“You oughta go back to writing fiction,” Tom said.
“I did, over the summer. Finished half a novel.”
“Why haven’t you finished?”
Cordo shrugged.
“Time. Energy. Journalism isn’t exactly conducive to fiction.”
Tom thought.
“So quit,” he said.
Cordo chuckled, trying to break Tom’s façade, only to find he was serious.
“I can’t be that irresponsible.”
“What’s irresponsible about it?”
“I have a daughter.”
“Who earns a lot of money through scholarships and grants.”
“She has a daughter.”
“Financially her responsibility. You give them shelter, pay the utilities and food, give them transportation. They’re covered under your healthcare. You have enough in the bank to keep all that going for a year, don’t you?”
Cordo nodded.
“Probably.”
“And then if nothing happens or not enough happens after a year, you get another job. Something smaller maybe, The Stranger or The Herald. They’d probably love to have a Times editor on staff.”
Cordo thought.
“Couple months ago a guy called offering me a job for the second time.”
“You could take him up on that. What’s the company?”
“Titus.”
Tom looked at him.
“Hmmm. Interesting. When was this?”
“I met with the guy six years ago and he just called me again over the summer.”
Cordo watched Tom’s thinking face.
“What’s Amelia doing in the lab?” he asked.
“Same as Lourdes—researching asexual reproduction in sexual plants.”
Cordo thought.
“Well if they still want you after six years, they’ll probably still want you after another year,” Tom said. “You could take them up on the offer if you don’t wanna go back to journalism. Better money probably.”
Cordo nodded.
“Yeah.”
But he wasn’t thinking about that right then.
Cordo put in his two weeks’ at The Times. His editor was stunned but he left on good terms with everyone.
For Christmas Amelia got Camille pajamas with plants on them, plant books, and other such baby things with floral designs. Cordo got her Dr. Seuss books, an album with Springsteen songs translated into lullabies, the first season of Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting, animal coloring books, everything without the slightest floral design. Amelia’s eyes scorned him as he scowled at her.
At the turn of the new year, Cordo was unemployed. Amelia was back in the lab and would go back to school when it started up again in the middle of the month. Margaret, with more patience than Job, took care of Camille, who was just as uproarious as Amelia had been and despite Margaret’s concern, Amelia never listened, only told the nanny to let Camille cry, though furnish her with all the care and affection as though she were cooing.
So no peace for writing at home for Cordo. He drove to Tom’s house instead, then walked the backwoods route to the lake and bench and he spent hours and days there writing, no phone, no books to look up details or facts concerning what he was writing, only his mind to depend upon and provide stimulation.
By this process, by the end of February, he finished the longhand manuscript—311 college-ruled pages. This he then typed up on his laptop, alone at Tom’s house, because no serious writer writes in public. The manuscript took him five weeks to write longhand and another to type it, then another to edit, another to re-edit, and while you’re at it, go ahead and take another week to re-re-edit it. Then he let Tom and Tom alone read it and he finished it in a week, reading during his lunch, between classes, and sitting up in bed until late at night, long after Cordo had fallen asleep beside him.
They refrained from talking about the novel until after Tom finished and then his remarks were praising for the most part, asking for clarification on some points, criticizing some passes as unclear or improbable but hey, I’m no writer. After some minor editing to the prose but no real alterations to the story, Cordo composed a long list of literary agencies in California, New York, and London and sent out query letters asking for representation along with a synopsis of the novel.
Responses came sporadically over the next five months. He’d sent out 28 letters. Sixteen came back declining to read the manuscript, four asked to do so, and he never heard back from the remaining eight, perhaps because he had sent them a letter when they expressly said on their websites they were not taking on new clients or perhaps because he’d neglected a requisite on their submission guidelines, thus his letter or email had been discarded without being read.
He sent the manuscript to each of the four requests in the order he’d received them, one at a time, and waited to hear from one before sending another.
This took him into summer, when he started work on a second novel. The first two agents passed, the third made an offer and she and Cordo talked on the phone, they got on well. She offered representation, he asked for a few days to think it over, she agreed. He contacted the fourth agent to tell him about the offer and he soon got into contact with Cordo, also offering representation. Perhaps because he was in a Manhattan agency, perhaps because he only took 15 percent commission, whereas the female agent, based out of California, took 20, perhaps for another reason altogether, Cordo accepted this fourth agent’s offer and told the California agent thanks for her offer.
He signed a contract with the agent, terminable whenever either party should choose, and then his agent expressed concern over parts of the novel, asked questions, Cordo explained. After obliging requests to tweak these parts in order to make them clearer, the agent disseminated the manuscript to publishers. By December he and his agent were in negotiations with a small publishing house in Los Angeles.
Also at this time, Amelia graduated suma cum laude. She would have graduated in May had she not taken time off in the previous fall. She continued working in the lab during winter break, after which she would go into the graduate biology program in the spring.
