Connect: A Novel

also by julian gough

Juno & Juliet

Jude in Ireland (formerly known as Jude: Level 1)

Free Sex Chocolate: Poems and Songs

Jude in London

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2018 by Julian Gough

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, London, in 2018.

www.nanatalese.com

DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gough, Julian, 1966– author.

Title: Connect : a novel / Julian Gough.

Description: First American edition. | New York : Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, [2018]

Identifiers: LCCN 2018010706 (print) | LCCN 2018013954 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385541336 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780385541343 (ebook)

Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / Adventure. | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Technological. | GSAFD: Science fiction.

Classification: LCC PR6057.O815 (ebook) | LCC PR6057.O815 C66 2018 (print) | DDC 823/.914—c23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018010706

Ebook ISBN 9780385541343

Cover design by Michael J. Windsor

Cover images: woman © Klaus Vedfelt/Stone/Getty Images; man © Liu Zishan/Shutterstock

v5.3_r1.2

ep

To Solana Joy, who saved my book, and my life

Contents

Cover

Also by Julian Gough

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

ONE: THE COLD DESERT

TWO: RED BLOOD CELLS

THREE: A BUTTERFLY WAKING IN WINTER

FOUR: CATERPILLAR SOUP

FIVE: TORRENTS

SIX: SYSTEM HARDENING

SEVEN: ROADRUNNER

EIGHT: THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY

NINE: I WISH I HAD A RIVER I COULD SKATE AWAY ON

TEN: STACK OVERFLOWS

ELEVEN: TURNOVER PULSE

TWELVE: EVERYTHING PLAYING AT ONCE

Acknowledgments

A Note About the Author

ONE

THE COLD DESERT

This is a novel, set in the future. But it is also true.

It will happen, just like this, and soon. I know this, for reasons that will become clear.

Who am I? Well that’s an interesting question. Obviously, someone is producing these words; writing this book; the guy with his name under the title. He’s physically doing the job right now, in Berlin, on an old laptop, at an even older writing desk, in the corner of his bedroom.

But I’m not him.

This is a novel, set in the future. But it is also true. Don’t worry, it will all come clear in the end.

1

She walks into Colt’s bedroom without knocking.

Her son is wearing the helmet again. He’s moving his arms, his head. Playing in his gameworld. It’s totally real to him.

The black plastic just covers his eyes, nose, and ears. Enough to keep out the universe.

He doesn’t hear her. Doesn’t see her.

Naomi hates watching this, but she can’t stop. He’s so like his father. As handsome. More handsome.

Colt shoots someone. Drops to one knee. Shoots someone else. Ducks the return fire. She knows the gestures so well. She’s seen this so often.

He’s killed them all. He unties the girl. He kisses the girl, or she kisses him. It’s not clear from the sounds that leak out of his helmet into the room. But his mother knows exactly what he’s seeing now. He sees his ideal woman, not wearing very much. Designed by him and his friends, mostly American and Russian teenage boys, so: Small nose. Big breasts. Narrow waist. Wide ass.

Standing alone, beside his single bed, his pajamas begin to bulge out at the front, and the bulge rises, changes angle.

In real life, he has hardly even spoken to a girl.

Naomi looks away, blinking. Glances around her son’s small, dark bedroom, the drawn blinds keeping out the bright desert sunrise.

Electronics equipment and tools cover the small table.

Piles of old clothes on his chair, on the floor.

What a mess.

There; six, seven empty water glasses, half-visible in the shadows under the bed. Every glass in the house. Well, she can get those later.

She turns and walks silently, bare feet on the wooden floor, out of his bedroom. Quietly closes the door.

Walks away, down the short corridor, to the bathroom.

She loads up her brush.

Toothpaste for sensitive teeth.

Brushes carefully for three minutes. Leans down into the sink, and sluices out her mouth under the tap. Straightens up, rinses the brush, and flicks the bristles dry with her thumb. Lays it down, on the edge of the sink. Beside her son’s toothbrush.

Almost eighteen, and never been kissed. Oh, Colt.

She picks up her brush again. Takes a deep breath, and closes her eyes.

Brushes again, harder, with the dry brush, till her gums bleed.

2

In the kitchen, Naomi hangs her silk jacket on the back of her chair. The jacket used to be her mother’s, one of the few things she had brought with her from Nanjing. Naomi strokes the shoulder unconsciously, as though her mother were still wearing it.

From behind her, the fridge says, Don’t forget your pill! in a bright, friendly voice that makes Naomi grind her teeth.

