Wetware

by Craig Nova

  IN THREE days the markets were just as Blaine had guessed, within a half-percent. He sat in his office and thought about the meeting of the board of overseers. The first order of business was to get rid of Warren, which, he guessed, wasn’t going to be much of a problem. McCourt sent him a book, a copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, with a card that said, “Funds for my retirement have been established. Never been happier. Retiring soon. McCourt.”

  CHAPTER 7

  2027—project continuing

  BRIGGS THOUGHT the entire thing had probably gotten too hot for Carr to handle; at least it had gotten that way when she recognized part of what he had been doing. Briggs was inclined to think that she hadn’t turned him in; her quitting was a way for her to resolve the difference between what she knew she should do and what she wanted to do. Get out before the project corrupted her. It was better to be far away when things went south. Anyway, he guessed that was what had happened. She had been smart enough to get out.

  He was still thinking about this in the evening, when Mashita came in to see him and said, “You know, you take someone from nothing and build them up to something in this business, and what do they do? They up and quit on you.”

  Briggs shrugged. “What can I say?”

  Mashita stood in the door of the office.

  “We didn’t need Carr anyway, did we?” Mashita said.

  Briggs looked through the glass walls of his office, where he saw the blue glow from the monitors that were on in here and there.

  “Well?” said Mashita.

  “I think we can get along from here all right,” said Briggs. “We’re about half done with this stage of it. All the basics are complete.”

  “All right,” said Mashita. “It’s yours, then. I’m not hiring anyone to replace her.”

  Still, Briggs was careful, since he thought things could change and that Mashita would decide to hire someone after all. He was even more cautious than when Carr had been there, but slowly he started again, taking bigger chances now, or at least more obvious ones. The days combined into weeks, and the weeks into months. The architectural part of the project was finished, and Galapagos started to put the work that Briggs had done into production.

  When he needed an emotional lift, especially at night when the building wasn’t crowded, he went to look at Kay and Jack. At the end of the hall, Briggs came to a metal door that had lines of rivets along the top and bottom, the pattern of them implying the strength and order of an earlier age. In the stairwell he put one hand on the red banister that switched back and forth from landing to landing. His feet echoed in the air of the concrete hall. That was the thing about concrete. Always damp.

  At the bottom he opened the door to the cellar, and instantly the odor of dry ice came up to him from below. It made him think of a skating rink. Here, the lighting had a deep blue tint. One of the company’s concerns was infection, and they had done a lot with lights to kill bacteria. The door closed behind him, the pressurized air whooshing out: dust could be blown out, but it could never make it in, not past the outward flow of five feet per second. And in an emergency, it could be increased. In the basement, where the growing platforms were, the air was filled with the mixture of iodine, antibiotics, the odor of a newborn child, and the sweetness of spilled intravenous fluids.

  During certain cycles, when the order of operations had to be carefully observed, and when the pace was slowed down by lowering the temperature, the room was filled with snow. The humidity, which came in at a pretty high rate, froze and fell in straight, windless lines, the individual flakes white with a little blue cast to them, each one having a pattern that reminded Briggs of the feathery shape of a carrot top. The snow had a particular odor, too, which was of roses and iodine.

  When he had first seen Kay, her face emerging from the vapor, he was reminded again that he had done the one thing that could get him killed, no questions asked. That is, if anyone found out. Briggs supposed that he had been drawn to it because fertility, as far as he was concerned, was bound up with beauty and a damp sultriness. Well, he wasn’t sure why he had added it, aside from the thrill, but whatever the reason, he had made it possible for her to have a child.

  He wondered if she wanted to have a child. He had made it possible, but that didn’t mean it was something she necessarily desired. What he had done was forbidden for good reasons, since the other items he had written in, not just her beauty and her capacity for love, but those qualities that had been required by the specifications for the project, such as cunning and hostility to humanity, her coldness, her profound ability to think that only one thing was important (her current, mostly violent task), all of these, and some other nasty items, could cross into the human gene pool if she had a child. Delight in killing, pleasure in doing the thing that really hurts, indifference to a plea for mercy.

  Briggs always did his examination in the same order, to be sure he missed nothing. He started at the bottom of the platform where her feet were, and went through the checklist: color of skin, rate of oxygenation, which he knew by the scale which was inside the platform. As he did so, he moved along the side of the transparent steel. He looked at the shape of her toenails, the flesh under them as pink as a rose petal.

  Her feet were longish, and the tendons in them radiated outward from a band just beneath the ankle, like the spokes of a closed umbrella. As he stood there, she flexed her toes. Was she dreaming? And if so, was it of a detail that she thought of as beautiful, such as the blue tint in a dragonfly’s wing, the membrane colored by a sky on a clear day in summer? Or the oily luminescence in a hawk’s eye as it hunted for movement in a field below. Of course, she would like the speed as the bird dropped, the beating of its wings after the kill, as it lifted what it had caught back into the sky. Maybe she dreamed of childbirth, the panting, the shivering, the first sucking tug at her breast.

