Human Lives Saved

Illustration by Laurie Harden

“Shot you?” she said.

I guided her fingertips to the wound.

“Oh, Fred,” she said. “When?”

“At the end.”

“When he—?”

I nodded before remembering her long witness upon night: Veronica could hear and feel, not see.

“Yes,” I said. “Before he gave up. It made him give up.”

Then, after a longer moment: “No. No. It didn’t. How can I say that? It was me. Me. I made him give up!”

I said this and felt glad she coldd hear and feel, not see.

He stood at the plate window with hands entwined gently at the back of his tweed, an Auguste Rodin bronze named Contemplation, in corporate clothing.

He watched those outside.

From where I stood I could see their signs: We’re Animals Too! Prevent Cruelty! Don’t KILL For CURES. They gathered Friday afternoons and Saturdays in an average week. Today they mustered at mid-week to coincide with media coverage of a breakthrough. Of what level of breakthrough, they possessed no knowledge. Cameras would soon cover building and grounds; lenses might light briefly on bodies, faces and signs; and a few of the crews might nod their heads to hear a word, thrusting a microphone forward. That mattered; nothing else.

We had released nothing to attract them; at least nothing beyond essentials, only hinting a major story was in the wind.

Robert Means’s shoulders shifted slightly—not in a sigh, for Robert never sighed, to my knowledge, but in the barest of shrugs, as a kind of physical signal: he had finished a thought.

“Do you think they’ll be surprised?” I said.

He looked at me. People misjudge him by his appearance. He carries barely a pound of extra flesh on his body, both due to physical regimen and metabolism; yet he appears, at first glance, as a soft, overweight man, one whose gaze over the twilight years made him opt for luxury while luxury still possessed meaning. His face rounds outward. People usually change their estimations, seeing the normal physique below: but that face, with its cheeks, its fleshy chin, even its slightly fleshy brows, give the uncanny sense of being a mismatch. It throws people. Sometimes Means uses that off-guard moment to get past the defenses of opponents.

“Surprised?” he said, lifting the corners of his full lips. “I suppose so. Though they may not get the point.”

“Expectation of conflict?” I said.

“Yes.”

We had talked of it before, how you can agree with someone who expects a fight, and despite agreement still be forced into fighting.

“I’d think it would please them.”

“So would I. By the way, Fred, I hear of a coincidence—that it’s Tony’s birthday. Maybe we should take him for a beer. We could go to Joe’s. Eighteen, is it?”

“Still not old enough to take him to—”

“If it was old enough for us—”

“Laws change.”

“Quicker than human nature, yes, they do.”

I tapped a finger on the sheaf of replies I had set on his desk. “Here’s what 1 really came in here for,” I said. “List of who’s coming. Several papers, one interactive, and two TV stations. Maybe some freelancers, maybe some magazine staff. Should be a good session.”

“Good. You think Tony’s up for it?”

“The press conference? He’ll be a hit.”

“No, I mean for Joe’s.”

I laughed. “Robert, he isn’t old enough!”

“I have an I.D. to say otherwise. I think it’s time he met our man.”

“I don’t see why—”

“Yes, you do. He should meet Joe. And no better place than there. Or time than now.” Robert looked piercingly at me. “What do you think? Don’t you think it’s time Joe came back to us?”

Like a punch in the midriff in the middle of a joke: he took me by surprise.

“He won’t,” I said, and felt a tightening, and a sadness, at the thought.

“Not just laws change,” Robert said. He returned to the window to gaze outward. “Maybe even these people will, sometime.” After a moment more of contemplation he lapsed into one of his thinking-aloud spells. “If only they would think about how to approach the whole question,” he said quietly, “instead of going at it all the time as if it was all a matter of heart. Then they’d see how much the medical establishment is holding up paper arguments based on heart strings, too. Both sides are culpable, is what I say. Human lives saved.’ You’ve heard that one, right?” He turned to me. “ ‘Human lives saved.’ Chimp research saves X-number of human lives.’ The chimps die, of course. And so do all the humans, eventually. That stink about prostate cancer prevention. Remember? Decades of research into prostate cancer, Fred! Animal studies up the wa-zoo! And what came of it?—men were subjected to radical treatments—and they were treated successfully—and the doctors could proudly and truthfully say: X-number of human lives saved.’ ”

“Sounds like good science.”

“It does. Sounds great till you learn that, yes, lives were ‘saved,’ but that once ‘saved’ those men lived an average of one-half to one and a half days longer. That’s an average, Fred. The misery! The pain of those men—and those animals! For the sake of saying ‘X-number of human lives saved!’ ”

“You’re beginning to sound like your opposition!”

“No! Exactly the opposite! I know the difficulties.”

“Of course,” I said, “it all may change.” I had Tony’s work in mind. “The point may become moot.”

