Beta Tests

The gearbox had shifted from third to fourth at 34.7 mph yesterday. Today it was 36.1. Liam opened the Notes app on his phone to log the difference, then closed it without typing anything because he'd forgotten what he was going to write, and also because a lorry with an interesting tyre pattern had pulled alongside them and he needed to check whether the tread depth matched the manufacturer's spec for—

"Liam."

He looked up. They were at a junction. He'd missed the sign for the clinic car park.

"I told you to watch for the sign," his dad said.

"I was watching the lorry."

His dad breathed out through his nose and indicated to loop back round. Liam looked at his phone. The tread depth thought was gone. Which meant the Notes app stayed empty. Which meant the gear shift data probably wouldn't get logged either. This happened more than his idea of himself as a careful, organised person would suggest.

He'd started forty-six separate notes documents in the last three months. He'd finished two.

His fingers began on his knee. One. Two. Four. Eight. The binary sequence. He'd worked it out when he was seven because patterns were solid and solid was the opposite of that feeling he still didn't have a good name for. It was somewhere between too fast and not enough. Like a processor running too hot, except also the processor kept switching jobs without asking.

His dad found a space and pulled in too quickly, stopping about twelve centimetres from the wall. He sat there with both hands still on the wheel, not moving.

Liam thought about this morning. His mum standing at the kitchen door in her coat, already holding her bag, telling his dad it was his turn, she'd done the last three, she couldn't keep rearranging her whole day. His dad not saying anything for a moment. Then: okay. One word, flat and careful, like he was setting something down somewhere and wasn't sure it would stay.

Before that, earlier, while his dad was making toast and not looking at either of them, his mum had crouched down next to Liam and said quietly, the way she sometimes did: you're not broken, you know. You're bespoke. She'd said it before, different versions of it. Liam liked the word. It was accurate. His dad had made a sound from the other side of the kitchen, not quite a laugh, not quite dismissive, somewhere in between. Bespoke, he'd said, like he was reading a word in a foreign language. Right.

His mum had looked at the back of his dad's head for a moment. Then she'd kissed Liam on the forehead and picked up her bag.

She'd waved them off from the doorstep but she hadn't smiled.

"Just, when we go in," his dad said. "Say hello. All right?"

Liam looked at him. "You always say that."

"Because it helps."

"It doesn't help me. It helps you."

His dad's jaw moved. Liam hadn't meant that to be unkind. He'd meant it to be true. He tried to work out which one it had landed as, but then the lorry turned into the road outside and he lost the thread completely.

The waiting room was a problem before he'd worked out what kind of problem it was.

The light overhead was flickering. Not in a way you could see, but at a frequency that hit somewhere in his body like bad interference through headphones. Two conversations were happening at once in the corner. The chairs were tilted slightly backwards, which meant you had to keep correcting your posture or slide, and correcting your posture used up processing power he needed for other things.

He found a chair by the far wall and sat down. His cooling fan came on. One. Two. Four. Eight. He was in the middle of the sequence when he noticed the chairs weren't in a straight line and had to stop himself going to fix them, which made him lose count, which meant starting over.

One. Two. Four. Eight.

His dad went to the reception desk to check them in. The receptionist was young with very bright earrings and she smiled at his dad and said something Liam couldn't hear from here. His dad said something back and she laughed, a real one, surprised out of her. His dad leaned against the desk with his arms folded, comfortable, easy, completely different from the person who had been gripping the steering wheel twelve minutes ago.

Liam watched this with interest. He had a folder in his long-term memory labelled Dad: default settings which contained things like the easy laugh, the way he talked to people in queues, the fact that he was good at remembering the names of people he'd only met once. The folder also contained a note: rarely accessed in the presence of Liam. He was not sure yet what to do with this observation. He filed it next to another note he'd been adding to for about a year: question — is Dad embarrassed of me, or embarrassed of himself? Both possibilities had supporting data. Neither felt complete.

He was also, he realised, not entirely sure whether his dad was flirting with the receptionist. He had a separate folder for flirting but it was poorly documented, mostly theoretical. He added a flag: review later.

His dad came back and sat down and the easy version packed itself away and the careful version came back, the one that checked Liam's posture and scanned the room.

A small kid across the room was hitting a pop-up toy with both fists. Red and yellow casing, spring-loaded, multiple segments. One channel was jammed. Liam could see the problem from here: the catch was sitting a bit too high, which meant the spring couldn't return to the right angle. The kid slammed it on the floor again. The noise went right through him like a spike in the signal.

He was out of his chair.

He knew, somewhere at the back of his mind, that he hadn't decided to stand up. The decision had happened underneath, a reroute that bypassed the usual checks. This happened three or four times a day and afterwards he always had to square it with the version of himself that was supposed to be systematic. He crossed the room. He had a paperclip in his jacket pocket because he always had a paperclip in his jacket pocket, and he crouched down and applied it at eleven degrees and the door popped open and a small plastic giraffe appeared.

