Six Floors Down

The way I pictured it, training in something non-human ought to begin with something non-human. Wei Lin put an apple on the table.

An ordinary one, green, with a sticker that said “Moldova.” I mentally estimated its cost (about eighty rubles at the nearest grocery store) and calorie count (roughly fifty-two kilocalories) and waited for the magic to start. Or the lecture. Or anything that would explain why five adults were sitting in the folded space of a suburban dacha staring at an eighty-ruble apple.

— What do you see? — asked Wei Lin.

— An apple, — said Artyom. In the tone of a field report.

— Green, — I added. — Moldovan. With a sticker.

— That’s the first floor, — said Wei Lin. — The surface. The render. What your brain shows you when you don’t push it. Apple, green, sticker. Enough to decide: eat or don’t eat. For a caveman—all you need. For you—not anymore.

— Why not? — asked one of the women. Dark hair pulled into a ponytail, no makeup, eyes—quick, attentive. I didn’t know her name yet. (I’d learn later: Marina. Former neurosurgeon. Left medicine when she started seeing patients’ nerve impulses before they registered on the instruments. Her supervisor diagnosed professional burnout. She diagnosed professional evolution. Her supervisor was a respected professor. She was right.)

— Because you’re no longer cavemen, — Wei Lin answered. — Your filter is leaking, and you see more than an apple; the only question is what exactly you’re seeing, and that’s what we’ll be learning. Seeing more already happens to you on its own; now we learn to control exactly how much light we let into the frame — like the aperture on a camera, which lets in more when it opens and less when it closes; in your case it’s jammed in the “open” position, and your frame is, to put it mildly, overexposed.

— In my shower—definitely flooding, — I muttered. (Artyom looked at me. Didn’t get it. Kira—the redhead who “reads bodies”—smirked slightly. Either she knew about my morning incident with the graph. Or she just found the joke funny. Hard to tell with her.)

— So, — Wei Lin placed his hand on the apple. — I’m going to remove the filter now. For three seconds. You’ll see the apple on the second floor. Some of you—the third. Some—nothing, and that’s also normal. Ready?

Nobody answered. Which, I assume, meant “yes” in the language of people who aren’t in the habit of admitting they’re ready for anything.

Wei Lin removed his hand.

---

The first thing I felt was a smell: earthy, wet, alive, as if someone had brought a chunk of forest into the room. The smell of the apple tree — its roots, the soil, and the water that had climbed up the trunk for months to become, in the end, this apple. The biography of a scent — from earth to shelf.

Then—color. The apple stopped being green. That is, it still looked green, but I could see that “green” was a decision. Chlorophyll in the skin cells was reflecting a certain wavelength, and my brain decided that was green. Between the apple and me stood a translator, converting electromagnetic radiation into sensation, and for the first time I caught the translator in the act.

(A very unpleasant discovery. You live twenty-eight years thinking you see the world. Then you discover you see a translation. And a loose one at that. Who knows what gets lost in translation? Maybe the most important stuff.)

Then—the third floor. Form.

The apple stopped being an object and became—a process. I could see it right now continuing to form: cells dividing, enzymes working, sugars converting to starch, starch back to sugars. The apple wasn’t sitting on the table. It was happening. Like a flame: looks still, but is actually a continuous process of combustion. Except the apple was burning slowly, invisibly, and what we call “an apple sitting on a table” is a freeze-frame from a movie that never stops.