Malenko opened the front door. “By the way, is Dylan right-handed or left?”
“Right,” Martin said.
“Good,” Malenko said, but did not elaborate.
“Doctor, I want you to know that before I can make a decision,” Rachel said, “I would have to meet some enhanced children.”
“You already have.”
Then like a half-glimpsed premonition she heard Malenko say: “Lucinda MacPhearson.”
32
“But she’s brilliant?”
“She is now,” Sheila said. “They raised her score by seventy-something points.”
They were at the Dells, in the cafe just outside the day care center having a muffin and cafe au lait.
“It’ll be two years in December. We took her in over the Christmas break from preschool, and when she returned her hair had grown back and nobody even knew. Then over the next months, she began to show signs of improvement—talking better, understanding better. In a year she was reading and reasoning and thinking. God, it was like somebody cranked up the rheostat.”
“That’s incredible.”
“You’re telling me? And they can do the same for Dylan. I mean, it’s a miracle. She was this hairless little monkey, and now she’s … Lucinda.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, what was the nature of her problem?”
“What do you mean?”
“Brain deformities or anomalies or whatever?”
“No.”
“Some kind of accident or trauma?”
“Not really.”
“Well, what made you bring her?”
Sheila looked at her incredulously. “She was slow.”
“Wait a minute. You’re mean these enhancement procedures aren’t just for kids with neurophysical defects?”
Sheila’s face darkened. “Well, a few are.”
“You’re saying that most are kids with no physical abnormalities—lesions, tumors, malformations—or whatever? They’re just … slow?”
Ever since Sheila had hinted at enhancement, Rachel had assumed it was a medical procedure to correct some anatomical defect of the brain. Now she was hearing something else: a secret practice for raising the intelligence of kids who tested low and whose parents had financial resources. In Martin’s words “an IQ jack-up” for the privileged. Rachel was about to articulate those thoughts, when Sheila’s eyes suddenly filled up and her mouth began to quiver.
“I didn’t want to tell you at first,” she whimpered, “but I could see how you were agonizing over his problems. I knew exactly what you were going through, watching your child struggle with things other kids get automatically. Lucinda couldn’t follow the simplest directions. She didn’t understand the simplest concepts. It would kill me to watch her try to put together her little puzzles—baby puzzles—cutouts with the pictures under them. She couldn’t do them,” Sheila said, wiping her eyes. “It ate me up to see how frustrated she’d get and end up throwing pieces across the room. So I knew completely what you were going through. But I really couldn’t say anything.”
Rachel nodded, feeling a vague uneasiness in Sheila’s tearful response.
“So, I’m telling you it’s like a miracle what they did for her, and they can do the same for Dylan.”
“Except I’m not sure I can grapple with manipulating his intelligence. Or even what that means. I thought you were telling me about a procedure to medically correct brain abnormalities.”
“I am, and it means making him smarter, simple as that.”
“Look, no two brains are alike—like people’s faces. Slow brains are different from smart brains, is what they told me. So, it’s like a
“What do you know about the operation?”
“Just that they make little incisions and implant some kind of neurostimulation like what they do for epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease—stem—cell stuff. I don’t know the details, but what I do know is that after a year or more, the kid’s a little whip. Like day and night.
“At three, Lucinda couldn’t distinguish red from green even though she wasn’t even color-blind-the next year, she was reading at third-grade level. The year after that she was doing fifth-grade math. What can I say? A miracle. She was like a sponge—and still is. Everything she’s taught she learns like that and
As she listened to Sheila, Rachel had a mental flash of Lucinda sitting poker-straight at her computer screen, her dual golden ponytails rising from the top of her head like bullwhips, her fingers on the keyboard like a concert pianist, her little pink mouth flapping directions on how best to navigate the search engines. Miss Confidence.
Miss Obnoxious.
Then Rachel saw that fat pink chipmunk face fill with noxious glee.
Children could be astonishingly cruel, but Lucinda was a soulless little bitch. “And she’s okay?” Rachel said. “No personality problems, behavioral issues, side effects, headaches?”
“Uh-uh. It’s been great. She’s already talking about being a doctor when she grows up.”
Rachel nodded, studying Sheila’s responses. “And where is it done?”
“They have some off-site location. But they’ll fill you in.”
“And you have no regrets?”
“Regrets? Uh-uh. No way.”
Sheila shook her head a little too much and could not hold on to Rachel’s stare.
“Nor did Harry,” Sheila added.
From what Rachel knew, her late husband was something of an intellect, a great reader and a man who became a chief engineer at Raytheon. He had died a year ago, so she couldn’t get his input. That was unfortunate because Rachel could sense something forced in Sheila’s manner—overwrought confidence.
“Does Lucinda know she’s been enhanced?”
“God, no! And there’s no reason. In fact, the doctor says that it’s best they don’t know. Besides, she was sedated the whole time and remembers absolutely nothing.”
“How long did it take?”
“The operation? A few hours, I guess. They kept her a couple days in recovery, which she slept through, and when she came home she didn’t have a clue. Not even a headache. And when the hair grew back, she stopped asking about the boo-boos.”
“Amazing,” Rachel said. And yet, all she could think of were the countless and dark unknowns. “What about the fact that it’s not legal?”
Sheila rolled her eyes. “Legal-schmegal. Forty years ago abortions weren’t legal, but that didn’t stop people from getting them. It’s just that enhancement isn’t very PC, if you know what I mean.” She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “Stuff like that gets out, it could cause class warfare.” She chuckled nervously at her own
