Life?
Human life. A creature sewn together out of dead matter. Limb by limb. Organ by organ. Sinew and cell. Animated by some electric shock, so that the heart beats and the blood flows, and the eyes open. A monster of a man, gigantic and fearsome, filled with revenge against his creator for his creation. A created being without scruple or stop.
I shook my head. Sir, believe me, if you worked among the mad, as I do, you would hear such strange stories. Many madmen believe they are gods.
Captain Walton looked uneasy. Mr Wakefield, I do not doubt your truth, and so I beg you not to doubt mine. I have wrestled with it long enough.
We did see something out on the ice – of that there can be no question. I will stake my life on it. All of my men saw it. They saw a being of uncommon stature and swiftness.
What we saw I do not know.
And this poor man is mad – of that there can be no question either. The question, then, to me, is simple:
Is his story the result of his madness or its cause?
What is the temperature of reality?
The Cognition Suite, said Victor – opening another door.
The room was fitted out with storage-shack steel shelves. A bank of tiered steel tables supported computing equipment. In the corner, like a prop from another time period, was a hat stand with an umbrella neatly folded at the base. The room had the look of a bad set from an early episode of Doctor Who. The shelves were neatly lined with small vats of cryopreserved heads. Unlike the vats at Alcor, these cases had glass fronts. Rabbits, pigs, sheep, dogs, cats …
I get them from a farmer friend, said Victor.
Do you fuck her?
He ignored me, as he does whenever I say something he doesn’t like.
From my perspective, said Victor, the body can be understood as a life support system for the brain. Look here … He opened another door.
Two lever-and-probe robots were bent over slices of human brain.
Meet Cain and Abel, said Victor. I copied them from their parents, Adam and Eve, who work at the University of Manchester in the bio-tech department, synthesising proteins.
These two are tireless. They need neither food nor rest, holidays nor recreation. Bit by bit they are mapping the brain.
Whose brain? I said.
Don’t panic, Ry, I’m not a murderer.
He sat on the table, ignored by Cain and Abel. This is slow work, he said. Mapping the brain of a mouse takes forever. Even the stupidest human looks like Einstein when we try to map the contents of his brain.
But if we could restore an existing brain …
Yes … The answer may lie in reviving the brain at a very high temperature and very quickly. This could happen with radio frequencies.
Microwave the brain? I said.
No, said Victor. All you would get is brains on toast, which some consider a delicacy. Microwave frequencies warm unevenly – how many times have you shoved your shepherd’s pie back for another three minutes? Electromagnetic waves are more likely. What we are trying to do is to avoid the formation of ice crystals as we rewarm tissue. You saw for yourself at Alcor that the purpose of cryopreservation is to avoid ice crystals, which do enormous and irreparable damage to tissue. We face the same problem of crystallisation when we reheat the organism.
If we could solve this problem it would have life-changing implications for tissue transplants. How long do you have at present from donor to recipient? Thirty hours?
Thirty-six max, I said.
Well, then, if we can understand how to preserve and rewarm donated organs, it will mean we can store those organs for use as needed. The waiting list for a kidney would be over.
All of that is good, I said, and laudatory. But you aren’t really interested in kidney transplants, are you? You are interested in bringing back the dead.
You make it sound like a Hammer Horror movie, said Victor.
What else is it? I said.
What is death? said Victor. Ask yourself that. Death is organ failure due to disease, injury, trauma or old age. Biological death marks the end of biological life. Isn’t that what they teach you at medical school?
(He wasn’t waiting for an answer.)
A hundred years ago, the upper limit of life for working men here, in Manchester, was less than fifty. Doctors like you deplored that. Doctors like you worked to extend life. Now we expect to live to eighty in good health. Why stop there?
You are talking about something completely different, I said. Not longer life, but the end of death.
The end of death would certainly mean longer life, he said, smiling at me, maddening and superior.
(Why do I feel uncomfortable about what he says? Why do I find it macabre? Death is macabre.)
He seems to read my thoughts.
It is a strange thing, he said, that we are so much more relaxed about invasive interventions at the start of life. Since 1983 human embryos have been cryopreserved with glycerol and propylene glycol. The best embryo survival rates are with those at the two-cell to four-cell stage of development. No one knows exactly how many human embryos are now being cryopreserved worldwide, but it is at least a million. And the number of living children who began as embryos at liquid-nitrogen temperature is in the tens of thousands. We accept that we can coax life into being. Why should anyone object when we seek to deter death?
Cryopreservation is crude, I said. All those preserved bodies in their sleeping bags and nitrogen – they aren’t coming back to life, and it would be horrific if they did.
I agree with you, he said.
And if you are correct, Victor, the technology to scan and upload the contents of a brain is a more likely contender to extend life than bringing back the dead.
