After protein had been added into the mixture, the egg had been fertilized but died—long after any of the other experiments had survived—again due to the lack of amniotic fluids.
“By that time my cancer was getting worse, so I figured now was the best time. I figured when I would next be ovulating—I had told Cordo I was on birth control—and so a few days before, I injected myself with the RABSDNATEP. In retrospect I see that my blood cells should have destroyed the compound, as there were no familiar cells to prevent them from doing so, but I think they didn’t because I have such advanced cancer—they were too busy attacking each other. This is something you’ll need to consider in your experiments—adding familiar cells to RABSDNATEP, maybe dead red blood cells. In any case, I conceived and Cordo and I hadn’t had sex before my diagnosis. I’m currently five months along and al the sonograms show you are a perfectly developed child. Cordo suspects nothing—shortly before the diagnosis, he and I had sex without a condom.”
Cordo, who along with Tom had been up nearly 12 hours straight, started to cry. As they neared the last of the 29-year-old videos, Lourdes grew gaunter everywhere except her stomach, which swelled.
“As I’ve said, all the measurements and ratios are listed extensively in the documents but if my hypothesis is correct, you should be able to apomictically reproduce naturally, now that the gene is in your DNA. When that’ll be is tough to say. In plants they reproduce apomictically when they must to survive—as when they develop a disease—which is why I think I would have conceived even if I hadn’t ovulated, I think the presence of the cancer cells and the appearance of the RABSDNATEP might have catalyzed ovulation—but there’s no guarantee you’ll develop cancer—it’s hereditary, I’m almost sure, but it might recede in your DNA. So if you don’t develop cancer, I’m not sure what’ll happen—the apomixis gene may just lie dormant until such time as is required comes about. Another option may be that you’ll reproduce apomictically as soon as you’re able to ovulate. So if you are a genetic clone of me as you should be, you’ll reach puberty around when I did—13. In anticipation of this, I’ve instructed a lawyer to mail you a letter on your 13th birthday instructing you to ask Tom Liking for a key to a safety box in Seattle Mutual Bank, where you found this hard drive. They have your name and Cordo’s name as signatories, you’ll have to add the subsequent generations’ names to the list.”
The last video. She looked her worst, spoke in the same timbre as when she used to hallucinate:
“Today’s the day. Can’t sleep. Thinkin’ about all the flaws. Up to now I was blind to them. How will men use this? They’re biologically incapable of pregnancy. It’s tempting just to leave it as it is, an exclusively women’s privilege…” She smiled a little, “…but women won’t have any need for men anymore, if they don’t want to. That’ll inevitably lead to a matriarchal dystopia. It’s only right to make both sides capable…”
She thought long.
“We strip an egg of its genetic material with…with isopropanol or CTAB, make it just like an incubator, combine it with RABSDNATEP…and sperm in a culture. A man wouldn’t be able to carry it and a woman’s body would destroy the embryo but in a culture…We’d have to replicate the conditions of the womb…Somehow—”
She looked briefly despondent.
“No, that’s bullshit. We did this, if this is possible, anything is—anything. The embryo goes to term in the culture or…an external uterus. That would be good for women who don’t want to carry or—or can’t conceive naturally…”
She thought more, harder.
“Genetic diseases. Cancer…Apomixis can cure those who have contracted diseases, mutations. But those with genetic predispositions to heart disease or Sickle cell or Down syndrome? I’ve thought about the fundamental difference between plant and animal cells—cell walls. They’re what prevent the spread of disease in plants. But developing cell walls in animal cells is impossible or even if it were, people would be rigid, like trees…We’d probably save the rainforests and get cheaper reams of paper but otherwise…We’d have to alter the DNA directly to get rid of the genetic predispositions. But if we do that, you change the person entirely, you change one iota…they’re different.”
She rubbed her head, which must have been throbbing.
