Chapter 9

“We are no guiltier in following the primitive impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her floods or the sea it’s waves.” Marquis de Sade

Never may the act of possession be exercised upon a free being; the exclusive possession of a woman is no less unjust than the possession of slaves; all men are born free, all have equal rights, never should we lose sight of those principals; according to which never may be granted one sex the legitimate right to lay monopolizing hands upon the other, and never may one of the sexes, or classes, arbitrarily possess the other. A quote by Marquis de Sade.

“Was I wrong Sharon when I acted on my adolescent fantasy impulses and enslaved you and Monica years ago.” Eric asked Sharon as they were sitting in the dark listening to some mood music.

“You know we always loved you Eric, even before you took us. You only made it possible for us to express it openly Eric.” Sharon told Eric.

“But was it real Sharon? Did you love me or is that just the memory I inserted? Did I dream up all that on my own, or did dear old Dad help me out?” He questioned himself.

“Does it really make a difference Eric? What’s done is done. I mean you looked it all up. You studied it. You made yourself an expert in it. This is you now Eric. Embrace it, be all you can be, ha, ha. As to enslaving us, you removed all the controls you installed years ago. You even explained what you had done to us in excruciatingly painful boring detail. Far from enslaving us Eric you freed us. You made it possible for us to be more, so much more than we were back then.”

‘“Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain”, the Marquis de Sade once said Sharon.”’ Monica observed from the doorway as she entered the room and joined the conversation.

“But this is incest...” Eric started.

“And you know we have always been on birth control for that very reason, not that I think the odds are against us having normal healthy babies by you Eric. But even if we weren’t, from everything I’ve read on the subject of genetics, we stand very little chance of becoming one of those inbreed gene pools your always reading horror stories about anyway.” Sharon chided Eric.

“But no form of birth control, not even getting your tubes tied is 100% Sharon.” Eric finished.

“And you know that we would never intentionally become pregnant since even the $1 store sells a pregnancy pee test kit today and there is “the morning after pill” now. Besides who would intentionally carry to term a defective fetus. A defective fetus, that would become a defective child when it grew up. In this enlightened day and age that is unacceptable. First it is inexcusable for a woman not to know when she becomes pregnant. Then there are just too many inexpensive noninvasive tests that allows any woman to know just about everything about that new life inside her. What that child inside her is, or will become for that matter, is an open book she only has to read today. She, or he too I guess has a right to know, should know everything long before it becomes anything more than a gleam in it’s Daddy’s eye as the saying used to go. If we ever want to create one it will be superior in every way?” Sharon boasted to Eric.

“If we ever decide to have a child Eric I can assure you he...” Monica followed up.

“Why a he Monica?” Eric interrupted her.

“We still live in a mainly male dominated society, well world I guess you would have to say Eric. Even a strong female will continue to be just a female and that will limit her options in any existing culture. Even our modern Western culture is still male dominated. Though women are more equal today than ever before we are still at a major disadvantage with males. Given a choice we would always choose male for the sex of our baby.” Sharon elaborated.

“So what is this all about Larry?” Eric questioned Larry.

“My company has gone through the full gambit of DNA sequencing and yes we can make improvements to the human brain. Mostly they are small improvements. For instance we can improve the composition of the cerebral cortex gray matter. The main difference between us and the other mammals now is in the folded gray matter in our skulls. Theirs are smooth and ours are folded up more, giving ours many times more surface area than theirs. But still those improvements will not make us that much smarter that people that exist right now.” Larry paused to let anybody ask questions. Most of our core company was here.

“Wouldn’t that assure that all our children would be geniuses Larry?” Sharon asked.

“Yes it will Sharon, but that is not a real breakthrough as far as evolution is concerned.” Larry answered.

“A superior brain would lead to a superior human being.” Eric laughed.

“But only by degrees.” Larry answered.

“Okay Larry what’s your point?” Eric finally asked the question Larry wanted asked.

“We have the ability to create a truly superior human being through the manipulation of DNA, but he ... it ... whatever will be deformed by human standards. The skull will have to be enlarged to accommodate the new larger brain. In other words it will not look human and other humans will reject it.” Larry laughed.

“In other words it will be a freak.” Monica put in.

“Yes it can’t be helped Monica.” Larry agreed

“So what are you suggesting Larry.” Monica followed up.

“As you know I deal in drugs. Certain drugs allow the brain to operate more effectively, but as I’m sure you all know there is a price to be paid. There are side effects, drastic side effects to deal with. First those drugs and other things are highly addictive, and the second drawback is they require more and higher doses to get the same results, and the third negative is they drastically reduce life expectancy and even the quality of life itself. I can’t really recommend any of them to anyone, but they do work.” Larry stated.

