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First part of The Great American Yardsale:

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For some reason, the panels and circuits in Marquette’s head were exactly what I had expected despite knowing consciously that they were not supposed to be there.

They really weren’t supposed to be there, and yet, despite all of nature’s intentions they were, in all their copper-wired glory. If inside had just been pink-gray brain jelly, I would have probably been okay. Brains are no big deal.

As it was, though, my new cousin, Hirsch, had crouched next to me on the floor and fanned me absent-mindely with Marquette’s health records folder, staring anxiously at Marquette himself on the kitchen table. The folder swayed up and down, and was too thin to be complete, but just so happened to be the perfect thickness to produce a nice breeze.

“So, what’s up with him?” asked Hirsch.

“You might want to come over here and take a look,” said Robin, stooping over the table, “I mean, unless you’re going to faint like your friend over there.”

Hirsch looked at me, asking if he could leave.

“I’m fine,” I said, the faintness from before curling up and dying in the pit of my stomach. I could feel it begin to decay, leaving a sour taste in the back of my throat.

“Just put your head between your knees if you get dizzy again,” said Hirsch. I must have glared at him, because afterwards he hurried off to loom over the brother I barely knew.

“Oh jeez, it stinks!” said Hirsch as he approached the table.

“That’s the burning plastic smell that got stuck up in here. Look, see that chip, there? It’s completely fried.”

Fried. Marquette’s fried brains. Fried brains were probably a delicacy, sometime, somewhere, before they decided that’s exactly where the mercury was stored.

“What’s that one do, anyway?”

“That… I’m not sure, you know, they have to do a custom job on each one of these, but looking at the number it probably holds his queuing programs. This one looks like a permanent mood stabilizer… just lucky that whatever got these components didn’t get the motherboard, huh?”

I swallowed to keep the sourness in my stomach down.

“So, how much of the data do you think could be salvaged?”

Salvaged, as from a shipwreck.

“No idea, but it really needs to be replaced.”

Computer pieces in water, human pieces in water.

I saw Marquette’s head cracked open, yet again, a sickening systems failure on all accounts.

I closed my eyes, trying to think happy thoughts. Juneau summers. Cooking with mom, fishing with dad, even though there were usually no fish to catch. Computer pieces dumped in water, along with human pieces, in green garbage bags. The fish knew to keep away. Dad knew to tell me to close my eyes when they floated by…

“Oh, oh, Pavlo, no —”

Before I knew it, my shoes were covered in puke. So much good putting my head between my knees did me.

“I’ll take him upstairs,” said Hirsch, grabbing my arm, pulling me off the ground, but I didn’t know if I should move considering what I’d track all over the floor.

To think I left the last remaining paradise for this.

***

“You’re going to be able to handle yourself here, right?” asked Hirsch, pacing his second lap around the bedroom.

“I’ll be fine,” I repeated. That was the thing about throwing up; once it was over with you always felt a lot better, and now that the sourness was out of me and on the kitchen floor I no longer thought of the sour waters at home. “I’ll get used to it. Or you can just herd me upstairs if you need to.”

“I don’t know.”

“Why even bother asking, then?”

“You don’t know… Marquette. He’s had a lot of problems like this,” said Hirsch.

“Then you should install a new fan.”

“There’s not a whole lot of space for a fan in his skull — and that’s besides the point, anyway! Robin said she was setting up shop here. What if she needs to bring someone in without telling us? Like an emergency?”

“Then I end up on the floor and I make a mess. I give you permission to kick me out of the way if you need to,” I said. An empty stomach meant endless hope, thinking, somehow, from the perspective of afterwards, that it wouldn’t be too bad to do again.
Hirsch stopped and made a grimace at the floor, sparing me the full brunt of it. “You really don’t get it, do you?”

“If Marquette is allowed to have his problems, why can’t I have mine?” They say the first step is admitting you have a problem. With the effort of that first, vital step, my limbs weighed me down, weightlessness of hope gone, the sourness replaced with hunger. Recovery.

“Marquette is —” Hirsch paused. “Do you want Robin to crack open your braincase and have a look?”

“No.” Unlike Marquette, I was one-hundred-percent grade-A organic. Suddenly, the thoughts of pink-gray brain jelly from earlier didn’t seem appealing at all.

“And that’s the difference between you and Marquette.”

I crossed my ankles, setting my hands down on the bed’s comforter. “So, what are you going to do? Deport me? Send me back as defective?”

“No,” said Hirsch, “But I can make you go to a shrink.”

I pulled the comforter over my lap. I should have been able to pull the memory of fishing over myself, just like this, and I should have been able to pull it over my face to stop myself from staring at the back of Marquette’s head. Instead, though, fishing had become a magnifying glass. A long time ago, fishing would have been the perfect comforter. It’s funny how one fishing trip could ruin your life.

“If I went to a shrink, she’d think I was delusional, remember,” I said. “What would I be able to tell her, anyway?” My being in St. Louis in the first place was of questionable legality. “Nothing. And it doesn’t work if I lie.” In fact, Marquette’s very existence was of questionable legality. However, while you could find cyberneurosurgeons of questionable legality, it was near impossible to find shrinks of questionable legality. In fact, they probably didn’t exist at all.

“Maybe you are delusional,” said Hirsch bitterly.

“Shouldn’t you be busy worrying about Marquette?” By the time Robin was done with him, he could be an entirely different person. I had never seen it before, exactly, what happened when a cyborg’s chips had to be replaced without backup, but I had heard stories, everyone had. They’d all been heavily dramatized or maybe they hadn’t been, or maybe they were all entirely made up. Either way, I know I wouldn’t want to be shut down and turn out completely different when I was reloaded. The thought actually repulsed me. Traumatic brain injury was one thing, but this, for it to be normal…

“I’ve worried enough about Marquette.”

“Then go worry some more. Find your absolute threshold.”

“I’m going to tell your mother what happened,” said Hirsch.

“I’m older than you,” I said, as if, somehow, that gave me more authority. Simple age didn’t give authority in new families.

“Then why don’t you be the responsible adult and tell her yourself?”

“I’m tired, Hirsch,” I said, “And you have no idea. Maybe I’m just sick. Don’t want to catch whatever I have, do you?”

Hirsch sized me up, searching for any sign of genuine illness, paleness, redness, swelling, probably, and then finally left me alone in the bedroom.

It was the same nerves that signaled fake and actual sickness, though, so my face wouldn’t show the difference. But really, the two were the same, just one sickness housed in the body and the other a glitch in infinite brain circuitry. Maybe Hirsch really thought I was delusional, because we had been here in America too long, immersed in the Americans and their knowledge that Juneau no longer existed. Maybe I was delusional, and Juneau no longer existed, and I had always been here, in St. Louis, thinking myself from a city that never existed in an okrug that never existed, either. If you’re told something enough times, you begin to believe that it’s true.