Flip

  ***

  In a way, Michelson felt envious of the man who lay on the surgical table before her, his brain lying underneath a flap of tissue called the dura mater. True, his life as volunteer 119 was now over, but she was giving him an exceedingly precious gift in exchange.

  In a few hours, you’ll see reality in its truest form. The best view I’ve ever had of the quantum world is a third-hand, digitally processed representation.

  The limitation gnawed at her. That she hadn’t found a noninvasive way there first galled her. That it was Aida who’d found it, and then only through a stupid accident that The Project, and by extension herself, had fomented, was almost beyond her comprehension.

  It was more than unfair. Aida didn’t deserve it. The woman hadn’t even been looking for it!

  She shut down her roiling indignation; such agitation wouldn’t do before starting the procedure in earnest. Michelson did take comfort in several things. All the data in Qian’s imaging system told her Aida should be on her way here, as was Greg. They would be under her control. That was excellent. But she took deeper satisfaction in knowing she was much more familiar than the Doxiphuses were at navigating quantum space, and after spending a few hours studying Aida’s EEG traces, she wondered if she could reproduce the conditions that had sent Aida over in the first place. If so, it represented an entirely new way to get observers engaged in viewing quantum space. Getting them back safely was another matter.

  The expertise of The Project was in insertion; they’d never even considered bringing an observer back. If Michelson could get into Aida’s lab and to the machine, she and The Project would be done with this messy business of inserting observers.

  I need to finish this and get back to University City. I need to get to that machine.

  Before entering the surgical suite, she had called Kelley to find out where things stood with the Doxiphuses, but he had forwarded his calls to his assistant, and she was forced to leave a message. Any news of the family would have to wait; she didn’t allow interruptions in the surgical suite once she entered. Except from Gilden.

  Her surgical team had performed the initial craniotomy while she was flying in. The observer’s head was held stationary in a halo clamp, a stainless-steel ring that encircled the skull like, well, a halo. Screws extended from the inside edge of the ring directly into the skull itself, anchoring it in three dimensions. The vast majority of the cranium had already been removed above the ears in a single, long circumferential cut made with an electric bone saw. The bowl-shaped pieces of the occipital, parietal, and most of the frontal bones rested on a tray to her left. The tough, fibrous dura mater had been sliced circumferentially around the brain in a similar manner as the upper cranium, with the exception of a small piece in front, which remained connected. This allowed Michelson to lift the dura like the flap of a tent to expose the beauty of the most complex structure she knew of in the universe.

  After the craniotomy prep, her team had effectively removed all sources of sensory stimulation to the brain from the torso and limbs. This was necessary, as any stimuli coming from the body into the brain could distract it from what they needed this magnificent structure to focus on. All the sensory and motor neurons in the spinal cord had been transected, leaving the subject completely paralyzed and on a respirator, which was rhythmically pushing air into the observer’s lungs. The necessary cranial nerves had been cut as well. The nerves that carried the electrical signals that regulated the heart were the only exception.

  The senses of smell, taste, and hearing had to be dealt with too, which was more difficult. You couldn’t just cut those nerves; they played too large a role in the sensory information stream the brain used to build the perception of reality. They actually arose from the same tissue as the brain did during embryological development and were extensions of the brain itself. If you severed the auditory and olfactory nerves, it would result in neurochemical imbalances and hallucinations caused by the brain trying to replace the flow of information it had always received. People self-induced these types of hallucinations by spending too much time floating in the hypersalinized fluid inside sensory deprivation chambers. No, those senses had to be fooled. The Project, under the guise of a perfume company, had awarded a contract to a biochemical engineering team in China to develop a molecule that the chemical receptors in the nose and tongue would latch on to and thus produce sensory input but was chemically neutral. They had no taste or smell. Tubes, now permanently implanted during the prep, delivered a steady stream of the white-noise molecule into the observer’s mouth and nasal cavities.

  Hearing was likewise hoodwinked through the bilateral implantation of modified cochlear implants. A similar white-noise signal was permanently fed into the cochlea, the snail-shell-shaped organ of hearing embedded in the bone of the skull, by a microelectrode array.

  The brain was now cut off from all sensory input except for the crucial sense of sight. A precarious, unbalanced position to be in, but a necessary one. The Project had lost many subjects early on by such drastic alteration of the relationship between the brain and body. The minds of subjects in the initial trials, deprived of sensory input, went through massive bouts of hallucinations as the brain desperately tried to build a world for itself. It was amazing to watch the tenacious efforts on the EEG traces and fMRI, but eventually, the psyche collapsed, and the EEG shifted to the pattern of a persistent vegetative state and then to brain death.

  The key to achieving their goal was to compel the brain into attending to a view of the world that it had at best glimpsed in a fleeting moment during infancy when the neuronal controls for attention and consciousness still were developing. Once those controlling neural systems became active, the brain would spend the rest of its life purposely ignoring quantum space.

  So how do you get someone to see a thing that can’t be seen by looking at it? The first part of the answer lay in taking advantage of the two different types of attention in humans, overt and covert, as identified by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1894.

