True Empathy
True Empathy
Dr. Kinn watched as the computer model of his device worked perfectly; no matter what he did to its inputs, it went into the radio, and was recieved by the other end perfectly. And when the other end changed voltage, it was radioed back across. It was a perfect mirror image.
"I've done it!" he shouted, waking up the young engineer who had given him as much of herself as she could -- and for more than this project.
"Mmm?" she asked. Her much quieiter response made him think of the time, and the aging bird quieted down, and tried to contain exuberance.
"Dianna, my dear," he whispered, quickly walking back over to the couch-bed in the living room, "we've done it. Your model works." In his elation, however, he did kiss her, getting her to smile.
"If you programmed the model right," he whispered, "we're ready to build one."
His smile faded as his mind now worked on the future, the current problem having been solved. "There's one problem," he pointed out, "and that is a volunteer."
This statement seemed to wake her up considerably. "I know a perfect pair, identical twins just right for it," she answered, "but you might not like them."
"Any research subject I will like," he insisted, "if they'll do it."
***
She did as he asked. The next day, as he returned from the machine shop with a large-scale prototype of his device, he found the two brothers in his office. One seemed to be explaining to the other something about biology, but he immediately clammed up when thr bird walked in.
Dr. Kinn was surprised. Identical twins were rare, and the few clones there were often differed in age significantly. These twins must have had a real, biological mother, who was quite lucky.
The two snow leopards looked surprised; with the exact same raised brows and slightly wrinkled nose. But their identical reations lasted only a moment, before the Doctor could see all of their differences.
"Gentleman," he formally introduced, taking his coat off and flattening the feathers on the back of his hands out of habit, "I am Doctor Kinn."
"Hello Doctor," said the talkative one, as they both bowed -- motions from the waist being as identical as their various facial expressions, "I am Steven, and this is Stanley. Steve and Stan would be better."
It was hard for Dr. Kinn to avoid finding amused awe at what he considered to be a minor biological oddity. His first instinct was to put them in a cage, and try to study their complete range of motion and expression to look for differences.
Stan wore a wrist band, which reminded Kinn of a red collar on a dalmation, watched him intently. His brown eyes seemed bright -- and as the Doctor shuffled around to get his model and organize his thoughts, they seemed to get brighter whenever he looked over at him. He seemed to be wearing a nervous smile, or so was the effect compared to his brother.
Steve held a pad of notes and moved his brown eyes around a lot, between it and the Doctor. He seemed to be engrossed in thought; the Doctor hoped he would be listening.
"Steve tried to explain to me what this was," said Stan, "but I didn't quite get it."
The act of speech reminded Dr. Kinn that these were, in fact, sentient beings, not worthy of cages, and removed his instinct completely.
"Of course," he assured, "I can explain."
He held up the model, a very densely packed disk of metal. "This, in fact, is the device, mangified three times." He could see the relief when he mentioned the magnification on Steven's face, and mild vexation curiosity on the face of Stanley.
"What this device does is simple: it is a two-way communicator in a particular radio frequency. What it will exchange is particular signals in your nervous systems, generally relating to pain, skin sensation, and a few autonomic functions."
Steven now showed the identical awe, but only in the glimmer of his eyes. His mind was obviously processing it much more rationally than his brother was.
"I hope to prove that this is a perfect compliment to the mirror neurons, as found in any social mammal," concluded Kinn. "If I'm right -- then you should experience the autonomic causes of each other's emotions. In other words, true empathy."
Those two words made their expressions reverse. Steve's eyes got sharper, and Stan's nervousness became more visible in a clenched jaw. It was this second thing that made the bird throw away the rest of his speech.
"That's the general idea, but I bet you knew at least that. Do you have any questions so far?"
Stan looked at Steve silently, and the cat went down his list. "Could you elaborate the risks?" he asked calmly.
Dr. Kinn became somewhat nervous and grave, as the risks -- if anything -- would surely make them decline. "Well," sighed the eagle, "there are two main risks. The biggest risk is that, if the surgeon slips, one of you could be paralyzed for life. A much more remote risk, given all of our testing, is that the device could malfunction. While it is designed simply to turn the radio off in this eventuality, a complete failure would also cause paralysis."
There was a brief silence for a moment. Different forms of the same contemplative look came over their faces.
Stan finally spoke, voice identical in pitch, but wavering in tone. "If it were you who was paralyzed, I would never leave your side."
But there was no answer from Steven, except a continued fearful look.
Kinn wanted anything to cover that up. "Any more questions?" he asked, unable to help from cracking a smirk as he saw several more on the list.
