Alt.History 101 (Alt.Chronicles)

by Ken Liu

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  108 Stitches

  by Tony Bertauski

  FOLLOW YOUR PASSION.

  That phrase has been thrown around for decades. Maybe centuries. Some people have no passion, my granddad used to say. They had nothing to lead them. Passion wasn’t a bag of glitter you could grab; it wasn’t fairy dust that would inspire you to greatness. Passion required great effort; it was a garden that needed to be tended. “And you got passion, Theo,” Granddad would say. Then he would add, “Some people aren’t as lucky as you.”

  That always confused me. If passion took all that hard work, what did luck have to do with it? My passion was baseball. And Granddad had a little something to do with that.

  The glittery path of passion led me to the World Series. I was on the mound and the crowd was coming unglued. Granddad was in section four, row three, with a stony expression, the one he reserved for times like this. It was the last inning of game seven. The last out. The last pitch. There were tectonic plates under less pressure, but I was made for this moment.

  Literally.

  I was stroking the baseball’s red stitching when time began to slow. The Hall of Famers always said that was their experience when it was all on the line, when the pressure was unbearable… time just slowed down. Maybe I was thinking faster and it just seemed that way, the synapses firing in overdrive and the carnival ride coming to a slow grinding halt. Maybe I was having a stroke or a tumor was about to burst, but strokes didn’t exist anymore.

  Neither did cancer.

  Ever since I was little, I couldn’t get enough of that red stitching. Someone once asked if I was happy playing baseball. What the hell does happiness have to do with anything? I thought. Happiness wasn’t always on the other side of success. Good for you if you found it there, it just wasn’t guaranteed. I went through a long list of emotions getting to the top of the game and couldn’t remember a lot of happiness. That glittery path was anything but straight.

  How did I get here?

  I started thinking, a dangerous thing to do in baseball. How did I get here? Hell of a question to ask at that moment. Hell of a question to ask at any moment, but with a World Series on the line? Hell of a time to get existential.

  It all started when I was five years old.

  I was feeling the seams on a baseball Granddad had given me. Baseballs lived in his back pocket. Bam, curveball coming at you, kid. I remembered that particular baseball because the day before I didn’t give a damn about it. One day it was just a leathery paperweight sewn together with thick red thread, the next day it weighed a little over five ounces and had 108 hand-stitched threads with a cork center surrounded by two rubber layers—one red, one black—followed by various layers of yarn and wrapped in a full-grain cowhide leather cover.

  What happened in between was a doctor’s visit.

  There was nothing wrong with me, as far as I could remember. Granddad insisted I go see this doctor, promising nothing would hurt. I was five; what choice did I have? The doctor smelled like cherry smoke, which seemed wrong. He put something on the back of my neck, didn’t let me see it, but it was cold and hard. Granddad was there and didn’t seem concerned. I wondered where my parents were. A few seconds later, Dr. Cherry Smoke injected half a gallon of ice cream into my head. No one ever explained why.

  The next morning I grabbed the baseball and never put it down.

  That same doctor, the one that smelled like cherry smoke, was at the hospital when my mom and dad got in the car accident. He wasn’t as friendly, a lot more serious this time. Didn’t look at me, just addressed my grandparents and said they were doing all they could.

  My grandparents worried more than most people. They remembered the days when people couldn’t be fixed. Those were the days when people got sick, when there was such a thing as diabetes and multiple sclerosis and heart disease. The days when people donated kidneys instead of printing them. I used to think those were the days the dinosaurs were around.

  That all changed in the late seventies.

  Stem cell biotechnology – or at least the key parts – was developed by Drs. James Till and Ernest McCulloch in 1978. There was debate about who actually discovered stem cells (the term was published in 1932 by Dr. Florence Sabin), but it was Till and McCulloch who changed history. That was about the same time Steve Wozniak and a business partner got together to found a start-up company. Some experts believed the company might’ve become a contender in personal computing, rather than medical technology, had Wozniak’s neighbor’s son not fallen out of a tree. Instead, the company changed course and became instrumental in stem cell production and applications, developing a line of synthetic stem cells that made it possible for the boy to walk again. These flawless replications of stem cells—like microscopic computers—were called biomites.

  The two founders split before biomites were officially announced. The new biomite-production company was renamed Tree, and their advertisements always referenced the tree of life, as in Life is better under the Tree. Their symbol was an apple tree.

  If that neighbor’s son hadn’t fallen out of that tree, the world would still rely on immunizations and antibiotics, and would be at the mercy of genetic disorders and microbial infections.

  Those synthetic stem cells were what they used to print my mother a new leg. They used her DNA so it wasn’t some generic limb off the shelf. It looked exactly like the leg she had before it was mangled. They also injected biomites to restore a partially functional liver and a crushed spleen as well as reduced the swelling in her brain. Dr. Cherry Smoke put her in a coma while they made the repairs and she would wake up fully repaired.

  Granny didn’t like it when they called it that. Repairing something was mechanical. “She’s a human being, not an automobile.”

