Connect

by Julian Gough

‘But it might . . . it might work.’

  ‘Work?’

  ‘Save you.’

  ‘OK. That’s good, Mama.’

  ‘Remember what you did . . . with the imaginal disc you designed?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  Perhaps he does. Perhaps not. It doesn’t matter. Her voice is soothing him, and that’s what counts.

  He never wanted bedtime stories. He wanted facts. Sometimes a song, once the light was out, to get him to sleep: but before that, facts.

  ‘Tell me about the procedure, Mama.’

  Oh, just like when he was a kid. ‘Tell me something, Mama,’ he would say. ‘About what?’ ‘Anything, Mama. I’m interested in everything.’

  OK, tell him.

  ‘This is an improved version of . . . of . . . what you did,’ she says. ‘I think I can undo the damage, and replace everything, without . . .’

  Too close. No. Can’t say it.

  She looks away from his face. Stares at the blank wall.

  ‘It requires putting the subject into a chrysalis-like state.’ Yes; imagine you’re delivering a paper. ‘The subject can’t eat or drink or even really move during the process. Once the process is triggered, some of the existing brain structures will be . . . dissolved, and the imaginal discs will begin to build out the new structures using the dissolved material.’

  ‘OK. How long will the whole thing take?’

  ‘Well, it’s impossible to say. Most of the research has been done on entirely different phyla, let alone species. The little research that has been done on mammals may have no application to a human subject, so . . .’

  ‘Stop being a scientist, Mama, and just guess.’

  She cracks a little. A sob. ‘Well . . . It’s just really hard to know. I mean, we’re taking the plane apart and putting it back together again while it’s still flying, you know? It’s just impossible to . . .’ Her voice judders with repressed sobs. ‘So much could, just . . . There’s just, no way of knowing if the plane, will keep, flying.’

  ‘No metaphors, Mama.’

  ‘OK.’ No, she can’t look at him. She looks at the ceiling till her throat stops convulsing. ‘You go to bed for a few days. It’s like having the flu. You’re hot, you’ll be hot – I mean, that’s a ferocious amount of chemical activity, in every single cell, I mean obviously it generates heat.’

  ‘Mama . . .’

  ‘You’d be . . . unconscious. I’d have to manage your temperature. Your body will lose control of temperature regulation . . .’

  ‘How long, Mama?’ Because if it’s too long, he will die.

  ‘In Drosophila muca—’

  ‘Stop talking Latin.’

  Naomi makes a mental note; secondary language regions affected, but not primary . . . She’d taught him Latin as a kid, he’d loved it; it was so much more logical than English. But Latin’s one of the many things he’s been losing over the past month.

  ‘In the kind of . . . they’ve studied this in . . . in fruit flies. In fruit flies the rate of mitosis is dependent on . . .’ She stops, starts again. ‘It takes about eight hours . . . for the cells to reproduce, to divide.’

  He’s not really following her. It’s like he’s dreaming while awake. She gets the uneasy feeling that there’s a constant distracting parade of sounds and images and feelings sparking inside him as the cramped neurons connect to each other, to other parts of the brain.

  ‘Eight hours . . .’ he says, ‘that’s not so bad . . . then we’d know . . .’

  ‘No, no. The imaginal discs contain as few as fifty cells. To build the new structures – a leg, an antenna, a wing – the cells have to . . . double, and redouble, and double again and again. It’s eight hours each time. Each doubling.’

  ‘How many times?’

  ‘In Drosophila . . . in fruit flies, it averaged fifteen times. Fifteen cycles.’

  ‘Fifteen by eight . . . that’s . . . I can’t do math any more, Mama.’

  ‘That’s about five days.’

  ‘Five days . . . without water or . . .’

  ‘It could be faster. It could be slower. We’re building a bigger structure. But we’d be using a much bigger imaginal disc. More developed, with a lot more cells, thousands, so that takes out some of the cycles . . .’

  ‘So how many days . . .’

