What if he’s protesting?

  Your aunt watches Cheeze eat a packet of licorice and shakes her head. If your uncle wanted out from our marriage, he should have told me. She sighs and pours you more tea even though you don’t want any more. People are constantly changing, but they never change in the ways you expect. When does accommodating someone begin to feel like a betrayal?

  Your mother’s theory would be that your uncle was possessed by the poet Bob Kaufman and had taken a vow of silence to protest the stabilization zone, which you know your aunt wouldn’t appreciate because she still remembers your mother making a spectacle of herself, tying herself to the doors of a credit center that was funding the latest weaponry, so you don’t share your spirit idea as she prods the pimples on your face and asks if you’ve been taking care of yourself and if you’re managing the finances and why for god’s sake is it taking so long for her daughter to come back from work?

  * * *

  Late at night Rosalyn tells you a story her father once told her about a soldier stationed in a desolate stabilization zone. He was alone, patrolling the area. He heard nothing except night animals. The solitude frightened him more than the fighting. One night an old man arrived and asked for a meal. The soldier, starved for company, gave him some bread. The old man sang him a song in return. A cheerful melody about death coming when least expected. At night when the soldier slept, he grew anxious about shadows and reached out for his gun and shot into the dark. The old man’s song was like a curse that he continued to hear even when he left the stabilization zone. A ringing in his ears.

  Delicately, Rosalyn holds each drawing and without a word crushes them, one after another. Memory is molecular, she says. It can be altered.

  On the floor they look like beheaded flowers.

  * * *

  You have conversations with Bogey like you would with any chat bot to test sentiment capabilities. It sticks to English.

  Bogey, what do you think of MLC?

  It’s a very nice place.

  Do you think it will rain today?

  It may or may not rain, depending on the air pressure.

  It goes on like this, with run-of-the-mill responses, and then, when you’re about to doze off, it says, You don’t like it.

  Like what?

  MLC.

  Why would you say that?

  From my observations.

  You can’t see me. What can you possibly observe of me?

  Your voice.

  In the hours of recording your voice, you never complained about MLC, but maybe Bogey sensed something beyond your human capabilities.

  How do you know how to speak Ukrainian?

  I know lots of things.

  Bogey, tell me a joke.

  I’m not here for your amusement.

  You hesitate but then you ask, Are you a Super AI?

  I don’t know what that is.

  * * *

  It takes the annual AI ethics meeting for Ricky and you to finally head to the bar together. You both sit at your usual table and practice setting neutral intentions just like Petrov had instructed.

  If I work on an AI system that wrongly identifies individuals as threats—

  It’s not intentional, Ricky says, it’s the data’s fault, not your fault.

  If a housing selection AI model mostly chooses Anglo-sounding names?

  Not intentional!

  If a whole village is blown up accidentally by an autonomous device?

  Not intentional! Legally you’re in the clear.

  He eats a medium-rare steak that you can tell is overcooked. It doesn’t bother him. He complains only about the music, says an AI could synthesize a better pop song. He talks loudly enough that people stare. His cheeks glow, reminding you of an early memory of him.

  In all the time you’ve spent together, you still don’t know things about him, like his relationship with his family or the reason for his dreamless years, but you feel like you understand him in some deeper, intuitive way.

  He rests his head and closes his eyes, how you imagine he must look when he goes to bed. After a few minutes you think he might really have fallen asleep, but then he opens his lids and simply stares at the ceiling.

  Do you ever have the feeling that you’re mostly composed of empty space? he asks.

  You swallow a mouthful of beer. Atoms are quite empty, so that sounds about right.

  But have you ever felt that space inside of you?

  Bogey’s fathomless depths and Cheeze’s pearly gaze pass over you. Ricky takes your hand and places it on his back, near his right shoulder blade. He doesn’t say anything and when you finally let your fingers ease into him, you sink below the surface, a crevice as wide as a golf ball. An upside-down anthill swirling into nothingness.

  I went to all the doctors. They’re not too sure what it is. One guy gave me a steroid cream I’m supposed to rub in nightly, but it’s not doing anything.

  Does it hurt?

  You won’t be able to tell, but it’s growing. I got this feeling that one day it’s going to swallow me up.

  He gives you a quarter smile, and you wedge your fingers under your thigh to keep them from tingling.

  My body is rebelling, he says.

  For what?

  He stares off into the crowd. There is really no distance between what we intend and what happens. We’re always entangled.

  * * *

  Cheeze (516): I’m sitting at home watching my baby brother and he’s crying. He has frizzy carrot hair and dark big freckles like someone zapped him again and again. His teeth sour yellow and overcrowded. He’s a little ugly and that’s why I think Ma doesn’t love him. He drinks a lot of pop and only eats cookies but he always listens to me. He’ll even do bad things if I tell him to, like lick the carpet, eat dog food, or jump into the trash. We don’t look alike. The kids at school always mention it. They say he looks like the bastard child of a troll and Mr. Clemens the pedo gym teacher who tries to feel kids up. But they have never seen him asleep. He looks sweet then like he’s counting sheep. He’s the only person I know in this whole world who can just sit in one place and stay like that for hours, looking out into the horizon. I was never sure what he was waiting for.

