by David Dun
“This allows for an incredible amount of signal variation and integration among multiple neurons. Which is wonderful for the elegant brain but tough on the mathematician.
“To further complicate matters, one neuron can detect incidental parallel stimulation of other neurons. That is to say, a neuron can make a biochemical note of the triggering of other related neurons. Certain molecules, such as glutamate from a neighboring axon, will stimulate a chemical response in a dendrite more easily if the neuron to which the dendrite feeds is likewise stimulated from another source. The cell becomes more readily stimulated if parallel messages are being received by other neurons. Conversely some neurons are inhibitors; they dampen or counteract a particular response. For example, in a holistic sense a hunger response can be dampened by exercise.”
Sam and Anna nodded dumbly.
“Dr. Fielding believes that Jason has derived one of the most complex equations they have ever seen in order to model brain function. And Dr. Fielding’s colleagues in neurology are in misery because they didn’t receive all of it.”
“We knew he’s a genius,” said Anna. “We’re trying to figure out what’s wrong with him.”
“There is something else. We can tell that Jason was postulating an increased potential. Maybe an induced response, for example, with a drug—Only the drug he was apparently thinking of doesn’t exist.”
“What was he thinking of?”
“Nannites.”
“Give me a break,” Anna said.
“I know, but it was on the disk,” Yanavitch said. “Judging from his notes, Jason really believes in some factor that he ascribes to Nannites.”
“You don’t believe in Nannites?”
“No. But the first day somebody suggested that light was disappearing in black holes, I probably wouldn’t have believed in that either. Look, I can’t take it seriously, but I can’t make any final conclusions until we get the rest of his data. Especially the code.”
“What is that?” Sam asked.
“After we used Anna’s code, there were other codes to access files within the first file. They’re using your computer to break it.”
“I’m aware,” Sam said.
“Dr. Fielding learned that it’s against U.S. law to use such a lengthy encryption.” The doctor paused and was dialing the telephone. After a few queries he hung up.
“Dr. Fielding is at a lecture. They’ll have him call me the instant he returns.”
“So you’ll see my brother if we can get him?”
“Oh, absolutely. Go anywhere, do anything.”
“You may have to,” Sam said.
“Is my brother fixable?” Anna asked. “Of course I know before I ask that you can’t answer.”
“You’re looking for some hope and I don’t blame you. I can’t say. But I know the question to ask: Why the fear message? He’s clearly getting fear messages or neuronal activity in the fear areas of the brain. The brain’s intellectual tendency creates an explanation for the fear. Which in his case is the Nannites.”
“If someone is mostly normal but just a little emotionally unavailable, how do you fix that?” she asked.
Sam wrinkled his brow.
Yanavitch thought for a moment. Looked at Sam, then back at her. “Well, before you go into Gestalt therapy you might try this popular book ... what is it? I think it’s called Where Did He Go? Where Did She Go?
Twenty-three
“You look like you’ve run out of room.”
Roberto found Jason staring at an equation he’d written on a white board. The formula covered the board from edge to edge and nearly from top to bottom. “Yes, well, I’m going to take a digital photo and put this up on a screen. Then I’ll start with a fresh board.”
“We think we should move you.”
“Why is that?”
Roberto tried to look sincere. “Trick the Nannites.”
“You don’t believe in them.”
“It should be clear to you that we believe in you and your work. So if you believe in Nannites, that’s good enough for us.”
“How would you propose to trick them?”
“Make them think you died.”
“In the beginning what was to be the universe was packed into space almost infinitely small. Then something happened. Maybe God said good morning. The big bang, some have called it. A tenth of a millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second later the universe had started cooling off and was about a hundred million, trillion degrees and we had gravity.
“I won’t bore you with what happened next. Suffice it to say it took another three hundred thousand years and an average temperature of three thousand degrees for atoms to form. That was the Nannite moment and the world of the Nannites began in our world. They must have gotten here from someplace else, but now they could start to develop their carrier in our universe. We are the most highly evolved carrier.
“Given that Nannites were here before we even became mammals and that they had all that time to evolve, beating us by over five billion years—given that we don’t even know how much longer than our universe they have been around—what makes you think we can fool them?” His eyes were wild. “I think you’re dull, Roberto. You just don’t get it.”
Roberto didn’t know how to respond.
“How did they get to you?” Jason asked.
“They didn’t get to me. I’m trying to help you.”
“I want to work. Leave me alone. And stop acting like an idiot.”
“Look, why don’t you go outside, get some fresh air? We’ll go for a walk and talk about it.”
Jason put down his marker and walked out the door with Roberto, nodding at the refrigerator-sized Frank Stefano.
“I wish Chellis would feed you to a meat grinder, whip up some Roberto tartar with ground olives and mushrooms, a good dose of garlic, fresh horseradish, and a little pimento on top.”
“Let’s enjoy the walk,” Roberto said. “It’s beautiful here, but we can find an even better place for you to work.”
“There is one certainty that arises out of all of this.”
“What’s that?”
“Human consciousness for all of its glory is a miracle that has not yet sufficiently advanced to free us from sick mutants such as yourself.”
