“It was on the news, Owen. I’m sorry,” he says.
Then, oddly, he scans the street. Pulls me into the waiting room and locks the front door. I give him a look, and my dad says something that puts a cold sweat on my forehead: “The police are looking for you. Just for questioning. But there are things you need to know.”
We march past familiar photos of my father’s happy patients: a toddler with his prosthetic carbon fiber arm clasped around his mother’s neck, preteens with their maintenance nodes coated in rainbow colors they chose from a thick binder, and an elderly man standing straight and proud with the skeletal metal of an artificial calf and foot shining below his khaki shorts.
You can’t separate the body from the mind. In the last decade, the Neural Autofocus became elective with every upgrade, from artificial limbs to medical exoskeletons to retinal implants. Autofocus makes the communication between mind and body seamless. Sharpens you up, they say. Every one of those smiling faces on the wall has that subliminal gleam of intelligence. Overclocked brains and shiny new limbs.
My dad ushers me through the empty waiting room and down an antiseptic corridor toward the back offices. Most of the lights are off. An office window is broken. Papers are strewn around the floor, marked by boot prints.
“We were raided this morning,” Dad says. “The feds seized everything.”
“Because of the ruling?”
He nods. “A research freeze. Vaughn’s rallies have them in a frenzy.”
My father cocks his head and listens to the eerily quiet hallway. Then he opens the door to his cramped office. Cheap venetian blinds chatter as the door swings. He squeezes into the squeaky chair behind his desk. A blank square marks where his computer used to be. Emptied file cabinets gape.
I sit down across from him.
As a kid, I played with toy cars on the floor under this desk. After my mom passed away, I hung out here for countless hours before and after school. I grew up under these fluorescent lights, but now the place seems strange, broken.
“What’s going to happen?” I ask.
My father just shakes his head.
“It’s too much to tell and I waited too long. I am sorry.”
“Sorry?”
He clears his throat and looks away, blinking. I realize how much older he looks today.
“Sorry for what?” I ask.
“You have to understand, Owen, when we started this research all those years ago, we were excited. The potential to do so much good. Curing diseases, making people better. But when you got hurt …” He takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry I never told you.”
“Never told me what?” I ask, my voice hollow.
The answer is already nibbling at the back of my mind. Little memories of life here at the shop: playing, working, even sleeping here when my dad worked late. And every once in a while, after the nurses left and the front door was locked, Dad called me into the operating room to check on my implant. He wanted to make sure the seizures would leave me alone, he said. I’d stare at the anatomy poster on the wall while he put on his mask and pulled his magnifier lens over one eye. The last time he tinkered with my implant was in high school, when I was about Samantha’s age. The age she’ll always be.
Frontal lobe. Temporal lobe. Motor cortex. Sensory cortex.
“You’re an amp,” he says.
My father watches me absorb the words, desperate for forgiveness. Grasping at it. But this new reality is too shocking to digest.
“I’m not medical?” I ask, reeling.
His lip twitches involuntarily and I realize he is holding back tears. “You were hurt so bad, Owen,” he says. “My baby boy. Falling off that truck hurt you worse than you knew. Worse than I ever, ever let on.”
“But you said I had a simple brain stimulator. That I’m not like the elective kids. Not an amp.” I mumble the words like an incantation. Like a prayer. “You told me I was normal.”
“Understand that I used every possible means at my disposal to repair the trauma. You didn’t need to know. Stigma does terrible things to children. You’ve heard those demonstrators outside. I needed to give you a normal childhood.”
“So you lied.”
“Until you have a child of your own, you cannot comprehend how much I love you,” he says flatly.
“Do I even have epilepsy?”
“You do. But the hardware you’ve got is special. It does much more than prevent seizures. The insult you suffered to your brain was … devastating. The implant had to shoulder the burden while you healed. It became a part of you, Owen.”
There is something else. Something worse. Some shiver of guilt in my father’s shoulders gives it away. “Neural Autofocus can’t do that,” I say.