Well done, Ry! You have been listening to me after all. Yes, I agree that cryopreservation is likely to be an interim technology, at least for the purposes of life extension – though, as I said, if we can get it right, it may happen ahead of our ability to grow new organs from stem cells, so it is worth pursuing. In any case, if we could revive a ‘dead’ brain, that would be fascinating – for the person who is returned, and for us.
Personally, I would find it terrifying, I said. And that brain would not have a functioning body.
And that brain may not be aware of the fact, said Victor. We can simulate its environment. Don’t most people have body–mind disconnect? Most people do not recognise themselves in the mirror. Too fat, too old, too changed. The mind is often disconnected from its host. In your case you aligned your physical reality with your mental impression of yourself. Wouldn’t it be a good thing if we could all do that?
What kind of research are you doing in this room? I said, because I too can avoid difficult questions.
Bessie’s next to come out, said Victor, pointing to a sheepdog.
Beyond Bessie’s sad and severed head were brains outside of their skulls, some hooked up to monitors. Victor said, We are looking for synaptical responses.
Have you found any? I said.
Yes, he replied. I have made some progress. But I want to make more. And I need you to help me.
I can’t get you human heads, if that’s what you want. Try your farmer friend.
He came to me, put his arms around me. Ry, I wish you would trust me.
I said, I wish I could trust you.
He dropped his arms. Stepped back. He said, I have a mission for you.
(Maybe he’s M but that would make me James Bond.)
He said, I want you to go back to Alcor and bring me a head.
(Or is he Salome and I am John the Baptist?)
You are out of your mind, Victor.
Not at all. The head I want is at present out of its mind. I want to return it to a mindful condition.
Whose head is it? Or was it?
The head? Oh, that is a story …
(Is he the teller? Am I the tale?)
Bedlam 2
Captain Walton was gone. I sat alone.
The man he had
brought to me lay sleeping by the fire. You will say I was not alone and, whilst that is the fact of the matter, it is not the truth of the situation. The man who lay breathing quietly resembled a being from another place or time. Not in his clothes, nor, as I was soon to discover, in his speech, but in his utter remoteness.
Captain Walton had imparted to me that this man had but one thought, one desire, one occupation, and this had separated him from the world of men. The ice-raft the sailors had found him on, outside the ship, remained the circumference of his soul. He was cut off from the mainland of himself.
The firelight on his face showed him to be fine-featured. He had the restless, nervy body of one accustomed to study, to toil, long walks and scant nourishment.
Unable to settle by the fire with my book of sonnets (I am too preoccupied with my own thoughts for poetry tonight), I determined to read the papers Captain Walton had left for me. To that end, I lit a second candle and moved to my table, where I could examine the contents of the satchel.
The man’s name is Victor Frankenstein. He was born in Geneva. He is a medical doctor of some distinction, judging from the letters of recommendation, sea-washed and faded, inside the torn leather satchel. There was more; a journal, close-written and cramped, the formation of the letters hasty or wild. On the frontispiece, in a bolder hand than the rest, he had written: To examine the causes of life we must first have recourse to death.
I read on:
I collected bones from charnel houses and disturbed with profane fingers the tremendous secrets of the human frame. In a solitary apartment, or rather, cell, at the top of the house and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were staring from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and the slaughterhouse furnished many of my materials.
There was a pencil drawing folded inside the journal. The template for this drawing was Leonardo’s The Vitruvian Man; man the measure of all things, beautiful, proportioned, rational in his beauty. Yet this drawing shared none of the attributes of the original. There were measurements, certainly, and beyond the scale of any human frame; the length of the arms, the width of the face. The drawing was scribbled over many times with marks nearer to scratchings than writings, and across the page were innumerable rubbings out, and twice the thick paper had been pierced by the pencil point, whether in excitement or despair I do not know.
I turned back to the journal:
One of the phenomena which had peculiarly attracted my attention was the structure of the human frame. Whence, I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed?
My visitor stirred but did not wake. In this enquiry he is not the first and shall not be last. That God alone is the principle of life scarcely answers the question – rather it extinguishes the question. Many have sought to return the dead to life. Many have wondered, and wept, that death should be the arbiter of life. That the body, so vigorous, the mind, so keen, should be no more. Is that life? And why should an oak tree live one thousand years or more, and we struggle to achieve our allotted three-score years and ten?
And the alchemists, with their philosopher stones and homunculi and conversations with angels, what did they discover during their weary lives of toil? Nothing.
In the midst of life we are in death.
Poor man. There is a gold locket in the satchel. Inside the locket is a pen-and-ink sketch of a pretty young woman. No doubt she is dead. Is that what drove his mind to its delusions?
I read on:
I saw how the worm inherited all the wonders of the eye and brain. I paused, examining all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life.
