After Mind (12 page)

“Okay, back up. What about this room?” She blinked. “There’s no water in here.”

“This is definitely not a pure room.” He pointed up as her eyes followed. “That sprinkler,” he said, whispering.

“Oh, yeah. There’s that. You know it’s just a pipe, right? There’s not even any water in it. Not until there’s a fire, anyway.”

He thought a moment, then said, “Last night, I dreamed I could swim.”

She scoffed. Then went back head down to click-clack away.

“Really, I did. Underwater, too.” He leaned forward over the robot arm. “I’m not kidding. Swimming like a fish. But it was me.”

“You mean I could be up in a boat with a pole,” she said, laughing, “and I could catch you like a fish. You’d be flapping away. Wiggle, wiggle, aah, wiggle-wiggle.”

“Yeah, you could try,” he said, then relaxed. The 3D printer beeped and he looked back. The knuckle was done, but he didn’t rush. “Okay. I got a better one. Why did the rhinoceros get kicked out of brain school?”

“I dunno, why?”

“Because he kept trying to break into the girl’s hippocampus.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Did I get you?”

She was silent.

He threw his head back, cracking himself up. “I did. I got you.” He pointed at her and twirled on his stool. “I think. . . .” He cackled and twirled. “I think it’s funny.”

“What? You mean at the zoo?”

As he slipped from his stool, he slapped out to grab the table’s edge. The hook of his robot’s arm broke free with the force of his crash. The tendon cable let loose and the gripper’s fingers sprung back to open. They hyperextended and broke without their knuckle backstops.

But he didn’t care in his belly-on-the-floor laughter. He could fix a broken finger later. His mind reveled instead in his healing now.

She lifted both hands in surrender. She tried to laugh with him, but couldn’t. “I still don’t get it.”

He looked up from the floor over the table top to her scowl. When he was younger at school on the playground he believed he was alone. That lonely boy was real. But with Meg here at work, fixing or breaking from laughter, he knew he had a friend. There was no contradiction. He believed and he knew that he was his same self. He got up from the floor and laughed a small victory for fun.

“I still don’t get it. What’s so funny?” she asked.

“Never mind,” he said as he climbed back on his stool at his side of the table. “Remind me when I’m done with the body to build a hippocampus for my robot’s brain. I can print one out on the printer with its mouth open really wide like this. . . . Like the one with the broken tooth at the zoo. I can fit it right up here where the head is going to go.”

“Wait a minute. You have no idea what a hippocampus means, either.”

“Yeah, so? I heard my dad say that joke to the guards downstairs. They thought it was funny. And you know what?”

“What?”

“I have no idea what it means, either. But I’m glad that you’re here.”

“Great. Where else am I supposed to go?”

He shrugged.

“Then do me a favor. When you get up, print me a giraffe, too. I want one.”

He straightened up one of his robot’s fingers. They weren’t broken as bad as they looked. “I thought of a name for him.”

“For who?”

“Packet. I’m going to call him Packet.”

“Call who packet?”

“My robot.” He showcased the working pile of pieces in front of her face.

“Okay, whatever,” she said. “Don’t forget my giraffe.”

“You know what else?”

“What?”

“I’m going to go into space.”

“With your robot?”

“No. But all kinds of people say they’re going to do it and never do. But I will.”

“So how are you going to get into space?”

“I dreamed it, like me swimming under water.”

“Oh, please. Then you’re not going.”

“Yes, I am. I invented a bioship that uses space dust for fuel. Space dust gets shot out by stars, and it’s organic. That means it’s alive. And it’s everywhere in space. My ship grabs up all the space dust in a giant ocean tank of water.”

“Right. And what are you going to do about all that ocean
water
?”

“Nothing, the water won’t bother me because it’ll be in space! And the people in my spaceship will know how to turn all of it into energy. They
blast
it out the back. Physics says you can do it. Quantum engines and energy stuff. I know all about it. I dreamed it. It’s real.”

“Cool. Can I go with you on your spaceship?”

“Sure, why not? It’ll be a big ship. A thousand people. Giant. Open air,
huge
inside.”

“Cool.”

“You want to know what it looks like?”

“No.”