“Tell me,” Roberto said. “Do the Nannites have a sense of history?”
“Good question. Keep moving in that direction and we may have some hope for you after all.” Jason looked at him. “I don’t think it’s the Nannites you want to fool, Roberto. I think it’s Anna.”
“Don’t be silly. She’ll come to visit at the new compound.”
As they walked along the trail in single file, with Jason ahead and Frank bringing up the rear, Roberto felt watched, even though foliage was so dense it would be difficult for someone to follow them undetected.
The trees around them were smallish, maybe sixty feet tall, mostly Douglas fir, a few silver firs, and the occasional big-leaf maple. The conifers had branches all the way to the soil that tangled and competed with the ground-loving species. A son of Italian farmers, Roberto had learned a few names of the things that sprang from the earth in this place of green and mist. Unlike the south of Italy, things grew so tight that the machete line became a wall in places, as if someone were contemplating hedgerows.
“Wait.” Roberto stopped to listen.
“What?” Frank said.
“I don’t know, I thought maybe I heard something.”
“It won’t be Nannites,” Jason said.
Roberto thought it was sarcasm, but he never knew for certain with Jason.
The path had gotten muddy, their boots slushing noisily. He listened in the new silence. A black-capped chickadee was doing its dee-dee-dee and a kingfisher flitted on uneven wing beats with its rattle call, before it landed on a snag, sitting proud and blue like midget woodland royalty.
There was a slight whirling autumn breeze in the islands, and in the distance honkers
called in V formation, always seeming to reach for somewhere that never came.
“Okay.” Roberto shrugged. They began walking again.
As they approached a familiar bend, Roberto was sure he heard radio static for just an instant. This time he drew his unloaded gun and wished it were full of bullets.
Ten feet in front of him a painted face rose from out of the wall of green, then another. Roberto whirled, looking. As he did so the forest became a mosaic of plants and faces. They were surrounded by at least a dozen men wearing combat fatigues and carrying what looked like futuristic military rifles. Roberto’s chest constricted; he could be dead in seconds. Suddenly his head was plunged in darkness, his arms were pinned to his sides, the gun yanked from his hand, and all he could see were his feet. Then a zipping sound up his neck and he could see nothing. Before he could think, he was helpless and struggling. They laid him on the ground and began tying him. Frank was swearing and thrashing in the bushes.
“If you couldn’t fool these Neanderthals, you sure couldn’t fool Nannites,” Jason muttered. The way he spoke, it sounded as though he was watching rather than fighting. Roberto wondered if somehow Jason was in on whatever was happening, but that seemed impossible.
In seconds the attackers were gone and Roberto lay with his arms tied and some sort of tape holding his wrists and ankles. He couldn’t move. His head was zipped in a nylon bag, almost suffocating and foam-filled. He heard the dee-dee-dee of the chickadee again. He no longer heard Frank; the assailants may well have killed him.
He thought of the dark; then he felt the dark, the staleness of his own breath, the soft foam clinging when he stuck out his tongue. With his first rib-expanding gasp he felt velvet closing around his mouth. He tried another breath and then again, faster. He could suck but he couldn’t fill. Soon he sounded like a marathoner gone mad; eeee, haw, eeee, haw, the breaths came and their frequency mounted with his fear. Soon his body was shaking, nearly convulsing. Eeee, haw, eeee, haw. Breathing sounds and the want of air took over his mind. He was crying and choking and still the breaths came harder and harder, faster and faster.
His mind was a lizard trapped in a tiny cave. Then arose something worse, the fear of not being able to end it, to kill himself.
Roberto screamed and remembered the souvenir turtles in Mexico. The workers laid them on their backs in the sun. The necks came out. Then the legs. Stretching and reaching, the turtles slowly became frantic. Finally their limbs started to dangle, and then at last they simply waved, as if saying good-bye on their way to a slow death.
Sam wanted to make calls from the airport. He still liked pay phones more than cell phones because he claimed that talking on a cell phone was about as private as screaming from your back porch. Anna thought the phone companies had fixed that problem, but didn’t bother arguing with Sam. While waiting, she had some thinking time, and to divert herself from nagging worry about Jason began imagining how intriguing it would be to undertake a little investigation.
As she thought about the phone call she might make, she exited the jet on the tarmac and walked away from the plane so as not to be heard by the pilots.
“Hey, you,” she said to Peter in her usual way.
“Anna, great to hear your voice. I hope everything is going grand with Sam.”
“Just grand. That’s not what I called about.”
“Oh?”
“I have a screenplay that might be good for you.”
“Really!”
“Uh-huh, it’s great.” Then she went on for five minutes.
“Man, this sounds exciting.”
“Ah, Peter, there is one thing you could do for me.”
“Uh-oh.”
“What do you mean uh-oh?”
“It’s about Sam, isn’t it?”
“I do need a favor that has to do with Sam, and clearly I brought it up right in the midst of discussing a mutually advantageous proposal—which I might add you deserve anyway—and I want to do it with you no matter how this conversation turns out. You have my word on that.”
