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deeply I'd offended him with some of the things I'd said the day before. The
trouble with meeting people again after interviewing them was that they often
spent the intervening time thinking through the whole conversation, in minute
detail-and concluding that they'd come out badly.
Rourke said, "It's the oldest semantic weapon there is. Think of all the
categories of people who've been classified as non-human, in various cultures,
at various times. People from other tribes. People with other skin colors.
Slaves. Women. The mentally ill. The deaf. Homosexuals.
Jews. Bosnians, Croats, Serbs, Armenians, Kurds-"
I said defensively, "Don't you think there's a slight difference between
putting someone in a gas
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the phrase rhetorically?"
"Of course. But suppose you accuse me of 'lacking humanity.' What does that
actually mean? What am
I likely to have done? Murdered someone in cold blood? Drowned a puppy? Eaten
meat? Failed to be
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moved by Beethoven's Fifth? Or just failed to have-or to seek-an emotional
life identical to your own in every respect? Failed to share all your values
and aspirations?"
I hadn't replied. Cyclists whirred by in the dark jungle behind me; it had
begun to rain, but the canopy protected us.
Rourke continued cheerfully. "The answer is: 'any one of the above.' Which is
why it's so fucking lazy. Questioning someone's 'humanity' puts them in the
company of serial killers-which saves you the trouble of having to say
anything intelligent about their views. And it lays claim to some vast
imaginary consensus, an outraged majority standing behind you, backing you up
all the way.
When you claim that Voluntary Autists are trying to rid themselves of their
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humanity, you're not only defining the word as if you had some divine right to
do that . . . you're implying that everyone else on the planet-short of the
reincarnations of Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot-agrees with you in every detail."
He spread his arms and declaimed to the trees, "Put down that scalpel, 1
beseech you . . . in the name of all humanity!"
I said lamely, "Okay. Maybe I should have phrased some things differently,
yesterday. I didn't set out to insult you."
Rourke shook his head, amused. "No offense taken. It's a battle, after all-I
can hardly expect instant surrender. You're loyal to a narrow definition of
Big H-and maybe you even honestly believe that everyone else shares it. I
support a broader definition. We'll agree to disagree. And
I'll see you in the trenches."
Narrow? I'd opened my mouth to deny the accusation, but then I hadn't known
how to defend myself.
What could I have said? That I'd once made a sympathetic documentary about
gender migrants? (How magnanimous.) And now I had to balance that with a
frankenscience story on Voluntary Autists?
So he'd had the last word (if only in real time). He'd shaken my hand, and
we'd parted.
I played the whole thing through, one more time. Rourke was remarkably
eloquent-and almost charismatic, in his own strange way- and everything he'd
said was relevant. But the private terminology, the manic outbursts... it was
all too weird, too messy and confrontational.
I left the take unused, unquoted.
I'd gone on to another appointment at the university: an afternoon
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with the famous Manchester MIRG-Medical Imaging Research Group. It had seemed
like too good a chance to miss-and imaging, after all, lay behind the
definitive identification of partial autism.
I skimmed through the footage. A lot of it was good-and it would probably make
a worthwhile five-
minute story of its own, for one of SeeNet's magazine programs-but it was
clear now that Rourke's own concise notepad demonstration had supplied all the
brain scans junk DNA really needed.
The main experiment I'd filmed involved a student volunteer reading poetry in
silence, while the scanner subtitled the image other brain with each line as
it was read. There were three independently-computed subtitles, based on
primary visual data, recognized word-shapes, and the brain's final semantic
representations . . . the last sometimes only briefly matching the others,
before the words' precise meanings diffused out into a cloud of associations.
However eerily compelling this was, though, it had nothing to do with Lament's
area.
Toward the end of the day, one of the researchers-Margaret Williams, head of
the software development team-had suggested that I climb into the womb of the
scanner, myself. Maybe they wanted to turn the tables on me-to scrutinize and
record me with their machinery, just as I'd been doing to them for the past
four hours. Williams had certainly been as insistent as if she'd believed it
was a matter of justice.
She said, "You could record the subject's-eye view. And we could get a look at
all your hidden extras."
I'd declined. "I don't know what the magnetic fields would do to the
hardware."
"Nothing, I promise. Most of it must be optical-and everything else will be
shielded. You get on and off planes all the time, don't you? You walk through
the normal security gates?"
"Yes, but-"
"Our fields are no stronger. We could even try reading your optic nerve
activity, via the scanner-
and then comparing the data with your own direct record."
"I don't have the download module with me. It's back at the hotel."
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She pursed her lips, frustrated-obviously dying to tell me to shut up, do as I
was told, and get inside the scanner. "That's a pity. And I suppose you'd have
problems with the warranty if we improvised something-our own cable and
interface . .. ?"
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"I'm afraid so. The software would log the use of non-standard equipment, and
then I'd be in deep trouble at the next annual service."
But she still wasn't ready to give up. "You were talking about the Voluntary
Autists, before. If you wanted something spectacular to illustrate that... we
could image your own Lament's area-while you brought to mind a sequence of
different people. We could record it all, and play it back for you. Then you
could show your viewers a real-time working copy of the thing itself. Not some
glossy animation: flesh and blood, caught in the act. Neurons pumping calcium
ions, synapses firing. We could even transform the neural architecture into a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]