Here & There
Page 52
It was still breathing when later discovered.*
* * *
* pages 513-14. I guess now we know what made Reidier vomit. Truth be told, just reading that, I almost did myself. I had to stroll out on the Stuck-Up Bridge to look down between the tracks into the river’s depths. I kept thinking about Shelley’s Frankenstein. Most misinterpret the story as a condemnation of science. What horrors we can unleash with our ambition and intelligence: creatures, atomic bombs, Eccos. But Shelley was warning us about losing touch with our humanity, admonishing us about forgetting compassion. The sin isn’t that Dr. Frankenstein made the Creature, it’s that he abandoned him. Somehow Reidier went in the opposite direction but ended up in the same place.
* * *
… … … …
I can’t bring myself to tell Eve. The mole crab incident* was unsettling enough. I do not know what to do. I cannot stop. Not now.
* * *
* pages 528-529.
* * *
… … … …
I didn’t delete them. It was too dangerous. What if I did it again, accidentally? I had QuAI deal with it. She wrote a restriction algorithm that will prevent, disrupt, and erase any future implementation of these settings while quarantining the specific data behind a quantum lock.
Tonight I have to do something about Iteration 3.
June 18, 2008
Iteration 5 is stable and safe enough; subject has yet to manifest any psychopathic behaviors.* It has been five days, and thus perhaps still too early to be determined. I must still keep Ecco with me at all times. Although to give him room to “misbehave,” I often leave him alone in a room with a video camera, and monitor the feed from another location. I have concurrently escalated the temptations presented to Iteration 5 in these isolation tests. Initially subject was left alone with several stuffed animals, then stuffed animals and scissors, pliers, and knives; next, subject was left alone with a live frog, then the frog with scissors, pliers, and knives; onto, a baby chicken, then a baby chicken and the weapons; lastly, a baby rabbit, followed by the baby rabbit with the weapons. While Iteration 5 showed interest in the animals and the objects, he never became aggressive nor violent toward the animals. He exhibited no weird/bizarre/unsettling behavior. Just “normal” childlike conduct. Nevertheless, side effects still plague the work. Iteration 5 does not sleep. He’s amenable enough to “go to bed” but simply lies there. He never seems to slip into sleep, let alone achieve REM state. Oddly, while Ecco seems unperturbed by his state, he has intuited that it is abnormal and will engage in pretend behavior. He will close his eyes and fake sleep. His intuition is actually so sharp he has been able to infer my anxiety about this condition and my need for him to pretend around Eve. The other night, I went downstairs while he was “sleeping” to get QuAI to run some gedankens for me. When I returned, he lay there in the dark. I whispered to him if he were still awake. Ecco nodded and whispered back, “Yes, but I closed my eyes and pretended when Eve checked. She watched a long time.” She’s watching him. I am unclear as to whether Eve’s watchfulness is a manifestation of her suspicions or rather a growing “maternal” bond that has seemed to develop since the burn damage from the egg incident. These two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. So far, subject has proved immune to a variety of treatments. Melatonin, children’s Benadryl, normal Benadryl, NyQuil, Ambien, Lunesta, scotch—none of these soporific substances have any sleep-inducing effect. (The scotch makes him sick.) Unfortunately, this is not the only side effect. Iteration 5 also appears to have an insatiable appetite. He’s always hungry, so much so that I’ve even caught him eating sweet-smelling cleaning supplies (which also, expectedly, make him sick). Are the hunger and cleaning-supply cravings a result of a fault in the scanning and/or animation processes of teleportation, or are they due to some biological rebellion in response to his body’s dearth of sleep? Did I make my son crazy, or is he going crazy? At least Iteration 5 is only self-destructive, instead of outwardly destructive. Regardless, his demeanor is sweet, engaged, generally appealing. I have devolved him from monster to self-saboteur. Toying with a more holistic hypothesis, psychology has an influential dynamic on neurology. Bertram’s been a helpful sounding board. Perhaps the emotional state during transfer has an effect on the underlying topography of brain-wave patterns when restored. So the use of pain to measure the transfer of emotional states with Iteration 3 actually damaged/deformed Ecco’s fundamental wave patterns. Sour Golem’s breath makes for an angry monster. Apparently my use of music instead at least circumvents the issue. By engaging the subject in singing “The 59th Street Bridge Song,” I have been able to transfer a more harmonious emotional state. Ultimately, the goal is not to alter one’s demeanor, but simply mirror replicate it.
* * *
* Page 366, Galilee 6:21, Experiment 47 Omega.
* * *
HIDDEN FILES*
* * *
* I later discovered that Hilary’s CD-RW also had three document files on it.
* * *
13.9.2008*
* * *
* 1) Eve’s final journal entry.
* * *
I’ll see you on the far shore: how we get there is up to you.
-----Memo-----*
* * *
* 2) a communiqué from Larry Woodbury to Donald Pierce,
* * *
From: Larry Woodbury [mailto: larry.woodbury@darpa.mil]
Sent: Monday, September 8, 2008 11:18 p.m.
