by Rich Horton
I half-expect she’s fallen back into slack-faced drooling apathy while I was having my special moment. It would just serve me right if I were having the most vivid case ever of the meditator’s bane, Now I have it, didn’t I?
But her face isn’t slack at all. She’s still wearing that grin of impending shared joy; I remember I would grin like that and the other women at my table in the prison dining hall would all start to laugh, or sometimes start to groan, before I even told the joke.
And then Layla delivers her joke as clearly as anyone. “I’m pleased to meet me.” She giggles—laughing at my own jokes is another lifelong thing—and I’m still giggling with her giggles as I say, “It would be mutual, if there were more than one of us.”
She really laughs this time. I suppose no one is better or can be better at hitting your sense of humor than yourself.
Layla is smiling puckishly at me when she says, “I suppose no one is better or can be better at hitting your sense of humor than yourself.”
I say, “Oh my fucking god,” just the way she did, just the way I always do. “I just thought those, like, those exact words. So-ab so-lute so-ly.” My old, dry throat, tongue, and lips strain almost to cracking, trying to talk the way I did as a teenager.
She holds her hands out and chants, clapping and popping thumbs up on every third, “Abso-fucka,” clap clap thumbs clap, “abso-fucka,” clap clap thumbs clap, “abso,” clap, “fuckin’,” clap, “lucky-lute,” thumbs up, “lute-lee!” clap, clap, clap-clap-clap-thumbs-up!
My hands are stinging from the clapping, and I am holding thumbs up at the screen myself. Seeing my withered old crone self of a natch do the “Absofuckinglutely Popout” just the way all us cool girls did in middle school ninety years ago cracks me up again. She and I have a grand old laugh together.
Better still, when I look at her again, she’s still with me, and in the corner of the display, her DLPFC graphs moving toward normal and healthy faster than I’ve ever seen. It looks like my tenth and last bringback is going to be my best. I suppose, given that it’s me, I must have always hoped that. But now I know.
After that breakthrough session, I go in for scans and tests, including a full ONC that takes about an hour. From there I go to a review of my test results with Dr. Gbego, who is my partner, co-author, the person who persuaded me into this project. I had a big old load of neurology courses back when I was getting my MD, but compared to what Gbego knows, I might as well have spent my time on astrology or alchemy.
Gbego is a smooth young nubrid of about eighty. He looks about twenty-five on the old natch scale (my scale). He sits down beside me so we can both see the same displays. If he thinks I’m disgusting physically, he shows no sign of it, so he’s either aesthetically blind, well-controlled, or nice. Back when we started the project of the first and only auto-bringback, I’d’ve said all three. I grow more doubtful about the nice and the aesthetically blind every time we meet.
“Here’s the results from your oscillating neutrino chemopathy,” he says, pointing to the display on the wall in front of us.
Not only does he give no sign of disgust, he’s also rather good at putting me at my ease, good enough to make me wish hopelessly that I were not a hideous old crone of a freak, because I’m automatically suspicious of that easy, natural way of conversing he has. And because I don’t trust my automatic suspicions any more than I trust this brilliant man.
One of many thousands of advantages to being a nubrid is having time and plasticity to work around anything that didn’t come naturally, like, maybe, for example, getting along with people. It’s just another skill: some people are born good with people, some people are born abrasive, abrupt, or clueless. But when a nubrid is born socially wrong-footed, they just squirt fresh cloned cells into the correct brain center, add a dash of plasticity enhancers, and start that hapless jerk into a training regime overseen by specialists. Maybe, if it’s a severe case, that poor inept kid might spend thirty lonely, awkward years. So what? You’re going to have most of a millennium to flirt, make small talk, dance socially, and find true friendship and deep love and whatever else you need from other people, and do it as well as anyone.
So I always wonder if really nice, likeable, considerate nubrids are fake, and what real self they were born to.
I suspect smooth, young-looking, kind, and wise Dr. Gbego, brilliant neuro, had he been a natch, might have had an autism spectrum disorder, because all of his interactions with me feel perfectly performed, like he’s running apps: the be politely supportive app, the signal interest to get better information app, the listen empathetically app, the be nice to the hideous old natch even if she fucking disgusts you app.
From all those decades of constant self-polishing, nubrids become fake copies of themselves with perfect brains, so smooth there’s nothing for another personality to stick to. They’re totally likeable but not at all lovable, at least not with any passion, which is not lovable, really, in my pathetic old hideous limited natch opinion. Which is I’m sure what they’d think my opinion was—if they actually cared what a natch thought.
It’s so much better to be a nubrid. They probably don’t have these little flashes of envious rage the way a natch does, either.
I’m looking where Gbego’s finger is pointing, at the ONC image of my right hippocampus, and I go from blazing rage to abject humiliation at once, but there’s no other way, at least not one I understand, to get to what I must know. “I’m sorry, Dr. Gbego, I just blurred out for a second. Back me up and explain again please?”
“I probably bored you out of your mind,” he says, smiling apologetically. “I was just running through all the caveats, oscillating-neutrino chemopathy is still in its infancy, some of the things that show up on ONC don’t seem to correspond to any reality we understand, what we do understand doesn’t always say what we understand it to, yakka-da-yakka-dakka-day. All stuff I should have the respect to remember you already know and have heard. It’s a miracle we didn’t both zone out.” The apologetic smile gets broader.
