She usually kept her Q-phone—most people just called them phones—off while she was on the Metro. It was her thinking time.
She couldn’t imagine life without Q. It was a portable, always-accessible brain. After JFK and Khrushchev negotiated détente, much to the dismay of hard-liners everywhere, who still tried to stir up trouble, much scientific information was rapidly declassified. Satellites now provided access to public information. Q—short for “quantum”—was a new form of communication built on ever-changing but always-there particles. They flashed in and out of existence rapidly, a form of energy capable of holding and transmitting vast amounts of information.
Megan had heard rumors, generally from slightly drunk physicists at parties or out-and-out geeks, that an early variation of Q—a very strong, consciousness-changing form—was embedded in the cereal-box space toys they’d all played with as children. Whenever she tried to track down more information about that esoteric conspiracy-type twist, she found nothing.
She’d gotten hold of Bette’s war records—it was no secret that she had been in Europe, in the Women’s Army Corp, but exactly what she had been doing was not clear. The huge stack of paper from the Army was mostly black with redactions. The CIA did not admit that Bette had been an agent. Out of the bits and pieces of information that Megan had acquired privately, from old letters, or remembered snatches of conversation she’d been too young to understand, she’d put together a rather surprising tale: her mother, Bette Elegante Dance, and father, Sam Dance, had helped develop Q—a more radical form of it than was now used for daily communication. Megan called it Strong Q—a form of Q that promoted neuroplasticity. Strong Q could rewire brains, accelerate learning in adults to preschool speed, and mess with the very stuff of memory. Strong Q explored and used the quantum-physics basis of mind and consciousness to its own advantage, as if it had a personality, an agenda. It was really kind of frightening, so it was no wonder that this deep basis of the Q that everyone—well, most everyone—knew and used and loved was not public knowledge.
Megan had very little idea of how this had come about, though she had tried very hard to get to the bottom of it. Oh, there were standard histories of Q’s development, but strange physics shrouded its depths—the physics that people had heard of, mostly related to Einstein, but about which even those who had worked on the theories disagreed. Through dogged research, Megan had found papers authored by Rutherford and Hadntz, and Meitner and Hadntz—except that no one seemed to know who the mysterious Dr. Hadntz might be. One rumor had it that she had died in a concentration camp during WWII.
Presently, the great leap in communications fostered by Q was explained by the Synergistic school of thought, and various esoteric mathematics, new ways of looking at phenomenon; but when you got right down to it, as Megan had tried, one encountered a maze of human thought that rivaled that of early quantum physicists—in fact, it was based on those stunning, early twentieth-century revelations by Curie, Einstein, Dirac, Born, Heisenberg, Meitner, Planck, Schrödinger, and many others. But the legend that drunken physicists shared at parties was that Q had something to do with the basis of human consciousness itself.
Which brought Megan back to memory research. The questions
What is memory? What is consciousness?
seemed pedestrian, even meaningless, to most people, but, to Megan, they burned more brightly than magnesium.
Classbooks using Q were embedded with an altruistic baseline able to evaluate the intent of the user. Q could not be used for injurious purposes. It made decisions drawn from a wide philosophical, biological, and moral database. It was able to discuss decisions and argue with users, and was a vast, consensus-based network.
Q readily passed the Turing test. This pleased some, frightened some, and angered many.
It delighted Megan.
When questioned, Q declined to answer questions about its own development. Megan assumed that it had decided to lie. For altruistic reasons. She assumed that Q was engaged in a constant hacker war in its nether reaches. Despite this, the world had accepted Q as a necessity, like electricity. Electricity could be dangerous and deadly, but tamed by engineers, it made modern life possible.
* * *
If Megan tried to talk to Brian and Jill about their parents’ possible role, they shrugged it all off—Jill, most vehemently, and Brian because how could his little sister know more than him? At least, that’s how it seemed to Megan. But there was a lot that Brian just plain wouldn’t talk about. Just like most people. At least he didn’t drink all the time anymore.
