Science Fiction by Scientists: An Anthology of Short Stories (Science and Fiction)

by Michael Brotherton

  I’ll be excited to see the results when we can look at the “after” MRIs without compromising the treatment. I have so many theories about who is and isn’t in the control group. But “double blind” is important.

  We got the whole group together to shout, “Go Squids!” for the end. Promotional material. This is my life now. It pays the bills, I guess.

  I never expected Stosh Majewski to be the one to roll his eyes at me as we all wandered off our separate ways, though.

  23 April 2025

  The Squids got us seats to one of their playoff games, very good seats, not rinkside but very good. We sat in a group.

  The TV journalist did not interview me or Ben or any of the other staff. We are in the PR spot, being earnestly interviewed and scientific. We know our place. In the timeouts, in the period breaks, they want a few minutes with the old players.

  And that is where it happened.

  Ed was being interviewed live on national TV — international TV, of course it was across the border not just in Windsor but all over Canada. There was some caption under his name, “Ed McCann, Squids Stanley Cup Team ‘90, ‘91, ‘93,” something like that.

  The guy tossed him an easy question — “Isn’t it amazing to see the Squids in the playoffs again after all these years?”

  And Ed said, “It is, Dave — ” The guy’s name really was Dave. Only six months before Ben and I would have high-fived each other that he could remember Dave was Dave and not Jerry or Braden or Junior.

  “It is, Dave,” said Ed, “but what I’m really concerned about right now is the escalating situation with the water wars in Bangladesh. With all the energy we’re pouring into the ice tonight, I think that’s the water we should all be concerned about.”

  Dave — not Jerry or Braden or Junior — had to cut back to the color commentator and the play-by-play announcer, going back to the main part of the game, because the faceoff was starting anyway.

  So we didn’t get in too much trouble.

  And I don’t think they’d yank our funding over Ed McCann running his mouth on TV, because this is the guy who referred to the Canadian Prime Minister as “that frigid shit-for-brains Canucks fan” on a live feed, right before he got put in our program.

  But Ed. Our Ed. Being able to pronounce Bangladesh, much less knowing that there’s a problem with the water supply there?

  I’d say that’s neural regrowth, there. In areas none of us could anticipate.

  I wrote it down in my clinical notes as “personality changes.”

  But in this private notebook I can just say: go, Ed.

  And please shut your mouth and say, “Go Squids” for the rest of the playoffs, for all of our sakes.

  30 April 2025

  Ed trashed his room today. Maybe I was wrong about what the Bangladeshi water thing meant, but…I don’t think so.

  The sheets were shredded. The bedframe broken. He had a plant in there that he loved. The pot was shattered, the root ball in pieces.

  Ben watched to make sure he didn’t injure himself, but otherwise he just closed the door and left him to it. Safest thing. A guy like Ed, he’s a really nice guy in his best moods, but he knows how to destroy things. I’ve advised the staff that they don’t have to make it them. Property is just property.

  The Squids can afford new bed frames, after all.

  When I asked Ed about it later, when he calmed down, all he would say was, “Man, Doc, I don’t know. I don’t even know who I am these days.”

  Well. I think that would upset anybody. Especially anybody with decades of never learning any other coping skills.

  I’ve made notes about having occupational therapy to teach other coping skills in future trials.

  I feel like a cold and terrible person that I think those therapy classes would have tainted these trials.

  Especially when I know that I’m sending half of these people home to their families without either the cephalladine effects or the therapy.

  I tell myself it’s for the longer-term good of everyone with this kind of brain injury. I hope I’m right. I watch Stephane staring at the corner of the room, not even the TV, just the corner, and I think of what Claire will face when I give him back to her. He didn’t want into the trial in the first place — she was the one with hope. Couldn’t I have given her husband a couple of emotional training wheels?

  Apparently not.

  12 May 2025

  The Squids’ drive for the Stanley Cup is still going strong, but they’ve lost the last fan I ever thought they’d lose.

  Stosh wandered away from the patient lounge as I was packing up to leave for the night.

  “I don’t know, I just couldn’t stand another night of hockey on the TV,” he confessed. “I think I’ll just go for a walk in the garden.”

  “You feeling all right, kiddo?” I asked. I resisted the urge to take his temperature. Ben does that every day.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ve just had enough hockey. Weird, huh?”

  “You could read a book or something,” I suggested.

  He laughed. “Come on, Doc, let’s not get crazy about this. It’s pretty nice out. I’ll just stretch my legs. Probably listen to music on my device.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  Despite his lack of interest in reading, I wrote, “Personality changes,” in my chart next to his name: I realized that while his balance has improved, he hasn’t asked about getting back on his skates in months.

  Ed is in watching the game with the others, but he’s also filmed an appeal for the water charity in Bangladesh that approached him after he opened his big mouth in April.

