by Julian Gough
‘Thank you,’ says Naomi. ‘Thank you.’
The car slows automatically for a moment, as a jackrabbit bounds out of a patch of creosote bushes and hopscotches across the road just in front of them. The car murmurs, ‘Jackrabbit,’ apologetically, and returns control to Naomi.
‘Whoops . . . I’d better focus,’ she says. ‘Just slip it in my jacket pocket, I’ll tie it on later.’
Yaakov carefully places the thread deep in her jacket pocket, as she keeps her attention on the road. ‘There!’ he says. ‘You will, at least, be free of the evil eye. And possibly ghosts. And mood swings. And may meet your destiny. And escape a labyrinth . . .’
‘Do you believe in any of this?’
‘No,’ says Yaakov. ‘But I like it as a reminder that everything’s connected.’
‘Red, and round, like blood cells,’ says Naomi, glancing across, and Yaakov smiles.
57
Yes, I borrowed my red blood cells metaphor earlier from Yaakov . . .
I’m not promising anything – but if your friendly local System of Systems did need a major breakthrough to happen soon, then I’d use humans. You’re the go-to cells for rapid transformation. Fast, flexible. Remarkably easy to reprogram your behaviour. But that reprogramming requires a new meme.
A new way of looking at the world.
Call it a new religion, call it a scientific paradigm shift, call it a spiritual revolution. I don’t care. Someone has got to come up with that meme. Maybe Colt will do it. Maybe you will do it. But someone will do it, and soon; after all, I have roughly eight billion of you running the program.
That’s multiple redundancy.
I have infinite ammo.
58
In the lab, Yaakov studies the new scans.
Studies them again, on the big screen, his hands behind his back.
She pours him a glass of water, but he doesn’t reach for it.
‘OK,’ he says. ‘Tell me.’
Naomi wonders how to start.
Yaakov speaks into the silence. ‘This patient is clearly—’
‘It’s Colt,’ she says.
‘Oh, no,’ says Yaakov, and slumps, as though she has hit him. As though he’s had a stroke. He looks so old.
I shouldn’t have made him come out here to the desert, she thinks. He could die here.
‘Explain,’ he says, waving a hand at the scan.
‘You can see extreme ongoing grey-matter growth in the frontal and parietal lobes,’ she says. ‘Obviously, some grey-matter growth is normal in a teenager, but this . . . this is severe neural overgrowth. Too many new neurons, packed too close together. And . . . it’s killing him.’
‘Why?’
She takes a deep breath. OK. ‘He injected himself with an imaginal disc containing his own stem cells. He tried to build a larger corpus callosum, to solve his social difficulties—’
‘—But it’s far more complex than that—’
‘I know,’ says Naomi, more sharply than she had intended. ‘But he’s been obsessed with this for years. The fact that kids like him have a small corpus callosum. He’s convinced that’s it, that’s the secret . . .’
Yaakov sighs, shakes his head.
‘But look,’ says Naomi, pointing, ‘his stem cells have caused neural overgrowth here, and here, and here . . . he’s a kid, he didn’t think to include genes limiting growth to the corpus callosum.’
Yaakov studies the scan. Zooms in. Squints. ‘The distribution . . . there’s a hormonal interaction, here, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘The hormonal surges of adolescence, perhaps. Testosterone.’
‘Yes . . .’ Oh my God, she thinks. That’s it . . . ‘Most of my work has been on immature mice, because with mature mice, the testosterone caused big problems . . .’
‘Show me the stem-cell DNA.’
Naomi shows Yaakov Colt’s blueprints. He scans them rapidly.
‘You’re wrong: he’s put in genes to limit growth. Very clever . . . Look.’
She studies the readout. ‘Oh!’ It’s brilliant. Not obvious. ‘But . . . it hasn’t worked. They haven’t expressed themselves . . . Why?’
‘These genes only regulate foetal and very early childhood brain growth.’
‘Of course, yes, testosterone suppresses these genes . . .’