Megan had decided that it might be best to keep her thoughts to herself unless she could prove them beyond a doubt. And the only reason she wanted to prove them was to find her parents. If they were even findable.
But why would they stay away from their family if they had a choice? That was the heartbreaking question she had to face and try to answer, if her theory was true. If they were alive, where were they? Couldn’t they at least leave a clue? What might they be afraid of?
As a parent, she realized that her child, and protecting her child from assault or injury, was her most primal underlying concern.
So, if her theory about their mother was correct, what were she, Jill, and Brian being protected from?
Abbie, her five-year-old, would be home with Jim by now after a day at Montessori school. Jim was a political commentator, and worked at home. Megan was thirty-six. Jim was fifty. His curly black hair was graying at the temples, and his beard was almost white. Of medium height, and a bit too heavy, his blue eyes twinkled through old-fashioned round glasses. Once-divorced, he was tickled to have another chance. He was astonishingly kind, adored Abbie and Megan, and had the wicked sense of humor Megan was so used to in her family, though he usually kept it sheathed except when writing. They lived in a forty-year-old suburban neighborhood, Tall Oaks, nestled beneath a canopy of deep-breathing trees.
Megan might be too involved with her pursuit of information; she might appear to be completely absentminded, and sometimes even cold, to her brother and sister, but she was busy. She tried to connect to people. Really, she did. Jill was much more outgoing. Megan preferred to sit back and observe.
She transferred to a local bus, which soon trundled through her neighborhood.
Every few blocks, a grandiose monstrosity hulked over the modest split-levels and ranch homes that had housed a generation of postwar children. Less-kempt yards, here and there, contrasted with smooth, glowing green lawns. The tall-grass yards were often those of people who bought there when the houses were new, although one young man maintained that he had a right to have a meadow, rather than a lawn. In true Tall Oaks spirit—different than more restrictive outer suburbs where 1984 was reality—no one had challenged that right.
When she passed the tall-grass homes, Megan missed her parents. Halcyon House, her childhood home, was empty now, enveloped in the wild evolution of her father’s famously inclusive one-acre flower garden, and ever-smaller areas of grass irregularly mowed by a succession of local kids. Megan mostly missed her dad. She had lost her mother in 1963. Mom went somewhere and never came back.
That was probably why memory interested her so much. She didn’t so much want to look at a photograph of her mother—which were strangely few—as feel the touch of her hand, smell her hair, hug her legs, as Abbie hugged hers, and be drawn into her tight embrace. Take the drug that would reactivate experience.
She wanted her childhood back.
All that was long, long gone.
New leaves shimmered in late-afternoon sunlight, and kids on bikes shouted and waved to one another. The bus passed Rathbone Place. Jim occasionally expressed thanks that they didn’t live on such an ominously named street. Megan mentally said hello to her closet doors, which were somewhere on that street. She had seen an ad in the community newsletter asking for original cupboard and closet doors. The little row houses built for commuters had transmuted into fifties chic. The Rathbone folks had probably bid on her unrepentant never-renovated house in the first place. She and Jim had outbid a couple of other buyers to snag it.
Because she felt oddly happy in small, confined places, she had removed the doors from the upper closet in her study when they had moved in, and stored them in the attic until she saw the ad for
AUTHENTIC ORIGINAL TALL OAKS HOUSE PARTS
, and those plain closet doors brought her a hundred bucks. A few pillows, a lamp, and books—all things from her parents’ old house downtown—furnished her tiny Megan loft.
In fact, thought Megan, she was oddly, but blessedly, happy with just about everything in her life. Everything was in order, unsurprising. She liked it that way. The only thing not perfect, right now, was the state of her research. She might well lose her funding if she didn’t come up with the more focused chimera she had pursued all of these years:
What is the neurobiological foundation of empathy?
and
Can it be dependably, pharmacologically or otherwise, replicated?
