The Mad Scientist's Daughter (38 page)

  "I want you to go get on the computer, OK? You can watch your shows."

  Daniel didn't move, just stared at her. She pressed the intercom button again and heard nothing but the crackle of static.
Maybe he's just outside
. She guided Daniel into the living room, where he opened up his laptop. The light brightened his face, washed out the outline of his soft features. Cat left him sitting on the couch. Blood rushed in her ears. She took the stairs down to the laboratory two at a time and slammed the door open. It was empty. The computers hummed and blinked. The air seemed undisturbed. Cat dug her nails into her palm. She went to her father's bedroom. Dark and empty. Outside. He must be outside, despite the unusual heat. His car was in the driveway.

  Cat ran out through the kitchen door. She ran out onto the airless screened-in porch; she ran out into the swelter ing yard. Cicadas screeched like a broken-down machine. She couldn't breathe. The heat increased the world's gravity, and her lungs constricted inside her chest. It was too hot to run but she ran anyway, around the side of the house to the garden she had transformed in the years since Daniel was born, lush with flowering vines and rows of herbs.

  "Daddy!" she shrieked.

  He was sprawled out underneath the citrus tree. Her citrus tree. The branches were heavy with lemons she hadn't bothered to pick. In the dappled shade her father lay on his back, his arms splayed out at painful angles, his skin pale. She dropped to her knees beside him and felt for a pulse. She held her breath; she willed her own heart to stop beating, just long enough so she wouldn't confuse the two, so she wouldn't suffer that moment of false hope. But no. She felt something fluttering inside him. She put her hand on his chest. She didn't know how to do any of these things. She didn't know how to save a life.

  Cat didn't want to leave him lying there in the garden but her comm slate was still tucked away in the bottom of her purse, inside. She ran back through the yard. She ignored Daniel when his eyes followed her across the living room, the music from his show tinny and grating. She could only do one thing right now. She pulled her slate out of her purse. It slipped against her palm. Her fingers shook. She connected with Emergency Services and ran back outside, out of the humming house and into the chattering brightness.

  "He's passed out," she said to the operator. Her voice rose and fell with the motion of her steps. "I can feel a heartbeat. I found him like that." She rattled off the address without thinking and then wondered if she had given the wrong one.

  She was aware of Daniel following her. She only heard snatches of the operator's voice.

  "Don't move him… be there shortly… calm… good."

  In the garden, Cat switched off her comm slate and dropped it in the soft, dry soil. She took her father's hand, clammy and limp, in her own. Daniel stood beside her. She tried not to cry. Daniel didn't say anything for a long time, and then he said, "He isn't sleeping, is he?"

  Cat took a deep, shuddery breath. She shook her head.

  "Will he be OK?"

  "I don't know." With her free hand she pulled Daniel in close to her. She kissed the top of his head, smelled the powdery scent of his shampoo.

  "I don't want Grandpa to die." A trembling in his voice. His eyes were wet.

  "He hasn't died yet," said Cat, and that was when she heard sirens, from far away, caught on the wind.

 
 

 
 
 

They took Cat's father to the hospital two towns over where Daniel had been born. Cat followed the ambulance in her car. The EMTs had asked her about the tumor in his brain:
Has he been taking his medication? Has he been exerting himself?
She had stuttered out answers, not knowing if they were true.

  Now she set the car to auto-drive and leaned back in her seat, digging her nails into the skin of her arms. Daniel played with his portable holobox and made spaceship noises under his breath.

  In the hospital, she sat in the waiting room and stared at the row of vending machines blinking across the way. She felt herself slipping back into that familiar, robotic numbness. She hadn't cried once. Every now and then she heard Daniel sniffling beside her and she wrapped her arms around him but it felt insincere.
Don't do this. Let yourself feel. Let yourself feel.

  When the doctor came out in her long white coat, Cat sat straight up. She took a deep breath. The doctor didn't smile. Daniel looked up from his holobox but didn't say anything.

  "He's fine," said the doctor. "For now."

  "For now?"

