by Allan Kaster
She wondered, sometimes, if she was being selfish. She’d told herself so many times she would do anything, sacrifice anything, if it would mean a better life for him. But that wasn’t supposed to mean sacrificing him. She’d always told nosy strangers that he was fine just the way he was, and she had meant it.
But that woman, she had seen how smart Henry was—Maggie had told people how smart he was—that woman had seen it, and had dangled such glittering promises in front of him. Seduced his brain for herself, all with her smug assumption that everyone was better off as carbon copies of her version of normal.
That doctor wasn’t even a real person herself, was she? All the magazine profiles were gleefully transparent about that. Proud, even. How she’d built her own personality by zapping whatever neural pathways she’d decided fit her concept of the ideal human. They’d had her up before ethics boards in the early days, for God’s sake, before enough rich dilettantes decided brain stimulation was the way of the future to start normalizing it.
She was destroying society, that doctor. Maggie didn’t know why more people didn’t see it. On her message board, the only place she still felt sane, she’d talked to a woman whose daughter had been turned down by every university she applied to. Ten percent of the kids at Harvard have an implant now, the woman had mourned. How can she compete? She came to me sobbing and asked if we could afford it. My healthy, energetic, brilliant seventeen-year-old daughter came to me asking for elective brain surgery.
The message board folk were a spectrum, with some adamant the new technology was spitting at Nature and some who allowed it might be permissible to treat a proven medical need. Maggie stayed quiet when those people talked. Most of them didn’t have anyone who’d been judged to have such a “medical need,” the type that insurance would pay for, and they didn’t know any better.
Someday she’d get up the courage to write a post. A long post. Her story. Her manifesto, she supposed it would have to be called, at the length such a thing would run. But manifestos always had some sort of action at the end of them, didn’t they? If only she could figure out some way to disable all the implants, every instance of deep brain stimulation in the entire world. Dig a channel to send the course of humanity hurtling down a different path, bypassing this future entirely.
But even if she could do that . . .
Henry came to see her sometimes. Or Hank, as he called himself now. He would greet her and call her “mom,” standing awkwardly with his hands in his pockets and eyes that were a stranger’s. Maggie tried her best to keep her eyes dry, to keep from staggering when the memories cut her: Henry tackling her with hugs so fierce they almost lost balance, Henry’s lopsided smile of accomplishment when he figured out some new philosophical concept, Henry collecting every flower in the yard and filling his room with them.
All Hank talked about was how good his grades were now, and how much money he would be making soon, and Maggie screamed inside her head about how much she didn’t care. She wanted his smile back, his love of botany, his penchant for memorizing any type of diagram and reciting it back to her with unadulterated joy; his painting and his laughter and the way he would challenge her to board games like he was preparing for the most serious battle in the world; she wanted Henry.
Any fantasies about tearing the implant out of his head crashed when she imagined what would come next. Henry’s eyes, filled with betrayal, with hatred at her, and then he’d go and get it put back in again.
But that crisp spring day, her body sagging on the porch like her bones had lost their will to hold her up, Maggie hit on her idea. She couldn’t save Henry. But she could show that woman, that monster, exactly what she had done. She could show everyone who gave that doctor such plaudits that the thing they so loved was nothing more than a phantasm.
She sat up. The cool air suddenly felt invigorating. I could do this, she thought. That doctor always claimed the implant didn’t make you different, that it just made you a truer version of yourself, but she was wrong, and Maggie could prove it. Because the doctor had an implant, too, and without it . . .
Well. Without it, they would all see. That doctor wasn’t going to be the same person. She’d be erased. She’d be someone else.
A squirrelly reticence wormed its way through Maggie’s gut. Was she contemplating murder? She knew how she felt about losing Henry, after all.
But no. The doctor was a programmed personality, nothing more: an organic AI that had been written over a real human’s brain. If anything, Maggie would be saving the person the woman used to be.
For the first time in two years, the edge of Maggie’s lips curled up toward something like a smile. She’d need that manifesto after all.
☼ ☼ ☼
She sold us on a miracle.
“I couldn’t get out of bed,” she told us, the same line she’s spouted in all those magazine profiles. Everyone knows her story, but she told it to us anyway, describing the endlessly circling thoughts that had crushed and trapped her, the compulsions that wouldn’t release her from mounting panic unless she scraped her hands bloody or hung onto every candy wrapper or broken pencil that crossed into her teenaged world. Such graphic detail—I wonder if she wrote herself a subroutine for stimulating creative language.
When deep brain stimulation became a possibility for her, she’d been circling her ideation for months, flirting with fantasies of razors and ropes. Her parents had tried all traditional paths for her, and all had failed. She described it as drowning. Nothing to lose. Nothing left but the one last gasping hope that she could be cured by new technology.
I don’t know whether I believe her. Her parents are dead now, and they never gave the magazine interviews she’s so fond of, but if I could speak to them, what would they say? Maybe they weren’t like me; maybe they didn’t love her as she was and hid their faces with embarrassment when people asked why their daughter was no longer in school. Maybe they whispered in their darkest, secret thoughts that life would be easier if their daughter killed herself, so when the marching future offered them the chance to kill her themselves and call it treatment, they jumped at the chance.
