Afterparty (29 page)

She wondered, not for the first time, if she was a bad person. There seemed to be something in her that wanted to sneak and steal. It was this bad thing, she was sure, that had caused her real parents to leave her at the orphanage. It was this bad thing that had made her listen to the Wander Man. And it was this bad thing that had made her try to kill Mr. Paniccia when she was five years old.

She wasn’t like Grandpop. He was a good person, and his IF was God himself. Sasha’s friends, on the other hand, could be so … immature.

“Let’s roll,” Bucko said. “Mission fucking accomplished.”

“Wait.” There was something new on the floor near the desk, a package about two feet square. Did Eduard bring that into the house with the latest paintings?

The box was marked up with shipping stickers, and the flaps had been opened. Sasha squinted to make out the label in the dim light. It was addressed to Grandpop. The “from” address was a series of numbers. She should have brought Tinker with her to remember it for her.

Bucko was opening the flaps. Inside was a cube of pale plastic. It was too big for her to lift out.

“Just so we’re keeping track,” Bucko said, “Eddie’s now intercepting mail, art, and office equipment.”

She had no idea what the object was, or why her father was keeping so many things from Grandpop. Adults were crazy.

*   *   *

She could not sleep until she’d read the new messages. She knew the IFs would be curious, so she called up Mother Maybelle, Zebo, and Tinker, and together they went through the files.

A number of them had already been flagged by Eduard as important. A dozen were from someone named Rovil Gupta, and several more were from Lyda Rose. Both of them mentioned “Little Sprout.” She knew that name.

“Hey Tinker,” she said. “Do you remember that photo? The real one, on paper?”

Of course he did. They’d found it in Grandpop’s desk drawers once. The next time she’d looked for it the photo was gone, but fortunately Tinker had been with her the first time.

The robot boy whirred, and a length of paper unrolled from the slot in his chest. Mother Maybelle leaned down, fabric crinkling, and tore off the strip.

“Hmm,” she said.

She handed the paper to Sasha. In the photo, four people stood facing the camera, holding glasses. A toast, just like in a wedding movie.

Grandpop looked about the same as he did now. Next to him was a hugely fat white man with brown hair and a sour look on his face. Beside the fat man was a pale redheaded woman, her head thrown back, laughing at some joke. And beside her was a tall woman with skin darker than Sasha’s. She was smiling too.

Tinker had also remembered the words that had been written on the back of the photograph: “NME 50! Little Sprout 3/5/17.”

Sasha had no idea who these people were, or what most of the words meant. But she could find out.

Mother Maybelle saw what Sasha was thinking. “You are not staying up all night hunting around on the internet,” the woman said. “You have school tomorrow!”

“Just let me finish,” Sasha said. She turned back to the message list, and on impulse she searched for “Little Sprout.” One of the messages had come in just a few hours ago, from someone named Gilbert Kapernicke. It wasn’t addressed to Edo, but to Eduard. Zebo read it aloud:

Dear Eduard,

Rovil Gupta, whom you may remember from Little Sprout, visited us today by phone. We talked about Lyda, so much so it was like having her in the room. She is hurting, and she would very much like to speak with your father. We would be pleased for you to arrange this, but of course that is your choice to make.

“Who the hell is this Gilbert nitwad?” Bucko asked.

“Please,” Sasha said. “Just let me think a minute.” She had to figure out so many things. Who were these people? What did they want from Grandpop? And how was she going to tell him without Eduard ruining her life?

“I think we’re going to need the entire—” She was going to say the entire IF Deck. But there was one card she was definitely not going to bring out. “I think we’re going to need more imaginary friends.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Rovil said he didn’t want to drive us across the country, but he put up only token resistance. “You want to get to the bottom of this, don’t you?” I asked. “Don’t you want to find the fucker that broke your fingers?”

“I want to think that someone besides Edo is doing this,” he said.

“Keep trying,” I said. “Meanwhile, Ollie and I need you. We can’t rent a car, since we’re both supposed to be incarcerated in Toronto.”

“If you can get us in to see him, I don’t see how I have any choice.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Free will is an illusion anyway.”

