Can you type it for me?"

  He merely looked at her.

  "Can you move the ball?"

  The wireframe ball did not move.

  Eventually he blinked, but she suspected it was involuntary.

  Weeks of this.

  Sweat had broken on his brow again. She dipped the washcloth and wiped it away.

  "Not too much longer now, Dad. I'll take you downstairs to sit at the window when we're done. I think I saw the cardinal out there earlier."

  He blinked.

  The eyes themselves expressed no emotion. No sign of whether or not he wanted to continue, if he was finished with today's attempt or if he was done with the research altogether. He'd never given expressed permission to participate, aside from a blink for yes. For all she knew the whole process was torture to him—from the minor surgery to insert the subdural implants to the daily barrage of questions.

  His body was already a prison, and his facial expression did seem to indicate anguish. The upward arch of his eyebrows and his angled, twisted lips made Helena, the caregiver who came in daily to help, once comment that it looked like he was perpetually going to the toilet.

  It could have been far worse. At least he could still blink. Some patients couldn't even control that. Without her father's blinks for yes and no she might have given up on the experiment entirely. She might have put him in a hospital. Let him waste away to nothing.

  Tears prickled her sinuses and she held them back, not wanting to cry in front of her dad, who couldn't help but cry in response despite his once-rugged exterior.

  If only she could tell what he was thinking, but that was something she also hoped to achieve. Not only did she wish to communicate with her father, over time she hoped other researchers might be able to use similar the technology to map the human brain and bridge the gap between humans and AI.

  Without the constraints of language and movement, Amelia saw virtually no limit to how much Humanity could achieve.

  Without the burden of the body restricting the intellect.

  But right now she couldn't even get him to push a goddamn ball or type a single letter.

  "Just… push the ball, okay, Dad?"

  The ball remained still.

  "Can you push the ball? Dad?"

  Blink blink.

  She brought a fist down hard on the small table. "Can you please push the goddamn ball?"

  The laptop rattled. Something thudded to the floor downstairs.

  Amelia turned to the doorway and the stairwell beyond, thinking she must have shaken something loose.

  Don't know my own strength.

  She leaned down to stroke her father's wispy silvery hair and kissed his clammy liver-spotted forehead. "I'm sorry, Dad. I didn't mean to get mad. I'll be right back, okay? Then I'll bring you down to watch the birds."

  Her father didn't blink.

  Amelia left the room. The stairs of the old house creaked as she descended. Her great-grandfather's grandfather clock ticked away in the empty foyer. As she reached the first floor she could see into the living room. From where she stood at the bottom of the stairs nothing appeared to be out of place.

  "Good morning, Ms. Amelia," Helena said behind her.

  Amelia jumped, not expecting the caregiver to arrive for another hour. The woman held bags of groceries in her hands and must have let herself in from the garage with her spare key. Amelia helped the young woman, pleasingly plump in her pale blue nurse's scrubs, to unload the food into the fridge.

  Later she brought her father downstairs on the chairlift and while he stared out the window at the birds fluttering around the feeders and the stone birdbath under the big maple she sat in the old wicker rocker beside him catching up on some research on the role endocannabinoids played on pathological anxiety.

  Amelia's main field of study was cognitive science. She'd worked through her doctorate and had moved into the research field upon graduating. After nearly ten years she'd decided practically begging for grants was something she no longer wanted from life, and had taken an open position teaching specialized cognitive biology at the Academy of Modern Science in Boston.

  When her father had called about his diagnosis she'd packed up at the Academy within the week and taken the train home to Toronto. The trip had taken her nearly a full day, and on the way she'd wondered how a university professor with no children and no nursing experience was going to take care of a man who'd responded to her scraped knees as a child with a brisk Walk it off.

  When she'd arrived home her father had already been using a walker to get around. His limbs had shaken uncontrollably and his fingers had curled up into virtually useless fists. He'd fibbed about the progress of his illness. His specialist had given him between two and five years to live, but likely no more than three.

  That was six months ago.

  Amelia closed her computer and turned to him. Outside the cardinal was back, a bright red male with a crest on its head. It landed in the birdbath, startling the sparrows, and splashed its wings in the water.

  It used to make her smile to see the joy those simple creatures brought to him, this old fashioned "man's man" who'd wanted a son but had been equally happy—if not more—with a girl. Who'd taught her how to hook a worm, play baseball, fight back against bullies, and never let a man treat her like a second-class citizen.

  With his face twisted in an eternal rictus it was impossible to tell if the birds still made him happy. Was there joy in his tired green eyes? She couldn't tell. His disease had advanced so rapidly in the past six months he could no longer utter even a single laugh.

  Amelia rolled her father into the kitchen. After dinner—Helena had prepared the blend of fruits and vegetables and nuts for her father's endoscopic meal—Amelia helped Helena clean up and wash dishes.

