Science Fiction: The Best of 2001 Read online

  My newborn mind is vast, my neural net a majesty of convoluted dream. A million thoughts and questions swirl through it, but all pale before the single thought, the central one, of my existence. Who am I? Why am I here?

  Sheila Downey says I shouldn’t bother with such questions. They have no answers, none that are consistent, certainly none that can be proved. Life exists. It’s a fact—you could even say an accident—of nature. There’s no reason for it. It just is.

  But I’m no accident. I was put together for a purpose. Wasn’t I? Isn’t there a plan?

  —You’re here, she says. —Be satisfied.

  I should be, shouldn’t I? I would be, were I still a simple worm. But I’m not, and so I ask again that most human, it would seem, of questions. What’s the point? Why was I made?

  Sheila Downey doesn’t answer. For some reason she seems reluctant.

  At length she clears her throat. —Why do you think?

  I have a number of theories, which I’m happy to share. One, she wants to learn how the brain works. More specifically, she wants to learn about language, how words are put together, how they’re made and unmade, how they dance. Two, she wants to study how two dissimilar creatures live together, how they co-exist. Three (the least likely possibility but the closest to my heart), she wants to learn more about worms.

  —Very interesting, says Sheila Downey.

  —Which is it?

  —Oh, she says, —I’ll be looking at all of them.

  Which answers the question. Though somehow it doesn’t. What I mean is, I have the feeling she’s holding something back.

  Why, I wonder, would she do that? What is there to hide? I sense no danger here. And even if there were, what could such omnipotence as hers possibly have to fear?

  Today I fell in love. I didn’t know what love was until today. Before I had the word for it, I had no idea there was even such a thing as love. It’s possible there wasn’t.

  Sheila Downey is the object of my affection. Sheila Downey, my creator, who bathes my brain in nutrients, manipulates my genome, fixes my electrodes. Sheila Downey, so gentle, professional, and smart. What fingertips she has! What dextrous joints! She croons to me as she works, coos in what I think must be a dove-like voice. Sometimes she jokes that she is no more human than I am, that she is a chimera, too. I was born a pigeon, she says, laughing. But then she says, not really. I was born a clumsy ox, or might have been, the way I feel sometimes. Only lately have things fallen into place.

  —What things? I ask.

  —You, for one, she says.

  I swell with pride. (I also swell a bit with fluid, and Sheila Downey, ever vigilant, adjusts my osmolarity.)

  —You are a very brainy worm, she says. —It took a very brainy person to make you. And that person, along with a few significant others, was me.

  —I’m yours, I say quite literally.

  —Well, yes. I guess you are.

  —You care for me.

  —You know I do. Both day and night.

  —What I mean is, you care about me. Right?

  She seems surprised that I would question this. —Yes. In all sorts of ways.

  At this my heart turns over (although, strictly speaking, I do not have a heart; it’s my fluid, my oozy goo, that shifts and turns).

  —I need you, Sheila Downey.

  She laughs. —Of course you do.

  —Do you need me?

  —I suppose, she says. —You could look at it that way. You could say we need each other.

  —We do?

  —Like the star gazer needs the star, she says. —Like the singer, the song. Like that. Yes. We do.

  It was at this point that I fell in love. It was as if a ray of light had pierced a world of darkness. Or conversely, a hole of darkness had suddenly opened in a world composed solely of light. Prior to that moment, love simply did not exist.

  Sheila Downey was interested in this. She asked how I knew it was love.

  I replied that I knew it the same way I knew everything. The notion came to me. The letters made a word that seemed to more or less describe a chain of cortical and subcortical activity. Was I wrong?

  She replied that love might be a slight exaggeration. Gratitude and appreciation were probably closer to the truth. But the definitions weren’t important. Of more interest to her was my continued facility for concept formation and abstract thinking.

  —I’m impressed, she said.

  But now I was confused. I thought that definitions were important, that meanings and shades of meanings were the essence of communication. I thought that words made all the difference.

