Bad Apple

We built the Braves because I had an allergy to furry pets, and we had no interest in getting a fish or turtle or a hypoallergenic, engineered, overpriced designer animal whose personality always seemed a bit off—like forcibly breeding animals for human preferences screwed with a psychological, character-critical gene. We programmed the Braves to be based on a real human nervous system and the complex dynamics of hormones, then we released them into a virtual, self-sustaining environment consisting of multiple ecosystems to generate food sources as well as predators and threats. Time passed faster in the synthetic environment though. We wanted to speed up the Braves’ growth, watch them develop within days, experience the bittersweet satisfaction parents do when they send their kids off to college. I wanted to raise the Braves to accomplish amazing feats like living forever or using telekinesis. Ash just wanted to be a caring parent. He’d been in an existential rut lately, asking me what was the point of life if it meant grinding in the great monolith of a corporation for most of his years. I’d read online that this internal crisis meant Ash needed some form of responsibility to give him a sense of purpose, and because I wasn’t willing to give birth to a child, Ash treated our Braves as his children.

“The first two weeks are critical,” Ash said. Two weeks was how long it took a Brave’s brain to gain the majority of its adult mass, adding about 70% of its final DNA content after birth. “We have to pay attention to emotional and environmental exposure.” Ash sang songs and read stories to the Braves while I oversaw their exploration in a play area bounded by fences. Our first set of Braves grew up without much of an issue: we disciplined them gently but firmly when they misbehaved, displayed affection on a regular basis, encouraged their natural curiosity while young.

I had grown bored of raising the Braves to be happy and nothing else, although Ash seemed content to look after the same Braves and their offspring and their offspring’s offspring, populating the environment until there were enough generations to develop a small civilization with culture and social norms. At the time, we shared an account, helping each other care for the Braves and the growing number of responsibilities we’d acquired to oversee the civilization. Ash wanted to teach them a form of communication, and although we had not preprogrammed a language into the blueprint, the Braves contained a gene equivalent to Foxp2, responsible for transforming new experiences into routine procedures. Ash began spending longer amounts of time singing and speaking to the baby Braves, and soon enough, they gained the ability to speak to us through the computer. It was no different from raising a child except for the lack of physicality, and the Braves seemed to distract Ash enough he stopped complaining about his incompetent coworkers and boss who refused to provide concrete tasks to obtain a promotion. Now when I asked about work, Ash would say, “Oh, it’s just a means of money, no use getting so riled up by it.”

But I had no interest in raising Braves if they were just going to mimic human children. The more I watched them grow in their microcosm, ensuring their proper nutrition intake, recording the number of births and deaths, the more cognizant I became of my own time dwindling away, so invested in raising these creatures who had yet to do anything remarkable despite deriving their physiological functionality from a species that’d managed to travel to space and nuke entire islands.

After Ash went to sleep, I crept out of bed and headed to the study room, where I had downloaded the data for all of the different Braves I’d raised. I selected several of the most productive and conscientious profiles and uploaded them to a public server, encouraging people to download and raise their own Braves. I figured diversifying the parents might yield greater advancements in personalities and achievements, and even created a separate account with a small batch of newborn Braves primed for accelerated development. It took me several weeks to do anything with them, though.

Ash’s mother had been hit by an absent-minded DiDi driver, and Ash was trying to convince her to come to America for treatment and long-term residency. He was a filial only son, and his mom was too old to live alone. She refused, convinced the culture shock would be too great, that she wouldn’t be able to find tofu or bamboo shoots or bitter melon or Lao Gan Ma in grocery stores, that she’d be mugged at gunpoint while walking around the neighborhood—the same neighborhood young girls passed through selling Girl Scout cookies unsupervised. “Ma, the air is much better here,” Ash said during their weekly WeChat call I seldom spoke in. Ash’s mom probably thought I was a rogue, inconsiderate, wild child who left her son alone every few months to adventure around, couch surfing and eating exotic street food consisting of pig tails or mealworms or blood soup noodles. Ash eventually persuaded his mom to move, although it was more likely she gave in because her apartment’s bathroom flooded. During those few weeks, we drove to the hospital daily to check up on her recovery, bringing baskets of her favorite foods including braised pork trotters which I purchased in bulk just to prove you could find these dishes in this country. She begrudgingly accepted them. I wasn’t sure if Ash was still raising his Braves; I was too busy with work and driving up to the hospital and dealing with the paperwork for the health insurance and immigration forms to permit her to stay. But I didn’t pause my private account either. I left the Braves to themselves while I ran Ash’s errands, and after Ash’s mom was discharged and we situated her in the guest room, I finally logged back in.

My Braves had grown faster than I imagined. They were exposed to other peoples’ Braves who were crueler, more selfish and clever, and this seemed to cause mine to grow larger and fiercer, once creatures who only knew to wait for feedings now choking little pigeons with their fists and eating them raw. When foreign Braves stole the blocks and toys I’d purchased for educating the young, my Braves learned to hide their belongings, to take them out only when they were alone in caves too dark for others to follow. I let them retreat into the caves, and they emerged less and less often as the number of foreign Braves grew. Eventually, I presumed them dead after I stopped seeing them leave for food and supplies. Ash’s Braves were everywhere—socializing within communities, leading expeditions out of towns, taking a stroll when it was warm enough. Ash checked up on their health regularly, ensuring each was fitted with a custom nutrient plan for their individual builds and physical goals. I watched them interact with other Braves, advising them on how to eat, dress, play. The others began to follow Ash’s Braves, fetching toys and plucking corn stalks and digging spuds from the ground, presenting them as gifts. “I’ve built leaders,” Ash said, a proud parent.