  Or, he thought, was she dreaming of him, of their mutual slippery movement, the gleam of sweat, of the creamy expulsion of semen, the fluid heat of it and wetness seeming right, too, and necessary? He stood there, his hands sweating, thinking that he would go back upstairs and delete the code, but then he realized that it had already been validated, compiled and checked, and that if he did anything like that, it would call attention to himself.

  He had added more than her ability to have a child. He had set it up so that when Kay saw him, she’d feel as though she knew him. She’d be delighted to see him. She’d trust him. She’d smile. She’d speak to him as though she had seen him once and had always wanted to get to know him better. “Hi, Briggs,” she’d say, taking a step closer and smiling, putting out her hand to take his with a warm and friendly touch. “It’s good to see you,” she’d say. Then she would wait for a moment, just looking at him. She would feel this as a combination of warmth and sweetness, almost as though her attitude were palpable, like the scent of cinnamon and sugar in a bakery. What could be wrong with that?

  It took a while, but the next step came, even though he told himself that he would never take it. He had approached the technical problem as though he were writing music, and he went about establishing a common, unstated understanding between the two of them, an attitude that was known to both: they would recognize a similar sensibility in each other. This, of course, increased the intensity with which they would meet. She would be far more than just friendly. The warmth would still be there, and that sweetness, too, though suffused with a more tactile sensation, as though the scent of cinnamon and sugar had gotten under her clothes. It wouldn’t be untoward, not kinky or convoluted, but just the opposite—frank, innocent. Her hand would take his a little more firmly, but without a hint of shame or discomfort of any kind. It was all right. She might blush with pleasure.

  Of course, he hadn’t stopped there. It was harmless, he told himself, like writing poetry or some other pursuit that one should keep to oneself. It was a vision of the best of what people felt sometimes, an invocation of . . . well, of those times when someone felt onl
y the warmth that came from a common sensibility and the most loving aspect of another human being. In fact, he was trying to allow himself the exquisite pleasure of love, which was that he could be, in Kay’s presence, someone he liked to be. And as he did this, he realized that more and more she determined who he was. What could be wrong with that? He and she would laugh at the same things and have a language that no one else could understand so well as the two of them. He thought that before Kay was released, he would add a cue to control these things.

  He took a step along the side of the platform, toward her head. Her calves had a slight curve to them, but it started pretty far up the leg. She would look good in stockings and heels, although he didn’t think she would ever get the chance to wear them. Pale skin. Not a mark on it. She had never nicked herself with a razor as a teenager, trying to look grown-up. The shape of her kneecaps had come out all right. No chronic knee problems, nothing like that. Long thighs, powerful, slender. Hip bone a little prominent. Ribs just barely visible beneath her breasts, which had a pattern of small blue veins, just beneath the skin. Nipples the color of raspberries. Long neck, prominent shoulder bones, fingers of the hand long and graceful, perfect for playing the piano. Light down on her neck that made a swirling pattern as it disappeared into her hair.

  He had drifted down a long cascade, one detail flowing into the next, and with each forbidden detail he had added, the more infatuated he had become. And then, too, he didn’t even know precisely what he had done, fertility included, because the code went through many in silica generations before actually being produced, and although he had set up the rules by which this was done, he was afraid of what he didn’t know.

  When he had been working on the code at home, he had listened to Mozart. The code was almost an echo of the music, since often he had the sensation of a piece of music going through his mind over and over in a way he couldn’t shake, and this had been so prominent that he had begun to try to encode the harmonies, the notes, the way in which the music was put together. It wasn’t so hard to do for Mozart, since the music bore a relationship to mathematics, but the difficulty came as he tried to invoke her ability to play and write music. He had lingered over the Requiem, adding the details of it and trying to suggest, as he did, the longing that had gone into it. The longing was twofold: for the loss of life and the devotion to something larger. Here, of course, he thought that Kay would respond to the presence of life, the approach of it, with all its tragic consequences. What increased a sense of beauty more than one’s own sense of being ephemeral?

  He had painstakingly encoded Beethoven, Stravinsky, Mozart, Bach, Schubert, Puccini, Bizet, and had set Kay’s talent up as a problem to be solved by the in silica natural selection: What was at the heart of this music, and how could one use it as a tool to take the next unexpected step in composition? He added the coordination, strength, balance, and tactile precision that had been uncovered in years of studies of concert musicians. Just as he had set up another problem for the code to work through in silica: how these tools could give expression to enormous emotion and the most profound longings.

  As he stood next to Kay’s stainless-steel bed, he closed his eyes to concentrate. He bent his head, too, his face just over the transparent cover that went from the head to the foot of the bed. When he opened his eyes, he saw that his breath had turned white on his side of the transparent steel. Kay raised herself up to get close, her lips just on the other side of the glass from his, her breath condensing too, on the inside, a mirror image of his, just a fraction of an inch away from the white mist of his breath.

  As he stood next to her, by the platform, he put his fingers into the condensation and rubbed it away. She raised an arm, the muscles taut and yet fluid under the skin, as she reached out and put one finger into the condensation on her side. Impatiently she rubbed it away. Then she stared at him through the spot she had cleared. She lifted her head a little and came closer, her eyes on his: she looked into every corner of his consternation. Their lips were separated by just a fraction of an inch, just back from the clouded glass. Even from here, he felt her loving forgiveness.

