Shannon Connor
Winward
“All I could perceive was right here, right now, and it was beautiful.”
—Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D.
Carla
The kitchen is dark, except for the glow of the clock. It’s three in the morning. The elation that carried me home is almost gone.
I set my keycard on the counter. I tell the kitchen, “I’m finished, Maggie. I did it.”
•
I’m up long before dawn, despite the sleeping pill.
It’s quiet in our room.
I stumble to the bathroom. The pain is bad, but the nausea is worse. There isn’t much in my stomach, maybe a glass of red wine. I miss the bowl, then have to fumble for a tissue. The floor is otherwise spotless—the woman who cleans has been here. What’s-her-name. Didn’t I let her go? Did I pay her? I think I forgot to pay her.
Vertigo. Sink. Cabinet. Four pills, chased with mouthwash.
I shower. Hot. Water is a whisper. My pulse is a drum. Better. I can’t hear the silence anymore.
•
I log into the household account while coffee brews. What is her name? My eyes are full of code. Anita. Yes, I paid her. Twice.
My head hurts.
•
It’s still dark when I board the Phalynx shuttle. I beg a seat from a teenager and close my eyes on departure. The lurch unsettles everything. My stomach, my balance. The pain behind my eye is a sharp wedge of light.
The shuttle belches heat from beneath the bench. It warms my feet, but the rest of me is cold. Your gray trench coat is too short for me. Too tight on the wrists. I’ve been wearing it all week.
I tuck my hands inside the coat, close to my heart.
•
The Ghost-Writer Project successfully engineered the contralateral conversion and overwrite of a chimpanzee’s right hippocampus in thirteen months. The Phalynx Foundation responded to our preliminary reports with an extended contract and a fifty-percent increase in funding to begin mapping the entire medial temporal lobe. The second phase is expected to take a little over three years.
Even with the patronage of a goliath like Phalynx, bureaucracy is a lumbering beast. The human brain, on the other hand, is a spectacular processor; efficient, resilient. With inspiration, motivation, and the proper tools, it can accomplish miracles—even on itself.
In the three months since I learned I am dying, I have plotted the code to reconstruct an entire hemisphere.
•
The guard on duty greets me. He asks me about the Celtics. I don’t remember the score. I don’t remember his name. I mumble something, let the whoosh of the opening door wash it away.
But I have to go back. I don’t have my keycard. I have to stand there, smiling and shrugging like an idiot while he makes my lapse of memory a matter of record, while he logs it and laughs about a game I watched and can’t remember. The computer spits out a new card and I sign for it. Chicken scratch. His smile wavers. I can’t do this much longer.
Where the fuck is my keycard?
•
The sky is lightening outside my window. Dawn breaks over rooftops, domes and glaciers of blue-tinged glass. I can’t see the streets from my office, but I can see the broad green palms in the Arboretum Wing. The trees are greedy for sunrise.
I wonder where you spent the night.
•
I activate my panel with a swipe of my card and access Ghost-Writer X, files buried so deep in a catacomb of sub-directories they would not be found unless someone at Green Level requested a full-system audit. Not that anyone would have cause to look; I’ve masked my access and data logs so that anyone checking my usage would see recycled forays into chimpanzee genetic code. Nothing more alarming than a divorcee throwing herself into her work.
Ghost-Writer X flickers to life on an array of monitors around my office—a collage of brain images, exabytes of human genetic script, synaptic maps spread out like star charts. Complete. And I feel nothing. I am the rat on the wheel, thinking, What’s the point?
•
The corridor to the observation lab is a bridge over downtown. Beyond the glass the city sprawls and spins in all directions, mute. It is all-over warm, here. Too warm. I pause, my hand pressed to the window. If I pass out, they will find me. It’s too soon.
The dizziness rolls over me. My handprint fades from the glass, spotless. As if I was never here.
•
Reilly is awake. He watches me approach. His eyes are somber. So are mine, I suppose. He shuffles over to his panel and nudges a button. A green light switches on above the window. I punch the key to let him speak.
“Hello.”
“Good morning, Reilly.” I am surprised at the sound of my own voice, drifting down the long corridor of cells.
“Hello. Hello.”
Green lights are popping on down the row. The troops are rousing.
