Captive Dreams

by Michael Flynn

  “No, they’ll fight it, Sèan,” Alma told him. “If I take Ethan off, there’ll be a big stink. How will they ever get anyone else to sign up their child?”

  Zachariah spread his hands. “Mrs. Seakirt, I admit that no one wants to fail—”

  “Or at least not many of us,” said Mick.

  “But the success of this research project is not why I urge you to reconsider.”

  “The Institute operates for a profit,” she reminded them. Vinnie had told her that. Greed for profits blinded people.

  “Alma, we care about Ethan,” said Mick. “All of us do. You’re not alone. He’s not a burden you have to shoulder by yourself.”

  “What do you know about it?” she snapped. “You ran out like all the others. You’re not concerned about my Ethan at all. It’s the profit you’ll make from building these prosthetics for the Institute.”

  “Alma.” He straightened; shoved his hands in his pants pockets. Looked down; looked back up. “Alma, if it will convince you otherwise, I will donate every cent of profit on those machines to any charity you name.”

  Taking Ethan by the hand, she stood up. FitzPatrick stood with her. “No, I’m sorry. My mind is made up.” She walked to the door, the lawyer trailing behind her. “I coped with Ethan for years before the operation. I can cope with him again.”

  “We’ll fight you on this,” said Mick. “We’ll have the court name a guardian.”

  FitzPatrick nodded. “See you in court.”

  As she stood in the half-open door, Silverman spoke up. “One thing, Alma.” She looked back at him. “The decisions are not easy, and you never, ever know if you are right. But if you go ahead, it won’t be like it was before.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’ll remember.”

  Her skin tingled, and for the oddest moment she felt as if she were encased in glass and everyone in the room beside herself and Ethan were far, far away. Then the moment passed and Ethan tugged at her skirt and she looked down. “A’ we goin now, momma?”

  She knelt and hugged him, untwisting the cord with a practiced movement. “Yes, we’re going now. And momma will take care of you forever and ever.

  “Will ev’ythin be awright?”

  She brushed at his clothes and hair, straightening any sign of disarray.

  AFTERWORD TO "CAPTIVE DREAMS"

  I wrote “Captive Dreams” whenever I was stuck on “Melodies of the Heart.” Consequently, although it was started later, it was finished a year earlier. It appeared in Analog (Aug 1992) and placed second in its category in the AnLab voting. The time setting of the story coincides with the epilog of “Melodies of the Heart,” and consequently old Dr. Wilkes makes an appearance.

  The immediate inspiration for the story was a then-neighbor’s daughter, who was developmentally disabled and to whom the divorced father was greatly devoted.

  I noticed that sometimes when I greeted her, the young girl would not answer for a few moments, then would wave as if she had just heard me. There are likely any number of explanations for the behavior, but one that struck me at the time was literally retardation. The sensory signals were slower reaching the brain. In the story, I extended the notion to suppose that different sensory channels were reaching Ethan’s brain at different times, and consequently he was seeing, hearing, touching different “moments.” This would be an impairment of what Aristotle called the unifying or “common” sense. Such a perceived world would be inherently unintelligible. This led to the imaginary device for coordinating the sensory signals; but of course that was only the beginning of the story.

  Recently, I read that one of the flaws in experiments that purportedly show decisions being made before the subject is aware of making them is that visual signals, auditory signals, and tactile signals really do arrive in the brain moments apart, but that some function in the brain combines them into a common sensation. Score one for the old Stagirite.

  A reviewer once wrote of this story that it was “about” the ethics of animal experimentation. It wasn’t, but you must be the judge. The title comes from Gérard de Nerval, Fragments de Faust: “The jailer is another kind of captive—is the jailer envious of his prisoner’s dreams?” Alma Seakirt is another kind of captive.

  The letters I received from the caregivers of children like Ethan showed that some people understood and were profoundly moved. That’s all any writer can ask for.

