Corpus Callosum

dress and smoothed it.

  “Thanks. I got it from— I can’t remember. It’s old.”

  Milton lifted the Rumchata bottle and swirled its contents around slowly, a tight-lipped grin playing on his face.

  “Not sure this really goes with the restaurant’s offerings,” he said.

  Jeanette rested her chin on her hands. “Order a tea to mix with. Maybe a Coke. That’d go.”

  “It was all we had,” Joey said, blue light shining.

  He waved away her words. “I’m just teasing. I love Rumchata. How are you, Joey?” Milton said, turning to the Box eagerly like he was addressing his mother-in-law.

  “I’m well, and yourself?”

  “Oh good, good. I’m glad you could come out with us,” he shot Jeanette a glance.

  “Oh and it took some real convincing, let me tell you!” Jeanette said, unscrewing the Rumchata cap. She turned around and searched for the wait staff with a worried look.  ”We need some ice…”

  “Oh, yeah. Is that true Joey? I didn’t mean to force you out,” Milton said. “I thought you maybe wanted to come, since Jeanette mentioned having you join us. I’m sorry.”

  Joey emitted a warm yellow light that matched the restaurant’s cheap sconces. “I was gonna hang back. I thought we shouldn’t mix business and pleasure.”

  “What?” Jeanette said, her mouth half-full of drink.

  Milton reached across the table but missed Jeanette’s hand. “Oh, no not at all—”

  Joey said, “This is supposed to be a date, isn’t it?”

  Jeanette patted the box. “Oh, but I wanted you to come meet him again!”

  “And I’m glad to see you,” Milton said, and slapped his menu against the table with finality.

  Jeanette took his cue and read over her menu as well. The restaurant was fairly new and hadn’t received uniformly positive reviews, but everyone applauded its originality. To Jeanette, the food sounded heavy and nauseating. Her stomach had shrunk over the last few weeks. A waiter surreptitiously fell in beside her and poured ice water into a glass. She diluted it with Rumchata and fortified herself.

  The words on the menu weren’t sinking in. Her eyes kept quivering and shifting focus to Milton. He was apparently rapt and reading the menu top to bottom. His eyes looked brown now. In the scrubs they’d looked bluer. His cheekbones and eyebrows drew all focus to them; there was probably some mathematical perfection to it that Joey could calculate, if Jeanette asked her. Jeanette tried to remember his height but couldn’t. His posture was upsettingly perfect.

  “I think I’m getting the Seitan Bolognese,” he said. His menu dropped.

  “I—hm. I don’t know. Joey, what did I have to eat today?”

  “Half a cinnamon crunch bagel and a cinnamon Pop-Tart,” Joey said after a moment. “A Flintstone’s gummy and a Pink Lady Apple.”

  “Let me guess,” Milton said, “sprinkled with cinnamon.”

  Joey allowed herself to snicker. To Jeanette it sounded as inauthentic as the courtesy-laugh she used to give out when she was alive.

  “What, it’s good for you!” Jeanette protested. “Cinnamon prevents diabetes and is low-glycemic index.”

  Milton pushed a candle from the middle of the table. This gave him a more direct line of sight to Joey’s Box.

  “Are you her dietician now?”

  “I think being health-conscious is just another way of being a body fascist,” Joey said. A green triangle of light scrolled around her sides. “But still, I find myself keeping track of it. I can’t help it.”

  “She can’t help it!” Jeanette emphasized.

  Milton poured himself a small nip of Rumchata. When he returned his palms to the table they vastly encroached into the sisters’ side. His nails were perfectly square and tidy. That was something Jeanette had always been a fascist about— the nails she would allow around or in her. Most men had atrocious nails, and didn’t even think to clean them before reaching into someone’s panties. She threw back another sip and wondered why she was thinking that explicitly.

  They ordered; Jeanette got a platter of prosciutto sushi with wasabi tapenade. Milton said he was surprised she wasn’t a vegetarian.

  “That’s me,” Joey said after the waiter had left. “I didn’t eat meat for twelve years.”

  “And now?” Milton said with a wink. His lips pursed slightly as he did it.

  “You’re awful,” Jeanette said.

  Joey said, “I don’t mind it so much now, actually. At some point, you have to put your own species first.”

  He lifted his glass. “To that!” But Jeanette did not join him.

