by PJ Manney
Amanda picked up the HOME phone and dialed a number. Peter recognized the button notes. It was Carter’s number.
“Mandy, not now!” said Peter.
She ignored him. “Hi . . . Yeah, we’re watching . . . Tapped directly into the satellite feed. They’re transmitting for broadcast later . . . Really? I’ll ask.” She covered the mouthpiece. “He wants to help. I think he can.” Peter’s eyes narrowed. She muttered into the receiver, “Sweetie, can I call you back . . . ? Uh huh . . . Yeah . . . Bye.” She sighed and hung up. “He wants to see you. He also said you’ll be picked up for questioning soon, so cooperate and keep your chin up. But lay low otherwise. He would have said more . . .”
The press crept closer to the house.
“Fuck these assholes!” Peter stormed out of the media room and passed a mirror. The sight made him stop: bruised face, nose swollen to the size and color of a plum. He could only imagine the bruises on his ribs. “Jesus . . .” It was time to get tough.
He hustled through the house, opening windows to the mayhem outside. This appearance of accessibility only drove the media to greater heights of trespassing. They couldn’t see him positioning movable speakers to face the windows. In his home office, he synchronized all the speakers, except those near Amanda’s kitchen monitor, on a single input. Then he plugged his Roland GR-33 guitar synthesizer into a Roland-ready Stratocaster he kept nearby for synth doodling when he needed to think.
Firing up the MP3 library, he clicked Jimi Hendrix’s immortal Woodstock improvisation of “The Star-Spangled Banner” as he turned all volumes to “11.” So much for laying low. He’d be on the evening news for sure.
Hendrix started conventionally enough, finger picking until the phrase, “And the rockets’ red glare . . .” Then Jimi and Peter slammed into hard feedback-filled improv. A measure later, Peter hit the waterworks. Sprinklers rose from the lawn and soaked the few reporters not driven back by the wall of sound. Cameramen may have had rainproof equipment, but the stand-ups’ hairdos couldn’t withstand the deluge.
Peter played a countermelody over, under, and around Hendrix, weaving through the classic performance with surprising skill. Any musicians watching the news would at least be impressed by how Peter’s melodic thread became a second voice of protest. With a lead foot on the synth’s sustain pedal, and fingers wailing the whammy bar, he barely heard Amanda screaming, “Peter? What are you doing?”
CHAPTER FIVE
The press retreated to the street. Some left to bring reinforcements. It wasn’t over yet.
Exhausted and bone sore, Peter wandered from his study, through their living room, toward the loggia at the back of the house. He had had enough.
The huge glass-enclosed space, designed like an eighteenth-century horticultural conservatory, enclosed an Olympic-length lap pool. Amanda had had it built especially for him. Its Enlightenment Age icing was excessive and a classic Valley indulgence, but he justified the pool as necessary for his sanity. Through the enormous greenhouse windows, the sun set pink and purple over the red-, yellow-, and orange-colored leaves of the maples, sycamores, and oaks that separated their yard from the neighbors’. But they wouldn’t appreciate the view much longer, given the size of the mortgage.
Peter swore to himself he would never assume anything in life, ever again. Nothing was safe.
Amanda had returned to the backlog of phone messages in the kitchen, which he could still hear playing faintly in the background. “Hey Amanda, Joe Vauxhall’s memorial service is Tuesday at noon. We’re meeting at the Chronicle offices, then walking to the Yerba Buena Gardens, like Joe did every lunch hour.” And then he heard a new message.
“Um . . . Hey . . . It’s Kevin again. Pete? Um . . . I don’t think it’s a good idea you come. Clarissa’s family doesn’t want you there. Sorry, dude . . .”
Clarissa’s family had just watched the news.
Peter stabbed at a HOME entertainment console, searching for music to drown out the dead. Maybe it was on the nose, but he needed some focus. Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” blasted from the speakers. Shucking off his clothes at the water’s edge, he stretched his arms and torso. His ribs made him flinch where a bruise spread down his left side. He dived naked into the deep end and expelled all his air to sink to the bottom. The music’s burbling bass notes wove through the water. He held his breath as long as possible.
