Fragments

by James F. David

  “I tried it on too,” Ralph said loudly.

  Elizabeth put her finger to her lips and then took Ralph’s arm and pulled him to one side. Then she pulled a pack of gum out of her pocket and handed it to Ralph.

  “Juicy Fruit,” Ralph said, and busied himself with opening the gum.

  With Ralph temporarily occupied Wes turned back to Daphne with the scalp array. Daphne kept rocking but didn’t resist when they fitted it to her head. Shamita and Len were glued to their monitors. Len’s thumb came up but Shamita shook her head and wiggled her hand back and forth. Wes pushed the scalp array down a little farther and then turned back. A minute later Len’s thumb came up and a few seconds later Shamita nodded approval. Wes smiled and then turned back to Daphne, picking up an electrode. Then, embarrassed, he waved Karon over, and she attached two electrodes inside Daphne’s blouse.

  “Daphne, would you please lie down?” Wes asked.

  Daphne remained upright and her hands came up and began to play.

  Wes’s face wrinkled with concern, but quickly Gil stepped forward and put his hand on Daphne’s arm.

  “Daphne, you trust me, don’t you. Please lie down. You can keep playing.”

  Daphne didn’t move, but when Gil pushed gently on her arm she lay down. Then Gil motioned for Wes to take her legs and lift. Daphne’s hands remained in the air, playing in silent fury.

  “Dr. Martin—I mean Wes. Do you want me to get her to stop playing?” Gil asked.

  Wes spoke over his shoulder as he walked to his monitor. “No, it won’t matter.”

  Wes went to work on his terminal and began tapping away while Len and Shamita worked at their own. Karon leaned over Len, her hand on his shoulder, pointing occasionally at the screen. After a few minutes of typing Len spoke.

  “Liquid-nitrogen pressure is stable at one atmosphere, super-chips are fifty-seven degrees Kelvin. The computer memory is superconducting. Physiological readings are nominal—her heart’s beating like a hummingbird’s but it’s not dangerous. We’re ready here, Kemosabe.”

  “Not yet,” Shamita replied. Then, a minute later: “OK, I’m set to intercept. Whenever you’re ready, Wes.”

  “Right. Relax her, Shamita.”

  Shamita hit a single key and Daphne’s hands stopped playing and slowly sank to her sides. Elizabeth stepped forward, worry on her face.

  “What did you do to her?”

  “Nothing harmful, Elizabeth,” Wes replied. “We’ve just rerouted her brain waves through the computer.”

  Elizabeth looked skeptical. “Why did she stop playing?”

  “We’ve selected out psychomotor functions,” he said casually.

  “What?” Elizabeth asked in exasperation.

  “We relaxed her,” Len cut in.

  The sound of tapping could be heard at Shamita’s keyboard. Then Shamita, seemingly oblivious of what had been happening, turned to Wes.

  “I’m reading occipital, parietal, prefrontal, the works. It’s all routed except the psychomotor. You want me to filter sensory input?”

  “Take it down slowly to fifty percent and then hold,” Wes responded.

  Elizabeth was eyeing Wes suspiciously, making him uncomfortable.

  “All we’re doing is filtering out the sights and sounds around her,” he said defensively. “It’s like using a dimmer switch to turn down the lights a little.”

  “You’re robbing her of awareness.”

  “It’s like falling asleep.”

  “It’s unnatural.”

  Wes gave up. Elizabeth wasn’t going to be mollified.

  Elizabeth walked over to Daphne and looked down into her face and then turned to Wes.

  “People don’t sleep with their eyes open.”

  “I said it was like falling asleep, not exactly the same thing.”

  “It’s like being paralyzed,” Elizabeth said, her voice trembling slightly. “It must be horrible.”

  “Fifty percent, Wes,” Shamita said. “She’s a beautiful subject. Look at those alpha waves. Almost no spindles. I’m ready to map her. How about you, Len?”

  “I was born ready, Shamita.”

  “What do you mean, map her?” Elizabeth asked suspiciously.

  “We need to map out her cognitive functions, and especially localize her calendar-counting ability. Once it’s mapped we can select it out.”

