Rebooting a Human Mind

Lacey choked and sputtered as she struggled to keep her nose above the cold water. An arm like a bar of iron around her upper chest tightened. She fought against it, against the current that slid along her back and down her legs.

“Stop, dammit,” a stranger’s voice rumbled from behind. “I’m trying to save you.”

The words sank in. He claimed to be her savior, not a killer. She forced herself to accept that as the truth, for air flowed into her lungs as she relaxed and let him pull her through the water.

But why was she here, drowning? And where was “here”? Last she knew, she was at ASU, heading for the math building. Lacey looked up at the cloudless blue sky, where the morning sun still slanted low from her right side. Not much time had passed. Perhaps she would not be too late for work.

Her stomach churned as she considered how crazy those thoughts were.

Voices came into her waterlogged ears, a meaningless clamor of fear and anger. Hard hands grabbed her arms, lifted her from the water. She was laid down ungently and immediately shoved onto her side. Pressure on her rib cage. Fingers prying at her mouth. She pushed them away, then slapped at the other probing hands.

All she could see as the nearest would-be Samaritans pulled back was a row of feet and knees. Lacey managed to sit upright in the puddle growing larger on the smooth cement under her butt. As she attempted to piece together what had happened, her entire body began to shake. She hugged herself, clothes soaking wet, draining off her body heat.

A woman demanded, “What were you trying to do?”

Another woman, in a soft and warm Southern accent, said, “Nothing is so bad you should kill yourself over it.”

“But I wasn’t,” Lacey protested through chattering teeth. “I couldn’t have. I must’ve just slipped and fell in.”

The encircling crowd shifted, revealing the placid, glittering expanse of Tempe Town Lake. The sun shone over the Mill Avenue bridge, only a few minutes’ walk from campus. What had happened during that missing time? She had no recollection of anything since passing the high glass walls of the engineering building. Blackout? Seizure?

“You walked straight into the water,” the first woman said accusingly. “Then you didn’t even try to swim. You just went under.”

“Call 9-1-1,” someone suggested.

“No, don’t,” Lacey said.

The Southern woman said, “You have to go to the hospital. You nearly drowned.”

“I’ll go. Just not in an ambulance.” She had no faith in emergency rooms. She would need to pinpoint her symptoms first, figure out what tests would lead to a diagnosis, then get a referral for anything her own doctor could not do. Lacey got to her feet. She ignored the avid, critical stares. “Where’s the man who rescued me?”

Everyone looked around, but he had vanished. Tears of guilt and embarrassment stung at the back of Lacey’s eyes. She had not even thanked him.

She borrowed a phone and called her boss to say she would be late. “An accident,” she offered as her excuse. In response to his questions, she said she was unhurt, simply shaken.

“Take the day off,” her boss ordered.

Relieved that she would not need to face her coworkers until she came up with an explanation, Lacey gave him a sincere thank-you before disconnecting and handing the phone back to its owner.

She fended off well-meaning offers of assistance and walked on stiff knees toward the nearest bus stop. Once she got home, she would make a pot of sweet tea, take a shower, change clothes, turn on her computer, and figure out what was happening to her normally sharp mind, which had served her well for twenty years on the staff of the School of Mathematics. Accumulating bits of knowledge and piecing them together like a quilt always soothed her nerves.

Lacey did not make it home. She came back to herself leaning out into the air high above one of ASU’s broad pedestrian malls, her back arched and arms outstretched as though to fly. The concrete below undulated like a mirage in her panicked gaze as she attempted to regain her balance, windmilling her arms, pressing her heels into the roof with every taut muscle in her legs and back, willing herself not to fall.

Once she collapsed on the flat surface and could no longer see the height from which she might have plummeted to her death, she began to shake and sob. Breathing became difficult in the small gasps her tight chest allowed, the very air surrounding her thick and oppressive.

Somewhere in her mind, she felt a ghostly presence. Even as she became aware of the lurking phantom, it drew away. Had it saved her? Don’t go, she thought to it, squeezing her eyes shut against the tears. Immediately it vanished, like a soap bubble carried too long on a breeze.

Lacey wondered whether anything had been there—or if she was simply hallucinating. A manifestation of her own mind, perhaps, that had brought her back to awareness before she could harm herself.

She crawled farther from the edge, then sank down again and rolled onto her back. She let the sun bake her skin and dry her clothing until her trembling muscles stilled. The exotic perfume of jacaranda blooms, jarringly normal, drifted past on an errant breeze.

Eventually, not daring to remain longer in the sunlight, Lacey rose. She explored the rooftop until she discovered a narrow maintenance access that must have been the way she had gotten onto the roof. At the edge of the building, she hugged the shadows, reluctant to emerge into the flow of people passing along the mall.

The Health Services center stood nearby, its sign proclaiming compassionate health care for students. She considered begging them for help, for she no longer trusted herself. One near-death incident was worrisome enough. Two . . . that was a disturbing trend. But she was not a student.

Lacey swallowed in a vain attempt to dislodge the lump in her throat and looked around her wildly. Perhaps she could make it to the Catholic Newman Center, or the Methodist church on University Avenue, before awareness slipped away again. She felt conspicuous standing in one place so long, but the rooftop struggle had both frightened and exhausted her. Could she ask someone—anyone, a passerby, a kind stranger—to accompany her to the transit center or the hospital and hold her back from anything crazy or dangerous? She let out a half-strangled sob, realizing how that would sound.

What, then? What could she do? Lacey had no idea.

This time when the darkness released its grip, Lacey came back to herself with a train bearing down on her, its brakes screeching as people screamed from the passenger side of the high fence built to keep them safe. This time she was not alone. That other presence was in her mind with her, battling for control.

She understood at that moment what her body had somehow known, that the phantom meant to subdue her will. No, worse, it wanted to replace Lacey, the disorderly human mind, with its own pure intellect. Her muscles, under neither her control nor that malevolent other’s, kept her frozen in front of the oncoming train. The drowning, the fall, the train, she realized dimly, were all to drive out this other mind, the one that intended to claim her physical body.

Lacey tried to beat back the presence, tried to smother it, shout at it, but it kept advancing. Then her body began to act, taking a halting step toward the fence, then another, and another, passing over the low light-rail track and into the narrow space between the train and the fence. Unable to stop the physical movement toward self-preservation, even if she wanted to, Lacey found herself being collected together from the various parts of her mind.

The presence—perhaps some kind of AI gone rogue—was downloading itself, she gathered from alien information swirling around her brain. Her body had been interrupting the downloads by placing itself into danger. Each time, she, Lacey, was rebooted. But the AI had learned. It would keep her fleshy envelope alive.

Lacey fled to a part of the brain where she sensed the least activity. The center of emotions, she guessed. What use would an AI have for such? There she hid, compressing her consciousness into the tiniest of spaces, hoping to go unnoticed while she observed and learned, waiting for her chance to emerge and reboot her human mind.