“Or get worse,” he said. I sat morosely self-absorbed, unlike the driver and two other passengers in the semi-PV we rode downtown from the labs.

The press conference went strangely well. The simulated tissue dissection had the med-reporters going nuts. A computing magazine’s reporters materialized despite having said they would skip it: and their hands ended up typing on pads like teams of sprinting spiders.

We had all harbored worries: things invariably go awry, when a project that works in the privacy of a laboratory moves onto the public stage. Expected results come off cockeyed; models break down; excitement simmers and then cools to disappointed afterthought. This time, however, the demonstration flew like crazy. We all felt the wildness in the air and the utter astonishment of the media; because this worked. It felt like a shot of adrenaline straight into the cerebellum. How could we not glow at the babbling, frenzied reaction? Tony moreover shined like a zillion-watt lightbulb. The kid’s charm and brights shimmered like marquee lights down Broadway. The crews from the papers and news and science press lapped it up, kittens at a cream-cup. I loved to see it.

“You know what’s our big problem?” Robert Means said.

He sat in the driver’s seat. Meg Astor, a cell biochemist and systems modeler who has turned herself toward issues in linguistic structure in the past decade, sat next to him. Veronica Speller, six years my senior but with natural color in her hair considerably less streaked with respectable gray than mine, and a mathematician of the first candle, held my hand in the back. Me, I rank among the tops in human interface system development, thanks to Robert’s guidance over the last six grueling and intensive years. We made a brilliant carload—just about half the brains of the outfit called Med-Dyne, unless, as I worried sometimes, Tony had half the brains of the outfit all by his lonesome. What a lonesome that would be.

Brilliant as we were, no one answered him.

I thought about Tony’s enthusiasm. It communicated to everyone, yes. What had it communicated, however? I realized how the media might have seen the boy—no, must have: as a bright but wacko kid. He waxed with a high-vibration mania over Hocus.

Hocus: Meg Astor’s pronunciation of “Focus Automaton” early in the project had planted the name in Tony’s noggin. It went by the handle of Hocus from just about day one.

Verry must have been thinking along similar lines, for she smiled faintly. I wondered if she might be remembering holding Hocus during the press conference.

“It’s the rabbit,” she said.

“Hocus was perfect,” I said.

“Tony and Hocus,” she said.

Verry wore clear, wire-rim glasses today. Blind since birth, she had Men early into the habit of hiding her eyes, a practice encouraged by those around her: it served as an identification-tag to the seeing. After I told her how lovely her eyes were, even though she would never see herself, she bought clear plastic lenses. She would never concede to doing away with eyepieces entirely. They had become an identification-tag within herself, too.

I never pressed the point. She looked lovely in glasses, too.

“No, no,” I said. “Tony was perfect, too. Absolutely wonderful.”

“He was wonderful,” she said.

“So how can you say Tony and Hocus are a problem?”

Meg looked back at us. “Because— maybe we’re thinking the same thing, Verry—because it looks so screwball. And it is screwball. My god, the kid is stuck on rabbits!”

Meg spoke with some difficulty. While still young she had suffered nerve damage equivalent to a light stroke; the doctors could identify no direct cause. She lost control over some muscles of her face.

Before I knew this I thought her the most preoccupied and serious person in the world, since I never saw her fully smile.

I learned better.

“That’s just how Tony is,” I said. “He’s just that way.”

“Sure he is,” Meg said.

“So he was a little excited—”

“Excited! Jumpy just like a damned rabbit!” she said.

We laughed at that. Had to. Tony, who was living a childhood dream of creating an artificial animal, and who had the brights to enable a project with precisely that aim and sufficient maturity to see it through to fruition, had the temperament and nervous energy of exactly the animal he chose to fabricate.

“And the whole thing,” said Meg, “is his inability to get beyond rabbits. He doesn’t want to look beyond. It’s rabbits this, rabbits that!”

“There are things to clean up in the programs,” said Verry. “Probably always will be. If he wants to, he can do rabbits all his life. He’s created an entirely new industry.”

Robert shook his head. “I wasn’t talking about Tony.”

He pulled the car around the corner. In another block we would be in sight of the bar. Tony and his mother followed somewhere behind us.

“Tony isn’t the problem,” he said.

“Then who is?” I said, wondering if I should have said “what.”

Robert glanced at me in the rearview. “Joe,” he said. “Joe’s our problem.”

That froze things tight, right there. In the car and in my gut.

Joe bombed out of Med-Dyne. As a kid he showed incredible aptitude for modeling psychomotor interrelations—or not modeling them, but creating the base-sets of rules from which to grow muscular systems— something of which I had no understanding at the time, though I now did, and he looked to be headed for the Big One, the kind of project that would make Med-Dyne’s star burn in the ascendent and transform Joe overnight from talented, teen-genius computer geek with a hand for biological engineering into an acknowledged, world-class leader in self-organizing automatons, overnight.

