The Notebook and the Crèche
“What happened to your doorbell?”
It was late evening, the air darkening. Vin tried to answer but no words came out. Bill’s face wrinkled with concern. “You actually look worse. Where were you, man? Why didn’t you answer?”
“I have a lot of work to do.” Bill was interrupting him again, this time at a critical step in what could be a turning point in history. In the history of the world.
Bill shouldered him aside, pushing into the house. “You might not have time to get high, but you have time.” He took the short flight of stairs to the first floor in two long strides and then stopped. His head swiveled slowly left to right, absorbing the changes.
“You finally moved in.”
“You have to leave. I don’t have time for this.”
“Really?” Bill stepped out of sight.
“Yes, really,” Vin shouted. He ran up the steps, his feet almost slipping on the smooth treads. When he reached the living room he stopped.
Beyond the dominating picture window, the waters and islands of Puget Sound were dark and glittering. A distant cargo ship and a state ferry towed the white scars of their wakes through a field of liquid scree and small, colored pricks of brightness on a far shore billowed hazily under haloing mist, all of it spread out beneath the entirety of naked space, an endless hollow sky scored by the few stars resolute enough to shine through both an endless abyss and the building light of human endeavor that rose to meet it.
“You’re making a mess,” Bill said. “What are you doing? You’re pulling this place apart.”
Bill sounded as if he were talking to a puppy, a creature incapable of self-reflection. Vin flushed with embarrassment. Bill had caught him metaphorically chewing the furniture.
“I don’t have to explain.” Vin glanced around the room. The damage was worse than he thought it should be. He didn’t remember being that violent with the baseboards.
“Well, wow, that’s a strange thing to say. Of course you don’t have to. I’m not the ganja squad of the Spanish Inquisition. Are you worried about something?”
“I’m in the middle of a project”—Vin was speaking quickly—“and, it’s not all that important, but . . .” He didn’t know how to end the sentence. He swallowed.
“Okay. No sweat. But you’re acting a little bit like evil already won and the world’s now a place where people just eat each other. Did you find something?”
Vin became aware of the distance between himself and Bill. Bill, watching him closely.
“You did,” Bill laughed. “You did, didn’t you? What is it? What did you find?”
Vin’s eyes widened. He was trapped.
“C’mon, man, what . . .” but Bill’s voice trailed off. Then he said, “Wow, you’re freaking out.” He took a step toward Vin, then slowly turned and walked to the island. “You know, okay. Maybe you don’t have to tell me.”
Bill glanced at Vin and moved into the kitchen, stepping close to the refrigerator, he glanced at Vin again, then he moved to the pantry door and glanced back. He said, “It’s not on this floor, is it?” And then he was heading to the second floor.
Vin walked around the island to the far counter and the cheap, slotted wood block that bristled with the handles of kitchen knives. He stared at them as he heard Bill knocking around upstairs.
“What the hell?” Bill yelled down.
Vin saw his own hand resting on the counter beside the knives. He heard Bill scrambling up to the third floor. Bill was Vin’s oldest friend. Vin loved him, no matter how exasperating he could be.
And Vin knew that he was not a person who would do what his own hand was telling him he might do. No matter what he imagined or saw in his mind’s eye, no matter how angry his occasional ranting or how violent his dreams, no matter how often he woke from a wrenching nightmare into this world of physical laws and normal time, this world in which he drew warm air into delicate lungs and in which his blood circulated through tender extensions of veins, arteries, and branching capillaries; in the real world he simply could not do the kind of thing that his hand—by resting so close to a solid thicket of slim and tapering knives—was implying he might. It wasn’t possible. Vin tried to see himself from outside his own form, to see how unimportant this moment really was in the long body of eternity.
Bill came banging back down the stairs. “Alright, I give up. What’s the secret?”
Vin lifted his hand off the counter and ran his palm over the stubby ends of the knife handles. “I pulled everything apart because I was trying to figure out what was going on with the electricity.” He turned away from the knives and walked toward Bill. “Joaquin, Nerdean’s attorney, said that the house is using more electricity than it should.”
“Did you check in the basement? Where I presume the fuse panels would be?”
The warmth went out of Vin, a cold wave falling through his legs and into the floor. Bill couldn’t go downstairs.
“Yes.”
“Okay. I’m only asking.”
Bill headed into the dining room, slumped in the farthest of the folding chairs. “Tough project,” he said. Vin leaned against the counter, completely uninterested in what Bill might say.
“Anyway, you want to smoke up?”
“No.”