He watched dried blood liquefy and slowly cloud the water around his face. His lungs ached for air and his chest throbbed. He thought about breathing in to let the water equalize the pressure for good . . . but instead surfaced to Australian crawl the pool’s length. He concentrated on strong, rhythmic strokes, lap after lap, willing his body to swim past the pain. As he hoped, the song made him wonder: How in hell did he get here?
Poor boy raised by single, fuck-up dad, but made good—check. Did everything to not become his father—check. Stanford on a full science scholarship, which brought him to Palo Alto, never to leave—check. Married his college sweetheart—check. Created a successful biotech start-up—check. He’d been a good husband, hadn’t he? Done everything on the checklist to achieve the American Dream, hadn’t he? Except for the fact they hadn’t had children yet, of which Amanda never ceased reminding him—and he was now unemployed and accused of a crime against humanity—life was great.
Like most men, Peter believed work defined him, and he never paused in the process of accomplishment for fear of . . . what? That he wouldn’t be satisfied? Afraid he hadn’t done enough or done it well enough? Wasn’t part of the American Dream committing to a course of action and never deviating until all goals were accomplished? Well, had he done it or not?
Until today, he believed he had. But after today, his goals felt as hollow as the Tin Man’s chest. His life’s work was called evil and taken from him. Game over.
Swimming’s physical effort and repetitive motion kick-started the more rational, objective parts of Peter’s brain. They spoke insistently over the pain, the emotions, the doubts and the unanswerable questions that still chattered away, but were getting quieter lap after lap.
Rationality ruled because the chaos underneath was too terrifying: Sell everything . . . and don’t dwell too much on the fact he was losing the armor he had built up against his impoverished past. Cooperate with the government, help find the bad guys, and stay out of jail, if anyone would believe him. Find allies in as many fields as possible. Let Amanda spin it. Cut losses and move on. But move on to what? Would it be the “same as it ever was” again?
Todd Rundgren’s song, “Born to Synthesize” played on shuffle. It stopped him, and he listened. He had a soft spot for psychedelic music and played it a lot, which amused his wife and annoyed his friend Carter, who loathed the aural indulgences of the genre. But Peter was bizarrely stimulated every time he heard “Born to Synthesize.” The high-frequency scintillations of the synthesizer jiggled his neurons like a massaging showerhead. There was something there to figure out . . .
Amanda yelled down the stairs, “I’m going to bed.”
Peter padded along plush carpeting up the half-circular grand staircase in the central hall to their bedroom.
Amanda watched CNN in bed. There was their house, with sprinklers and reporters running. She glared at him. He ignored her and showered off the remaining blood and chlorine, bandaged and taped up his playdough nose, downed a handful of ibuprofen, brushed his teeth, and climbed in beside her. He rolled away, lying still, hoping she wouldn’t talk. But she turned off the HOME and scooted over to wrap herself octopus-like around his back. He accepted the warmth of her body. But that was all.
She kissed the back of his neck and ran one hand into his hair while the other hand reached around his front to trace spirals on his chest with her fingernails. He tolerated her for a few moments, then gently removed her hands.
“Honey?” she whispered.
He grunted.
“Please, Pete, look at me.”
He didn’t move.<
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“Don’t cut yourself off from me. I love you.”
He rolled to look at her. “Mandy, my dick’s on sabbatical.”
“Okay. I get it.” She grinned. “Maybe you should hang a sign from it, saying ‘Gone to France,’ or something, so I’ll know when to ignore you.” He didn’t laugh. She prodded. “Any plans for your dick’s resurrection?”
“It’s not exactly Frankendick, is it?”
“Hey, you’re the bioengineer.” She rolled on her back and stared at her own patch of ceiling. “You know, I’m ovulating.”
He was so foggy from the abuse of the day, he didn’t understand at first. “What?”
“I stopped taking the pill,” she said.
“When?”
“A month ago.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“No. I am not shitting you. I love you, and I want to have our child.”
“Everything’s unstable . . . too up in the air. And especially not now!”