Oh well. Colt likes it. I think…

It’s hard to tell.

She goes to the fridge, takes out the pillbox, and closes the fridge door.

She pulls the snug, airtight pillbox lid straight up and it sucks free. She licks her little finger; lifts out a tiny green tablet on the wet fingertip. Gulps the tablet dry. Hesitates.

Opens the fridge again, and takes out the cool silver tin in which she keeps her fresh ground coffee.

She glances toward the kitchen door. If Colt was here, he’d be lecturing her. He’s usually straight in after her. Probably still caught up in the game. Good.

Coffee inhibits absorption, says the fridge, and Naomi knows she’s projecting, but…the fridge sounds sad. Worse; disappointed in her. Drinking coffee is not recommended within an hour of…

"Oh, shut up," says Naomi.

It shuts up.

She puts the silver tin down carefully on the countertop. Quietly unclips the lid.

She leans down over the open tin, and inhales the rich, warm, bitter, complicated, comforting smell.

Then she looks for the Italian stovetop coffeepot, while her conscious mind splutters and rages and says no, no, no.

Oh yes. Top shelf…

She takes down the small aluminium pot. Unscrews the top.

Her hands automatically pour the water, spoon the coffee, screw the pot back together, while her conscious mind says no, no, no.

She switches on the old electric cooker.

This really isn’t a good idea…

She heats some milk. Whips it into stiff foam with the little handheld frother, just as the coffee comes bubbling and gurgling through into the aluminium pot.

Coffee interferes with absorption…

Her hands assemble a cappuccino.

I need to control my levels…

She makes Colt a smoothie, and puts it on the table.

Puts a box of granola on the table.

Goes to the cupboard, picks up a bowl. No, wait; that granola tastes weird with coffee. And she’d rather have the coffee. She puts back the bowl.

I can eat in the lab.

She sits down with a sigh, and lifts the cappuccino to her lips.

Colt walks into the kitchen. He’s wearing the helmet, but the game’s switched off, so the visor is clear. He can see her.

Naomi’s hand, holding the cup, lurches reflexively forward, to hide the coffee behind the box of granola. Warm foam slops back over the cup’s lip, onto the handle, her hand; drops in a slow glop to the table.

Fuck it.

She brings the cup back up, and takes a slow, deliberate sip. It’s delicious.

Your smoothie’s on the table, she says.

He looks at the coffee in her hand.

Did you take your tablet early, or something? he asks.

Drink your smoothie, she says.

He goes and gets a straw. Green, to match the smoothie. Sits across from her.

You shouldn’t drink coffee with your tablet, he says. It interferes with absorption.

She puts down the cup, to lick the foam off her hand. Picks up the cup, takes another sip. Drawls in a French accent, Well, maybe I want to be interfered with.

Colt frowns. "That doesn’t make sense, Mama."

Naomi reaches up and, turning a big, invisible dial, says, Click.

These days, Naomi only does that when she really, really wants to change the subject. When pursuing the point will mean shouting, and crying.

Colt changes the subject. Have you got your chimpanzee yet?

Naomi groans, and reaches for the invisible dial again.

Colt rocks back and forth in his chair, almost imperceptibly.

Naomi’s hand stops, in midair. No. It’s a fair question. She drops her hand back to her side. They’re not giving me a chimpanzee.

Colt takes a drag on his smoothie. Why not?

Too expensive. Too much paperwork. Ethics Committee wasn’t happy. They gave me about fifteen different reasons.

He makes the smiling, worried face that means, Seriously?

She does the little shrug and smile that means, No, I’m exaggerating. Five, six reasons, she says.

You could appeal again, says Colt.

I could, yeah.

You’re giving up.

Yes.

Mama, you could just test it on me.

Is he joking? But he never jokes.

Oh my God he’s serious.

NO, Colt.

I trust you.

Colt, it’s a completely untested, experimental procedure…

It’s not untested, it works…

It works in mice! Not people.

But—

And it took me months to find a way to make it work in mice, and mice aren’t complicated. I wasn’t worried about preserving their memories, or their personalities…

But you’ve dealt with the cell membrane integrity problem…

How do you know that? Sharp, she’s way too sharp, and he winces. Hunches his shoulders. Colt?

But he closes his eyes, starts humming.

This could be bad…

She wants to walk around the table and comfort him, touch him, hold him, but she can’t—her hug’s like an electric shock when he’s like this, he bucks and screams—and so she rocks in her chair, in unconscious sympathy with his rocking, and watches his face writhe. My God, he’s really trying to engage today.

