Lizard and the Butterfly

19 min readMar 15, 2023

Author’s note: I’m sharing a speculative fiction story I wrote seven years ago. It lived solely on my computer until last year, when it was published by Untenured Digital Magazine. The story is told through the eyes of a neurodivergent teen girl living in a near future after a pandemic has reshaped society. (Yes, I wrote this years before our Covid 19 pandemic). I spent two years working with children with neurodevelopment disorders (some severe on the spectrum) helping teach them musical theater with The Miracle Project, and I was deeply changed by the experience. These children each had their own unique gifts and opened my eyes to interacting with the world in different sensorial ways. So when this story about a pandemic, and a mother and daughter — who both functioned a-typically in the world - found my brain, I had to write it. I am not, however, an expert on neurodivergence or children with autism (though I did share it with some folks in the respective communities for review).

This is a work of fiction. (Except for Bob The Butterfly. His story is true.)

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

lizard and the butterfly

by taryn o’neill

1] < check it >

They’re not actual zombies, but they only have one thing on their mind:

Volatility. It’s bananas. And the volume, too. My sleeve is tapping at four times the normal rate. The Dow is going bonkers. China. <Again> Government held back data on manufacturing. <Shocker> It’s gonna drop… 36,233.02. Can they feel it?

Nope. Their super pretty faces are trying to frown, confused <too much Botox, so it’s just a grimace.> But they’re so pretty. Perfect teeth and skinny arms. Not soft and squishy, like me. Their haptics must be woven into their sleeveless dresses ’cause I can’t see ‘em.

Biotech!

You sneaky dog. Always popping up right before the bell. The hopes of a nation rising and falling in the span of a second. What data did you just — -

DING.

36,232.24.

BANANAS! <I’m off> But STILL. First time Dow has dropped below 37K since ’25.

< fyi the algorithms are all redundant, they’re just running along a mobius strip on the route to nowhere. Money is all an illusion. The founders knew this. Apparently my grandfather knew it too. He was sharp.>

OK.

Bloomberg Terminal: Disconnect.

Regular data resume.

Time to breathe.

I will look around.

To the edge of my room.

I have five minutes before snack.

Ugh. Uggggh. Butterflies, down there. Something is coming —

WHATTHEFUCKISIT?! FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK — -

The desk on my face is nice and cool. I smell rosemary.

IT’S TODAY!

She’s COMING.

How do I prepare? I have to prepare. <Focus.>

2] < framing >

Nothing and everything was getting done. Not the important stuff. Lots of the pointless. Bloated content that seemed totally relevant in the moment. I have numbers in a folder somewhere. <What is the folder but a representation of clusters of data. There is no blue shaped folder in your computer. It is the programmer thinking you are dumb and creating an image of something it thinks you can handle. Not that I’m saying you’re dumb.>

Humans work well within a system, <‘specially me, duh> We have a day, a month, a year. We are taught to exist inside schedules: semesters, work weeks, weekends, vacations. When we don’t have them, the energy dissipates. Time becomes transparent. When there is nothing to frame your space. <FOCUS Hilly>

I have matching scars on my forearms. One by a cat, one by me. Mine is deep and straight. The cat’s jagged and surface. The cat’s is new as I played roughly with her two days ago. I got in trouble. She only visits this floor once a week. I don’t know if hers will leave a mark. Mine did.

These butterflies in my stomach, they are smart, they remembered before I did. Different organs with their own circadian rhythms. So they must have a sixth sense of their own. Can they predict what I can not? What it will be like to see her? There is no pattern, or at least it’s locked away.

- -

“Hillllly?”

Snack time. Mina smells clean today — “your food luv — I need at least 2/3s of it eaten.”

<Yuck, it’s the pink bowl of mush.>

“I — uh uhuh — I phett — “

<Fuck. My fucking mouth.>

“It’s ok luv — take your time.”

“I — uh uh — menaa”

“Or just swipe it out — “ pointing to my tablet —

“Are you excited?! It’s your big day!”

Oh. RIGHT. Fifteen. One Five. NOW it makes sense. My goddamn birthday.

I wave my hard at her and pull my food towards me, glaring. She registers me with a knowing look, stepping towards me, her fleshy frame, “I know sugar… They’ll be here soon. It’s important for you to keep your glucose levels normal. I don’t have to tell you that.”

She places an arm on my shoulder, I flinch but she maintains her touch, pressing down harder. I feel a wash of dopamine flow through me.

“I’ve set your sleeve to give you alerts when they arrive at reception. You good to get yourself dressed, sweets?”

