Those were all justifications; beneath those reasons, that blue light exuded cool. There was a strange sexiness to it; an embrace of something corporate but beyond corporate, with no commercial use, no add-ons, no in-app purchases. She watched her Piloted officemates with actual jealousy.
She knew how much it would bother Val if she got one. Val worried in infinite permutations; the little insecurities would grow. Val would wonder if Julie was thinking about other things when they were together. She would resent the split attention on family nights, even if Julie did it to help the family. It wouldn’t be worth the stress on their relationship.
But did you wait until everyone had one? Until you were left hopelessly behind? She wouldn’t have signed up for the first year of a product like this, the same as she never bought a car from a model’s first year of manufacture. Val’s mechanic father, even more careful than his daughter, had taught Julie that one before he died.
This wasn’t the first year, though. According to the pamphlets David had left around the house, the company had done years of trials on rats and adolescent chimps. This was the fifth year for the earliest human adopters, and the third for teenagers, though Val had seen it for the first time in her school only the previous spring.
Julie went so far as to call some of those early adopters’ parents. She asked David for names from his own school, rather than rely on referrals provided by the company. Nobody spoke badly of it. One parent said her son had gone from Cs and Ds to As and Bs. Julie was glad the B grades were mentioned; she would have been less likely to believe a mother who said her child’s mediocre grades had been replaced by perfection. The B implied the Pilot was a booster, not a panacea. It couldn’t entirely replace natural ability and study skills and applying oneself. It couldn’t replace her child.
• • •
Julie and Val decided Julie would take David to the consultation appointment without Val. Balkenhol Neural Labs’ Pilot Installation Center was a sleek and modern stand-alone building in an upscale mall’s parking lot. If they put the same money and thought into the devices as the architecture, Julie thought, David would be in good hands.
They were met at the door by an efficient-looking redheaded white woman whose entire job appeared to be tech store–style triage. She found their appointment on her tablet and led them down a spotless hallway, gray walled, lights echoing the one on the redhead’s temple. They were brought to a cozy room with four chairs around a glass table and a window onto a central greenhouse, lush and bright.
“Impressions, kiddo?”
David stroked his single chin whisker reverently, a move that had been amusing both his parents since they’d noticed it. “It doesn’t feel like a doctor’s office. It’s more comfortable.”
There was a knock on the door. “Hi, I’m Dr. Jordaan. You’re David and Julie?”
The doctor shook hands with them and indicated the chairs she wanted them to sit in. She had tight, springy curls on top of her head, the sides shaved to let her Pilot stand out against her dark skin. Her white coat was tailored and immaculate, and she exuded confidence. Julie appreciated that she’d greeted David, the potential patient, first; they’d met so many doctors who talked past little Sophie as if she weren’t in the room.
“So, David, I hear you’re interested in a Pilot.” Dr. Jordaan had a slight accent Julie couldn’t place. “I’ve looked over the health records your doctor sent over, and I think you’re a good candidate, but first I want to tell you what the Pilot can and can’t do for you.”
David nodded, as serious as Julie had ever seen him.
“Your friends may have told you it lets you concentrate on multiple things at once, but that isn’t quite true. What it does is it lets you approximate functional multitasking.”
“How?” Julie pressed. That phrase was verbatim out of the brochure.
Dr. Jordaan pointed to her Pilot. “Stimulation of the right temporoparietal junction, behind here. The rTPJ is associated with reorienting attention in response to unexpected stimuli. What we’ve discovered is that rTPJ stimulation results in the ability to get as close to actual multitasking as a person can currently get.”
“So it’s not actual multitasking?”
“Functionally so. As close as a person can get. Closer than anything you can imagine until you have this in your head. I would have killed to have this in med school, let me tell you. You don’t even know how distracted you are until you feel the difference. Speaking for myself, it’s a powerful, competent feeling.”
David had told Julie his questions in the car on the way over, but now he just looked at the doctor’s Pilot with open longing. Julie had to admit the description sounded glorious, but she tried to ask the questions that careful Val would ask. Will it change his personality? Not his personality, only his mood, and only for the better; people with Pilots reported they were happier, less stressed, less tired. What’s the youngest age you recommend it for? It doesn’t affect brain development; it’s been successfully installed in children as young as thirteen. Julie probed for flaws, to make it more real and less miraculous. In the end she settled on the one boy’s B grades: no perfection, only improvement.
What was so wrong with perfection, anyway? She thought of David sitting at the dining room table, running his hand through his hair as he worked on math problems until it all stood on end, the hair and the math. She wanted all the good things for him, the happiness and the wakefulness and the stress reduction. She wanted him to succeed, though she’d never say it out loud; she didn’t want to put it on either kid that they had to