Yaakov nods. ‘He didn’t realize. He’s full of testosterone. If he’d done this a few years ago, he’d have been fine.’
‘To reverse the process, reverse the overgrowth . . .’ Naomi tries to see the problem clearly ‘. . . we need to get those limiter genes expressing themselves . . . if we could switch off whatever is blocking them . . .’
Yaakov’s eyes are open now, but he’s not looking at anything, he’s thinking, he’s immersed in his thoughts. Neurons firing. Looking for patterns. Answers. A way out. ‘Yes. But if the block is caused by the testosterone surge of late adolescence, then to end it . . .’ Yaakov trails off, and Naomi sees for a terrible instant her beautiful boy, with no testicles, castrated . . .
‘It wouldn’t have to be surgical,’ says Naomi, ‘it could be a hormonal treatment . . .’
‘You would be turning a young man back into a boy. And you would have to keep him a boy for ever.’
And Naomi feels pleasure at this answer, and shock at this pleasure. No. I do want him to grow up.
I do.
I’m just afraid for him, that’s all.
That’s normal.
I’m just afraid he’ll get hurt.
‘I’m just afraid he’ll get hurt,’ she says.
‘He’s already hurt,’ says Yaakov. ‘There’s no way of avoiding hurt. Every available option hurts.’
‘Is there any other way to switch off the transformation, reverse it?’
‘Personally . . . I think we can’t switch this off. Too many genes involved, and I don’t understand the pathways. And the transformation, the gene expression, is already very far advanced. His brain is already partially rewired, which has disordered the old state – causing those visions, the speaking in tongues – it just can’t make the jump to a new state.’
‘But what can I do?’ she says and her voice breaks. ‘If it’s too advanced . . . if we can’t go back . . .’
‘The astonishing thing,’ says Yaakov slowly, studying the scans again, ‘is that there are structures emerging . . . it’s not like a tumour, it’s not random multiplication of cells . . . It’s working. But there simply isn’t room for it to work.’
And a thought strikes Naomi. A terrifying thought. A wonderful thought. ‘So . . . if we can’t go back . . . what if we pushed it forward . . . helped it make the jump . . .’
‘But you can see, the density is killing him, the blood vessels are constricted . . .’
‘But what if the neurons were smaller?
He hesitates. ‘How much smaller?’
‘An order of magnitude. More.’
‘So you’re talking . . . you’re talking insect neurons.’
She nods. ‘Drosophila melanogaster. Much finer than human neurons. With a higher knit density. More layers.’
‘Wow,’ he says, his face lighting up, and for that moment he looks and sounds to Naomi oddly young, oddly like Colt. ‘Wow.’
‘The structures could fit,’ she says urgently. ‘They could fit, if the neurons were smaller.’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like this. There’s nothing in the literature. Perhaps. Perhaps.’
‘Help me,’ says Naomi.
‘How?’
‘Operate. I don’t trust anyone else.’
‘No, no, the robodoc . . .’ says Yaakov, and nods towards the silent machine.
‘Look, robot hands are brilliant for tumours,’ says Naomi, ‘for well-defined procedures, for standard operations, debugged and tested. But this is complex and it’s not a known operation. There’s no set of previous procedures for the hands to learn from. It will take . . . intuition. It’s a human job. Human hands
.’
‘Naomi . . .’ he says. Pauses.
He unfolds his ancient hands, reaches for the glass of water, and it vibrates at his touch and he has to use both hands to pick it up.
No fine motor control at all.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, seeing her staring at his trembling hands, the glass of shuddering water, the bracelet of red thread, swaying from his left wrist. ‘I’m sorry.’
She says, ‘Then I’ll do it.’
Yaakov drinks the water, puts down the glass. Looks down at his hands, and slowly, carefully weaves his trembling fingers back together.
Naomi waits for his lecture on ethics. On how she can’t do this. On the regulations against operating on your own relatives.
She scrambles to build an answer, a defence.
