Gill was busy removing needles and patches from the rodent’s skin. He released the mouse from its little harness and handed her to Deverson. She sat up on his hand, twitching, sniffing at the air. “This incredibly resilient little gal has been through this procedure five times. We have some mice who’ve been restarted twenty or more times. We’ve learned that they progressively lose their fear, become fearless of humans, cats, heights. Now why do you suppose that is?”
It was a rhetorical question but the girl in the front row quickly raised her hand. Professor Deverson, a lecturer, not a discussion moderator, became visibly flustered, looked over at Gill helplessly.
“And your name is?” Gill asked with a cocked eyebrow.
“Sara Keplar. “The rodents’ fear centers were starved of oxygenated blood, and after revival, these areas of the brain didn’t recover.”
Gill was closer to her now. He nodded his approval, studying her long bare arms, slender and strong and tan. He was staring and he didn’t care.
Deverson had unruffled himself and was busy stuffing the mouse into a small cage. Then he moved forward across the stage to his brain chart. “We’ve been fortunate to have had the opportunity to monitor the deaths of several human subjects in recent years, volunteers who were dying of various ailments, and these brave individuals have allowed us to observe how the brain goes about this final process.
“And it is a process, an instinct-driven shut-down procedure which unfolds with very little variation in all the human individuals we’ve studied, and in a strikingly similar manner in lower vertebrates as well.
“It appears to be a subconscious mechanism first activated when blood pressure drops to zero. We’ve coined this process the Expiration Protocol. Now let me take a moment to distinguish EP from other involuntary mechanisms, such as the so-called Hibernation Sequence, which activates when core temperature drops, or the respiratory failure mechanism, or other survival devices. EP is not a survival device. The EP mechanism kicks-in when all the survival mechanisms have already failed. In other words, the EP mechanism begins with the subconscious mind’s involuntary acceptance of imminent shutdown.
“EP’s first order of business is to send vasoconstriction commands throughout the body, forcing blood cells toward the head, routing some through the lungs to pick up whatever oxygen is still available in the alveoli. Blood is pushed up the carotid artery into the brain where further vasoconstriction directs it here,” again he slapped the rendering, “into here, this tiny portion of the anterior cerebral cortex, but, interestingly, excluding this area,” he glanced at Sara over his little half-glasses, “where we believe lies the brain’s fight-flight centers.”
He now paused to gauge his audience’s attention, and satisfied, continued: “At this same time EP is shutting down whole systems, sending commands directly to the organs in question and to their corresponding neurological command centers in the brain. It is a very careful process to conserve electrical and biochemical resources. The excretory system is shut down first, followed by digestive, immune, respiratory, reproductive, cardiovascular and endocrine systems, in that order, always in that same order. The motor control system is also shut down and so are the senses, touch first, then taste, smell, hearing…”
“The EP has taken over control of the entire organism. All over the body, individual cells, deprived of biologically useful energy, are breaking down by the billions. The only thing that seems to matter to EP is keeping a few areas of the brain alive for as long as possible, a frantic race to save a few neuron bundles for an additional few seconds.
“Sight is the last sensory function to terminate, even after the eyelids are no longer blinking. But the optic nerves do fail, and the visual cortex shuts down momentarily thereafter, and for the dying individual all contact with the outside world is severed. It is still several minutes before this last area of one temporal lobe will cease activity.” He held up one index finger. “Only one lobe, only one small area, a couple million tenacious neurons, marshaling the entire body’s bio-chemical reserves, each neuron interconnected with it’s dying comrades through tens-of-thousands of synapses. The core.”
It was at this point that Deverson normally asked the class which behavioral area of the brain they thought it might be, and he liked to ask because they never got it right, but the young girl in the front row was poised to raise her hand, itching to answer. Had she seen his little article in last quarter’s New England Behavioral Physiology Review? How likely was that?
To be safe, he didn’t give her the chance to answer. He slapped the chart and continued “This is all that’s left: the hopes and fears, the thoughts, experiences, dreams and aspirations of a lifetime, here in the left lower temporal, the area of the brain where we appreciate and create…music.”
