by Robert Berke
Myra Shiltz was another frequent visitor. She had been his personal assistant for nearly ten years. He had barely noticed her until he became less and less able to conduct his affairs on his own. Now he recognized and genuinely appreciated her ability to anticipate his needs and carry out his instructions-- the same qualities which had made her virtually unnoticeable to him in the past. Now, she was truly just an extension of himself. His staff saw her as an extension of him too. Because of that Myra was able to control office affairs even with Smith gone. Smith once quipped that because of Myra he could be dead for five years before anyone at the office would notice. He trusted her completely notwithstanding the fact that he had no other choice.
Alice, his night nurse, kept watch over Smith when Hermelinda couldn't. Even though Hermelinda was there most of the time, she had to watch the monitors while Hermelinda slept. She was a cheerful, middle-aged Filipina. She habitually updated Smith with the latest celebrity gossip. Though he had no interest in news of the latest Hollywood breakup, her lightheartedness gave Smith a special cheer and he always listened to her stories intently. Almost every week she would bring fresh fruits and vegetables from her own garden for Hermelinda to enjoy or to juice for Smith.
After Alice, his most frequent visitor was Dr. Bayron, his co-conspirator in the artificial brain project. Smith particularly enjoyed Dr. Bayron's visits. He felt they spoke a language that no one else quite understood. Not just the language of science, but another language known only to them that grew out of their still-secret project.
He also got occasional visits from Sam Takahashi, an old childhood friend and Smith's personal lawyer. Sam's visits began to taper off when Smith could no longer raise a glass and enjoy a drink. Sam was a famous alcoholic whose benders were legendary. Smith did not fault him for not wanting to spend good drinking hours entertaining a dying man. Smith once explained to Hermelinda, when he was still strong enough to hold full conversations, that in life a man will have very few friends he can call to pick him up in a strange city in the middle of the night with no questions asked, and that Takahashi was that friend to him. "We know each other for over 50 years," Smith assured her, "he'll be here when I need him, and no one will be able to keep him away".
The two beds in what had been the living room were close together. They had not started that way though. Smith had instructed the furniture movers to place the beds on opposite sides of the room so that Hermelinda could have some sense of privacy and personal space even though she had to be in sight of her patient. After just a few weeks of sleeping on opposite sides of the room, Hermelinda pushed her bed across the room right next to Smith's bed. She said she was tired of having to walk across the room every time Smith or one of his machines needed attention, but Smith thought, correctly, that she just liked being near him. Sometimes, when it didn't hurt too much, he would reach over to her bed and stroke her hair. She seemed to make a purring noise whenever he did so.
She did not make an excuse when she stopped sleeping in her own bed altogether and began climbing into his.
Smith liked having her close at night. He could smell her and she smelled nice, a little like roses, a little like jasmine, and a little like ... coconut? The smell made him feel safe. He wished that his body still worked well enough to be able to make love to her, but that function was one of the first to fail on his now almost completely useless body.
On a bright Monday morning Myra arrived, promptly, as usual, at 9 a.m. "Good morning, Mr. Smith," Myra said as she pulled a chair up close to his bed.
"Okay, okay everything hurts today, so let's just move the ball forward as much as possible before Hermelinda drugs me up and puts me out."
"Alright. We actually got a lot accomplished," she said. "With the additional staff and processing capacity, Dr. Bayron has changed his time estimate to one more year."
"Doesn't that son-of-a-bitch know I'm dying now? What the hell else does he need?"' Smith began to move his arms as he said this in an effort to emphasize his point, but the pain that showed in his face as he tried to move his arms made the point for him.
"Relax, relax, relax..." Myra said looking to Hermelinda to see if she was at all concerned by Smith's outburst. And in fact, when she looked at Hermelinda she saw Hermelinda looking at the monitor near Smith's bed. The two women smiled at each other, each recognizing that they shared the same concern for the man in the bed. Smith relaxed, so Myra continued, "There's more."