“Oh, it’s going to be like that, is it? Well, what you don’t know yet is that I have brought us a bonus, my lucky friend. I brought us some glass.”
Bill had only mentioned meth a few times, but had never offered it before. Vin glanced over his shoulder toward the knives. He pushed off the counter and walked into the dining room, sat in the folding chair across from Bill, who dropped a small, yellowing plastic bag filled with white powder onto the table in front of him. Bill’s smile was forced mischief. A weighted and dark feeling of distance spread outward from Vin’s center until it surrounded him. In his current state, body exhausted, mind buzzing, he wasn’t capable of really understanding where the feeling came from, but through it he could see that Bill had crossed to a place where he didn’t want to follow.
“This will put some awesome between you and daylight,” Bill said.
“What the hell, Bill? You can’t do that.”
Bill nodded and his lip curled up. “Alright. I see then. Too busy?”
“Yeah.” After a pause, “If you’re going to kill yourself, you should leave.”
“Okay.” Bill cocked his head and stared out the picture window. He said, “I don’t know why I bother.”
In the many years they’d known each other, they’d had two physical fights, one in elementary school and one in high school. They both knew Vin was no match for Bill, but they pretended he might be. Vin tried to calm himself. He felt breath passing through his nose, muscle lifting his gut.
“I’m still thinking a lot about Kim,” he said.
“Fuck you,” Bill said each word slowly. Then he stood, walked to the top of the stairs that led to the front door. “Motherfucker. Where are you going to go when they throw your ass out of here? You think of me as your backup, but now you’re pissing me off too.”
Vin looked away. “I don’t need a backup. I have an education.”
He heard Bill jump down the stairs. The front door opened and then clicked gently shut.
Vin was alone because he needed to be. But he didn’t immediately go back to the basement. The open hatch and the chute frightened him.
He folded one of the chairs and carried it to the second floor bedroom where clothes and crumpled sheets were massed across his inflatable mattress. He pulled open the sliding door that led to a generous teak terrace and planted the chair on it, slid the door closed so bugs wouldn’t go inside.
Vin had first noticed loneliness in elementary school, though he’d probably felt it earlier. All the kids had been learning the same things at the same time, learning about presidents and addition and other countries in portions determined by obscure principles formulated before his teachers were born. The system was nonsense, its lessons obvious, but each day they all repeated its lifeless rhythm. And instead of doing or reading what he wanted, he had had to go to recess or play games. Everyone else liked those things. Vin started skipping school. And then he began to realize that he knew more about many things, but the other kids knew more about topics that still confused him, like how to respond when people ask you questions, and what to wear and how to talk with each other. He thought maybe these relative differences in knowledge would even things out.
But that was a child’s dream. As he grew older, he focused on learning things that had been difficult for him and he made great progress, but the other kids still didn’t understand what he knew. He began to see that when you added everything up, he would always know far more. And then he saw that although different people did different things well, some few people couldn’t do anything well. And it disgusted and infuriated him to finally realize that the world was going to leave a small number of people including his own best friend, Bill, permanently broken.
To other people, Bill had always seemed to have a confidence that could be trusted, but underneath, Vin could see him struggling to contain his fear—of everything—frantically trying to save his own life from everything, all day, every day. The confidence was a fragile front. In school, after only a few minutes on any topic, Bill would get antsy. He was smart, above average, but there was something missing. For a while, his adoptive parents tried to drug him into studying, but Bill was either allergic to the drugs or they put him to sleep. He fought against taking them. His parents never gave up, but Bill stopped taking what he didn’t want to.
Bill had been the first person to truly admire Vin’s extensive knowledge of things and to value Vin’s differences, and Bill protected Vin. Vin had a temper, but he would smolder feebly, too frightened to act. Bill threw punches. When pushed, Vin might become theatrical, even reckless. He might flip a desk or call out a teacher, but he would fold in the face of real opposition. More than once, Bill stepped up to cover Vin’s retreat. Bill was serious.
Bill’s sister, Kim, was a year younger than the two of them. For the first years that Vin knew Bill, Kim was a weak modifier, a quiet presence whose needs created drag on their rambling play. But during the summer after Vin had finished seventh grade, Kim acquired a bright nimbus that Vin didn’t understand, one that had a direct connection to the stillness that overcame him when she was near. He began to avoid her, and that awkwardness created a bond between them.
When Bill told him that Kim had a crush on him, it changed how Vin saw himself, allowed him to believe that he might be a better kind of person. Other people desired her and she desired him. The knowledge buoyed him, even when Kim started dating other people. Then, in Vin’s first year of college, as he was just beginning to relax around Kim and they both knew something big was happening, Bill fell apart. He became a shredding, unpredictable cyclone of self-loathing, and he accidentally killed her.
