io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Reality Check” by Nancy Kress. Enjoy!

Reality Check

by Nancy Kress

The bedroom door was closed. It was always closed, locked from the inside. Harry and Sarah glared at each other one last time before rearranging their faces into parental smiles. Not that Oliver would see them. Still, they had to try.

They’d been trying for fourteen months.

Sarah rapped on the door. “Oliver, darling, won’t you come down for breakfast?”

“No, thank you,” Oliver called. “Can Mattie bring me the tray?”

“Son,” Harry called, “you make a lot of extra work for Mattie, bringing up all your meals on a tray.”

Silence. Then, “I’m sorry, sir, but it’s not that much extra, is it? She never has to clean my room, after all.”

This was true. Occasionally Oliver requested more toilet bowl cleaner, laundry detergent, fresh sheets, which apparently he washed along with his clothes in his bathtub and hung out his third-story window to dry.

All at once Harry lost his temper. “Oliver, damn it, this has gone on long enough! Come on out of your room!”

“I’m sorry, sir, I can’t.”

“Then we’ll just have to—”

Sarah grabbed her husband and dragged him—she was surprisingly strong for such a slender woman—across the hall into the guest room and shut the door. “Harry, what the hell do you think you’re doing? The therapist said—”

“Fuck the therapist! What that kid needs . . . I’ve said it all along and I’ll say it again—is to think about somebody else for a change! Not to mention a good walloping!”

Sarah drew herself up to her full, impressive height; she’d once been a model. “You will never strike our child. You agreed to raise him without coercion, with the freedom to make his own choices. And the therapist said that of the many boys he’s seen with HIRSIA, all of them eventually made the decision to come out of their rooms and were more mature for having made that decision by themselves, and furthermore—”

“That therapist is a quack! If I’d pulled this shit when I was a kid . . .”

“You mean back in the dark ages,” said Sarah, with the nasty smile that meant he was an old man, twenty years older than she and thirty-eight years older than Oliver. She hated herself for the nasty smile but never seemed able to not do it. “How can you hope to relate to a kid today? All you can relate to are the microbes in your lab!”

“There you go again, denigrating my research because your working life is over now that you’re not twenty-three, while my contributions to science . . . not that you ever bothered to try to understand them.”

“Don’t call me stupid in that roundabout way! I know exactly what you work on—you and that bimbo ‘lab assistant’ have discussed it in front of me often enough, as if I weren’t even present!”

“Really—you understand my work, you think? All right, what is it?”

“Amphibiosis,” Sarah said triumphantly.

“And what is that?”

“Microbes that . . . that . . .”

Harry smiled, the mirror of her earlier smile. “The condition in which two life-forms create relationships that are symbiotic or parasitic, depending on context.”

“Sounds like our marriage,” Sarah said.

Harry scowled. “I want to have Oliver—”

“No! Don’t even bring that up again! I’ll never cosign, and you can’t have it done alone! Never, never!”

“Don’t get hysterical.”

“I’m not hysterical! I’m merely telling you I will never, ever agree to that . . . that . . . abomination!” She left the guest room, careful to not slam the door. Oliver might hear. He knew nothing of their fights, their mutual unhappiness, the lab bimbo, the talk of divorce that never progressed beyond talk because neither of them could bear to expose Oliver to the misery that had become his parents’ life together. They both loved their son. This was, in Sarah’s eyes, Harry’s only redeeming feature.

Harry shoved past her, went downstairs, and bolted—quietly—out the front door to go to his lab. Sarah lingered. Mattie, unasked because by now this was the routine, brought up Oliver’s breakfast tray, knocked once, and left. Sarah had learned that by standing in the hallway linen closet with the door opened just a crack, she could glimpse Oliver as he carefully opened the door, scanned the hall to be sure it was empty, and brought his tray inside. Oliver seemed well. His hair was now down to his shoulders and looked clean. No real beard, just a light peach fuzz. He smiled the adorable smile he’d had since infancy: pancakes this morning, his favorite.

His door closed. Sarah stayed in the closet another few minutes, until the tears stopped.

• • •

They had tried everything, and there was a fair amount of everything to try because HIRSIA was an epidemic. Well, maybe not that exactly, but widespread, even more so in Japan than in Los Angeles.