  On her way upstairs she leaned into the living room and saw the baseball lying in the middle of the wooden floor.

  "Helena?"

  The woman came in from the kitchen, soap foam crackling on her yellow plastic gloves. "Yes, Ms. Amelia?"

  "Did you dust my father's baseball?"

  The woman gave her a confused look.

  Amelia tried not to sound upset as she pointed at the ball on the floor. "That's his Jackie Mitchell baseball. It's a collector's item."

  Helena shrugged. "I didn't dust today, Ms. Amelia."

  Amelia watched the woman head back to the kitchen before bending to pick up the ball. She turned it over in her hand, reading the signature, chuckling bitterly at the irony.

  Her father had gotten it when Amelia was young to remind her not to limit herself because of how the world might view her, that she could do anything she put her mind to with determination and strength. Jackie Mitchell had proved that by becoming one of the first female pitchers in professional baseball, and as her signature on the ball said she had beaten two legendary heavy hitters.

  I struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, it read.

  That her father had picked this baseball of all the signed balls he could have gotten felt somewhat eerie.

  ALS had also struck out Lou Gehrig; the disease itself had once been named af
ter him.

  Amelia wasn't sure she believed Helena hadn't knocked it down off the mantle, but she couldn't imagine why the woman would lie about it. If she hadn't moved the ball it had somehow managed to pop up out of its clear Lucite box stand, fall to the floor and roll to the center of the room of its own volition.

  What was more unbelievable? That sweet trustworthy Helena had told a small fib for the first time since Amelia had known her? Or that an inanimate object had defied the laws of physics?

  With a troubled frown, Amelia returned the ball to its stand.

  It was time to face the truth, she decided: the experiment just wasn't working.

  Despite all the coaxing over the past twenty-three weeks her father couldn't manage to type a single letter using the BCI, and she was beginning to fear they were better off when he was still just barely able to hold a pen, eking out two words a minute.

  His health seemed to be deteriorating faster, as well. His crippled arms hung loose from his shoulders, lacking muscle, tired flesh sagging. Ribs clearly visible. Spine protruding like the back plates of a dinosaur. Sallow, sunken eyes. Teeth receding from his gums.

  Dr. Jorgenson said her father wouldn't live much longer than six months in his current condition. He'd suggested she consider moving her father into a hospital for round-the-clock care.

  Amelia had strongly opposed the idea.

  The decision to keep him home was entirely selfish, she knew. Imagining her father wasting away in the hospital like her mother had after her stroke… she couldn't go through that again. Couldn't watch it happen to such a strong man as he'd been.

  But the obsessive in her—a trait she'd gotten from her father—needed to continue their work here. She felt close to a breakthrough, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

  She knew they could always try communicating through eye movement, not through blinks but using the tracking software on her laptop. Her father might have taken to it quickly despite his misgivings but she didn't want him to get used to the ease of it.

  By making the BCI his only method of communication she hoped it would force him to adapt or risk never speaking to his daughter again. Although she couldn't blame him if he chose the latter, after she'd treated him like a lab rat for so long.

  "Come on, Dad." Amelia positioned the headset on his thinning scalp as her laptop fired up. "Today's the day, huh?"

  She didn't believe a word of it.

  Her modified interface converted several signals from the implants in her father's brain—EEG, iEEG, LFP, and other sensory input—into data her computer could process. It worked because the brain itself was essentially a computer, albeit far more complex than her laptop. With the addition of small implants on the medial prefrontal and medial posterior parietal cortexes, she hoped he might eventually be able to manipulate a 3-dimensional version of himself through self-recognition, a notion first attempted using virtual reality tech.

  If only she could get him to type a single letter.

  The air was sweltering in her father's room today. She brought a fan upstairs and set it in the window. It whirred distractingly as she sweated hunched over the computer but the cool breeze curbed her growing agitation.

  After half an hour of watching him blink his bleary eyes she stood up.

  "All right, Dad," she sighed, her spine popping as she stretched. "I guess we're done here."

  As she moved to flick off the laptop the sound of the fan lowered in timbre, the blades slowing until they stopped altogether.

  She bent to check the plug. It was loose but didn't appear to be the problem.

  As she stood again she saw her father watching her in the big mirror on her mother's vanity. Off to his immediate left she saw the alarm clock no longer showed the time in its large red digital numbers.

  "Power's out?"

  Her father blinked once.

  She put a comforting hand on his shoulder. "I'll be right back, okay, Dad?"

  Leaving him in his wheelchair she hurried downstairs to check the electrical box. Helena wouldn't be in for another hour or so—her two young children had the day off school—and Amelia still retained a bit of childhood superstition about being alone in the big old empty family home despite having been back so long. She'd always felt that unease even more acutely in the basement, and although she wasn't imagining ghouls and beasties in every corner like she had as a child, the memory of her brief sojourns to the basement for a popsicle or an errand brought that childish fear back to the forefront of her brain.