  “Abilities like that aren’t localized,” Elizabeth said. “It must take the entire cortex to solve those problems.”

  Elizabeth spoke with authority and Wes realized she had been reading up on brain function. “That’s true,” he explained. “Most of the cortex is involved, but only peripherally. Key processing functions are highly localized along well-defined neural pathways. We’ll select out those pathways.”

  “You can’t eliminate the role of the rest of the cortex.”

  Wes turned to Elizabeth, unsure of what to say. He was used to her opposition based on humanitarian grounds, but now she seemed to be attacking the scientific basis of his work.

  “We’ve experimented with this, Elizabeth. Any cortex can play a support role as long as its dominance is compatible with the donor cortex.”

  Elizabeth looked satisfied, but Wes didn’t know her well enough to be sure he could read her expressions.

  “All right, let’s map her . . . I mean map Daphne.”

  Wes had to constantly fight the tendency to lose himself in his work and to forget he was working with human subjects. Wes made eye contact with Len and Shamita to make sure they were ready and then stood by Daphne’s head. Elizabeth moved to the other side and Gil came to stand behind her. Gil’s expression was easier to read than Elizabeth’s. He was eager.

  “Daphne,” Wes said gently. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” she replied softly.

  “How do you feel?”

  Daphne gave no response, briefly worrying Wes, so he hurried on.

  “You feel sleepy, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sleepy.”

  Wes wanted to rush into the calendar problems but felt Elizabeth’s presence and decided to take extra steps to reassure her.

  “Daphne, are you afraid?”

  “I’m sleepy.”

  “You’re not scared, are you?”

  “No, I’m not scared.”

  Sure he had satisfied Elizabeth, Wes tried to move on but Elizabeth stopped him.

  “Daphne, this is Elizabeth. Do you know where you are?”

  “I’m sleepy.”

  “Do you know who I am, Daphne?”

  “I’m sleepy.”

  “Do you know who I am, Daphne?”

  Daphne gave no response and with every second of silence the tension grew. Daphne’s answers to Wes’s questions made perfect sense but her response to Elizabeth’s made her seem disoriented. The look on Elizabeth’s face told Wes a storm was coming and he was looking desperately for relief when Ralph distracted Elizabeth.

  “I think she went to sleep. Didn’t you, Daphne? You went to sleep, huh?”

  “Yes,” Daphne replied. “I went to sleep.”

  “See,” Ralph said, “she’s asleep.”

  Wes wanted to point out that a sleeping person does not respond to questions, but Len interrupted with another of his stupid jokes.

  “Reminds me of the man who went to a talent agency claiming he had a talking dog. The agent said let me hear him. The man asks his dog ‘What covers a house?’ and the dog says ‘Roof.’ Then the man asks ‘What covers the outside of a tree?’ and the dog says ‘Bark.’ Then the man asks how the ride was over to the agent’s office. ‘Ruff,’ says the dog. The agent throws the man and his dog into the street, where the dog gets up, brushes himself off, and says ‘Maybe I should have said bumpity?’ ”

  “Len, be serious,” Wes scolded.

  “I was. If you think about it, the agent didn’t know the dog could talk because the questions could all be answered with dog sounds. We’re guilty of the same thing. We believed a reduction in sensory in
put would mimic falling asleep so all our questions asked if that was what she was feeling. We confirmed our hypothesis rather than looking to disconfirm it. To tell you the truth, Daphne seems disoriented to me.”

  Len was right. Wes wanted his subjects to be in a harmless state similar to sleep and sure enough he had found what he was looking for. Wes felt naked, like the emperor wearing his new clothes. He hadn’t done his homework and now Elizabeth could move in and seriously damage his project. But to Wes’s surprise she didn’t.

  “Len, you’re partially right, but I don’t think Daphne’s disoriented,” Elizabeth said. “Just the opposite, actually. She seems highly focused and suggestible. Let me try something. Daphne, you’re afraid, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid.”

  “Daphne, you’re happy, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I’m happy.”

  Everyone except Elizabeth was surprised by Daphne’s responses.