  Overt attention, so intimately linked to our visual system, is when you elect to attend to what you are looking at, leaving the other visual stimuli present in the visual field to be filtered out. The brain, under the direction of the consciousness, recognizes they aren’t important and so can be safely discounted. The example Michelson always thought of was that of an audience watching a movie in a darkened theater. The audience’s entire focus is directed toward what’s on the screen. They can still see the seat or person in front of them, and the walls of the auditorium, but they ignore these. Literally, the audience turns a blind eye to them.

  Covert attention proved to be Michelson’s ally. It’s a peculiarity of the human consciousness that every individual can lock their gaze on any given part of their visual field yet choose to attend to something in another part. An aspect of the internal experience that defines human consciousness as a distinct mental state from animal consciousness is the ability to disconnect our focus from what we’re looking at and place it on another set of stimuli, either endogenous or exogenous.

  She discovered that if you could permanently sever the link between attention and the visual system, the human brain could perceive another world. To do that was simply a matter of turning off the spotlight of overt attention and amplifying the activity of the parts of the brain that controlled covert attention. A set of nano sensors embedded into the visual centers in the occipital lobe sensed the activity and fed the data to Qian’s imaging system.

  Time to get to work.

  Turning off “the spotlight” consisted of systematically destroying both the visual systems of the brain and the portions of the brain involved with overt attention. Michelson listed them off in her head as she started the procedure. First, she used a laser to burn the neurons in the fovea, the area of the retina where the neurons are most densely packed and thus the area with the highest spatial resolution. Then she severed the extraocular eye muscles, which moved the eyeballs around
, and inserted screws through the eyeballs and anchored them into the bones behind the eye socket fixing them in place.

  Now into the brain itself.

  Her team had mapped out and marked the particular regions that controlled vision and overt attention. Michelson verified these and proceeded with the ablation of the frontal eye field, an area in the frontal lobes that functioned to establish gaze as directed by conscious effort and the intraparietal sulcus.

  With patient, deliberate movements, she removed—scooped, really—portions of the brain while the assistant surgeon, a brilliant Filipino woman by the last name of Santos, cauterized the severed blood vessels. Brain tissue is amazingly sticky, so flicking the wet scraps of the observer’s brain tissue off her instruments was almost like trying to flick peanut butter off a knife, and it was a motion she now casually performed.

  In a fluke of evolution, one of the brain structures, the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), which regulates covert attention, sits only on the right side of the brain, behind and slightly above the right ear. This lateralization of function is unusual in an organ that so exquisitely distributes functions between the two hemispheres.

  The TPJ serves to help shift focus to new stimuli as they come into the brain. Being a cortical area, it is on the surface of the brain, so inserting the cannulas (thin needlelike tubes) that would introduce the excitatory neurotransmitters to it for the rest of Observer 119’s life was relatively easy.

  A glance at the clock showed an elapsed time of four hours; the most sensitive part of procedure lay ahead. She had to set cannulas into the pulvinar, the posterior area of the thalamus, deep in the center of brain. The pulvinar, when excited, enhances covert shifting of attention. The area she had to hit was only about the size of a sugar cube, and it was entirely encased in the pineapple-size organ. A mistake at this point meant a waste of a brain and her time. The subject wouldn’t die for several days, as long as it was on support, but that was immaterial to The Project’s goal. It was only with painstaking slowness and multiple measurements, calculations, and recalculations that she was able to locate the area she needed in three dimensions of space.

  Michelson placed the cannulas and started the feed of the gamma aminobutyric acid (GABA), itself an inhibitory neurotransmitter, into the pulvinar. In essence, she was inhibiting the inhibitor to produce greater activation of the pulvinar as discovered by Buchsbaum et al. in 2006.

  There, the hard part’s done. She glanced again at the clock; it was a little after 2:00 p.m. Six hours and seventeen minutes.

  Aida and Greg should be here by now.

  Why didn’t Jerome let me know?

  She left the insertion of the nano sensors into the occipital lobe to her assistant while she sat on a couch in the surgical suite to call Gilden. She wouldn’t actually leave the suite until Qian confirmed they had a good feed. Gilden picked up on the first ring.

  “Are they here yet?” she asked.

  “No, the plane is waiting for them at the airport now,” he said in a low tone. “The last prediction shows him taking the offer. What’s Kelley saying?” She sensed the barb of an accusation in what he’d said; working this through Kelley had been her idea.

  “He hasn’t returned my calls.”

  “Are you done in there? We don’t have a signal yet.” The barb had grown a very sharp point.

  “The team is making the connections for the feed now. We should have a signal within the hour.”

  “Let the team finish that up. Find out what’s going on with Greg and Aida.” The line clicked dead before she could reply.

  Stiff and sore from her hours of labor, Michelson stood up and went to check on the team’s progress. Satisfied, she left the surgical suite, changed into some fresh scrubs, and got an apple juice before calling Kelley. This time he too answered on the first ring.

  “Hello, Beverly,” he started. “I’ve been with the auditors all morning. I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to return your calls…university business and all.”