She teared up. “And you always promise that in some near future we will. But we don’t. It’s been ten years. This is your neurosis. Not mine.”
“Were you not here today?” he yelled.
“We need a baby because of today!” She yelled back, her cheeks wet. “Because we can make life in spite of it!”
“Mandy, I can’t handle this right now.” He fought back his own tears. “I thought I’d made it, but I can’t give you a job or a house or a baby or even take care of you. I’ve failed you. I’ve failed everybody. And on top of it all, I’m being blamed for something I had nothing to do with!” He punched his pillow in frustration.
“How did you fail?” she sniffled.
“Only a nanobot could have done this! And I’m the only guy in the US who makes them. Just the fact the technology exists . . .”
She wrapped herself around him again, even though he resisted. “You are not your father. This is not going to destroy you. It’s going to make you stronger. This is the first time I’ve ever seen you eaten alive by doubt. I know you’re innocent. And I will always be here for you. For God’s sake, if I could escape my parents’ commune and make myself into someone entirely different, you are more than capable of getting over this.”
“But we’re losing everything!”
“This is one of those trips the universe throws you, so you don’t get complacent. I know it sounds cruel, but it’s an opportunity to do what you always wanted. And you know what I’ve always wanted.”
He grabbed her and buried his face in her long silky hair. The delicious, spicy smell of her wrapped around him like a warm, soft life preserver. But it was not a sufficient aphrodisiac. As he drifted off to sleep, he hoped he wouldn’t dream about his day.
CHAPTER SIX
The next day, against Amanda’s better judgment, Peter insisted he leave the circus that had been his home and make his twice-a-week pilgrimage to see Paul Bernhardt. He was lucky that vintage American muscle cars were fast, the roads empty, and the police otherwise occupied.
In a cozy nursing home room in Menlo Park, Peter’s father slumped in a floral-upholstered armchair, dressed in an old plaid flannel shirt, a worn “Mr. Rogers” cardigan, sweatpants, and shearling slippers that Amanda had bought him for Christmas last year. His once-broad shoulders curled forward from lack of use, but a strong cleft chin, ruddy cheeks on fair skin, vivid blue eyes, and a crooked nose gotten in a fight were still common Bernhardt traits. There were other traits Peter was grateful he hadn’t inherited or acquired: addiction, rage, isolation, irresponsibility, and apathy.
In his youth, Pop’s hair had been almost black. Now it was pure white, giving his reflective pale skin a gray cast. Paul Bernhardt’s identity disintegrated as his brain was attacked. That living, breathing person was not Pop anymore. Alzheimer’s would claim another victim unless Peter could figure out a way to stop it.
Biogineers had been so close to a marketable cure, developing a nanorobotic drug delivery system the FDA had fast-tracked to approve. They had created several types of ingestible bots to perform different jobs to halt the spread of Alzheimer’s. One bot fit like a lock and key to receptors in brain cells to stop the production of beta amyloid proteins outside the neurons, which were a key component to Alzheimer’s lesions. Another nanobot system could raise levels of acetylcholine, which when deficient, caused neurofibrillary tangles, insoluble twisted fibers inside the neurons of Alzheimer’s patients. And another could deliver stem cells to repair the damage. Adding insult to injury, the FDA believed Pop didn’t qualify for human trials because of medical technicalities and his relationship to Peter, so Pop had to wait like everyone else. Hope wasn’t only gone for Alzheimer’s patients around the world. It was gone for his father. And would it be gone for him, too, since the disease appeared to have a genetic component?
Losing one’s mind was the most horrific thing Peter could imagine.
His previous idea, abandoned a decade before, surgically implanted an alternate brain system, like a cochlear implant. But venture capitalists and the feds nixed it at the research stage. As far as Peter knew, no one pursued that line of research to completion, because of the limited ethical commercial applications. Maybe DARPA continued exploring it for the military, but that research was hidden, if it existed at all. Congress stopped funding anything that smacked of the words “revolutionary” or “groundbreaking” years ago. No one would get something off the ground quickly enough to benefit Pop. He didn’t have much time left.