  “I feel the same way, Daphne,” Ralph said. “Kinda happy, angry, sleepy. Maybe some sad too. Do you feel sad, Daphne?”

  “I feel happy.”

  Wes was surprised by Daphne’s answer. “If she feels all those other ways, why doesn’t she feel sad?” Wes asked, looking to Elizabeth, who had suddenly become the expert on Wes’s experiment.

  “You feel sad, don’t you Daphne?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Yes, I feel sad.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Shamita said.

  “Me too,” Karon echoed.

  Wes looked to Len, who shook his head knowingly. Wes hated being the only one besides Ralph who didn’t know what was going on. “Someone want to let me in on this?” To Wes’s annoyance his team turned to Elizabeth, waiting for her.

  “Daphne is in a highly suggestible state. When you asked her if she was sleepy you actually suggested to her she was sleepy. I then suggested she was afraid, and she responded she was. In this state Daphne will feel whatever it is you want her to feel. Somehow you’ve electronically mimicked a hypnotic trance.”

  “Let’s tell her she’s a chicken,” Ralph suggested, a big grin on his face. “We can make her walk around and cluck and stuff.” Ralph put his hands in his armpits when he said it and flapped his elbows up and down.

  “No!” Wes said in a near shout.

  “We might want to think about that,” Len said seriously. Then, when Wes turned and gave him a puzzled look, he added, “We could use the eggs.”

  Karon laughed but Wes’s glare shriveled Len in his chair and Karon covered her mouth. Turning back to Elizabeth, Wes was ready to apologize, but hesitated when he saw a trace of a grin.

  “Elizabeth, I . . .” he began.

  “Wes, I think it’s all right to continue.”

  It sounded like Elizabeth was giving him permission—again Elizabeth had maneuvered herself into a position of authority.

  “You might want to think about what this does to your project,” she continued.

  Wes was already thinking about it and resented being told to do what he was already doing. His initial analysis suggested it wouldn’t make any difference. If anything the similarity to a hypnotic trance could be helpful since to blend several minds into one new mind he needed to shut down certain mental functions in the different brains involved. He planned to do it electronically, but if it could be enhanced hypnotically, so much the better. Wes decided to paper over his anger at Elizabeth and turned back to Daphne.

  “Daphne, you’re not afraid,” he suggested. “You feel fine. You feel relaxed. Now, Daphne, how do you feel?”

  “I feel relaxed.”

  Relieved, Wes returned to his console, and waved Karon forward. She stood in front of Daphne with a set of cards. Each card had a different black-and-white geometric pattern on it. Karon held them up one at a time, waiting until Shamita signaled for the next card. Slowly, Karon showed the entire deck to Daphne. When they began the series again, Elizabeth moved close to Wes.

  “What’s this about?”

  “Well it’s kind of complex to explain. . . .”

  Elizabeth glared at him.

  “We’re mapping the visual cortex.”

  “How can you map a billion neurons?”

  “We can’t—no one could—and we don’t need to. We function at a macro level, not micro. Each of the patterns she is looking at triggers millions of neurons. Fortunately, the neurons make it easier for us by multiplexing. It’s a process similar to the way FM radio broadcasts.” Elizabeth looked puzzled, so he elaborated.

  “Originally it was believed brain neurons functioned in a hierarchical fashion. A single neuron might respond to the angle of a line, another neuron to the line’s width, a third to light and dark, and so on. These bits of information would then be passed on, combining to trigger a complex cell. A number of complex cells would combine to trigger hypercomplex cells, and so on. A neat theory, but you were right about the neural activity. Whenever your visual field is active nearly every neuron is firing, all the time. There’s no evidence of a hierarchy.”

  Wes paused when Karon switched to using a tape recorder to map the auditory cortex. Elizabeth was waiting expectantly when he looked back.

  “Mapping neural hierarchies proved impossible, but we had better luck with the FM theory. In order to broadcast stereo, frequency-modulated radio combines several waves into a compound wave that can carry more information than the individual waves—it’s called multiplexing. The signal is split again at the receiver back into the original waves. The cortex functions in much the same way by compounding signals, and then compounding the compounds—that’s multiplexing. We intercept the multiplexed signals and reroute them through fiber-optic lines to the corresponding hemispheric locale in the receiving cortex.”