  Briggs went over to the next platform, where the growing medium swirled around Jack. He had started to add things with Jack too, and these, he guessed, were in addition to those he had given Kay, but then they might both receive something that had been added to the other, since they shared some of the basic code. Briggs had no idea how this would work. He guessed it would be sorted out, but he wasn’t sure how. Certainly, he had added defiance.

  Briggs had started in with Jack to compensate for all those things he had wanted when he was young, and for that matter still wanted, although less strenuously. Briggs had started with his own talents. Jack was going to be good with math, much better than Briggs, because Briggs had been able to build on what he knew with the information in the world’s libraries. Jack would like the order, the forces that are illuminated by mathematical descriptions, and he would like, too, the sense of proportion that math brought to perception. But Briggs hadn’t stopped there. He had wanted someone he could trust. A real friend.

  Briggs’s feet left tracks, perfectly impressed in the snow, as he went across to the growing platform where Jack was emerging from the swirl of the growing medium. The examination routine was the same. He started at the feet, which, like Kay’s, were long, and had high arches. In fact, as Briggs looked at the calves, the muscles in them defined like those of a good 440 man, he remembered the anatomy he had studied, the autopsy pictures he had gone through of runners who had died in their prime. The muscles of Jack’s thighs stretched upward in defined ridges. Power and grace. Light pubic hair that ran up his stomach a little, toward the navel, which existed in the neat segmentation of muscles that appeared to be tightly confined by his skin.

  Briggs moved toward Jack’s head. Along the rib cage the muscles had the pattern that receding water leaves in the sand, like strands woven together. Chest like a breastplate. Prominent larynx. Small ears. Bushy hair. Still, Briggs worried about the interior surfaces, the lining of the esophagus, the stomach, the lungs. It didn’t take much. Of course, this knowledge had been acquired the hard way, but what knowledge hadn’t?

  Jack’s eyes, the set of the jaw, the brow furrowed with effort, showed the qualities that Briggs had been concerned with and that were now obvious. If, for instance, Jack ended up as an infantry officer, cut off from his battalion with a handful of men, short on ammunition, short on water, he would know what to do: establish lines of fire, take inventory, count the ammunition, decide on the right rationing for the water, cut losses, try to establish communication, treat the wounded. Of course he would be afraid, but these actions would be a matter of a discipline, and a reflection of his certainty that the discipline, while difficult, was still all that he had. Jack lived, or would live, for those moments when everything was most frightening. Danger and difficulty would be like oxygen to him.

  As Briggs came to the top of the platform, Jack turned to look at him. Jack moved his lips as though unsure of the language, and although Briggs couldn’t hear him, he made out the words: “Don’t worry.”

  Briggs stood there until the snow covered the canopy, each flake touching the surface with an almost infinite gentleness. As it piled up, he suspected that he had managed to trap himself, and that with each new attempt to escape, he would probably make the trap that much more intricate and that much harder to get out of. Yes, he thought, that is the trouble: I can’t tell whether I am getting out, or only getting in deeper. The snow fell around him. He suspected that he was in the midst of all the unseen aspects of himself, all the hidden desires and wishes that usually existed as shadows and distant shades, but that one saw clearly in a disaster of one’s own making.

  Still, as the blue-tinted snow fell around him, he confronted the central fact that his understanding of the mechanism of life did nothing for him beyond the mechanics of it, and all he had done was to extend the old mysteries into new realms. The
only thing he was certain of was that he disliked a lot of what had been done with his work.

  For instance, in the early days, when people cloned themselves to produce organs for transplant, the clones had been used for their hearts, kidneys, livers, thyroids, pituitaries, and anything else that came in handy (the way an Eskimo cut up a walrus). This crude use had been troubling, but in the end practicality took over; this entire process had been reduced to one of ownership, and if you owned yourself, you owned what was grown from it. You took what you needed and discarded (at first) and then sold (later, to defray the costs) what you didn’t need. Briggs had simply folded his discomfort with this, and other items too, like the cry of the dishwasher, into a general sense of numbness, although at times he could still feel the squirming of some unnamed but enormous fury in the depths; it was like putting his hand on an eel in dark water.

  It occurred to him that his fascination with Kay’s ability to have a child was one of those things in the depths: it was possible that Kay’s sultry fertility was a matter of his resistance to the current brutal state of affairs, at least where artificial life was concerned. If he and Kay could have a baby, then could one treat the child as an item to be sold by the pound—or by the piece—like auto parts?

  He had suppressed the desire to resist, pushed it into a shadowy part of the mind, but he hoped, with a wild vanity, that this impulse was still alive. Did a bird ever forget how to fly south in the winter, even after years of being kept in a cage? He clung to this notion with a fierce hope, as though knowing what was right and what was wrong and being able to act on it was a matter of his own resurrection. If you killed the moral impulse, you killed the man. And as he considered this, he thought of Kay dropping her clothes, of the almost inaudible sound of the skin of one leg slipping over the skin of the other as she crossed them. Perhaps she would do this when she sat at the side of the bed so as to consider him before running a hand along his chest, over his stomach, all the while looking him in the eyes.