“Stem cells maybe. But there’s no guarantee those aren’t carrying the disease genes. A person can’t just be reborn to die the same way as the last time…”
Thinking, nearly crying.
“Oh my god, OK, what else? The consciousness. Without that we might as well be trying to make polyjuice potions. So neural stem cells…But they could contain the genes for genetic Alzheimer’s or dementia or schizophrenia…Neurons, MIT in 2012 proved that memories are stored in clusters of neurons…We map the brain, track neuronal activity…I don’t know, mind uploading, artificial intelligence…”
An epiphany:
“If that works we could assemble bodies of…silicon, prostheses…download the consciousness into a…hard drive…The electrons and protons would carry potentially diseased DNA but the neurons would be clean, some of them would divide, as MIT found, or get them from the dentate gyrus, that’ll enable them to reproduce, sustain themselves…Have everyone’s neurons and brain map and a ‘Do or Do not regenerate’ form on file in case of sudden death—car crash or shooting. Maybe somehow we work out the genetic disease dilemma so that people can regrow organic bodies that’ll never develop disease…”
She nodded.
“Live forever.”
She looked into the camera, looking suddenly exhausted.
“So…It’s over for me. You’ll have to do the rest. And your daughter after you. And hers after. And so on. We’ve uncovered the secret to immortality. But like all worthwhile things, it’s flawed. When you watch these, you may wonder why I chose to do it so…unusually. Any other way and Titus could have access to my remains, my DNA—they have their fingers in a lot of pies throughout the city. If they get that, they won’t need me—us—anymore. It’ll take them decades if they’re good scientists but they’ll figure it all out. This way all of me disappears…Except you.”
Crying again.
“This is mine—ours. They’ll look at it as just another way to improve their stock value and line their pockets and they’ll extort people just like that Shkreli fuck but to us…this is everything…This is more than money and…This is Cordo and me. Forever.”
Cordo covered his depleted face, perhaps thinking to cover his ears but unable to do so.
“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. I don’t doubt you’re a physical replicate of me…But what about my mind, my memories, my knowledge?”
She held her forehead as though it were a whale ship leaking spermaceti.
“So that’s why I made all these, copied all my notes, photographed my experiments. I have to believe. We’ve come too far. If this is possible, anything is. For thousands of years, people turned to Nature in order to relieve physical and mental ailments. Look to the Doctrine of Signatures for proof. But as we’ve developed as a species, we’ve more and more turned our backs on Nature and look rather into ourselves to try to cure ourselves—thus the greater funding of stem cell research and thus the decimation of the Amazon. We’ve forgotten that humans and the earth have a symbiotic relationship, one cannot survive without the other. Is it so far-reaching then to say that the solutions to all our problems and inequities lie in the very soil and water from which we arose?”
She nodded, bit her bottom lip. Then, voice shaking:
“I have to bring you into the world now. As for me…”
She thought, came up with nothing, dryly chuckled.
She closed her laptop.
Tom and Cordo awakened Sunday morning after passing out once they’d finished Lourdes’ videos, all of which they had watched almost without blinking. When they stood up from their chairs, their joints popped and they looked around the hotel, as though they’d been roofied and were trying to collect
their bearings. When they looked at each other, they were both thinking the same thing.
“It can’t be real,” Tom said.
Cordo was loath to move, as though doing so would make it all real indeed. But he did and he took out the plastic bags of hair from the bag he’d brought and gave them to Tom.
“Find out for sure.”
Tom and Cordo drove to the university. In his lab Tom took samples of Cordo’s hair and conducted tests comparing them to the women’s hair samples, six experiments per bag of hair. Past midnight they finally had their answer:
“Lourdes, Amelia, Camille, and Hortense are 100 percent related to each other. There is no indication they are in any way related to you.”
They drove home in silence. Inside the house was bleak except for the shaft of light radiating from underneath Camille and Hortense’s bedroom door. Tom and Cordo trudged through the dark, dumping their bags of unused clothes on the couch as they proceeded into the kitchen, turning on the yellow light that radiated off the tiles and made everything even yellower.