Oh, Colt, thank you, I love you, come back, yes…

He opens his eyes, says without looking at his mother, I read your new paper.

Colt, you can’t… She tries to modulate her voice, not close him down with her emotions, but she’s, inexplicably, scared. And angry.

She glances toward the kitchen counter, at her screen, but it’s switched off, and folded up like a sheet of paper. No, of course, he must have read it in her office. The only copy is in her data safe.

Please, Colt, you have to stop hacking into my files. It’s not fair. I need some space. Some privacy.

You’ve solved the problems. He won’t look at her. Mumbles, You’re ready to go on primates. Please.

I’ve solved the old problems. There are always new ones. She shifts in her chair, trying to catch his eye. Look, realistically, it will probably kill the first couple of primates. The official risk assessment was not good. That’s why the Ethics Committee won’t…

But they don’t know how important this is.

I gave them the general outline…

I saw your application. You didn’t tell them…

Colt, I’m not even sure I want to do it.

Why, you think God will be mad at you?

It’s her turn to stiffen. Look, changing people…so fundamentally… She can’t talk about the sacredness of the human creation, that will just set him off, she’ll have to rephrase it. It’s not just a religious problem. Even in secular, ethical terms, once you have two classes of people…

No, you’re changing the terms. After a couple of years of religious argument, Colt has gotten pretty good at fighting her inside her own logic. "If God made you, he says, then God could be acting through you."

Yes. She has thought that. But what if He’s not?

Let’s not argue about religion, she says. We end up playing two different language games; it can’t go anywhere.

OK, says Colt.

They are connoisseurs of each other’s OKs. And that’s not a good OK. She studies his face. He looks down. Takes another drag on his smoothie.

Did StemCellCon accept your original paper? says Colt.

No.

She doesn’t have to explain herself to him.

He drinks more smoothie.

There’s a silence.

Did you submit it? he says.

Oh, this is ridiculous. Who’s the parent here? Honey, forget it, the deadline’s passed.

But if you…

You were fighting again, says Naomi.

When?

This morning.

"Oh yeah. I told them and told them and told them I didn’t want to fight. But they wanted to fight."

Naomi sighs so deeply the froth on her cappuccino dimples, and stays dimpled. So what did you do? She takes her third sip; it’s OK. The first sip is always the best, by far.

I gave myself infinite ammo, and I killed them all and I took their women.

I don’t want you doing that.

They’re not real women, Mama. Well, one of them turned out to be real…

No, I don’t want you killing the people that annoy you.

It’s only a game, Mama.

Wait a minute, back up. There was something odd about his voice there…What do you mean, one of them turned out to be real?

But Colt shakes his head hard, doesn’t want to talk about it.

Naomi feels a hot shiver of embarrassment on Colt’s behalf, at the thought of him trying to be a man with a real woman, and so she puts it with all the other stuff she doesn’t want to think about. If he wants to talk about it later, he’ll bring it up.

She takes another sip. Takes it slow, tries to savor it.

If only all sips could be first sips.

That’s the problem, Colt, she says. You can’t do that in real life.

What?

You can’t just change the rules to suit yourself.

"But you want to change things, Mama. You change things in the lab. You change the rules of life."

No, I don’t want to change things. I’m a scientist. I just want to observe, and understand.

Colt is shaking his head. You can’t observe a thing without changing it. You’re part of the universe. When you get extra information, that’s already a change.

Why did she start this? Now he’s not drinking his smoothie.

"There’s a difference, a lot of differences, she says, between playing a game, and doing research."

OK, great, they’re different. So why can’t I change the rules? It’s my game. And sometimes the rules turn out to be dumb.

In real life, you don’t have infinite ammo. In real life, they can kill you.

I can tell the difference, Mama.

She glances at the time. Plenty. Oh well, if they were going to argue, they may as well argue about the big stuff. She takes in half a mouthful of coffee. Pushes it to the front of her mouth with her tongue, sucks it back hard through her teeth, swallows. I think you’re spending too long in the helmet.

Colt is rocking back and forth again. But he’s engaging, he’s not shutting down. He’s improving.

He clears his throat. There’s a guy in China played for six days straight. Without sleeping. That’s the record.

Oh dear Lord. "Look, he must have taken off the helmet at some point—"

No. Colt is starting to rock faster. "He didn’t."

Fine, fine! He didn’t. This wasn’t going anywhere. This never went anywhere.

There was another guy did it for eight days, said Colt, but he died.