  HOPEFUL MONSTERS

  It was a brilliant spring day when Karen Brusco brought home her perfect baby. It was of a piece with the day, which was likewise perfect. Flowers sported red and yellow among roadside bushes, burst from front gardens, and draped precipitous hillsides with bridal veils. Laurel and forsythia and daffodils sweetened the air, and Karen responded with her own glow. She was a mother. Like spring, she had burst forth.

  It was cause for celebration, and so shortly after returning from the Choice Center, she and Bill invited family, friends, and neighbors over. All of them agreed that Rachel was perfect, perhaps the most perfect baby ever born. In part, this must have been no less than politeness, but much of it was no more than truth. Not only had Rachel scored a perfect 10 on her APGAR but going beyond appearance and activity, she exhibited a delicacy and symmetry of feature, an alertness and focus in her gaze, a genuine benevolence in her grimace that was given to few other newborns. Except, of course, for those others whose parents had used the Child Design Department.

  “We didn’t design for intelligence,” Bill explained, though not because he discounted intelligence to beauty in baby girls. “We just haven’t identified the gene for intelligence yet.” The “we” was broadly construed, as when a sports fan says “we” won a game. Though down with architecture, piping, wiring, and HVAC, he could not have identified a gene if it had walked up to him on the street and shaken his hand.

  “There is no gene for intelligence,” grumbled Jessica Burton-Peeler, a matronly woman who lived around the corner—if a ring road can be said to have corners. Her husband, Charlie Singer, liked to call her “the second-best geneticist in North America” and, if she objected, amended that to “the second-best geneticist in our house.” Charlie was in the kitchen chatting up Sarah and Andrew, who were Karen’s parents, and a neighbor, Jamie Shaw, who had dropped in for the cake and ice cream.

  “Well, yes,” said Bill. “I meant ‘gene’ in a metaphorical sense.” He was acutely aware that SingerLabs was a major player in genetics and nanotechnology and that consequently he was talking to a pro.

  Jessie leaned over the crib, set in a place of honor in the living room, and tickled Rachel under the chin. The baby responded by making a grotesque face. “Genes aren’t metaphors,” she told the proud father. “They’re molecules. But the reason there’s no gene for intelligence is because there’s no one thing to call ‘intelligence.’”

  “The state of the art isn’t there yet,” said Bill, a bit defensively. “Beauty is an abstraction, too. But the complex of features that make it up—eye color, nose length, cheekbones—those are things we can get a handle on. We worked through composite sketches during the design phase of the project and…”

  “And Rachel is not a ‘project,’” said Karen, who had stopped by with a tray of hors d’oeuvres from the kitchen. She let several guests pick from the tray before setting it down on the coffee table and joining her husband at the crib side. “Just like an engineer, to talk about ‘projects’ and ‘design phases’ all the time.”

  Bill tucked up. “It’s an analogy. They told us how genes aren’t one thing in one place. So they have this MAGIC machine—a Multiplex Automated Genome Integrator and Calibrator—that locates and replicates the DNA from multiple sites at accelerated speeds. It’s like an acrostic. The letters that spell ‘blue eyes’ aren’t in a contiguous string but hopscotch around the genome like…”

  Charlie had come up behind them. “…like a little girl skipping through Himmel und Hölle,” he said. “The interesting question is…who’s the littl
e girl? Besides this one,” he added with an avuncular nod toward the crib. He looked down at the baby, but made no move to touch her. “What surprises have you in store for us, hopeful monster?” he said softly.

  Karen bridled. “Monster? Rachel’s no monster! How can you say a thing like that?” Charlie was a neighbor, a friend. They often had dinner together. She could not believe he had said that.

  Singer ignored Jessie’s kick to his ankle and unwrapped a stick of gum, which he popped into his mouth. “A ‘monster’ is just a large-scale mutation,” he said. “Goldschmidt coined the term ‘hopeful monster’ because he thought evolution proceeded in big leaps and ‘hoped for the best.’”

  Bill nodded his head as if understanding. Karen was mollified, but still suspicious. “The genes are like lines of code,” Bill said, “and the genome is the program.”