To: donald.pierce@darpa.mil
Subject: redundant architecture
Pierce,
Engineers finished work. All kernel relays have been hardwired in. Team predicts this will circumvent issues we’ve been having with software hacks penetrating R’s encryption. Any and all activities that occur in the Gould Island Control Room will be mirrored on your console in Observation Deck. Should provide you with unfettered and unadulterated access to everything Reidier is doing. Whatever under the radar experiments he might be hiding/running within official experiments will be relayed to you instantaneously. Whatever happens at his console, happens at yours.
Tech team has also rigged a secondary storage system inside the university’s servers to duplicate all of the data Reidier runs through or already stores there, so you’ll be able to analyze the copied information without Reidier knowing.
~L. Woodbury
My dearest Daniel,*
* * *
* and 3) a letter from Hilary . . .
* * *
I hope this letter finds you intact. If you’re reading this, then my precautions didn’t quite work out as planned. In a way this letter is itself (if ever read) an admission of defeat, an acknowledgment that all of my efforts to protect you with an insulated distance were for naught. Not to mention a testament to my contradictory efforts: Why go to all this trouble to hold you at arm’s length for my entire process only to entangle you after I’ve stopped? Why leave the key for you, the research, this letter?
I can only imagine the knowing sneer on your face while reading this. Why indeed, you had already asked yourself.
Selfishness, I’d say. At the end of the day, I needed my son to know me. To know how much I love him, despite the consequences.
Narcissism, you’d reply, then counter how at the end of the day, I needed a reader to know my work. To marvel at its insight and carry it forward. Damn those consequences too.
I miss arguing with you. I miss sparring with your passion, laughing at your frustration with me, admiring how sharp your mind has become, how my little boy can now outmaneuver me. Sometimes.
I don’t trust myself on the train ride I have ahead of me. On two different trips, I thought I saw you walking up the train car aisle. I’ll have to take an Ambien to get through Penn Station without getting off. The impulse has been overwhelming every time I’ve come through. A visceral need to see my son. I feel untethered, like I’m drifting away in every direction at once and powerless to do anything about it. But if I
could just see Danny. How I wish to hop off of Amtrak, hop on the downtown C, surprise you at work and take you out for lunch. If I could simply touch your hand across a restaurant table, see your silhouette in the sunlight as you turn your head, the slope of nose and curve of chin that describes the same profile captured in my first sonogram, the world could take shape again, regain its weight. And then I wouldn’t mind disintegrating so much. I know it’s mundane, but there’s a simple joy a mother gets watching her son eat. At least once during every meal we’ve shared together, there’s a moment when I marvel at this full-grown man who was a part of me, drew all sustenance from me, who now sits across the table, towering over me, echoing mannerisms of his father.
I miss you both so much. This ordeal, this isolation weighs on me—no, that’s not right, it’s not a pressure from the outside. The force is internal, it grows in me, taking hold of my chest, reaching up my esophagus, sometimes crushing my throat from the inside out.
But if I get off that train, what would I say? What could I tell you? You were so angered by our last “conversation,” by my taciturnity, by my distance. My evasive, protective answers would only set off the tinderbox of dried-up memories you’ve been filling up for years.
I rely on Clyde and Bertram’s paranoid warnings to bolster my will. For all we know, the Department’s been staking out your office at Anomaly for months. It’s almost certain they’ve been listening in on our conversations, tracking our disagreements, and taking the temperature of our relationship. Surfacing now to indulge my need to see you would not only pop me up on their radar, it would make you a potential target.
I can manage my son’s anger, but not his loss. I will not ensnare you in the Department’s skein.
But I can’t leave you with nothing. I can’t leave you to simply swallow our acid-coated last words.
By now I’m sure you’ve put many of the pieces together. You’ve gotten to know the Reidiers. You’ve honed your own suspicions about the Department’s ambitions, not to mention Beimini’s machinations. I’m sure you have developed a sense for the tectonic pressures at play in the final few months leading up to The Reidier Test: Kerek’s drive, Eve’s fear, Ecco’s deterioration. The tumor eating away at Eve’s sanity—and Kerek’s. He had to simultaneously reject and embrace his evolution into the Destroyer of Death, dance along the border of the finale of frontiers. It was the only way out, and the only way to save Eve.
The Reidier Test was Kerek’s future.
The Reidier Test was Pierce’s legacy.
Blinded by their own agendas, they both misread their barometers. The wind had blown them in different directions and finally sent them spinning out of control toward one another, two hurricanes tossing an atom bomb back and forth.
An incident and accident. A triumph and catastrophe.
I am sorry for pulling you into all this, Daniel. The stakes swirling around this spin with a hungry fury. It is what has drawn us apart and now funnels us together. We have become the report’s collateral damage. Our distance is the last line of defense for the Reidiers, maybe the world. It sounds histrionic, yes, but the destructive capability of this singularity is too great a secret.
The closer I get, the more important it becomes to hide Reidier’s success and survival.
My proximity is toxic.