They’d cajoled Oliver, reasoned with him, recruited his school friends to stand outside his door and shout “Hey, man, let’s go swim at the club!” No success.

They’d gotten Oliver’s private school involved, but the headmaster did not believe that forced attendance fostered real education and so had supplied Oliver with internet study videos, worksheets, textbooks. Oliver did his schoolwork faithfully and well, earning excellent grades.

They’d hired a Japanese-style “coaxer” to stand outside Oliver’s door for a month, urging him gently to take small steps toward emerging. “Talk to me, Oliver-san, about the video games you play. I play, too!” Nada.

Early on, they’d hired a hacker—correction, “private security specialist”—to discover what Oliver did online all day and to show Sarah and Harry how to remotely monitor his computer. What if Oliver was on the Dark Web, or watching woman-abusive porn, or being recruited to a terrorist organization, or something even worse? (Sarah didn’t know what that might be.) But Oliver did indeed play video games whenever he wasn’t doing schoolwork. Sarah, who’d never played, was astonished at the complexity of the games and their graphics, further proof that Oliver was really smart. What could he do if he applied that intelligence to something worthwhile?

Once, without telling Sarah, Harry cut off the power to Oliver’s room. Oliver stopped eating. After three days, Sarah couldn’t bear it. The ensuing fight escalated from screaming and threats of violence to actual violence: Sarah threw a bunch of bananas at Harry. She missed. The bananas came apart in the air and Sarah had never had good aim anyway, but now Harry taunted her that he could claim domestic abuse and get sole custody of Oliver.

Sarah was tired. They should never have married. Harry had been dazzled by her beauty, which had lasted pretty well, and her youthful model glamor, which had not. She had been dazzled by his early scientific success, which had lasted, making him more pompous and smug every year. They blamed each other for their unhappiness. Their only marital success, Sarah thought, was that they had always, always, kept their misery away from Oliver. He had no idea how his parents regarded each other, and in a weird way his disease was actually proof of their parental success. Although the latest edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders had declared Hiding in Room Syndrome with Internet Addiction a genuine illness, Harry and Sarah’s current counselor said it proved that Oliver felt secure enough to follow his own path even in the face of their disapproval. The counselor also said that eventually Oliver would come out of his room.

He didn’t. Nor did two million other teens, mostly boys, in the United States. The “epidemic” grew, spawning news articles, scientific studies, intense interest from brain researchers.

After years of animal research, Dr. William Cantwell at Harry’s university got FDA approval for human trials of his Deep Brain Stimulation Rewiring Implant.

• • •

“Deep brain stimulation is nothing new,” Harry had said to Sarah during one of their less acrimonious fights. “It was first used in 1987.”

“On people with Parkinson’s and other movement disorders! Not for what Oliver has! You’re not the only one who can do research, Harry!”

“Noodling around on the internet is not ‘research.’ And your noodling is outdated. DBS has been shown to help people with a wide range of disorders, including depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, cluster headaches—”

“Oliver doesn’t have those!”

“HIRSIA is a form of OCD. Cantwell’s trial has excellent results. You’re resisting the only thing that might help Oliver.”

“From the person that said a ‘good walloping’ would help him!”

Harry performed a peculiar, complex maneuver: turning on his heel to leave, arresting one foot in midair, turning back to Sarah as if moving through concrete, reaching one hand to touch her and pulling it back as if burned. His face contorted wildly until it settled into a single expression like a pioneer on virgin territory. “Please,” he said humbly. “Sarah, please listen to me. I want what’s best for Oliver, and I know you do, too. Please.”

Harry never begged. Sarah was flooded by sudden memories of sweet things gone sour: the first sexy days of their marriage. Harry’s joy at Oliver’s birth. Both of them holding Oliver’s hands, one on each side, as he learned to walk, his sturdy little legs careening him first into her thighs and then into Harry’s. They’d all laughed, and then Sarah had reached for Harry’s other hand in an almost unbearable paroxysm of love.

“Please,” Harry said again.