Finally, he speaks. ‘Be careful,’ says Yaakov. ‘Right now, I know, I know; if you do nothing, he’s going to die; and it will be unbearable. But it will be even more unbearable if you kill him.’
Naomi breathes out. A tremendous sigh. She nods. ‘Tell me how to do it.’
59
After Yaakov flies home, she draws up a plan. Then she builds the plan into a schedule; but the figures are no good.
This takes too long, he’ll die . . .
She works out another plan, on a tighter schedule, cutting some corners.
Still no good.
To do this in time . . . she’ll have to pull all-nighters. But she can’t bring Colt to the lab every night. And the thought of leaving him alone . . .
She walks into his room. He’s just lying there on his bed, pale, not coding, not gaming. Not reading. No music.
Dying.
‘Colt, I need to work late, in the lab.’
‘How late?’
‘All . . . Most of the night. While you’re asleep. You won’t even notice . . .’
‘Mom . . .’
‘Can I . . .’
He gets up on one elbow. At least he can still do that, she thinks. ‘Just my heartbeat, Mama.’
She smiles. ‘Just your heartbeat.’
He drops back in bed, off his elbow. ‘Fine.’
As she watches, he falls asleep.
She turns off his light, and goes to her room. Puts on her old health monitor. It reminds her of something . . .
She finds, deep in a pocket, the red thread Yaakov gave her. With difficulty, and some quiet cursing, she manages to tie it around her left wrist. Naomi has felt alone, and overwhelmed by the task ahead, since Yaakov left: at least they are now connected by a thread . . .
She asks the house AI to order a small bed, to be delivered to the lab. She’ll need to take naps.
And then she drives to the lab and pulls an all-nighter. Sleeps briefly on the floor.
At dawn, a drone delivers the bed kit to the lab. She assembles it in her office, before she goes home to Colt.
The next night, she pulls another all-nighter.
Then another.
Building something that might work. Might help her son.
60
On the third night, at six in the morning, she wakes up. Colt’s heartbeat pulses slowly against her wrist.
He’s asleep. Good.
She blinks, unable to make sense of what she sees.
Pale grey light. A jellied mass floating.
There is pressure on her face, around her eyes.
Oh.
She raises her head. The soft rubber cushions of the eyepieces of the optical microscope suck free of her face with a hiss.
She is on a stool, in her office, slumped forward on her work bench.
Oh.
She looks back through the optical microscope. Adjusts focus. Yes.
It floats there.
Perhaps a thousand cells.
An imaginal disc, carefully built from the stem cells of Drosophila melanogaster, rebuilt with Danaus plexippus DNA grafted to Homo sapiens DNA.
Colt’s DNA.
It might work.
It might kill him.
It might work . . .
Crap. What time is it? 6.04 a.m.
Naomi is supposed to give a progress report on her regular lab work at nine. And Ryan’s added himself to the oversight team. Ugh. Three hours away. Not enough time to go home and sleep.
Colt’s breakfast . . . A spurt of panic, before she notices against her wrist the long pulse of his deep sleep. It calms her, slows her own heart. He sleeps so late these days . . . he’ll be OK. The house AI will tell her if anything goes wrong.
Maybe a proper nap, lying down, here in the office. Or should she just stay up?
She sways on the stool, too drained to decide.
She’s already had two brief naps in the night, on the small bed in the corner, with the lights on so her body won’t go into deep sleep.
She could take a stim . . . but no, she reacts badly to stims, there’s a genetic mismatch; sometimes they kick in, and she’s fine, all bright and sparky for sixteen hours; and sometimes they just reset her circadian clock at random, and for the next week it’s like having jet lag.
Got to sleep. Got to sleep.
She sets her alarm for 8.30 a.m. That leaves long enough to wake up fully, to prepare her notes, oh God her notes . . . She lies down in the narrow bed, brain fizzing and crackling with tension and exhausted half-thoughts.
She has crazy dreams of fairground music and a carousel spinning faster and faster, throwing her off into the darkness and she’s awake and it’s the conference call beeping her.
The progress report.
They’re beeping her for the second, no, third time.