“Then what are we here for Larry?” Eric asked.

“I would like to introduce a colleague of mine. This is Emily May Ratajkowsky. I’ll let Maybe explain what she’s into, and what she wants in return for her help Eric.” With that Emily May Ratajkowsky stepped out of the darkness behind Larry. Dressed all in some kind of blacker than black one piece pantsuit outfit of some clinging material that did nothing to hide her curves she stepped out of the blackness surrounding her like a magician at a Vegas magic show act.

To say Emily May was black did not do her or her skin color justice. Emily May was so black that she was almost blue. Her skin actually had blue highlights to it, just like her long blue black flowing straight hair, which was tied back in a pony tail that flowed down her back right now. Her black skin and hair was set off by bright alert intelligent crystal clear blue eyes and the sharp Scandinavian features of a modern day Amazon or Viking Valkyrie, but it wasn’t until she got close that it really registered that she was a veritable giant. At 6’ 6” she towered over Eric and everyone else in the room.

“For everybody’s information I was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. I can trace my ancestry all the way back to 1706 when the first French ship, the Le Prince, arrived at Saint-Domingue, that was Haiti’s original name. I am a direct descendant of the Marquis of Larnage himself and am descended from the island’s original royalty. He took a Taino Tribe princess as a wife, that tribe is now extinct. I am part French, Dutch, Swedish, Czech, Polish, Turkish, Persian, Caucasian, Zulu, and even have some original island Taino blood thrown in for good measure. As you may have noticed I derive my size and coloring from my Zulu warrior ancestors. And before anyone asks I have a twin sister that is as white as snow, and no she isn’t an albino. Her name is Zella, that’s African meaning lacking for nothing, one who knows the way, a damn self righteous know-it-all bitch. Her damn hair is even white, not platinum blond, white damn it.”

“I started out with the same ideal as Larry and the others he is working with. I did DNA, and then drugs, but that burns you out too fast. Then I got interested in the early work in Hemispherectomy. Hemispherectomy is a very rare neurosurgical procedure in which a cerebral hemisphere, half of the brain, is physically removed from the person’s skull. Of course now it’s just disconnected, or disabled in some other way.”

“The early surgeons wanted to control the most severe cases of epilepsy in children. In those cases where the drugs and less invasive surgical procedures failed to work. So the surgeons literally took off the top of the child’s skull and removed the offending hemisphere of the brain. In the 1960s and early 1970s, hemispherectomy involved essentially removing an entire half of the brain. This procedure was known as anatomical hemispherectomy. Anatomical hemispherectomy decreases the likelihood of the epileptic seizures returning, as there is literally no longer any part of the identified epileptic causing part of the brain area left to cause seizures, ha, ha. If thy eye offend the pluck it out.”

“What interested me about these latter follow-up studies though was that these people with the operation were found with no significant mental damage. Long-term effects on memory, personality, humor were minimal, and there was only minimal changes in all cognitive functions overall. For example, in one case study they’re study followed a patient who completed college, attended graduate school and scored above average on all the standard intelligence tests after he underwent the operational procedure at age 5. The man eventually developed what the researcher described as “superior language and intellectual abilities”. Understand that this was despite the removal of the entire left hemisphere of his brain, the side of the brain which is supposed to contains the classical language centers. Rather than impairing the person he was recorded as normal, or above normal.”

“Isn’t that supposed to be impossible?” Eric questioned.

“Yes ... yes it was, but it’s not according to the actual studies they did on this man. This caused them to reassess their theories about the left hemisphere of the brain. Of course the evidence did indicate that some advanced language functions, higher order grammar for instance, could not entirely be replaced by the right side. But the extent of the advanced language loss was often dependent on the patient’s actual age at the time of surgery. The younger the patient the more adaptive the brain it appears. In fact one study following the cognitive development of two adolescent boys who had undergone a hemispherectomy, found that the brain’s plasticity and development arise, in part, from the brain’s adaptation to the behavioral needs of the person himself. Environment does play a role it appears.”

“The brain that is left adapts to fit available strengths, weaknesses, and biases of the boy involved. In other words the boy himself adapts to the task to fit his new brain more than he adapts his brain to fit the task. The boy himself makes up what was lost. Neuroplasticity after the hemispherectomy does not imply that they completely regain all previous functions of the missing half of the brain, but rather they have the ability to adapt to the current abilities and disabilities of the brain in such a way that the individual may still function, however differently the new way of functioning is.”

