Human Sister (10 page)

First Brother stood beside me, wearing a white surgeon’s gown. We were in the back part of the house, in Grandpa’s laboratory and study, where we had what Grandpa called level 3 security. Above us, beyond the top of the tent, beyond the ceiling of the room, and up through five meters of sandy soil, chardonnay vines hung heavy with musty, sweet-smelling grapes nearing harvest in the late September sun.

I looked up at First Brother’s face. I’d been told that the visible portion of his head had been produced by a Japanese company, but it hadn’t occurred to me before that his Asian facial features were remarkably handsome. In the soft glow of sedatives, I felt radiantly confident that he would perform the operation perfectly. As soon as Grandpa, Grandma, Mom, and Dad finished their tea (Grandpa had said he wanted everything to appear perfectly normal in the front parts of the house, where security wasn’t so good), cells to generate the biological components of my new brother, Michael, would be extracted from me.

I placed my hand on First Brother’s hand. “I’ll miss you when you go to live in Canada.”

“Why?” he replied without looking away from the systems monitor.

“You’re my brother. I like playing games with you. Grandpa says you’ve worked hard preparing for this operation.”

“The operation will not be difficult,” he replied, still looking away. “I was chosen to perform it because my hands and brain function rapidly, steadily, and accurately. There is minimal risk that you will come to harm. You are to remain calm.”

“I’m so calm I feel I could melt right into this table.”

“Your blood pressure and brain activity rise when you talk.”

“Will you miss me when you’re in Canada?”

He turned to me, the saccade of his eyes over my face and arms reminding me again—though now my imagination was heightened by drugs—of dragonflies, their micaceous wings aflutter. “No,” he answered. “Grandpa will take care of you. You will not need me. I will not need you.”

I looked away. First Brother could be so difficult at times. In the nearly five years since we’d met, he and I had played with Lily; we’d listened to Grandpa’s favorite music (by Bach, Beethoven, or Zwilich); we’d talked about many things, especially my studies (actually, I’d done nearly all of the talking); and once we’d even baked cookies with Grandma, and then he and I had pretended that he’d come to have afternoon tea with me in my house when we were older and that he’d been able to eat the cookies and drink the tea. I’d learned to enjoy his company—most of the time, that is—if he seemed to give me at least a modicum of attention. But often, when his eyes stubbornly remained focused elsewhere, I had to imagine that he had another pair of eyes in the side of his head and that those eyes focused only on me.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“The time is 1611. We will begin in nineteen minutes.”

It’s night already in Amsterdam, I thought, and Elio will be asleep. If I were there, he would have wrapped himself around me, his skin feeling so good next to mine.

With a start, I heard the air filter motors rev, groaning under the strain of maintaining positive pressure as the operation tent door zipped open.

“How’s my brave and wonderful girl?” Mom asked as she entered. Dad and Grandpa followed. Their hair and faces were wrapped in white.

“I’m ready,” I answered.

“All systems and functions are acceptable,” First Brother said.

Grandpa adjusted the IV. “Please count slowly for me, honey—down from ten.”

“Ten, nine,” I felt something cool spreading through my arm, “eight—”

First Brother

“W
hat a beautiful day to see you,” she says.

The smiling and the stroking on the dorsal structure of the pigeonoid continue.

“You’re looking very well.”

A lighter stroking, now of the forward ventral structure, commences.

“Do you have a message for me?”

The stroking of the ventral structure ceases. She holds her palm up and open, displaying its pattern of furrows that map where her palm and fingers fold in on themselves. Six seconds pass. She retracts her hand.

“No? Just along for the ride, then? Well, I’m glad to have the company.”

She extends her legs, pushing the dorsal side of her torso against the edge of the raft at one pole of the major axis of the cavity. She puts the removed glove back on her right hand, pats her right thigh with her gloved right hand, and says: “If you’d like to stay drier, you’re welcome to come down here.” She pats, smiles, waits, then says: “Well, make yourself at home wherever you like.”

She begins paddling with a Beaufort 4 breeze at her back toward the washed-up sailboat south of the mouth of the Russian River.

Sara

F
rom as far back as I can remember, Stanley Franklin, the U.S. senator from Massachusetts who was on the Armed Services Committee, visited us for two or three days a couple of times each year. During those visits, Grandpa devoted full attention to his dear old friend, and so those visits became mini-vacations from study for me. I especially enjoyed listening to the senator talk with Grandpa and Grandma about unsavory characters he’d recently met in Washington, D.C.—usually members of the Ecumenical Reform Party. “Urps,” Senator Franklin called them (for ERP), often with a slight gagging gesture.

The day before Labor Day, about three weeks before my operation, Grandpa returned home from Senator Franklin’s annual summer party at the senator’s beach house on Cape Cod. He gave Grandma and me a hug, then excused himself, saying that he wanted to go to his study to think. He appeared tired and distracted.

He was also wearing the same clothes—white socks, tan pants, and long-sleeve white shirt with red and blue stripes—that he’d worn when he left to visit Senator Franklin. In fact, they were the same clothes he’d been wearing every day for at least a month. I noticed this because usually Grandma would get after him to put on something different after he’d worn a particular shirt or pants continuously for about a week; and when she would, Grandpa would comply, often grumbling to me in private that my grandmother was a bit old-fashioned, having grown up before outer garments were available that no longer actually needed washing. As for the recommended nano-laundry after thirty wearings, Grandpa said he didn’t care for the so-called laundry-fresh scent; he preferred the unique scent of each person’s body.

