Nothing Human

  “But remember, Keith, that if the brain cells are making proteins to induce the trance Hannah and Lillie are in, the proteins or neurotransmitters or whatever is responsible may be found only in the brain, contained by the blood-brain barrier. Sixty percent of all messenger RNAs are expressed in the brain at some point. However, there’s nothing odd that we could detect in Hannah’s cerebrospinal fluid, either.”

  Keith sat quietly, trying to absorb it all.

  Reeder poured himself a second drink. “But of course genes do other things as well, including form the fetus. Presumably some of those extra genes are responsible for the anomalies in Hannah’s and Lillie’s brains.”

  “So Miller, when he was doing the in vitro fertilization, did he―”

  “No. Not possible,” Reeder said, and that made the third doctor who had said that to Keith. Yet here the impossibilities were, in the form of twenty-one children.

  “Inserting specific genes in specific places in the human genome is really difficult,” Reeder said. “And thirteen years ago we knew even less. The inserted genes have a way of splicing themselves into unsuitable locations, disrupting other working genes. Also, the transpons and retroviruses that were the means of delivering genes into an embryo twelve years ago could never have carried as big a gene load as this. That Miller could have accomplished that—not to mention designing the genes in the first place!—with identical results for at least twenty-one babies, isn’t possible. I don’t care how much of a genius he was. The techniques just didn’t, and don’t, exist.”

  Keith knew he was going to make a fool of himself. “What if it wasn’t Miller’s science? What if he got it, spelled out step by step, from elsewhere?”

  “From where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Reeder frowned. “No other country is that far ahead of us, if that’s what you’re thinking. Genetic information is shared internationally.”

  “Not another country.”

  Linda Reeder spoke for the first time. “What are you hinting at?”

  “I’m not hinting, only speculating. Somebody knew a lot more genetics than we do. Aliens?”

  They both stared at him. Linda rose abruptly. “I better check on Hannah.” She strode from the room, every line of her body scornful.

  “I know how that sounds,” Keith said. “I’m not saying I believe it myself. But Miller did tell people he’d been abducted, and he was missing for a month. My investigator, who’s the best there is, verified that.”

  Reeder finished his second drink. “I prefer to stick to facts. There’s only one more I haven’t given you. In every case I’ve tested, it looks as if the trance state began with the onset of puberty. There are numerous genes that switch on then, and it’s possible they also switched on whatever of the inserted genes are active in the children’s brains.”

  Puberty. Lillie’s blossoming body, the box of tampons, the lipsticks clattering to the floor. “I see.”

  “I’m not sure there’s anything more I can tell you,” Reeder said. “If you give me your e-mail address, I’ll—”

  Someone screamed.

  Reeder tore out of the room. Keith followed, not caring that it wasn’t his house. Reeder ran up a flight of stairs, down a hall to a bedroom.

  Linda Reeder stood by a pink-covered bed, her hand to her mouth, eyes wide. On the bed sat a young girl in pink pajamas, looking puzzled and a little scared.

  “Mom? What’s wrong? What did I say? Dad, what’s wrong with Mom?”

  Hannah. Looking like a normal thirteen-year-old girl, long blond hair parted in the middle, music cube on the night stand, holographic poster of rock star Jude Careful above the bed. A window framed by white curtains was open to the warm April air.

  “Mom? All I said was, the pribir are coming. Well, they are. Mom?

  “Dad?”

  By the time Keith drove back to New York, doing ninety miles an hour on Route 87, Lillie had been awake three hours. He’d given Iris permission over the phone for Dr. Asrani to run whatever tests she wanted as long as Lillie agreed and didn’t seem too upset. He could not, in this context, have defined “too upset.”

  “Uncle Keith!” Lillie said. He hugged her hard, until, blushing, she pushed him away. She was never physically demonstrative. Maybe it reminded her too much of Barbara. Her beautiful gold-flecked eyes looked clear and alert.

  “How do you feel?” Such banal, ordinary words! As if she’d had a head cold, or the flu.