Cordo sat at the table, covering his eyes while Tom made coffee. The pot percolated chug-chug-chug as Tom and Cordo sat at the table, saying nothing for a long time.
“Is it bad?” Tom asked.
Cordo looked at him as though this were the most ludicrous question.
“It’s unnatural.”
“But is it bad?”
Cordo searched himself.
“It’s Lourdes,” Tom said, “…in some form.”
The coffee was brewed. As though a bell had been rung to call him, Cordo stood and crossed the living room into the hallway and Tom got up to pour them both coffee, for neither of them would sleep tonight, while Cordo checked in on the girls, telling them he and Tom were home and kissing them goodnight.
For the next month, Tom and Cordo watched the remainder of the videos, about 60, starting when Amelia was pregnant:
“As Lourdes theorized, I conceived as soon as I hit puberty. Lourdes wondered how or even if her consciousness, her knowledge would pass onto the next generation. She couldn’t have hypothesized it would be in dreams and a mental voice such as schizophrenics might hear. As a child I was incorrigible, crying no end, to the point Cordo had me medicated and sedated. That only changed the time in which I heard the voice and had the dreams, gave me day terrors—which weren’t terrors at all but memories. They subsided shortly before I got pregnant, I theorize because all of Lourdes’ stored memories and knowledge had fully transferred to me. It’s important you do not medicate your offspring—we need that voice and those dreams and had I not been medicated, I may have gained Lourdes’ consciousness sooner.”
Later on during her pregnancy:
“Someone broke into the house while we were away at Tom’s. They stole my hairbrush. I’m certain it was Titus. I’ve always been careful not to leave strands in it. Whatever they get from it won’t be enough to sustain their research. They’ll eventually approach me and ask me to take up where Lourdes left off.”
She clenched her jaw, looked down, then back up to the camera:
“Sidenote: I think Tom and Cordo are fucking. Six months ago he was fucking that whore Lila. He doesn’t understand…”
Her face twisted up, then softened.
“I don’t fucking understand. Have to come up with a way to alter memories—inject enzyme inhibitors into the temporal lobe before the fetus’ neural tube closes maybe…or remove those neurons completely—obliterate memories of fights, comments, affairs…”
Another video some time after Camille’s birth:
“Watching the two of them get married…”
She ground her teeth and looked as though her mouth were full of salt. Then she started crying for a few moments before slamming shut the laptop.
A still later video, Amelia close to 20:
“I’ve perfected the apomixis formula. Titus’ lab is a great boon to me. They suspect nothing, only I’ve my ‘mother’s’ propensity for knowledge and knack for science. It’s important they remain oblivious. I’ve kept a close watch over my blood and have recently noted some strange activity I believe to be early signs of cancer. Twenty-five would be in line with when Lourdes first showed signs. So we have four or five years remaining. As we’ve discussed, you should concern yourself solely with the matter of the consciousness. Our method now—these videos—takes too long. If we could have our full consciousness at the instant our vocal chords and brain have developed, we could get a lot more done in the 29 years or so we have. Keep up with your work on AI and mind uploading. The answer as to how to transfer the consciousness and how to sidestep genetic disease is there. For our purposes the best graduate school program for you would be McGill’s computational neuroscience program in Montreal. But I don’t like the idea of us being so far apart, not with Titus snooping around. We can get everything done here, we’ve done well so far.”
Her last video. She looked dead already, face gaunt as a meth addict’s:
“I’ve been trying to remember anything from when I—Lourdes—died…What happened then, did I immediately go into Amelia? Was I hidden in the dark and screaming to be heard, uncovered? Did I die? For even the swiftest second? As far back as I can remember, there’s only darkness and screaming and…fear.”
She wiped her eyes, sniveled.
“Back in I go.”
She shut her laptop.
