Could she have been wrong about Dr. Saperstein? Was it possible that Haven’s work was, if not right, then at least justified? The idea made her head hurt.
“But what you’ve done is monstrous,” she said. “What you’re talking about doing is monstrous. It’s murder.”
“It’s euthanasia,” he said, a little more forcefully. “And it’s standard practice. Labs all across the world do chemical testing on live animals. Cancer researchers inject rats with cancer cells. Ebola researchers shoot monkeys up with Ebola. Test subjects are routinely euthanized.”
“But we’re not talking about rats,” she said. “Or monkeys.” She thought of strange Calliope and her enormous eyes, Gemma’s color exactly, only bigger in her thin face; she thought of the girl who’d nearly stabbed her with a syringe and the children who spent their days crawling around in oversized diapers, sucking their fingers and wailing if a nurse tried to touch them. How many graves would they need? Would they even be buried? Lyra had mentioned that the replicas at Haven were either burned or packaged up and dumped into the ocean, but there were no oceans here. Perhaps they would be stacked like fish fillets in refrigerated trucks and shipped off to the coast. “We’re talking about people. Human beings.”
Saperstein squinted at her as if trying to see her from a distance. “You’re what—sixteen? Seventeen? I remember being your age. Everything seems so certain. Black and white. Wrong and right. Good guys and bad guys. But the real world isn’t like that, unfortunately.” He leaned forward again, putting his elbows on the desk. His sweater, Gemma saw, was in fact filmy with a surface of cat hair, and it made her want to cry again. “Let me ask you something. What makes a human? Do you think it’s our eyes, our ears, our capacity to walk upright?”
She nearly said, All of those things, when he went on, “It can’t be. What about the blind, or people missing their ears, or paralyzed from the shoulders down? What about people whose faces have been burned off, deformed by war or birth? You would say that those people are humans, too, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course,” Gemma said quickly, embarrassed she had been on the verge of agreeing to something so stupid. “Being human isn’t a trait, like having hair.”
“Okay. So what is it?”
“That’s a dumb question.” But she realized she couldn’t actually answer him. “It’s how we think,” she said finally. “It’s our brains and what we do with them.”
“But what about humans who’ve lost their capacity to think and reason?” he asked. He sounded almost apologetic, as if he hadn’t meant to trap her. “And what about computers, which can think and reason as well as any human? Are they people? Do they deserve to have rights and freedoms?”
“You’re trying to confuse me,” Gemma said.
“No, Gemma. I’m not. I’m trying to understand.” Dr. Saperstein sighed and took off his glasses. Suddenly he looked strangely exposed, like a half-blind mole coming up from the ground. There was a splotchy ink stain on his cheek, and more on his fingers. “If it isn’t legs or eyes or even how we think, what? Might it be the capacity to love, to be loved, to grieve and be grieved for by others? Friendship, connection, the ability to empathize, to walk in someone else’s shoes?” She could see, now, why he had been the one to take over after Dr. Haven’s death, why people had trusted him to lead. His voice was hypnotic, almost comforting—like the drumming of rain on a window. You wanted to curl up and go to sleep, let his voice do all the work.
“You’re talking about a soul,” she said. Suddenly, she was exhausted. She remembered, all at once, being at church when she was a kid, leaning against her mom, drowsy in the sunlight, while the priest droned on and on.
“Soul, sure. It doesn’t really matter what you call it.” Saperstein was still watching her. She felt he almost knew what she was thinking. He spoke so softly she nearly missed what he said next. “Whatever it is, the replicas don’t have it.”
“So what? That gives you the right to use them how you want?” When had they stopped going to church, and why? It seemed important, suddenly, to know. Had her parents believed, like the replicas did, that because she wasn’t made by God, she didn’t belong to him? That she was excluded? “What about the Home Foundation? You stole kids. And you can’t pretend they weren’t loved by someone, somewhere. You can’t pretend they aren’t people.”
For the first time, Dr. Saperstein looked uncomfortable. And this, more than anything, gave her a small jolt of pleasure. She sat up a little straighter.
“You didn’t think I knew about that?” She thought of poor Rick Harliss, his stale breath and face rutted by years of desperation and loss, that shitty motel room when he’d first told her about how she’d been born, made, at Haven.
“What happened at the Home Foundation was wrong,” he said firmly. Once again, she was surprised. “You have to understand, I had no idea what was happening until later. We were on the verge of shutting down. I was on a plane twenty, twenty-five hours a week, in different states and even different countries, trying to raise funds. I trusted the wrong people to manage. And believe me, I put an end to it as soon as I found out.”
Was it possible? In the letter Emily Huang had written to her friend, she’d made it sound as if it was all Dr. Saperstein’s idea. But what if she’d lied? What if she was ashamed of her own role?
What if she had killed herself after all? Out of guilt and shame and a sense of remorse?
“You covered it up,” Gemma said. “You lied and you made everybody else lie, too.”
“What else was I supposed to do? We would have lost everything. Then there would have been no reason for any of it.” He leaned forward and his eyes screwed onto hers like metal caps. “We’re talking about research that directly impacts Alzheimer’s research, research into what makes the brain deteriorate, how to stop it. We’re talking about research that could have spared the lives of thousands of civilians stuck in hellish war zones, that might have been used in targeted attacks to prevent the horrific casualties of innocent people. We’re talking about research critical to modern food supply. I regret some of the things we did—and some of the things done in our name. Of course I do. But we were fighting a countrywide campaign against reason—against research.”
“That still doesn’t give you the right,” Gemma said.
He ducked his head and sat for a few seconds with his eyes closed, almost as if he were praying. When he raised his head again, he looked even older, as if several years had elapsed. “Do you use shampoo?”
She was so startled by the question she couldn’t even nod.