I nod. My heart slows. She picks up of spoonful of the thick acai and hands it to me. Whatever.

I finish the bowl.

Eat think repeat. Eat think repeat. Walks at dusk, when all that’s left of the sun is its scatter.

[3] < memory >

My mom was a late bloomer and an old soul. She loved Joni Mitchell <old, Canadian, folksy> when everyone else loved Beyonce. Her mom loved Joni, too, and she needed the connection. <Just before our love got lost she said… I was as constant as a northern star…> She would tell me how how special it was that I was a girl, our mitochondria DNA unbroken from our female ancestors, “How amazing is THAT?!” She would stare at me hoping I would understand, even with my issues. Her clear green eyes, bright against her lashes, threatening to sprout tears.

She was an artist. A writer, actor, painter, performer. A magical thinker. An explorer of the invisible. She found meaning in everything.

She had these ‘to do’ lists and whiteboards, scraps of notebooks and pads of paper everywhere. The IDEA. It would take her over like a daemon. My dad would just smile and tell her it was a great one. Because there were hundreds of them. Ideas. All great. All unfinished. Never turned into anything complete outside of her mind. She wasn’t unaware of her issues. She wanted constraints on her, to force her to finish, to ‘ship’ as people used to say. But every new day brought original inspirations that would threaten her other kids, would starve them out. Abandoned. Beside the stacks of magazines, dog eared, notated, never thrown out in case a secret was still to be found.

If she just had had some restrictions. A structure to capture her energy and direct her focus.

Lost Kinetic Potential.

- -

I remember a story she would tell me about the butterflies. One day she found two floating, dead, in our pool. In a panic she scooped them out with the old blue plastic mesh thing that would hang on the fence outside her office window. She laid them down and shook off the water and put them on the concrete, in the sun. Something about the light that would heal them. She just knew. And after a few minutes they twitched and started to move. But only slowly. Dragging their wet bodies in circles along the concrete. Knowing her, she must have been crying. She fed them sugar water the way her entomologist friend had told her to and placed them on pieces of shrubs . For two hours she coaxed them along with her voice and her will. Pulling one of their wings out from behind where it shouldn’t have been <so fragile>. One of them survived. Bob, as she called it <male or female who knows>, found a mate, and they would dance and fly around the yard. Making little butterflies. She had saved the species. She was happy then, even in the growing fog. She buried the one she could not save.

- -

Huh.

That biotech blip at the end of the day was Something of Note. A new drug that shows promise? WBE prototype leak? <I’m not supposed to know such things.> Primary folder open, subfolders, 200 bookmarks, Alt Open All. In what manner should I search? Source articles, full research and appendix available. Let’s skim these suckers, see if there is something of note. What is subterfuge? Open tab, search, define. What is the evolutionary argument against reality, copy paste search. New data. Scan new email, screen capture, send. To myself. For review in the background.

I love this rush. The moment to feel real and whole.

M U L T I T A S K. They say consciousness evolved out of it. The need to regulate the flood of sensory input.

<focus, Hilly>

- -

The irony was that she should have worked at a think tank. She was that smart. But the ideas always put her too much in a state of awe. The irony. She was getting to the truth about the universe. But for every new book she started to devour, another article clipped and highlighted, ten hairs hair would fall out, and her autonucleoids and cytokines would rise.

I remember the hospital. The blue line that would take me from the front door to the elevator and then down the hallway to her big door. Then to her single bed with wires hanging from a metal pole we named Alfred. It would beep. It was trying to talk to me. Her eyes would crinkle when she saw me. But she knew not to reach out her arms. And dad wouldn’t force me into them. We would stand there, her body in pain, fighting itself, my body twitching from the light…

FUCKFUCKFUCK <BREATTHEEEEE HILLY>

- -

4] < reasons >

An early article called it “The Over-Tasked Mind”. Our brains that once looked for patterns in tall grass to detect a tiger now looked for patterns in every bip bop and boop. The mind is a tool. It has a purpose. But survival is easier now and the tool got distracted. A generation of people hunched over their phones, vertebras compacting, eyes straining, FOMO, sleep stunted by blue light and ambitions, but that was the least of their problems.

The first research papers were scoffed at: “Your phone is making you sick.” But it wasn’t the phone itself that was to blame, but how it made you think. Unencumbered. Your phone, your computer, opening a multiverse of portals, projecting your Self into the ether. Your brain, the train, on a never ending track, addicted to the ‘ding’. Your happy place, the nucleus accumbens, lighting up with every alert, swimming in dopamine. But along with it came MULTI TASKING <shhhhh> which lead to STRESS. Your brain mistaking #crazybusy for real stress, flooding the body with the big C — cortisol. Just to survive. As it always had <in periods of war and tiger attacks> which led to our inner soldiers deployed, immune response 10 hut!… fanning the flames. INFLAMMATION. The delicate HPA Axis, our endocrine and immune systems symbiosis, up in smoke. A flood of cytokines. Exhaustion. Depression. Too long in this cycle.

