After Mind (2 page)

And when their constant bickering became too much to bear, her mother would snap, “How do you know when it’s time to pull over and take a break from driving? When the argument from you two is about what side of the car the sun is shining on: ‘It’s shining on my side.’ ‘No, my side!’ ‘No, it’s not! It’s shining on—’ ‘Mommy! He said the sun isn’t shining on my side.’”

Terri slipped out a smile and dodged a car pulling into a space in the lot. Then she recalled and laughed, remembering her mother’s final break: “Okay, enough! We’re pulling over so we can get out and see. The sun is staying right where it is, and where it always has been, and that’s all you’re going to get out of me.”

Terri leapt onto the curb from the lot that edged the southwest curve of a green, oval sports field. The field’s white cricket pavilion stood as testament to tradition while competitive runners lapped the lawn. Miniature aerial drone trainers flew backward to set the pace, each drone keyed on the individual pattern of its chosen runner’s jersey. The lead runner was fast and fit, with a loud striped chest of red over blue. He watched Terri the most as she ran, and she caught a few of his looks, but none were ever returned.

She turned away from the field and toward the east and west rectangular wings of DigiSci’s four-storied, “H”-shaped building. She hopped the steps to the glass foyer that connected its stone-veneered walls. Other than receipt of a large corporate contribution nearly a dozen years before, the building’s biggest outside connection was a long-standing partnership with the famed lab for advanced Human & Cognitive Machines—HACM Lab US—at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Terri had made up her running distance too fast. She circled DigiSci’s entryway, laboring to catch her breath. She stood as straight as she could, pressing the palm of her hand deep onto the beat of her chest.

DigiSci’s tired façade hid a tangled story of change inside. Terri swallowed to calm her breathing, then muscled open the foyer door. The stairwell to the left was plain from a distance, but had a closer detail only she knew from a hundred failed runs before, each ending with a return to sitting and weeping on a stair. This time, Terri thought as she held her breath and skipped up the stairs, it better be different.

A plaque, hanging by a thread on the foyer’s second-floor wall, was inscribed with the simplicity of a Mandelbrot set, a unified equation, a layered, complex beauty of nature. The equation was expressed as mixed media on wall, an expansive, swirled design that barely survived beneath brittle, flaked paint. She had seen its earlier creation and there had been art here once, but it had all disappeared long ago.

She passed the robotic torso of a security monitor on a counter, and pushed open a metal door into an eight-by-twelve-foot mantrap. A biometric scanner on the wall read the veins of her fingers, and the rear door opened. She turned right, into the western wing of the building, and made a beeline down its center hallway to the last door on the left. An “Emergency Shut Off” button for the entire building’s power was mounted under glass on the wall outside a single wooden door.

Inside, to her left against the wall, was one of two computer room air-conditioning (CRAC) units. It pumped ducted air to seven-foot-tall server cabinets, eight on each side of a single central aisle. The chilled blanket of air was like a whole body inhaler that calmed the scorch from her run. She slowed, turned to her right, and faced the one black cabinet at the end of the west-facing row.

The brushed-black metal of the cabinet was a welcome touch. It was critically cooled in the small room’s farm of servers. As it whirred, she scanned its speckle of lights and exhaled.

“Is it true?” she asked beneath the hum of the room’s white noise.

The second of the two CRACs was perched along the room’s rear wall to her left. It pumped out its chilled air under the tiles of the floor. On the wall above the second CRAC was a four-foot-wide slate, and above that was a single, three-lens camera. Its blue LED flickered.

“Is it true?” she shouted.

The blue LED went solid. The slate on the wall turned clear and the gray cinder blocks of the wall shown through. Then the screen wiped into a live video stream.

Now in view, Daniel paced between a desk, its mess, and his side of the wall. The backside of outdated, text-based code in the correct orientation from his side of the room covered the screen right to left. He turned with his fist over his mouth, the knuckle of his thumb scraping his teeth. He looked, but saw right through her.

“I asked you a question,” she yelled.

Daniel swiped his hand in the air and his code scooted away. “The problem is he doesn’t know who he is. But it’s him. And he wants to play computer.”

“How do you know it’s him?” Terri asked. “Last time it thought it was a dying squid.”

