Elizabeth Moon - The Speed of Dark

“So — it makes us pay attention to other people?” Linda asks.

“No, no — we know you already do that. We’re not like those idiots back in the mid-twentieth century who thought autistics were just ignoring people. What it does is help you attend to social signals — facial expression, vocal tone, gesture, that kind of thing.”

Dale makes a rude gesture; the doctor does not attend to it. I wonder if he really did not see or he chose to ignore it.

“But don’t people have to be trained — like blind people were — to interpret new data?”

“Of course. That’s why there’s a training phase built into the treatment. Simulated social encounters, using computer-generated faces—” Another slide, this one of a chimpanzee with its upper lip curled and its lower lip pouted out. We all break into roars of laughter, uncontrollable. The doctor flushes angrily. “Sorry — that’s the wrong slide. Of course it’s the wrong slide. Human faces, I mean, and practice in human social interactions. We’ll do a baseline assessment and then you’ll have two to four months of post-treatment training—”

“Looking at monkey faces!” Linda says, laughing so hard she’s almost crying. We are all giggling.

“I said it was a mistake,” the doctor says. “We have trained psychotherapists to lead the intervention… It’s a serious matter.”

The chimpanzee’s face has been replaced by a picture of a group of people sitting in a circle; one is talking and the others are listening intently. Another slide, this time of someone in a clothing store talking to a salesperson. Another, of a busy office with someone on a phone. It all looks very normal and very boring. He does not show a picture of someone in a fencing tournament or someone talking to the police after a mugging in a parking lot. The only picture with a policeman in it could be titled Asking Directions . The policeman, with a stiff smile on his face, has one arm outstretched, pointing; the other person has a funny hat, a little backpack, and a book that says Tourist Guidebook on the cover.

It looks posed. All the pictures look posed, and the people may not even be real people. They could be — probably are — computer composites. We are supposed to become normal, real people, but they expect us to learn from these unreal, imaginary people in contrived, posed situations. The doctor and his associates assume they know the situations we deal with or will need to deal with and they will teach us how to deal with those. It reminds me of those therapists in the last century who thought they knew what words someone needed to know and taught an “essential” vocabulary. Some of them even told parents not to let children learn other words, lest it impede their learning of the essential vocabulary.

Such people do not know what they do not know. My mother used to recite a little verse that I did not understand until I was almost twelve, and one line of it went: “Those who know not, and know not they know not, are fools…” The doctor does not know that I needed to be able to deal with the man at the tournament who would not call hits and the jealous would-be lover in the fencing group and the various police officers who took reports on vandalism and threats.

Now the doctor is talking about the generalization of social skills. He says that after the treatment and training our social skills should generalize to all situations in everyday life. I wonder what he would have thought of Don’s social skills.

I glance at the clock. The seconds flick over, one after another; the two hours are nearly done. The doctor asks if there are any questions. I look down. The questions I want to ask are not appropriate in a meeting like this, and I do not think he will answer them anyway.

“When do you think you would start?” Cameron asks.

“We would like to start with the first subject — uh, patient — as soon as possible. We could have everything in place by next week.”

“How many at once?” asks Bailey.

“Two. We would like to do two at a time, three days apart — this ensures that the primary medical team can concentrate on those during the first few critical days.”

“What about waiting after the first two until they complete treatment to see if it works?” Bailey asks.

The doctor shakes his head. “No, it’s better to have the whole cohort close in time.”

“Makes it faster to publication,” I hear myself say.

“What?” the doctor asks.

The others are looking at me. I look at my lap.

“If we all do it fairly quickly and together, then you can write it up and get it published faster. Otherwise it would be a year or more.” I glance quickly at his face; his cheeks are red and shiny again.

“That’s not the reason,” he says, a little loudly. “It’s just that the data are more comparable if the subjects — if you — are all close in time. I mean, suppose something happened that changed things between the time the first two started and finished… something that affected the rest of you—”

“Like what, a bolt from the blue that makes us normal?” Dale asks. “You’re afraid we’ll get galloping normality and be unsuitable subjects?”

“No, no,” the doctor says. “More like something political that changes attitudes…”

I wonder what the government is thinking. Do governments think? The chapter in Brain Functionality on the politics of research protocols comes to mind. Is something about to happen, some regulation or change in policy, which would make this research impossible in a few months?

That is something I can find out when I get home. If I ask this man, I do not think he will give me an honest answer.

When we leave, we walk at angles, all out of rhythm with one another. We used to have a way of merging, accommodating one another’s peculiarities, so that we moved as a group. Now we move without harmony. I can sense the confusion, the anger. No one talks. I do not talk. I do not want to talk with them, who have been my closest associates for so long.

When we are back in our own building, we go quickly into our individual offices. I sit down and start to reach for the fan. I stop myself, and then I wonder why I stopped myself.

I do not want to work. I want to think about what it is they want to do to my brain and think about what it means. It means more than they say; everything they say means more than it says. Beyond the words is the tone; beyond the tone is the context; beyond the context is the unexplored territory of normal socialization, vast and dark as night, lit by the few pinpricks of similar experience, like stars.

Starlight, one writer said, perfuses the entire universe: the whole thing glows. The dark is an illusion, that writer said. If that is so, then Lucia was right and there is no speed of dark.

But there is simple ignorance, not knowing, and willful ignorance that refuses to know, that covers the light of knowledge with the dark blanket of bias. So I think there may be positive darkness, and I think dark can have a speed.

The books tell me that my brain works very well, even as it is, and that it is much easier to derange the functions of the brain than to repair them. If normal people really can do all the things that are claimed for them, it would be helpful to have that ability… but I am not sure they do.

They do not always understand why other people act as they do. That is obvious when they argue about their reasons, their motives. I have heard someone tell a child, “You are only doing that to annoy me,” when it is clear to me that the child was doing it because the child enjoyed the act itself… was oblivious to its effect on the adult. I have been oblivious like that, so I recognize it in others.