• • •

War and Peace had nothing to do with that Russian novel from two centuries ago, although Oliver had to admit that when he read it for his online class Honors Lit, it was fascinating. He really got into Natasha and Pierre and the rest because they seemed so real. However, the video game War and Peace had a bigger canvas, set across the entire galaxy with hundreds of characters in widely varying cultures on a bunch of different planets. The planets had carefully worked-out physical properties of axial tilt, gravity, light intensity for their star type. Oliver had checked; astrophysics and math were his favorite subjects. The game had battles, of course, but just as much diplomacy and treaties and human screw-ups by both heroes and villains. All the stuff found in so-called reality, but heightened, made more interesting, more real. And far more beautiful—the game’s graphics were beyond stunning. Each time a new long-shot vista appeared, Oliver thought of that Keats poem in Lit class, where some explorers were so awestruck by their first sight of the Pacific Ocean that they

“Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”

Oliver didn’t know where Darien was, but it was a cool way to describe being amazed. And he, Oliver Eagleton, got to be a major actor in this amazing, imaginative, infinitely exciting world with something new in it every time he sat down at his computer. Nothing he’d known at school—when he’d actually been going to school—could match it. None of his friends—when he’d had friends—were as complex or smart as the witty Commander Julian Osgood, as the emotionally tortured Lady Serena, as the weird alien culture of the H’bid, as the treaties and betrayals among the planets of the Sixth Alliance.

He knew his parents were concerned about him. But they didn’t, couldn’t, understand. They didn’t have enough imagination to even realize that Oliver knew they were having problems in their marriage and that he was tactfully staying out of it, letting them work it out. Meanwhile, he kept his grades up, kept his room and bathroom clean, was unfailingly courteous to his mother and father. He was fine.

Before he opened the game, he gazed for five minutes at the Jackson Pollock print on the wall, Convergence. It too was amazing, its complex abstractions suggesting figures and symbols and secret stories that were different every time he studied it. Besides, the five-minute wait heightened his anticipation for War and Peace. He would play for just for a few moments before he ate breakfast, yes. He opened his computer.

Then he no longer sat in a chair in his bedroom. He was on Sylvanus, listening to the Commander explain to Lady Serena what the enemy leader might do next. Was the Commander correct? Figuring that out was Oliver’s job and doing it well meant trying to imagine himself into the enemy leader’s mind, to become that person. Oliver felt his every sense sharpen. Pleasure raced through his body.

He didn’t even remember to eat his pancakes.

• • •

Dr. Metz, the neurosurgeon at the deep-brain institute, was a colleague of Harry’s from med-school days. Bill Wu, running the clinical trials, was an old friend from prep school. Jennifer Porter, the weary-looking psychiatrist on the team—Sarah thought of it as a football team, sixties-something people in helmets and padding to make themselves look larger than they were—was supposed to be an objective outside consultant for the clinical trial, but Sarah didn’t believe it for a minute. The psychiatrist was on the team.

“I already told Harry that I’ll listen but I won’t necessarily agree,” Sarah said. “Nobody is cutting open Oliver’s brain. We have a very smart son and—”

Dr. Wu, the quarterback, interrupted her with a merry laugh. “Of course not. Our newest ‘implants’ aren’t really that. They’re not even really ‘rewiring’—that’s an unfortunate popularization. We insert invisible wires, powered by a tiny biotech ‘motor’ that Oliver will never even know is there. The device stimulates changes in a key ‘reward’ area of the brain, broadly called the cortomesolimbic system. The stimulation produces changes that turn off various metabolic pathways, inhibiting certain neurotransmitter activity involved in addiction. Put simply, Oliver will no longer get little chemical hits of pleasure from playing video games. They won’t seem as rewarding, and he’ll stop.”

“And you think that hocus-pocus will make him come out of his room?”

“We know it will,” said a voice behind Sarah. She turned.

Another man had entered the room from a second door. Younger than the others, only his white lab coat identified him as belonging in a hospital rather than on a magazine cover. Sarah’s eyes widened. So did his. Nobody but the psychiatrist noticed; she smiled sourly.

Dr. Wu said, “Harry, Sarah, this is Dr. Jerome Makin, my colleague. Jerry, you’re late.”

“I’m so sorry,” Jerry said. He had a faint, unplaceable, musical accent. Also thick, mahogany-colored hair falling over one bright blue eye. Sarah shivered.

