Human Sister

by Jim Bainbridge

  “We’ll see how brave you are when you need your next fix,” Casey roared.

  “I’m going straight from here to a clinic, just as my wife’s been—”

  The doctor was interrupted by a tremendous banging and clanking of something on wheels coming through the door.

  “That’s okay,” the doctor shouted. “I don’t think we’ll need it. Her heartbeat and breathing have resumed. Her blood pressure is rising steadily. Eighty-five over 45. Thank God.”

  I wanted to open my eyes but found that even the tiniest slit let in blinding light. I decided to rest quietly and listen. Over the next few minutes, the doctor spoke with several people who noisily ran in and out of the room. From those conversations, I learned that he’d decided not to give me anything to counter the LN27Q3 because of possible cross-reactions. The drug would wear off on its own in about an hour.

  The doctor took my hand in a grip from which I winced. “Sara? Are you conscious? Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” I whispered, wincing at the word’s sibilant ending.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Please—” Uh. That sibilating high-speed saw in my head.

  “What?”

  “Dim the lights.” I winced. No more s’s.

  “Can we dim the lights?” he roared. “Is that better?”

  I opened my eyes slightly and whispered, “Ja,” as Elio would have, thinking I’d never again utter the manic sibilance of yes, never again push tongue toward alveolar ridge and form that venomous sound.

  “Would you like something else?”

  Please speak softly came to mind, but I replaced it with, “Talk quietly.”

  “Oh. Yes, of course. I’m sorry," he whispered in a whisper almost comical in its loudness. "Everyone, please, whisper. Her senses are painfully amplified.”

  “Are you through?” I asked.

  “Through for now,” Casey roared. “But next time you might not to be so lucky. We know you saw the Sentirens at Alberta Robotics. It’s against the law not to report a sighting.”

  “May I go now?” I asked the doctor.

  “I’d like to observe you until the drug wears off.”

  “May I see… uh… have Elio and Grandpa come here?”

  “They’re over in G,” Casey said. “I’ll go get them.”

  After Casey left, the doctor whispered, “Sara, I’d like to ask you a few questions to determine whether you’re fully lucid. You don’t have to answer me, but”—he pursed his lips and frowned—“well, before you go I’d like to know you’re okay.”

  Did something happen, I worried, to my mind? Did I say something? I didn’t. Did I?

  And then I remembered: I had nearly failed, nearly succumbed to Casey and cried out Yes!

  “What’s your address?” “How old are you?” “What’s 19 times 7?”… I answered each of his questions in turn, though with difficulty—I was so upset and ashamed at having nearly failed. Finally, he asked, “If it takes two government agents to plug in a light, how many does it take to protect us from the Chinese?”

  “I think I’d need to know how many Chinese agents it takes to plug in a similar light,” I said, noticing that the “s” sounds were considerably less painful than before.

  He smiled. “I think you’re going to be just fine.”

  “I’d like to get dressed before Elio and Grandpa get here.”

  “Yes, of course. Here, swing one leg over the edge first. That’s right.”

  It was then I noticed I’d urinated on myself and on the table.

  “Let me get you a towel,” the doctor said.

  I laid my head back on the table while the doctor noisily gathered up some paper towels. “Gently,” I whispered as he began mopping up.

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “Maybe I should try to use the shower before I dress.”

  “Sure, I suppose. Let me call.”

  Speaking toward the computer, he requested a shower. “And how about her clothes?”

  “Can’t have ’em. Casey says they’re goin’ upstairs. Ditto the teleband, ring, transmitter, finger cast, luggage, the whole lot. Kiss ’em good-bye.”

  “I have to have the ring,” I said, nearly in tears for the first time that day. Mom had told me, referring to the bimetallic ring she and Dad had given me, that I was the white platinum; Elio, the yellow gold.

  The doctor shrugged. “At least you can wash off. I’ll give you my coat to wear afterward.”

  I was carefully patting myself dry after a piercing shower when the door flew open and in ran Elio shouting, “Sara!”

  I braced myself for a painful hug, but the doctor caught Elio’s arm and whispered, “Careful. Her senses are amplified to a painful degree.”

