Flip

by Christopher J Fox

  Sitting on the side of the control console was a USB smartcard reader, its blue LED glowing in the darkened room. Aida slid her university ID badge, which also was a smartcard with an embedded computer chip, into the reader. Immediately a prompt appeared on the screen, asking for her PIN.

  She typed in “12241871.” Greg didn’t approve of her practice of using dates as passwords or PINs, but she had reasoned with him that if she was going to have to go through this added layer of security, she would use a PIN she would remember.

  The QUESAM administration program splash screen came up with blinking text across the bottom that read “Initializing.”

  “There you go,” she said, and got up to let Bill take her place.

  “Do you want the default parameters?”

  “No, not with the new QUESAMs. There are stimulation pulses in a default run that could interfere with the readings.”

  In addition to being detectors, the QUESAMs also could produce electromagnetic pulses at specific frequencies and for narrow slices of time. These pulses would run along all the cells in the brain, and based on how fast they were transmitted by each individual cell, you could tell what type of cell each one was. Like which ones were normal cells and which were cancer cells. And once you could locate exactly where they were, you’d place nanoparticles of heavy metals, like gold or platinum, in them and send another therapeutic pulse through. The second pulse would cause the metal atoms to kick loose an electron (radiation) that would fly out into the cancer cells and smash their DNA, killing them. But because their energy was so low, they wouldn’t go much beyond the cancer cells themselves.

  “Gotcha!” Bill said. “Can you check these settings, please?”

  Aida leaned over to give the screen a quick glance. “Looks good.”

  She stepped onto the foil mat and grabbed the door handle to the inner room to release the latch. Bill’s hands moved between the screen and keyboard, locking in the approved parameters for the run as she stepped in and closed the door behind her.

  The silence of the inner room fell on Aida’s ears, cutting her off from the outer world like Odyssean wax plugs. She swallowed to pop her ears and spoke to make sure she could still hear and to start the recording of the calibration run.

  “Are we all sealed up?” she asked. “Good. This is a calibration run with QUESAM’s version four point three. Readings only, no stimulation.” She reached behind her neck to undo the clasp of her crucifix and took out her earrings as well. There could be no metal within thirty centimeters of the helmet, and the gold in her jewelry was an excellent electrical conductor.

  “Turn down the lights a little, please, Bill. Don’t want to overstimulate the visual cortex.”

  The lighting for the inner room was carried in by bundled fiber-optic cables from light boxes in the outer lab, which kept the electrical noise down. Bill lowered the lighting.

  “There, that’s good,” Aida said.

  She sat down in the chair, which reclined back when it sensed her weight. It slowly moved to the right position for the helmet to join it, then locked into place. Overhead, the ends of the fiber-optic cables looked like dim stars in an early-evening sky, except they didn’t twinkle.

  “Okay, ready here, Bill. Let’s get going, and don’t forget to log this in the notebook.”

  Aida couldn’t hear Bill’s response. They had elected not to put speakers in the inner room, and there was no room for nonmagnetic-style headsets used in MRI machines under the helmet. Instead they had suspended a mirror on the ceiling in which she could see the window between the inner and outer rooms. Glancing up, she saw that Bill held the notebook. He waved it a few times and gave a weak smile and a thumbs-up. In that moment she saw the color had drained from his face like water from a sponge. Then he sat down and was blocked by the monitors.

  He looks ashen. “Bill, are you all right? We can postpone this if you’re sick.”

  Another thumbs-up sign rose from behind the console, and the gentle hiss of hydraulics told her the helmet was moving into position. Bill had initiated the session sequence. Well, okay. It’s a short session, and he can always abort if he has to.

  The helmet was actually the open, hollow end of a four-foot-long telescoping cylinder and sat in a cradle suspended from the ceiling by a massive support arm. Thick cables, heavy with insulation and shielding, twined and twisted their way around the support arm as they ran to the helmet. In her mind’s eye, the video of previous tests played, and Aida imagined she saw the cylinder approach the chair from above and behind her and then telescope out when it was level with the chair. She wouldn’t be able to see the helmet until it was right on top of her, engulfing her head, with only a small cutout for the face. When the helmet was in position, she smirked; she thought it looked like an even larger version of that massive beehive hairdo that Elsa Lanchester wore as the Bride of Frankenstein.

  Slowly, in the edge of Aida’s sight, the darkness inside the helmet blocked out some of the putty-colored walls of the inner room, and pillows inflated by puffs of air gently stabilized her head and neck from either side. The overhead lighting dimmed for a moment, signaling to her that the detection cycle would begin in sixty seconds. She had to focus on her breathing now, calm her mind, and get her brain into neutral—not doing, just being. Aida rested her tongue on the roof of her mouth and half closed her eyes.

  She noticed the edges of her nostrils being pulled gently inward by the cool rush of air, and then her attention shifted to her expanding ribs and abdomen.

  In…

  The release of breath came without effort as her diaphragm and chest-wall muscles relaxed.

  Out. Twenty-one…

  Relaxation spread downward from the top of her scalp and through her face, throat, neck, shoulders, and upper back.

