Chapter 2: Like A Dew-Covered Orange Rose
A busy city. Which city, you ask? His reply would be that, for all it matters to him, cities everywhere are the same. Their traffic junctures teem with the same denizens, surviving but not thriving on the same busyness. Rebellion lurks around the corners, except that even rebels play from an all-too-familiar, narrow range of repertoire. He shuffles impassively past the establishment and the renegades, finding home in neither camp. Like an exile in his own land.
But the prank of the gods is such that even an adrift soul has to be sustained by refueling stopovers for the belly. The life of the mind cannot do without the life of the flesh. Clad in a long black coat and grey turtleneck shirt on this wintry morning, he exits the subway station and makes his long trek through the sea of towering blocks, intersections and crosswalks to the workplace as usual. Formerly a novelist, insurance is now his trade. Today, a shivering teenage boy in a dark green sweater leans against the white granite-clad pillar of his office building. Head bent low, the boy fixes his eyes on his fidgeting feet.
"There is nothing you can do. Go back."
"My mom said the debt collectors would be repossessing our house," the boy continues to stare at his grungy brown shoes.
"Not if she negotiates for a payment plan."
"This is a six-digit figure bill. We have never even seen five-digit sums in our bankbooks." The boy's voice sounds hoarse.
"There is a first for everything. You'll learn that in time."
"All this trouble would be gone if you guys help out!" The boy finally looks up with angry tears.
"If you really need to hear it for the umpteenth time, the terms and conditions stated explicitly that self-inflicted injuries are excluded from coverage."
"She wasn't herself! The one who overdosed on sleeping pills was her inner demon. How can you blame her for being .... sick?" The accusing glare does not go away.
"Nobody is blaming her. We are just doing our jobs," he states matter-of-factly. "The firm is adhering to a contract written according to an ordinary person's understanding of the English language. The security guards who hauled you out earlier—Don't look at me with such surprised eyes. Was that so hard to infer?—were carrying out their duty to ensure the firm and other tenants can conduct business in peace. And going by her habit of fretting over the tiniest of details, your mother must have done her job as well."
The boy is definitely startled by now. "W-What do you mean?"
"She did consider the possibility that the clause on suicide applies also to suicidal attempts caused by medical conditions. She knew very well too that her impulsive bids to end her life were growing more frequent. It was just that she ultimately forced herself to take a blind leap by not asking and sign up for the policy."
His legs collapsing to the white pavement, the boy rests his head on the pillar and stares blankly ahead for some time. Finally, the boy mutters, "She had no choice. All the affordable insurance plans she could find came with that kind of condition. That must be the case. So what do you want us to do? Take on another debt and worsen her paranoia so that she inflicts yet more violence on herself?"
"What if—" The boy trembles. "She, she succeeds during her next ...." His voice breaks.
He looks down at the boy silently. Some passers-by slow down or pause to stare at them. As the hour wears on, though, the human traffic thins until only a few latecomers to work are scuttling around. At long last, he tilts his head upwards and sighs.
Just then, a monarch butterfly glides up the street and charges at them, with sunlight reflecting off its orange wings with black outlines and white dots. It swoops away from them at the last minute, circles up a street lamp and darts in and out of the backs of office blocks. Next, it soars into the sky and dances in a curious pattern.
"Gosh! Are those letters?" The boy widens his eyes.
He, for his part, furrows his brows and stares intently at the lines the insect is making.
"H. O. P .... E."
"Right! In cursive! W-What's going on?" The boy gasps.
"Radio control of a cyborg butterfly!" A melodious voice rings out from the road. They turn to see a woman with a small device in her hand pushing a bike toward them. Decked out in a fuchsia car coat, a tinsel choker and an electric blue dress, she wears her hair in a loose bun and appears to be in her late twenties, possibly the same age as him.
Waving the device before her sparkling eyes, she elaborates, "Pressing the buttons here sends radio wave signals to electrodes implanted on locations of the butterfly's nervous system that affect flight movements. There are also controls that enable you to fine-tune the movements by adjusting the voltage and frequency of the alternating current. Someday, GPS [1], miniature cameras [2], and heat [2] and chemical sensors may even be attached to the butterfly! In one organism, you then have the compactness and human-mediated navigation capabilities for searching the nooks and crannies of disaster zones [1], on one hand, and the ability to maintain stable flight without constant human monitoring [2] and refuel the system through readily available nectar, on the other. Don't let people enslave pets through that technology for pleasure purposes, though. That kind of perverseness crosses a line with me."