Poor man. Life to death, indeed, but there is no such thing as death to life.
I had a wife. I have her no more. I am a Quaker and sit silent under the torrent of my grief. She will not return, and if she did, a ghastly sight dripping in her grave clothes, where would be her soul? The soul does not return to a house in ruins.
It is written that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. I do believe it, but the world has not seen it since.
Poor man! That he should imagine cold limbs could ever be warm.
What’s this he writes?
A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent creatures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs. Pursuing these reflections I thought that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.
Reading this, I put down the journal. Surely his mind has been darkened by grief? He imagines he searches for life when what he seeks is his own death. Only in death may we be reunited with those we have lost. For myself, I do not seek death but neither do I fear that which will bring me peace.
Here in Bedlam, where the mad must tread out their days in confined steps, there are more than a few driven out of their reason by grief. For women it is the loss of a child. One I know carries a rag doll and sings to it. Another grasps the hand of any visitor who comes too near, and begs of them, Have you with you my Lucy?
I got up to fetch more wine from my cupboard in an adjoining room. The moon is near and bright and under her light the courtyard seems to drift like a silver sea. This voyage of ours is lonely – the more so if we find a companion, only to suffer the bitterest loss.
In truth we are alone.
I went back into my study. The man, Victor Frankenstein, was sitting up, his face solemn. He had moved away from the fire into the shadows. His body, so lean and pale, was hidden. His head, fine and well-shaped, the hair still dark, gave the impression of speaking by itself – a head without a body.
I gave him wine. What is your story, sir? I said.
That is the dilemma, he replied. I do not know if I am the teller or the tale.
Only in the living of it does life seem ordinary.
In the telling of it we find ourselves strangers among the strange.
Reality is not now.
Sometimes when I look at Victor his face blurs. I realise it is my vision that must be blurring, because people’s faces don’t blur … but it is as though he is disappearing. Perhaps I am superimposing onto his body his state of mind.
The story of the head? I began it, didn’t I? In the bar in the desert. Do you recall?
Yes, I recall. His lapis eyes that matched his shirt. My sensation of being caught. By what? He took my fingers and kissed them. I love your big hands, he said. If I could choose another body, perhaps I would live in miniature and stand on your hand like one of those magical creatures caught in a nutshell.
I can be King Kong, I said. That makes you Fay Wray.
Doomed love, he said. That’s a programme in need of an overwrite.
Love’s not zeros and ones, I said.
Oh, but it is, said Victor. We are one. The world is naught/nought. I am alone. You are nothing. One love. An infinity of zeros.
I’ll stick with the gorilla, I said.
Lift me up, then, and I’ll whisper in your ear. Quick! Before the world bursts in to kill us.
I held him close. Whatever he says about the body, his body is what I know.
I told you, Ry, that I did my PhD in the States, at Virginia Tech. The reason I went to study there, after Cambridge, the only reason, was because I wanted to work with a brilliant mathematician called I J Good. Have you heard of him?
I hadn’t.
Victor said, Jack Good was part of the team at Bletchley Park during World War Two. A colleague of Alan Turing. Good was a codebreaker. A statistician, an expert in probability. A Bayesian. He tells a story about that:
I arrived in Blacksburg, Virginia, in the seventh hour of the seventh day of the seventh month of the year seven of the seventh decade and I was put in Apartment seven of Block seven … all by chance.
>
Jack was an atheist, of course, but after his experience with those sevens, he concluded he had to revise his calculation of the probability of there being a God from zero to 0.1. Bayesians, you recall, must update outcomes according to new data. They live in the opposite of the past.
I said, You mean the future?
No, Ry. The opposite of the past is the present. Anyone can live in a past that is gone or a future that does not exist. The opposite of either position is the present.
Jack was the cleverest and funniest of humans. He was a Polish Jew, born in England in 1916. He went to Cambridge early, on a scholarship, and was wise enough to change his name from Isadore Jacob Gudak to plain Jack Good. Jews were not popular in England at that time. The English are serial racists – one group gets accepted, another group becomes the scapegoat.
You are a Jew, I said.
Yes, said Victor.
But you don’t talk about it.
Race, faith, gender, sexuality, those things make me impatient, said Victor. We need to move forward, and faster. I want an end to it all, don’t you see?
An end to the human, I said.
An end to human stupidity, said Victor. Although, I do have a note from Jack, dated 1998, where he speculates that an ultraintelligent machine would lead to the extinction of Homo sapiens.
Do you believe that will happen? I said.
Victor shrugged. What do we mean by extinction? If we can upload some human minds to a non-physical platform, then what? Biological extinction perhaps. I don’t like the word ‘extinction’ – it is alarmist.
Frankissstein Page 13