  In…

  A slightly deeper breath in flowed to a deeper release as she breathed out the tension.

  Out. Twenty…

  In…

  Out. Nineteen…

  In…

  Out. Eighteen…

  With each cycle, the wave of release continued its journey downward, like a slowly falling line of dominos, ending at her toes and the soles of her feet.

  In…

  Thoughts and images flashed on the screen of Aida’s mind, each vying for her attention. She let them slide away as they popped up, then guided her focus back to her breathing.

  Out. Twelve…

  In…

  Her mind was starting to settle down now as she continued the cycle of breathing she had first learned in yoga class. But, like a child protesting bedtime, it wasn’t quite ready to let go yet. It tried to latch on to the sense of pressure from the chair she felt at certain points along her back and legs. Aida acknowledged the sensation, then let it flow over the waterfall of the stream of perceptions.

  Out. Eleven…

  In the last ten breaths of the cycle, she visualized a warm, bright, nurturing light filling her body. Once it filled her, it would surround her like a cocoon.

  In…

  Out. Four…

  Peace and comfort.

  In…

  The next step was to accept and send out wishes for love, kindness, and compassion to the entire world. Generally this was the hardest step of the meditation for every practitioner. It’s human nature to show concern for strangers, for the unknown multitudes of the world, only after ensuring that your own needs are met. Aida was no exception, so she was more than surprised when a slight sense of that universal love came to her, not from her.

  Out. Three…

  In…

  Peace and comfort and love.

  Out. Two…

  The last breath came and went without her noticing it at all. A slight hum built inside the helmet. Why are the capacitors charging? I said no stim…

  ***

  Piece-of-shit computer! Hurry up. Bill mentally cursed as he sweated away the longest sixty seconds of his life. He sat with his arms crossed and his leg twitching
. His eyes darted between the countdown timer, the “abort” button, and the settings he had just changed.

  It’s five grand, man, and it’s just a machine. They’ll fix it, the devil on his left shoulder said. Then a weak voice, screaming as loud as it could yet barely discernable to him, said, What about Dr. D? What if she gets hurt?

  He felt as if he might puke as the timer passed through nine, eight, seven…

  Bill watched her. When the timer showed five, the stimulation capacitors he had reconfigured to overload began to charge.

  Three, two, one…

  Her left hand tightened on the arm of the chair, and her legs lifted.

  Zero.

  A burst of stimulation pulses ran across the EEG window of the control screen as a sound like an old electric typewriter with a key held down, machine-gunning its way across the page, came through the speakers.

  He stood up from the console, then looked down at an EEG that was all over the place. Through the window he saw Aida’s arm, dangling over the side of the chair, her hand unmoving.

  Oh, shit!

  He jumped from the console and got both feet on the mat, then wrenched the door open.

  “Dr. D? Are you all right?” he said, panicking.

  He hit the “abort” button on the wall of the inner room, and the helmet started to retract. Aida’s eyes were closed, her face blank. Bill grabbed her by the shoulders and shook, shouting, “Dr. D! I don’t know happened. I’m sorry.” Unsympathetic muteness was the only response he received.

  A crushing weight fell on Bill’s chest, and he struggled for his next breath. His vision narrowed, turning gray at the edges as his stomach collapsed on itself and his heart pounded in his ears. He staggered to the outer room and grabbed the trash can as his whole body convulsed, trying to vomit out the fear and self-condemnation. The taste of bile mixed with coffee filled his mouth and nose as a stream of stinging fluid erupted from him. Then the gray curtain in his field of vision closed off the world, and he passed out on the floor.

  12 Waking Up

  P eace and comfort. Aida felt she was being carried upward, like a leaf on a breeze. It was familiar yet different. She remembered the music from earlier and reached out for it, but there was only silence. She drifted outside of time and was content to do so. Weightless, she felt something wash over her and move her in one direction, then another in the same way. Silence and floating, and then the silence changed. She felt it change rather than hearing it. It was a physical sensation; she felt it vibrating her, and she resonated along with it in harmony. Her awareness grasped on to the sensation and began to focus. She tightened her grip on it and was surprised to discover it was coming from her and from outside of her. It was everywhere. And it was joyful and grateful, and Aida laughed in the pure delight of it. The sound of her laughter filled her and then everything else, and it too resonated in the vibrating silence.

  She became aware of colors, lights, and movement…and darkness. There were things out there—she could see them but felt a slight sense of vertigo. They were out of focus, untouchable, and for a moment she felt she was falling—like in a dream, moving, and dropping, ungrounded and thrashing but motionless at the same time. Her entire field of vision was two-dimensional; everything was flat, with no depth.

  A bright object moved toward her out of the shimmering light and the dark background. It took on a long, cigar-like shape, and Aida was able to focus on it. Then the one bright object transformed into many smaller bright objects that were close together, arranged in two triple columns of illuminated dots.

  “What is that?” she asked and was startled to hear her voice aloud. Her hearing had cleared, and under her voice, the vibrating silence had turned into a low-pitched hum. It almost sounded like a voice, one immense voice of everything.

