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New technologies create new moral dilemmas—but not simple ones.
I clicked the Promote Target icon on my desk and claimed another minor victory. “Just one more to go,” I said out loud, “and it’s vacation time!”
“What is it?” came the voice of Kaitlin from over the short cubical wall.
“Some kind of squirrel monkey,” I said, noting the genetic ancestry.
“I thought that was already a real animal.”
“This hybrid is different. Kinda cute. Wanna see?”
“Nah. Too busy.”
Me too. My job was to discover something by accident, and I had a quota to meet.
A lot of scientific discoveries are made by accident, like say, penicillin, or matches. The polite term is serendipity, but when you’re in the business, you understand that it’s half desperation and half luck. Sometimes you learn more from the botched experiments.
Our training video had an old black-and-white skit where Don Knotts was dressed up like a nutty professor. He kept stumbling around, knocking over test tubes racks and spilling chemicals all over the place. An interviewer asked what he was doing.
“I’m trying to discover something by accident!” he squeaked.
“Class D Serendipity,” a superimposed title noted, until the klutz tripped over that too.
We refined discovering things by accident to an art. Genie, our supercomputer, generated billions of genetic combinations, including the human genome, other organisms, and primordial mixtures of everything. The output was fed to a subsystem, the simulator, which would “grow” an organism to spec, and try to determine whether it was likely to have congenital problems that were “incompatible with life.”
The simulator was licensed to kill. The more they improved it, the more potential life forms it eradicated. The beauty of it was, when a test subject failed, no one cared or even noticed. It was just data. Of course, Genie lacked the ability to make final judgments, which is why they had openings for real people. They loved med-school dropouts—kinda smart, kinda cheap—which is how they found me. Because of my hands, my parents thought I would make a good surgeon, but during my first visit to an ER, I discovered by (car) accident that the sight of blood made me faint. I was a good fit here at Good Fortune Genetic Design.
I only needed one more target, and I’d get two weeks off, so I went back to work, not caring how dubious the targets in my queue were. I’d promote the first decent one and get my butt out of there. I’d already discovered four virtual species of potential interest. No cures for diseases like my pollutant-associated mutation syndrome (PAMS), no missing link, or Bigfoot. But my teddy panda had promising marketing potential, my frog-hog’s skin had useful properties for burn victims, and I have no idea what they might do with this squirrel monkey thing.
My call light came on, and the bell trilled my favorite guitar riff from “Love Slave.” I jumped a bit, thinking that someone had already returned my promoted target, rejecting it. Then I saw the ID. It was a lady who used to work on our floor.
“Tina Peshj?” I said out loud. She never spoke to anyone while she was here, much less me. Why a call now?
“That cow is calling you?” That was Kaitlin, in the next cube.
I laughed at that. The other women said that Tina had an udder on the back of her neck. I think it was really just a clump of huge skin tags, but it did look rather like an udder. That’s not why people called her names though. She was a bitch, and rumor had it that she had slept her way to a “comfy position” up in Special Projects. Who would actually sleep with that “cow” was beyond me—and I was pretty desperate myself.
“Yeah, it’s Tina. Want to come check it out?” Any excuse to get Kaitlin to pay attention to me.
“I’ll pass,” she said. I was tired of hearing that. “Aren’t you going to answer her?”
“Not for a five-dollar nickel.”
I freely admit to being an asshole. I’m very loyal when it comes to friends, though I haven’t many of those.
Tina’s message asked me to come up to her office to see an unusual target she’d come across. I told Kaitlin that Tina just needed some help because she didn’t understand how Genie worked, and I headed for the elevator. In fact, I was intrigued, partly because it was Tina and partly because I’d never been to Special Projects before.
Tina had actually asked me out once, when I first joined the company. I refused. I was queasy that way. It bothered me when she turned her head too quickly, because her blond hair would flip aside, and I’d see the thing on the back of her neck. She wasn’t all that hideous when her hair stayed in place, though. I might have actually gone out with her, but by then, I’d heard of her reputation as the company whore.
I found her office on the fourth floor. Not where the bigwigs were, but definitely a step up from our prairie dog village. Here the halls had long lights that reflected off the ceiling and nice textured wallpaper that had a pattern of endless double helixes. Tina had a real office with a door and a window that overlooked the half-empty parking lot. I entered quietly, and Tina did not turn to see me right away. Her hair covered her neck. From that limited view, she looked like any other girl, and I wondered why she hadn’t had that growth removed a long time ago.
“Hello,” I said.
She turned. She wore jeans and a black T-shirt with a Led Ventrickle logo on it. No makeup. The only thing she had fussed over was her hair, for obvious reasons.
“I requested an image,” she said, looking me over a bit, I think. “It ought to be finished any time now.”
Sometimes a creature would be so strange you’d want to render a detailed image. Some of them were just wrong. So messed up, like the human gastropods. Or the saber-toothed rectal worms. But most of the time, they were hilarious. We’d all gather in someone’s cube and laugh our heads off at the pictures. After a while, even the sick ones were kind of funny. We gave them stupid names, and then we’d get serious, and try to find something useful.
I looked her SmartDesk over, trying to figure it out. Everyone’s is configured differently, but hers was pretty jacked. It was completely level, not inclined at all. You had to lean over it to see past the glare from the window. Then, instead of stacks of windows tiled up everywhere, there were only two windows open, plus her touchpad and tele. One window was her work queue—a single target—and the other was a folder labeled “Next Week,” closed, with a virtual gargoyle paperweight on it. With so little, her monitor might as well have been an old upright.
“What have you got?” I said.
She dragged the target to flip it over, and the image appeared. I leaned over. It looked just as I thought it would, based on the data: Target 9381093—humanoid, hunchback, “slimb” (supernumerary limbs, non-Hedgehog protein) et cetera. The thing had two extra arms extending from a half-formed second collarbone on the chest.
What do you know, a four-armed freak. Just like me.
No, sorry. A natural-born surgeon, that’s what I was supposed to have become. Well, I had the hands for it all right, but not the stomach.
