1
My name is Dr Calvin Schechter. I'm a lifelong Californian. I love small dogs, big waves, and turkey club sandwiches. I'm also a world-renowned neurologist and developmental biologist, supposedly retired.
My wife and friends know that isn't true; aside from my not being at the beach most weekdays, they know my dream is to retire to Paso Robles and run a turkey farm. I have more than enough savings to do it. In truth, I now lead the highly secretive N+B (neuroinformatics and bioacceleration) program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, with the ambitious goal of cloning bodies and minds and making the world safer for humans.
Sue and I--that's my wife, Dr Susan Schechter Cohen--dreamed up the foundations of this whole field as grad students. Sue is a bioinformaticist. Her work modeling the physical structures of memory and conscious thought was, and still is, utterly revolutionary. It's because of her there's a chapter on neuroinformatics in any modern neurology textbook that's worth the cost of its own printing.
For years, Sue has steadfastly chosen academic spaces over commercial or government work. She believed that as it moved from theoretical to applied, neuroinformatics posed ethical and safety questions that ought to be answered in daylight by the wider academic community. I admired this viewpoint, but as I'd often pointed out, universities were terribly inconsistent about having the stomach, and funds, to drive this work. The DoD had no such issues. For years, they courted me for the singular combination of my own expertise and my literacy with Sue's work, which even computer scientists often found impenetrable.
I hated the idea. But ultimately, I became convinced that 1) the program's objectives were about as noble as you could possibly expect from a state government, and 2) if I didn't take the job, they'd give it to someone with less of a moral compass and far less idea what the hell they were doing, which could lead to disaster in any number of ways.
It killed me, though. To continue Sue's work and not tell her what amazing stuff we were doing? This was both our lives' work, finally coming together!
It got worse when, six months later, the whole UC system's research budget hemorrhaged, costing Sue the position she had held for over a decade. Temporarily relegated to self-employed theorist, and sous-chef to yours truly, she did her best to keep busy. I told her I would get her a job. And I meant it: the very next day I began lobbying to create a new principal investigator position alongside my own. The DoD wonks were an asinine boys' club, but I knew my team would back me up.
Summer came, then autumn, and the days grew shorter. By the time I managed to get a meeting with the big-wigs to make my case, it was the day before "Thanksgiving", or as I call it, Turkey Day. I desperately needed this win. It didn't seem right for Sue to be languishing at home, taking care of the roast, while I basked in the accomplishments she'd inspired. And collected $50 bottles of wine from brass whose names I made a point to never remember.
I put my heart into the debate. I brought handouts. I even brought a budget proposal that one sympathetic official had helped me put together. The light switch had gone on in some of these powerful old men's eyes, I could tell, but more convincing was yet needed. I offered an improvised tour of the lab, so I could point out every single subsystem that built on Sue's work. After all that, I got sucked into a late night dinner. Some mediocre steakhouse that served us porterhouse and very old scotch in a back room. I was growing impatient.
Finally, a man I'd never met before that day--a general, and evidently the boss of those wine bottle men--took me aside and said, "Alright, you've won me over, son. I'll do the requisition Friday. Here's my card. Fax me a copy of Sue's CV, and I'll see to it we don't bother interviewing." I sat around for another half hour, drinking coffee and sobering up. I was mentally and physically exhausted, and there was still a 45 minute drive home.
Finally I reached our doorstep, turned the key, came in and set down my bags. The glorious thyme-heavy aroma of Team Schechter's roast was thick in the air, the vent fan on the stove still running. Sue hadn't cleaned up her mise en place, though. She always did. I figured she must have finished late and headed to bed. After all, I'd warned her I would be out all night. No matter. If I had to tell her the good news in the morning, so be it.
I cleaned up, climbed the stairs... and found the bedroom empty. There was the strangest commotion drifting down the hall from Sue's office...
***
It was the morning before Genocide Day, or as my husband's patriotic dingbat bosses call it, "Thanksgiving", when I finally decided to spy on him.
Calvin wasn't allowed to talk about his job, I understood that; and it went without saying that the work was a continuation of his own research, which meant almost certainly it involved mine as well. I trusted Calvin implicitly. But it sucked, not being by his side, not being able to back him up at meetings or exchange word of our latest exciting results!
