Twelve Tomorrows - Visionary stories of the near future inspired by today's technologies

by Neal Stephenson

  That, and the Connors curse. Fatal Familial Insomnia.

  It turned out that Dr. Chung already knew a lot of my story. He knew about Dad, and Bobby, and Mama, and Aunt Carol Ames. He even knew which of the kids got the gene—it’s a 50-50 chance—and which didn’t. The safe ones: Cody, Patty, Arianna, Timothy. The losers: Shawn, Bonnie Jean, and Lewis. And me.

  So I talked and talked, and the little light on the recording cube glowed green to show it was on, and Mrs. Cully nodded and looked sympathetic so damn much that I started wishing for Jenny back. Dr. Chung at least sat quiet, with no expression on that strange ugly face.

  “Are you showing any symptoms at all, Ms. Connors?”

  “I have some trouble sleeping at night.”

  “Describe it for me, in as much detail as you can.”

  I did. I knew I was young to start the troubles; Mama was forty-six and Bobby twenty-nine.

  “And the others with the ffi gene? Your mother and Robert, Jr. and—” he looked at a paper “—Shawn Edmond and—”

  “Look,” I said, and it came out harsher than I meant, “I know I got to tell you everything. But I’m not going to talk none about any of my kin, not what they are or aren’t doing. Especially not to a Chinaman.”

  Silence.

  Then Dr. Chung said quietly, “I think, Ms. Connors, that you must not know how offensive that term is. Like ‘spic’ or ‘nigger.’ ”

  I didn’t know. I felt my face grow warm.

  He said, “I think it’s like ‘hillbilly’ is to mountain people.”

  My face got even warmer. “I … I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  But it warn’t. I’m not the kind to insult people, even Chinese people. I covered my embarrassment with bluster. “Can I ask some questions for a change?”

  “Of course.”

  “Is this Chi—did this clinic come to Blaine and start treating people for what ails them, just to get my family’s trust so you all can do these experiments on our brains?”

  That was the scuttlebutt in town and I expected him to deny it, but instead he said, “Yes.”

  Mrs. Cully frowned.

  I said, “Why? Because there are only forty-one families in the whole world with our sickness? Then why build a whole clinic just to get at us? We’re just a handful of folk.”

  He said gently, “You know a lot about fatal familial insomnia.”

  “I’m not stupid!”

  “I would never think that for even a moment.” He shifted in his chair and turned off the recorder. “Listen, Ms. Connors. It’s true that sufferers from ffi are a very small group. But the condition causes changes in the brain that involve neural pathways which everybody has. Memory is involved, and sleep regulation, and a portion of the brain called the thalamus that processes incoming sensory signals. Our research here is the best single chance to gain information beyond price about those pathways. And since we also hope to arrest ffi, we were able to get funding as a medical clinical trial. Your contribution this science will be invaluable.”

  “That’s not why I’m doing it.”

  “Whatever your reasons, the data will be just as valuable.”

  “And you know you got to do it to me fast. Afore the Libertarians lose power.”

  Mrs. Cully looked surprised. Why was she still sitting with us? Then I realized: Dr. Chung warn’t supposed to be alone with a young woman. Well, fine by me. But at least he didn’t seem surprised that I sometimes watch the news.

  “That’s true,” he said. “If Rafe Bannerman wins this presidential election, and it certainly looks as if he will, then all the deregulations of the present administration may be reversed.”

  “So you got to cut into my skull afore then. And afore I get too sick.” I said it nasty, goading him. I don’t know why.

  But he didn’t push back. “Yes, we must install the optogenetic cable as soon as possible. You are a very bright young woman, Ms. Connors.”

  “Don’t try to butter me up none,” I said.

  But after he took blood samples and all the rest of it, after we set up a whole series of appointments, after I answered ten million more questions, the Chinaman’s—no, Chinese man’s—words stayed in my head all the long trudge back up the mountain. Not as bright, those words, as the autumn leaves turning the woods to glory, but it was more praise than I’d gotten since I left school. That was something, anyway.

