Then … that moment.
Even now, as I sit here in an abandoned hotel and listen for sounds of movement outside, I can remember the moment when the read-outs started to turn around.
The clots started to break up. The cancerous cells started to lose vitality. The breed of simian flu which we'd acquired illicitly from the University's labs went into remission.
The monkey started getting better.
And we felt like gods, and stayed that way even when the monkey suddenly died of shock a day later. We knew by then that there was more work to do in buffering the stress effects the beckies had on the body. That wasn't important. It was just a detail. We had screeds of data from the experiment, and Philip's AI systems were already integrating it into the next version of the ImmunityWorks software. Becky and I made the tweaks to the beckies, stamping the revised software into the biomachines and refining the way they interfaced with the body's own immune system.
We only really came down to earth the next day, when we realized that Rebecca had contracted Marburg.
Eventually the sight of the St Armand's dying heart palled, and I started the car up again. I drove a little further along the coast to the Lido Beach Inn, which stands just where the strip starts to diffuse into a line of beach motels. I turned into the driveway and cruised slowly up to the entrance arch, peering into the lobby. There was nobody there, or if there was, they were crouching in darkness. I let the car roll down the slope until I was inside the hotel court proper, and then pulled into a space.
I climbed out, pulled my bag from the passenger seat, and locked the car up. Then I went to the trunk and took out the bag of groceries which I'd carefully culled from the stock back at the facility. I stood by the car for a moment, hearing nothing but the sound of waves over the wall at the end, and looked around. I saw no one, and no signs of violence, and so I headed for the stairs to go up to the second floor, and towards room 211. I had an old copy of the key, ‘accidentally’ not returned many years ago, which was just as well. The hotel lobby was a pool of utter blackness in an evening which was already dark, and I had no intention of going anywhere near it.
For a moment, as I stood outside the door to the room, I thought I heard a girl's laughter, quiet and far away. I stood still for a moment, mouth slightly open to aid hearing, but heard nothing else.
Probably it was nothing more than a memory.
Rebecca died two days later in an isolation chamber. She bled and crashed out in the small hours of the morning, as Philip and I watched through glass. My head hurt so much from crying that I thought it was going to split, and Philip's throat was so hoarse he could barely speak. Philip wanted to be in there with her, but I dissuaded him. To be frank, I punched him out until he was too groggy to fight any more. There was nothing he could do, and Rebecca didn't want him to die. She told me so through the intercom, and as that was her last comprehensible wish, I decided it would be so.
We knew enough about Marburg that we could almost feel her body cavities filling up with blood, smell the blackness as it coagulated in her. When she started bleeding from her eyes I turned away, but Philip watched every moment. We talked to her until there was nothing left to speak to, and then watched powerless as she drifted away, retreating into some upper and hidden hall while her body collapsed around her.
Of course we tried ImmunityWorks. Again, it nearly worked. Nearly, but not quite. When Rebecca's vital signs finally stopped, her body was as clean as a whistle. But it was still dead.
Philip and I stayed in the lab for three days, waiting. Neither of us contracted the disease.
Lucky old us.
We dressed in biohazard suits and sprayed the entire house with a solution of ImmunityWorks, top to bottom. Then we put the remains of Rebecca's body into a sealed casket, drove upstate, and buried it in a forest. She would have liked that. Her parents were dead, and she had no family to miss her, except us.
Philip left the day after the burial. We had barely spoken in the intervening period. I was sitting numbly in the kitchen on that morning and he walked in with an overnight bag. He looked at me, nodded, and left. I didn't see him again for two years.
I stayed in the house, and once I'd determined that the lab was clean, I carried on. What else was there to do?
Working on the project by myself was like trying to play chess with two thirds of my mind burned out: the intuitive leaps which had been commonplace when the three of us were together simply didn't come, and were replaced by hours of painstaking, agonizingly slow experiment. On the other hand, I didn't kill anyone.
I worked. I ate. I drove most weekends to the forest where Rebecca lay, and became familiar with the paths and light beneath the trees which sheltered her.
I refined the beckies, eventually understanding the precise nature of the shock reaction which had killed our two subjects. I pumped more and more intelligence into the system, amping the ability of the component parts to interact with each other and make their own decisions. In a year I had the system to a point where it was faultless on common viruses like flu. Little did the world know it, but while they were out there sniffing and coughing I had stuff sitting in ampoules which could have sorted them out for ever. But that wasn't the point. ImmunityWorks had to work on everything. That had always been our goal, and if I was going to carry on, I was going to do it our way. I was doing it for us, or for the memory of how we'd been. The two best friends I'd ever had were gone, and if the only way I could hang onto some remnant of them was through working on the project, that was what I would do.
Then one day one of them reappeared.
I was in the lab, tinkering with the subset of the beckies whose job it was to synthesize new materials out of damaged body cells. The newest strain of biomachines were capable of far, far more than the originals had been. Not only could they fight the organisms and processes which caused disease in the first place, but they could then directly repair essential cells and organs within the body to ensure that it made a healthy recovery.