  The doctor jerked her head toward the hallway. "I'd like to speak to you." She led Cat to a cluster of rooms at the end of the corridor. Cat sat down in the hard chair and rubbed her forehead: the yellowish fluorescent light gave her a headache. The doctor sat down behind her sleek metal desk and folded her hands and said, "You know he has a brain tumor."

  Cat nodded.

  "It's gotten worse. Much worse in the past few months, from what I can tell from the scans." The doctor looked down at her hands. "He was taking medication?"

  "Yes."

  "It's not working anymore." The doctor looked back up. "I'm sorry."

  "I don't understand what you're saying." Cat shifted in her uncomfortable seat. The doctor pushed away a strand of hair that had fallen across her forehead. She sighed.

  "He's dying, Ms Novak. The scans give him only a few months."

  Cat's heart collapsed inside her chest.

  "Thank you," she said. The doctor's face twisted up as though she couldn't understand why Cat was thanking her. Cat couldn't understand it herself. She stood up, knocking the chair across the office floor. "Thank you," she said again. "May I see him?"

  The doctor nodded. "But I should warn you. He may not be himself. We're working on getting him stabilized. We'll have some treatments for him – for pain, mostly." She smiled wanly. "But other than that…"

  Cat nodded and pushed back out into the hospital corridor. There were too many people out there. The sight of them made her dizzy. She stumbled back to the waiting room. Daniel still sat in one of the chairs, playing with his holobox. She rushed forward, gathered him in her arms. "We're going to see Grandpa," she whispered into the mop of his hair.

  She held Daniel's hand as they walked down the hallways to Intensive Care. The nurse at the desk told Cat that Daniel couldn't go any farther, that he was too young, and so Cat, numbly, blindly, left him sitting with the nurse before stepping across the boundary into the ICU. She followed the hallway down to the end, and then there he was, her father, laid out on a bed behind a heavy blue curtain. His eyes were shut, and his skin looked gray in the hospital light. She pulled a chair up next to his bed.

  "Daddy," she said.

  For an eternal minute he didn't move. Then his eyes slowly opened. His pupils contracted into two black dots.

  "Caterina," he said. "Caterina, you have to call Finn."

  Cat bit down on her tongue to keep herself from weeping. She grabbed his hand, held it loosely in her own. A thin wire snaked from his ring finger to the computer console on the wall. He opened his mouth, closed it.

  "Call Finn," he said again. "Let him know…" He closed his eyes. "I'm so tired. Like my mind can't keep up." He opened his eyes again. "Call him."

  "Daddy, I can't." She choked on her own voice. "He belongs to STL now, remember?"

  "Of course I remember!" All the color had leeched out of her father. "But you can still call him! You remember! The program he wrote, years ago. You remember."

  "No." Cat leaned forward over the bed and smoothed her father's hair across his forehead. "No, I don't remember. You told me there's no way–"

  "I did no such thing. The code, Kitty-Cat! In my lab computer!"

  "The code? What code?"

  "The code! The program!"

  Cat became aware that the beeping of the heart monitor on the wall beside the bed had sped up. A nurse-bot buzzed into the room, stopped at the foot of the bed.

  "The patient needs to rest. Please see the front desk for more information." The nurse-bots reminded Cat of the android that worked at the coffee shop in the city, the way they lit up when they spoke. But that was the only similarity.

  Cat stared at it, still holding her father's hand, as he tossed his head back and forth on his pillow.

  "Please, ma'am," said the nurse-bot. "This is intensive care."

  Cat took a deep breath. She turned back to her father. Pressed her hand against his forehead until he lay still.

  "Call him," he said. "Call Finn."

  "OK, Daddy," said Cat. "I'll call Finn."

 

Cat came home from the hospital exhausted. She slumped on the couch in the living room, and Daniel crawled onto her lap. He curled up there like a kitten. She ran her hands over his hair, watching the ceiling fan fling shadows across the wall.

  "Daniel, I need to do some things." Cat's voice sounded strange: parched dry, empty. "Do you think you can entertain yourself on the computer while I'm working?"

  "Is it about Grandpa? The things you need to do?"