  “That’s okay,” she lied. “Did Greg accept the offer? The air ambulance is waiting for them at the airport.”

  “What do you mean? I saw the discharge report myself. It said Aida was prepped for transport and the whole family left for the airport sometime after midnight.”

  Disturbed, she repeated the obvious to him. “They’re not here, Alvin.” You idiot! “Are you sure they actually left?”

  “Let me double-check. Paperwork errors happen. I’ll call you back in five minutes.”

  She laid down on the bench in the surgical locker room, closed her eyes, and waited for the call. Four minutes later, she answered her chirping phone. Without interrupting, she listened and sat straight up, swinging her feet to the floor.

  “We need to find out where they are, Alvin! Yes, you can reach me at this number.”

  Thanks to the multiple walls between the locker room and the surgical suite, all the team heard was a muffled scream from Michelson as they confirmed with Qian that Observer 119 was online.

  21 Hunting

  “W here are they now?” Gilden asked in a low voice, starting the meeting with the obvious question. “How did they do it?” He tapped his pencil on the desk. “And are they a threat?”

  Michelson, occupying the seat facing him, was fuming. Qian paced and didn’t take the seat next to Michelson. The room’s fourth occupant, Angus Baka, stood silently next to the sealed door. Michelson detested the hulking red-haired brute. He was Gilden’s handpicked attack dog and chief of security and operations. His bungling of the initial contact with Aida and her daughter had put the Doxiphuses on their guard, priming their suspicion and making them receptive to the assistance they so obviously had received.

  Baka spoke first. “They’re driving, and they’ve had a little more than a ten-hour head start. They didn’t switch to a plane, so that puts them in a circle with Chicago on the east, the Missouri-Arkansas border on the south, the Nebraska-Colorado border on the west, and about halfway into Minnesota to the north.”

  “Why should we assume they didn’t get on a plane?” Qian asked.

  “All flight plans have to be registered with the FAA, and they’d have to get a medical charter,” Baka replied. “That was the first thing we checked. We also grabbed a partial image of the ambulance from the ER security video. It shows the Doxiphus family getting in with the medic; he’s driving. They’re in an older vehicle, white with striping, as best we can tell—it was a black-and-white camera. We weren’t able to get the plates from the image either…wrong angle.”

  “So they could be anywhere in the Midwest. That’s not much help,” Michelson said with disdain.

  “If I’d been told about this as soon as your system went offline, I could have put eyes on them round the clock,” Baka countered. “Is Kelley going to be of any help?” The question was to Michelson.

  “Kelley refuses to involve the state police. He’s afraid to drag the university into this and says no crime has been committed.”

  “Probably just as well.” Turning to Gilden, Baka continued. “We’re monitoring traffic cameras in all the states they could be in. There won’t be that many vehicles of this type, and we have traces on their cell phones and credit and debit cards. I’ll find them.” He said this with absolute certainty as he leveled an accusatory glare at Michelson.

  “Fine. Find them and report back. Take no action,” Gilden commanded. Baka turned and left the room. “We’re one hundred percent back online. What can we do in quantum space?” he asked Michelson and Qian.

  “I’ve been working on that,” Qian answered, then motioned to the screen on the wall. “This is a recording of the feed from Observer 113 as we were monitoring the subject and her family yesterday evening. Mr. Baka was present as well.” He made no mention of the hospital room or any other context. “In the center of this view, the subject’s QRM—that’s quantum representation of mind—is surrounded by the QRMs of actors A and B. Mr. Baka is outside the circle that A and
B describe.”

  Gilden watched the glowing spots of light in the computer-generated background. The whole thing resembled a Jell-O fruit mold to him.

  “Now watch carefully,” Qian went on “At time counter three, you see a burst of light emanate from the subject’s QRM and move to touch the QRMs of A and B.” The recording continued to play. “Now at time counter fifty-nine, you see the burst of light again move from A and B back to the subject.”

  Although Gilden hadn’t spent the thousands of hours watching and interpreting the information from quantum space that Qian had, even he knew this was something The Project had never encountered before.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “This event is unique in nature. Based on Mr. Baka’s description and the data, I believe Dr. Doxiphus is somehow able to extend her consciousness into the perceptions of other people, and when she does that, she can see and hear what they are. She sort of piggybacks onto what their senses perceive. Furthermore, Dr. Michelson and I believe she can communicate with those whose minds she touches. It’s a most fascinating phenomenon.”

  “That’s tremendous, Qian, really,” Gilden said with only a little bit of sarcasm, “but how does this help us find her?”

  “We believe this ability is unique to Dr. Doxiphus. So we’ll monitor and wait for her to do it again. It should lead us right to her.”

  Gilden nodded and dismissed him. “Thank you, Doctor.” As Qian walked toward the door, Gilden added, “Qian, I want updates every six hours on the status of the other observers. There will be no more observational blackouts. I’m accelerating the pilot, and we can’t afford to go dark again.”

  “That’ll make it harder for us to find them,” Michelson protested. “We’ll have better coverage if all four observers are tasked for searching, and we haven’t discussed accelerating the pilot!”