  When I got back to the trailer, about noon, nobody wouldn’t speak to me. Carrie must of dropped by. Bobby’s wife, Dinah, sewed on her quilt for the women’s co-op: the Rail Fence pattern in blue and yellow, real pretty. Mama sat smoking and drinking Mountain Dew. Granmama was asleep in her chair by the stove, which barely heated the trailer. It was cold for October and Bobby didn’t dig no highway coal again. The kids were outside playing, Shawn warn’t around, and inside it was silent as the grave.

  I hung my coat on a door hook. “That quilt’s coming nice, Dinah.”

  Nothing.

  “You need some help, Mama?”

  Nothing.

  “The hell with you all!” I said.

  Mama finally spoke. At least today she was making sense. “You better not let Bobby hear where you been.”

  “I’m doing it for you all!” I said, but they all went back to pretending I didn’t exist. I grabbed my coat, and stomped back outside.

  Not that I had any place to go. And it didn’t matter if I was inside or out; Mama’s words were the last ones anyone spoke to me for two mortal days. They hardly even looked at me, except for scared peeps from the littlest kids and a glare from Bonnie Jean, like nobody except a ten-year-old can glare. It was like I was dead.

  But half the reason I was doing this was the hope—not strong, but there—that maybe I wouldn’t end up dead, after first raving and thrashing and trying to hurt people and seeing things that warn’t there. Like Dad, like Aunt Carol Ames, like Cousin Jess. And the other half of the reason was to put some decent food on the table for the kids that wouldn’t look at me or speak to me from fear that Bobby would switch them hard. I had hopes of Shawn, who hadn’t been home in a couple of days, out deer hunting with his buddies. Shawn and I always been close, and he was sweeter than Bobby even afore Bobby started showing our sickness. I hoped Shawn would be on my side. I needed somebody.

  But that night in bed, with Patty on my other side as far away as she could get without actually becoming part of the wall, Bonnie Jean spooned into me. She smelled of apples and little kid. I hugged onto her like I warn’t never going to let go, and I stayed that way all through the long cold night.

  “We have good news,” Dr. Chung said. “Your optogenetic vectors came out beautifully.”

  “Yeah? What does that mean?” I didn’t really care, but my nerves were all standing on end and if I kept him talking, maybe it would distract me some. Or not.

  We sat in his lab at the Chinese clinic, a squinchy little room all cluttered with computers and papers. No smoking bottles or bubbling tubes like in the movies, though. Maybe those were in another room. There was another Chinese doctor, too, Dr. Liu. Also Jenny, worse luck, but if she was the “chief technician” I guess she had to be around. I kept my back to her. She wore a pretty red shirt that I couldn’t never afford to buy for Patty or Bonnie Jean.

  “What does that mean?” I said, realized I’d said it afore, and twisted my hands together.

  “It means we have constructed the bio-organism to go into your brain, from a light-sensitive opsin, a promoter, and a harmless virus. The opsin will be expressed in only those cells that activate the promoter. When light of a specific wavelength hits those cells, they will activate or silence, and we can control that by—Ms. Connors, you can still change your mind.”

  “What?” Jenny said, and Dr. Chung shot her a look that could wither skunkweed. I wouldn’t of thought he could look like that.

  “My mind is changed,” I said. His talking warn’t distracting me. It was just making it all worse. “I don’t want
to do it.”

  “All right.”

  “She signed the contracts!” Jenny said.

  I whirled around on my chair to face her. “You shut up! Nobody warn’t talking to you!”

  Jenny got up and stalked out. Dr. Liu made like he would say something, then didn’t. Over her shoulder Jenny said, “I’ll call Dr. Morton. Although too bad she didn’t decide that before the operating room was reserved at Johnson Memorial.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and fled.

  I got home, bone-weary from the walk plus my worst night yet, just as Jimmy Barton’s truck pulled up at the trailer. Jimmy got out, looking grim, then two more boys, carrying Shawn.

  I rushed up. “What happened? Did you shoot him?” Everybody knew that Jimmy was the most reckless hunter on the mountain.

  “Naw. We never even got no hunting. He went crazy, is what. So we brought him back.”

  “Crazy how?”

