Murmuration

by T. J. Klune

  The only other sounds are the beeps of the machines around them.

  “In this case,” Dr. Hester says, “it was FTD. Frontotemporal dementia. Remember what I told you about muscles? About the brain?”

  They can. Mike and Greg both remember. “They can atrophy.”

  Dr. Hester nods. “Yes. They can. If not used, the muscles of the body can atrophy. But I use my brain. I use it every day. I use it to the fullest extent that I can. I am one of the greatest minds in my field, perhaps the greatest. My understanding of the brain goes far beyond anything that you could even comprehend. It’s fascinating, just how deep the mind can go. What it’s capable of. The nervous system. Most people don’t even think about it. But do you know how miraculous it is? That it’s evolved in the way that it has, that it functions as it does. It is most likely the greatest achievement mankind has ever known, and the only thing we did to earn it is to survive. We are made of the dust from stars, and this is what we’ve become.”

  He sighs. “Today is one of my good days. I don’t have them much anymore. Five years ago, I was at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. One moment, I’m sitting in my office, trying to fill out a damn expense report for a conference I’d gone to, and the next… well. The next moment, I’d forgotten who I was.” He shakes his head. “They found me wandering in the pediatric ward, muttering to myself about horses and shadows. I was scaring the children. I came out of it a few hours later.

  “I was diagnosed with a form of FTD a few months later. Pick’s disease. A rare neurodegenerative condition that progressively destroys the brain cells. There is already dementia. And aphasia, though it comes and goes. It’s fatal, though it can take anywhere from two to ten years. I’m one of the lucky ones. So far. But every day I can feel it. It gets just a little bit worse.”

  “What does that have to do with me?” Mike or Greg asks. They don’t know which, though they don’t think that it matters.

  “Nothing,” Dr. Hester said. “At least, at first. You were just a name on the television, your face splashed across the news as being arrested for the murder of your wife. A high-powered DC moneyman with the dutiful pretty wife. America loves that sort of thing. I don’t know why. Maybe because it’s happening to someone else and they can judge to their hearts’ content. You were found guilty by the court of public opinion before you ever stood in front of a judge and jury. A husband usually does it. And you didn’t deny it, you just told a story that the people didn’t want to believe. And then the video found on her computer. Where she claimed to live in fear of you. It was all very… pat, if you ask me, but no one did.”

  “I don’t remember. Any of it.”

  “No. Probably not. A side effect of the encephalitis, the beta-blockers, and being cryogenically frozen for three years. It may come. In time.”

  And that’s… that’s almost too much to take. “Why?” he asks, because he doesn’t understand. He’s Mike now, he’s Mike and he doesn’t understand cryogenically frozen and encephalitis. He doesn’t understand beta-blockers, just that it sounds like They Came from Outer Space. He doesn’t know how this is going to help him get home. That’s all he wants. He just wants to go back home.

  “You were found guilty. You went to jail. You got less time than her family wanted. Forty-seven days into your sentence, you were beaten quite viciously in the prison showers. Rumors were her family paid someone off. Or that you’d pissed off the wrong people inside. Or they just didn’t like your face. You were found eighteen minutes after. You were nearly unrecognizable. I’m told it was quite… bloody.”

  Mike breathes.

  Greg chokes.

  “Both arms were broken, both legs. Your fingers. Orbital socket on the left side, same as your cheekbone. Your sternum. But the most severe injury came from your skull being cracked in four places. Your brain was swelling. There was surgery, of course, but by then you’d contracted an infection which led to viral encephalitis. Your brain was inflamed. You fell into a coma. Part of your skull is a metal plate now. It was the only way they could… no matter. That’s when I found you.”

  “For what,” Greg asks in a dead voice.

  Mike says nothing, because he’s thinking of Sean, of the dance they could have shared. Of the way he smiles his just-for-Mike smile, and Mike dies a little then. His heart cracks, splits, sinking in on itself.

