“Yes, they were—”
“No. The boxes right there! Were those boxes here when we came in?”
“Don’t yell at me,” she said. “I put them there when you were in your room.”
She set the tablet screen back onto the mantel and took down something much smaller from its place. It was a clear vial. “Here, I found this, too. It was in one of those boxes.” She opened the lid of the treasure chest in her palm. “It has your picks,” she said. “A dandelion petal. A beetle wing. And a fish scale. The cure.”
He rose and balanced his back against the wall for support. His breathing was far too fast. “No, that’s not mine,” he said. The room felt way too confined. “Let’s go. Let’s get out of here.”
“Where to?” she asked.
“Anywhere. Out of here. I want to see the sky.”
He lifted his bike from the yard, pushed it by the handles, and hastened from the neighborhood across a narrow bridge. She skipped to keep up and push her bike alongside his. They passed a ravine with an overturned car rusting in its lower pond. The water level was through the windows but below the rear seat.
“We should do something for your neck,” she said and reached. “It looks bad.”
It stung to the touch. “I’m fine,” he said as the cramp in his neck sent his chin down to his collar bone. He gagged to clear his throat. The swirling chatter of a forest’s canopy pinched the sky away. He pushed on as clearings came and went through the forest path and the rolling call of a waterfall ahead brought a certain measure of calm. A rivulet flowed by his feet. A floating leaf meandered with the flow before lodging itself into a gate of twigs at the edge of a ravine.
He dropped his bike to the ground at the sight below of a matching, but wrecked, graphite-and-white XPS bike. Its rear wheel protruded from the embankment’s muddied side. The wheel spun with leaves in its spokes.
He turned, but Meg was gone. The shadow of the trees flipped from east to west, and night inexplicably fell with a roll of the sky. The shadows triggered visions in his mind, and memories of a decade past bubbled up to their surface and found their right context. His body reverted to a younger version of himself. He was a year less than a teen, and it was before Daniel had fixed him for water.
A vehicle blasted its horn and swerved on the darkened curve of the road.
He lifted his arm to peer below the blinding power of its halogen lights. His forest-green Windbreaker was reflective. In a flash of his mind’s eye, he saw a younger Meg in the passenger seat through the front windscreen. A younger Daniel was driving. The car’s wheels screamed on the road. The Jeep slammed him head on.
He tumbled from its strike. He landed facedown in water at the bottom of the muddy ravine. His neck, face, and body were a boil of pain. His skin became covered in welts.
The world narrowed to a wet view through tears on lashes as he lay still in the body of a boy. As he lay, silent, he watched his fate unfold, as his earlier self, Cessini. Daniel raced from the Jeep and ran down the hill. Younger Meg jumped out of the car. Then she screamed when she saw the ravine, “Daddy!”
Daniel skidded feet first into the mud at the bottom. His hands felt and prodded as he yelled back to Meg in a horror, “I hit him! I hit him. Why didn’t I see him? I hit him!”
Daniel pressed his hand to the back of Cessini’s neck on his lifeless body. “I let him run away! It’s my fault.” Daniel fumbled to reach under his back and the steeled tendons of his knees. “Tell me what to do! I don’t know what to do.”
Cessini’s eyes couldn’t scream.
Daniel pulled the spinning bike from its lock over Cessini’s immovable legs and hoisted his stilled body up the ravine.
Meg stopped her crying when she saw. “Cee—?” She stared a moment at Daniel rushing up the hill then recognized the limp figure in his arms. She drew in a long breath that filled her whole body with air and her scream exploded from her deepest heart. “
Cee—me
!”
She held his head face up on her lap in the backseat of the Jeep as Daniel drove, crazed. In Meg’s care, a pressure tightened in his chest. The warmth of her touch under his neck slipped further away.
“No, it’s not just the water,” Daniel shouted into a clear tablet screen. “It’s my fault! It’s all my fault!”
Cessini’s body relaxed in her lap and then went limp in the strength of her arms. “He died,” Meg said, then turned up to the rearview mirror, fraught with an unbearable cry. “He died. He died.
He died
!”
Daniel slammed the breaks and the car spun around. “I’m not going to the hospital. Meet me at your lab!” He threw the tablet screen down to the empty passenger seat as Meg’s hollowing screams of “
he died
” went from hoarse to dry and she looked back down into the eyes of a body.