Daniel smiled. He finally saw her and leaned with his knuckles upon his desk. “Because he thinks his name is Packet.”

The green lights of the cooled and brushed metal cabinet flickered, but to Terri, they could have meant anything from the outside.

“Can you do it?” Daniel asked. “Can you try it again? Once more?”

The LED panel of the cabinet signaled that the servers ran warm above seventy-six degrees. Normal operation. But to her arms, the air felt cold as ice.

“Absolutely,” she said, and then turned back to Daniel on the screen. “I don’t know.”

Daniel glared, eviscerated her doubt. “And he refused to drink water.”

She ran her hand along the cheek of the cabinet and cupped her fingers along its edge. The tiny bumps on her arms stayed raised in the room’s cocoon of chilled air. “Then yes,” she said, but unsure. “Absolutely. Whatever it takes. One last time.”

Daniel’s few steps to his right took him out of view of her screen. A simple, wooden door at the left side of the wall’s CRAC buzzed and unlocked at its frame. Daniel entered the data hall and held out his hands in an offering of peace. “I set him up in a hospital room, a safe environment for him. He’s accepted it so far, free form.”

The tall metal cabinet was waiting, its processors churning inside.

“Are you ready to go inside? Do you want to see him?” Daniel asked, finding a way to lift a tiny smile.

Terri thought of every reason to say no, but then found an ember of “yes” that trumped them all. “Only if he can see me.”

TWO

NOTHING MORE, NOTHING LESS

C
ESSINI MADDEN WAS twelve when the family bumped up the Tasmanian central highland hill in a Jeep. His father, Daniel, drove with an exaggerated bounce in his seat as he kept to the road. Robin Elion Blackwell wrung her hands in the front passenger seat. Her preteen daughter, Meg—short for Margaret Theresa—lowered her window to its final quarter and finger-cupped its top for a view of the construction. The bumps would soon be over, or so the sandbagged signs said.

Bouncing his feet on his rear-seat mat, Cessini thought that this place could be different, or better. The refreshed Tungatinah Hydroelectric Power Station wasn’t far from the place they had recently started calling home, but they had been driving around the island of Tasmania for most of the day. The plan was simple: to get to like their new homeland that placed them forever and a mile from where they had come.

Cessini caught the wind through his window, the sweet smell of the world. “Hey, Dad,” he said, “you and me, we could fix this road. Give us a shovel and a couple of machines, and it’s fixed in no time flat. This is the best place ever already. You’re going to love it. All two hundred megawatts of power. Pesky water doesn’t stand a chance.” He bounced his feet on the mat. This was going to be great.

Tungatinah revealed its industrial self as they cleared the final switchback in the road.

Meg looked at him, shook her head, and then went back to her window.

“Okay, so what’s it look like to you?” he asked. “’Cause the sun’s shining on my side for sure this time.”

“Hope,” she said. Then, with the side of her head on her window, she laughed at the height of the sun, obviously still on her side of the car.

“Hmm, hope,” he said. If Meg said it, then it must be true. He poked her and she scooted farther away.

He reached for the ScrollFlex case in the netting attached to the back of Daniel’s seat. He unrolled the soft clear screen from its suede capsule case and swiped by a picture of him and Meg traveling halfway across the world in a plane. He held the clear screen up to the windshield as it registered their location. A photo journal from Tungatinah’s brochure appeared, which he flicked larger and read aloud:

“‘After its third overhaul in seventy-five years, Tungatinah had a weathered dignity and resolve. Five penstocks dropped water nine hundred fifty feet from the head lagoon.’”

He looked out his window and found the long pipes. They were orange.

He continued: “‘The latest upgrade was a transition to superconducting coils and zero-resistance transmission lines that delivered a hundredfold benefit to life. The old clearances that were cut two hundred feet wide through centuries of conifers for the run of overhead power lines could now grow back to the welcome width of a family walking side-by-side on the grass. Once complete, the new buried run of conduit will have a hidden width of only six feet underground.’” He looked up from the screen. “Hey, Dad. They’re burying cables six feet under. What if they hit a few dead people?”

“I don’t know. I guess a few of them would wake up with a shock,” Daniel said with a whistling haunt as he brought the Jeep to a halt in the Tungatinah lot.