He fixes his eyes on mine and replies instantly. “I gave you something extra.”
I press my palms against my eyes until dark pinwheels lace my vision. I’ve had a head full of lies all of my life. This thing my father put in my brain does more than stave off epilepsy. It must accelerate my mind, sharpen my intellect, insinuate itself into every thought I have.
Every thought I’ve ever had.
For an instant, I envy Samantha Blex. At least she saw herself for who she was. It occurs to me that my own father killed whoever I am, or might have been, with the implant he chose to put in my adolescent skull.
“Things got out of control so fast,” says my father. “Joe Vaughn and his Pure Human Citizen’s Council—they came out of nowhere. You can never underestimate the fear that drives humankind.”
“I need to think,” I say.
“You don’t have time to think,” he says. “The federal government already has my research. There were things in there I couldn’t erase. Parts requisitions. Lab time. Once they figure out what I did, I’ll be arrested. Then they’re going to come for you. For what’s inside your head. They are likely already on their way.”
I’m touching the nub on my temple, prodding it compulsively with my fingertip. “What did you do to me?”
“The hardware I gave you was stolen,” he says. “At the time, there was no other choice. Nothing off the shelf was powerful enough to compensate for the damage.”
“This is crazy—”
“You need to go right now. Through the side office. The police are looking for you about your student’s death. Do not speak to them under any circumstances. Try to close your bank account.”
He starts scribbling notes on a piece of paper, frantic. “Listen to me, Owen. Get your things and go west, to a place called Eden. It’s a trailer park in Eastern Oklahoma,” he says, handing me the paper.
I stand up and open the office door. “A trailer park?” I ask.
“Eden is where all of this began—the original Uplift site. We chose to test Autofocus there because it was isolated and rural. The population was in need. A perfect setting for our experiment. Only now, it’s become an enclave. Full of other people who are like you. Your own kind, Owen.”
He reacts to the look on my face. My own kind?
“You’ve got to find a man named Jim Howard, an old colleague of mine. He’ll guide you through this. There’s a lot you need to learn about yourself.”
“Dad?” I ask. “Dad, come with me. I can’t—”
“Go!” he barks. The force of his exclamation jolts me into the hallway. “Find Jim Howard. Don’t tell me how you’re getting there. They’re coming for me right now. When they take me in, I will have the opportunity to obfuscate the situation. At the very least, I may cause a delay. It is the best chance you’ve got.”
My father is suddenly small and old and feeble behind his desk. Like someone I’ve never met. Never would want to meet.
“I risked everything to give you a life,” he says. “Don’t throw it away.”
I know the thing I’m about to say isn’t fair and that I can never take it back, but I say it anyway. That’s just how it goes, sometimes. “You didn’t give me a life,” I say. “You stole it.”
My f
ather is quiet for a long second. When he speaks, his voice is without emotion. “You’ve got to realize, Owen, that without the amp you would have died. It is a part of you, but you have to give it permission. I gave you something extra. When the time comes, you have to activate the amp willingly.”
“When the time comes for what?”
“To do good, Owen,” he says, standing. He softly pushes the door, eyes never leaving mine. “I’m sorry that I waited until it was too late. Find Jim. The old man is the only one who can help you now.”
Click.
The door shuts and the hallway is silent save the far-off roar of demonstrators. I follow my dad’s advice and walk on dull legs out the side door. Through the adjoining offices. Out into the alley that runs alongside the building. Run my fingers over rough brick. Look at the world without seeing it. After a half minute walking through the familiar backstreet, I get a funny feeling. For some reason, I stop and look at the sky.
A block away, a bomb detonates.
The guttural roar engulfs me and a shock wave brings my knees to the pavement. Dark smoke pours into the street behind me. The concussion has erased half my father’s building. Pieces of brick and concrete are still spinning away.
It takes a little while for my legs to listen to me.