  “Well, only if each line of code were broken up and scattered throughout the program, and an instruction could mean something different depending on when it was read and what other instructions were read at the same time. Oh, and bits of the syntax could be roped into other instructions, like the letters in a crossword puzzle. But other than that, yeah, ‘just like.’”

  Sometimes Charlie could irritate Bill. “There was some scientist,” Bill insisted, “who reformulated genetics in terms of information theory. I read an article about it once.”

  “Shapiro at Chicago,” Charlie said. “Sure. It was his paradigm that led to Rachel. He showed how genetic change could be massive and non-random. When you look inside genes, you find biochemical activities that can rearrange DNA molecules. They ‘recognize’ particular sequence motifs, which means genetic change can be specific; and the same activity can operate at multiple sites in the genome, which means change is not limited to one genetic locus. That’s what turned MAGE into MAGIC. Why, there are some critters that completely reorganize their genetic apparatus within a single cell-generation. They fragment their chromosomes into thousands of pieces—and reassemble a specific subset into something else.” He leaned over the crib again. “So Goldschmidt wasn’t exactly right; but he wasn’t entirely wrong, either. And what Nature accomplishes by accident, our clever engineers hope to accomplish by intelligent design.” He shook his head. “Next to genes, my nanomachines are simple Tinkertoys.”

  Bill said, “Oh, come on, Charlie. The nanos you build are…”

  “Just machines. But an organism’s not a machine, Bill; and a baby’s not a mousetrap. You don’t take a bunch of parts and assemble ’em from the outside. An organism diversifies into its own parts from the inside.”

  Karen tickled Rachel, a process the child did not seem to care for, since she squirmed and fussed. “She’s a little miracle,” she said.

  “Charlie,” said Jessica finally, “we’re here to coo over their baby, not lecture them on genetics.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Karen said with conviction, “she’s under warranty.” She bent over the baby and rubbed her gently. “Aren’t you, you little cutie!” Rachel emitted a great belch and smiled at no one in particular.

  Jessie frowned and looked at Charlie, but neither of them said anything.

  “Of course there’s no gene for intelligence,” Bill explained patiently to his fellow engineers when he had returned to work from paternity leave. Rachel and her beauty had become naturally the topic du jour. One could not examine the hologram without making some comment. It was expected. “That’s because there’s no one thing we can call intelligence.”

  Hugo, who had the desk next to Bill, laughed. “Maybe not, but there’s a lot of things we can’t! Hey, Winnie! You see Bill’s new baby?”

  Winnie had been passing through the bull pen with a flatscreen tucked under her arm and a hard-hat pushed back on her head. She was evidently just off a site visit. She hesitated, then came over and accepted the hologram, studying it for a moment from different angles before handing it back. “She’s very pretty.” But as she turned to go, Hugo stopped her.

  “Is that all you have to say? Aren’t you going to say something about the, you know, process?”

  “Hugo,” said Bill. “Leave her alone.”

  But Winnie gave Hugo a level gaze. “You know I didn’t approve; and you know why. So why don’t we leave it at that?”

  Bill watched her go into her office and insert her flatscreen into the wall pocket. The wall came alive with circuit diagrams. Bill felt guilty about goofing off and made to return to his own project; but Talequah said, “I don’t think she likes that you selected for beauty rather than brains.”

  Hugo guffawed. “You mean she wishes they’d been able to select for beauty when she was conceived!”

  “I wanted to select for intelligence,” Bill said, almost apologetically, “but it’s not simple, like repairing genetic diseases. Those are usually specific defects in specific loci, and fixing what’s broke is always easier than optimizing something that isn’t. Besides, intelligence involves two brain hemispheres, the nervous and glandular systems, and who knows what else? So it’s not even clear yet which genes to tweak in which direction.”

  Talequah glanced at Winnie’s office and said, “Maybe it’s because she doesn’t have kids of her own.”

  “No,” said Bill. “You weren’t here last year. Winnie felt it was immoral.”

  “Immoral!” Talequah raised her brows. “That gorgeous little baby? Why?”