I got the feeling Ash was compensating for disappointing his mother by forcing her to come to the US rather than moving back to China. “You don’t even have a family here,” his mother was lecturing when I returned home late from picking up the bitter melons and sea cucumbers she insisted were critical to her blood flow—phallic foods either too bitter or too tasteless to stomach, but maybe blood flow required a type of boldness capable of swallowing your hesitation even if it meant bursting an artery. Ash and I took turns looking after his mother, whom he said I was to consider my mother as well since mine had died two years ago from brain cancer. But Ash’s mother would eye me like the rotten slab of red snapper on a bed of ice at the fish market: lifeless, incapable of continuing her bloodline, a waste of space. Ash said this was how his mother expressed love: like a freshly sharpened blade, the more welts the more care. I supposed love was simple to Ash: Ash’s Braves loved him, or as close to love as the binaries were coded to accurately mimic oxytocin released upon stimulation. Ash had become their god.

We talked about hiring a surrogate mother or adopting, but Ash insisted on stalling because we had the time-based advantage and only needed to wait out his mother’s death after which we wouldn’t need to bother with kids at all. He was too distracted to make a sound decision. “Look, the smartest Braves have evolved to regenerate their telomeres,” he told me. While his Braves had stopped visibly aging and dying, his mother grew more paranoid, leaving pregnancy tests in our bathroom, hovering behind me while I crushed garlic with the edge of a knife and slammed my fist into the flat side of the blade so the impact against the cutting board echoed. “How unfeminine,” she critiqued.

Ash was driving his mother to her weekly tai chi sessions with the other local elderly when I checked in to see if anything had changed with my personal Braves, or more like if I could find any concrete evidence of their deaths. To my surprise, they’d emerged from the caves and had established towns at the outskirts of the higher density populations. I attempted to reward them with pets and affectionate words in exchange for interacting with Braves outside their budding community, but they had stopped reacting to my positive reinforcement. Rather, they displayed emergent behavior we’d neither trained nor programmed them for: they grunted harsh words at each other, occasionally scratching or choking one another until the other surrendered. Sometimes they would ignore the surrender altogether, insisting on wringing out every last breath. The more they seemed to self-destruct, ransacking others’ homes, stealing food from their neighbors and families, the less I attempted to re-establish order. Maybe they’d starve themselves out and all that’d be left was Ash’s Braves, their descendants and the many foreign Braves who followed Ash like a king. I didn’t feel too guilty about leaving them alone because I had little time to think about them: Ash’s mother kept nagging me about dust on stair railings, unwashed bed sheets, grocery selections she considered unfresh and threw out before I could insist they were fine and only I’d eat them.

“What the hell happened?” Ash asked me after I restocked the fancy ginseng his mother liked to brew and drink throughout the day. She only accepted the ginseng in the Changbai Mountains—the super old ones grown for a minimum of six years. He pointed to his screen. Several of his Braves lay on the ground outside the main town, motionless, eyes dulled, blood seeping from their bodies like torn soup dumplings still warm from the steamer. “Where’d these rogue Braves come from? They’re ruining everything,” he spat.

“You can’t expect them all to be reared perfectly,” I said. “Chemicals and genes and evolutionary developments do weird things. You can’t predict everything.”

“I was the perfect parent.” Ash doubted me, as always. “There has to be a trigger. Did you accidentally overshoot the MAOA gene or CDH13? I thought we agreed not to include those at all in the seed case?”

I shrugged. “I didn’t include them. You were there, remember? And you reviewed the code.”

Ash shook his head. “Then what went wrong?” he murmured.

“Don’t forget to take your mom for her walk,” I reminded.

“Can you do it? I need to figure out the backtrace for this.”

I slipped on my coat and pocketed my keys even though we installed a smart lock. Ash’s mother didn’t trust any kind of smart home security and thought thieves could guess the door code from our fingerprints even though the material didn’t retain marks. She was waiting outside, stretching under the sun which she claimed none of us got enough of—we’d die early with our vitamin D deficiencies.

“Ash still has some work to do,” I told her.

“As always,” she scoffed and shuffled forward with her slight limp.

After we walked to the stoplight, silent except for the occasional car driving past and the caws of crows who had suddenly settled in the neighborhood although none of us knew why, she said, “You’d have good, smart, independent children.”

“What?” I asked. She didn’t normally say anything positive.

“You’re diligent, although not necessarily the best at judging quality. And Ash has a good head if a bit hyper-focused.”

She wasn’t wrong, I supposed. “Maybe,” I said.

When we returned home, Ash’s mother took her afternoon nap and I visited Ash’s study where he sat, back slouched, squinting at his screen with a deep frown.

“There was a rogue group of Braves,” he said. “I’m not sure where they came from. They’ve somehow evolved to be stronger and more manipulative than the rest.”

“Those are good qualities though—makes them good candidates for success,” I replied.

Ash rolled his eyes. “This isn’t a human society. This is a Brave society. They’re all supposed to get along and be happy.”

“Well, you can’t shelter them forever.”

“I don’t want to be negligent.”

I didn’t tell Ash I had raised the rogue Braves. We both had backdoor access to the system and could delete Braves at will, although we both promised not to do so, swearing to let the system grow organically. I decided to delete my batch after he went to sleep—I didn’t hold the same attachment to them as Ash did. I wanted to examine how closely we could model biological systems and grow their intelligence, not nurture love into program executions and probabilistic decision networks. “Don’t you think you’re too attached?” I asked. Ash glared and remained quiet. I wondered if I had the courage to tell his mother that we weren’t ready for kids.