The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men (2 page)

“Mr. Stillman is slightly hearing impaired,” I said. “As the result of an explosion. He was a decorated detective with the
NYPD
until he had to retire on partial disability, after a bad morning with a suspicious package.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“We knew each other,” I went on, “back when I was a reporter. I covered a few of his cases. He’s good.”

“I see. Well, Mr. Stillman, to answer your question—the local police are out of the picture. This is a private property issue as far as they’re concerned. Second, your time, to be honest, is less costly than that of research staff. And, third, our insurers require an outside vetting. Greta was the subject of neuro-cognitive experiments which are vital to a new medical procedure we’re hoping to market in a very short …”

“You got a monkey who was murdered?”

“Greta was not a monkey, Mr. Stillman. In fact, that’s one reason Mr. Levin here will be helping with your report. As assistant director of public relations, he frequently has to translate our language into … more public language. Greta, to be precise, was
Pan troglodytes
, an east African chimpanzee and the closest relative to humans in the animal kingdom. Her
DNA
was 98.4 percent identical to yours.”

“But this Greta. She’s like 98.4 percent dead now, am I right?”

“Yes.”

“You have your own security people?”

“Yes. In the past week they’ve reported nothing more than a minor break-in and the usual protesters.”

“Break-in where?”

“A photography lab. Some lighting equipment and battery packs went missing.”

“Protesters?”

“I’m sure you saw them when you came in. Animal rights groups, most of them—
PETA
, that sort of thing—people who think the animals are being abused. The world is full of romanticists, Mr. Stillman, who
believe that science advances by magic or by computer modeling or some such nonsense.”

“So are they? Being abused that is?”

Katharine looked at me and then toward the dark mahogany of her twin office doors. “Greta fell, Mr. Stillman. From a high place. Which I’m sure you’d like to examine for yourself. Laurence, if you would perhaps show our guest to the compound itself, you could introduce him to Dr. Deckard on your way.”

“Yeah,” I said, “that would probably be the best thing.”

So we ran the maze.

I took him back to the atrium, across the polished marble, clepclepping like horses at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Then into the chrome elevator that they probably don’t have in the Grand Canyon, where we watched the numbers flicker and listened to the soft ping of passing floors, all the way up to
INFECTIOUS DISEASES
. And then down the syringe. That’s what they call it on the public tours. A glassed-in hallway—almost a tube—connecting two of the buildings. It gives a spectacular view of the entire campus. Though at night it’s a little different. Twelve stories up, you think twice about stepping out into nothing. And even in the daytime it’s intimidating.

So halfway across, I stopped him, just to make my point. “In case you’re wondering, this isn’t a joke. There’s a hell of a lot at stake here. So don’t get cute with these people.”

“Or what? They’ll make me stay after school?”

“Just stick with the program, okay?”

“Sure. I figure you’re paying better than the government.”

In a small anteroom outside a door marked
DISSECTION
, we put on cleansuits, booties, and masks. Then I keyed the numbers into the security pad. On the other side of the door, a lab assistant checked us out and pointed toward a white-gowned figure manipulating a robotic arm that descended from the ceiling. He looked like a dentist. Other white figures clustered around a stainless steel table in the center of the room. The subject of their attention was not moving.

“Dr. Deckard?” The assistant halted us outside the circle of bowed heads.

“Yes?”

“It’s Mr. Levin,” the assistant said. “He’s here with the vetting officer.”

“Laurence. Of course.” The dentist-figure glanced at us without standing upright. “Come over and have a look if you want, although I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. This isn’t an autopsy. Our only real concern is with the neural pathways and”—he sawed through a bit of skull with a far too familiar sound—“how the connectors performed. But you’re welcome to observe. Give us a little more water flow here.”

“This is Augustus Stillman,” I said. “Dr. Deckard is the lead investigator for the neuro-cognitive section.”

“Augustus. An emperor we don’t hear from every day.” Deckard lifted away a portion of the cranium and laid it in an aluminum pan. “I always thought you got a bum rap in Shakespeare. Caught you at a bad time.”