Bill won fights by hitting first. When his opponent was down, Bill would walk away. That awed Vin—Bill’s ability to seize a moment and then walk away. But Vin knew Bill didn’t have the heart to press his advantage, to hurt someone more than he had to. So it was on the universe—it was the fault of reality itself—that Bill actually ended up killing someone. But it was more than a fault, it was an expression of something deeper and far more wrong that the person Bill killed was the person he loved the most, the person he was closest to.
A soft breeze picked up and the humid evening began to cool. The folding chair was uncomfortable. Vin was hungry and there was pizza in the refrigerator. He wanted to empty his mind, but he’d thought too much about things he couldn’t clear away. Most of the time, he dealt with the reality of losing Kim by not thinking about her.
He moved inside to the air mattress and let his mind wander—to the bare walls around him, to the house, to Nerdean, the elusive. He pulled the sheet over himself and closed his eyes. He knew he would have to go back to the basement, would have to climb down the ladder in the pale chute and face what waited there for him. No amount of distraction would change that hatch back into a fantasy. He had trashed Nerdean’s house and uncovered her secret. Nothing could undo that.
Then his eyes popped open. What if the closed hatch wasn’t intended to protect a secret from being discovered by people above ground? What if it was meant to keep something that was down below from coming up?
The light from the open chute had a cool yellow hue. It was near midnight as he stepped onto the first rung and looked up to see his distended shadow shifting on the ceiling like a marionette. He straightened as he dropped one foot toward a lower rung, then another.
When his eyes were almost level with the basement floor he stopped. He had placed Life in a Medieval Castle at the hatch’s rear edge so it wouldn’t be able to shut and trap him in the room below. He continued lowering himself until he could see a room expanding beneath him on three sides. He paused, but no unexpected shadows crossed the walls. He felt vulnerable on the ladder with his back to the open space. He panicked a little and pushed off the rungs early, landing off balance and crumpling to avoid twisting an ankle.
The floor of the room was white vinyl with silver and gray flecks, white acoustic tiles on the ceiling, lighting strips at regular intervals like old fluorescent tubes. Several feet to his right, arrayed side-to-side with about four feet between each, were three large caskets raised at an angle, their near ends low to the floor, far ends higher, their exteriors ivory colored and shining dimly, molded from a material that looked ceramic. A long transparent pane was centered in each casket’s thick, red-seamed lid. Two caskets were empty and revealed deep, shadowed interiors, but the pane closest to him was misted, its contents obscured.
He stood, his knee twingeing, an ache that snapped into nothing as his hip aligned. The room extended several feet past the caskets. To his left, a row of computer monitors covered a long black desk. Three white office chairs with tops and sides curving inward like pieces of eggshell were tucked under the desk at regular intervals.
He stepped toward the first casket and strained to see inside, leaning over the top. When his hand touched the pane, the mist cleared. Vin recoiled, pulling his hand off the cool glass and the casket sighed as if exhaling, the pane misting over again.
In that moment the window had cleared, he had been staring into a woman’s face. The spot where he’d pressed his hand still sparkled with tiny flecks of moisture. He placed the tips of his five fingers on the pane and the mist cleared again.
Her eyes were closed. She was submerged in bluish liquid and didn’t appear to be conscious. A metallic band crossed the center of her face, covering her mouth. She had a large forehead, a straight, slim nose, and a strikingly pronounced jaw. Her naked body was frighteningly thin and it was difficult to guess her age. Her face was youthful, perhaps thirty years old, though her hair—mostly floating back from her head—was completely gray.
Coin-sized discs held a number of wires to her head, body, and limbs. The wires, floating in the blue liquid, extended to nipples in the casket’s walls. Her chest moved with an almost imperceptible rhythm. She was alive. Vin watched her for a long time, flattening his hand on the glass.
A soft soughing started from a far corner of the room—an air conditioner turning on. He lifted his hand from the casket and heard the brief exhalation again as the window misted to hide the woman inside.
He rubbed his palms together, feeling the moist chill of light condensation as he walked to the long desk. At its far end were several enclosed racks of computers. All of them appeared to be on but they were silent, not a single fan whirring. He turned back to the caskets. Several feet behind them rose a full wall of rectangular electronic devices, a steady green light shining on the faceplate of each.
There were three keyboards and touch pads on the desk, each paired with two monitors. Beside the last monitor was a thick, dog-eared notebook, eight inches by ten, with a cover of black paper as dense and textured as leather.