At first I thought it was a joke, but none of my friends were smart enough to pull off a hack like that. I flexed my twenty fingers and stared at the familiar four-armed image. The face was not rendered, but mine reflected faintly on the desk.
“What do you think?” she said.
“It looks like me.”
“Scary, huh?”
“What the hell is this thing?” I said. “I mean, why would it pop up like this?”
“I really don’t know,” she said, wrinkling her eyebrows in puzzlement. Then she looked at me—at my arms—awkward as it was. “Listen,” she said, “why don’t we go out and take a long lunch? We can talk it over.”
“Well, okay,” I said. “But first, I’ve got another idea. Let’s go ask Swami.”
Upstairs there was this guy, Ben Lebinsky, who everyone called Swami. Wheelchair bound, smart, independently wealthy—we all wondered why he bothered to work. Usually no one talked to him because he could be a real SOB, and you never could tell what he was thinking. But sometimes people are misunderstood, and I once had a good conversation with him about botany, of all things.
Swami was in his office, which, like Tina’s, had real walls and a door. The door was open, and Swami had his back to us. He was staring at his desk. On his window shelf were several bonsai trees, and a huge picture of a strange tree hung on his wall. It didn’t look like a real tree, but some kind of fantasy thing. A caption said, in a green vinelike font, “The Healing of the Nations.” There were other posters, too, done in throwback style. One had a gray Star of David made of heavy chain links on a black backdrop, with the cryptic title “80,000 Careless Ethiopians” in red. The Jewish symbol and obscure African reference made a curious combination. Another depicted a musical score, but when you looked close, the music was made of tiny DNA strands. You see a lot of DNA motifs around here, but otherwise Swami was a unique character.
“Hey, Swami. I’m Jimmy Tanner. This is Tina Peshj.”
He turned his chair halfway around, apparently unable to move his neck much. As soon as I saw him from the front, I remembered that he had cerebral palsy. He sat in his chair, head cocked, arms bent oddly, making me self-conscious of my own extra arms. He was about thirty, and had long, stringy black hair.
“Hey guys,” he said. His head bobbed a little when he talked, and he seemed friendly enough. “One Tree. What can I do you for?”
“Tina came across a weird target today, and we thought we’d see what you made of it.”
“Genie moves in mysterious ways,” he said. I knew he was brilliant, but I didn’t know why he pretended to be so superficial. “What ’cha got?”
We hadn’t brought an ID for him to look up, but described the six-limbed target.
“You found Spider-Man,” he said, sounding very serious. Then he chuckled and lifted a bent wrist in my direction. “Your cousin!”
“It seems like a pretty big coincidence,” I said.
“There’s a difference between irony and coincidence,” he said with an air of condescension.
“Whatever.”
“Maybe someone wanted Tina to come to you.”
He tried to be friendly again, but I didn’t buy it. A smile faded. “So,” he said, “what are you going to do? Are you going to pass that target to the next round?”
“I don’t know,” said Tina, looking at me with uncertainty.
“Why would anyone go to the trouble of forging a target, just to get me and Tina together?” I said.
Tina scrunched her face in disgust, and Swami put an upright finger over taut lips. “I don’t know,” he said, turning to Tina.
“Don’t look at me!” she said.
Her face was getting red, so I decided to change the subject. Not that I don’t like seeing people squirm, but in her case, I’d rather see it in private. “So what’s with the trees?” I said.
Swami smiled genuinely this time. “I just love trees,” he said. “Did you know they have their own missing link?”
“No . . .” Sorry I asked.
“Man descended from some early form, and there are missing pieces to the puzzle. If you think about it, the same is true for trees. They didn’t just start out tall like that. They had to compete for sunlight with other plants, and different ones grew taller and taller. Still, the species are more similar than different, losing their leaves at the same time and all that, so there must have been common ancestors to modern trees. Maybe only one ancestor. The One Tree.”
I studied the tree mural on his wall again. It was a computer-generated image. The trunk was not straight but curvy, and the branches made it look like a bonsai—artistic, with oversized leaves. The leaves had wide, pointed fingers, with serrated edges.
Swami saw me studying it. “I’ll leave it as an exercise for the student to figure out the species of The One Tree.”
“I think I get it,” I said. “You’re rich, but you work here because of your interest in botany. You are using Genie to help you find your missing link, aren’t you?”
He smiled and nodded in approval. “You’re on the right river. Let’s leave it at that.”
Tina swung her arm back and forth at her side. “Okay. Thanks anyway.”
I took Tina to lunch. That was the first date I’d had since starting the job and only my third since dropping out of med school. I actually hadn’t dated that much during college either, partly because I was too busy and partly because my mom never liked any of the girls I dated. There were two reasons they went out with me, she said. Either they did it out of pity for me, or else they were deformed themselves.
“It’s nice to have high standards,” I once complained to her, “but what the hell do you expect? I have four flipping arms, for God’s sake.”
“They’ll make a nice girl very comfortable some day,” she said.
That’s a mother for you—definitely not of this world. My dad was the opposite. He once advised me not to get married, but to always try to have affairs with married women. The theory was that if they were already married, they wouldn’t demand a commitment. Up to then, I thought my parents had been a happy couple, but I guess they were just stuck with each other.
“Your mother and I were raised to be happy and independent,” Dad explained. “Not values conducive to marriage, when you put them together. Thousands of years of family values and silly love songs, undone by one generation who thought it knew better!”
I felt really sorry for him, but he punched my shoulder and winked at me.
“Thank God,” he said with a chuckle.
Lunch with Tina was okay. We took the rail to a place on the other side of town that neither of us had been to. It was a New York-style Italian deli, and the obviously Italian New Yorker that ran the place was constantly yelling at all the obviously non-Italian immigrants that were carrying on his family legacy for him. No table service, so we had to wait at the counter while they fixed our orders. I had a pepperoni roll smothered in sauce, and Tina had a dish of some kind of pasta casserole. We went to sit by a mural where the Tower of Pisa threatened to collapse onto our lunch.
I hadn’t expected romance; neither of us are that type. That’s for perfect couples, of which there aren’t any. Some myths have outlived their usefulness. I did have the feeling that she was checking me out, though. She confirmed it by mentioning my arms.
