Stephanie scowled at the avatar in the shape of her mother. “That’s just so . . . her!”
Her father sighed. “How do you mean?”
Stephanie shook her head. “Ideas, that’s all she could think about. Everything’s an idea to her. She loves me because I gave her some intellectual glimpse into the future? Someone had to remind her to tell me she loves me?”
Her father’s demon let go of her hand and stepped away. “That is her way. She’s so passionate about ideas that she sometimes forgets to see the people behind them.”
“And I hate that,” Stephanie growled.
Her father said nothing. “There were times I hated that. There were times I loved it. But I was her husband, not her daughter.”
“It was harder on me,” Stephanie insisted.
“It was,” he agreed and then waited for her to say something. When she did not reply, he added, “Don’t rush yourself. There’s always the middle door.”
Stephanie closed her eyes, drew a long breath, and tried to find a way through the chaos of her emotions.
As if on their own, her feet took a step toward the middle door. She opened her eyes and looked at the Fresno processor’s impersonation of her mother. In that direction lay her death.
She took another step toward the middle door and then closed her eyes. She remembered, back in the hospital, seeing the big black resident holding the small crying boy in his arms. She remembered how Jani had smiled at her. She remembered her father’s arms closing around her.
Then, without looking back, she opened her eyes and ran to her mother’s image and the computer it represented.
As the old woman’s arms enfolded Stephanie, her glass snake bracelet fell to the floor. It grew in size and length, coiling around mother and daughter until its emerald body completely enveloped them.
Then, with the patience of eternity, the snake bit its own tail. Slowly it began to swallow, pressing mother and daughter closer and closer together, shrinking itself down into a smaller and smaller knot, until at last it disappeared with a soft pop.
* * *
Afterword
Most of my stories have multiple origins that slowly combine over time. The first spark of “Endosymbiont” came from an article in Science about Carsonella ruddii that revealed its amazingly short genome and examined its implications on horizontal gene transfer and the evolution of organelles. In particular, I was fascinated by how in the serial endycytosis theory of prokaryotic evolution, the progenitors of mitochondria and chloroplasts would have had had to sacrifice their independence to become endosymbionts. I saw this as kind of the opposite of placental motherhood in which a mother has to sacrifice to give her child independence. Underneath it all was a question about whether there was a cellular basis to our conception of mother and daughter. I put on my sci-fi thinking cap and began to wonder if perhaps there might in the future evolve a new kind of creature, perhaps involving artificial intelligence, that would provide a new mode of motherhood.
But it wasn’t until my first semester in medical school, when I began to meet patients on the ward and in the classroom, that the story matured. My biochemistry professor, an oncologist, presented a fascinating case in which a middle aged patient, through doctor error, had been given a massive overdose of cisplatin—an exceedingly toxic chemotherapeutic agent that uses platinum ions to poison cells. The result had put the patient into a coma, destroyed her kidneys and done massive damage to her liver. When she woke from the coma, the patient found herself in agony, blind, deaf, and without a sense of taste or smell. Through the Herculean efforts of the professor, the platinum was removed from the patient’s body. Slowly her vision returned, and her hearing recovered enough to be functional with hearing aids. She had to suffer through dialysis for three years before she received a kidney transplant.
But the truly, absolutely shocking thing about this seventy year old woman was her character. When interviewed in front of the class, she alternated between joking with the doctors and scolding them for their “newfangled” manners. When the medical students got to ask questions she only called on the “handsome boys” and reminded us all that she was single again. I’ve rarely laughed so hard and never laughed so hard in a biochemistry class. Here was a woman who had suffered more pain—and pain unlike anything I could even imagine—and yet was not in the least bit bitter. When I asked her how she avoided bitterness and how she could stand to be presented to a whole class of medical students when doctors had failed her so profoundly, she grew serious and said something like “It’s a struggle. There were some very long and agonizing and lonely nights. And when you face the dark times and think about what had been done to you…well, you have to choose to face it and then refuse it."
Somehow this patient’s irrepressible character and her struggle to avoid bitterness meshed with my previous thinking about prokaryotic evolution and motherhood. Of course I couldn’t use the patient’s voice. She was entirely too strong. The instant readers got to know her, they would know instantly that she would succeed in fighting off bitterness. So when I began to tell the story bouncing around in my head, I discovered I was doing so in the voice of a frightened, vulnerable, but equally irrepressible teenager. I was writing in the voice of many of my former students and those few teenage patients I had come to know. From there it was simply a matter of applying my butt to the chair and my fingers to the keyboard and the story seemed to write itself.
The protagonist’s snide and youthful voice came very naturally to me; she is an amalgamation of the learning disabled students and teenage cancer patients I’ve interacted with as a medical student. An acute awareness of how unfair the universe has been to her heats her otherwise thoughtful words. When provoked she’s prone to sarcasm and snide remarks. Like most young people, she is phenomenally perceptive and constantly uncovering new emotional forces influencing her. She has more than a shade of scientist about her; her desire to understand why things are the way they are drives her curiosity. Most importantly, she seeks an explanation of and a reason for her cancer. But the answers she finds—as they are for so many of us facing adversity—only lead to more questions and more pain. It is in this context, that she struggles to understand the truth and define herself.