Reilly strokes the panel. “Breakfast,” he says. Then, as an afterthought: “Please.”
“The techs will be in to feed you when it’s time.” I offer him a smile. It feels wrong. My cheeks feel stiff, unnatural. You always tell me the chimps respond to it, but Reilly doesn’t seem to notice, either way. He thumbs his panel.
“Hello. Hello.”
I am raising my hand to switch off the comm.
“Hello. Maggie. Hello.”
My hand stills, and now I see you, a ghostly reflection in the glass.
Maggie
I meant to ask her why she is here so early, but I guess I don’t have to. The answer is written on her face; bruises under her hazel eyes, a haunted look. She’s not sleeping, same as me. Same reason.
She’s so thin. She has her hair pulled back in a knot, pinned. It makes her cheeks look positively gaunt.
And now we’re staring at one another. The chimp is hiccupping my name. When Carla says it, it’s the computer’s voice I hear, with her lips moving.
Bless him, Reilly stops.
“Couldn’t sleep?” she asks.
“Night shift.”
“So Kim has you babysitting his breeders now?”
Just like that, it’s between us again, this ache both new and painfully familiar. This knot of feelings: anger and hurt and pity and fear. In a breath, she has belittled my work, my friend, my choices. Is it the tumor talking, or is it Carla? Should I hold my tongue, or tell her to go to hell?
I can hear what she’s left unspoken, the old rivalry, the disdain. I’m trying to prolong life, Maggie; Kim Kyong just proliferates suffering. The world is overpopulated enough. I can feel tears brewing that I won’t shed. But Carla, there’s something beautiful about creating life.
I want to hold her. That is strongest of all. I want to kiss her brow, her mouth, tell her it will be okay. But I think that’s a lie. Even before she was dying, it would have been a lie. I’m remembering every careless comment, every dagger thrown at me over morning coffee, the two of us facing off across that tiny kitchen. And worse—an army of days marching one after another; meetings and trials and code and trials and hearings and trials and a message in my hand-pod—we’re out of coffee, don’t forget the scans for today’s trial—when I’m standing in the next room, Carla!
Reilly barks my name once more, and I flinch. It makes my skin crawl. I brush past Carla to switch off his comm.
Reilly smacks the panel a few times more. Then, realizing I have muted him, he shuffles to the corner of his cell. He picks at the scars on his head. His baby doll is stuck face-down in the grating of his cell floor. I feel the twist in my heart, a flush of anger at Carla that doesn’t help this situation at all.
My transfer hurt her. She took it as betrayal. And maybe it was, but I couldn’t bear it any more. Her cruelty. A quick word, a flick of a scalpel. An hour, a day, and she’s forgotten the damage. She thinks my skin is tougher than it is. She thinks the chimps recover, and objectively they do—an overwritten left hippocampus functions flawlessly for its dead right twin on a MEG projection, but look at him, Carla. Just look at him. He is not the same. His heart is lost.
But I guess that’s not something you can quantify.
She is sitting on the bench now, across from Reilly’s window. Before I know it, I am on the bench beside her. I can smell her. She’s been using my shampoo. It’s all I can do not to pick up her hand and twine our fingers together. I wonder how it would feel. Will she be cold? Is there anything left?
“Have you told Bryant yet?” I ask.
Carla makes a noise through her nose. A laugh, of sorts. No.
She is looking away from me. I study her face. She is in pain.
“You can’t expect to hide it much longer.”
“No.”
“Carla, if you tell them now, you can have some say in…” I can’t bring myself to finish. How to break Ghost-Writer down. Where it all goes. As opposed to If you don’t tell them, and then you drop dead… Though maybe that’s the point. Maybe she doesn’t want to live to see her life’s work undone.
She still won’t look at me. She’s looking at Reilly, or nowhere at all. Is she angry at me for bringing it up? Is this a silent treatment? Or is she too tired to argue? Does she care? I want to shake her. This is not like her.
This is not Carla.
Carla
Your face is framed in curls. I can’t remember there ever being so much gray in your hair. You think I stopped seeing you. I think you’re right. I must have been blind.
You have those creases of worry. They tell your age, but you remind me of a child, with your blue, blue eyes. You are so beautiful. I wonder what you will look like when you are truly old.