“Why don’t you have them removed?” she said, locking her eyes to mine.
I forced a little laugh. “You’re a blunt instrument, aren’t you?”
“I wasn’t born a bitch,” she recited. “It’s men like you that made me one.”
That made me laugh for real. She smirked with satisfaction.
“Well?” she said. “Don’t the arms get in the way? I can’t imagine they were any fun to grow up with, and I should know.”
“Kids used to pick on me. Seriously, the first time I asked a girl out, I wore shin guards, in case she tried to kick me.”
Tina laughed. “I’m still wearing my shin guards. Not literally, but you know what I mean.”
I did. My shin guards had become the cynical façade I put on every day. But the kicking still hurt.
“My parents said my arms were a gift,” I said. “You know, like I was deformed for a reason.”
Tina laughed out loud. “Gawd! How stupid can people be?”
“I know. A gift, right. My mom thought that with four arms, I would be a brilliant surgeon. How she thought a pair of useless claws could perform surgery is beyond me.”
Her eyes had a twinkle in them. “Well, couldn’t they hold the clamps or something?”
“That’s exactly the sort of thing she used to say. It was ridiculous.”
“Are your parents still around?”
“They both flipped off a couple years ago.”
She didn’t say she was sorry to hear that, because she wasn’t. There’s nothing more sickening than fake emotions. “So now you can get rid of the arms.”
“Oh. I don’t know. I’m just used to them, I guess.” She had a point though, getting me thinking that I sure didn’t need to keep the damned arms just for my parent’s sake. “Why don’t you get your growth removed?”
I tried to lock her eyes, they way she had done to me, but this time she looked at the floor. “I’m afraid to.”
“Why?”
“I don’t really know. My parents were, so I am too.”
“Do you think they had a good reason to be scared?”
“I think my parents thought something bad would happen to me, like I’d lose my strength. Maybe there’s a hormone secreted.”
I made the shape of a letter omega, my hand approaching one ear, arcing over my head, and out the other ear. She’d gone over my head.
“You know, like Samson,” she said.
“Samson. Wasn’t he some old super hero?”
“Yeah. When his main squeeze cut off his hair, he lost his strength.”
“So you really don’t know why you shouldn’t cut it off,” I said as I got up to dump our lunch trash.
“No.”
“Then why don’t you?”
“That’s a dumb question,” she said. “Just who would take care of me if something went wrong?”
“You have friends, don’t you?”
“If only. Do you know how hard it is to take care of someone when their health is really, really bad? I don’t have those kinds of friends.”
“Well, maybe there’s nothing that’s going to really happen.”
She looked at me with disdain. “Well, maybe there is. What’s with you anyway?”
“Why don’t you ask your parents?”
“Why don’t you leave me alone? No one has heard of my mom in years, and my dad’s in jail.” She pushed the table away enough to fold her arms in defiance.
“Perfect,” I said, not letting her get away with that. “So we’ll start with your father.”
“You’re such a jackass,” she said, failing to suppress a smile.
“No comment.”
“None taken.” This girl was good.
“I’ll pick you up Saturday morning,” I said.
Prisons haven’t changed much since those old black-and-white movies. The prisoners are still low-lifes, the walls are still bare and smell of painted cement, and the wardens are still ugly people, most of them. Tina’s dad was in that kind of place, not one of those white-collar suites. He had been caught hacking a government system, she told me on the way there. It wasn’t a habit of his to break the law, but when you do something innocuous in the wrong place, it can be a federal offense. Like saying the word “hijack” too loud on a passenger jet. Her dad, Tyler, got himself fifteen years for peeking at the personnel folder of his boss at Homeland Security. That was the story, anyway.
We were scanned and taken to a visiting room. Tina was very anxious. She kept fixing her hair. I couldn’t tell whether she was excited or disgusted to see her father. She hadn’t told me so, but I could tell there was something more than his conviction between them. Tina sat in a hard plastic chair with metal legs, along a wall with a thick Plexiglas window, like banks had. The hole to talk through was made with clear baffles, so you couldn’t make contact or pass anything through. I stood behind her.
Presently, her uniformed father was escorted to the other side. Tyler Peshj was a man of average build, with greasy brown hair that was combed to an artificial perfection. He looked to be about fifty, but had a worn expression that was littered with the scars of acne. When he saw Tina he perked up. The escorts let go of his shoulders and departed through a back door.
Tina had completely dropped her bitch persona and was trying not to sob. “Daddy,” she said.
“Christine. It sure is good to see you.”
To avoid further sentiments, she quickly introduced me as “just a friend.” Then they didn’t say much to each other for a while. It was more like they were caressing each other with words. Nothing mushy at all, but it was the way they spoke, the way they looked at each other.
Tina looked uncomfortable, and she said, “Jimmy has a computer question for you.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, surprised at my politeness. I must have been trying to put some structure to my own discomfort. “We work for Good Fortune, as you probably know, and I was wondering whether it would be possible to hack into the computers.” I outlined the situation of the four-armed target, and trailed off, not knowing how much detail Tina’s dad needed.
“Not a problem,” he said without a thought. “Might take time, is all.”
“Okay.” I hadn’t prepared anything after that, and his answer was too easy.
Tina wanted me to keep talking, and she was still fiddling with her hair. Tyler looked at her, pretty much ignoring me. “Why did you come here, honey?” he said.
“Daddy,” she said, faltering. “It’s just that I was thinking of having this removed.” She breezed a hand halfway to her neck. He knew what she meant.
“I’m surprised you haven’t done that long ago.”
“Really? That’s funny, because I remember that Mom was really scared to do it. I always assumed that there was a good reason for that.”
“Of course there was a good reason. Your mother was an idiot.”
“Where is she now? Do you know?”
“Not a clue, kiddo. If I were you, I’d stay away from that woman. Then again, I wouldn’t blame you for looking her up. If you do, don’t tell her where I am, okay? I got nowhere to hide.”
They talked a little more, and Tyler tried to be polite and ask me a few questions. He obviously thought Tina was bringing her man to meet her father, even though we both denied it. I couldn’t tell whether he was happy or indifferent about the idea.