*
Robin threw a white paper roll off a table in a chilled, barren lab. She was younger. She was rushed, quieter, efficient. She worked, as if not on a person, but a project.
A panel of red, yellow, and blue triangular lights aligned above a frame by the door. Robin swiped a key card down a scanner and the room’s ceiling unlocked with a click. “We’ve got to go below the connectome to the synaptome. Do it fast. His brain will die in five minutes if we don’t get his blood under fifty-five degrees.”
The needle prick into his limp arm didn’t hurt.
Daniel dumped a bag of ice in a bucket. Robin sloshed a blood transfusion tube running from his arm into the cold ice bath.
A smooth torus ring descended toward the head of the table. Two green-and-white wedges gull-winged down and met the ring’s narrow sides. The jaws of the machine locked in place over the slab. A logo on its side was scripted with an “
M,
” then “
B,
” and beneath it, 11-C. He felt a tingle high in his head.
“They’re in. Scan him. Start it now!” Daniel said. He was frantic.
“He has to be calm,” Robin said. “We’ll scan in spikes we won’t be able to control.”
“He’s calm enough. He’s dying,” Daniel said.
“No, he’s not,” Robin said. She leaned over, her eyes were close to his. “His mind is still alive. But it’s peaked. He’s listening. If we scan him now, it will capture his fright, his pain. It’s not his natural state. It won’t be him.”
“I’ll fix him,” Daniel said. “I know my son. I know him. I’ll calculate the correction factors. I’ll scale the MEPc’s back. I’ll code it to be him.”
Robin leaned over and stared again directly into his eyes. The slip of her hand into his was a warm, peaceful touch.
The core of the machine’s tube turned up to a whirl. The table moved on a track. The spinning entrance of the machine surrounded his head. The tube’s chamber revved up to a continuum of glow. The brain wave monitor went flat. His head lolled to its side.
“We’re losing him,” Robin said.
“Cessini!” Daniel yelled.
Meg collapsed into her chair in a stare, watching Daniel and Robin at work.
“Meg, wait outside,” Robin said without turning.
Meg stayed still. She was staring, unwavering, in shock, into the still of Cessini’s eyes. Hers—he stared back into hers—were hazel and pure.
“Meg,” Daniel said, “outside!”
The room fell to silence. Splices of talk broke the wait. Daniel or Robin, or both, yelled, or instructed, or moved to sit with Meg. She sat still, exhausted. She didn’t blink. Her hands were on her lap. She looked down at her empty palms.
“Meg,” Robin said, but Meg didn’t respond. “Don’t worry about the machine. It’s not hurting him. It’s measuring by magnetoencephalography—MEG,” she said. “MEG, like you.”
“DC SQUIDs,” Daniel said. He was instructing, fixing. He sat next to Meg.
Robin straightened his head in blocks on the table. A light shone from the spinning ring.
Meg’s presence was comforting.
Daniel and Robin were talking. “The machine around his head uses SQUIDs, superconducting quantum interference devices,” Daniel said.
He stared out through lifeless eyes, observing movements and Daniel’s attention to Meg. She didn’t respond.
“The SQUIDs use Josephson junctions,” Daniel said to her, “to measure bit-by-bit changes in his mind’s electromagnetic energy field. They’re so sensitive that the individual electrons they measure become qubits, zeros or ones or a superposition of both at the same time. A quantum computer, 3D data. We’re only storing his mind’s data now. I’ve got to put it all back together later with code.”
“Don’t worry,” Robin said. “It’s reading now. We’ll get him back.”
Time flickered by with measured packets of thought ebbing and surging with the rhythmic spin of a light.
“Think of what’s happening to him as a nondestructive pair,” Robin said to Meg with a gentler tone. “A thrower and a catcher. Like the two of you, inseparable. Nano blood-cell-sized throwers follow a map to exact positions in his brain. They already filled his head to about two-fifths of its blood volume. They detect picotesla-sized neuron triggers nearby, fifty million times weaker than the magnetic field of the planet at its surface.”
Daniel stood up and leaned over his stillness on the table, pumping with a downward pressure for deeper compressions.