‘Can you do anything about colds yet?’ asked a voice, and I turned to see Philip, standing in the doorway to the lab. He'd lost about two stone in weight, and looked exhausted beyond words. There were lines around his eyes that had nothing to do with laughter. As I stared at him he coughed raggedly.
‘Yes,’ I said, struggling to keep my voice calm. Philip held his arm out and pulled his sleeve up. I found an ampoule of my most recent brew and spiked it with a hypo. ‘Where did you pick it up?’
‘England.’
‘Is that where you've been?’ I asked, as I slipped the needle into his arm and sent the beckies scurrying into his system.
‘Some of the time.’
‘Why?’
‘Why not?’ He shrugged, and rolled his sleeve back up.
I waited in the kitchen while he showered and changed, sipping a beer and feeling obscurely nervous. Eventually he reappeared, looking better but still very tired. I suggested going out to a bar, and we did, carefully but unspokenly avoiding those we used to go to as a threesome. Neither of us had mentioned Rebecca yet, but she was there between us in everything we said and didn't say. We walked down winter streets to a place I knew had opened recently, and it was almost as if for the first time I felt I was grieving for her properly. While Philip had been away, it had been as if they'd just gone away somewhere together. Now he was here, I could no longer deny that she was dead.
We didn't say much for a while, and all I learnt was that Philip had spent much of the last two years in Eastern Europe. I didn't push him, but simply let the conversation take its own course. It had always been Philip's way that he would get round to things in his own good time.
‘I want to come back,’ he said eventually.
‘Philip, as far as I'm concerned you never left.’
‘That's not what I mean. I want to start the project up again, but different’
‘Different in what way?’
He told me. It took me a while to underst
and what he was talking about, and when I did I began to feel tired, and cold, and sad. Philip didn't want to refine ImmunityWorks. He had lost all interest in the body, except in the ways in which it supported the mind. He had spent his time in Europe visiting people of a certain kind, trying to establish what it was about them that made them different. Had I known, I could have recommended my Aunt Kate to him – not, I felt, that it would have made any difference. I watched him covertly as he talked, as he became more and more animated, and all I could feel was a sense of dread, a realization that for the rest of his life my friend would be lost to me.
He had come to believe that mediums, people who can communicate with the spirits of the dead, do not possess some special spiritual power, but instead a difference in the physical make-up of their brain. He believed that it was some fundamental but minor difference in the wiring of their senses which enabled them to bridge a gap between this world and the next, to hear voices which had stopped speaking, see faces which had faded away. He wanted to pin-point where this difference lay, and learn to replicate it. He wanted to develop a species of becky which anyone could take, which would rewire their soul and enable them to become a medium.
More specifically, he wanted to take it himself, and I understood why, and when I realized what he was hoping for I felt like crying for the first time in two years.
He wanted to be able to talk with Rebecca again, and I knew both that he was not insane and that there was nothing I could do, except help him.
* * *
211 was as I remembered it. Nondescript. A decent-sized room in a low-range motel. I put my bags on one of the twin beds and checked out the bathroom. It was clean and the shower still gave a thin trickle of lukewarm water. I washed and changed into one of the two sets of casual clothes I had brought with me, and then I made a sandwich out of cold cuts and processed cheese, storing the remainder in the small fridge in the corner by the television. I turned the latter on briefly and got snow across the board, though I heard the occasional half-word which suggested that someone was still trying somewhere.
I propped the door to the room open with a bible and dragged a chair out onto the walkway, and then I sat and ate my food and drank a beer looking down across the court. The pool was half full, and a deck chair floated in one end of it.
Our approach was very simple. Using some savings of mine we flew to Australia, where I talked Aunt Kate into letting us take minute samples of tissue from different areas of her brain, using a battery of lymph-based beckies. We didn't tell her what the samples were for, simply that we were researching genetic traits. Jenny was now married to an accountant, it transpired, and they, Aunt Kate and Philip and I sat out that night on the porch and watched the sun turn red.
The next day we flew home and went straight on to Gainesville, where I had a much harder time persuading my mother to let us do the same thing. In the end she relented, and despite claiming that the beckies had ‘tickled’, had to admit it hadn't hurt. She seemed fit, and well, as did my father when he returned from work. I saw them once again, briefly, about two months ago. I've tried calling them since, but the line is dead.
Back at Jacksonville, Philip and I did the same thing with our own brains, and then the real work began. If, we reasoned, there really was some kind of physiological basis to the phenomena we were searching for, then it ought to show up to varying degrees in my family line, and less so – or not at all – in Philip. We had no idea whether it would be down to some chemical balance, a difference in synaptic function, or a virtual ‘sixth sense’ which some sub-section of the brain was sensitive to – and so in the beginning we just used part of the samples to find out exactly what we'd got to work with. Of course we didn't have a wide enough sample to make any findings stand up to scrutiny: but then we weren't ever going to tell anyone what we were doing, so that hardly mattered.
We drew the blinds and stayed inside, and worked eighteen hours a day. Philip said little, and for much of the time seemed only half the person he used to be. I realized that until we succeeded in letting him talk with his love again, I would not see the friend I knew.
We both had our reasons for doing what we did.
