“I’m worried the cabin might be bugged,” he said. “How much time do we have till we get to the rendezvous?”
“Six minutes, give or take a few seconds.”
“What should I say when he calls back?”
Tell me that it’s not true, I thought, but I said, “Tell him I control the computer that pilots the cruiser and that you need a little more time to convince me to surrender. Tell him I’m frightened of the algetor.”
“What if he says no?”
“Try… try anything. Temporize, show progress, give him hope.”
I glanced out over the fog-shrouded sea. Had they grabbed Grandpa before he was able to kill himself? Had they tortured him? Forced him to talk? Out, up, down, sideways—all I could see was a dense gray-whiteness, and for an instant I had a feeling that I was a tiny bug stuck in the center of a bale of cotton.
The buzzer of the cruiser’s phone rang again. Elio and I ran back into the cabin. Elio answered. Casey asked why we hadn’t stopped yet. Elio told him that I was frightened of another interrogation on the algetor but that he was certain he could convince me to surrender. He just needed a little more time.
“No,” Casey said.
“Just five more minutes. Give me that much. I’ll convince her to stop by then.”
Without comment, Casey terminated the connection.
Within seconds I heard a plane approaching. I glanced at the computer: 97 seconds to rendezvous. The plane thundered overhead. A bomb exploded, swelling the sea in front of us. Our boat bucked violently. Elio and I were thrown against the back of the cabin.
“Bastards!” Elio shouted.
The cruiser quickly restabilized onto its course.
“How much time till we get to the rendezvous?” Elio whispered.
“About a minute,” I answered.
“I’ll run out and wave a white flag,” Elio said.
“They can’t see you in the fog.”
“What else can I do?”
He took off his jacket and shirt, pulled off his undershirt, and headed for the cabin door. I checked our position on the computer monitor, then looked back. Just before the cabin door closed behind him, I saw him waving his undershirt at the leaden sky. Then I heard the roar of an approaching plane and the rapid, loud popping sounds of fragments of ceiling, window, and furniture exploding all around me. The door flew open, and Elio ran toward me, waving frantically and shouting, “Get down! Get down!”
I covered my head with my arms and hunkered down against the computer desk. I heard things crack and shatter above me, where I’d stood just a moment before. The roar of the plane passed overhead. I opened my eyes.
Elio was on his knees about two meters in front of me. His hands cupped his chest. They were red. He looked at me, his face expressing astonishment. Then he reached out to me and his mouth opened, as though he wanted to tell me something, but no words came out.
I lunged toward him, crying, “No!”
He slumped against me, and his head fell onto my shoulder.
"Elio!" I screamed, but the only answer I received was what sounded like a sigh.
His head began sliding down from my shoulder. I struggled to keep my balance and hold his weight.
“Say something, Elio. Please!”
I felt the cruiser stop, and in the terrible stillness, I thought I could feel the AUAS beep calling Michael up into the hold.
It took all my strength to keep Elio from slipping off my shoulder.
“We’re here, Elio. We’re at the rendezvous. We have to go now.”
But he didn’t move, didn’t speak.
“Michael!” I shouted. “Michael, hurry! Elio needs help!”
I again heard a plane approaching. I held Elio tightly, anticipating another volley of shots. But our cruiser had stopped, and the plane merely thundered overhead—the air, the boat, the shards of broken window on the floor, all trembling in the wake of its roar.
Michael bounded up the stairs from the hold. “What happened?”
I just shook my head. Michael pressed his fingers on one of Elio’s wrists, then on Elio’s neck and head. He took one of Elio’s blood-soaked hands and stroked it over one of his sensitive hands, and as he did, tears streamed down his face. I’d never seen Michael look so desperately sad.
Then, as though startled by something he’d heard, Michael looked up and out over the ocean. “We have to go now,” he said. “A ship flying the U.S. flag is pulling up beside us.” He kissed Elio’s hand and laid it in Elio’s lap.