But Henry and I weren’t drowning. I told her that. I told her it was hard, but we got by, and that we were, mostly, happy. It was certainly true of me, and Henry assured me it was true of him, too. I told her he didn’t need fixing and we didn’t need miracles and I didn’t want to take any unnecessary risks, not with something as precious as my child’s brain, his person.
“It doesn’t change who you are,” she told us a dozen times, falsely. “It will just make him become more of the person he wants to be.”
In retrospect, of course she would say that. It’s the only way she can excuse what she’s done to herself, isn’t it?
I still almost said no. I told Henry I loved him exactly as he was, that I couldn’t fathom wishing him different without wishing him not Henry. When you know the whole of someone, even what others see as their weakest points are a part of what you love. That’s how I found peace with it after the first of his ever-evolving diagnoses, first ADHD and then the rapidly cycling correction to anxiety, bipolar, BPD, ASD, with each new doctor as likely to declare a previous misdiagnosis as to add another label to the combination they were medicating him for. But long before all that, when I was in shock after that first child psychologist sat us down and explained all Henry’s difficulties with school and with the other children weren’t just a phase . . . I asked myself if I would swap my boy for one the doctors described as “normal,” and the sick horror of the thought made it hard to breathe.
Because that boy wouldn’t be Henry.
I made sure my son knew all this. I made sure he knew it all, every day, especially the days after his father left, or the days I found him staring at university or job-hunting websites with an expression like someone had socked him in the stomach. And when he first came to me about DBS, I made sure he knew he didn’t have to have brain surgery, not for me. Not then, not ever.
“Don’t worry, Mom,” he said to me right before, squeezing my hand almost as tight as I was squeezing his. “I’ll still be me.” I almost begged him to promise.
Afterward, one of the handful of times he visited, wooden and humorless, he said, “I didn’t realize how much it would change me.”
He didn’t look at me when he said it.
☼ ☼ ☼
After a week spent online, Maggie had freshly swallowed every article and magazine profile ever written about Dr. Laura Chen. She’d also studied as much of the workings of the DBS implants as she could understand, hunting down research papers that were a little jump above the layman. Her electrical engineering was rusty, but she’d done similar research before Henry had gotten his implant, and the more she read, the more conversant she felt.
Besides, she wasn’t trying to do any complicated neuroprogramming. She just wanted to figure out how to shut a unit down without hurting the person physically. The shutting down part looked relatively easy—DBS patients had as many cautions as people with pacemakers, and Maggie was reasonably sure that despite the unit’s shielding she could disable one with a homemade EMP soldered out of a flash capacitor. But the relative ease of that side of the equation meant it was standard for the individual frequency generation algorithms of a DBS unit to be solidly backed up.
Especially someone whose implant programming was as complicated as Dr. Chen’s.
Deep brain stimulation worked via electrodes inserted far into the brain that produced electrical bursts in response to what they’d been programmed to view as abnormal neuron firing. But Dr. Chen had taken it far beyond “abnormal.” She’d been given her original implant under medical supervision, but after being inspired to enter the field herself, she began experimenting with her own neural pathways in college, tweaking the electrical bursts to increase her stamina, intelligence, and determination. DBS didn’t have any sort of pinpoint precision—neurologists still weren’t even sure why it worked as well as it did—but Laura Chen had been an artist at it. Later she went overseas to have more electrodes inserted so she could mess with her neurons in every lobe, and Maggie was willing to bet the code that now equaled Dr. Chen’s personality was very carefully protected.
Maggie would need some type of access. Preferably some way that would avoid her coming face to face with the doctor—she didn’t know if Dr. Chen would recognize a skeletal, graying woman as the pleasantly round mother she’d met two years ago, but best not to take chances. Luckily, in several of the magazine profiles, Dr. Chen had been pictured with her wife.
From there it was only a hop and a skip to a thousand social media updates and the name of the studio where the wife took yoga every week.
For some reason, it surprised Maggie that the studio was only half an hour away. It shouldn’t have, because they’d moved here back when Henry was commuting in every other day for testing appointments. Maggie tended to think of Dr. Chen as being far away and unreachable, somehow on another plane thanks to her fame, despite the fact that the young man wearing Henry’s face now worked for the doctor as a research assistant.
Maggie took a breath and clicked over to buy a yoga mat.
Her first day of class, she was struck by how long it had been since she’d been out of the house for any but the most necessary errands. She’d even been having groceries delivered, mostly stacks of instant noodles that she didn’t eat. A few women leaving the yoga studio greeted her on the way in, and Maggie had to think hard to shape the words of a suitably banal polite response.
She’d signed up for an open level class, and she got lucky: she recognized the woman she wanted as soon as she stepped barefoot onto the smooth wooden floor. Dr. Chen’s wife was a striking dark-skinned woman, taller than everyone else in the class, with a firm jaw and her hair the type of shiny black waves Maggie tended to assume existed only in shampoo commercials. Her confidence and grace were magnetic. Maggie thought she would have felt drawn in even if she hadn’t had other motives for being here.