It took a little longer than we'd hoped, but we threw a lot of computing power at it and in the end began to see results. They were complex, and far from conclusive, but appeared to suggest that all three possibilities were partly true. My aunt showed a minute difference in synaptic function in certain areas of her brain, which I shared, but not the fractional chemical imbalances which were present in both my mother and me. On the other hand, there was evidence of a loose meta-structure of apparently unrelated areas of her brain which was only present in trace degrees in my mother, and not at all in me. We took these results and correlated them against the findings from the samples of Philip's brain, and finally came to a tentative conclusion.
The ability, if it truly was related to physiological morphology, seemed most directly related to an apparently insignificant variation in general synaptic function which created an almost intangible additional structure within certain areas of the brain.
Not, perhaps, one of the most memorable slogans of scientific discovery, but that night Philip and I went out and got more drunk than we had in five years. We clasped hands on the table once more, and this time we believed that the hand that should have been between ours was nearly within reach. The next day we split into two overlapping teams, dividing our time and minds as always between the software and the beckies. The beckies needed redesigning to cope with the new environment, and the software required yet another quantum leap to deal with the complexity of the tasks of synaptic manipulation. As we worked we joked that if the beckies got much more intelligent we'd have to give them the vote. It seemed funny back then.
September 12th, 2019 ought to have a significant place in the history of science, despite everything that happened afterwards. It was the day on which we tested MindWorks 1.0, a combination of computer and corporeal which was probably more subtle than anything man has ever produced. Philip insisted on being the first subject, despite the fact that he had another cold, and in the early afternoon of that day I injected him with a tiny dose of the beckies. Then, in a flash of solidarity, I injected myself. Together till the end, we said.
We sat there for five minutes, and then got on with some work. We knew that the effects, if there were any, wouldn't be immediate. To be absolutely honest, we weren't expecting much at all from the first batch. As everyone knows, anything with the version number ‘1’ will have teething problems, and if it has a ‘.0’ after it then it's going to crash and burn. We sat and tinkered with the plans for a 1.1 version, which was only different in that some of the algorithms were more elegant, but we couldn't seem to concentrate. Excitement, we assumed.
Then late afternoon Philip staggered and dropped a flask of the solution he was working on. It was full of MindWorks, but that didn't matter – we had a whole vat of it in storage, I made Philip sit down and ran a series of tests on him. Physically he was okay, and protested that he felt fine. We shrugged and went back to work. I printed out ten copies of the code and becky specifications, and posted them to ten different places around the world. Of course, the computers already laid automated and encrypted email backups all over the place, but there's no substitute for a physical object with a date stamped on it. If this worked it was going to be ours, and no one else was taking credit for it. Such considerations were actually less important to us by then, because there was only one thing we wanted from the experiment – but old habits die hard. Ten minutes later I had a dizzy spell myself, but apart from that nothing seemed to be happening at all.
We only realized that we might have succeeded when I woke to hear Philip screaming in the night.
I ran into his room and found him crouched up against the wall, eyes wide, teeth chattering uncontrollably. He was staring at the opposite corner of the room. He didn't seem to be able to hear anything I said to him. As I stood there numbly
, wondering what to do, I heard a voice from behind me – a voice I half-thought I recognized. I turned, but there was no one there. Suddenly Philip looked at me, his eyes wide and terrified.
‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘I think it's working.’
We spent the rest of the night in the kitchen, sitting round the table and drinking coffee in harsh light. Philip didn't seem to be able to remember exactly what it was he'd seen, and I couldn't recapture the sound of the voice I'd heard, or what it might have said. Clearly we'd achieved something, but it wasn't clear what it might be. When nothing further happened by daybreak, we decided to get out of the house for a while. We were both too keyed up to sit around any longer or try to work, but felt we should stay together. Something was happening, we knew: we could both feel it. We walked around campus for the morning, had lunch in the cafeteria, then spent the afternoon downtown. The streets seemed a little crowded, but nothing else weird happened.
In the evening we went out. We had been invited to a dinner party at the house of a couple on the medical staff, and thought we might as well attend. Philip and I were rather distracted at first, but once everyone had enough wine inside them we started to have a good time. The hosts got out their stock of dope, doubtless supplied by an accommodating member of the student body, and by midnight we were all a little high, comfortably sprawled around the living room.
And of course, eventually, Philip started talking about the work we'd been doing. At first people just laughed, and that made me realize belatedly just how far outside the scope of normal scientific endeavour we had moved. It also made me determined that we should be taken seriously, and so I started to back Philip up. It was stupid, and we should never have mentioned it. It was one of the people at that party who eventually gave our names to the police.
‘So prove it,’ this man said at one stage. ‘Hey, is there a ouija board in the house?’
The general laughter which greeted this sally was enough to tip the balance. Philip rose unsteadily to his feet, and stood in the centre of the room. He sneezed twice, to general amusement, but then his head seemed to clear. Though he was swaying gently, the seriousness of his face was enough to quieten most people, although there was a certain amount of giggling. He looked gaunt, and tired, and everybody stopped talking, and the room went very quiet as they watched him.
What You Make It: A Book of Short Stories Page 7