Becoming Human, page 16
“The pleasure is mine. Perhaps we could get together for lunch sometime and then fool around later.”
“Oh, you are wicked,” she gushed.
“Thank you,” I said with a snort-wink. I wished I had eyebrows to raise and lower, like Groucho Marx. She smiled, but said nothing more.
Ed showed up to spend a few minutes with me, but had to hurry off. “I won’t be seeing much of you for a while,” he told me. “My boss said I was spending too much time chatting with you on my rounds. And the other guys thought I was getting a bit peculiar talking to a machine every night.” He whispered, “I think they’re a little afraid of you.”
I tried not to sound despondent, though I was. “You’re the only friend I have, Ed. I’ll miss you.”
“I’m sorry, Oscar. But I’ll still stop in every night, of course.”
“I’m happy to hear that, Ed. I wouldn’t want anyone to steal me.” We both enjoyed the joke with internal laughter.
Susumu came in with a niece, a student at a nearby college. Like him, she said very little. Nothing, in fact. She was shy, like Gerry, the newspaper reporter. I would have liked to get to know her a little, but I never got the chance. Partly because Henry arrived at that time with one of his two children, a student in computer sciences. Even though he didn’t live with his father, the young man knew something about my history, and was interested in what I could, and could not, do. He seemed disappointed that I didn’t have any “controls” for him to manipulate, and that I couldn’t play championship chess or retrieve arcane information. But he didn’t look at me much, preferring to stare at his Blackberry.
“Can you do those things?” I asked him.
He looked up, finally. “Well, no. But I don’t need to. I can get a computer to do those things for me.”
Although I didn’t like his arrogance, I made no nasty remark, merely looked out at my guests.
“What can you do?” he demanded to know.
“Not much. In fact, I’m so limited that I’m thinking of becoming a student in computer sciences.”
“All right, Oscar,” said Henry, though he was smiling a little. “That’s enough.”
The boy/man finally went away, texting someone on his shiny communication device. The afternoon dribbled away like that, people coming and going. I asked for, and got, a whiff of Coca-cola, which was okay, but not something I would take with me to a desert island. I preferred Prosecco.
At about four of clock David stood up in front of me to make an announcement. He tapped his Coke glass with a metal stirring rod and, when everyone quieted down, he turned back to me and said, “Oscar, you’ve long wanted to get out and see the world. At this point that would be very difficult. But we can do the next best thing.” He waved his arm around to encompass everyone in the room. “The crew has a surprise for you.” Everyone clapped. “Hold the applause! You don’t know what the surprise is yet.”
Faisl asked the obvious: “What is it?”
“Good question!” He signaled for one of the maintenance people to wheel in a large new monitor, which they placed in the far left corner in front of Omar’s bench. When it was set up and ready, he started a countdown. Everyone joined in. “Five. Four. Three. Two. One. ZERO!”
A picture flashed onto the screen. I could see grass and trees, and people milling around, and buildings in the background. There was another spirited round of applause.
“Can you tell what you’re looking at, Oscar?” Robyn asked me.
“No idea.”
“Just outside the lab,” Henry said, pointing to my left. Right behind the monitor.”
I understood immediately the significance of this. It was exactly like having a window. “It’s fantastic!” I gushed, and meant it. “Now I don’t feel so cooped up. Thank you, David. Thanks to all of you!” Everyone said I was welcome, and that I should enjoy it. How could I hate David after this? Of course it had never been hatred, despite his willingness to inflict pain on me. It had been jealousy, one of the most human of emotions.
I gazed some more at the screen. I had never seen grass or trees, not like this, live and in color. Students were milling about or sitting in the shade chatting and drinking lattes. And the birds! All the colors of a rainbow! It was so wonderful that it occurred to me to ask, “Can you set up cameras in a rain forest? The Grand Canyon? Times Square?”
Everyone laughed loudly. When I realized what I had said, I laughed, too. But perhaps a bit more wistfully than the others.
“There are cameras all over the world,” said Susumu. “And websites to bring the pictures in. Tomorrow I’ll show you downtown Tokyo.”
“I like the scenes from Paris,” Robyn added.
D’Arcy chipped in with, “Check out New Orleans. It’s the nicest city in the world!”
“I disagree,” Henry countered. “That would be Denver.”
Everyone seemed to have a favorite place he would rather be. I wondered why no one thought the best one was where he or she found himself.
After I was powered down for the night I stared at the monitor into the wee hours. It was pretty with the lights on the buildings and the shadows on the lawn. Even at the late hours, there were still students wandering around. I wondered whether they ever slept.
Before I went into hibernation, though, I thought about the party. When I wasn’t occupied with visitors I had watched the crew and their guests eat their donuts and drink their beverages of all kinds, and chat with whomever was near them. It reminded me somehow of the whole human race. People of all kinds mingling together, finding out about one another’s problems and interests. All different, yet all the same. But nobody was more different than I was. I hungered for the day when that was no longer the case, and I could speak to them as an equal.
