Peter Watts - Beyond the Rift

“You had everything you needed.” Stavros didn’t bother to disguise the contempt in his voice. “Terracon’s best hardware people handled the linkups. I modeled the virtual genes myself. Gestation was perfect. We did everything we could to give you a normal child.”

“A normal child ,” Andrew remarked, “doesn’t have a cable growing out of her head. A normal child isn’t leashed to some cabinet full of—”

“Do you have any idea the baud rate it takes to run a human body by remote control? RF was out of the question. And she goes portable as soon as the state of the art and her own development allow it. As I’ve told you time and again.” Which he had, although it was almost a lie. Oh, the state of the art would proceed as it always had, but Terracon was no longer investing any great R&D in the Goravec file. Cruise control, after all.

Besides , Stavros reflected, we’d be crazy to trust you two to take Jeannie anywhere outside a controlled environment…

“We—we know, Stav.” Kim Goravec had stepped between her husband and the pickup. “We haven’t forgotten—”

“We haven’t forgotten it was Terracon who got us into this mess in the first place, either,” Andrew growled. “We haven’t forgotten whose negligence left me cooking next to a cracked baffle plate for forty-three minutes and sixteen seconds, or whose tests missed the mutations, or who tried to look the other way when our shot at the birth lottery turned into a fucking nightmare—”

“And have you forgotten what Terracon did to make things right? How much we spent? Have you forgotten the waivers you signed?”

“You think you’re some kind of saints because you settled out of court? You want to talk about making things right? It took us ten years to win the lottery, and you know what your lawyers did when the tests came back? They offered to fund the abortion .”

“Which doesn’t mean—”

“Like another child was ever going to happen. Like anyone was going to give me another chance with my balls full of chunky codon soup. You—”

“The issue,” Kim said, her voice raised, “is supposed to be Jeannie .”

Both men fell silent.

“Stav,” she continued, “I don’t care what Terracon says. Jeannie isn’t normal, and I’m not just talking about the obvious. We love her, we really love her, but she’s become so violent all the time, we just can’t take—”

“If someone turned me on and off like a microwave oven,” Stavros said mildly, “I might be prone to the occasional tantrum myself.”

Andrew slammed a fist into the wall. “Now just a fucking minute , Mikalaides. Easy enough for you to sit halfway around the world in your nice insulated office and lecture us. We’re the ones who have to deal with Jeannie when she bashes her fists into her face, or rubs the skin off her hands until she’s got hamburger hanging off the end of her arms, or stabs herself in the eye with a goddamn fork . She ate glass once, remember? A fucking three-year-old ate glass! And all you Terracon assholes could do was blame Kim and me for allowing ‘potentially dangerous implements’ into the playroom. As if any competent parent should expect their child to mutilate herself given half a chance.”

“It’s just insane, Stav,” Kim insisted. “The doctors can’t find anything wrong with the body, you insist there’s nothing wrong with the mind, and Jeannie just keeps doing this. There’s something seriously wrong with her, and you guys won’t admit it. It’s like she’s daring us to turn her off, it’s as though she wants us to shut her down.”

Oh God, thought Stavros. The realization was almost blinding. That’s it. That’s exactly it.

It’s my fault.

“Jean, listen. This is important. I’ve got—I want to tell you a story.”

“Stav, I’m not in the mood right now—”

“ Please , Jean. Just listen.”

Silence from the earbuds. Even the abstract mosaics on his tacticals seemed to slow a little.

“There—there was this land, Jean, this green and beautiful country, only its people screwed everything up. They poisoned their rivers and they shat in their own nests and they basically made a mess of everything. So they had to hire people to try and clean things up, you know? These people had to wade though the chemicals and handle the fuel rods and sometimes that would change them, Jean. Just a little.

“Two of these people fell in love and wanted a child. They almost didn’t make it, they were allowed only one chance, but they took it, and the child started growing inside, but something went wrong. I, I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but—”

“An epigenetic synaptic defect,” Jean said quietly. “Does that sound about right?”

Stavros froze, astonished and fearful.

“A single point mutation,” Jean went on. “That’d do it. A regulatory gene controlling knob distribution along the dendrite. It would’ve been active for maybe twenty minutes, total, but by then the damage had been done. Gene therapy wouldn’t work after that; would’ve been a classic case of barn-door-after-the-horse.”

“Oh God, Jean,” Stavros whispered.

“I was wondering when you’d get around to owning up to it,” she said quietly.

“How could you possibly…did you—”

Jean cut him off: “I think I can guess the rest of the story. Right after the neural tube developed things would start to go—wrong. The baby would be born with a perfect body and a brain of mush. There would be—complications, not real ones, sort of made-up ones. Litigation , I think is the word, which is funny, because it doesn’t even remotely relate to any moral implications. I don’t really understand that part.

“But there was another way. Nobody knew how to build a brain from scratch, and even if they could, it wouldn’t be the same, would it? It wouldn’t be their daughter , it would be—something else.”

Stavros said nothing.

“But there was this man, a scientist, and he figured out a workaround. We can’t build a brain, he said, but the genes can. And genes are a lot simpler to fake than neural nets anyway. Only four letters to deal with, after all. So the scientist shut himself away in a lab where numbers could take the place of things , and he wrote a recipe in there, a recipe for a child. And miraculously he grew something, something that could wake up and look around and which was legally —I don’t really understand that word either, actually—legally and genetically and developmentally the daughter of the parents. And this guy was very proud of what he’d accomplished, because even though he was just a glorified model-builder by trade, he hadn’t built this thing at all. He’d grown it. And nobody had ever knocked up a computer before, much less coded the brain of a virtual embryo so it would actually grow in a server somewhere.”

Stavros put his head in his hands. “How long have you known?”

“I still don’t, Stav. Not all of it anyway, not for sure. There’s this surprise ending, for one thing, isn’t there? That’s the part I only just figured out. You grew your own child in here , where everything’s numbers. But she’s supposed to be living somewhere else , somewhere where everything’s—static, where everything happens a billion times slower than it does here. The place where all the words fit. So you had to hobble her to fit into that place, or she’d grow up overnight and spoil the illusion. You had to keep the clock speed way down.