Stephanie’s struggle against embitterment is similar to the struggle I have seen in many of my learning disabled students. It is also a struggle I went through when I was dealing with my dyslexia. This background helped me to understand my character, but it also threatened to overwhelm her. I had to be very careful to be true to her voice, to constantly steer the story toward the feelings and issues of one struggling with a disease (not a learning disability)—and to the themes of biology, technology, family, and motherhood that would be important to Stephanie.
My father’s battle with cancer also added to the inspiration and challenges of writing the story. Several years ago my father was diagnosed with angiosarcoma, a very dangerous cancer of the blood vessels. For many years in a row, everyone lived with the fear that dad only had a few months to live. It turns out that our family is one of the lucky ones and that dad has gone into full remission (knock on wood). But even so, it seems that we are all still recovering from the anxiety and shock that the surgeries and chemotherapies brought on. Writing this story provided me with an opportunity to reencounter the difficult family dynamics disease brings on. I knew also that the story might provide the chance to spread the word about research charities, and so in a way writing the story felt a bit like taking revenge on cancer.
Right away, the theme of Seeds of Change appealed to my belief that fiction can be a mode of social change. I firmly believe that it is only through imagining other ways of life and other experiences that we ever gain the ability to sympathize and so become more responsible citizens. The most important revolutions begin quietly. The perception of injustice and suffering must precede any action against them.
In a moment of gleeful linguistic frivolity, I saw the anthology as a chance
to plant my own—perhaps small—seed of change by bringing the strange world of cancer and the stranger world of neuroethics to readers. It’s my hope that reading “Endosymbiont” prompts understanding of what it’s like to struggle with disease and thought as to what exactly defines a human neurologically. The fields of neuroscience and neurology are advancing more quickly than most people realize. And as new imaginative and curative technologies enter the hospital and clinic, we as a society will be faced with new and strange ethical questions. In “Endosymbiont” I speculate about a much larger step than we are likely to see in the next few years. But it is my hope that imagining these issues now will prime the pump as it were and prepare us for future ethical challenges.
A DANCE CALLED ARMAGEDDON
Ken MacLeod
I WALK FAST up the North Bridge under a sky yellow with city light on low cloud. The streets are almost empty. Even for the fifteenth winter of the Faith War, it’s quiet. Everyone on the street seems to have tense shoulders and wary eyes. For the past week, all the talking heads have been telling us the current battle’s going to be decisive, it’s going to be the big one, and right now they’re telling us it’s not looking good.
I’m out on the town because I don’t want to sit alone at home. But as I stride along I can’t help watching the news on my glasses. The picture flickers in the corner of my eye, the sound murmurs in the earpieces. Even on Fox News, the commentators and retired generals are all taking care not to call what’s going on Armageddon. They are, presumably, trying not to make the panic worse than it is already. America is going into national nervous breakdown from coast to coast: fires, riots, entire football stadiums packed with swaying, sobbing people waiting for the Rapture or the Second Coming.
My wife’s working nights at the hospital, hauled out of retirement to help cope with the rising flood of casualties flown in from the big medevac staging areas on Cyprus and Crete. Here in the UK—unlike the US, with two million so far thrown into the meat-grinder of the Middle East and Central Asia—we don’t have the draft. But every medical worker knows they’ll be on call until they die.
I walk in to the Heart of Oak and my glasses steam up. I take them off and slip them in their pouch inside my shirt pocket, taking more than usual care because I’ve only just got them, a Sony Ericsson Cyber-sight upgrade. I idly wonder whether it would be possible to give glasses a heating element, just so they don’t steam up when you step from a cold night into a warm and crowded pub. That would be a sight more useful, so to speak, than the menu of VR games bundled with my new specs. It might even be more useful than television.
The room’s so small I hardly need my glasses to see everyone in it, and I give them all a big grin. Whether I know them or not, I know who they are. They look familiar. They look like me.
I love my ugly race.
* * * *
THE MINUTE MY wife and I first walked in to the Heart of Oak, years ago and quite by chance, I realized that for the first time in my life I had found my own crowd. I had walked into a place where I fit right in, right from the start. But I was half way down my first pint before I recognized who we were. To begin with, I just recognized the scene in a painting: the red coats on one side, the kilts and plaids on the other, the cannon-smoke and rain, the long low mossy wall, the man on a white horse, wheeling: there’s only one battle these could depict.
“That’s a painting of Culloden,” I said to my wife. She turned and looked over her shoulder. “And that one beside it, with the men by the boat on the shore, is of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Mind you, I can’t tell whether he’s landing or leaving.”
She laughed. “Yes—they’re looking very decisively in both directions!”
The music started up then, and we listened to it and looked around. The Heart of Oak then looked just the same as it does tonight. The room is almost square. The wall beside the door faces the bar. Along that wall there’s a table, and behind it sit the musicians and singers. Others sit behind the table at right angles to it, beneath the painting of Culloden. The musicians and singers look like their audience, and now and again someone you thought was just there to listen will step forward and slide behind the table and start strumming or singing.
