by C. A. Gray
“There’s no chance of injury to him if there's a wire crossed somewhere, right?” Val asked anxiously.
“No,” said Dr. Yin. “Worst case scenario, it just won’t work.”
I tapped the buttons on the interface: the screen responded to my touch. “So far so good,” I said. A few more commands, and a 3-D, virtual image of Liam’s brain appeared, depicted in light and shadow to represent areas of increased metabolic activity. With two fingers, I zoomed through the sagittal and coronal planes of the holograph, allowing me to inspect the activity in deeper brain structures. Liam caught my eye under the helmet, and I gave him a thumbs up. Across the room, Val breathed a sigh of relief.
“Let me just make sure it’s sensitive enough,” I said. “Liam, think about something you feel strongly about. Some kind of intense emotion, I don’t care which one, but don’t tell me what it is. I want to see if I can guess it. Where’s Hepzibah?”
“She’s upstairs, do you want me to get her?” Dr. Yin volunteered, and I nodded.
“Yes, please. I want her to take a blood sample for neuropeptides too. Liam, not yet.” He’d screwed his eyes closed, like he was trying to exclude all external stimuli that might contaminate his conjured emotional state.
“Shh,” he hissed, “I have to get in ‘the zone,’ don’t interrupt me.”
Giovanni exchanged an amused look with me, pulling one of the netscreen chairs over to where I sat before the VMI interface so that he could see what I saw. Val crept a little closer to Liam, like a shy animal, or a child afraid of breaking something.
Dr. Yin returned, Hepzibah rolling down the stairs behind her but catching herself with her extendable arms before she could topple headlong to the basement floor.
“Liam, are you ready?” He nodded, and I turned to Hepzibah. “Will you draw a blood sample from him, and analyze it for… hold on…” I grabbed an edge of the paper with the plans we’d used to create the VMI, and Giovanni handed me a pen. I scribbled the names of seven of the major neuropeptides associated with various emotions, including salheptonin, the one I’d studied in my senior thesis for its possible association with desire and romantic love.
I hoped that wasn’t the one she found.
“…These,” I finished, handing the paper to Hepzibah. She took the paper from me, and wheeled over to Liam’s forearm to take a sample. I meanwhile tapped the interface for a new image, again using my fingers to visualize the deeper structures of Liam’s brain.
“Here, have them side by side,” Giovanni murmured, reaching over to bring up the previous baseline holograph, from before Liam had been thinking about anything emotional. I synced the holographs so that we could compare the differences. Dr. Yin hovered behind us as Hepzibah finished her collection. She leaned over to point to an almond-shaped structure deep inside the new holograph.
“The amygdala,” she breathed, pointing to it. “Wow. It’s like a Christmas tree.”
“He’s terrified,” Giovanni whispered. He sounded surprised as he glanced at Liam, whose eyes were still screwed tightly shut. His face remained expressionless, but I thought I saw a fine sheen of sweat on his forehead. Val hovered halfway to him, as if wanting to help but unsure what to do. “That boy has some serious imagination…”
“Your results,” came Hepzibah’s tinny voice. “Trace amounts of several of your neuropeptides were present, but levels of cholecystokinin are several orders of magnitude higher than expected baseline values.”
“Can I stop now?” Liam’s voice sounded strained.
“Yes, open your eyes. For heaven’s sake!” I said, rushing over to pull the helmet off of his head, as if that would help rid his mind of whatever he was imagining faster. “Are you okay?”
His bright blue eyes seemed to grab onto mine like a lifeline. “What was the emotion?” he croaked.
“Fear.” Then I amended, “More like panic, actually.”
He licked his lips, nodded, and stood up slowly, as if reorienting himself to the room. “It works.” Val rushed to his side, patting him on the back helplessly.
“What in the world were you imagining?” I asked.
He gave me a weak smile. “You told me not to tell you.”
“I already guessed! You can tell me now.”
“And give you that much power over me?” he teased, sounding a little more like himself.