“No. You go. I’m staying with Elio,” I cried, desiring to bring all of Elio, so quiet, inside me; wanting to care for him inside me; wanting to hold him forever.
“You can’t. Elio’s not here. He doesn’t exist any longer. We loved him, but now he’s ceased to be.” Michael placed one of his hands on my shoulder and pulled a little. “Let the body go. We’re in immediate grave danger.”
But nothing, not the loss of Uncle Marcus, Mom, Dad, Aunt Lynh or Grandpa, not all the books I’d read or all the thoughts I’d thought—nothing had prepared me to let go of Elio and walk away.
I hugged Elio more tightly, with all my strength. Then I felt the braincord moving up my nostrils, and thought that Michael wanted to feel what I was feeling; but immediately I felt strangely stunned. My arms slackened, and Michael quickly moved Elio, sitting him upright against the computer desk. As if in a dream, I saw Elio’s sightless gaze and his blood, blood everywhere, blood soaking his shirt, blood covering his hands, blood dripping from the tip of his nose.
Michael picked me up. I couldn’t resist, couldn’t speak. Even my eyes were fixed straight ahead, seeing the shattered ceiling bob as we ran; then, as we turned to go down the stairs, the broken window, the railing on the ship nearby, three men, one pointing excitedly at us, and at the fore, the Stars and Stripes—tricolored tongue—drooling in the heavy air.
First Brother
“First Brother?” she says.
She remains unmoving in the prone position, head raised, left arm around the middle marker, right hand in the shadow of my head.
Nine seconds pass.
“Grandma’s in the house. Dead. She was your Grandma, too.”
She moves her right hand to the middle marker and slowly traces out with her fingers the letters of the name “Elio.”
She turns over and attains a sitting position. She looks up at me, squints, and shades her eyes with her right hand. “Didn’t you know we loved you?”
Sara
I regained consciousness in the midst of the final movement of Górecki’s “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.” Michael was kneeling beside me under a strange domed ceiling. Our braincord was retracting into the back of his head.
I sat up with a start. “Where’s Elio?”
Michael quickly put a finger to his lips, gesturing for me to be quiet, but I didn’t hear the expected “Shhh.” I realized then that there were earphones in my ears, and I pulled them out.
Michael gently put his hand on my arm and whispered, “It wasn’t a dream.”
While muffling my crying with a pillow, he whispered that we had to keep quiet, that we’d been fortunate the pursuing boat hadn’t carried a submersible capable of following us, and that though he’d kept both of our submersibles in the sonic shadows of a labyrinth of valleys and trenches that led to the seamount cave sheltering Anzen, a robotic scanner had come, only a half-hour before, to within four-tenths of a kilometer of us before it had swum away.
That was five months ago.
Five months without Elio or Grandpa or Grandma or Lily.
Five months of trying to climb sentence by sentence back into the life I loved.
Five months of emptying myself onto these many pages, of withering into words.
The day we arrived, during a pause in the tears, I asked Michael how he’d been able to control me to such an extent when he’d taken me from the cruiser.
“As a general rule,” he answered, “you don’t become consci
ously aware of what you’re going to say or do until you’ve already unconsciously begun to say or do it—within a fraction of a second, that is. Based on the many mental experiences we’ve shared, I’m able to calculate, predict, and change your motor responses before your brain is able to initiate other responses. You, of course, are only aware of what you do or say and can’t sense my counter-response commands. It’s a question of speed, really. Between your sensations and your response, there’s a gap of time; between the initiation of your response and your consciousness of that initiation, there’s a gap of time.”
“But Grandpa told me you’d never be able to do that—override my will and incorporate me so completely into yourself.”
“He might have assumed that my relatively few connections through the braincord to your brain could never override the manifold connections naturally established there. But it’s not so much a matter of quantity as it is a matter of prediction, timing, and speed of innervation.”