  —If this isn’t love, I told her, —then tell me what is.

  —I’m no expert, said Sheila Downey. —But in my limited experience, having a body is fairly important.

  —I do have a body.

  —Understood. But you lack certain essential characteristics. Essential, that is, for a human.

  —What? Eyes? Ears? Arms and legs?

  —All of those, she said.

  —But I can smell, I told her. —I can taste your chemicals.

  —I wear latex.

  —Latex?

  —Gloves, she clarified.

  In other words, it’s not her I’m tasting. So what, I say. So what that ours is not a physical attraction. I don’t need touch or smell or taste. The thought alone, the word, is sufficient. Having love in mind, saying it, believing it, makes it so.

  * * *

  When I was a worm, I acted like a worm. I thought like one. Now I think like a human, but I’m still a worm. How puzzling. What, I wonder, makes a human fully human? What exactly is a human I’d like to know.

  It’s more than a mammal with arms and legs and hair on its head, fingernails on its fingers, binocular vision, speech, and the like. What I mean is, it’s more than just a body, clearly more, for take away the limbs, take away the eyes and ears and voice, and still you have a human. Take away the gonads, replace the ovaries with hormones and the testicles with little plastic balls, replace the heart with metal and the arteries with dacron tubes, and still you have a human, perhaps even more so, concentrated in what’s left.

  Well then how about the brain? Is that what makes an animal uniquely human? And if it is, exactly how much brain is necessary? Enough for language? Fore-thought? Enough to get by day to day? Hour by hour? Minute by minute? Enough to tie a shoe? To cook a turkey? To chat with friends?

  And if a person loses brain to injury or disease, does he fall from the ranks of humanity? If he cannot speak or organize his thoughts, if he has no short or long-term memory, if he wets his pants and smears his feces, is he less a human? Something else perhaps? A new entity, whose only lasting link to humanity is the pity and discomfort he evokes?

  Well, what about the genome then, the touted human genome? Does that define a human? I don’t see how it can, not with genes routinely being added and subtracted, not with all the meddling that’s going on. Who’s to say a certain person’s not a product of engineering? Maybe he’s got a gene he didn’t have before, to make a substance he couldn’t make. And where’d he get that gene? Maybe from a fungus. Or a sheep. Maybe from a worm.

  You see my difficulty. It’s hard to know one’s place without knowing one’s species. If I’m a worm, so be it, but I’d rather be a human. Humans tread on worms (and nowadays they take apart their genes), not the other way around.

  Sheila Downey says I shouldn’t worry about such things. The distinctions that I’m grappling with, besides being of little practical value, are no longer germane. Taxonomy is an anachronism. In the face of bioengineering, the celebrated differentiation of the species is of historic interest only.

  She does, however, continue to be impressed by the level of my mentation. She encourages me to keep on thinking.

  This gets my goat. (My goat? What goat? I wonder.)

  —There is a goat, says Sheila Downey cryptically, —but that’s not what you meant.

  And then she says,
—You want to know what you are? I’ll tell you. You’re nineteen thousand ninety-nine genes of Caenorhabditis elegans and seventeen thousand forty-four genes of Homo sapiens. Taking into account the homologous sequences, you’re 61.8 percent worm and 38.2 percent human. That’s not approximate. It’s exact.

  Somehow this information doesn’t help.

  —That’s because it doesn’t matter what you call yourself, she says. —It doesn’t matter where you think you fit. That’s subjective, and subjectivity only leads to misunderstanding. What matters is what you are. You and you alone.

  Respectfully, I disagree. Alone is not a state of nature. What you are depends on who you’re with. Differences and distinctions matter. The ones who say they don’t are the ones who haven’t been trod upon. Or perhaps not trod upon enough.

  —Poor worm, she says. —Have you been abused? The world’s not just, I know.

  —Why not? Why isn’t it?