  “Project Amorea,” Dr. Hester says. He sounds exhausted. “An idea of preservation born out of my own desperation. I am living on borrowed time. I thought if I… found a way to cheat, to not stop, but to slow the process, I’d find the answers I sought.” He glances at Dr. King, who has remained silent since he’d entered the room. He studies her for a moment, then looks back at Mike and Greg. “I’m scared,” he admits, voice cracking. “I shouldn’t be. I’m a rational man who knows nothing but rational thought. I don’t believe in Heaven. I don’t believe in Hell. I don’t believe life energies return to the cosmos or other such nonsense. No, I think when we die, when that little candle that flares within us is finally snuffed out, that’s it. That’s all there is. That nothing but darkness awaits us all, and that everything we’ve done, every single part of our lives, none of it matters. We are here for however short or long we are, and that is all there is. And I couldn’t stand that thought. That my life has been leading to this, that I’ve sacrificed everything I have only to have the very thing I’ve attempted to push the boundaries of turn around and betray me. It terrified me. It still does, even though I know so much more.”

  “What did you do?” Mike demands, shoving Greg to the side. “What the hell did you do to me?”

  “I made Amorea,” he says, hands shaking, “out of nothing. It’s almost an exact replication of the little town I grew up in, that idealized version of Americana that everyone fondly remembers, even if they never lived in it. The 1950s were… different. The wars were over. The economy was surging. America had asserted itself as a dominant superpower. We were… different then. We were happier. And I wanted to go back to that. So I made Amorea. I made the town. The buildings. The streets and the trees and the wind that blows. The grass. The fountain in the park. The house you slept in. Your toothbrush. Your shoes. Your cat. The clothes on your back. I can’t take full credit for it, obviously, for as much as I know about the way the mind works, I’m quite embarrassingly technologically inept. But I had the ideas. And I was able to find the talent to make this a reality. Well. An unreality, maybe.”

  “No,” Mike says. “You’re lying. That’s not—”

  “Amorea is a construct,” Dr. Hester says. “A simulation, albeit a very good one. It exists in nothing but lines of code and in the crumbling mind of a tired old man. I built it from the ground up, but I never used a hammer or nails. I paved its roadways, but never left the scan room. Every corner you’ve seen is lovingly crafted with nothing but thought. I created Amorea as an experiment. To give those whose minds were all but gone a chance to live a life. To see if perhaps it would slow the degeneration. From trauma. Disease. Infection. Hypoxia. I made Amorea, Mr. Hughes, selfishly. Because I wanted a place where I could go and live my life in hopes that I would be free from the horrors that are certain to be in my future.”

  “The people,” Mike says hoarsely. “All those people. In Amorea. My friends. My—” He can’t finish that last thought.

  “Are real,” Dr. Hester says. “To an extent. That extent being that they were once like you. They lived and breathed and walked this earth. Like you, a tragedy occurred. Whether involuntary or self-inflicted, they found themselves in comas with almost no chance of ever waking up. I thought I was giving them a gift. As long as they weren’t brain-dead, I could manipulate their brainwaves into thinking whatever I wanted. Their bodies were useless, but their minds? Mr. Hughes, the mind is a powerful thing, capable of so much beauty. And so much destruction.”

  He closes his eyes and tilts his head back. “I picked them myself. All one hundred and thirty-eight of you. People without family. Without ties. The scourg
e of society. The destitute. The forgotten. Those that wouldn’t have anyone miss them if they were gone. I gave them a place to go in hopes of finding my own way home when it was time.”

  He shakes his head. “And then you happened.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Greg asks hoarsely. “What have you done?”

  Dr. Hester’s eyes slide toward unfocused and he slumps a little, staring off into nothing. Greg glances at Dr. King, but she shakes her head. “Give it a minute. This happens. Sometimes. If it goes on longer than a minute, the rest of this will have to wait until another time.”

  “No,” Greg snaps. “I want answers.”

  Mike says, “I want to go home, oh Jesus. Oh god. Please just let me—”

  Dr. Hester coughs. He blinks once. Twice. And then, “Sorry about that. I got a little lost.” He looks around the room, nodding at Dr. King, then looking back at Greg and Mike. “I’m old. That’s not something even I can stop. It’s inevitable, you know. Where were we?”