Not that I had much to exchange at present. I had a little project going, some conjectures about the performance scaling of quantum synapses, just to keep busy. My copy of Simulink sat idle on one monitor screen, while the other was open to a craft channel on YouTube. At a friend's insistence, I had recently tried knitting, then quickly moved on to crochet. The motions were somehow more soothing. An alarm on my phone went off; I smiled and set the project down. Ah, yes, time to start on The Roast.
I'd always fancied myself a pretty good cook, but the true culinary devotee in our house was Calvin. And his greatest obsession of all was the holiday bird. We did about four a year: a turkey for Genocide Day, a goose for New Year's, and turkeys for Pesach and the 4th of July. Brining would begin days in advance, and the roast usually the night before, so we could then focus on enjoying our feast. It was his ritual for as long as I'd known him, and I was happy to play sous-chef.
This year, though, things were slightly different. His work was keeping him extremely busy Thanksgiving week, while I frankly had fuck-all to do. Thus, we'd agreed I would carry out The Roast myself, in accordance with his exacting and time-tested recipe.
I chuckled to myself as I started the oven and set out everything I'd need on the kitchen island. There was something almost cartoonish about me, the mother of neuroinformatics, doing stereotypical housewife duties while my husband toiled all day at Livermore. He was sincerely regretful about putting me in that position, and for the moment, I was more amused than anything. Did I resent being kept out of the loop? A bit.
But for now, my thoughts weren't on that. They were on delicious meat.
I rechecked Calvin's handwritten notes. This was a 20 pound turkey--we'd vacuum seal and freeze much of the white meat tomorrow, and spend the next couple months using it up--and he'd aggressively stuffed the bird. This brought our roast time to about 6 hours. Plenty of time to code-crack that sorry excuse for a door panel, snoop around in my husband's home laboratory, button it back up, kick back and get high, and
still
have the bird ready.
It ended up taking 43 minutes to splice a code tester onto the door lock, override the safeties, stand back and let her crank. Finally, the lock made a CHUT sound, I turned the handle, and it swung back noiselessly.
Peering through the dimness of the small room that had once been a parlour, I could see a server rack, a workstation strewn with snipped wires and half finished breadboards, and...
Son of a bitch. No fucking way.
The large glass-chambered machine occupying the center of the room could only be one thing, a Schechter-Cohen Transmogrifier. Our shared dream. I'd had an inkling he was working on a system that reproduced
some
of its capabilities, but never would I have guessed he had gotten so far. Even with lots of help, even with big advances in bioacceleration, the whole design relied on assumptions about neural read-write efficiency and incubation rates we had never been able to test. I'd frankly assumed those would turn out to be flat wrong.
But here she stood, all polished chrome and borosilicate and shiny black ABS plastic. Not only that. Fuck me, the machine was running a tissue sample right now.
This would not do. I had zero confidence in the feds to develop such powerful and dangerous tech without
both
doctors Schechter Cohen. There was nothing for it but to painstakingly document the setup, hide my notes as leverage, and confront Calvin about it later.
It wasn't easy--I had to note every minute detail of the machine's user interface, every exposed setting, and at one point open up the chassis and take photos of the slotted in breadboards. All told it was about two hours, including a couple breaks to run back to the kitchen and check on the roast. Once I'd finished, and convinced myself everything was optimal in the kitchen, I decided to sit back and chill with an edible.
Unfortunately, no amount of PhDs will prevent you from doing the occasional bit of stupidity: I believed I was using CBD 10:1 Lemon Bar when in fact I was using regular old Lemon Bar. There followed a very peaceful impromptu 2 hour nap, interrupted only when the timer I'd set for the turkey went off.
I was groggy, and more than a little high, at this point. I vaguely recall lifting the bird out to unwrap the foil and check its internal temperature. Glory be, The Roast was absolutely perfect; even fucked up, I had pulled off this coup. The browning was amazing, the smell, intoxicating. In my present state it was very hard to resist the temptation to pull off one of the massive drumsticks and start chewing it. Even though I would have burned myself and Calvin would have come home and murdered me.