Stillman looked at me.

“He says you got a bum rap. Shakespeare and all that.”

“So what kind of experiment was it?”

Something in Stillman’s tone caused Deckard to rise up and study us for the first time. He was wearing a plasticine face shield that exaggerated the mantislike features of his face. “Fascinating stuff really. Can you see that? Right down there? The visual cortex. It’s where neurons first register motion in the brain. But here’s the really interesting thing. You can have tons of visual input and no consciousness at all of motion or form or color or depth or velocity unless everything’s connected to the frontal lobes, up here. What that means is that if the wiring’s no good, then we don’t actually see anything. Makes you wonder what we miss every day, doesn’t it?”

“You did something to the wiring in her brain?”

“In a sense. We wanted to know what would happen if we could increase the intensity and speed of her connections, so to speak. Could we create a kind of superconsciousness, at least visually?”

“You were making a genius chimp.”

“In a very limited sense. Think of it this way. You, and most humans, can look at a ceiling fan, for example, and after a few minutes it looks as if the blades are rotating backward. Now in reality we know that the blades aren’t going backward at all, but it seems that way because our perception is out of sync with what’s really happening. So—what would reality look like if we could triple or maybe quadruple the amount of information flowing from cortex to lobes? Human beings just assume that reality is something that
flows
all around them. But what would reality look like to a much faster processor?”

“You sped up Greta’s brain.”

“We inserted microscopic implants, rerouting a number of neural pathways. Roughly four times the amount of information moving from the visual cortex to the frontal lobes. In some ways, a very simple and elegant procedure.”

“So what went wrong?”

“Nothing. At least not procedurally. She had recovered nicely from the operation, and we had just released her back into the compound.”

Stillman edged closer to the table and looked at the peaceful figure. It was hard to tell what he was thinking. “She looks like a muppet,” he said.

“I never thought of it like that.”

“So how did she actually die?”

The question seemed to catch Deckard off guard. He thought a moment and reached behind the cranium so he could move the head in several directions. “Broken neck, I’m afraid.”

“That’s too bad.”

“It’s too bad for a lot of people. The same procedure we used on Greta will be used on humans in the very near future. Stroke victims,
Alzheimer’s, epilepsy,
ALS
, cerebral palsy, brain cancer. We already know it will work. What we have to do now is demonstrate that it will work, which is the part of my job that I detest, putting on puppet shows for government review boards. People will die, Mr. Stillman. Real live people will die for every delay we face in this program. Our procedure is that revolutionary. And the animals here at the Jervis Center get the most humane possible treatment. They are very lucky.”

“Lucky?”

“Yes, very. If you haven’t seen the compound yet, get ready to be amazed.”

“I’m already pretty amazed, doctor. So this broken neck. How would you say it came about?”

“She fell. From the top of the escarpment. The tape caught most of it.”

“The tape?”

“I should have told you,” I said. “We have most of it on camera. Digital, not actual tape. I just thought you’d want to see the compound first, where it actually happened.”

“Whatever you say.”

On the way out, Deckard asked me how Janie was doing, as if he’d just happened to think of it on the spur of the moment.

I gave him a look. “We’re doing okay,” I said. “We have a woman who stays during the day. Nurse drops by a few times a week.”

“Good. That’s good,” he said.

I let Stillman go on out into the hall and turned so that I fully faced the bastard. “You don’t have to remind me of anything,” I said. “I’m handling it.”

“I was just concerned. Tell her I was thinking about her.”

In the observation room Stillman seemed hypnotized by the birds. On the other side of the glass they were soaring, not flitting or hopping or pacing along branches like pet shop parakeets, but rather soaring inside a biosphere that itself soared higher than an aircraft hangar.
He focused on a flock of yellow bee-eaters, swarming like mosquitoes and then diving into the greenery below us. After a while he said, “I thought this place was for monkeys.”

