Daryl Gregory - Second Person, Present Tense

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Second Person, Present Tense

DARYL GREGORY

From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (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 & 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 exhale.

—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.

It's a little girl's room strewn with teenager. Stuffed animals crowd the shelves and window sills, shoulder

to shoulder with stacks of Christian rock CDs and hair brushes and bottles of nail polish. Pin-ups from

Teen People are taped to the wall, next to a bulletin board dripping with soccer ribbons and rec league

gymnastics medals going back to second grade. Above the desk, a plaque titled "I Promise…" exhorting

Christian youth to abstain from premarital sex. And everywhere taped and pinned to the walls, the

photos: Therese at Bible camp, Therese on the balance beam, Therese with her arms around her youth

group friends. Every morning she could open her eyes to a thousand reminders of who she was, who

she'd been, who she was supposed to become.

I pick up the big stuffed panda that occupies the place of pride on the bed. It looks older than me, and

the fur on the face is worn down to the batting. The button eyes hang by white thread—they've been

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