Facing the Quasi-Autonomous Robot Monsters Under The Bed, Part III

(Read Part I) (Read Part II)

G:How do you differentiate a person from his/her/its surrounding environment? Where is the line going to be drawn?

A:I wrote a science fiction story to answer this one.

Warning to vegans: this story contains milk and milk products.

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I.

A woman stands in a bathroom looking at a small white stick. The blue lines on the stick are clear and distinct, and while a trip to the doctor will be made for the sake of redundant confirmation (and a checkup), Emma starts considering herself "pregnant" from that moment onward.

Over the course of the next few weeks, Emma starts feeling different. Her appetites shift, her stomach feels uneasy much of the time, and her shape begins to change. She is pregnant, and unmistakably so.

She goes into the kitchen, grabs a small green glass plate from the cabinet, and takes a block of sharp cheddar cheese out of the refrigerator. The cheese is hard, solid and slightly white around the edges. She picks up a knife and carves off two thick slices. She takes a loaf of wheat bread out of the wooden breadbox on the counter and removes two pre-cut slices. She arranges the cheese neatly on one of the slices and places the second slice on top of the layer of cheese.

As she cuts her sandwich into two tidy triangles, Emma is struck by the utter absurdity of what she is doing. Her mind occasionally runs along on strange jaunts that take her, as she calls it, "behind the scenes" -- that is, to a frame of reference seemingly outside and behind that layer of reality ruled by well-known divisions and boundaries.

Sandwich, she repeats to herself. Sandwich. Sandwich. Semantic satiation arrives swiftly. She knows words -- quite a few of them. They were in books, in the mouths and minds of others, on television, and on billboards when she learned them as a child. Now they are in her as well. Part of her, as they are surely represented somewhere physically in the jungle of synapses in her brain. But she does not own them.

Emma looks down at her plate, sees rough lines and angles of brown, bits of yellow, vague shadows and reflections moving across a green gloss surface. She sees voids of varying size and shape; bubbles burst by tiny citizens of the yeast community. She lifts up the corner of one triangular piece of bread and sees a flat piece of yellow, marked lightly with the signature of a knife's serrated blade. The knife sits beside the plate now; bits of cheese pushed snugly like clay between the tiny spikes along its cutting edge.

II.

About eight miles away from where Emma lives, there's a dairy farm. A cow is tearing up grass from the pasture she mills in with her sisters. The grass is slowly, slowly being digested and the matter that made up the grass is being transmuted into cow. Cow considers this, albeit not in words, but in the silent acknowledgment of cow-ness that she knows will instruct some of the matter she ingests to be allocated for muscle, some for the maintenance of organs, some for the production of hormones, and some for milk.

This is an old-fashioned farm -- a small-yield organic operation, one of the last of its kind. Cow is milked by hand; she has heard the whispers about shiny silver machines with lots of tubes and cramped quarters, and she thanks the earth in her cowish way that she lives on this particular farm rather than one of the more modern ones. She is full to bursting with milk; she exhales a long slow breath of relief as she sees the farmer approaching with a bucket. Milk inside Cow is part of Cow; when milk enters the bucket, milk is no longer part of cow. Milk is, however, part of the earth, as is Cow, as is the bucket, as is the farmer.

The farmer finishes milking Cow, and takes the full bucket to the whitewashed kitchen/laboratory where it will be sterilized and processed and properly set up to be turned into cheese. The farmer pours himself a small sample cup of milk once it has been cleaned; milk is now part of farmer, and farmer's internal instructions will transmute milk into muscle and skin and saliva. And farmer and milk and bucket and cow are still part of the earth.

III.

Emma's sandwich is, in one sense, impossible.

There is no hint of inevitable sandwich destiny in any of its components. She could, if she were motivated and equipped with the proper tools, pick apart the sandwich down to the molecular level, and still find no indication of essential sandwichness in any tiny piece. She could also simply rewind the sandwich-making process in her head, and return internally to a few minutes ago when she had bread and cheese and a plate and a knife, but no sandwich to speak of.

