by Bart Kosko
He wanted to see the red status numbers at the base of the egg stand. He could not make sense of the DNA codes and nutrient ratios but he mumbled them softly to himself for Jism to hear. He did see that the fetus was now 14 weeks old and had a fuzzy degree of life of 41% alive.
“Look at him,” John said. “He looks a third like you.”
“And a third just like you.”
“Yeah. But a third like whom? Sure hope you know what you’re doing with this gene search.”
“You’re just like all men,” Denise said as she kissed his neck and rubbed her firm breasts on his shoulder. “All you want with a girl is to propagate your genes. Your big white ego can’t give up that sixth of the genome for the child’s own sake.”
This was true and it cut John in some new place inside himself that he could not name. It was that place where Jism knew to stay out of. John still could not fit a wife and child into his view of his future or his view of himself and he did not want to part with that extra portion of his genes. Yet he longed for both Denise and the child. He felt the warmth grow in his loins and felt the first tingle on his back.
“But momma can,” John said. “She can give up anything for her little Barbie doll in a fish tank.”
Denise did not answer. Instead she drooped her head in a half pout. John leaned in and kissed her on the cheek.
“Sweet Denise. What’s the gene search done for our little precious today?”
Denise pulled away to boot the egg computer with her right palm print. The black console beneath the egg displayed adaptive genome in gold.
“50-50 gene mix,” Denise said softly to the voice sensors in the egg stand.
A blue sheet appeared in 3-D perspective.
John knew that the blue sheet stood for genome space compressed down from its billions of dimensions to just the two of length and width. He had given the device his blood and spit and urine and had told it his medical history.
Each point on the blue sheet defined one genome or unique set of human genes. It stood for a list of over four billion base pairs of nucleic acid. These base pairs defined the person’s DNA blueprint. A bright red dot named Denise appeared close to a bright blue dot named John. A black line formed from the red dot to the blue dot. A bright purple dot formed at the midpoint of the line. That meant the system had finished its many teraflops of computations.
“Face at age 30,” Denise said. “50-50 gene mix.”
The smiling face of a young man appeared on the console. He had dark hair and John’s hawk nose and her soft Asian eyes and cheekbones and lips. The computer had run millions of Monte Carlo simulations to compute this statistical average of the parents’ genomes.
“Hi folks,” the face said.
John felt again the strange mix of joy and fear.
“He sounds just like you,” Denise said.
She hugged John. Then she again palmed the console. The face popped off and the console screen went black.
“We can still stay with the 50-50 mix if you want.”
“No. We agreed to this. Let’s see what science has done for us.”
“Gene search to date,” Denise said to the console. “Mix in thirds.”
The blue plane popped back on with the red and blue dots and the purple dot between them. This time a line did not connect the red and blue dots. The purple dot moved slowly at random out from the midpoint of the red and blue dots. Then a new green dot appeared in the center of the other three dots.
The green dot stood for the child’s new gene mix. The gene search had perturbed the parent midpoint in its search for a DNA blueprint with higher IQ and a better and more fluid mix of nerves and muscles.
The green dot slowly moved outward as the purple dot moved outward and came to a stop. The search system had optimized some measure of the purple genome’s health and IQ. The system had constrained the result to stay near the parent dots in genome space. So each parent still had a third of his or her genes in common with the new gene set. Denise and John had also given the system a set of 25 body features that picked out preferred directions in the genome space.
“Face at age 30,” Denise said.
A new face popped on the screen. It looked much like the first face but had larger eyes and forehead and thinner lips.
“Dad,” the face said. “What is my name?”
“Jesus,” John said.
“Oh. I like that name.”
John. Relax. This means a great deal to Denise.
Denise palmed the console once more and the console screen returned to black.
“What do you think?” she said. “I know it shook you a little. Shall we keep him?”
John looked her in the eyes and held her shoulders but did not answer. He did not want Jism to feed him the answer either. He knew Jism sensed that.
He did his best to think of her now as his fiancée and not as his financier.
“You know,” she said. “It’s still legal to abort him. He’s only 41% alive.”
Answer with care. Pause and think.
“Get rid of the flowers,” he said and kissed her.
“Wall: Paint. New van Gogh and Picasso.”
The red and purple flowers popped off the three walls of the room. Classic van Gogh paintings popped on and off in large squares on two walls. Classic Picasso paintings did the same on the third wall behind John.
Then the paintings changed.
Van Gogh’s Starry Night swirled into a cosmic spacescape of galaxies that spiraled out while massive black holes at their centers ate them from within. Picasso’s flat horse and dog shapes turned to alien faces and starships and cubic planets. Soon all three walls crawled with hybrids of the two masters and with new paintings in their styles. John wondered if the old gold miner would see it all as magic.
“Wall,” John said. “Add some Dali and Escher. And some music.”
“That won’t work. I trained the walls to my voice. You know that.”
“Last time you were still watching the manual disks.”
“I’ve come a long way since then. Watch. Wall: Paint. Add Dali and Escher. Wall: Compose. Variations on your Beethoven’s 51st Symphony.”
