Eve and Adam (12 page)

It hits me then, what should have hit me earlier: They’re all in on it. The doctors, the nurses. They know the injury’s gone.

They’re all in on it. All playing a game, hiding the truth from me.

It’s why my mother was in such a hurry to get me out of the hospital and safely to Spiker. My secret would have been out within a day. And what would have happened to my mother if it had come out that she’d broken the law? Many laws?

It’s dark in the room but the clock shows 8:42
A.M.
I would normally be up by now. I’m buzzy from lack of sleep, and my head is full of pictures and words. Aislin’s bloody face. The dream memory of a long-ago hospital room. Solo’s words:
You’re a mod. You’re genetically modified.
The unreal sensation of my fingertips on the place where terrible damage should be.

Despite this, what I remember most is Solo kneeling on the bathroom floor.

I head for the bathroom. Aislin snores softly.

I grab the scissors Solo used to cut off my leg bandage. Awkwardly, I slit the bandages on my right arm and hand.

I bend my crushed fingers, wave my mangled hand, flex my broken elbow.

It’s as if nothing ever happened.

You’re genetically modified.

Don’t think about it.

I take a hot, hot shower. I can’t believe how good it feels. Standing upright in the stinging spray is a gift. Shampooing my hair with both hands is bliss.

I towel off, change into fresh clothes, actual jeans with two legs. Then I reach—with my right hand, no less—for my sketchbook and pencil.

Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.

I open to the unfinished sketch I’d been working on for Life Drawing.

The pencil feels smooth and certain between my fingers. The whispered resistance of point on paper is music.

I make a few random lines, just to get the rhythm right.

Don’t think about it.

I study my drawing. It still sucks.

It needs something. Energy, spark, soul.

Life drawing, my ass. This is a still life.

It’s the eyes. The eyes are all wrong. They’re nothing like the eyes I’ve been creating with the aid of my mother’s software.

Adam’s eyes pulse with possibilities.

These eyes … well, they’re granules of graphite on recycled wood product.

Don’t think about it.

I start to erase the left eye, but suddenly I picture the dog-eared poster on the art room wall: “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”

I turn to a new page, tear it out, and write Aislin a quick note.

I put the paper by her pillow. She’s kicked off her blankets, so I tuck them around her chin. Her cheek looks like an overripe plum, purple-black and swollen.

I stash my sketchbook in a drawer.

Then I flee for the safety of Adam.

– 20 –

I settle into my workstation. A shaft of sunlight slices the air. The twinkling ficus tree has dropped a leaf onto my keyboard. A couple of workers glance up when I appear, then quickly return to their monitors.

I enter my password. Click, click, tap, tap.

I can type again. Two hands, ten fingers.

Adam materializes.

He is a good-looking guy, Adam. Very good-looking.

Apparently, the other workers think so, too. They stare, as if hypnotized, at his hovering form.

“I want her job,” someone murmurs.

I glance over, and, in perfect sync, all gazes return to their respective monitors. I am, after all, Terra Spiker’s daughter: Eye contact is not an option.

Terra Spiker, who’s apparently capable of anything.

I wiggle the fingers of my right hand. My perfect, pain-free fingers.

They were trying to save my life. They
did
save my life.

If they hadn’t cut corners, ignored the FDA, I wouldn’t be here.

Wouldn’t I do the same thing for someone I love? For Aislin?

Yep. In a heartbeat.

But would I have kept it a secret from her, a secret she has to hear from some stranger?

Solo’s not a stranger, some part of my brain protests. But he is, of course. I know virtually nothing about him, except that he hates my mother.

Click, click. I focus on the monitor.

I realize that Adam’s eyes—which, yes, happen to be the color of Solo’s, which, yes, is just a coincidence—aren’t as lifelike as I’d remembered.

Like my sketch, the gaze is blank. There’s an emptiness, a void. Still, there’s a feeling of, I don’t know,
possibility
with Adam.

This isn’t like art. I know how to fix this problem.

The set of tools for designing the genetic components of the brain are different. They aren’t as simple as the first steps in creation: Plug in this gene and presto, you’ve got blue eyes or dark hair or lungs.

