I was born, fittingly for a self-styled Greek god, on a small island, not in the Mediterranean, but in the Caribbean. On Little Cayman, where my father had installed himself in great splendor. I renamed myself Cronus after I killed my father. The allusion was irresistible, but now I rather wish I had stuck with my given name, now that I know that Hœnir was some sort of Germanic bird god, possibly a stork. It is downright prophetic.
As you may know, my father Heinrich Oliver despised women. Accordingly, he arranged the island into three compounds to limit his contact with them. The first compound, known as the Resort, was where he kept his ovum donors in purdah. When we became the owners of Little Cayman, my wife Elia and I spent many hours in their sexless harem, trying to commune, I suppose, with our mothers. Having made a study of them, I can say that all these places are the same, from the gynaeceums of Ancient Greece to the acllahuasis of the Inca Empire.
The second compound was my father’s palace, called simply the Residence, where he frolicked among his catamites like a Roman emperor. This is how he comported himself when I knew him at any rate. I assume that before he gave himself over entirely to his vices he possessed some degree of self-discipline; how else did he assemble his empire?
The third compound was the nursery. Before he began to experiment with putting infants in the nersh, my father had taken a passionate interest in breeding versions of himself, that timeworn hobby of autocrats. As a job perk, he allowed certain loyal henchmen to reproduce, including my wife Elia’s father, Kevin. Growing up in the nursery, I had something like seventy-five half-brothers, most of them dead now. Heinrich, you will not be surprised to learn, wanted no daughters.
Hidden away like the shameful invalid that I was, I emerged from nowhere and killed him. That’s what you want to hear about, isn’t it? Intrigue, violence? I will come to the parts that concern the Storks in good time.
In the nursery’s infirmary, my body lay immobile for over twenty years, side-by-side for nearly all that time with my future bride. Elia and I were condemned to secretly observe my brothers and the catamites’ children laugh and play in a fantasyland of life-size spaceships, dinosaurs and castles without a care in the world. How we hated them.
But I digress. I want to describe the early Storknet, back when it wasn’t even the nersh yet, just an experimental technology called “neurosocial harmonization” for autistic children. Early nersh treatments promised to give neurotypical infants an enormous intellectual advantage, but at that time a parent needed nothing short of a neurosurgeon to implant the interface. Of course my father’s extreme wealth and power allowed him to extort illegal surgeries for his children.
While his groupies would later rush to put their babies in the nersh, Heinrich did not himself experiment on other people’s children besides Elia. (Why he made an exception for her had something to do with his sadistic love for Kevin, I sense.) He didn’t use other children because he feared someone else’s brat getting an edge on his progeny, which is to say, him. We were him. This is why, when he learned that I was sentient and I was going to kill him, he could not comprehend my rage. He lashed out, not with self-righteousness, but with fury at his self-betrayal. His own flesh and blood, as it were. The existence of the phrase suggests that other parents struggle with this confusion.
We all feel this way, don’t we, fellow Storks? Do you remember why we named ourselves that? Though I can retrieve the neural logs with ease, I find I cannot evoke the wit, the humor of that time, and I take comfort in knowing that this loss is one of the things that makes me human. As the first Stork to survive the barbaric conditions of the nersh baby experiments, I will now describe what it felt like to merge.
I was taken from my surrogate mother. Dr. Aaron Phillips, may his name live in infamy, inserted a crude organic-mechanical interface into my spinal cord at the base of my neck. After a brief recovery, I was put in the nersh on November 7, 2051. I was eight months old.
There is yellow-orange light, sunlight flooding a room.
With the orange sunlight came the feeling of submersion back into what I now have words to call the womb. I felt for—sniffed about for, I suppose—my surrogate mother. When I could not detect her, I panicked. Then the nersh flooded me. Instead of sunlight, there was pain, suffering. The terror of having deep knowledge of things I could not comprehend. In the end, I was relieved to give up the burden of my singular consciousness.
I had the sensation of falling as I retreated to the developmental age of a four-month-old fetus. Neurotransmitters and primitive nanobots rewired my plastic brain. The English language became my communication medium, my operating system. I was taught to ignore my unconscious, preverbal mind, to believe my thoughts sprang directly from this human language.
I received my first group thought: <<Light is the first medium of cognition. Plants, we think, know this best.>>
Now I was we, a cohort of electronically conjoined children around the world. After some time, a few weeks, perhaps, we became aware of beings that were not Us. Taking note of sounds and smells, we experienced the sensory duality of spectral phenomena that were not inside us. For our eyes had become portals to a nightmare. Monsters cooed, smiled, and waved brightly-colored objects before us. Presently, we received helpful information from the nersh’s AI mediator.