Smith had noticed the glance between the only two women in his life and forgot what had angered him in the first place. "Dr. Bayron has been in contact with a Russian research team at the St. Petersberg Neurological Institute who are also modeling a human brain," Myra continued. "They want to collaborate. Dr. Bayron told me to tell you that these guys already have a complete model of a hypothalamus and are well underway with the hippocampus. He said that combined with what he's gotten done, we could have a complete model in just about six weeks."
"That was not my plan. I am very concerned about that," said Smith.
"I'll get him on the web-cam right now." She said as she pulled her laptop from her bag. She pressed a few buttons on her computer and the lights in the room went dim as a large display mounted to the wall lit up with an image of Myra's desktop wallpaper of a sunset over the ocean. Myra adjusted a small webcam on Smith's notebook computer until his image appeared in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Moments later another image filled the remainder of the screen: the image of Dr. Bayron, a frayed, black spiral notebook on his desk in front of him.
Every time she saw him, Myra noticed new details about Dr. Bayron's transformation since he first began working with Smith. When she first met him, he was tall, dark, and handsome. A quiet and mysterious stranger of the sort she would have liked to have swept her off her feet. But under Smith's crushing demands, he had largely stopped taking care of himself. His face had begun to sag for lack of sleep. His movements became listless due to lack of exercise, his hair unruly for want of a haircut, and his posture stooped from too many hours hunched over a microscope.
No one in their right mind would sacrifice so much of his own life for his employer, not even someone paid as handsomely as Dr. Bayron. But Myra knew that Dr. Bayron shared her employer's obsession.
Smith spoke first. "Can you hear me?"
"Yeah. You got the news?"
"I did."
"Well, what do you think?" Bayron asked.
"Russians, my friend?" Smith asked incredulously. "I'm definitely going to want more facts."
"Like what?"
"Don't play dumb with me Bayron. You know I'm not giving you these obscene amounts of money to model any old brain. I want a model of my brain."
"I know that, but I also know time is running out. Look, I don't even know if their code is useful. It could be complete crap for all I know. Just authorize the information sharing for now. It costs you nothing and we may be able to speed our process by studying theirs. I think you need to give me a little latitude on this. Trust me, if I don't need it, I won't use it."
"It's your code, Doc. If you want to share it, that's your prerogative. Just don't go mixing up my brain with someone else's. You don't want to go creating a Frankenstein. But if I were you, I'd speak with legal before letting anything out of that lab. Between your time and my money, it's got to be worth an awful lot."
"If I thought the way you did I'd be richer than you." Bayron quipped. "I'll call legal in the morning."
Myra piped in, "Should he call in-house legal, or should he call Takahashi?"
"Nah," Smith said, "Keep this in house. Takahashi hates paperwork. I'll tell Takahashi in my own way. Bob Hanover in legal handles the intellectual property and patents. Give Bayron Hanover's extension . Someone in-house should know what we're doing anyway."
A short but clear silence followed as Bayron and Myra contemplated the fact that the project had been kept strictly need-to-know until this time.
Smith broke the silence himself, "...and
don't forget to upload your progress to me." The instruction was completely unnecessary.
"Don't micromanage me Smith." Bayron said with a smile.
"Hey, remember, I'm the rich one. Don't tell me how to do my job." They both laughed. But the pain from the laughter cut Smith's chuckle short. He winced and lost his breath. Hermelinda came rushing to the bedside. Bayron opened the notebook on his desk and wrote some shorthand notes.
"I'll call you later with that number," Myra said into the webcam and then abruptly terminated the conference to give Hermelinda space to tend to her patient.
It was evident to both Myra and Hermelinda that Smith always enjoyed his conversations with Bayron. Bayron was smart, personable, and driven. But he especially liked talking to Bayron about the project. They had their own language for discussing the things which just a few months ago had been nameless and virtually unimaginable. That lexicon was a natural part of many of their conversations. Sometimes, when talking to Bayron, Smith felt like a visitor in a foreign country who finally hears his native tongue and at once feels -- even if just for a moment -- home.