Oh, Maggie, remember you at twenty-one? Not so lovely as this, but lithe, and laughing. You made it so hard to work, to study, how did I ever get by?
Remember that one night? In the apartment above Singh’s deli? (We always smelled like bologna. You stopped eating meat.) I read you passages from The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat while you painted my toes, and, when they were dry, you took the book from me and sat astride, my hips to your hips. Your hair was longer, then. You used your hand and your hair as a screen, whispering sweet, sexy, romantic things into my ear, kissing my right eye. Secrets, you said, for the subtle half of me. I tried to tell you, “contralateral”—if you wanted the right hemisphere, you had the wrong side. But you didn’t let me get a word in edgewise.
You’re talking to me now. You mean well, but I’m barely listening. That’s pity in your voice. Is this what we have come to?
Reilly is watching us. He turns back to his panel, his hand dancing back and forth. Maggie. Carla. Maggie. Carla. He looks back, like he is trying to solve a puzzle.
I know how he feels.
Maggie
“Have you had any tremors?” I ask.
“No.”
“Fainting…seizures?”
I’ve earned a glance. “You’re not my physician, Maggie.”
“Well, when did you see him last? What has he said?”
“What has Alex said?” She echoes. She turns away again, back to Reilly, away from me. “Glioblastoma multiforme, left temporal and parietal lobes. Inoperable. What do you expect him to say?”
“I—” I can’t do this. “I just wish you would—”
“What?”
Let me in. “Be…proactive.”
Another soft exhalation. She is laughing at me. I throw up my hands. I feel like a child, but I can’t stop it. I can’t…
I am rising. I am mumbling excuses. It’s late. Early. Rotation… I have to go. I can’t stop the banal little words from tumbling out. Can’t stop feeling small next to Carla. Can’t stop her from leaving me—what difference does it make that I’m the one who packed up and left?
I meant to say “Goodbye, Carla.” Maybe that would have been cruel. Maybe I meant it to be. A parting shot. It doesn’t matter. What came out was, “I love you.”
I don’t think she even heard me.
At least the tears wait until I make it to the door.
Carla
It doesn’t take much to chase you away. Begs the question, doesn’t it…how did you hold on for so long?
I hear your footsteps retreating, and I clench my teeth. Maggie, I’m sorry. But it’s no good. Not now. Not like this.
Why didn’t I ever say it before?
The door slides open to the west-wing corridor, shut.
Reilly has watched you leave. His eyes flick to me, then to his panel. He raises a hand, considers, and looks back at me.
You are the one who insists on anthropomorphizing these chimps but, Maggie, I would swear he wants to tell me something more than his little panel can provide.
Maggie, I think—
•
The night of the Phalynx gala. August, so humid, your dress was wrinkled, your skin blotchy and pink from too much wine. You didn’t speak to me on the shuttle home. I thought you were tired.
And in the morning—my head hurt. You appeared in the kitchen doorway haggard and sallow, and I thought, “Mags, you don’t wear these parties so well anymore.” I thought you would ask me about coffee. I never thought you’d say, “I want a divorce.”
I saw it all differently, then. The way you squared your shoulders that night when I came in off the balcony with Amy—you knew. Oh, God, Maggie, you knew. The way you kept your face turned to the shuttle window, the distance between us under the sheets. When I put my foot against your leg, goodnight, and you shifted. Not shifted. Moved.
“Did you fuck her?”
No, no, I couldn’t say it enough, Maggie, no—but I can’t honestly say I didn’t want to, and you knew that, too.
Sunday. I slept on the sofa. I opened the windows. Space, time, fresh air. I thought you would change your mind, but you were so calm it scared me. I watched you assemble boxes.
“It’s not about the other women, anyway,” you told me. Women plural. Another death, that. How much did you know? The messages on the sly, the flirting over the operating table, that one, quick kiss with an intern in the ladies’ room—pointless diversions, not worth this. Not worth us. Not even the point…
“You don’t see me anymore,” you said.
“I see you.”
“I’m furniture.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Maybe,” you said. You finished with a box, left it sitting in the middle of the floor. To fill with what? What do you pack up first, from a life? Lives—how do you tease apart what’s yours and what’s mine? Had you thought about that yet? “But I’m not much more than that.”
“You’re my wife.”
