The things moved between caves in which lay the hulks of ships, almost all too strange to describe.
And somewhere distant, somewhere near the heart of the rock, in a matriarchal chamber all of its own, something drummed out messages to its companions and helpers, stiffly articulated antlerlike forelimbs beating against stretched tympana of finely veined skin, something that had been waiting here for eternities, something that wanted nothing more than to care for the souls of the lost.
Katerina's with Suzy when they pull me out of the surge tank.
It's bad-one of the worst revivals I've ever gone through. I feel as if every vein in my body has been filled with finely powdered glass. For a moment, a long moment, even the idea of breathing seems insurmountably difficult, too hard, too painful even to contemplate.
But it passes, as it always passes.
After a while I can not only breathe, I can move and talk. 'Where…'
'Easy, Skip,' Suzy says. She leans over the tank and starts unplugging me. I can't help but smile. Suzy's smart- there isn't a better syntax runner in Ashanti Industrial-but she's also beautiful. It's like being nursed by an angel.
I wonder if Katerina's jealous.
'Where are we?' I try again. 'Feels like I was in that thing for an eternity. Did something go wrong?'
'Minor routing error,' Suzy says. 'We took some damage and they decided to wake me first. But don't sweat about it. At least we're in one piece.'
Routing errors. You hear about them, but you hope they're never going to happen to you.
'What kind of delay?'
'Forty days. Sorry, Thorn. Bang goes our bonus.'
In anger, I hammer the side of the surge tank. But Kate-rina steps toward me and places a calming hand on my shoulder.
'It's all right,' she says. 'You're home and dry. That's all that matters.'
I look at her and for a moment remember someone else, someone I haven't thought about in years. I almost remember her name, and then the moment passes.
I nod. 'Home and dry.'
Second Person, Present Tense by DARYL GREGORY
From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006) and Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection (2006)
Daryl Gregory (darylgregory.com) lives in State College, Pennsylvania, with his wife, a psychologist and university professor, and their two children. He is a full-time writer, although half of what he writes is web code for a software company. His stories have appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy amp; Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, and elsewhere. He's working on his first novel, a science-fantasy about demonic possession and golden age comics.
'Second Person, Present Tense' appeared in Asimov's, and is certainly one of the stories that made that magazine a leader in the field in 2005. Gregory postulates a drug that can destroy the construction of self. A teenage girl overdosed, and the new replacement self has been, in effect, raised for a couple of years by her neurologist. Now she has to go back to the family that raised the original personality that she can remember, but whom she is not. Good science and good writing make this story a candidate for the single best SF story of the year.
If you think, 'I breathe,' the 'I' is extra. There is no you to say 'I.' What we call 'I' is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale or when we exhal e.
- Shun Ryu Suzuki
I used to think the brain was the most important organ in the body, until I realized who was telling me that.
- Emo Phillips
When I enter the office, Dr. S is leaning against the desk, talking earnestly to the dead girl's parents. He isn't happy, but when he looks up he puts on a smile for me. 'And here she is,' he says, like a game show host revealing the grand prize. The people in the chairs turn, and Dr. Subramaniam gives me a private, encouraging wink.
The father stands first, a blotchy, square-faced man with a tight belly he carries like a basketball. As in our previous visits, he is almost frowning, straggling to match his face to his emotions. The mother, though, has already been crying, and her face is wide open: joy, fear, hope, relief. It's way over the top.
'Oh, Therese,' she says. 'Are you ready to come home?' Their daughter was named Therese. She died of an overdose almost two years ago, and since then Mitch and Alice Klass have visited this hospital dozens of times, looking fo her. They desperately want me to be their daughter, and so in their heads I already am.
My hand is still on the door handle. 'Do I have a choice?' On paper I'm only seventeen years old. I have no money, no credit cards, no job, no car. I own only a handful of clothes. And Robierto, the burliest orderly on the ward, is in the hallway behind me, blocking my escape.
Therese's mother seems to stop breathing for a moment. She's a slim, narrow-boned woman who seems tall until she stands next to anyone. Mitch raises a hand to her shoulder, then drops it.
As usual, whenever Alice and Mitch come to visit, I feel like I've walked into the middle of a soap opera and no one's given me my lines. I look directly at Dr. S, and his face is frozen into that professional smile. Several times over the past year he's convinced them to let me stay longer, but they're not listening anymore. They're my legal guardians, and they have Other Plans. Dr. S looks away from me, rubs the side of his nose.
'That's what I thought,' I say.
The father scowls. The mother bursts into fresh tears, and she cries all the way out of the building. Dr. Subramaniam watches from the entrance as we drive away, his hands in his pockets. I've never been so angry with him in my life-all two years of it.
The name of the drug is Zen, or Zombie, or just Z. Thanks to Dr. S I have a pretty good idea of how it killed Therese.
'Flick your eyes to the left,' he told me one afternoon. 'Now glance to the right. Did you see the room blur as your eyes moved?' He waited until I did it again. 'No blur. No one sees it.'
This is the kind of thing that gets brain doctors hot and bothered. Not only could no one see the blur, their brains edited it out completely. Skipped over it-left view, then right view, with nothing between-then fiddled with the person's time sense so that it didn't even seem missing.
The scientists figured out that the brain was editing out shit all the time. They wired up patients and told them to lift one of their fingers, move it any time they wanted. Each time, the brain started the signal traveling toward the finger up to I20 milliseconds before the patient consciously decided to move it. Dr. S said you could see the brain warming up right before the patient consciously thought, now.
This is weird, but it gets weirder the longer you think about it. And I've been thinking about this a lot.
The conscious mind-the 'I' that's thinking, hey, I'm thirsty, I'll reach for that cold cup of water-hasn't really decided anything. The signal to start moving your hand has already traveled halfway down your arm by the time you even realize you are thirsty. Thought is an afterthought. By the way, the brain says, we've decided to move your arm, so please have the thought to move it.
The gap is normally I20 milliseconds, max. Zen extends this minutes. Hours.
If you run into somebody who's on Zen, you won't notice much. The person's brain is still making decisions, and the body still follows orders. You can talk to the them, and they can talk to you. You can tell each other jokes, go out for hamburgers, do homework, have sex.
But the person isn't conscious. There is no 'I' there. You might as well be talking to a computer. And two people on Zen-'you' and 'I'-are just puppets talking to puppets.