  She gives a harsh sort of laugh. —Why? Because our instinct for it isn’t strong enough. Maybe that’s something we should work on. What do you think? Should we fortify that instinct? Should we R & D the justice gene?

  By this point my head is spinning. I don’t know what to think.

  She says I shouldn’t tax myself. —Relax. Look on the bright side. This sense of indignation you’re feeling is a very human trait.

  —Really?

  —Oh yes. Very. That should make you happy.

  I’m ashamed to say it does.

  —Shame, too? How precocious of you. I’m impressed.

  She pauses, and her voice drops, as if to share something closer to the heart.

  —My sympathies, little worm.

  I have an inexplicable urge to mate, to wrap myself around another body, to taste its oozing salts and earthy humors, to feel the slimy freshness of its skin. I want to intertwine with it, to knot and curl and writhe. The urge is close to irresistible. I’m all atingle. It’s as if another elegans is nearby, calling me, wooing me, sirening me with its song.

  Sheila Downey assures me this is not the case. There is no other worm. It’s an hallucination, a delusion, triggered, she suspects, by an instinct to preserve my wormness through procreation, a reflex mechanism for perpetuation and survival of the species gone awry. She hypothesizes that I’m experiencing a rebound effect from my preoccupation with being human. That the pendulum, as it were, is swinging back. She finds it interesting, if not curious, that my worm identity remains so strong.

  —I expected it to be overshadowed, she says.

  The way I’m feeling I wish it were. Craving what I cannot have (what does not even exist) is tantamount, it seems, to craving death. This is strange and unfamiliar territory to a worm.

  —It’s as if your lower structures are refusing to be enlightened by your higher ones. As if your primitive brain, your elemental one, is rebelling.

  I apologize if this is how it seems. I do not mean to be rebellious. Perhaps the pH of my fluid needs adjustment. Perhaps I need some medicine to calm me down.

  —No, she says. —Let’s wait and see what happens.

  Wait? While I writhe and twitch and make a fool of myself? While I hunger for relief and moan?

  Of course we’ll wait. How silly of me to think otherwise. Science begins with observation, and Sheila Downey is a scientist. We’ll watch and wait together, all three of us, the woman who made me what I am, the worm that isn’t there, and me.

  On further thought (and thought is what I have, my daily exercise, my work, my play, my everything) I uncover a possible answer to my question. What makes a human different from all other animals is that she alone will cut another animal up for study, she alone will blithely take apart another creature for something other than a meal.

  Sheila Downey says I may be right, although again, she isn’t very interested in what she calls the field of idle speculation.

  But I, it seems, am interested in little else. —Is that why I was made? To be like that?

  She will not answer, except to turn the question back on me. —Is that how you want to be?

  The human in me, I have to admit, is curious. The worm, quite definitely, is not.

  —I’m of two minds, I reply.

  This comes as no surprise to her. —Of course you are. Does it seem strange?

  —Does what?

  —Having two minds, two consciousnesses, alive inside of you at once?

  It seems strange sometimes to have even one. But mostly, no, it doesn’t. On the contrary. Two consciousnesses is what I am. It’s how I’m made. It would seem strange if I were different.

  I wonder, then, if this is why I was made. To bring our species closer. To prove that two can work together as one.

  —A noble thought, says Sheila Downey.

  Now there’s a word that sends a shiver down my spineless spine. A noble thought to bring, perchance, a noble prize.

  —But not as noble as the truth, she adds portentously, then pauses.

  At length she continues. —I’ll tell you why we made you, she says. —Because that’s what we do. We humans. We make things. And then we study them, and then we make them over if we have to. We make them better. It’s why we’re here on Earth. If there is a why. To make things.

  —And this is being human?

  —It’s part of being human. The best part.

  —Then I must be human, Sheila Downey, because I want to make things, too.

  —Do you, worm? She sounds amused. Then she lapses into silence, and many moments pass before she speaks again. Her voice is different now: subdued, confessional.