The spellbound audience issued a chorus of oohs and ahhs as the portly professor flipped to the next page on the easel, revealing a colorful line-graph.
“Thanks to our human volunteers we did learn something that went undetected in our earlier animal experiments. Each of our human subjects, 16 so far, was placed on an extremely sensitive weight scale.” He tapped his pointer on the chart. “Early on, you can see these regular oscillations – changes of from seven to ten micrograms - the weight of air, drawn, then expelled from the lungs. Here, where the oscillations stop, is where the subject has ceased breathing. Now we see a wavy line with variations of one to three micrograms. These would seem to be caused by organ functions and muscle spasms - shifts of mass within the body that fool our ultra-sensitive scale. And here is where the heart stops beating, and the line flattens, more and more as the minutes pass.” He flipped the page, a continuation of the chart.
“The body is still, the line flat, trending slightly downward as the gasses within the body cool. Ten minutes, 12 minutes, 15, and then this: a blip, a four gram drop at about the same moment we believe the brain core has failed.” He stabbed the blip on the chart. “We call this the Instant of Neurotransmission Failure, a cascade event in which neuronal integration fails and the remaining cluster of brain cells no longer communicate with one another. And at that moment, the INF, four grams are dropped, weight we cannot account for.”
Sara’s hand shot up. Deverson looked at her dumbfounded.
“The soul,” Sara said, “the human soul has mass. It weighs four grams!”
Deverson regained his composure: “Outbursts aside, there might be a tendency to think the human soul has four grams of mass. Nonsense. Wishful thinking, an expression of our fear of death, of our desire…our need for evidence of an afterlife.” His audience began to buzz and several hands shot up. Deverson lowered his head and raised his arm and in a few seconds the room fell silent again.
“Well,” The professor said after a moment, then nodded at Gill who began manipulating switches next to Bernice, causing the second mouse to flinch and spasm intermittently. “Getting back to little Bernice here.” He checked the clock. “It’s been 19 minutes, seven seconds, and I assure you we will not be able to resuscitate her, not with epinephrine, electrical pulses, pure oxygen, heart massage…
He jabbed the large monitor with his rubber tip. “The core has gone dark. Bernice has passed her INF. Her ‘soul,’ which I assure you weighs considerably less than four grams, has abandoned her.” A few students laughed. “It happened about 60 seconds ago, somewhere inside this tiny head, in a place where we might say science and religion intersect, perhaps the key to the very secret of life itself.
“We will explore this mystery in the coming weeks and hopefully move a tiny bit closer to unlocking it. Thank you. I’ll see you all tomorrow at eight a.m. Come prepared to work.”
Deverson left the stage to a silent audience.
Gill went about the business of loading the equipment onto a wheeled cart as the class dispersed. He looked for the girl in the front row; disappointed she had apparently left in the crowd.
“Hi,” she said, coming up from behind, startling him. She laughed. “So
you’re the guy I’m supposed to be nice to, eh?”
“Would you like a drink,” a voice asked, floating in from above. Gill’s vision snapped back into focus - a birds’ eye view of a vast desert, seven miles below. “Sir?” The voice behind him was soft, just above a whisper, to avoid waking Sara, who issued forth a little sleep noise, a combination of a squeak and a moan.
“Yeah. A beer,” Gill said.
The pretty young woman, jet-black hair tied in a loose pile on her head and held in place by what appeared to be chopsticks, began to recite the beer list in alphabetical order as she had done thousands of times before. Gill stopped her at Sierra Nevada Pale. “And the young lady?”
“Same,” Gill said.
“It will be just a few minutes,” she whispered, moving on to the seats opposite.