Time was up and the escorts returned. Tyler looked hard at his daughter. “I have one last question for you,” he said. “Can you promise to tell me the truth?”
She made a fake smile and then sneered. “I love you too much to lie to you, Daddy.”
“Oh, then this will sound silly,” he said, mimicking her sarcasm. “Do you hate me?”
“Of course I do.”
Then something very strange happened. Tina must have blushed, I thought, because her cheeks became really red. Tyler sat up in his chair and drew close to look at her face. She realized something had happened and turned away from him. Then I saw it.
Her cheeks each had a bright red heart tattooed on them. It took me a minute to figure out what it was: mood makeup. She never wore makeup that I’d noticed before, but there was no mistaking this. Mood makeup is some gunk that reacts to your skin temperature, or electrical resistance or some jack like that. It changes color depending on your mood.
She was so embarrassed that her chair fell over as she got up. She gave me a shove toward the door, the metal chair legs clattering loudly on the floor.
“Come on!” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
I shrugged with my hands to Tyler, who just sat there perplexed. “Aren’t you going to say good-bye?” I said to her.
“Good-bye, Daddy,” she called, holding her hair in place. She didn’t turn back.
We stopped at the bank to make a withdrawal on the way to the clinic. While waiting in the car at the drive-through, I learned that the rumors about Tina being the company whore were all lies. She hadn’t slept with anyone. I believed her; guys spread those kind of stories when there is a girl that they think somehow threatens their sexuality. They do it when someone is so hot that they all want her, but can’t have her. And they do it when someone is so unsavory that they’re embarrassed to admit that, yes, there are females out there that even their super-libidos must reject. So they spread lies, to create the illusion of legitimacy to their rejection. I figured that one out from being rejected so often.
People buy into it, too, even other women. I’d heard Kaitlin call Tina a cow, for example. That was her way of fencing off the livestock from “real” women, so that guys could more easily tell which side she was on.
It was hard to find the clinic because it wasn’t on any of the computer maps. Those places that are “guaranteed 100% sterile” don’t usually want to be listed. After missing several turns, we found it—a dubious establishment in the low-rent part of town.
Before I was born, the spiraling costs of health care nearly bankrupted the country. They had a big depression. People tried to socialize health care, but couldn’t quite pull it off politically, so for over twenty years, we’ve had a hybrid system that doesn’t work at all. You can’t get good care in the government facilities unless you’re uninsured, and you can’t get good care in the private sector unless you’re rich. Of course, insurance was one of the causes of the problem in the first place.
Another cause was pollution. A lot of kids were born with defects, like Tina and myself. After a few business, were flipped off by lawsuits, a law was passed that basically let the others off. Too many would be put out of business, which would throw things deeper into economic ruin. They were still working on it, but at the time, a lot of middle-class people went to unlicensed clinics.
The people we met were just in it for the money, and since the job didn’t pay them well, they had pretty poor service. I could tell by the way they treated Tina that they didn’t believe in what they were doing anyway.
I waited for over an hour, until a semi-professional nurse brought Tina out of the operating room. Tina had a white towel wrapped around her head, held in place with a pink Velcro strap. It looked like she’d just come out of the shower, and I didn’t see any blood at all. This nurse, a black lady with an African or island accent and a badly repaired harelip, was the one person who seemed to care about Tina. She gave us painkiller and antibiotics, instructions for care, checked one last time for bleeding, and saw us to my car.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“If only you cared.”
“Of course I care. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here, would I?”
She gave me a strange, pained look.
“Does it hurt?”
“The muscles in my neck are sore.” Tina exhaled a big breath, as if she’d been holding it all these years. “Wow,” she said. “I can’t believe I just did that.”
I took her to her apartment, offering to stay for a while. I’d have spent the night on the couch if she’d wanted, but she would have none of that. I’d seen how vulnerable she could be, but she was a proud lady, that one. She barely thanked me for helping her, as if that would somehow compromise her independence.
“Do you mind if I check on you?” I asked.
“No.”
Then, as she chained the door behind me, she opened it as far as it would go, and called me through the crack.
“Yeah?” I said.
“Sorry about the mood makeup.”
“Well, I’m not sure, but I think he appreciated it.”
“You’re really dense, aren’t you? It was meant for you.”
She slammed the door in my face. There is nothing more confounding for a guy than having a door slammed in your face, except maybe a slap in your actual face. With the door slam, you know you have to get back inside to overcome the insult, but you also know that you should let it go. It could have been classical drama, me yelling at her through the door like in some old movie. Only it wasn’t, because I’m not dramatic. She slammed the door in my face, so the hell with her.
Neither of us would apologize, so we went on for a while like we were just co-workers. I sometimes had to keep my distance. While she had always been a bitter pill, she now seemed more acerbic, more in your face. I supposed that with the healing of her amputated growth, other scars were itching. I decided to let things cool for a while.
As it happened, Swami sent us both an interesting e-mail, and we met in his office to discuss it. Tina wouldn’t talk to me, and I only granted her a nod. I’d be damned if I was going to apologize to her for not being able to read her mind. You don’t slam doors in people’s faces for that.
“One Tree,” Swami said, apparently as a greeting. He backed his wheelchair into his office, and we sat in chairs to either side. “I think I figured out what’s going on with your four-armed target. But first, I have to ask you something. Either of you ever smoke herb?”
“No,” we both answered, both taken aback. It wasn’t the sort of question you asked someone at work. “What’s that got to do with anything?” I said.
“You may recall,” he said in an exaggerated haughty voice, “in our last lesson, that I spoke of the One Tree, so you know what that is.”
“The missing link of trees, right?”
“Correct-o-mundo. What I didn’t tell you was that the One Tree might as well be mythical at this point. I’ve done a lot of research, and I think it’s too far removed genetically from anything alive today to ever recreate.”
“I’ll bite,” I said. “What’s the missing link for marijuana?”
“Hey, I like you. You’re sharp!”
“I got talent, sidecar.”
He chuckled. “Anyway, you’re on the right river. I can’t recreate the One Tree, as I used to think. But I’m onto one of its descendants: Sinsemilla, the mystical mother of Mary Jane. She’s attainable, and her medicines hold many cures.”