3

When the argument is finally over, Colt returns to his room.

Naomi stalks out into the hot desert air, swings the door shut with a bang.

Damn.

Big gestures never work.

Forgot my jacket.

And my screen.

She goes back in quietly, grabs them, leaves again. Closes the door carefully behind her.

As she walks past the little patch of velvetleaf senna bushes, she strips off some leaves, and stuffs them in the jacket’s pockets.

Keeps walking, to her old Pontiac under the awning.

She throws the jacket across onto the passenger seat so hard that some of the leaves tumble out and fall to the floor. She sighs, and gets behind the wheel. OK, let the day begin…She reluctantly switches on the screen, and it unfolds to hand size, glowing with bad news, messages, reminders…

Hmmm. There’s an alert from the game, from this morning. Colt triggered parental controls. Not just a warning; the gameworld shut him out. So he was definitely doing, or trying to do, something with that woman. Or she was, with him…

I really don’t want to think about this right now.

The car starts, and she listens with a critical ear to the hum of the electric motor. Was that a rattle? No.

The sharp smell of the senna leaves soothes her. She pulls out onto the road, and heads for work.

She knows it’s a terrible car because everyone says so, but she bought it with her own money and she likes it, and the safeties will kick in if she screws up. It isn’t logical; she knows a newer, fully self-driving car would be far safer; but the lack of control makes her nervous. And they do get hacked remotely, sometimes, even if it’s rare.

Luckily, Nevada still allows people to drive their own cars; it just jacks up their premiums.

Nevada still allows pretty much everything, if there’s money in it.

4

The Casey Biological Research Facility is high on the sunny side of a valley, a few miles beyond the advancing eastern edge of Las Vegas. Land’s still cheap out here. And it’s going to stay peaceful around the facility, too; they can’t have neighbors, by law, because they sometimes handle pathogens.

As she crests the hill, and swings down into the valley, she glances in her rearview screens. The road, always prone to early morning mirages, even back when it had been just plain asphalt, was recently coated with a matte-black high-efficiency solar-capture surface.

Naomi has grown fond of this newest section of the Federal Highway Solar Grid; and not just because buying her electricity live from a solar road surface on the way to work is cheaper than charging at home…

There it is. Her timing is just right. The sun has already heated the flat black river of road so that a thin layer of warm air sits on it, held in place by static, beneath miles of cool, dense, early morning mountain air.

The pale blue sky, refracted through the unstable lens of inverted air, pulses and flickers on the ground like water, and the dreamscape of Las Vegas, tiny and distant, shimmers up out of a lake that isn’t there; the top of the Luxor pyramid, the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building.

The whole world, dissolved in light.

She arrives at the facility, a low sprawl of connected labs and offices, and parks the car in the shade, behind Lab 3. Plenty of room. She’s early, as usual. Though, to be fair, she gets to park in the shade even when she isn’t early. Because everyone else is always late.

Naomi walks across the hot asphalt of the parking lot toward the main entrance.

She sees a small delivery drone make a rooftop parcel drop, to her office.

Oh good, my caterpillars. They’d better be well refrigerated…

The drone rises, heads off back to the warehouse.

Not for the first time, she wonders why they don’t just paint the asphalt outside the labs white, if they’re not going to use it for solar, so it won’t pointlessly soak up so much heat.

Hmm. Donnie’s car. Parked by the front door. Laaaaaazy man.

As she steps inside, the hairs on her arms rise at the temperature drop, and she puts her jacket back on.

Shannon’s not at her desk in reception, of course, so Naomi just walks on into Lab 1, no one.

Lab 2, no one, the doors popping open at her approach. Good. After the security breach a couple of weeks earlier, they’d tightened up access so much that, for a few days, all the lab doors locked at her approach. A massive pain in the ass.

Speaking of which…

Lab 3, Donnie Glassford, leaning over a lab bench.

Her boss. Looking like a shaved gorilla in a Texas Longhorns shirt, as usual. And sober, which is less usual. A pleasant surprise. There’s even a mug of coffee by his elbow. Admittedly he hasn’t actually drunk any of it, and it looks cold and scummy.

He straightens up, looks Naomi over, pausing in the usual places. No Colt today?

Ugh. She studies the faded, peeling decal on the mug, to avoid looking at him. A Texan flag flies above the words Remember the Alamo.

He wanted to stay home, work on his game.

Donnie nods. Uh-huh…be with you in a minute.

