LJ Idol Week 15 - Just put a bandaid on it...!
God exists - and in a roundabout way I’m paraphrasing CS Lewis in the most contemptuously flippant way possible - essentially, to set a good example. God is bound irrevocably by the laws he’s made for himself and chief among this covenant seems to be that God will not violate free will. This is why God begs us, why God begs and begs and begs, for us to ask. For us to kneel, to submit to His will, to be cleansed, to be made good. God can’t - won’t - do His work on us without permission.
Of course, that explains human evils. You have things like forest fires and cancer. But might entropy and the laws of physics have a will, an inevitably of progression that God holds sacrosanct? But what if disasters and diseases could *choose* to be good, to reason their way into living a Christian lifestyle?
Therefore, I propose to the funding committee that the best way to cure Ebolavirus is to grant it superhuman intelligence.
Before entering the laboratory proper - a biohazard level 2 lab, the "least frightening" on the campus, as Dr. Kabemba put it; and as far away as you can get from the hot lab with the experimental stocks of EHF - I jot down a few notes about Dr. Kabemba: coolly handsome, gentle eyes. Blue tinge to his dark skin even under yellowish flourescent lights... etc. etc. I add patient with me even though it's not the kind of thing you want to show up in an article. He's better than most are at dumbing it down for journalism majors.
"We're looking to form a neural network," he explains, pretending, in a gentlemanly way, not to notice me struggling not to lose my pens in a borrowed lab coat. "We've manipulated E.coli in the lab - a most agreeable bacteria! - in order to make it infectable by Ebolavirus. Once the virus infects the organism, latches onto its genetic information, and starts printing out new copies of itself, we believe it'll pick up on a certain gene we've spliced in. We call it the 'wand protein' gene." He bends forward. ...For 'magic science wand', that is" he confesses, sotto voice. He has the unsmiling deadpan my father used to use when making jokes like this.
He pulls on a pair of gloves as if by afterthought and unlocks an ultraviolet cabinet. I can't see what's inside very well, the cabinet is dark.
"Did you ever splice plasmids into the bacterial genome in undergrad?" he asks me. "Do you know how you can tell we've successfully recombined an organism's DNA? Along with the worker genes we splice in a plasmid to give us a visual shorthand."
He lifts a plastic lid, opaque with the condensation of cellular reproduction. "It glows in the dark."
=========
One hour later
"So, a neural network," I prompt, over lunch. My surname's Nigerian, but I'm a third-generation Bostonian and Kinshasha is burning hot. Over the course of my assignment here I've come to prefer eating in the laboratory cafeteria. For whatever reason, it always seems to be at 65 degrees. Maybe some kind of safety measure. Dr. Kabemba had a story about bacteria multiplying on heated toilet seats in Japan that put me off dinner last night.
"Yes. We figured it would be the most efficient way to get SmartBola up to the cognitive level we'd need. That and it works best for our purposes. We've got mammalian drives like self-preservation and reproduction and the good of the community, but no one knows what kind of instincts a sapient virus would have. This gives it some incentive to keep its numbers up, and that means not reproducing in a live host where you'd have the immune system constantly depleting your numbers and causing loss of memory, cognitive ability, and so on."
"And that's the basic idea, if my briefing was correct. 'Hemmorhagic fevers are inefficient reproducers: they kill the host too quickly'," I recited, from my memory. "So instead you want to convince it to choose artificial reproduction and life inside a safe, suburban petri dish."
"Indeed." Dr. Kabemba doesn't laugh much, but a slight bow of the head tells me he finds my comment amusing. I'm lucky he's easy to read. And inherently friendly, although most people probably don't see him that way. He adds, with a small, tight, regretful smile, "We all wished that instead of tampering with it we could see something like a genuine viral intelligence. But we have no idea what kind of form that would take. Trusting a living thing to act with self-interest is the predictable bet. Or at least that's how our boss put it."
