Hereditary Expressions
by Joseph Lagorio
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
Tom teased the spoonful of potatoes in front of Larissa’s mouth. “Once you finish, you get to play with colors.”
“No!” Larissa shouted, stamping her foot on the surface of the chair where she was standing. Her hands tightened into little balls, and her brow furrowed as much a two year old’s could. “No, Granpa! Play!”
Karl watched from the other end of the table with a look that illustrated where Larissa had learned to furrow her brow, and his breathing hissed through his nostrils. Cora had gone back to the bedroom to send some work emails from her laptop and entrusted Tom and Karl with lunch.
Tom cleared his throat to get Karl’s attention as he set down the spoon on his grandchild’s plate. Karl roused from his absent glower, and Tom gave a pointed look to the man’s own spoon.
Tom picked up his spoon and scooped a bite of potatoes to illustrate. With a resigned sigh, Karl followed the direction. “Yum,” Tom said in a singsong voice, “I love potatoes. Yum, yum, yum.” Tom rocked his head back and forth as he spoke.
Skepticism pinched Larissa’s eyes as she watched.
He lifted the spoon to his mouth, and opened his mouth wide. “Aaaawwm,” he said, while he took an exaggerated bite. “Yum, yum, yum.”
Larissa’s eyes flicked to the spoon on her own plate for the briefest moment. “Look,” Tom started again, pointing to Karl. “Even Dadda likes potatoes.” With the spoon cradled delicately between his cybernetic fingers, Karl lifted the bite achingly to his mouth. When he finished, his smile seemed as much in relief as it was to act out how much he enjoyed potatoes.
“Yum, yum,” Tom said. Then he reached for Larissa’s plate. “Are you going to eat those potatoes? If not, I might just gobble them up!”
“No!” Larissa scrabbled at the plate. “Mine!”
“Ope! Okay, here let me help you then.” Tom picked up the little girl’s spoon, and she opened her mouth wide for the bite. “Yum, yum yum,” he said, and she giggled with a wide smile while she chewed.
Karl and Tom continued to encourage her together, but after four more bites they could tell they’d gotten as much out of the little girl as they could get. She scurried down out of her chair and scampered off to the other side of the house, screaming for her mom.
Tom looked back to Karl with a smile and found the man studying his left arm. He’d recently had the entire limb replaced. Now his upper arm and forearm were two batteries. To Tom, they were just blocks of some unidentifiable manufactured polycarbonate, connected by a gleaming bearing joint at the elbow. The batteries had cords weaving out and around his body to connect to his other upgrades. The hand on that arm did feature fingers for basic manipulation, but the use-case of lifting or grabbing as evolution provided for every human had been intentionally forsaken as a second priority. Now the fingers could unravel into an array of solar panels.
The young man had talked animatedly about them when Tom arrived. By taking advantage of solar energy to power his peripherals, he was saving his employer on his utilities and overhead, and increasing his value production.
His next chance at a promotion was less than a year away, and the additional margin would act as an important credit when his company began his performance evaluation.
As Tom watched his son, Karl looked up to him with his one natural eye. His other was a clean black sheen. Tom didn’t even know what benefit Karl had installed that for, but the muscles around it were natural. When Karl looked to him, those muscles tightened.
“She knows that I struggle when she gets into one of those moods.”
Tom cocked his head. “It can be frustrating, but Larissa is not intentionally making you uncomfortable. All children her age are rambunctious. The idea of missing even a moment of coloring or stacking blocks is just torture to them.”
“Not her,” Karl hissed between gritted teeth. “Never her. Everything is for her.” He motioned to his various upgrades. Did the status lights shine with extra fury? “I do this all for her, and then Cora does this. Walks off and leaves lunch with me to prove how little help I can provide for Larissa. As if my sacrifices don’t count!”
Tom took a deep breath. In the span of a literal picosecond, he could access any nugget of information that humanity had ever recorded and understand it completely through the power of his increased processing and memory abilities. The blinking lights and the whirring components represented the height of human ingenuity.
And raising a child with another human being as your partner still defied reason when not intentionally and continuously approached from a mindset of cooperation, compromise and goodwill. Tom’s own missteps seemed so primitive in comparison. If he’d forayed into young fatherhood during the Zeitgeist of transhumans, how much more might his mistakes have wrecked his family’s lives than he'd already managed in his own simpler times?
“Son, I think she just needed to get some work done. So, she left Larissa with her father. I can’t imagine that as some performative insult.”
“Don’t even, Tom,” Karl barked. Tom rocked back in his chair, nearly grunting in surprise. “I’m always with Larissa. I never have to leave the house. I made these sacrifices so that she would never know a second of her life without her father. That’s how I am approaching fatherhood. And Cora treats me like hell for it. It’s fine when Larissa eats on her own, but Cora knows I don’t have the fine motor control of natural fingers to manage when she’s like this.”
Tom lowered his gaze and took a long breath. “I'm sure she just wanted to give you time to interact with Larissa without her. Children this age are so focused on their mother. Cora is like a black hole to Larissa. She just can’t ignore the pull. I think Cora just wanted to make sure you got some time without that gravity. For both of us. She wanted to give us a moment where Larissa could focus on us.”
Karl glowered out the nearest window. After a moment he snarled, stood, and stormed off into the kitchen. When the door swung shut behind him, Tom pressed at his temples with a thumb and forefinger, hefting a long sigh. His heart raced following Karl’s outburst, and he took a moment to measure a deep breath and savor the silence.