  Elio scowled at the doctor, jerked his arm away, and walked toward me. His dark-chocolate eyes looked worried, but as he drew near, his rosy lips lit with a smile, and the crush of our kiss was full of love.

  “What did they do to you?” he whispered, his eyes full of tears.

  I seemed to be deliquescing into his lapis lazuli jacket, its azure sky filled with dark secrets and flecks of golden light.

  “Sara, what’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong?” I echoed, feeling dreamy.

  “Did they hurt you?”

  “No.”

  He turned to Grandpa, who’d been whispering with the doctor. “Grandpa?”

  “I’ll see to it that beast is fired and never gets another government job,” Grandpa said.

  His words shocked me out of a blissful torpor. “No! Grandpa, please, don’t. He said you’d never make it past level 3, that your heart would stop, and it would look like a natural death.”

  Grandpa looked down at the floor. He appeared old, tired, and weak—an image deeply saddening to me. I loved him so much.

  “Where are your clothes?” Elio asked. “You’re shivering.”

  “I’m afraid they’re gone,” the doctor said. “To be analyzed molecule by molecule, I expect. She can have my coat.”

  “No. She’ll wear my clothes,” Elio said. “I’ll wear the coat.”

  “They took our ring,” I said.

  “Our ring? Don’t worry. We’ll get another just like it. We’ll pick it out together.” He quickly took off his clothes, piling them on the exam table. Then, more slowly, he began helping me dress. “What happened to your leg?” he asked as he knelt to help me put my feet into the legs of his pants.

  “Let me see,” Grandpa said, getting up and walking behind me.

  “I was ordered to remove the transmitter,” the doctor said.

  “For what reason?” Grandpa asked.

  “Casey said it was illegally brought through Customs.”

  “Illegally?”

  “I guess there’s some law that says all implanted devices have to be declared.”

  “Grandpa,” Elio said, “what did they do to Sara? Why is she shaking all over?”

  “They gave her an experimental drug and then induced horrific pain.”

  “What? Why would anyone do that to Sara?”

  “They wanted her to tell them about androids in Canada, but she refused to say anything. Casey kept ordering greater and greater pain until her heart stopped.”

  “Her heart stopped?”

  “Only for a minute and thirty-three seconds,” the doctor interjected. “But it seemed like a decade while I was trying to revive her.”

  “Grandpa?” Elio said.

  “I’ve already placed a call in to Dr. Taranik at Stanford Medical Center. We’re old friends. I expect a callback soon. We’ll take her there as soon as she’s dressed and ready.”

  By the time we were settled in a private room at the SMC, my hypersensitivity had diminished enough that I felt comfortable with normal light and sounds, but I still trembled uncontrollably and felt sick with exhaustion. Dr. Taranik was disinclined, even after completing extensive tests that showed not a trace of any known drug in my system, to prescribe something for either the t
rembling or the exhaustion. He said he had no idea what might react negatively with LN27Q3, a name not appearing in any databank accessible by him.

  He told us that there didn’t appear to be any permanent heart or brain damage, though it was clear that my neurological system had been severely challenged. He said I should remain in the hospital overnight. We would just have to wait to see what the next day brought. In the meanwhile, I was to rest and avoid stimulation as much as possible.

  When I woke the next morning, New Year’s morning, my trembling was gone, but I felt tired and sad and was unable to concentrate normally. Dr. Taranik said all of my tests looked good and predicted that I would wake up the next morning or the next and my depression also would be gone. I was released from the hospital in midafternoon.

  A few days later, Elio returned to his classes at Stanford. He wanted to stay with me longer, but I told him I was feeling better and would be fine until he came back on the weekend. It was during this time that I first noticed Grandpa was working—in his Magnasea office in Berkeley, he said—many more days each week, and for hours longer each day, than I’d ever known him to work away from home. I also noticed that during the increasingly infrequent times he was with me, he remained unusually quiet. I asked him what was wrong.

  “Nothing. I’m simply following doctor’s orders. You’re supposed to rest.”

  “Grandpa, I love you. I hope you don’t blame yourself for what happened.”

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

  Sara

  “Begin 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 ho
w, 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.