  The lines were getting closer now. Each dot emitted a soft pearl-white glow and left a thin trail of the glow behind as it moved ahead in a straight line. Other objects grew out of the flatness, taking on depth and dimension, and her visual world resolved itself in one instant. Although the objects didn’t change their color or shape or how they were moving, she was able to see them now.

  This is all like a Magic Eye picture, and I’m seeing the 3-D image that was embedded in the 2-D image all the time. She understood now. All these things had always been there; you just needed to unfocus your vision and your eyes. Then your visual centers would reinterpret what they saw, and then—boom!—in an instant, your perspective would flip, and you’d see the 3-D objects. But this wasn’t an eight-by-ten stereogram she could look away from and see the normal world again. This was everywhere she looked.

  Filaments of light stood out against the dark background, and in them she saw the light-emitting pearls moving. The pearls and fine threads gathered in clusters here and there and into larger, brighter groups that moved with their own rhythms.

  Tendrils of light connected most of the groups. Some groups sat isolated and out of contact with the rest of the formation. Although there was order in the pattern, nothing was straight and orderly in it. What Aida saw looked like the roots of a tree or the tangled runners of a strawberry plant, and it all moved in organic slowness. Between the strings of light, individual pearls sat in the darkness, glistening jewels set in velvety blackness. Some moved and left spider-thread trails behind them, while others were still and dim, or perhaps they were so far away that she was unable to see if they moved.

  All was in constant motion around her, like the rising and falling of swells in the ocean. The rows of pearls were still moving toward her, or perhaps she was moving toward them. As Aida watched, their light blinked out for a moment and returned. She sensed the inky black background itself was moving. It had blocked out the pearls, like a nearby hill that blocks your view of distant trees as you drive along a highway. She watched the wave roll away into the distance and saw the ripples it left in its wake. The ripples didn’t make themselves known on their own but by how they reflected and distorted the light from the pearls. One of the smallest ripples was coming toward her. When it reached her, it washed over her, and she felt it carry her, ever so slightly, along with it.

  The two columns of lights were very close now, and Aida saw dozens of rows in the two columns. Each row had six lights in it, three on each side, separated by a small gap, like an aisle running down the center of a church. Voices came from the two columns—not the one voice of the background but multiple voices, like a room filled with people who were talking at the same time. She couldn’t understand what they were saying, so she pulled back a little and tried to listen for just one voice. With some concentration, Aida could hear, out of the garble, one voice, a little girl’s.

  “Combien de temps pour qu’on arrive là-bas, maman?”

  A woman’s voice replied, “Continue à chercher la mer Méditerranée, mon chéri. Si tu la vois, c’est qu’on est presque arrivés.” Keep looking for the Mediterranean Sea, dear. When you see that, it won’t be long.

  French? That’s French! Aida understood the words, but they made no sense. What is this? She had to get closer to see. She closed the distance between herself and the columns of pearl-like lights. Other voices—she recognized them as adult voices now—filled in the background, but she concentrated on the little girl’s voice. It’s a little girl and her mother on a trip, she realized, and with the mention of the Mediterranean Sea and the sound of the roaring engine…they’re flying! Then she knew what she was looking at and listening to. Each of the pearls of light was a person, and they were seated on a plane in flight. It explained the pattern she was seeing and the conversations she heard but not how she was seeing it.

  Where am I? When Aida looked away from the columns of pearls at the vastness that expanded before her, the sense of vertigo returned. Panic was starting to rise in her, so she turned her focus back to the plane. She could focus on that and feel grounded.

  Behind the two columns of pearls, a wave was approaching. It was something like the ripples tha
t the other wave had left but more substantial. In what seemed like a moment, the wave overtook the lights and swept through them, scattering their order and throwing them out on random paths. And then she heard screams; everyone on the plane was screaming. As she watched, most of lights faded, then disappeared into the blackness. Something happened to the plane!

  A few pearls, less than a dozen, stayed in their rows and columns, but they were silent now. They sat, barely moving, leaving thin trails of milky-white threads behind them in straight lines. Again, from behind the plane, a wave was approaching but moving much slower than the first one.

  Aida knew something had happened on the plane, and she surmised what had happened to the pearls she could no longer see. She saw the wave continue to move toward the plane and the remaining pearls.

  They’re not moving. They need to get out of there. They need help!

  “Wake up!” she shouted at them, but they didn’t move, and she knew they couldn’t hear her. I have to get in there to help them, she realized. As she had done so many times in her emergency room rotations and residency, she completely forgot about herself and focused exclusively on the people in front of her who needed her help. With hands she didn’t have, she reached out to touch them, to feel and see where the wounds were. She listened to the sounds the wounded were making, smelled the aromas emanating from the wounds or other parts of the body. She processed each of these instinctively, using the information to order her next actions.

  And then Aida was standing on the wing of the plane, looking through the cavernous hole at the interior of the cabin and at a boy and a little girl seated next to a woman. The plane was on the ground, and around her were broken trees and the torn brush of the jungle. Smoke was seeping out from the plane, and heat radiated off its metal skin. It’s going to explode soon.

  The little girl in the white dress started to move. She coughed, and the boy next to her, probably her brother, reached over to see if she was okay.