“Okay, so, imagine a gigantic barrel, hold it up sidewise so you’re looking into its opening. There are people living and walking all along the inside walls.”

“Wait, you’re going into space in a barrel?”

“No. Come on.” He tore a sheet of paper from a pad and hurried to scribble oodles of tiny people. She leaned over her desk. He rolled the paper into a loose tube and tacked its long seam with a piece of tape. “It’s huge, okay? The people walking along in here stare across the diameter of the tube and what do they see? The people on the other side, over here, are upside down and looking back across at them. This freaks everybody out, right, so you put a huge projection screen, side-to-side, right down the length of the tube. And you project the sky on that screen. Now the people think they’re standing in a semi-circle or a valley and they look up and see the flat, projected sky with clouds and everything.” He ran a flat hand along the outside of the rolled paper to show her how the sky screen would go lengthwise down the tube.

“Cool.”

“But there’s a problem,” he said as he ripped out another sheet of paper from his pad and rolled an even tighter tube. “You got the axle of the ship running straight down the length of it.” He stuck the smaller tube into the larger one. “People don’t want to look up and see some giant axle in the sky. They’ll freak out again. So, you wrap that axle with more projector screen.”

“Yeah, I get it. I like it.”

“I know, right?” He peered through the two rolled tubes to Meg on the other side of the desk.

“One thing, though”—she leaned over the table and grabbed—“the projector screen can’t be glued right onto the axle itself. It’s got to be kind of like supported off it a bit so there’s room between the screen and the axle. That way repair people can walk between them and fix things, like you see people walking through the framework of those old blimps, or something. ’Cause there’s always stuff that needs to be fixed.”

“Yeah, that’s true. There’s always stuff to be fixed.” He chuckled, grabbed the two paper tubes back from her, and squished them into the gripper of his robot. The three inanimate fingers held.

“Yeah,” she said and went back to her game.

“So, before we go into space. . . .” he said as he got up, danced a few steps over to the cart, and then smiled through the canopy of the printer, “tell me, what color do you want your giraffe?” The printer’s spool reset for the start of another piece as he flipped through the networked catalogue. He smiled again, looked back at her, and knew. Together, they’d have so many more places they could go.

*

But until that day, on a regular Tuesday, Cessini’s eyes slowly pivoted back up to the black metal pipe down the midline of the ceiling as it taunted and belittled him, pressing him down into the cushion of his stool. The metallic sprinkler head’s sixteen-prongs mocked him deliberately and incessantly from above as he worked.

He had fabricated all sorts of spare parts, servos, tendons, screws, and wheels that he collected into little plastic baggies and packed into the shelves all around the room. So why couldn’t he likewise constrain the water from the sprinkler head above? He hopped off his stool to do it.

“You want to know what I think is a really bad idea?” Meg asked, busy with her tablet.

Cessini grabbed a four-rung, closed stepladder that leaned against the wall, opened it, and straddled its legs atop the table. He was careful not disturb his robot’s developing frame. His plan took balance, nerves, and a roll of masking tape.

Meg watched in fits of silence and sputter. “What are you doing?”

“What’s a bad idea?” he asked. He pulled a spare baggie from a box on his desk and tucked it into the left front pocket of his pants. Then, before she could answer, he squeezed his fist through the center hole of the masking tape roll and pushed it up to his forearm.

“Wait, what are you doing?” she asked again.

Cessini’s eyes never left the polished sprinkler nozzle above. He put a foot on his stool and climbed up onto the edge of the table. He steadied his hands on the top bar of the stepladder and committed his climb up to its fourth, top rung.

“Don’t!” Meg jumped off her stool.

He let go with his hands and wobbled to a standstill. His sight rose to twelve feet from the floor. His target was directly above and only a back-arched glance away. He raised his trembling hand. His eyes were within inches of the sixteen-pronged head.

Meg scattered around to his side of the table and grabbed for his pant cuff.

“No, don’t pull,” he said and kicked.

She ran for the door as a lookout.

He clenched his teeth and curled his toes in his shoes. He reached down with his left hand to remove the baggie from his pocket. The tape roll dislodged down his forearm to his wrist so he raised his hand. He spread his fingers to return the roll to a tighter place on his forearm. Then he reached instead with his empty right hand to his left side, arching his ribs, and dug the baggie loose from his pocket. “So what’s the really bad idea?” he asked.