Jerry said, “I was with a patient. Ms. Eagleton—”

“Sarah,” she said before she even knew she was going to speak. Her voice sounded urgent in her own ears. Harry did not notice.

“Sarah. I don’t mean to sound so rock-solid positive about Oliver because of course a parent as concerned and intelligent as you knows that nothing in medicine is one hundred percent certain. What we can tell you, what Jennifer here will tell you when we men stop mansplaining and let her take the floor, is that all of our trial subjects so far have beaten HIRSIA and have come out of their rooms. Please let her have a chance to tell you about those kids.”

Sarah nodded. She seemed incapable of further speech. Dr. Porter threw an unreadable glance at handsome young Dr. Makin and began to talk.

• • •

Two weeks of prolonged, intense decisions. Dr. Wu was eager to have Oliver as a clinical-trial subject; he told Sarah and Harry that most kids who refused to leave their bedrooms had psychological problems like social anxiety or even schizophrenia. Oliver’s school records showed no troubling history of  . . . well, anything. The notes and affidavit from the astronomically expensive therapist that Oliver had seen a year ago, until he refused to attend any more sessions, had found Oliver stable, intelligent, and imaginative. Also cooperative, until he wasn’t.

Oliver was not quite fourteen. His consent to be hospitalized was not necessary. The current conservative administration in power in Washington had wrenched much control of children away from the state and returned it to parents, where, Harry said, it rightly belonged. Sarah wasn’t as sure about the decisions Harry made, or the way he used his connections in the scientific community, but Jerry convinced her that this was best for Oliver.

She was not hard to convince.

So . . . a sedative in Oliver’s food. A locksmith. A stretcher, an ambulance, medical personnel. A lawyer, with a mountain of papers to sign. And then the operation.

“Let me repeat again,” Jerry said while holding Sarah’s hand across the table. He gave another nervous glance around the small, obscure restaurant where nobody who knew either of them was likely to go. “Oliver came through the procedure fine, is still under observation and will be drugged until tonight, and then you and Harry can see him.”

Sarah squeezed his hand. What the hell was he doing? He had sworn to himself after Darlene that he would stop this shit. But she was irresistible. That skin, those eyes . . .

Sarah said, “Three more hours until I can see Oliver?”

“Yes. And—”

She said, “Then let’s go back to the motel one more time.”

• • •

He woke slowly, his hand reaching for the keyboard even before he was fully conscious. His hand wouldn’t move, and Oliver’s eyes flew open. He lay in a white room hooked to machines . . . a hospital room. His hands were bound to the metal rails of a bed. His head ached.

Oliver’s IQ was 140, but he was thirteen years old. He began to scream for his mother. She raced into the room, along with a doctor, two nurses, and, last in line, Oliver’s father. His mother’s hand seized his, and the doctor began to talk.

A brain tumor. He’d had a brain tumor, but it was “just” a meningioma, nothing to worry about. Oliver’s father said, “If you’re going to have a brain tumor, this is the one to have. Not malignant, just a benign mass pressing on the outside of your brain, that’s what made you pass out. The doctors went in and snatched it out, and you’re fine.”

His mother bit her lip. She looked tired. “You were in the hospital for two days, sweetheart. But your father’s right, you’re fine. That kind of brain tumor isn’t cancer. We can take you home tomorrow.”

At soon as his parents left, Oliver looked up “meningioma” on his phone and spent an hour reading. They had told him the truth; the tumor had not been dangerous, the operation simple. He touched the bandages on his head. A doctor would come to the house to examine the surgical site and ask him questions. Other than that, he could carry on with his normal activities.

Wasn’t it unusual for a doctor to come to his house? But his father had connections in the scientific community; that probably explained it. Oliver closed his eyes and slept.

Back home on Wednesday, Oliver glanced at the War and Peace icon on his computer. But, no, he didn’t feel like playing right now. Must be the drugs he was still on to control brain swelling. He would play later.