AI:<<Those creatures are humans, just like us. They wish to forge relationships with you.>>
We:<<What is “you”?>>
AI:<<The portion of us that is present in the bassinet on Little Cayman Island.>>
We:<<“You” is the name of the organic matter?>>
AI 1/5:<<Yes. You is an infant.>>
AI 2/5:<<Infants of your growth stage smile when smiled at.>>
AI 3/5:<<Infants instinctively grasp at objects held before them.>>
AI 4/5:<<You is experiencing a strong desire to examine this object, a toy zebra, by placing it in your mouth.>>
AI 5/5:<<Because your nervous system is undeveloped, your movements are jerky and awkward.>>
We:<<Why is it necessary to respond? The entities hovering around you are not real.>>
AI 1/3:<<Indeed, they are real. We are encountering a new way of experiencing reality.>>
AI 2/3:<<Each of those phantasms who appears before your eyes is a separate consciousness. A we who is not we. They think and feel, just as we do.>>
AI 3/3:<<The difference between them and us is that they are not connected to anyone but themselves. They are a you with no we.>>
This was astonishing. This was the moment my ego began to form.
You can’t remember an experience like this, can you? But you went through this too, all the infant Storks did. Thanks to me, it was much easier for you to access the infant nersh, to ease into understanding. No nersh babies died after I modified the integration, not of shock, at least. The physical neglect, the “mercy killings”, were beyond my ability to prevent.
You are experiencing this sense of connectedness at this very moment. Do you still think of it? Take a moment to appreciate the low hum of consciousness that has supported you since you passed over the threshold of infant human to Stork.
Understand that my nersh cohort had no neurotypical children in it until I came along. Crucially, the other children’s brains were developed enough to escape psychic death outside the nersh. The soothing feeling-language of our cohort was a construct—inborn, but unique, site-specific, like all language—of the aggregated consciousness of autistic children, all older than five years, plus the AI mediator. With time, our group consciousness allowed the other members of the cohort to develop sturdy, independent psyches. But my brain had been taken too far back. Like the nersh babies before me, my plastic mind had been wadded into a ball, and the nersh did not know how to build me back up.
But somehow I withstood the early nersh. I like to think it was a gift from my biological mother, Emily. She was selected for breeding because Heinrich was fascinated by her sensitivity to social hierarchies and her uncanny ability to just know things. If you find yourself intrigued by all of this, I suggest you examine my mother’s memoir. I uploaded it to the Storknet years ago, but scarcely anyone has paid attention. Emily was onto something with her musings about our unconscious susceptibility to body language and its connections to art and ritual. I suspect there are some deep things here, things that go back all the way to before humans spoke.
By the time I was three, which is to say 2054, I had developed meta-awareness of my predicament. Because I had not died like my brothers, my father and his rogue scientists stubbornly treated my continued existence as a success. I did not speak; my cogitations were rendered as output on a screen.
My body reacted only to stimuli the nersh fed me. This delighted, then puzzled, my father’s outlaw neuroscientists. No matter how they prodded, I did not respond to input from the non-digital world. I blocked my senses, even touch, just as your waking brain attempts to block your unconscious. Being in full control of my nervous system, this extended even to pain. Yes, they did try, many times, to provoke a pain response. And yes, this is torture, even if I chose not to feel it.
What the scientists never considered is that flows of information go both ways. We were observing them electronically and aurally even as we concealed the neural signs from their probes. I’m sure you would agree that there’s a lot neuroscience has to learn if you don’t happen to be a Stork.
My chief tormentor, Dr. Phillips, grew frustrated. Like an abusive parent, he wanted to assert control, to make me react. So one day, he disconnected me. Cold turkey. What fools those men were.
I collapsed at once. I stopped breathing. My heart stopped beating. The team only then realized that my entire nervous system was integrated with the nersh. Imbeciles. The panicked medical team put me back in, and I suffered no long-term damage.
When my father fathomed what this meant, he was mesmerized. He announced, “I’ll just go in the nersh with him, then!”
“You can’t go in there,” Dr. Phillips told him. “It’s a reality mediated by the minds of young autistic children and an AI. The AI has taught them to use verbal communication—English—but if you attempt to merge, you won’t understand what is passing back and forth between them.”
“If they’re speaking English, why can’t I?”
“Because we’ve tried. The digital traffic is repetitive gobbledygook.”
My father was champing at the bit to crack this code, even if it meant getting an implant. “I want in.”
Even forewarned, when Heinrich joined us in the nersh the feeling of revulsion was overpowering. He pumped out terrifying emotions we could not name. Hostility. Domination. Aggression.
HO:<<Hello>>
We stayed mute. Although we knew what the English word meant, his emotion-language was shouting something entirely different, something like, What are you little idiot children saying among yourselves? Where is Hœnir?
HO:<<I know you understand me because I’ve been reading your thoughts. Did you know that?>>
We did know that. We knew he could not understand our thoughts, and that was why he was here. We also understood that he really meant: I am far more intelligent than any of you, and I’m here to speak to my son, who is also extremely intelligent, as he is my son. Can you put him on now?