“I’m your employee,” you replied.
And you were.
A détente, during the day, until the transfer came through. A shared shuttle in the evenings, all so civil. By the end I was helping you; folding sweaters, making phone calls to charities to pick up your discards. It took the wind out of my arguments, but what could I do. Stand around and not help, like a spoiled child?
September was the last stand. I don’t think you even realized I was still fighting. You were clearing out the spice cabinet. I poured wine. I asked you when it fell apart. Another failed attempt to figure out, why.
You said, “You don’t compose poems for me anymore.”
I thought I misheard you. You packed a tin of saffron (from that little shop on Fifth Street, remember?).
“I don’t write poetry.”
“I didn’t say you wrote them,” you corrected, with a coy little smile.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
You filled the box. You sealed the lid. “I know.”
I followed you to the front door, and you took pity on me, then. “There’s a moment,” you told me, “after we make love…just before you fall asleep… I used to call it our magic moment.”
I was scowling. I could feel it. I couldn’t help it. “What?”
You looked at me. Your eyes teared up a little. I couldn’t tell if it was really over, or if that was hope. You told me that sometimes, in that moment, I used to say things I wasn’t aware I was saying—like I was talking to you from inside a dream. You said I would never remember in the morning. They were like secrets, love letters from a part of me I never knew existed.
In retrospect, I’m not sure how that is different from flirting with other women.
Later, I helped you carry the last boxes to the parcel shuttle, all but the one we forgot about, on the other side of the sofa, with your winter coat in it.
I kissed you on the cheek and said something about transferring your deposits to your new account. I should have told you I was jealous of that other part of me.
Maybe she would have had the words to make you stay.
•
—I think…
the…
light. green. flash. green. Hello. Hello.
I am on the floor under Reilly’s window.
I can’t see the chimp from here, but I can see number forty-two several units down, spinning in her cell. Agitated.
Acrid taste in my mouth, already familiar. Seizure.
I don’t know how long I have been here, but it can’t be that long. The morning staff haven’t come in yet. I pull myself up—have to use the bench, rising to my feet in stages. The corridor swells, lights dim and brighten. Not good.
I don’t have much time.
Maggie
The Arboretum opens to the public at nine. As usual, I am the first person inside.
I love it here in the mornings, before the crowds have had a chance to arrive. I love to find a spot out of the way where I can look up at the canopy, and the sky beyond the glass ceiling dome. I love that, for a short time, I can imagine the world the way it was once, untouched by people; that I am there, in nature, alone.
It doesn’t last long. Today I have had a quarter hour to myself, at most. I am in the Jungle Annex, on a bench, gazing up at Clerodendrum quadriloculare—“Shooting Stars”—when I hear someone discreetly coughing.
“Good morning, Margueritte.”
“Hello, Kim,” I say, putting on a smile. It’s all right. There is a group filing in behind him—a Moms group, by the look and raucous of it.
“I knew I’d find you here.”
“Oh, yes? What gave me away?”
“You had a faraway look in your eyes when we passed in the lab this morning. A yearning for peace and contemplation. The Arboretum is a natural choice. A splendid choice.” Kim is a thinking man. This flirting looks comical on him, but endearing in its way. His mustache twitches, and he squeezes his dark eyes shut in humor. He confesses: “I bribed the night guard to track your keycard.”
“Oh really? And what am I worth?”
“Admittance creds to laser tag night at the New Coliseum.”
“Ah, big spender!” I exclaim. Kim grins, and blushes to the extent that he is able. We sit together for a moment, companionably, admiring the purple fireworks in stasis over our heads.
He is a good companion. A good friend. He has listened when I needed to talk. He has talked when I needed distraction. He gave me work to do, to ease the hurt. But he has been drawing towards the wrong conclusion, and I see I will have tell him so as he catches my eye.
“Forgive me, Margueritte. I do not wish to overstep. But…would you care to join me for an evening?” He reads the change in my face and sputters. “For dinner? Perhaps. Or…breakfast, in this case. A meal. Sometime. We could…”
I place my hand on his. “Sometime could be nice,” I say. “But, Kim, you must realize…”
“Yes,” he is already nodding, eyes downcast. “Yes.”
“—it’s only been three months since… Carla…”
“Yes, of course.”
