Page 32 of The Echo Wife
To her, my idea—shaping the mind of a clone as it formed—was an exercise. It was a critical thinking lesson. She had wanted me to figure out on my own why the thing I was talking about was impossible.
I’d raised it as a hypothetical, of course—a late-night what-if to kill time while the autosampler ran a routine. We ate pizza off of paper plates that bent under the weight of the grease in each slice, and we talked about why my idea would never work.
“First,” Lorna said, “you’d need a full cognitive map of the mind you wanted to re-create.”
“A full cognitive map ofanyone’smind is almost impossible to create with any degree of accuracy,” I said, taking the position she wanted me to take, opposing my own suggestion. Showing her that I understood the holes in the concept.
“Then you’d need to find a way to impose that cognitive map on a… what? A clean brain?” She said it without condescension, without malice, but the word “clean” had a weight to it that reflected the absurdity of the notion.
I’d pointed my pizza at her head. “Maybe we could come up with a mind-wipe ray. Zap, and your brain is clean as a whistle, and you can stamp someone else’s brain on it. Easy-peasy.”
She smiled. “There you go. Perfect. So you use the brain-zapper, and then you pop the new framework in there… how?”
“A computer chip?” I said, my mouth half-full. “Or… hormonal conditioning, maybe?”
“Oh, perfect, hormonal conditioning.” She nodded overemphatically, her eyes crinkling. “Because we totally know which hormones correlate to which behaviors. We know that with absolute certainty. Not a bog of warring hypotheses at all.”
“Right, it’s easy,” I’d said brightly. “And then you just have to lock in that framework to keep the clone from deviating too far during their first few weeks.”
“Piece of cake.” Lorna had laughed, and I’d laughed with her. I’d accepted that my idea was ridiculous, full of holes, impossible.
But later that night, I’d caught her watching me thoughtfully, and a few days later, she’d handed me a white paper on neonatal theories of cognitive development.
“Read this,” she’d said, and I read it, and I began to understand.
“Are you ready to get to work?” I asked.
Martine blinked, looked at me. The words seemed to take a moment to process. “Sure,” she said. “What do you need?”
“Well.” I sat across the table from her and looked at her as though she were my equal. “We have a tricky job to do. What do you know about neurocognitive programming?”
Her face went very still. “I’m sorry,” she said slowly. The edges of her voice were polished smooth. “I think I misheard you. Please, would you be so kind as to—”
“Yeah,” I interrupted, impatient already with the way she couched her words in layers of apology, soaking up responsibility in advance, getting ahead of anger I hadn’t even felt yet. “Programming. We have to program Nathan’s brain. Do you know how that works?”
She took a sip of her tea and stared at a spot just over my shoulder. That line in her forehead grew just a little deeper. “No,” she finally said. There were layers to that “no.” A different person would have listened for whatever kind of pain was hidden there. A different person would have paid attention to them, would have asked her what was wrong.
We didn’t have time for that, though. We didn’t have time to waste on her emotions. Seyed had already started pushing the cortical primer that would help to define the structure of the new Nathan’s brain as it formed. We needed to get to work.
“Normally,” I said, “we would start this whole thing with neural mapping.” I watched her for a sign of recognition, saw none. She stared at me, blank as a cell-frame, waiting. Always fuckingwaiting. “We take a picture of the brain we want to replicate,” I tried, and she nodded once.
I mentally adjusted the way I was going to need to discuss this process with her. I simplified every explanation as much as I could. Since I’d first begun applying for corporate funding, I’d been forced to prepare consumer-friendly explanations of my process. We weren’t there yet. We hadn’t reached the point at which I needed to admit wealthy customers to my lab for invasive, inconvenient tours. But I’d spent so much time figuring out how to explain my work to someone who couldn’t hope to understand it, and I dug deep into those explanations in order to talk to Martine. I spoke to her using every strategy I’d developed for the eventual day when I would start pitching the cloning process to a wider, stupider market.
It would have been easier, in many ways, to simply leave her in a corner, someplace she wouldn’t get in the way.
But I had seen what happened when she destabilized, whenshe thought too much about who she was and why she had been made. I had already buried that body and dug it back up again. The way she’d been watching the specimen tanks, leaving her in an out-of-the-way corner to think things over while I worked felt like more of a risk than I was willing to take.
Those were all the justifications I made to myself about why I was willing to spend the time it took to explain the cloning process to Martine.
But, of course, there are always other reasons.
I didn’t want to work alone, just me and Seyed and the damaged thing between us. And maybe I didn’t want to leave Martine alone, either. Everything was wrong, but keeping both of them close, broken as they were, seemed better than being without them. Some part of me hoped that between the two of them, I could salvage one entire ally. And besides all that, I really did need Martine’s help. I needed more from her than I cared to admit.
I continued my explanation of neural mapping, trying to bring the entire concept down to a level Martine would understand. “We take a picture of how the brain works. How it makes choices, how it reacts to different stimuli. Then we make adjustments based on how we want the clone to be different.”
“Right,” she said, her jaw tight enough that I barely saw her lips move.
“That’s what we use to make a subject’s brain work like the original’s brain, or differently from the original’s brain,” I continued. “It’s complicated, the way we get the brain into shape—we have to deal with each section independently first, and then we deal with the way the sections interact with each other.” In hindsight, Martine followed all of this fairly easily, but at the time, I felt certain that I was only bewildering her. I shook my head. “None of that is important. The thing that matters is that we make those adjustments up front, then program the clone’s brain using the new map. That’s how we make sure that, for instance, a clone of a politician will never try to pretend tobethe politician,even though they look alike.” I paused, trying to read her face. “Is this making any sense to you?”