  ‘It could be as few as three. It could be as many as fifteen. I don’t know. When you tried it . . . you were in a fever state for a day, then there was a gradual transformation for a couple of weeks . . . But it was only a partial success, a partial transformation. This should be a much faster, more intense process; I can use an accelerant, to force the new neurons to make their connections quicker. But it depends on how much of your brain . . . breaks down, and how much of it has to be rebuilt. How large the new structures are.’

  ‘I’m not going to be me afterwards, am I?’

  ‘I don’t know. When they studied this in moths, they found that the adult moth remembered things it had learned as a caterpillar. So, even though the caterpillar had been dissolved . . .’

  ‘Caterpillar soup . . .’

  ‘. . . And rebuilt completely differently . . .’

  ‘But it might dissolve all my memories.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I might forget who you are.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I might forget who I am.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It might dissolve me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But it might dissolve the . . . the neural overgrowth.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The cancer’s going to kill me anyway, isn’t it.’

  ‘It’s not cancer!’

  ‘The overgrowth is going to kill me anyway. Isn’t it. If we don’t dissolve it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Colt nods. ‘Time flies like an arrow,’ he whispers. ‘Fruit flies like a banana.’

  Naomi laughs; can’t help it. ‘I remember when that was your favourite joke.’

  Colt smiles. He’s slipping away. ‘How old was I?’

  ‘Five, six maybe. You told it every day, for weeks. Months. Every time you saw a fly. Or a banana. You nearly drove us crazy.

  ‘I’m already forgetting who I am . . . Do it.’

  She nods; but he can’t see it. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘I will.’

  It takes a while to set up the necessary drips and catheters, tubes and monitors.

  ‘Will I dream?’ he says.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says.

  ‘That’s not very scientific,’ he says drowsily. ‘Guess.’ She has given him a sedative, so that he won’t move too much while she is attaching all the tubes and wires. Lately he’s been tossing and turning, unable to get comfortable at any angle.

  ‘Sleep,’ she says.

  ‘Sing me to sleep,’ he says.

  ‘What song?’

  As a child, he’d get obsessed with the oddest songs. Never a normal lullaby. And, once he’d got fixated on a song, he would ask for it every night for months. A year. Until another one came along that captivated him.

  Always songs that ached.

  ‘Sing “Space Oddity”,’ he says.

  Naomi’s mind lurches back a decade, more. That terrible year, when he couldn’t sleep. And then, one night, she’d shown him an old clip of an astronaut singing ‘Space Oddity’, on the original International Space Station. Floating in zero-G, for real. The astronaut had changed the lyrics, so it had a happy ending, with the character returning to earth.

  Colt had been fascinated by the song, the video, so she had played him David Bowie’s original version, where the astronaut doesn’t come home. Told Colt this was the real version, the original. And Colt had thought the whole song was real, was a true story, and he had cried, inconsolable, until she had explained it was just a song, a made-up story; that it was written before people had even been to the moon.

  He had played the Bowie version on repeat, all the time. Made her sing it, every night.

  She
didn’t like to sing it, because it made him sad. But she sang it, because it helped him sleep.

  She starts singing now, but he interrupts.

  ‘Do the countdown,’ he says.

  He’d always hated it when she just sang the words in the first verse and didn’t do the countdown as well.

  His little voice coming out of the dark, out of the safe, warm nest he’d made from a couple of duvets and a big, heavy, folded blanket, pressing down on him, calming him. ‘The numbers, Mama. Sing the numbers, too.’

  She’d explained to him that David Bowie had sung the verse and the countdown on separate tracks, and she couldn’t sing two things at the same time. But he cried when she left the numbers out. So she’d sung both.

  She sang both now, crowding the numbers into the gaps . . . Ten, nine, eight . . .

  ‘Bye bye, Mama,’ he whispered.

  He was gone before the spaceship reached the moon. She continues with the song, quietly, over his sleeping head, as she prepares the first imaginal disc. It really does look like a disc, a small white disc, under the light of the microscope. Like a communion wafer, she thinks. And it, too, will be transformed, into a living body.

