Pandora's Brain

by Calum Chace

  Going up to Cambridge had been an eye-opener of a different sort. Despite the university’s genuine efforts to recruit more applicants from the state school sector, almost half of his contemporaries were from private schools. This was hardly surprising, Matt realised, given the smaller budgets of state schools. He had no particular views about the politics of this situation, but he was both impressed and subtly influenced by the confidence and self-belief of his new peers. These young men and women had been told from an early age that they were a gilded elite, and of course they believed it. It was the natural order of things, they assumed, that they would go to the best universities, secure the best jobs, live in the best houses and drive the best cars. Their self-belief did not infect Matt with an expectation that these things applied to him, but he enjoyed their company, and it gave him another new perspective on his old life.

  He looked around the classroom again. Its smells triggered powerful memories of the years he had spent here. The faint tang of disinfectant just about masked the layers of new and ancient sweat, with a top-note of overcooked vegetables. Long hours spent fighting off boredom had given him an intimate familiarity with this place, but it was superimposed now by the same sense of dislocation he felt about the boy in the photo on his desk at home. Matt had enjoyed much of his time at school: neither classroom nor playground held any terrors for him, and for that he was grateful. But even when he understood exactly what the teacher was trying to get across, the end of a period could seem a long time away. Boredom just seemed to be a regular, inevitable, and annoying guest in the mind of a schoolboy.

  In a half-hour’s visit he had noticed numerous details of the room’s interior geography which had snagged and anchored his thoughts during the years he had spent there. Initials carved into desks, scratches and discolouration in the once-white paintwork on the Crittall window-frames, and patches of ceiling where the plaster had come away. The patches served as Rorschach tests: one looked like the map of Africa, and another had been interpreted by the pubescent Matt as vaguely pornographic.

  He wasn’t surprised to notice that the room had not been re-painted since he was last here.

  After answering questions about his mother, his life at Cambridge, and what he was doing during the holidays, Matt asked Simon if he had ever come across a movement called transhumanism.

  ‘Sure,’ Simon replied. ‘I’ve read a few articles about their ideas over the years. It’s nothing new, of course: science fiction authors have been writing for ages about people living for thousands of years. But they seem to be getting more media coverage these days.’

  Matt dropped his head to conceal a smile, amused at the way Simon had slipped so naturally into teacher-pupil mode. With his slight, wiry frame and thin reedy voice, he might not be expected to command much respect in the classroom, but in fact he was one of the school’s most popular teachers: his enthusiasm for his subjects was obvious and genuine, and he had never lost his sense of fun, or his firm belief in the profound value of a good education.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Carl mentioned them yesterday. He came across them while reading about the philosophy of personal identity.’

  Simon gave Matt a sidelong glance as he packed some books inside a rucksack. ‘Are you interested because of your father’s work?’

  Matt was surprised. It hadn’t occurred to him that his father might have been interested in transhumanism. He was aware that Simon knew his father quite well: he and his wife had been to dinner at home a couple of times.

  ‘No,’ he replied hesitantly, his mind racing to find a connection. ‘Why?’

  Simon looked away, regretting the mention of Matt’s father. ‘Oh, just that transhumanists are very interested in how the brain works and how to enhance cognition.’

  Matt’s voice sounded distant. ‘He never discussed that sort of thing with me.’

  Simon gave Matt a kindly smile. ‘You didn’t have as much time together as you should have. He was always busy, and he died so young.’ He looked away, turning back to his rucksack to avoid making Matt more self-conscious.

  Uncomfortable, Matt changed the subject.

  ‘So have you read any transhumanist literature?’

  ‘Not really: as I say, just the odd article here and there. If you are curious about their ideas, perhaps you should read one of Ray Kurzweil’s books: he seems to be the best-known proponent. He’s an interesting chap, actually. He was a successful software developer – made a lot of money out of speech recognition software, if I remember right. He’s also written several books about an event called a Singularity, when the rate of technological progress becomes so fast that mere humans are unable to keep up, and we will have to upload our minds into computers. He thinks that this will happen remarkably soon – within your lifetime.’

  ‘Yes, Carl said it was about uploading minds,’ Matt said. ‘But in my lifetime? That’s a bit of a stretch!’

  ‘Yes, well a lot of people do see transhumanism as something of a cult. They call it ‘rapture for geeks’.’

  ‘Rapture?’ Matt asked.

  ‘Mmm. From the Latin for ‘taken’. A lot of Christians – mostly in America – believe that virtuous people will be ‘taken up’ by Christ when he returns for the Second Coming. Some people think that transhumanists have simply transferred that sort of religious impulse across to a blind faith in technological progress.’

  Simon looked at his watch, tutted, and picked up his backpack.

  ‘Now, fascinating as all that may be, I have to be elsewhere. If you want, we could pick this up next week. I’m giving my usual philosophy course for year 12, and I’m covering personal identity next Wednesday. That would be a great opportunity for you to talk to the students who will be trying for Oxbridge: they would really appreciate it if you sat in.’

  ‘Sure. I can do that.’