By mid-January Cordo and his agent had come to terms with the publishing house: The publisher would give Cordo and his agent a $2,500 advance on the book, which would be published in late March. To promote the novel, Cordo would give radio, podcast, TV, and internet interviews and readings at bookstores in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, San Diego, L.A., Phoenix, Denver, Albuquerque, El Paso, and Dallas, paying his own expenses.
Cordo kept his success between himself and Tom, going out to dinner the night before the book came out and Cordo started the tour in Seattle. They had glasses of champagne over their dinner.
Cordo and Amelia scarcely spoke anymore. He didn’t know what she knew of his life—that he’d quit The Times to sow his wild literary oats—but probably presumed Tom told her everything if she had asked.
He drove his tour—the only financially practical way to do it. He went alone and returned to Seattle in the middle of May, exhausted. He’d finished his second novel while on the road and after editing, sent it to his agent in June.
After agreeing to the California press’ terms, they had given Cordo and his agent $1,200. The remaining $1,300 came upon publication. Cordo kept about $1,100 after taxes and his agent’s commission.
He talked to Tom after the tour about the financial prospects. If his book sold enough, he’d get his first royalty check in August. How much did he need to make to give him reason to stay at it, instead of going to work for Titus?
“A dollar,” Cordo replied, smiling.
He and his agent were informed in July that about 6,000 copies of the novel had been sold, giving Cordo about another $2,000 after everyone else was paid, but not enough to warrant a second printing. The paperback rights were then put up for sale and in October were purchased for $50,000 by a publisher in New York.
The paperback version sold better, about 10,000 copies when it
was re-released in February.
By this time Cordo’s second book had been published, with another advance of $3,000.
Such was how life went for them over the next 11 years. Cordo’s advances and royalties progressively got bigger as he toured farther around the country, sold more books, and got a larger publisher. He soon made decent money—about $60,000, less than what he’d made at The Times but enough to become one of the approximately 1,000 authors in the world who make enough to make a living out of it.
He put out a book a year and his eighth book, his first bestseller, caught the interest of a publisher in London, who bought the rights and soon published in Europe, where it became a bestseller as well. Then came the translations and eventual interest from film producers, who bought the film rights to the novel for $15,000 for a three-year option but the film was never made.
By Cordo’s 10th book, he was making more than he had at The Times.
After four years in graduate school, Amelia graduated with her doctorate at 18. Shortly after this she was contacted by Titus and signed a contract and a confidentiality agreement with them. What the terms of the contract and agreement were, Cordo nor Tom never asked nor were ever told and they said nothing to try to dissuade her.
Tom applied for and got tenure, as well as a $100,000 research grant for his lab, in which Amelia still worked part-time on her previous research. Whether this were related to what she did for Titus, she never said.
At 20 Amelia moved Camille and herself into a house in rural Olympia, bought a car. Camille never received any drugs, as Amelia had, to combat her night terrors, as well as the voice she said she constantly heard in her head, “quite like Mom’s.”
Despite Cordo’s efforts Camille grew up with an affinity for plants and science. Likewise she grew up always too mature. Her IQ tested at 190 and she, on Amelia’s endorsement, opted to go straight into college at seven.
Hester had died shortly before Amelia’s undergraduation and she’d had no other dog since. Now she got another for Camille, another Great Dane, before she started school.
“Plant science?” Tom asked at their weekly family dinner at Cordo’s house, which Tom had organized and insisted upon.
Amelia looked to Camille beside her.
“She doesn’t know yet,” Amelia said. “She’s mentioned interests in psychology and chemistry, so we’ll see.”
She and Cordo never looked at each other during any of these dinners.
After Amelia had made it known she would be moving out, Cordo and Tom got married by eloping in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. They and, upon Tom’s insistence, Amelia and Camille spent a week in two cabins there beside the Snake River looking up at the Grand Teton Mountains. Sometimes Cordo went with them on nature hikes through these mountains, other times he stayed beside the river in a lawn chair and read while the wind blew cotton off the vines and into the air, drifting, a snowstorm in the sunshine. Cordo and Tom moved into Cordo’s house when they went back to Seattle.
Soon Amelia and Camille started missing family dinners until the whole enterprise was abandoned. Cordo tried to call her, to see her at home—he knew the way to her house, as he and Tom had helped to move her in—but his calls and voicemails and texts and emails went unanswered and unacknowledged and she was either never home or never opened the door to him.
Cordo was 51 when 26-year-old Amelia called him out of the blue and invited Tom and him over to dinner at her house. They arranged it for that night.
It had been a full year since she and Cordo had last spoken.
When Amelia opened the door to them, both Cordo and Tom were taken aback. There could only have been a few things right then to have such an effect on them and none of the others were as interesting as Amelia herself: With her neck-length smooth black hair and green eyes, which looked artificially colored, and her smile dimples and her voice and the way she stood and the way she moved, taking them and their bottle of cabernet sauvignon gape-mouthed into the house, through the living room, and into the kitchen, where Camille sat at the bar top doing her homework, she must have reminded them so of Lourdes.