It would have been overnight. He dropped out before nightfall.

An accident, a bizarre mistake, a moment of violent passion: call it what you will. He caught a glimpse into the blackest corner of his own soul and grew alarmed—deathly alarmed—and backed out. Gave up on his brain. On his abilities. On his promise. On the project. Everything.

He picked up a gun and shot his dad.

Now he ran a bar.

Everyone in the car stared at me.

Robert kept his eye on the street as we wheeled toward Joe’s place; Meg looked out the side window; Veronica for heaven’s sake could hardly stare, being blind and having her clear-plastic lenses pointed forwards.

Yet they did. They stared at me.

“Here we are,” Robert said, pulling the car to a stop and cutting the hum of the motor so the others could hear the thudding and pounding of my own internal engine.

“Don t put it that way,” said Verry.

“Why not? It’s true,” I said in the darkness.

In the bedroom I sometimes shut the door, jam the rug against the bottom crack, and pull the shade to the bottom, to gain a delicious taste of the uttermost night in which Verry operates at all times. At bedtime, when we share everything else, I want this, too. I fail in it: always do. Light seeps around the door frame and the edges of the shade; and if I shut my eyes, within seconds I see patterns of light etched there by retinal memory.

“It’s true,” I said again. “I was an utter asshole! Or I was worse than—”

“But you’re a gentle man. I know this. You’re 100 percent a gentle man. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t know that. So how can you change from what you say you were, to this?”

We leaned against each other in the bed, our skin touching, my left arm over her, her right over me. Our heads sank against the pillows, weighted by a long day, by feelings, by thoughts, by comfort. Intimacy includes a thousand shadings and more, only a few of them active and sexual—something I failed to learn with my first wife.

“Maybe I didn’t,” I said. “I feel like after that—after that shock—I fell apart. I had to put myself back together. And it wasn’t me doing the reconstructing. It wasn’t Robert either, though he certainly helped. He helped a lot. It was as if I was made of a million blocks, and the first time I piled them up, I blew it; and once I made a few mistakes, then I made more, and more. And then—but then the blocks toppled, and I had to pile them up again. Did a better job this time.”

Or the underlying rules—the parameters for self construction—they rebuilt me more soundly.

Such is the way I think, ever since Robert turned me around.

Tony and his mother Twilla stood on the sidewalk, two patches of color against the gray of the doors at the Fox Theater.

Twilla, a small woman with straw-yellow hair, played with the gloves in her hand—I remembered her doing the same during the news conference—and with the straps of her slim black purse. She had a good many such nervous gestures, making me wonder if Robert had tested her for unused aspects of the mind.

Tony made his mother look short, being tall and gangling, apparently more like the absent father. He grinned crazily at us. He, too, had hand motions: his left hand made short swooping and cupping pulls inward, the way a child’s might who imitated catching hardballs—although in Tony’s case, knowing his obsession, I suspected it amounted to nothing more than animal-petting motions. In his daily life he walked around with a rabbit in his arms, either a live one or, more often recently, Hocus.

“Are you sure this is an appropriate place to celebrate?” said Twilla in a brittle voice.

She usually felt more agreeable to new ideas than she sounded. A need for reassurance made her a touch querulous, I guessed.

“Of course,” said Robert as he heaved himself up from the car seat.

He had no particular extra weight to lift, but did need to fight against an abnormal musculature. Rising from a sitting position had proved a difficulty since childhood. He walked with a cane, but not because he needed any help walking. Just standing.

We must have looked like a case study in misfit groups. Gangling Tony and his nervous mother, both with uncontrollable hand motions; Meg Astor with her serious and half-frozen face; Robert with his disjointed appearance, and his cane; Verry with hers; and me.

I look pretty much normal.

When we filed into the Brewtique, Joe looked up with only half the surprise I expected. He calmly went about setting up glasses. The one customer there rose to leave as we entered. I wondered how Robert arranged it: we had bar and Joe to ourselves.

“Did you catch the news?” said Verry, finding her seat.

“Caught some of it.” Joe finished setting up. “You looked good.”

“Thanks, Joe.”

Joe glanced at me, catching my eye for a second before moving to Robert. “Rounds? Even the kid?”

“I’ll have soda,” said Tony.

“If he wants,” said Robert. “Say, Joe, I hear you might not be the town’s last living bartender any more. Another live-tended bar’s opening.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

Five years ago, when Joe dropped out of everything to take over the Brewtique, all other bars in town had converted to coin arcades. You put in an I.D., a dollar coin or two, and got your I.D. and change back if the I.D. was good, and if you were owed anything—unless you wanted to tip. Had to be the oddest part of machine bars: tipping. Presumably the techs got the extras.

Joe showed an iconoclastic streak for one of his generation, bucking trends with his human-run bar.