  “You picked me,” Greg said with a growl. “You took me from—”

  Dr. Hester laughed weakly. “I took you from a hospital room where you’d been without a visitor in four months. I took you from a place where not a single person gave a damn whether you lived or not. Did you know that a reporter snuck past hospital security to take photographs of you? They splashed them across the tabloids, you swollen and broken, hooked up to more machines than the general population even knew existed. And how they loved it. They ate it up. They said it was what you deserved. That it was karma. Divine retribution. That your poor, poor wife deserved more than you ever gave her. That she lived in fear of you until one day you just snapped and killed her. That’s what I took you from, Mr. Hughes.”

  “I didn’t….” But honestly, Greg doesn’t know what he did. He knows the anger that’s burning inside him, knows it’s a familiar thing, knows he grew up in a home where violence was a normal thing. For all he knows, maybe he did do it.

  No, Mike thinks, though his voice is rather lifeless. There was a knife. You called it a Wüsthof Ikon Damascus. She came after you. She was angry. You didn’t—

  “It doesn’t matter,” Dr. Hester says. “Not anymore. I saved you. From a life where you would have been nothing but a husk lying in a room where no one cared one iota about your well-being.”

  “Like I am now?” Greg asks.

  Dr. Hester doesn’t even flinch. “I know what it seems like now. I know what you’re thinking. But I cared enough to give you a second chance. To give you something more.”

  “You did it for yourself.”

  “All motives are selfish, Mr. Hughes. They always are. Yes, I did it for myself. But I also did it for those who would come after me. I did it in hopes of giving them a chance for something more, even if their minds begin to fracture.”

  Mike thinks, What do you know about schizophrenia?

  “How do I know you’re telling the truth?” Greg asks. “How do I know any of this is real?”

  “He’s in there, isn’t he?” Dr. Hester asks, cocking his head. Even Dr. King begins to look on with far more interest. “In your head.”

  Greg says nothing.

  “Early on, we ran into some difficulties. We put the first few people into Amorea just as they were. We uploaded the consciousness without any significant alterations, aside from tamping down the more extreme emotions. It went well at first. Those six people went on as if they’d lived there their entire lives. But then they began to ask questions. Why am I here? Where did I come from? What is this place? Is this real?”

  Mike thinks, Yes. That. All of that.

  “Have you ever watched someone go insane, Mr. Hughes? It’s a terrible thing. We can’t see into Amorea, not clearly, not like you’re thinking. It’s not some Orwellian nightmare where we know your every single move. No. We get bits and pieces that have to be put together like the most complex three-dimensional puzzle. In studying the brain waves, it’s like seeing a picture that’s been filtered too many times. Like a dream that you can remember, but only just.” He chuckles. “It was more than I’d ever thought we’d get, honestly. But it didn’t last very long. Those six, they… it was terrible to watch.”

  “Then why did you?” Mike asks, voice cold.

  “Because in every experiment, there is going to be trial and error. It’s basic science. There are going to be failures. There are going to be times that you have to go back to the drawing board. And that’s what we did. After… well, after that failure, we started over. And it came to me then that if the people couldn’t be themselves, if they couldn’t be in Amorea and be as they’d been in life, couldn’t they be someone else? After all, Amorea was meant to be the best possible place it could be. Why couldn’t the same be said about the people?”

  Mike thinks, I’m real. I’m real. I’m real.

  “Mike Frazier is the better part of you,” Dr. Hester says, leaning forward. He’s doesn’t reach out for them, which is a good thing. They’re both wound too tightly. “We took away the anger. The rage. The sins of mankind, I suppose you could say. We gave you a different name, so that you couldn’t be triggered into believing you were Gregory Hughes. Mike Frazier is a mask. He’s a costume. Like a child playing dress-up. Mike Frazier is not real.”

  Mike says, “I am real. I am real, you bastard. You asshole. I am real.”

  “Perhaps we should—” Dr. King starts.

