Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  The intruder flails, jitters, and then he convulses as the torpedoes unload tightly focused electrical currents through his torso.

  Yes yes yes! Excitement! Happy! the dolphins are chittering all around me. Win!

  The intruder goes limp. His mouthpiece has fallen out, and bubbles are pouring from his mouth, causing him to float downward.

  I unsheathe the special knife at my waist, which is designed to handle the mesh of our perimeter net. Its black blade severs the elastic fibers of the mesh effortlessly, and with three quick slices, I have cut out a panel that drapes toward me, creating a doorway.

  “Loud Mike! Quiet Mike! Constantine!” I say through the translator, which pipes out their signature whistles.

  These three echo their whistles back to me: Roger, boss, we’re listening!

  “Go take,” I tell them.

  They are off through the opening I have made. Quiet Mike pulls the camera strap off the man and swims it back to me. Loud Mike and Constantine nose the limp body to the surface, then push it toward the tiny island that lies a short distance from our perimeter.

  I myself surface for the first time today, feeling as always that I am a misshapen monster emerging from the deep. (Metaphor?) I allow my large head to peek above the water, where I blink to switch my eyes to air-sight. I am supposed to make sure that the intruder’s face is out of the ocean, so he has every chance of surviving. I can see the tip of Loud Mike’s nose above the water, poking the limp man repeatedly until half of his body lies above the water line, on the dry sand of the island. It is enough. If the man is alive, he will be able to breathe.

  I look to my left, where, on the far side of the sea paddock, the low, long roof of Blessed Cures’ ocean clinic rises above the sand, and I let off a flare.

  With another blink, I switch back to underwater vision as I dive down. In moments, the whole pod is reunited in the paddock. With a flick of the knife handle, I reverse its function, and I use it to heal the elastic of the net and seal the flap back into place.

  Soon the vibration of a small boat motor reaches our ears. Someone is launching from the clinic to pick up the intruder, who will have to answer for his trespassing. Already, this feels very distant. A human problem for the world above. All traces of the man have been wiped from the ocean.

  Except for the camera, which I am now holding.

  Toy? asks Quiet Mike.

  Toy toy toy?! echo the others. They set off in barrel rolls again, but these are playful and not menacing.

  Play! someone says.

  Play play play! is echoed throughout the pod.

  I throw the camera at Shark Girl (named for her tendency to bite and her gender), who catches the strap with her flipper, then lets it fall so she can catch it with her fluke. The others crowd around, looking at the glass lens, the strap. It is passed back and forth between different dolphins, but they soon tire of it. The camera is heavy and sinks quickly—not an ideal dolphin toy. Shark Girl lets it fall when it next comes to her, and she picks up a piece of kelp instead, which she swims away with, the other six in pursuit.

  I dive to the bottom and retrieve the camera.

  2. THE CLINICS

  The world through a camera lens is not the same world one views with the naked eye. There is a moment, when you take a picture, when you see something familiar and discover that it is not familiar at all—it is alien and new, because you have studied it through a new eye.

  Camera world.

  Coward realm.

  A warmer cold.

  By the time the clinic signals me, hours later, I have gazed at the whole of the sea paddock through the camera. The signal is a piercing buzz, tuned to my human ears, that pulses through water until I swim back to the jetty and press the Off button.

  Even though I hate the noise, I swim back slowly, because I do not like the clinic. I do not like the feeling in my stomach that appears magically when that buzzer sounds.

  Metaphor. There is no magic. It is adrenaline.

  Just in front of the clinic building, a stone jetty extends into the sea paddock. Beneath the water line, a steel door is built into the jetty, and it is to this I swim. The signal button, large, red, and obvious, is located to one side of the door. I press it, and the alarm goes silent. Simultaneously, the door unlocks, and when I pull up on the handles, there is a sucking sound, and then the rush of water pouring in. The door glides open, as clean and white on the inside as the clinic itself. I glance back to see if any of my underwater colleagues have decided to investigate, now that the buzz has been turned off, but there is no one nearby. The dolphins and manatees instinctively know to stay away from this door.

  Beyond it, underwater now that the door is open, is the bottom of the conveyor belt that leads upward at an angle, with handgrips every couple of feet. As soon as I swim in and take hold of the nearest grip, the belt whirs into motion. In a few yards I am above the water line, and my flipper feet and dolphin legs lie heavily against the belt, reminding me of the existence of gravity.

  Dead weight! I think.

  My gray skin begins to tighten and pucker immediately. But none of these minor discomforts are why I don’t like the clinic.

  By counting the seams in the tunnel’s ceiling, I calculate how many feet above the ocean I am with each second that passes.

  Hated clinic.

  Iceland itch.

  I clean ditch.

  Better.

  Eventually I remember that I don’t need the rebreather here and I let it fall from my mouth. The air of the world, or at least the air of the conveyor tunnel, floods into my lungs. It is fresher, which is nice, but on the other hand, it is laden with the taste and scent of the human world.