The electronic beeps and the mechanical clicks and whirs of components had left with Karl. With their absence, Tom’s senses seemed to stretch out from where they had previously been huddled close. The air in the room was still stale and lifeless. With each breath, his diaphragm had to gather it and draw it into his lungs. But he became aware of a bird’s song wafting in from the nearby window, and the rustling of a breeze through trees. He became aware of the soft plodding of footsteps behind him.
Tom turned and found Cora behind him with little Larissa holding her hand at her side. Cora’s eyes were wide and she stood stiff and her throat worked at unspoken words. Her lips tightened together, and she took a long breath before stepping forward to place a hand on his shoulder.
“Thank you.” Cora didn’t say it. She just mouthed it. Larissa didn’t hear it. Maybe she knew it anyway. The little girl stepped forward and rested her small hand on his knee.
* * *
Tom slipped his hand behind Karl’s head and lifted him, shuffling down the hall to the changing table in the nursery. Once there, he busied himself with changing and cleaning the child, starting with placing a wet wipe over him, to keep untimely urine evacuation from traveling too far. The boy’s little face screwed up with surprise at the sudden coolness after Tom settled the wipe over him.
“Ope, ope! Sorry about that, bud! I should have warned you, but I’ll be quick. I promise. I know this can’t be your favorite process.”
Karl’s eyes snapped back to Tom and the muscles around his face eased. Worry still pulled at his brow, but he’d calmed.
Better keep talking, then, slow and calm. “Yeah, having someone else wipe for you doesn’t sound so fun to me either, but that just happens in life. Sometimes you need a little help to get through whatever is in front of you. It doesn’t mean you’re weak or anything. Just means you need experience, or guidance. Luckily for you, your mother and I have tons of experience. She and I will be able to help you through all kinds of snafus while you get stuff figured out.” Little Karl’s had face eased even more as Tom continued. “And I can promise you something else too,” Tom said.
* * *
Tom walked Larissa to the nearby park, and the air outside was light and free in the mid-morning sun. The warmth of direct sunlight nestled into his skin, pulling his attention away from anxieties past and present. The day was beautiful, and he would enjoy it with his grandchild. He could step to the muted rhythm of routine and regret later.
When they were about a block away from the park, the first sounds of uncorrupted joy reached them. Giggles and screams from other children, delighting in the jungle gyms and other playground apparatuses, danced in the air. The sounds jostled at the leaves on the ground and teased flower petals into the air. They pulled at his hand.
Tom sucked in a breath and looked down to see Larissa tugging him to walk faster. Her four-year old frame leaned deep to maximize her leverage against him.
“Larissa, would you like to go ahead?”
The little girl looked up to him, and the sky was in her eyes open and wide and untapped.
“Do you see that empty bench?”
She craned her head to look, still yanking on his arm. “Yeah, yeah.”
“That’s where I’m going to sit, okay? If you get scared or get a boo-boo, you can come get me there.”
“Okay!”
“Alright, run straight to the park. I’ll be watching! I want to see how high you can swing!”
He released her hand, and she tore away with the wild legs of a toddler’s uncoordinated gait.
He ambled the rest of the way to the park and took a seat at the bench he’d identified to Larissa, waving to make sure she saw him. After a few moments alone, he pulled a black disk from his pocket. It was no larger than a hockey puck but about half as tall, and it fit easily on the bench beside him. He pressed the power button and pulled away the shield that protected an array of sensors and lenses that lined one half of the circular rim.
After only a few moments a light teased from red to green and began to blink at regular intervals. Tom leaned down to make sure that the cameras had the best view of the park as possible. Karl wouldn’t want to miss this if he could spare any of his processing.
Once satisfied, Tom sat back and let the fresh air wrap him and fill him. Larissa quickly made friends with other children at the park, and they ran around screaming and leaping in some game where rules mattered as little as the last moment.
Eventually Cora arrived and sat beside him, crossing a leg and placing a basket with snacks and bottles of water on the bench at her side. Tom greeted her with a smile, and she offered him the same. Once settled, Cora picked up the disk and placed it on the knee of her crossed leg, balancing the lenses toward the park. “Thank you for taking Larissa ahead.”
Tom chuckled. “If she’d had to wait for you to finish the snacks, it might have broken her. I was glad to help.”
Cora sat back, and they both eased into a conversation that wove from the weather to Larissa’s latest stunt as they watched the girl at play. While they sat, the wind teased strands of Cora’s hair from where she’d tucked it behind her ears, but she did not move to replace it. She was unperturbed. Tom couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her falter at anything.
“Thank you for giving me a chance to be here,” he said.
Cora turned to him, confusion pinching her eyes.
“I gave so much of my time and energy to the future, working to stay ahead by any one of a hundred measures, each as arbitrary as the last. It’s nice to be here, enjoying now and making up for the time I handed away.”
Cora looked down then, and her thumb traced the line of the black disk on her knee. “Do you think Karl will realize?”
Tom pursed his lips. “When I was a younger man, with that unfailing drive to achieve and accumulate, even back when I could convince myself that I was doing it for him, I was only able to give time to those foolish endeavors.”
She turned back to the playground and lifted her chin to hold her head higher. “Well, at least we’ll be there for her, right?”
Tom looked back out at the playground to watch Larissa. He could never be her father, but maybe he could be enough to end the inheritance that he’d passed to his son. Maybe he could be enough that Larissa would never know to pass it on to her children. “Yeah,” he said. “We’ll always be here.”
Copyright © 2021 by Joseph Lagorio