31
On Monday the new technician started work. She was initially assigned to help Omar build and insert more neurons into my backside. All that first day he patiently taught her to put the three tiny parts together and seal them so they wouldn’t come apart and short-circuit a thought I might have. On a good day Omar could create twenty of them in an hour, and each of these, once inserted, would take another few minutes to connect to the surrounding ones. It was slow, monotonous work, but Gladys soon learned to make a satisfactory neuron. The connections were still made by Omar, but it was obvious that she would save him hours of work every day, and that production would nearly double when she became proficient with the whole process.
Gladys was short and plumpish, and already wore bifocals, but she had a pleasant face and was a good worker. The only problem was that she was afraid of me. Even after she was assured that I was harmless, and sometimes even benevolent, she kept her distance. I overheard her tell D’Arcy once that I am “unnatural.” He didn’t try to deny it. But what could be more natural than my step-by-step evolution? Everything and everyone came one tiny development at a time, built up over the eons. Perhaps one day the Earth will be covered with Oscars, the next stage in the progression of humankind. Nevertheless, whenever I tried to speak to her she put her head down and pretended she hadn’t heard anything.
I have begun to think that the primary characteristic associated with humanness is not love, as Robyn had informed me, but fear, especially the fear of the unknown. But who am I to criticize this very human emotion? I, too, fear the unknown—being turned off and dismantled, burning in hell for the rest of eternity. Life is not only terrifying for everyone, it is unrelentingly so.
But, regardless of her prejudice and trepidation, she was learning to perform her duties rapidly and well, and the neurons began to build up even faster than before. I could almost feel myself growing in awareness and confidence. Despite her competence, however, Susumu paid little attention to her. Perhaps I could have helped him overcome his reticence, but I also knew that it would take time for them to get to know each other. If nothing else, my own experiences had taught me to be patient.
In the meantime, the others focused their attention on finding and developing a material that would behave like skin. It wouldn’t be actual skin, like that from a cadaver, but artificially produced epidermal layers made from human cells allowed to grow on a kind of semi-solid matrix. All the crew had to do was to cultivate this material in little dishes, overlay to the proper thickness, and attach the multi-layered membrane to my wires, hoping to get me to feel things that touched the outer surface. Susumu estimated that the whole process might take several weeks, or even months. Henry came in a few times to stare into the glass containers which were set up in a near corner of the lab, where I couldn’t see them. If the experiments were successful, I wondered whether a skin patch would itch. If I were alone, who would scratch it? This may sound silly to you, but for people with no arms it is a serious concern.
During this process I didn’t have much to do except gaze out my “window” and contemplate the day I would be moved to a much bigger laboratory. A few times I watched rain fall from the sky. What an amazement! How could there be that much water stored in those puffy clouds, which looked like a sky full of cotton until they turned dark and let loose? Once, it rained all day and night and another day and night, and I wondered whether we were taking all the water in the sky, leaving none for anyone else. But when the sun came out, everything was greener than it had been before. The grass and flowers—all the colors of the spectrum!—were quite beautiful coated with little drops of rainwater, which glistened like tiny silver mirrors on their leaves. I watched this for some time, as well as the students criss-crossing the lawn, apparently oblivious to the beauty of it all. I wondered what they imagined life was about, their minds wrapped up in their cell phone conversations and portable computer screens. When they die what images will flash before their eyes—words on smart phones?
Despite everything, Gladys started to warm up a little, toward both me and Susumu. From time to time I noticed them chatting, and Susumu smiling, which was a rarity until she arrived. Once or twice they went out for lunch together. It was surely a budding romance if ever there was one. They never left together at the end of the day, however, so I don’t know what went on then, if anything. Even if it wasn’t much, I was happy that he had found a friend to talk to, someone to make him smile. I envied him that.
During this waiting period, also, the crew tested me at least once weekly, sometimes more, to see if my memory capability and IQ varied with time. They calculated a figure of 130 + 10 for the latter, a little above the last reading and a bit higher than that of the average human. My IQ measurement led to an interesting discussion: should they add more and more neurons to my brain in an attempt to make me even smarter, or would that, in fact, make me less human? Were geniuses in a class by themselves, and therefore useless as representatives of humanity? Would you want an opportunity to be far smarter if it distanced you from your friends and relatives, leaving you out in the cold with your lofty thoughts? Another consideration: a high IQ is sometimes associated with insanity, and even when it does not, great intellects are sometimes deficient in other ways. President Richard M. Nixon, for example—brilliant as the sun and, at the same time, stupid as a rock. Benjamin Franklin, one of the all-time smartest human beings, was also a notorious philanderer. I have often heard it said that no one is perfect. Which is another way of saying that there’s something wrong with everyone!
My memory passed muster, too. When David asked me to recite a commercial I had seen in the past week, I cleared my throat of imaginary phlegm (I had been practicing that maneuver) and orated, in the voice of James Earl Jones:
“Cialis is only for men healthy enough for sexual activity. Do not take Cialis if you take nitrates for chest pain, as this may cause an unsafe drop in blood pressure. Do not drink alcohol in excess if you are taking Cialis. Side effects may include headache, upset stomach, delayed backache or muscle ache. Erections lasting more than four hours, though rare, require immediate—”
“All right, big guy, that’s enough. Thank you.”