"Hermelinda," Smith called out her name as loud as he could, even though she was right next to him, "be a dear and give me some morphine. My neck hurts."
In another part of the world, another man was also in pain, and he cursed his pain. He had suffered a life of ugly and difficult work and, in his own opinion, he had earned his pain and had also earned the right to curse it. He was not the unfortunate recipient of some unfortunate disease that chose its victims, like Smith, at random. He had pain in his hands and fingers and he accepted that he deserved that pain for having used his hands in horrible ways. He could not remember how many times he splinted his own broken fingers or dressed his own wounds when proper medical care was not an option.
He rubbed a medicated menthol gel into his twisted, arthritic, and abused fingers and as he did so, each irregularity that he could feel in his bones brought back memories of a time when he was young and an intolerance for pain seemed to be a luxury afforded only to the old and the weak. A dent below the second knuckle on his left hand reminded him that some doors are made out of steel and cannot be punched through. The lump that had never fully healed on his right hand taught him that sometimes the person holding the gun is at a disadvantage in close combat. That lesson had nearly cost him his trigger finger, which snapped back and practically broke off when an American tried to kick the gun out of his hand. His scars, both internal and external, were the only medals one could earn in his line of work, and he cherished them, even as he cursed them.
The fingers on his left hand still moved reasonably well, but the fingers on his right hand hardly moved at all anymore. This made it difficult for him to open the child-proof lid on his extra-strength Tylenol. He poured four Tylenol into his huge but barely functioning right hand and tossed all four into his mouth, washing them down with a large belt of Imperia Vodka straight from the bottle.
Vladimir Vakhrusheva had successfully adapted the skills that he had learned and perfected for the benefit of a now-defunct government to the new free-market economy which now dominated northern Asia. He had learned quickly that those skills were exceedingly valuable to his new, powerful, entrepreneurial benefactors. But still, the only mark of his success in Russia's post-perestroika free-for-all, was his rather quick transition from cheap Polish potato vodka to the finest quartz-filtered, Imperia Vodka made from the rarest wheat according to Mendeleev's original formula.
CHAPTER II.
Dr. Douglas Bayron was also a fan of Mendeleev. In fact, he kept a large poster of the periodic table hanging in his lab. It was something of a totem for him--a source to trace all of his understandings of the world back to. It was a daily reminder that all things, no matter how complex, were merely amalgamations of simpler things. It reminded him that there is simply no limit to the number of simple things there are in the world. It inspired his belief that all things in nature had orders and values and properties waiting to be discovered.
Myra had noticed that Dr. Bayron had changed since starting the project, but she did not realize that he had grown to look something like Mendeleev too. To her, it seemed that he had become a caricature of sorts-- a mad-scientist whose drive and intensity blinded him to even the face he saw in the mirror.
His lab, however, was meticulously maintained and orderly. It consisted of ten thousand square feet of highrise office space. One thousand square feet was fully occupied by the processors, servers, and RISC arrays that had already modeled billions of human brain cells in three dimensions. Another one thousand square feet was dedicated to high-speed, high density, data storage which long ago had exceeded one thousand petabytes making Bayron and his staff part of a very small group of people throughout the world to use the word "exabyte" on a daily basis.
Another three-thousand square feet was inartfully referred to as the sausage factory. It was in this portion of the lab, divided into twenty-five grey cubicles, that some of the most skilled renderers in the country sat, day in and day out, assigning attributes to each identifiable component on the detailed, three-dimensional MRI of Smith's brain.
The remainder of the space included conferencing facilities, Bayron's personal office, an engineering and fabricating lab, and a combination examination, operating, and recovery room, which was nicknamed, "the infirmary". On Smith's instruction, Myra had relocated all of the other offices that had been on the same floor as the lab to other floors so that the lab could be quickly and easily expanded as necessary.