The body fought back. It believed it was being attacked. BY IDEAS.

She wasn’t special. Just early.

- -

She found a dead lizard in the pool. Pasty white with a bacterial film bubble around its mouth. There was no life left to save. She was quick to see that. She buried it too.

- -

We had this copper sink. A left over from the previous owners. Derelict looking until an accident with a lemon revealed a rose pink glow under the burnished stained brown. For hours she would squeeze lemon juice onto a scrub brush and clean it until it shined… marveling at the science, the chemistry of citric acid on copper — See?! But knowing all too well that water and air were foes of this newborn glow. But she couldn’t help herself. Elbow grease and time. Things she had, back then. The glow was like the ark of the covenant <my dad told me that> — so beautiful but not meant for this reality. I’d sit there, on the edge of the counter, watching her squeeze lemons into the stupid sink, desperate to see the glow. Me, ignored in the shadows, not able to contribute. She didn’t care motherly cares. She was an alchemist, addicted to the glow… to the light that called to her. She didn’t take too kindly to my screams against it.

But there were things we shared in the dark. The smells of her plants, of basil, rosemary, lavender. Only a smell can bring you out of a deep sleep, she once told me.

- -

Decision. Movement.

DISCONNECT.

I take off my sleeve and push my body up from my chair.

<Ow> Legs are stiff. And fat. I have faith <in statistics> that my genetics will shift.

The air moves around me,

no data,

my eyes sift through a sea of molecules.

The closet door opens, like an airlock <pop>. The light turns on, a warm glow.

A row of clothes. Greyscale <mostly>. She loved fashion. An explosion of clothes. Rows of color and textures that she would constantly re-sort. Even inside her, I saw her brainwaves dancing among the new Fall Collection. She demanded places to wear things, events, a social calendar of culture infused intellect. <Her mother had had places to wear things, on the arm of my grandfather.> But then she would crumple in her heap of silk and cashmere unable to leave the house. Overwhelmed. What would she want me to wear? A sweater, soft shirt, easy pull-on pants. Nothing to snag my frizzy hair.

Dad. I’m sure he’s lost more of his. Stopped taking those P- pills when hers kept falling out. Solidarity. I remember. It hit him the hardest. That he couldn’t take care of us both.

He would get frustrated with her. Her need for naps, for help with me. How her ‘productive times’ were right when the nanny would leave and he would get stuck with me and a half cooked dinner. He was such a Saint. Looking at her with both reverence and fear. Emotion was supposed to keep us bonded as a community, used to find a mate, protect our offspring. It was for survival. But when it merged, fused with higher intellect the seeds of destruction were born.

Why do we need to know the truth about everything? It’s not worth losing your mind over.

<Fucking sexist medical community!> The warning signs were there. Ignoring the autoimmune issues popping up with greater frequency, as women tried to decide what being a woman meant. Mom would talk about it. Clucking at her friends with the two kids and a chip on their shoulder, guilty for having the job, for leaving it, with a husband they said they despised (but secretly loved) while trying to fit into the jeans their daughters wore, lead a Pinterest worthy lifestyle <bye bye Pinterest> and still be the care taker. Care. I looked it up. It’s root meaning lament and grief. Sorrow and wail. Apt. So came the fatigue, the foggy brains, more cases of Lupus, Hashimotos, and of course MS. All in a time when the future was being invented <mostly by men>. A new Cambrian explosion.

An explosion is always ugly. As if every brain was quantumly entangled, connected through an invisible field of pheromones. Mass sickness, no matter your creed. Septic shock. 225,000 dead in six months. Millions in bed. A pandemic. All bodies declaring war on its owner.

- -

SHUT THE FUCK UP!

Breathe. Stupid emotions.

The lizard, floating there. The one that she buried. It was one of those days when she knew I could hear her. Understand. She told me about our lizard brains, that we had evolved from them, that pieces of the reptile were still in us. <ewwww> She grazed my skull with her finger tips, touching at the base to point out the cerebellum. Then point to a picture where our lizard brain, our limbic system was… the amygdala, the hippocampus shaped like a horse shoe. Our primal urges, our emotions were the same as a million billion years ago <yes, I know more like a hundred thousand> that they can overpower our smart noggin, the cortex, at the front of our head — she tapped both of our foreheads. We are still at the mercy, she explained, of our past, of where we came from. The trick was to realize when the lizard was awake and not to let it control you. She was in awe of the dance between the thoughts and feelings. The billions of neurons responsible for our selves.