  “Okay. That doctor said it’s April 28 and I’ve been knocked out for weeks. Is that true?”

  “Yes.”

  “How come? Did I get hit by a car or something?”

  Shoba Asrani must have told her all this, but he saw that she wanted to hear it from him. “No. You just sort of collapsed in the living room, and I called 911.”

  “A heart attack?”

  “No, sweetie. Nobody knows why you collapsed.” God, how much was he supposed to tell her about the extra DNA, the brain structures, Miller, the other kids? How did you discuss what utterly baffled everyone?

  “Well, can I go home now?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll ask. Look, I’m going to talk to Dr. Asrani. You get back in bed and wait for me.”

  “I don’t want to get into bed. I’m not tired.”

  “Then sit in that chair.”

  “I’m hungry,” she said. “Is there a vending machine? In the hall, maybe?”

  The sheer normalcy was eerie. Keith gave her money. He found Dr. Asrani in her office, apparently waiting for him. She looked as unsettled as he felt, too unsettled for small talk.

  “Keith. We ran tests. The structure in Lillie’s frontal lobe and olfactory glomeruli is now active. The PLI isn’t like anything we’ve seen, a totally new firing pattern. Usually neurons fire at intervals of―”

  He wasn’t yet interested in details. “Is she in danger? Is the growth harming her in any way?”

  “Not that we can tell. She checks out fine, and she says she feels fine. Of course, we want to keep her several days to run — “

  “No. She wants to go home.”

  Asrani took a step forward, waving one arm. “No, we need to — “

  “I’m taking her home. I’ll bring her in here every day, if you want and she agrees, or someone will — ” How long could he be away from the SkyPower legal work? “—but right now I’m checking her out of the hospital.”

  Asrani looked extremely unhappy. But she had no legal ground for keeping Lillie, and she and Keith both knew it.

  He said, “Something important, doctor. When she woke up, did she say to you, or to anybody, anything peculiar?”

  “Peculiar how?”

  “Did she happen to mention the word ‘pribir’?”

  “No. What’s a pribir?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing. Start the paperwork for me to take her home, doctor.”

  He found Lillie back in her room, looking out the sealed window at a parking lot and eating a bag of corn chips. Two candy bars lay on the windowsill. She’d already found her jeans and sweater in a closet and changed from the hospital gown. “Uncle Keith, I can’t find my shoes. Somebody might have stole them.”

  “We’ll get you new ones.”

  “They were Kleesons,” she said. “And I had them all broken in just right.”

  He couldn’t think of anything to answer. The situation was too surreal.

  The paperwork took longer than Keith thought necessary. Why didn’t a modern, on-line hospital have more streamlined systems? Lillie, barefoot, slouched in a chair and read an old movie magazine. The air smelled of chemicals and food and cleaning solvents, a typical hospital smell, but despite the “increased activity in her frontal lobe and olfactory glomeruli,” Lillie didn’t react.

  Finally they walked out of a side entrance toward the car. The sun had just set, replacing the afternoon’s warmth with a cool breeze. Warmth didn’t last in April, not even an April as hot as this one. Keith shivered and put an arm around
Lillie, dressed in her cotton sweater.

  She pulled away. “Can we stop at McDonald’s on the way home? I’m still hungry.”

  “Yes, if you want to.”

  “Good. And oh, Uncle Keith — “

  “What?” He was trying to remember where, in his headlong blind haste, he’d parked the car, and if it had been a legal spot.

  “The pribir are coming.”

  CHAPTER 4

  By the next day, the Troy Record had the story. One of the parents of a newly wakened child had evidently called them, full of joy at the “miracle” that God had brought about in order to return their son. The paper sent a reporter for a human-interest story, but the reporter was less intrigued by the religious angle than by the strange utterance that more than one just-coma-free child had made simultaneously: “The pribir are coming.” The reporter only had three names, and Dennis Reeder was furious that the parents had divulged those three, but the parents swore there were seventeen more. The wire services picked up the story, and suddenly it was all over the Net and the papers and the TV news.