  “You know how, Ludie,” Jimmy said, looking at me steady. “Like your family does.”

  “But he’s only seventeen!”

  Jimmy didn’t say nothing to that, and the other two started for the trailer with Shawn. He had a purpled jaw where somebody slugged him, and he was out cold on whatever downers they made him take. My gut twisted so hard I almost bent over. Shawn. Seventeen.

  Dinah and Patty came rushing out, streaming kids behind them. Dinah was shrieking enough to wake the dead. I looked at Shawn and thought about how it must of been in the hunting camp, him going off the rails and “expressing” that gene all over the place: shouting from the panic, grabbing his rifle and waving it around, heart pounding like mad, hitting out at anyone who talked sense. Like Bobby had been a few months ago, afore he got even worse. Nobody in my family ever lasted more than seven months after the first panic attack.

  Shawn.

  I didn’t even wait to see if Mama was coming out of the trailer, if this was one of the days she could. I went back down the mountain, running as much as I could, gasping and panting, until I got to the Chinese clinic and the only hope I had for Shawn, for me, for all of us.

  Dr. Morton turned out to be a woman. While they got the operating room ready at Johnson Memorial in Jackson, I sat with Dr. Chung in a room that was supposed to look cheerful and didn’t. Yellow walls, a view of the parking lot. A nurse had shaved off a square patch on my hair. I stared out at a red Chevy, trying not to think. Dr. Chung said gently, “It isn’t a complicated procedure, Ms. Connors. Really.”

  “Drilling a hole into my skull isn’t complicated?”

  “No. Humans have known how to do that part for thousands of years.”

  News to me. I said, “I forgot a hat.”

  “A hat?”

  “To cover this bare spot in my hair.”

  “The first person from your family to visit, I will tell them.”

  “Nobody’s going to visit.”

  “I see. Then I will you get you a hat.”

  “Thanks.” And then, surprising myself, “They don’t want me to do none of this.”

  “No,” he said quietly, and without asking what I meant, “I imagine they do not.”

  “They think you conduct experiments on us like we’re lab animals. Like with the Nazis. Or Frankenstein.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I think they are … unknowing.” It felt like a huge betrayal. Still, I kept on. “Especially my Granmama.”

  “Grandmothers are often fierce. Mine is.” He made some notes on a tablet, typing and swiping without looking at it.

  I hadn’t thought of him—of any of them—as having a grandmother. I demanded, like that would make this grandmother more solid, “What’s her name?”

  “Chunhua. What is the name of your grandmother?”

  “Ludmilla. Like me.” I thought a minute. “ ‘Fierce’ is the right word.”

  “Then we have this in common, yes?”

  But I warn’t yet ready to give him that much. “I bet my granmama is more fierce than any of your kin.”

  He smiled, a crinkling of his strange bald face, eyes almost disappearing in folds of smooth skin. “I would—what is it you say, in poker?—‘see that bet’ if I could.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  He didn’t answer, and his smile disappeared. I said, “What did your granmama do that was so fierce?”

  “She made me study. Hours every day, hours every night. All spring, all summer, all winter. When I refused, she beat me. What does yours do?”

  All at once I didn’t want to answer. Was beating better or worse? Granmama never touched me, nor any of us. Dr. Chung waited. Finally I said, “She freezes me. Looks at me like … like she wants to make a icy wind in my mind. And then that wind blows, and I can’t get away from it nohow, and then she turns her back on me.”

  “That is worse.”

  “Really? You think so?”

  “I think so.”

  A long breath went out of me, clearing out my chest. I said, “Bobby warn’t always like he is now. He taught me to fish.”

  “Do you like fishing?”

  “No.” But I liked Bobby teaching me, just the two of us laughing down by the creek, eating the picnic lunch Mama put up for us.

  A nurse, masked and gowned like on TV, came in and said, “We’re ready.”

  The last thing I remember was lying on the table, breathing in the knock-out gas, and thinking, Now at least I’m going to get a long deep sleep. Only at the very last minute I panicked some and my hand, strapped to the table, flapped around a bit. Another hand held it, strong and steady. Dr. Chung. I went under.

