Human Sister

events. But all I find is an ineluctable tide of circumstances well beyond the abilities of a little girl to hold back. I’d desired to become the heroine who would have succeeded—where Grandpa, Mom, and Dad had failed—in helping First Brother acquire a richer emotional life. But I’d not known what to do other than to accept First Brother as a unique individual with interests different from my own, and to fantasize that when I became older and more learned, I would be able to teach him to laugh and love. I’d thought I had plenty of time. Now, I was eight years old, and First Brother had never laughed—or loved, as far as I could tell—and he was leaving, taking away with him my dream of being a heroine for him.
    First Brother bent over and picked me up. I held him tightly, consciously desiring to retain my every sense of him. He was tall, strong, and firm; his hair was soft and black; his skin olive brown; eyes hazel; lips full, but tightly closed and still. His clothes smelled laundry fresh. Times that we’d been together flashed through my mind. Except for Elio during two weeks of each of the three prior summers, First Brother had been my only childhood playmate.
    Holding back tears, I caressed his smooth face, kissed his cool cheek, and said, “I love you, First Brother.”
    He stiffened, as he always had in response to my emotion, and put me down.
    As the car disappeared beyond the perimeter gate I turned and ran back to the house, where I requested Gatekeeper 1 to let me in. I ran to the entrance to the bedroom area and requested Gatekeeper 2 to let me in. I ran to the entrance to Grandpa’s study and, barely able to choke back tears, requested Gatekeeper 3 to let me in. Then I dove onto Grandpa’s sofa, where I cried and cried, no longer even conscious of what I was crying about, and cried on until Grandpa came and held me.
    “Shhh… shhh,” he whispered, stirring up in me images and sounds of the ocean breathing on the shore. “Shhh… Everything is all right. You were a good and brave girl.”

First Brother

    S he pulls the raft up onto the narrow strip of gray-brown sand that separates the ocean from the Jenner Estuary. The beach is littered with driftwood. Mist rises from wet sand into air vibrating with the screeching of gulls and the sibilant sound of waves breaking near the shore.
    She begins walking toward the sailboat. She is within 50 meters of the boat. A dog (highest correlation: golden retriever) emerges from the shadow of the listing boat and trots toward her. She smiles. She pets the dog. The dog sniffs, licks, and paws her. She expresses fondness in a manner humans are wont to express with their pets and young children.
    Outside the space of probable behavior, she cries as she holds the dog. By increasing magnification through the pigeonoid’s eyes, I conclude that she is unharmed by the dog, which barks, struggles to escape from her grip, and, succeeding, lunges forward. Her image rapidly diminishes in size. The distance between her and the dog increases. She is heard to shout: “No! Come back! Don’t chase the pigeonoid. He’s our friend.”
    The dog stops running and turns. It looks back at her and pants. She wipes at both of her eyes with the back of her gloved right hand. “Come here, boy. Come.” She pats her legs just above her knees. “Come. That’s a good boy. Come here.” The dog runs back to her. They meet and she hugs the dog. “Oh, yes, yes. That’s a good boy. Yes.”
    She pulls her head away from the dog and strokes the dog’s flanks. “You’re so thin. Where’s your human? Where’s home?”

Sara

    G randpa began the FMD sessions at 1700 the day after First Brother last visited us. Before the first session, Grandpa asked me to look through his microscope at the navitors, tiny rod-shaped pellets variably magnetized on one end and approximately half the size of a brain neuron cell body.
    He told me that every three days a new cluster of navitors would be implanted in the braincord junctions and that for two hours each evening beginning at 1700 and for two hours each morning beginning at 0500—times when Elio almost certainly wouldn’t call—I would lie perfectly still in the FMD, which would drive the navitors at the rate of approximately 1 millimeter per session toward their designated target areas in my brain. As they traveled, the navitors’ paths would diverge so that the FMD could send them to the 12,464 Harvard brain-classification