She ran back in to get her tablet away. “Don’t. The water will shoot!”

With the baggie balled in his right hand, he pulled a strip of masking tape free with his fingers, ripped the tape with his teeth, and zeroed in. He pinched the top corners of the baggie, blew in a puff of air, and reached it up toward the sprinkler head. He wobbled. He breathed.

His hands didn’t move as his mind intended. The distance to the head looked reachable from the floor. Now, his neck was straight back with his jaw open in pant. With each inch higher that he dared, the sixteen prongs cursed back at him with a dizzying unease.

“Ceeme, no! Stop it.”

Each pointed tooth of the head was detailed with a studied recognition he knew from below and now knew intimately. The small glass bulb with its blood-red liquid was ready to burst. Only a thin metal guard protected it from breakage with the slightest impact. If it broke, the pre-action system would activate. Seconds would count before the air pressure in the pipe matched that of the surrounding air. Water would rush into the dry pipe, fill the sprinkler head, and spray off the sixteen points of the splatter disk in a deluge over him and the room. There was no way he could climb down the ladder in time or dive for cover to avoid the horrendous rain. He’d have to throw himself down and hope for the best. The floor down below where he would hit was hard. He could hide under the table, or better still, hit the floor full footed and run.

Meg fell back onto her stool. “You want to know what I think is the really bad idea?”

Cessini blew another puff and swelled open the baggie for another go. It fit over the sixteen prongs. He tacked the torn-off strip of masking tape on the top edge of the baggie and pressed it onto the higher stem of the nozzle’s one-inch-high vertical pipe. He closed his eyes to breathe, and then opened them as he pulled the tape roll from his wrist. He picked the tape free and set its end onto the pipe. He wrapped the whole roll around twice, then three times more around the outside of the baggie over the nozzle, tight, but not an ounce more of pressure against the delicate glass vial inside.

Meg spilled her secret without waiting. “My mom said she was talking to your dad. They want us all to live in the same house.”

He unwound and circled the tape once more to be absolutely sure it was tight and the baggie was secure over the sprinkler head. He tore the tape from the roll with his teeth and pinched it off. He swallowed. He was done.

Meg breathed out below.

His forehead was beaded in sweat and aflame in a rash, but he felt the worthwhile cost of a victory. He climbed down with the palms of his hands a red, burning blaze. He touched down his feet on the desk, then the stool, then the floor. He removed the stepladder from its straddle over his robot’s body and set it folded back against the wall by the 3D printer.

He sat on his stool. His skin was afire with sweat. He smiled at Meg, satisfied. “I think that’s a great idea,” he said. “Moving in together in the same house. I like it.”

She didn’t move a muscle. Her hand was pressed over her heart.

He scooted his stool closer up to his side of the table and opened a baggie of screws and electrical gizmos. He peeked up at Meg past his eyebrows and then looked back down at his work. She said nothing. She was still. His faintest twist of a tri-wing screw made a louder peep than her. He looked up again, holding his screwdriver upright beneath the tip of his finger. “So, when are you thinking of moving in?” he asked.

Meg broke her blinded stare at him and tilted her head back to the baggie taped and wrapped around the sprinkler head above. He had done it. All she could do was nod. Her hand stayed over her pounding heart as she looked back down and across the table and uttered a faint, but definitive, “Never.”

*

The never day came on a Saturday night. Daniel’s hands covered Cessini’s eyes as he led them straight into Cessini’s bedroom for a present. Meg was antsy with anticipation. Robin beamed, a rare occasion. Daniel removed his hands from Cessini’s eyes once he was aligned in the center of the room, but then he kneeled down for an eye-to-eye hold.

Cessini’s painted mural of the waterfall and his bed beneath it were the same, his nightstand with sound machine and an old bellows lamp shaped like a squid were left untouched. Daniel held his shoulders from pivoting any farther. Behind Daniel was a new white melamine shelf that wrapped waist-high around the three other walls. The shelf was the perfect mantel addition for his many projects and discoveries yet to come.