  When I woke, it was in a different hospital room but Dr. Chung was still there, sitting in a chair and working a tablet. He put it down.

  “Welcome back, Ms. Connors. How do you feel?”

  I put my hand to my head. A thick bandage covered part of it. Nothing hurt, but my mouth was dry, my throat was scratchy, and I had a floaty feeling. “What do you got me on? Oxycontin?”

  “No. Steroids to control swelling and a mild pain med. There are few nerve receptors in the skull. Tomorrow we will take you back to Blaine. Here.”

  He handed me a red knit hat.

  All at once I started to cry. I never cry, but this was so weird—waking up with something foreign in my skull, and feeling rested instead of skitterish and tired, and then this hat from this strange-looking man. I sobbed like I was Cody, three years old with a skinned knee. I couldn’t stop sobbing. It was awful.

  Dr. Chung didn’t high-tail it out of there. He didn’t try to there-there me, or take my hand, or even look embarrassed and angry mixed together, like every other man I ever knowed when women cry. He just sat and waited, and when I finally got myself to stop, he said, “I wish you would call me ‘Dan.’ ”

  “No.” Crying had left me embarrassed, if not him. “It isn’t your name. Is it?”

  “No. It just seems more comfortable for Westerners.”

  “What is your damned name?”

  “It is Hai. It means ‘the ocean.’ ”

  “You’re nothing like any ocean.”

  “I know.” He grinned.

  “Do all Chinese names mean something?”

  “Yes. I was astonished when I found out American names do not.”

  “When was that?”

  “When I came here for graduate school.”

  I was talking too much. I never rattled on like this, especially not to Chinese men who had me cut open. It was the damn drugs they gave me, that thing for swelling or the “mild pain med.” I’d always stayed strictly away from even aspirin, ‘cause of watching Mama and Bobby. Afore I could say anything, Dr. Chung said, “Your meds might induce a little ‘high,’ Ludmilla. It will pass soon. Meanwhile, you are safe here.”

  “Like hell I am!”

  “You are. And I apologize for calling you ‘Ludmilla.’ I have not received permission.”

  “Oh, go the fuck ahead. Only it’s ‘Ludie.’ ” I felt my skull again. I wanted to
rip off the bandage. I wanted to run out of the hospital. I wanted to stay in this bed forever, talking, not having to deal with my family. I didn’t know what I wanted.

  Maybe Dr. Chung did, because he went on talking, a steadying stream of nothing: graduate school in California and riding buses in China and his wife’s and daughters’ names. They were named after flowers, at least in English: Lotus and Jasmine and Plum Blossom. I liked that. I listened, and grew sleepy, and drifted into dreams of girls with faces like flowers.

  I was two days in Johnson Memorial and two more in a bed at the clinic, and every single one of them I worried about Shawn. Nobody came to see me. I thought Patty might, or maybe even Dinah if Bobby’d a let her, but they didn’t. Well, Patty was only twelve, still pretty young to come alone. So I watched TV and I talked with Dr. Chung, who didn’t seem have a whole lot to do.

  “Don’t you got to see patients?”

  “I’m not an M.D., Ludie. Dr. Liu mostly sees the patients.”

  “How come Blaine got so many Chinese doctors? Aren’t Americans working on optogenetics?”

  “Of course they are. Liu Bo and I became friends at the university and so applied for this grant together.”

  “And you brought Jenny.”

  “She is Bo’s fiancé.”

  “Oh. She warn’t—there he is, the bastard!”

  President Rollins was on TV, giving a campaign speech. Red and blue balloons sailed up behind him. My hands curled into fists. Dr. Chung watched me, and I realized—stupid me!—that of course he was working. He was observing me, the lab rat.

  He said, “Why do you hate the president so?”

  “He stopped the government checks and the food stamps. It’s ‘cause of him and his Libbies that most of Blaine is back to eating squirrels.”

  Dr. Chung looked at the TV like it was the most fascinating thing in the world, but I knew his attention was really on me. “But under the Libertarians, aren’t your taxes lower?”

  I snorted. “Five percent of nothing isn’t less to pay than fifteen percent of nothing.”