"Stan wishes to know," Steven stated, "more about what this 'true empathy' would be like."
Kinn had to think about this one, and did his best guess. "All the research I've done indicates a fairly literal meaning of the term. When you bump your elbow into a wall, he would feel he had bumped his elbow. When you are upset, you will feel a knot in your stomach, and his muscles will react. But there is a flipside too," he said, "when he is in love, your heart will flutter."
"But -- no picture of who it is?" suddenly asked Stan, nervously.
"No picture," repeated the bird honestly, not sure which answer he would rather have. "This is empathy, not telepathy. He would feel the heart flutter, and his brain would react emotionally, but there is no telling what picture he would paint."
Stanley relaxed, as Steven wrote some notes. To Kinn, this seemed the right answer.
"In that case," continued Steven, "what are the limitations on the device? Range?"
"After about 15 feet it switches off."
"Can you be more specific about the signals it sends?"
"Not unless you have a biology degree. Put it this way," he added when he saw that answer didn't satisfy. "Everything your brain feels below the neck. All of your skin, and some of your muscles. This does not include proprioception, that is the sense of where parts of your body are. If you are standing there, and you are sitting here," he said to Stanly, "then you would know your arms were by your sides, but you could feel the notebook in his hand, as he held it."
Stan looked back at him a mixture of wonder and puzzlement.
"So," Steve clarified, "we wouldn't feel the sensation make as much sense?"
"Correct."
"That was my last question. Thanks Doc."
The eagle waited until he finished writing before concluding the session. "I would expect you'd need some time to think it over," he answered.
"Yeah," added Stan, glancing at Steven, still wearing the unsettled expression, "quite a bit."
They walked out, but Stan stopped.
"One more thing," he asked, "you'll -- do what we want?"
The other brother tried to hush him and drag him on, but the professor felt no offense. "Whatever compensation you want can certainly be arranged," he replied with a smile well hiding the fervent hope that they would not take too literally his request.
On his way off campus, he bumped into her, with a rather tall great dane, who seemed to be walking with her most uninterestedly.
"Dr. Russell I presume?" asked the eagle, recognizing the description Dianna had given him of the surgeon.
"Yes," he replied dryly. "And I feel I should warn you to begin with, I don't know whether I would be willing to do it or not."
"May I ask why?" asked Kinn.
"It's too risky. You are asking me to unthread a tapestry that would require almost microscopic precision. Unless you can get be a pair of spectacles with enough magnification, I won't put my reputation on the line."
"That is what I was tryig to explain to him," she answered matter-of-factly. "I believe that I have set up a reasonable tool, which will control your surgical tools to within 10 micrometers with the movements of your hands, if you want it to."
"And I would want a lot of practice before I even attempted something like that," growled the dane.
"Well, Dianna, if it's practice he wants, practice he shall get. But for now, I really would like to go home."
She nodded, and with a vague promise to give Russell practice tomorrow, followed Kinn back to their house.
***
Practice, he got. After a week, the surgeon found himself most satisfied with the device, and met the two brothers briefly. Watching him talk to them, Dr. Kinn noticed that they didn't look at him the same way as they did him. He wondered if they were expecting something more from Kinn -- the thing they would want, which Dianna only told him he would not like.
The surgery was scheduled in three weeks. Both Dianna and he spent every waking moment making sure that every possible input voltage to the device switched off the radio, and that every possible input signal -- interference, feedback, evereything -- resulted in no signal at all unless it was properly encoded. And then, that none of them resulted in anything that was too strong a sensation compared to the voltage range the brain excepted.
Endless testing, finding bugs, and re-testing. It was enough to make Dr. Kinn dispair. "Will we ever get it right?" he sighed.
"Don't get upset," she soothed. "You just have to understand that -- well, this is how engineering is. After talking to the surgeon, and talking to us, they know the risks. They are willing to go through with it."
"I don't think they're being rational, at least not Steven."
"Rational or not, they agreed. If you are getting concerns about the ethics, Doctor, we should stop now."
It was just enough to keep him going. Such doubts, he told himself, were proof that it was a project worth the scientific renoun he expected to receive.
"I suppose the kill-switch function hasn't failed," he admitted, "even if we keep finding new and clever ways to divide by zero."
One day after he planned, he sent it off to be printed onto a microchip, and an extremely special circuit board late in human technology, without a trace of lead. He decided it was good enough, even though there was one error that she could not find how to fix -- a strange square wave that never occured in nature, and was not generated by known technology.
While the surgeon worked, Dr. Kinn -- and Dianna to a lesser extent -- were too anxiety stricken to do anything but wait. It was now that Dianna told him what the brothers had confided in her as payment, in addition to a tidy sum.