I made spooky fingers and went, “Whoo!”
“Shut up, jerk,” Tina said. “I want to hear what Swami found out.”
“So you’re in?” Swami said to her.
“In what?”
“My little club. There’s too much research for me to do alone. Anyone who helps me reincarnate the ancestral herb will reap in like kind.”
“You must be smoking the good stuff,” I said.
“Funny,” Swami said with a bemused smile. I liked Swami, because he tolerated me. People often fight back, which just tells me that their ego is threatened. Swami had his act together, and I respected that. “Think about it. Man’s been growing and smoking herb almost since fire was harnessed. So herb evolved along with the human brain, in symbiosis. As man became more conscious, he needed herb less, so Mary Jane became relatively barren. And we became less spiritual.”
“Whoa.”
“Today’s herb is weak, giving only a bit of euphoria. But Sinsemilla, now, she would restore man’s full consciousness, a direct link to the original spirit breathed into the Garden of Eden. I don’t expect you to buy all that right away. But if you want to help, hey!”
“I promise, I’ll think about it. Now what about Tina’s target?”
“Fair enough,” said Swami. He paused for effect. “It’s a test signal.”
“A test signal.”
“It’s sort of like calibration. One way to do science is when you know the result you are looking for and set up a careful test for that result. But sometimes that so-called methodical purity is impossible to achieve. In our case, we don’t know the result at the outset, so we can’t afford to ignore data just because it isn’t rigorously attained. Our management needs to make sure that Genie identifies the targets that he should, and then they need to make sure we report them properly. So they inject an artificial target into the raw data. A test signal. The real rigor of our process happens at the back end.”
“Test signals.” Tina was uncertain. “Testing me, you mean.”
“Partly, yeah.”
For once, someone said something about that four-armed target that made sense. Since it was no coincidence that it hit me so close to home, it had to be that someone had deliberately planted it. Until now, I just could not figure out why. This was some kind of ethical test.
“So what should I do?” said Tina. “I mean, should I tag it for follow-up or trash it?”
“I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“But what’s the right answer?”
“Not your problem. Your job is to identify Genie’s best targets. It’s up to someone else to be critical of your choices. The old scientific method was too critical up front. By the turn of the millennium, this negativity, posing as critical thinking, was killing science by feeding anointed lab coats and starving creativity.”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to do the wrong thing and blow my chances at my new position.”
“What chances? If you had a chance, would they treat you like a cog in a wheel? Allow me to quote Neville Livingston, aka Bunny Wailer. ‘We aren’t organizations, we are organisms.’ All these corporate types are part of a system, and a system doesn’t care about its parts. They’re replaceable.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Stupid of me to forget that. See ya.”
“No, seriously. If someone treats you like part of an organization, they don’t care about you. If they treat you like an organism, then they do.”
“That’s actually true,” Tina said, smirking at me.
Swami beamed. “Of course it’s true. If you don’t believe me, go check out who’s on the board of directors.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, turning to go, making praying-Gandhi hands. “See you around, Swami.”
“One Tree,” Swami said, waving over his head as he rolled to his desk.
“Thank you,” Tina said to him. Then she followed me out. “Good God, get me out of here,” she muttered.
If Tina was being tested, why did the target resemble me? Was it originally intended for me? Did Tina’s promotion have anything to do with it? Swami had put us on the right river, but we still didn’t know much. I was damn well going to get to the bottom of it all, though.
Something else Swami said had made sense too, and when I got back to my desk, I looked into the company’s board of directors. There wasn’t one. The shareholders had voted to replace the old board with a computer. At the time, it was pretty controversial stuff, so it was not hard to find information on it.
The idea was that today’s business environment—which included local policy, local and federal law, oversight by several agencies, high investment costs, high risks, insurance nightmares, and more—was too complex a maze for humans to negotiate quickly enough to turn a profit. With a highly adaptive program tracking the myriad variables, creating and simulating strategies, the company had turned around and was four times more profitable than our nearest competitor. The owners plugged in the broad business goals, and let the machine figure out how to achieve them. For example, that’s how the current quota system got started. The board figured out that the way to maximize profit was to focus on certain metrics, such as the worker productivity measured as a ratio of qualified targets per month. It didn’t matter that there was nothing we could do to generate the targets—it was just a way of pulsing the company’s efficiency.
There was a management team that directed operations from this output. In that, they had a lot of leeway, but if the company fell short, it was that team that was fired, not the computer. All that made some sense of Swami’s warning about being treated like a machine part.
In a rare excursion, I went to my boss’s office to ask him about it. Dave Deale was a handsome guy, brown hair with graying temples. Deep, commanding voice. The kind that did well in front of customers, but not necessarily his employees. He was broad and muscular, but hobbled from some football injury, like he had blocked a field goal with his butt, and they never got the ball out.
“In the final analysis,” Dave said, after I asked about the board, “our company is just another flavor of mint.”
“I don’t get it.”
He smiled at his private joke. Some people are like that. They amuse themselves, and if no one else is amused, they are amused even more. “I mean the kind of mint that makes money. Of course we don’t print it; it’s all just numbers. But we’re nothing more than another kind of money-making apparatus. Another flavor of mint. See?”
“Yeah, Dave, now I get it. Doesn’t that make you feel like a cog in a wheel?”
“What do I care? I get paid, just like you and everybody else. Sometimes I’m proud of what we accomplish around here.” He shrugged. “It’s a job. Then I go home to my family, my kids climb all over me, and I’m someone important to them. You ever take a kid to Disney?”
I shook my head. Actually, I’d been one of those kids taken to Disney, when I was written off as a terminal case. I hated it. All those fantastic things to look at, but nothing was real—you couldn’t even touch most of it. It was a great monument to the imagination—but whose imagination? Whose dream was to take a vacation with a bunch of afflicted seven-year-old biological losers? Not mine, that was for sure.
“I forgot, you aren’t married,” he said. “You won’t find much love at work, ’fraid to say.”
“You got that right.” I left his office, trying to find my way back to Walt Real World.