Vin was sure the woman in the first casket was Nerdean and the notebook was hers. When he woke them, the monitors showed a password prompt and nothing else. He worried that if he did the wrong thing on one of the computers, he might harm her.
In a neat, spidery handwriting regularly intercut with codes, odd symbols and strange drawings, the notebook referred to the entire system—computers and caskets—as a crèche. It said the crèche induced a state similar to suspended animation, but that for a subject—a person in the crèche—it would feel like a lucid dream. Vin suspected that he might have missed a critical passage when he realized that Nerdean, who had clearly seen the awesome disruptive potential of safe and enduring suspended animation, was concerned about the subject’s experience. Why not simply leave them unconscious?
Vin had several large and innumerable smaller questions. To start with, how did the crèche keep Nerdean alive? And when did she expect to wake up? And how could the crèche maintain both suspended animation and enough brain activity for lucid dreaming over an extended period of time? The notebook had some answers (most of which raised further questions), a great deal of unconnected or indecipherable detail, and a few terse and diary-like personal entries.
To avoid a surprise visit from Joaquin, Vin called to say he’d gotten overenthusiastic about the electrical system and pulled some of the house apart but was now putting it back together. He said it wasn’t a big deal, but he’d be doing it slowly to make sure it was right. When he was done, he’d arrange a walk-through so Joaquin could review things. Vin would pay expenses, of course.
When Joaquin asked if Vin had found anything interesting, Vin improvised, saying the electronics in the master bedroom drew more power than he expected, and he was still looking at communications between them. Joaquin seemed sufficiently appeased.
Bill didn’t come by, and Vin called family members to say he was starting a new project. He said the new thing might be bigger than Sigmoto. He was doing a deep dive on the technology and would be out of touch for a while. He figured he’d bought himself at least a month of light contact.
The hatch on top of the chute closed automatically, and opened when approached from below. Vin spent a lot of time in the underground room with his hand on the transparent pane just watching Nerdean float in the blue solution.
The electronics behind the caskets were batteries, but the room still drew power from the local grid. Nerdean’s life depended on the design of her system, so she’d built in a few redundancies.
He slept fitfully, and Nerdean appeared more than once in his dreams, naked, silent, floating in the blackness of space. One morning, he woke with a memory of her holding the notebook, its cover crawling as if it were alive. She had opened it and shown him that only a single word was written inside, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t read the word.
The computers had surprising idiosyncrasies. For example, the connecting ports were a weird, bespoke-looking nineteen-pin plug. He wouldn’t be able to automate a password attack so he started guessing. At first, he worried that a security check might lock the system after too many successive attempts, but it didn’t happen and he was soon typing anything that came to mind.
Other than this apparent lack of a threshold on password guessing, the system seemed well designed. Even small details had been considered. The keyboards, for example, were exceptionally responsive and felt good to use; every cable was high quality, neatly bundled and routed through special channels; and the bevel of each battery was pleasingly snugged into its enclosing cabinet. He began to trust the design, to feel that, as long as he didn’t physically break anything, the system would help him avoid dangerous mistakes. He worried less about harming Nerdean.
If he was going to find the password, the most likely path would be through clues in the notebook, the only thing he possessed that Nerdean had written. He bought a scanner and scanned every page so he could review them on his laptop.
Nerdean often used an odd mixture of letters, numbers, and mysterious symbols that confounded Vin. Many of the notes looked like specifications, with circuit diagrams or beautiful and intricate drawings of body parts, isolated organs, or small mechanical structures. Most of the drawings were annotated with numbers and short scrawls that might have been distance measurements, materials tolerances, metabolic requirements—anything really. Every so often he’d come across a gnomic expression of frustration, captured in her immaculate, miniature script.
Using the scanned pages for reference, Vin typed out as much of the text as he could understand, and arranged it in a layout as close to the original as possible. It forced him to pay close attention to the details of each page. After only a handful of pages, he noticed a repetition of the word “simulation” and the abbreviation, “sim.” He quickly highlighted each instance of related words, including a brief sentence at the back of the notebook, written sideways on the inside margin of a page that the book naturally opened to because the spine was broken: “Nerdean is a simulation.”
Familiarizing himself with the dense complexity of her notes and the sheer scope of what she had accomplished had placed Vin in a state of sustained awe, and the brutal certainty of that sentence unsettled him. It struck Vin as an odd, accusatory note, as if Nerdean disliked herself.
