“We’re done here.”
That’s what George was preparing to say—which was much better on the ego than “We failed,” and much, much better than “I failed.”
Any romance she’d imagined between them had been all in her head and hers alone. She’d just been another source of ideas to steal. And now that all those stolen ideas were falling short, he was bailing—on Buzz and on her both, latching on to the nearest excuse, no matter how crackpot. But Pandora wasn’t looking for some panpsychic victory of conscious trees and thinking rocks. So she made a silent vow to herself: George could give up but not her. She’d finish what they started. Demand custody of Buzz’s source code and threaten to expose George’s IP theft if he objected.
That’s how it was when parents broke up; ninety percent of the time, the mom got the kids. Maybe because the mom did the heavy lifting of giving birth, which wasn’t necessarily the case with Buzz, as demonstrated by the fact that she didn’t already have its source code. But even that, his hoarding the code, was just more evidence that she’d been used.
Not that her response to George said any of this. In typical Pandora fashion, she made fun of his less scientific enthusiasms with understatement, hoping he’d get the message and shape up, if shaping up was still an option. And so: “Groovy,” she typed, before hitting send.
Actually, not groovy—not groovy at all. George was going suboptimal. The young coder’s brain had become its own Trinity project, going up in one big mushroom cloud. Not that George was smoking the psychedelic fungus in question. He’d taken it the usual way, by eating it, gagging, puking his guts out, and then moving on to “tripping balls”—as Milo would have put it.
Apparently, disembodiment sounded awfully attractive to George, who was in the mood to be widely distributed. He’d had help reaching this point—something about important information he hadn’t had before Buzz’s code evolved beyond George’s ability to overwrite it. Meaning Buzz would become whatever it was destined to become—its primary programmer avoiding the construction “programmed to become” because, well, Buzz had moved beyond that point.
George made a mental note to text Pandora the thing about the thing before remembering—oh yeah—he had an appointment with her dad (their last, as it would turn out).
55
“It’s been a gift,” George said, “this deep dive into thinking about thinking.”
“You don’t look well,” Roger said. “Are you okay?”
“As okay as any consciousness. Better than okay.” George paused, trying to think of the word to encompass his feeling of being all encompassing, of connection, of unity with all he could see, feel, hear . . .
“Expansive,” he concluded. “Multitudinous,” he added. “I’m clickable—hyperlinked. Click on me and you’ll see.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Roger pointed out.
“Or maybe it makes too much sense,” George countered. “For as limited as the embodied senses are, making sense seems like more trouble than it’s worth.”
Roger refrained from countering his client’s nonsensical counter. Instead, he focused on George’s face, noting the way it pixilated whenever his client moved the slightest bit. But when the boy held steady, Roger could see the veins on his neck standing out, his client’s pulse pounding dangerously away.
“George,” he said carefully into the computer microphone, “I want you to call 911.”
George laughed.
“I’m serious, George. Call 911. I think you’re having some kind of cardiac episode.”
“You mean I might die?” George asked, apparently mightily amused. “Last I checked, everybody does. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, right? I’ve enjoyed this speed bump, though.”
“Stop talking. Start dialing. Or tapping. Punching. Use the damn keypad. Three numbers: nine and one and one . . .”
“Already handled,” George said. “Got a text on a timer. Already unlocked my office door.”
“George, you’re scaring me.”
“Apologies,” George said. “Although, strictly speaking, it’s me who should be afraid. But I’m not. Hence, the gift.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s not death, per se, that people fear,” his client said. “It’s the loss of consciousness. All that hard work of living and experiencing and storing up impressions to build a personality out of. You’re telling me it’s all for nothing? Poof! It’s gone.” Pause. “Scary, dude.”
“George, I want you to listen to me,” Roger pleaded, feeling suddenly, helplessly, every mile between them as he reached toward the screen to . . . do what? “Have you taken anything?”
George smiled. “Some ’shrooms; they’re all the rage in NorCal. Giving Adderall a run for its money. Microdosing, they call it. But I figured, you know, this is America. Go big or go home, right?”
“How much did you take?”
“Enough,” George said. “I’m going to go with ‘enough.’”
“For . . . ?”
“To understand,” he said, right before launching into the Gospel according to George Jedson, Space Cowboy.
Roger should call someone—Quire security, hell, V.T. himself. Except he didn’t have a landline, his wireless went through the same sat link that was letting them Skype, and the link wasn’t duplex. It had been annoying early on, the way the line cut out whenever he or a client tried to talk at the same time. Not all that different from his old ham setup, come to think of it. Pandora’s phone was on a different carrier, but she had it with her while she visited his mom. Apparently, she needed it, too, for something to do while the old lady slept away what remained of her life.
All these thoughts and regrets spooling through the therapist’s mind as he sat—helpless—while his client’s mind continued to unspool.
“You know about the laws of thermodynamics, right?”
Roger obliged, nodding, as George geeksplained anyway.
“Matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, simply changed from form to form. But then there’s this other stuff—dark matter and energy—and the reason they call them ‘dark’ is because they literally have no idea what they are. The math says they’re there—make up the majority of the universe, in fact, but they seem to be hiding.”
Roger could disconnect, free the line, call someone. But he couldn’t take his eyes off George. And what if hanging up just speeded this to the—to whatever this was?
“And you know the universe is expanding, right? Supposed to be the byproduct of the big bang, but get this—instead of slowing down, which is what you’d expect from something that’s been blown to pieces, the expansion is accelerating.”
As is the way you’re talking, Roger thought. “Go on,” he said, feeling sick.
“So what’s pushing it if matter and energy don’t increase and nobody knows anything about the dark varieties except there’s more of them than the visible stuff?”