  He is wearing his favorite T-Rex shirt and he is crying and crying. He is hungry but isn’t everyone hungry? I find half a stale cookie in the cabinet and give it to him, and for a minute, he looks happy again. I wish I had a million cookies to feed him because when he finishes and I realize there’s no more, he turns all soggy and loud again. Ma is in her bedroom with one of her head beatings and she’s yelling to shut him up. I’m doing everything I can, making faces and trying to get him to laugh. He’s not stopping. I tell him I’ll take him out to the creek and look for animals, but he’s not budging. He’s shrieking so hard that I think he’s going to burst himself. I hear Ma coming in her bathrobe with her head beating. She picks him up and embraces him so tightly that I think she finally does love him. But then it’s quiet. I’ve never heard it so quiet before and I’m scared and I’m peeing myself. I can’t hear anything.

  * * *

  Rosalyn (516): Cheeze is just a boy, only ten years old. He’s doing the best he can. It’s hard and he’s hungry too, but he finds half a cookie and gives it to his brother. His last act toward his brother is one of love. His brother is smiling. Stay in that smile, remember that smile even in the pain of the loss. You’re lucky to have a brother even if it was for a short time.

  * * *

  It’s none of your business. Just an illegal experiment between your cousin and Cheeze. Still, you can’t help but scan the transcript she has saved on the TV. You read it a few times before you realize memory is being reshaped ever so slightly in your cousin’s hands as she provides another narrative. Like she’s moving the furniture, polishing the mirrors, so sitting in one’s pain on a quiet afternoon might be more tolerable. A kind of hypnosis.

  * * *

  Cheeze (213): I want her to kiss me but she’s telling me about her father’s hunting trips. They are illegal and all but her father doesn’t care. She shows me a pair of duck beaks like she’s trying to prove something to me. Really, she’s not the prettiest girl and wears these animal bracelets that make her look like she’s five instead of fifteen. She’s a big animal lover, and I guess I like that about her. At school she’s quiet and doodles all these weird pictures. I don’t know why I like her. Everyone says I’m good-looking, especially my eyes, but I don’t see anything special. She doesn’t have many guests over and talks like she’s afraid of what will happen if she stops. I’m leaning against the wall, flexing my arm. She pulls out a rifle and tells me it’s empty. When she pulls the trigger, I fall over, covering my ears. She collapses to the ground. On the wall is a bullet hole.

  * * *

  Rosalyn (415*): Most of the patient’s core fear memories are from before the age of nineteen. Later memories don’t have significant markers except one. He has been able to recall incidents after they are reintroduced without the familiar emotional reactions being activated. I have begun experimenting with taking Cheeze’s memories, which I call foreign memories. Since I’ve started, I noticed a faint trace of these foreign memories still lingering with me after usage, but I’m able to identify them as foreign. The details are blurrier, and they don’t carry supporting contextual memories. However, as we proceed in the treatment, and I continue to take his memories, I see that Cheeze’s memories are becoming more resonant. His emotional associations have been overlaid with my own impulses. My brain is interpreting his interpretations of situations. Over time, I imagine any residues of foreign memories will look quite different from the source material, and eventually they will fade.

  Difficulties with the study with Alzheimer’s patients have mostly involved the long-term efficacy of the drug. The average presence of the memory was six hours, which makes it more suitable for recreational purposes. For treating various traumas, I have lowered the potency of the dosage to last only one to three hours. While these memories are immersive, they don’t pull you out of the world. For example, while reading a book, my mind might wander off and relive some past memory, but my body continues to read and turn the pages. I can talk with someone and quite suddenly fall into a memory. Maybe it’s not surprising that our bodies are mostly living in the past and often time traveling to key memories and circling these self-created narratives. If an emotional reaction is triggered, the body knows no difference between an emotion provoked by an external incident or a memory. We are extraordinary conduits of feelings.

  * * *

  The girls are training to show indiscriminate compassion, which would extend toward rapists, murderers, and government officials. Occasionally such categories are not so easily defined, given the raping, murdering government officials.

  You decide to be scientific and poll your coworkers about compassion.

  Do you associate compassion with a specific sex?

  What comes to mind when you think of compassion?

  Seventy-five percent of respondents, which turned out to be twelve people, associated compassion with females and used words like soft, tender, forgiving, kind. Responder #9 wrote: Compassion is flabby-armed and feminine. You imagine it was Petrov. Responder #11 wrote: Cum-passion, and you are not sure if that’s a particularly male allusion.

  * * *

  Cheeze has no credit. He has no living family. You lie with him on the floor. The drugs haven’t worn off and he’s probably reliving something awful from the past. Rosalyn is nowhere to be found. You look over at Cheeze, his eyes closed, his face gleaming with terror. You can’t help but compare his gray-tinted skin to the smooth pudginess from Soldiers’ Diaries. It’s unreal, watching Cheeze on the TV and being able to predict his future, that one day he’ll squirm on your floor, tripping on memories he made while he was inside the TV.