“Oh, what do you think I’m going to do, turn it into a practical joke? Put spiders in your bed or whatever?”
“Spiders?” he gave a hearty laugh. “Try again.”
“Snakes? Sharks.”
“Go ahead and run your way through all the ‘S’ creatures,” he joked. “I’m gonna go upstairs and get Francis, he’s up next.”
“Do you know how you’re going to run the experiment with Francis yet?” Giovanni asked me. “You’re testing for not just emotion, but empathy, so—”
Dr. Yin snapped her fingers, crossing to the netscreen as if she were on a mission. “How do I access the Commune?” she asked Liam.
Liam changed course to help her, and her fingers flew once I saw text appear from someone on the other end.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Having them look up and send us disturbing and sad holographs: death, destruction, human suffering… that kind of thing.”
I looked at the titles of some of the holograph files Kyle had sent over, and grimaced. “Geez.”
Dr. Yin nodded at me. “I know, but it’s the only way I know of to test for empathy. Most people don’t have an imagination as strong as Liam’s. We’ll need it to be extreme enough that we can identify a response.”
“Do you need me as a baseline first?” Liam asked, but Dr. Yin shook her head.
“You’ve probably had enough for a bit, but we should get a baseline from someone else before we try it on Francis…”
“I’ll do it,” Val volunteered, raising her hand.
We were all silent for a minute, perhaps all thinking the same thing. She seemed to guess it too, because she said, “Oh come on, I work with abused foster kids. You think I haven’t already seen stuff twice as bad as what you’re about to show me?”
“She does seem like the perfect test case,” Dr. Yin conceded, evaluating Val. “I don’t know you very well yet, but I’m guessing you’d score higher on an empathy test than the average person.”
Liam said to her in a low voice, “I just don’t want you to have a breakdown or anything.”
Val put her hands on her hips, eyes flashing. “I’m stronger than you think I am, Liam Kelly!”
Liam raised his hands to show he meant no offense, and Val crossed to the seat under the helmet, determined now. Against my will, I felt the tiniest flicker of respect for her. Maybe she wasn’t just a cartoon princess.
“This is a little harder without the A.E. chips,” Dr. Yin murmured, “it won’t be quite the immersive experience it was back in the lab in Dublin. But with some old school headphones and a netscreen…”
“Hold on.” Giovanni crossed to the netscreens and reached down to a drawer in a cabinet below them. “I saw these earlier.” He pulled out a pair of A.E. goggles, and with a few keystrokes, networked them to the system.
“Almost as good,” he declared, handing them to Val. She wriggled out from under the helmet to slip the goggles on.
“And here,” added Liam, pulling out a pair of earbuds from the same drawer and handing them back to Giovanni, who plugged them into the goggles. Since she couldn’t see him anymore, Liam pressed the earbuds into Val’s palm. Val grasped them, and tapped them into her ears.
Dr. Yin gestured to me to resume my place by the VMI interface. “Tell me when you have a baseline,” she said.
I instructed her, “Val, take some deep breaths, and picture yourself on a beach listening to the waves.”
“Oh hold on, I can put her there!” said Dr. Yin, swiveling back to her netscreen. Giovanni and Liam crowded behind me to watch m
y interface. I had to admit, it felt a little strange to be the one in charge, with three of my superiors assisting me, not the other way around. Strange… but very satisfying.
A minute or so later, Dr. Yin gave me a thumbs up. I counted about thirty seconds for Val to quiet her mind, and then captured the baseline image of her brain. “Got it,” I told Dr. Yin.
Dr. Yin said, “All right, Val, I’m going to start the first video, you ready?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice just slightly tremulous.
“What’s the video of?” Liam whispered to me.
“You don’t want to know.”
Within a few seconds, Val gasped, and covered her mouth.
“I hope she never plays poker,” Giovanni muttered. “Or if she does, I hope I’m playing against her.”
Val started crying then. I pressed the button to capture the image.