• • •

Sarah had never been so happy. The day after he came home from the hospital, Oliver came downstairs for dinner. He had spent the day in his room, but the tracker showed her that all his computer activity, about five hours, was on his schoolwork. And then he came down for dinner! Harry and she exchanged looks of pleased amazement. Oliver said little, but he listened as Harry talked about . . . that thing he was working on in his lab . . . oh, yes, amphibiosis. Partnerships between microbes—germs had partners?—that helped in some situations and hurt in others. Boring. But Oliver asked what must have been an intelligent question because Harry looked pleased as he answered it. Then the two of them went into the den to watch a PBS documentary.

Sarah crept into her bedroom and texted the great news to Jerry. He’d come yesterday to examine Oliver’s head, and he’d said all looked good. He didn’t come today, but they’d arranged to meet at their motel tomorrow, when Harry was at work. Sarah’s sister would stay with Oliver while Sarah “ran necessary errands.” It astonished Sarah that she felt so little guilt—well, none, really—about Jerry. But it wasn’t as if Harry was interested in her anymore, or even noticed her. Jerry was so eager for her, and she for him. Didn’t she deserve to feel like this one more time in her life, after the way Harry always put her down? Besides, there was the lab bimbo.

Over the next week, the bliss continued. Oliver came out of his room for meals, he talked to Mattie a little, he even took a walk around the block and on his return remarked that the Henderson place needed painting. Which it did!

That psychiatrist for the clinical trial, Dr. Porter, wanted Sarah, Oliver, and Harry to come in for a “post-surgical session.” Sarah had refused: “We’re all fine, doctor, thank you.” But the woman had not given up.

“I think you and your husband should come in, Mrs. Eagleton.”

“No, thank you.”

“But I really—”

“No, thank you!”

Even Jerry said Sarah didn’t need to see Dr. Porter, although he seemed worried about saying it. Probably he was working too hard, poor baby. Sarah took his hand, caressed it, and kissed him. She wanted him to be happy, as happy as she was now.

• • •

Something was wrong.

For the third time in a week Oliver opened War and Peace and sat staring at the game. This time he forced himself to play, but he abandoned it after a few moves. It seemed so silly. None of it, after all, was real.

He turned to his math program and became engrossed in quadratic equations and then in physics problems. He had a lot of schoolwork to catch up on.

At lunchtime he went downstairs and ate with his mother, telling her about a math problem he was working on. She listened but he could tell she wasn’t really following him, so he talked with her about his father’s plan to have the driveway resurfaced. She sort of listened to that, nodding, a small almost imperceptible frown creasing her lipstick.

• • •

“He sounds different,” Sarah said to Harry.

“Different how?” They sat in the den, Harry absorbed in watching a soccer match someplace in Europe. Oliver had gone to his room. He was doing schoolwork; Sarah had checked the tracker program.

“I can’t explain it, exactly. His voice is just . . . flatter? I don’t know. But something is missing.”

Harry switched off the TV. “Jesus, Sarah, you’re never satisfied! He stopped playing video games, he’s acing all his schoolwork, he’s taking long walks every day—at least that’s what you told me—and most of all he’s out of his goddamned room! What else do you want? His voice has changed? Of course it has, he’s an adolescent boy. Don’t be so silly!”

Sarah gazed at him stonily. She knew “what else” she wanted, but she could hardly tell Harry that it wasn’t him. Jerry always listened to her. Tomorrow she would call Jerry and tell him about this shift in Oliver’s voice. Jerry wouldn’t call her silly.

• • •

Oliver sat on his bed, staring at the Shakespeare play his Honors English teacher, Ms. Robertson, had just finished discussing with the class in person and with Oliver on Zoom. Tomorrow, after the dressing finally came off his head and he could stop wearing a cap—not permitted inside Baywater Academy—he would return to school. To learn more about this sort of stuff?

Romeo and Juliet was ridiculous. If Romeo could flee Verona, and since he was rich, why didn’t both of them just leave after they got married and go somewhere safer? Or, since plenty of people had watched him kill Tybalt, Romeo could tell the prince that he had witnesses to prove this was all part of a fight Romeo hadn’t started, then take his medicine for defying the prince’s ban on fighting, and accept banishment since surely Juliet would join him? If they loved each other so much? Instead the play had this ridiculous plot with a magic potion and a faked death and her suicide and then his suicide and that was supposed to bring peace to the warring families? None of it made sense. And anyway, these characters were all made up by Shakespeare. It wasn’t history, it was . . . was . . . not real.