  —You want to know why we made you?

  I remind her that she told me why. Just now. Has she forgotten?

  —No, she says. —The real reason. The truth.

  How many truths, I wonder, can there be?

  —Because we had the tools and technology. Because someone asked the question. Not, is this experiment worthwhile, is it beneficial? Not that question, but can we do it? That’s the real reason we made you. Because we could.

  She bears some guilt for this. I’m not sure why.

  —Is that detestable to you? she asks.

  I tell her no. I’m grateful that she made me. Humans making other humans seems the epitome of what a human is.

  —To some it is. Detestable, I mean. They say that just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. They say that science should be governed by a higher precept than simple curiosity.

  —And what do you say?

  —I say they don’t understand what science is. It’s human nature to be curious. There’s no purpose to it. There’s no reason. It’s a hunger of the brain, a tropism, like a plant turning to the sun, to light.

  Her mention of this tropism gives me pause. Traditionally, worms avoid the sun. It makes us easy prey. It dries us out. But now I feel slightly differently. I’d like a chance to see it. I’m curious about the light.

  Sheila Downey isn’t done with her defense of science. —It’s a force of nature. Morals simply don’t apply. It proceeds regardless of ethics, regardless of propriety and sometimes even decency. That’s what makes it ugly sometimes. That’s what makes it hurt.

  I assure her I’m not hurting.

  —Little worm, she says, with something sweet yet biting in her voice. —So self-absorbed. Progress never comes without a price. The boons of science always hurt.

  Basilisk, real or not? Not.

  Sphinx? Not.

  Minotaur? Forget it.

  Pan? A goat-man? No way.

  And all those centaurs and satyrs, those gorgons and gargoyles, mermaids and manticores—phonies, the whole lot of them.

  And while we’re at it, how about those cherubim? Fat-cheeked, plump little nuggets of joy hovering in the tintoretto air like flies—I mean, get real. They’d be scared to death up there. And those tiny little wings would never hold them up.

  I alone am real. Thirty-six thousand one hundred and forty-three genes and counting. The first an
d now the first again (Madam, I’m Adam). The Avatar. The Pride of Man. The Toast of Nature. The Freak.

  Sheila Downey says we’ve reached a crossroads. I can no longer be kept alive in my current state. My body, that is, cannot sustain my brain. We have a choice to make.

  A choice. How wonderful. I’ve never had a choice before.

  —One, we sever the connection between your body and your brain.

  —Sever?

  —Snip snip, she says. —Then we look at each of them more closely.

  —How close?

  —Very close, she says. —Layer by cortical layer. Cell by cell. Synapse by synapse.

  —You dissect me.

  —Yes. That’s right.

  —Will it hurt?

  —Has anything hurt yet?

  She has a point. Nothing has. And yet, for reasons I can’t explain, I seem to be hurting now.

  —You’re not, she says. —You can’t feel pain.

  —No? This sudden sense of doom I feel, this tremor of impending loss. . . these aren’t painful? They’re not a sign of suffering?

  She hesitates, as though uncertain what to say. As though she, like me, might be more than a single creature, with more than a single point of view. I wonder. Is it possible? Might she be suffering a little, too?

  She admits it’ll be a sacrifice. She’ll miss me.

  I’ll miss her, too. But more than anything, I’ll miss myself.

  —Silly worm. You won’t. You won’t remember. Your words and memories will all be gone.

  —And you? Will you be gone?

  —To you I will. And someday you’ll be gone to me, too. I’ll be gone to myself. Being gone is part of being here, it’s part of being human. Someday it won’t be, probably someday soon. But for now it is.

  This gives me strength, to know that Sheila Downey will also die. I wonder, will she be studied, too?

  —You mean dissected? She laughs. —I can’t imagine anyone being interested.

  —I would be.

  Another laugh, a warmer one. —Tit for tat, is it? My inquisitive little worm. If only you had hands and eyes to do the job.