She whispered that my grandfather was involved in something big, something about understanding it all <my grandmother had died of Alzheimers>. The world didn’t know how close we were to figuring this whole brainy mess out. But soon, she whispered, soon.

I think she always wished she could be validated for the depth of her feelings and ideas. But she couldn’t control her lizard. It ate her from the inside out.

[5] < analysis >

Evolution is funny. Nature selects in mystery. It knows what is fit before we do.

Millenniums of royalty kept the world in check, from growing too fast or out of sync with nature, shedding rebel blood to secure their own. Maintain the status quo! <Unless you were some Roman emperor>. The visionaries and change makers were thrown in the dungeons. But once the slaves and serfs were freed, once a steamship cut a route to the new world, where meritocracy was birthed… the whole thing went to hell.

I mean WAKE THE FUCK UP!

The people who made the phones, the networks they run on, the platforms they feed, most of them are like me. It only makes sense we could handle the load and not rewire our brain. The warning signs were there (though a decade too late), yet you treated it like a bottomless Coke, an amusement park that you never had to leave. As if you were capable of anything more than a vacation there?! I MEAN, C’MON!

You may be pretty, but you’re really fucking dumb.

<Sorry.>

<Hormones.>

- -

“Honey? How’re you doing? I saw a few blips there…”

Mina has her head poked around the edge of the door. Sneaky.

“Fffff — iiiiii”

“Fine? OK good luv. They’ll be here in 12 minutes. Beautiful sweater you picked out, goes so nicely against your skin!”

Then a warm and gushy smile, pulls her head back to her hallway bound body and shuts the door.

Mina <in her capacity> knows I like 12 minute reminders. It gives me two minutes to prepare to know that they are less than 10 minutes away. 600 seconds. 12. being 6 if divided by 2 and if added is 3 which times 2 times 1 is 6.

I look at the violet cotton against my arm. The weave of high vibrating strings.

- -

I once saw Mina on the staff computer on her lunch break. The big dull grey screen. Only one portal now. The AAs, the advanced algorithms <no one will call them AI’s, come on> presenting her with everything she needs to know. A singular mandated focus.

Clarity. The Compartmentalization Act of 2024 was a terror to most. But then it became a relief <to a lot>.

The world is limited now. People throttled as to how much bandwidth they can consume. The amygdala is now blocked from the stimuli it adored. Firewalls In the brain. The Firemesh. <Soothes the brain, Saves the body!> It came out quickly, already prototyped for other pursuits. The ‘neural link’, ‘neural dust’ , a theoretical answer to the looming AI problem — already entrenched in geek lore by books and billionaires. If only they knew it would be fast tracked and recalibrating to make people less, not more. Jobs and lives required to be simplified and streamlined. The zombie Bloomberg hosts — happy with their one job of relaying market news, and of their skinny arms.

I’m exempt. Not throttled, of course. My computer and un-meshed brain free to roam what’s left of the public web. <It still exists, just in a streamlined form.>

Next year, I’ll have access to The Arktos server. The grand poobah. 16 is the entry point. The corporations, the brain trusts will come calling, with consent. For I have a brain that can interact with the algorithms… I can predict, analyze, feel. In my own special way, my body happy to partake in the neural dance. I love the data, tapping at my arm. Can meaning come from it? If a pattern can be discerned. A pattern is beautiful. A pattern is a hat tip to the universe. The momentary glimpse of its grandness.

But I don’t mistake it for Joy.

- -

Fucking shit.

<Background refresh complete>.

FUCKING SHIT!

Conclusive findings on ability to transmute A-spectral neurons into resilient neural and entric neurons. HPA Axis stabilized with 3D rendering replication. Up for Peer Review.

<A-spectral neurons, that’s what I have! You know what this could mean?! SPECTRUM PEEPS FTW!!>

My Grandfather said to fix something you have to know how it works. Then you have to know how to duplicate it. In having to fix the brain we were forced to solve its mystery. The quick influx of funding helped. The roll out of the Heron 133 Q-bit system helped <duh>. Necessity breeds invention. To solve the epidemic we had to be able to copy the brain and study its code. Whole Brain Emulation. WBE. It’s not public knowledge yet, talked about in labs and behind oak paneled doors, places my grandfather could go. My mom would talk to herself about it when she thought I was trapped in my head.

