I said, “That’s true, but it’s no use thinking that way. In the end, I can’t function unless I pretend that my choices are real. I doubt that anyone can.”
Francine was silent for a long time. I stared up into the darkness of the room, trying hard not to contemplate the near certainty that her decision would go both ways.
Finally, she spoke.
“Then let’s make a child who doesn’t need to pretend.”
Isabelle Schib welcomed us into her office. In person, she was slightly less intimidating than she was on-line; it wasn’t anything different in her appearance or manner, just the ordinariness of her surroundings. I’d envisaged her ensconced in some vast, pristine, high-tech building, not a couple of pokey rooms on a back-street in Basel.
Once the pleasantries were out of the way, Isabelle got straight to the point. “You’ve been accepted,” she announced. “I’ll send you the contract later today.”
My throat constricted with panic; I should have been elated, but I just felt unprepared. Isabelle’s group licensed only three new adai a year. The short-list had come down to about a hundred couples, winnowed from tens of thousands of applicants. We’d travelled to Switzerland for the final selection process, carried out by an agency that ordinarily handled adoptions. Through all the interviews and questionnaires, all the personality tests and scenario challenges, I’d managed to half-convince myself that our dedication would win through in the end, but that had been nothing but a prop to keep my spirits up.
Francine said calmly, “Thank you.”
I coughed. “You’re happy with everything we’ve proposed?” If there was going to be a proviso thrown in that rendered this miracle worthless, better to hear it now, before the shock had worn off and I’d started taking things for granted.
Isabelle nodded. “I don’t pretend to be an expert in the relevant fields, but I’ve had the Qusp’s design assessed by several colleagues, and I see no reason why it wouldn’t be an appropriate form of hardware for an adai. I’m entirely agnostic about the MWI, so I don’t share your view that the Qusp is a necessity, but if you were worried that I might write you off as cranks because of it,” she smiled slightly, “you should meet some of the other people I’ve had to deal with.
“I believe you have the adai’s welfare at heart, and you’re not suffering from any of the superstitions- technophobic or technophilic-that would distort the relationship. And as you’ll recall, I’ll be entitled to visits and inspections throughout your period of guardianship. If you’re found to be violating any of the terms of the contract, your licence will be revoked, and I’ll take charge of the adai.”
Francine said, “What do you think the prospects are for a happier end to our guardianship?”
“I’m lobbying the European parliament, constantly,” Isabelle replied. “Of course, in a few years’ time several adai will reach the stage where their personal testimony begins contributing to the debate, but none of us should wait until then. The ground has to be prepared.”
We spoke for almost an hour, on this and other issues. Isabelle had become quite an expert at fending off the attentions of the media; she promised to send us a handbook on this, along with the contract.
“Did you want to meet Sophie?” Isabelle asked, almost as an afterthought.
Francine said, “That would be wonderful.” Francine and I had seen a video of Sophie at age four, undergoing a battery of psychological tests, but we’d never had a chance to converse with her, let alone meet her face-to- face.
The three of us left the office together, and Isabelle drove us to her home on the outskirts of the town.
In the car, the reality began sinking in anew. I felt the same mixture of exhilaration and claustrophobia that I’d experienced 21 years before, when Francine had met me at the airport with news of her pregnancy. No digital conception had yet taken place, but if sex had ever felt half as loaded with risks and responsibilities as this, I would have remained celibate for life.
“No badgering, no interrogation,” Isabelle warned us as she pulled into the driveway.
I said, “Of course not.”
Isabelle called out, “Marco! Sophie!” as we followed her through the door. At the end of the hall, I heard childish giggling, and an adult male voice whispering in French. Then Isabelle’s husband stepped out from behind the corner, a smiling, dark-haired young man, with Sophie riding on his shoulders. At first I couldn’t look at her; I just smiled politely back at Marco, while noting glumly that he was at least 15 years younger than I was. How could I even think of doing this, at 46? Then I glanced up, and caught Sophie’s eye. She gazed straight back at me for a moment, appearing curious and composed, but then a fit of shyness struck her, and she buried her face in Marco’s hair.
Isabelle introduced us, in English; Sophie was being raised to speak four languages, though in Switzerland that was hardly phenomenal. Sophie said, “Hello” but kept her eyes lowered. Isabelle said, “Come into the living room. Would you like something to drink?”
The five of us sipped lemonade, and the adults made polite, superficial conversation. Sophie sat on Marco’s knees, squirming restlessly, sneaking glances at us. She looked exactly like an ordinary, slightly gawky, six-year-old girl. She had Isabelle’s straw-coloured hair, and Marco’s brown eyes; whether by fiat or rigorous genetic simulation, she could have passed for their biological daughter. I’d read technical specifications describing her body, and seen an earlier version in action on the video, but the fact that it looked so plausible was the least of its designers’ achievements. Watching her drinking, wriggling and fidgeting, I had no doubt that she felt herself inhabiting this skin, as much as I did my own. She was not a puppeteer posing as a child, pulling electronic strings from some dark cavern in her skull.
“Do you like lemonade?” I asked her.
She stared at me for a moment, as if wondering whether she should be affronted by the presumptuousness of this question, then replied, “It tickles.”
In the taxi to the hotel, Francine held my hand tightly.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
“Yes, of course.”
In the elevator, she started crying. I wrapped my arms around her.
“She would have been 20 this year.”
“I know.”
“Do you think she’s alive, somewhere?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s a good way to think about it.”
Francine wiped her eyes. “No. This will be her. That’s the way to see it. This will be my girl. Just a few years late.”
Before flying home, we visited a small pathology lab, and left samples of our blood.
Our daughter’s first five bodies reached us a month before her birth. I unpacked all five, and laid them out in a row on the living room floor. With their muscles slack and their eyes rolled up, they looked more like tragic mummies than sleeping infants. I dismissed that grisly image; better to think of them as suits of clothes. The only difference was that we hadn’t bought pyjamas quite so far ahead.
From wrinkled pink newborn to chubby 18-month-old, the progression made an eerie sight-even if an organic child’s development, short of serious disease or malnourishment, would have been scarcely less predictable. A colleague of Francine’s had lectured me a few weeks before about the terrible “mechanical determinism” we’d be imposing on our child, and though his arguments had been philosophically naпve, this sequence of immutable snapshots from the future still gave me goose bumps.
The truth was, reality as a whole was deterministic, whether you had a Qusp for a brain or not; the quantum state of the multiverse at any moment determined the entire future. Personal experience-confined to one branch at a time-certainly appeared probabilistic, because there was no way to predict which local future you’d experience when a branch split, but the reason it was impossible to know that in advance was because the real answer was “all of them.”
For a singleton, the only difference was that branches never split on the basis of your personal decisions. The world at large would continue to look probabilistic, but every choice you made was entirely determined by who you were and the situation you faced.