“Along with neuroplasticity, there is recovery due to resilience. Resilience is the ability, in this case, of the brain being able to recover from a tough situation and take back most of it’s original functions. Neuroplasticity resilience explains why the hemisphere that is left intact is able to recover most, if not all, of the functions that were once the exclusive function of the removed hemisphere. Resilience allows the patients that underwent hemispherectomies to recover and navigate back to something close to full recovery.”

“This procedure was almost always performed exclusively on young children because their immature still growing brains generally display more neuroplasticity and resilience than adult brains. This ability allowed neurons from the remaining hemisphere to take over the tasks performed by the lost hemisphere. It is reasoned that this likely occurs by exercising, strengthening, and expanding neural pathways and connections which already existed on the unaffected side of the brain. Connections that existed, but would never have otherwise been used and would have remained dormant because they weren’t needed until now.”

“And this gets us what Emily May?” Monica asked.

“Call me Maybe, Monica. Since the late 1970s they have quit doing anatomical hemispherectomies. They have been using, a few new types of less invasive functional hemispherectomies. One such procedure is a peri-insular hemispherectomy. Peri-insular hemispherectomy allows for seizure relief with minimal brain tissue removal. In this procedure, the surgeon aims to disconnect white matter pathways, rather than removing the offending hemisphere entirely. This minimizes long term complications.”

“Another relatively new procedure to epilepsy surgery is endoscopic surgery. This surgery is performed using miniature cameras mounted in thin flexible probes along with other surgical instruments that can be inserted in small incision sites to snip connectors and other things. Its appeal lies in its minimally invasive nature, which generally decreases the chance of infection and increases the speed of physical recovery.”

“Still what are you getting at Maybe?” Eric asked again.

“Contrary to popular belief, and the ever popular “10% Theory” about your only using 10% of your brain, almost 100% of the brain is used all the time while we are awake, and even while we’re asleep there is constant activity. Magnetoencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging have shown that over 35% of some specific areas of the brain are used in some complicated tasks. Rather than trying to create a new species of human with DNA, we need to use our technology to increase the efficiency of the brains we already have.”

“What all the hemispherectomy and other neurosurgical procedures I have studied showed me was that it is possible that by exercising, strengthening, and expanding the neural pathways and connections which already exist, but are unused in our brains, we can increase our own brains effectiveness. Using those connections that already exist, but would never have been used and would have remained dormant without some outside stimulation. I want to directly electrically stimulate them.”

“Look the cerebral cortex is the outer layer of neural tissue, or gray matter, of the cerebrum of the brain, it is separated into two cortices, by the longitudinal fissure that divides the cerebrum into the left and right cerebral hemispheres. The two hemispheres are joined beneath the cortex by the corpus callosum. The cerebral cortex is the largest site of neural integration in the central nervous system. It plays the major role in memory, attention, perception, awareness, pleasure, pain, imagination, creativity, thought, language, and even consciousness itself.”

“The cerebral cortex is folded, providing a greater surface area in the confined space of the human skull. Cortical folding is crucial for the wiring of the human brain and its functional organization. A fold or ridge in the cortex is termed a gyrus and a groove is termed a sulcus. These surface convolutions appear during fetal development and continue to mature after birth through the process of gyrification. In the human brain the majority of the cerebral cortex is not visible from the outside, but buried deep in the sulci.”

“By the use of endoscopic surgery performed using miniature cameras mounted in flexible probes along with other surgical instruments that can be inserted in these small incision sites through the skull bone itself or by following the spinal cord up under the cranium in back of the skull we can insert thin film printed circuits into the folds of the sulcus itself. These electrical circuits, run by a external CPU and battery pack implanted under the skin in the small of the back, can then stimulate the gray matter itself directly. This allows us to make more new pathways and speeds up the brain’s functions itself. “ Maybe finished up.

“And you think you can do this through these ... these pin holes?” Eric asked.

“No ... no this experiment will only use small thin electrodes, platinum needles really, and micro thin wires going to an external CPU and battery pack that will be attached to both sides of the head. We will target specific areas of the brain that magnetoencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging have shown us are critical thinking areas of our minds. Scientists have constructed maps of the cortical areas on the basis of variations in the appearance of the layers as seen with a microscope. One of the most widely used schemes came from Korbinian Brodmann. He split the cortex into 51 different areas and assigned each of them a number. For example, Brodmann area 1 is the primary somatosensory cortex, Brodmann area 17 is the primary visual cortex, and Brodmann area 25 is the anterior cingulate cortex. We will use that map to implant our electrodes.”