I made an overture to Tina via e-mail, asking what she was going to do about her four-armed test signal. She made a brief reply that basically said it was none of my business. “Bitch” was my single-word response, to which she returned, “XOXO.” I was going to reply “Same to you,” but hesitated. Tina wasn’t as introverted as she was when I first got to know her. Before her operation, I don’t think she would have e-mailed things like that.
Something about that new assertiveness attracted me. If she was out to stick it to the world, to make them pay for the way they treated her, I wanted to be there to watch. We didn’t have to be lovers, but we didn’t have to be enemies either. She must have been thinking the same thing because after a couple of days with me not e-mailing back, I received another message from her.
She asked me to dinner and a movie. I made her promise not to slam any more doors in my face, and she went along, joking that she reserved the right if I called her a bitch or a cow. It was nice, the two of us having a laugh like that. Nothing like reminiscing over old insults to break the ice.
Dinner was okay, the movie sucked, and then she said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but do you want to make love?”
I laughed. I was into that. Since her neck healed, she actually looked hot. I made villain eyebrows, rolled a make-believe mustache in my fingers, and said, “My place or yours?”
“Not tonight,” she said. “There’s something you need to do before the rubber hits the road.”
“I’m all ears.”
“No, you’re all arms. Lose two of them, and I’m yours.”
I stared at her. She was all veneer. I hadn’t learned to see through that yet, and until now, I hadn’t wanted to. “You’re serious,” I said.
“Completely. I had my neck fixed because of you, so now it’s your turn.”
“That was just cosmetic surgery. Arms, that’s a whole different animal.”
“Exactly. And I’m not going to make love to an animal. To be honest with you, Jimmy, I don’t think anyone else will either.”
She had a point there. I instinctively clutched my smaller hands together, which was about the extent of their range of motion. They had good feeling though, and when they held each other, the damn things felt precious. I hated them.
Tina had me wanting her right then, but I wasn’t going to be manipulated like that. So I abruptly called it a night. No door slamming though.
I had recently made my semiannual quota at work, so I had two weeks coming to me. I had entertained the idea of asking Tina to go on a trip with me, but I wasn’t sure I could stand her for that long. But two weeks might be about enough time for a double amputation. Maybe it was time to get those meat hooks out of my life.
Cutting off your extra hands is like buying a new car. Once you make the decision to do it, you can’t get your mind off it until it’s done.
I’d chosen the government hospital because of the complexity of the operation. It wasn’t like having a giant wart removed from the back of your neck. Besides, it would cost a lot less this way, and if something went wrong, I wouldn’t have to worry about suing anybody; the government would make good. They always did—not millions of dollars for pain and suffering, but enough to keep people happy. The alternative for them would be to admit that the social program was a failure, and there were plenty of political machinations to prevent that from happening. It’s funny how nothing fails anymore.
Tina played the role of sympathetic friend, but I could tell there was more to it than that. I didn’t fool myself into thinking she really liked me, but it was tempting. Love is dead, but it still haunts this pitiful world. Hell, Tina herself was the one who got me listening to the new “love is dead” stream, and though anyone can care for someone else, there’s always something else behind it. I was nervous as hell and was grateful for her being there, whatever the reason. My eyes couldn’t focus on the paperwork, and she was almost eager to help me get through that.
I had a perverse idea to keep my arms in a jar of formaldehyde, as a souvenir, but she talked me out of it. “You should donate them to research,” she said. “It’s your moral obligation because they might be used to advance medical science and help others in need.”
“Since when did you care about others in need?”
She just gave me a fake hurt look. Anyway, I signed the forms, just to get on with things.
We were both quiet while I was being prepped. When the nurse moved out of the way, I saw that Tina was looking at me intently. I thought maybe she was worried about me, but then she said, “Do you mind if I use you in one of my stories?”
“What stories?”
“I write dark fiction, mostly horror.”
That was news to me, but it did sound like her. A hint of post-Goth. She seemed like the kind who would write for therapeutic reasons. “What’s the story about?”
“It’s about these Siamese triplets.”
I stifled a guffaw.
“I know,” she conceded, giggling. “Asshole.”
“I’m sorry. Seriously, go on.”
“So this one triplet—the most viable one, the one in the middle—decides she’s had enough of her parasitic sisters, so she kills them in their sleep.”
“Ouch.”
Tina smiled a wicked little smile and giggled again. “It gets better. So she has to, like, carry them to an unlicensed chop shop, which is really hard to do, of course. She pays some flapjack doctor to cut her dead sisters off. So he does, and everything goes fine, until the sisters start haunting her. They’re like phantom limbs, you know?”
“Like when a person loses a leg, but it still itches?”
“Exactly. Except the sisters don’t itch. They beat her up, over and over. For real. They do other nasty stuff, too, but I don’t want to give it away.”
“So what does she do?”
“There’s nothing she can do. She’s too much a coward to kill herself, so she just lives like that for the rest of her life.”
“That’s really scary,” I said. It was, but what I was thinking was that Tina was pretty scary herself. Given the way people treated her for her entire life, I couldn’t blame her.
“You really think it’s scary?” Tina smiled again. “Thanks! Don’t tell anyone about it, though. You’re the only one I’ve ever told one of my stories to.”
For once I knew a real smile on Tina when I saw it. It was a good feeling, to have broken her veneer, and it was a good time for that to happen. I immediately forgave how inappropriate her story was, under the circumstances.
“I won’t tell anyone,” I said. “But what’s that story got to do with me?” Well, I’d almost forgiven her.
“Nothing, really. Your arms gave me the original idea, that’s all.”
The nurse returned and chased Tina out. They wheeled me to the OR, where I thought I would count down to unconsciousness, but I fainted the moment the gurney bumped the doors open.
I had disturbing dreams. My parents were conjoined twins, literally joined at the hip. Then I was born, but not the normal way. I grew from them like another parasitic twin. Even growing up, I was still attached to them. The three of us were fused in a big, grotesque lump. After Mom and Dad died, they were still there, dried up and shriveled. I had to carry them around, one on either side, no matter where I went. And they were like those phantom limbs, itching and aching.