The walls changed to the seething surreal landscapes of Dali and the fractal symmetries of Escher. Loud orchestral chords in G Major came from the walls. The complete works of Beethoven had trained and seeded the system’s neural autocomposer. The G Major chords sounded like the E-flat Major chords from the start of the Eroica Symphony. Yet they had their own feel to them that John recognized but did not like.
Denise pulled back from John to open a chrome drawer. She pulled out a thin tube of pink sponge and held it under John’s nose as he helped her green silk robe fall to the floor. The stick gave off the sweet smell of bubble gum.
Denise held an outlawed pea stick.
John’s eyes watered as he sniffed the sweet outlawed pheromone compound based on phenylethylamine or PEA. He felt the “pea brain” further charge his sex and adrenal hormones and further fire the erotic visions in his mind’s eye. He and Denise did not need the sex booster but it would sharpen their feelings and lessen the time between bouts. Liberals and Greens had outlawed the pea compound as a cause of date rape.
“No no no,” John said. “Not Beethoven. Give me something with balls in it. Something like Wagner. And not that damned ‘Ride of the Valkyries.’ ”
“Okay. Wall: Compose. Wagner but no preludes or overtures.”
Denise turned back from the wall. She stood naked as she faced him.
“John?” she said as she sniffed the pea stick. “Sure you don’t want to talk about that new United Nations tax on my futures trades? You love to talk about taxes.”
John pulled off his sweat-stained black T-shirt and felt the full rush of the pea brain. The wall music began as “Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla” and grew on its own from there to something grand and orchestral with string tremolos and harp glissandos.
“Fuck the UN and fuck me,” he sa
id.
The two fell to the sleek black floor in an animal frenzy of sex.
The wall art changed faster now. The wall figures grew and shrank and merged and split. The music grew louder and faster and more contrapuntal. It drifted further from its Wagner seed music into complex patterns of orchestration that would have taken a human days to write out on 40-line score sheets.
John had not slept with Denise for over two weeks. So he found his frenzy coming to a quick end. He clutched her in Darwin’s rhythm and soon saw the white flash of orgasm in his mind’s eye and felt the hot contractions of his nerves and muscles.
John’s frenzy ended with him behind Denise and his right hand pulling her twisted long black hair. But John and his pea brain were not yet spent. His climax had been too hot and too strong to fade so fast and Denise had still not reached her climax.
John looked down at the smooth arc and ribs of her back. The music grew with her mounting frenzy. He saw out of the corners of his eyes the more complex patterns of colors on the walls while he watched her supple spine writhe up and down. She flexed her vaginal muscles and her small fine white ass cheeks faster and faster and kept him hard despite himself. She moaned more and shook her head so fast from side to side that it seemed to vibrate on her neck.
Her orgasm came in a taut shimmering spasm.
Denise clenched her cheeks and all her muscles one last time and held it like the last breath of someone drowning. Her moan passed into a soft scream and then died off in a broken laugh.
The music and walls still tracked Denise’s mood but they did not slow after her climax. Her clenched cheeks and vaginal muscles still held his hardness and now it almost hurt. Still John felt the calm roll over him and felt the clearness of mind that always came after sex.
He thought of Jism watching him. Or at least listening to him.
John looked past Denise’s fine ribbed back to his raisin lying on the floor. He felt truly naked without Jism in his ear. It had fallen out in the frenzy. The wild music and swirling colors irritated him and he wished it would soften or stop. His hardness withered.
Denise did not see John grab the small brown device. She also did not see him pause when he pushed the raisin into his left ear and then stared in shock at her scalp.
John thought he saw pink worms on her scalp.
“Jism.”
Yes?
“What about jism?” Denise said with a laugh.
John pulled the twist of her coarse black hair to the side. Denise moaned and he got a good look at the thin pink scars and tiny stitches that ran across the back of her head. The raisin could sense John’s adrenal flash.
“Jism! Christ! Look at these fucking brain scars!”
“What do you think of them?” a voice said that began as Denise’s and ended as a man’s.
John jumped up and grabbed for his pants.
“Wall: Allahu Akhbar!”
A placid face appeared on large squares of all three walls. John recalled the face from the cave video that Jism had played for him a few hours before. The face was that of his neural math idol.
It was Hamid Tabriz.
The music turned into the wild Arabic music from Tabriz’s cave in the Qareh Dahg Mountains. The driving music further confused him.
Denise’s naked body jumped to its feet.
“Let us be friends,” Denise/Tabriz said in unison with the wall images of Tabriz.
John. The Jeep. Run to the Jeep.
Then the small lithe body of Denise leaped across the room. It spun and backfisted John in the mouth. The blow split the side of his lower lip and loosened a tooth. It almost knocked him over backward. Denise grabbed John by the neck and the two fell back against the black console and egg shelf.
Denise yanked the egg free of its mount and raised it above her head to throw. Blood nutrient sap poured from a trailing hose.
Blind her if you can.
John dove at her instead. He drove his head into her stomach as she tried to crush his skull with the egg. She missed and fell over backward.
