What It's Like To Be A Bat - A Short Story

 There are some days, Caleb Sanders says, he wishes he were a bat.

“A bat, you know… a bat doesn’t need their eyes to see. They see with their ears, right? They echolocate…”

I nod along as the psychologists and doctors I’m sitting beside take notes. I left my holopad in my office. My role in these meetings was only ever advisory—I’m not supposed to be knowledgeable about anything on the medical or technological ends of the project. I’m here because I know about bats. So I nod along.

The guy is pretty young, maybe in his mid-twenties. He’s got this dark brown hair, messy but not unkempt. Too long, probably, but not unkempt. Low vision obviously, but he wasn’t born that way, so not exactly what we would want if we had an infinite pool of candidates to choose from.

He’s nervous, or maybe just meek. Probably nervous. He’s standing there making the case to us why we should help him end his own life and start a new one.

I thought I had muted my beeper, but I get the notification while Martin and I are eating dinner that they picked the first trial subject. It’s the kid. Caleb.

It occurs to me that I should introduce myself to him. He’s sitting there on the little table thing in Dr Parvati’s office in one of those paper gowns and here I am in a suit and tie. It’d be less awkward if I introduced myself. 

“You understand,” says Parvati, “this will be a gradual process.”

Caleb nods, so she continues. “You can opt out whenever you’d like, of course, but we can’t guarantee there won’t be permanent side effects if you do. And there’s going to come a stage in the process where you won’t have the capacity to opt out anymore.”

He nods again, and Parvati hands him some paperwork. He signs it. She starts packing up her things and I extend my hand.

“I’m Clay Ipstein, it’s good to meet you.”

He doesn’t shake my hand—I guess he doesn’t see it. 

“Nice to meet you too.” There’s a look on his face.  “You a doctor?” he asks.

“Yes… well, yes, of chiropterology.” The look on his face is funny now, so I clarify: “Bats.”

I wake up late at night and realize what I missed earlier today. I slip out of bed so I don’t wake up Martin and sneak out into the kitchen where my holopad is.

I open what the people from the technology end of the project sent me. With their entire genome sequenced, it’s simple enough to create an exact digital replica of a bat’s body, down to the atom. I highlight the nucleotide that’s causing the extension of the wing to be locked a third of a degree shorter than it should be and schedule an email about it to send at a reasonable hour tomorrow.

Martin’s already got coffee going when I get up. “Up early, huh?” I tease as I give him a kiss on the cheek.

“Yeah, I didn’t fall asleep for a while after you woke me up.”
“Oh.” I thought I had been quieter. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s alright.”

After visiting Cordelia, I stop at the supermarket where I run into Caleb. No one ever told me the protocol for this but I’m not his doctor and he’s not my patient so the stranger thing to do would be to not say hello. After a second, he remembers my name and we walk away from each other. I look kind of ridiculous with how much stuff I’m buying.

I watch as his card declines. I offer to pay for his few things and he thanks me. It occurs to me that his brain scan was today.

Alana laughs. 

“Must be nice to get out of the rehab campus and actually do some research, huh? Get your hands dirty?”

I smile and nod. Martin fills Alana and her new girlfriend’s glasses back up with wine. “I don’t know, Alana,” says the girlfriend, “Caring for the sick bats has got to be fulfilling, yeah? Like, they’ve gotta be thankful when you let ‘em back into the wild?”
“It is,” I answer. My mouth is full.

“I’m sure you can see it on their faces.”

I’m a little late to Caleb’s first session. The rest are a full hour long, but this one’s only 30 minutes, so it’s the worst one to be late to. By the time I’m there he’s already been hooked up to all the relevant machines. Other than the IV tube I don’t really know what any of them are for—the little pads strapped to his head apparently kill targeted brain cells and send signals into the brain to rebuild them with the ability to process certain synapses in the same way bats do. 

Parvati asks Caleb some questions off of a clipboard as the grad students listen. 

“What’s your name?”

“Caleb Brighton.”

“Good.” She writes something down. “What month is it?”

“September.”

“Good. What do you do for work, Caleb?”

“Uh, nothing right now… my eyes.”

She nods and writes something down again. “Good. Where did you grow up?”

He thinks for a second. “Newton. It's way up in Maine.”

Everyone nods, so I assume he gave the answers they expected. One of the grad students calls him a taxi on the university’s quarter. I don’t think he remembers my name anymore.

Martin tells me he wants us to go back to a couple’s therapist. I ask why.

I go to visit Caleb’s third session. I’m not late this time so I watch the medtechs place each little square pad carefully spread across his head. He sits up in his hospital bed for an hour reading a book. I don’t recognize the cover but it seems like fiction. He squints at it and flips back to the previous page. He scans it, his face still scrunched like he’s missing something. After a moment, he turns the page forward again. Parvati and her grad students watch him intently—I guess I do too.

When he’s done, he answers all their questions again. It takes him longer than last time. There’s some hesitation in his voice sometimes, but everyone in the room seems at ease by how he answers them so I trust I have no reason to worry. They know what they’re doing. He thanks Parvati and the medtechs and gives the grad students and I a nod as he walks out.

Alana is over for dinner again with her girlfriend, a different one, I think, but maybe the same one. I’m in my office working on my holopad. I don’t want to disturb them, but I’ll go down and make decent company when dinner is served. I send an email to the tech people that the bat looks good.

