Human Sister (13 page)

S
he pulls the raft up onto the narrow strip of gray-brown sand that separates the ocean from the Jenner Estuary. The beach is littered with driftwood. Mist rises from wet sand into air vibrating with the screeching of gulls and the sibilant sound of waves breaking near the shore.

She begins walking toward the sailboat. She is within 50 meters of the boat. A dog (highest correlation: golden retriever) emerges from the shadow of the listing boat and trots toward her. She smiles. She pets the dog. The dog sniffs, licks, and paws her. She expresses fondness in a manner humans are wont to express with their pets and young children.

Outside the space of probable behavior, she cries as she holds the dog. By increasing magnification through the pigeonoid’s eyes, I conclude that she is unharmed by the dog, which barks, struggles to escape from her grip, and, succeeding, lunges forward. Her image rapidly diminishes in size. The distance between her and the dog increases. She is heard to shout: “No! Come back! Don’t chase the pigeonoid. He’s our friend.”

The dog stops running and turns. It looks back at her and pants. She wipes at both of her eyes with the back of her gloved right hand. “Come here, boy. Come.” She pats her legs just above her knees. “Come. That’s a good boy. Come here.” The dog runs back to her. They meet and she hugs the dog. “Oh, yes, yes. That’s a good boy. Yes.”

She pulls her head away from the dog and strokes the dog’s flanks. “You’re so thin. Where’s your human? Where’s home?”

Sara

G
randpa began the FMD sessions at 1700 the day after First Brother last visited us. Before the first session, Grandpa asked me to look through his microscope at the navitors, tiny rod-shaped pellets variably magnetized on one end and approximately half the size of a brain neuron cell body.

He told me that every three days a new cluster of navitors would be implanted in the braincord junctions and that for two hours each evening beginning at 1700 and for two hours each morning beginning at 0500—times when Elio almost certainly wouldn’t call—I would lie perfectly still in the FMD, which would drive the navitors at the rate of approximately 1 millimeter per session toward their designated target areas in my brain. As they traveled, the navitors’ paths would diverge so that the FMD could send them to the 12,464 Harvard brain-classification areas Grandpa had designated as target areas. The navitors would slowly dissolve as they penetrated my brain, leaving a trail of molecular guidance cues and neuron growth factors that would develop into neural pathways running between the braincord junctions and their target areas. All tests on animal and Sentiren-type brains and all computer simulations had proved, Grandpa said, that there was no risk whatsoever of degradation in my brain functions—the entire process was as safe as, though more involved than, cutting toenails.

Looking back, it’s hard for me to believe that, despite his assurances, I didn’t harbor some fear. Perhaps I’m simply not remembering.

The braincord, the last 15 centimeters of which were bifurcated into two white channels, was guided by microsensors implanted near its tips. The first time it moved up my nostrils, I was so overcome by irritation that Grandpa quickly backed the cord out.

I vigorously rubbed my alarmed nose. “It feels like two worms slithering up there!”

“That was a good, healthy response,” he said, handing me a tissue. “We have automatic responses that help prevent things from slithering up our noses. Don’t fight the tickling sensations. Accept them. Relax when the cord moves into your nostrils. Shall we try again?”

The second time, I concentrated on accepting the tickling, the watery eyes, and the runny nose; and the braincord found its junctions and implanted the first navitor clusters. For the next two hours, I lay still, listening to the FMD’s high-pitched chirr, which sounded as though it came from the busy workings of hundreds of little hammers. After a few sessions, neither the braincord’s movement up my nostrils nor the FMD’s buzz bothered me, and during the many hours I was required to lie still in the FMD, I was able to think about the math problems Grandpa had given me or about what it might be like to have Michael rather than this monotonous machine connected to me.

Senator Franklin visited us one evening while he was in California for a Pacific defense conference. On that day, my afternoon FMD session was completed early.

Grandpa made a point of showing the senator our remodeling plans, explaining that I would be a young woman in a few years and should have the privacy of the back third of the house for myself. “I don’t need the security any longer,” Grandpa said. “I’m glad to have put all that android stuff behind me. I wish Karl and Mary would do the same.”

I felt confused in that moment, torn between revulsion at Grandpa’s lie to his friend and conviction that Grandpa knew what was best—what he had to do.

“I heard about the transfer of their pets to somewhere in Canada,” the senator replied. “In a truck with avocados and strawberries, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Grandpa chuckled.

“Quite a caper, that,” the senator said, shaking his head. “Some uptight people in Washington were less than amused.”

Over dinner, the senator complained unceasingly about his life and about what he called our troubled times: the military was demanding crazy projects that would bankrupt our country, which was already in its twelfth year of a seemingly implacable depression; barring some miracle, the ERP almost certainly would win many new seats in the next election; he would have to endure an exhausting campaign to win re-election; and his wife was unhappy that he had to work so hard and that when he did come home he was too tired to do anything.

Though I felt unease from Grandpa’s seemingly light-hearted deception of his old friend, I sensed from Senator Franklin’s words and the tone of his voice that things were bad in the cage of the outside world and were getting worse. Evidently, Grandpa had been right: We had to be vigilant in keeping our secrets. But little did I suspect how many secrets there would be or how they would multiply malignantly, taking on a dark life of their own.

