Machine Man - Max Barry [58]
But with the dial tone in my ear I hesitated. My brain whispered new scenarios. Carl doing physical therapy with Lola. Her standing behind him, encircling his torso with her arms, showing him how to move. Her breath tickling his ear.
I saw movement beyond the green glass. Jason, working late. I thought: Maybe there’s another way.
I LAY still while the fMRI machine thrummed around me. It was unsettling, because I had to lie back and with my head poked into a small hole in a large machine. The issue was the hole looked like a mouth. It was also difficult to forget that the unit generated enough magnetic force to pull a pin clean through my body. I was glad I had thought of this. If things progressed like I planned, it would soon be difficult to MRI myself nonfatally. The whoomp-whoomp-whoomp was comfortingly rhythmic.
“That’s good,” said Jason’s disembodied voice. “Now regret. Something you wish you could change.”
“An uncle of mine died from colon cancer. I was twelve. I remember thinking how ridiculous that was, a failure in one small body part being fatal. I didn’t understand why they couldn’t give him a new colon.”
“Sorry. I’m not seeing much. Can you try again? Something more … emotional?”
“Well … once in junior high I didn’t go to a school dance, because I thought nobody would want to go with me. Then afterward I heard this girl I liked would have.” Isabella. She had been good at chess. Always underdeveloped her rooks, though.
“Still not definitive.”
I almost said, Let’s skip regret. Because, really, how important was that? It was a social emotion. Group survival was maximized if all members felt an emotional obligation to treat one another fairly. But you personally wanted to be able to cheat and steal without remorse. I’m not saying that’s a great set of values. I’m just saying logically.
“I fell out of a tree as a kid,” I said. “I cut my leg open and had to get stitches. It left a scar. A little white line. Now it’s gone I kind of miss it. It was a physical connection to my past. Not an important part. But still. I’m disconnected in a way I didn’t anticipate. My body maps space to time. It has an embedded history.” Jason was silent. “Of course, human tissue completely regenerates every seven years. It’s unlikely that scar was composed of the same molecules. Do you think it’s really appropriate to consider people to be the same entity they were seven years earlier? Because, physically, they’re not. They’re connected but every part has changed. Like a renovated house. It seems like after seven years you shouldn’t be liable for things you did before. Why should a man be imprisoned for a crime committed by a different physical entity? Should we expect a couple to stay married when they barely share a molecule with the people who said, ‘I do’? I don’t think so. I know it’s not that simple but that’s my feeling.”
Silence. I had wandered off topic. “I think that’s as close as we’re going to get,” Jason said. “Let’s try longing.”
“THERE.” JASON pointed to his monitor. We had been mapping my brain for six hours. In the darkened observation room, his eyes were pits. “Activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Highly localized.”
I looked up from wiring myself into the Contours. It was the first time I had done this in a while. It hurt. But not in a completely bad way. “That’s guilt?”
“Yes.” Jason paged down. “According to Krajbich et al., patients with damage to the VMPFC are quantifiably less sensitive to guilt. Regular people have a guilt quotient of two hundred. But VMPFC-impaired people average twenty-seven. That means they feel an amount of guilt that’s negligible compared to the norm.”
I activated the Contours. Sensation spread down my metal legs. I wouldn’t say it was worth losing both legs just for this, but it was a good feeling. “Interesting.”
“On every other measurable emotion, the two groups scored the same. Oh. Wait.” He peered at the screen. “Envy’s up.”
“Envy?”
“Actually, that’s within the margin of error. Probably