Memory, including the phenomenon of false memory, and the ability of humans to create stories and share them, was a vital part of her theory, and her colleagues took these astounding abilities for granted. Memory was not sexy; no one threw money her way, money with which to hire, set up research, and enable experiments. This did cast some darkness on her life. It seemed so damned important. The spread of true empathy, disseminated via carefully thought-out vectors, might well unravel the world as everyone knew it. Such a change would be as momentous as the other great watersheds of human history: the invention of printing; the development of science. Perhaps, Megan often thought, she was just not very good at convincing others that she was on the track of something important.
At other times, she thought that maybe she was too good. Maybe she was on the track of something that many people feared: a power shift from the few to the many.
Revolution, pure and simple, and all the blue sky and heartache that revolution might bring.
From deep in her purse, her phone emitted a muffled beep. A message.
* * *
Instead of going home when she got off the bus, Megan called Jim, spoke with him briefly, and then headed down the service road bounding a creek that ran into a small, marshy lake. This was where she always went to think.
But first she rummaged deep in her bag, where she kept her pack of cigarettes. Yes, she had stopped smoking when pregnant with Abbie. Yes, she never smoked at home, and in fact, hardly smoked at all. She did, though, buy a fresh pack of Chesterfields every month and give the old, usually unopened pack to the first bum she saw when she came out of the drugstore.
She ripped open the cellophane, took out a cigarette, and had it match-lit in record time. Clamping it between her teeth, she hoisted her bags, headed down the wide gravel path, and took deep, mind-sharpening drags as she moved with long strides into the preplantation, Revolutionary War–vintage forest. Braddock’s famous road was just a mile away, and she liked this living vestige of the past, wise and restful, her refuge.
Two boys poked at something in the creek with sticks. Hundred-year-old oaks towered overhead. Geese honked, harsh voices rising in eternal goose argument. A bike swished past.
It was hard to believe. Jill, committed.
Then again, sometimes Jill let fly with odd comments that revealed she was in what could be charitably described as another reality.
Megan trudged along. Her shoes got muddy. Her briefcase and purse weighed heavily on one shoulder. She turned things over in her mind as the road dwindled to a path and the smell of thawed earth grew stronger. She stored her spent cigarette butt in a little metal pillbox and lit another.
Brian was at St. Elizabeth’s now, and said they had Jill on lithium. Why were they using such a big hammer?
In Megan’s opinion, Jill’s life was much too demanding. She was completing her dissertation and working at the World Bank and in her bookstore, as well, to pay for what Megan thought of as Elmore’s Folly. What she really needed was a vacation from her life. Elmore’s insistence on his showy Folly had forced Jill to leave her full-time job at the Bank, predicated on the promise that when she finished her languishing doctorate, her pay would double. Jill’s schedule had been manageable before she went back to Georgetown. The Bank paid for Jill’s doctoral work, but Elmore was incensed about the temporary loss of income, saying that she could go back to school—not poli-sci, but law school, which assured one of an income—as soon as he made partner. Everything in life was supposed to sync with his internal schedule of How His Life Would Move Ahead, presumably trailing Perfect Spouse and Child in his wake to display when necessary. At least, that’s how Megan saw it. She knew that Elmore and Jill had ferocious arguments about whether or not to sell the bookstore property, which had appreciated tremendously in value, to pay for the Folly—either that, or transform the store into living space. Jill would simply not let go of her store, even though, as Elmore often pointed out at family gatherings, it didn’t do a whole lot more than break even and took up too much of their time.
Their new home was certainly a fine town house, on one of the best streets in Georgetown, although, to twist the knife, Elmore often mentioned that the bookstore, with its commanding view of Key Bridge and Rosslyn, would have been
the
perfect place from which to trump everyone who was anyone. D.C.’s hottest designer, who had categorically excluded Jill’s garage sale finds, decorated Elmore’s soulless triumph. After a battle, Jill had angrily stored her own things at Halcyon House.
Add to all that Jill’s concern about five-year-old Stevie, whom everyone thought was more than just childishly dotty, particularly since he’d begun insisting that his name was not Stevie, but Whens.
Megan lit her third cigarette and the gnats fled. The budding greenness of the forest enveloped her. She turned down a little-used path lined by starry spring wildflowers. Two kids in a rowboat struggled with oars far out on the lake.