MARY SOON LEE

EBB TIDE

I’d never expected to return to Britain, but there I was, standing in the Immigration line at Heathrow airport. Apparently it used to be one of the busiest airports in the world. When I had flown out twenty years ago, it was already well into its decline. Now most of the buildings and all but one ranway were closed down. Half the fluorescent lights had been switched off to conserve power, and the temperature in the terminal was barely above freezing.

I squeezed my daughter’s cold hand, glanced down to check that her coat was still buttoned up. She had taken her toy rabbit out of the baggage trolley, and was busy chewing its long ragged gray ears.

“Clarissa —” I tried to get her to let go of the rabbit, but she braced herself, her thin face scrunched up with determination.

“Eat rabbit,” Clarissa told me.

The old man ahead of me in the line turned round, his eyes narrowing as he squinted at Clarissa and the vivid blue tattoo on the center of her forehead. He nudged the woman beside him. “Look, there’s one of those morons behind us. I thought they were all meant to be upgraded by now’.”

I pulled Clarissa closer to me, but she didn’t seem to have heard. Or maybe she didn’t understand. Her vocabulary had peaked around her seventh birthday. Now, less than a year later, the hard-gained knowledge was coming unraveled, more words slipping from Clarissa’s grasp every day.

Slowly the line shuffled forward, all of us smelling of stale sweat and desperation. The handful of tourists and reporters had long since vanished past the Temporary Visit booth. Anyone crazy enough to be immigrating to Britain had to be desperate in one way or another.

The old couple ahead of me were refused entry. I couldn’t hear the reason, but I heard the old man swearing his face darkening to a choleric red. His wife tugged at his sleeve, and led him away, the two of them trailing across the dim expanse of the terminal.

“Next,” called the immigration official.

Swallowing hard, I walked forward. In the chaos of leaving New York, sifting through twenty years of accumulated junk to pack a single suitcase, I’d never considered that I might be denied entry to Britain.

I handed the man my documents, and he paged through them with bored efficiency. “Says here you used to be a British citizen.”

“Yes.”

“But you took the technical proficiency test, and qualified for entry to the U.S.”

“Yes.” The words had run out of my head just like Clarissa’s. Her fingers were entwined in mine in a sticky knot. I stared at the man dumbly. Despite his navy blue uniform and crew cut hair, he managed to look scruffy. At night, he probably went home, put his feet up on the sofa, and watched telly all evening. But here he was judge and jury, sole arbitrator of our petitions.

“See, we don’t ordinarily readmit people who upped and left soon as things got tough. You re-scin-ded your citizenship when you went.” He spun out each syllable of rescinded as though it were a parliamentary edict. “You got any ex-tenu-ating circumstances?”

“Yes.”

He looked at me expectantly.

“My daughter —” the rest of the speech died in my throat. I lifted Clarissa up so that he could see her tattoo.

He leaned forward, and reached out to touch Clarissa. I put her down quickly, but his face was unexpectedly sympathetic. “My sister had a boy like that. Her husband wanted her to sell him, you know, to America or Japan for upgrading. So my sister divorced him, and she’s looking after the kid by herself.”

He stamped my papers. “You can go. I’ve given you unlimited entry on compassionate grounds. Your daughter looks like a nice kid. Good luck.”

“Thank you.” Stupidly, I wanted to cry. He didn’t know me, but he was trying to be kind. I’d almost forgotten what that felt like. As Clarissa and I were walking away, he called after us, “If you’ve time, take her to the Zoo. They’ve got a baby giant panda.”

London hadn’t changed. Oh, the youngsters were sporting primary-colored bands of body fur instead of the spiky hairstyles I remembered, and there were few private cars left on the road. But in comparison to Los Angeles or Tokyo, it was like stepping into the past. A few decades ago, back when parliament almost revoked the fight to silence, pundits predicted that Britain would soon be a Big Brother state, complete with twenty-four hour surveillance and electronic ID cards.