Well, if he had to write a paper about Romeo and Juliet, it would be about the weaknesses of this silly story. Let Ms. Robertson cope with that.

He turned to a science program, which focused this month on methods of tracking ocean currents. Great stuff!

• • •

Oliver had returned to school days ago, Harry was at his lab all day, and still Sarah had not seen Jerry. She was frantic about him, about Oliver, about . . . everything. On the phone Jerry was evasive, and as of yesterday he had stopped taking her calls, just as Sarah had stopped taking Dr. Porter’s calls to schedule a post-surgical conference with her and Harry. Harry said there was no need, Oliver was perfectly fine. It was Jerry that Sarah needed to talk to, not Dr. Porter.

Finally, desperate, she did call the psychiatrist back. “Please tell Dr. Makin that I am trying to reach him on an urgent matter, and if I don’t hear from him today, I will come to the medical building and talk to him there. Or to Dr. Wu.”

A long pause. Dr. Porter didn’t ask what the urgent matter was—why not? Sarah had prepared a convincing lie. Instead the psychiatrist said quietly, “I’ll give him the message.”

“Thank you.”

Jerry arrived an hour later, looking as furious as Sarah now felt. She flung open the door. “Why haven’t you returned my calls? Any of my calls?”

He pushed past her into the house. “Why did you call Jennifer—Dr. Porter— to summon me like some errant schoolboy? Do you know how that makes me look in the eyes of my staff? Sarah, for Christ’s sake!”

“Is that what you care about? How you look in the eyes of your staff? What about me? What about us?”

“Us,” Jerry said, a bleak little word that somehow drained all the fury from her, replacing it with dread. “Okay, we’ll talk about us. But first you have to listen—really listen—to what Dr. Porter and I were going to tell you and Harry together if you’d ever deigned to come in for your post-surgical conference. This isn’t the right place, the right way to explain . . . There have been some anomalies in the clinical trial.”

“Anomalies? What does that mean? Oh, God, no—is Oliver in danger? Is something wrong with his brain? Is he going to die?”

“Of course he’s not going to die. Jesus, Sarah, let go of my arm. Oliver is completely healthy. But we’ve discovered that some of the clinical-trial subjects are showing a slight change in personality. Now don’t panic, you knew this was an experimental trial and what is happening—might be happening—is explicable and not dangerous, if you just . . . Sarah, listen to me!”

She grabbed hold of herself, forced herself to listen, but kept tight hold on his arm.

He said, “You were told that by blocking certain pathways in parts of the brain, the trial subjects would no longer find video games so rewarding because they would no longer be receiving quick jolts of chemical rewards for playing. You remember that?”

“Yes.”

“That has turned out to be true. But there is also a . . . call it a ‘switch’ in the brain connected to the metabolic pathways of the corto mesolimbic system. It’s called the periaqueductal gray, and we’ve known for some time that it seems to affect not only addiction but also subject animals’ levels of playfulness. Tickling rats, for instance, activates the PAG and—”

“Rats?”

”It isn’t—”

“You made Oliver’s brain like a rat’s?”

Jerry ran his free hand through his hair. “Never mind the rats. The clinical-trial subjects, most of them, are showing markedly less activity in the PAG area, and less desire to play. At anything. They’ve become far more interested in . . . in concrete things, in activities with clear purposes and practical outcomes. The phenomenon shows a direct correlation with IQ.”

“I don’t understand,” Sarah said, but she felt panic rise in her, a sweeping dark wave rushing closer and closer. “Jerry, is Oliver . . . what did you do to him? And what’s wrong with practical outcomes . . . what did you do to him?”

“Sarah, it will be okay. No one quite fully understood the links between imagination and the PAG that . . . Oliver will just be less imaginative, more . . . that’s why video games no longer appeal to him! Which is what you wanted! He may become more practical, more rooted in reality . . .”

“Well, what’s wrong with that? If that’s all . . .”

“All?” Jerry seemed dazed, upset, and all at once Sarah was swept again with tenderness for him. He was in distress, and even though she didn’t see why—Oliver was okay, nothing wrong with being practical—it was now Jerry who needed her. Needed comfort, needed distraction, needed her love. She put her arms around him and kissed him.