*   *   *

The drive was making Ollie’s symptoms worse. The confinement, and the inability to take action, was taking its toll. She spent most of the time on her pen, but by Illinois she was twitchy and cranky. By Kansas she was picking fights.

“You really think we have no free will?”

This seemed to come out of nowhere. We were south of Wichita, Rovil chauffeuring us across miles and miles of sun-blasted land.

“Have you been stewing about this since New York?” I asked.

“Ever since Gilbert said his god was in control,” she said. “So answer the question.”

“We do not have free will,” I said formally. “At least, not the way you’re thinking of it.”

“How do you know how I’m thinking of it?” she said.

“Like how everybody thinks of it. That there’s a ‘you’ weighing several alternatives, then choosing one of them. But there’s no choosing. That’s an illusion created by the mind to make you feel like you’re in control.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m choosing right now not to throw you of the car.”

The Midwest was in another drought, and everything outside the windows was winter brown. I kept expecting a flash of wings, hoping Gloria was pacing us like an albatross, but she was nowhere in sight.

I said, “Let’s say we run a wire into your brain.”

“Let’s pick Rovil’s instead.”

“Hey!” he said. I hadn’t realized he’d been listening.

“Okay, a doctor runs a wire into his brain, and every time the doctor presses a button, a certain neuron gets fired. And every time it fires, Rovil turns left.”

“The opsin experiments,” Rovil said. He glanced up in the rearview mirror and said to Ollie, “It was actually a fiber-optic cable channeling colored light to genetically modified neurons.”

“Oh, of course,” Ollie said. “That old thing.”

I laughed, and Ollie said, “So he hits the button, and Rovil goes left. Remote control.”

“It doesn’t feel like remote control to him,” I said. “Rovil’s walking naturally, and then he turns, and it feels completely natural. Except there’s no choice involved—well, except for the doctor choosing when to hit the button.”

“Wait, how does that feel natural?”

“The urge is subconscious. It’s like you’ve got an itch on your nose, and you reach up to scratch without thinking about it.”

“I feel like there’s a catch coming somewhere,” she said. “But go on.”

“Now let’s say there’s another area of your brain where Free Will lives,” I said. “Call him Free Willy. He’s just like the doctor. He decides when to trigger that neuron and make you turn left.”

“How did this stop being about Rovil?” she asked.

“Here’s the problem: Free Willy is made up of nothing but more neurons. So in order for the decision to occur, a
bunch
of neurons have to fire. That means one of those neurons has to be the first neuron. But who makes that one fire? If it’s yet another neuron, then you’re just running in circles.”

“That’s my point,” Ollie said. “You can’t get something out of nothing.”

“But it’s not coming from nothing, ’cause the brain’s not a closed loop,” I said. “There’s input constantly coming into it, from all over the body, all those physical senses.” I took her hand in mine. “But there’s also input coming from other parts of the brain.”

“The subconscious,” she said.

“Sure.
Most
of the brain is subconscious, and there’s neurons firing all over the place, constantly processing. And I know what you’re thinking—”

“Here we go again,” she said.

“You’re thinking, hey, that’s fine for low-level actions, like moving a body part. But how about higher-level decisions? One little wire can’t make me, say, decide to follow a crazy woman across the country, can it?”

“No way,” Ollie said. “That would be ridiculous.”

“So maybe there’s
another
free will node that handles higher-level thought.”

“Free Willy Two,” Ollie said.

“The sequel,” I said. “So now we have Free Willy Two, but he’s made out of neurons too. Maybe he needs many, many neurons to form a complex thought, maybe they even have to fire in a certain order, or a certain frequency. But it’s all just neurons, and when it comes down to it, everything depends on
one
of those neurons being fired first. Every neuron’s connected to surrounding neurons, and charges travel by known rules. Their action is absolutely mechanical. Thoughts, decisions … they just happen.”

“Mechanically,” Ollie said. “Like a gun going off.”

“Yup. Except there’s no one to pull the trigger.”

“When
I
pull the trigger, it sure feels like I’m the one doing it.”

“Exactly—it’s a
feeling
,” I said. “It happens after the brain’s gone off. You think you’re in control, but that’s just the warm fuzzy of false confidence.”

