“Ha! Missed me again!”
“You’re really good, Trev.”
He was. Like most attention-deficit kids, Trevor could muster enormous powers of concentration when the activity actually interested him.
They followed their plan of transitioning Trevor from the shooting game to one teaching math in the last fifteen minutes of the hour. Trevor’s levels of arousal and engagement fell, but not as far as they had the previous week. This was a new version of the math game, punchier and more inventive. In effect, Trevor was beta-testing Math Monkeys, while Ethan and Jamie gained learning-algorithm data from him.
The session was a success. After Trevor left, shouting about his victory over the math monkeys, Jamie said, “Did you catch that? Maip tried a stutter-and-recover strategy on him! We didn’t program that!”
“Not in quite that form, anyway.”
“Come on, Ethan, she figured out for herself how to apply it! She learned!”
“Maybe.” He would have to do the analysis first.
But Jamie danced around the lab in an exuberant imitation of Trevor. “Freakish! She did it, Dr. Stone Man! You did it! Go, Maip!”
Ethan smiled. It felt odd, as if his face were cracking.
At midnight, Ethan let himself into the modeling lab in Building 6. The place was empty, even the most die-hard geek having gone out on a Friday night for beer and company. “Lights on low,” Ethan said. The lab complied.
He’d told himself he wasn’t going to do this again. It only made everything harder. But he could not resist. This was the only place that felt meaningful to him now—or at least the only place where meaning felt natural, like air, instead of having to be manufactured moment after effortful moment.
The lab contained, in addition to its staggeringly expensive machinery, three “rooms,” each with the missing fourth wall of a theater stage or a furniture showroom. The largest was an empty, white-walled box, used to project VR environments ranging from an Alpine village to the surface of the moon. The two furnished rooms represented living spaces with sofas and tables, onto which could be projected the VR programs: changing a chair from red velour to yellow brocade, setting out bottles on a table. Old stuff, but it was the starting point for the real challenge of modeling three-dimensional “reality” that could move and be moved, touch and be touched. This lab, already a huge profit-maker for MultiFuture Research, was usually the first one shown to visitors.
Some of the programs, however, were private.
Ethan slipped on a VR glove and put his password into the projector aimed at the smallest room. It sprang to life and Allyson was there, sitting on the floor, holding her stuffed Piglet. This was the Allyson he’d brought to the lab near the end of her illness, when it was clear that the doctors’ pathetically inadequate measures could not help her. Four more months, they said, but it had been only two. Ethan was grateful that Allyson had gone so quickly; he’d seen children for whom Moser’s Syndrome took its slower, crueler time.
Tina had not been grateful. By that point, she had barely been Tina.
Allyson had loved Winnie the Pooh. Kanga, Roo, and Eeyore had been her friends, but Piglet had been more: a talisman, an icon. Once she’d told Ethan that she hated Christopher Robin, “because his Piglet can talk to him and mine can’t.”
The 3-D model of Allyson raised her head and looked up at Ethan. It was a tremendous technical achievement, that mobile action on a holographic projection. Right now, Ethan didn’t care. When he’d brought Allyson here, late at night on another Friday, she’d already begun to lose weight. Her skin had gone as colorless as the sheets she lay on at home. Her hair had fallen out in patches. Ethan had known this was his last chance; the following week Allyson had gone into the hospital. When Tina had found out what he’d done, she had raged at him with a ferocity excessive even for her. Although it should have been a warning.
The model of Allyson—or, rather, the voice recorder in the computer—said, “Hi, Daddy.”
“Hi, baby,” Ethan said. And she smiled.
That was it. Ten seconds of Allyson’s short life, and an enormous expenditure of bandwidth. He hadn’t kept his daughter in the lab longer than that; she’d looked too tired. Ethan hoped that the Biological Division’s Molecule 654-a could cure Moser’s Syndrome. But for him, there was only this.
He called up the overlay programs, one by one. Allyson’s skin brightened to rosy pink. Her hair became thick and glossy again, without bare patches. Her little body grew sturdier. Her eyes opened wider. “Hi, Daddy.”
“Hi, baby.” He reached out with the VR glove and stroked her cheek. The sensation was there: smooth, warm flesh.
Over and over he played the enhanced, miraculously mobile model. Throughout, Ethan kept his face rigid, his hands under control, his thoughts disciplined. He was not Tina. He would never let himself be Tina.
No one, not friends or colleagues, had known how to treat Ethan after Allyson, after Tina. “Call us,” friends had said while Ethan awaited Allyson’s diagnosis, “if anything goes wrong.” And later, after Tina, “Call us if you need anything.” But there is no one to call when everything goes wrong, when you need what you can never have back.
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Hi, baby.”
When he’d had his fill, the fix that kept him from becoming Tina, he closed the program and went home.
On Monday, Laura Avery waylaid him as he walked from the parking lot to Building 18. This being October in Seattle, it was still raining, but at least Ethan had remembered his umbrella. She had one too, blue with a reproduction of a Marc Chagall painting, which seemed to him a frivolous use of great art. Laura, however, was not frivolous. Serious but not humorless, she had made important contributions during her months at MultiFuture Research, or so he’d been told. The company, like all companies, was a cauldron of gossip.
“Ethan! Wait up!”
He had no choice, unless he wanted to appear rude.
She was direct, without flirtatious games. Ordinarily he would have liked that. But this was not ordinarily, and it never would be again, not for him. Laura said, “I wondered if you’d like to have dinner one night at my place. I’m a good cook, and I can do vegetarian.”
“I’m not vegetarian.”
“I know, but I thought I’d just show off my fabulous culinary range.” She smiled whimsically.
It was an attractive smile; she was an attractive woman. When they’d first been introduced, Laura had glanced quickly at his left hand, and her smile had grown warmer. He’d taken off his wedding ring the day after Tina had left him, long before she’d killed herself. Later, after someone had undoubtedly told Laura about Ethan’s story, Laura had grown more circumspect. But the warmth had still been there; he hadn’t needed MAIP to read her face. Now, a year after Tina’s death, this invitation—had someone told Laura it was exactly one year? Was she that coldly correct?
No. She was an intelligent, appealing woman aware enough of her appeal to go directly after someone she liked. Why she liked him was a mystery; in Ethan’s opinion, there wasn’t enough of him left to like. Or to accept a dinner invitation.
“Sorry. I’m busy.”
She recognized the lie but hid any feeling of rejection. “Okay. Maybe another time.”
“Thanks anyway.”
That was it. A nothing encounter. But it left him feeling fragile, and he hated that. The only thing that had gotten him through the last year was the opposite of fragility: controlled, resolute, carefully modeled action.