But in 2009, the Ecorights party passed stringent laws forbidding any form of electronic recording or tracking of people’s movements. Two years later, they finally gave Britain a constitution, protecting human rights, interstellar alien rights (not that we knew of any aliens), animal rights, and plant rights — all the way down to the endangered country hedgerows. And despite the failing economy and the seesaw of political power, the constitution had survived intact.

As Clarissa tagged along with me on my job-hunt, she kept stopping and looking around as though she’d lost something.

Finally she tugged on my hand as we waited at Piccadilly Circus tube station. “Mummy, where did the eye-spies go?”

“Spy-eyes” I corrected automatically. Then I hoisted her up on my hip. “There aren’t any spy-eyes over here. No spy-eyes, no hovercars, and no tattoos.”

I brushed her forehead gently. The day we’d flown in, I’d taken Clarissa to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. The plasterwork was flaking from the walls, and the medical facilities barely rose to X-ray machines, but the doctor pretended to talk to Clarissa’s rabbit while he examined her. And three hours later, Clarissa had only a fading pink mark on her forehead. They hadn’t even charged me.

Clarissa had been remarkably patient during the job-hunt, but I’d noticed the ears on her rabbit getting more and more ragged. Whenever I had to leave her, she took the rabbit out and chewed on it. Sometimes a receptionist would try to play with her, but Clarissa just chewed the rabbit in big-eyed silence until I returned.

I finally found a job predicting rates of chemical contamination in the water supply. On the morning before I was due to start, I took Clarissa to London Zoo. After all the U.S. media reports of starvation caused by Britain’s outdated anti-technology stance, I was bemused that they were still keeping the Zoo open. I hadn’t seen any evidence of starvation in London itself, but I presumed the situation was worse in other parts of the country, and a single elephant eats enough to feed six families.

But the Zoo was not only open, it was the most crowded, most high-tech place I’d seen since arriving. Children pressed their faces against the one-way walls of the enclosures, watched holographic computer simulations explaining the animals’ diets and habitats and life cycles. A pool the size of two football stadiums extended into Regent’s Park, filled with eighty dolphins and a bewildering assortment of fish.

Clarissa clutched my hand as we walked through a tunnel extending through the middle of the pool, the blue-green water glowing all around us in the sunlight. She let go of her rabbit for a moment to stare at a baby dolphin sliding up and over the glass tunnel, its gray belly inches from her nose. Audio speakers relayed its high-pitched squeaks, and Clarissa whistled back at it.

She pointed at the water. “Want to go play.”

“I’m sorry, that’s only for the dolphins. They’d be frightened if you joined them.”

“I want to play.”

I took a deep breath. “Clarissa —”

But she’d already switched her attention to a bright yellow ball that was rolling along the tunnel floor. She ran after it, spun i t around until the boy who owned it came along. Her fingers trembled as she let him take the ball. I pressed my hands against her fingers, trying to hold them still, but the shaking continued, like a small rapid echo of her heartbeat.

Clarissa looked up at me. “Mummy sad?”

“No, no—I’m happy.” I patted her shoulder. “Let’s go and see the bears.”

But I’d read the scientific literature on DIMS (degenerative impaired mentation syndrome), and I recognized the symptoms. First, higher level cognitive functions are affected, often causing aphasia and other linguistic problems. Next, secondary motor control functions deteriorate, producing both the onset of palsy and severe tissue damage to Broca’s area, the part of the brain that is the center of speech. In this phase, children begin to stutter and develop muscular twitches of increasing severity.

Somehow we’d reached the bear enclosure and one of the zookeepers had just arrived with a bucket of food. Clarissa crouched down, watching intently as the man tossed out food, the bears deftly snagging the carrots and other tidbits with their paws.

I pressed my forehead against the cool metal netting closed my eyes for a second. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought Clarissa back to England, maybe Paul was right. The night Clarissa was diagnosed with DIMS he had held me for hours in bed, not asking questions, not trying to kiss me.

Eventually Paul had cleared his throat. “Emma, I’ll go with you to Electrosim in the morning.”

“What?” I pulled away from him. “Paul — that’s not funny.”

His face twisted in a way I’d never seen, harsher, patronizing. “Oh come on, you know we can’t keep her. Why would you even want to? Electrosira is nearby and they pay well.”

