I pressed no charges. I offered myself as the criminal; and when they heard the facts, police and court agreed.
Now the two of us wounded humans are at work creating a third wounded human: for we do think, all of us, that what we create will be human; and we believe we must wound it, through blindness or insensitivity or stupidity, or all three.
How can we help it? How can we not be blind when we advance into the never-seen?
Yet can we let blindness stop us?
Many of the thinkers and computational modelers and systems developers upon whose work we base ours see little difference in essential nature between the process of learning within the mind, cell development, individual adaptation to environment, corporate survival, and species evolution; and specialists in those disciplines tell us incontrovertibly that nothing—no mind, no cell, no corporation, no species, no genus, no system—reaches equilibrium. All systems consist of imperfect hands reaching for what cannot be reached. Can we be any different? Would it not be an even greater form of hubris than the hubris we embrace now, if we were to sit awaiting own perfection, awaiting the time we have self-built ourselves perfectly, before daring to attempt to build another? I say it would be. It would consist of the greatest hubris of all. Robert, and the rest of the team, believe likewise. Even Joe finally sees it that way.
Do any parents await the achievement of their own perfection before trying to create the perfection of a child?
Throwing ourselves into this project: it is our way of reaching.
I still think often of my bullet wound. I must. Sometimes I feel it as if it remains a physical passage ripped through me. A perpetual wound.
I think then of Joe, whom I clearly remember turning from the wall where I had driven him; I remember seeing the glow of knowing in his eyes, and seeing the muzzle of my own gun. I remember it clearly: for it pointed at my heart.
I thought: The little buzzard’s going to kill me!
Yet a moment before the flash and burn and screeching pain hit me, he carefully and steadily lowered the muzzle from my chest so the bullet struck my midriff.
Joe in his own way—I hate to put it this way, recalling as I do the aching and soul-searing pain—but in his own way he was engaging in Robert’s practice of saving human lives: his, mine, and possibly someone else’s, too, though he could hardly have guessed that this new life taking form beneath our hands, our gazes, our minds, is a new potential that will reach to realize itself, exactly as would another human being.
Potential, reaching to realize itself: we try to save that, wherever we can. I do. Joe does. Everyone here does.
Because we know where we must most firmly take hold:
Where we cannot yet reach.