THE BURDEN

Duncan Ralston

 

 

Amelia washed her father's trembling hands with a damp cloth, wrung it out into the bowl of cool water she'd set beside his wheelchair, and wiped sweat from his brow.

His sweat was not from exertion but from the heat in his upstairs bedroom. Her father never exerted himself anymore, and they had yet to begin their daily routine. Since Amelia had returned home to take care of him he existed in one of two states: sitting and resting. Sometimes she sat him in front of his bedroom window. Other times she sat him at the kitchen table or the back porch with a view of the bird feeders and the large maple her mother and father had planted when they'd bought the house several years before Amelia was born.

When she crouched beside him she could never tell if he saw exactly what she did. He could no longer communicate, except through simple eye movements, blinking once for yes and two for no. He couldn't feed himself, so he "ate" via an endoscopic tube. Couldn't bathe himself. Dress himself. Couldn't go to the bathroom without her help. She would often find she was already too late.

Not long ago her father had been strong, healthy, active. He'd eaten right. Hadn't smoked, never drank to excess. When her mother had been with them (God rest her, Amelia thought reflexively, though she no longer believed in God), her parents had hiked the nearby woods each morning after breakfast, and biked the dirt roads to and from the house at dusk. He'd exercised his mind as well as his body, completing puzzles, reading mystery novels, making woodworking projects by hand.

James Adam Corbel had done everything experts had suggested to stave off disease, dementia and the eventual wasting away of old age. And like a hijacked jet, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis had crashed into his body and demolished all of his progress. Medical experts called his current condition "locked-in," meaning her father was locked inside of his own mind.

Amelia placed the modified Brain-Computer Interface on her father's head and booted up her laptop. The software worked using subdural implants, converting electrical impulses from the limbic system to interact via transmitter with software on the computer. Researchers had already used the technology successfully to help ALS patients communicate with caregivers and loved ones but after months of daily attempts her father had yet to respond.

She'd known the process would take time. In the original study it had taken weeks for patients to type out a single letter using BCI technology, and those results had been far better than previous attempts with locked-in patients. As far back as 1995, a journalist had written an entire book by blinking it to a transcriber. It had taken ten months and two-hundred thousand blinks, at an average of one word every two minutes, to finish the book.

Amelia had taken a sabbatical from her duties at the Academy. She had all the time in the world to work with her father. What she couldn't count on was how much time her father had left to live.

Just one letter and she would consider the day well spent.

"Come on, Dad… Let's make today a good one."

The software launched on her laptop, a combination word processor and image manipulation program she'd "borrowed" from the Academy. The cursor blinked on the white page. On the opposite side of the screen was a three-dimensional wireframe ball.

The idea was that her father could either type a word or move the ball, depending on his mood or mental landscape. Her thought was that just using a word processor might be too restricting. This way her father could work at his own level. She wondered though, if giving him too many choices had been the wrong way to go.

"How are you feeling today, Dad?"

His moist, jaundiced eyes twitched toward her. He blinked hard.

One for yes. Not exactly the response she was hoping for.

"Can you type it for me?"

He merely looked at her.

"Can you move the ball?"

The wireframe ball did not move.

Eventually he blinked, but she suspected it was involuntary.

Weeks of this.

Sweat had broken on his brow again. She dipped the washcloth and wiped it away.

"Not too much longer now, Dad. I'll take you downstairs to sit at the window when we're done. I think I saw the cardinal out there earlier."

He blinked.

The eyes themselves expressed no emotion. No sign of whether or not he wanted to continue, if he was finished with today's attempt or if he was done with the research altogether. He'd never given expressed permission to participate, aside from a blink for yes. For all she knew the whole process was torture to him—from the minor surgery to insert the subdural implants to the daily barrage of questions.

His body was already a prison, and his facial expression did seem to indicate anguish. The upward arch of his eyebrows and his angled, twisted lips made Helena, the caregiver who came in daily to help, once comment that it looked like he was perpetually going to the toilet.

It could have been far worse. At least he could still blink. Some patients couldn't even control that. Without her father's blinks for yes and no she might have given up on the experiment entirely. She might have put him in a hospital. Let him waste away to nothing.

Tears prickled her sinuses and she held them back, not wanting to cry in front of her dad, who couldn't help but cry in response despite his once-rugged exterior.