He was quite shocked. "I had no idea," he answered, "why me? I'm twice their age, and not attracted to males."
"Stan likes them older, apparently."
"Good grief," he sighed, "I had no idea that was what they wanted. But I suppose I did say anything, didn't I. You're okay with -- this sort of thing?"
"As long as I'm the one you love," she replied, holding his hand which had clenched itself into a fist, "I don't really care what they do to you."
An even worse thought. Fortunately, any more contemplation was interrupted by the surgeon's appearance at his office door.
The dane was stone-faced as ever, and said nothing when the Kinn ran right up to him and asked, "how did it go?"
Only as the dane walked away in silence did he realize there was no way to tell until they woke up.
With the nurse's permission, Dr. Kinn and Dianna went to their recovery room, shared so that the radio transmitters would be within their narrow, 15-foot range when the two of them awoke.
Dianna sat in a chair, but the eagle stroked Stan's arm continually with his smooth palm, occasionally letting his golden feathers brush the white, spotted fur. He decided he had better get used to touching them, given what they had asked of him.
And then, suddenly, the other stirred. He reached out his arm into empty air. When nothing was there, he gave a quiet groan of affection. When Dr. Kinn realized that he was recieving signals of his brother's touch through the radio, he rushed over to the other bed, and gave him something to grab.
The touch of true feathers on Kinn's arm, even through the closed eyes, made him smile and purr. "How are you feeling?" he asked.
"Like I am wrapped in a cloud," he murmured happily.
"That's good," replied the Doctor with a smile, feeling almost that good. His theory, and her invention, worked.
***
All Kinn asked Steven and Stan to do after they had returned to their feet, and got accustomed to rather strange experiences of each other's footsteps, was to do a very simple test to map out the regions of skin the device was splitting between them.
Each brother was simply touched with a pencil, and the other was asked to say something when he felt the sharp point. Just as he had predicted, all skin on the outside below the neck -- that he dared test, anyway -- seemed to be shared in sensation.
The doctor wrote up the paper, and published about two months later. The reaction was astonishing. Everyone wanted to talk to the two brothers, to see their "true empathy" with their own eyes. They accepted the first dozen or two interviews, but then forbade anymore.
Since the doctor didn't contact them for some time, he thought nothing of it. In fact, he was hoping to put off their suggestion for repayment as long as possible.
Several weeks later, he bumped into an old friend who had gone into psychology. "I feel I should tell you something," the cat said, "Stan came to see me, alone. He said that this -- empathy device of yours given them was driving them apart. It was too much information, seeming to exacerbate their differences. He found himself unable to enjoy life when he was around."
Dr. Kinn hadn't really considered such psychological ramifications. "What did you say to him?" he asked.
"I suggested that he and his brother try to work it out, that they do something together they would both enjoy."
And it was the night that the Doctor's advice was taken. About 8 PM, after Dianna had gone to work some at her lab, there was a knock on the door.
The doctor opened it. Steve gave him no chance: he jumped up and kissed him, while Stan seemed to stand back and enjoy it through his empathy. The bird was quite bowled over, but knew of the psychologist's suggestion and tried to bear it.
"May we come in?" Steve purred.
The doctor just nodded.
The moment he was on the couch with Steve, his feathered face was smothered with licks. He endured it, imagining that it was Dianna doing this, as he could tell Stan was standing behind the couch, probably feeling it through empathy. Kinn watched Stan, who despite closing his eyes, walked around the couch.
But the Doctor saw, just in time, that Stan reached into his waistcoat, and removed a 5 inch switchblade.
The bird shoved Steve off him and jumped up in a split second of terror. "What do you want!?" he demanded, watching the knife.
They both smiled, the exact smile, within half a second of each other. It was a grim smile of an enticing prospect, of revenge for a terrible crime. It was the excitement, so fully chraged with anticipation, that it made the Doctor start backing away.
Two or three steps of fear, and Steve tried to run around behind him, but the bird shoved him heartly to the wall. Stan lunged at him, making him grab the knife, and getting a minor cut in his arm. Dr. Kinn managed to knock the knife from the spotted hand, stumble backwards into his study, and slam the door, pushing against the door with all his might.
Just before the second brother, who would surely overpower him, arrived, he got it shut and locked with a simple spring lock. As they hammered on the door, he wished he had put a deadbolt lock on his former walk-through closet, but had no idea anyone but Dianna would try to disturb him.