  MIRACLE CHILDREN’ PREDICT COMING OF ANGELIC HOST!

  ARMAGEDDON TO ARRIVE SOON; COMA KIDS AWARDED VISION

  ALIENS TO INVADE, SAY MUTANT CHILDREN BACK FROM MYSTERIOUS TRANCES

  SPIRITS FROM THE OTHER SIDE CHANNELED BY CHILD MEDIUMS

  Nobody knew what the pribir were.

  “Well, they’re not angels or ghosts,” Lillie said with disgust. She had the TV on while she ate a bowl of cereal and a Fun Bun for breakfast. Hers was not one of the names on the Net.

  “What are they, Lillie?”

  “I told you. I told everybody, at the hospital. They’re people coming soon.”

  “From where?”

  “I don’t know. We’re out of Fun Buns, Uncle Keith.”

  Her nonchalance was, somehow, the part of the whole thing. She was so casual. Some information, some idea (posthypnotic?) had been planted in her brain, and to her it was as ordinary, as much a given, as breakfast cereal and rock music and warm spring weather.

  “The anomalous structure is now active,” Shoba Asrani had said when Keith took Lillie back to the hospital the next day.

  “It happened when we went outside,” Keith said.

  “That fits with it being olfactory activity,” Dr. Asrani said.

  “You mean she smelled something?” Keith said incredulously. “And it gave her some hypnotic suggestion? The same thing that kid in Troy smelled?” The open window in the pink bedroom, the sealed one in Lillie’s hospital room.

  “Not hypnotic,” Asrani said. She looked visibly frayed. Keith knew there must be frantic medical conferences going on about this, on-and off-line. How could there not be? He didn’t ask, he didn’t want to know. Now that he had Lillie back, his previous thirst for information had transmuted to a desire to put the whole thing behind them and have their lives back.

  “Sit down, Keith,” Asrani said.

  “I’d rather stand.”

  She raised one arm. Let it fall again to her side. He thought he’d never seen such a helpless gesture. “Then listen standing. The usual human nose has fifty million bipolar receptor neurons inside each nostril. Inhaled molecules bind onto those receptor sites and trigger electrical signals. The brain is basically a chemical-electrical machine, you know. Each gets translated into the other all the time.

  “The electrical signals travel first to a tangle of nerves called the glomeruli, where undoubtedly selective processing of some sort goes on. Then those signals go out to major portions of the brain involved in memory, learning, emotion, fear responses—pretty much everything important except muscular control. Have you ever seen a dog excited by a scent?”

  “Of course,” Keith said.

  “Well, animals like dogs that rely on smell more than humans do have roughly the same setup as ours, plus an additional structure, the olfactory tubercle, that makes our sense of smell wishy-washy.

  “Lillie’s anomalous growth is in the same place as a tubercle would be, at the base of the frontal lobe, but much larger. Her glomeruli are firing in electrical patterns nobody has ever seen before. In each nostril she has not fifty million receptors but closer to five hundred million. Since each receptor site presumably binds a different molecule to it, she could be detecting molecules we have no idea of. And whatever information those molecules give her is going out to both her rational and emotional brain centers.”

  “Are you saying that Lillie is smelling molecules that tell her these ‘pribir’ are coming?”

  “I don’t know what they tell her. Obviously she’s not upset by whatever it is, so more than a simple exchange of information is going on. Her emotional centers are being soothed, conditioned to acceptance. She has a high measure of serotonin in her cerebrospinal fluid, much higher than she had before. Serotonin creates equilibrium.”

  “You mean they’re brainwashing her!”

  Dr. Asrani did something Keith had never expected: she lost her temper. The serene Indian woman shouted, “Don’t you get it? We don’t know! We don’t know anything!”

  After a moment she added, “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. But … how did these theoretical molecules get into the air? And how could children scattered over four states smell the same ones?”

