EXCERPT #3

She had a teaching position at Marquette University. She was in her lab dressed in a green smock with dark purple trim. Though she was a scientist, fashion was important to her. Because she was a scientist, she pushed maybe a little too hard on her individualism, a fashion statement, an eccentric personality leaning away from the socially inept science nerd, a social butterfly. Associates called her Magda, not Dr. Van Vogt.

She leaned over a metal table, one of many along the floor parallel to the wall of windows. Outside the wind swirled and made dance the falling flakes of snow, sending them in elaborate patterns of design making the eye focus first near and then far. Her hands moved in mid-air, fingers punching and curving through space that crisscrossed with infrared beams, which interpreted the movements as commands for the PC workstations that sat on the table before her. Lines of code scrolled down the screen faster than the eye could interpret. She preferred working in code as opposed to a three dimensional gooey interface. She liked looking at a screen rather than a holographic image. Besides, she could work faster this way. She wondered when a direct connection between brain and computer might become a reality, what a leap in efficiency that would be. The commands then would move at the speed of thought. And how fast was the speed of thought? Was it anywhere close to the speed of light? Probably, but could the mind focus long enough not to wander into some uncontrollable programming hell, a cacophony of chaos.

The heaters located below each window interrupted her thoughts as they hummed and whooshed trying to keep the concrete room at an acceptable temperature, the loud ticking of metal expanding and contracting. A round plastic clock and the blackboard below it, the only wall ornaments. Yellow painted concrete bricks, green linoleum, and a ceiling of white soundproof rectangles turned rust-patched with age and water damage. A current of cold breeze from down the long empty corridor crossed the room in waves.

Magda took no notice when Colleen entered the room, though she subconsciously registered the intrusion. Her mind focused tightly on a certain part of human DNA that she was hoping was responsible for the development of the brain’s frontal lobe. Today was Friday and if she worked all weekend she was quite sure she could have her first cloning of that section of the human brain. She didn’t need to reproduce all of the brain; she only wanted the part that processed data, not the piece that stored data, for that she thought she might use a hard drive. Biological processing had proved over time more efficient for multitasking than anything that silicone structure could produce. This was the sign of the times, the wave of the future, living processors.

Colleen cleared her throat softly behind Magda, trying not to startle her. After over a minute Magda removed her hands from the infrared interface and turned an unfocused eye to Colleen. “Huh?” she asked.

“We’re getting ready to leave soon. We’re going to get dinner once we’re down to the Marriot in Chicago. There’s still room for you. You are coming, aren’t you?”

Magda knew that she should take the weekend off, overtime was making her sluggish. And she wanted to go. She had been playing with the theory of relativity since she was a child. It was a challenge that was waiting to be proved as a law or disproved as a workable mathematical equation that had flaws in reality. Besides, lately her social life had been dismal, if not non-existent. The scientists who would congregate there, the intelligent people who spent much of there past-time contemplating Einstein’s theory, would be well worth the trip to meet. She was, in fact, packed and ready to go to the symposium in Chicago, but something inexplicable forced her to say, “Not this time. I’m right in the middle of something that I just can’t let go. I’ll lose it if I don’t do it.” Which was true in a way, she was right in the middle of finally being able to identify the correct strand of DNA, but she had been working on this so long that it was unlikely that she would forget if she took a break for the weekend. Actually, it was the computer that had identified the piece of DNA and the computer would definitely not forget.

Colleen whined, “Are you sure?”

Magda couldn’t believe herself when se heard herself say, “I’m positive. You go and have fun and come back and tell me about all the wonderful male attractions I missed.”

Colleen forced a grin as she turned and walked away. “I’ll bring back all the handouts I can find and stories to make you green with envy.”

Magda laughed and nodded as she watched her friend leave. Then she frowned. Her own actions were so often totally foreign to her own desires she wondered if someone else might be running her life. She turned back to the screen and stared at the code there. Off in her periphery, snow swept across the row of windows, a dance that affected how she thought.

Joe woke with a gasp, and adjusted his balance floating in the black rubber inner tube. He couldn’t believe he had done it. Yet, just as quickly as the feeling of success had burst from his inner being, a feeling of confusion overwhelmed him. He knew he had gone into his mother’s memory with the intention of changing a decision she had made so that his parents would never meet. Yet, his parents had met. His father, Professor Karl Yorg, had met his mother, Dr. Magda Van Vogt, at the Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His mother had died giving birth to Joshua Yorg. For the life of him, Joe couldn’t remember why he felt he succeeded.

He knew he wanted more, more of the pieces of this mother’s life, his prior life. It was all so confusing. He felt like an addict, never getting enough. He’d known his mother was a doctor, but he had always assumed a doctorate in literature or philosophy, not of science. He was astonished and proud, in his way.

And her research? She had been trying to use a part of a human brain as a computer processor. The biggest challenge for computer programmers had always been data mining, the retrieval of information, the sorting through the vast warehouse of useless information to find correlations of minute datum, trying frantically to make the information usable.