“But if there’s no free will,” Ollie said, looking up at me, “then there’s no such thing as sin.” I was surprised by how steady her voice was. “If no one’s responsible, then there’s no morality.”

“You cannot prosecute a gun for murder,” Rovil said.

“You can if the gun’s complex enough,” I said. “Look, you can’t think of a person like it’s one thing, one ‘I’ that decides everything. The brain is a collective, a huge number of all these thinking modules. It doesn’t
make
a decision, it
arrives
at one.”

“Words,” Ollie said. “
Something’s
got to be responsible.”

I thought for a minute, trying to figure out how to explain this. “When the brain starts working on a problem, all those parts of the brain start working, using all the data they’ve got—personal experience, cultural rules, moral impulses … all those things go into the hopper,” I said. “The brain parts solve the equation of what to do—that’s what we
call
a decision, but it’s really just an answer. And each answer is input to the next equation. In fact, each answer changes the brain itself in minute ways, strengthening some connections, weakening others. That’s why people who think of the mind as software and the brain as hardware have it wrong—there’s nothing but hardware, jolts of electricity running down the wires, building up a charge, waiting for that emotional trigger to be pulled. The gun fires itself.”

“When you load it properly,” Rovil said.

“This is madness,” Ollie said. “We can’t have people murdering each other and then say, too bad, can’t do anything about it, no one fired the gun.”

“I never said that. We punish the gun.”

“What?”

“The gun is collectively responsible,” I said. “It’s like Congress, or a corporation. And when the gun breaks the rules, society punishes it.”

“But that’s not fair,” Ollie said. “The gun’s just doing what it was primed to do.”

“Maybe we’ve gone off track with the gun analogy,” I said.

“No, stick with it.
Bang.
The gun fires, and kills someone.”

“Okay, yes.”

“And then we put it in the electric chair,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“How is that fair?! We don’t execute mentally retarded people.”

“Except in Georgia,” Rovil said.

“Those are retarded guns,” I said. “We’re talking about fully functioning, complex guns that have the power to process all the information available. That includes the rules of society. That information about what’s ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is data the brain needs to make its decision. The next gun that comes along might think differently.”

“I can’t agree with this,” Ollie said. “You may be right about how the brain works, but I don’t want to live in a world where no one’s responsible.”

“I keep saying, we
are
responsible, just not in the way—”

“Stop,” Ollie said. “Please stop.” She took her hand from mine and looked out the passenger window.

I noticed Rovil looking at me in the rearview mirror, his eyebrows raised questioningly. I shook my head. I’d thought I was distracting her, relieving the tension, but I’d only packed the powder a little tighter.

*   *   *

We pulled off the interstate at Amarillo, short of the New Mexico border, an hour before sundown. It was Saturday night, and the instructions had been to wait until at least Sunday. I wanted to do the last leg of the trip so that we arrived at Edo’s place in daylight.

We found a motel a quarter mile from the interstate. When we stepped out of the refrigerated capsule of the car, the heat slammed us. We’d left spring up north; Texas was well into summer.

Rovil bought his dinner from a vending machine and said he wanted to hole up in his room and do work, leaving Ollie and me to find supper on our own. We started walking toward the nearest restaurant on our maps, and immediately began to sweat. In two blocks we reached La Cantina, a rundown brick building squatting between a Discount Gas & Liquor Drive Thru and a shop with a sign that said simply
INCOME TAX
.

Ollie thought the place looked sketchy, but I argued that it was impossible to get bad Mexican in Amarillo. And yet: enchiladas microwaved to hell, salsa from a can, Velveeta cheese coating everything. Only tequila could have saved the meal. Ollie, however, seemed to barely notice the food; her eyes were tracking the restaurant staff and the handful of other customers. She would not be surprised by the cowboy again.

She stayed on guard after we returned to the motel. She sat on the bed, turned sideways so she could watch the door, her pen screen unfurled across her lap. I was on my own pen, watching a free version of
Pride and Prejudice
. I flashed on a memory of Mikala and me lying beside each other like this, our minds somewhere else, our bodies touching, while we wondered whether certain cells were dividing and growing inside my body.