Human Sister (5 page)

His eyes teared over and his chin quivered. “I’m following doctor’s orders. That’s all.”

Sara

“B
egin where we began,” Michael said a few days ago, right     before I began scribbling the twenty some pages I’ve already composed. He handed me a few white fibrous sheets and this antiquated instrument I’m holding, this pen with ink encased in a tube and a ball point that rolls over paper, allowing me to deposit a thin blue trail of thoughts. He’d made the ink, tube, ball point, and sheets of paper in our fabricator.  

“When I was a little girl,” I replied, “I learned to draw letters and numbers. I learned to sign my name. But since then I’ve seldom written anything with a pen. I’ve simply spoken and watched words appear on a computer screen. Why do you want me to transmit my memories in such an old and cumbersome manner?”

“We have been here a week now,” he answered, “and each day you’ve become more depressed. For your mental health you need to physically disinter your memories and fears. Let them flow down past the back of your eyes, through your brainstem and neck, across your shoulder, into your arm and fingers, pen and ink, and onto the sheets of paper. Then we will scan into the computer the memory-laden pages before we feed them into one of our nutriosynthesizers, where they will become part of an apple that we will share. The apple will give us pleasure and metabolic energy, and its waste, once passed through us, will be returned to the fabricator to make more ink and paper, which will absorb still more of your memories. Call it therapy. Call it learning to become part of the life cycle contained in these underwater domes. Call it doing what you must to survive.”

“But I can’t decide where to begin,” I objected. “What do you think started us on the path that led here? No matter what event I focus on, a multitude of prior events could just as well be blamed. Trying to find the beginning of anything, it seems, is like searching for the smallest negative number.”

“Begin where we began,” he repeated, and he kissed my forehead with his cold lips. His biological subsystems are warm but well insulated in his interior, so unless his synthetic muscles have recently been working hard, his surface remains nearly at the temperature of the ambient air. Back home I had an infrared photograph of the two of us sitting at our study table, him with his arm around my shoulders, his head leaned lovingly against mine. I was bright with various colors of mammalian heat. He barely appeared at all—a wispy ghost. Strange how things change. Now, he has taken charge, does what is needed for us to survive. I feel like an impotent ghost, condemned to remain in a world in which she doesn’t belong.

Evidently content that his instructions to me were adequate, Michael patted me on my shoulder and walked toward the dome’s rounded door. Nearly every aspect of the dome’s structure is rounded to help hold back the crushing pressure at this depth. The release of the door seals made a doleful wind-through-pines whisper. The door slid open. Michael walked through it and into the branching cylindrical tunnel that connects this dome with the other two modules. I wasn’t sure whether he was returning to the module where he has been working on a hydroponic garden that includes curved trays of plants covering the walls from top to bottom, or whether he would return to the other module, where he has been assembling the artificial human wombs designed by Grandpa.

In this module, our pillows and rolled-up sleeping bags lie just to the right of the door. Unrolled, the two sleeping bags cover nearly the entire open area of the floor. Continuing clockwise, there is a fabricator and a nutriosynthesizer atop cabinets, the stair-stepper on which I am supposed to exercise daily, the external door to the compression chamber that opens to the seamount cave in which we are hiding, and, finally, the desk I sit at, working now on yet another page.

Above the desk a holographic monitor is mounted on the wall. Housed in the half-dome below the floor are the air and water recyclers, fuel cells, and feedstock for our fabricators and nutriosynthesizers. Above me, in the low-slung artificial sky (at its apex, only about twice as high as I am tall), a few small pink-fringed clouds snail through morning light. The brisk recycled air brings false news of fragrant dew-kissed rose bushes, the twittering of birds awakening, the soft chuckle of a fountain.

Something else abides in this cold titanium bubble far under the sea: the consciousness that emerges within me, a woman not yet eighteen, a consciousness that has been doing little for days other than looking back, as if watching a stranger in a mirror who finds solace only in the intertwining shadows of memory where her dead still live and love. With them is the little girl—I see her now, limned with the light of memory, out across a distance of years—the happy little girl I once was.

Leaning toward her through those years, I whisper, “Where did we go wrong? What more should I have done?”

The little girl senses my grieving voice in a peculiar rustling of autumn leaves that click and scrape along the vineyard drive. She turns, listens, peers out along a row of moonlit trees, and answers back, “Who are you?”

Nothing. I am nothing but memory. The weight of memory. The mud-suck of memory.

“Begin where we began,” Michael urged. Well, as anyone reading this can see—will anyone read this?—I disobeyed. Something unusual for me, disobeying. I suppose I could arbitrarily designate a beginning and say that, like most humans, I began mid-ecstasy; and like a few, when my mother discovered me, burrowed tail and all into her uterine wall, clinging to life, it was another who spoke up and saved me.

“Mary,” Grandpa said, hoping that in time his daughter-in-law’s body would betray her, make her maternal despite her wishes, “what would be wrong with giving the little tyke a chance to be born? Then give it three months to see how things go. Three months isn’t that long. If after three months you still feel the same way, then give the baby to Helena and me to raise. We would like a granddaughter to care for and love in our old age.”

After making the decision to endure a pregnancy (the gift of a bigger home in Berkeley was part of the deal), Mom immediately stopped smoking, refrained from even an occasional social drink, rigorously followed the exercise, diet, and nutritional supplement program prescribed by Grandpa, and, after I was born, breast-fed and cared for me ideally. But on my ninety-second day, as I was settling into my new home—Grandpa and Grandma’s world of science and flowers and love—Mom resumed smoking, popped the cork on a bottle of champagne, and danced with Dad on Stinson Beach to celebrate the resumption of her life.

