“It doesn’t matter what is known,” he said. He touched the box. “It’s about what is knowable.”
He abandoned his gate arrays. Above his work station I found a quote taped to the wall, torn from an old book.
Can animals be just a superior race of marionettes, which eat without pleasure, cry without pain, desire nothing, know nothing, and only simulate intelligence?
In the spring, a medical doctor named Robbins made his interest in the project known through a series of carefully worded letters.
The letters turned into phone calls. The voices on the other end belonged to lawyers, the kind that come from deep pockets. Robbins worked for a consortium with a vested interest in determining, once and for all, exactly when consciousness first arises during human fetal development.
Hansen Labs turned him down flat until the offer grew a seventh figure.
James came to me. “He wants you there.”
“I don’t care.”
“Robbins asked for you specifically.”
“I don’t give a damn. I don’t want any part of it, and you can fire me if you want to.”
James grew a weary smile. “Fire you? If I fired you, my bosses would fire me. And then hire you back. Probably with a raise.” He sighed. “This guy Robbins is a real prick, do you know that?”
“Yeah, I know. I’ve seen him on TV.”
“But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”
“Yeah, I know that, too.”
Hansen provided technicians for the testing. The week before the tests were going to occur, I got the call. I’d been expecting it. Robbins himself.
“Are you sure we can’t get you to come?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think that’s possible.”
“If the issue is monetary, I can assure you—”
“It’s not.”
There was a pause on the line. “I understand,” he said. “All the same, I wanted to personally thank you. It’s a great thing you’ve accomplished. Your work is going to save a lot of lives.”
I was silent. “How did you get the mothers?”
“They’re committed volunteers, each one. Special women. We’re a large, national congregation, and we were able to find several volunteers from each trimester of pregnancy — though I don’t expect we’ll need more than the first one to prove the age at which a baby is ensouled. Our earliest mother is only a few weeks along.”
I spoke the next words slowly. “You’re fine with them taking the risk?”
“We have a whole staff of doctors attending, and medical experts have already determined that the procedure carries no more risk than amniocentesis. The diode inserted into the amniotic fluid will be no larger than a needle.”
“One thing I never understood about this… a fetus’s eyes are closed.”
“I prefer the word
I put the phone down. Looked at it. Plague of abortions.
There were men like him in science, too — ones who had all the answers. Fanaticism, applied to any facet of an issue, has always seemed dangerous to me. I picked up the phone again. “You think it’s as simple as that?”
“I do. When is a human life a human life? That is always what this particular argument has been about, has it not? Now we’ll finally be able to prove that abortion is murder, and who could argue? I sense that you don’t like me very much.”
“I like you fine. But there’s an old saying, ‘Never trust a man with only one book.’”
“One book is all a man needs if it’s the right book.”
“Have you considered what you’ll do if you’re proven wrong?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if wave function collapse doesn’t occur until the ninth month? Or the magical moment of birth? Will you change your mind?”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I guess now we find out, don’t we.”
The night before the experiment, I called Point Machine. It was call or drink. And I didn’t want to drink. Because I knew if I drank again, even a single sip, I’d never stop. Not ever.
He picked up on the fifth ring. Faraway voice.
“What’s going to happen tomorrow?” I asked.
There was a long pause. Long enough that I wondered if he’d heard me. “Not sure,” he said. The voice on the other end was coarse and weary. It was a voice that hadn’t been sleeping well. “Entogeny reflects phylogeny,” he said. “Look early enough in gestation and we’ve got gills, a tail, the roots of the whole animal kingdom. You climb the phylogenetic tree as the fetus develops, and the newer characteristics, the things that make us human, get tacked on last. What Robbins is testing for is only found in humans, so my gut tells me he’s wrong, and wave collapse comes late. Real late.”
“You think it works that way?”
“I have no idea how it works.”
The day of the experiment came and went.
The first hint that something went wrong came in the form of silence. Silence from the Robbins group. Silence in the media. No press conferences. No TV interviews. Just silence.
The days turned to weeks.
Finally, a terse statement was issued by the group which called their results inconclusive. Robbins came out a few days later, saying bluntly that there had been a failure in the mechanism of the tests.
The truth was something stranger, of course. And of course, that came out later, too.
The truth was that some of the fetuses
But others didn’t.
And gestational age had nothing to do with it.
Two months later, I received the call in the middle of the night. “We found one in New York.” It was Satish.
“What?” I rubbed my eyes, trying to make sense of the words.
“A boy. Nine years old. He didn’t collapse the wave function.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing. He’s normal. Normal vision, normal intelligence. We tested him five times, but the interference pattern didn’t budge.”
“What happened when you told him?”
“We didn’t tell him. He stood there staring at us.”
“Staring?”
“It was like he already knew. Like he knew the whole time it wouldn’t work.”
Summer turned to fall. The testing continued.
Satish traveled the country, searching for that elusive, perfect cross-section and a sample size large enough to prove significance. He collected data points, faxed copies back to the lab for safekeeping.