  Cat nodded even though it wasn't about Grandpa, not really. Daniel slid off her lap and trotted into the dining room to retrieve his plastic laptop. She wondered if he un derstood what was happening.
He's not sleeping, is he?
Daniel seemed to have a better grasp of the world than she did sometimes.

  Cat went downstairs to her father's laboratory. She switched on the intercom system so she could hear the beeping, chirping noises of Daniel's computer games upstairs. Then she sat down at the old computer on her father's desk. She opened it up and watched the screen flicker on. She closed her eyes.
Welcome back, Daniel
, the computer said. It had always been easy for her to stay calm, and she just had to do it for a little longer, a little longer…

  She opened her eyes and brought up the files labeled with Finn's name, the same ones she had dug through before she flew out to the desert to meet Dr Condon. She had scoured these files years ago and never found anything like what he described.
A code. A program
. Her father was delirious with sickness, had forgotten the implications of Finn's purchase by STL, but part of her didn't want to give up the hope that it was real.

  She flipped through the files, pushing them aside with the tips of her fingers: the same schematics, the same elaborate-looking mathematical equations. Then she found something new: a folder labeled
Finn Miscellany
. It was not stored on the directory, which was why she hadn't seen it before. It was only located here, on her father's computer. She opened it.

  Photographs. Photographs of the inside of Finn's torso. A video file of Finn looking straight into the camera, labeled with the year Cat turned six. She did not recognize the background. And at the sound of his voice, distorted through the computer speakers, she realized could not watch for longer than a few seconds.

  Cat found a file labeled
Emotion Project
. She tapped it with the tip of her finger, watched as it blossomed across the screen. Page after page of incomprehensible code. This wasn't what she was looking for: this was what had sent him away, not what would bring him back.

  She closed out the file.

  And then, after forty-five minutes of searching, she found it. It was a single file tucked away in a folder that had been tucked away in another folder, like Russian nesting dolls. It was labeled
Emergency
. Cat opened it, expecting more schematics. Instead, she found a short program, simple enough that even she could understand it. Highschool level. When executed, it would send a blip to a portion of the circuitry in Finn's brain. The notes blocked out at the end of the program said:
May cause minor sparking. Nothing problematic. Receipt program already implemented.

  For a long time, Cat read the program code over and over, until she lost all sense of its meaning. She almost forgot to breathe. Her father had told her there was no way to contact Finn. That it was an impossibility. She should have known he was lying.

  But there was still no way to send a message: no way to tell Finn why the computer in Cat's father's laboratory had connected, however momentarily, with the computer in Finn's brain. She wondered what the note meant by minor sparking. She thought of a tiny pistol going off inside Finn. A flare.

  Cat brought the keyboard up on the touchpad. She typed in
exe
. She hit return. For a moment the computer paused, and then
attempt successful
appeared onscreen, the cursor blinking and blinking and blinking. She felt like nothing had happened. She typed
exe
again, and again the program informed her that her attempt had been successful. This time, she shut the computer down, and turned around in her chair, and leaned her head against her hand.

  She sat in the laboratory, lights winking around her. The computers sounded like they were sighing. On the worktable was a scatter of wires, pulled out of the abdomen of a new metal insect, a butterfly the length of her arm. The wings were made of some gossamer, plasticine material, so thin it felt like silk. The wires dangled like entrails. Cat held the butterfly up to the light and color refracted through the wings, orange and red and gold. Its stillness unnerved her, and she knew that it would remain still, that it would never have a chance to move, because her father was dying.

 

Cat spent the next days in a fugue. In the mornings she did her routine chores – dropping Daniel off at school, sweeping the back porch, watering the garden – and in the afternoons she drove to the hospital to sit with her father while he slept in the white light of the hospital room, sleek robot nurses sliding across the gleaming floor. He had become much more coherent since the day the ambulance brought him to the hospital, and the doctors had moved him out of the ICU, into a private room. Cat slumped in the chair next to the bed and watched his chest rise and fall, listening to the steady beeping of the robots and the lifesupport machines. The air smelled of the pine cleaner they used on the floor. She could barely smell medicine; she could barely smell sickness.