Grandpa and I completed the FMD sessions during the first week of May, and six weeks later we flew to Amsterdam to visit Elio. Visiting Elio for my birthday had by now become a tradition, one I eagerly looked forward to. But this summer’s visit was considerably darkened by the fact that Grandpa was vigilant the entire time in not letting me run or engage in any kind of physical play. I had to be ever careful not to bump or jar my head because the connections between my cribriform plate and the new neural pathways were still quite fragile. Even worse, I couldn’t tell Elio why I was being such a spoilsport—such as when I refused to join him and his friends in a game of what he said Americans called soccer, games I had participated in and enjoyed in prior summers—and I feared he might never again want to spend another summer vacation with me.

As soon as Grandpa and I returned from the trip, Grandpa began having a computer stimulate the neural pathways that led to all parts of my brain from the junctions in my cribriform plate. My job was to practice total relaxation by concentrating on my breathing while the computer stimulated my newly formed nerve cells and monitored responses. I was also to report—but only when asked, since reporting broke my concentration—what sensations I’d felt and what mental impressions I’d had in the few seconds or minutes since the last report.

The first month of practice was devoted to acquainting the computer with my body. It quickly discovered how to move each of my fingers and toes, then my arms and legs. By the end of the first month, the computer had learned how to control my right hand sufficiently well to draw or type as proficiently as I could under my own control. Next, it learned how to move my tongue, mouth, and vocal cords so that during exhalations it was able to speak through me.

The strangest part of this was how natural it all seemed. Before the practice sessions began, I had imagined that having my arms and fingers and voice operated in some mysterious way would make me feel eerily possessed. But I found that as long as I remained totally relaxed and didn’t interfere, my hands, legs—even the words I spoke—felt as though they were being consciously driven by me. Of course, the observer part of me knew the computer was manipulating my body, but the
feeling
of producing the motions or words was the same as if I myself had intentionally produced them.

What was this “I,” then? An imagined something fantasizing that it was in control of a body and its thoughts? Perhaps I really was, as Grandpa had repeatedly said, a network analogous to a colony of ants, which functions well in complex ways without having any central control. Perhaps my “central control,” my consciousness, was merely a complex feedback loop observing internal brain phenomena—an observer tricked by itself into thinking that it had control because the correspondence between observing and happening was so seamless that observing became seen as cause.

After the first month of these lessons, things became more difficult for me when the computer began exploring other areas of my brain. I would remember funny things and laugh; I would smell cookies baking or lilacs after a spring rain; I would see Elio on Vidtel or First Brother staring at a blank wall; I would hear Grandma talking or music playing or a squirrel clucking in a tree.

I repeatedly told Grandpa that I disliked the all-too-real feel of what I was experiencing, that I worried about losing the ability to distinguish these hallucinations from reality. He insisted that my job during these sessions was not to like or dislike anything. My job was to breathe in and out, in and out, and to observe—only observe and later report—the feelings, thoughts, sights, sounds, and other sense impressions stimulated by the computer.

Easy to say, I told him, but difficult to do.

“Difficult?” he responded. “It is not difficult to breathe or observe. If you’re finding something difficult, then you’re doing something other than breathing and observing.”

I tried to do exactly as Grandpa instructed, but I continued to have trouble distinguishing between me-observing-me-seeing-something and me-seeing-something-while-observing-me-seeing-this same something. It was like being in a house of mirrors where I was one of the mirrors—but which one?

I tried to do exactly as Grandpa instructed because I understood that much of what the computer was learning would be passed on to Michael, and that much of what I was learning about observing myself under another’s control would prove invaluable when Michael and I eventually connected through our braincord.

I tried to do exactly as Grandpa instructed because I loved Michael and was prepared to do anything for him even before he was born—on 3 September, Grandpa’s eighty-third birthday. Until that day, I’d been allowed in to only two of the three rooms in the remodeled level 3 area: the sparsely furnished room that was to become my bedroom as soon as Michael was born, and the main room, which was to contain the hydroponic garden and Michael’s and my study and living area.

Throughout Michael’s ten-month gestation, I was not permitted even to peek into the third room when Grandpa entered it. He didn’t want me to see how Michael was being made. As with Lily, I was to accept Michael whole, as an incomprehensibly complex and wonderful person, not as so many nerves and muscles and organs connected in such and such a way.

But as the months passed, the itch of curiosity grew too intense for me to keep from scratching it. One day in the eighth month, when Grandpa appeared to be concentrating on some problem and his hands were busy carrying a particularly large container, I stealthily followed behind him as he walked toward this mysterious third room. As the door slid open, a whoosh of warm air escaped, bringing with it the smell of something antiseptic. The light inside was blue and dim. In the center of the room sat a shiny metallic platform covered with a transparent cylindrical hood. Under the hood lay what looked like a headless, fully grown man whose chest had been carved open right down the middle. Off in a corner, on top of another metallic platform, stood a large tube filled with liquid. Suspended in the liquid was what appeared to be a brain with blood vessels and white cords leading down from it to lungs, a stomach, a liver—

The door whooshed shut.

Though that was the only time I got a peek inside Michael’s gestation room, I often stood outside that room and wondered about my new brother growing in there. What would he be like? In what ways would he change my life? Would he really be all that I wanted him to be? All that First Brother had not been? And would he be happy in these three rooms, with only the scenescreens as his windows to the outside world?