Richard Powers - Bewilderment

Get up, dude. I’m training today. And I have so much homework to do before we go. Thanks to you!

He wanted to walk to Currier’s lab. The lab was four miles from our house, a two-hour walk in each direction. I wasn’t crazy about spending half a day on the adventure, but that was all the birthday present he wanted.

Maples blazed orange against the sky’s deep blue. Robbie took his smallest sketchbook. He held it in the crook of his arm, scribbling into it as we walked. He slowed down for the most banal things. An ant mound. A gray squirrel. An oak leaf on the sidewalk with veins as red as licorice. He and his mother had left me far behind, Earthbound. I needed a moment alone with Aly myself, to visit that ecstasy whose source she never revealed to me. Currier had turned me down for the training once before. But this morning felt like ultimatum time.

Despite my constant prodding, we got to the lab ten minutes late. I came in the door apologizing. Ginny and a pair of lab assistants were huddled in conversation. They broke off, startled to see us. Ginny shook her head, distressed. “I’m so sorry, guys. We need to cancel for today. I should have called.”

I couldn’t tell what was up. But before I could press her, Currier appeared from the back hallway. “Theo. Can we talk?”

We headed to his office. Ginny snagged Robin by the shoulder. “Want to check out the sea slugs?” Robin lit up, and she led him away.

I’d never seen Martin Currier move so slowly. He waved for me to sit. He remained standing, hovering near the window. “We’ve been put on hold. The Office for Human Research Protections sent an interdiction letter last night.”

My first thought was for my son’s safety. “Is there a problem with the technique?”

Currier swung to face me. “Aside from how promising it is?” He waved an apology and composed himself. “We’ve been told to halt all further experiments funded in whole or part by Health and Human Services, pending a review for possible violations of human subject protection.”

“Wait. HHS? That doesn’t happen.”

His mouth soured again at my quaint objection. He crossed to his desk and sat. He pecked at his keyboard. A moment later, he read from the screen. “‘There is concern that your procedures may be violating the integrity, autonomy, and sanctity of your research subjects.’”

“ Sanctity? ”

He shrugged. It made no sense. DecNef was a simple, self-modulating therapy showing good results. Labs across the country were conducting far dodgier trials. More drastic experiments were being run inside the bodies of hundreds of thousands of kids every day. But someone in Washington was keen to enforce the new human protection guidelines.

“The government doesn’t arbitrarily shut down reasonable science. Did you do something to alienate someone in power?”

Currier inhaled, and it dawned on me. He hadn’t done anything. My meme of a son had. The elections were coming, and the parties were neck-and-neck. In a single gesture, designed to make the news, agents of the chaos-seeking administration had played to the Human Sanctity Crusade, slapped down the environmental movement, pissed on science, saved taxpayer money, thrown red meat to the base, and shut down a novel threat to commodity culture.

Marty held my gaze—a neural feedback all its own. He was having as much trouble with the idea as I was. The law of parsimony demanded a simpler explanation. But neither of us had one. He pushed his rolling chair away from the computer and massaged his face with both hands. “Needless to say, this kills any chance of licensing the technique. If I were a paranoid person…” He was paranoid enough to leave the thought unfinished.

“What will you do?”

“Comply with the investigators and make my case to the appeals board. What else can I do? Maybe it’ll turn out to be a short-lived nuisance.”

“And in the meantime…?”

He looked at me askance. “You want to know what will happen to him, without any more treatments.”

It shamed me, but he was right. The trap evolution shaped for us: the entire species might have been on the line, and I’d still worry first about my son.

“The honest answer is: We don’t know. We have fifty-six subjects pursuing some form of feedback. They’re all going to be yanked violently out of their training. We’re in uncharted waters. There’s no data for what happens next.” He looked around his office, the inspirational posters and 3-D brain teasers. “With luck, he has achieved permanent orbit. Maybe he’ll keep making gains on his own. But DecNef could be like any other kind of exercise. When you stop working out, the health gains degrade and you regress back toward your body’s set point. Life is a machine for homeostasis.”

“What do I do if there are changes?”

He seemed to want to ask a favor, scientist to scientist. “I’d ask you to keep bringing him in for evaluation if I could. But I can’t, until this investigation is over.”

“Clear,” I said. Although nothing was.

ROBIN WAS PHILOSOPHICAL, WALKING HOME. It’s still the experiment, right? Whatever happens, we’ll learn something interesting .

I wasn’t sure if he was consoling me or educating me in the scientific method. I couldn’t concentrate. I was thinking of all the legitimate scientific research that might be shut down between now and Election Day, on no better grounds than political caprice. We were, as Marty said, in uncharted waters.

“It’s temporary. They’re just on hold for a while.”

Do they think the training is dangerous or something?

The maples were too orange. My mail notification sounded. I could smell winter on the air, two thousand miles and three days away. Robbie tugged at my sleeve.

This isn’t because of Washington, is it?

“Oh, no, Robbie. Of course not.”

He twitched at the tone in my voice. My mail bell dinged again. Robbie stopped in place on the sidewalk and said the strangest thing. Dad? If you went to sea or to war… if something happened to you? If you had to die? I would just hold still and think of how your hands move when you walk, and then you’d still be here .

After dinner, he asked me to quiz him with flash cards of state flowers. Before bed, he entertained me with tales from a planet where a day lasted only an hour, but an hour lasted longer than a year. And years had different lengths. Time sped up and slowed down, depending on your latitude. Some old people were younger than young people. Things that happened long ago were sometimes closer than yesterday. Everything was so confusing that people gave up on keeping time and made do with Now. It was a good world. I’m glad he made that one.

He shocked me by kissing me good night, on the mouth, the way he always insisted on when he was six. Trust me, Dad. I’m a hundred percent good. We can keep the training going by ourselves. You and me .

THAT FIRST TUESDAY IN NOVEMBER, online conspiracy theories, compromised ballots, and bands of armed poll protesters undermined the integrity of the vote in six different battleground states. The country slid into three days of chaos. On Saturday, the President declared the entire election invalid. He ordered a repeat, claiming it would require at least three more months to secure and implement. Half the electorate revolted against the plan. The other half was gung-ho for a retry. Where suspicion was total and facts were settled with the like button, there was no other way forward but to do over.

I wondered how I might explain the crisis to an anthropologist from Promixa Centauri. In this place, with such a species, trapped in such technologies, even a simple head count grew impossible. Only pure bewilderment kept us from civil war.