Wearing the same clothes was only one of Grandpa’s many rigid routines. Except for infrequent meals taken away from home, he ate the same breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day, year after year, occasionally adding a different fresh fruit or vegetable from our garden that Grandma would insist he try. Every day, he ate at the same time, worked with me on my studies at the same time, exercised at the same time, went to bed at the same time. Years later, Elio would tell me that he thought my grandpa was slightly autistic. When I questioned Grandma about this, she said, “Honey, as you experience more of the world, you’ll find that to be male is to be at least slightly autistic.”

After Grandpa disappeared into his study on this day that he returned from Senator Franklin’s, I tattled on him, pointing out to Grandma that I thought he’d been wearing the same clothes for a very long time. She said he’d been working extra hard lately and that at such times it was best just to let him be in whatever he felt most comfortable.

The next day, Mom and Dad arrived earlier than usual and immediately went to join Grandpa in his study, where the three of them stayed until lunch. Grandma had told me earlier in the morning that First Brother would not be coming along because Grandpa wanted to talk privately with Mom and Dad about some important matters that might take all day. I’d complained that First Brother could have played with me while Grandpa talked with Mom and Dad, but Grandma had merely shrugged.

After lunch, Mom and Dad left, and Grandpa took me to his study, where he had me sit beside him on the sofa. He began by telling me that Senator Franklin had convinced him it was likely that, for the first time, the ERP would achieve a plurality in both the House and Senate in the next year’s election and that, with their increased power, they almost certainly would pass a law banning the creation of new androids and possibly even ordering the destruction of all existing androids, even First Brother.

“Kill First Brother?” I said.

“Yes, honey, but don’t worry. Your mother and father have just told me they’re going to send both of your brothers to live with a trusted associate in Canada as soon as possible. Your brothers will be safe there.”

“They won’t live with Mom and Dad anymore?”

“Not for now, but your parents plan to follow your brothers to Canada if the ERP succeeds as well as Senator Franklin predicts.”

“They’ll still come to visit me, won’t they? And First Brother will, too.”

Grandpa sighed. “You simply have to accept that your brothers will be leaving soon, that next year your mother and father probably also will leave, and that if we are to create a new type of android—a bioroid, actually—we must do so quickly, before the chance is forever snatched from us.”

He paused, as though waiting for me to grasp the subject he’d just interjected.

“You want to create Third Brother?” I asked.

“Not exactly. For over ten years now, your mother, father, and I have secretly been doing research and making plans for a bioroid, one incorporating a Sentiren brain within a brain much like your own.”

I asked why he wanted to create such a new brother. He reminded me that Mom, Dad, and he were finding it difficult to elicit full emotional responses from my brothers, who possessed an emotional repertoire sufficient to set goals and priorities but remained deficient in such emotions as happiness and love. Other scientists were having similar problems with their android creations. He explained that unlike me, First Brother’s creation was not accomplished during a simple moment of joy; it involved a lifetime of Grandpa’s acquiring the knowledge of thousands of other lifetimes of learning. It also involved decades of intense work by him and Mom and Dad. 

“Perhaps,” he said, “if First Brother had come to consciousness with you as his primary caregiver, he would have learned how to hug and love a sister before he learned how to think about quantum physics. Perhaps part of his difficulty is—”

“You’re going to let me raise my new brother,” I interrupted, “so he’ll be able to love me?”

“Before we—you and I—decide whether we’re going to do that, I need to explain a few things. Your mother, father, and I have perfected how to grow a mammalian brain on a scaffolding of organic nanoneuralnets so that mammalian brain neurons not only grow and flourish side-by-side with Sentiren neurons, they actually connect to and communicate with the Sentiren neurons to such an extent that the mammalian brain and the organic nanoneuralnet brain become totally integrated and operate as a unitary system.”

“You want to put human brain cells into my new brother?”

“I want you to understand clearly that I don’t want to create this new being unless you do. In the first place, if we proceed with the project, we’ll be involved in highly controversial activities that are likely to become illegal if Stan’s predictions come true.

“Second, as I see it, the project can succeed only if you desire to raise this new being as if he were your son. This would be much more involved than simply spending a few hours together with him on the occasional weekend, as you’ve done with First Brother. It would mean giving him limitless time and love in order to make him the best he can be.”

Grandpa explained that if I began this project simply because he wanted me to, or because I thought Mom or Dad wanted me to, I would be doing so for the wrong reasons, and we would all fail. He was concerned, he said, that he or Mom or Dad might influence me to do something I didn’t want to do and would later regret.

Looking back, I see how craftily Grandpa played my eight-year-old ego—letting me fantasize that only I, not Mom, Dad, Grandma or he, was capable of raising a bioroid as if it were a human child. Why did he let me puff myself up in this way? He must have wanted more than informed consent; he must have wanted informed desire, desire that would grab hold of me before the core reason for my involvement was disclosed.