Its best features survived from days when the town itself was feeling its oats: a wood frame around the bar mirror, of oak; a tin ceiling stamped in patterns of squares, and painted a red deeper than fire-engine and darker than the crimson of maples in autumn; cushioned stools; and a long curve of a bar-top, darkly shellacked, with a brass rail below.

People admired Joe’s work in keeping it open. From what I heard, it might have been looking at a profit, even. Not profit in the way machine arcades raked it in, but profit even so.

“I haven’t formally introduced you two. Tony?” said Robert. “Remember I told you about the guy on the life-modeling project before you stepped on?”

Tony nodded, eyes aglow. He heard plenty.

“Well, this is him.”

“Him?” With a disbelieving eye-over at Joe, who pretended not to care.

“Yes,” said Robert. “Joe. This is Joe Staupolos. The town’s only living bartender, at least for the time being. Former bright star and genius kid with our project. In fact the high-end project’s been on hold since he left.”

“What’s the matter,” said Tony brightly. “Teenage burnout?”

Joe spilled the beer he had been setting in front of me. I know how steady his hands are. I would have spilled it myself. Tony had all the tact in the world—with his rabbits.

In all fairness, teenage burnout we kept as an open topic at Med-Dyne. We thought it worth talking about, because it happens: going too far, too fast, and pushing the brilliant kid until something pops or cracks and the kid leaps out a window.

So when Tony Barbieri wanted to put together rabbits, we gave the nod. We would have just as soon do white mice or frogs: but rabbits would be fine. A big jump for us, but fine. We wanted the young mind to go where it wanted, at whatever pace it needed to go.

Joe gave no sign beyond the few drops of beer. He wiped them up and filled the other glasses. Robert had straight tomato juice. Twilla drank something with a ridiculous parasol.

“No, not burnout,” said Robert on Joe’s behalf.

“So, Joe,” said Tony, his voice still bright with his youthful cheer, “you were on the big project? Wow. I couldn’t do it. I mean I don’t want to. You saw Hocus, didn’t you? I’ll be working out testing for Hocus for years. Man, that’s enough.”

“But the work you’re doing,” Meg said to Tony, “it’s what would make possible work like Joe’s. We didn’t know before what we know now.”

“Yeah, but Joe’s work, that’s so much bigger.”

“It was too big,” she said, “back then. But it’s your breakthrough—”

“That’s right,” Verry said. “It’s a breakthrough, hooking up the processors to work on the real-time modeling of each cell.”

“Not a price breakthrough,” muttered Robert.

“No, but a performance breakthrough,” Verry said. “Parallel processors were pretty good before—”

“Hey,” said Tony. “Those were your parallel processors. I just established the hierarchy.”

“Well sure it’s a new form of parallel processing,” said Verry. “But it’s the overall integration of parts in a whole—we couldn’t have done it without you, Tony.”

The chatter bugged the hell out of me. Even so, I could see Joe beginning to rise to the bait. He looked at the kid, and at Verry.

“On the tube,” he said, “all you talked about was the frigging rabbit.”

Tony flinched, but grinned anyway. “Well, sure, and that’s what it’s all about. The frigging rabbit.”

Everyone laughed. I relaxed a little. Joe likewise, if a littler bit.

“Sure,” said Verry. “People see the rabbit and can’t believe it’s real—or that it isn’t. It’s both real, and not real, in terms of being a rabbit.”

“That’s right,” said Tony. “It’s a machine. But how does anyone know that? You can cut it open and it bleeds! You look at its face and it looks just like a rabbit, acts like a rabbit, and moves like a rabbit. You analyze its cells and the cells work the same way the cells do in a rabbit.”

“Almost,” said Meg.

“Even shits like a rabbit.”

“But we made it,” said Verry. “It’s all the result of electronic output.”

“That’s the difference,” said Tony, his face alight. I have seen enthusiasm on the face of a teenager but never such brightness as came from this light-bulb of a high-school head. “We made it. Or even closer to the truth, we let it make itself. You have to say that. I didn’t even really invent the hierarchy. We let the hierarchy establish itself. But the brain—that’s the real thing. It takes like about four hundred of old Holland-style neural nets to make each neuron, and even at that, it probably isn’t enough—”

“Do you still love him?” Verry said one night.

“Still love him?” I cried out involuntarily at the question and felt the pain within me that came neither of age nor disability. “How could I not! My god, Verry, he’s my boy! He was everything! Everything! Maybe that’s how it got under my skin, and turned me into—” I stopped, unable to go on. I pulled in a breath of air I thought I could never release, for it felt strong enough to yank out my heart with my lungs.

I buried my eyes in my hands: futile gesture, in a room already dark.

I glanced over at Robert. He kept his eyes on Joe without opening his mouth. He knew Joe would back off if the boss spoke up.

Hell if I would say anything, either.

“You know what we lacked before, don’t you?” said Meg, interjecting.

“Basic know-how,” he said.