If only she could tell what he was thinking, but that was something she also hoped to achieve. Not only did she wish to communicate with her father, over time she hoped other researchers might be able to use similar the technology to map the human brain and bridge the gap between humans and AI.

Without the constraints of language and movement, Amelia saw virtually no limit to how much Humanity could achieve.

Without the burden of the body restricting the intellect.

But right now she couldn't even get him to push a goddamn ball or type a single letter.

"Just… push the ball, okay, Dad?"

The ball remained still.

"Can you push the ball? Dad?"

Blink blink.

She brought a fist down hard on the small table. "Can you please push the goddamn ball?"

The laptop rattled. Something thudded to the floor downstairs.

Amelia turned to the doorway and the stairwell beyond, thinking she must have shaken something loose.

Don't know my own strength.

She leaned down to stroke her father's wispy silvery hair and kissed his clammy liver-spotted forehead. "I'm sorry, Dad. I didn't mean to get mad. I'll be right back, okay? Then I'll bring you down to watch the birds."

Her father didn't blink.

Amelia left the room. The stairs of the old house creaked as she descended. Her great-grandfather's grandfather clock ticked away in the empty foyer. As she reached the first floor she could see into the living room. From where she stood at the bottom of the stairs nothing appeared to be out of place.

"Good morning, Ms. Amelia," Helena said behind her.

Amelia jumped, not expecting the caregiver to arrive for another hour. The woman held bags of groceries in her hands and must have let herself in from the garage with her spare key. Amelia helped the young woman, pleasingly plump in her pale blue nurse's scrubs, to unload the food into the fridge.

Later she brought her father downstairs on the chairlift and while he stared out the window at the birds fluttering around the feeders and the stone birdbath under the big maple she sat in the old wicker rocker beside him catching up on some research on the role endocannabinoids played on pathological anxiety.

Amelia's main field of study was cognitive science. She'd worked through her doctorate and had moved into the research field upon graduating. After nearly ten years she'd decided practically begging for grants was something she no longer wanted from life, and had taken an open position teaching specialized cognitive biology at the Academy of Modern Science in Boston.

When her father had called about his diagnosis she'd packed up at the Academy within the week and taken the train home to Toronto. The trip had taken her nearly a full day, and on the way she'd wondered how a university professor with no children and no nursing experience was going to take care of a man who'd responded to her scraped knees as a child with a brisk Walk it off.

When she'd arrived home her father had already been using a walker to get around. His limbs had shaken uncontrollably and his fingers had curled up into virtually useless fists. He'd fibbed about the progress of his illness. His specialist had given him between two and five years to live, but likely no more than three.

That was six months ago.

Amelia closed her computer and turned to him. Outside the cardinal was back, a bright red male with a crest on its head. It landed in the birdbath, startling the sparrows, and splashed its wings in the water.

It used to make her smile to see the joy those simple creatures brought to him, this old fashioned "man's man" who'd wanted a son but had been equally happy—if not more—with a girl. Who'd taught her how to hook a worm, play baseball, fight back against bullies, and never let a man treat her like a second-class citizen.

With his face twisted in an eternal rictus it was impossible to tell if the birds still made him happy. Was there joy in his tired green eyes? She couldn't tell. His disease had advanced so rapidly in the past six months he could no longer utter even a single laugh.

Amelia rolled her father into the kitchen. After dinner—Helena had prepared the blend of fruits and vegetables and nuts for her father's endoscopic meal—Amelia helped Helena clean up and wash dishes.

On her way upstairs she leaned into the living room and saw the baseball lying in the middle of the wooden floor.

"Helena?"

The woman came in from the kitchen, soap foam crackling on her yellow plastic gloves. "Yes, Ms. Amelia?"

"Did you dust my father's baseball?"

The woman gave her a confused look.

Amelia tried not to sound upset as she pointed at the ball on the floor. "That's his Jackie Mitchell baseball. It's a collector's item."

Helena shrugged. "I didn't dust today, Ms. Amelia."

Amelia watched the woman head back to the kitchen before bending to pick up the ball. She turned it over in her hand, reading the signature, chuckling bitterly at the irony.

Her father had gotten it when Amelia was young to remind her not to limit herself because of how the world might view her, that she could do anything she put her mind to with determination and strength. Jackie Mitchell had proved that by becoming one of the first female pitchers in professional baseball, and as her signature on the ball said she had beaten two legendary heavy hitters.

I struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, it read.

That her father had picked this baseball of all the signed balls he could have gotten felt somewhat eerie.

ALS had also struck out Lou Gehrig; the disease itself had once been named after him.

Amelia wasn't sure she believed Helena hadn't knocked it down off the mantle, but she couldn't imagine why the woman would lie about it. If she hadn't moved the ball it had somehow managed to pop up out of its clear Lucite box stand, fall to the floor and roll to the center of the room of its own volition.

What was more unbelievable? That sweet trustworthy Helena had told a small fib for the first time since Amelia had known her? Or that an inanimate object had defied the laws of physics?

With a troubled frown, Amelia returned the ball to its stand.

 

It was time to face the truth, she decided: the experiment just wasn't working.

Despite all the coaxing over the past twenty-three weeks her father couldn't manage to type a single letter using the BCI, and she was beginning to fear they were better off when he was still just barely able to hold a pen, eking out two words a minute.

His health seemed to be deteriorating faster, as well. His crippled arms hung loose from his shoulders, lacking muscle, tired flesh sagging. Ribs clearly visible. Spine protruding like the back plates of a dinosaur. Sallow, sunken eyes. Teeth receding from his gums.

Dr. Jorgenson said her father wouldn't live much longer than six months in his current condition. He'd suggested she consider moving her father into a hospital for round-the-clock care.

Amelia had strongly opposed the idea.

The decision to keep him home was entirely selfish, she knew. Imagining her father wasting away in the hospital like her mother had after her stroke… she couldn't go through that again. Couldn't watch it happen to such a strong man as he'd been.

But the obsessive in her—a trait she'd gotten from her father—needed to continue their work here. She felt close to a breakthrough, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

She knew they could always try communicating through eye movement, not through blinks but using the tracking software on her laptop. Her father might have taken to it quickly despite his misgivings but she didn't want him to get used to the ease of it.

By making the BCI his only method of communication she hoped it would force him to adapt or risk never speaking to his daughter again. Although she couldn't blame him if he chose the latter, after she'd treated him like a lab rat for so long.

"Come on, Dad." Amelia positioned the headset on his thinning scalp as her laptop fired up. "Today's the day, huh?"

She didn't believe a word of it.

Her modified interface converted several signals from the implants in her father's brain—EEG, iEEG, LFP, and other sensory input—into data her computer could process. It worked because the brain itself was essentially a computer, albeit far more complex than her laptop. With the addition of small implants on the medial prefrontal and medial posterior parietal cortexes, she hoped he might eventually be able to manipulate a 3-dimensional version of himself through self-recognition, a notion first attempted using virtual reality tech.

If only she could get him to type a single letter.

The air was sweltering in her father's room today. She brought a fan upstairs and set it in the window. It whirred distractingly as she sweated hunched over the computer but the cool breeze curbed her growing agitation.

After half an hour of watching him blink his bleary eyes she stood up.

"All right, Dad," she sighed, her spine popping as she stretched. "I guess we're done here."

As she moved to flick off the laptop the sound of the fan lowered in timbre, the blades slowing until they stopped altogether.

She bent to check the plug. It was loose but didn't appear to be the problem.

As she stood again she saw her father watching her in the big mirror on her mother's vanity. Off to his immediate left she saw the alarm clock no longer showed the time in its large red digital numbers.

"Power's out?"

Her father blinked once.

She put a comforting hand on his shoulder. "I'll be right back, okay, Dad?"

Leaving him in his wheelchair she hurried downstairs to check the electrical box. Helena wouldn't be in for another hour or so—her two young children had the day off school—and Amelia still retained a bit of childhood superstition about being alone in the big old empty family home despite having been back so long. She'd always felt that unease even more acutely in the basement, and although she wasn't imagining ghouls and beasties in every corner like she had as a child, the memory of her brief sojourns to the basement for a popsicle or an errand brought that childish fear back to the forefront of her brain.

The basement was bright enough she didn't require a flashlight. Sunlight streamed in through the two grimy windows on either side of the furnace with their view of the leaf-clogged cement wells. Even if it had been fully dark down here, what the eye couldn't see would have filled in by memory.