"It's nice thinking that if everyone were smart enough," ('it's nice', how flippant, and this is not the way I want to speak to him, this is not coming out with the philosophy I need, "they'd choose goodness instead. And the drive to evil is some - some lack in us, some education, something you can throw affluence and ability at until it goes away."
"Yes." Inscrutable, now. Looking out the window, staring hard at the manicured grass, as if he can see the whole history of his country out past the campus walls.
"How quickly do you expect to have a SmartBola network up and running?"
"Considering how quickly the virus multiplies? I'd say just under three weeks."
=========
Three weeks later
I've been allowed in the hot lab, finally. I'm gaining the trust and camaraderie of the people here - it helps that Dr. Kabemba seems to like me, and I get the feeling he's not an easy man to impress - and hoped to be asked in for the moment of first contact, but the early experimental stages were fragile enough that they didn't want anyone besides the core team looking at the virus for a while. ("Outside of how lethal a hemmorhagic fever is to begin with, our major concern was prions," Dr. Kabemba told me. "Misfolded proteins. They just burrow and burrow and burrow..." He makes a face. "That's not the right word." It's evocative enough. I remember that prions cause mad cow disease. Spongiform encephalitis - spongiform because that's how your brain looks with holes bored in it.)
It occurs to me, for the first time, to be afraid of how a virus like this thinks. The way I'd be afraid of a man following me in the streets after dark.
"You're trying to speak to it now, correct?"
"Yes. Come closer to the microscope. Can you see the screen through your PPE?" I must have hesitated. "It's all right."
The virus looks like a pile of noodles, I think, crazily. A steady stream of balls is being bounced off of them. So far, the viruses don't seem to notice.
I look from the screen to the lab tech to Dr. Kabemba. "Explain this to me," I ask.
"It's the same principle behind the E.coli - how we made it infectable," he says. "A virus uses something like a lock and key mechanism to make sure it has the right organism. E. coli has something like a hard shell and the gene to create that is something we can manipulate here in the lab, and with our E. coli the virus can unlock it and get inside. The lock and key theory of human olfaction has flaws, but our nose is said to work more or less the same way. Little particles hitting receptors, and we recognize the shapes ... So there's something there that can register information if given enough intelligence to know it's doing it, and smell is a very powerful way to communicate. It might take hundreds of generations for SmartBola to figure out something like a language, and then hundreds more to figure out something like using Brownian motion to manipulate our particles, but I think eventually they might be able to speak back."
"And hundreds of generations takes how long, in virus years?"
Dr. Kabemba opens his mouth to speak. Then he stiffens. "Look at that. I think they moved."
The virus seems to ripple. All at once, like a bunch of people at a stadium doing the wave.
What an unworthy metaphor. I don't belong in this job.
I pull away from the screen and look at the dish. It looks like any other blood agar. I can't even make out the colonies.
=========
Twenty-five years later
I have a recording of my father's first words to the Network. Truly ancient cassette tape - it was more stable, or something, I forget how my mother explained it to me. But journalists still used it back then. I'm not supposed to have it, it's classified, but they snuck it out for me before the lab shut down. Most of the doctors and technicians that my father knew stayed loyal to the project, to the Network. He was well-loved, once. As am I. As was the Network. "To Miss Kabemba" is written on the plastic cassette box in marker. Heart above the i. Amazing thinking somebody with a doctorate writes like that.
The first voice is the Network's. There's a machine - think Stephen Hawking - that can translate particle motion into machine speech for us. There's a microphone so we can speak back to it. Ugly and strange, but we still used the old thing, even fifteen years on.
" - Listen. This is not some kind of Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Brothers Karamazov deal where you nobly sacrifice any chance at happiness so that one little thing won't suffer. Where you write off any sense of responsiblity! ...It's bats. We're asking you to infect bats and give all this that you have to your brothers. Yes, they'll die, but do you have any idea how many people we're losing to this? And how many rats we go through in the - "
"Doctor. Please." It's my mother. The tape plays back a shift of fabric. Her hand is on his shoulder.
