by PJ Manney
Before Carter flew off to wrestle the many-headed hydra of Washington, Peter convinced a reluctant Amanda to visit girlfriends in New York City for a weeklong shopping trip. She’d felt depressed about her awkward, changing shape and irrelevant wardrobe. Peter used her need for female bonding time to its fullest extent.
Ruth held up her part of the plan. With Peter’s fMRIs and CT scans secretly taken before his wife left, Ruth prepared the components to be implanted with the departments necessary, keeping as many people on a need-to-know basis as possible. It was now or never.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Ruth sat in the waiting room at Stanford Hospital. She had a signed document allowing her the right to remove the Hippo 2.0 and Cortex 2.0, just in case Peter Bernhardt emerged mentally incapacitated. Clutching it in her hands, she watched Peter and his doctors and nurses live on her GO. But she could not keep still, only catching a glimpse of the screen every few seconds.
While brain-computer interface chips would be buried in Peter’s brain to fuse with his neurons, the short-term memory Hippo 2.0 and long-term memory Cortex 2.0 receivers would be embedded in his scalp, so they didn’t overheat and cook delicate brain tissue. By keeping them just under the skin, they were easily accessible should any changes need to be made. In addition, the Cortex 2.0 prototype would be partially external for easy updating. A magnet connected an outside receiver to his skull and the receiver was attached to a wireless, mobile hard drive the size of a pack of cigarettes. Peter could pocket the hard drive or wear it around his neck. This backup brain’s processor and memory was also programmable with Prometheus’s computer systems, allowing for easy software updates as the technology evolved. It also held power generation outside the head, because the bloodstream nanogenerator they were using couldn’t yet generate enough power for the external processor, only the internal parts of the Hippo 2.0.
Eventually, as the device size continued to decrease and he had proved his concept worked, the hard drive would be small enough to be attached discreetly to the skull and, finally, under the skin itself. Future patients could have the prosthetics and no one would ever have to know.
As they wheeled him into the operating room, the chief of neurosurgery, a gangly man with black hair that stood straight up under his surgical cap, stopped the orderly. “Sure you want this, Pete? You’ve got nothing to prove.” He bent close to Peter. “You, of all people, know the risks involved. But I still feel obligated to give you an out.”
“If I’m not willing to walk the walk, I’d never let anyone else do it. And I can turn the damn thing off or have it removed if necessary.” He didn’t voice his concern that two functioning hippocampi and cortex systems might make him psychotic.
The surgeon gave his team the thumbs up and followed the gurney into the operating room. As they prepped him, every reason why he shouldn’t be there flew through Peter’s head. But his last thought before chemical twilight descended was he hoped his wife and best friend would forgive him.
An army of activity wheeled around Peter’s brain. There was the neurosurgeon, leading the implantation team; a neuroanesthesiologist, who kept him in a painless twilight during the scalp incision and removal of a keyhole in his skull, but otherwise awake; a neurologist to monitor the surgery and make sure no damage was done; a computer engineer to coordinate the robotic and computer-guided systems linking Peter’s MRIs to the surgeon’s pointer as he operated; as well as nurses, assisting residents, and interns.
Peter’s skull was braced by four prongs of a square stereotactic head frame screwed to his scalp, which not only kept it immobile, but helped the small robot sitting at the side of Peter’s temple to reference the 3-D coordinate scans inside and outside his brain, finding the perfect location to insert the instruments through the keyhole. The neurosurgery team could rest assured they were working on the correct location for the prosthetic with the help of the fMRI-programmed robot literally leading the way with its own probe entering the brain tissue.
Bundles of nanowires followed, each about one one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair, linking the Hippo 2.0’s nano-scaled bloodstream generator in the basilar artery to a chip. The chip’s individual transistors would attach directly to existing brain cells through liquid polymer connections formed around the neurons, which would grow onto the chip to integrate into Peter’s brain.
They woke Peter after they opened his skull so that if they adversely affected any neural areas, they could spot it in his behavior. Lying there motionless was the most nerve-racking six hours of his life. The only questions he kept asking himself: Am I still sane? Am I still me?
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It was lonely recuperating without Amanda, Carter, or even Pop at his side. His only visitor, not including his doctors and nurses, was Ruth. For such an unusual woman, incapable of physical contact or affection, she was a welcome sight, tics and all.
After the post-operative inflammation subsided, Ruth said she would bring a shaigitz from computing, sworn to secrecy, to help check the neural connections and turn on the unit. In this case it was an Indian American colleague named Bino. Heavyset, with large, expressive eyes and an ever-ready grin, he brought a laptop to wirelessly program the chip and test it thoroughly.
After running the gamut of troubleshooting software, Bino said, “That’s it, bro. H-1 locked and loaded. C-2 in snooze, awaiting new programming.”
Ruth paced and twitched beside the bed. “So how feels mein Übermensch?”
“Not much like Superman. I know I shouldn’t have expectations, because I don’t have any input, but . . .”
