“I understand your skepticism. Ask me about anything you’ve seen, thought, touched, or smelled in the past twenty-four hours. Even your drunk memories. Actually, I might know more about them than you do. How much of last night do you remember?”
Her having gotten drunk was an easy guess. What else was she going to do after leaving her husband? “You sound like a bad psychic,” she told him. “You want me to give you information you can read into and guess from. The more I tell you, the more you’ll incredibly seem to know. It’s not going to work.”
“Hazel.” Then he sighed, and when he sighed Hazel really started to lose it, because he sighed when he got bored. He found it dull when people were resisting something he knew they would eventually accept. The interim, when he had to repeat himself over and over until the other person’s view finally did flip and change, was annoying tedium.
“Hay-zel,” he said. This “affectionate” pronunciation of her name drove her nuts. As though it near-rhymed with “gazelle.” “After all our time together,” he continued. “After everything you know about me. You’re doubting me when I tell you I’ve done this?” When Hazel didn’t answer, he drew in a sharp breath. “Fine,” he said. “Let’s do it your way. A cold reading.”
“Great,” she answered. Hazel thought about hanging up the phone but was curious, despite understanding that her life was absolutely over. Because if Byron didn’t have all the information he claimed, he wouldn’t dare push it. The way you avoid losing, Byron always said, is by removing any possibility of loss.
There was a chip in her brain. Byron had downloaded everything she’d done and thought for the past twenty-four hours.
“This will only be embarrassing for you, you know.” The tone of his voice lowered now, directed itself a little bit aside, as though he were trying to do her a favor. “You’re sure you want to rehash this?”
Hazel swallowed. Her mouth kept growing watery. “Did anything bother you?” she asked. “Or did you find it all hysterical?”
She sat down in the grass now, to keep things from getting too spinny. She probably needed to eat. The painkillers were wearing off. Hazel started pulling up one blade of grass after another, like the lawn was a type of rote punishment: if she ripped up every blade of grass in the backyard, she’d be allowed to wake up and this would all be a bad dream.
“Hazel, come now. Of course the entire timeline of events troubled me. You’re my beloved wife. No, it’s not easy to see you trying to play teenager. I’m sure it’s not easy for your father, either. He clearly wants his space.”
In the past, whenever Byron showed Hazel one of his new inventions and she tried to find a flaw in it, he always had a bulletproof answer for everything. He loved that game and he never wanted her to stop playing it with him. The trick to keeping her playing along, and she realized now that Byron had counted on this, was a delusional sense of hope on her behalf—she’d kept trying to beat him because she’d thought that one day maybe she could. It was gambling-addict thinking. This time will be different; it will make up for all the others.
Now she herself was his newest invention, but Hazel was done playing. Trying to poke holes in his victory would only result in heartbreak for her.
“Why be up-front about it?” she asked. “Why tell me what you did?”
Hazel swore she could hear his smile through the phone. The scales of his lips sliding across one another.
“I tell my wife everything.”
“You didn’t tell me you were putting a chip in my brain.”
“Okay. I tell my wife everything eventually.”
“So I’ll just have it taken out.” There was a long silence—had she heard Byron just nearly laugh?
“I don’t recommend that.”
Now she was the one letting out the impatient sigh. “What, will it kill me if it’s taken out? What if I’d died having it put in, Byron?”
“Hay-zel. Your life means everything to me. That’s why I still want to be there for every moment of it, even though you’d rather not spend it together. The implantation procedure is very safe. Like you said yourself, no scars. I won’t bore you, but it’s been there for a while. I hoped I wouldn’t ever have to turn it on, but then you left and I just missed you so much.”
“What about the extraction procedure?”
“You won’t be needing that. But I do have to warn you—if you showed up at a hospital spouting some nonsense about a brain implant, you’d appear insane. Like much of our best technology, this is truly ahead of its time. It won’t show up on any scan the doctors do.”
“Will its performance be affected if I shoot myself in the head?”
“Your performance will be affected. You don’t want to kill yourself, Hazel. It would make my stock rise. Sympathy buying. It’s a real phenomenon.”
“So I’ll just go somewhere the download won’t work. Live in a mountaintop cave in Tibet.”
“Ha. Your prototype doesn’t have an active GPS because those are detectable. Instead, each download gives us your exact coordinates. You’d have a twenty-four-hour lead, so I suppose we could have a fun chase if you wanted to, but you couldn’t outrun us every single day. You wouldn’t have the resources.”
A wayward ant from the lawn found its way onto Hazel’s leg and began crawling across. She looked down and pondered squishing it, then realized this was the closest she’d ever come to understanding what it would feel like to trade places with Byron. She was an ant on his leg. Worse, he’d be delighted after tomorrow’s download when he found out she’d had that thought, and delighted by her horror of realizing he was going to know about it.
Every time she went to the bathroom, Hazel realized, Byron would now see whatever she saw. Was she supposed to not look after wiping? No. Screw that. She’d look even longer.
“And what if I come home?” Hazel was curious about the reward Byron would offer. But going home was out of the question. THERE IS NO FUCKING WAY, BYRON! Hazel thought very emphatically, since thinking something to Byron was now more or less the same as saying it to him twenty-four hours into the future.
“Then we could proceed with the meld and I’d be the happiest man on earth. I’m probably already the happiest man on earth, of course, but with my wife at my side, I’ll be happier than the second-happiest guy by an even greater margin.”
Hazel paused. “With the meld, would the downloads stop?”
“It would be a real-time stream of information from your brain to mine. Not a once-a-day push. You wouldn’t feel it the way you do now when an entire day’s data gets sent.”