by Allan Kaster
But he’d never approached her with something so . . . personal. So frightening. She remembered the moment clearly: she’d been making dinner, and her hand had frozen on the handle of the frying pan she’d been taking out. The pattern of brownish scratches crisscrossing the Teflon had etched itself into her memory.
“Mom, have you heard of deep brain stimulation?”
Of course she’d heard of it. The news loved their clickbait headlines about each new twist in the proliferation of DBS. And when she’d seen that first article the fleeting thought had crossed her mind, could Henry benefit? But the technology back then had been limited to extreme cases of OCD, depression, and a few other mental illnesses—clear-cut cases all, not the overlapping patchwork of combinations and question marks that Henry’s doctors argued over.
Back in the beginning, the DBS scientists had talked big, saying they had such hopes, that this might even be the key to treating previously intransigent personality disorders or neurological conditions that conventional medicine struggled to unlock. But nobody had predicted just how fast DBS would explode. The more the researchers and doctors managed to expand it, the more the funding poured in, and the more those clickbait headlines passed over Maggie’s dashboard.
It had gotten to the point where well-meaning acquaintances had begun asking. “Have you ever considered DBS for Henry?”
At first she’d politely explained that Henry still couldn’t be treated with DBS. As the years passed and questions got ruder and more frequent, she’d become grateful that this remained true, that she could shut down such brutally impolite good intentions with a simple statement of fact.
It was different saying it to Henry, though. “Honey, if you’re thinking . . . it’s still limited, and your situation is complicated. They can’t—”
“I know, I know,” he’d said, already gaining steam in his familiar Henry way. “If you look at what’s officially treatable via DBS, I can’t benefit yet. But I’ve been emailing with one of the premiere researchers in the country, Dr. Laura Chen. She’s pioneered a lot of the expansions of DBS treatment over the past generation. Before she started pushing the research, the field was in a state of nascent infancy compared to what it’s capable of now. And the best part is, she’s like a self-improving AI, because she essentially reprogrammed her own neurology to make her better able to reprogram people’s neurology. She—”
“That’s the best part?” Maggie couldn’t help muttering.
“It’s a testament to the genius of humanity,” Henry said, either missing or ignoring her sarcasm. “There’s a recursive beauty to it. Like a piece of art, except science.”
“I know who Dr. Chen is, honey,” Maggie had said. She wondered if the doctor would have understood what a compliment it was that Henry had just compared her to a piece of art.
“I emailed her,” Henry went on, barely pausing. “She’s more than a genius—she doesn’t submit to what others say are the limits of reality. I think she might be the harbinger of the next stage of human evolution. Making our species into something new and better.”
“Humanity doesn’t need to be made better,” Maggie tried to argue.
“Yes, it does,” Henry said, with his intense, peculiar gravity that Maggie loved even when it choked her up to see other people shy away from it. “Of course it does. What do you think the entire field of medicine is? Vaccines, cancer treatment, pharmacology—they’re all evidence of humanity’s agency in making bug fixes to evolution. Natural selection is nothing more than a long-term guessing game that has resulted in a flawed product that gets along as best it can. DBS might be the start of a true sort of intelligent design, one engineered by science. Cool, huh?”
Maggie often had this feeling when Henry got on one of his logical tears, the sensation of being bowled over by an ocean wave, trying to frame a response and failing utterly even though she knew in her bones what she wanted to say. Maggie was smart, she knew she was smart—she had been an engineer, after all—but Henry always presented his thoughts as such airtight arguments that she needed time to sort through what she actually thought of them.
The stakes had never felt so high, though.
“Dr. Chen thinks she might be able to help me,” Henry continued, and in retrospect, that was when it all slipped out of Maggie’s control. “She says we should come out and see her. She has all sorts of tests she wants to run on my brain. She says I can be her test subject.” He beamed. “It would be fascinating to see what my brain is doing on a mathematical level. If those algorithms can be rewritten, then I could stop being such a buggy program.”
The pan banged against the sideboard. Maggie put it down carefully. “You’re not buggy,” she said. “Human brains aren’t computer programs.”
“Why not?” Henry said blithely. “All we are is very complicated organic machines. Mom, let’s say you’d stayed in AI research and you’d built some sort of intelligence that was unlike humans but equivalently complicated. You wouldn’t hesitate to refine your own project, would you? Medical researchers are hoping to be able to do the same thing, only they’re working backward in understanding a complicated machine they didn’t create.”
“Henry, slow down, okay? You’re getting way ahead of yourself. We don’t even know this woman can help you.”
“Oh, of course not, not now at any rate. She’s told me as much herself. But there’s no negative value in acquiring more data, and great positive potential.” He reached over to pull a gingersnap out of the cookie jar and bit into it with a decisive crunch.
Maggie didn’t agree that day. She wasn’t so much of a pushover as that. She did her own research, staying up hours into every night, sleep she couldn’t afford to lose but collating information she couldn’t afford not to have. She asked Henry to show her the emails Dr. Chen had sent and then started emailing the woman herself, pages of questions and concerns that came back with prompt, detailed, and intelligent replies that neither over-promised nor treated Maggie like anything less than an equal.
