Next to the mini kitchen is a small bathroom. That’s where I strip down, soap up, and shower off.
That’s where I start thinking about the girl.
Like I don’t know her name: the girl. Please, Solo. I know her name. Evening. E.V. to her friends.
Eve.
There’s a problem with that name, Eve. You say “Eve” and you think Garden of Eden, and then you think of Eve and Adam, naked but tastefully concealed by strategic shrubbery.
Except at this particular moment, my brain is not generating shrubbery.
So, basically, that’s despicable. The girl had her leg chopped off. She just got out of surgery. So I add shrubbery.
And yet the shrubbery doesn’t stay put. It’s moving shrubbery. It’s disappearing shrubbery.
Which is deeply wrong of me. I step back under the twin showerheads and blast myself with hot water. Maybe I should make it cold water. But I don’t want to.
“That’s the problem with you, dude,” I say, speaking to myself. “You suck at doing things you don’t want to do.”
I don’t feel bad speaking to myself.
Who else have I got?
Solo isn’t just a name, it’s a description. I have no actual friends. I have some online ones, but that’s not quite the same.
I’ve never had a girlfriend.
When I touched Eve, she was the first girl I’d touched since coming here to live six years ago. Unless you count women scientists and techs and office workers I’ve accidentally brushed in the hallways.
Sometimes I do count those. It’s a normal human behavior to count whatever you have to count.
“Back up, man,” I tell myself softly. “She’s a Spiker. She’s one of the enemy.”
The microphones won’t pick up what I say with the shower running. I know these things. Even though I’m not supposed to. For six years I’ve lived and breathed this place. I know it. I know it all.
And I know what I’m going to do with it.
As soon as Eve is gone.
– 9 –
Three little days, but oh my God, can they be long.
Time is relative. An hour spent watching paint dry is much longer than an hour getting a massage.
Which is exactly what I’m doing. Getting a massage from Luna, the massage therapist.
Luna doesn’t touch The Leg.
In my head, The Leg is capitalized because The Leg is what my whole life seems to be about now. Every single person I’ve seen in the past few days asks me about The Leg.
How is it?
How’s The Leg?
The Leg is attached. Thanks for asking. There’s The Leg right there. It’s on display, always outside of the sheets and blanket, although the whole thing is still so wrapped up it looks like I borrowed The Leg from some ancient Egyptian mummy.
How’s The Leg?
It seems a bit mummyish, thanks.
I had a dream where The Leg was no longer attached. Not a happy dream, that. It scared me. I try to be glib and tough and all SEAL Team Six about it, but in all desperate seriousness: I was scared.
“I need Aislin,” I say to my mother.
“Aislin is a drunken slut,” she replies, without looking up from her laptop.
This is diplomatic for her.
I decide to change the subject. “What are you working on?”
With effort, she pulls her gaze from the screen. “Fluff. A vanity project for one of the biochems.”
“Fluff?”
“Educational software. Project 88715.”
“Catchy. The kids’ll eat that up.”
“Mm-hmm.” She returns to her screen.
“Aislin is not a slut,” I say. I don’t deny the drunken part. “She’s been in a steady relationship for months. Anyway, she’s my friend. I miss her.”
“Talk to the masseuse,” my mother says. She glares at Luna. “Who are you? Talk to my daughter.”
I feel the tremor go through Luna. Luna is probably fifty years old, a very nice Haitian woman. I like Luna. She doesn’t hurt me as much as the various other physical therapists.
Luna has six kids. Two are in college and one is a real estate broker in San Rafael.
Number of things I have in common with Luna? Zero.
“I want my friends,” I say.
“Pfff. Friends, plural?” my mother asks. “Since when do you have friends, plural? You have one friend and she’s a drunken slut.”
“I’m lonely. There aren’t even any other patients. The only one around who’s my age is Solo.”
“You haven’t talked to him, have you?” my mother asks, feigning a casual tone. Casual, like warm and fuzzy, is not part of her emotional repertoire.
“No,” I lie, wondering why she cares.
Actually, I’ve seen him every day since my arrival, passing by my room with studied indifference. He only spoke once, to tell me that he called Aislin and told her not to worry about me.
His eyes are disturbingly blue.
Against my better judgment I ask, “Who is Solo, anyway? And why is he here?”
My mother ignores me. She has different Ignore settings, and this one means she’s hiding something. She thinks she is inscrutable, and maybe she is, to her minions, but I’ve had seventeen years to deconstruct her poker face.
Before I can press her to answer, Dr. Anderson strides purposefully into the room. He always strides purposefully, although he doesn’t seem to have much purpose, what with me being his sole patient.
“How’s the leg?” he asks.
“The Leg is bored,” I answer. “The Leg wants to know why it can’t go home and recover.”
“You’ve been here three days, Evening! Are you insane?” my mother cries.
“I should leave,” Luna says meekly, half-question, half-hope.
“Stay,” my mother commands. “Calm her down.”
“I don’t need to be calmed down. I need Aislin. I need something to do.”
“You have to take this slowly, Evening,” Dr. Anderson intones. He has perfect teeth and the graying temples of a Just For Men model. “This kind of recovery is measured in months, not days.”