  “Well,” said Bill, feeling a twinge of discomfort, “there is trial and error involved.”

  Hugo snorted. “How else can they identify which genes control which features in the first place? They have to experiment.”

  “Well, they also analyzed my DNA and Karen’s,” Bill said. “And Karen’s parents’, too. They even exhumed my mom and dad and as many of our grandparents as we could locate. My sister, too. It wasn’t all…experimenting. Even so, there’s still a risk.”

  Hugo shook his head. “Sure, but there are risks to staying in bed with the covers pulled up over you. We needed a lot of basic research over a lot of years to get us where we are today.” He glanced once more toward Winnie’s office. “People shouldn’t let religious beliefs get in the way of progress.”

  Karen took Rachel to her parents’ house, which was only a half-hour’s drive away. A new baby was a hassle, as Sarah and Andrew would no doubt remind her. The Grandparents’ Revenge, Andrew had called the baby, and had promised to mark as a red-letter day the first time she said to Rachel things Sarah had once said to her. It was a cheerful sort of vengeance, withal, and today Karen wanted only some time off for the hair salon. A freelance technical writer could work from home—an important consideration when she and Bill had been planning to have a child—but sometimes she just needed to get out of the house. Bill was on the road this week—a site in upstate New York—and she needed someone to watch Rachel for a couple of hours.

  “You were a rambunctious child,” Sarah told Karen when she had taken little Rachel in her arms. “You once swung on the refrigerator door playing Tarzan and tipped it over. I ran out the front door and up the street to my mother because you were driving me crazy.”

  Karen had heard the story innumerable times before, the catastrophe growing with each telling. “Well,” she said, making light. “Don’t let the little wiggle-worm swing on any doors.”

  “Oh, she’s a quiet little darling.”

  Rachel had been looking from voice to voice, face to face. The doctors all said that this was an important stage in her cognitive development, learning to recognize important people in her life. Karen smiled and Rachel looked at her with such round-eyed earnestness that she had to laugh. Rachel was supposed to return the smile, but her grave stare was just too comical.

  Sarah said to Andrew, “What is Rachel staring at?” And Andrew—he had never been Andy, not even to his own parents—pressed the hold button on the newspaper and said, “What?”

  The poor wriggler was trapped inside a playpen, and Andrew reflected for a moment on her unjust imprisonm
ent. It was a small fold-out that they kept on hand for just such occasions—soft netting festooned with toys—but since the kid could not even crawl yet, it seemed to Andrew a bit of overkill. He crossed the room to where his granddaughter lay on her back, kicking her arms and legs like an old-time break dancer. A gaily colored mobile hung just above her—an ominous Toy of Damocles, Andrew thought—but the baby was staring intently at the hinge on the corner of the playpen instead, juking the base so that the hinge would flex slightly.

  “I think she’s going to become a mechanical engineer, just like her grandpa. Aren’t you, sweetie?”

  If Rachel had an opinion in the matter, she did not share it. Andrew jiggled the mobile to attract her attention, but to no avail. He decided to turn her over.

  “I think she’s done on this side,” he told Sarah, and his wife looked away from the television long enough to approve. “Let her exercise her neck muscles,” she agreed. “She doesn’t hold her head up well yet.”

  Rachel fussed a little when she was turned, but then discovered her left hand and spent the next fifteen minutes in its contemplation.

  Karen was afraid something was wrong with Rachel. She had propped the baby up on the floor with pillows to cushion any fall and, to encourage crawling, had placed brightly colored toys just beyond her reach, like the pediatrician had said; but so far she had had no joy of it. Rachel would simply fix her gaze on one of the toys and stare at it and stare at it. When Karen leaned in front of her, she stared right past her.

  “Each baby progresses at a different rate,” Bill reminded her at dinner when she had mentioned this. The pediatrician had told her the same thing.

  “And her fingers twitch.”

  “Babies are always twitching. It’s a sort of isometric exercise hard-wired into our instincts.”

  “No, she twitches her fingers always in the same order; first one hand, then the other. Then she laughs.”