Codename- Ubiquity

by Wendy Devore

  I put away my phone and reached into my bag for this month’s copy of Vogue, my one guilty pleasure. Though my lack of personal style in no way reflected it, I adored the art and symmetry of high fashion. Never mind that I’d never in a thousand years be able to afford that kind of luxury.

  The trees that lined Palm Drive stood like sentinels standing watch over Stanford University’s iconic Quad. I took the first campus stop, right at the end of the lushly landscaped green oval. It was a longer walk, but I liked to stroll through the Quad, its inspiring sandstone arches perfectly framing the Romanesque splendor of Memorial Church.

  I headed toward the building housing the Cognitive Imaging Systems Research Lab where I shared a small office with three other graduate students. The lab was under the joint direction of the departments of electrical engineering, computer science, and medicine, and I was extremely fortunate to work for the lab’s founder, Dr. Christopher Daniels. I’d actually met Dr. Daniels a dozen years before, when he was still a post-doc at the University of Illinois, and I was a dangerously sleep-deprived child suffering from years of untreatable, debilitating night terrors. My entire college career had been leading up to this singular goal: I was my own built-in research project, and if I could only secure the funding to free up my time and get unrestricted access to an fMRI machine, then I could finally understand how to fix my broken brain. When Dr. Daniels found the call for applications to the Breckinridge Fellowship in last month’s Journal of Sleep Research, I knew I had to apply.

  I poked my head into Dr. Daniels’s office on my way to the grad student office. He was busy reshelving texts from the stack on his desk

  “You look very nice today,” he remarked.

  I felt a little self-conscious but smiled in return. “Thanks,” I said.

  “You look a bit fatigued. Are you having trouble sleeping? Experiencing any—”

  The nightmarish groans of the earthquake roared fiercely in my ears, drowning out the sound of his voice. I closed my eyes and took another deep breath.

  “What did you say, Dr. Daniels?”

  He paused for a moment, cocked his head, and narrowed his eyes. “I asked if you had experienced any night terrors or other disturbances?”

  If I told him about the relapse, he’d send me home to rest for a week. I’d miss my interview. This was not going to happen.

  I straightened my spine and looked him directly in the eye.

  “I’m fine. Just stayed up a bit too late. What’s up?”

  Dr. Daniels gave me a wary look but seemed to dismiss his misgivings. “I need those results on the EEG parasomnia data by end-of-day today,” he mentioned, shoving the last book into place.

  “No problem. I’ve almost got the bugs worked out of the code,” I assured him. “Anything else?”

  “I’ve done some digging into the Breckinridge Fellowship,” he said, stroking the neat black beard on his chin as he always did just before he was about to impart some wisdom. “It’s a new grant program, so there’s very little information regarding the types of students or research pathways that they’re interested in funding. However, word through the grapevine is that Breckinridge’s company is expanding his biomedical devices program. So definitely play up your role in our EEG research.”

  I frowned. “Then why would they advertise the call for applications in the Journal of Sleep Research?”

  Dr. Daniels shrugged, but his smile was warm and encouraging. “Beats me, but it’s definitely right up your alley. With a grant of that size, we’d definitely be able to free you up to get started on your pet project. You’d be able to spend all the time in the fMRI that you could handle.”

  “You think I stand a chance?”

  He patted my shoulder. “If anyone around here does, it’s you.”

  The grad student office was windowless, cramped, impersonal, and completely devoid of other grad students. Four simple veneer-topped tables pushed into a cluster in the middle of the room defined the space, and roll-away office drawers sat below each workspace. My tidy desk stood in stark contrast to the piles of paperwork, sticky notes, computer peripherals, and general disorder cluttering the workspaces of my officemates. Atop a particularly chaotic heap of spider-lined EEG traces on Yoshi’s desk sat a wooden sign that read “A cluttered desk is a sign of genius.”