The mind is all-powerful, Amelia thought as she stepped off the creaky wood stairs, assaulted by smells, sights, sensations and memories. The smell of dust, wood and damp concrete. The drip of the washbasin faucet. The gurgle of the floor drain, a misplaced tennis ball nearby. Dust on her fingers from the stair railing. Rough wood of the stairs on her sock feet.

A computer couldn't process so much disparate information so quickly.

The burden of the body, she thought.

Cobwebs hung from the corners of the rafters, wood charred black in places by a fire that had happened long before the Corbels had moved in. As a little girl she'd often wondered if anyone had died in the fire but she'd never bothered to ask her parents or look into it herself. The walls were exposed down to the lath. The concrete cold on her sock feet as she crossed to the electrical box.

Her father had updated from fuses to circuit breakers when Amelia was young, worried the old knob and tube wiring might cause another house fire. She flicked the main switch down and back up.

As she did a blue tendril of electricity unfurled from the switch and as it struck her finger an image blossomed in her mind of her father lying upstairs in his bed. Not vague as if from memory or imagination but genuinely as though she were sitting right across from him. He was looking directly at her, though she realized she was not looking directly back at him but at his reflection in the vanity, made obvious by missing flecks of silver backing and the chip in the lower right corner Amelia herself had made when she'd tripped and fallen playing dress-up with her mother's jewelry.

It was almost as if she were looking out through her father's eyes.

In the mirror, her father blinked.

Yes.

The mirror cracked suddenly, fracturing his face down the middle. The pain of the shock finally reached her nerves and the vision disappeared as quickly as it had come, sending her reeling back from the electrical box.

Amelia fell down hard on her butt and her left hand struck the yellow-green tennis ball which rolled lazily toward the sports equipment bin.

Standing and rubbing her sore buttock, she wondered how to explain what had just happened. She'd never experienced anything like it before, never imagined anything with such clarity.

But it was her imagination, of that she was certain. It had to be.

Idly she surveyed the room. Her gaze fell on the tennis ball.

How did that get out of the bin?

Two weeks had passed since the incident with the Jackie Mitchell baseball, long enough that she'd forgotten about it until just then.

Was it possible the two were connected?

She recalled the vision of her father, blinking at her in the mirror.

Yes, Amelia.

Amelia crossed to the bin and picked up the tennis ball. She placed it carefully beside the drain where she'd found it when she'd first come down. Stood again and kept it under a watchful eye.

"Can you move the ball, Dad?"

The ball didn't even twitch.

"Dad? Move the ball for me, please."

Amelia stared at it. Willed it to move.

She was so focused on the ball the sudden buzz and rattle of the air conditioner firing up outside made her jump, and she laughed at herself as cool air began to hum through the duct above her head.

"You're a scientist, for God's sake. This is ridiculous."

She scooped up the ball, deposited it in the bin, and ascended the stairs.

Her father was still in his spot by the window when she returned to the bedroom he'd shared with her mother. He sat facing the mirror, unable to turn away from his reflection.

The chip was still there in the glass where her face had struck when she was eight, breaking in incisor. Otherwise the glass was unblemished, not cracked as it had been in her vision—or whatever it was that had happened to her in the basement.

Amelia didn't know what she would have done if the mirror had been broken.

Gone crazy, maybe, she thought, and the fan whirred by, prickling the flesh on her forearms and making her shiver.

Her father blinked.

 

"You really should get someone out there to cut the lawn, Ms. Amelia." Helena stood at the kitchen sink washing the equipment she used to feed Amelia's father through the endoscopic tube. "My cousin, he owns a landscaping business. I could get you a family discount."

Amelia looked out over her father's shoulder at the backyard and saw Helena was right. The grass was shin deep. With the heatwave they'd experienced the past few weeks she was surprised the lawn hadn't just dried up and blown away on the wind.

"Thank you, Helena. But I can do it myself. It'll be good stress relief."

An hour later she'd forgotten the lawn, and sat again beside her father in the hot bedroom with the fan whirring.

A high-pitched grunt outside the window caught her attention.

Scowling at the interruption she went to the window. Her father hadn't made any progress since the day the power had gone out so it wasn't as if she would be missing anything at the computer anyhow.

Down below a young boy crept through the tall grass, hunting something. The grunt must have been from when he'd jumped over the tall wooden fence. He wore a backwards ball cap and a ball glove on his right hand, reminding her of herself when she was young, aside from the boy's lack of ponytail.

