Human Sister

enough to establish some groundedness and meaning to their actions, and they’d been able to speak and solve problems. Emotions such as love were to have been learned later.
    When Michael was six months old, Grandpa said it was time for Michael and me to begin connecting with each other through the braincord. By then I’d had eight months of practice at being connected with a computer through the braincord, and I thought I’d become quite proficient at relaxing and letting my body and mind be controlled in part by instructions coming in through the cord. But I was about to discover that unlike the computer, Michael was not programmed to narrowly focus on one feeling, thought, sensation, or motor activity at a time.
    Grandpa had Michael sit beside me at my study table; then he told me to gently tap the center of the back of Michael’s head. I did, and a round segment of Michael’s skull flipped up. The braincord emerged, its bifurcated ends waving slowly in the air, appearing alive, appearing to search for something—for me.
    Following Grandpa’s instructions, I took hold of the ends of the cord and guided them to my nostrils. The cord moved up my nose and locked into place in the junctions of my cribriform plate. Then something new and frightening happened: a hurricane of images, sounds, smells, emotions, and fragments of thoughts swept into my mind, each sensation lasting only a fraction of a second before it was whisked away from the spotlight of my conscious awareness, only to be instantly replaced by another. The warmth of my skin, Michael’s bottle locked away in the cooler, a feeling of hunger, an image of Lily dozing in one of Grandma’s flower beds, the scent of Grandpa’s body lotion, the odor of his breath after breakfast (invariably, blueberries, cinnamon, steel-cut oats, and matcha tea)—many such disconnected sensations hurled in rapid, strobe-like fashion through my mind, making me feel confused, then dizzy, then nauseated.
    “Grandpa, I’m feeling a little sick,” I said.
    The wild staccato scramble of sensations abruptly ceased. I looked at Michael. His face had taken on its appearance of raised-brow surprise, which slid within a moment to wide-eyed curiosity. He focused intently on my eyes, and inside my mind I felt something strange, something like a pair of eyes looking around, or perhaps hands patting first here, then there, searching for something in the dark, wet interior of my brain. I didn’t know how I knew, but I knew that Michael had become aware of my sick feeling—not through hearing my words, as I’d tried to make Grandpa aware, but through a conscious process similar to how I had been made aware of my own feeling of sickness—and that he was searching for this new feeling, trying to connect with it, trying to feel it for himself.
    But now that the swirl of images and sensations had ceased, the vertiginous feeling quickly evaporated, leaving Michael searching for something that no longer existed. His hunt continued for a few more moments (during which I became aware that my own eyes were moving about erratically), then stopped, and the whirlwind of Michael’s mental life again swept into my mind.
    After this first connection, Grandpa told me that I had been catching glimpses of the Sentiren ability to be simultaneously conscious of multiple feelings, sense impressions, and trains of thought. Like a Monet painting overbrimming with multifarious colors, each moment of reality for Michael was an explosion of innumerable events. It took us nearly three years before he learned to slow the input of his consciousness into my mind so as not to overwhelm me. Though he quickly discovered how to connect with my feelings, memories, and thoughts, I was able to connect with his only intermittently, perhaps because my brain didn’t operate as rapidly as his. This inability to follow his mental processes was disappointing for me because from the beginning of the project I had hoped to be able to get inside the truth of another’s mind—inside his thoughts and feelings—before they were whitewashed by language. Over time, however, my sense of his presence in my mind evolved from an eerie feeling of his being in a particular place in my head to a feeling of his simply being there, of being everywhere in my mind, just as I felt myself to be.
    From our first session on, Michael never appeared a bit confused or overwhelmed when we were connected by the braincord. In fact, he quickly