  I snorted at the thought and dropped my bag on the desk before waking my laptop. I intended to take full advantage of the quiet to check out the latest version of the code we were developing. I hoped that this deadline would take my mind off the impending doom that overwhelmed me every time I imagined standing in front of the interview panel.

  I stared blankly at the screen, trying unsuccessfully to squash the stubborn bug that was breaking my code. I rubbed the back of my neck, stood up, and stretched. Despite my best efforts, the looming interview was making it impossible to concentrate. At that moment, Jeff, Silvan, and Yoshi strolled in, locked in animated conversation.

  I hunched over immediately, concerned about my almost-too-short hemline.

  “Whoa!” Jeff called, taking an exaggerated step back. “Who the hell let a girl in here? She’s dressed up like a country bride,” he hooted.

  “Dressed to impress for the interview?” Yoshi’s knowing nod was equally irritating.

  I glared at Jeff and slid back into my seat, tugging at the bottom of the dress. Hoping my agitation wasn’t showing, I affected my coolest stare as I stuck in my earbuds, called up a techno instrumental mix, and dove back into the code.

  Even with the techno blasting, it was easy to overhear their conversation.

  Yoshi leaned back in his office chair and hucked a squishy stress ball toward the ceiling. Jeff caught it easily on the rebound, passing it hand to hand and kneading it in a way that somehow struck me as salacious.

  “Ashley invited me to dinner to meet her parents,” Yoshi complained, motioning for the ball and cupping his hands.

  Jeff whipped it back to him. “Ho-boy. I’ll tell you what,” Jeff suggested, propping his massive, well-worn cowboy boots on his desk. “Let’s head out for a beer tonight and talk about the reasons why you should immediately break up with that crazy chick!”

  Silvan chuckled. “Sounds like another office hours session at the Dutch Goose.”

  Yoshi shook his head. “No way, man. She’ll kill me if she knows I’ve been hanging out at a dive bar with you two.”

  “Nah,” Jeff drawled with his big Texan grin. “Just tell her it’s a lab celebration—we’ll say it’s Katie’s birthday. Say we’re all going, and you can’t say no.”

  I nearly did a double take. I never went out with the other grad students. Actually, I never went out—with anyone. I bit my lip and scrutinized Jeff and Yoshi, racking my brain for an excuse to beg off a night of drinking.

  Yoshi shrugged. “Okay, well, then…the Goose it is. Ashley never needs to know that it’s a boys’ night out.”

  I dropped my gaze deliberately to my keyboard, blinking hard. The slight stung more than I’d expected. But I suppose it was just as well. A night out drinking with “the boys” was really not something that fit into my regimen for avoiding debilitating night terrors—or, at least, I suspected it wouldn’t be wise, if in fact I had ever actually tried it. I took a deep breath, cranked up the music, and sank back into the safety of my work, determined to focus.

  Jeff’s tap on my shoulder was so unexpected I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  “It’s interview time, girlie-o!” he sang, giving me a completely inappropriate wink.

  My palms immediately went clammy. This was it; now or never. I closed my laptop, slid my feet back into the kitten heels I’d kicked off under the desk, and tried to rise gracefully from my chair without showing too much leg. I noticed that Jeff waited to follow me out of the room, and I hoped he wasn’t staring at my ass.

  As we headed to the seminar room where the panel interviews were to be held, the cold sweat spread.

  Jeff was up first, so I sat outside the
room and agonized while I waited. I popped open my laptop, thinking I’d fill the time by finishing some work, but instead I stared vacantly at the blinking cursor, my mind simultaneously racing yet blank. Pools of sweat formed beneath my armpits. I had a feeling Michelle was going to regret loaning me her dress.

  It seemed like ages before Jeff finally strode out of the room, completely relaxed and with a mammoth smirk on his face.

  “No worries, little lady, they’re a bunch of pussycats. We spent most of the time shootin’ the breeze. Those boys sure have a thing or two to say about the women’s basketball team. Good luck. See you back at the ranch.”