That, at least, is the story I gleaned from hearing Grandpa and Grandma speak about how I came to be—and how, to my parents, I rated a distant second to my older, non-biologic brothers.

But I wonder—now, after discovering so many secrets and lies—whether I really came to be in that manner. Perhaps, even before the dilated-pupil conception, Grandpa had intended me to be a part of his next and most daring project. Perhaps he even went so far as to surreptitiously foil Mom and Dad’s birth-control methods, methods nearly certain not to fail. Then again, perhaps Mom and Dad were in on it all along.

During my first years with Grandpa and Grandma, I wasn’t permitted to venture out alone beyond the walls enclosing the high-security home they had built into the side of a vineyard hill. There were bad people out there, I was told, fanatics who hated Grandpa for the work on robotics and emergent intelligences that he and his company, Magnasea, had done for the military—people who would, if we weren’t careful, kidnap and hurt me.

Not only did these threats darken my imagination of humanity in the outer world, they also darkened my perception of nature beyond the walls, such as of the old valley oak tree that stood alone atop a hill just east of our yard. My first memory of this tree comes from an overcast, misty winter morning when I was riding on Grandpa’s shoulders. He stopped directly in front of the ivy-covered wall, and I pushed myself up with my palms against the top of his head to peek out at the world beyond—and there it was, this ancient tree, silhouetted against a gray sky. Tattered rags of pallid green beard lichen drooped from its many-jointed, crooked arms, which rose pleadingly in all directions. Perched on a bleak, leafless arm a lone crow cawed, without answer, before spreading its lustrous wings and becoming a lampblack kite, fluttering, gliding, crying to the leaden sky.

Nor did all dangers lurk out there with the fanatics, the craggy oak tree, and the crow. I was fair-skinned, with white hair, and Grandpa insisted I stay out of the sun. Thus, the sun-curfew of my early years: no playing outside from 0800 to 1800, May through August; from 0900 to 1700, March, April, September, and October; and from 0900 to 1500, November through February. I learned to love the sun low in the often multicolored sky, the soft slanting light, the shadows grazing leisurely across the lawn. During those early mornings and late afternoons, I hugged trees and rubbed leaves and petals between my fingers to memorize their smells. I watched hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies flit from blossom to blossom and giggled and shivered as bugs crawled up and over my hands and arms. But all the while, because of Grandpa’s warnings, I avoided the dangerous brightness of the sun, staying where he wanted me—in the foliage of shadows.

I had been eagerly waiting beside the thick, heavy door to the house for about a half-hour—a long time for a little girl only three and a half years old. Finally, the pressurizing fans clicked on and about a second later the door we called Gatekeeper unlocked with a clunk, clunk and slid open with a whoosh. Mom and Dad were there, as expected, and between them, also expected, stood First Brother. He was holding their hands. He looked entirely human, like an adult, though his body appeared rigid, even his eyes, which stared straight ahead. Because of the outward flow of air—intended to repel smart dust from wafting into the house—I couldn’t smell them, or the wet vines draping the arborway behind them, or the purple crocuses freshly in bloom, or the earthy scent of trees after a night of soft winter rain.

Normally, I would have rushed into Mom’s and Dad’s arms, but on this day I, too, might have appeared somewhat wooden, intrigued as I was at seeing in person for the first time one of my brothers, whom Grandpa referred to as Sentirens. First Brother was about Mom’s height, shorter by about 8 centimeters than Dad, and wore black shoes, black slacks, and a long-sleeved pink shirt. His black hair, short and parted on the left, contrasted with Mom’s blonde hair and Dad’s, nearly white like mine.

First Brother didn’t even glance at me. He just continued staring—eerily, it seemed at the time—at something over my head. I looked back, but there wasn’t anything on the blank white wall. All of the walls in our house were white and, except for the scenescreens in our bedrooms, blank: no windows, no artwork, no clocks—no places for surveillance microbots to hide.

“Hello, Sara.” “Hello, sweetie,” Mom and Dad said, respectively, before stepping forward, still holding hands with First Brother. Gatekeeper went whoosh, clunk, clunk. The pressurizing fans fell silent.

“This is your brother,” Mom said. She was trying to pull her right hand free from First Brother’s left. “Aren’t you going to say hello?”

I looked back toward the kitchen and called out, “Grandma!”

“My darling little girl,” Mom said, bending over to pick me up. “Give me a big hug.”

Her breath smelled of stale cigarette smoke, but her body smelled of violets, and I loved the way she held me, loved her warm, wet kisses, loved the energy she exuded, of an intensity greater than either Grandpa’s or Grandma’s.

I was passed to Dad, who had by then also managed to free his hand from First Brother’s. “How’s my sweetie?” He hugged and kissed me, but more gently, softly, softer than either Grandpa or Grandma would have; and he smelled good, too: citrus, mint, sandalwood—all calming like his smile.

I heard cheery hellos from Grandpa and Grandma and was set back down onto the floor. While the grown-ups hugged and kissed, First Brother continued to stare, now at something on the ceiling, though at what I couldn’t tell, for there wasn’t anything there—just the same blank whiteness of the walls.

“How’s my grandson today?” Grandpa said, sounding cheerful. He hugged First Brother, but First Brother continued staring at the nothing on the ceiling.

Grandpa brought First Brother’s right hand close to me and indicated with a nod and a smile that I should do something with it. I took hold of the big hand—its skin cool and smooth, almost slippery, like that of a frog—but I didn’t know what else to do with it.