“You expected a bigger bang.”
“Yeah. Stupid. Of all people, I should know better.”
“No. Just romantic. Come, Bino. Mein Übermensch needs rest.”
“Ruthie? Will you come back in the morning?”
Peter’s plaintive tone almost made Ruth smile. “Of course. You will have things to tell me tomorrow.”
Uneventful time passed. He napped. He ate bland hospital meals. He listened to music, checked his correspondence, and returned calls on his GO. He watched the news, but refused to watch movies, since the tiny GO screen reduced anything visually worthwhile to ants on parade and gave him a headache.
Peter had to maintain a fiction with Amanda and Carter as to his whereabouts and remembered why lying was hard: you had to remember all the lies you told before. The chip could help with that! He told his wife and partner that he was at work, doing his normal routine. A handful of Prometheus employees would back that lie up. Carter and Amanda didn’t behave as though they thought anything was amiss.
He didn’t want to dwell on what might happen if his secret was discovered. Carter would be furious, but he was too invested in the process to abandon Peter. But a pregnant Amanda? Beyond hormonal rage? And uncontrolled weeping? She might walk out on him—at least for a while. Was his little experiment worth losing his wife, even for a short time? He was determined not to find out.
Carter’s texts said he was making headway in DC. The Washington Post agreed that without additional congressional support, there wasn’t much of a story in the Mankowicz nanotech press releases, and they’d move them from the front page to the inside pages in exchange for an exclusive interview with Carter to be determined later, regarding the social and political ramifications of Prometheus’s research.
And finally, Peter slept. And dreamed. And that’s when it happened.
A functioning hippocampus dumps the day’s remembered events into the neocortex during sleep. But the brain doesn’t remember everything, because information is prioritized and the hippocampus helps determine what is important. The unconscious decides based on the strength of associations with other things we know, which corresponds with well-traveled neural pathways in the cortex—because the neurons that fire together wire together. That’s why you remember the important business meeting you scheduled and the teacher’s comments about your child’s poor grades, because they are associ
ated with concepts you have already thought about and deemed important and have a strong neural pathway for them, but you don’t remember the hairdresser’s telephone number or an ignored conversation on the train, because they weren’t important and there were no preexisting memories to attach them to. If you remembered everything, your brain would fill up with garbage.
Peter’s new hippocampus was taking everything in and not prioritizing it, just as an Alzheimer’s patient would need because the prosthetic did not know which pathways and associations were lost, to be created anew. Even though his own hippocampus was sorting and assessing just fine, the Hippo 2.0 kept everything in backup, just in case. He remembered it all, from Carter’s verbatim GO texts to the smarmy news anchor’s puke-cutesy dialogue with the weatherwoman. And when his Cortex 2.0 was functional, he’d have a place to dump it all.
He dreamed, not reshuffled thoughts dropped into the nonsense logic of the dream state, but huge blocks of real information, cut, shuffled, and pasted like editing a computer document on methamphetamines. He extracted meaning from their juxtaposition, seeing patterns where none existed before. Whether they were relevant to his (or anyone’s) life, or simply random, like millions of monkeys striking keyboards and inadvertently typing a Shakespearean sonnet, was anyone’s guess. The color of Strawberry Jell-O on his meal tray met the red of the suit the weatherwoman wore, which met Amanda’s text about a red, jeweled Indian-style tunic her girlfriend made her buy, and Bino, who was Indian American, had worn red Converses. His dream, which he couldn’t forget, was a collusion of redness overlaying other thoughts, as though redness were a clue to his existence. But what did it have to do with reality?
And the music! The GO shuffled all day, from Feist to Nine Inch Nails, from R.E.M. to Johnny Cash, and everything played back in his dreams, a soundtrack over the images and meanings.
When he awoke with complete recollection of the dream trip, he was concerned. If all the information created by processing and deconstructing his one, very boring, nonproductive day occurred every night, then how crazy would his dreams be during important, urgent events? Could he selectively keep some information and dump the rest? If not, would all that information make him insane?
He made sure he discussed it with Ruth the next day before the doctors sent him home. Ruth told him, “Medarf vartn un zayn.” Wait and see.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Peter picked Amanda up at Oakland Airport. He was retrieving her bags when she spied a Prometheus-logoed baseball cap on his head.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing . . .”
“You’ve never worn a hat in your life.”
He knew it wasn’t the best moment to break the news about his brain surgery and patted the top of his head. “Oh, yeah, I found a bump, and a dermo at Stanford cut it out. Nothing serious, just forgot to tell you. He said I should be more careful about the sun.” The keyhole procedure still had a small bandage over it. He’d keep it covered until some hair obscured the larger incision.
Amanda squinted at him as he put the bags in her Mercedes’s trunk.
“How about, ‘Hi, honey! I missed you so much!’ ” He put his arms around her, holding her close as he whispered in her ear, “’Cause I missed you more than you know. Think the baby’s up for a little X-rated action?” Her swollen body melted against his, and her head nodded on his shoulder. He’d find the right time to tell her the truth. Just not now. And he’d make sure the bedroom was extra dark, so she wouldn’t notice his skull.
