The Mother Code

by Carole Stivers

Acknowledgments

Dear readers, Thanks so much for reading THE MOTHER CODE. And to those of you who not only helped get my book nominated, but also voted for it in the Goodreads Choice Awards 2020 Science Fiction category, I send a special Thank You! For your reading pleasure, I’ve annotated some interesting (non-spoilery) passages from the book. Enjoy! Carole

KAI COULD FEEL the morning heat spilling through Rosie’s hatch cover, flooding his cocoon.

This opening sentence of Chapter 5 is the first sentence I ever wrote for THE MOTHER CODE—and it may be the only one that stayed entirely the same throughout years of editing and rewrites! What is now Chapter 5 used to be Chapter 1, and what is now Chapter 1 was originally a short Prologue. This is all to say that Kai's birth and early childhood were the most important things on my mind when I started writing the book. The adult intrigue that led to Kai's situation became important to me only later, as I pondered how he came to be born to a robot Mother, and what challenges he and his Mother might have to face in the future.

As he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, his fingers touched the small bump on his forehead, the rough place where the chip was embedded just under the skin.

In THE MOTHER CODE, the chip in the forehead of each Mother’s child is the one mark that distinguishes him or her from any other child on Earth. The paragraphs after this passage go on to discuss the tefillin that Kai sees on the foreheads of some men in a lesson Rho-Z is teaching him, and how he compares his own chip to a tefillah. During a trip to Jerusalem in 2000, I saw ancient head-tefillin in the Israel Museum. I was fascinated by these small leather boxes containing Hebrew texts on vellum, worn on the forehead by Jewish worshippers as a reminder to keep God’s law. Later, as I was researching for The Mother Code, I read a book called The Future of the Mind by Michio Kaku, which among other things discusses brain-machine interfaces. I also learned about the concept of an electronic mesh, envisioned by Drs. Charles Lieber and Guosong Hong at Harvard, that could be injected into the brain to both record from and stimulate neurons. My own brain is a funny thing—always making strange connections! Just as those ancient people (and some modern people) used a head-tefillah to bind the remembrance of God’s role in their history to them, I thought that injectable electronics might be used to form a bond between a child and its robotic Mother. I loved the idea that due to this modification, a child born to a robot Mother would be connected both physically and empathically to an artificial intelligence—one that is based on his or her own human mother. This connection was key to Kai’s development, and to his later decisions.

He peered through the hatch cover, once more transparent. Outside, the familiar rock formations surrounding their encampment stood firm, their massive red fingers pointing skyward.

The Utah desert setting of Kai's early life was a joy to visit, both in person and in my mind, as I was writing THE MOTHER CODE. Although I consider myself a "mountain person," the stark beauty of this desert terrain is, for me, unsurpassed—just one of many natural wonders on Earth that call for us to preserve them for future generations.

“Kai. You’re a boy, right?” said Sela. “I can tell. I’m a girl.”

Sela was one of my favorite characters and was always the first child that Kai met in the desert. But in much earlier versions of the manuscript, the next child that the two of them met was a rambunctious and reckless boy named Geoff. Eventually, Geoff was "folded into" Sela's character, making her the reckless one. This change endeared her to me even more—and made it that much more difficult for me to watch her suffer the consequences of her own behavior!

Each Mother’s child would need more than just food and water, more than education, more even than safe nurturing and a sense of common purpose that would unite him with others of his kind. He would need that sense of security that came from knowing who he was. Somehow, she’d have to work this into her code.

This chapter, in which Rose McBride ponders the challenge of crafting THE MOTHER CODE, was one of the more difficult passages for me to write. As I wrote this (and as I so often do), I found myself just as "stuck" as my character was, wondering how to move forward with a seemingly impossible task. What Rose needs to do here—amidst her own impending grief and panic—will propel the rest of the plot. But she does her best...as I tried to do! By the way, it's no mistake that Rose's office scenes, as well as many later scenes in the book, take place in the San Francisco Presidio—an iconic site that I have visited often, and one that often appears as a backdrop in futuristic sci-fi films like Star Trek.

“When interacting with their children, the Gen5 bots will require a gentle touch, a precise touch. But to deal with the outside world, they will also require power, strength. We knew we couldn’t create both in one rig. So, we engineered a manifold appendage.”

Of all Rho-Z's many parts, her hands seem to garner the most attention from readers—thus the many depictions of hands, both robot and human, that adorn the covers of various editions of the book sold throughout the world! I first had the idea for this “manifold appendage” while watching Sebastian Thrun's on-line lectures in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. Dr. Thrun stressed that not only the programming, but also the materials and the mechanics need to be optimized in order to design safe robots for personal use by humans. I found myself sketching these hands as he spoke—and, writing out lines for my character Sara to recite as she explained her design to James.

Epilogue

What to read next? If you liked THE MOTHER CODE, I’d suggest two books I read and loved this year. One is fiction: MIGRATIONS, by Charlotte McConaghy. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42121525-migrations The other is nonfiction: THE SIRENS OF MARS: SEARCHING FOR LIFE ON ANOTHER WORLD by Sarah Stewart Johnson. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50751225-the-sirens-of-mars Both are beautiful books that take us out of our comfort zones and into the realm of the near-possible!