Donnie goes back to work, on a mouse. He’s removed the entire left frontal lobe by the look of it. Nothing complicated. As Donnie always says, It isn’t brain surgery, ha-ha. The top of the mouse’s skull sits discarded on the bench, a few inches away, like a tiny bicycle helmet.

Naomi recognizes the mouse. Well, not the individual mouse. But it’s a research strain she’s familiar with; a hairless albino, with a genetically engineered tendency to develop brain cancer.

She glances at the frontal lobe. Wait, this is one of hers. What the fuck is Donnie doing with one of her mice?

With his right hand, Donnie lifts the unconscious mouse by the tail, leaving the top of its skull on the bench. With his left hand, he removes the thick insulated lid from a small flask of liquid nitrogen. It boils over furiously, like a cartoon volcano, white vapor pouring down the sides, heading across the desk like a tiny fog bank.

And he’s let the nitrogen heat up too much, she thinks. If he’s going to leave it there for the whole operation, he should have used a larger flask. Better volume-to-surface area.

But her anger’s already starting to fade, as the fear kicks in. Donnie doesn’t do lab work.

The mouse, brain still exposed, twitches in Donnie’s hand. It’s going to wake.

Donnie dunks it in the flask of nitrogen, leaving only the last half inch of tail held in his fingertips. Tiny volume, relatively large surface area; the mouse freezes to the core in seconds. Donnie pulls it out, turns, hesitates, with the frozen mouse dangling over the bench.

Damn, he says. Sorry, Naomi. Forgot the foil. Will you roll me a sheet?

Sure. She tastes a sudden squirt of sick in the back of her throat, swallows.

Swallows again.

Naomi tears off a sheet of aluminium foil from the roll, lays it on the table.

Donnie lays the mouse across it diagonally, wraps it like a burrito, labels it with his ungloved hand, picks it up in his gloved hand, and throws it in the freezer. Pushes down the lid till it clicks.

I’ve been talking to the Ethics Committee, he says. He picks up the mug of cold coffee, gives it a startled look, and puts it back down again.

Oh.

Called in a couple of favors. Looks like we might get a couple of chimps through.

OK, she says. After a long ban, research on chimpanzees has only been legal again for a couple of years, to help researchers deal with the various primate-to-human epidemics. Getting permission to work on anything that isn’t SIV, Benin fever, an Ebola mutation, or F-strain flu is incredibly difficult. She knows how hard he must have worked to get this. OK.

So if you could just publish…

No.

He sighs. Look, everybody here knows you’re doing great research. But if you don’t publish—he puts on the voice of some old TV character, she has no idea who—it don’t exist.

She has an abrupt, vivid memory of the exposed brain of the last big mammal she worked on. A dog with nerve-sheath degeneration. Big black mutt.

Oh, I got too close.

Pain research. A long time ago.

She ran tests on the dog, a week after she’d destroyed its ability to block pain. Trusting, dying, it still licked her hand.

She blinks away the memory, and shakes her head. It’s not ready.

It doesn’t have to be ready. You know; better if it isn’t. Ask the big questions, say the method shows promise, blah blah, preliminary results, yadda yadda, and we can get funding to look for the answers.

Working on it, says Naomi, looking out the window at the blue sky. Nearly there. Just need some more data points.

He doesn’t like it when she looks out the window.

If you don’t publish preliminary findings, it’s really hard to get a budget, he says. Got to step it up.

I know. She keeps looking out the window.

Seems you have a habit of not publishing papers.

Whoa. This is a new angle of attack. What do you mean? she says, and now she’s looking at him.

Donnie shrugs.

What do you mean?

Impressive, the work you did on Barbary ducks.

How would you know that? Those ducks, my God. One of her first pieces of research, from her time at Berkeley.

Those are remarkable papers, he says. Really remarkable.

Who…where did you get them?

A lot of stuff in there I didn’t know. He looks her up and down as he speaks. Sure, I knew that, with Barbary ducks, the sex was…coercive. I knew the females had evolved corkscrew-shaped vaginas, with all kinds of fake exits and dead ends, to outwit the guys; but your paper…it really made me look at them differently.

I never published that paper. Any of those papers. She notices her voice is trembling. Fear? Anger? Both. Oh God, it’s like she’s caught someone reading her diary.

"Well, that’s what I’m saying, says Donnie, and shakes his head. You really should’ve. That stuff you did on the guys, tracking the way their penises evolved, so they could evert and ejaculate up a corkscrew, ah, vagina, in a tenth of a second…and that whole genital, whatever, arms race, with the duck vaginas changing the direction of the corkscrew, to keep the guys out…fascinating. You should have been proud of it."