"I'll be right back, okay, Dad?"

Blink.

She hurried down the stairs and into the kitchen. Looking out through the glass in the backdoor she saw the kid shaking his head in apparent incredulity. Amelia opened the door and stepped out onto the porch.

"Can I help you with something?"

The tanned, freckle-faced boy looked up with worry in his eyes. His expression softened when he saw she wasn't mad. "I hit the ball. O-over the fence." With trepidation he looked at the surrounding grass. "What is this?"

"What is what?"

The boy blinked. "There must be like a hundred balls back here."

Amelia shook her head. "What?"

"In the grass. I can't even figure out which one is mine. You got like a dog or something?"

Amelia stepped off the porch onto the lawn. Immediately she spotted three balls within spitting distance: a racquetball, a tennis ball, a Nerf ball.

She took two further steps and saw more, each one nestled in the tall grass. It appeared to have grown around several of them. Others had rolled there recently, the tracks still visible.

Orange rubber balls, chewed pet balls, nicked croquet balls, dirty gray softballs, scuffed hardballs, stress balls, golf balls, even a pool ball. A whole neighborhood worth of missing balls, all of them somehow ending up here, in the Corbel backyard, under the shade of the maple.

What is this? she thought, unintentionally mirroring the boy's words.

Amelia shaded her eyes to look up at her father's window. The room was too dim to see inside but she could sense him looking down at her, and in her mind's eye he blinked yes.

"Take them," she said, heading back to the house.

"W-which one?" the boy stammered.

"All of them!"

Upstairs her father sat exactly where she'd left him. "Did you move those balls out there, Dad?" He eyed her blankly. She hunkered down in front of him, gripping the arms of the wheelchair. Not meaning to do it so violently. "Did you?"

Blink.

"How are you doing this?" Amelia knew how stupid it sounded but she couldn’t shake the idea.

Blink blink.

"No. You don't know?" She frowned and stood, looking down at him. His tired green eyes tracked her movement. "I need you to work with me here, Dad. If this is… if this is doing something to you, I need to know."

He blinked hard twice.

"Do you want to stop?

No.

"What then? Why won't you meet me halfway here, Dad?"

He turned his eyes to the right and Amelia followed his gaze to the laptop. The screen had gone into sleep mode. Their reflections looked back from the glossy black plastic.

Her father had never liked computers. Never wanted to work learn how to use them, never written an email or used the Internet. A computer had run him out of his job at the factory. It was only natural he hadn't wanted to cooperate with her after having shunned the technology for so long.

Hand-craftsmanship, that's what you lose when robots start doing the job of men, he'd always said. You wanna make something special you do it by hand.

"It's the computer, isn't it?"

Yes.

"But how…?" She shook her head, realizing the question was useless. Occam's razor suggested her father must have unintentionally created some sort of energy field with the modified BCI, but with the amount of balls in the backyard the field would have had to be enormous.

It simply wasn't possible.

"This isn't possible, Dad." She shook her head, trying to convince herself. "This can't be happening."

He blinked once, hard.

Yes, Amelia.

"Okay." She began pacing the small room, mind racing. "Okay if it's real, Dad, maybe you can do something for me…"

Her gaze fell on the bookshelf. Stacked horizontally in front of her mother's old mystery novels were several crossword books. She brought one to the desk and opened it to where he'd clipped a pen as a bookmark before he'd lost the use of his hands. She removed it and flattened the fold, nearly set the pen down on the pages but hesitated at what she saw.

The puzzles on both sides were already filled in, a single word repeated over and over in the boxes.

Heart thudding in her temples she flipped through the book and found more of the same, every single box filled in with one of three letters.

Amelia held the book up for her father to see. "Did you do this?"

He didn't blink. Didn't need to.

He'd written the answer all over the pages:

E|S|Y|E S|Y|E|S Y|E|S|Y|E|S Y|E|S Y|E S|Y|E|S|Y|E|S|Y E|S|Y|E|S

She set the book down on the desk beside the laptop and the pen on top.

"Show me."

He merely looked at her, eyebrows turned up, mouth turned down in a grimace.

Amelia let out an exasperated groan and flopped down onto the bed, holding her temples as she tried to piece it all together. "It's a joke then, isn't it? You… I don't know… what did you do, Dad? Did you fill it all in when you could still hold the pen? Did you get someone to put all those balls out there in the yard? Are you messing with me, Dad? Is this a prank?"