  The basement was bright enough she didn't require a flashlight. Sunlight streamed in through the two grimy windows on either side of the furnace with their view of the leaf-clogged cement wells. Even if it had been fully dark down here, what the eye couldn't see would have filled in by memory.

  The mind is all-powerful, Amelia thought as she stepped off the creaky wood stairs, assaulted by smells, sights, sensations and memories. The smell of dust, wood and damp concrete. The drip of the washbasin faucet. The gurgle of the floor drain, a misplaced tennis ball nearby. Dust on her fingers from the stair railing. Rough wood of the stairs on her sock feet.

  A computer couldn't process so much disparate information so quickly.

  The burden of the body, she thought.

  Cobwebs hung from the corners of the rafters, wood charred black in places by a fire that had happened long before the Corbels had moved in. As a little girl she'd often wondered if anyone had died in the fire but she'd never bothered to ask her parents or look into it herself. The walls were exposed down to the lath. The concrete cold on her sock feet as she crossed to the electrical box.

  Her father had updated from fuses to circuit breakers when Amelia was young, worried the old knob and tube wiring might cause another house fire. She flicked the main switch down and back up.

  As she did a blue tendril of electricity unfurled from the switch and as it struck her finger an image blossomed in her mind of her father lying upstairs in his bed. Not vague as if from memory or imagination but genuinely as though she were sitting right across from him. He was looking directly at her, though she realized she was not looking directly back at him but at his reflection in the vanity, made obvious by missing flecks of silver backing and the chip in the lower right corner Amelia herself had made when she'd tripped and fallen playing dress-up with her mother's jewelry.

  It was almost as if she were looking out through her father's eyes.

  In the mirror, her father blinked.

  Yes.

  The mirror cracked suddenly, fracturing his face down the middle. The pain of the shock finally reached her nerves and the vision disappeared as quickly as it had come, sending her reeling back from the electrical box.

  Amelia fell down hard on her butt and her left hand struck the yellow-green tennis ball which rolled lazily toward the sports equipment bin.

  Standing and rubbing her sore buttock, she wondered how to explain what had just happened. She'd never experienced anything like it before, never imagined anything with such clarity.

  But it was her imagination, of that she was certain. It had to be.

  Idly she surveyed the room. Her gaze fell on the tennis ball.

  How did that get out of the bin?

  Two weeks had passed since the incident with the Jackie Mitchell baseball, long enough that she'd forgotten about it until just then.

  Was it possible the two were connected?

  She recalled the vision of her father, blinking at her in the mirror.

  Yes, Amelia.

  Amelia crossed to the bin and picked up the tennis ball. She placed it carefully beside the drain where she'd found it when she'd first come down. Stood again and kept it under a watchful eye.

  "Can you move the ball, Dad?"

  The ball didn't even twitch.

  "Dad? Move the ball for me, please."

  Amelia stared at it. Willed it to move.

  She was so focused on the ball the sudden buzz and rattle of the air conditioner firing up
outside made her jump, and she laughed at herself as cool air began to hum through the duct above her head.

  "You're a scientist, for God's sake. This is ridiculous."

  She scooped up the ball, deposited it in the bin, and ascended the stairs.

  Her father was still in his spot by the window when she returned to the bedroom he'd shared with her mother. He sat facing the mirror, unable to turn away from his reflection.

  The chip was still there in the glass where her face had struck when she was eight, breaking in incisor. Otherwise the glass was unblemished, not cracked as it had been in her vision—or whatever it was that had happened to her in the basement.

  Amelia didn't know what she would have done if the mirror had been broken.

  Gone crazy, maybe, she thought, and the fan whirred by, prickling the flesh on her forearms and making her shiver.

  Her father blinked.

  "You really should get someone out there to cut the lawn, Ms. Amelia." Helena stood at the kitchen sink washing the equipment she used to feed Amelia's father through the endoscopic tube. "My cousin, he owns a landscaping business. I could get you a family discount."

  Amelia looked out over her father's shoulder at the backyard and saw Helena was right. The grass was shin deep. With the heatwave they'd experienced the past few weeks she was surprised the lawn hadn't just dried up and blown away on the wind.

  "Thank you, Helena. But I can do it myself. It'll be good stress relief."

  An hour later she'd forgotten the lawn, and sat again beside her father in the hot bedroom with the fan whirring.

  A high-pitched grunt outside the window caught her attention.

  Scowling at the interruption she went to the window. Her father hadn't made any progress since the day the power had gone out so it wasn't as if she would be missing anything at the computer anyhow.

  Down below a young boy crept through the tall grass, hunting something. The grunt must have been from when he'd jumped over the tall wooden fence. He wore a backwards ball cap and a ball glove on his right hand, reminding her of herself when she was young, aside from the boy's lack of ponytail.