  He winked at me again. If he wore a ten-gallon hat, he would have tipped it toward me. I hated that guy sometimes.

  I took a deep breath, dry-swallowed, gathered my laptop, and marched into the room, trying to look more confident than I felt.

  Three conference tables were arranged in a semicircle, and I quickly counted ten interviewers. All of them were men, all of them were over sixty, and all of them were wearing dark suits. Not my kind of crowd.

  I sat in a chair in the center of the tables and waited. The longer I sat, the shorter and less confident I felt. It was as if I’d time traveled to the Spanish Inquisition.

  The interviewers shuffled stacks of papers and glanced at one another, but no one spoke and no one would look me in the eye.

  Just when I thought I’d have to begin the interview myself, the door flew open, and a tall, gaunt man with a mane of silver hair strode purposefully into the room. His piercing, glacial gaze conveyed complete authority. His exquisitely tailored, crisply pressed navy sharkskin suit gave him the air of an aged, menacing James Bond. He was clearly older than my parents, yet his flinty expression radiated a vitality that was equal parts mesmerizing and intimidating. The force of his personality was so great that his presence alone filled the room with a palpable sense of gravity. I felt my shoulder muscles form an instant knot, and I fought the urge to shrink back into a dark corner. The interviewers uniformly straightened in their seats but maintained total deferential silence.

  The newcomer stood between me and the rest of the panel, leaned against the table, and snatched my application from the lead interviewer’s hands. He paged quickly through the document.

  “Good afternoon, Ms. Rathman, I’m Andric Breckinridge. Let’s just get a few preliminary questions out the way.”

  I gulped and nodded, spine ramrod straight and bare knees glued together. I clenched my clammy palms and tried to breathe slowly.

  Andric Breckinridge stared at me with his cold aquamarine eyes.

  “Tell me about your undergrad work.”

  I struggled to maintain eye contact. The sound of my own heartbeat pounding in my ears made thinking impossible. I looked away and composed myself. “Well, sir, I’ve been a student at Stanford for the last six years. I did my undergrad in electrical engineering here. My master’s is in computer science. I am currently pursuing my PhD with Dr. Daniels.”

  He frowned and glanced at my application. “You didn’t start your undergraduate program immediately after graduating from high school?”

  “I was actually homeschooled. I had some, uh, medical issues that prevented me from starting college immediately.”

  “And this means your age is…” Breckinridge probed.

  This seemed like a completely inappropriate question.

  I glanced nervously around the room. Was my age a problem? “Sir, I’m twenty-eight.”

  Breckinridge cast a withering look in my direction. “You’re no child prodigy, then. Perhaps your social isolation explains why you chose to wear a cocktail dress to an interview instead of appropriate business attire.”

  I shrank in my seat.

  “Do enlighten us, Ms. Rathman—how is it that you find yourself working with Dr. Daniels?”

  I took a deep, centering breath and tried to keep the tremor out of my voice. “Well, sir, I have been a patient of Dr. Daniels for many years. When Dr. Daniels came to Stanford to lead the Cognitive Imaging Systems Research Lab, he invited me to participate in his PhD program. Under his guidance, I have been writing algorithms to analyze electrophysiology for a variety of projects and trials.”

  “Certainly not the standard method of admission.”

  “There’s no favoritism,” I stuttered. “I work hard, just like all the other grad students.”

  Breckinridge pursed his lips and shuffled through my application again. “I’m not hoping to fund ‘all the other grad students.’ I’m seeking an exceptional candidate. What makes you a worthy investment?”

  I clutched my shaking hands together tightly, blinked hard, and composed my thoughts.

  “I understand your company is developing new biomedical devices. My current project uses a combination of fMRI and electroencephalography—EEG, of course—to further understand the biology of parasomnias—that is, sleepwalking, nightmares, night terrors, etcetera. Using the two technologies together presents some interesting problems, since the strong magnetic field of the MRI introduces artifacts which generally render the EEG unreadable, but after several months of trial and error, I’ve managed to write some algorithms that can filter out many of the artifacts so that a clearer picture of the patient’s neurological status can emerge.”

