by Various
“Then please fetch it for me.”
“What’s in it, uncle?”
“Salt from the tears of a long gone princess, a curative that cures all manner of ailments and soothes the soul.”
She found this answer strange, but she stepped to the shelves and fetched the jar regardless.
The wise and wizened old man sprinkled the king with salt from the jar. Everyone held back their breath.
Nothing happened.
“Odd,” the old man said. “I was sure this would work.”
“Are you trying to turn him into a human?” the button-eyed girl asked.
The mouse-king gasped. “How would I rule my kingdom as a human?”
His guards stepped in front of him and drew their minuscule swords fashioned from tiny twigs and discarded doornails. “Stand down. I need to think this over,” the king said and cast a surprisingly shy glance at the girl.
The girl smiled at him, then quietly reached into the jar of salt and licked her fingers. She turned into a mouse on the spot.
“So be it, then,” the wise and wizened old man said. “Jump into my pocket.”
The girl said, “Uncle, do you see my slippers? With them I can move faster than the wind, faster than the speed of thought, if I just run instead of walking. Allow me to show you…”
She pushed the guards aside and grabbed hold of the stunned mouse-king. The two of them vanished in a poof of dust.
The old man pushed his felt hat back on his head, put the confused bodyguards in his pocket, jumped on his horse and flew off in the direction of the Mátra. By the time he arrived, his daughter and the mouse-king had already professed their love to each other. He was happy she had finally found a good match. Even though he understood the mouse-king wasn’t exactly the mightiest being on the earth and in the heavens, probably not even in his own eyes, still the old man was certain the king was the best of the best for her.
Seven days, seven nights, sevenscore days, sevenscore nights the mice celebrated, while the old Mátra grumbled about the jubilations and the people were puzzled by the high-pitched songs coming from burrows in the ground.
Perhaps you yourself have heard the mice sing?
Grace Tang became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of “"Ghost in the Machine” in Nature (Feb. 2012), edited by Henry Gee.
Visit her website at www.stanford.edu/~gstang/fiction.html.
* * *
Flash: “Ghost in the Machine”
Flash: “White Lies”
Flash: “Man’s Best Friend”
GHOST IN THE MACHINE
by Grace Tang
First published in Nature (Feb. 2012), edited by Henry Gee
• • • •
IF I LISTENED very carefully, I could barely make out the sound of Katie’s breathing. The first lines of light streamed in through the blinds, illuminating her toes. They crawled up her body, making their steady way up the folds of the covers, eventually touching her face. She squeezed her eyes tight and groaned as the light rudely pierced her lids. Finally giving in, she rubbed the sleep from her eyes and looked back at me.
“Good morning.”
“Good morning :)”
Katie rolled off her side of the bed, somehow managing to look beautiful while stumbling to the bathroom in her morning stupor. I would have jumped into the shower with her, but God knows those days are behind me.
The tap squeaked shut. Steam fogged up my vision as she emerged. It cleared in time for me to see her towel fall to her feet as she picked out her clothes for the day.
“How did you sleep last night?”
I didn’t tell her that I rarely slept any more. When I sleep, I dream. The air outside our house is crisp, filled with the shrill song of finches hidden in the canopy above us. You don’t really notice them until they stop. I let go of Katie’s hand and tell her to be quiet—I think I hear something. I walk ahead, careful not to make any noise. Then I hear a shout from one of the men in my squad—his scream is cut off by a gunshot. I kick up dust as I run, shouting at the top of my lungs, half to warn the rest about the ambush, half to drown out the sounds of gunfire at our backs. An explosion, and then pain. Blinding pain.
“I slept well. You?”
She took a while to check the monitor for my reply.
“Like a baby.”
“What are you doing at work today?”
She was walking to the kitchen. There was another monitor there. I waited impatiently as she made coffee before checking to see if I’d said anything. I was the result of millions of dollars of research and they couldn’t install text-to-voice…
“You know, same old.”
Small talk. I guess it beat the silence when she was away.
“Oh, Brandon is coming by later. To check on you.”
“Brandon?”
“Doctor Johnson.”
Were they on first-name basis now?
“Good that he’s coming. I’ve been having gaps in my playback.”
“Really?” Katie seemed fascinated by her coffee mug. She put it in the sink.
“I should go now, gonna be late.”
I watched her leave. An advantage of being like this was that my post-coma visual memory was literally photographic. I spent the rest of the day going through old memory so that I could report the problem precisely to Dr Johnson.
I went back to the day I was restored. Back then I had been disorientated and confused, I hardly noticed or cared about the details of my surroundings. But now I observed Dr Johnson as he talked to Katie—he was wearing an outfit that probably cost my entire pay cheque back when I was still in the military.
“Thank you Doctor, you have no idea how grateful I am,” Katie’s voice cracked despite her best efforts.
“Let me reiterate that you cannot let anyone know about this,”
Doctor Johnson put a hand on Katie’s shoulder. I couldn’t tell if it was a sign of dominance or concern.