I was. I am.

Three great papers. But you didn’t publish any of them.

Who gave you…where did you read them?

Your conclusions in, was it the third paper, the reproductive-strategy paper—yeah—they were particularly, ah, intriguing.

Even his mention of that paper fills her with the same complicated tangle of emotions she had felt back at the time. I was out of my area… Wait, why is she distancing herself from it? It’s a good paper. Even if…

A genital arms race, driven by rape, muses Donnie. Rape as the dominant reproductive strategy—

The female still had a great deal of control over her vagina, breaks in Naomi. She tries to remember the paper’s conclusion, but there’s a cloud of shame and fear associated with it that makes it hard for her to think straight. Females could block the—

Yeah—Donnie just bulldozes straight through her—but kind of intriguing, that the winning evolutionary strategy for female Barbary ducks is, basically, to make sure they are raped by the strongest rapist.

That’s not what I said—

Hey, I get it, Donnie interrupts, and winks. Sex is dangerous.

She bites her tongue. Looks up at the ceiling; down at her feet.

Oh, those ducks. Those strange months, watching them rape and be raped, while her marriage to Ryan broke down. Studying a culture in which affectionate, consensual sex between equals had become impossible; worse, a disastrous error, producing unsuccessful offspring.

They had backed themselves into an evolutionary situation from which there was no way out.

They had bred love out of the system.

Watching those ducks, it was impossible not to think of her mother and father’s strange, bleak marriage; of her own complicated, messy, painful life.

By the time she was finished, she wasn’t sure if she’d written a scientific paper or an autobiography.

It was a great study.

No, she didn’t publish it.

"I mean there’s rape culture, and there’s rape culture, oh boy, says Donnie. I hadn’t realized male Barbary ducks were four times the weight of the females. Sure, you didn’t apply the findings to any other species, but it kind of explains football players." He laughs.

She doesn’t.

She’s worked it out now. It’s obvious.

It was Ryan, wasn’t it?

Mmmm, says Donnie. You might want to keep Colt out of the lab for a few days.

Look, she blurts out, I’m sorry, Donnie, but… Then she realizes he’s not hitting back at her, he’s just changing the subject. Why?

Shannon says to tell you, you might be getting a surprise inspection later in the week.

Seriously? OK, this is more urgent. Urgh. When?

Probably Thursday. She’ll tell you when she knows.

Oh, great. OK. He’s an insensitive twice-divorced misogynistic idiot, but he could be worse. Be polite. Thanks, Donnie. And say thanks to Shannon.

Sure. She’s lost his attention. He’s playing with a little handheld chemical cauterizing tool like he’s never seen one before. Jesus, maybe he hasn’t.

Come on. He knows you’re wondering. Just ask him.

Why are you dissecting my mouse?

It was injured. The other mice had attacked it. And I was interested in how your work was coming along. You’ve been keeping pretty quiet.

She glances involuntarily at the frontal lobe.

Yeah, he says drily. So it seems to be going well.

How much does he know? Her face is beginning to ache from the effort of not showing him her emotions.

Was the mouse… She stops. Oh, there’s no point in not asking. Was it exhibiting any unusual behavior patterns?

I only saw it for a couple of minutes, but, yeah, it was its behavior that stopped me.

What was it doing?

Fighting. Your big maze, the one with the cameras sucking data on movement and choices. This guy was holding his own against maybe a dozen other mice.

How? She knows the cameras will have caught it, and that getting into a conversation with Donnie about this right now is unwise, but her curiosity’s too much.

It was using the maze as a three-D space, jumping walls to shake off pursuit. Donnie frowns. Very fast reaction times. It seemed unusually aware of its environment. Kind of weird to watch. It will all be on the cameras. They trapped it, eventually, in a dead end with high walls. Overwhelmed it. I pulled it out alive, but it was, you know, basically a goner, so I did a quick autopsy.

She wonders how true that is. The body had looked undamaged. She thinks the word asshole so fiercely she’s afraid for a moment she’s said it aloud, and she clenches her jaw. Unclenches.

OK, she says. I’ll analyze this. She scoops the frontal lobe into a coolbox before he can react, and heads for her lab.

Naomi…

If he slaps my ass, I’m going to break his arm.

She waits till she is in her lab, with the door closed behind her, and locked with an old-fashioned metal key and bolt she’s installed herself, before she finally allows her face to show her feelings.

Her whole body relaxes, as she quietly snarls, rolls her eyes, sticks out her tongue.

