Analog SFF, April 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “I wanted to talk. I just got a visit from your Mr. Austin."

  He nodded, frowning. “What did you think?"

  I sat on the table. “I agree with you: he doesn't seem right somehow. And you called the E.P.A. and they said he didn't work there?"

  “They couldn't locate him. But they also said the E.P.A. is big, there were recent political appointments, maybe he's just not in the directory yet."

  I thought about that for a while. “Okay. Suppose he is E.P.A. What's his interest? Why does he seem so cagey?"

  Jack furrowed his brow, as he did when thinking. “Maybe there is contamination at the home, but it's something very bad, something far worse than he says.... He might be helping some corporation that hopes to cover up an illegal toxic burial or spill."

  I nodded. “It's possible."

  “Right,” Jack said. His voiced dropped low, although we were alone in the room. He leaned toward me. “But there's something else. Yesterday, after I called you, I called the home. I talked with the new director. She said that Austin had been there last week. And then something happened. I think something piggy-backed along my call to the home."

  “Some kind of spyware?"

  “No. A ghost came to my house last night,” he whispered. “A ghost of William Marrion. It asked for you. And it said it's coming back tonight."

  “A ghost? William Marrion would never have invested in such a vanity."

  Jack shook his head. “I don't know. It didn't stay long, but it was very convincing. What should we do? I think you should be there."

  I thought about this a long time. “You're right. We don't know. I guess we have to see what it wants. I'll be there. There's a dinner after the board meeting, but I can make it after that."

  “Eleven, then? The back door?"

  I nodded. Then Jack hesitated. “Allen?"

  “Yes, Jack?"

  “This doesn't seem right. This Austin and the ghost are probably unrelated. But maybe not."

  I put a hand on his shoulder. “There's nothing we can do until tonight.” I took off my jacket. “How can I help now?"

  “What about the board meeting?"

  “It's at five. I can spare a few hours."

  He hesitated, then nodded emphatically. “We're trying to help a joint team of Venezuelan and Canadian grad students. I'll send you the files right now. I'm giving them a temporary copy of the standard Ariel bioinformatics package, but we need to work the phones to get someone to volunteer some genomics data."

  “Will do."

  * * * *

  After the board meeting and a dinner at Bice, I caught a taxi downtown to Jack's neighborhood. I wanted fresh air, so told the driver to drop me a few blocks away from Jack's apartment, and I walked through dark alleys where dumpsters sat askew, corners into the road, to get behind his building. I knocked on the back door. I had called ahead, and Jack was waiting. He pulled it open.

  “Sorry, bulb's out,” he said, as I stepped into the dark entranceway and pushed the door behind me till it closed and locked with a click. After a moment my eyes adjusted to the dim glow there, cast from the lights in the hall.

  I felt a sudden, strong sense of déja vu, overwhelmed by the memory of a moment like this years before—almost twenty years. It was late afternoon, but winter night. I ran through The Marrion Home's dark gymnasium, sneakers squeaking, following David Ressar, another orphan who had been a close friend. We sought Jack and a fourth friend, Janet. David had a strange passion for hide and seek, even as a teenager, turning serious and intense. He crouched as he ran, like a wolf on the hunt, and it took all of my effort just to keep up with him. We found Jack, finally, with Janet, hiding in the storage space behind the open bleachers. She and Jack sat across from each other, their heads together, looking at some secret trifle that Jack hid from the rest of us. Janet's long blond hair streamed down between them, forming a curtain. The solemnity of the scene stilled David and me, where we crouched in the small doorway to the storage room, and instead of shouting, “We found you!” David just whispered, “Hey."

  “Hey,” Janet answered softly, looking up with a smile. She radiated happiness whenever she saw one of us. She was this kind of person: accepting and appreciative of everyone. It destroyed her, in the end, when she left the home and entered the brutality of the world outside. But we knew no threats there, at that moment. We were just four fast friends, on the verge of becoming adults.