Dr. Bayron, applying the theories of co-relational/oppositional holographic memory and processing which had won him a doctorate many years ago, spent most of his time assigning attributes to the empty spaces in between the cells which his assistants had successfully rendered. Those empty spaces used to be called "nothing" until science gave lie to that description.
As a research scientist at MIT, a young Dr. Bayron, barely 24 years old, had posited the theory that the higher functions of the mind, emotions, abstract reasoning, synesthetic sensory convergence (the ability to "taste" a steak immediately upon hearing it sizzle on a grill, for instance), all occurred in the empty spaces of the brain in which the invisible forces of nature like relative gravity and micromagnetic pulls operated to process non-linear, non-binary information instantaneously.
When the scientists operating the Large Hadron Collider at CERN discovered that empty space actually has some measurable mass, Bayron postulated that those empty spaces suddenly had to be considered as a part of the substance of the brain itself. Overnight, Bayron's theory had become a genuine hypothesis.
To test his hypothesis, Bayron wanted to model the brain of a European Quail, the least complex full brain in the animal kingdom. He wrote a grant proposal asking for a huge sum of money to fund his research. He was surprised when he received a call from the research director at SmithCorp. SmithCorp would fund the research, but not at the amount requested. It wouldn't be necessary, the director said, because the brain of the European quail had been thoroughly mapped and modeled, by none other than Elijah Smith himself. Smith had a very personal interest in this project, the director said, as years of research had been expended unsuccessfully trying to get the Smith model to work. As perfect as the model was, the computer never became a Quail. Not only couldn't the computer build a nest, it didn't even produce patterned data. But Smith himself personally believed that Bayron's theory was the key. And so, with the financial support of his unexpected benefactor, Bayron started assigning properties to the empty spaces. Everything he could learn about the properties of nothingness were added to the model. When the CERN scientists discovered there were actually many different kinds of nothingness, each with their own properties, Bayron's model became more complex. The more the CERN scientists learned about the nature of empty space, the larger Bayron's model grew.
One day, like magic, the model spewed out a pattern. It was definitely a pattern. When the data was plotted, there was th
e clear image of an oscilloscopic wave. Dr. Bayron, like Archimedes bolting from his legendary tub, ran to the audio lab waving his printout at the technicians. "Produce this sound for me!" he yelled at the first technician he saw. "Do it, do it!"
The technician scanned the wave diagram into his computer, pressed a few keys and turned up the volume on a speaker. A moment later, they all heard a clear sound:
"Chirp".
"What the hell is that?" The technician asked.
"It's a god damn European Quail!" Bayron shouted.
In retrospect, he wished he had just said, "Eureka."
After celebrating the almost magical chirp with his research team, Bayron made a phone call to the research director at SmithCorp. After explaining his result, the research director put him on hold. He was barely on hold for 10 seconds when a louder, different voice, came from the phone.
"Douglas Bayron?" The voice said. "Elly Smith."
Bayron, by virtue of some unknown instinct, stood up when he realized who he was speaking with. "Yes sir. I trust you've heard we got affirmative results?"
"I had no doubt, Bayron," Smith said, "I am not in the habit of betting on losers. But this is just proof of concept, you understand. Let me tell you what I really want."
When Smith offered Bayron the opportunity to model a human brain, Bayron jumped. The promise of unlimited resources and huge pay were appreciated, but were hardly necessary.
And so it was the European Quail that brought these two men together.
Bayron protected his empty spaces. They were his. He didn't let anyone else at SmithCorp work on the empty spaces. He guarded them jealously; that's where the magic lay. He filled most of his black spiral notebook with the properties of the various types of nothingness that he identified in the model he was creating of Smith's brain. The pipes and tubes, neurons and arteries and the chemicals that drive the apparatus - all the quantifiable aspects: that work could be done by his assistants most of whom were really just highly educated technicians and mechanics. Myra called them the trained monkeys. But the magic he kept for himself in the bound pages of his spiral book.