I scan the instructions. They make clear, in a playful, user-friendly way, that genes may lay the table for the brain, but they don’t cook the meal. Brains are about experience, too. And even at the genetic level, the interactions are so subtle and so intertwined that you can never be sure what you’re getting. The brain is a tangle of wires, billions and billions of wires, with some areas relatively sparse and other areas so densely packed that the connections seem to fuse, creating something greater than the mere connection of wires.

I scratch my wrist, where a scrap of surgical tape has been left behind. It itches. My whole body’s on edge, the way I feel when I haven’t been able to run for a few days.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s the problem.

No, I tell myself, that’s not the problem. The problem is that one way or another, you’re going to have to confront your mother and tell her you know the truth.

Don’t think about it. Not yet.

I could give Adam a genius-level IQ. I could drag certain icons together and come up with a massively complex brain. One that’s capable of absorbing incredible detail and synthesizing vast quantities of data.

On the other hand, I might also create a person so smart he can’t relate to anyone but people like himself. I could reduce his potential pool of friends, peers, lovers, to one ten-thousandth of one percent of the human race.

I could make it impossible for him to be happy.

Maybe I should make him average. He would have a wide choice of friends and possible lovers. But he’d have to work harder at school. Things might not come quite as easily to him.

He might be happier. But merely making him average wouldn’t ensure that.

I could tilt him toward the arts. I could prepare him for a life of science. I could code him to be a humanitarian.

I could make him fearful and cautious. He would probably live longer. But he might not find what he was looking for and needed.

I could make him reckless and bold. He might die younger. He might be a criminal. He might be a great creative mind.

This is not the simple, fun art work of making a face and a body. I’m not religious, but I’m starting to have some sympathy for God. Give man a brain smart enough to name the animals, one generally useful and productive, and you have to see the whole forbidden apple thing coming down the pike.

This isn’t as easy as it looks.

I think about brains I’ve known. Aislin. What the hell is going on in her brain? She’s not as book-smart as I am, and maybe that gets her into trouble. But at the same time, if you added up all the sheer pleasure and fun we’ve each had? Aislin’s pile would look like a skyscraper next to my three-story townhouse.

And what about my mother? She’s brilliant. Ambitious. Amoral.

You’re a mod. You’re genetically modified.

I can still hear the way Solo said it:
a mod.
As if that’s a regular word, an entry in Webster’s.

He sounded like a doctor when he told me. A doctor telling his patient she has an incurable illness.

Which is funny, when you think about it, because what I have amounts to a superpower. I can heal with a speed and completeness that’s unbelievable. I could be a comic book hero.

And yet I never noticed.

How smart can I be if I never even noticed?

“He’s … beautiful.”

I turn to see Aislin, pointing to Adam. She’s a disaster. Bruises all over one half of her face. The bandages covering the sutures are stained with seeping blood, now dried to a rust color.

She is not a mod.

“How are you feeling?” I ask. I don’t get up and hug her, although I think maybe I should. I don’t.

She doesn’t answer. Her mouth is hanging open. “Marry me, Adam. I don’t care if you’re missing some parts. I love you.”

“Yeah, his face turned out pretty well,” I say flatly. “So again: How are you?”

Aislin tries to focus. “I’m way hungover. Plus I guess someone must have dropped a safe on me.” She smiles, wincing, and I see a jagged, broken tooth.

When I was seven I broke a tooth after missing a landing on the balance beam. It grew back. How did I not notice how strange that was?

I am silent. Aislin’s lower lip trembles. She is about to cry.

I stand, push back my chair. And I hug her.

Why don’t I want to? Why do I feel as if my skin has been sandpapered and now everything is just too much?

“I have to help Maddox,” she says into my neck.

I push her, hold her out at arm’s length. “Maddox is a drug dealer. A stupid one, no less. He’s a drug dealer who ripped off other drug dealers. And he got you hurt.”

She steps back away from me. “What am I supposed to do? Just let them kill him?”

“How about calling the cops?”

She sighs. “He’ll go to prison.”

“Probably.”

I tap my foot, a parody of my mother. “Aislin. Seriously. What other option do you have?”