“And then…” I wish suddenly, violently, that I could tell him the rest. I am desperate to tell him—but Carla has her pride. She deserves her pride.
“Divorce is difficult. I understand.” Kim slides his hand from beneath my fingers and places them on top, offering comfort, only. “I have been through it twice. I do understand. I thought a distraction might be beneficial. That’s all.”
“Yes. And perhaps…” My god, now I’m sniffling. “Perhaps…later.” Oh, Carla, I can’t take this stabbing knife-pain in my heart.
“You love her dearly,” Kim observes. I nod. Kim coughs, passes his eyes over the lush, living exhibit before us. He seems to be reading the labels on the far wall, too tiny for me to see, but with his surgeon’s glasses, not so much a challenge.
“I understand she let her staff go,” he says.
This takes a moment to sink in. “Let go? You mean…let them all go?”
Kim nods.
“What…how do you know this?”
“Interns,” he replies. He is looking at me closely, a mixture of concern and pure gossip-lust bubbling over in his face. “Do you know why she would do this?”
“I…might,” I answer. “But…” My stomach is twisting in knots. I should feel relief, shouldn’t I? “I’m sure she’ll explain herself to the Board, soon enough.”
Kim nods, begins to speak, and in my pocket my pod buzzes. I pull it out and look. It’s Carla.
“Excuse me,” I tell Kim. “It’s late. I have to go.”
“Yes, of course. Take care, Margueritte.”
“Goodbye, Doctor.”
Carla
The plasticity of the brain is the saving grace of Project Ghost-Writer, and the most exciting frontier of medical science. Unraveling the genetic script—near incomprehensible and infinitesimal in its complexity, but not quite—yes, that was a breakthrough tantamount to man’s first flight to the moon. But without the body’s malleable tissue—fetal cells, cerebral matter—the applications would have been limited. Knowing how to read and write life is not the same as creating it.
I could not build a brain from scratch, for instance. I could, however, given certain parameters, undo death. Brain death, that is. That is to say, I could overwrite it.
Theoretically.
I’ve done it in pieces, on primates, in controlled conditions: a chemical death to small, specifically targeted portions of the brain, a remote reprogramming of the twin organ in the opposite hemisphere. With Ghost-Writer, we can compel healthy neural activity to colonize, reproduce, and invert itself in dead tissue so that it functions in a mirror image to its original purpose.
Overwrite.
My brain is nothing but pieces of primate. Human adaptation on the project will not be authorized for decades, but if I fail I am a dead woman anyway.
And if I succeed…
You still love me. You said it, running away, yes, but still. You said it. In all this time, I haven’t been able to figure out how to fix things, fix us, but, Maggie, if you still love me, maybe there is hope. I messed everything up, but maybe there’s a part of me that knows just what to do.
•
ARE YOU STILL HERE?
It takes a moment for a response. Long enough for me to wonder if my assumption was wrong. Maybe you stopped visiting the trees when you stopped working for me. Maybe you have no more need to meditate. Maybe you sleep better now that you sleep during the day. Maybe you’re in bed already, in this new apartment that I’ve never seen, burrowed under the purple quilt, snoring lightly. Maybe you’re not sleeping. Maybe someone is there waiting for you. Welcoming you home.
YES. WHAT’S HAPPENED.
Oh, you know. Word travels fast. Bless ’em. Never mind. The monitor behind me begins to chirp. My pulse is racing. Time. Must orchestrate this just right.
I NEED TO SEE YOU. COME TO THE LAB. PLEASE, I add.
OMW.
Hurry, Maggie. HURRY.
•
I didn’t plan for being nervous. I keep thinking of Reilly in the first few hours after the procedure, banging his head against the wall until we had to strap him down. I have nicked myself shaving, once pretty badly over my ear, and it takes several tries to get the IV connected properly. This is no good. There’s no time for this. When the needle is in, I quickly alter the injection program to begin with a mild sedative. I need my hands.
The drug is quick. By the time the second plunger descends, sending a local anesthetic to my scalp, my qualms are gone. This is right. This is good.
I center myself on the table, slip on the MEG cap, and nest my head in the molded headrest. It is made for chimps, a less than perfect fit, but it will do. I fasten the netting and insert the nodes. Awkward, from this angle, and with the wires and tubes, but I manage. I have a camera and a monitor over my head.
