Video Killed the Radio Star

It was eleven when I climb the stairs to the tiny Montreal apartment my mother shared with my aunt. “I’m not too late?” I ask Obasan. She hesitates, shakes her head no. Not too late. My mother sits by the window, her slim build and erect posture accentuated by her sleeveless summer dress. She turns and smiles.

“She remembers you,” says Obasan “she talks about you sometimes.”

My mother looks up at me wide eyed. “I don’t know what happened” she says with the grave simplicity of a child. Unsure whether she means the cancer, the dementia or the path of her life, I sit beside her and take her hand. She’s holding a tiny heart-shaped silver locket, which she drops into my hand in answer. I look questioningly at Obasan.

“It’s from your father I think,” Obasan says.

I’ve never met my father. My mom was a brilliant scientist, a Japanese Jane Goodall, meeting the daily losses of species and habitats with equilibrium and humour. There never seemed to be much money in her work but she remained determined, saving tiny helpless creatures buffeted by civilization. She always expressed the greatest joy and pride in the tiniest of my accomplishments. I had felt as if she were whole unto herself, as if a father would be unnecessary, even an intrusion. It wasn’t till I was older I began to wonder what it must have been like for her, appearing on Obasan’s doorstep with an unexpected and unnamed child on the way.

“She was always trying to love those that could never love her back,” says my aunt, glancing speculatively at me as if trying to determine if I were one of those. “He was in science too, I don’t know much about it. I didn’t want to ask, I thought maybe he was married to someone else.” She doesn’t discuss the reaction they must have gotten from my grandparents back in Japan. “He has some kind of camp North of Thunder Bay.”

“Oh, he’s a naturalist too?” I ask, happy to hear they shared something at least. She tilts her head slightly, her lips pursed. Not quite.

A week later I’m on my way to Thunder Bay. It's hot, the clouds ballooning with unshed grief. I’m in jeans; hard to know how to be properly casual. I called ahead to say I was coming but not why. The person answering the phone expressed no curiosity.

There’s a long dusty road and a series of buildings, a cross between industrial and agricultural, but nothing sets them apart really. A gorgeous view of billion-year-old rocks plummets to the tree-covered shore and then disappears. A house, a deck and I’m here.

I had given zero thought to what I wanted to say. I wanted to be natural and confident, interested in tying up loose ends, nothing more. It didn’t come out that way.

“You’re my father,” I blurt almost immediately. He looks surprised and amused, “are you sure?” I hand him the locket, almost accusingly. He takes it in his fingers which come like hairy sausages towards me. He laughs and I see the locket how he must see it; a cheap bauble. Not a sweet reminder of young love between penniless students. “Here, look,” he says, pulling open a drawer, “you keep that one, there are tons.” The drawer is filled with lockets all exactly the same.

“We gave them all one,” he says. “It started as a kind of cover, you know. So they’d feel like it was a moment of passion or whatnot. Then it was more of a joke. Like Facebook. We were Facebook’s predecessor. Tagged.” I’m not sure how to respond, but he’s not noticing.

“So your mom?”

“Is a scientist,” I finish, hoping to remind him.

“And you?”

“A lawyer”

“Corporate?”

“Human rights”

He snorts in disappointment. “Yeah, so we were doing research. We needed genetic material. Eggs, especially, and whatnot. Your sisters!” he guffaws. “so a couple of us would pick out somebody, one of us would take them to dinner, a slight sedative would be added to their drink and voila! Really easy actually.”

“Roofied them?”

“Scopolamine. They don’t remember anything, they’re up for everything, think they had the time of their lives. Probably did.”

He’s big but not corpulent, bloated, more like, suggestive of failing health but immensely good cheer, like the sun-bleached and peeling Ronald McDonald downstairs from my mother’s apartment.

“Back when, there was all this concern. You could experiment on animals, but even that… Peta and whatnot. So we developed humans with no brainstem. It looks human but has no feeling. Like a fish. And of course, AI! So they’re kind of a hybrid.”

“Who are?”

We’ve entered the house. My question is answered. There’s a woman. She’s naked. She looks vaguely like my mother, like a younger version. I pull back.

“Oh, she doesn’t mind. Like I said, no brainstem. Like a fish. Well, a fish with a computer inside. So yeah, you know Darwin, survival of the fittest?”

“Yeah”

“So the ones who survive best are the psychopaths. No feelings. Wartime, all these guys getting Post-trauma,” he waves the weakness away; “the psychopaths are fine! They come back, they create empires, they solve problems. They’re survivors. What was your mom working on?”

“Saving vanishing species”

“survival of the fittest. You save things, you ruin us all. Anyway, that problem’s been solved. By the 3D printer!”

“What?”

“Yeah, we inject DNA – genetic material into a kind of plasticized solution and print out whatever you need. They started with ears and fingers and teeth and skin but really we’re not that different from any cellular organism.”

My eyes stray back to the woman. “So who’s funding this? The military?”

“Yeah, I guess, among others. There’s never been a problem getting money”

“So that’s my sister?”

He laughs, mouth open too wide, thick white coated tongue hangs a second too long.

“Oh is that what’s bothering you? Incest? No, she’s not your sister, she’s a mix of several different genetic materials we tweaked. Maybe some of your mom’s genes but lots of others. Ever had your tonsils out? It's like that. You go under, you lose some genetic material you weren’t using anyway. She’s a giant tweaked tonsil.”

“But I’m not? one of them?”

“Nah, you know, boys are boys, we’d have a team, hey? So when we got them back to the lab we’d take their eggs or whatnot and sometimes one thing would lead to the next. We usually soaked them pretty good with spermicide but you never know, one could have gotten through. Lab work not always as careful as it should be”

“So I might be your son?”

“Or not,” he says generously. “We might share some DNA. The strong survive!”

He’s sitting beside her now on the couch across from me, his chubby fingers kneading her knee. “Innocent!” he says, “like the garden of Eden. Eve.”

“You’re Adam?”

“No,” modestly, “I’m the creator. Small c Creator. Still some kinks to iron out. They don’t reproduce. Yet. It's not even about the brainstem, apparently. Something about bonding and oxytocin.”

I’m looking and not looking, I’m horrified and fascinated.

“There are lots of them. And really, that’s what we want. Cooks, cleans, basically their mind is just an extension of ours. Like a wifi speaker. Or a cochlear implant in reverse. So I think, I feel like chicken tonight, and the sensors inside her, work by radiowaves, she gets up and makes chicken. Or whatnot.”

She smiles at me. Or he does, through her, I guess.

I drive back to Montreal through a thunderstorm, dry-eyed. An old song my mother and I used to sing along with on the radio gyrates through the rain, “Video killed the radio star, we can’t rewind we’ve gone too far, video killed the radio star.”