I stop by the sanctuary for a little while. I go and sit with Cordelia in her enclosure. She’s asleep now, hanging from one of the ropes. She’s small, which may be part of the reason her wing was damaged so badly when we found her—she could easily fit into the palm of my hand. Her fuzzy dark brown fur rises and falls as she snores. 

Eventually, she wakes up and I feed her. She eats a beetle from between the forceps in my hand.

She’s an evening bat, like Caleb will be. I look into her little, black eyes, and listen to them.

They started printing off the pieces today. They have fifteen or so medprinters going at once so no part of the body is much older than any other. Obviously this sort of thing breaks down at any significantly large scale—you could never print an entire human body. But I watch, amazed, as the printer techs put all the pieces together. I’m supposed to be here to supervise, make sure everything gets put in the right place, but they don’t need me.

They carefully insert a computer into the bat’s skull cavity, and connect it to the body’s nervous system. It’s designed to weigh exactly as much as an evening bat’s brain—this evening bat’s brain—so it doesn’t interfere even slightly with movement. It’ll connect to a set of external devices which are in turn connected to Caleb’s new brain. It’ll allow him the total seamless experience of being a bat.

I get a call that Cordelia is sick. It’s a virus in her gut from the beetles we feed her. It was an issue with our supplier. I’ll review the anti-viral agent we have on file for this and make sure she gets it—she’ll be fine in a couple of weeks but there’s a chance of bat to human transmission, so I can’t see her until then.

Parvati calls and tells me they’ve moved Caleb to inpatient, which means everything is on track. I go in and visit him. He’s slumped down in the hospital bed strapped up to maybe twenty-five or thirty different machines monitoring his vitals and, I think, tracking his brain activity. I look him in the eyes for a second and his face twitches. I guess Parvati sees when I instinctively make a face in reaction. She turns to me and says, “He isn’t in pain. It’s just a minor muscle spasm, it happens.”

I reply. I leave. 

Martin corners me in the living room as I’m putting away some of my papers. “Clay, I want us to go to couples therapy,” he says. He’s serious now.

“I care about you, Martin,” I say.

“What?” he asks. I try to say something but he speaks first. “I never said you didn’t.”
“I know,” I say. I’m thinking about a way to phrase this that will make him the least upset. “But psychotherapy—”

“Jesus Christ,” he interrupts.

“But a psychotherapist doesn’t understand us like we understand each other! They can’t!” I say. I shouldn’t be raising my voice like this.

“Clay—” he starts.

“They’re behaviorists, Martin, they just change behavior!”

“Clay, I’m not stupid! Maybe I want somebody to go in and change your goddamn behavior!” he says.

We keep going back and forth. He assures me that a psychotherapist could access his mind better than I can and access mine better than he could. He also assures me that he’s not just upset that I was in my office while Alana and her old new girlfriend were over for dinner. I get quieter and tell him how much I care about him. I tell him that over the course of our relationship, I have understood him better than anyone else I’ve ever met, as though I can see the very genetic code which makes him up, and he can sense mine. I sleep on the couch tonight. I figure I won’t wake him up here, at least.

Cordelia died last night. Or maybe early in the morning, I don’t know. It was nothing to do with her illness. Everyone did everything right with the anti-virus. There was a bad thunderstorm, and she startled in her sleep. She fell, and her wings were still damaged enough that she wasn’t able to catch herself. She landed wrong, I guess, got unlucky, and they found her on the ground in the morning. She was a year and seven months old. I turn off my holopad and walk in one direction for about an hour and a half before I call Alana and ask her to pick me up. 

Caleb has his fifth and final session today and I ask Parvarti why they space them out like this. She says, “We can more easily monitor that it’s working and that he’s responding well to it this way.” I ask if they could have done all four and a half hours of brain rewriting at once. She frowns. “Not safely.”

Everything goes well for him.

He’ll wake up and spend three and a half months as a bat. Not as a human in a bat’s body, but as a bat, experiencing everything the way a bat would, down to the slightest mental states. When his time’s up, they’ll shut down the devices that let him control the bat body and restore his brain function from the scan they took of his brain in the same way they rewrote his brain now, but gentler, so that he retains memories of being a bat, at least hypothetically. They’ll interview him about what it was like living as a bat, what sort of bat-thoughts he thought and bat-feelings he felt. They anticipate he may lose substantial chunks of his long-term memory but not short-term. When he wakes up, our interaction at the supermarket will have just happened to him, as will his entire life as a bat. They want to use the whole thing to learn more about human consciousness or something and I signed on because I thought the project would be a far more valuable study into bat consciousness. 

An evening bat has a lifespan of up to 8 years in captivity. I wonder why they only give Caleb three and a half months.

Early in the morning I get up and leave the house. I drive to the hospital and they let me in because I’m one of Caleb’s approved visitors, even early in the morning. I move the upholstered armchair up against the door to his room so it can’t open. I’m careful not to disconnect any of Caleb’s IVs or especially the machines taking his vitals. I take the earplug out of Caleb’s ear and carefully push it as deep into my ear as it was into his. It’s still off, of course, so I’m not connected to the body yet. I switch on the machines I remember seeing when I visited Caleb’s rewriting sessions and connect them to my head where it seems they should go. I fiddle with them for a second but the machines know what they’re doing and they don’t need me to do it. I won't connect to the body until I’m ready to live in it—until my brain’s ready. The earplug will stay off until the last possible moment.

I sit down in the arm chair facing Caleb’s bed for the next four and a half hours.

I can feel my vision getting fuzzier, the world darker. I reach for the button to turn the earplug on.