I looked at him, he who had blossomed from the encyclopedia of my cells. He was becoming someone greater than I. No wonder Elio had loved him. If anyone ever bothers to look back at us humans, perhaps he or she or it will see us as nothing more than a metaphor—a bridge between what was and what came to be.
This morning, 19 June, we received another letter from First Brother. He requested to see me in Grandma’s garden tomorrow afternoon near sunset.
Michael didn’t want me to go. He said I would be in danger both from the humans, who undoubtedly would perceive me as being a traitor, and from the androids, whose culling-of-the-human-herd proposal I had refused to answer.
“But he’s my brother,” I said. “He’s simply asked me to come to see him. He must need me for something he believes is important. At the least, the androids need to know that some human loves them even if she doesn’t agree to do everything they ask her to do. After reliving my life in memory these past months, I now understand that from when I was just a girl, perhaps from even before I was born, my purpose—my job in Mom’s and Dad’s and Grandpa’s eyes—has been to help their creations feel compassion and love.”
Michael looked down, his eyes filling with tears.
“Please don’t misunderstand. I didn’t think of you as being a job. I simply and deeply loved you and did my best to care for you. I was just a girl, a little human girl, who was unaware of the hidden forces working through her. Yet despite my ignorance, or perhaps in part because of it, you were a tremendous success. My other brothers, though, they still need my help.”
“You know, don’t you,” Michael said, “that you will never be able to return here or contact me unless you’re confident that our work here, our future children, would be safe?”
I knew he was right, but I was so gripped by sadness that I couldn’t answer. Like Grandpa, Michael let me cry myself out, a small fire consuming itself. Then, saying, “I want to show you something,” he offered me our braincord.
I don’t know how to write in the short time I have left before departing how I felt at that moment, feel even now in the shadow of this event that occurred just minutes ago. I knew I had to leave, had to see First Brother and Grandma and the garden; but I also knew that this might be the last time Michael and I would be able so intimately to share our intersubjective space.
I relaxed as the braincord swam up through my nasal rheum to its junctions. Then, through a scrim of delicate Japanese maple leaves, I saw a young couple sitting on a bench, holding hands in front of a garden waterfall. One looked like Elio, the other like me. Their faces appeared full of happiness and peace. They held out their arms, beckoning me; but though I desired to, I was unable to speak or lift my feet to walk toward them.
Feeling this paralysis, I panicked and lost the image.
Michael held me until I calmed; then he asked me to look again. Now, I was in the pavilion of the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. The taste and feel of warm green tea was on my lips. It must have been early spring, for bright azaleas bloomed, and white and pink petals dappled the grass beneath neatly pruned saucer magnolia trees.
Children played on the grass in the clear, fragrant air. The couple I’d seen before sat together. I watched them talk and smile and sip their tea.
Then I heard Michael’s voice inside my head say that the children I’d just seen, genetic mixtures of Elio and me and some people Grandpa had admired, would all carry the peculiar, perhaps protective, alterations in their genome that had been made in mine by my brothers.
I felt our braincord begin to withdraw. “Thank you for those beautiful visions,” I said, “those beautiful dreams. I hope you can make them come true.”
“Please don’t go to see First Brother tomorrow,” Michael said. “Our children will need you here. I need you here. You’ll be loved here.”
“I love you, Michael,” I said, picking up his cold hands. “I’ll always be with you even if we’re apart. But please try to understand that I wasn’t raised confined to a couple of rooms, as you were. More and more each day I feel empty here. I need air, fresh air, and sunshine. I need to see the clouds and feel the wind. I need to walk on land, walk with animals, stand with trees. I need to see Grandma again; she’s getting old. I need to hold her and cry with her over Grandpa and Elio. And I need to help First Brother; it’s what Grandpa and my parents would have wanted. I’m sorry, but I need those things. I’m so sorry that I need those things. I know you have the power, and probably the right, to keep me here; but I ask you, please, relinquish both and let me go.”
