Bewilderment

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COG CAME TO MADISON. They’d been through before, but not for a few years. Back then, they filmed my elevator pitch about using absorption lines in the light passing through a planet’s atmosphere to detect life from a quadrillion miles away. Since then, COG had gone from being the poetry slam of academic lectures to becoming the chief way that most of the world learned about scientific research.

Every COG talk was delivered to a live audience in less than five minutes. The highest user-rated filmlets in the COG Madison site bubbled up to a site called COG Wisconsin. The tops in COG Wisconsin percolated up into COG Midwest, then COG U.S., and finally the coveted COG World Class. Only viewers who made it through a whole minute of a given clip could vote on it. The voters themselves climbed leaderboards for giving out the most evaluations. In this way, knowledge democratized and sciences went crowdsourced and bite-sized. My own talk topped out at COG Wisconsin, held back from the regional round by thousands of users furious that I could talk about the universe without ever mentioning God.

The organizers for COG MAD 2 sent me an email. I skimmed the first few lines and shot back my regrets, reminding them I’d taken part the last time. Two minutes later, I got a follow-up, clarifying the email I’d rushed through too quickly. They weren’t recruiting me. They wanted Robin Byrne to make a cameo in a talk by Martin Currier on Decoded Neurofeedback.

I was furious. I ran a quarter mile across campus to Currier’s lab. Luckily, the trot left me too winded to attack him when I found him in his office. I did manage to shout, “You stupid shit. We had a deal.”

Currier flinched but held his ground. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You gave COG my son’s identity.”

“I did no such thing. I never even talked to them!” He pulled out his phone and punched up his email. “Ah. Here they are. They want to know if I would like to join your son onstage.”

The penny dropped for both of us. COG had come straight to me. They had done nothing more than what Dee Ramey and Ova Nova had already done. Discovering the real Jay was now trivial, with so much to go on. My boy was outed. So many ships had sailed.

My hands were shaking. I picked up a logic toy from his desk—a wooden bird you were supposed to free from a nest made of a dozen sliding wooden pieces. The only problem was that nothing wanted to slide. “He has become public property.”

“Yes,” Currier said. For him, it was almost apology. He watched my face, psychologist by training. I was busy proving to my own satisfaction that the bird’s nest was broken and couldn’t be solved. “But he has given a lot of people hope. People are moved by this story.”

“People are moved by gangster films and three-chord songs and commercials for cell phone plans.” I was getting worked up again. Panic did that to me. Currier just studied me, waiting, until I opened my mouth and words came out. “I’ll ask Robin. None of us gets to decide this for him.”

Currier frowned but nodded. Something in me appalled him, and for good reason. I felt as if I were my own son, about to turn ten, seeing through adulthood for the first time.