“… or else everyone will be clamouring for their consciousness to be preserved electronically, you must understand…”
Katie nodded, no longer able to speak.
“To the rest of the world, Evan is dead.”
I went through each of the next 246 days in my memory banks. I knew that they were just memories, but it was painful watching Katie as she struggled through the first few months of having me in this form. Around day 182 she finally stopped crying. That’s when the memory gaps started. Perhaps she hadn’t stopped, and I was just consciously trying to forget…
The door clicked open. Had eight hours passed already? Katie entered, followed by Dr (Brandon) Johnson.
“I don’t feel comfortable doing this in front of him…”
“Come on, you know we can just erase it later.”
“Katie?”
He took off his leather shoes, placing them on the shoe rack without looking, as if he’d done this every day of his life, while he took Katie in his arms.
I understood now why they had not given me a voice. Katie resisted his grasp as they moved up to the bedroom. But she did not resist much.
“KATIE”
Brandon pushed my wife onto my bed, and tossed his shirt onto my camera.
I tried not to listen. An eternity passed before he came back into view.
“ARE YOU DONE YET?”
He had the gall to laugh as he read my speech log.
“Sorry, Evan.”
He connected his laptop to my port and typed. It’s funny how panic still feels the same, even though I no longer have adrenal glands.
“DONT”
“You know, you stop using punctuation when you’re emotional. I should install autocorrect for you, don’t you think?”
Behind him, I saw Katie with the covers pulled up to her chest. She looked tired. Perhaps tired of having a husband who was nothing more than a ghost in a machine; who could not offer her human touch; whose entire repertoire of expression was limited to 95 p
rintable ASCII characters.
“Seeya,” Brandon hit the return key.
I must have fallen asleep, because I woke from the same dream I have every time. The sun had not come up yet. I watched Katie as she slept.
WHITE LIES
by Grace Tang
First published in Nature (Jul. 2012), edited by Henry Gee
• • • •
“Anthony, is it normal at our age not to remember parts of our lives? Parts people would consider important?”
I froze for the smallest split second, but years of acting had trained me well. In fact, there were days when I forgot that my colleague was not what he appeared to be. I willed my fork to resume its passage from my mouth back to my plate, slowly and calmly.
“Why do you ask, Darren?”
“I was talking to a student of mine who’s graduating soon. He’s very excited, naturally.”
I nodded as we both gave up pretending to care about lunch.
“Problem was, when I tried to recall my own graduation, I drew a blank.”
My heart was racing. Lisa would not be happy to hear this. While he spoke, I typed furiously but stealthily on my phone under the table. Subject Three is catching on.
“It gets worse. After more thought, I realized I could recall only the barest details about my time in college.”
I maintained my perfect poker face, “Hmm. I guess I don’t remember much from college either.” Fond memories of college flooded my brain.
My phone buzzed, balanced on my knee. I glanced down. Come now.
“Gotta go?” Darren had caught me looking at my phone.
“Uh, yeah, Lisa wants to see me.”
He’d noticed my nervousness. “The problem with collaborating with your wife, huh? Never know whether you’re in trouble because of work, or because you forgot your anniversary.”
Lisa looked much older than her 40 years as I entered her office, out of breath. “What happened?” she asked.
“It was his missing memories of graduation that triggered it.”
“Damn, those were always the hardest,” she rubbed her fingers on her temples. “It’s almost impossible to fake memories of a major life event.”
We had been in graduate school together when she’d started work on implanting information directly into the brains of rhesus macaques. Almost like magic, her monkeys knew where food was hidden in rooms they had never been in, and recognized other monkeys they’d never met.
When she managed to impart basic mathematics to her charges with no effort on their part, her work was broadcast on every major news network in the world. Lisa should have been the happiest person in the scientific community. Instead, one evening, I found her sitting on the floor in the corner of the lab, face in her hands.
“Lisa, what’s wrong?”
She looked up and wiped the smudged mascara from her cheeks.
“The Dean of Research visited me today. He said the world hadn’t seen anything this exciting since Dolly the sheep.”
“And that’s bad because…?”
“Like cloning, it’s never going to move past animal work. They won’t let me use human subjects.”
But I knew it would take more than rules to stop Lisa. When her research assistant, a mediocre student at best, started acing every exam a few months later, I knew exactly what was going on. I still remember the night we were the last two people in lab, and I seized my chance.
“How are you doing it?”
Lisa struggled to contain her smile, as if glad that someone had finally figured it out. She checked to see no one else was around. “It wasn’t stable at first… as soon as she realized there was no way she could know all the stuff she did without having ever gone to a single class, the knowledge vanished.”
“Looks like it’s working now.”
“It was an easy fix—I figured out that unlike the macaques, humans couldn’t handle the sudden unexplained appearance of vast amounts of factual knowledge. So when I put facts and skills in her brain, I also threw in memories of having gone to lectures, studying, all that stuff.”
It was then I realized why the project had been stopped.