  The disc is so tiny, so delicate.

  It floats in a clear solution, perfectly tailored for it. Nutrients dissolved in artificial plasma, and some enzymes to trigger the breakdown of the existing partial brain structure. Calm, still. Nothing like the rush-hour chaos of human blood in human veins. At least she can deliver this speck of complexity directly to the brain, beyond the brain–blood barrier.

  At least the disc won’t be slamming in and out of a human heart, again and again and again.

  But can it possibly survive the transition into this tormented body? Into the danger and chaos of a living organism, with its thousand enzymes, million chemical reactions, billion bacteria, trillion viruses, all buffeting it, attacking it, trying to eat it, dispose of it, hijack it?

  It can’t fulfil its destiny without taking those risks.

  She looks for the syringe. Prepares the needle. Old school, wide bore. Very gently takes up the solution, with no turbulence. She’s already set up a powered delivery line, with a micro-catheter targeting a vessel deep in the corpus callosum. She gently injects the solution into the delivery line. And watches the solution, the invisibly small disc, descend into the dark of her son’s brain.

  Gets out another syringe.

  Prepares the disc for the frontal lobes.

  Delivers it.

  Prepares the disc for the parietal lobes. Takes the last syringe from the drawer.

  Delivers the disc.

  He begins to get hot. Very hot.

  She strokes his skin with cool, damp cloths.

  *

  She sits with him, the door locked, as day becomes night.

  The skull, the three layers of protective membrane, the cerebrospinal fluid; they are all optimized to insulate the delicate brain from outside heat and outside cold. But now, with the tremendous, ongoing chemical activity in the frontal and parietal lobes, the brain case finds it hard to shed this amount of internally generated heat.

  After twenty-four hours, he loses much of his temperature control. And if the areas of the brain surrounding the medulla overheat, he will die. So she cools the blood as it circulates through him, with ice packs, with wet towels. Uses his circulatory system as a refrigeration system. A heat pump.

  She puts in another catheter, in a vein in his thigh, and washes his blood externally. Standard dialysis, followed by a second loop to balance the pH, which is already dangerously acidic. And she puts back the red blood cells she has stored. Like an athlete given a boost before a race; he can carry twice as much oxygen now.

  But with blood so thick with red blood cells there is a heightened risk of clotting, of stroke: and so she worries her way through the long hours. Monitoring, adjusting.

  On the second day his liver is under tremendous pressure from the breakdown products of the transformation. His kidneys are on the brink of failure.

  On the morning of the third day, Naomi hears the others arrive for work. All around her, life starts up again. But in her office, Colt’s breathing is harsh, shallow, fast. She is afraid that his autonomic nervous system is being compromised by the changes; that he could just stop breathing, and never breathe again.

  She has hardly slept.

  A thought strikes her; yes. If he does . . . if he doesn’t . . .

  It is hard to phrase the thought correctly. She knows what she feels; she can see what she must do; but it’s oddly hard to put it into words.

  If he dies, and I have killed him; yes.

  There is no need to put it into words.

  She removes her hand from his hot forehead, and he murmurs something, nothing. A sound, not a word. She leaves her office, locks it behind her. Walks the corridor, nodding and smiling to a research student vaping in a doorway; nodding and smiling to Shannon in reception; as though life was good and all was well.

  Hiding the furious anger.

  My son is dying, and you’re still alive.

  She enters the next lab, and the next, looking for something suitable. After three days of fragile naps, waking at each gasp, it’s hard to remember what she’s looking for.

  Oh, right.

  But that’s kept in the poisons cabinet. And since an unfortunate incident towards the end of a rather turbulent affair between a grad student and a security guard – who was, admittedly a bit of an asshole – the poisons cabinet is in Donnie’s office.

  She stands outside the door, swaying.

  The problem with Donnie’s office is Donnie. But it’s Monday morning. Donnie will be hung the fuck over. Donnie won’t be in for a couple of hours.