She looked down the length of her body from where she lay in the center of the bed and saw her father blink twice.

"I can't do this anymore, Dad. I love you, but I can't." A tear rolled down her cheekbone into her ear. Her vision blurred, looking at the ceiling because she couldn't bear to look at him as she said it. "You know I have to put you in the hospital, right? I have a job to get back to. People need me."

Yes.

"Is that what you want?"

No.

"Then what? Why won't you show me?"

That same anguished expression met her query.

Amelia wiped her tears and pushed herself up and off the bed. She grabbed the puzzle book and the pen from the desk and slapped them down angrily on the shelf.

His eyes followed her in the mirror as she left the room without saying another word.

 

Amelia couldn't sleep even though she was exhausted. After giving up on her father she'd finally mowed the lawn with the push mower, stooping to pick up all the balls the kid hadn't taken when he left. Still her body wouldn't relax. Her nerves were set on edge. Limbs full of energy.

Energy field, she thought. Ridiculous.

Rain pattered on the window.

Outside, a storm raged. Inside, the house stood silent.

Like Dad, except in reverse.

Amelia had made a decision today, and tomorrow she would place the call to Dr. Jorgenson. It meant an end to her pathetic "research." An end to her time with her father in this old house, holding on to memories of a life that no longer existed. Dad had always said he'd wanted to die in this house he'd made special for his family with his own two hands, and instead he would wink out of existence in a hospital bed just like Mom had.

She rolled to her side and watched the rain drizzle down the glass he'd replaced when she'd hit a homerun through it at age ten.

So much of this house was a part of him. Her mother had loved it just as much but had poured herself into the furniture, the wallpaper, the knickknacks and photographs. Her father had redone the upstairs walls when dry rot and mold ruined the lath and plaster. He'd replaced the ugly nicotine-stained stucco ceilings, built the kitchen cabinets by hand, remodeled the upstairs bathroom and added a second half bath on the first floor where there'd once been a closet.

This was his house more than it was anyone's.

The house belonged to her father. Her father belonged here, not in some hospital.

Lightning flashed, brightening the windowpane.

She counted Mississippis in her head, the way he'd taught her when she was little. Thunder rumbled after four. Less than a mile away.

Amelia rolled onto her back, closing her eyes, letting the pattering of rain lull her to sleep.

Lightning flashed over her eyelids.

One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three—

Noticing the blue light hadn't diminished Amelia opened her eyes and saw him standing at the foot of her bed.

No—standing wasn't the right word. He floated, several feet above the floor.

A man made entirely of light.

Not light. Energy. He was pure bright blue energy.

Like a spark. Like lightning.

Plasma, she thought.

Amelia stared at the plasma man until his bright silhouette had imprinted itself on her retinas. He stood—floated—near the foot of the bed with his feet stretched toward the floor and his hands held straight at his hips, palms out, like a diagram of the nervous system. White light traveled through each vein, every nerve ending crackling like static electricity.

She could see his heart pumping. See the light flooding his limbs and his brain.

Amelia sat up abruptly, gripping the sheet. "Dad?"

The plasma man blinked eyelids made of energy.

Then he winked away, casting her bedroom back into darkness.

She leaped out of bed and hurried for the hall, catching her toe on the doorjamb. Crying out she grasped her foot, squeezing it to dull the pain.

Eyes full of tears, as much from the sight of her father's transformation than the sudden injury, Amelia limped into the hallway.

By the time she reached his bedroom he was gone.

His body still lay under the tangled sheet, but the essence of him, the energy that made James Adam Corbel the man she called "Dad," had moved on.

Dispersed.

Glassy eyes stared at his own reflection in the mirror. When she followed his gaze she knew for certain he did not see what she did. He didn't see the mirror had split down the middle, fracturing his reflection just as it had in her vision.

The vision he'd shown her.

Her father's eyelids closed for the last time by her hand.

Amelia sat beside his body a long time, considering what she had accomplished.

What he had accomplished.

Whether through her own modifications to the BCI technology, the sheer force of his will, or some other spiritual method her father had transcended his body, releasing himself from the burden of the physical world.

The first plasma man.

She would destroy the headset and purge all of her data in the morning but for now Amelia curled up beside what was left of her father, hugged him against her, and stroked his hair.