Richard Powers - Bewilderment

The influencer followed up the invitation with several enigmatic emojis. All kinds of other influencers and non-influencers started to repost her post, and the resulting streaming jam caused the Ova Nova servers to choke for an hour. Nothing built more interest in free content than the supply briefly running out.

According to Currier, the hip flooded in on Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday and Friday, the mainstream arrived, and the late-to-the-party showed up over the weekend. Apparently, someone ripped the video and uploaded it to a pair of archive sites. Somebody else trimmed out a clip of Robin and ran it through a filter, making his eerie words sound even eerier. People were using it on message boards, in chats and text, at the bottom of their mail signatures…

I held the phone with one hand and poked a search into my tablet with the other. Three common words, in quotes, and there Robbie was, looking and sounding like a visitor from a galaxy far, far away.

“Shit.”

Laughter trickled from Robbie’s room. I heard that!

“What do you suggest I do about this? What am I supposed to tell him?”

“Theo. The thing is, we’re also hearing from journalists.”

Which meant they’d be on my front stoop in another few heartbeats. “No,” I said, almost spitting. “No more. I’m done with this. We’re not talking to anyone else.”

“That’s fine. I’d advise you not to, in fact.”

Currier sounded almost composed. But then, he stood to profit massively from the flash fad. Robin did not.

I couldn’t tell how much trouble we were in. Maybe the whole viral thing would blow over as quickly as it had blown up. Most of the people who were thumbing the clip and passing it along probably didn’t even bother watching it all the way through. It was just a bit of weather, and there would be several more clips to thumb and pass along before the day was out.

But while Currier told me not to worry, mass cascades of error-correcting bits surged in waves of electromagnetic radiation around the planet’s surface. They blasted in vertical geysers 35,786 kilometers upward into space and rained back down at 300 million meters per second. They coursed in bundles of parallel light through fiber conduits only to fan out in bursts of radio across the open air at the whim of tens of millions of grazing fingers coaxing electrons from hundreds of millions of spots on capacitive touch screens a few inches high. Robin’s streams were the slightest blip in the race’s desperate search for mass diversion. As a fraction of the feed produced and consumed that day, a few hundred billion bits of information were like a single pip on the surface of a strawberry at the end of an eight-course dinner. But these bits were my son, and, reassembled, they held the record of his face on a late afternoon by the side of a lake telling a perfect stranger, Everybody’s inside everyone .

Currier said, “Let’s stay calm and see how this plays out.”

Hanging up on him got easier with practice.

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.

ROBIN WAS THOUGHTFUL but cautious. Do they want me, or do they really want Jay?

“They definitely want you.”

Cool. But what do I have to do?

“You don’t have to do anything. You don’t even have to say yes if you don’t want to.”

They want me to talk about the training and Mom’s brain and stuff ?

“Dr. Currier would describe all that, before you went on.”

So what am I supposed to do?

“Just be yourself.” The words turned meaningless in my mouth.

His eyes got that faraway look. My timid boy, who spent years avoiding contact with strangers, was calculating how much fun it might be to spill the secret of life to the general public from the lip of a large stage.

A week before the event, I started to decompensate. I regretted letting him agree to anything. If he bombed, it could scar him for life. If he crushed it, he’d climb up the ladder of COG regions and be loved by ten times more people than loved him now. Both possibilities made me ill.

The evening before the event, after Robin finished the day’s last math packet, he came to me in my study, where I sat behind a stack of ungraded undergrad exams, vigorously doing nothing. He walked around behind my chair and put his hands on my trapezius. Then he called out the commands I used to get him to relax, back in the day. Jelly up!