The third injection is a fast-acting neural paralytic, corpicadium, one of my early babies, engineered in the Phalynx labs while I was still in medical school. When introduced at the midline, corpicadium will inhibit inter-hemispheric information transfer and establish, essentially, a chemical wall to protect the healthy right side of my brain from the neurotoxin waiting in the fourth plunger. A reversible corpus callosotomy, assuming the overwrite takes.
I proceed as if it will take.
It has to take.
It will take.
I am…I am buoyant with hope. Euphoria. This is the sedative—no. This is what I was meant for. Maggie, it all makes sense now. I smile at the monitor that is staring down at me, waiting.
INITIATE: ERASURE.
It won’t be long. I fix my eye on the light over the operating table. It is so bright. It is…brilliant? It…
…is
ight…
Maggie
Bob is all smiles as I approach the Primate Wing guard station.
“Welcome back, Maggie.”
“Laser tag, Bobbie?” I give him a wink, though my thoughts are already rolling ahead, trying to anticipate. What happened? What changed her mind? Is she distraught? Is she ill? Does she need me for comfort? Or does she need my ID—transfer or not, I am still a co-signer on half the equipment in there.
Bob has the grace to look sheepish. “I figured you wouldn’t mind, Maggie. Kim is a Department Head and all. You won’t report me, will you?”
“No worries.” The doors pull open, and I am moving.
Worry doesn’t even cover it.
The corridor is much busier in the morning. Funny how quickly I’ve gotten used to this place at night. A couple of Carla’s techs are standing outside the lounge, talking in furious whispers. Their conversation drops as they see me approach the Ghost-Writer suite. There are questions in their eyes. I ignore them. I swipe my keycard.
ACCESS DENIED.
I pause for a moment, then, stupidly, I swipe again. Still, ACCESS DENIED.
Of course it’s denied. I don’t work here anymore.
I buzz for entry, but there’s no response. Buzz again. Wait. Nothing.
“What the hell, Carla?”
I pull out my pod. I’M HERE. LET ME IN.
No answer.
I can hear techs mumbling as I turn heel and head back to the guard station. I consider walking right past Bobbie and going home, but I don’t.
“Bobbie.”
“Maggie?”
“Laser tag.” I nod at his console. “Where’s Carla?”
Bobbie gives me a look and grumbles something about oversight monitoring and reports, but turns to the console. “I haven’t seen her leave,” he says, “but…yeah. No. She’s still in the lab, Maggie.”
“Call her.”
He does. No answer.
“Visual?”
“Seriously?” He is starting to look irritated, but something in my face convinces him. He consults the keyboard, and frowns. “Non-responsive.”
“What do you mean, non-responsive.”
“I mean…non-responsive.” His fingers fly over the controls, tap tap tap. “I don’t…”
“Bobbie, open the doors.”
“I’m not…” he begins, but I am already storming back down the corridor. The twisting in my stomach has become a fist of fear.
“I need a Level Green Clearance to override an Admin’s protocol!” Bobbie shouts at my back. Nevertheless, he does what I asked. When I reach the door, it opens with a sigh.
I barrel through the common room, past Carla’s office. The door is ajar. I notice my trench coat slung over the back of her chair, but she’s not there.
The door to the OR is closed. I don’t even bother with my keycard. I hit the comm.
“Bobbie, all override!”
But I don’t need to shout. Bobbie has come up behind me. His long, blue-jacketed arm shoots past me to slide his card. “There better be a real emergency, or I’m gonna—”
The rest dies on his lips. He stalls in the doorway, and I shove past him, acting on instinct before my brain has time to piece together what I am seeing. But when I reach the table, I freeze, hands splayed out at either side as if they don’t know what to attend to first. A short, guttural, animal sound fills the room. I suppose that’s coming from me.
Oh, God, Carla. What have you done?
Though I can see at a glance what she has done. My eyes switch from the nightmare on the table to the monitor with its program log displayed: ERASURE INITIATED. INITIATE: OVERWRITE.
Oh, Carla. Oh, fuck.