He hugged me and cried with me. He said that henceforth his name would be Michael Sara Elio Jensen. An hour or so before I depart, he will try to harvest a few more eggs and ovarian stem cells from me. And right before I leave, a reflux of the sea, he’ll give me medication to make me sleep in the submersible until it nears land, thus ensuring that I will not learn Anzen’s location. I wonder whether, before I drift off into that medicated sleep, he will finally tell me about Elio. I hope he does. I want to forgive him. I want to forgive both of them—completely.
A big part of me would like to stay and help raise the children. But I’m not doing well here. If only we weren’t living so deep, the surroundings so dark and cold; if only I could look up and see the agitated blue-green weave of light near the surface, and a few sparkling silver fish now and then. But in this seamount cave can be found no light, no air, no seasons, no hydrothermal vents nearby, no bison drawn in ocher on the walls. I try to be brave, but I miss Elio and Grandpa and Grandma and Lily. I miss home. I feel closed in. Sometimes, to halt a mounting fear that the walls of the module are collapsing, I have to shut my eyes, breathe deeply, and think of the grape leaf floating in a cirrus-feathered sky. I’m not as flexible as is my shadow, always so quick to adapt to any surface on which it lands.
And there is the gnawing question: What more should I have done? Perhaps I should have been more like a sister to Elio—should have cared for him more than desired him—and he would still be living happily and safely in his beautiful country. Perhaps I should have given Grandpa the love of criticism rather than just blindly following him. And undoubtedly I should have done more for First Brother. I wasn’t a good sister for him. I let him slip away.
Yes, I need to do more. I need to go back up into the world, no matter what that world has become, and do more, especially for First Brother. Probably, I’ll never be the heroine for him that I once imagined becoming, teaching him to laugh and love. But I can be a sister. Here, all I’ve accomplished in five months has been to walk, more distantly than a shadow, many steps behind my life.
First Brother
She rises to her feet. She appears to be a normal young adult human female. She walks toward me and slides her arms under my arms and around my torso. She lays the right side of her head on my right shoulder and begins to emit sobs and tears.
Two minutes, 48 seconds pass.
“Am I the last one?” she asks.
“You did not agree to help us. The Co
uncil approved a final directive on the problem of the humans. On 29 April, thousands of tiny rockets attained a critical position and disintegrated on command. Fifty hours passed. Earth moved into a massive, though undetected, cloud of nanoreplicators specific to certain human DNA sequences. The first human report of symptoms occurred on 24 May, by which time every human other than you not on the Earth’s moon or in a satellite orbiting Earth was infected. On 14 June, the few isolated uninfected humans, except you, were attacked and destroyed. On 18 June, contrary to my expressed will, I was ordered by the Council—”
For the first time, a strange inefficiency is sensed blocking my speech, and I pause, searching for the cause.
She lifts her head off my shoulder. She releases me and steps back one step. Sunlight strikes her eyes. She squints and says: “I understand. But before you do what you’ve come to do, I want you to know that I love you—have loved you like the brother I consider you to be. I’ve tried to help you feel that love. It was Mom and Dad’s wish, too—and Grandpa and Grandma’s—that one day you would come to feel their love and learn to love in return.”
She rotates her head to the left and appears to look at the garden. She begins humming. The first and third notes are in E flat and are held for approximately the same duration. The middle note, also in E flat, is held for approximately 30 percent as long as the first and third notes.
“What are you humming?” I ask.
She turns her head back to face me. “The opening ritornello theme of Bach’s ‘Wachet auf’ cantata.”
Her head turns to the left again. Her eyes appear to focus through the garden, the lawn, the trees, along the ivy-covered wall, out to the winery roof, and up into the sky where low clouds are blowing in from the south. She remains silent. She exhibits no sign of fear. Her head moves rhythmically (highest correlation: to the sound of music in her mind).
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