  David and I stayed crouched in the doorway, and for a moment all of us were silent. Suddenly I understood, for the first time, that we all three loved her. Janet was the love of my life and of David's life and, in some way, of Jack's life, even though Jack was gay.

  And now, to see Jack waiting solemnly in the dark, I felt the same overpowering sense of being bound to him, and to the others I knew from the home. We were united by a bond that all of the children of the home shared. It felt still as if we belonged more with each other than with the world outside and the lives we had made in it.

  “Hey,” I whispered.

  He smiled sadly back, catching something of my mood. “Hey..."

  We started up the stairs to his apartment. “How was the board meeting?” Jack asked.

  “The usual. The chairman pulled me aside after and complained about our hours at OpenMed. I reassured him that open source medicine was making a market for future Ariel products."

  “He accept that?"

  “Not really. He told me the future is next quarter."

  Jack lived in a converted loft. The entrance lay behind a massive wood and steel door on rollers. Leaning into it, he pulled the door open, we slipped inside, and I helped him slide it in place behind us. Once I had teased Jack about his student lifestyle—an executive needed to flaunt it a bit to be taken seriously—but he had only blinked and looked at the floor and mumbled that he didn't like unnecessary change.

  The place had two bedrooms but it was otherwise a single great room with a towering ceiling held up by massive square wooden pillars, their edges rounded smooth with age and passing hands. Tall opaque windows let dim street light onto sparse furniture and heaps of old-fashioned paper books.

  “The ghost came over the general com agent,” Jack said, pointing at the corner of the room where an arrangement of a couch and chairs created a space around a single vid screen and its motion-capture cameras. We sat down together on the couch, and he turned on the screen. An entertainment menu automatically scrolled down, but nothing else.

  “Do you want something? What do you think?” Jack was nervous.

  I smiled reassuringly. “Nothing to do but wait,” I said.

  We didn't wait long. In a few minutes the menu shivered, and a pale glow started in one corner of the screen. A mitosis of pastel pixels divided and spiraled, grew exponentially to cover the screen, then shrank and resolved into the figure of an elderly man wearing a simple tweed jacket and charcoal pants, standing in a pale spectral wash of visual noise. This conservative, fatherly figure was William Marrion, the founder of the Marrion Home orphanage and doctor, geneticist, and philanthropist. I had not seen him or his image since the spring before his death, at the age of eighty-eight, two years ago.

  “Jack,” it said. Then it turned toward me. “Allen Sumaran?” It looked and sounded as if it might be a low-quality ghost: the face showed little emotion, the tone plodded a bit mechanically. Even so, it must have been very expensive and taken a lot of time and sacrifice to create. William would have had to move into a clinic, where rare specialists would have drilled dozens of holes down through his skull, and then every night for a month or two he would have slept with his head strapped to the mattress, wires shunted into his cortex as responses were tested during induced dreams and the personality simulacrum was trained. Ghosts were usually a vanity, not at all what I expected of William Marrion. We would need to learn if it had some other use besides appeasing the fears of a dying man.

  “I am Allen. Why are you here?"

  “I was set to activate
if anyone called the Marrion Home and said certain things. I was triggered last week by a series of calls seeking the records of all the children of the Marrion Home, during the period of time when I was alive. I have deleted all but the most public of those records, but that will only delay the search."

  “What search?"

  “The search for you and your kind. I am about to tell you who you are, Allen and Jack. You must listen carefully and consider long before you tell others from the home.

  “Before I founded the Marrion Home, I worked for the government, on a project called Enduring Security. Its purpose was to design enhanced human warriors. The last head of the daily operations for the project was this man."

  The ghost waved a hand and a face popped up. The hair was different and the face was younger, but the green eyes, the left with a touch of brown, were familiar.

  “We've seen him before,” Jack said. “Tom Austin."