  The tunnel lets out into the clinic’s pool room, which is large and open and white, with a high ceiling and sunlight pouring in everywhere. Lab technicians, also in white, are waiting for me as the conveyor belt spills me out into a kind of rubber net that waits at the very end.

  “Alexios! Thank you for coming.”

  That is Mr. Tavoularis, the man in charge of the clinic.

  Two technicians have grabbed me beneath my arms and they are lifting me over several yards of pavement, which I am not able to navigate on my own because my new legs do not walk. (My old legs didn’t walk either, but at least they had feet, giving the impression that walking might be possible.)

  “Just a quick hop,” one of the lab techs is saying in a friendly voice as I’m whisked over the floor, “and here you are, Alexios!”

  They lower me into the saltwater pool and then they and several other techs stand at the edge, peering down with intense interest as I swim to the underwater sling chair they have designed just for me, just for meetings like this one.

  “What have you got there, Alexios?” Mr. Tavoularis asks me, when I am settled comfortably, only my head above the surface. He has spotted the intruder’s camera, which is slung over my shoulder.

  I hold it out to them and a lab tech leans over to take it from me.

  “Can you speak, Alexios?” Mr. Tavoularis asks. He is conversing with me in English, as everyone does. It is the official language of the clinics in which I have spent my life, and so it is the only tongue I have ever used.

  Tongue. Figure of speech.

  Mr. Tavoularis is tall, with a very large, dark, well-combed mustache that curls upward on each side, while the hair on his head is cropped close to his scalp. He wears a doctor’s lab coat with a fine linen suit beneath.

  Tavoularis

  or, as I often think of him when he lectures me,

  saliva tour.

  I have not been to the clinic for weeks. This means that I have not used my human voice for weeks. The strange rasp of air in my throat surprises me as I say, “I can speak.” My voice is rough and sounds older than I am. Bu
t this is typical. It will improve as our conversation progresses. “That’s the camera I took from the intruder,” I tell him.

  “Excellent,” Mr. Tavoularis says. “We have revived him, you know. You and the dolphins did a wonderful job of keeping him alive. We will discover who he works for, which will be quite helpful to us. It is always our aim to stay one step ahead of our competitors.”

  He tells me this as though I will be relieved, but I am not paying much attention. One of the lab techs is a woman with large breasts, and another is a man with a plump stomach. I am thinking that, if positioned correctly, they could both fit into a rectangular box together without wasting much space. I begin to do calculations of their combined weight and how much room would be left over. I never imagine fitting chimeras or dolphins into boxes, but I am always thinking about this with humans, due to their varied shapes.

  “So,” Mr. Tavoularis says, clearing his throat slightly, which I have learned is his way of saying I need your full attention now, Alexios. He rolls open his tablet, preparing to take notes. “Recount for me the incident with the intruder.”

  This is the procedure every time something unusual happens near the paddock. The Blessed Cures Consortium calls it a postmortem, even though that means after death in Latin, and the intruder didn’t die. Though it does occur to me that Blessed Cures might kill the man when they have finished questioning him. Still, that would make this a “premortem,” wouldn’t it?

  Blessed Cures.

  Bleeds Curses.

  As I describe what happened with the intruder, Mr. Tavoularis says things like “Oh, I see” and “Do go on,” and it is very difficult for me not to associate those bland conversational encouragements with the examinations I used to have in the clinic where I grew up—Genetic Radiance. The Genetic Radiance clinic was also owned by the Blessed Cures Consortium, though its medical specialty was different. I was the specialty there. Here at Blessed Cures, I am merely an employee.

  Mr. Tavoularis is nodding and making shorthand notation with two of his fingers into his tablet’s holographic input, so I suppose I am saying the proper words to describe how I disabled the intruder and so on, and yet I am not hearing myself anymore, and I am hardly seeing Mr. Tavoularis or any of the lab techs who are huddled attentively at the edge of the pool.

  I am instead hearing and seeing Caroline, my special doctor at Genetic Radiance. If I am not mistaken, I am reexperiencing one particular conversation with Caroline when I was seven years old.

  I am not mistaken. This conversation has been engraved upon my consciousness. Metaphor.

  Twenty percent of my attention remains on the Greek scientist with the luxurious mustache.

  Ten percent of my attention is being used to fit lab techs, like interlocking puzzle pieces, into boxes.

  A different ten percent of my attention is occupied in calculating how it is possible to follow several entirely different trains of thought at the same time.

  Sixty percent of my attention has retreated into the past and is watching the memory of Caroline unfold before me:

  “Mm, yes, I can see that,” Caroline says. “If your friend lost his mother, it certainly could help to ask another woman to act as his mother, to replace her. But please think carefully, Alexios—is there any other answer?”

  She is administering a test. She is nearly always administering a test. This one is called HEEP, which stands for Human Emotion, Empathy, and Pathos. It is not heaps of fun. The test before this one was the one I have to take most often, FunIntMin, which stands, obviously, for Functional Intelligence in Minors.

