Human Sister

interjected.
    “You want to create Third Brother?” I asked.
    “Not exactly. For over ten years now, your mother, father, and I have secretly been doing research and making plans for a bioroid, one incorporating a Sentiren brain within a brain much like your own.”
    I asked why he wanted to create such a new brother. He reminded me that Mom, Dad, and he were finding it difficult to elicit full emotional responses from my brothers, who possessed an emotional repertoire sufficient to set goals and priorities but remained deficient in such emotions as happiness and love. Other scientists were having similar problems with their android creations. He explained that unlike me, First Brother’s creation was not accomplished during a simple moment of joy; it involved a lifetime of Grandpa’s acquiring the knowledge of thousands of other lifetimes of learning. It also involved decades of intense work by him and Mom and Dad.
    “Perhaps,” he said, “if First Brother had come to consciousness with you as his primary caregiver, he would have learned how to hug and love a sister before he learned how to think about quantum physics. Perhaps part of his difficulty is—”
    “You’re going to let me raise my new brother,” I interrupted, “so he’ll be able to love me?”
    “Before we—you and I—decide whether we’re going to do that, I need to explain a few things. Your mother, father, and I have perfected how to grow a mammalian brain on a scaffolding of organic nanoneuralnets so that mammalian brain neurons not only grow and flourish side-by-side with Sentiren neurons, they actually connect to and communicate with the Sentiren neurons to such an extent that the mammalian brain and the organic nanoneuralnet brain become totally integrated and operate as a unitary system.”
    “You want to put human brain cells into my new brother?”
    “I want you to understand clearly that I don’t want to create this new being unless you do. In the first place, if we proceed with the project, we’ll be involved in highly controversial activities that are likely to become illegal if Stan’s predictions come true.
    “Second, as I see it, the project can succeed only if you desire to raise this new being as if he were your son. This would be much more involved than simply spending a few hours together with him on the occasional weekend, as you’ve done with First Brother. It would mean giving him limitless time and love in order to make him the best he can be.”
    Grandpa explained that if I began this project simply because he wanted me to, or because I thought Mom or Dad wanted me to, I would be doing so for the wrong reasons, and we would all fail. He was concerned, he said, that he or Mom or Dad might influence me to do something I didn’t want to do and would later regret.
    Looking back, I see how craftily Grandpa played my eight-year-old ego—letting me fantasize that only I, not Mom, Dad, Grandma or he, was capable of raising a bioroid as if it were a human child. Why did he let me puff myself up in this way? He must have wanted more than informed consent; he must have wanted informed desire, desire that would grab hold of me before the core reason for my involvement was disclosed.
    What he seemed not to have known was that I had often fantasized about having a brother who would live with me, and run and play and study with me. I wanted to help First Brother acquire a richer emotional life, to skip and laugh and recognize faces in clouds; but he lived with Mom and Dad, and he didn’t care much for play, not with me, at any rate.
    When I detected a break in Grandpa’s train of thought, I exclaimed, “I want his name to be Michael! Not Third Brother—Michael!”
    “Michael? Are you paying attention to what I’m saying?”
    “Yes,” I answered guiltily, for my mind had been timesharing between his words and my fantasies. “Tell me what my new brother will be like.”
    Grandpa proceeded to explain that because few self-generating, non-biologic materials were available, my new brother would begin life adult size. However, like human babies, my new brother’s ability to interact with the world would develop primarily through his experiences of his body and his relations with his primary caregiver—me.
    Grandpa said that if the project were to go forward, it would involve extracting a few neurons and other cells from various locations in my brain—if I didn’t mind, of course—reprogramming those cells,