Feels good.

5

Her lab is familiar, calm.

Better feed the caterpillars.

There’s an automated feed system, but she likes to believe the caterpillars benefit from regular fresh leaves. Monarch butterflies, Danaus plexippus. Everybody’s favorites.

A couple have already started to pupate. About to break down, and rebuild; transform completely.

She carefully takes the cool glass lid off the quiet tank, puts it down.

Leans in, smells the soil.

As she pulls a handful of leaves from her jacket pocket, the silk of the jacket is cool and smooth against the back of her hand. The soft fuzz on the surface of the leaves gives pleasure to her fingertips. She strokes the leaves, absentmindedly, as she notices her own voice is still going around and around, arguing with Colt, inside her head; and she realizes it’s been going around constantly since breakfast, right through her drive to work, right through her conversation with Donnie. Whoops. She takes three deep breaths.

One…two…

Better make it five.

OK.

Look at the leaves, the caterpillars crunching through them, really look at them.

Be here now.

They’re so alive.

Intense, vivid colors.

Just…little packets of life.

No, I don’t want to change the world, she thinks.

But she sits at her desk and dictates detailed notes anyway, her voice a little shaky. The results from the last trial really were extraordinary.

And she doesn’t have to publish. No one can make her.

6

Back at home, after work, she walks to Colt’s bedroom, and stops at the door. Listens.

Nothing. But that doesn’t mean much.

She reaches out, to knock; but her knuckles pause short of the door. Naomi hasn’t really looked at, really noticed, the door in a long time. It is covered in posters, stickers, handmade signs from every stage of his life. She unclenches her fist, and brushes her fingertips gently across the rough red paint of a sign at eye level.

Her eyes prickle, and she blinks.

Colt made it, with a big, messy kid’s paintbrush, a few months after they’d moved into this house; after she’d left Ryan. Ten…no, God, almost twelve years ago.

Colt had used red poster paint, and a sheet of paper taken from his mother’s printer. Half the hairs on the brush were bent or broken, sticking out sideways, so there are little scratches of red outlining the main letters. It says No Burglars. Actually, it says No Burg and on the next line lars. Colt made it after a neighbor’s garage was broken into. He was six. He’d been worried the burglars would rob their house, steal his toys. Couldn’t sleep.

After he put up the sign, he felt totally safe again.

The power of words, written down.

Coffee, she thinks, I need coffee; and dismisses the thought. She listens. No sound. She, very gently, turns the handle of his bedroom door. Swings the door open a little, slowly.

He isn’t in his bedroom.

She searches the house for him, but he isn’t there.

She goes outside. Walks around the house. No sign of him.

She circles the house again, farther out.

She finds him, still wearing his helmet, but otherwise naked, lying facedown in a sandy patch of ground beyond the mesquite bushes, halfway up the ridge.

Her heart slams, slams again. As she breaks into a run, her legs feel heavy, heavier. Like she’s lifting sacks of wet sand. It takes seconds to reach him, but the seconds are immense, exhausting.

She drops to her knees beside him on the warm ground, afraid to touch him, wondering where to touch him; looking for blood, for damage.

Every detail looks strong, sharp. Vivid.

His body in the low sun, the vertebrae under his tanned skin casting curved shadows the length of his back. Like tiny sand dunes.

The flexible black plastic band at the back of the helmet, holding it on, is scratched and scuffed.

The pale marks on his arms…Her mind flinches, and she glances away.

His clothes—faded gray Road Runner T-shirt, black jeans, red boxer shorts, the micromesh skinsuit he wears for gaming—are in a heap a few yards from his body.

The sand. Little stones in the sand. A couple of dry mesquite twigs.

A round plastic floss dispenser.

A cigarette butt, bleached completely white by years in the sun.

Everything has incredibly well-defined edges. She’s pulling all the visual data out of the incoming images, analyzing them fast and hard, looking for unusual patterns.

Looking (though she is not consciously aware of this) for tracks in the sand—snake, coyote, human, whatever.

She’s looking for blood, for a weapon, for (this is a funny one) a syringe. Years ago, in college, Naomi found her roommate lying facedown in the bathroom with a syringe beside her; so to see Colt’s body, facedown, legs at that angle, unlocks that old pattern from memory: body + syringe = explanation, and so Naomi’s brain checks for that pattern, that explanation, and her eyes dart to where the syringe was, so many years earlier.