The sporadic clouds were behind them now. Gill returned his gaze to the vast desert, clear and stark, and focused on a rugged hilltop directly below, contemplating the Rorschach-like intermix of rock and shadow…
It was a wonderfully natural smell, sweet, feminine, a little musty, and her pillow was saturated with it. Gill engulfed the pillow, coiling around it into a fetal ball. Then, as he slowly opened his eyes, Sara was gone. Not only Sara; her alarm clock was gone, her lamp, her little jewelry box. He jumped out of bed and checked the closet. Her clothes were gone too. As he dressed he scanned everywhere for a note, an explanation, something. But there was nothing. Those few items she’d arranged around his apartment when she’d moved in with him 11 months earlier were gone. Faint shapes in the dust was all that remained, fragile shadows that seemed to fade even as he looked at them.
He hurried across campus on his mountain bike, late for another experiment. What would they be killing today, he wondered; rabbits, perhaps a dog or two. He was trying not to think about Sara. There’d been no hint from her, no warning she was unhappy. But of course there must have been. He had just missed it. Insensitive fool. It hurt. He ached in his throat and his stomach.
There was commotion in the quad, another demonstration, but this time there were older people in the crowd, adults mixed in with the students. Among the placards he saw several large crosses looming above the gathering – it was the Christian Students Alliance again.
The man at the podium, a pastor of some kind, was ranting about God, pounding his little pulpit to the delight of his immediate audience.
Gill caught a few words, carried on the wind across the lawn: “Playing God, trespassing on His domain, thou shalt hold no false gods before me…” The crowd cheered wildly, a big crowd today, wrapped around freeborn Hall in a crescent moon of frothing commotion directed at a Sacramento “News 10” van. The animal rights activists were out as well, in front of the campus theater, chanting something he couldn’t quite make out. Why did these demonstrations always happen at the quad, Gill wondered as he pedaled by. Deverson’s lab was way over by the university airport, over a mile from the enraged picketers. He also wondered if Sara would be at the lab. He couldn’t recall the student work roster.
She was; her beat-up, red Mustang convertible in the lab parking lot. Inside, in the small lobby, Deverson was being interviewed by another TV news crew, a woman reporter. He looked worried. Gill slipped by into the inner lab, locking the door before another reporter could muscle in.
“Jesus Christ,” Gill said as he closed the lab door and leaned against it.
“Something like that,” the new lab assistant said, looking up from the rat-sized coolant matrix he was attempting to install on a baseline magnet. Wilson, he said his name was.
Sara, working on an autopsy over by the sink, didn’t turn around.
“Bunch of hypocrites,” Gill said. “Who are they to say God told them to stop us from exploring God’s world using the talents and tools God gave us?”
“Well put,” Deverson said, squeezing through the door. “I wish I’d thought of it. But it’s academic now – Chancellor Willis just told me. He and Dean Darvey cancelled our lab schedule.”
Distracted, Wilson looked away from his work and a mist of liquid helium sprayed his arm. “Shit,” he howled, jumping clear.
Sara turned to the sound, and for a moment made eye contact with Gill, who, try as he might, could not erase the hurt puppy-dog look on his face. She returned to her work without expression.
He rarely saw her after that, the day INFX shut down. Just occasionally around campus, maybe a faint nod of recognition, if anything. She had gone on to work the project at Deverson’s farm, but he had not. Couldn’t. And although he’d made up several convincing arguments as to why he’d given up his grad assistantship, he’d always known the real reason. He’d even switched thesis advisors. Eventually he’d managed to convince himself he’d forgotten all about her. It was the best he could do.
The plane hit some turbulence and she grimaced again, eyes closed, and made a quiet groan. Gill studied the curve of her mouth, the faint wrinkles above her upper lip. Why had she left? All she had ever said: “It was time.” What the hell did that mean?
When the stewardess returned with two bottles of beer, Sara was still dozing happily, wearing her amused smile - nose wrinkled, dimples accentuated. Gill studied her at close range. The lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth made her look childlike, Gill thought. Playful, vulnerable. He chuckled out loud at the ridiculousness of the idea and Sara suddenly frowned.
Her eyes popped open. “What?” she said.
Gill realized his face was only six inches from hers. He retreated quickly. “I g…got you a beer,” he stuttered.