The kid went from crying to laughing in about half a second. Liam found this genuinely interesting, the speed of it, one state completely replaced by another, and he was still thinking about it, still crouched on the floor, when the kid's mum said, "Oh, thank you, that's so kind."

He looked up. She was smiling at him. He hadn't planned for this bit.

"The catch was misaligned," he said. "The spring over-compressed."

She kept smiling. He wasn't sure if she was waiting for something else. He gave one nod and stood up and walked back to his chair.

One. Two. Four. Eight. One. Two. Four. Eight.

His dad was already crossing the room.

Liam watched him go. He could see the shape of what was about to happen before it happened, the way you could see a circuit failure coming from the load pattern. His dad reached the woman and started talking, and even from here Liam could hear the tone, the quick, slightly too-loud voice that meant he was trying to smooth something over.

"I'm so sorry, he doesn't always, he's just having a bit of an off day—"

The woman's face did something complicated. She looked at Liam, then back at his dad, then at her kid, who was pressing the giraffe button over and over and laughing each time.

"He fixed it, though," she said. "That was really kind of him."

"Yes, no, absolutely," his dad said, "he's just, he doesn't always say hello first—"

Liam looked at the floor.

It was a particular feeling, this one. Not clean. Not a logic error with a query attached. It sat in his chest in a way his technical vocabulary didn't quite cover, because that language was for explaining himself to other people and right now he didn't feel like a system. He felt like a kid whose dad was saying sorry for him to a stranger whose kid he'd just helped, while that stranger kept trying to say it was fine.

He pressed his fingers into his knee.

One two four eight one two four eight.

His dad came back and sat down and said, "All right?" and Liam said, "Optimal," which was a lie.

A few minutes later the receptionist came round from behind her desk carrying a tall stack of folders and caught her foot on the leg of a chair. The folders went everywhere, paper sliding across the carpet in a wide fan. She said something under her breath and crouched down and his dad was already there, off his chair and crouching beside her before anyone else had moved, gathering papers, stacking them carefully, asking her which order they went in. Their heads were quite close together over the pile. At one point they both reached for the same sheet and their hands were briefly in the same place and neither of them moved away immediately.

Liam tracked this with considerable attention.

The receptionist said thank you and his dad said not at all and helped her carry the stack back to the desk and they stood there talking for a moment longer than was strictly required for the handover of folders. When his dad came back his face was slightly different from how it had been. More colour in it. He sat down and looked at the floor and then at the ceiling and then at his phone.

Liam updated the flirting folder extensively. He changed the status from mostly theoretical to active data collection. Then he filed the whole thing under open question — significant findings — handle carefully.

Dr. Aris appeared in the doorway and looked straight at Liam. "Good to see you," she said, in the same level, undecorated way she always did. No brightness, no performance. Then her eyes moved to his dad and she paused, just briefly. "You must be David. Come in."

His dad put his hand on Liam's shoulder as they crossed the room. A small pressure, a prompt. "Say hello to Dr. Aris," he said. Liam opened his mouth. "The chocolate digestives are on the table," Dr. Aris said, already moving to her desk, not looking at either of them. "I remembered you liked them last time." She said it in the same easy way she said most things, like it was nothing, and Liam understood that it was nothing, and also that she was giving him somewhere to put himself that wasn't hello. He sat in his usual chair by the window. His dad cleared his throat. "What do you say, Liam." Not quite a question. Liam looked at the biscuits. "The chocolate ones have more sugar," he said. "That's probably why." His dad's jaw tightened. Dr. Aris made a small sound that might have been a laugh and sat down.

His dad took the chair nearest the door, which was the furthest from Liam. Liam noted the distance. Dr. Aris noticed it too — he could tell from the small adjustment she made, angling her chair slightly, bringing the space between the three of them closer without appearing to.

He noticed the plant on the windowsill, same as always. The roots were pushing further through the drainage holes than last time. He was working out whether to mention it when she said:

"What have you got in your bag?"

The motherboard was sticking out at twenty degrees. He'd meant to sort that before coming in.

"Microwave controller board," he said. "I'm remapping the relay sequence." He pulled it out and put it on the desk, which he also hadn't planned, but it was out now. "The original firmware sends everything through one processor path. I'm splitting the magnetron control cycle off from the timer circuit so they can run in parallel. The original setup creates bottlenecks." He stopped. "I've been working on it for three weeks but I keep losing the thread."

He hadn't meant to add that last bit.

Dr. Aris looked at the board and then at him, without the bright, pleased look adults usually did when he explained technical things. "What does losing the thread feel like?"

He thought about it. "Like the project is still there but I've been rerouted. And when I come back I have to read all my own notes to find where I was. Except sometimes I didn't write the notes. So." He paused. "So I have forty-six notes documents."