He desperately wanted more information. He closed his eyes, waiting, floating. As if summoned, more of Magda’s past quickly came to him.

In the living room of their third floor apartment on the north side of downtown Milwaukee, Back’s Goldberg Variations moved repetitiously, softly drifting through the still air. Abundant foliage surrounded her as Magda Yorg looked out the front window to the traffic below. There was an abandoned Clark gas station across the street. Outlawed combustion engines had been replaced with Bio-responsive motors and the old service stations could find no conversion appropriate since the new energy source was self-generating.

With her knees squished together, she placed her elbows on them. Her right had grasped the handle, as the other quickly palmed and released the hot curvature of a glossy white coffee mug with the black face of a cow on it. Magda scrunched her face to look out the ice-frosted window into the glaring rays of the morning sun as it rose out of Lake Michigan. This alcove projected out from the living room, three walls of an octagon, windows all. Her toes were white, curled as if grasping the age-darkened wood for purchase, as if her small body would spin off into space without considerable concentration. Her expression was one of pain and anger mixed intolerantly to a fine cohesion. Her white flannel pajamas, with childishness, in contrast with her personality but in keeping with her mood, had dinosaurs, each purple and green. The legs of her pajamas were rolled halfway up her shins. The sleeves similarly cuffed. A yarn blanket, multicolored, haphazardly hung behind her from the seat of the mission rocker where it had fallen from her shoulders.

Her husband Karl shuffled into the room, stopped dead center, then as silently as possible, moved over to the couch and eased himself down to its low level of firmness. Magda could feel his eyes upon her but she kept looking in unfocused at the street below, slow traffic appearing hushed by the snow. He probably knew that she had heard him, but to her amazement, he kept his peace, breathing through a night’s work of stuffed sinuses.

She hadn’t come home until after four this morning. And though she was dressed for bed, covered in colored dinosaurs, she had been here all night, waiting for the sun, waiting for something, anything. How could life go on? Everything looked so normal out there and beautiful. Anger stirred her so she sipped her coffee; nothing left to do but watch the world go by. Life for her was dying. She’s stay here, stuck in time, and life would more on without her.

She felt so small and helpless; she wanted comforting but didn’t know how to accept it. Tears filled her eyes. She hadn’t cried yet, since the news. Her skin had gotten so thick and her mind had refused to move. Stuck! Beyond belief. All she could do was return home on autopilot and curl up, feeling small. She had stumbled here without any recollection of the journey.

Magda breathed through her teeth loudly, a reversed hiss wanting to fill her deflated self. She closed her eyes and the tears fell down her cheeks. Her eyelids twitched. She was losing control, had lost control, something very frightening to her. A breeze coursed internally through her from chest to limbs. Her entire body shook, silently. And then the fury came as a defense against the emotional storm, the helplessness that was crippling in its intensity. She dropped her cup, which landed on its edge, bounced and rolled on its side leaving a small splash and a trail of coffee. The injustice welled up within her. She kept her eyes closed as she screamed, hoarsely, mutely.

Suddenly she stood and clumsily kicked the cup against the wall where it chipped: a thick chunk lay behind as the cup spun away elliptically heavy of handle from the wall to a stop. She glared at Karl staring at her. Luckily, the cup was on the floor or she might have thrown it at him. Not that she was mad at him per se, it was the world she wanted to destroy and she might as well start with him, he being the only form of life close enough to kill. And that’s what she felt like doing, killing: offense being the best defense. She so desperately needed something against which to fight.

Karl cleared his throat and waited. She hadn’t told him the news yet. He had been sleeping when she had returned. His patience was almost infuriating. She knew he was being kind but it didn’t matter.

“Well?” she snapped.

“Well what?” he responded cautiously.

“Aren’t you going to ask?”

“I’ll wait ‘til your ready,” he said, again the epitome of patience.

“You’re acting smug: like you’re better than me,” she said, not really believing her own works.

In response, his facial muscles twitched indecisively. Any way he moved she’d be there waiting to attack. She didn’t want to; she wanted to be comforted, but she was bound and determined to strike out. Both knew what was coming, both watching it unfold. He would not want it to happen. Yet she was so full that she had to burst; and he was the only available target, maybe the best target where his compassion for her would guarantee forgiveness. She could see him trying to figure a way out, to divert the inevitable. She almost wished he could, but instead she laughed inside, a laugh of disgust, a form of sarcastic humiliation she wanted to toss his way. She was mentally digging his grave and stomping on it. She waited, watching him squirm.

“Well?” she asked again.

He sniffed and somewhat reluctantly asked, “What happened?”