“Thanks,” she whispered, trying to stretch isometrically in the confined space.
“I was wondering, Sara. Did you ever get out to see Adel after the funeral?”
“I’ve got to go water the cat,” she said, ignoring the question.
“What about the lab notes? Did you ever get them from her?”
“I’m a bad girl,” she said as she disappeared up the aisle.
Gill glanced earthward at what he guessed was west Texas.
Day 13
Monday
Port Alford,
Henrique Island
Devon Robbins powered the big skiff into the current, skillfully carving broad S-turns through the larger swells. The rain and fog had retreated out to sea, improving coastal visibility, but the swells were running two meters, cold, gray walls of translucent liquid steel rolling downwind, almost parallel to the coast. Beautiful to watch but don’t get caught broadside.
As he steered the skiff in a wide arc around the Sphinx, Devon came up behind the heavily-laden Research and Supply Vessel Argyle as she nosed in toward the wide pebble beach. With the bow anchored perpendicular to shore, Captain Rachete let his ship drift one-third around before weighing two stern anchors, thus creating a triangular-shaped windshadow to protect the offload operation. Since Devon’s arrival here, Argyle had always been Henrique’s supply vessel, making the 5000 km round-trip from Cape Town or La Reunion every other month. At 1,820 tons, she was stout enough to deal with these waters, but nimble enough to slip in close to the beach. Important because Port Alford had neither pier nor wharf. All supplies had to come ashore on skiffs, dragged up the beach with a small tractor and stowed in a concrete warehouse 20 meters from high tide line. Stowaways? Not likely. Rachete wasn’t the sort to let something like that get past him.
Reims was gone, having moved on to Henrique Archipelago’s four smaller islands, continuing the search for terrorists. She’d taken all the students and most faculty along, “for their own safety,” Lieutenant Petard had claimed, leaving at the research station Patrick Mulfe, Dr. Galli, Devon and a contingent of 11 marines who now dressed and acted like students, hoping this deception might again lure the evildoers out of hiding. Terrorists? Where could they find refuge on this rugged, treeless rock? The snow never melted on Monts Mascarin above 1000 meters; largely unexplored ice and stone. Could they be up there? Mujahideen in the snow? It seemed unlikely.
Dev
on landed at the pontoon dock just as Argyle’s crane lowered it into the water. Relative calm in here. Today, loading the skiffs would be the easiest part of hauling replacement supplies ashore.
Captain Rachete was in the mess, stirring four packets of sugar into his black espresso. It was a few minutes before 9:00 a.m. and already the seas were coming up in front of a big west-trending storm. “My young friend,” he said to Devon in his almost accentless English as he slid a manifest across to his young visitor. “We came as soon as we could. I hope it satisfies your needs.”
Devon panned down the list quickly: 36 PCs, 36 monitors, 11 laser printers; five network routers; two satellite transceiver systems with antennae; a centrifuge; an electroencephalograph; three microwave ovens; a commercial satellite receiver and downlink; a 70” led television; a DVD/VCR combo drive; a toaster oven; a two kilowatt diesel generator, a 300 watt marine radio transceiver, two flat-bed scanners, a blender/juicer, an electric golf cart, two sump pumps, a table saw, two drills, 24 flashlights…
Devon looked up from the manifest. “I don’t suppose you brought any lightbulbs…” All the lightbulbs on at the time of the blackout had burnt out, a fact the island residents hadn’t learned until the marines brought a portable generator ashore from Reims. They’d been rationing lightbulbs ever since, trading them like cigarettes in prison.
Rachete looked askance, first left, then right. “No. We only had 12 hours to load before sailing. Quel dommage, we did not think of lightbulbs.” He motioned for Devon to sit, waving his thin, dark-tanned arm. “You still haven’t built the pier for me, I see.”
Devon chuckled as he poured himself coffee, then sat across from Rachete at the large, square table. The coffee in his cup was barely rocking, testimony to the captain’s outstanding seamanship. There was no way a pier could work in a harbor as poorly sheltered as this. The seawalls would have to be enormous.
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