After Mind Read Online Free PDF Page B

he turned. “We’re inputting through a set of controls in the lab next door. Meg is holding the implant.”
    “What implant?” Packet asked.
    Meg rushed over to the instrument tray and slammed it loud with her two open palms. She held up an implant with its dangling magnetic coupler that had appeared on the tray like magic. She cocked her head and hollered, “Cochlear!”
    He laughed. “That’s not even close to my ear,” he said. What in the world could have made her so angry? He stuck his fingertip deep into his ear and twisted a silly face.
    A knock rattled the wooden door on the right. Packet lowered his finger from his ear.
    “He’s here,” Meg said, setting the implant back on the tray.
    “Who is?” Packet wiggled himself farther upright on his bed.
    “The man who paid for all this,” Daniel said. He took a big breath and exhaled. Meg quieted, too. “Dr. Luegner wanted to see you before you went to sleep tonight,” Daniel said as he straightened himself and went over to answer the door. “He won’t be here long. Be yourself. Be good. Just . . . don’t be too much of yourself right now. Okay?” Daniel asked.
    “Okay.”
    The door on the right creaked open and a silver-haired man peeked through. Daniel’s stance blocked the man’s face.
    “Can I come in?” the man whispered.
    Meg moped back to the nightstand and fiddled with the bed sheets. She feigned a smile without raising her head. Her smile was truer as a frown.
    “Why do you and Terri look so much younger?” the man asked Daniel, blinking one eye. “The video feed of my contact is receiving. I can see this whole room fine.”
    “We’re streaming images from the mainframe’s perceived visual field, live as it processes and thinks them, out to the receptors in your lens. Terri and I are in the studio next door with the camera on us and we’re transmitting our images back into the mainframe’s simulated visual cortex. This room that you see is the composite in his mind; him sitting in his own self-image, us the way he last remembers us, and you, the way he sees you now. Except that I have our privacy filter on.”
    “Your youthful age?”
    “I don’t want him to see the real us just yet. You’re seeing the way he remembers us. Last time Cessini saw me, I was fifty. Terri was twelve. He’s only going by what he knows,” Daniel said and stepped away from the door. “Here, move to your left, more into the frame of your camera.”
    The man entered the room from the door. He had an aqua-blue collar and darker blue cuffs that stuck out from under the sleeves of his navy pinstripe suit. He stared at first then made a seemingly random search with his eyes: up, down, left, then right as he oriented himself, taking in the full scope of the room.
    So why do I look like that, also so young?” the man asked. “I haven’t worn that suit in a decade.”
    “I’d rather you say, ‘Why do I look like this?’ Not ‘like that.’ You have to imagine we’re in the same room. It’d be rude otherwise. He can hear you,” Daniel said. “Besides, you have your camera filter on. We’re feeding in your general movement, your body and obscured face. But he’s clarifying you in his mind, visualizing you from the last memory he has of you. It’s natural perception.”
    “So he’s hallucinating the parts of me he can’t see?”
    “It’s what we do instinctively, as humans,” Daniel said. “He knows you’re not simply a shape.”
    Packet shied away as his dad and the man talked. If he stared any more, they’d realize he could hear every word, so he fiddled with Meg’s tuck of his sheets instead. Meg’s smile was nice.
    The man leaned back against the door. He crossed his polished black shoes.
    “He remembers that suit when he thinks of you,” Daniel said. “A decade ago for us was only yesterday for him. You had called our home. You were wearing that suit.”
    “Okay, fine, so this room is a stage in the software theater of his