“No-how, Joe. Whatever we have at any one time—that’s basic know-how. It isn’t something you can ever not have.” Meg spoke slowly yet with conviction and a steadiness, despite her partially nerveless lips, that brooked no interruption. “How can we ever lack what’s always there? What we needed was enabling technology. You know what that is. Like the telephone. The telephone is part of the enabling technology of the computer network.”

“I know about that but what about—”

“Right. The quest for the augmentation machine.”

“Hey,” he said, “I didn’t say that—”

“But it’s still on your mind and it’s still on ours. A simulated human mind. That’s what we want. And we still think the way to get it is by simulating the entire human. And we’re closer. We can do it. We can! Tony here’s our key.”

I held my breath.

Tony piped in. “It is the arrays of parallel processors that did it, just like they might make it possible to make a real augmentation machine,” he said to Joe, before Joe had a chance to recover his wits. “We needed them all because it’s the only way of constructing working DNA for a robot.”

“Not rabbit,” said Verry, with a smile.

“A rabbit and a robot. But the thing is, to model the macrocosm we had to—”

The words this kid used! He talked to Means too much.

“But your rabbit isn’t a robot!” Joe said.

“Says who?”

“Says me! What you’ve done is created a virtual rabbit, down to the DNA, with all your multiprocessors working like crazy to imitate what normal cells do; and it’s a simulation, not a robot, because your physical here-and-now rabbit is dependent on the computational power assembled outside your frigging rabbit Hocus! Because even if your cells are self-re-producing and diversifying to the point of creating an apparently living being, it’s still connected by an umbilical! It’s still computer-dependent! What I want to do—”

He stopped.

I cannot describe the sudden sense of tension—not a tension that arose then and there, but one that vanished: for around us had been the hovering and squeezing kind of tension never known to be there until its departure.

Joe had taken the bait and run.

“Every tool has a handle,” Robert said to me not long after we met. Nearly a decade ago, now. “By that I mean there’s an interface between us and the tool. You know what ‘interface’ means.”

“Sure as hell do,” I said, maybe more hotly than I intended. I had yet to make up my mind about this Mr. Means.

A man leaving middle age who about had it with everything, I had just emerged from a part of the hospital I never imagined existing: recovery and rehab.

Not from drugs.

Recovery from violence.

Rehabilitation from who I was.

From me.

Robert Means worked with the Virchco outfit that produced the testing program at St. Mary’s for social misfits of all stripes. They believed antisocial behavior often results from under-utilization.

People come into this world equipped with different arrays of abilities, inclinations, and talents. If they fall within the normal range, fine. If not, society may fail to use them.

One way to effect rehab, then: you devise radical new tests—in the case of Virchco, a V.R. system set of infinite-permutation routines. They make a stab at evaluating such elusive characteristics as imagination, flexibility, spatial perception, mental coordination, and adaptability to changing frames of reference. What else do you test for? Speed in comprehending complex situations? High thresholds of patience? Aptitude for character analysis? These, yes, and anything else you can think of—which suggests the utter impossibility of the task.

“You know, Fred,” Robert said, looking across the metal desk in the off-white room serving as his office in St. Mary’s, “I came here with only the faintest hope I’d find someone useful to my own work. But here you are. And you were practically under my nose. I would never have guessed.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “I mean, you’ve shown me I did OK—”

“Doing OK isn’t the point,” Robert said. “Anyone can do OK because we don’t have any standards for what’s OK and what isn’t. We aren’t working from some scale you have to score high on. I want the unexpected—so I guess you could say I’m looking for whatever I’m not looking for. I certainly wasn’t looking for you.”

I fidgeted. I had no idea why I should be in this office. I knew, however, that my initial resentment dissipated. I felt no anger. This interview had novelty.

Usually resentment grew—it always grew, no matter what I did— and turned gradually into nastiness.

It felt novel and right not to feel like a mean sonofabitch.

“Let me ask you this,” Robert said. “And I know this goes back a ways. A lot of years back. I’ve checked.”

I felt a hint of the knife-edge of bitterness, as if it rested against a tendon in my arm, ready to press and cut. I waited for what he would ask.

“Do you know why your parents thought you were mentally retarded?”

A red-flash of anger erupted briefly until I registered and considered and turned over for re-examination that one word in his question: thought. My parents thought I was mentally retarded.

A thousand answers sprang into my mind. All died within me, just as suddenly. All of them, except one:

“No,” I said.

“I have an idea. Want to hear it?”

I suddenly regarded the man opposite me with fear. He had transformed himself once already from an anonymous nobody good at devising gimmicks with a machine into a human being who had surprised me—startled me—by forcing me into revealing myself. I never revealed myself. Never. Hide is the word. Hide! Now he transformed again into a spectacled mystery who could peer into darkness. Time, and my mind: I regarded both as darknesses.