  Biomites couldn’t save my dad, though. You couldn’t take a rod of steel through the chest and be repaired. We were indeed still human. My uncle Craigy never understood that and always said we should live forever, said it was a conspiracy that people died so companies could sell more biomites. Craigy had problems, though. He was a little off. Paranoid. Granny never let him get seeded with biomites to correct what Granddad called correctable problems.

  I used to think, Yeah, why not live forever? Biomites are perfect biological stem cells that can endlessly and flawlessly replicate. We should all be ageless immortals. Nobody wants to die. Especially Dad.

  Granny thought the mites were a sin. “You can’t build a Frankenstein and call it dad.”

  Biomites were made in a vat, extruded like amorphous goo that was made to look like flesh and bone and tissue. “That’s not clay,” Granny would say. “The good Lord shaped us in his likeness.” Clay was what she called it—the cells we were born into, the fallible organic cells that made up our body.

  Craigy would argue with her, saying things like, “Biomite legs are no different than prosthetics. People strapped on fake limbs and you never had a problem with that. Now they just print them.”

  Granddad never joined the debate.

  Despite Granny’s proselytizing, she didn’t stop Dr. Cherry Smoke from printing my mom a new leg. The day she walked out of the hospital, I thought if God gave us the brain to make these biomites, then we should use them. And then a week later, I forgot all about that. Sort of forgot about my dad, too. All I could think about was baseball and the seams beneath my fingers.

  Granny was worried. She thought I should be sadder, that I was acting like everything was okay when it had only been a week since my dad was buried. She thought som
ething was wrong with me. “They did too much to him,” she told Granddad.

  He hushed her up when she said that. They looked at me funny, one of those knowing looks adults gave kids. I was too old for them to spell words, so he just hushed her up. I wasn’t supposed to know it had something to do with Dr. Cherry Smoke and that thing he did to the back of my head and the brain freeze that followed, how every day after that I only thought about baseball. Granddad always said he could’ve gone pro had he not screwed up his knee. He always said my dad could’ve been a pro if he wanted it more. Granddad said he couldn’t live with himself if he let his grandson waste all that talent.

  Follow your passion, Theo.

  I was sad about my dad, sure. Anyone would be. It was just, I didn’t see the point of being sad. I wanted to play baseball.

  Granny got cancer a few years after that. “Very treatable,” the doctors said. “But not if she doesn’t take the biomites.” Which she didn’t. She died a year later. Granddad was heartbroken. We did the funeral and a week later he went to the doctor and came back not so sad. He remarried six months later to Jill, his second wife. She was twenty years younger than him. He was happy again.

  For me, life was good.

  By the time I was fifteen, I was on a travelling baseball team, the youngest on the bus and the number one high school prospect in the nation. And I wasn’t even in high school. But all that changed when I heard the pop in my elbow.

  Granddad took me to a different doctor this time because Dr. Cherry Smoke had been arrested a few years earlier. I saw it on the news and watched the police escort him into court, where he was sentenced for a long, long time. Granny would’ve had a heart attack if she was around to see that.

  The new doctor was tiny, wore a white lab coat a size too big, and had very dark eyes. Granddad told her what happened to me and that he wanted her to repair the ligament with an injection. He knew exactly what strain of biomites worked best for athletes. He knew the dosage, the technique and how much it would cost, and he wanted it done that day. She ordered tests even though I didn’t need them. I heard the pop, we all knew what that meant. Granddad was patient, went along with the tests, and he was right. Let’s do the injection.

  But the doctor refused.

  She said I had too many biomites already. I never knew there was such a thing. What was the difference? Clay cells were fallible and biomites were impeccable. If she went to buy a car, she wouldn’t drive a lemon off the lot because she had too many perfect cars at home.

  Granddad was livid. I’d never seen his nose get so red. He demanded to speak with the chief of medicine, swore she would never practice medicine again, threatened lawsuits and even punching out a window if the hospital thought they could refuse treatment like that.

  It got him nowhere.

  They said my body had been pushed too hard, too fast. Granny would be nodding her head if she was there. I was already over six foot tall and threw a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball. They called me the freak, but the doctor made it sound more like I was a freak of technology. Frankenstein.

  “Let nature take its course,” the doctor said. “Let his body catch up. Besides,” she added, “it’s against the law.”

  I didn’t know there were laws. I was fifteen, maybe I should’ve known that, but I didn’t care about anything that happened outside the foul lines. I didn’t know there was a law that only allowed so many biomites. There were exceptions, such as accidents and deformities, but children below the age of eighteen could only get so many.

  The doctor didn’t explain any further. She could’ve talked about the crazy parents that pushed their kids too far, seeded their brains for intelligence, their legs for speed. The government put a limit on that, protecting those developmental years.

  Granddad didn’t believe that I was over the limit, insisting she check on that. They pulled the records and pointed to one particular treatment, one administered by Dr. Cherry Smoke, currently a resident at a federal penitentiary. That, it seemed, was all the proof she needed. He had given me a psychoactive seed.