  But the office is locked.

  Back to reception. Shannon is still slightly high from her weekend; good.

  ‘Is Donnie in yet?’

  Shannon frowns. Speaks, gravely. ‘We still await, in fear and trembling, the return of the messiah.’

  ‘I need something from his office.’

  ‘Left your underwear behind, huh. Happens to me all the time.’

  Naomi, working on the assumption that Shannon is joking, smiles. ‘Any chance I could . . .’

  ‘Sure.’

  Shannon unlocks Donnie’s office from her desk, using a Clark County Fire Department emergency override key which she is not meant to have. ‘Just close it behind you.’

  Get in and get out before Donnie arrives.

  The thought of Donnie cornering her in his office . . . not a good thought. She shakes her head.

  Focus.

  Potassium chloride. To stop the heart. The lethal intravenous dose is thirty milligrams per kilogram.

  But she can’t open the poisons cabinet. Of course, there is a rigorous safety protocol to prevent exactly this from happening.

  A moment of supreme frustration, and a kind of fluttery fear, that she will have to endure Colt’s death, that the universe has locked the cabinet to make sure she endures it . . . Woozy, sleepless panic.

  No. No. This is Donnie. He’s not capable of enforcing a rigorous protocol.

  It’s a simple, old-fashioned, mechanical combination lock, back in fashion after the recent embarrassing failures of some of the advanced software locks. Although Naomi is pretty sure this one has been here since they were originally fashionable, first time round.

  She tries his birthday, everyone knows he uses that on the internal security doors (which are always wedged open anyway).

  No.

  Hmmm, four numbers; four numbers Donnie can remember while drunk . . .

  She tries the Battle of the Alamo, 1836. He never shuts up about the Alamo.

  1, 8, 3, 6 . . .

  It opens.

  There, big container. KCl. She takes enough, then more than enough.

  Closes Donnie’s door behind her very gently.

  She calls in to Lab 2. Nods at the bored Nigerian kid running a small centrifuge.

&n
bsp; She dissolves the potassium chloride in a beaker of artificial blood plasma.

  Finds a large syringe in stores.

  Halfway back to her lab, she thinks; perhaps a muscle relaxant first, or along with it. So it won’t hurt. Or a fast-acting barbiturate. The body resists death, it can’t help itself.

  No. I don’t care if it hurts.

  *

  When she returns to her office, and walks across to the small bed, his body filling it, in a diagonal, he is no longer breathing, and her heart and breath stop too, for a long moment.

  She wasn’t there.

  He was alone.

  She had thought she would feel sorrow, that she would weep, be overwhelmed, pulled under, drowned in tears.

  It’s not like that at all. What a strange sensation. So clear, so clean, so blank.

  It is as though she had never lived.

  She unscrews the long, slim red protective cap from the needle, and prepares the dose. She is careful. She is calm. Normally, she would follow a sterile protocol – clean everything with alcohol wipes; make sure filtered air blew towards her as she worked, keeping the bacteria and viruses of her skin and hair and mouth and lungs away from the needle, the fluids. But a contaminated solution is not a problem here.

  She is faintly pleased to see how much of the saturated liquid she fits in the fat syringe. Three, almost four times the lethal dose for her body mass. Good to have a contingency built in, just in case her metabolism handles it differently.

  She is so caught up in the preparation that she almost forgets why she is doing this. When she remembers, there is a new feeling. Enormous, but very far away.

  She gets the vivid image of mountains, pushing into view above the clouds on the northern horizon. An old memory.

  If she stays; if she doesn’t do this thing now; she will have to cross those mountains alone; find high passes through them, over the coming months and years; and she knows she doesn’t have the strength.

  There is a taste of salt. It starts at one corner of her mouth and bursts across it. She licks the salt water from her lips. Tears on her face; but with no emotions attached to them yet.

  Her body knows what has happened, even if her mind refuses to acknowledge it. The mountains are closer, higher, and these drops are the first of a storm that might make it impossible for her to carry out her plan.