“Yes,” I said even as I cried inside— “No! No! No!”

Part of me ran away, down the hall, out the door, out into the sunlight outside St. Mary’s, screaming the whole time.

The rest of me stayed and heard out this man.

“You were delayed in a lot of things,” he said. “Extremely delayed. I won t list them all. But one was speaking. You were slow about that.”

Yes, I thought.

“When you finally talked, though, you did exactly as well as your peers. You fit right in. But by then you were already with other slow-Iearners.” Robert spoke in an odd way, with eyes slightly held wide and a tension around the muscles of the nostrils—I notice such things—that spoke of some kind of excitement, as though these thoughts he was expressing surprised and affected him, too. “And what was going on was exactly the opposite of being slow—you were tremendously fast. But no one knew it because you never showed it. In a way you didn’t have anything to show—because it wasn’t just our usual spoken language you were learning.”

How’s he know this stuff about when I was a kid?—a. resistant part of myself protested.

He went on: “I don’t know if you’ve heard about kids who grow up bilingual. It happens, sometimes, that the parents speak English and the nanny, Spanish. The parents get worried, because months pass and the kid isn’t speaking yet—and time passes and passes. The kid’s backwards! Then, suddenly, the kid speaks—in two languages. The kid can handle talking with the parents, and with the nanny—and the kid knows to keep the languages separate! It makes sense that the child needs more time before speaking—for it’s establishing parallel but separate language systems in its head! Something like that happened with you.”

“I only speak—”

“Something like that. What was the equivalent for you, of the other language, that you were learning? Have any idea? Any at all?”

A shake of the head from me.

“You were practically born with something I’ve worked all my professional life to acquire. We could call it the language of interface, because it consists of an entire mental vocabulary and way of putting that vocabulary together. It lets you think things other people can’t.

“An example of what I mean. When most people talk about a door, what do they see? They see a slab of wood, or an aluminum frame with a panel and screen, or two sheets of plywood with an air space in between. But when I say the word ‘door’ to you, what do you see? Do you see the wood or aluminum or anything flat and taller than it is wide? No—or at least you didn’t. By now, you’ve adapted at least a little. Because I bet as a kid, because of this way you have of seeing things, when you learned what a door was, you pictured the handle, and maybe the hinges, and maybe the frame. Because you saw the interfaces. You saw what made the door different from the wall; and you thought that what other people saw as a door was the unimportant part.”

I stared at him. My first thought: He’s right! My second: How’s he know? Third: Who cares?

“In other words, you saw that a tool isn’t a tool without its handle. That’s what we believe, those of us studying interface. The interface is the tool. The interface defines our relation to our world. The interface is technology whole and entire!

“It wasn’t what you did in the Virchco tests that caught my eye, but how you did them. Almost everyone goes into a virtual environment and sees things. That limits their ability to act and make decisions. You are the first I’ve encountered to understand innately that everything in these tests is a tool that can be used —that what we’re doing is surrounding ourselves with every possible tool—or in other words every possible interface. Society is busy doing that all the time. It’s what I call maximization of culture. Maxxing on the availability of tools— and seeing the tools.”

After the initial stab of recognition in what he said, I grew nonchalant. I had no idea why he should be interested.

In three years, however, together with being engrossed in a set of training modules in computers and mathematics I never thought I could fathom, Means had me halfway toward seeing how to use my talents; and he had me on a project designed to mimic the way the eye perceives different shapes in motion. First I created a theoretical brain that could use a theoretical eye; next, a multiprocessor-backed real-time eye. My work had to do with how the brain makes bandies for the images the eye takes in.

In two more years I had the pair of eyes and the set of optic nerves with appropriate software that went into Hocus, the nexus of gigabyte access and multiplex process that looked like a rabbit and bred like one when it came to expenses: eight million dollars-plus and counting.

Which was nothing.

Nothing compared to what would come next.

The rest of the party left, with a few meaningful glances toward me from those who knew, and a puzzled look from Tony, who knew no more than bits and pieces.

I gave myself over to an impulse I hoped would be a good one:

I stepped down, walked to the door, locked it, and flipped around the Open/Closed, to have the former where we could see it.

We were open.

Joe said nothing, silently filling a beer for himself and looking self-absorbed, as if considering an impulse of his own.

He gave in, too.

He walked around the bar to the customer side and chose a seat a few down, so the bend in the bar separated us.

“It’s fantastic what Tony’s done— and he’s going to keep on doing it,” I said as a way of getting back on track.

“What do you mean?”

I noticed how he said these words. He meant the question for what it was: a question. He hid no resentments behind it, and no distrust. How different from a few years ago!

“I mean this project’s enough to keep Tony going for years. And it’s what Tony wants to do. But you know that Robert—”

“Robert. He wants the next thing.”

“Yes!”