I remember waking up and falling asleep several times, looking at the recovery room ceiling. I lay there, very still, mad at myself for being afraid to look at my chest. One night I awoke and lay there a long time, building up courage. I tested my good arms and found I could pull them out of the sheets. They looked normal, and I turned them over and over. Then I put them firmly at my sides, afraid to let them get near my extra arms. I didn’t want to feel that they were there or that they were missing. In the morning, I told myself.
That night I was dismayed to discover my parasitic arms still attached. They started to move by themselves. They tore off some bandages and pulled down the sheet. I tried to sit up, but they slammed my chest back down. Then they began choking me. I couldn’t breathe, and even my normal arms could not pull those wretched things from my neck.
It’s horrid having nightmares when you’re alone.
Tina never came to visit, which I thought strange, and I didn’t call her either. I was the patient, damn it, and I wasn’t about to call anyone for sympathy. I was in the hospital for almost two weeks, which seemed like forever, especially when you have to eat crap like Honey Smackerels every morning and dry soy burgers every night. All day, every day, I suffered through a marathon of a British soap opera, “Bag Enders,” on the Hobbit Channel.
The doctors removed the bandages and showed me my new chest. The parasitic arms were gone for sure. They had done a good job of covering up the holes, and once the scars healed, you might not even notice. It felt strange to touch the scars where my little crooked arms had been. I had mixed feelings, since they had been a familiar part of me. It hurt to touch there, which proved that I was wounded, as opposed to healed. My upper chest was now flat, like a normal person, and that made me feel a way I had never felt before: like a man.
I marveled, my fear mostly gone, and wondered what my parents would think if they could see me. I liked to think they’d have been pleased to see their son looking normal for the first time, even if it meant I would finally never be the super-surgeon they had once imagined.
It was nearly three weeks before I could return to work. I’d overextended my leave and now owed the company some time. If I accelerated my quotas, I could make up for it. It felt good to be back in the office, and I got a sense of what Tina must have felt to go in with her growth removed. I felt taller and more confident. I walked right by Kaitlin’s cube and sat at my desk, as if nothing was different. I wanted people to remark to me first, rather than me parading myself around. I sat and caught up on some things. Midmorning, my chest started to ache. It hadn’t hurt like that in several days.
No messages from Tina. At break, I went up to at least pass by her office. She wasn’t in. I didn’t want to ask about her, but when I happened on another coworker who had been promoted to her floor, I asked anyway. Apparently Tina had been granted leave, but was overdue getting back.
It was serious enough that I convinced someone to call the cops. The police turned up nothing in her apartment. Evidence was that she’d left. Her car was gone, and her bank accounts showed a big withdrawal that suggested a trip.
I felt abandoned by Tina, just when things between us might have taken a good turn. My chest ached more often, and while the two wide surface scars below my collarbone were healing, there was some swelling.
I had a recurring nightmare that phantoms of my discarded arms were trying to strangle me. I’d wake up, and my chest would hurt. I called in a couple times, but the doctor said pain was normal at this stage and that the dreams would eventually go away. Amputated limbs itching or aching was normal, too, he said, but I wasn’t experiencing that.
Another week passed, and I began to really worry about Tina. That was when I received an e-mail from her.
Jimmy ~ hope your ok. sorry to leave while you hospital, but i had to get away. I did something very bad to you and I’m sorry. Its my fault, but mostly the company. You can sue them for a brazillian dollars. I’m serious you can put the basturds out of business for cannibalonialism. They knew all the time and one tree was on the right river too. Test signal was to see if I would and I’m sorry I did it. ~T
It wasn’t from her company address—there was no return address—and it wasn’t signed, but it had to be her. My arms were gone, and so was Tina. What the hell was going on? Whatever it was, I had to do something. Getting a lawyer seemed like the thing to do, but I needed advice from someone I could trust.
The state penitentiary welcomed me with iron bars.
“Well, well!” said Tina’s dad, eyeing me through the Plexiglas.
“Yeah,” I said, still self-conscious. “I had them cut off.”
“Good for you.”
“Tina cut her growth off too.”
“How does she look?”
“Oh, great.”
He didn’t know she was missing, so I told him. I handed him a copy of her message and watched his face for reaction. His best guess was that she had gone off to find her mother. It made sense, especially if I was right about her having more self-confidence lately. As to where her mother was, he had no idea. We ran out of visiting hours talking and arranged another meeting. Since he was in a hacker’s prison, he wasn’t allowed computer access, so we couldn’t correspond by e-mail. Phone was okay, but monitored, and we decided to just meet in person.
By the end of our third meeting, Tyler (as I called him) slipped me a closed envelope through the window slot. He was allowed to do that. I took it, and he held up a hand to mean not to open it yet.
“Are you a religious person?” he said.
“Well, a little.” Right, if they still made pennies.
“Me too.” He winked.
“Tina has disappeared,” I said to Swami in his office. “I think she’s in hiding because the company is after her for some reason. It has something to do with me. I need your help hacking into Genie to try to figure out what this is all about.”
I filled him in and showed him Tina’s message. He nodded sympathetically.
“I can’t help you in any case,” he said, “because I don’t have a clue how to hack into the computers around here. I’m not smart enough.”
“What if we had help from someone who can do it?” I told him about Tina’s dad and his reputation as a master hacker.
Swami turned that over and looked up at me from his wheelchair. “Maybe,” he said. “One condition.”
“What?”
“If we get in, you help me target the mother herb.”
That figured. I stalled, my eyes falling onto one of Swami’s tree posters. “Hey,” I said, “do you like that new tune by Got 2B Shvat?”
“Who?”
“You know, the Hasid Rock group? They have a big tree on their video. Shvat is some kind of Jewish arbor day, isn’t it?” Blank stare. I’d been curious since I first visited Swami’s office, and curiosity got the better of me.
“I don’t know.”
“So . . . you’re not Jewish?”
“No.” He smiled a deliberately mysterious smile. “Rasta Nova.”
“Oh.” That made sense of all this obsession over drugs, Jah being the god of marijuana, and all. “Too bad. The ‘I’ve got friends who are Jewish’ card might have come in handy to play some day.”