Peter lightly fingered the strings of an acoustic archtop.
He often played for other residents. Music elicited a greater response for Alzheimer’s patients than any other stimuli, because music traveled different neural pathways than did other perceptions—pathways that remained intact. Still, it never ceased to amaze when a room full of the living dead came alive as he played. He discovered patients were particularly responsive to this guitar, a 2001 Manzer Paradiso he was lucky enough to pick up secondhand, since he’d never top Linda Manzer’s waiting list filled with performing legends. Its tone, of such clarity and brilliance, pierced through the fog of rotted cortex to touch a fundamental part of their remaining selves. Heads bobbed, feet tapped, hands clapped. Previously silent lips sang verses. Faces smiled. It was beautiful to watch.
Pop heard Peter’s doodlings and rocked back and forth slightly in his chair. That meant “Get on with it.” He began with the Beatles. Pop loved the Beatles.
Peter strummed the chorus to “With a Little Help from My Friends.” Paul stopped rocking, but after a few measures, slowly shook his head. That meant “try another.” Peter played the opening of “Norwegian Wood,” which sounded particularly lovely with this guitar’s piercing voice. This brought vigorous head shaking. Peter knew what dissatisfaction meant. There was only one song Paul wanted when he got this way. And Peter hated it. To his generation, the song was so obvious, so banal, so simple, it descended into cliché. And it so accurately described his father’s life, the son shuddered in filial pain. Pop used to say that’s what made it a perfect song. Everyone thought it was about them.
Peter broke into the opening chords of “Yesterday,” afraid to tell his father he’d lost his company, even though Pop was too far gone to hit or insult his son like the bad old days. Alzheimer’s only gift was that the old man’s monumental rage was snuffed out.
But Pop’s stare wasn’t vacant as the song continued, and something between a smile and a grimace played on his lips. Was the glimmer of love in the rheumy old eyes for Peter, or for the memory that still remained of love lost, against all neurological odds?
Pop swayed happily to the music. Peter was free to play anything from now on. Rundgren’s “Born to Synthesize” still preyed on his mind, and he played it to recall thoughts he’d had earlier. On one hand, the song’s message could be quite literal. Todd Rundgren was one of the first musicians to use a synthesizer in unorthodox and groundbreaking ways, and it could have been about the creation and manipulation
of sound waves on a synth to make music and the creative process in general. But it felt like it should have meant more. Like there was a nugget of inspiration couched within the lyrics. Rundgren sang that creation was based on such simple and opposing building blocks. All alone, they were meaningless. But add and subtract and combine and multiply and bingo—the birth of the new. The emerging pattern and how we interpreted it was the message.
If that wasn’t a good description of how the brain worked, Peter wasn’t sure what was. But what happened when it didn’t work? Like Pop. What was missing? What could be replaced?
Replacement parts for the human brain had been fraught with difficulties for decades. The brain did not process information like a computer, digitally, using ones and zeros. It was an analog memory system, made of specialized cells called neurons. But bridges between the two were possible. Scientists learned how to make computers “talk” to the brain’s auditory cortex for cochlear implants for the deaf, and to the visual cortex for retinal implants for the blind. Prosthetic limbs could be controlled by the “thoughts” of the motor cortex. All by figuring out the computing algorithms necessary to communicate with the brain.
So instead of a computing model of brain biology, scientists reversed the idea and pinned their hopes on the biological model of computing to not only create artificial intelligence, but to unlock the convoluted cortex’s secrets.
Rundgren referred to the Hindu idea of “orbits of consciousness” spinning, but getting nowhere until you combined them. And then . . . cognition happened. So what if the orbits of consciousness were two different types of cognition in two different types of cortexes: biological and digital? As of now, “thinking” couldn’t go anywhere, except within its own organic or machine system. How could thoughts migrate back and forth, from the gray matter between the ears to a computer processor? And could he make one small enough to implant, yet big enough to hold our thoughts, now collected by the artificial memory of a prosthetic hippocampus and shuttled around both the human cortex and the mechanical cortex? But how would the mechanical cortex affect how we thought?