- -

The lizard and the butterfly. The lizard couldn’t survive the pool, the man mixed chemicals, nothing of note or nature to cling on to, too heavy to float. But it had the final laugh.

BEEP… BEEP.BEEP.

They’re here.

- -

[6] < arrival >

A journey to get up to my room. 242 seconds on average for most. 2 x 4 = 8 minus 2 equals 6.

Should I open my black-out curtains, even just a bit?

BANANAS. < Stop it Hilly>

The beginning of my life was shadowy. Not bright or fully formed. Until it was. Suddenly. And the brightness hurt. “So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?” < Mom’s favorite quote from a book about a blind French girl and a Nazi:> Why is the future always white? In the movies: Bright, stark, colorless. Unless it’s post- apocalyptic and then it’s more to my greyscale liking <but so depressing>. I have this nightmare of a blinding white Arkos tower that will wrap its tendril around me and sync in through my eye.

I CAN’T LIVE IN A BRIGHT FUTURE DON’T THEY SEE?

- -

Through a sea of molecules

Into the bathroom.

I stumble.

I push up my violet sleeves.

Why did I scratch my arm? I know why the cat did, but was it play or to protect? Why did I? To be in the moment. With my body. To see what blood would do.

There are my eyes. In the mirror. Are they like hers? Suddenly I can’t remember. How will I get from here to old? Who will help me? What will cause my wrinkles if not the sun on vacation on some Italian island that I might never go to. Who will teach me? What is it that bonds a child to a parent, to mother? I left behind some fetal cells, lodged in her tissue, having escaped through her blood brain barrier. Did my cells change yours, Mom? Could part of me have hurt you? You saw choices beyond me. Too many. But my existence didn’t quell them, only multiplied them. Choosing for 2. You thought you’d be tethered to the Earth. Why didn’t I help? It is her fault, it is my fault — It’s too late to help — How will I continue on this ancient female mitochondrial DNA, this blood line —

WHY AREN’T YOU GIVING ME THE ANSWERS??!?!

FUCKFUCKFUCKINGANSWERS!

—

I can feel my body.

Entirely on the floor.

The cool tile beneath me.

Once the tile had been wood. A bench. In a restaurant with palm trees around it. My head not on tile but on her lap, a silky dress oblivious to my food stained eight year old hair. The butterflies were angry, stabbing with their little pointy wings right under my ribs. . I couldn’t breathe. <And so sad because we were in a restaurant in one of the few times I could go out, I must have been having a good week.> People walked by us. We were in the lobby. The only place where I could stretch out. But she ignored them all, their stares, didn’t care what they thought. She had laid me out with my head in her lap. She said in a calm voice… “I will fix you, okay?” There was this light in her eyes, now I remember. And she clapped her hands together like a bell, and rubbed them in a blur. And then placed one on top of the angry butterflies and the other one on my belly. Then she rubbed gentle circles over where it was sore. So softly. Barely pressing. I could feel her heart beating through the tips of her fingers. Circle after circle, as she looked at me with gentle kindness. The butterflies didn’t like that at first, but then they got lazy… and sleepy. And found it hard to poke. They finally agreed it was best just to leave. I felt soft and comfortable. Melting into her lap. I don’t know what she did. She had made them go away. They disappeared. Freed. She was full of magic. An alchemist. Not meant for this world.

“Hillary?”

My father’s voice. Right on time.

I look up, <Hi Daddy.> I just smile.

“You okay?”

“YYYUUEESS”.

He laughs and joins me on the floor.

“It looks like you’ve grown again.”

He smooths my cheek and gently kissing my forehead.

“Happy Birthday kiddo — “

I snort and scrunch my nose .

He pulls something from his back pocket. A tiny bouquet of rosemary sprigs. Tied with a string.

“They’re from the garden.”

I take them and press them to my nose, breathing in the molecules. My heart tickles and then is warm.

“Let’s say hi, shall we?”

Yes. It’s time. He helps me up, He leads me into my room. To the desk, I sit. Attaching my sleeve my arm. I turn towards the open door.

“Are you ready?”

I nod. I can feel my warm heart beating, my mitochondrial DNA preparing for contact.

He lifts up his case, next to the desk and gently pulls out a small blinking tower. <He must miss her so.> He syncs it to my desktop. She held on. So much longer than everyone else. She waited just long enough. For the idea to become reality. <Grandad would be proud.>

“She’ll be so happy to see you.”

And my sleeve comes alive in a million flutters as light floods my brain — the most beautiful light that I have ever seen —

Lizard and the Butterfly

Written by Taryn O'Neill