“Okay, we got it, pull her out!” Liam commanded, and Dr. Yin swiveled around to the netscreen to comply.
“Hepzibah, can you please get a blood sample?” I asked her. “Analyze for the same neuropeptides as before, if you would.”
Hepzibah wheeled over to where Val sat, sobbing. Liam rushed over too, pulling the helmet from her head and the goggles off of her face. “It’s okay. You’re okay,” he told her, wiping her tears away with his thumbs. I tried hard to ignore this.
“But that’s a real video! That really happened to someone!” Val gasped.
“Look at that!” Giovanni marveled, pointing to the slice of VMI imaging. It showed a part of Val’s brain I recognized as the right supramarginal gyrus. “I’ve never seen such a profound response before!”
“She has the pattern for pain, too,” I pointed out, indicating several of her other deep brain structures.
“What’s the pattern for pain?” Liam asked, standing up and moving back over to us.
I slid the slices through with my fingers to show him, naming the relevant structures in turn: “The anterior insula, the anterior midcingulate cortex, somatosensory cortex, and right amygdala—this is the pattern you’d expect for someone experiencing pain themselves. The right supramarginal gyrus is the connection: it’s what allows her to see someone else’s experience and translate it into an experience she’s having herself.”
“I have analyzed her blood,” Hepzibah announced. “High levels of demartonin have been detected, though this cannot be compared against an expected reference range.”
Giovanni and I nodded at each other, and I explained to Liam, “Recent research suggests that demartonin is associated with physical pain and trauma, but there’s no reference range for it yet because it hasn’t been studied enough. Thank you, Hepzibah.”
Liam crossed back to Val, helping her to her feet. “By the time you’re done with these experiments, we might all need therapy,” he murmured to me, but cast me a tiny smile to show he meant no offense. Val wrapped her arms around him, and he hesitated only a second before pulling her close. I looked away.
“We’ll need more than just the empathy test for Francis and Alex, though,” Giovanni observed. “We should get baseline patterns for other emotions as well. I’ll volunteer next, if you like.”
“I’m still not sure if we’ll get Alex as a subject,” I said, gesturing for Giovanni to sit down under the helmet. I glanced at Dr. Yin, but she was already typing something to Kyle, presumably pulling up a different set of visuals to stimulate her chosen emotion.
“Sure she will,” said Dr. Yin, distracted. “Your mom said she had to, and your mom always gets her way.”
I caught the snide tone in her voice, but let it slide. Apparently there was still a bit of competition between them, at least on Dr. Yin’s side. Instead, I commented, “I have a feeling Alex always gets her way, too.”
“Yeah, but Alex’s power is of the strictly female variety,” said Liam, giving Val’s shoulders a squeeze and releasing her. “Against M? I wish her luck.”
“It’s kind of weird that you’re still referring to my mom as a character from a James Bond movie,” I observed.
“It’s a habit,” Liam shrugged. “It’s not my fault she turned out to be your mom.”
“Shh,” Dr. Yin hissed, pointing at Giovanni, whose goggles and ear buds were now in place.
“Would you go upstairs and ask Larissa to come down next?” Liam whispered to Val, who dutifully nodded and obeyed.
“Why her?” I whispered to Liam, and he shrugged.
“I just wanted to give Val something to do. Distraction works well for her.”
“You know her really well,” I observed, unable to keep a trace of sadness from my voice.
“I should, we were together for a long time,” he shrugged.
Once we had baseline samples for empathy, and also for pleasure, sadness, anger, and fear, each from at least three separate individuals, it was time to stop for dinner. Val had prepared it with Julie this time, and Andy and Jake apparently stood in the corner pretending to help, but really just watching, and talking about something else. Tomorrow, I’d run the same experiments on Francis, and on Alex, if she’d let me. Dr Yin and Giovanni went upstairs to join the others. Liam helped me save the data and shut down our makeshift lab.
“Hey,” he said, and I looked up from the VMI interface. “Really nice job.”