There are one or two beautiful women in the room, and here and there a handsome man, if you like the gypsy rover type—such as Andy, the guy who was playing a guitar and singing that first night we walked in. Not tall; short curled-back hair that was black then, eyebrows that met in the middle and a dark two-millimeter stubble. The rest of us . . . we’re ordinary, but with some aspect in common that’s hard to define, and only noticeable when we’re all in one place. It was when I was idly scanning the other faces and wondering why some of them looked vaguely familiar and why most of them seemed, not related exactly, but from the same stock, that I realized.
These were my people.
We were the defeated.
Defeat. That’s what folk songs—British folk songs, at any rate—are about. They’re about vanished trades and lost loves and lost causes. They’re not like the blues, or country and western. They don’t protest; they don’t even, always, mourn. They remember what was lost, and they admit defeat.
That admission is what makes the defeated cheerful. They’re not losers, not failures, not depressed. I once met a man who’d had a very successful life—in diplomacy, special ops, politics, literature. His family still fancied themselves Jacobites. He had the look and the attitude I see on most of the faces here. If you’re a Jacobite, you know you’re defeated. My mother once told me, quite seriously, that the tinkers—Scotland’s traveling people, a native equivalent of Gypsies—were descendants of Charles Edward Stuart’s scattered soldiers. I refrained from reminding her that we were, too: we had an ancestor who fell at Culloden, and another who carried the clan colors home, wrapped beneath his plaid.
I’m no Jacobite, not even when sentimental, not even when drunk. But I can still join in “Mo Ghille Mear.”
* * * *
I TAKE MY pint of eighty shilling to the round-topped standing table in the middle of the floor, hang my jacket on one of the hooks underneath, nod to a few people, and settle to enjoy the music. But as I do so I notice that most people here are have kept their glasses on, or are glancing now and again at a handscreen, checking the news. I know I‘ll be doing the same before long. Right now I want to forget all that.
Andy’s belting out “The Bonnie Ship the Diamond.” It’s a song about a whaling ship, and a whaling ship that was lost at sea, at that. When he ends the final chorus he raises a glass.
“Here’s to the Faroese!” he says.
We all cheer, no matter what we think of fishing for the whale these days.
“Here’s to the Japanese!”
And it’s another “Yay!” for scientific research. But it’s a bit more ragged.
“Here’s to the Russians!”
Dead silence for a second. Then Andy blinks and shakes his head.
“Did I say that?”
Everybody laughs. Andy grins, props the guitar on the seat beside him and starts rolling a cigarette. He tucks the roll-up beside his ear and swallows a quarter of a pint and joins in the next song. While it’s on I yield to the temptation to put my glasses on again. There’s never been a television in the Heart of Oak, even in the days when pubs had television. I pick the wall above the right-angle bench for the virtual screen. Given a new choice of standard size or full wall, I pick full wall.
I blink and rock back on my heels. The illusion is impressive. It’s as if the whole wall has become a window, with people sitting and standing quite oblivious in front of it. I split-screen to eight different news channels. Voices chatter in my earpiece, changing as my gaze flicks from one screen to the next.
They’re all showing the news that everyone’s been following: the battle, now in its seventh day. The whole front along the Syrian-Jordanian border has been rolled up from the east, with massive Iranian flank attacks and the huge tactical surprise of a
Russian airstrike and airlift from secret bases in Yemen just after the Saudis folded. The whole melée is now concentrated in northern Israel, in the shadow of the Golan Heights and in and around the valley of Meggido. I call up a couple of religious channels and their graphics are so technical it’s funny. They show more thick curved arrows and small-print labels than on the news reports. Complicated time-lines connect every twist and turn of the battle to a verse in the prophecies of Daniel or the Book of Revelation.
This is excusable. The scene is apocalyptic: US, UK, Israeli, and Jordanian units in continuous engagements with much larger armies of Syrians, Russians, and Iranians. Tank battles, artillery duels, airstrikes, naval bombardments. Every minute or so one of the live-action screens goes white as a tactical nuke explodes. I watch in fascinated horror a zoom shot of men scrambling from a burning tank, burning themselves, then shut the news off. The wall comes back, with nothing more military than that old familiar painting of the debacle at Culloden.
My glass is empty, the song is over. Andy’s easing himself out from behind the table, his roll-up unlit in the corner of his mouth. I shrug my jacket back on and join him outside the doorway. He nods to me over hands cupped around a lighter. I’ve been coming here, off and on, for years but have exchanged few words with him, or with any of the other musicians.
“Cold night,” says Andy. He glances up and down the street. “Quiet and all.”
I laugh so hard I almost blow out my lighter. Take a sharp drag, exhale.
“Aye,” I say. “Everyone’s inside waiting for the end of the world.”
Andy twists his neck a bit to mime cringing and looking up at the sky, then shakes his head.
“D’you reckon he’s coming back?”
Seeds of Change Page 10