Human Sister

fragile. Even worse, I couldn’t tell Elio why I was being such a spoilsport—such as when I refused to join him and his friends in a game of what he said Americans called soccer, games I had participated in and enjoyed in prior summers—and I feared he might never again want to spend another summer vacation with me.
    As soon as Grandpa and I returned from the trip, Grandpa began having a computer stimulate the neural pathways that led to all parts of my brain from the junctions in my cribriform plate. My job was to practice total relaxation by concentrating on my breathing while the computer stimulated my newly formed nerve cells and monitored responses. I was also to report—but only when asked, since reporting broke my concentration—what sensations I’d felt and what mental impressions I’d had in the few seconds or minutes since the last report.
    The first month of practice was devoted to acquainting the computer with my body. It quickly discovered how to move each of my fingers and toes, then my arms and legs. By the end of the first month, the computer had learned how to control my right hand sufficiently well to draw or type as proficiently as I could under my own control. Next, it learned how to move my tongue, mouth, and vocal cords so that during exhalations it was able to speak through me.
    The strangest part of this was how natural it all seemed. Before the practice sessions began, I had imagined that having my arms and fingers and voice operated in some mysterious way would make me feel eerily possessed. But I found that as long as I remained totally relaxed and didn’t interfere, my hands, legs—even the words I spoke—felt as though they were being consciously driven by me. Of course, the observer part of me knew the computer was manipulating my body, but the feeling of producing the motions or words was the same as if I myself had intentionally produced them.
    What was this “I,” then? An imagined something fantasizing that it was in control of a body and its thoughts? Perhaps I really was, as Grandpa had repeatedly said, a network analogous to a colony of ants, which functions well in complex ways without having any central control. Perhaps my “central control,” my consciousness, was merely a complex feedback loop observing internal brain phenomena—an observer tricked by itself into thinking that it had control because the correspondence between observing and happening was so seamless that observing became seen as cause.
    After the first month of these lessons, things became more difficult for me when the computer began exploring other areas of my brain. I would remember funny things and laugh; I would smell cookies baking or lilacs after a spring rain; I would see Elio on Vidtel or First Brother staring at a blank wall; I would hear Grandma talking or music playing or a squirrel clucking in a tree.
    I repeatedly told Grandpa that I disliked the all-too-real feel of what I was experiencing, that I worried about losing the ability to distinguish these hallucinations from reality. He insisted that my job during these sessions was not to like or dislike anything. My job was to breathe in and out, in and out, and to observe—only observe and later report—the feelings, thoughts, sights, sounds, and other sense impressions stimulated by the computer.
    Easy to say, I told him, but difficult to do.
    “Difficult?” he responded. “It is not difficult to breathe or observe. If you’re finding something difficult, then you’re doing something other than breathing and observing.”
    I tried to do exactly as Grandpa instructed, but I continued to have trouble distinguishing between me-observing-me-seeing-something and me-seeing-something-while-observing-me-seeing-this same something. It was like being in a house of mirrors where I was one of the mirrors—but which one?
    I tried to do exactly as Grandpa instructed because I understood that much of what the computer was learning would be passed on to Michael, and that much of what I was learning about observing myself under another’s control would prove invaluable when Michael and I eventually connected through our braincord.
    I tried to do exactly as Grandpa instructed because I loved Michael and was prepared to do anything for him even before he was born—on 3 September, Grandpa’s eighty-third birthday. Until that day, I’d been allowed in to only two of the three rooms in the remodeled level 3 area: the sparsely furnished room