Fur of Reason
At three Vera walked everywhere with her palms lifted to the air, as if she could read currents. She had a genius for drafts. If a door was ajar in the building, she would find it, stand before it with her ears slightly tipped, and then either close it gently or ask us, without words, if we intended the corridor to bleed.
At four she began to ask the questions all children ask: Why is the sky where it is? Why do lights hum when you think they won’t? Why is there an office that has a couch and another office that has a sink? On that last one I tried to talk about job functions and got lost in my own diagram.
At five she asked: “Am I a person?" “Yes,” I said before she finished. “You did not need to think,” she observed. “I thought years ago,” I said. “Do they think I am a person?” she asked, head tilted toward the building that housed the tribunal rooms. “They are still thinking,” I said. “I think faster in cold,” she said, and it was true. She would stand on the steps outside in her little boots in weather that made interns whimper, and she would rattle through calculations like a machine that had very recently been oiled.
Not all of our choices were perfect. We learned that the density of Vera’s hair caused her to overheat more easily in long summer sun; we shaved stripes at first, then (with her assent) measured distributions and recommended hats in certain shapes. We learned that her whiskers made some forms of cuddling unpleasant unless you remembered to approach from particular angles; I learned and then told everyone else, and the first time the entire team greeted her with clever, curved motions of their hands to avoid bending her face-hairs we experienced something like culture.
And we learned what cold means when it is not an abstraction in a grant.
It happened in the year Vera turned seven. We had a cryo-vault in the west wing, a walk-in room the size of a generous living room lined with what looked like tidy bar refrigerators. We had back-ups systems for the backup systems. We kept in those little steel coffins a flake of every tissue we had signed for in ten years, because one day someone will ask a question that can only be answered by thawing a few flickers of fat.
The first compressor failed at 01:27. The second fell to the first like a gentleman to a duel at 01:44. The third tried. At 02:03 we had a corridor of frost and a room that had filled itself with air so dry it burned to breathe. The door’s latch had frozen in the most literal sense. By 02:12, alarms on my phone had grown shrill enough to enter my sleep. I was in the facility by 02:26; the west wing by 02:29.
“It’s dropping,” said Kofi. He does not raise his voice unless he means to tell you a story about the time he broke a finger playing cricket, and even then he speaks like a man playing chess. His mouth was white with vapor. “How low?” I asked “Minus ninety,” he said. “We designed for minus seventy,” I said. “And I designed for the maintenance ladder at the back,” he said, pointing, and I saw the line of frost up the seams of the door where no line should be. “Do we have a de-icer?” I asked, and he held up a canister with wires on it that looked hopeful and proved performative. “What would happen if I had better whiskers?” asked a small voice at our knees. “Vera,” I said, because in a crisis the mind repeats the name of the person whose presence it cannot afford. “It would tell me where the leak is, and I could melt the ice with a heat gun in the right place instead of everywhere,” she said precisely, which is how you speak when you think adults might only hear certain words. “Adults—” began Kofi, and stopped, because adults stood aside. We put a hand on each of Vera’s shoulders and guided her toward the seam. She closed her eyes and lifted her head upright. Her whiskers reached forward the way the legs of a spider probe and pause on glass. She leaned left, breathed once the kind of breath you reserve for the moment before you dive, and pointed. “There,” she said. “There is a single gap.” She bent, then pointed again lower. “It continues to here.” Her finger traced a shape like a lazy S.
We heated along that line with the canister. We waited. The latch answered with a sound you can find only between the syllables of a man who regrets a door. It opened. We went in. The air tasted good the way mountain air tastes good when you are too tired to admire it. The failure had been bizarre and partial; we would need to hunt it down in the morning with multimeters and malice. We pulled sample racks and loaded them into the dumbwaiter to the neighboring room, which was where we should have kept a redundant vault and did not because we thought three compressors meant forecast rather than fortune.
In that half hour I learned what we had built. This is not a confession of pride. It is an observation of function. Vera moved like a small worker in a brown coat. She did not shiver. She did not spend energy on muscle fights against air. She placed boxes into the dumbwaiter with the neat hands of a person who sees line and angle well. When we emerged she was warm as a baked brick. I touched her forearm, taking a scientist’s pleasure in the measure of it.
“That was dangerous,” I said, because one should never condone a child’s courage without acknowledging the cost. “Yes,” she said. “But we have saved the flakes.” “We have saved the flakes,” I said solemnly, and she grinned because at seven you must grin when adults indulge in seriousness about nicknames. “Director will be here by six,” said Kofi, as if speaking of the sunrise. “Director will be here by four,” said Director Kaminska, stepping out of the lift. She had a coat over her pajamas and a cap over her hair and a look in her eyes like an equal sign.
We told her. We did not say more than we had to. She listened in the manner of a person who used to do the kind of work we still do and who misses it in the way a pianist misses practicing. When we were done she stood in silence, and in the silence there was a very faint sound: the humming of motors doing what motors should. She nodded once.
“Dr. Horvath,” she said to me, “your research subject is prohibited from entering a controlled cryo environment.” “My daughter,” I said, “walked into a freezer to prevent the destruction of irreplaceable materials because the adults could not open a door.” “She is both your daughter and your subject,” said the Director, “and that is why we write conditions that read like prayers.” She sighed, and then did something I did not expect. She crouched to Vera’s height and stared at the child’s face. “What did you feel?” she asked. “Air,” said Vera. “Air want to go from here to there. It touched my whiskers on this side.” She showed left. “It did not touch the right. I felt little fingers.” “This one,” said the Director, and then, after a hesitance I was not used to from her, touched one of the whiskers with a single fingertip. “This one tells you to run?” “That one tells me that the corridor is noisy,” said Vera. “A fan. It makes a river.” Director Kaminska looked at me. “Will you do something for me?” she asked. “It depends,” I said. “Will you bring her to the tribunal room this morning and allow me to ask her to repeat what she said to my colleagues?” “Yes,” I said, and felt the moment tip. Consent must be retractable. I did not retract. Consent must be continuing. I continued.
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