And through it all was Henry, who had latched onto this idea like a limpet on a rock and talked of almost nothing else. He rambled on to Maggie about the latest research over every meal, about the new ideas Dr. Chen had sent him, about the unassailable logic of letting his brain be scanned every which way.
None of that was what convinced Maggie, however. Instead, it was the day his voice got quiet and he said, “Please, Mom. I want to do this.”
To Maggie, being a parent didn’t just mean she loved her kid unconditionally. It also meant she had to respect him.
Since he’d become old enough, she’d always told him he had a voice and a choice in any of his treatment. She told herself she had to live up to that. And he was right, wasn’t he? There wasn’t any harm in getting more information.
☼ ☼ ☼
There’s more controversy about elective DBS than medical DBS. Like plastic surgery: realigning a cleft palate or reconstructing a body after surgery passes without judgment, but those who choose to reshape their noses or breasts will navigate society’s stigma.
The arguments by legislators who’ve worked to ban elective DBS—whether successfully or not—have all followed a similar theme: fear. Fear of a society in which rewriting one’s brain becomes the norm rather than the exception, or of those who would use it to exacerbate qualities of greed or predation. Those who have testified before them in favor of elective DBS have generally made the argument for libertarianism and self-determination, that this is no different from altering one’s brain through meditation or therapy or hard work, and that any of these things could be considered “mind-altering.”
But I think Dr. Chen revealed what they all really think, in that one ill-considered news comment she “clarified” after all the flack. She was challenged on whether she worried that her advocacy and research would turn the whole world into a society of people with brain implants, all programming themselves to be whoever they wanted to be.
“What would
be wrong with that world?” she said.
Those of us who object aren’t all afraid of new technology. We’re rejecting her image of the future.
☼ ☼ ☼
“I call this piece Transhumanism,” Victoria said.
Over the past four months, she and Maggie had graduated from increasingly frequent coffee dates to movies, museums, and beach trips. Maggie’s worry about accidentally running into and being recognized by Dr. Chen before she accomplished her goals had gradually faded; Laura Chen worked so much that the few times she was available for socializing it was easy for Maggie to pretend she’d come down sick.
She still didn’t know where Laura kept her backups. It was a hard thing to work into conversation, after all. But it wasn’t like it was a chore to keep spending time with Victoria. Maggie caught herself wishing at times that she could have a true friend like this someday, a girlfriend with whom she could argue about the actresses in television shows or go out for margaritas on her birthday. Uncomplicated.
If only it were real.
Maggie had continued to ask about Victoria’s art, on the theory that people always liked talking about themselves, particularly avant-garde artists who dabbled in relative obscurity. She’d told Victoria she wanted to go to her next exhibit, and Victoria had seemed surprised but gratified. Now they stood in front of a painting that spilled into three dimensions in the southwest corner, an abstract sculpture of a human torso with flowing hair. The daubed acrylic behind it was all shades of blue and green, and when Maggie looked closer, she caught the silver sparkle of fish.
Transhumanism, Victoria had said.
“It’s not the title I would have expected,” Maggie responded. She liked the piece a lot more than the title. “I would have pegged it for Mermaid.”
Victoria laughed. “People have such a narrow view of transhumanism. Like—they picture cyborgs and mechanical eyes and hands you can screw a flamethrower onto.”
“We have the mechanical eyes now,” Maggie said. “I don’t think anyone considers those people cyborgs.” It had become an accepted medical technology, the next generation of prosthetics. Maggie had no objection; she didn’t view useful medical tech as any sort of fallacious slippery slope.
“Oh, I know. I just think—everything’s sort of like that, isn’t it? Right now we’re foraying into what a generation ago we would have called transhumanism, except it’s not flamethrowers and chrome skulls, it’s . . . a natural extension of humanity. Dimensions we never imagined that integrate seamlessly with our daily lives. Like how no one could have predicted the way smart phones and social media would be just one more ubiquitous aspect of us, not something we think about every day as The Fancy Technology We Type Into.” She laughed again. “There I go, an artist trying to explain my art. I should know better.”
“No, it’s okay,” Maggie said. “Your wife’s work, I know. It must be important to you.”
“Yes. It’s . . . I sort of live it through her, in a lot of ways. The moral and technological questions she struggles with—it’s one of the main inspirations for my art.”
“I saw her post about DBS to your wall the other day—” They’d officially friended each other; it wasn’t stalking anymore. “You said she struggles with her work? I don’t—I mean, I’ve seen some of the articles about her. She always seems so confident.”
“That’s her public face,” Victoria said. “There have been . . . she’s had some hard decisions to make. This next piece is about one of them, actually.”
“Oh, my God,” Maggie said. She’d physically recoiled from the piece before she could stop herself. “Sorry! It’s just—it’s affecting—”
“I have to confess, that was the reaction I was going for,” Victoria said.
Maggie stood and took in the art. This one had an abstract representation of a person in it, too—a man painted on the canvas who screamed soundlessly into the void. Maggie fancied she could hear the wails in the jagged black that bled from his skull. The mixed media in this painting was at the top, a lowering cloud of crushing metal, and the whole thing felt upside-down in a way that made her brain want to vomit.
