Human Sister

by Jim Bainbridge

  “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

  “What 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

  From 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.

  What he seemed not to have known was that I had often fantasized about having a brother who would live with me, and run and play and study with me. I wanted to help First Brother acquire a richer emotional life, to skip and laugh and recognize faces in clouds; but he lived with Mom and Dad, and he didn’t care much for play, not with me, at any rate.

  When I detected a break in Grandpa’s train of thought, I exclaimed, “I want his name to be Michael! Not Third Brother—Michael!”

  “Michael? Are you paying attention to what I’m saying?”

  “Yes,” I answered guiltily, for my mind had been timesharing between his words and my fantasies. “Tell me what my new brother will be like.”

  Grandpa proceeded to explain that because few self-generating, non-biologic materials were available, my new brother would begin life adult size. However, like human babies, my new brother’s ability to interact with the world would develop primarily through his experiences of his body and his relations with his primary caregiver—me.

  Grandpa said that if the project were to go forward, it would involve extracting a few neurons and other cells from various locations in my brain—if I didn’t mind, of course—reprogramming those cells, and then placing them in a gestation chamber, where for ten months they would reproduce, differentiate, and connect with each other and with organic nanoneuralnets. During the same operation, cells from my liver, kidneys, thymus, bone marrow, and other organs would also be extracted; and through a process similar to that used for the brain cells, those extracted cells would develop into functioning organs of a biologic system necessary to support the biologic parts of the integrated brain.

  Unlike First Brother, my new brother would need to go to the bathroom; he would even cry salty tears, just like mine!

  And then came the disclosure of what I now believe was the core reason for my involvement: Michael and I could more directly be a part of each other, Grandpa said, if interconnections between our brains were made through implants to my cribriform plate, which, he explained, was a good place for such a junction because it was hidden and was easily accessible through my nostrils. The implants would be constructed from my cells and would be nourished and repaired as if they were a natural part of me, thereby making the junctions all the more difficult to detect—possibly an important feature, depending on future political developments.

  “What would the connection be for?” I asked.

  “After some practice with the braincord, it should be possible for you and Michael to enter each other’s thoughts and to control each other’s arms, hands, and other motor functions.”

  Though I don’t remember being concerned about the extraction of cells, I reacted strongly to this braincord suggestion. Someone’s controlling my body had not been part of my fantasy of having a new brother. Images of some of my own intimate interactions with my body flashed through my mind, and I scooted off the couch. “No!”

  Grandpa’s eyebrows squirmed like fuzzy white caterpillars. “Of course, Michael wouldn’t—”

  “No! No! I don’t want that!”

  I wanted a brother I could play with, not someone new who would be capable of controlling me even more than Grandpa already did.

  Grandpa continued looking at me with steady attention. This was the look that often preceded my having to sit cross-legged on the floor of his study and meditate until I calmed. But determined to have the brother I wanted, not the brother I thought Grandpa wanted, I stayed my ground, standing silently in front of him.

  Although he was intent on motivating his androids with emotion, Grandpa was suspicious of human emotions, which, he said, had evolved in a primitive world very different from the one in which we now had to survive and prosper. In our advanced technological world, only reason transformed into wisdom through carefully guided experience and training could tame and properly direct our powerful yet often errant and dangerous emotional heritage, a heritage providing modern humans with at best a call to action and a coarse first approximation as to what that action should be. Thus, my human emotions had to be passed through the meditative filter of reason, so that I might confront reality with a minimum of illusions and self- or clan-centered aggression.

  “I just want a nice brother I can study with and play with,” I finally said.

  Grandpa smiled. “Yes, of course, you do. I wouldn’t think of giving Michael any capability to harm or embarrass you. I can assure you that Michael will not be able to exert any control over you that you wouldn’t approve of. The power of his intentions and desires coming in through the braincord would be only a slight fraction of the power of your brain over itself. For him to have any influence over you at all, you would have to meditate and enter into a high state of relaxation and receptivity for him.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. We thought you would enjoy being able to get inside and feel and understand Michael more directly and deeply than you ever could by using normal means of communication.”

  “I’d be able to feel what he feels?”

  “We hope you will, at least to some extent.”

  “You mean, as when Grandma’s happy I can see it in her face and hear it in her voice, but I can’t really feel it. But with Michael I could really and truly feel his happiness?”

  “Yes, that’s right. And he could feel your happiness, too, if you choose to let him.”

  My imagination sparkled. I knew that words often were used to hide, not disclose. I’d sensed the shadowy underneath and behind of things. How wonderful it would be, then, to know, truly know, what was inside the words, gestures, and bright feelings of another.

  “But,” Grandpa said, interrupting my growing excitement, “if you don’t want to have this capability with Michael, we can do quite well without the implant and the braincord.”

  Did Grandpa actually believe that Michael would never learn to override my will, or was that another deception? I haven’t brainjoined with Michael even once since coming here to this watery hideaway, because on the way here I discovered that he could, in fact, control me completely. And not only that—I discovered a secret that he’s been keeping from me, a secret I’m not yet ready to let him know that I know.

  “I can see you’re excited about creating Michael,” Grandpa said after more discussion, “but there is one thing we have to be clear about before we proceed. We must keep all things related to him secret. Only you and I, Grandma, your father, mother, and brothers can ever know. Even Elio must not learn anything about your o
peration or about Michael.”

  My excitement was instantly replaced by a hollow feeling of dread. Only a few months earlier, when Grandpa and I had visited Elio and Aunt Lynh for the third summer in a row, Elio had more or less forced me to tell him what I knew about his father’s death. I’d felt terrible about divulging the secret I’d promised Grandpa I would keep, and I’d promised myself never again to agree to keep a secret from Elio.

  “Please, Grandpa, I can’t keep secrets from Elio.”

  “If we are to do this, you must.”

  “But I’m sure he won’t tell.”

  Grandpa again looked at me silently. I knew he was probably right about keeping Michael secret and that he would probably win this little battle with me, as he nearly always did. When my gaze finally slid toward the floor, he said, “It is likely that our phones are tapped, so we can’t speak over the phone about any secret. Our use of encryption would only serve to inflame suspicion and increase surveillance. Nor can we speak about this matter among ourselves, even in the kitchen or anywhere else outside of these rooms where we have level 3 security. During the ten-month gestation period, we’ll move most of my study and library into one of the guest bedrooms. We’ll make a second bedroom for you in here. Michael will have to remain in these level 3 security rooms until the political climate improves.”