Are you touching your scar right now? The resentment locked in its tissue is a constant irritation. For too long, ever since your father died, my work has cleaved through our relationship. It was always so imminent, so imperative, and so masking. I could disappear into it and leave my sadness at home with you and the ghost of your father that I saw in every one of your gestures and smiles. He lived in you, a constant incarnation of my loss. The despair of losing him was too much to swallow, and the shame of abandoning you too difficult to stomach. Work was my salvation, an outlet that I ironically justified as for you. I needed to work to support us while leaving you completely unsupported.
I know that’s why you fell. And why you let go.
I should’ve been in the hospital waiting room. I should’ve been waiting back at the dorms with your bags packed and ready to take you home. I should’ve never forced you to go to boarding school. If I had been able to look past myself, I would’ve seen you “accidentally” leave your key in your room when you snuck out to get high and drunk at the water tower. You were a teenager after all, these things happen. I should’ve known you would’ve shrugged it off and climbed the dogwood out front, shimmied up the branch that reached out to the study room’s Juliet balcony on the second floor, like you had done so many times before. I should’ve guessed your adolescent mind would disregard the risk of leaping out across the void. After all it was only a body-length away, and you were more than capable. I should’ve predicted you’d make the jump, hook your arm over the railing as soon as your torso thumped hard against the concrete balusters. I should’ve understood how you would’ve felt in that moment, dangling from the second story, locked out of your dorm, exiled from your home, fatherless with an absentee mother who couldn’t manage to snap out of her own grief long enough to help you carry yours. What else could you do? Something had to give. Something had to snap.
So you let go.
You couldn’t have known that the branch had broken in the storm the previous week. You couldn’t have guessed that it had landed just so and the mud had hardened around it. You couldn’t have calculated that the broken edge would be propped up at just the right angle to pierce your skin, slide in just below your rib cage, and scrape your liver. All you knew is you wanted out. And one way or another, this was your way out.
I knew. I’ve always known. I’m so sorry. My weakness was unforgiveable.
I’d like to think my current distance was more a considered act of love than some habitual reflex of neglect. I’d like to believe this report has morphed from our wedge to our link. That in leaving this for you, I’m not throwing you to the wolves, but rather reaching out and pulling you close in the only way possible.
If I’ve been successful, then my distance would have been worth it.
If I’ve failed, then maybe my report can serve as my apology. Or as an offering. You might not be able to forgive me, but you can know me. What I was doing, and what I was trying to do. You can at least have this piece of me and understand. With everything at stake, you having that is worth the risk. I don’t want to leave you, and I won’t leave you with nothing. Not again.
I love you, more than you can know. More than I deserve to.
An ocean of love,
Mom*
* * *
* . . . is what she should’ve written.
There was no letter.
Just the journal entry and memo.
Fuck you, Hilary.
* * *
APPENDIX
These following items were sent to me separately, starting several months after I received Danny’s original package. There were no notes, just the ensuing printouts (presented in the order they were received). The postmarks originated from Taos, NM; Miami, FL; Cayenne, French Guiana; and Perth, Australia. I assume they were from him. However, I have neither a way to confirm this nor a means to be certain he personally sent them from the above places (or simply sent them to a post office there to then forward to me). The last one was received more than half a year ago. Furthermore, while each was seemingly printed out from various websites (including known, reputable news sources), none of these are currently posted at the respective addresses. It is unclear as to whether they were removed, censored, or fabricated. Other than the Brown Daily Herald, each news source and journalist has denied (through e-mail, all refused phone calls) any knowledge of, or connection to, these pieces.
In the time between receiving these items and publishing, I have verified Bertram Malle’s unfortunate demise at Block Island, as well as Danny’s account of Clyde Palmore’s sabbatical and his current position. He is still in Haiti, working for Habitat for Humanity’s international chapter on low-cos
t, earthquake-proof construction. Toby has requested no updated information about him be printed. Lorelei ████ is still in New York City. She is engaged to a lithium importer and works at Ogilvy & Mather. When asked about Danny in a phone interview, she dismissed Danny’s account of their relationship, describing them as professional friends. She laughed at his yarn-spinning aptitude, which always impressed her, and added that they lost touch sometime between his disappearance from Anomaly and her transition to her new job.
I have no knowledge of either Hilary or Danny’s whereabouts or whether they are even still alive.
-Joshua V. Scher
Restor8ion
Credit: Justin Sanders
HANNAH’S OCTAGONAL MORTAR BOARD itches her scalp. It isn’t so much the cap’s fault, but rather that of her cappa clausa. The dignity of the Chancellor’s office requires her black robes be made from pure ottoman silk. It is an elegant, expensive material that traps body heat like Hades itself. She almost always overheats and sweats. It’s not very dignified. How long has it been since her last Katharsis? How many Colloquiums had she daydreamed through, picturing herself removing the cap and resting it over the tip of her scepter? The hubbub from Academia Council would almost be worth the scandal. She sighs and casually adjusts the mortar board, trying to get comfortable. Her violet hood zip-zops against the leather back chair.