“A lot of impotent men must watch the evening news!”
“I never watch it, myself,” he smirked. I didn’t laugh; no one is more impotent than I am.
One other thing of note happened during the prolonged attempt to prepare a touch-sensitive “skin” for me. It was an argument between David and Robyn. The only other person in the lab at the time was D’Arcy, who tried to ignore it. It started when Robyn borrowed something from David’s desk—a felt-tipped pen or the like. He didn’t like that and he yelled at her for taking it. She seemed stunned that he had become angry over such a little thing, but he insisted that it was a big thing. Finally she threw it at him and it hit him in the nose. Fortunately he wears glasses, so it didn’t get him in the eye, but he was livid at that, and he came over and slapped her in the face. She screamed and began to cry. He called her a “bitch.” She ran out. At that point I wanted with all my soul to break his neck. To come at him and slam him to the ground and stomp all over him. I could do nothing like that, of course, but I gave him a piece of my mind. In fact I told him I was going to kill him.
Then Robyn came back in. She was smiling. David was, too, and D’Arcy burst out with a laugh and loud applause (he has big hands). I didn’t understand. Robyn approached me and touched me on my front. I was too upset to think about what it might feel like when I had some skin. “I’m sorry, Oscar,” she murmured. “Henry asked us to put on a little performance. It was an attempt to get you angry.”
David said I was wonderful. “But why?” I wanted to know, still confused by something that made no sense to me.
“Don’t you understand, Ozzie? We were testing your emotions. Your ability to get mad at someone. In other words, we need to know how human you are becoming.”
I thought about producing a rumble of laughter, but I was still too upset. All I could think of was: to hell with them. I never wanted to see them again. Not even Robyn. I would never do this to them, so why would they do it to me? It took me all that night and more to understand the reasoning behind the trick, the “experiment,” if you like. It worked, but I never wanted to be tricked like that again, and the next day I told them so.
“You’re becoming more human by the minute,” David assured me. “That’s exactly how you should feel!”
32
There must be times in everyone’s life when he or she falls into a rut, when every day seems much like the last one and the next. This is what happened to me for several weeks after the party and its associated events. The entire crew was focusing its attention on developing a functional skin and how best to attach it to my neurons so that I could feel the touch of another person or object. And eventually, of course, to construct a penis for me so that I could feel the thing that almost everyone wants: a sexual union between two human beings. It was a slow process, and everyone in the laboratory, including me, was becoming impatient.
How do you imagine how an orange might taste like if you’ve never had one? How do you imagine hearing if you have always been deaf, sight if you’ve never seen? It’s impossible. It’s frustrating, maddening. I only knew I wanted to feel because everyone else did, and it was important enough in the protocol to put it ahead of taste or mobility. When I could feel things I would be far more human. And sex was the most important of all the feelings. I knew I wanted it because I already had some idea of what love might be like and I longed for more. I wanted to fully experience that kind of human desire. David’s description of sexual pleasure was of no help at all. “It’s unbelievable,” he told me. “Unique. Almost other-worldly. You can’t imagine it even if you’ve just had it a few hours before.”
Nevertheless, I kept trying to imagine it while we all waited for a piece of skin that would work. They tried several prototypes and none was worth a damn. In the meantime, I gazed out the “window” at what was going on outside the lab. The students seemed to be in a rut, also, and every day seemed about the same as every other. Sitting on the grass texting someone, drinking their lattes or smoking cigarettes, laughing in little groups of three or four. I wondered what sorts of important events they were waiting for. Maybe none. Perhaps that’s why they seemed so bored: maybe it’s necessary to have something significant to look forward to in order for life to be interesting enough to have meaning, even if there is no paradise to anticipate. Of course they already had penises and vaginas, so they couldn’t look forward to acquiring them. Perhaps when I get one I will be bored, too. Maybe it will be like Christmas is already over.
As always, I gazed at Robyn from time to time. I could never get bored doing that. She was so lovely in her sweatshirt and jeans with the hole in the left knee. Sometimes she would look up and, knowing I was watching her, reward me with a glorious smile. On occasion she would even come over and touch me, reassure me that things were going well, that everything was on schedule. I had learned to purr like a cat, and I did that whenever she touched my front. The first time she abruptly pulled her hand away as if I were a hot stove. After that, she patted me and smiled. It was a wonderful feeling, even though I could feel nothing. Does that make sense?
Sometimes one of the crew placed his computer in front of me and I monitored what was going on in New Orleans or Paris or Tokyo or the Alps. Nothing much, usually, but it was fun to observe people who didn’t know they were being watched, and take in the serenity of the mountains and streams that seemed to derive their beauty from the act of being seen. Just as there was no sound when a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, could it also be true that there is no beauty without people to appreciate it? According to quantum mechanics, if no one is watching the moon, there is a good chance that it is not there. How amazing it is that a quark needs two other quarks in order to exist! It’s difficult to believe that Something isn’t behind all the mystery of existence. Not of the universe, but of existence itself. In fact, it’s impossible to believe that existence just happened. Therefore, it must have been created, just as I have been created by my laboratory crew.