  “We don’t know how they got there. No more than we know how Lillie got to be what she is. But the distance is at least explicable. There are male moths that detect a single molecule of female moth sex pheromone and then zoom to the female moth from six miles away. A model something like that, but even more powerful, might be operating in Lillie and the others.”

  He couldn’t take it in. His mind rejected it. This was Lillie, his Lillie, Babs’s daughter… He walked over to the window and stared blindly out, seeing nothing.

  Dr. Asrani said, “You mentioned ‘brainwashing.’ There are as many definitions of that as there are so-called ‘experts.’ But looking at animal models again … there are a great many precedents for affecting behavior by manipulating smell. A certain kind of tapeworm in a moose will scent the moose’s breath so the breath attracts wolves. The tapeworm needs a wolf to finish its life cycle. So it gets a wolf to eat the moose, and it. And some ants — “

  “Enough,” Keith said. “I understand.”

  Which was probably the stupidest thing anyone had said all day. Of course he didn’t understand.

  He turned to face Dr. Asrani. “The names of all the children won’t stay secret long, you know. There have been too many medical people involved. Lillie and the other twenty kids — “

  “Eighty,” she interrupted him. “We have a fuller roster than Dr. Reeder.”

  “I’ll bet you do. Anyway, what do you recommend I do for Lillie? Bring her here?”

  “No,” she said, suddenly looking very tired. “Not here. If you want, you can take her to some friend or relative whom you can trust. But frankly, Keith, I don’t think it matters where you take her.

  “I’m afraid that before long, Lillie may be telling you where she has to go.”

  The first indication anyone had that the pribir did indeed exist came when they blew up SkyPower.

  Keith, not knowing what else to do with Lillie, brought her with him to Wolf, Pfeiffer. They arrived by 7:00. He told the hotshots already in and working that his niece had the day off from school and he would be taking her to lunch, so she would spend the day in his office. The assistants and associates looked askance, but he was a partner and nobody objected. The other partners didn’t notice. He installed her at his computer, where she promptly began manipulating software he didn’t know he had. She found games and programming languages and video feeds and settled in happily.

  He watched her a minute from the doorway before leaving for a meeting in the conference room. She sat facing away from him, absorbed in the computer. Her bright brown hair bounced on her shoulders. She wore a pale green sweater in a hideous style currently fashionable with teens, knitted with large holes
on both shoulders and stuck all over with what looked to him like dangling yarn braids. Her shoulders, glimpsed through the weird holes, moved slightly as she used the keypad. He could hear her talking to the software in a low, musical voice.

  He went to his meeting.

  Twenty minutes later, a secretary opened the door, her face disapproving. “Mr. Anderson, your niece wants you. She says it’s an emergency.” Her tone said that in her opinion there was no emergency at all.

  Keith knew Lillie better than the secretary did. He bolted from the meeting.

  She stood in the middle of his office, her young face anxious but not frantic. “Uncle Keith, you have to tell all the people to get off SkyPower right away.”

  “What?” he said stupidly.

  “To get off SkyPower right away. It’s not the right way for us to go―”

  He stared at her.

  She had opened his office window the six possible inches mandated by the Sick Building Act of 2009. “Tell me from the beginning, Lillie.”

  She looked perplexed. “There isn’t any beginning. You have to just get all the people off SkyPower right away, before the pribir correct it. That’s not the way we should go. It damages genes.”

  “What do you mean, ‘correct it’?”

  She glanced out the window. “Make it go away. It damages the right way.”

  Keith said to his wall screen, “Oliver Wendell, turn on the TV to NewsNet.”

  ” — since eight o’clock this morning. Some of the children themselves have been calling SkyPower Corporation, news outlets such as this one, and the White House. No one knows what to make of this latest—”

  “Oliver Wendell, turn the TV off. Lillie … how do you know this?”

  She looked impatient. “The pribir told all of us, of course. There are people —they don’t know how many ― on SkyPower and the pribir don’t want to hurt them when they correct it. Genes are the right way, Uncle Keith, not power sources or chemicals that damage genes. So you have to get the people off, because the pribir will only wait a little while.”