I stood up, started dressing. I’d spent five years with Paul, but this was the first time I’d hated him. He expected me to sell my daughter to Electrosim like a broken car. And then they’d implant the cyber enhancements in her damaged cerebrum, and in a few weeks she’d be sold again as the world’s most expensive luxury, a human robot. Add the correct software and she could pilot a hypersonic jet or carry out a preprogrammed sexual fantasy.

“Emma — don’t overreact.” He sat up in the bed, the fine blond hairs on his chest picked out by the bedside lamp. “I’ve always been willing to spend time with your daughter, but this is something else again. It’s not fair to Clarissa to drag this out. You know I’m right.”

“Mummy?”

I snapped back to the present. Feeding time was over, and Clarissa’s face was screwed up. “I want to go wee-wee.”

I led her over to the toilets, waited outside her door, wondering how long it would be before she needed help.

Children with second phase DIMS drool and may lose bladder control. It’s a messy, ugly disease that steals children piece by piece. I’ve read the theories about what causes the cellular changes, the impact of various chemical pollutants on the formation of the central nervous system. But none of the theories evoke the reality of the disease as clearly as an interview with one of the first parents of a DIMS child.

He said it was like watching the tide flow out of his son.

And so it was. Every day, another piece of Clarissa ebbed away, and there were pebbles and broken shells left behind, fragments that would never come whole again.

At work, my boss was very tolerant. He allowed me to take Clarissa into the office, where she spent most of the day sitting underneath my desk — holding her rabbit and drawing pictures with fat wax crayons.

I took the pictures back to our rented apartment, pinned them on the walls. At first the pictures were recognizable, pin-stick caricatures of Clarissa and me, bowlegged green and yellow dogs, and luminous pink fish. After a month, I had to ask her what the swirling loops of color meant. After another month, she couldn’t answer.

But she smiled.

Her smile widened as her vocabulary shrank. Except for the brief periods when I had to leave her, or the jab of a syringe on our weekly appointment at Great Ormond Street Hospital, she seemed to always be smiling.

One evening in April, after work, we celebrated her eighth birthday in our apartment. I’m not sure Clarissa knew what the cake represented, but she beamed at me while I blew the candles out. Seconds later, she had chocolate cake over everything from her cheeks to the tablecloth.

I spooned a little of it into her mouth, checked her diapers, carried her over to the bay window. The rain was still pelting down, the sky nearly dark though it was only six o’clock.

Clarissa laid the side of her face against the window. Maybe she was listening to the rain, the different sounds as it splashed against the glass window, the leaves, the puddles in the gutter. Provided I overlooked the persistent tremor of her skinny arms, she looked like a normal child.

I knelt down beside her, and hugged her tight, breathing in the clean sweet smell of her hair.

Two days later, Clarissa had a severe asthmatic attack. I held her in my lap, waiting for the ambulance to arrive, waiting for each wheeze of air from her lungs. The skin around her nose and mouth paled, then tinged to blue.

A siren wailed toward us, and I raced out to the road. The paramedic had to force my fingers loose from Clarissa’s arms. All the way to the hospital, I sat opposite her, watching the imprint of my fingers fade from her arms, the thin oxygen mask hiding her face.

The hospital waiting room was a blank horror. All I remember was the tea, thick white pottery cups of lukewarm sugary liquid. And then the doctor’s face, briskly sympathetic above his starched labcoat. “We’ll need to keep Clarissa hospitalized from now on. Her autonomic nervous system is beginning to be affected.”

He led me to the ward, steered me to the chair by her bed.

Clarissa was sedated, an oxygen mask fastened over her nose and mouth. I didn’t even know if I wanted her to wake up. I wasn’t sure she’d recognize me. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize my daughter in what was left of Clarissa.

I closed my eyes, Paul’s parting shot returning across the months. “What do you want to do? Watch your daughter turn into a vegetable because upgrading is unnatural? That’s selfish bullshit.” Paul lowered his voice, held out both hands palm up. “If she’s upgraded, then she can give something back to society.”