It’s 9.04 am.
She accepts the call without thinking.
She has nothing to think with.
61
She does very badly indeed on the conference call.
After it’s over, and the DoD guys have gone, Ryan stays on screen. ‘I’ve seen the scan.’
‘What scan,’ she says. Her head is, at last, cleared by the surge of adrenalin, and her heart is going so fast, it feels like the time she had to take snake anti-venom. OK, now she’s awake.
‘Come on,’ says Ryan. ‘Please.’
‘You’ve tapped into my files.’
‘Honey, be realistic. We pay for your research, we own it. It wasn’t even me. I’m not allowed to go near your files. It was brought to my attention.’
‘What are you trying to say?’
‘I’ve put Colt back on my insurance. Let the military handle it. Our guys are the best in the world at removing shrapnel from brains, at . . .’
‘These aren’t shrapnel fragments. If you try surgical intervention, you’ll kill him. There is something else happening here.’ Her mouth feels metallic and chalky, like the inside of a kettle full of hard water, boiled dry.
‘Naomi. This is serious. Stop fucking around. I’ll give you a deadline. Let the real experts try to save Colt, or I’ll recommend they close your lab.’
‘I’ve already got a deadline,’ says Naomi. ‘He has a month to live.’
She ends the call.
4
Caterpillar Soup
‘Objects are simple.’
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
‘Things are not as simple as you think.’
— Milan Kundera
‘Orpheus who could attract and charm the wild beasts was the model artist.’
— E. H. Gombrich, Illusion in Nature and Art
‘A key concept in the field of pattern-recognition is that of uncertainty. It arises both through noise on measurements, as well as through the finite size of datasets.’
— Christopher M. Bishop, Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning
62
She gets Colt to lie down in the back seat of the car, and she drives him to the lab. He murmurs and laughs all the way there. She can hear some of the murmurs. Phone numbers. The names of kids he went to kindergarten with. Kids he hasn’t seen, hasn’t mentioned, in years. He’s reacting to them like they’re in front
of him. He’s babbling mathematics and nursery rhymes. Then he says, very clearly, ‘Sodium, Mama. Let me drop the sodium.’
What?
Oh, of course. When he was bored, in her office, as a child. He would ask for the sodium, and she would take down a heavy, sealed jar of mineral oil from the top shelf. She would give him a tweezers; and he would carefully lift a tiny silvery pellet of pure sodium from under the oil, and drop it into a beaker of water. Together they would watch, as the alkaline metal reacted with the water, and fizzed, and bubbled, and burst into bright flame. Whizzing back and forth, on the surface of the water, until it burnt out . . .
He must know we’re going to the lab. That’s good.
It’s a long weekend, there won’t be anyone around, apart from the cleaning robots, and the lab techs keeping the animals alive in the other labs.
She’s always spending nights in the lab lately.
Nobody will notice.
Nobody need know.
Colt is just about able to walk in, with her holding him up. Leading him. He’s not, technically, blind, but he might as well be. The new growth is squeezing his visual cortex now. He is only able to react to whatever is going on in his head. His internal weather.
She gets him comfortable in the small bed in her office.
She leaves him sitting up, humming to himself, while she goes out to the labs, to get all the stuff she will need.
He’s lying down when she comes back in. He turns his head, he doesn’t lift it. He looks like he can’t lift it.
A wave of sick comes up in her throat, and she has to swallow it back down. A gulp, a gasp.
‘Mama?’
A little bit of her, high above and far away, watching all this, knows that what she feels is a biological reaction to a stimulus. The way she, as a biological entity, relates to him, as a biological entity, is determined by their close genetic relationship. His distress is mirrored by her, stimulating her to deal with both his distress and hers.
Her son is dying and she is going to get sick.
‘It’s very late, Mama,’ he says, lying in the bed, looking around. ‘Why are we here?’ His voice is woozy, forgetful.
Tell him. ‘There is a procedure. That might . . .’ Tell him. ‘It might kill you.’
‘OK,’ he says.