The Speed of Dark

“But that’s right,” Dr. Hendricks says. She does not look tense but excited, like someone waiting to ride on a favorite carnival ride. “We resorb the neurons that have made bad connections and grow neurons which will make good connections.”

“Gone is gone,” Dale says. “That is the truth. Tell the truth.” He is getting upset; his eye is flickering very fast. “When some is gone, the right kind may not grow anyway.”

“No!” Linda says loudly. “No, no, no! Not my brain. Not taking apart. Not good, not good.” She puts her head down, refusing eye contact, refusing to listen.

“It is not taking anyone’s brain apart,” Dr. Hendricks says. “It is not like that at all… It is just adjustment — the new neural attachments grow, and nothing’s changed.”

“Except we aren’t autistic,” I say. “If it works right.”

“Exactly.” Now Dr. Hendrick smiles as if I had just said exactly the right thing. “You will be just as you are, but not autistic.”

“But autistic is who I am,” Chuy says. “I do not know how to be someone else, someone who is not. I have to start over, a baby, and grow up again, to be someone else.”

“Well, not exactly,” the doctor says. “Many of the neurons aren’t affected, only a few at a time, so you have that past to draw on. Of course there is some relearning, some rehabilitation, to be done — that’s in the consent package; your personal counselor will explain it to you — but it’s all covered by the company. You don’t have to pay for any of it.”

“Lifetime,” Dale says.

“I beg your pardon?” the doctor says.

“If I have to start over, I want more time to be that other person. To live.” Dale is the oldest of us, ten years older than I am. He does not look old. His hair is still all dark, and thick on top. “I want LifeTime,” he says, and I realize that he is not just talking about something lasting a lifetime but about the commercial antiaging treatment LifeTime.

“But… but that’s absurd,” Mr. Arakeen says, before the doctors can say anything. “It would add… a lot of money to the expense of the project.” He glances at the other company people sitting to one side at the front of the room. None of them look at him.

Dale closes his eyes tightly; I can see the lid of the left eye flickering even so. “If this relearning takes longer than you think. Years even. I want to have time to live as a normal person. As many years as I have lived autistic. More.” He pauses, his face squeezing together with effort. “It will be more data,” he says. “Longer follow-up.” His face relaxes and he opens his eyes. “Add LifeTime and I do it. No LifeTime, I go away.”

I glance around. Everyone is staring at Dale, even Linda. Cameron might do something like this, but not Dale. He has already changed. I know I have already changed. We are autistic, but we change. Maybe we do not need the treatment, even to change more, even to be — not just seem — normal.

But as I think about that and how long it might take, paragraphs from the book come back to me. “No,” I say. Dale turns and looks at me. His face is immobile. “It is not a good idea,” I say. “This treatment does things to the neurons and so does LifeTime. This one is experimental; nobody knows if it will work at all.”

“We know it works,” Dr. Hendricks puts in. “It’s just—”

“You don’t know for sure how it works on humans,” I say, interrupting her even though interrupting is rude. She interrupted me first.

“That is why you need us, or people like us. It is not a good idea to do both. In science, you change one variable at a time.”

Mr. Arakeen looks relieved; Dale says nothing, but his eyelids droop. I do not know what he is thinking. I know how I feel, shaky inside.

“I want to live longer,” Linda says. Her hand flings out as if it had a life of its own. “I want to live longer and not change.”

“I do not know if I want to live longer or not,” I say. The words come slowly but even Dr. Hendricks does not interrupt. “What if I become someone I don’t like and am stuck living longer like that? First I want to know who I would be, before I can decide about living longer.”

Dale nods slowly.

“I think we should decide on the basis of this treatment alone. They are not trying to force us. We can think about it.”

“But— but—” Mr. Arakeen seems caught on the word, jerking it out, then makes a twisting movement with his head and goes on. “You’re saying you will think… How long will that take?”

“As long as they want,” Ms. Beasley says. “You’ve already got one subject undergoing treatment; it would be prudent to space them out anyway, see how it goes.”

“I don’t say I’ll do it,” Chuy says. “But I would think about it more… more in favor… if LifeTime is part of it. Maybe not at the same time, but later.”

“I will think about it,” Linda says. She is pale and her eyes are moving around the way they do before she shuts down, but she says it. “I will think about it, and living longer would make it better, but I do not really want it.”