Terms and Conditions

Harold

The Paperton Public Library has forty-one computers, and forty of them are watched by a little black dome on the ceiling that the librarians swear is for "patron safety." The forty-first sits in the back corner, between Large Print Westerns and a radiator that clanks like somebody's trapped in it. Nobody uses that one, because it's slow, and because it's next to the Westerns, and the Westerns smell like 1978.

I'd sat three feet from that computer every Thursday for two years, reading Louis L'Amour and pretending I was warm. I never once noticed there was no camera above it.

That's the thing about seeing. You can be very good at it and still miss what's right next to you.

It took me forty minutes to get Ghostline open in the browser. Twenty of those minutes were the computer. The other twenty were me, typing my own name into things and then panicking and deleting it, because Toshi had said don't say my name on a phone, and I didn't know if a library computer counted as a phone. At my age everything counts as a phone.

I typed in the string from the napkin. The screen went black, then gray, and then there was a blinking cursor and nothing else. No logo. No cheerful mascot. No owl thanking me for speaking up.

I typed the way I was raised to write letters.

Dear Toshi, I wrote. It was good to see you at the Rusty Nickel. I have thought a great deal about what you said. I would like to know more. Regards, Harold Horcross.

The reply came so fast I jumped.

dont sign your name, it said. ever.

Apologies, I wrote back. Force of habit. Regards, H.

A long pause. Then: ok thats fine actually.

We went on like that for an hour. Him in little lowercase bursts, like a telegraph operator with somewhere to be. Me in paragraphs, because if I'm going to commit a federal crime, I'm going to use complete sentences.

He told me he'd worked at Proxy. He told me he'd been fired by an email. He told me there was a thing in a storage unit that he wasn't going to describe over any network, however encrypted, because the thing in the storage unit was worth more than the city of Paperton, and the people who wanted it back owned computers that made Ghostline look like two cans on a string.

Then he told me what the thing needed.

it needs a pilot, he wrote. it can move on its own but only for short stuff. walking. standing. basic reflex. the real stuff, talking, deciding, being someone, needs a human mind on the other end.

What sort of human mind?

the kind with a neural interface. which i dont have. and which costs more than both of our houses.

I don't own a house, I wrote. I rent a room above a dry cleaner.

fine. more than both of us will make for the rest of our lives.

There was a long pause. The radiator clanked. Somewhere behind me, a toddler was being told, gently and firmly, that we do not lick the globe.

one more thing, he wrote. theres code in it i cant read. not encrypted. some of it started as mine. an old side project. but it grew. it learns. from everything. most of it isnt written by anyone i know now. deep in the firmware, dormant. my best guess is some kind of autopilot. something that takes over eventually. i dont know what triggers it. i dont know what it wants.

I read that last line four times.

Machines don't want things, I wrote.

The cursor blinked for a long time before his answer came.

Sure.

That was all he wrote. But I'd been a teacher for thirty-one years, and I knew what "sure" meant from a student. It meant you'll see.

Here's the part I still can't explain, and I've tried. Neither of us suggested it. I'd swear to that in court. I scrolled back through the whole conversation later, looking for the moment one of us said let's put an old man in a robot and see what happens, and it isn't there. There's just him saying it needs a pilot, and me saying nothing, and then a few minutes later both of us talking as if it had been decided years ago. Like we were remembering the plan instead of making it.

My mother used to say that some ideas are too big to belong to one person. She said it about the Constitution and about her meatloaf recipe. I used to think she was being dramatic.

* * *

The letter came on Monday.

I almost threw it away. It was a nice envelope, thick paper, the kind of cream color that means somebody paid extra, and nobody pays extra to write to me unless they're about to ask for something. The return address said MINDLINK LABS, with a logo like a brain made of little glowing dots, holding hands with itself.

> Dear Mr. Horcross, > > Congratulations! Based on your demographic and cognitive profile, you have been selected for Phase II of the Mindlink NeuroBridge™ Clinical Study. > > We are seeking healthy adults over 65 with a background in fine motor expression (such as art, music, or craftsmanship) to help us build a more connected tomorrow. > > Participants will receive a monthly stipend, all procedures at no cost, and the satisfaction of contributing to the future of human potential. > > Mindlink: Your Mind, Amplified.