"You .... are not asking us to buy or sign up for anything, are you?" The boy looks at her with befuddlement.
She bursts into laughter, "I'm a biomechanical systems research fellow out on fieldwork, not a marketer!"
"And if you can do anything," she winks, "It's to turn the corners of your mouth up! A beaming face gives someone who sees you the turbo boost to fight on for another day."
They stare at her as she summons the butterfly back into a container from her bike's basket. As she climbs onto the bike, she turns back to smile at the man, "Same for you, mister!"
With that, she rides off in the morning light, leaving the young dropout and the tardy insurance agent behind on the windy street. The view of her back stays in his mind for a long time. Like an uninvited flower setting up home on a small patch of a desiccated and frigid heart.
Behind-the-Scenes Science:
Butterflies have not entered the picture at the time of writing, but researchers have successfully controlled the locomotion of cockroaches [1], beetles [2] and moths [3] by sending radio wave signals to electronic packages attached to their backs. The receivers in these packages then delivered electrical stimuli to the insects through electrodes implanted in their nervous systems [1] [2] or flight muscles [2] [3]. Much work has been done to map the area of stimulation and, for each setup, the characteristics of the current applied to the movements generated. With stimulation of sensory pathways and channels like antenna, however, they found that the insects would learn to ignore the stimuli and respond instead to what other senses tell them [1]. Direct stimulation of nervous systems enables rescue workers to avoid this problem.
Further work to be done includes [1]:
(i) shrinking the sizes of the packages further so that they do not tire out the insects too fast,
(ii) using more flexible materials that fit the insects' curved bodies better,
(iii) employing batteries with larger capacities,
(iv) adopting stronger adhesives to minimize the detachment of the packages from the bodies as the insects move around, and
(v) coming up with electrodes that remain sufficiently conducive even as tissue and bodily fluids cover them over time, as they are naturally wont to.
Scientists have also controlled fruit flies with laser light which excites neurons [4] and remotely manipulated the locomotion of rats [5], fish [6] and other larger animals [7] [8]. However, these options may be disadvantaged by the need for human visual contact, in the case of laser light, and bulkier sizes and graver ethical concerns, in the case of animals bigger than insects.
References:
1. Sanchez, C.J., Chiu, C.W., Zhou, Y., González, J.M., Vinson, S.B. and Liang, H., 2015. Locomotion control of hybrid cockroach robots. Journal of The Royal Society Interface, 12(105), p.20141363. DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2014.13632. Singer, E., 2009. The Army's Remote-Controlled Beetle, MIT Technology Review, viewed 3 February 2017, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/411814/the-armys-remote-controlled-beetle/
3. Verderber, A., McKnight, M. and Bozkurt, A., 2014. Early metamorphic insertion technology for insect flight behavior monitoring. JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments), (89), pp.e50901-e50901. DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.3791/509014. Davis, R.L., 2005. Remote control of fruit fly behavior. Cell, 121(1), pp.6-7. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2005.03.010
5. Talwar, S.K., Xu, S., Hawley, E.S., Weiss, S.A., Moxon, K.A. and Chapin, J.K., 2002. Behavioural neuroscience: Rat navigation guided by remote control. Nature, 417(6884), pp.37-38. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/417037a
6. Kobayashi, N., Yoshida, M., Matsumoto, N. and Uematsu, K., 2009. Artificial control of swimming in goldfish by brain stimulation: confirmation of the midbrain nuclei as the swimming center. Neuroscience letters, 452(1), pp.42-46. DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2009.01.0357. Lee, S., Kim, C.H., Kim, D.G., Kim, H.G., Lee, P.S. and Myung, H., 2013. Remote guidance of untrained turtles by controlling voluntary instinct behavior. PloS one, 8(4), p.e61798. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0061798
8. Li, H.P., Dai, Z.D., Tan, H., Guo, C. and Sun, J.R., 2008. A remote system for gecko animal-robot. Computer Technology and Development, 18(8), pp.16-19. URL: http://en.cnki.com.cn/Article_en/CJFDTOTAL-WJFZ200808006.htm