My head is computing…how long has it been? How long does she have left? Minutes? Seconds? The tissue can only be offline for so long, or the overwrite won’t work… But we haven’t mapped the whole lobe yet, we haven’t even touched the parietal… All this, but my hands are already moving, checking heart rate, respiration…and even if we had, Carla, the neoplasm is too big, too unpredictable, you’d have to…and then I see the program waiting to download into Carla’s skull, a file so large I am momentarily stunned.
She hasn’t just mapped the site of the tumor. She’s mapped the entire left hemisphere. She’s going to—no. She already has. The MEG on the wall behind is like a partial eclipse, half the world in shadow. Hemisphere death. She’s killed the tumor, and everything with it.
Trembling, I turn back to Carla. I examine the nodes, twelve in total, six in a horseshoe pattern from the midline to just behind her left ear, six on the right. Jesus, how did she do all this alone? There’s blood soaking through the MEG cap and pooling on the operating table, but she laid down a sheet to catch the mess. Ever practical.
Except nothing’s happening. Carla is lying here, half-dead, and the program is patiently pending. Uninitiated. She forgot to put take the overwrite phase off of manual.
Just like you forgot to change the access protocols to let me in, I chide her silently, as I scrutinize the placement on the thin metal rods. Aaah, damn it, there’s no time for this. That double-back to the guard station cost you half your shelf-life, genius.
I have to trust she got the placements right. I turn to the computer.
For a heartbeat, I hate her. For doing this, for fucking it up. For not telling me what she planned. She knew if she’d asked I wouldn’t have let her… Would I? But it isn’t a choice now—or rather, it is—overwrite, or death.
INITIATE.
I raise my eye to the MEG projection of the left side of Carla’s brain, silent and gray, and the right side sluggish, spastic. She’s in a dream state, echoes of cognition. She is sinking—coma, perhaps. Or flatlining. Likely, flatline. I am watching Carla die.
But the impulses in Carla’s brain, little rivers of light, do not fade. They brighten, grow stronger, first on the right and then—yes, there it is. Mirroring! There is the neoplasm, a sprawling, spider-shaped mass, dead and harmless, just building material now. The right hemisphere is reaching, colonizing, replicating mirror images itself. A new dominance, new channels of information filling in like constellations being born.
Oh, Carla. It’s beautiful.
•
It is nearly midnight when you open your eyes.
We’ve been moved upstairs to an intensive care unit where they’ve been monitoring the progress of the overwrite. We will be censured, later, certainly—or I will be, if you don’t pull through—but the scans look good, and for now they are letting me stay by your side, in case you wake.
Curiosity has overcome even the sternest of them, even Bryant. The Chief of Medical Research himself has been stopping in hourly to check on your status. They all want to see if the Ghost-Writer Project can make the leap to humans.
I have my doubts. My thoughts are full of Reilly. When I told you the procedure left him changed, you didn’t believe me. When you finally stir, when you open your eyes and your gaze travels first lazily, then alarmingly around the room, I fear the worst. It is animal reaction I see in you. Nothing rational. Nothing of—
Carla. Your eyes have found me. I feel your body relax under my hands. You see me, and you know me.
Your mouth opens. Nothing but nonsense sounds come out.
“The pathways are still plastic,” I tell you. “You won’t be able to speak yet.” If at all, I think, but don’t share. One hurdle at a time.
You are looking at me, your hazel eyes liquid with emotion I don’t need words to understand. Relief. Apology. Love. Love. Love.
And a question.
“Yes,” I tell you. “Yes, it’s gone. Dead. Overwritten.”
Your gaze is still fixed on me. I feel your fingers lacing between mine—shaking, uncertain. Fine motor skills, too, are compromised. The surviving half needs time to teach itself the duties of its missing twin. But the knowledge is there. It can be retrieved, reminded. And some things, it already knows.
“Can you understand me, Carla? Can you understand my words?”
Yes, you nod. Tears begin to well up in your eyes. Yes. And I have something to tell you.
“Wait,” I whisper.
I rise to pull the curtain shut around us. I slip out of my coat, toss it over the camera suspended in the corner of the ceiling.
I crawl onto the bed with you. I cradle your shaved, punctured head, wires and all, against my breast. I kiss your brow. “Now. What is it, my love?” I close my eyes and, in the silence, I listen.
And now I know it will be all right. From now on, my Carla, it will all be poetry.
•