But instead, she simply picks up the sandwich and takes a bite out of it. She still has a sandwich at this point, albeit a sandwich with a piece missing. Or perhaps not missing, but assimilated. Emma chews and swallows; the sandwich is absorbed into her. She continues eating, and gradually the immediate notion of sandwich disappears out of matter and returns to the realm of ideas, at least in Emma's house. Emma digests the sandwich, her internal algorithms processing parts of the earth that were once parts of Cow and wheat and air and water into human cells.

IV.

The ball of cells in Emma's uterus has two X chromosomes. Assuming it grows into a baby, the baby will be a girl. It knows nothing yet; it may have rudimentary sensations of heat and pressure and touch and motion, but it does not reflect upon the nature of these things. If it forms memories at this stage, it stores them in wordless massless pictureless forms that will exist perhaps as deep red undercurrents in future tides of thought, but nothing more.

Meandering instructions process matter into more cells -- more cells with DNA identifying them as Yuki's (Emma has already decided on what she'll name the baby if it's a girl).

Boundaries don't make sense at this level, at this stage. Legally, morally, philosophically, people have been attempting to draw them for generations, with the intention of wresting the secrets of what we are obligated to do from nature. But nature gives no answers: she silently seems to mock at times, but in truth she is simply reminding us that we're on our own when it comes to making these choices.

At this stage, boundaries exist only in the weighing of values, in the questions people ask one another, and themselves: Could I live with myself, if...?

Yuki is a wanted baby or ball of cells or fetus; Emma made life on purpose, and would not attempt to take it back. But she understands why some might not. If she was someone else, she might not have named Yuki yet; Yuki would be "tissue". And this would not be harsh or cruel; it would simply be a matter of choice, between the pregnant one and whatever internal sounding boards she might have in her head. Voices, remembered: mothers, grandmothers, fathers, doctors, teachers, characters from books. Her own, standing out by its signature quirks and foibles and talents and turns of phrase.

But Yuki is, again, wanted. Emma has chosen to think of herself as with child, yet she does not deny the fact that Yuki is still a ball of cells and not a laughing, squirming infant. There is a difference, Emma thinks, though she knows some would disagree. She lets them, and they let her. Nothing firm, except her belly as it grows.

V.

Emma gets dressed. Her husband, Rick, is in his home office clacking away on the keyboard. Emma looks at her sweater still lying on the bed. If someone walked in and touched the sweater, rumpling it as it lay still and deflated, Emma would not feel it. She picks up the sweater and slips it over her head.

Rick walks back into the room, playfully tugs on the hem of Emma's sweater, feels her warmth radiating into the thin acrylic. Emma's nerves respond to the feel of the sweater's force vectors changing; it is like a second skin.

She sheds it again, feeling warm, and knowing that some of her cells already adhere to its interior space.

VI.

Yuki arrives in January, in the season of her name. Her hair is dark, her eyes are blue. Ten fingers, five toes. Yuki is a healthy baby, but only one leg developed -- the other seems to have stopped at about mid-thigh, and there is no foot.

Emma is briefly jolted by Yuki's asymmetry, but mostly, she is relieved that her baby is alive.

Yuki lies in her cradle, though she does not yet know the word for "cradle". She hears sounds and sees colors and shadows and light flitting through the room, but does not differentiate this stimuli. Her father comes in; his mouth moves as he points to blurred localities of matter, and he speaks the name-labels of things.

Gradually, Yuki comes to feel not awash in everything, but apart in some strange way. She is learning words: her parents are feeding them to her the way they feed her pureed squash and carrots and applesauce. In some respects, this makes the environment easier to manage, but in another sense it makes everything seem further away and less immediate. Her brain is changing shape, her body is changing size. Her internal engines are busily turning food and milk and water and air into more of her.

On her second birthday, she receives a second leg. She's adept at crawling by this point, but Emma's degree is in robotics, and she's built a leg for Emma the way some parents knit booties. Emma doesn't force the new leg on Yuki; instead, she puts it on the floor in front of her, nearby, the way she would a toy. Yuki crawls over to it, stares at it, picks it up. It's light and finely made, radiating clear and silver smoothness. Yuki holds the leg as she would a tool at first; she waves it at the cat, who sniffs it idly and walks away.

