Richard Powers - Bewilderment

“Now see if you can get it to turn green.” New feedback for new parameters of affect. I thought Robin might revolt. He’d been in the scanner for almost an hour. Instead, he cackled with pleasure and tranced out again. Soon enough, he’d learned how to run the dot through a rainbow of colors. Currier smiled his wry, dry smile.

“Let’s put this all together now. How about a green dot, the size of the background shadow, all the way on the center right? Hold it there for as long as you can.”

Robbie nailed the day’s final assignment fast enough to impress everyone. Ginny released him from the scanner, flush with success. He trotted into the control booth, swinging his palm above his head for me to high-five. His face had that look it got when I spun a planet into being for him at night: at home in the Milky Way.

That’s the coolest thing in the world. You should try it, Dad .

“Tell me.”

It’s like you have to learn to read the dot’s mind. You learn what it wants you to think .

We scheduled a follow-up for the next week. I waited until we’d left the building before grilling him. Currier could have his scans and data sets and AI analyses. I wanted words, straight from Robin’s mouth. And I wanted them for myself.

“How did it feel ?” I wanted to hand him a picture of Plutchik’s wheel and have him point to the exact spot.

Still triumphant, he head-butted my ribs. Weird. Good. Like I could learn to do anything .

The words puckered my skin. “How did you get the dot to do all those things?”

He quit the billy-goat butting and turned serious. I pretended I was drawing it. No. Wait. Like it was drawing me .

THEY WANTED ROBIN ALONE for the second session. Currier thought I might distract him. As part of that painful feedback-training called parenthood, I surrendered Robin to the power of others.

I could tell things had gone well when I picked him up at the lab. Currier looked pleased, although he played his cards close to his chest. Robin was walking on air, but without the usual mania. A strange new awe possessed him.

They gave me music this time. Dad, it was totally crazy. I could raise and lower the notes, and make them go faster and slower, and change the clarinet to a violin, just by wanting it!

I cocked an eyebrow at Currier. His smile was so benign it made me queasy. “He did great with the musical feedback, right, Robin? We’re learning to induce connectivity between the relevant regions of his brain. Neurons that fire together wire together.”

Astonishingly, Robbie let another man tickle him on the most sensitive part of his ribs. Currier said, “‘For use almost can change the stamp of nature.’”

What’s that supposed to be? Robin said. Like poetry or something?

“ You’re something,” Currier said. Then he booked us for a third visit.

Robin and I walked from the neuroscience building to the lot where I was parked. He held my forearm, chattering. He hadn’t grappled me so much in public since he was eight. Decoded Neurofeedback was changing him, as surely as Ritalin would have. But then, everything on Earth was changing him. Every aggressive word from a friend over lunch, every click on his virtual farm, every species he painted, each minute of every online clip, all the stories he read at night and all the ones I told him: there was no “Robin,” no one pilgrim in this procession of selves for him ever to remain the same as . The whole kaleidoscopic pageant of them, parading through time and space, was itself a work in progress.

Robin tugged on my arm. Who do you think that guy is?

“What guy?”

The one whose brain I’m copying?

“It’s not one guy. It’s the average pattern of a few different people.”

He slapped my hand from underneath, like he was patting a ball into the air. His chin lifted and he skipped a few yards, the way he used to when he was younger. Then he waited for me to catch up. My son looked happy, and it chilled me.

“Why do you ask, Robbie?”

I feel like they’re coming over to my house to hang out or something. Like we’re doing stuff together, in my head .

THE LAWS THAT GOVERN THE LIGHT FROM A FIREFLY in my backyard as I write these words tonight also govern the light emitted from an exploding star one billion light-years away. Place changes nothing. Nor does time. One set of fixed rules runs the game, in all times and places. That’s as big a truth as we Earthlings have discovered, or ever will, in our brief run.

But the place is big , I tried to tell my son. “You can’t imagine how big. Think of the most unlikely place…”

A planet made out of iron?

“For instance.”

Pure diamond?

“They exist.”

A planet where the oceans are hundreds of miles deep? A planet with four suns?

“Yes times two. And we’ll find even stranger places, between here and the universe’s edge.”

Okay. I’m thinking of my perfect planet. My one-in-a-million place .

“At one in a million, there are roughly ten million of them in the Milky Way alone.”

OUR DAYS SEEMED TO IMPROVE, and not just because I looked for evidence. His December school evaluations were his second-best ever. His teacher, Kayla Bishop, penned a message at the bottom of his report: Robin’s creativity is growing, along with his self-control . He stepped off the bus in the afternoons humming. One Saturday he even went out sledding with a group of neighborhood kids he barely knew. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d left the house to be with anyone other than me.

He came home the Friday before winter holidays with a length of jute twine taped to his rear belt loop. I slid it through my fingers. “What’s this?”

He shrugged as he put his mug of ginger hazelnut milk into the microwave. My tail .

“Are you doing genetic engineering in science these days?”

His smile was as mild as the May-like December. Some kids clipped it on to torture me. You know. Like: “Animal lover” or something. I just left it on .

He took his hot milk to the table, where his art supplies had been spread out for weeks, and began poring over candidates for his next portrait.

“Oh, Robin. What jerk-faces. Did Kayla know?”

He shrugged again. No biggie. Kids laughed. It was fun . He lifted his head from his work and looked at some small revelation on the wall behind me. His eyes were clear and his face inquisitive, the way he used to look on his best days when his mother was still alive. What do you suppose that’s like? Having a tail?

He smiled to himself. Painting, he made jungle sounds under his breath. In his mind, he was hanging upside down from a tree branch and waving his hands in the air.

I feel bad for them, Dad. I really do. They’re trapped inside themselves, right? Same as everyone . He thought for a minute. Except me. I’ve got my guys .

It creeped me out, the way he said it. “What guys, Robbie?”

You know . He frowned. My team. The guys inside my head .

For Christmas we drove back down to Aly’s parents’ in Chicago. Cliff and Adele were a little stiff, welcoming us. They hadn’t yet forgiven my little atheist’s Thanksgiving assault on their core beliefs. But Robbie pressed his ear into each of their bellies, and they warmed to his embrace. He proceeded to hug every one of his cousins who put up with it. In a handful of minutes, he managed to freak out Aly’s entire family.

Over the course of two days he sat through all the football and religion, took a ping-pong paddle to the temple, and watched his cousins react to his gifts—paintings of endangered species—with varying degrees of suppressed mockery. He did this all without melting down. When at last he showed signs of breaking, we were close enough to departure that I shoehorned him into the car and escaped before anything could mar our first incident-free holiday since Aly’s death.