She unrolled her mat on the next spot over and gave the woman what she hoped passed for a nervous smile. “Hi. I’m Maggie.”
The answering smile she got was open and welcoming. “Victoria. Nice to meet you.”
Maggie knew her name was Victoria, knew everything about her that could be gleaned from a public social media page. But she said “nice to meet you” back and then the line she’d planned as a nonthreatening conversation opener. “It’s my first day.”
“Oh! Well, Terrence is a fantastic teacher,” Victoria said. “He’s great at helping you work at your level. And you can go into child’s pose anytime, no judgment.”
Maggie didn’t know what child’s pose was, but she thanked Victoria and pretended to concentrate on smoothing down the curl of her mat.
She did, indeed, spend most of the class in child’s pose. Even lying folded double felt like it stretched her raw, leaching her pain into a puddle on the studio floor. She’d plotted out what she would say to Victoria after the class, too, but when she turned and tried to form words, she had to fight past a sob stuck in her nose and throat.
“I . . . I just moved here, and . . .”
“Sweetie, are you okay?” Victoria put a hand on her shoulder.
“I . . . I guess I’m a little overwhelmed.” The sob bubbled up, undenied, and Maggie swiped at her eyes and nose in annoyance. This was not what she had planned. But she pressed on. “Would you let me buy you a cup of coffee? I’m so new here and . . . it doesn’t have to be today, next time would be fine too, or whenever—”
“Oh, sweetie. I’ve got time now. Let me show you this great little shop around the corner; they’re a coffee shop and an antiques house, so all their tables and chairs are these interesting older pieces. You can buy the furniture, too, but I just like the vibe.”
Victoria put a hand on Maggie’s shoulder again and shepherded them out of the yoga studio, calling farewells to Terrence and the other students.
Maggie had more careful scripting in her head, but instead she ended up weeping her way through a latte and a slice of truly decadent flourless chocolate cake.
“I’m sorry, it’s just—I miss my son,” she whispered between sniffs, and Victoria “oh, sweetie’d” her again and drew all the right conclusions.
“You’re so kind,” Maggie said finally, sincerely, when she was able to wipe her tears away on a coffee shop napkin and not have them immediately replaced. “I’m sorry. I guess I needed a friend. Can you recommend—tell me what there is to do around here. Tell me about you.”
“Well, I’m an artist,” Victoria said. “Mixed media, mostly—I like exploring the place where painting and sculpture meet. My wife always says something poetic about fractional dimensions.”
“Like a fractal,” Maggie said automatically. “Something that isn’t two-space but isn’t three-space.” Like the surface of the human brain, she thought, but cut herself off before adding. So many wrinkles and fissures and complexities. Not flat. Not simple.
“Yes! Exactly,” Victoria said. “Are you a mathematician?”
“Engineer,” Maggie said. “Or at least, I was . . .”
“I so admire that. My wife is brilliant at all that, but I could never wrap my head around STEM fields. Just got the creative genes, I guess.”
“These days you could always get an implant for it,” Maggie said. Too soon, maybe, but when else was she going to get such a good opening?
Victoria hesitated. “Actually, my wife is a DBS researcher and neuroprogrammer. And there was a time I—but that’s a story for another day. You were asking about good ways to get yourself out of the house.”
Maggie was sure she hadn’t phrased it that way, but she was, she reminded herself, only playing a part. Who cared if Victoria felt pity for her rather than friendship? As long as it got her in.
☼ ☼ ☼
I’ve heard al
l the logical arguments. That DBS is elective and victimless, that it helps many and on the whole harms no one. And I haven’t believed in God for thirty years, so I’m not one to say it’s a crime against nature.
But I do think we have to give some serious thought to what it means to be . . . oneself. We all change over the course of our life, but is that equivalent to rewriting our neurology? How many neurons do we alter before someone isn’t the same person anymore? Before we’ve killed who they used to be?
The religious opponents of DBS sometimes call this soul. I think it’s science, but I agree with them for all that.
How long before less invasive treatments for any condition involving the brain start to be phased out as unprofitable, before society will no longer give any accommodations because “why don’t they just get DBS”?
There will be people who say what I’m choosing to do here doesn’t address any of that. That I should write books, or articles, or give speeches, not attack a single person just because I disagree with her.
They might be right. But sometimes a demonstration is worth a thousand words.
☼ ☼ ☼
Dr. Laura Chen had been far from the only doctor performing DBS in the country, of course. The surgery was all too common, and plenty of people got their treatment from someone who wasn’t the face of a movement. Henry had found her name online thanks to all those magazine articles, and he’d written to her before he even told Maggie he was researching. Dr. Chen had told them to come out and see her personally.
In retrospect, Maggie should have been suspicious. What kind of celebrity doctor tells a sixteen-year-old kid to see her personally, unless she’s trying to steal his brain away?
She’d relived that first conversation with Henry so many times it had become a specter in her head. She should have listened to her creeping foreboding, but she’d shelved her reservations and tried to listen to her son with an open mind. She’d learned from him so many times, after all—he read widely and thought deeply, and he’d changed her opinion on more than one occasion. Those long, rambling conversations were one of the many things that had made him Henry, one of the many things she loved.