“It’s a complete ecosystem. What you can see from here is the southeast quadrant. Three streams, two waterfalls. A lake. Fish, birds, anthills. Orchids. Strangler vines. Everything that’s endemic to the animals’ environment. Four point two acres of habitat completely enclosed and rigorously managed. Twice as large as the original Biosphere project in Arizona, except that this one works. Outside the compound itself there’s another 317 acres accommodating 18 different primate species within 31 large social enclosures. We house a total of 2,800 individual primates, not including the staff.”

“You sound like you’ve given this spiel before.”

“Many times. That rock formation on your right is eighty-four feet high and tall as a four-story building. It’s an exact replica of a cliff face in Tanzania, where some of our first animals were taken. On the far right, that gray slab jutting out? The large male beside the log is named Morgan. Sort of the patriarch of the clan. That pile of leaves is where he’s been nesting for three or four nights, which they asked me to mention because he’s never removed himself from the others this far before. It’s probably Morgan on camera making a threat gesture just before the incident.”

“Threat gesture?”

“Their hackles go up, and they yawn. Chimps’ve got a set of fangs like Count Dracula.”

“I didn’t see any bite marks on the body.”

“They’ll clobber the shit out of you too. And throw stuff. Your average chimp is a lot stronger than an adult human. And their temperament doesn’t improve with age.”

“You saying the husband did it?”

“I’m saying you’ve handled more of these than I have.”

“So. How serious are your protesters?

“Depends. We have several species of those—the no-fur crowd,
PETA
, Animal Liberation Front, Earth Firsters. Every once in a while a few of them will get past security and trash a lab or spring a few animals.”

“And it might look bad for the Center if the wrong kind of story got out. Hold up the research and all that.”

“Yeah. You’re catching on.”

“Bad enough to close you down?”

“I doubt it. The stakes are too high. This is the last stop before major medical trials on humans, and we’re talking about pharmaceuticals, implants, tissue cultures, and new operative procedures. There’s money going through here like coke through Colombia.”

“Great. So this Deckard. He’s really onto something big?”

“We believe so.”

“Okay. How about I talk to this other chimp, the one named Morgan?”

“Talk to him?”

“Yeah. He can do sign language, right?”

“You want to interview a chimp?”

“You said go anywhere I want, ask anything I want. So why not ask the guy who was there?”

“I’ll see what I can do. But we’ve got less than twenty-two hours, and I’ve got a hell of a lot of writing to do. How about we review the tape first.”

“How about I talk to the chimp first.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

The caretaker brought him on a leash. Morgan himself closed the door but stiffened when he saw Stillman sitting beneath the mirror on the far side of the room. “It’s okay,” the caretaker said. “Here, let me take this off. Now hop on your box. Hop up here the way we always do.”

Morgan clambered onto a carpet-covered box and scooped up the grape on his side of the table, holding it between his lip and gum for a moment, taking it out of his mouth for a closer look, and then popping it back in for a satisfying chew. He glared at Stillman and then at the keyboard on his side of the table. He raised one arm and jabbed twice at the oversized pictograms like a man with a mechanical hand. On the computer screen next to Stillman a word and an image appeared.
Grape
. When the woman caretaker did not respond, he tried more keys. The first screen cleared, to be replaced by
Juice. More. Juice.

Stillman watched from the low chair at the end of the table.

The woman was bent over her duffel bag, drawing out toys, cups, bottles, and recording paraphernalia.

Morgan rocked back and forth on his box, stretching his lips into a wide grimace, and then typed again.
Sylvia. Juice. Sylvia. Juice. Cup.

“I think he wants some juice,” said Stillman.

“I know. And you don’t have to whisper. He’s used to the routine. Just let me finish here. You can give him half a cup.”

Stillman poured orange juice into one of the tiny paper cups, the kind he’d seen in nursery schools, and set it on the table in front of the creature. Morgan leaned forward and sniffed before lifting the cup with delicate care and setting it in the palm of his left hand. Then, making a funnel with his mouth, he raised the cup further and poured.

“You have to take it away from him,” she continued, “or he’ll scrape off the wax with his teeth and eat it.”