  “I could move somewhere else so I didn’t have to see him anymore,” I say, after some reflection.

  “Certainly you—you could. But the question was how you could help your friend with the loss of his mother. How would you moving away help your friend?”

  I don’t have an answer for that. That solution would not help my friend with his loss of his mother, but it would dramatically help the situation, because I would not have to hear about it anymore. Most of the HEEP’s questions are like this one, boring and long.

  “Do you have another answer, Alexios?” Caroline asks me. Her expression remains friendly, but there is something different about her eyes, something less patient.

  “Time travel could answer any of these questions,” I tell her. “However, no one has demonstrated it as a practical possibility, though mathematically, there are paradigms under which it’s possible.”

  “Yes, we’ve discussed this a number of times. But is there an answer to this question?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “What is the answer, Alexios?”

  “I don’t know. But the answer exists. It’s written on the answer sheet, of course.”

  “All right, then,” Caroline says. I can hear the frustration beneath her words, though she is good at hiding it. She checks off that question and reads the next question off the projection that hangs in the air between us: “Your pet cat catches a bird and brings it into the house while it’s still alive. You see that the animal is in pain—”

  “The cat or the bird?”

  “The bird. You see that the animal is in pain….”

  She stops.

  “Is that it? There wasn’t a question,” I point out.

  Caroline shakes her head. She scrolls through the remaining questions on the HEEP with a look of dissatisfaction. I know there are twenty-one more, and yet she does not continue.

  I sense an opportunity and say, “Can we do the IQ test instead?”

  “Yes, all right,” she answers. The words are almost a whisper, but of course I hear them perfectly well.

  The IQ test is so much better, because it is full of puzzles like this one:

  What letter comes next in this sequence?

  TTTFFS

  The answer is naturally S, because the letters can be easily understood to stand for ten, twenty, thirty, and so on.

  Here is my favorite type of question:

  6236 = 2

  7032 = 1

  9516 = 2

  8968 = 6

  5367 = 1

  3344 = 0

  2005 = 2

  6819 = 4

  2984 = 3

  7100 = ?

  The answer to this one is 2, because the question is asking how many circles are in the number to the left. I enjoy this sort of puzzle, which demands that you must change your perspective away from the obvious. The test has hundreds more like this and of different kinds, which are almost as good.

  We begin the IQ test, but after only a handful of questions (metaphor, by the way), Caroline is called from the room. She sets the tablet on the tray by my bed and lets me finish on my own.

  While I answer the questions, I allow my mind to scramble and unscramble words in the background:

  Genetic Radiance.

  Ice teen cardigan.

  Incinerated cage.

  Aptitude tests.

  Attitude pests.

  I have just answered…

  Six drinking glasses stand in a row, with the first three full of wine and the next three empty. By moving only one glass, can you arrange them so empty and full glasses alternate?

  …when I notice that Caroline is in the hallway outside my room, speaking to someone.

  “I’m afraid there’s no change,” Caroline is saying.

  “None at all?”

  I become slightly interested, because that is the voice of my mother! Her name is Philomena, and she visits the clinic from time to time. Sometimes she even brings a man called Paulos, who is my father, though it has been more than two years since I last saw him.

  I continue with the test, because I very much want to beat my fastest time, but I am still listening to the conversation in the hall as I work. Caroline ofte
n forgets the strength of my mod for long-distance hearing. I can hear them out there, whispering, as well as I could if they were standing inside my room speaking at a normal volume.

  “I thought you felt he was improving,” my mother says. “The report from six months ago gave us the impression that, you know…there was reason to be optimistic.”

  There is a pause. After a time, Caroline says apologetically, “I hoped he would improve. Perhaps that report reflected my hope more than it should have. We were all so eager for improvement that small changes appeared much larger than they actually were. In reality, the only change we’ve been able to document over the long term has been a slight worsening in his empathy scores.”

  “But his intelligence…”

  “IQ is still climbing,” Caroline tells my mother. “That’s a certainty. You have a very intelligent son. But not…”

  “…in any way that matters.” My mother has finished Caroline’s thought, it seems.

  There is an uncomfortable feeling in my lungs, as if they are straining to get oxygen out of the air. My stomach is doing something odd as well. It is generating a feeling that is very like falling. I don’t care for the words either of them is saying, and yet I cannot stop listening.

  “He is very good at puzzles,” Caroline says, as if this might be a consolation.

  I can hear my mother sigh. Sighs, I have noticed, can mean a variety of things. Sometimes they communicate boredom, or monotony, or sorrow. This sigh strikes me as something more final than any of those feelings. “Thank you for your honesty,” my mother says. “You know my husband and I were considering legal action. The promises that were made back in the embryo stage…”

  “I didn’t work for the clinic then, but I was brought on to evaluate the scientific basis for our genetic claims. In the most technical view, Genetic Radiance has delivered on its promises to you.”