  “And those are illegal.”

  It was like she hushed Granddad up. He didn’t say another word. We walked out. We never saw her again.

  But I didn’t forget that. A psychoactive seed. I looked it up later and discovered it was a questionable procedure that altered the shape and activity of the brain. Brainsculpting was what most people called it. It had its uses, like curing compulsive behavior and epileptics, but it was illegal on children. At least the way Dr. Cherry Smoke was using it.

  I wasn’t much of a thinker, but it wasn’t hard to connect the dots. One day I didn’t care about baseball, the next day I never stopped thinking about it. Granddad gave me the passion my dad never had, the drive to compete, to win. To never give up. Is that a bad thing?

  Years later, a reporter asked me a question when I was connected to Dr. Cherry Smoke. He asked if it was fair for my granddad to pick baseball for me, that I didn’t have a chance to be who I was. The reporter suggested that Granddad picked my life for me and how did I feel about that?

  “What did it matter whether I chose it, Granddad or God chose it?”

  “Well, what if he’d brainsculpted you into a soldier?” he asked.

  “Then I’d be the best goddamn soldier in the world.” That got a laugh.

  The reporter later wrote how I used “Granddad” and “God” in the sentence, like I confused them as the same. Whatever.

  The day we left the doctor with the white coat and dark eyes, Granddad called a friend about my elbow. A week later, his friend came to the house. He wasn’t wearing a white coat, no stethoscope around his neck or credentials on his jacket, either. He examined my arm, took a seeder from a black case, and pressed the nozzle to the elbow. My arm went numb from shoulder to thumb.

  “This is our secret,” Granddad said. “It’s not fair you have a bad tendon. We just made things fair.”

  We won five state championships and two national tournaments by the time I graduated high school. That was how we said it in the house. We won these awards. We won these games. I never argued because Granddad was right: it was a team effort. I couldn’t have done it without him.

  I wouldn’t have.

  I was drafted number one that year by the Chicago Cubs, a losing franchise that always seemed to have the top pick. I didn’t have a girlfriend and didn’t want one. If I wasn’t playing baseball, I was practicing it. If I wasn’t practicing, I was watching it.

  “Just give me the seams,” I once told a reporter. Nike paid me seven figures to use my face and that line on their products. Just Give Me the Seams was on T-shirts; fans waved it on banners and had me autograph it on baseball cards. I never wanted to say it again.

  That was about the time the complications started.

  At some level, I knew I had issues. I just figured they were buried so deep I’d be dead before they made it to the surface. But hairline fractures started showing up in my psyche and this hollow ache, this perennial emptiness would seep and fill my head. Even when I set the record for strikeouts in a single game my rookie year (twenty-four), I went home and watched game tape. Happiness, I discovered, was not on the other side of success.

  Just more road.

  Cocaine, heroin, and weed had become relics from Granddad’s era. They had been replaced by a new strain of biomites called charge. Charge targeted the chemicals of happiness, namely dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. Charge was seeded in tiny doses and changed the brain chemistry so these chemicals were naturally produced in ready supply. When it came to dulling the pain or filling the emptiness, charge made narcotics look like breath fresheners.

  I was twenty-five and the fractures had grown into cracks. I felt like an empty shell at times, a programmed strikeout machine that no amount of autographs or billboards could fill. I wanted to feel something.

  So I took a charge.

  It happened after I was traded to the New York Mets. I was lonely in
Chicago, but absolutely isolated in New York. I was a Midwesterner and grew up in a small town. I wasn’t ready for New York. It occurred to me that I could brainsculpt myself into liking the city, but Granddad was against toying with success. I’d already won two Cy Young Awards at that point. Why risk winning two more, five more—hell, ten more—just because I was a little nervous?

  The team’s trainer noticed me sulking, I guess. Or maybe he was making money on the side, it didn’t matter. He was good at spotting marks. “It’s nothing,” he told me. “Like a tenth of a percent, like a drop of rain. Not even that, like the size of gnat shit,” he said, showing me his little finger like that explained it. “Baby gnat shit.”

  I said no.

  But he kept coming back, making conversation about biomite technology, that it wasn’t just about health anymore, it was about how you felt. A small dose of iSkin created temporary tattoos that could change on a daily basis, even tattoos that moved like short video clips—angel wings that flapped or tigers that leapt across your chest. Audio biomites now made it possible for music to be pumped directly into the brain.

  The trainer was beginning to make sense. Charged biomites targeted your needs because everyone was different. “You throw different pitches than everyone else,” he said, “so I do different stretches for you, you understand? People are shooting biomites in their eyes to make them blue or their goddamn scalp to get hair, you know what I’m saying? It’s got something for everyone.”

  He got to me. If I was honest, I wanted him to. He knew that. He saw the desire under all the resistance. I didn’t want blue eyes or gorgeous hair. I wanted to fill the emptiness. He could see that.