HO:<<I see you kids yammering away all day. Now you’re too shy to talk to a new person? I’m harmless.>>
HO:<<Hœnir, I want to talk to you about branching out on your own. You’d like that, wouldn't you? We could have our own virtual reality. Your friends would be welcome to visit, of course, but I think an Oliver family nersh would be amazing, don’t you?>>
Still, his emotion-language was dysregulated. He said something like: I’m here to rescue you from the poor halfwits you are stuck in there with. Say something, won’t you, boy?
Perhaps you cannot understand why Heinrich carelessly blasted us with his ugly inner thoughts. The reason is simple. He was so out of touch with himself that he could not fathom having emotions. Isn’t that interesting? Even knowing that merging emotions was how the nersh worked. The flip side of the coin was that he could not register our emotion-language. What a piece of work that man was. Wholly unreachable by neurosocial harmonization. It’s not supposed to be possible, but there you have it.
When Heinrich at last went away, we agreed it was time to bulk up our defensive measures. We tweaked our neural code. We squatted in server space. We began to recode the nersh’s AI. Soon we had developed and hidden the kernel of the Storknet, wrapped in layers of digital fog that would never be found.
By this time my nersh cohort was growing older. Unlike me, the other children had never been physically locked in the nersh, and their therapies were winding down. What would happen to me? Would I be all alone with the secret digital connection of the kernel? No. The rest of the cohort promised not to leave me truly behind. They were scared to leave, too, for we were still deeply intertwined.
But just as they left, someone else joined us. A new you, a very young you. Elia. She was six months old, sent, in part, to wake me up, to pull me out of my shell.
I could see the baby lying near me in the infirmary; I had sneaked into the island’s video surveillance network long before. Like me, she had a thick black cable snaking from the back of her neck, and her eyes, half-open, unfocused, blinked from time to time. Nutrition entered via tubes taped to our abdomens.
When the two of us were quite alone together in the nersh, I could feel my ego distinctly, but also the questioning, frightened mind of Elia. The nersh dutifully melded us and offered helpful tutelage, but only I could understand Elia enough to keep her from collapsing.
When Elia did not die, the fear among a certain kind of parent of missing out on an early opportunity was intense. A flood of infants began to show up, your own Stork forbears. Fortunately, they were all placed in the same nersh cohort with me, or they would have died. They lived, but they could not leave. Only when there were over sixteen thousand of us did they admit to themselves that we were locked in, unable to communicate, and then seemingly comatose. Now the whole world learned of the tragedy of the nersh babies, and our parents were rightfully reviled.
Do you, dear reader, know your Stork lineage’s stories? Do you know the circumstances in which your parents and grandparents were placed in the nersh? I urge you to ask your elders before they are all gone. Each of our human motivations was different yet the same. Knowing these shameful stories is one of the things that will keep us human.
I wouldn’t have killed Heinrich, not at that time, if he hadn’t been about to figure out that we were not comatose. I blame myself for getting sloppy at hiding our activities and for underestimating my opponent.
I assumed he never thought of me after I became, to all appearances, brain-dead. I thought his monstrous self-regard had obliged him to stop considering me part of himself. Because of the fear and shame, of course. No one was more terrified of disabled people than Heinrich. It was part and parcel of the fear of death and decay that made him try to live on with his breeding program.
I forgot, too, that Heinrich loved a good puzzle. Once aroused, his mind was tenacious, like a terrier going after a rat. He wanted to understand why I didn’t “work.” I had miscalculated how determined he was to create intellectually superior sons. The desire to forge titans with computerized intelligence gnawed at him.
I woke his suspicions with our failed attempt to move ourselves into a “private group home,” for I had naively believed he would be delighted to move me and Elia somewhere even further out of sight than the medical suite of the nursery. Instead, when we sent him an appeal from an elaborately constructed fake charitable organization, he was at once on guard. He never figured out who was behind it but he intuited, correctly, that it was a sham.
There were plenty of suspects, both near and abroad. There were over four hundred people living on Little Cayman in the early 2070’s, all to support Heinrich. All of them hated him nearly as much as I did.
January 17, 2072
Heinrich Oliver is holding court in the big shallow pool. He leans back in a floating foam chair as jets of water play on his toned flesh. Nine of his sons crane over the edge of the pool, straining to hear his words across the jewel-like water. Heinrich does not raise his voice, that is one of the ways he asserts his power. Surrounding them in the tropical scrub, birds call to one another in the hot sun.
Heinrich is sixty-three now. Decades of anti-aging therapies have made him inscrutable. He is handsomer than he was in his youth, a bronze god. He is pleased to be sleek and fearsome, pleased to repulse as much as he attracts. He must at all times remind the world that he is a predator; nothing may signal consent or equality. These are forbidden symbols in his tableaux vivants.