“On what?”
“This,” he said like it was obvious, gesturing at our setup. “It’s pretty impressive.”
I shrugged, hiding how pleased I felt. “You built it.”
“That’s just following instructions, which you’re better at than you think, by the way,” he said, wrapping up the earbuds and setting them inside the goggles. “You remember when I told you I was coming back from the Americas so dejected, because none of the rural people I met with had the least interest in fighting against Halpert, and I told myself, ‘at least Rebecca is working on a project to help us defeat them?’”
“And I totally disappointed you by going to London with my friends instead?” I reminded him with a smirk.
“You did then, yeah. But this is the sort of thing I was hoping for. I know you’re not doing it for me, but still… thank you.”
I nodded, giving him a shy smile. “I just hope it will it be enough. I mean, this, and whatever else we do.”
He met my eyes, the mirth fading from his expression. “Me too.” Then he crossed to me on the way to the stairs, settling a hand on my lower back to guide me, the way he always had when we were in San Jose. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed that.
Halfway up the stairs, I guessed, “Clowns?”
It took him a second to remember what I was referring to, and then he laughed. “Seriously? You think I’m the kind of guy who’d be afraid of clowns?”
“I’m just going through the list of phobias in my head. That one’s called coulrophobia, by the way. I only remember that because I read it in a study once.”
“Maybe it’s alek-to-ro-phobia,” he suggested, enunciating every syllable. I glanced back at him with a raised eyebrow, and he clarified, “Fear of chickens.”
“Well that’s unfortunate, because I think that’s what we’re having for dinner.”
“Dammit!”
I laughed. “You’re really not going to tell me?”
He didn’t answer for a moment, and as we emerged on the ground floor, I turned to look at him, expectant.
“I think you could probably figure it out, if you wanted to,” he said at last, not looking at me when he said it, as if purposely aloof. He made his way to the kitchen to help Val set the table before I could reply.
Chapter 17
After dinner, Giovanni and Dr. Yin took their turns washing the dishes. I saw Mom and Mack take a couple of glasses and a bottle of wine upstairs to the study—my eyes lingered on them as they left, and Mom turned around to give me a tentative smile. I smiled back, and her face softened, the smile reaching her eyes at last.
I’d have to ma
ke more of an effort to get to know Mack. Maybe he had lied to me about who he was. But it was under Mom’s orders, and I’d forgiven her. It was a little hard to get used to the idea of Mom with somebody else, too, but… well, it had been six years since Dad died. And if she was happy, I was glad for her. I mean, as much as anybody could be happy in the present situation.
“All right!” Jake clapped his hands together. “Who’s up for a bonfire?”
“A bonfire.” Francis blinked at him. “Where, exactly?”
“In one of the open-air caves! It’s foggy out tonight, no one will notice the smoke.”
“There’s no wood,” Francis pointed out flatly, still staring at Jake like he was an idiot.
“Larissa helped us print some,” said Jake, undaunted. “Not wood, but one of those composite logs. She even recycled it from our trash!”
Larissa shrugged at Francis with a big, innocent smile. “Just being helpful!”
Francis rolled his eyes at her while Jake, Julie, and Andy went outside to set the fire, Jake with his guitar case slung on his back.
When we arrived in the cave, Val sidled up next to me.
“I like your friends,” she told me softly. I smiled at her.
“Yeah. They’re pretty great,” I agreed.
She coughed a little, and said, “So… do you think there’s going to be a war?”
My smile faded, and I sighed as the two of us passed through the compound entrance. “I really don’t know. If there is, we’ll need a lot more people on our side first.”
Val bit her lip. “And your experiments are meant to…?”
“Help us understand how the Silver Six think. That way, maybe we can come up with something more elegant and less destructive than all-out war. But the Commune isn’t growing any bigger at the moment, and we really can’t risk meetings to spread the word to new people right now. It’s too dangerous. And unless we can get our message out beyond the current Commune members, I don’t see how war will ever be a real option.”