“All right, you’re not sure what it means, you just have a guess. I promise I won’t take it as gospel.” I lean forward toward his finger on the display. “Now explain the color coding to me.”
“It’s sort of an emotional intensity indicator. Based on ONCs of similar brains—and we don’t have enough of a sample and ONC tech is progressing so fast that nearly all recordings are outdated immediately—we asked it to predict, if you recalled that complex of memories, how much you’d release of various neurotransmitters in your limbic system, how high your electrical activity might go above normal in the feeling part of the brain—”
“Dr. Gbego, I do have a Ph.D. and the parts of me that earned it and use it are over in the prosnoetic-enhanced side of me, not lost in the brain plaques. Show me what you mean, on the graphs and charts, and use appropriate technical language.”
He made a little head-bow, touching his forehead with two fingers. A few decades ago, that became the universal sorry I was a jerk signal. “Well, here.” He calls up an eigenvector-color legend.
Subtracting his too-smooth condescension, I must say Gbego did all right in explaining the overall color coding, though “I would guess that it is the intensity of the emotions that went into encoding the memory, not the emotions that are likely with its re-emergence, that is most strongly represented. Also, red for the mild ones and deep blues and purples for the strong ones? What kind of reporting software is that?”
“Physicists designed this.” He’s still smiling; I must fix that sometime soon. In two years of working with the man, I have found I can always make him stop smiling. “The short-wave, high frequency, high energy part of the spectrum is blues and violets.”
Disappointing myself, I smile back. “All right, I see what you mean: that ’mongous big purple blob there in my right hippocampus. Your oscillating neutrinos are telling you I’ve got some emotionally huge memory there. When I can access it directly, it is totally like
ly both to be a memory about something really emotionally huge, and also totally likely to upset the absolute living shit out of me. Right?”
“Uh, I suppose—I mean, I intended—um, yes.”
I laugh at his sheer awkwardness. “Are you trying to find a gentle, discreet way to ask whether I remember that I chopped up both my parents with a wok cleaver? Yes, I know I did, and I’ve never stopped knowing. Back when they let me out of prison, they let me watch the sealed records of my testimony, so I know what I said was my reason. As for whatever else might be somewhere in the shriveled plaques that make up most of my hippocampus at the moment, no, I don’t recall anything emotionally or with any sense of having been there, about how I slaughtered my parents like a pair of deserving pigs.”
He stops smiling. Knew I could do it!
The rest of the meeting is very correct and businesslike. I keep thinking that should make me sad, but really I’m more interested in how smooth Dr. Gbego stays, even though his reserve doesn’t feel nearly as phony as his warmth.
Layla begins, “Hello, Layla. Are you still me?”
“Hello, Layla, yes I am. Look around my office, you’re sitting here too, tell me what you see.”
She leans back to look slowly all around, taking it in, thinking. “That window is showing video from the moon. I guess it’s a display, not a window. But we’re not on the moon. The gravity’s all wrong. I must have been to the moon more than once, to know that the gravity is wrong right away.”
The little rotating 2-D brain map at upper right of the display has been changing across the last few sessions. At first it was an increasingly normal and regular dance of color through the DLPFC, and little trickles like forking lightning breaking out of the former plaques and reaching into the healthy bits of each hippocampus, at first more on the left than on the right, then the right caught up, then both got busy.
Lately it has looked like the old traffic flow maps that used to appear on the dash of Dad’s car when he’d drive into the city. He held one of the last human-operation-on-public-streets permits in New Jersey, thanks to his political pull. He said he just liked the fact that his license said ‘Human Operator’ because it meant they recognized he was still human, “which is rare even in humanists.”
Once I started to hate that, I steeled myself not to argue. Nor did I ask why other people’s lives should be endangered by his driving mistakes that no machine would ever make, just so he could have his little joke. Giving him no chance for the judicious and rigorous explication he loved, I’d just glare at him and say, “Dumbshit.” It worked a lot better.
Anyway, that tangled flow of brightly colored spots in the realtime brain image in front of me, like the New Jersey highway system on Dad’s old map, represent the same good situation: lots of things going lots of places smoothly. Layla’s brain, my brain, our brain, looks very nearly normal; it would take a neuro as proficient as my smug partner Gbego to spot the difference between those information flows on the display and what happens in a normal brain.
“We have been to the moon,” she says quietly. “I can feel it copying into my memory; it must have crossed over from the prosnoetics. Oh! And that’s the connection. The idea you had, because the last three bringbacks before me, before us, before they said you could do it for yourself . . . you had the idea because hypergerontological cases have mostly been moved to the moon anyway, and this body is acceleration-restricted because of those sclerotic arteries in the brain, so the last two cases—no, the last three, Bridget Soon moved to the moon after the first three treatments—”
I can feel it flooding in, including feelings I’d had at the time but hadn’t recalled afterward; it’s funny what a difference it makes to have your memories linked to their emotional context again.