  Elizabeth looked thoughtful. “Wouldn’t those signals make sense only to the donor mind?”

  “There are slight location differences, but we let the receiving brain decide how to split the multiplexed wave. So far every individual we’ve tested has been able to make sense of the signal if we send it at the multiplexed level.”

  “Mental telepathy?”

  “It’s real science,” he said defensively.

  “Don’t get upset. I’m just saying it mimics mental telepathy. But it seems so slow—I mean routing it through the computer and then to another person.”

  “The signal is routed through the cryogenic computer so we can monitor the brain waves in each donor and reroute signals as we choose. We use the liquid nitrogen to supercool our CPU and the fiber-optic lines. The superconducting chip processes the information faster than the brain itself, which allows us to keep up with the multiplexed brainwaves. Actually neurons fire rather slowly, through a clumsy electrochemical process involving the diffusion of sodium ions across a semipermeable membrane. The distance of the transmission is microscopic so we usually don’t notice the slow rate except on a macro level like with reaction times. It can take a quarter of a second to pull your finger off of a hot iron, and that’s much slower than our system processes. The lightwave transmission through the supercooled fiber optics is a hundred times faster than that of the neurons—the speed of light, actually. As long as we keep the length of the transmission lines short enough, and we work at a multiplexed level, it works.”

  Karon had finished with the tapes and was working through the tactile series, poking and prodding Daphne. It was a short series, and she soon finished, Shamita signaling success.

  “Looks good, Wes,” Shamita said. “She’s nominal all the way.”

  “Great. I’ll give her the problems.” Wes picked up a yellow pad and stood by Daphne’s head. “Daphne, I want to ask you to solve a few date problems for me. You’ve done these many times before. Are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “On what day will July thirteenth fall in 2017?”

  Daphne’s reply was nearly instantaneous.

  “Thursday.”

  Wes checked the answer on his pad. She was correct. Wes felt relief—it was working. />
  “What would be the date of the third Thursday in June 1803?”

  “The sixteenth,” Daphne replied after a few seconds.

  “New Year’s Day in 1939 fell on what day?”

  “Sunday.”

  All of Daphne’s answers were correct. Wes looked at Len and Shamita. Len was staring at his screen with Karon leaning on his shoulders. Karon looked up and gave a thumbs-up sign. Shamita rocked her hand back and forth in a motion that said “so far so good.” Wes returned to his questions.

  “On what day would the second Tuesday in February 1901 fall?”

  “The twelfth.”

  “November fifteenth in 2044 would be on what day of the week?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “What year would be the first leap year after 2050?”

  “Twenty fifty-two.”

  Wes ran through his list of questions and Daphne continued to answer correctly, compensating for leap years and never hesitating more than a few seconds. When Wes got a sign from Shamita that she was satisfied with her map, Wes flipped back a few pages in his pad to his special questions. “Daphne, what date would be the fifth Thursday in November 1854?”

  “The thirtieth.”

  “Daphne, what date would be the fifth Thursday in November 1873?”

  “There is no fifth Thursday in November 1873.”

  Wes was pleased. Daphne had instantly recognized his trick question and responded correctly. Wes next tried a new type of question.

  “How many Mondays were there in 1826?”

  Daphne paused after the question, her eyes flicking back and forth. Then after about twenty seconds she responded.

  “Fifty-two.”

  “What was the first year after 1950 that had more than fifty-two Mondays?”

  “1951.”

  As far as Wes knew, no one had ever asked Daphne to sum the number of particular weekdays occurring in a particular year. Most people wanted to know what day of the week their birthday would fall on in some future year, or what day of the week a holiday like Christmas occurred in the year they were born. When faced with a new type of question Daphne had paused far longer than normal but then responded with her usual accuracy. From then on whenever asked that type of question Daphne never had to pause more than a few seconds. Wes suspected Daphne had taken the time to construct an algorithm to solve the new type of problem.