The Mother Code

by Carole Stivers

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.