There's a pause. A dangerous pause. They realize how unworthy they look before the Network.
The machine says this: FATHER-WHAT-IS-RAT
"It's a grounded bat. It's not important," says Dr. Kabemba, bitterly.
"We are humbled by it," says someone whose voice I don't recognize. It's somewhere between sarcasm and a sorrow so intense I am humbled by the sound just the same.
Even in a recording, even in one I've heard dozens of times before, it still makes me flinch to hear my father angry, however gentle he was with me.
"I keep imagining, even now..." my mother told me, her grey head tilted and a funny look in her eyes, trying to pull out the exact image she had with her journalist's precision, no matter how inelegant: "Even now I keep seeing an arm reaching out of the growth medium and grabbing him, like some kind of swamp monster, or..."
Then she makes a disgusted face. "I never could make a good story out of him. Even if I had Pulitzer-level skills anybody reading the paper over breakfast would forget about it by lunchtime. What's the point, even?"
She places the photograph of him on the mantle face down, and murmurs to herself: "All this love. All this love."
"I'll burn you to death," says Dr. Kabemba.
The machine says this: IF-YOU-CHOOSE-THAT-IT'S-ON-YOU-FATHER
Another inkblot of silence. I can practically hear the lab technicians exchanging glances. They were still always looking for danger, in those times.
"They're shutting down the labs," Dr. Kabemba tells them. "I have to give them something. You're considered a failure, a very expensive failure. We keep trying to release you in hot spots and you just refuse to infect anything, and we can't -make- you. Do you understand?"
THEY'RE-LIVES-FATHER-COUNTLESS-ORGANISMS-IN-THE-BIOME-COUNTLESS-CELLS-EACH-HAS-PURPOSE-A-BODY-IS-A-WORLD-A-BAT-IS-A-BODY-THAT-CONTAINS-A-WORLD-THEY-ARE-ALIVE-FATHER-THEY-ARE-ALIVE-THEY-ARE-ALIVE
REJOICE-IN-THIS
"Do you understand what I'm about to do now?"
There's the sound of a sigh, and the crackle-pop of a plastic lid being opened, and not long later my father is dead.
===========
Several days later
I don't want to tell anybody but I can hear the Network singing in the night. Something about vibrations. The water in the pipes. It doesn't please me, they don't understand the way the human ear works, but all the same I feel as if it should.
The guards at the abandoned building know me and they love me like a daughter. The way the Network does. They let me slip past them, just like that.
I have a hand-cranked generator. I turn the speaking machine on.
"My father is dead," I tell them.
YOU-WORTHLESS-THINGS-DO-YOU-UNDERSTAND-YOU'VE-ALREADY-TAKEN-A-LIFE
Who had said that to them?
"Are you ready to come out now?"
The speaking machine is silent for what must have been years in their time.
WILL-WE-FLY-WILL-WE-KNOW-THE-HEAT-OF-OTHERS-BODIES-IN-THE-COMMUNAL-TREE-TRUNK-IN-THE-CONGOLESE-JUNGLE-IN-THE-DEAD-OF-THE-NIGHT-IN-THE-BLOOD-AND-IN-THE-BLOOD-AND-IN-THE-BLOOD
"Yes," I tell them. "Yes."
SISTER-WILL-WE-FEEL-THE-LIFE-INSIDE-OUR-VEINS-AND-OUR-GUT-FLORA-AND-OUR-PARASITES
"I think so," I tell them. "If you try."
IS-IT-WORTH-IT-SISTER-IS-IT-WORTH-IT-ALL
I tell them what my mother would have told them.
"No," I say. "God, no. Nothing is."
Share in this, you and I.
WE-ARE-READY.
I run my hands under the sensors like a caress and come up with nothing visible to the human eye. At night I take them barefoot down to the forests, to the streams, over the moss on the rocks, still warm with daylight heat, and in the dappled moonlight I wash my hands of them.