“I’m missing the end of the school year.” I am starting to feel quite sorry for myself. “I have homework, tests. Oh crap, my bio exam is Tuesday! And my Life Drawing project is half my semester grade.”
“You can’t draw,” my mother says. “Your fingers are crushed. Your arm’s a mess.” She pauses, mentally thumbing through her What Mothers Are Supposed To Know file. “She is right-handed, isn’t she?” she asks Dr. Anderson.
He nods discreetly.
“At least can I have my laptop? I can type with my left hand.”
My mother glances at her own laptop.
She is having an inspiration. You can practically see the giant lightbulb throbbing over her head.
“Evening, I have just the project for you! Something to keep you thoroughly occupied.”
“I don’t want a project. I want to spend a couple of hours with Aislin. I want you to send a car for her and bring her here.”
Luna has moved to my lower back, and seriously, my desire to fight with my mother—even if it is a respite from boredom—is diminishing with each deep, healing stroke.
“It involves genetics.” My mother sets aside her computer and comes to my bedside. “You love genetics. I would even pay you to do it.”
“Pay me?”
“Why not? I’d have to pay someone else to test it. What do you want? A hundred dollars? A thousand?”
My mother, ladies and gentlemen: one of America’s preeminent businesswomen. Not a clue as to what a dollar is.
“I want ten thousand dollars,” I say.
Dr. Anderson nods his approval.
“Is that a good number?” my mother asks. She turns the question over to Luna. “Is that a good number?”
“Ma’am, I don’t—”
“Whatever,” my mother snaps. She makes a brusque gesture with her hand. “The point is
, I have something that will keep you busy.”
“Aislin will keep me busy. That’s my price: Aislin. You can keep the money.”
She taps her freshly tended nails. French manicures, twice a week. Five tiny crescent moons dance on my bed rail.
She sighs.
Dr. Anderson examines a smudge on his stethoscope.
“One visit,” my mother says at last. “I’ll have security search her. If she has any drugs or booze on her, I’ll confiscate them and have security rough her up.”
I assume that’s bluster.
Then I look at her again, at my mother, and I’m not so sure it is. This is a woman with a billion-dollar company. This building is big enough to house what amounts to a small hospital among many, many other things.
Can my mother actually have people beaten up?
Maybe. Maybe she can.
She smiles to show she doesn’t mean it. The smile convinces me that she can.
“So what’s the project? You want me to wash some test tubes?”
“No, that’s why we have people like Solo,” she says. “You’re a Spiker.”
I feel a slight twinge of sympathy for Solo. I’d been assuming he’s some kind of wunderkind, and here she’s talking about him as if he were her servant.
People like …
Quite a bit of condescension locked up in those two words.
“This will be a wonderful introduction to the kind of thinking and creativity we require at Spiker,” my mother says. “It’ll challenge you, sweetheart. Bring out the talent I know you have hidden deep, deep down inside you.” She’s getting excited now. The lines in her forehead seem to smooth; her eyes gaze with a certain wild excitement at the horizon.
She pauses, waiting to be sure she has my undivided attention.
“I want you, Evening, to design the perfect boy.”
Luna stops rubbing.
“Am I doing this with crayons? Or will I be working with Play-Doh?”
My mother smiles tolerantly. “Oh, I think we can do a little better than that. You can start tomorrow morning. If you do it, I’ll have your little friend here tomorrow afternoon.”
“I think Aislin has her dance class on—”
“Evening. When I send for people, they come.”
– 10 –
“This is where you’ll be working. Playing.”
My mother hesitates, frowns, realizes she’s frowning and that frowning causes lines, and unfrowns. “Play, work, call it whatever you like.”
“So long as I do it.”
“Exactly.”
Solo is pushing my wheelchair while my mother leads the way. At the last minute, the orderly who was supposed to be assisting us this morning had an attack of stomach pains. His backup couldn’t be located.
It crosses my mind, just for a nanosecond, that Solo might have arranged to be here with me. Maybe he’s as desperate for company as I am.
Solo pushes my wheelchair into a horseshoe-shaped work station. It’s an amazing space with soaring ceilings and low-slung black leather furniture. There’s a huge ficus tree next to the desk. It’s strung with white twinkle lights, probably a remnant of the long-past holiday season. It’s oddly whimsical in the clean, minimalist setting.
I don’t have time to admire the decor, though, because I’m too busy gaping at the twenty-foot-tall, floor-to-ceiling monitor. I’ve never seen a screen so big. Movie theater big.
A strand of DNA is displayed on the monitor. This is not just some run-of-the-mill textbook image. And it’s definitely nothing like the primitive double helix model I made in sixth grade out of Styrofoam balls and toothpicks. (My mother’s assessment: “What are we, Amish?”)
This thing … this thing is pulsating with energy. It’s alive.
“That’s the project,” my mother says. “That’s 88715.”
“It’s real,” I murmur.
“No, just a simulation. You can see the DNA, you can see entire chromosomes, you can pull out further—” She demonstrates by tracing a finger across the touch screen that is set at wheelchair level. The image on the wall zooms out. “Now you see a chromosome. Out further, it’s a cell.”