At first, Yuki does not wear the leg. She drags it around the house as she crawls, she uses it to reach under the couch and pull out dust bunnies and rubber balls that have rolled beneath into the shadows. She puts her hand in the socket in the end, and hears a low hum. The leg emits a soft glow then, but this stops after a few minutes. Yuki's eyes are wide and round now, but she does not cry.

VII.

Yuki is in kindergarten now. She's already reading, and is becoming an expert at using the computer. She's picky about her food, and her hair is still dark, her eyes bright blue. She's adjusted to the new leg -- in fact, she's on her third model, which her mother tells her will grow as she does due to the new nutrient-transmission interfaces she's installed in it.

Yuki can still remove the leg when she wants to -- sometimes she does it to scare the boys, sometimes just to look at it, and to look at her own form in its absence. When the leg is attached, her brain is aware of every inch of it, and it is hers as surely as her other fleshborne leg is. And it does grow, its form changing to accommodate new gaits and weight and usage patterns per its feedback sensors and adaptive algorithms.

Yuki feels whole and complete regardless of whether she's wearing the leg or not. Her form is a choice; at any point in time, she may have two legs or one. Her body is a fluid, flowing sequence of matter and decision and subjective boundaries -- she knows this more than most her age. And her sense of rights is solid: she knows her body is hers and no-one else's, regardless of all the bits of world and time and learning that make it up.

VIII.

Yuki is sixteen. Emma is now forty, and Rick is forty-three.

Emma no longer eats sandwiches. She's changed slowly over time, but there's very little of the matter she was made of when Yuki was born at this point.

Rick is mostly flesh, save for the standard phonear model typical of most everyone these days -- the next next next generation of handsfree communication, they call it. He still thinks Emma is beautiful -- in earlier days he'd wondered what she'd look like with wrinkles and long, white hair, and he'd expected that he'd still have found her lovely then. And he finds her lovely now, though her skin may crack and need replacement on occasion, it does not wrinkle.

People change, Rick, she'd said to him. I will change. Will you be with me no matter what? No matter how I change?

Rick told her yes, of course. I'll love you even when I can't tell your face from a prune.

He'd laughed at that. She had as well, but nervously.

Now, Emma's skull is blue resin. She has hair of a sort: long and silvery and equipped with photosynthetic fibers. Instead of making cheese sandwiches, she holds her head out the window of the car as she and Rick drive through the countryside in late spring. She laughs and thinks about her head: the calcium that used to house her brain is probably off forming ionic bonds somewhere, and the housing that now shields her brain came from hydrocarbons, which came from long-dead dinosaurs and fallen leaves.

Something lights up on her chest, deep within, whenever Rick leans close to kiss her. Her lips are still supple and dense with nerve fibers. She is not indestructible: her brain is still a thing of water and patterns, and traditional human frailties have less been transcended than shifted to inhabit new spheres: now she does not worry about sunburn, but about cracking paint and metal fatigue. She does not worry about cancer, but about things like molecular seizure and nutrient-transmission failure.

She also wonders whether a visiting alien would be able to tell the sentients from the landscape -- would her movement patterns stand out as significant, or would the alien minds and eyes that looked upon the earth see her as mere aggregate, indistinguishable from nearby scrap metal and stone? Would they see fit to pull her apart, figuring that her body would serve as raw material for something else?

The thought is unsettling at best.

Autonomy exists: this is a right she fiercely claims, a right she claimed for herself and her daughter long ago, even when people told her she should not have children with her history, when people told her she should not replace her blood with transparent respirocyte fluid, when a superstitious neighbor hummed and clucked upon hearing she was getting a new blue plastiskull equipped with automatic heads-up display and on-board Internet.

So, occasionally, she worries. Worries that she might not have any real claim on self, since everything she is is essentially borrowed: her form, her very mind, are gifts, and she knows not if she has actually earned them.

But she does not worry all the time. She is not worried now, in the car with Rick, Yuki typing busily to her friends on a wireless pad in the back seat, her own earphone pulsing warmly. She is happy, and she is Emma, through and through.