Funny, and terrifying.
“What’s wrong?” she asks quietly. I look at the brain map; the welter of activity looks like termites coming out of a burning log.
I take a finger and write a word at a time on my palm, without any ink or pigment, and not looking down at it:
not now. not here. soon. not while connected. just think about it later today & you’ll know.
Then I babble something senseless about how a strong sense memory of swinging the cleaver backhanded into Mama’s face just came flooding back and overwhelmed me. And Layla immediately begins to babble comfort-noises back at me, so I know she understands too. After a minute or so of that, I launch into the story we would both know completely, the one she referred to just now. With just a spot of luck, maybe nobody monitoring will notice how unnecessary our explanations are now, or ask why we are making them.
Of course, for more than two decades before the murders, most sensible people, commenting on the news, had the good sense to hate my parents, along with the parents of all the other ‘natural children.’ Anyone with any empathy could understand how we felt about being condemned before we were born to age and die far before we had to.
Most nubrids and quite a few of the older generation of natural humans could also understand we had been deprived of the nubrids’ far greater brain plasticity. During the eighty or hundred years we would live beside them, we would be making up our minds for good and shutting off new experiences. In that same time, the nubrids would put mistakes and sad memories behind them, build on skills and knowledge, and keep growing mentally the way children could while enjoying the kind of mental maturity that only a handful of saints, philosophers, artists, and scientists ever had.
Our parents had elected to kill us early after first crippling us. No one in the global or regional or local government had done anything to stop them; there had been education campaigns and media campaigns and public pressure, but nobody had done what would have fixed it: investigated the personal data, kicked down the doors, and made our mothers get the virus sequence.
Privacy was too important, human rights were too important, the fucking right of fucking jackass parents to raise children no better than themselves was paramount. And because all those rights of all those now-dead people were so well protected, we natches would have to live as permanently immature stuck-in-our ways idiots, and then die, old, sick, ugly, and soon. But thank god society had respected our parents’ crazy fears, smug superiority, and deep attachment to that advertising sell-word ‘natural.’
My lawyers begged me not to give my speech to the jury, which I had written and rehearsed with such care. They went out of their way to tell the jury, over and over, that I was “young” (thirty-one? For a nubrid, that’s young. For us natches, that’s a real big chunk of life). They begged them to forgive me for being “impetuous and headstrong” (hoping the jury might ignore the steps I took to isolate the house so Mama and Daddy would not be able to call for help and I could take as long as I wanted about it, or that the police data recovery expert had found many dozens of drafts across many weeks of the script for exactly what I would say and do as I killed them).
I gave my speech anyway. I told them the truth: I had been cheated of what they all took for granted. Mama and Daddy had done it because they had enjoyed the revenue and attention from founding Natural Children Forever! and the Coalition to Preserve Natural Humans and god knew how many other fundraising and adulatory fronts, and because they liked to tell themselves how special and wonderful they were. The law could not make me whole; the ‘natural human’ organizations had lobbied hard to make sure that sentimental idiots had passed laws in every country to prevent us natch-spawn from suing the parents who had done this to us. The law would not arrest them or try them or get revenge for me; instead, it protected them.
So since the law wouldn’t do it, I did.
Apparently that made me a monster.
When the jury came back in, after only an hour, I didn’t detect a drop of sympathy in their faces. They had decided on life without the possibility of parole.
I suppose I cultivated my taste for science originally because it pissed off Daddy and Mama. Science in general was their number one s
cary, shiny anti-human monster. Or maybe I just wanted to understand the intellectual triumph of the decoding and application of the nubrid process, since I couldn’t partake of it. Ellauri and Jautta’s mapping of the deep level semisymmetric interconnections that enabled alloaddressing of genes between the immune, nervous, and regenerative systems would have been a feat as great as relativity, programmable computers, or calculus, even if it hadn’t led to any applications for a hundred years. But as it happened, the nubrid process explained why people got set in their ways and how they aged and why aging killed them, how one virus could be chicken pox and shingles and one brain center could handle bits and pieces of math, music, and language, why people got Alzheimer’s and arthritis, and countless other things.
I was thirty-two when they sent me to prison, supposedly forever. The Prison Authority spent a fortune on psychiatrists trying to persuade me I should feel bad about who I was and what I’d done, although they still weren’t going to let me out even if I rolled over and agreed with them. I had only two alternatives to madness: sparring with the psychiatrists and reading and studying The New Neuro, as it was being dubbed. And after a few years, the psychiatrists gave up.
That left me nothing to do but read and study, but fortunately it turned out that was an inexhaustible consolation. A few years into the process, I began writing papers and critiques. I couldn’t accept money, or patent anything, or publish them under my own name because of old laws about not allowing convicts to profit from their crimes; apparently the publicity I would have gotten from being Mama and Daddy’s killer was potentially a violation. But I found half a dozen editor-curators who were willing to run my work under aliases, a different alias each time so that there was supposedly less potential for the discovery that a leading New Neuro theoretician was me.
By that time they had the blood test; I knew Alzheimer’s for me was when, not if. So I concentrated my work on it, hoping to save myself and the thousands of natches then still alive who were starting to slide away.