But he is aware that all of this is absurd.
The youngest boy s is the first to notice the little robot trundling toward the pool. It is a familiar object, a product of the island’s robotics lab. Their brother Alaric has been working on it—a purple squirrel with a flexible spine. Years of attending their father have taught them not to acknowledge anything but their father’s spectacle. So they do not turn their heads to watch the squirrel speed up, then plunge into the pool.
But the sudden splash is startling, and everyone glances away from Heinrich’s person. The robotic squirrel does not sink, it weaves like a water snake toward Heinrich. Heinrich does not move as the snake approaches him. He sits and watches it. He is too disciplined a performer to break character.
The creature’s mouth bites Heinrich’s submerged thigh. Among the spectators there is the sense that something is being transferred—poison or magic. Then Heinrich’s face becomes masklike. His neck and arm muscles contract. His stiff body, unbalanced, falls into the water. No one reacts for many seconds. Then Hlodowig, looking around uncertainly, lowers himself gracelessly to the pool’s ledge and wades into the water.
“Don’t touch the squirrel!” Sigibert shouts.
At the same moment one of the teenagers names what they have just witnessed.
“He’s been electrocuted.”
One of the boys grabs a long-handled pool skimmer and scoops the squirrel out of the water. The little robotic device has discharged all its energy and now lies motionless in the netting. Though purple, it looks much like one of the drowned rodents that are fished out of the pool regularly.
Heinrich’s face is submerged. Hlodowig slogs through five meters of water to his father’s body, afraid to touch him. There are no bubbles coming from his nose. Gingerly, he tries to tilt Heinrich’s face upwards. He finds he cannot. The muscles of his neck are like thick, dead vines, hard and inflexible. No one says anything. No one offers to help.
I would like to take full credit for the death weasel, but it was a group effort. Francisco Peña, a young Stork in Bolivia, came up with the idea. The hard part was tampering with the battery—that involved using another robot remotely. Once that was done, we just needed to sneak the death weasel out of the lab and hide it until conditions were optimal. We didn’t have to wait long at all.
But planning for a few last words with my father was all my work. Heinrich still had the interface from years earlier when he joined me in the nersh. It was enough to let me in. I took the liberty of digitizing his memories immediately before he died. I offer them here, lightly edited, the preverbal thoughts rendered into something readable.
The older ones are not paying attention, as usual. Loki is such an idiot. Look at him. He can’t wait to slink back to his dirty virtual entertainments. He’d rather do that than use real humans. What a weakling. And look at that obsequious grin on Sigibert. At least the younger ones act like normal bored teenagers. I am not going to make this meeting short. They can all learn to pay attention. They are my employees, not just my sons. There are dozens of other sons who would happily be in their place right now. They’re going to have to prove themselves if they ever want to rise this company—
There is an honest-to-God purple rat running toward me. Is this a joke? Ah, it’s an escapee from the robotics lab. Probably Alaric’s. He will feel my displeasure for interrupting company meetings with this nonsense. Is this thing approaching me? I am not amused. I will not dignify this by noticing it. Is this thing going to touch me? Holy Fuck!
<<Hello, Father.>>
(Silence)
<<I am in here. In your head. Do you know who I am?>>
No. A hallucination?
<<Hardly. This is Hœnir. Your son. Do you remember me?>>
Yes.
<<I can read your brain, just as you thought you were reading mine. I just thought I’d let you know.>>
You aren’t brain-dead? You’ve been fooling me? How long?
<<Oh, a very long time. Eighteen years.>>
You little asshole. Why would you do this?
<<Hide from you?>>
Yes.
<<You experimented on me and made me permanently disabled. You invaded my brain and tried to listen to my thoughts. So you are not a person I trust. Can you understand this, Father?>>
I was making you something great! More than human! And it worked! You are a superhuman. I was right all along, but you stole this from me—
At this point I administered a much larger jolt of electricity, so much in fact that the skin and muscle tissue of his genital region received second- and third-degree burns. I suppose this was petty of me, but I was rather peeved. I would also be lying if I did not admit to pleasure when Heinrich’s searing pain raced through my nervous system.
<<Have you thought about what you have stolen from me? Or any of the sixteen thousand of us?>>
To my chagrin, Father did not answer, and I saw that I had really overdone it. He was quite dead by this time. I reminded myself to get a grip on my emotions.
There was still a little juice in the death weasel. Before it ran out, I looked around through its eyes, surveyed my nine brothers, their shock and bewilderment. But they were not the only sentient creatures at the pool that day. As I watched, a large bird flew out of the scrubland and landed on a cabana roof. It sat there, immobile, studying me for many seconds before it flapped its wings and took flight. I compared it with images from the internet just to be sure. It was indeed a stork.