“Jimmy, you’re a jerk.”
I bowed facetiously, then agreed to help him find his almighty weed.
The trouble with Tyler helping us hack into Genie was that he was imprisoned for hacking. The whole place was set up to deny him any kind of online access. All lines in and out were screened, and he wasn’t allowed to have a computer of any kind. His phone calls were monitored, his mail read, and I don’t know what else. The plumbing was isolated, so that signals couldn’t be transmitted through the pipes or the water itself. The only places he had any privacy were in the bathroom and the chapel.
“The law provides for privacy of religion,” he said, “so there’s no monitoring in prison chapels. I bribed the company that supplied the windows.”
Swami and I called up Celia, a woman named on the note Tyler had slipped me. She was a craftswoman who made the stained glass windows in the chapel. Moreover, she was part of Tyler’s little crime syndicate, and the windows were part of a larger plan that revolved around his being able to hack systems from prison. They weren’t ordinary windows. They had a layer of some kind of thin gel with unusual properties. The gel would compress slightly when hit with sound waves, which made it change color. Thin film interference, she called it. “It’s actually a rather old and crude technology,” Celia told Swami and me. “A poor man’s secure receiver.”
Another property was that the window glowed briefly when hit by light. A computer-controlled laser could draw letters on the window. Tyler would read them, and they’d fade away in a few seconds. This apparatus provided two-way text messaging, leaving no artifact in the prison.
Celia and Tyler had conspired to rent an apartment that was in the line of sight with the prison chapel. The idea was that Tyler would pretend to pray, and a telescopic color analyzer in the apartment would detect the color changes in the special windowpane. It then translated the changes back into sound, and we’d hear what Tyler was saying. Then we could laser messages back to him. Or plug into another system at our end, and Tyler could operate it remotely from prison.
“It gives a lot of deniability, because there’s no direct linkage,” Celia explained. “It’ll be really hard for anyone to even figure out what we’re doing.”
“Why?” said Swami. “The Pentagon used to have countermeasures for this sort of thing. They were afraid spies would read the vibrations from windows of rooms where classified meetings were taking place. They’d have radio speakers up against the glass, to wash out the vibrations from the voices.”
Celia smiled knowingly. “You’ve done some homework. But I don’t think the prison will be expecting that sort of technology. They’ve been too busy worrying about subcutaneous nanochips and wireless sets hidden in tooth fillings. This ancient history stuff is mostly forgotten. We could have tried reading direct sound off the glass, but using light turns out to be better, and it gives two-way communication.”
Tyler had already used this system to hack around some, and was keen to try something bigger. Swami was no hacker, but he knew a lot about Genie, and the other systems in the company—the ones used for e-mail, networking, and all that jack. With a little help from a master, he could be dangerous. We were ready for some test signals of our own.
The eighth-floor apartment was dark and almost totally unfurnished. A single table lamp sat on the floor with a dim fluorescent tube and no shade. There were a few water bottles in the musty fridge, and cheap blinds on the window facing the prison. Two devices sat on heavy tripods by the window, the laser and the telescope. I couldn’t tell the difference between them. Some notebook computers and other stuff sat on two collapsible tables, all connected together by a pastafest of wires. Celia explained that they never went wireless on this kind of risky job. Closed circuit was much safer.
According to plan, Tyler went into the chapel, turned on the lights, and started to pray. Swami, Celia, and I sat in the darkened apartment, the scope trained on the chapel window and wired into the color analyzer. Celia showed Swami how to jog the scope around a little until he found the most active spot. We recorded some very clear color changes, and the analyzer showed a lot of structure not visible to the naked eye. The modulated frequencies were translated into audio, and Tyler’s voice rang tinny out of a speaker.
“Test prayer number nine, number nine, number nine . . . For score and seven years from now, when I shake loose the surly bonds of prison, free at last, free at last . . .”
“It works!” Swami remarked.
Celia smiled with satisfaction and did some fine-tuning.
Tyler’s voice became clearer. “Now is the time for all good men to come Watson! I need you!”
We typed a response, and the laser jittered invisibly, scrawling words on the window, or the finger of God writing on the wall, as Swami preferred to call it.
“My prayer has been answered,” Tyler said.
“Now it’s time to pray to the system,” Swami quipped.
I found it ironic that I was going to fight the technology that had been working so hard to prevent or cure handicaps like mine. We owed Tyler and Celia, and I promised to pay them well, if any fruit fell from the trees.
The next time we met in the apartment, Swami was ready with a connection from the apartment to the office network. That link was wireless, but encrypted. The apartment was old enough to have landlines, but they were analog. Swami was going to rig a converter at the office before we went much further. Now we needed to steal an administrative password. There were all kinds of ways to attempt that, we learned, and most of them were detectable by security. There was a simple one that Tyler always tried first. Once set, I phoned Tyler and told him to go and say his prayers. In a few minutes, we were reading him.
“Get yourself to a login prompt,” he said.
“Ready.”
“Okay. Type the following credential.” Tyler then recited a login ID that included some kind of prefix and a suffix. Only the middle part was like my own ID, which I never had to use unless my biomatch was on the fritz. He waited a little bit, then gave us a complicated password.
Swami’s face lit up like a reefer. Or so I assumed. “I’m in!” he said, laughing. “I’m really in!”
“I’m confused,” I said. “Why did we need the windows, scope, and computers, just for that?”
We hadn’t. What Tyler had given us was simply a super user account and password that shipped with the company computer. No one had ever changed the default, a stupid oversight, but common.
“Getting in is just the start,” Tyler said. “You’re going to need my help breaking other barriers, mining data, and a lot more.”
I couldn’t really follow what Swami and Tyler were doing most of the time, and I gave up participating in the conversations. I was just a middleman between them in an already awkward process.
After a week and a half of working a little almost every day, they began to piece together a picture of what was going on. They began to ask questions about the company, about patent law, and other things. My job became to research these things. Sometimes the information was readily available, especially the more controversial items, since the debates filled public records. Details about the company were harder to come by, but with a few assumptions here and there, things became clearer.
Be sure to read
the exciting conclusion
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