  “This man's name is Sherman Wall. He is very dangerous. Working for decades, including nearly a decade under Wall's command, the Enduring Security scientists created several generations of individuals with very reduced fear reactions, accelerated growth and maturity, enhanced strength, and reduced pain sensations. However, the project was incomplete: when it became clear that these troops would resist suicidal orders, they brought me in to help.

  “I was an expert on the evolutionary and genetic heritage of the orbitofrontal cortex and related subcortical brain structures. These brain areas control your ability to simulate the concerns of persons—both your own self in the future and other people. They provide the capability to value the future and to value the lives of others."

  The ghost lowered its head. “I'm not proud of what I did. But I did it. We were at war against terrorists. I believed that something had to be done. So I helped design soldiers that had very short-term cares only. They were like frontal lobe damaged patients, analogs to sociopaths and psychopaths: able only to respond to immediate rewards. As a result, these soldiers could be trained to do anything, given that the costs to themselves were farther out in time than they cared to think about—a few days, or a few hours, even, if there were some reward that would come to them first.

  “I succeeded. Austin got his breed of soldiers who would act without any concern for their own or anyone else's future. These troops fought one time that I know of, in the Syrian invasion. How many live today, if any, I cannot say. Eventually, a great struggle broke out in the intelligence community. Many opposed or feared the project, and ultimately they managed to shut it down and destroy or hide all records.

  “I moved on to industry and made my billion. But I wanted to do something better, to balance out the harm I came to realize I had done. So I founded the orphanage. And there I created you and your brothers and sisters."

  For a while we just stared at the flickering ghost. Finally, Jack whispered, “What? You did what?"

  “I had discovered that not only could I reduce the ability of someone to care about the future, but I could also enhance it. I could foster enhanced children who would care as much for the world of their grandchildren as they did about the next day, and who would care about other people as much as they cared about themselves. Can you see the genius of this? Everyone, every secret government program or even every parent, dreamed of modifications of humans into superintelligent individuals, or perfect warriors, or great athletes, or—most often—just blue-eyed blonds."

  The ghost leaned toward us. “No one, not a single geneticist in the world, sought to enhance our species into morally superior individuals. This fact is a testament to the stupidity of humankind. No one sought to better us, to make our children the kind of people that would have prevented global warming or mass starvation or the death of the oceans. But I did it. And you are that people,” the ghost said, managing a passionate emphasis. “You are something superior: a race of people that cares more, that can care more, about the future."

  We sat, stunned, for a long time, before I asked, “Why should we believe this? We don't know where you came from, what you are."

  “Allen, when you were ten, you and I sat alone in the swing behind the field. You asked me if I would be your father, and I told you I would be honored if I could be. Jack, when you graduated, after the party, I went looking for tea bags and interrupted you in the pantry, kissing Julian Rouse."

  These were true things, that no one else should know. But the evidence was unnecessary. Deep down, I already believed. For the first time in my life, everything made sense.

  At the orphanage, the outside world had seemed impossibly cruel. We all had made incredibly naive and disastrous forays into our declining neighborhood on the outskirts of Philadelphia. I had tried to organize lottery ticket buyers to save their money and form a microcredit bank, and the grocery store owner that sold the tickets had beaten me up. Julie had started a garden for the homeless and they had left after a week with all the orphanage's tools. David stopped every fight he saw, and typically got drawn in. On and on. We simply could not understand why people did the things they did. At first, we believed that people hated orphans, but then we discovered that outsiders treated each other and themselves and the world just as they treated us. The ghost revealed the truth in what I had always liked to believe: we inside the orphanage were alone sane.

  “It's true,” I said.

  “How could you do this? How?” Jack asked, leaving it unclear whether he was asking the moral question or the technical one. The ghost assumed the latter.

  “I had done it before, you see. I already knew of people with unusually advanced frontal lobes. I had identified the relevant genes to be altered. And my government experience gave me the rest: I knew how to get surrogate mothers; I knew how to get the gene work done by private companies out of the country; I knew how to work away from the eyes of the Feds."