Then Camille’s videos, starting during her pregnancy:
“Amelia made tremendous progress on the work. I think in the time remaining me, I could perfect the mind-uploading theory and sophisticate the brain mapping and neuronal tracking programs. Once we perfect that, apomixis will be obsolete and we can consider going to Titus. Once the programming is completed, we can appeal to investors to get enough money to build a larger computer network, maybe begin human trials, designing prostheses.”
Days after Hortense’s birth:
“It’s strange seeing Amelia and you together. How we begin and end. I felt nothing when you were born—relief, I could tell immediately the apomixis had carried over—but…no less, no more. Did Adam feel any differently after Eve was birthed from his rib? There’s some kind of…telepathic link between the three of us. Amelia’s mentioned it in the past. We both know what’s in your mind—the terrible memories of Lourdes’ teenage years with her father—and we know what’s in each other’s mind, what the other knows. She’s in love with Cordo…So am I, I suppose. And so will you be…”
She nodded.
“I miss him. Amelia cries all the time. So do I. I wish we could tell him but…he wouldn’t understand, not yet. This has to remain secret…”
She thought hard.
“Things’ll be different someday. What matters now is that he’s happy…with Tom.”
Her jaw tightened. She slammed the computer closed.
Tom and Cordo finished this final video in bed late one night and then sat up for a while in silence in the glow from Cordo’s computer screen.
“What do we do?” Cordo asked.
Tom could say nothing for a time.
“Get her to do chemo when’s she 25.”
“What about now?”
“…I don’t know.”
They were heavily quiet.
“I wanna tell her we know,” Cordo said.
“Why?”
“…I—I don’t know. Why not? This is a good thing, isn’t it?”
Tom wasn’t sure.
“I can’t…face her, not after…you and me…”
Tom turned his face into the dark, shuffled out of bed, headed into the bathroom, closing the door softly. A moment later Cordo heard sniveling.
Cordo got up and knocked on the door, then opened it. Tom was bracing himself against the sink, head hung in front of the mirror.
“What’s wrong?” Cordo asked.
Tom sniveled again, looked at Cordo in the mirror, looked morose.
“When we started all this, I knew you would always be in love with
her,” Tom said. “So would I, in my own way. And I was fine with that because…”
He chuckled not humorously.
“This is so fucked up.”
“Tom, I love you—” He put a hand on Tom’s shoulder, “—I’ve been with you longer than she and I ever were.”
Tom was not comforted, was silent.
“I’m not gonna leave you for Camille, for God’s sake!”
Tom bit his lip.
“There is no Camille.”
So they kept their knowledge to themselves.
Camille graduated that December with her doctorate in neuroscience and started working for Titus. She was 17. With her signing bonus, she and Hortense moved into an apartment in Seattle. This apartment was perfectly complementary to Camille’s decorating tastes, as nothing she could do or not do would make it any bleaker nor less. There were two bedrooms separated by thin walls that might as well have been of papier-mâché.
Then it was just Tom and Cordo left in the old house he’d shared so long ago with Lourdes. Tom spent more time at the university and as a result, or perhaps because, Cordo spent more time at Camille’s, despite the dreadfulness of the apartment. He ate dinner with her and Hortense and went on nature hikes and to the movies, just the three of them, Tom either alone at home or at the university.
Cordo wrote a couple novels, like as not out of obligation to his publisher. None of them sold well and he was not surprised.
Hortense entered college at seven years old, her IQ having tested at 195. She immediately declared herself a bioengineering major.
“I want to work with prostheses,” she told Cordo when he asked how, with her wide-ranging interests in botany, psychology, neuroscience, computer programming, engineering, philosophy, and medicine, she’d landed on that major.
Camille’s resemblance to Amelia, to Lourdes, was unmistakable, so that Cordo and Tom might have both wondered how they could ever have been blind to it. She was 20 and only grew more haunting with each day gone.
Most Unnatural Page 18