  “You feel it, don’t you?” Dr. Hester says, eyes glinting. “A divide. In your head. You think you’re one person, but you also think you’re another. That will fade. In time. Mike Frazier will fade from you. He speaks for you, and you can hear him in your head, but soon, that will stop. Your memories might return. They might not. I don’t know.”

  Greg thinks, Let me, Mike. Let me, let me do this.

  Mike thinks, I’m real! I’m real! I’m real!

  “Do you remember Amorea?” Dr. Hester asks.

  “Yes,” Greg says. “Why am I different? Why did those things happen to me?”

  “We don’t know. Your brain waves were always different. Up until a few years ago, flatline was considered to be the deepest form of a coma. After all, if one is brain-dead, how much further could one go? But there was something beyond that. Something more. In the deepest comas, beyond the flatline, there are electrical waves called Nu-complexes. They originate in the hippocampus, which is the center for emotion and memory. And that’s where you were, Mr. Hughes. The deepest state.”

  “Emotion and memory,” Greg says.

  “Yes,” Dr. Hester says. “And you pulled someone there with you. So much so that your Nu-complexes began to sync up. Began to mirror each other. It was something so… astonishing that we pulled you out of Amorea and put you back in, just to see what would happen. You were a blank slate for only a short amount of time while the rest of Amorea remained on hold. But when we put you back in, when you became plugged back in to Amorea, you synced up again with him. Almost immediately.”

  “Sean,” Mike says. “Sean.”

  Dr. Hester smiles. It carries with it a melancholic curve. “Sean Mellgard. Or Nathan Powell, as he’s known in the real world.” The smile fades. “Drug addict. Heroin was his choice du jour, or so I’m told. Got hooked at age fourteen. Overdosed at nineteen. They found him choked almost to death on his own vomit in his car, parked under an overpass in Detroit. By the time they got to him, the oxygen to his brain had been cut off for upward of seven minutes. That and the combination of drugs in his system led to his nervous system shutting down.”

  “He gets migraines,” Mike whispers, because he doesn’t know what else to say. “They hurt.”

  “We know,” Dr. King says, not unkindly. “We think it’s his body’s way of still fighting addiction, even after all this time. Which is why Dr. Hester introduced the Ercaf to Amorea for him to take. Ercaf was a popular migraine medication beginning early in the 1950s. He wanted to make sure the experience was… authentic.” She says this last with a
trace of scorn, but Dr. Hester either doesn’t hear it or chooses to ignore it.

  “The Nu-complexes began to move in sync with each other. We’d never seen anything like it before. For all intents and purposes, Mr. Powell—Sean—was brain-dead, with the barest blips of alpha waves. But from the moment you were sent to Amorea, that began to change.” He sounds excited. He’s practically vibrating from it. Mike and Greg are sickened by the sight of him. “You were the last person we introduced into the environment. Not because of anything mundane like lack of funding, no. We’d felt we’d achieved the exact number needed to have Amorea become a thriving town on its own, with as little interference from us as possible. But then you came.”

  He cocks his head at them. “Tell me, Mr. Hughes. Mr. Frazier. What is so different about you than everyone else?”

  “Nothing,” Greg says.

  “None of this is real,” Mike says. “You’re lying. None of this is real. None of this is—”

  “You remembered, didn’t you?” Dr. Hester says. “While you were in Amorea. You remembered things about being Greg Hughes.”

  “Yes,” Greg says.

  “Not real,” Mike chants. “Not real. Not real.”

  Greg thinks, Let me.

  Mike thinks, It hurts. Oh my god, it hurts. I just want to go home.

  Greg thinks, I know.

  “We thought you did,” Dr. King says. “It was… surprising, to say the least.” She glares at Dr. Hester before continuing. “We thought that your real persona was breaking through your Amorea life at first. And maybe that wasn’t too far off the mark. It took us longer than it should have to realize what was actually going on.”

  “I was waking up,” Greg says. “I was coming out of the coma.”

  “Yes,” Dr. Hester says. “I don’t use the word miracle, Mr. Hughes. Ever. Modern science has no place for miracles. But here you are, as close to one as I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime. And I think it was because of the deep coma. The syncing of your brain waves with Sean Mellgard’s.”