  “See what I mean? That’s not my Joey,” she said. She tilted her head to the ceiling and pushed a growing pool of moisture from her eyes with her palm. “Nevermind. Now isn’t the time…”

  “It’s okay! Jeanette, hey-” Milton dove forward and clasped her free hand in both of his. Soft, just like she’d expected. Slight calluses on the tips, suggesting that maybe he played an instrument.

  “You’re distressed about me being okay with meat?” Joey said.

  Jeanette’s chest heaved against her dress. “Yeah! Steven, you have to understand. When she was in third grade, she let all the dogs out of our neighbor’s yard. And as soon as she could drive, she freed all the chickens from a farm ten miles away. And during hunting season—”

  “Hunting season was rough,” said Joey.

  Jeanette sniffled and laughed. “The hunters wanted to string her up. So, it’s disturbing for me to see someone as principled as she was…is…act so differently. It’s the lack of empathy that scares me.” She locked eyes with Milton. “Is that so bad?”

  “Jean, it’s not like I’m a sociopath.”

  Milton started to speak, but then the food came. They made a show of arranging their napkins and clanging their silverware against plates, of smiling and thanking the staff and quaffing drinks while Joey dimmed to purple. The smell of the food wafted into her sensors; it didn’t bode well for the flavor combinations.

  “I think that ham is lower grade than Taco Bell,” Joey said.

  Jeanette’s chopsticks froze above her plate. “Really?”

  “No, I’m just fucking with you. Go, eat.”

  Joey let herself sink to near obliviousness while they chewed and conversed. she asked Lily.

  Her reply came clear and reliable as church bells.

  When Joey came back, forty-five minutes and four drinks had passed, and  Jeanette and Milton were bent over a plate of lavender chocolate mousse. Both their faces were bright, the corners of their lips smeared with sugary goo.

  “Ohh this was a really good choice, great pick,” Jeanette was saying. She pushed a fork of mousse into Milton’s mouth. “At first I thought this was a pretentious idea, but noo…”

  Milton sucked the mousse from the tines and, with a full mouth, said, “I thought you were a girl with some pretenses. No offense intended.”

  He hiccoughed. Then he brought a napkin to Jeanette’s lips, dabbing hers and then his own.

  “We’re being so…vicarious about this,” Jeanette said. “Why don’t we just put the kids to bed and act like adults?”

  “The kids still need to be tucked in,” Joey said quickly. They turned to her slowly. A blank, sunny little smile was still plastered on Milton’s face.

  In the cab, Joey asked Milton if personality changes were a common side effect of being uploaded.

  “Bah,” he said, throwing his head back. Joey noticed his hand had slipped into the sleeve of Jeanette’s dress. “Personalities change. It’s just how people work.”

  Jeanette leaned her head against the cool glass of the cab window and burped. “Like, because of trauma…?”

  “Because of anything! Time, bad luck, good luck, maturity, history…Personality is not a stable thing, to begin with. So if you study…let’s say you measure a person’s personality traits, both before and after BrightBox. And let’s say there’s a change.”

  Jeanette s
hot up in her seat. “There’s a change?!”

  “Let’s say there is one. Let’s just say,” Milton winged his free arm around in an infinity shape. “Thing is, the person probably woulda changed in that span of time anyway.  The odds are in favor of people changing, all things held constant. So you can’t isolate LifeMedia as the cause.”

  He closed his eyes and rustled his fingers under Jeanette’s sleeve. They listened to the cab rattle over a bridge.

  Joey said, “There aren’t any general trends in how people change, though? No systematic differences between a breather and a BrightBox?”

  “Breather?” Milton said. He seemed immediately sobered.

  “Ha. That’s a good one Joey; good term,” Jeanette said to her reflection in the window.

  “Yeah, are there consistent differences between breathers and uploadees?”

  “Not anymore than with similar medical procedures…Look. It’s like when somebody gets hurt. An athlete, say. A lot of athletes get injured and stop wanting to watch sports.”

  “Makes ‘em sad..,” Jeanette mumbled.

  “Yeah,” Milton said. “Smart people with brain injuries stop playing chess. Injured athletes avoid ESPN. BrightBox users sometimes avoid food, drink, smells, physical activities, and in-person social interactions. Because it’s not the same as it was.”

  “So, you admit it isn’t the same,” Joey said.

  “It’s not—ugh,” Milton grumbled and gripped the bridge of his nose. Jeanette’s head lolled onto his