One night, after much calculation and guessing, he tried the password Nerdean is a simulation, and then tried the same phrase without spaces and with and without capitalization, almost wincing at the message as he typed. Nothing changed. He kept trying. He tried opposite phrases and phrases with similar meanings—NerdeanIsntHere, Nerdean is a Fraud,—and then, to atone, Nerdeanispowerful and Nerdeanisbrilliant. He felt his hands begin to act automatically, flying over the keyboard and slamming the enter key. He had solved the puzzle of the house and made it to this room and now a password, a simple password lay between him and the purpose of his work, between him and understanding. He typed until all the joints of his hands ached and threads of sweat slipped across his back and arms. He typed, Nerdeanisafake and almost fell off the egg-shaped chair when the screen blacked out. Then he watched in euphoric disbelief as the screen drew a green command prompt.
He stared for a long time at the newly useful screen. He had crossed another threshold. When he finally willed his stiffened fingers to begin interacting with the keyboard again, he imagined a third person watching from a distance. To that person, it might seem as though very little had happened.
He began to trace his way through the scrolling volumes of information in innumerable files. Each casket, including the one Nerdean occupied, was heavily instrumented. He found an abundance of real-time metrics, for everything from raw material reserves, to power levels, to measures of flow and turbulence in the blue liquid (referred to as “broth”). There were checks on how responsive specific valves were and biomonitors tracking a range of indicators from heart rate, to anatomically localized muscular stress, to mental activity. There was an ongoing analysis of blood chemistry that triggered immediate changes to system functions, including adjustments to the broth. The handful of high-level summaries was all green, indicating system health.
Beyond monitoring, the documents explored an array of technical subjects, from speculation on how a subject’s mind remained active while torpor was induced in the body; to descriptions of how the crèche’s muscle stimulation subsystem used targeted microshocks to reduce the effects of muscular atrophy; to the various functions of the broth, including its microbial composition and nurturing of skin and hair; how the broth cycled and regenerated; how leads on the subject’s neck recognized and responded to signals from her nervous system; how the whole electrical subsystem was wired; how much charge remained in the bank of batteries, and a method for estimating how long that charge might last. He found schematics that showed that huge tanks of raw materials had been buried in the hillside.
Even though the documents said a session in the crèche could be as short as twenty-four hours, he learned from the instrumentation that Nerdean had been immersed for several months. He couldn’t find anything that said when she expected to revive.
As he paged through the reams of colorful graphics, seemingly limitless volumes of text, and columns of numbers, he asked himself how anyone could have conceived all of this, let alone created it and kept it secret. He found some intimation of an answer in a history of contracts and subcontracts detailing work on system components without reference to the larger project. They showed that Nerdean had been able to fully disassemble her audacious vision, break the numbingly complex whole into an elaborate hierarchy of sub-projects, and then find a way to complete those and assemble the results.
While he reviewed her documents, looking for a way to wake Nerdean, Vin’s respect for her work grew, outstripping his envy until he felt a true reverence—a sensation so intense it could cause brief moments of physical pain—a fluttering ache in his chest. After two almost sleepless weeks spent learning about the crèche, he understood Nerdean to be an epoch-altering genius, apparently capable of anything she imagined. As he daydreamed through spans of near exhaustion, he found himself longing to ask her questions and hear her answers. And as for his quiet doubts (was he being a fool, seduced by things he didn’t understand?), he chose to ignore them and they withered.
Fully trusting Nerdean would mean using the device. On a crisp, late summer morning, he opened the interface that controlled the duration of an upcoming immersion, a simple text file containing two colons followed by the number 24 and the word hours, the default and minimum period for immersion. Once he was in the casket, the file would lock. He closed it without changing the number.
He swallowed the recommended sedative with bottled water that he found under the desk, and undressed. He climbed into one of the empty caskets and stretched out against the supporting, cushioned struts. The heavy door lowered over him and he heard bolts shoot home and lock in place with smooth precision. He struggled to calm a lurking panic, defeating it by repeatedly reminding himself that he was trusting Nerdean. He smelled ionized air as the chilled broth began to wash into the casket and cover his feet and the backs of his bare limbs.
As he wafted toward unconsciousness, a needle-like pressure stippled his skin in multiple places. The crèche had deployed its strangely lifelike bots to wriggle over him like a host of robot spiders, measuring his body and adhering to critical points. The system would not apply its breathing apparatus or fully submerge him in broth until its monitors determined that he was unconscious. There was the simultaneous pinch and snap of the initial wire leads clamping down in sixty-four places across his body, and then nothing. Until he woke as someone else.