Solo locks my chair wheel and grabs a chair. He yawns. Clearly, he’s not as mesmerized as I am.
“The best part is that you can use any number of different interfaces.” Tap, tap, drag. “This one’s made of Lego blocks, for younger kids. See how there’s a Lego representation of the DNA?”
My mother’s in the zone, her voice animated. She gets like this when she’s excited about an idea. And this little project—this “fluff”—is nothing compared to her real work, the work she’s overseen on new drug therapies. When she’s laboring on something she’s excited about, she’ll move into Spiker’s lab for days, even weeks, at a time. More than once, she’s come home with her mascara smudged, her nails bitten to the quick, her eyes bleary.
Usually, it’s because her team has failed. But sometimes, and there are just enough of those times, it’s because they’ve succeeded.
“You can add or subtract blocks,” my mother continues. “Hover over and you see what each does. Or”—tap, drag, tap—“you can picture each element as a colored blob or as a tile in a mosaic. But either way you can run forward and see the effect.”
“The effect on what?”
“On your person.”
“My what?”
“Your person.” She enunciates carefully. “Per. Son. The person you’re creating.”
I lean forward and The Leg shifts slightly. “You almost sound like you’re talking about a real human being.”
She blinks and brushes back an errant strand of hair. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course it’s not real. That would be illegal. The fines would be astronomical. The government would probably shut us down. I might even go to jail. Me!”
“I didn’t—”
“No, no, no. This just provides students with an opportunity to learn how to…”
“To play God?” I supply.
She snaps her fingers. “Exactly. Exactly, exactly.” Deep sigh. “Exactly. We want to enable the average person, a person like … like him”—her eyes flit toward Solo—“to understand what makes humans … human.” She waves a dismissive hand and trails Bulgari.
“‘Like him’?” I repeat.
“You know what I mean: Someone who’s not a scientist.”
“A mere mortal,” Solo suggests.
“Stupidity is relative,” my mother says, still addressing me. “And it’s also case-specific. Thomas, the scientist most directly responsible for this project, has an IQ of 169. He also has his entire body covered in ridiculous tattoos. He’s very smart at science. You, Eve, are very smart at school, particularly science, and very stupid at choosing your friends.”
“Oh, snap,” I say.
“What?”
“Sorry. I was flashing back to 2005.”
The corners of Solo’s mouth flirt with a smile.
“The point is, you get to play God.”
“Can I play Portal instead?”
“You play Portal?” Solo asks.
“I have,” I say cautiously. “Is it all right with you if a girl plays Portal?”
“A girl?” He’s puzzled.
“Yes. I am, in fact, a girl.”
“I noticed,” he says.
“No, you did not notice she’s a girl,” my mother snarls. “You noticed she’s my daughter.”
My mother favors Solo with a look that has reduced many a grown man and woman to sniveling terror. She is in full feral mode.
But Solo is not afraid.
Oh, he pretends to be intimidated, but it’s an act. I see it as plain as day. He’s not intimidated at all. In fact, within his play-acting there’s something deeper going on.
“Yes, ma’am,” he says.
Oh my God. He hates her.
This startles me. I can’t quite believe what I’m seeing in those eyes. He actually hates her.
I mean, I hate
my mother, too, sometimes. But I’m her daughter. I’m supposed to.
And there are moments, like right now, when I actually kind of love her. At least, I love the way she loves her work.
Whatever’s going on inside Solo’s head, he hides it quickly. He slides his gaze to the side, away from her, and when he looks up his eyes are as distant and unknowable as a starless sky.
He has really nice lashes. Better than mine.
I look for something to do. I reach my hand toward the touch screen. Objects on the wall screen move.
“So I make a human,” I say. “Is this just about how they look?”
“No, no, that would be a paint-by-numbers set.” My mother smiles, but not at me. She’s smiling at the computer-generated image. “No, if you’re playing God, a lot of the fun is in building the brain. The mind.”
She takes a step away. Her hands come up to form a sort of basket of fingers. It’s one of her gestures. She uses it when lecturing her underlings.
“We are at a turning point in the evolution of the human species,” she says, surveying, with slightly crazy eyes, an imaginary audience. “Evolution has blindly felt its way forward. Now we, the product of evolution, are taking the reins. We are taking the wheel.”
“Is it the reins or the wheel?” I ask perkily, but she hears nothing.
“We will soon have the ability to design and create the new human. Evolution still, but guided evolution.”
There is a long pause. I am not entirely sure if she expects us to applaud.
“Of course,” she adds, coming down off her high, “only in computer simulation.”
I don’t know where she was headed with her lecture. But I am definitely sure that this project sounds interesting. The touch screen calls to me. Suddenly I’m wishing everyone would go away and let me play.
“I think I’ll … you know. Just mess around with the program a little,” I say.
My mother is pleased. Solo is … well, I can’t exactly tell.
Ten minutes pass. I look up and I’m alone.
I didn’t even notice them leave.
* * *
I stare at my first choice. The choice I have to make before I get into the details of playing God: male or female?
I consider the looming monitor.
Here’s the thing: I am not beautiful.