Cessini chuckled, got out, and stretched his legs. The metal transmission towers that crowded the paved lot were covered in rust. They looked far older than the brochure’s enticing photo. Robin hesitated and stayed in her seat, her fingers pinched over her brows.

Cessini read on: “‘Three decades earlier, the mainland over the strait to the north was the largest net exporter of coal in the world. Then the people voted to have the greatest proportion of renewable energy per capita on a world-leading par with Norway and Iceland.’”

Robin relented and came out of the car. Meg stood at her side on the curb.

Cessini scrolled down to two bulleted highlights: “‘The islander’s first phase initiative was the superconductor upgrade to the heritage site of Tungatinah and also to her five sister plants in the lowland western catchment. The second phase was the upgrade of the remaining fifty hydroelectric power stations throughout the five remaining northern and eastern catchment generation systems.’” But the second bullet was best: “‘The target of the entire system was fifteen thousand gigawatts of clean, deliverable power to the whole of the greater island grid. Any excess would be routed to feed the new Basslink-B undersea power cable to the mainland.’”

Cessini stopped reading as a man limped to greet them curbside. He figured it was the man his dad had called earlier about coming out to see the place, and he watched him.

Gerald Aiden stepped with an oddly stiff-sided gait that punctuated his walk, ruined the drape of his uniform, and twitched his pile of under-eye wrinkles.

The ScrollFlex snapped back into its windup capsule case.

“I hear you’re the one with all the power around here,” Daniel said.

“Good one,” Gerald Aiden said, his voice hoarse. He secured his cordial shake with a hand to Daniel’s shoulder. “Haven’t heard that one before.”

Cessini held out his hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”

Gerald Aiden took it. “And you are?”

“Cessini—spelled with a ‘C’ and ‘e’ so you say it like the water. Like sea. Not the astronomer. He’s a hard ‘C’ and ‘a’ as in Ka—Cassini, but I’m ‘Cee’ like the sea. Cessini.”

“Okay, steady there, kiddo, you’re way too quick for me.” Aiden laughed and pivoted for another introduction. “Mrs. Madden?”

“Blackwell,” Robin said. “I still go by Blackwell.”

“Okay, then.” Aiden winked at Daniel. “Your problem, champ, not mine.”

Meg offered a wave, but received no notice in return.

“Well, all right, then,” Aiden said to Daniel, “shall we go have a look?”

Meg stepped up, insistent and loud: “Why are the big pipes orange? Those ones coming down from the hill.”

Aiden stopped. “Name of this place means ‘falling water.’ And those, my gal, are penstocks, water inlet pipes from the lagoon. But it’s not the pipes that are orange.” He pivoted and restarted their walk to the main assembly building. “They’re covered in lichen. A living, breathing, composite organism of fungus and algae. A body and its feeder. It’s pure symbiosis. Can’t live one without the other. They’re what you see as the orange, not the pipes.”

Cessini picked up his pace and followed Aiden across the lot. He twisted up backward as he walked to see the tops of the metal high-voltage towers and their live power lines. They were huge from underneath. Straight ahead lay the imposing four stories of the rusted, corrugated main assembly hall. Two smaller bay buildings attached to the hall on its left and right. The power station sat beside a bed of frothed water. The spill-off roared.

The boil kicked up an arched spectrum of light, a rainbow-refraction of water drops in the air. A rainbow was to everyone else a beauty of nature, but to Cessini it was a warning, a cage in the sky held in front of his walk, like a dead canary in a coal mine. He flinched at the sight of its glistening arch, but continued ahead.
The nightmare of water had returned.

“Let me know if you have something in particular you want to see,” Aiden said as he turned and noticed Cessini lagging behind.

Cessini knew himself to be smart—maybe not as smart as some, but definitely braver than most. Who else, he thought, could walk as tall through life while afraid of the rain from above and the pain of their own tears from within? If there was anything he’d learned from his dad, it was that all things could be fixed, and by God if he could still crawl, he would find a fix for the run of his fear, and his days of nightmares with water.

He straightened his shoulders and soldiered on. Meg elbowed him back to center. The door of the hall was fifty yards afield. Cessini bucked up as Daniel tousled his hair.