Bewilderment

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I BROUGHT HIM TO CAMPUS WITH ME on days when I taught. He spread out his books on the desk in my office, and while I lectured or sat on committees, Robin taught himself long division and solved word problems and decoded poems and learned why the trees outside the office window turned carroty and gold. He wasn’t studying anymore. He was simply toying with things and enjoying the unfolding.

The grad students loved to tutor him. Checking in after a long October morning seminar, I caught Viv Britten, who was working on the small-scale crisis inherent in the Lambda-CDM model of the universe, sitting across the desk from my son, holding her head.

“Boss. Have you ever considered what is going on inside a leaf? I mean, really thought about it? It’s a total mind-fuck.”

Robin sat smirking at the havoc he’d unleashed. Hey! Curse word!

“What?” Viv said. “I said freak. It’s a total mind-freak, what you’re telling me.”

It was all that, and more. The green Earth was on a roll, assembling the atmosphere, making more shapes for itself than it could ever need. And Robin was taking notes.

We were down on the shores of the lake over lunch, fish-spotting. Robbie had discovered that polarized sunglasses let him see into a whole new alien world beneath the mirroring surface. We were looking, hypnotized, at a school of three-inch intelligences when someone called, four feet from my shoulder.

“Theodore Byrne?”

A woman my age stood clutching a brushed-silver computer to her chest. She wore a fair amount of turquoise hardware, and the folds of her gray tunic fell over skinny jeans. Her controlled contralto voice seemed baffled by her own boldness.

“I’m sorry. Have we met?”

Her smile hung between embarrassed and amused. She turned to my son, who, in a favorite animist ritual, was patting the almond butter sandwich he was about to eat. “You must be Robin!”

A flush of premonition warmed my neck. Before I could ask her business, Robin said, You remind me of my mom.

The woman looked sideways at Robin and laughed. Alyssa’s and my ancestors had come from Africa, too, only from somewhat further back. She turned to me again. “I’m sorry to intrude like this. Would you have a moment?”

I wanted to ask: A moment for what, exactly? But my son, trained up on ecstasy, said, We got a million moments. Right now we’re on fish time.

She handed me a business card spattered with fonts and colors. “I’m Dee Ramey, a producer for Ova Nova.”

The channel had several hundred thousand subscribers, with individual videos topping out at a million views. I’d never watched a minute of it, but I still knew what it did.

Dee Ramey turned to Robin. “I saw you in Professor Currier’s training clips. You’re amazing.”

“Who told you about us?” I couldn’t keep the anger out of my voice.

“We did our homework.”

The penny dropped. For a guy who’d grown up on science fiction, I’d been amazingly naïve about what artificial intelligence, facial recognition, cross-filtering, common sense, and a quick dip into the planet’s aggregate brain could do. At last I freed myself of stupid civility. “What do you want?”

My rudeness to a stranger shocked Robin. He kept patting his sandwich, too hard and fast. Ova Nova, Dad. They did that story about the guy who let the botfly hatch under the skin in his shoulder?

Dee Ramey shouted, “Wow, you watch us!”

Just the ones about how cool the world is.

“Well! We think what’s happening to you is one of the coolest things we’ve seen.”

Robin looked to me for explanation. I looked back. Realization spread across his face. Influencers wanted him for the perfect three-minute episode, one that could earn a million thumbs from strangers across the globe: Boy Lives Again, Inside His Dead Mother’s Brain. Or maybe it was the other way around.