“As if you care?” She paced before him and then took a step up to him, kneeled one leg on the coffee table, and towered over him. “They not only told me I couldn’t go on, but they destroyed all my work. Goddamn stupid politics!” She took two steps away and then whirled to face him, an accusatory finger outstretched. “It’s my DNA, damn it, and I’ll do what I want with it. It’s my choice.” She glanced around predatorily looking for something, anything, perched to pounce. “They not only removed my work, they took my notes. My computer has been reformatted. Said they didn’t want any record to exist. As far as they’re concerned, I never completed any experiments.” She growled and clenched her fists.

Her long brown hair she tossed from one shoulder to the other. “Eight years of work. Eight years of my life unaccountable. No research, no nothing. But let’s forget what this does to my resume. I completed the work, Karl. It’s done. It works. It’s better than I ever dreamed possible.” She was getting excited; her pride was in her voice. “It multitasks like nothing you’ve ever seen. It seems to have a mind of its own.” She stopped and almost smiled, though crooked, a touch demented, sardonic. “I guess in a way it does: have a mind, that is.” She wanted to share her happiness of success, but she never even got to do that. The research had been completed and destroyed in one fell swoop.

Dispassionately Karl asked, as if trying to lead the conversation someplace less volatile, “You backed up your system, correct?”

“Of course I backed it up,” raising her voice. She pointed at the laptop on the dark oak coffee table between them. A ceramic mushroom sculpture sat next to it. The laptop was closed, obviously turned off. “You think I’m stupid?” She paused. “But the official record is gone,” she pleaded, wanting so very much to be saved from herself.

“Sassy,” using her nickname, an endearment, “you knew cloning was illegal when you started. I’m surprised they let you go this far.” Karl said. “That’s the question, isn’t it?” Momentarily she sounded sane. “Why shut the research done when I’ve finally completed it?” Coincidently, as if from the hand of God, Bach’s Goldberg Variations ended leaving the room hanging in silence.

Magda raised a hand to her head, slo-mo with no soundtrack, the more deadly in silence. Her face was red but pale around her open mouth. She couldn’t believe it. She hadn’t thought of that. Using her fingers, she pulled taut her hair on one side, like a barrette pushing up and back. Could they have just taken her research from her only to continue on their own, in secret? She slowly closed her mouth, and then began talking a mile a minute as if she were trying to kick-start her own mental processes that had somehow shut down after she had heard the news. She had overloaded and her system had locked up. Now it was starting to move again and she didn’t like what she was thinking, didn’t like the implications.

“Listen, it isn’t like I’m cloning a human being. It’s only a small…, a piece of the brain.” She was referring to its illegality.

Karl boldly, recklessly interrupted her spoken thought, “Even parts are illegal. They don’t want us growing spare parts, like keeping people on ice just in case of an accident, and then chopping off pieces as needed.”

“That’s not what it’s like.”

“There’s always the question of when does human life begin? Where does it end? Does a sperm cell have rights? Does a brain-dead person still live? Does a clone belong to its donor? Or does it have its own rights like a child from its parent.”

Karl was always playing devil’s advocate. It was insufferable as if he thought what she felt could somehow be proven wrong. To Magda, this was a male thing. Men: trying to find some logic to not feel what they felt, as if feeling itself, no matter what the emotion, were somehow wrong, something to escape from. Why couldn’t they just be there for you when you hurt? Why did they always want to impatiently get to the cause and deny the justification for the feeling? A feeling was a feeling and needed no justification. It simply was.

Magda walked to the kitchen, steaming. Now she was truly angry with Karl, not just using him for release. She needed to breathe. She rinsed a few dishes and, leaving the water running, her hands dripping, hustled back to the living room. Karle had risen and stood there, pie-faced. With rasping vocal chords, she whispered loudly, low-toned in capitol letters through clenched teeth, “THE WHOLE WORLD AIN’T QUICHE EATERS!” and walked back to the sink breathing deeply. “They can’t all be tree huggers.” Turning off the faucet, a stick shift she pulled hard and kept there, her hand white with the pressure.

Magda lift her eyes and let go the faucet. Her mind reeled. She tried to release her jaw, tried to stop grinding her teeth. Karl stood in the doorway behind her; she could hear his snorkeling breath, his terrible allergies. She rubbed rapidly her hands dry, elbows resting heavily on the edge of the sink holding the weight of her rigid shoulders. She refused to lie down and die. She would not succumb. Life was worth living. She pushed herself erect with her hands on the edge of the counter, frozen momentarily and then slowly turned.

Her expression must have been what made her husband cringe. He cowered yet tried to stand his ground. But he was taking the wrong stance. She wouldn’t be placated. She felt trapped, she needed to breathe, so she pushed her way past him and went to the bedroom, dressed quickly in blue jeans and heavy sweater, grey wool socks. After sitting on the floor by the front door to pull on her fur-lined boots, she stood and donned her winter coat, but he stood before here blocking her way pleadingly inefficient. She glared at him for only a moment until he sighed and stepped to the side, looking exhausted thought it was barely seven o’clock in the morning. He’d only been awake for such a short time. He wants me to be reasonable, she thought as she slammed the door behind her. Fuck him!