  I’d have liked to see some personality changes in Stephane — Claire is sure she sees them, but I can’t agree with her. He still mostly sits and stares. And Peter is as sullen and defensive as ever about Jesse’s memory, but who knows whether that’s concussion-induced irritability or a sincerely held belief. Maybe some of both. Put my brother through what Jesse went through, and I’d probably be pretty snappish about it, too, regardless of what state my amygdala was in. The memory and coordination tests will be a better gauge of what’s going on with Peter.

  I wish I could say with Kendra. I wish I could say anything about Kendra. I think this was the wrong program for her. Being the poster child for Supporting Our Troops is not going to help anybody with their depression and isolation — especially when you’re the only one who has no connection to the thing everyone else is connected to.

  She’s in there watching the game with the others, though, even asking polite questions, so who knows.

  The front desk has decided to content itself with a picture of all of us together in Squids playoffs promotional gear. The front desk is not as dumb as it looks.

  28 May 2025

  The front desk came into my office personally to teach me the facts of life.

  “Stosh Majewski is a young man with his life ahead of him,” said Bill. His suit cost more than our portable MRIs. The researchers of yesterday — the developing nations of today — would cure hundreds of kids for what his shoes cost.

  “The more so now,” I said through a tight smile.

  Bill’s smile didn’t falter. He is better at this than I am. “We are not paying for Stosh to have therapy because we like him.”

  “You should. He’s a really nice kid.”

  “He’s a really nice kid with a hell of a one-timer.”

  “I don’t even know what that means.”

  Bill sighed gustily. The fern on my desk rustled in his minty fresh breeze. I wanted to cup a protective hand around it. Irrational. “Dr. Huang — Catherine — we pay your salary. We keep you and the players — ”

  “Patients.”

  “ — patients,” he agreed smoothly, “in this nice facility. But Majewski has millions left on his contract. If he can’t skate again, we’re not monsters. What we’re hearing is that he won’t skate again.”

  “For me, that’s a distinction without a difference.” />
  “For us, the difference is several million.”

  I waited. But he is, as I said, better at this than I am.

  “Catherine,” he said, emphasizing that this time he was not even trying on the use of my proper title. “You’re going to have to find out for sure whether Majewski is actually still sick and unable to play or just malingering.”

  “That’s my job?”

  “We think it is.”

  “I think my job is to find out whether I can heal these patients and report back to the world — and to you in particular — about a very serious problem that plagues your industry.”

  “Of course! No one said not to.”

  “And get you Stosh Majewski back in a Squids shirt.”

  “Sweater,” he said, and finally the smile wavered.

  I didn’t tell Stosh about this conversation. I didn’t want to upset him. Instead I told Ed. He looked so fierce I thought maybe I’d made the wrong choice, but after a moment he nodded, hard. “Don’t worry, Doc. We’ll get the boys together. The team needs to know we’ve got Stosh’s back.”

  I couldn’t see how that was enough, but Ed kept nodding. “You understand a lot about the brain, Doc, but you don’t know the part that has teams in it yet. We’ll get this fixed.”

  29 May 2025

  Ed must have been right. It was Stephane who went to the front office. Stephane.

  There wasn’t even any yelling.

  But they’ve eased off on Stosh, and our funding is approved for another several rounds of testing, not even with former players for the main body of subjects.

  For as long as I’ve been working with these guys, I don’t think I’ll ever really understand them.

  Stosh is going to be in three commercials and on five new billboards, though. Stephane thought of that, too, with Ed’s help.

  And then he came home and punched an orderly.

  I swear this job is going to give me difficulty with emotional response, volume control, and appropriate regulation of alcohol consumption.

  10 June 2025

  The Squids are in the final round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. Even Stosh is watching for old times’ sake.

  We haven’t had any fights since March. Grousing, arguments, sure. But no fights. Half these people are on placebo. But I think it’s clear that we’re seeing less irritability, which probably means some amygdala regrowth, some brain healing — only half as many of the people in the patient lounge are dealing with these problems, which has to reduce conflict all by itself.

  Also maybe they’re used to each other. Who knows.

  Claire came into my office and cried today. “Stephane is on the placebo, isn’t he. He’s not really improving at all.”

  “I’m not allowed to know that until the trial is over,” I said, as gently as I could.

  “I’ve been fooling myself.”

  I thought hard about what the best thing to say was. “Maybe you’ve just been encouraging him.”

  “I want my husband back!” she sobbed. “I want Stephane!” She wore lots of gracefully applied eye makeup, and it was all clumping and running in the least graceful possible manner. I handed her tissues as fast as I could pluck them from the box. I made soothing noises.

  I am not a clinician. I am not good at soothing noises.

  Finally, when she started to calm herself, I ventured something less soothing.

  “If he is receiving the placebo, that’s good news,” I said.

  She sniffled and looked inquisitive.

  “If he is, he can perhaps receive the real thing, when it goes through to the next stage, or is approved. Perhaps,” I emphasized.

  Claire looked more hopeful. “It’s working on some of the others.”

  “I think so. But I have to warn you. There are personality changes.”

