“How about turning on the TV and we’ll catch up on the news before we get going,” he nods at the flat-screen on the wall across from the bed. “Go ahead. Just point your finger. The one with the scar.”
“Say again?” I reply with a mouthful of muffin. “Do what?”
“Try it, point your right index finger at the TV,” he says, and I do it, feeling foolish.
To my amazement the local news blinks on without benefit of the remote control.
“It’s surprisingly intuitive,” he demonstrates with hand gestures that have no effect since he’s not wired the way I am. “An upward movement raises the sound, a downward one lowers it, providing you’ve done certain other things first,” and it wouldn’t matter if he has or hasn’t.
Presumably, Dick’s not equipped with the same sensors in his fingers, hasn’t been implanted with a SIN, the original version or the latest. I’m quite certain that for reasons of national security, it wouldn’t be allowed, reminding me yet again that Carme and I have little or no say, are expendable compared to him. And he tells me to go ahead and try out my new powers.
“Temporary ones, that is. A demo,” he adds.
Pointing at the TV, I make a series of rapid upward motions as if conducting an orchestra, and the volume booms . . .
“. . . The wildly popular Tidewater International Car Show opened Friday at the Hampton Coliseum, and the now-missing hot rod and hearse had been the biggest attractions . . . ,” the Channel 10 anchor says, and I mute the news with a cutoff gesture, a scuba I’m out of air hand signal.
“Not so different from swiping your finger across your cell phone if you want to hide the keyboard or zoom in on a map,” Dick seems proud of what he’s wrought. “Only in this case, motion is captured by the TV’s built-in camera, and an end receiver converts certain physical actions into commands.”
It doesn’t necessarily thrill me to hear that soon enough I won’t have to do much more than gesture, blink or use my eyes to make something happen or not. That’s assuming the parameters correctly line up as they did when I adjusted the volume, and they did only because Dick changed variables in a biofeedback algorithm.
After making his dramatic point, he changed the variables back to what they were before, and should I point at the TV again, it won’t have the same effect. Not until I meet various mathematical conditions, he says. It will be up to me to learn what those are as I return to my day-to-day activities.
Somehow, I’m supposed to figure out things as I go along, interfacing machine and biology, being a test pilot for my own SIN while doing the best I can to live as usual. Or as Dick puts it, practice makes perfect, and there will be plenty of that simply dealing with my work spaces on the NASA Langley campus.
Let’s say Building 1232, where I often park myself when test piloting and programming scenarios for autonomous vehicles (drones). Dick walks me through what it will be like accessing my office there, starting with the two outer doors that require my ID badge.
Once I scan open those electronic locks, next is my office door, including the fail-safe push-button code I’ll have to enter manually before I can use hand gestures to turn on the lights inside. But I won’t be able to unlock my desktop computer with a wag, jab or snap of my fingers unless I also insert this same ID badge into the card reader.
00:00:00:00:0
“THE NUANCES are infinite and beyond mind boggling,” I state the obvious. “I’m going to look like a wackadoo if anybody’s watching,” and I can’t begin to imagine the misfires as I point and blink like abracadabra. “Not to mention, if the wrong people catch on, Carme and I could end up dead.”
“The plan isn’t to have you dead, coming across as I Dream of Jeannie or a wizard,” Dick opens his laptop. “The idea is for both of you to be stealthy, to draw zero attention while you constantly acquire and transmit data.”
Everything will be analyzed and tweaked as we conduct high-risk activities with remote human guidance and the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI), he describes what sounds like a high-tech nightmare.
“How are we supposed to live with something like this?” but I already know the answer because it couldn’t be more glaring.
By and large Carme and I are on our own, the first of our kind, prototype 001 with no precedent, no other matching siblings who’ve come before us. One day we’ll be the models for others, Dick says as if we could aspire no higher. We’re the test pilots and guinea pigs in his top secret project, code name Gemini, which is Latin for “twins.”
Including digital ones, and based on electronic blueprints and schematics, Carme’s and my individual configurations of implants are identical. Our SINs are extensive with room to expand, Dick says as he continues to unfold our destinies, a life plan that wasn’t decided by us even if we agreed to it.
It wasn’t our idea for NASA and the military to repurpose our existences, and I don’t appreciate Dick’s presumptions. Especially when he shows me a female body diagram that supposedly represents the way I’m shaped.
“No good,” I shake my head vigorously.
As unimportant as it is in the grand cosmos of things, I don’t like being depicted as chunky. I like it less when my sister’s noticeably slimmer and more buff body diagram fills the other side of the split screen.
“Nope, nope, nope. Maybe I have to watch what I eat more than Carme does but that doesn’t mean we don’t weigh pretty much the same,” I let him know. “It’s just that we aren’t built alike. And I have to work harder. And might have a little more body fat.”
“All that can be tweaked,” he promises.
Not some things, I think dismally. My sister and I may be identical but that doesn’t mean we don’t have our physical differences. Most notably, I began my precipitous slide into puberty almost a year before she did, doubled over with cramps, outgrowing everything. When it was her turn, she got by with undershirts and extra-slim-fit jeans, never needing a hot water bottle, underwire or a Midol.
“There’s not much that won’t be fixable and changeable eventually,” Dick predicts, and it’s unnerving to contemplate the microscopic mission control that’s monitoring everything about Carme and me.
From the amount of cortisol, epinephrine and dopamine we secrete (how stressed or aggressive we are). To our blood sugar and other hormone levels (diabetes, PMS). In addition to the early detection of emergency conditions in the making (heart attacks, strokes).