  ‘Tell Carl he’s welcome to join us,’ Simon said, as he headed off to his next lesson.

  *

  Matt had held back the tide of emotion during the conversation with Simon. He was practised and skilled at doing this. But as he walked through the older part of the school towards the exit, he allowed the tide to swell and rise and crash down on him. His mind flew back to the day when his mother broke the news of his father’s death. He felt again the constriction at the top of his windpipe, the sudden difficulty breathing, the rising panic.

  He found that he had stopped walking, and was standing, leaning his shoulder against a wall. A few children passed him on their way from one lesson to another, laughing and shoving each other. He wasn’t part of their private world, so they ignored him. He needed to be at home in his room with the time and space to let his thoughts rampage. He needed to curl into a ball and nurse his anger and his pain in private. But for now he remained where he was, waiting for the intensity of the moment to pass.

  He had come home for a few days during the summer holidays, and he had walked into the house to find his mother sitting curled up on the floor, face down with her knees drawn up to her chest, her back against the wall. As he entered the room she stood up – slowly, and as if in pain. She didn’t look into his eyes until she was standing right in front of him. A sense of dread sucked the energy out of him and left him weak. Clearly something awful had happened: her eyes were red with crying. His mother’s face had always tended towards the severe, especially in comparison to his father’s warmth and ready smile. She was a tightly self-disciplined woman, but now he saw an immense new strain on her face, and it made him very afraid.

  She pulled him towards herself and held him tight, her head buried in his neck with a hand to the back of his head as she delivered the news between sobs.

  ‘The police were here. It’s your father, Matt. There’s been a terrible accident. He’s . . . he’s dead.’

  Matt thought he had steeled himself for bad news, but he was not prepared for this. He felt faint, and his peripheral vision disappeared. The quality of the sound in the room seemed to change:
a ticking clock became louder while noises from outside the house faded. He felt sick.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It was a car accident.’

  Matt pushed her back to look into her face. He stared at her as she continued.

  ‘He was in a car, driving to the airport. He was on his way. . .’

  Matt realised that his mother was looking at him with sightless eyes, as if she was in a trance. Then she returned.

  ‘He was on his way to the airport. He was on his way home.’

  ‘No, mum, this can’t be right. There’s been a mistake.’

  ‘He was on his way home,’ she repeated, her voice trembling but insistent. ‘His car was hit by a lorry that had lost control. It was carrying some kind of dangerous chemicals and there was an enormous explosion. He died immediately. He probably didn’t know anything about it. He didn’t suffer.’

  She sobbed again and he moved back into her arms and let his head fall onto her shoulder. They stood together wordless for several long moments, stunned.

  As an only child, Matt had little competition for his father’s attention. People always said how alike the two of them were. They looked the same, they shared many interests, they had the same mannerisms. Matt’s father was proud of his clever and curious son, and he delighted in answering his questions, sharing his experiments, teaching him how to observe things and how to make things. The questions ‘how’ and ‘why’ permeated their conversations: how does this work, why is it built like that, why did people make it this way.

  Three months on, Matt still couldn’t make any sense of his father’s death. He knew that he shouldn’t expect death to make any sense: it was just a design flaw, a horrendous accident at the heart of human life. But the loss of his father was too big an event for him to allow it to be meaningless. He still couldn’t accept that he would never see his father again – not unless he could find a reason why it happened, or a way to make some sense of it.

  And there was guilt. The conversations with his dad had mostly been one-way. They talked and laughed about Matt’s plans, Matt’s concerns, Matt’s questions. Very rarely had Matt thought to ask his father what was going on in his world. Matt knew this was normal; this was how parents and children behave. But it didn’t stop him feeling guilty. Irrationally but profoundly, he felt he had neglected his own father.

  At that moment, leaning against a wall in his old school, he realised that over the last few days and weeks an important decision had been gestating. Now it made itself known to him. He was going to follow in his father’s footsteps, and become a neuroscientist.

  Matt was under no illusion that his father had been on the path towards a Nobel Prize. He used to observe that very few scientists make dramatic breakthrough discoveries, especially these days when no individual can hope to remain abreast of every development in their own field, never mind across the whole of science. But he also said that almost every research project contributes something to the development of its field. He compared scientists to ants, carrying tiny pieces of information back to the nest, each adding something small but valuable to the pile of knowledge. Neuroscience was a worthwhile area. If Matt could make a contribution, even a minor contribution, then maybe – just maybe – he could give some meaning to his father’s death.

  Lost in these thoughts, he didn’t notice Jemma approach.

  ‘Penny for them’ she whispered, placing her hand on his shoulder.

  ‘What? Oh, sorry . . .’ he said, startled.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts,’ she said in a more normal voice. ‘Although looking at you, I suspect they’d be worth more.’

  He smiled, grateful that the interruption was by Jemma rather than anyone else. His attention snapped back to the present.

  ‘Worth less, I’m afraid. Worthless, even.’

  ‘I doubt that: you’re a deep one, Matt Metcalfe. Come on. I’ll buy you a coffee.’