“Who is he?” she asked.
“A man named Andrew Track,” Victoria said. “This is . . . just between us, okay? Laura wouldn’t want this getting out online or anything.”
“Cross my heart,” Maggie said.
“He was a serial child molester and murderer. Vicious. I can’t even tell you how—what he did to those children—” Her face trembled for a moment before she firmed her mouth. “The worst type of person. When they caught him, he’d kidnapped a little boy, and he taunted the police with it, saying the child was still alive but they’d never find him.”
“And the police wanted your wife to . . .”
“Yes. At that time Laura was the only one who’d been doing the type of research they needed. Most DBS researchers hadn’t been looking into . . . that kind of thing . . . yet. The DA offered Track a deal much better than he deserved if he would plead insanity and submit to Laura’s experimental DBS as treatment.”
“I take it he said no.” Maggie couldn’t tear her eyes away from the abstract Andrew Track in the painting.
“He said no. He could have saved himself from prison, from a possible execution sentence, but he said no. He taunted them. Said if he was going down, he’d take the little boy with him. The prosecutors got a court order to give him an implant anyway, and they took it to Laura and said that was all the consent she needed.”
Maggie had painted nightmare moral hypotheticals about DBS in her head so many times, each designed to spiral to the conclusion of we do not want to choose this world. But hearing this had actually happened . . . it all felt too uncomfortably real, the future she was trying to push against already arrived and crashing around her. Like she was standing in the middle of a flood still claiming she could help stop a tsunami.
She wondered why she hadn’t heard of this case. Gag orders, probably. Hiding away the ugliness of power.
“I can’t say I’m comfortable with the courts having that kind of say,” she said, trying for a detached political take but unable to keep a small bite out of her voice, “but I’m glad they were able to rescue the boy, at least.”
Victoria gave her an odd look. “They didn’t. Laura refused to do it.”
“What?” Maggie said. The woman who thought they’d all be better off with implants? Had refused? When it would save a boy’s life?
She’d just been mentally decrying the court’s power to rewrite a person’s mind as a slide into dystopia, but now she found herself unreasonably angry in the other direction. Who was Dr. Chen, to give herself the power to decide who lived or died?
“It wrecked her,” Victoria said softly. Her eyes were on her art piece. “Not sleeping, not eating, every minute of every day obsessing about the decision. The prosecutors were trying to find some way to compel her, but she’d committed no crime. She just said she couldn’t operate on someone who hadn’t consented to it. But it tore her up inside; every night she almost broke and changed her mind. Until they found the boy’s body.”
Sensing there was more, Maggie waited, spellbound.
“That wasn’t the end for her. The family didn’t know who she was, but she watched footage of them obsessively, knowing she could have saved their son. Meanwhile, Track went to trial, and it was going against him hard. No one had any doubt he would be sentenced to death. Halfway through the trial, his lawyers switched to an insanity defense, and . . . it worked. He was condemned to a state facility and mandated to undergo whatever treatment they deemed necessary. By that time, DBS research had marched forward, and Laura was no longer the only one who could treat such a thing. So they ended up forcing it on him anyway.”
“Oh, God,” Maggie said. It was inadequate. “Did it take? I know it doesn’t end up working a hundred percent of the time.”
Victoria nodded. “It worked. They treated him. They fixed whatever . . . I’m not a docto
r, but—I don’t know. They were able to give him empathy, remorse . . .” She swallowed. “He wrote to Laura. He’s still incarcerated in a facility, probably forever. I don’t know the legal reasons, but I guess they don’t want to risk the thing malfunctioning or him tearing it out of his head. But he wrote to Laura, and the letter was—devastated. Like he was begging her, even though it was all already over and done. How could you do that to me. How could you let me be responsible for one more death . . . He says he would do anything to bring that boy back, to bring any of them back.”
“He was a different person, though,” Maggie said. She had to keep believing that. “Just because the new him would have consented—”
“No. It doesn’t work like that,” Victoria said, with adamant firmness. “You’re the same person after DBS as before. That’s why Laura wrecks herself so much about it. She says it’s like time travel—trying to know how people’s minds might change and what true consent is, because—we’re talking physiological illnesses here that have refusing treatment as a possible symptom of that illness. But you can’t say that either, because that’s saying sick people don’t get to make their own choices . . .”
It had never occurred to Maggie that Dr. Chen had spent more than a second of thought on any of those quandaries.
Victoria misinterpreted her expression and gave a little self-conscious laugh. “Sorry. This takes up a lot of brainspace for Laura. And me too, I guess.” Her eyes focused on a point far away. “She got to the point, after all this went down—she wanted to try to rewrite her grief. She said she couldn’t bear it, wanted to program it out of her head. I told her no, absolutely not, that she had to work through it the usual way. I’m not sure if I was right or not. What value does pain give us, really?”
Maggie thought about the last two years. She wouldn’t rewrite an instant of her pain, because it paired hand in hand with her love for Henry. She couldn’t decrease one without dulling the other. “It makes these things important,” she said to Victoria. “Some things shouldn’t be taken lightly. We need to know that.”