“I’m not going to do anything that Sam wouldn’t like.”
“You know I wouldn’t ask that.”
“All right, what is it?”
“You’re his friend.”
“Yeah. So?”
“Does he have a girlfriend?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“See? How easy was that?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Now just one more little question. How sure are you?”
“Very sure.”
“Who was the last?”
“Oh, no.”
“All right, all right. Just tell me if she was a celebrity. If it was secret.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“Now think about this. Do I want to know this to hurt Sam or to get some much-needed insight?”
“Anna, you’re killing me.”
“I can just feel that it was a celebrity, but Sam has told himself that he has to have secrecy to the point where he may actually believe it.”
There was a long pause. Peter let out a breath. “Well, you’ve got it half figured out. I don’t know why you’re asking.”
“Thank you. You’re a sweetheart. But exactly how did it end? Did she give up or did Sam?”
“Maybe nobody had the opportunity to give up.”
“Nobody had ... Wait. Did she die?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You’re a darling, Peter. Thank you. I have my answer. Suzanne King was beautiful. The right age. There was all that publicity about the stalkers. She died in a plane crash about a year ago.”
There was silence. She let him go.
Next she called her agent and her script reader in quick succession. For every screenplay idea they latched on to, they looked at hundreds. Nothing in the latest crop looked that great. She had a three-movie-deal commitment, so that had to be worked into the equation. Then she called Genevieve and asked that they tell Prada, Christian LaCroix, Missoni, and Vivienne which dresses she would keep. She reiterated that the dresses were to be purchased and not received with compliments. They had sent about six each, and she’d been sitting on them for three weeks and only planned to keep a few.
She hung up and called her publicist.
“Lane and I are breaking up. It’s the usual, we’ll always be friends. We both got all we could out of the relationship and came away better people. Mutual. No third parties. We still talk all the time. And one other thing. This is very sensitive. I don’t want too much volume on this, just a little. But I definitely want something.”
“Yes?” Now Sally sounded interested.
“Create a little buzz, a little mystery about who might escort me to the party at the studio.”
The publicist could do it all in her sleep.
Twenty-four
The Beaver seaplane landed on the small inlet that they called Lodge Bay and made it past the breakwater arriving at the dock on momentum alone. It was a slick, fast landing with the radial chugging and spluttering typical of these old twelve-cylinder workhorses. When Sam stepped off the pontoon onto the dock he noticed the clear water, the white sea anemones, maroon starfish, and the small minnows visible below.
It was a blustery day with mottled, battleship-gray clouds with folded, dark creases. Sam, Anna, and three armed-to-the teeth Canadians—two ex-Mounties and one ex-military and all licensed private investigators—walked up the dock and took in the wilderness: bald eagles teetering on the wind, the rush of blowing trees, and the grandeur of towering granite. Any more men and it would have looked like an invasion.
Of the three men that Sam brought along, T.J., one of the ex-Mountie officers, was the natural leader. He was a brown and silver-haired, mustached forty-five-year-old who looked sharp and acted tough. Sam knew he was both, but also knew that he had fallen on hard times. A painful divorce and kids in college had left him broke. Sam worried about such things affecting a man’s performance under fir
e, but in this case he seemed committed and it was obvious that he was totally impressed by Anna.
Duke, black-haired, squat, and broad, an amateur fighter with stone hands, seemingly more oak than man, walked second to last and carried his weapon as though he expected to use it.
“It doesn’t feel right,” Anna whispered to Sam. He nodded but didn’t reply, concentrating on detecting what might be hidden.
Bringing up the rear was Jeff, a tall and quiet man who lived like a coiled spring.
Sam kept his finger on the trigger of his assault rifle, an M7, and the others did the same. Only Anna was unarmed. At the head of the dock a broad plank walkway traversed the rock and boggy heather beyond. A small stream murmured but did not put them at ease. The slap of their feet on the wood diminished as they hushed their footsteps.
After walking inland a good three-quarters of a mile, they came to the side door of the lodgelike main house. Sam moved along the windows, ignoring the door for the moment. Someone was on the floor and judging from the alabaster-white skin of her legs, it was the housekeeper fitted with a gray bag over her torso and trussed up so that she couldn’t move. Beside her was a man in well-worn blue jeans—maybe the handyman—then next to him another groundsman and beyond him another woman—a cook or housekeeper.
“Someone’s been busy,” Sam said. In a couple of minutes they had broken the door and were inside untying people.
“Where is Jason?” Anna said.
“They didn’t come back from their walk. The men must have taken them,” the first housekeeper answered.
“How many were there?”
“We saw several,” the man spoke up. “Maybe six but there were no doubt more.”
“Weapons?”
“All kinda strange guns.”
“Where is Nutka?” Sam could see the worry in Anna’s eyes.
“Still with her family. Coming back this afternoon in time for the massage.”
“Let’s go.” Anna turned to run down the path Jason would have taken.
Sam grabbed her arm and spun her around. “Plan. Remember the plan.”
“The plan is we go look for him.”
“Whoever did this is dangerous,” Sam said.
“That’s why we’re in a hurry.”