Distress

and descent nearly canceling each other out in energy lost and gained. It must have been worth about two thousand euros—but the navigation system, the beacons and locks, were so close to tamper-proof that I would have needed a small factory, and a PhD in cryptology, to steal it.

The city’s trams went almost everywhere, but so did the covered cycleways, so I’d ridden the Whirlwind to my afternoon appointment.

James Rourke was Media Liaison Officer for the Voluntary Autists Association. A thin, angular man in his early thirties, in the flesh he’d struck me as painfully awkward, with poor eye contact and muted body language. Verbally articulate, but far from telegenic.

Watching him on the console screen, though, I realized how wrong I’d been. Ned Landers had put on a dazzling performance, so slick and seamless that it left no room for any question of what was going on beneath. Rourke put on no performance at all—and the effect was both riveting and deeply unsettling. Coming straight after Delphic Biosystems’ elegant, assured spokespeople (teeth and skin by Masarini of Florence, sincerity by Operant Conditioning pie), it would be like being jolted out of a daydream by a kick in the head.

I’d have to tone him down, somehow.

I had a fully autistic cousin myself—Nathan. I’d met him only once, when we were both children. He was one of the lucky few who’d suffered no other congenital brain damage, and at the time he was still living with his parents in Adelaide. He’d shown me his computer, cataloguing its features exhaustively, sounding scarcely different from any other enthusiastic thirteen-year-old technophile with a new toy. But when he’d started demonstrating his favorite programs—stultifying solo card games, and bizarre memory quizzes and geometric puzzles that had looked more like arduous intelligence tests than anything I could think of as recreation—my sarcastic comments had gone right over his head. I’d stood there insulting him, ever more viciously, and he’d just gazed at the screen, and smiled. Not tolerant. Oblivious.

I’d spent three hours interviewing Rourke in his small flat; VA had no central office, in Manchester or anywhere else. There were members in forty-seven countries—almost a thousand people, worldwide—but only Rourke had been willing to speak to me, and only because it was his job.

He was not fully autistic, of course. But he’d shown me his brain scans.

I replayed the raw footage.

“Do you see this small lesion in the left frontal lobe?” There was a tiny dark space, a minuscule gap in the gray matter, above the pointer’s arrow. “Now compare it with the same region in a twenty-nine-year-old fully autistic male.” Another dark space, three or four times larger. “And here’s a non-autistic subject of the same age and sex.” No lesion at all. “The pathology isn’t always so obvious—the structure can be malformed, rather than visibly absent—but these examples make it clear that there’s a precise physical basis to our claims.”

The view tilted up from the notepad to his face. Witness manufactured a smooth transition from one rock-steady “camera angle” to another—just as it smoothed away saccades: the rapid darting movements of the eyeballs, restlessly scanning and re-scanning the scene even when the gaze was subjectively fixed.

I said, “No one would deny that you’ve suffered damage in the same part of the brain. But why not be thankful that it’s minor damage, and leave it at that? Why not count yourself lucky that you can still function in society, and get on with your life?”

“That’s a complicated question. For a start, it depends what you mean by ‘function.'”

“You can live outside of institutions. You can hold down skilled jobs.” Rourke’s main occupation was research assistant to an academic linguist—not exactly sheltered employment.

He said, “Of course. If we couldn’t, we’d be classified as fully autistic. That’s the criterion which defines ‘partial autism': we can survive in ordinary society. Our deficiencies aren’t overwhelming—and we can usually fake a lot of what’s missing. Sometimes we can even convince ourselves that nothing’s wrong. For a while.”

“For a while? You have jobs, money, independence. What else does it take to function! ”

“Interpersonal relationships.”

“You mean sexual relationships?”

“Not necessarily. But they are the most difficult. And the most… illuminating.”

He touched a key on his notepad; a complex neural map appeared. “Everyone—or almost everyone— instinctively attempts to understand other human beings. To guess what they’re thinking. To anticipate their actions. To… ‘know them.’ People build symbolic models of other people in their brains, both to act as coherent representations, tying together all the information which can actually be observed—speech, gestures, past actions —and to help make informed guesses about the aspects which can’t be known directly—motives, intentions, emotions.” As he spoke, the neural map dissolved, and re-formed as a functional diagram of a “third person” model: an elaborate network of blocks labeled with objective and subjective traits.

“In most people, all of this happens with little or no conscious effort: there’s an innate ability to model other people. It’s refined by use in childhood—and total isolation would cripple its development… in the same way as total darkness would cripple the visual centers. Short of that kind of extreme abuse, though, upbringing isn’t a factor. Autism can only be caused by congenital brain damage, or later physical injuries to the brain. There are genetic risk factors which involve susceptibility to viral infections in utero—but autism itself is not a simple hereditary disease.”

I’d already filmed a white-coated expert saying much the same things, but VA members’ detailed knowledge of their own condition was a crucial part of the story… and Rourke’s explanation was clearer than the neurologist’s.

“The brain structure involved occupies a small region in the left frontal lobe. The specific details describing individual people are scattered throughout the brain—like all memories—but this structure is the one place where those details are automatically integrated and interpreted. If it’s damaged, other people’s actions can still be perceived and remembered— but they lose their special significance. They don’t generate the same kind of ‘obvious’ implications; they don’t make the same kind of immediate sense.” The neural map reappeared—this time with a lesion. Again, it was transformed into a functional diagram—now visibly disrupted, overlayed with dozens of dashed red lines to illustrate lost connections.

Rourke continued, “The structure in question probably began to evolve toward its modern human form in the primates, though it had precursors in earlier mammals. It was first identified and studied—in chimpanzees—by a neuroscientist called Lament, in 2014. The corresponding human version was mapped a few years later.

“Maybe the first crucial role for Lament’s area was to help make deception possible—to learn how to hide your own true motives, by understanding how others perceive you. If you know how to appear to be servile or cooperative—whatever’s really on your mind—you have a better chance of stealing food, or a quick fuck with someone else’s partner. But then… natural selection would have upped the ante, and favored those who could see through the ruse. Once lying had been invented, there was no turning back. Development would have snowballed.”

I said, “So the fully autistic can’t lie—or judge someone else to be lying. But the partially autistic…?”

“Some can, some can’t. It depends on the specific damage. We’re not all identical.”

“Okay. But what about relationships?”

Rourke averted his gaze, as if the subject was unbearably painful—but he continued without hesitation, sounding like a fluent public speaker delivering a familiar lecture. “Modeling other people successfully can aid cooperation, as well as deception. Empathy can act to improve social cohesion at every level. But as early humans evolved a greater degree of monogamy—at least, compared to their immediate ancestors—the whole cluster of mental processes involved in pair-bonding would have become entangled. Empathy for your breeding partner attained a special status: their life could be, in some circumstances, as crucial to the passing on of your genes as your own.

“Of course, most animals will instinctively protect their young, or their mates, at a cost to themselves; altruism is an ancient behavioral strategy. But how could instinctive altruism be made compatible with human self-awareness? Once there was a burgeoning ego, a growing sense of self in the foreground of every action, how was it prevented from overshadowing everything else?

“The answer is, evolution invented intimacy. Intimacy makes it possible to attach some, or all, of the compelling qualities associated with the ego—the model of the self—to models of other people. And not just possible—pleasurable. A pleasure reinforced by sex, but not restricted to the act, like orgasm. And not