“Is she.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Of course she is!”
“Fine.” Andrew took the remote from his pocket held it out to her. “You wake her up, then.” She stared at him without speaking for a few seconds. Over the pickups, Stavros heard Jeannie’s body breathing into the silence.
“You prick,” Kim whispered.
“Uh huh. Not quite up for it, are you? You’d rather let me do the dirty work.” He dropped the remote: it bounced softly off the floor. “Then blame me for it.”
Four years had brought them to this. Stavros shook his head, disgusted. They’d been given a chance no one else could have dreamed of, and look what they’d done with it. The first time they’d shut her off she hadn’t even been two. Horrified at that unthinkable precedent, they’d promised never to do it again.
They’d put her to sleep on schedule, they’d sworn, and no-when else. She was, after all, their daughter.
Not a freaking toaster.
That solemn pact had lasted three months. Things had gone downhill ever since; Stavros could barely remember a day when the Goravecs hadn’t messed up one way or another. And now, when they put her down, the argument was pure ritual. Mere words — ostensibly wrestling with the evil of the act itself —
didn’t fool anybody. They weren’t even arguments anymore, despite the pretense. Negotiations, rather.
Over whose turn it was to be at fault.
“I don’t blame you, I just — I mean — oh, God, Andy, it wasn’t supposed to be like this!” Kim smeared away a tear with a clenched fist. “She was supposed to be our daughter. They said the brain would mature normally, they said—”
“They said,” Stavros cut in, “that you’d have the chance to be parents. They couldn’t guarantee you’d be any good at it.”
Kim jumped at the sound of his voice in the walls, but Andrew just gave a bitter smile and shook his head. “This is private, Stavros. Log off.”
It was an empty command, of course; chronic surveillance was the price of the project. The company had put billions into the R&D alone. No way in hell were they going to let a couple of litigious grunts play with that investment unsupervised, settlement or no settlement.
“You had everything you needed.” Stavros didn’t bother to disguise the contempt in his voice.
“Terracon’s best hardware people handled the linkups. I modeled the virtual genes myself. Gestation was perfect. We did everything we could to give you a normal child.”
“A normal child,” Andrew remarked, “doesn’t have a cable growing out of her head. A normal child isn’t leashed to some cabinet full of—”
“Do you have any idea the baud rate it takes to run a human body by remote control? RF was out of the question. And she goes portable as soon as the state of the art and her own development allow it. As I’ve told you time and again.” Which he had, although it was almost a lie. Oh, the state of the art would proceed as it always had, but Terracon was no longer investing any great R&D in the Goravec file.
Cruise control, after all.
Besides, Stavros reflected, we’d be crazy to trust you two to take Jeannie anywhere outside a controlled environment...
“We — we know, Stav.” Kim Goravec had stepped between her husband and the pickup. “We haven’t forgotten—”
“We haven’t forgotten it was Terracon who got us into this mess in the first place, either,” Andrew growled. “We haven’t forgotten whose negligence left me cooking next to a cracked baffle plate for forty-three minutes and sixteen seconds, or whose tests missed the mutations, or who tried to look the other way when our shot at the birth lottery turned into a fucking nightmare—”
“And have you forgotten what Terracon did to make things right? How much we spent? Have you forgotten the waivers you signed?”
“You think you’re some kind of saints because you settled out of court? You want to talk about making things right? It took us ten years to win the lottery, and you know what your lawyers did when the tests came back? They offered to fund the abortion.”
“Which doesn’t mean—”
“Like another child was ever going to happen. Like anyone was going to give me another chance with my balls full of chunky codon soup. You—”
“The issue,” Kim said, her voice raised, “is supposed to be Jeannie.” Both men fell silent.
“Stav,” she continued, “I don’t care what Terracon says. Jeannie isn’t normal, and I’m not just talking about the obvious. We love her, we really love her, but she’s become so violent all the time, we just can’t take—”
“If someone turned me on and off like a microwave oven,” Stavros said mildly, “I might be prone to the occasional tantrum myself.”
Andrew slammed a fist into the wall. “Now just a fucking minute, Mikalaides. Easy enough for you to sit halfway around the world in your nice insulated office and lecture us. We’re the ones who have to deal with Jeannie when she bashes her fists into her face, or rubs the skin off her hands until she’s got hamburger hanging off the end of her arms, or stabs herself in the eye with a goddamn fork. She ate glass once, remember? A fucking three-year old ate glass! And all you Terracon assholes could do was blame Kim and me for allowing ‘potentially dangerous implements’ into the playroom. As if any competent parent should expect their child to mutilate herself given half a chance.”
“It’s just insane, Stav,” Kim insisted. “The doctors can’t find anything wrong with the body, you insist there’s nothing wrong with the mind, and Jeannie just keeps doing this. There’s something seriously wrong with her, and you guys won’t admit it. It’s like she’s daring us to turn her off, it’s as though she wants us to shut her down.”
Oh God, thought Stavros. The realization was almost blinding. That’s it. That’s exactly it.
It’s my fault.
“Jean, listen. This is important. I’ve got — I want to tell you a story.”
“Stav, I’m not in the mood right now—”
“Please, Jean. Just listen.”
Silence from the earbuds. Even the abstract mosaics on his tacticals seemed to slow a little.
“There — there was this land, Jean, this green and beautiful country, only its people screwed everything up. They poisoned their rivers and they shat in their own nests and they basically made a mess of everything. So they had to hire people to try and clean things up, you know? These people had to wade though the chemicals and handle the fuel rods and sometimes that would change them, Jean. Just a little.
“Two of these people fell in love and wanted a child. They almost didn’t make it, they were allowed only one chance, but they took it, and the child started growing inside, but something went wrong. I, I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but—”
“An epigenetic synaptic defect,” Jean said quietly. “Does that sound about right?” Stavros froze, astonished and fearful.
“A single point mutation,” Jean went on. “That’d do it. A regulatory gene controlling knob distribution along the dendrite. It would’ve been active for maybe twenty minutes, total, but by then the damage had been done. Gene therapy wouldn’t work after that; would’ve been a classic case of barn-door-after-the-horse.”