  “Listen,” I told it, “why are you telling us this?"

  “I always meant to tell you, but then I died before I could. This ghost was a precaution."

  “But why now? What do you—what did you want?"

  “You may be in danger. I believe that remnants of Enduring Security may seek to locate and perhaps kidnap you. Or worse. There was always the danger that they would find out that I did something at the orphanage and believe that I had made soldiers. For sale, perhaps. I did not make soldiers. Except in one case."

  “What?” Jack and I asked, both startled.

  “David Ressar has both the first military enhancements and the frontal lobe enhancements. But I had only one soldier genome, so he is the only one. I thought perhaps ... he could protect you. All the rest of you are normal but for the frontal lobe enhancements."

  Even that made sense. David's awesome speed on the field, his ability to surpass all of us in every sport. His devastating defense of us when an outsider was cruel. His short temper.

  “This is awful,” I said.

  The ghost lowered its head again. “I'm not proud of what I did. But I did it. We were at war against terrorists. I believed that something had to be done.” It was getting repetitious. We were coming up against the limits of the ghost's programming and abilities.

  “Tell us the rest of what you know."

  “I have saved evidence of what the Enduring Security team did. It is stored at the orphanage, under the loose floor board where Jack hid toys as a boy, in the storage space behind the bleachers in the gym."

  “You knew about that?” Jack said, with a sad, rueful smile.

  “Yes, Jack. That information needs to be retrieved and used as a tool to bargain for safety. And it is time for you to know who you are and to claim the destiny of which you are capable."

  “Why tell us alone?"

  “It is time for you to know who you are, and to claim the destiny of which you are capable."

  We had hit the end of the line with this ghost. “What now?” Jack asked. It was a question for me and himself, but the ghost answered.

  “Now I will erase myself. One l
ast thing: the enhancement, the caring gene, is dominant. And Jack, Allen, I loved you. I loved you as much as a normal human is able to love."

  Then in a sputter of pixels it was gone.

  Jack started crying. I put my hand on his shoulder. “What do you do,” he whispered, “when everything makes sense after never having made sense?"

  “I don't know, Jack.” I waited until he stopped and wiped his eyes on his sleeve. “What do you think our options are?” I asked him.

  He thought for a few seconds, furrowing his brow. “One option is to go public. They cannot harm us if we go public and tell who we are. A few of us are famous, so it will get attention. What do you think?"

  I considered it. “You're right, as usual. Let's not do that yet, though. There may be other possibilities here. But we have to warn everyone else."

  “I know where everyone is right now,” he said. He wiped his eyes again and sat up stiffly, with new resolve. “I keep track of everyone. Except for Janet. You'll have to talk to David before you can find Janet."

  “Can you get the files, at the home?” I asked. “It sounds dangerous, but one of us will have to go."

  “I can do it. And I know all the out-of-the-way paths to the gym. I'll be safe."

  “Then let me tell you what I'm thinking. If you agree, you'll need to plan the details. This is the kind of thing you're best at."

  He heard me out, and then he said, “If something like that is going to work, you'll need David to agree."

  “I know,” I sighed, unable to hide my reluctance.

  * * * *

  I took the fast train to D. C. There was no way to predict if this was going to tip off Sherman Wall to our suspicions. I had not visited David in years, but then, as far as Wall could know, I had months before planned to visit D. C. for business or even to meet with David as a scheduled day off. I packed a small bag, trying to make it look like a normal trip. There did not seem to be anyone following me at the train station, and certainly no one on the train itself.

  From the D. C. train station, a short taxi ride dropped me in front of a white building with a green door on a broad boulevard of identical buildings. I looked up at the four stories of windows with oxidized copper frames, my bag in hand, hesitating. I had seen David each year at our annual Marrion reunions, and I exchanged e-mail with him at least every month, but I had not been alone with him, not come to visit just him—I'd not really talked with just him—in years. The pain of having lost Janet was a wall between us now. That and his anger at everything.