He did the best he could, taking a bookshelf and toppling it over in front of the door with a crash. Forgetting about his life's work, now strewn across the floor, he struggled to figure out how to keep his life. Call the police? Call Dianna? And tell them what?
Then he remembered: there was one divide by zero error they never fixed. It would be the perfect thing to sever their connection, his only hope of survival. He quickly dialed Dianna, who was working late, and hoped in fear of his life she would answer.
One ring. Two rings. Three rings.
Another half ring, and the phone came off the hook. "Hello?" asked the faimiliar voice, more tired than anything.
"Dianna!" he exclaimed, the note of fear unhidable as he could hear the brothers synchronize their bashing against the quickly warping door. "I need to know what the waveform was for that divide by zero thing!"
But his vocal tone seemed to be more important to her than his words. "Are you alright? What's happening!?"
"No, I'm not!" he squawked, hearing more and more wood crack, "this is a matter of life and death! What is that wave!?"
"Okay, okay," she struggled, "I have to pull it up!"
The third coordinated smash of the two beings working as one took the door from its top hinge, and splintered out the lock's wooden enclosure with a crackle of wood. It banged into the bookshelf, the only thing blocking their progress now.
"Okay, I've got it!" the stress in her voice matching his. "A square wave with a period of 0.035 seconds!"
"But how do I type that in?" he demanded as the brothers managed to get the bottom hinge off, and the cabinet to slide forward two inches. "The computer can figure it out! Just go to -- uh, I think you can type those parameters in, like uh, 'wave square 0.035'!"
After taking far too long, in his sense of time, to find the testing program, the bird typed them in, and the waveform was displayed. The brothers got the bookshelf two inches closer, brining their distance to just under two feet.
"Now I need it transmitted!" he gasped as he saw the door double its opening width.
"Use the electronic box! Set the display mode for voltage, and type in the harmonics!"
He looked at the oscilloscope, and his horror multiplied. Six dials, ten switches, four plugs, two rows of buttons, and a full numeric keypad stared him back.
"How!?" he whined, as smashing turned to constant pushing.
"Just hit mode a couple times, and then get the dials to make a square!"
He tried, getting it to snap into a square shape with mode, and guessed at what the frequency looked like. "Now what!" he shouted in terror into the phone. An arm with a knife appeared in the door, and stabbed at air.
"Now hook up the radio to plugs one and three," she instructed.
He grabbed the radio oscilloscope, and backing his chair as far as he could, switched it on. But he was too terrified to screw down thin wires to a plate on the back. He gave up, grabbed wires, and as the first leg stepped on top of the cabinet, pressed them into the screws.
His ears were almost blown off with the sound, a microphone feedback for the sound system of a stadium reverberating in the tiny room. As the arm and leg flinched and dropped the knife, Kinn pushed the radio off the desk. Its thin steel case case cracked, even on the carpet floor, and its glass dials broke, and several innards oozed out its warped sides.
Silence reigned -- save for the ringing in his ears.
"You're apart!" Kinn shouted, through the sound of his own hearing loss, "you're apart!!"
The advance stopped, and outside he could hear crying -- tears, he guessed, of joy. Dr. Kinn managed to pull the door a tiny bit further open, and squeeze out. The brothers jumped at him -- this time for a hug.
"I'm sorry," Stan sobbed into his ear slit, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry..."
Eventually, he picked up the phone in the living room, and told Dianna that he was alright, but to come home. And vowed to himself never to try any such experiment again.
***
"But why didn't it work?" he had to ask the psychologist the next day, after his two assailents had been arrested. "Why didn't they become closer?"
"Oh they did," the cat replied somewhat sternly, "too close. It is one thing to know someone's secrets, it is another to feel them. If Dianna was afraid of spiders, it would be one thing to know it, and another to get a dose of terror whenever you saw one, no matter what you were thinking a second before."
Kinn nodded.
"You and Dianna wish to be close, but you understand that some distance is always necessary. No matter what your first love may be like, it is so shattering because you get too close. And no matter how close you are, it is pale shadow of what those two went through. For whatever Steven reasoned, Stan changed. And whatever Stan felt, Steven's calmness tempered it. No matter their similarities, they were too different."
"If identical twins are too different," sighed Dr. Kinn, "would anyone be similar enough?"
"I doubt it," replied his friend, "but I suspect you won't be trying to find out anymore."
The bird shook his head.
It took some major consoling that night by Dianna to keep him from ending their relationship; for if empathy with her his personal goal, was not worth having, what was? In the end, however, he decided that too much empathy, and too much lonliness, were both bad. And after this conversation, as he lay next to her, he decided he could find a better balance.
The End.
(version 1.0)