Instantly his arms tightened, his body shaking. Was he crying?

“My work,” he choked out, “my research reputation—”

His research reputation? Before Sarah could let go of him, the door opened and Oliver stood there, his eyes widening.

The room froze, and then spun, all of it was spinning around her—Aubusson rug, green silk curtains, cherrywood furniture—spinning around and around. “Oliver . . .”

“I see,” he said.

Jerry had disentangled himself from Sarah and stood looking intently at Oliver. Was he going to say something, tell Oliver he and Sarah were in love, do what he could to make this nightmare all right? Jerry said nothing.

It was Oliver who spoke. “Does Dad know?”

Something was wrong with Oliver’s tone. It didn’t sound angry or upset, but not accepting, either. It sounded the same as when he had been discussing resurfacing the driveway, as if he were merely dealing with facts.

Jerry sounded weird, too—like he was talking to himself even though he gazed at Oliver, “One boy wrote poetry obsessively in his room. He’s stopped. One girl was ‘in love’ with a pen pal in Singapore and ran away to travel there. She broke off the relationship without a qualm. One kid—”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Sarah cried. “Oliver, I can explain this. Your father and I haven’t been happy for a long time. Jerry and I are in love. Your father will get over the divorce and—”

“Divorce?” Jerry said, startled out of his bizarre musing. “Sarah, we never discussed . . . I mean . . .”

The dark wave hit Sarah and shattered everything, as completely as a tsunami hitting shore.

Oliver said, “I don’t really think this is my business. I walked out of school, Mom, because English class was discussing stuff that made no sense, was just silly. Wiliam Blake. I’m not going back to school unless I can drop English and just do math, science, and history. Real stuff.”

He turned toward the stairs. Sarah looked dumbly at Jerry, who merely offered her another of his unconnected statements that had nothing to do with reality.

“Blake. Imagination. And—” he looked at Oliver as her son disappeared over the top of the stairs, “empathy requires imagination. I didn’t think . . . I didn’t realize . . . oh God, this is a disaster.”

Sarah looked at him. His eyes, shiny with misery, did not meet hers. He was not thinking of her, or of her son, but of his experiment.

Again the room spun. This time, Sarah clutched not Jerry but the solid back of a wing chair until the dizziness passed and reality returned. Then she went to find her phone to call Dr. Porter, whom she suspected she was going to need after all. No, first call Harry, before Oliver could get to him. Would Oliver get to him? Her son gazed at her from the bottom step, looking puzzled but not upset. Harry, yes, call Harry, they were going to have to be a united front about this monstrous thing that had helped Oliver but now was harming him. They needed a good lawyer. Someone had to be punished for what Jerry had done to her.

No, to Oliver. Of course that’s what she’d meant. Done to Oliver.

• • •

In his room, Oliver was baffled why his mother seemed so upset. His tumor was gone and he was fine. Somehow, she lacked the ability to see that. But it was true—he was perfectly fine.

Only . . . why did his Jackson Pollock print on the wall suddenly look so uninteresting, the colors so chaotic? Why had he once wasted so much time gazing at it, thinking it held stories and secrets? It was just confused smears of paint, nothing with real meaning.

He took it down, put it away in his closet, and didn’t think about it again.

About the Author

Nancy Kress is the author of 34 books, including 27 novels, four collections of short stories, and three books on writing. Her work has won six Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Much of her work concerns genetic engineering—although not her latest, a novella currently serialized in Asimov’s, “Quantum Ghosts.” Kress’s fiction has been translated into nearly two dozen languages, none of which she can read. In addition to writing, Kress often teaches at various venues around the country and abroad, including a visiting lectureship at the University of Leipzig, a 2018 writing class in Beijing, and the annual intensive workshop Tao Toolbox, which she taught every summer with Walter Jon Williams.

Please visit Lightspeed Magazine to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the December 2025 issue, which also features short fiction by Aimee Ogden, Jonathan Olfert, A.C. Wise, José Pablo Iriarte, Oyedotun Damilola Muees, David Marino, P.A. Cornell, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $4.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.

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