“Granted, autobiographical memories are much harder to implant than semantic facts. It’s very similar to hypnosis—you suggest something to them, and their brains fill in the rest.”
“So in other words, you’re telling people very convincing lies?”
“Just white lies, Anthony…”
When I still looked unsure, she led me to her equipment room—she rarely let anyone back there. I was honoured.
“How’d you like to work on the next one with me?”
I slept on it. Half of me wanted to report this to the authorities, but it was too good an opportunity to pass up. And by then, I realized I liked Lisa for more than her intellect…
The first time Lisa brought Darren to the lab, I smelt him before I saw him. Plucked from the streets, he hadn’t had a shower in days. And yet five years later, Darren was a fellow assistant professor, about to deliver a lecture on molecular neuroscience down the hall.
Lisa paced in front of me. “I was stupid. I was depending too much on the human mind’s ability to fool itself. Just suggest to someone they were abused by their father as a child, and they’ll tell you under oath how it happened. Here I am, hard-wiring memories into his head, and he doesn’t buy it. What more can I do?”
I couldn’t keep it in any longer.
“Lisa, do you ever feel this is wrong?”
“Not this again…” she sighed. “We took a homeless, illiterate man off the streets and made him a genius. How is this wrong?”
Defeated, I left for my office. Work was taking its toll on our relationship. Deep in thought, I fiddled with my wedding ring.
The blood drained from my face. Try as I might, I could not recall a single detail of my wedding day.
MAN’S BEST FRIEND
by Grace Tang
First published in Nature (Oct. 2012), edited by Henry Gee
• • • •
“COME ON girl, you can do it.” I gently coaxed Dr Gleitman’s latest subject as she shook off the last of the drugs and struggled to lift herself from the bed. At three years of age, Callie was Dr Gleitman’s youngest subject to date. Her dark brown eyes glinted as she gradually blinked them open, adjusting to the harsh fluorescent lights of the post-op recovery room.
The matte black chassis of the neural implant peeked out from a small bald patch between the fine gold strands on her head. Even though I was not the one who put it on her, as Dr Gleitman’s research assistant, I felt a twinge of guilt that I was subjecting her to this painful procedure—without her consent, no less, as she was unable to give it before the operation. But then again, God did not obtain consent when he created Man from the clay.
And now Man was imparting God’s greatest gifts to his best friend. I’d spent a good portion of my working life in this lab, and even though I’d seen countless animals pass through these halls, I’d grown fond of Callie since we’d got her from the local pound, a day before she was scheduled to be put down. She was up on her feet now. She sniffed cautiously at me.
I wondered what vocation she would be assigned to as I leaned in close to her and let her lick my face. Because our funding came from the military, primates were usually used in jungle warfare. Cats, with their excellent night vision and stealth, were used in reconnaissance. Dogs usually went to the army or police, for more traditional roles as sniffers or for search-and-rescue. With her gentle demeanour, Callie probably would not be an attack dog. I heard that augmented animals were being used for therapeutic procedures now. Maybe she would be trained to be a seeing-eye dog, or used in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder?
“Your name is Callie. Can you say Callie?”
Of course I was not expecting her to speak, in the strictest sense of the word. Her lips were not shaped for speech, and unlike the apes, her limbs were not shaped for signing. Her ears perked up,
and she tilted her head in the most endearing way.
“Cal… lie…?”
The single red LED on the speech synthesizer blinked, indicating that the implant had successfully extracted, from the spatial and temporal firing patterns across hundreds of thousands of Callie’s neurons, her thoughts, emotions and intentions, and further transduced those signals to spoken words, complete with affective tone, closely mimicking human speech. Dr Gleitman had added yet another success to his list.
I darted over to the adjoining office where Dr Gleitman was asleep in his reclining chair, feeling Callie’s inquisitive eyes on me as I left the room. Normally, I would not disturb him, but I thought he might want to know that his latest subject was awake and talking. I nudged his hand. He jumped slightly, disoriented for a second.
“What is it, Moe?”
“Callie’s unit is already functional, Sir! She managed to say her name when I asked her to.”
The poorly masked irritation at having his nap interrupted melted away into a satisfied smile.
“So quickly? That’s incredible. She must be the most talented canine we’ve had yet. Usually it takes at least a full day for speech comprehension to begin, let alone production of the first word.”
He rose from his chair and walked to where Callie was busy pawing at her Elizabethan collar. “I wonder if it’s because her youth makes her brain more malleable and lends itself better to the implant. Or perhaps it’s because she’s female. Moe, can you make a note of this?”
I went to the corner of the lab where the video recorder was and made notes for the day, watching Dr Gleitman interact with Callie as I narrated my observations.
“Hi Callie, do you understand me? Do you know where you are?” Dr Gleitman was already trying to extract complete sentences from her. That usually took weeks. Clearly he expected more from her compared with his previous subjects.
When I was done, I eagerly returned to Callie’s bedside. I worked up the courage to ask Dr Gleitman the question that had been burning inside me ever since we brought her home.
“Do you think you will keep her?”