Driving home, cumulus clouds cruised the sky overhead. Oddly ovoid in shape, they floated at both low and mid levels of the atmosphere. Higher clouds moved across the sky more slowly than lower clouds, so a nearby cumulus appeared to overtake and consume a more distant one. In his head, he heard the Flaming Lips play “Suddenly Everything Has Changed” and he remembered a conversation with Ruth about future nano-medical applications. Here was the answer, as he imagined a nanobot that could swim through the bloodstream and act like Pac-Man, reeling in bad bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens; consuming them; and destroying them. He could program artificial white blood cells to find specific organisms, like many identical locks in search of the matching keys of disease, to cure a systemic infection within hours. Or even simpler: What if the ovoids were messengers and carried stuff from A to B, like artificial red blood cells, but carrying much more oxygen than real cells. You could administer them to heart attack or drowning victims to prevent brain and organ damage. The medical applications for these bots were so numerous, it made his head spin. Eureka-tingling all over again, he couldn’t wait to have Ruth run a computer simulation.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
As Carter promised, Senator Mankowicz and the media went quiet about nanotechnology. There would be no new bans—at least for now. Peter believed if he could show the public his positive experiences, it might turn the tide of public opinion.
First stop on his PR campaign: his own investors. Josiah asked Carter and Peter to present their latest work at the next club Camp Week in July. There was great curiosity about it, even though there were no human trials yet. Peter told Carter he’d handle the club presentation. He planned to hide from everyone that he was the case study until then. The Prometheus programmers were nowhere near reading all his thoughts precisely. But club members would see the potential if he impressed everyone with his own transformation. Of course, it would mean admitting his deception to his partner and his wife, but once they saw his triumph, they’d understand.
Every department worked overtime to get the Cortex 2.0 ready, not realizing the mysterious “investors’ presentation” would be for two thousand men at a camp in the Sierra Nevada. Days flew by in a whirlwind of cold coffee, pizza boxes, and bedding on office sofas and floors.
“Why’d you do it?” asked Carter as he closed Peter’s office door behind him.
“What?” Peter scanned his daily financial update on his monitor, while Radiohead’s “No Surprises” played softly in the background. They had received a cash infusion from the club, and he was double-checking the numbers. The Hippo 2.0 made it much easier to find discrepancies instantly and discuss them with Finance.
“You lied to me. How’d you think I wouldn’t find out?” Carter wore a new expression, an odd combination of anger and pity.
A wave of guilt flip-flopped Peter’s stomach. “I’m sorry . . . I didn’t want to hide it from you. But you were adamant, with every argument nailed to the wall—and you were justified. I had to do it to save the company.” He rolled back his chair. “If the FDA guys at camp see how well this works, they’ll have to play ball. This will save Prometheus.” He loosed an enormous sigh. “I’m relieved you know.”
Carter slumped forward on the sofa, devastated.
Peter hurried to his friend to sit beside him. “I’ve been dying to tell you. We succeeded! The implants are awesome. And I’m working up a presentation that’ll blow Camp Week sky high.”
“You don’t have a fucking clue what you’ve done, do you? You’ve jeopardized everything, Pete! Everything! And for what? A little showmanship?”
“Look, I’m sorry you’re so upset. I really am. You know this is the only thing I’ve ever hidden from you, but I had to do it. There was no one else I could do it to in good conscience. You’ve got to believe me. Just . . . promise me one thing.”
“What . . . !”
“Don’t tell Amanda. Let me.”
“In what part of that motherfucking cyborg skull of yours do you think I’d do something as self-destructive as telling Amanda you lied to her and I found out before she did! You may not, but I value my fucking relationship with her!”
Carter stood and flung open Peter’s door to storm out, slamming it into the wall and spraying plaster dust. Adjacent cubicles went quiet, as employees wondered if they still had jobs.
Peter’s GO rang. It was Amanda.
“Pete?” She sounded scared.
“What’s wrong?”
/> “Come home . . . .” She muffled a sob. “I’m bleeding . . .”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
There wasn’t much to do, except make sure the miscarriage was complete. After the D&C, Amanda shivered under the blankets in Stanford Hospital’s recovery room, partially from anguish, partially from bodily shock.
Even though he wasn’t sure he believed it himself, he kept telling her, “It’s no one’s fault. We’ll try again,” on autorepeat, searching his mind for any fault, running through everything she did, said, ate, since her return. And no patterns emerged; no culprit shook its shaggy beast head. At least not yet. He kept running through his memories.
“If you’d been home,” she mumbled. “Maybe I could have gotten to the hospital quicker . . .”
“Honey, don’t . . .” He took her cold, trembling hand in both of his.
“You’re working too hard. You’re not yourself,” she said.
“What’s that mean?”
“You’ve changed. Ever since I came back from New York. I wondered if you were having an affair . . .”