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Just say it, Dad. Earth?

“The craft landed on a level plain in the middle of wild, waving, towering structures more complex than anything the crew had seen. These elaborate, fluttering structures reflected light at various frequencies. Many of them sported astonishing forms at their very top that resonated in lower frequencies—”

Wait. Plants? Flowers. You mean the ships are tiny?

I didn’t deny it. He seemed equal parts skeptical and fascinated.

Then what?

“The ship’s crew studied the gigantic waving green and red and yellow flowers for a long time. But they couldn’t figure out what the things were or how they worked. They saw bees fly into the flowers and the flowers track the sun. They saw the flowers wilt and turn into seed. They saw the seeds drop and sprout.”

My son held his hand up to stop the story. It would kill them, Dad, when they figured it out. They would get on the communicator and tell every other ship from Mios in the galaxy to shut down.

His words gave me gooseflesh. It wasn’t the ending that I imagined. “Why do you say that?” I asked.

Because they would see. The flowers were going somewhere, and the ships weren’t.

-

I BROUGHT HIM TO CAMPUS WITH ME on days when I taught. He spread out his books on the desk in my office, and while I lectured or sat on committees, Robin taught himself long division and solved word problems and decoded poems and learned why the trees outside the office window turned carroty and gold. He wasn’t studying anymore. He was simply toying with things and enjoying the unfolding.

The grad students loved to tutor him. Checking in after a long October morning seminar, I caught Viv Britten, who was working on the small-scale crisis inherent in the Lambda-CDM model of the universe, sitting across the desk from my son, holding her head.

“Boss. Have you ever considered what is going on inside a leaf? I mean, really thought about it? It’s a total mind-fuck.”

Robin sat smirking at the havoc he’d unleashed. Hey! Curse word!

“What?” Viv said. “I said freak. It’s a total mind-freak, what you’re telling me.”

It was all that, and more. The green Earth was on a roll, assembling the atmosphere, making more shapes for itself than it could ever need. And Robin was taking notes.

We were down on the shores of the lake over lunch, fish-spotting. Robbie had discovered that polarized sunglasses let him see into a whole new alien world beneath the mirroring surface. We were looking, hypnotized, at a school of three-inch intelligences when someone called, four feet from my shoulder.

“Theodore Byrne?”

A woman my age stood clutching a brushed-silver computer to her chest. She wore a fair amount of turquoise hardware, and the folds of her gray tunic fell over skinny jeans. Her controlled contralto voice seemed baffled by her own boldness.

“I’m sorry. Have we met?”

Her smile hung between embarrassed and amused. She turned to my son, who, in a favorite animist ritual, was patting the almond butter sandwich he was about to eat. “You must be Robin!”

A flush of premonition warmed my neck. Before I could ask her business, Robin said, You remind me of my mom.

The woman looked sideways at Robin and laughed. Alyssa’s and my ancestors had come from Africa, too, only from somewhat further back. She turned to me again. “I’m sorry to intrude like this. Would you have a moment?”

I wanted to ask: A moment for what, exactly? But my son, trained up on ecstasy, said, We got a million moments. Right now we’re on fish time.

She handed me a business card spattered with fonts and colors. “I’m Dee Ramey, a producer for Ova Nova.”

The channel had several hundred thousand subscribers, with individual videos topping out at a million views. I’d never watched a minute of it, but I still knew what it did.

Dee Ramey turned to Robin. “I saw you in Professor Currier’s training clips. You’re amazing.”

“Who told you about us?” I couldn’t keep the anger out of my voice.

“We did our homework.”

The penny dropped. For a guy who’d grown up on science fiction, I’d been amazingly naïve about what artificial intelligence, facial recognition, cross-filtering, common sense, and a quick dip into the planet’s aggregate brain could do. At last I freed myself of stupid civility. “What do you want?”

My rudeness to a stranger shocked Robin. He kept patting his sandwich, too hard and fast. Ova Nova, Dad. They did that story about the guy who let the botfly hatch under the skin in his shoulder?

Dee Ramey shouted, “Wow, you watch us!”

Just the ones about how cool the world is.

“Well! We think what’s happening to you is one of the coolest things we’ve seen.”

Robin looked to me for explanation. I looked back. Realization spread across his face. Influencers wanted him for the perfect three-minute episode, one that could earn a million thumbs from strangers across the globe: Boy Lives Again, Inside His Dead Mother’s Brain. Or maybe it was the other way around.

-

LIFE ASSEMBLES ITSELF on accumulating mistakes. By the time Dee Ramey showed up with plans to turn my son into a show, I’d lost count of how many parenting errors I’d already made.

Robin thought it would be fun, to become an episode alongside all of Earth’s other strange inhabitants. He put his case to me over ice cream, hours after I sent Dee Ramey packing. Honestly, Dad, think about it. I was super-miserable for so long. And now I’m not. People might like to know about that. And it’ll be educational. You’re all about education, Dad. Besides, it’s a cool show.

Two days later, Dee Ramey called me. “You don’t understand my son,” I told her. “He’s… unusual. I can’t have him turned into a public spectacle.”

“He won’t be a spectacle. He’ll be a subject of legitimate interest, respectfully treated. You can be there as we film. We’ll avoid anything that makes you uncomfortable.”

“I’m sorry. He’s a special child. He needs protection.”

“I understand. But you should know that we’re going to make the film, whether or not you want to take part. We’ll be free to use all the materials already available, in whatever way that makes sense to us. Or you can participate and have a say in things.”

Smartphones are miracles, and they’ve turned us into gods. But in one simple respect, they’re primitive: you can’t slam down the receiver.

My son was still technically anonymous. But what the Ova Nova researchers had discovered, others could soon find out. I’d made a mistake, and doing nothing now would only make it worse. At least I could still try to manage the way the story went public. Two days later, when my anger subsided, I called Dee Ramey back.

“I need a say in the final edit.”

“We can give you that.”

“You are not allowed to use his real name or say anything that would make him easier to identify.”

“That’s fine.”

My son was a troubled boy, hurt by seeing what the sleepwalking world could not. An offbeat therapy had made him a little happier. Maybe showing him on camera being himself could beat whatever sensationalism Ova Nova might create out of Currier’s clips and sales talks.