Grace Skinner, sitting beside Risa, wrings her hands with friction-burn intensity. “Is it bigger than a bread box?” Grace asks.
“You’ll see soon enough,” Sonia says.
Connor has no idea what a bread box is, yet just like anyone who’s ever played twenty questions, he knows its precise size. It’s all he can do to keep from wringing his own hands too, as he waits for the device to be revealed.
When Sonia began to tell the tale of her husband, Connor thought he might, at best, get some information—clues as to why Proactive Citizenry was so afraid of not just the man, but the world’s memory of him. Janson and Sonia Rheinschild, winners of the Nobel Prize for medicine, were erased from history. Connor thought Sonia might give him information. He never expected this!
“What if you invented a printer that could build living human organs?” Sonia said, after telling them of the disillusionment that ultimately took her husband’s life. “And what if you sold the patent to the nation’s largest medical manufacturer . . . and what if they took all of that work . . . and buried it? And took the plans and burned them? And took every printer and smashed it, and prevented anyone from ever knowing that the technology existed?”
Sonia trembled with such powerful fury as she spoke, she seemed much larger than her diminutive size—much more powerful than any of them.
“What if,” Sonia said, “they made the solution to unwinding disappear because too many people have too much invested in keeping things exactly . . . the way . . . they are?”
It was Grace—“low-cortical” Grace—who figured out where this was leading.
“And what if there’s still one organ printer left,” she said, “hiding in the corner of an antique shop?”
The idea seemed to suck all the air out of the room. Connor actually gasped, and Risa gripped his hand, as if she needed to hold on to him to stave off her own mental vertigo.
Finally Sonia pulls forth a cardboard box that is about exactly the size of what Connor imagines a bread box would be. He makes room on a little round cherrywood table, and she sets the box down gently.
“You can take it out,” Sonia says to him, a bit out of breath from her efforts.
Connor reaches in, gets his fingers around the dark object, then lifts it out of the box and sets it on the table.
“That’s it?” says Grace, clearly disappointed. “It’s just a printer.”
“Exactly,” says Sonia, with a smug sort of pride. “Earthshaking technology doesn’t arrive with bells and whistles. Those get added later.”
The organ printer is small but deceptively heavy, packed with electronics tweaked for its peculiar purpose. To the eye, it is gunmetal gray and, as Grace already noted, entirely unremarkable. It looks like an ordinary printer that might have been manufactured before Connor was born, and the casing itself probably came from a standard printer.
“Like so many things in this world,” Sonia tells them, “what matters is what’s inside.”
“Make it work,” asks Grace, practically bouncing in her chair. “Make it print me out an eye, or something.”
“Can’t. The cartridge needs to be filled with pluripotent stem cells,” Sonia explains. “Beyond that, I couldn’t tell you much more. I’ll be damned if I know how the thing does what it does; my forte was neurobiology, not electronics. Janson built it.”
“We’ll have to reverse engineer it,” Risa says. “So it can be reproduced.”
The small prototype has an output dish large enough to deliver the eye Grace requested—but clearly the technology could be applied to larger machines. The very idea sets Connor’s mind reeling. “If every hospital could print organs and tissues for its patients, the whole system of unwinding collapses!”
Sonia leans back slowly shaking her head. “It won’t happen that way,” Sonia says. “It never does.” She makes sure she looks at each of them as she talks, to make sure she drives the point home.
“There isn’t one single thing that will end unwinding,” she tells them. “It will take a hodgepodge of random events that come together in just the right way and at just the right time to remind society it’s got a conscience.” Then she gently pats the organ printer. “All these years I was afraid of putting it out there because if they were to destroy this one, there’s no recourse. The technology dies with the machine. But now I think the time is right. Getting it out there won’t solve everything, but it could be the lynchpin that holds together all those other events.”
Then she smacks Connor so hard with her cane it could raise a welt. “God help me, but I think you’re the ones to take charge of it. Janson’s machine is your baby now. So go fix the world.”
* * *
ADVERTISEMENT
You don’t know me, but you know my story, or one just like it. My daughter was run down by a sixteen-year-old on a joyride. Afterward, I found out that this boy had already been in trouble with the law three times, and had been released. Now he’s back in custody, and may be tried as an adult, but that won’t bring my daughter back. He never should have been there to steal that car—but in spite of his criminal record, and in spite of a clear penchant for reckless and violent behavior, his parents refused to have him unwound. The Marcella Initiative, named after my daughter, will make sure this kind of thing never happens again. If voters pass the Marcella Initiative, it will become mandatory that incorrigible teens of divisional age be unwound automatically after a third offense. Please vote for the Marcella Initiative. Don’t we owe it to our children?