"How many are finished?"

"Two."

She nodded. Not a well-done nod. A nod that meant she was actually tracking what he'd said.

"Can I ask about the tapping?"

"Cooling fan," he said. "When the processing load spikes—"

"Does it always work?"

He opened his mouth and stopped. "No," he said. He hadn't said that to anyone before, including himself. "Sometimes I'm already too hot and the fan can't catch up. And sometimes I lose count and have to start over and the starting over is—" he looked for the right word "—extra load."

"Right." She leaned forward a bit. "Here's what I want you to understand. The way you mapped that relay sequence, the pattern recognition, the systems thinking. That's your base architecture. Really good hardware." She paused. "But your operating system is running two environments at once and they're fighting each other. One wants routine, structure, finishing things. The other keeps breaking in with new inputs, new routes, new things to look at. They're not the same system. They're working against each other a lot of the time."

Liam looked at the motherboard. "Like a conflict in the relay sequence."

"Exactly like that. Both systems work. The problem is the conflict between them. The forty-six unfinished notes aren't because something's wrong with you. They're what happens when two real systems are fighting over the same resources." She sat back. "The social processing being slow is the same thing. Running all those manual overrides uses a huge amount of processing power. Your cooling fan makes complete sense."

Something in his chest shifted. Not in a neat way. He pressed his fingers down and found the sequence.

One. Two. Four. Eight.

"The plant needs repotting," he said, because he needed to say something and that was what was there.

Dr. Aris looked at the windowsill and back at him. "Still. I know."

"It was bad last time too."

"It was. I started a note about it."

He was almost smiling, which surprised him.

He glanced at his dad and caught something he hadn't expected: his dad was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, watching the two of them. Not with the tight, managing look from the waiting room. Something more open than that. Like he was trying to learn the rules of a game he'd been playing wrong. And underneath that, something else — a look Liam had seen on his mum's face sometimes, late in the evenings, when she thought no one was watching. Like someone standing outside a room where everyone else knew each other.

Dr. Aris let the moment settle, then turned to his dad. "You seem like you've been working hard out there," she said. Not unkindly.

His dad looked at his hands. "I went and apologised for him. In the waiting room. To the mother." He said it like he already knew the answer. "He'd fixed her kid's toy."

"And what do you think she made of that?"

His dad was quiet for a moment. "She kept saying it was fine," he said. "He didn't need me to do it, did he."

"He fixed the problem. He just didn't perform fixing it." She paused. "There's a difference."

His dad nodded slowly. "My sister said at Christmas, is there a problem with him. And I laughed it off. And for weeks after I kept—" He stopped. "I keep trying to get out in front of it. So nobody gets a chance to ask."

"And does it work?"

"No," he said. "Not really." He glanced towards Liam, then away. "I think it's making things worse. At home."

He didn't say anything else. Dr. Aris didn't push it. Liam kept his eyes on the motherboard and said nothing, because some things were not logic errors with queries attached and this was one of them.

"You've just watched him explain a relay sequence, identify a failing plant, and predict my note-taking habits," Dr. Aris said. "He didn't need managing in here. He needed space." She glanced at the motherboard. "Start there, maybe. Forty-six notes is a lot of threads to help someone hold."

His dad looked at Liam properly then, the direct version he didn't always manage outside. Something in his face came loose from where it had been stuck. It was a small change and it happened quietly and Liam filed it, and this time he knew exactly what folder it belonged in: the same one as the easy laugh at the reception desk, the heads bent together over scattered papers, the same person his dad was when nobody was watching to see if he'd got it wrong.

He'd been there the whole time. He just kept getting in his own way.

"Bespoke," his dad said. He said it differently from this morning. Not like a word in a foreign language. Like something that had just clicked into focus.

Liam looked at him. "Mum said that."

"I know," his dad said. "I didn't get it this morning." A pause. "I think I get it now."

"Dual-environment," Liam said. "Conflicting relay sequences." He picked up the motherboard. "Needs remapping, not replacing."

Dr. Aris stood and moved quietly to her filing cabinet, giving them the desk.

His dad reached out and tilted the board towards him, looking at the circuit paths. "Show me where the bottleneck is," he said.

Liam pointed to the relay junction and his dad leaned in close. They stayed like that for a moment, heads together over the board.

"Dad," Liam said.

"Yeah."

"The receptionist."

His dad went very still.

"The folders," Liam said. "And before that, the desk. I have a folder for flirting. It's not very well documented." He paused. "It is now though."

His dad opened his mouth and closed it again.

"Don't worry," Liam said. "I won't tell Mum." He considered for a moment. "I might start a notes document about it. I probably won't finish it."

His dad made a sound. It took Liam a moment to identify it because he hadn't heard it in a while, not directed at him anyway.

His dad was laughing.

Liam's hands were still on the desk. No sequence. No count. Just still.