And in a way Paul was right; I’d known that all along. The American administration is chiefly concerned about the economics—whether the U.S. is a net importer or exporter of human robots, whether they can be used to boost national productivity.

From the start they overlooked abuses in the system: mothers who took drugs to induce subnormal babies so they could sell them, children condemning their parents as legally senile so they too could be upgraded. Three weeks before I left America, Congress passed a bill making upgrading compulsory for all subnormals.

Yet despite that, despite the rich men who buy nubile human robots for evening entertainments that aren’t subject to the usual restrictive laws, most hu-bots are used constructively. The U.S. has thousands of hu-bots in the emergency services alone. Equipped with infrared sensory enhancements, they compute optimal trajectories through smoke-filled buildings, calculating the maximum stress they can put on their bodies without concerns about pain or panic.

The human body is more physically dexterous and adaptable than any machine yet built. Interface some electronic controls to the basic human nervous system, and the result is a triumph of modem technology.

I opened my eyes, stared at Clarissa in the hospital bed.

Maybe if I’d been a better person, I would have sold her. I smoothed her hair back from her cheek, picked up her cold hand lying still on the sheet, squeezed it.

Only, only no one knew what the hu-bots felt inside, whether they ever wondered why they were trapped in bodies that no longer listened to them. The surgeons open up the subject’s skull, insert the electronics, use destructive gene therapy that wipes out many neuron links even as it halts any further degradation of the nervous system. Once the procedure is finished, the software has control of the mouth and eyes and muscles.

If there’s anyone left inside, they have no means to communicate, no way of asking what happened.

I let go of Clarissa’s hand, walked down the ward, past a dozen beds with other DIMS children. Beneath the surface disinfectant, the hospital smelled of aging brick walls riddled with damp. Half the blankets had holes in them.

The boy at the far end had been there for two years, comatose for most of that time. An oversized orange duck nestled at the crook of his left arm, but that was just some adult’s sentimentality. Unlike the hu-bots, we can be virtually certain that third phase DIMS victims are oblivious to their surroundings, their intellect destroyed.

I paced back to Clarissa, stared at the ragged-ear rabbit at the bottom of her bed. There was a promise I’d broken.

While she could still understand, I did my best to explain DIMS to Clarissa. She wanted to see how it would change her, but of course there were no advanced DIMS cases in New York — they’d all been upgraded. So we watched a video together on an antiquated VCR, white static flickering across the picture. The boy on the tape forgot the words for knife, and baseball, and the name of his sister. He stumbled when saying Mommy; a ribbon of drool tracked down his shirt; his arms quivered like the flutter of broken wings.

Clarissa had ejected the tape, scrunched up her fists. With careful precision she said slowly, “I don’t want ever to be like that. Don’t let that happen to me.”

“Hush, now.” I had folded her against me, rocked her.

“Mummy, I mean it. Please don’t let it happen. I’d rather be a robot.”

“I won’t let it happen, I won’t.”

But I lied. I kept telling myself that tomorrow I’d take Clarissa to Electrosim. I’d stipulate in the contract that her body was not to be sold to a private buyer, but instead used in one of the humanitarian projects.

And then tomorrow had slipped into the day after, and the day after that. Congress passed the bill that rendered upgrading compulsory, and I had fled here to London.

I took one last look at Clarissa lying in the bed, walked to the nurse’s station. “I’d like to sign the euthanasia agreement.”

I signed the paper. The doctor came. They wheeled Clarissa to a private room, slipped the needle into the thin blue vein of her wrist.

I decided to stay in London. There was a voluntary organization that helped parents of DIMS children, and I even joined a local environmental group. I kept myself busy, but the loneliness grew. Even my memory of Clarissa blurred, until I couldn’t recall the shape of her eyes, the texture of her hair.

One afternoon in November, I went to London Zoo and stood by the bear enclosure. The keeper was throwing food, and I watched the bears snag carrots and apples in mid-flight. I remembered Clarissa crouching down beside me, the warmth of her body against my legs, the way the weak sunlight gilded her hair.

And day by day, the memories returned to me, bringing back the wholeness of Clarissa’s life, an unexpected benison.

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