But it’s not there. Relief, that it’s not there; anxiety, that there’s still no explanation. Her body produces so many chemicals in reaction to all these conflicting inputs that they begin to interfere with each other. She feels jittery and unable to think.

He moves his arms, in a slow, swimming motion. Moves his legs. Swimming in the warm sand.

Oh for fuck’s sake, Colt, she says, and closes her eyes and all her muscles untense, and she lies down beside him.

Mama, he says, turning his head, his helmet, toward her. No, he doesn’t like it when she swears. She normally only swears inside.

He used to do this when he was four, five, six years old. Swimming in the sand. He said he liked the way the warm sand felt on his skin. Then some kids at school heard about it, laughed at him, and he stopped. Stopped when he was maybe seven. He hasn’t done it in a decade.

You scared the shit out of me, she says, stretching out in the warm sand.

Mama, I’ve written a new level. I’ve integrated it into the game. His voice is dreamy, again. Far away. Happy. It’s set in the desert. It feels totally real.

"It is real. You live in a desert," she says, exasperated, relieved, sick. And she can hear it in his voice, that she’s not really there, in his world. That he’s talking to a ghost, out of politeness.

But this desert’s better, he says. It’s totally real. I’ve improved the sun.

Colt, the desert in your game is not real. She leans forward and tries to see his eyes through the dark glass of his visor, but can only see herself lying beside him, her face bent and smeared across the curved surface. He’s disappearing. There’s a difference between seeing the world, and seeing a picture of the world. Even a great picture of the world. It’s a serious difference. An important difference.

No, there isn’t. All we can ever experience is our own nervous system. All we ever see is a picture of the world.

But a picture based on reality, based on something that is actually there…

You don’t understand. He turns his head away, in the direction of the sun. I can see the corona. I can see the solar flares.

I totally understand that you’re excited. How can she get this through to him? It’s great that you’ve improved the graphics. But… He’s not listening. …if you could just… She tries to stop herself saying it, but these words, said together so often, have welded themselves into one unit, and she’s started it, so it finishes itself automatically. …live in the moment…

He hears that, all right. The sun flashes off his visor, as he turns fully to face her. He isn’t mapping her into the game; he can’t see her; she’s just a voice entering his game, his world, from outside, like a conscience.

Nobody lives in the moment! he says, and his voice is a little high-pitched, shaky. "We don’t have access to the moment! Where do you get these ideas! It’s bullpoop, bullpoop. Our brain just predicts what will happen next, and creates a picture of that. He’s not afraid to get angry when he’s inside the helmet. But it’s not real, it’s a guess. We live half a second in the future—"

I know, look— She feels a little sick.

"—because if we only saw what was already there, and reacted to that, our reaction times are so slow we’d be eaten."

I know—

We live in the future, we act in the future, it’s just we’re so used to it we don’t notice—

"I know." She stands up, brushes the sand off her legs.

"—until our projection of the world fails to map accurately, and we step on a step that isn’t there, or we—"

"But the whole idea of a map implies there is something there to map onto—"

"Sure! But we can’t know it, so who cares?"

"But if you don’t even see the real world, how can you live in it…"

"I do see the real world, you’re not even listening, I’m trying to explain…"

They’re shouting at each other now. But the louder she gets, under this empty blue sky, the smaller she feels. Loud sounds go nowhere, change nothing. They just wander off into the desert to die.

Colt…

"I can see the real flares, says Colt. He looks up at the sun, and it seems to calm him. I see the real flares, in real time. That’s why it’s so cool."

She takes a breath.

Another.

Another.

Tries to step back from her emotions. Just concentrate on the breath.

But thoughts are looping and firing, and he’s so like his father, and her memories of shouting are attached to so many other memories that the thoughts take over her breathing and she’s not concentrating on her breathing she’s just gulping big breaths and saying no to the memories. She realizes her visual center has pretty much switched off, that she’s been seeing and reacting to nothing but memories for ten, maybe twenty seconds.

Stop.

Be here now.

The world leaps back into focus. Her son. The desert. The sky.

He has stood up too, and he’s putting his clothes back on, starting with the stretchy, skintight micromesh suit.

The red boxers.

Jeans.

Road Runner T-shirt.

His favorite…Oh, it’s so small now…Jesus, he’s cut the seam in the neck, so he can pull it on without removing the helmet…

She can’t see his face, so she concentrates on his hands. Watches his fingers flexing as he dresses.

It’s real, I’m here, this is real. Talk. Calmly, calmly.

She remembers why she wanted to talk to him.

Tomorrow…

One downside of living in Nevada is the chronically