A harsh ringing in my ears already combines with a cacophony of sirens. Fire trucks, ambulances, police. I stagger toward the smoke, an urban zombie. Flames are eating the rind of the building. Its heart is a burned-out mess. The parking lot is wiped empty, the pavement cratered where the white van sat.
The realization gently nudges into my mind: my father could not have survived.
A heap of smoking gray rubble smolders where his office was. Nothing recognizable, just twisted rebar and concrete and ash. I don’t stop advancing when the surging heat starts to prick my face or when my throat goes raw and stinging from the smoke.
I stop when I see the flashing blues and reds.
Under no circumstances, my father said. Tears well in my eyes as I survey the wreck. I blink them away, searching for some sign of life. The clouds of smoke throb with police lights, ring with sirens. The silhouette of a police officer drifts through the haze and comes into focus.
“Hey,” she calls.
I turn and stumble away. Ignore her shouts as I duck around a corner. Eyes leaking, I accelerate until I’m sprinting down the alley—running blind, breath rasping, away from the noise and turmoil and death.
STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA, by and through
Attorney General Sam Pondi, et al.:
Plaintiffs,
JOHN SIZEMORE
v.
Defendants,
TAMMY ROGERS, representing
ORDER GRANTING SUMMARY JUDGMENT
In this case, we define capacity to contract to exclude individuals with artificially enhanced intelligence.
As has long been established, those with diminished capacity (e.g., minors and people with mental disabilities) lack the capacity to contract as a matter of law. Similarly, we find that individuals with artificially enhanced intelligence possess an enhanced capacity to contract, which necessarily creates an unlevel playing field.
We saw evidence that these enhanced individuals may prey on those with inferior “natural” intelligence of the sort belonging to what we have known heretofore as the “average man.” In other words, individuals with artificially enhanced intelligence implicitly confer diminished capacity to others.
In an effort to remedy the growing disparity between natural and enhanced levels of intelligence, and in an effort to create a level playing field, we hereby find that individuals with artificially enhanced intelligence lack the capacity to contract as a matter of law.
As a result, we thus find that the contract entered into between John Sizemore and Tammy Rogers is considered null and void.
The toaster misses my face by about a foot, then explodes into shards of white plastic on the sidewalk. I blink at it once or twice before a wooden napkin ring clips me across the bridge of my nose.
I catch sight of a scrawny forearm lurking in the second-story window of my apartment. Charles, my landlord, is throwing my belongings out the window in neat little parabolas. He’s already packed and dragged out a haphazard pile of cardboard boxes that rest on the grass next to the sidewalk. A couch and a chair sit incongruously in the yard.
“Charles!” I say. “What the hell are you doing?”
He pokes his gaunt face out of the window and glares down at me, breathing hard. He swallows and his Adam’s apple bobs. Muttering, he flings a handful of silverware at me and ducks back inside.
The front door flies open as I reach for the handle. Charles, all hundred and twenty pounds of him, charges out. He slams the door shut, locks it.
The lock is bright as cut copper, new.
“I don’t have to talk to you,” says Charles in the clipped, broken accent of a lifelong Pittsburgher.
“What?”
“Back up. To the sidewalk. You’re trespassing.”
Charles advances, eyes narrowed. Confused, I put my hands out and step back. “Charles, I don’t know what’s going on. What happened, man?”
“Thought you were so smart. Well, who’s smart now? Score one for the Yinzers, asshole.”
Charles kicks a box, and what looks like my college textbooks spill out onto the wet lawn. I stoop down to push the books back into the damp cardboard box. A young guy walking up the sidewalk carefully inspects a pile of my kitchen stuff.
“Hey,” I say. “This isn’t a garage sale.”
The young guy doesn’t respond, looks past me and makes eye contact with Charles.
“That means take off,” I say.
Charles taps his temple. “Don’t have to listen to him,” he says.
No reaction. No sympathy or anger. The guy just stands there, watching me warily, the way you’d watch a crazy person at a bus stop.