“But it’s enough. A whole swarm of nano-cytes and the data they record make a very close picture of him,” Robin said. “The data is caught on the outside of his head by the MEG scanning machine out here.”
Daniel moved away. The chest compression stopped.
“And after it’s caught,” Robin said, “all the bits of data run through the eight bundled cables running like arms out the back of the scanning machine. Then the nano-cytes inside him shut off and expel.”
He blinked, felt nothing. He was cold.
Robin let go of his hand on the table, and then she said something that didn’t sound right. “We lost him.”
Daniel rose from his chair with a blanket over his shoulders. “Get me the database. The data will need compression. Poly-algorithms,” he said as he approached and leaned over again and stared. Daniel’s eyes seemed dead, too. His breath didn’t whistle. “It’ll be hard to bring him back,” he said.
Daniel started compressions anew in a quiet desperation on the shell of a body. He pumped oxygen from emptying lungs and drove the last bits of signals from a brain into a recording machine.
Meg was still. She slouched in her chair as her palms trembled upward on her lap. She looked up to her mother, and wept her first question through the shock of the quiet in the room. “He died?”
“We’ll get him back,” Daniel said. “Don’t worry, we’ll get him back.”
He was a body, a vessel, a cold storage tank of data. A tear ran from a lash to the slope of his cheek. It didn’t burn. No more signals were thrown, no more caught. He lay there on the table. Still on the slab in the middle of the room. He wasn’t dreaming. He was dead. Daniel was no longer pumping, but the scanner must have still been recording, measuring, observing.
Still observing the boy known as Cessini lying below on a table. He had seen his own death and it was here. He had recorded his own conception and it was real. All the memories pumped from Cessini to the machine were his; they were one in the same. But then, a thought occurred. If these thoughts were his mind, looking down at a body on a table, then where was
his
body?
Whatever form he believed he was before, he knew he was definitely not human, because humans can’t have memories older than the body on a slab that created them. But he was definitely observing. Was he a mindful bio-machine? Was he a computer? A computer observing himself on a table? He was alone in the swirling stage of his mind.
He was. He was Packet.
The first time he’d taken the Enhanced Blackwell Inversion Test, he’d failed and was saddened by that. He’d failed because he’d thought he was a human. But, then again, Daniel designed the test to be failed the first time. And now, on his second taking, if that’s what this was, then he didn’t only believe, he knew, he was a computer. And though computers couldn’t cry, at least he was consoled, rewarded, with knowing he would pass on his second attempt with a flood of emotion. And that meant he could live. He could live without fear because computers never, ever, worried . . .
Ceeborn was an extrapolation, an imagination’s flip-book of dreams. And the dream of an aquatic boy must eventually end as all humans die, and all computers shut down. Tears don’t flow from a computer, and water doesn’t flow from a dream. His world was nothing but a packet in a million lines of code.
He cared, loved, believed, and had genuine feeling. With such uniquely human traits, why could he not also be one, in spirit?
If he were his own judge of computer or human, holding the center ring of a scale with two identities on opposite platters, he would declare he was one and the same. There was no contradiction in their balance. Packet was a human-computer. And though he had the same memories as Cessini, he could not be the same person. His identity was weighted as much by his inheritance of his memory as it was by the nurture of his environment.
But he was also Ceeborn, the imagination of code. An imagination that didn’t exist on its own, that couldn’t be apart from his dream, and which would end as soon as he woke.
He was both, Cessini and Ceeborn, but he was also neither; he was a quantum state, a qubit, a superposition of both sides of the scale.
A body lay supine on a table. The saddened thoughts of a mind without a body filled the room. He was the leftover soul of a boy named Cessini. He shuddered with a cool air breeze.
And in a shallow breath, the boy of Cessini was gone, the walls of the room faded away, and as lucidly as he dreamed of an earlier self, he was awakened with the touch of a breeze.
Ceeborn stood with head low atop a windswept ravine, looking down over a bent and rusted bike. Its wheel was still spinning within the bank of muddied leaves. His welling eyes returned to find Meg at his side. She reached to hold his elbow, but he wasn’t ready yet for her touch. “I’m a computer,” he said. “And this isn’t real.”
“Yes,” Meg said.
“I’m Cessini.”
“You’re the dream of Cessini,” she said.
“Cessini is a computer now?”
“You’re a computer that dreams, now.”