A couple months passed. Erika still hadn’t written a word. Every morning she’d go up to her room, and every afternoon she’d come downstairs defeated. She started getting these cramps in her hands, her fingers would get all claw-like, and Wyatt had to massage them so she could use them. We asked her if she might be willing to go to another hypnotherapist but she kept saying no; the experience with Hoffman had so rattled her that she was afraid of hypnotherapy altogether. Wyatt and I pored over the document for clues. He’d read about Haeckel’s Theory in some freaky alternative medicine book. I was familiar with McLuhan because of my dad, and read Understanding Media again, finding a lot to think about in light of the explosion of the Web.
What about the Bionet?
We had nothing to go on but our imaginations. We ended up concocting a science fiction explanation. This was a lot of fun, actually. Wyatt brought his knowledge of various medical modalities, I supplied the tech knowledge. We decided the Bionet would be a biological version of the Internet, a monitoring system in which individual bodies would transmit information to other bodies or groups of bodies. The initial stages of the Bionet would involve already existing technology, like pacemakers. When a pacemaker detected a cardiac event, it could transmit a distress signal with GPS coordinates to 911, triggering a response from paramedics. Then we thought, what if the Bionet could also accept signals from a remote source, and say, dispense certain things into the bloodstream? For instance, what if instead of swallowing a pill, there was a nanotechnology pharmaceutical factory installed under your skin? What if the Bionet was an extension of the immune system? And what if it could respond to a pandemic by releasing the proper cocktail of antigens into an entire populace, effectively putting up a wall against a particular outbreak? Then we started thinking about the neural ramifications of such a technology. Remember all those movies in the early nineties where people had bulky cable jacks in the backs of their necks? What if you could accomplish the same sorts of virtual immersions without the wires? What if your thoughts could transmit data about your body to an external server? Or what if you just got over a cold, and your friend got the same cold—could you send a thought into his brain that could provoke his artificially enhanced immune system to produce the appropriate antibodies? We pitched this stuff back and forth, eventually writing our book, Foundations and Principles of Bionet Technology. We had little ambition for our manuscript beyond our own entertainment. We wrote it with a sort of formal, academic tone, taking after Borges. It was just as sci-fi as anything Erika had ever written. While we were working out the early draft at the kitchen table, she was still upstairs not writing. After a few months we had a complete manuscript, which we uploaded to a print-on-demand Web site. We did no marketing, no promotion, just put it up there and kind of forgot about it. It sold three copies in the first week, which we found more funny than anything.
Erika didn’t meet her deadline for her next book and had to pay back her advance. This was our wake-up call that we really had to get her to a counselor. She felt like the part of her brain that wrote had been wiped entirely clean, like a magnet on a disk drive. Part of her still wanted to write, but she didn’t know how anymore. And she started wondering if she wanted to write only because that had been her routine for so long. Maybe she needed to do something entirely different now. Maybe her time as a writer was up. I doubted that, because when the hypnotherapy transmission had come through she’d been a hundred pages into the third book of a trilogy. She still had this stillborn manuscript on her computer, paused midsentence.
Summer came and went. The three of us had become something of a family. I loved them, I truly did. Our Bionet book sold a hundred or so copies. Then one day, a week before Halloween, I received an email. The person said he had read our book and understood we probably had a “mental block” problem on our hands. The sender promised to reverse the process and cautioned us to practice extreme secrecy. We were to meet him at Golden Gate Park at 10 a.m. on Halloween. He would appear dressed in a Chewbacca costume and provide more information at that time. I called Wyatt over to the computer before I even got to the end of the message. But there it was, in the signature and in the “from” line. The email was from Squid.
SKINNER
Skinner pried open the can of fruit cocktail and stared into its murky juice. There were cherries in there, peeled grapes it looked like, mandarin orange slices, peach cubes. He brought the can to his lips and gulped the juice then shook the can to rattle some of the stuck fruit bits into his mouth. Not bothering to locate a utensil, he fished out individual pieces with his fingers. He considered crumpling the can and tossing it into the bushes but instead he smashed it flat with his boot and shoved it into an outer pocket of his backpack. Everywhere around him: forest. More specifically, the North Cascades. More specifically still, an overgrown, twenty-mile trail crazily wending through hemlock, devil’s club, and salmonberry toward his childhood home of Bramble Falls on the north tip of Lake Chelan.
He’d really screwed the pooch this time, hadn’t he? Leaving his family in Seattle, venturing out of phone range, crazy pissed off and confused, not returning to his daughter’s condo to talk it out in a more constructive manner, just racing north, disappearing into wilderness. He couldn’t remember getting here. Couldn’t even remember what he’d said after seeing Waitimu’s clone, though he imagined it hadn’t been pleasant. Partly he expected his wife and daughter to pursue him and, in the act of pursuit, prove their forgiveness, but he suspected they’d been so thrown by his outburst, so startled by his sudden flight, that they’d decided to remain in Seattle to see if he had the guts to return.
Every time Skinner’s mind returned to the awful reality of what Roon had done he slipped into a thought algorithm. First, visceral unease that a member of his family had birthed a clone. Then a more substantial wave of disgust that Roon had cloned Waitimu. At this point his thoughts came to a juncture. He could either relinquish the values of purebred humanism, for which he’d fought as a Christian American private contractor, and allow Roon’s decision to float on by. Or he could reassert his commitment to those values in response to their being challenged. Every time the algorithm played out, he’d chosen the latter. Then, after he had doubled down on the rightness of his convictions, the algorithm demanded he turn his back on Roon and Chiho. Here, twisty guilt crept into the process, which he had to keep in check by further asserting to himself that he was standing up for what he believed in. But just as soon as the guilt was taken care of, his thoughts turned into angry fists. Why had they so thoroughly failed him? The algorithm turned to doubt. Maybe he was the problem. Maybe his were the mistaken values. The algorithm concluded and he started again at the beginning, back at disgust.
Out here with birds and trees the mechanizations of his confused thoughts boiled on in exile. It always astounded him how thoroughly indifferent the grand, natural world was to the agonies of human emotional life. Up towered swaying pillars of alder, turning sunlight green through the veins of their leaves. Most of these trees had sprouted prior to the FUS and would outlive every person now living. A rodent of some sort scurried in the underbrush. In this place the frettings of a father over his daughter fell silent in the terrifying continuity of geological time. At twilight Skinner came to a clearing where he pitched his tent and made a small fire. From his backpack he retrieved a roll of foil, from which he ripped a rectangle. Onto this surface he cubed some potatoes and tossed on a few slices of cheese, sprinkled on some Tabasco, salt, and pepper. He wrapped the food securely and placed the foil packet directly on the embers. Half an hour later he opened the steaming packet and ate.