  “You’ve written algorithms. Do you mean that you’ve implemented Christopher Daniels’s algorithms?”

  Had I misspoken? I rubbed my sweaty palms together and licked my dry, cracking lips. “No, sir. I developed several algorithms to define the data.”

  He segued into seemingly endless grilling, as Breckinridge asked me to explain the logic of each of my algorithms on the whiteboard. That was followed by multiple requests to write sample code in several different programming languages. Finally, he demanded a detailed explanation of the inner workings of functional magnetic resonance imaging and the complex statistical procedures that are used to cut through noise corruption to extract the underlying signal. None of the ten other interviewers in the room spoke a single word.

  Breckinridge paced as I left the whiteboard and dropped heavily into to my seat. The cold sweat had drenched my body, and the tips of my fingers and toes had gone numb from the strain of trying to withstand the formidable disapproval of this man.

  “One final question.” His long pause unnerved me. What incredibly complicated subject could he possibly broach now?

  “What research will you pursue if you are the recipient of this grant?”

  For the first time since I entered the room, I managed a genuine smile. That simple act was enough to flood my body with endorphins. My heartbeat slowed and my body relaxed, just enough to allow me to look him in the eye with some real confidence.

  “I suffer from a rare sleep condition—extreme night terrors that present with an unusual REM pattern in EEG. I would like to further understand the source of my disorder, which I believe I can do by monitoring the dreams using fMRI. Ultimately, I want to find a cure.”

  Breckinridge stiffened and slightly cocked his head. His newfound interest was somehow even more disconcerting than his presumption that I was clueless, and my self-assurance withered.

  “What is the content and structure of these night terrors?”

  I unconsciously clutched at the hem of my dress and twisted the silky fabric in my fist. “They are extremely vivid sensory experiences, sir, firmly rooted in realism.”

  His chin jutted forward and he took a step closer. “Do you experience bizarre or hallucinatory images? Imaginary creatures? Do you fall or fly?”

  I breathed in sharply; the horrible sight of the woman screaming as her home crashed upon her replayed before me. The musty scent of plaster dust overtook my senses, and the reverberation of crashing glass windowpanes rang through the room. I closed my eyes tightly and took two slow, deep breaths, waiting for the vision to subside.

  “Ms. Rathman, are you unwell?” His callous tone contradicted the concern in his words.

  I pri
ed open my eyes, thankful that the only sound I detected was the hiss of the room’s ventilation.

  “Yes, sir. I’m fine. The answer to your question is no; these night terrors are not, in fact, dreamlike in any way. The normal laws of physics and time always apply. There are never any magical creatures or superpowers.” Which is why they are so damn terrifying, I thought, making the conscious effort to quiet my mind so that last night’s carnage wouldn’t creep back in.

  Andric Breckinridge’s aloof expression had suddenly morphed into something even more unsettling. His keen eyes gleamed with laser-sharp interest.

  “Show me the abnormal EEG.”

  I lifted my laptop from under my chair and typed my password with quaking fingers. My nervous tremor was completely obvious as I handed the machine to him.

  He paged through various scans, completely absorbed in the data.

  “Fascinating,” he murmured

  Back in my seat, I sat in silence, doing all I could to suppress the urge to vomit from sheer, unfettered anxiety.

  Finally, he stood and handed me the laptop. “Email copies of these EEG traces to me.”

  “I’ll send them by end-of-day.”

  His frown made the entire room seem darker. “Send them now.”

  I shrunk back a bit more in my seat but immediately complied.

  “The recipient of the fellowship will be announced in January,” he said in his clipped and precise manner. Without another word, he turned and left the room.

  When I returned to the grad student office, I was mentally exhausted and sweating like a pig.

  Jeff looked up from his desk. “You’ve been gone a good long while, darlin’. How’d it go?”