Aislin drops into my chair. Near her part, her hair is matted with blood. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”

“How much does he owe?” I ask.

“I’m not asking you for money, E.V.”

“How much?” There’s a hard, cynical sound in my voice. I hate myself for using it.

She stares at her fingernails. “Nine thousand dollars.”

I wait for Aislin to protest that she doesn’t want it. That she’s not asking for it. But she is, so she can’t.

I don’t want to do it. I shouldn’t do it. But if it helps save Aislin from Maddox—from herself …

“If I do this, if I help out this one time, will you get your act together? Find a guy who treats you better? Will you make this crap with Maddox stop?”

Aislin sniffles, nods slightly.

The truth is, it’s not much money. It’s a lot for most people, but it’s nothing to my mother. The only problem is, my mother doesn’t give money away: She buys things. If I ask her for help, she’ll own me.

But I can only be bought once. So I need to raise the price.

I pull out my phone and text my mother.

Aislin is looking at Adam. “You’re missing a few parts.”

“I’m working on the brain,” I say, distracted.

“Why?”

“It’s part of the simulation,” I say. “He needs a brain. I’m trying to decide whether I should make him really smart, or just smart.”

Aislin thinks for a moment. “Can you make him kind?”

My phone chimes. My mother can see me in her office in an hour.

“An hour,” I report wearily, without explanation.

It’s so weird. After days of longing for her company, now I want Aislin to go away.

If she senses it, she doesn’t let on. “Can I watch?” she asks, pointing to Adam.

I pull an extra chair over. She sits down. We’re both glum.

I show her. “See these gumdrops? What it’s saying is, basically, this is a set of genes that in some other guy made him very smart. But here’s a different set. And here’s another set. And each of these sets, they think, made this or that person smart.”

“How come they don’t know?” she asks.

“Because no one quite knows. There’s no single ‘smart’ button. It’s like smart in different flavors. Smart vanilla, smart chocolate, smart raspberry.”

Aislin stares intently. “You mean, they decoded some real person’s DNA and figured out what made them smart? Who were the people?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. The program doesn’t identify them.”

“So, like Einstein or Stephen Hawking?”

“Maybe.”

“Well … that’s not cool, is it? Making people who are like other people?”

“It’s just a simulation,” I say. “They couldn’t do it in reality.”

She looks at me. Her eyes are shrewd. I look away.

“Just because they did something to me…,” I say. I don’t know the second part of the sentence.

“Are you going to ask your mom?”

“About the nine thousand?”

“About being a—what did Solo call it?—a mod.”

I hold out The Limb Formerly Known As The Leg. “Let’s see. I’m walking. My bandages have disappeared. I’m guessing it will come up.”

We sit in silence for a while as I idly pick through brain configurations. Gradually, the tension between us bleeds away. I don’t want to be distant from Aislin.

I need her. She’s all I’ve got. And she needs me, even if she doesn’t always realize it.

“We could do muscles first, then brains,” Aislin suggests.

“It’s not all genetic, you know: He would have to work out.”

“Make him right and I’ll work him out,” she says with a trace of her confident leer.

“Without a brain?”

She sighs. “They’re better off without one.”

– 21 –

My mother’s office is kind of incredible. It’s not low-key. It’s Vegas, baby, but with a very cool, even cold, high-tech touch.

The massive room is dominated by a thirty-foot-tall waterfall. The water runs down a series of stone planes set at angles. Very slowly, so slowly you don’t notice it at first, the angles of the planes shift so that the water is always in a new configuration.

Her desk—if you can call it by so mundane a name—is a wedge of brushed stainless steel, flat where it needs to be flat, but then swooping up on the left in a way that suggests an airplane soaring into the sky, combined with a scalpel blade.

Hanging from the ceiling are sculptures my father made right before his death. He worked mostly in metal—some wood, some glass, too. These aren’t mobiles, exactly. They’re static sculptures suspended from cables. My father called them “airborne artifacts,” sculptures meant to echo natural forms: clouds, trees, birds. My favorite, done in steel and Plexiglas, is the rough shape of a thunderbolt. There’s a standing sculpture, too, one I’ve always loved. It’s sort of a free-form redwood tree that extends from floor to ceiling.