  ‘Uh, no thanks, I just had one.’ He noticed Jemma try but fail to stop the disappointment from appearing on her face, and relented. ‘But I could use a hot chocolate.’ He smiled as her face brightened. Carl was right, of course. With her short, light-brown hair in a bob and her brown, smiling eyes, she was a great-looking girl. She was acutely intelligent, funny and kind. He liked her, and she liked him. It was just that that he normally didn’t really notice her because she was so greatly outshone by Alice.

  ‘What are you doing here anyway?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m picking up a couple of books I lent somebody. I should ask the same of you.’

  He smiled again. ‘I was catching up with Simon Jones. We were . . . um, you know . . . we were just discussing the future of the human race.’

  FIVE

  As he approached his house, Matt reflected that dinner at home had become a solemn affair since the death of his father. His mother was an undemonstrative woman, often wrapped up in her work and not much given to small talk or banter. Her remoteness had naturally been deepened by the tragic loss of her husband.

  Like Matt’s father, Sophie had left school aiming for a career as a research scientist. Her first degree would certainly have made this possible, but she and David had already fallen in love. They wanted children and she felt it would be risky to have a family dependent on the ever-precarious budgets of research science. David tried to dissuade her, but she went ahead and trained to be a doctor, and then opted to be a GP rather than a hospital clinician. Being a GP in an established practice gave her the flexibility to experience a full family life, but she found it intellectually constraining, and she was occasionally judgmental about some of her patients. She did not consider herself to be a woman who had made difficult sacrifices, but she gradually became slightly impatient, and prone to occasional caustic comments. Her speech was direct, brisk and clipped. Some of her colleagues and neighbours were intimidated by her, and she did not form new friendships easily. Especially after David’s death, her face in repose had become strained and severe.

  Matt was easy-going in most situations, but he was reserved and slightly formal with his mother. Neither she nor Matt considered their relationship a problem, and there was certainly no hostility, but it was functional rather than playful. With David, the house had been lively, brightened by enquiry, games and challenge. Now it was a quiet place.

  A group of Matt’s friends from college had organised a skiing trip over the Christmas break. It was a last hurrah before they knuckled down to revising for their final exams in the summer, and everyone was going. Matt had declined the invitation in order to be with his mother over the break: he did not want her to be alone during the first Christmas without Dad.

  He walked up the path towards the front door. Physically, it was an attractive house. It was a detached Georgian cottage, set back from a small road which branched off their small town’s high street. From the gate it looked like a toddler’s picture of what a house should be: a short, twisty path leading through empty flowerbeds currently dotted with snow, and past a couple of low leafless fruit trees up to a pastel green door, flanked by two symmetrical 12-pane windows, with three matching windows in the floor above. The face of the house was white plaster, with naked wisteria branches stretching lazily between the rows of windows. The roof was constructed of period tiles in good condition, but daubed with patches of yellow lichen and pale green moss, as well as more dabs of snow. Small windows at both ends of the gable roof indicated the presence of the attic bedroom which ran the length of the building. It looked like a picture postcard cottage, hunkered down for the winter, and waiting patiently for summer to bring back its colour and its finery.

  Inside, the house had seen changes down the years, as tastes and fashions evolved and looped back on themselves. Today it had stripped wooden floors with huge rugs, solid, practical furniture and off-white walls. Floor polish was the dominant aroma. The front door opened onto a broad hallway which ended in stairs leading to the bedrooms. Through a door on the left of the hall was an open-plan kitchen di
ning room, and a living room study of the same dimensions lay on the right. At the back of the house, through the dining room, lay a welcoming 30-foot lawn ending in a high Victorian garden wall.

  ‘Hi darling,’ Sophie called out as he walked through the front door. ‘Good day?’

  ‘Fine thanks,’ he replied as he put his head round the door of the living room where she was sitting on a broad leather sofa with her hands resting on the keyboard of her laptop. Sophie had been strikingly attractive in her youth, and Matt was aware that people who didn’t know them thought that she and David were an unlikely match. She dressed smartly and conservatively. As usual, she was wearing her steel grey hair in a bun, and with her green eyes and high cheekbones, she was still a handsome, if slightly forbidding woman.

  ‘How was Simon?’

  ‘He’s fine. Sends his regards.’ He thought of the conversation with Simon, and the decision it had crystallised. He knew that mentioning it would make his mother think of his dad, which would be uncomfortable for both of them. But it had to be faced sooner or later. He sat down opposite her. ‘He got me thinking about careers again. I think I want to go into neuroscience.’

  Sophie closed the lid of her computer and appraised her son. Then she looked away, distracted, and said simply, ‘Well, your father would be very proud.’ He heard the catch in her voice, and hoped he hadn’t brought it up too soon. He leaned forwards, speaking gently.

  ‘It’s not just because of dad, mum. It’s a fascinating area, and there’s so much progress going on right now.’

  Sophie looked at him and smiled sadly. ‘You’re right, darling. It’s a perfectly good idea. It’s just . . . you know . . . memories.’ She took a deep breath and brightened her face. ‘I tell you what. I’ll call your uncle Leo after dinner and see if he has any ideas. Better still, if he has any connections.’