He lunged at me, howling. We fought. He tried to claw my face. I took his arm and twisted way too hard. Robin screamed and dropped sobbing on the floor. I wanted to die. The back of his hand was half a crushed butterfly. Aly and I had had a pact, the only one she ever made me swear to. Theo? Whatever happens, we must never hit that child. I looked around the room, ready to throw myself at her mercy. But she was nowhere.
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ON GEMINUS, WE WERE TRAPPED on opposite sides of a terrible meridian. The planet’s sun was small, cool, and red. Geminus lay so close in that the star had captured its rotation. One side remained forever in scalding light. The other side stayed night, icy and perpetual.
Life germinated in the strip of twilight between permanent noon and midnight. In that band between burning and frozen, winds whipped the air and currents drove the water. Creatures evolved to exploit the loops of energy, moving bits of morning to warm the blackness and bits of night to cool the endless blaze.
Life pushed deeper into both halves of the wind-whipped landscape. Tendrils of habitability seeped down canyons and up watersheds, creeping from the temperate boundary toward the extremes. Life on Geminus split into two kingdoms, one of ice, one of fire, each adapting to half of the bipolar planet. For the boldest pilgrims, there was no turning back. Even the temperate boundary strip became fatal.
Intelligence arose twice. Each kind solved its own impossible climate. But the minds of day failed to find the night intelligible, while night’s minds couldn’t comprehend the day. They shared only one bit of common knowledge: life could never exist “over the edge.”
We traveled to Geminus together, my son and I. But we each arrived alone. I found myself in a wind-fed channel on the side of constant day. I searched throughout the habitable strip but couldn’t find him. The local inhabitants were no help. I’d imagined that people of endless day would be cheerful and upbeat. But their sky was filled with one single unchanging light, blocking out all signs of a universe. They lived as if there could be nothing but Here and Now and this. The thought stunted them. Their sciences and arts had stalled in infancy. They never even invented the telescope.
On Geminus, seasons were places. Walking a few miles toward the boundary belt took me from August to January. He had to be somewhere on the side of constant night. What people would he find there, shaped by lethal cold? Cunning and ingenious, diggers of heat mines and farmers of subterranean fungi. Brutal, barbaric, and depressed killers, competing for every priceless calorie.
He had been looking for me as well. Nearing the temperate boundary belt, I saw him a long way off, rushing from the other side. I broke into a run, but he held up his hands to stop me. I realized, there on the edge of darkness: he had seen the raw night sky. He’d looked at stars as no one on Earth ever would again. He’d seen change and time, cycles and variety. Math and stories, as countless, subtle, and various as the black-backed constellations.
He called to me, from over the standing edge of dark. Dad. Dad! You have no idea. But I was trapped in light and couldn’t cross over.
-
LOTS OF PEOPLE LOVED MY WIFE. And Aly loved lots of people, as if that were the most natural thing in the world. She’d had partners before me and stayed on good terms with most of them, even with one woman who’d broken her heart. Flirting was a part of her job. I watched her work hallways full of legislators and ballrooms full of donors as if they were all her dear friends.
She was on the road a lot, directing her NGO across ten midwestern states. For the first two years of our marriage, it used to kill me. She’d call me from some budget interstate hotel to say, We went to a great little Italian place downtown, and when I croaked a casual, “We?” she’d say, Oh, didn’t I say? Michael Maxwell’s in town. My ex from grad school? And that would be another eight hours of night thoughts I didn’t need.
Her ten-state area hosted an equal-opportunity harem of devoted women and men. Some of these friendships I knew about; others came as surprises, at her memorial service. The one time I asked whether she was ever tempted to stray, her jaw popped open in astonishment. Oh my God. I am so not built that way! I’d split into little pieces if I ever tried that.
I settled into a manageable mix of jealousy and thrill. Lots of good, kind people wanted my wife. My wife seemed to want me. Nature, as Aly often showed me, was quite ingenious in keeping people just happy enough.
So it didn’t surprise me when she came home late from the farmers’ market one Saturday, bubbly from a round of flattering attention. I ran into Marty Currier at the Apple Lady’s stand. We had a quick coffee. He wants us to be in an experiment!
Martin Currier was one of Wisconsin’s high-profile scientists: senior research professor in neuroscience, National Academy of Sciences fellow, Hughes Investigator—the kinds of recognitions I dreamed of winning once but never will. He was one of the few people in town Aly could bird with and learn something from. They’d go out together in all seasons, and it made me nuts.
“Does he, now? I’m sure he’d like to experiment on you.”
She grinned and tucked into her pugilist stance, circling her fists in front of her face, bobbing and weaving. She always held her small fists way too close together when threatening to rabbit-punch me. I loved that.
Come on, buster. We should try it. He’s doing wild things.
The Currier Lab was exploring something called Decoded Neurofeedback. It resembled old-fashioned biofeedback, but with neural imaging for real-time, AI-mediated feedback. A first group of subjects—the “targets”—entered emotional states in response to external prompts, while researchers scanned relevant regions of their brains using fMRI. The researchers then scanned the same brain regions of a second group of subjects—the “trainees”—in real time. AI monitored the neural activity and sent auditory and visual cues to steer the trainees toward the targets’ prerecorded neural states. In this way, the trainees learned to approximate the patterns of excitation in the targets’ brains, and, remarkably, began to report having similar emotions.
The technique dated back to 2011, and it claimed some impressive early results. Teams in Boston and Japan taught trainees to solve visual puzzles faster, simply by training them on the visual cortex patterns of targets who’d learned the puzzles by trial and error. Other experimenters recorded the visual fields of target subjects exposed to the color red. Trainees who learned, through feedback, to approximate that same neural activity reported seeing red in their mind’s eye.
Since those days, the field had shifted from visual learning to emotional conditioning. The big grant money was going to desensitizing people with PTSD. DecNef and Connectivity Feedback were being touted as treatments to all kinds of psychiatric disorders. Marty Currier worked on clinical applications. But he was also pursuing a more exotic side-hustle.
“Why not?” I told my wife. And so we volunteered in her friend’s experiment.
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IN THE RECEPTION AREA OF CURRIER’S LAB, Aly and I chuckled over the entrance questionnaire. We would be among the second wave of target subjects, but first we had to pass the screening. The questions disguised furtive motives. HOW OFTEN DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE PAST? WOULD YOU RATHER BE ON A CROWDED BEACH OR IN AN EMPTY MUSEUM? My wife shook her head at these crude inquiries and touched a hand to her smile. I read the expression as clearly as if we were wired up together: The investigators were welcome to anything they discovered inside her, so long as it didn’t lead to jail time.