The egg bounced once on the floor and dribbled more blood and sap from the ripped clear plastic cord. The wide end of the eggshell cracked on the second bounce. Then it broke on the hard pine floor and spilled its bloody contents. The pseudodiamond casing itself did not break.
John’s tiny son thrashed his small wet hands and feet for only a moment and then he lay still.
John’s lunge had made Denise fall backward against the edge of the egg shelf. The back of her head cracked in pieces along the pink scar lines. Chunks of black sponge spilled out and bounced twice on the floor. Denise’s eyes crossed and rolled like a lizard’s in separate directions.
The wall images of Tabriz spun off into wild fractal curves of all colors. Millions of colored dots blinked on and off in waves of color. The music screeched into fast parallel lines of atonal dissonance.
“There’s no blood!” John said to Jism.
Reach in and shut her down. Quickly.
John tried to reach and grab the split head but he froze.
He saw Denise lying wounded. He looked away and saw his son nearby in a puddle of red and yellow sap. John turned back and knew this was no longer Denise but still he could not bring himself to defile her ruptured skull. She was not his enemy and she needed help.
Denise/Tabriz did not agree.
The young girl snapped forward and backfisted him twice more in the face and chest.
The wall art slowed and mixed with flashes of Tabriz’s calm white face. The music calmed somewhat too and returned more and more to the pulsing Arab cave music. Denise’s eyes fell into synch and turned hard to look at John as she kicked him in the stomach.
John. Shut her down. Now!
He knew Jism was right and must have patched into Denise’s computer system and watched the struggle from the room sensors. Jism might even have made contact with the Tabriz system.
John saw in a flash that in the next instant Tabriz would fully self-organize and take control and kill him. The head blow had only stunned the Tabriz system.
There was a price for living and he would now have to pay it.
Denise tried to bite his hand as he punched her in the left temple. The blow knocked out more of the black foam. Then John reached around into her cracked head and tore through the foam and heard the music scream in a whistling roar.
Then his fingers found it and he yanked out the small golden nanochip.
In that instant Denise froze and the walls went black and silent.
Chapter 14
Highway I-10
Southern California
“Jism. He’s going to pull me over for murder.”
Please relax. The officer sensed us with only standard police radar as he did all the other cars in a 40-yard radius. We can infer at most that the central police computer in Los Angeles has now run our data and recent travel history and has found no reason for the officer to stop us.
John let Jism drive the Jeep through the stop-and-go traffic on the new 10 freeway that still ran from Florida to Santa Monica. The Jeep would take half an hour to reach Richard Cheng in the inner city.
“Jism. I’m worried about leaving the fetus. Little Stuart. I loved my son. You know that. I didn’t want to leave him there.”
John. There was nothing you could do. He died before the fight ended. Just try to relax.
“I am trying. Did you ever kill anyone? You’d be paranoid too.”
No doubt I would be. Yet the evidence suggests that Dr. Tabriz or his followers killed Denise well before we arrived at her cabin in Wrightwood.
John tried not to think about how she died but he could not push the thoughts from his mind. He still saw Denise with her skull cracked open. He saw her naked body thrashing in the chaos of random neuromuscular contractions.
Did Tabriz kill her quickly? That would have risked some injury to her body or scalp. Did he cut out her brain in one stroke? Or did he cut it out slowly with some sick new
technique he had devised? There was no way to tell from that last image of her on the floor. It all left open the real question: What did she feel at the end? How horrible was it to lose your brain and see at least some of it happen?
The Jism image appeared on the windshield but did not smile.
“But why?” John said. “Why?”
Of course he must view you as a threat. He went to such great lengths to deceive you.
“You mean he went to such great lengths to kill me.”
We don’t know that Dr. Tabriz wished to kill you. He could have killed you when you entered the cabin. He certainly could have killed you before you two engaged in sex on the floor.
“Hey. I had sex with her. Not him.”
I should think we can safely say you had sex with both persons if the term person has any meaning beyond the flesh. The point is that the Denise automaton—
“Jism. Don’t call her an automaton. We’re all one of those if you look at it in terms of differential equations. We’re all made of meat and we do just what the equations of physics say we will do and no more. Christ. You know that. What the hell are you? There is no Markov process in nature. No future is free of the past. Look. I’m guilty of a lot of things but I have never violated the law of conservation of energy! I should take some kind of pill to calm down. No. Denise was a chiphead. She literally had a chip for a brain! How can they do that?”
Very well. Denise was a chiphead. The point is that the Denise chiphead displayed no aggression toward you. Indeed it behaved in such a way as to suggest that it would never have harmed you if you had not found the scars on the back of its head.
“Are you saying I caused this? Tabriz attacked me! Look at this lip. It burns every time I talk. Why would he want to deceive me?”
Surely it relates to your Black Sun patent or your contract with the Israeli government or perhaps both.
“So you think it’s about hydrogen?”
In any case it seems to relate to oil. The terrorists attacked the Dhahran oil fields. That led to the expected outcome of a Saudi tit-for-tat strike against Israel. Then terrorists dissolved the oil tanker Hombre.
“No tie to Israel there,” John said.