Everything felt suspended. Eliot went to school, took his AP classes, expressed scorn for the jocks and goths who teased him, felt superior to his teachers, read obsessively—all normal. And yet not. One day, when his father was at a therapy session, Eliot slid into Dr. Tremling’s study and looked at his notebooks and, to the extent he could find them amid such sloppy electronic housekeeping, his computer files. There didn’t seem to be much notation, and what there was, Eliot couldn’t follow. He wasn’t a mathematician, after all. And his father appeared to have invented a new symbol for something, a sort of Olympic thunderbolt that seemed to have left- and right-handed versions. Eliot groaned and closed the file.
Only once did Eliot ask, “So how’s it going, Dad?”
“It’s difficult,” Dr. Tremling said.
No shit. “Have you had any more … uh … incidents?”
“That’s irrelevant, son. I only needed one.” But his face twitched harder than ever.
Three weeks after he came home, Dr. Tremling gave up. He hadn’t slept for a few nights and his face sagged like a bloodhound’s. But he was calm when he said to Eliot, “I’m going to have the operation.”
“You are?” Eliot’s heart leapt and then, inexplicably, sank. “Why? When?”
His father answered with something of his old precision. “Because there is no mathematics of a larger conscious entity. On Tuesday at eight in the morning. Dr. Tallman certified me able to sign my own papers.”
“Oh.” For a long terrible moment Eliot thought he had nothing more to say. But then he managed, “I’m sorry about the pig.”
“It’s not important,” Dr. Tremling said, which should have been the first clue.
On Tuesday Eliot rose at 5:00 a.m., and took a cab to the hospital. He sat with his father in Pre-Op, in a vibrantly and mistakenly orange waiting room during the operation, and beside his father’s bed in Post-Op. Dr. Tremling recovered well and came home a week later. He was quiet, subdued. When the new term started, he resumed teaching at the university. He read the professional journals, weeded the garden, fended off his sister. Nobody mentioned the incident, and Dr. Tremling never did, either, since hospital tests had verified that it was gone from his memory. Everything back to normal.
But not really. Something had gone missing, Eliot thought—some part of his father that, though inarticulate, had made his eyes shine at a breakthough in mathematics. That had made him love pigs. That had led him, in passion, to fling bad student problem sets and blockhead professional papers across the room, as later he would fling furniture. Something was definitely missing.
“Isn’t it wonderful that Carl is exactly the way he used to be?” enthused Aunt Sue. “Modern medicine is just amazing!”
Eliot didn’t answer her. On the way home from school, he got off the bus one stop early. He ducked into the Safeway as if planning to rob it, carrying out his purchase more secretively than he’d ever carried out the Trojans he never got to use. In his room, he locked the door, opened the grocery boxes, and spread out their contents on the bed.
On the dresser.
On the desk, beside his calculus homework.
On the computer keyboard.
When there were no other surfaces left, on the not-very-clean carpet.
Then, hoping, he stared at the toaster pastries until his head ached and his eyes crossed from strain.
Eliot wrote, “Metaphor is all we have.” But the assignment had been due weeks ago, and his teacher refused to alter his grade.
The Nearest Thing
GENEVIEVE VALENTINE
Genevieve Valentine (www.genevievevalentine.com) lives in New York City. Like most writers, she has been writing all her life, she says, but she began writing for publication in 2007, when her first story appeared in Strange Horizons. She is a prolific writer, and more than thirty of her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in magazines such as Clarkesworld and Fantasy, and in the anthologies The Living Dead II, Teeth, and Running with the Pack. She is what Jeff VanderMeer terms an “emerging” writer. Her first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, about a mechanical circus in a post-apocalyptic world, was published late in 2011. She enjoys working within and across all genres of speculative fiction (and finding period films in which anyone wears anything remotely accurate). She has a few novels “in various stages of completion.”
“The Nearest Thing” was published online by Lightspeed, and this is perhaps its first print publication. Mason is a coding genius and socially awkward. He works for/is owned by a corporation that makes personalized “memorial dolls,” robotic duplicates of individuals with artificial pseudo-personalities. He has been shifted to a development team led by Paul, a charismatic wonder-boy; the project is to develop an AI, “the nearest thing” to human.
CALENDAR REMINDER: STOCKHOLDER DINNER, 8PM.
THIS MESSAGE SENT FROM MORI: LOOKING TO THE FUTURE, LOOKING OUT FOR YOU.
The Mori Annual Stockholder Dinner is a little slice of hell that employees are encouraged to attend, for morale.
Mori’s made Mason rich enough that he owns a bespoke tux and drives to the Dinner in a car whose property tax is more than his father made in a year; of course he goes.
(He skipped one year because he was sick, and two Officers from HR came to his door with a company doctor to confirm it. He hasn’t missed a party since.)
He’s done enough high-profile work that Mori wants him to actually mingle, and he spends the cocktail hour being pushed from one group to another, shaking hands, telling the same three inoffensive anecdotes over and over.
They go fine; he’s been practicing.
People chuckle politely just before he finishes the punch line.
Memorial dolls take a second longer, because they have to process the little cognitive disconnect of humor, and because they’re programmed to think that interrupting is rude.
(He’ll hand it to the Aesthetics department—it’s getting harder to tell the difference between people with plastic surgery and the dolls.)
“I hear you’re starting a new project,” says Harris. He hugs Mrs. Harris closer, and after too long, she smiles.
(Mason will never know why anyone brings their doll out in public like this. The point is to ease the grieving process, not to provide arm candy. It’s embarrassing. He wishes stockholders were a little less enthusiastic about showing support for the company.)
This new project is news to him, too, but he doesn’t think stockholders want to hear that.
“I might be,” he says. “I obviously can’t say, but—”
Mr. Harris grins. “Paul Whitcover already told us—” (Mason thinks, Who?) “—and it sounds like a marvelous idea. I hope it does great things for the company; it’s been a while since we had a new version.”
Mason’s heart stutters that he’s been picked to spearhead a new version.
It sinks when he remembers Whitcover. He’s one of the second-generation creative guys who gets his picture taken with some starlet on his arm, as newscasters talk about what good news it would be for Mori’s stock if he were to marry a studio-contracted actress.
Mrs. Harris is smiling into middle space, waiting to be addressed, or for a keyword to come up.
Mason met Mrs. Harris several Dinners ago. She had more to say than this, and he worked on some of the conversation software in her generation; she can handle a party. Harris must have turned her cognitives down to keep her pleasant.
There’s a burst of laughter across the room, and when Mason looks over it’s some guy in a motorcycle jacket, surrounded by tuxes and gowns.