“He wants—”

Joe shook his head, his facial muscles fighting between a smile and a frown. His eyes glistened at the difficulty; and at seeing it I felt something I had nearly forgotten.

“Yes,” I said again, fighting down my own excitement and fears.

“But hell,” he burst, “it’s the whole business all over again! You know why I got out of it and you know why I could never pick the project up again! My god, it’s a kind of immorality, isn’t it, to work on simulating an entire human system, and then rendering it into an independent entity— isn’t it? Isn’t it? I mean you realize what Tony and the whole crew—you, too—what you’re doing? You’re working on life itself!”

“Yes, but you—”

“Don’t interrupt me! Who the hell do you think you are to do that? It isn’t any game! It’s that last stop of science—because you know that if we create a human analog it’s no longer an isolated scientific project done for its own sake; it’s a matter of acting on behalf of everyone, because in creating an electronic organism, an entire being—it changes everything! We’re no longer alone! We’ve maybe even created our successor, our Moravician child! Once you do something like that it doesn’t just go away!”

“Joe,” I said. “Think about this. Put it in perspective. We are going to revive the project. We’re going to create a simulation of a human being, along the lines we’ve just explored with Tony’s rabbit. Self-generating systems will do most of the cell reproduction, with the DNA replaced by series of parallel processors; and, yes, it may turn out—we’re even hoping it will turn out that we’re not just creating an analog but an actual thinking and humanly feeling creature—an electronic being with a real-time model, or call it a ‘manifestation’ if you will, with whom we can interact in three-space, just as with Tony’s Hocus. And, yes, if that happens, then—”

“But you don’t get the point. You know why I quit before! We’re such goddamned hubris-filled idiots that we don’t realize how deeply flawed we are and don’t see it would be an absolute mistake to put ourselves in the position of creators!”

“We aren’t the creators!”

Joe had avoided my eyes in his ranting—maybe because he knew I heard his objections before, or at least knew of them: I had joined Med-Dyne after he left, after all. Robert had filled me in pretty well on what had preoccupied him. Joe had come to hate the idea of himself being responsible for the creation of life: his own faults loomed too large.

As if they loomed any larger than anyone else’s.

He met my eyes now, questioning me by silence.

“We aren’t. Not at all,” I said. “Look at what you believe, Joe. Do you believe in a God who made us human? I don’t, and last I knew you didn’t either. The Universe and its laws are the environment for emergent structures and phenomena, one of which we call life; and life itself creates sub-environments in the Universe suitable for its own propagation; in other words, life begets life.”

“We’re talking an entirely different order of things. We’re talking potentially intelligent life, intelligent electronic life we’re creating!”

“Exactly. Life begets life, and life includes intelligence, on various levels. It does! And intelligence begets—”

“But how can we justify it?”

“It may be an emergent quality of a technical society that we create forms of intelligence other than our own-like the form we’re after, electronic intelligence. Or should I say, it’s emergent that we create other forms of electronic intelligence, since we have electronic intelligence ourselves, biologically based; and our society, made up of thinking brains, might be viewed as a complex electronic network, each of the agents of which are working in roughly parallel ways and working on some different aspect of the central question—which is, How do we replicate ourselves? Replicate—not as organic human beings, but as electronic intelligences?”

“It isn’t our central concern as a society!”

“Who’s to say it isn’t?” I said. “What we intend is different from what emerges from our efforts. Emergent phenomena are never the projects of intention. There’s nothing teleological about it.”

Joe looked at me suspiciously. “So you’re saying we should just go blindly into this, because it’s going to happen anyway? Because society’s pointed that way?”

“Not really. I’m saying we do have to take responsibility. Especially if it’s given to us to be the ones responsible. Look at it this way. Who’s going to be most responsible about something that needs responsibility? Someone who knows the difficulties? Or someone who goes into it completely blindly? Well, obviously, the one who knows the difficulties! Someone who can think about the future, maybe even someone who fears the future and knows to guard against what can go wrong!”

That left him silent. I wondered how far to go.

Then I wondered if I could afford to stop before pushing the point all the way.

“I guess,” I said, “I’m also talking about us. Us, as individuals. And that other responsibility, the one to ourselves. We’re extremely particular products of society, with extremely particular abilities and talents—and none of us are destined to do anything—but we re faced with a choice: do we use our talents and visions, or don’t we. If we do, we act as fully human as we can be: because we’re participating in what it is for us, as individuals, to be human. If we do, we accept responsibility! If we don’t, aren’t we rejecting—”

“Oh, man,” Joe said, burying his face in his hands, rubbing his eyes, then seeing his beer and remembering to drink. He drank it all. “Man, you’ve been around Robert too long.”

I laughed. “I was just thinking the same thing about Tony,” I said, or tried to, against the choking in my throat—choking, because it registered, this new change in Joe: for when he said this, he nearly smiled.

He wanted back on the project. I knew this now, with a certainty that surprised me. Robert, too, must have known.