Cordo and Tom’s discomfiture continued into dinner, creating occasional instances of silence, their silverware scraping their plates. Cordo glanced over at his daughter like a tweaker at a cop and awed at her.
The house was sterile. No great fiction, no fine piece of art, nor resounding work of music could ever come from such an environment. Everything was gray and silver and shades thereof, no woman’s touch, nothing hospitable, a passive hostility. There were no pictures on the walls, no decorations, no TV, only practical things. The couch and armchairs were not conducive to après-dîner coffee and chitchat but they attempted it nonetheless, Cordo and Tom, two Hawaiians in the Arctic, in the armchairs across from Amelia and Camille, two polar bears in leisure, on the couch.
Through the course of the evening, Cordo and Tom had learned that Camille—who was 13 now—was a neuroscience and computer-engineering double major. Since she was a freshman, she’d been engaged in artificial-intelligence research and had to date received $105,000 in grants and scholarships. She would graduate next year likely summa cum laude, then go into grad school and continue her research, which currently focused on an artificial neural network she had recently created capable of qualia, the ability to experience something subjectively.
“I asked the program to describe its surroundings to me,” Camille told Cordo and Tom. “It tried reading me a list of all the inner components of a computer or code sequences but then I asked it what colors it saw and it said, ‘Black.’”
Tom and Amelia grasped the significance of this.
“What does that mean?” Cordo asked.
“The network has developed a kind of sentience. I had previously shown it images with different colors and it absorbed those images, developed memories, and was able to recall those colors at a given moment. It could have told me there are no colors in the digital realm, only brief spurts of electricity and information, but chose instead to be subjective, ‘black.’”
“That’s amazing,” Tom said. “How did you create this program?”
“Mapping a healthy brain, then encoding algorithms for sight and sound—the other senses are impractical as of now—in the proper parts of the brain. So when I asked it to describe the colors it saw, the program absorbed my request into its equivalent of the thalamus, which relayed it to its equivalent of the frontal lobe, and that part is particularly interesting: I run an EEG test every time I test the program and it detects when the different parts of the mapped brain are stimulated by the transfer of electricity. When the information goes to the frontal lobe, there is a spike in electrical activity.”
“Meaning?” Cordo asked.
“It’s equivalent to increased brain activity in people.”
“Thinking,” Tom said. “But from what you’re saying, you only created a vessel, how did it develop sentience?”
Camille looked over at Amelia, who nodded.
“Neuron scanning,” Camille said. “Memories are stored in clusters of neurons stimulated to convey those memories by electricity. We take a sample of neurons from all parts of the brain, ganglia, and spinal cord, then house them in their own colonies in cultures of L-alanyl-L-glutamine dipeptide, HLA-B27, and D–MEM:F12. These neurons will intermix with those from the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, which will allow the neurons to divide and sustain themselves so we don’t have to constantly extract them. We place sensors wired to the computer into these cultures of clusters and the sensors give off low doses of electricity and once the neurons start firing, the sensors relay the signals into the program, which stimulate the different sections of the brain map. By housing the neurons together, they’re able to fire altogether and create sentience, voiced by the computer.”
“So what’s your end goal?” Tom asked.
“We’d have to conduct widespread experiments on a sample of the world’s population. To do that we’d need to get subjects to d
onate neurons, as well having their brains scanned. The end goal is to gather enough funding to develop software to enable the program to hold all of the information from the subjects.”
“People are forming new memories all the time,” Tom said.
“Yes, we’d probably recommend a yearly donation of neurons as part of their yearly physical.”
“There’d be a lot of data. How much, do you think?” Tom asked.
“On our first sampling of neurons, there was more than six gigabytes of information. Doing a larger sample, I’d estimate we’d have upward of a yottabyte or one trillion terabytes, more than all the information housed in cyberspace.”
“So your research is in computers replicating human behavior,” Cordo summarized.
“For the time being.”
“For what?” Tom asked. “Why would the world need this?”
“Have you heard of mind uploading?”
“Yeah, the transference of consciousness into an artificial space,” Tom said.
“So by mapping people’s brains and stimulating memories in their neurons, theoretically we should be able to rebuild—‘upload’—their consciousness into the computer.”
“Which…would keep them from dying?” Tom asked.
“Or revive them,” Camille said.
“So after they’re uploaded, what, they’d live in the computer?”
“Think of the computer as a way station. This idea developed as a way to help those who have incurable and/or genetic disorders. Altering DNA is unfeasible. So the next best thing is to take the person out of his or her body and put him in another one. The original may want to continue living—he may not be sick, just wanted to have his consciousness on file just in case—until his body reaches its natural end. But then there are the people who have incurable diseases—HIV, terminal cancer. A fear of death may be the only thing keeping them living in misery, so once their consciousness is uploaded, they should have no reason to keep living in pain.”
“But for a little while at least, there’d be two of the same consciousness, essentially the same person,” Tom said. “One flesh and blood, the other a mass of coding sequences in blackness.”
Most Unnatural Page 15