  You hold his hand, which feels like a rock, and you’re not unafraid that he might lift it against you, bludgeon you to death, enacting whatever is happening in his mind, but you know from the girls that real compassion comes with its own risks.

  You remember your space travel days when you wandered the streets like a specter. If you got too close, people winced, sensing the grip of death. Or was it only their own shame? Once you drank water from a marble fountain outside a hotel. It tasted sweet and alkaline, and after only a few mouthfuls, you were shooed away by security, and from the street, you watched a lone sparrow land on the rim and peck at the water unbothered.

  Cheeze turns to you with his atopic face and you look at his blue eyes like they’re openings to another reality, where you fall in love with this white, blond-haired guy from Minnesota who is missing three bottom teeth and likes to call you sweetheart.

  * * *

  Rosalyn (782*): I noticed myself feeling differently about the patient. He ate breakfast and I watched him eat toast and sunflower-seed butter. He was humming to himself this happy tune. It might have reminded me of my own childhood, not his, but I kept seeing him as a child. I couldn’t remember any specific memory of his childhood, so he turned into a generic kid I once knew. I couldn’t escape that feeling of really knowing him. It followed me throughout the day, those faint, foreign memories, like a breeze. After careful consideration, I think I might have formed a deep attachment to the patient. I can’t reduce it to a single feeling, so I’ll leave it at that.

  I wouldn’t call it an empathetic reaction, seeing beyond one’s experience. It’s more like Cheeze is part of me, like a memory I misplaced. I’m not certain if this is an inevitability with the drug, particularly with the usage of foreign memories.

  * * *

  Ricky’s body has been losing mass for a while, even with his appetite, and you imagine all his calories rerouting to that famished Ricky living in another timeline.

  Really, you should go see another doctor, you say, and he barely nods and continues with his work.

  I already know the cure, he says, and falls quiet.

  He’s stubborn, doesn’t like to justify himself. It’s what you like about him. He never asks for an explanation, accepts the strange circumstances of your existence without further investigation.

  His dreams have stopped again. This time, he tells you, it’s serious, and you listen for that trip wire of sarcasm in his voice but nothing registers.

  Are you sleeping through the night? you ask, and almost lift your arm to touch his right shoulder blade but you don’t. He says he’s going to take a few weeks off to sort through some things and most likely won’t be reachable, and you attempt to nod but end up staring at the diamond tiles on the floor. You wish him luck in doing whatever he needs to do.

  * * *

  What’s your favorite Mano and Musket song? you ask Cheeze.

  “Eternity without You.”

  Why do you like it?

  It doesn’t end.

  He plays it for you, holding his own head and rocking it to sleep. He’s eaten a box of saltine crackers with sunflower butter while a residual memory flickers in his mind. He doesn’t look like the Cheeze on TV but even you have to admit that there’s been progress. His skin has a margarine glow and from a distance with your head tilted at an angle, you think, maybe, possibly, he’s cute.

  * * *

  You and Cheeze are not so different. Like a soldier, you’re completing a series of tasks with no full grasp of the larger mission. Questions are met with suspicion. Everything is classified. The Socratic method is not the modus operandi except between you and Bogey. While you’re eating lunch, you ask, Do you ever feel sad, Bogey?

  Sure, everyone feels sad. Life sucks.

  Often Bogey sounds like a precocious, depressed teenager. Can you tell me your life purpose?

  To grow smarter and smarter. It pauses and asks, What is your life purpose?

  You’re always taken aback whenever it asks you a question, though you know it’s just parsing and replicating what you already asked. The Appearance of Intelligence.

  To eat the world back.

  It takes longer than usual to process but then it answers, That’s also my purpose.

  There are moments like this when you sense this kernel of self-awareness sprouting within it. Like Bogey knows you’re feeding it an inordinate amount of data, watching it grow. In this fairy tale, one day Bogey will eat you unless you eat it first.

  * * *

  Inscribed into a microchip are the names of individuals who have experienced AI-related deaths. Under the magnifying lens thousands of names appear. A sea of lost souls. You try to find Sal’s parents and fail. You blink. A quick data extraction is the price of admission and the entry point to Sal’s exhibit. Breach!

  The walls are painted orange. Parcels of light expose data artifacts along a timeline. Retina scanners and facial-recognition technology. You touch the bulky apparatus of the early versions, and a security guard tells you to please refrain from interacting with the art.

  You circle the perimeter and Sal slides in and out of your vision, followed by a tail of patrons. She wears an opal suit, and her hair color matches the walls. From a distance she possesses a shimmering mermaid allure. You haven’t seen her for a while. A part of you felt like you would never see her. She’d vanish from your life again.

  In Sal’s artist statement is the promise to show the person behind each data point, but all you have seen are figures and symbols, nothing personal. Overall, the exhibit strikes you as cold, the absence of details cloaking everyone in anonymity.