“It gets me,” Joe said, “how you think a guy who held a gun up to his dad and then pulled the trigger could help in any way in creating a good electronic human.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but look who else Robert has on his project—that same dad who grew jealous of his son, got enraged that his son was finding the outlets he himself lacked—the usefulness that he himself lacked— and then beat his own kid—beat the crap out of him! Beat him to the point the kid stole his gun—and used it!”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Oh boy. Yeah.”

We sat for a while after that.

Then we stopped sitting.

We both shook with nerves, getting off the bar stools.

So damned hard, making up for years of absence in the embrace of a moment.

Nearly cracked each other’s spines.

Afterwards we needed more beers, to replenish liquids.

Joe tossed me a clean countertop rag to make me stop using my sleeves.

“You’ve never told me,” I said, when I could, “who it was backed you for this joint.”

He looked around the bar, as if seeing it for the first time. “It was him, you know. Robert. Robert put up the money.”

Robert Means had put Joe where he would be forced to grapple with other human lives, while grappling with his own. A place and time enough to learn yet another language: human interface.

Should have guessed.

No one has cataloged all the terrors of the mind, although most of us start lists of our own.

Mine begins with memory: there I have stored myself, my actions, and my reactions to others: and there, in a museum dedicated to the prehistory to my Now, I see within a glass cabinet the visage and body of a man I have been, however much I must struggle to believe this lineage and descent; and the man I see stands stoutly, with a grimace of surprise, and with a hand reaching to clasp his side, where the red badge of the bullet-wound spreads; and beneath him, near the glass, in neat letters, a sign reads, “Here there be monsters.”

To be human means to be in possession of a physical body of chemical and electrical nature over which one has partial, never complete, control, as well as a mental “body”; and it means one suffers through periods when the ability to control even the mental portion slips too easily from grasp. At such moments one can become saint or monster—for some saints are made unwillingly, just as some monsters. I know which 1 became, after being nurtured by neglect, by the perceived hatred of my society that turned to self-hatred, by the self-inflicted misuses of mind and, consequently, body, which I achieved by abandoning talents I deeply knew to lie within me but out of reach. 1 knew no function to attach to my existence; and 1 became monstrous. I did violence to my son, hideously, with tortures of body and psyche, raining blows by cruel hand or word. I beat him, for he became what I most hated—the image of what I should have been: a human engaged in self-building.

Human means self-maker. We require constant self-construction; otherwise self-destruction sets in. I proved it for myself by setting into motion the series of events that ended with that piece of lead burning through my flesh, near enough my spine to give me pause even now.

I pressed no charges. I offered myself as the criminal; and when they heard the facts, police and court agreed.

Now the two of us wounded humans are at work creating a third wounded human: for we do think, all of us, that what we create will be human; and we believe we must wound it, through blindness or insensitivity or stupidity, or all three.

How can we help it? How can we not be blind when we advance into the never-seen?

Yet can we let blindness stop us?

Many of the thinkers and computational modelers and systems developers upon whose work we base ours see little difference in essential nature between the process of learning within the mind, cell development, individual adaptation to environment, corporate survival, and species evolution; and specialists in those disciplines tell us incontrovertibly that nothing—no mind, no cell, no corporation, no species, no genus, no system—reaches equilibrium. All systems consist of imperfect hands reaching for what cannot be reached. Can we be any different? Would it not be an even greater form of hubris than the hubris we embrace now, if we were to sit awaiting own perfection, awaiting the time we have self-built ourselves perfectly, before daring to attempt to build another? I say it would be. It would consist of the greatest hubris of all. Robert, and the rest of the team, believe likewise. Even Joe finally sees it that way.

Do any parents await the achievement of their own perfection before trying to create the perfection of a child?

Throwing ourselves into this project: it is our way of reaching.

I still think often of my bullet wound. I must. Sometimes I feel it as if it remains a physical passage ripped through me. A perpetual wound.

I think then of Joe, whom I clearly remember turning from the wall where I had driven him; I remember seeing the glow of knowing in his eyes, and seeing the muzzle of my own gun. I remember it clearly: for it pointed at my heart.

I thought: The little buzzard’s going to kill me!

Yet a moment before the flash and burn and screeching pain hit me, he carefully and steadily lowered the muzzle from my chest so the bullet struck my midriff.

Joe in his own way—I hate to put it this way, recalling as I do the aching and soul-searing pain—but in his own way he was engaging in Robert’s practice of saving human lives: his, mine, and possibly someone else’s, too, though he could hardly have guessed that this new life taking form beneath our hands, our gazes, our minds, is a new potential that will reach to realize itself, exactly as would another human being.

Potential, reaching to realize itself: we try to save that, wherever we can. I do. Joe does. Everyone here does.

Because we know where we must most firmly take hold:

Where we cannot yet reach.