  Alarm. “Not — some of the concussion men, they are — more violent — ”

  “No, no,” I hastened to reassure her. “Quite the opposite, or — not the opposite exactly, just — it’s hard to predict. They’re going off in directions we can’t anticipate. You saw Ed McCann talking about Bangladesh on TV perhaps.”

  She waved a well-manicured hand. “Oh, well, Ed.”

  I stifled a laugh, turned it into a cough. Perhaps I am overstating the personality changes. Perhaps Ed will do what Ed will do.

  The personality changes would be harder to live with if she was actually living with them. I knew that much. Finding that someone’s decisions and emotional memory were restored sounded grand, but they weren’t restored, they weren’t recreated, they were — made into different ones. And what are we if not our decisions and our emotional memory?

  But I looked in on her and Stephane together, and I thought that perhaps with what they had been through she would shape her own memories to him, if she could have him well again. She would tell herself that this was how he was.

  The true test will be releasing my patients into the world. The casual friends and acquaintances, the more distant relations who can’t visit every few days — will they feel that they still know them? Will they find anything in common, still? Or will those memories be reshaped, changed so that “of course” Ed will be Ed, obviously he was always like that?

  I used to think that going into the world would test their self-control and inhibitive behavior for drug and alcohol use, and perhaps it will. But as I grow more confident in the regrowth factor, the rest of the data — which is much harder to gather — interests me far more.

  Afterword

  Head injuries are big business these days. We’re spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to prevent them, and that’s a really good thing — an ounce of prevention, as the old saying goes. But sometimes people don’t manage to prevent concussion. Sometimes — as hard as it can be for those of us who make a living with our brains to understand — it’s not their top priority.

  One of the main things that goes wrong with multiple concussions is amygdala damage. The amygdala — properly speaking, the amygdalae, you’ve got one per side — is in the middle of your temporal lobe, and it’s good for all sorts of useful things: memory, decision-making, and how you process your emotions. Combined with cultural factors, this is why athletes (and soldiers and other people with repeated head trauma) end up with a reputation for anger management issues: they have literally broken the parts of their brains that are meant to handle that.

  You can read about post-concussion syndrome and amygdala damage at whatever level you like. The Mayo Clinic website has a brief overview of post-concussion syndrome at http://​www.​mayoclinic.​org/​diseases-conditions/​post-concussion-syndrome/​basics/​definition/​con-20032705. Almost any major metro newspaper will carry stories on football players and post-concussion syndrome in their archives of the past two to three years. On the more technical side, academic journals are filled with papers like “Relationship between competency in activities, injury severity and post-concussion symptoms after traumatic brain injury,” by Unni Sveen, Erik Bautz-Holter, Leiv Sandvik, Kristin Alvsåker, and Cecilie Røe, or “Long-term structural changes after mTBI, and their relation to post-concussion symptoms,” by Philip J. A. Dean, Joao Ricardo Sato, Gilson Vieira, Adam McNamara, and Annette Sterr. (“mTBI” means “mild traumatic brain injury.” It means your brains have been jostled nastily but are not leaking out your ears.) You can easily go down the rabbit hole of reading as much on that as you want or as little.

  The politics of whether people should go around knocking each other in the noggin might be simpler if someone could just reach in and fix an amygdala like a broken ankle. Would that be better? I don’t know — neither does my main character.

  On a more personal note, I have a non-concussion related balance problem. I decided not to get into the balance problems of these patients, as their emotions were more interesting to me, but the vertigo that can come from head injury is not any more fun than the kind I suffer from, the kind that comes out of the blue. Hockey is also one of the more
fun ways to get head injuries. Be safe out there, and keep each other safe when you can.

  © The Author 2017

  Michael Brotherton (ed.)Science Fiction by ScientistsScience and Fiction10.1007/978-3-319-41102-6_8

  Betelgeuse

  J. Craig Wheeler1

  (1)Austin, USA

  Fire fills the sky from horizon to horizon, hot red and yellow, surging, billowing, flaring gas. I’m in close orbit with flaming Betelgeuse horizon to horizon. Very impressive. In the opposite direction, overhead, is cold, dark sky.

  Being out here gives you a different perspective. I’ve had a long time to think about this. I’m not sure it’s a good idea after all.

  Things evolve. Even the notion of what it means to think changes. I had my active part in the decision. The science was compelling. We’ve learned so much about the Universe, but there is so much more to learn. That drive to understand doesn’t go away.

  My quest is a microcosm of all the exploration going on, a chance to add some details to the overall scheme — a cloud of gas, a contraction, a spinning up, a breaking apart, two stars forming, one swells, they merge, a doomed core, a collapse, a violent disruption, seeds of new beginnings. We’ve known all that for a very long time, but the information came from remote reaches. This was the chance to check out the process right in the neighborhood. Cross some i’s, dot some t’s. Who knows, maybe the lovely goddess Serendipity would grace us with tantalizing unexpectedness.

  From Earth, Betelgeuse had hung in the sky, resolute, during the Transformation. Some things can’t be hurried; they don’t respond to the hurly burly, the comings and goings of living things. Or they just live their lives at their own sedate pace. Until the end.