I read it at my kitchen table, which is also my dining table, my desk, and on bad weeks my pharmacy. Then I read it again.

A background in fine motor expression. Such as art.

I had never applied to anything at Mindlink Labs. I had never heard of Mindlink Labs. I'd been retired for six years, and in six years nobody had needed a man who could draw a hand. Now, three days after I drew a robot on a napkin, a company with a glowing brain for a logo wanted me specifically, for my hands and my eyes and my age.

The stipend, I noticed, was eight hundred dollars a month. In today's money, that would buy a very nice used lawnmower. I don't own a lawn. I'd accepted anyway, in my head, before I'd finished the paragraph. That's what being poor does. It makes you say yes to things before you understand them.

I took the letter to the library.

Toshi, I have received a letter, I wrote.

I typed the whole thing out for him, word for word, including the trademark symbol, which took me eleven minutes to find.

no way, he wrote. Then, in capitals, which from Toshi was practically a scream: NO WAY. harold thats a neural interface trial. thats the exact thing we need. thats insane luck.

Is it luck?

youre an old artist in the rust belt, he wrote. youre literally their target demographic. they probably mailed ten thousand of these. this is the universe handing us a key.

He was so happy. I could hear it even in lowercase. And I thought about the little glowing brain holding hands with itself, and about how nobody had wanted me for anything in six years, and I decided that for once in my life I was going to let a good thing be a good thing.

I would think about that decision a lot, later. But I don't regret it. Most of the best things I ever did, I did before I understood them.

* * *

The Mindlink clinic was in a converted Applebee's off the interstate. You could still see the ghost of the old sign on the brick where the letters had been pried off. Inside it was all white and quiet, and it smelled like a new car and a hospital had a baby.

The consent form was forty-seven pages. I read every one of them, because I'm a retired schoolteacher and I have graded worse.

Most of it was the usual. Risk of infection. Risk of headache. Risk of "unanticipated neurological phenomena," which I took to mean they didn't know either. But on page thirty-eight, in type so small it looked like a hairline crack in the paper, was this:

> All data generated by the participant's neural activity during and after the Study, including but not limited to motor intent, sensory response, emotional valence, and cognitive pattern, shall be the sole property of Mindlink Labs and its partners.

Its partners. I asked the nurse who the partners were.

She smiled the way people smile at an old man who asks questions. "Oh, just the usual," she said.

I signed. I thought about the stipend and the storage unit and the President stopping like a paused video, and I signed my full name, Harold Horcross, in real ink, with a flourish. Toshi would have hated it.

The surgery was nothing. That's the part nobody tells you. They put you under, and a robot arm the size of a dentist's lamp does something to the back of your skull, and you wake up with a headache and a shaved patch and the vague feeling that you've forgotten a word. I lay there afterward in a recliner that had probably been a booth, drinking apple juice from a tiny carton, and I felt exactly the same.

Then, for just a second, I felt the room.

Not heard it. Felt it. The hum of the lights. The Wi-Fi in the walls. The heartbeat monitor two recliners over, blinking for a man in a Detroit Lions cap. It was like the moment in a dark theater just before the curtain goes up, when you can feel all the people around you breathing.

Then it was gone, and I had a headache, and the apple juice was warm.

* * *

Toshi picked me up behind the clinic, three days later, in a car so old it had a tape deck. He didn't say much. He drove to the edge of town, past the old stamping plant and the Dollar Depot that used to be a Kmart that used to be a drive-in, to a row of orange storage units behind a chain-link fence.

Unit 114. He rolled the door up just high enough for us to duck under, and pulled it down behind us, and turned on a battery lantern.

There was a camping chair in the middle of the concrete floor. There was a man sitting in it.

He was wearing a navy suit and a flag pin. His hands were folded in his lap. His eyes were closed. He had a square jaw and kind eyes and hair the color of a good retirement, and I knew his face, because it was on a yard sign in front of the dry cleaner's, and on the side of the bus I took to the library, and on my television every twelve minutes, between the ads for Proxy Helpers.

"That's Noah Fiatt," I said.

"No," said Toshi. He set the lantern on the floor, and the light came up under the man's chin like a campfire story. "That's what's going to be Noah Fiatt."

The man in the chair wasn't breathing. I watched a long time to be sure.

The back of my skull began, very softly, to hum.