It hits me that something fundamental has changed. Whatever empathy glues society together is somehow drying up, becoming cracked and brittle. This guy standing over my stuff—he’s looking at me and what he sees is person shaped, but I don’t think he’s seeing a person.
Charles is all pumped up. His face is flushed with blood and I can see a vein in his neck throbbing. His hands are shaking from adrenaline as he speaks. “Joe Vaughn’s been on the TV, warning us about you people for years. Taking our jobs and messing up the schools and blowing up buildings.”
“You can’t kick me out. There’s still five months on my lease.”
“Not no more. State law says you amps can’t go into contracts with normal people. Just like I can’t sign no contract with a retard, you can’t sign one with me. You’re too smart.”
“That law is being challenged, Charles. It’s not official.”
“Highest court in the country thinks it is. The Supreme goddamn Court of the United States of America says you ain’t protected. So I guess it is the law.”
The word “law” rings in my ears. Dominoes are falling. No contracts? Meaning no lease, no marriage, no job. No life.
A few more people have stopped to rubberneck. A couple. An older guy. Most are just curious. Others are scrutinizing my stuff, sizing it up.
Charles curls his hands into fists, lets them hang by his sides like rotten fruit. Through clenched teeth he says, “You gotta go now.”
I lean over and scrabble through the box, dig out an old duffel bag. “Give me a damn minute—”
Now a couple of people are just grabbing stuff. Others watch, blinking slowly. The thieves walk away without looking at me. The old guy carefully steps over my hand like it was a crack in the sidewalk, holding my lamp.
“I’m calling the goddamn cops,” says Charles.
I drop to my knees and start shoving things into the duffel bag. Clothes, shoes, a box of granola bars. Appliances are too heavy to carry. Laptop is gone. Forget the furniture.
As pedestrians gawk, silent people carry away the puzzl
e pieces of my life. They see through me, hear past me. The expressions in their eyes are unreadable. I wonder why this is. Do they pity me? Or are they afraid? Is it possible that they really feel nothing at all?
I hope this scene isn’t playing out all over the nation. People like me struggling to grab what they can. Whole families, even. Grasping at the leftover shards of their lives. If that’s the case, it doesn’t really matter what these vulture people around me are thinking or feeling. Whether I’m less than human or more than human—animal or god—it’s all the same.
I’m not a real citizen anymore. Rules no longer apply.
When my bag is full, I move on. Leave Charles on the sidewalk, staring at me with clenched fists and a tight grin. I push past the onlookers and get myself on down the road.
It’s all on little pieces of paper. Thou shalt not. Thou shalt. The rules are there so that we can remember them and follow them. If the rules were obvious, we wouldn’t have to write them down.
I let my hair hang over the nub on my temple and step inside my bank and wait in line. I can feel the stares like cigarette burns on my skin. A security guard watches me, his back to the wall, beefy hands resting on his belt. I look around without seeing anything, push my breaths in and out through my nose. The teller is cautious but she lets me withdraw everything in my account. She stuffs about eighteen hundred dollars into an envelope.
I walk out of the bank, forcing myself not to run. Keep walking. Thinking.
In a frigid fast-food restaurant, I take my phone out of my pocket and call Allderdice High School. The administrative assistant tells me that all amps, I mean implantees, have been placed on unpaid leave. And the police called to speak to me, again.
“Hey, buddy, let me see your temple,” calls a chubby guy a few seats over. He and his friend wear painter’s caps and overalls, eat burgers with stained fingers.
I ignore him, hang up my phone. Then, I methodically dial my friends. Nobody answers. Must be a busy morning.
“What’s the matter? You can’t hear me, buddy?” asks the painter.
It’s the Joseph Vaughns of the world who have given regular people license to act like this. Talking heads on television who have repeated the incendiary words again and again until the insane has become commonplace. This guy sitting here wearing his work clothes isn’t a monster, he probably has a wife and kids and—