by Terry Persun
“Yes, I would say it was a frightening experience. If you weigh what you did to how it could have affected our lives, it was very scary.”
“Which is synonymous with frightening,” Fenny said.
“Precisely.” Dr. Klein reached for the fiber optic connector cable to his digital data recorder and drew it out long enough to screw into the receptor in Fenny’s side. “Get ready. I’m going to activate the request signal and monitor exactly what you’re sensing. I’m sure you know this already, but this mirroring is essential in my finding out how much you can handle.” He pushed a button on the front of the recorder. “Now, what’s more important than the amount of transfer is where it goes. This is the tricky part. I already know that some of the data will go to your digital side and some to your neurogrid side, but what data goes where? How has it allocated itself? This is all you, Fenny. Inside your mind,” he tapped the top of Fenny’s body again, “there are little decision-making circuits that are different than every other neurogrid system being used. That’s the whole idea of neurogrids: to be unique. These are your very own. I’m going to see what they’re doing.”
“Is that why you are reading that book? Have I become a difficult child in the way I assimilate information? Even tactile information?”
Dr. Klein smiled at Fenny. “No, that book is for me to understand how to say things in a clearer way. It’s not how you understand what I say, it’s how I mean it different than how I say it. I need to learn to interact with you so that we don’t have another episode like this morning.”
“I believe I understand.”
“Now,” he said while turning a knob on the simulator, “you don’t sense anything unusual, do you?”
“Not at all. I don’t receive feedback from the recorder,” he said as though Dr. Klein should already know it.
“Just making sure, my boy, just making sure.” He took Fenny’s hand, turned it palm up, and set it on the bench. “Try not to feel the bench but to focus on what I’m doing to your palm.” He pulled a pin from a small dish and poked Fenny. “Oh, a big jump. Do you know what just happened?”
“The sensor near that part of the hand registered near-destruction pressures. Pain,” Fenny said, wishing to show that he could translate the inputs.
For the rest of the afternoon, Dr. Klein ran all manner of item or device over Fenny’s hand, then proceeded to affect each hand a different way, but at the same time. All the while he took notes and read meters.
Fenny, although programmed in many things, was not able to interpret the readings as Dr. Klein could. There was a piece of understanding missing that Fenny felt would be available to him some day. All he had to do was pay attention and explain each action the doctor performed. Even as he had that particular thought run through his mind, Fenny had a paradoxical thought that suggested that he’d never be able to figure out what the doctor understood naturally, simply because he was not biological. There was a divide between electro-mechanical and biological. One that he did not understand. Perhaps he could learn the difference if connected to the information through his input/output ports. Perhaps that’s why Dr. Klein suggested that it was dangerous that he could now access his own interface fully.
CHAPTER 11
MAVRA LISTENED PATIENTLY to Neil after he returned home.
“My meeting with Steffenbraun was short. Mostly theory.” Neil paced the floor in front of her as he talked. “He kept going back to his research in the conversation. One thing I realized from our little heart-to-heart, though, is that Steffenbraun is genuinely worried. I’m not sure whether he’s concerned about the machine being compromised or his research being shut down, but to him, this is serious business.”
“Doesn’t matter, does it?” Mavra said.
“I suppose not to some people but for me, in order to put this together, motivation plays a key role. It could take the investigation in opposite directions.”
“I can see that at one point it would make a difference, but at the beginning, where we are now? If you just look at Steffenbraun as a frightened man worrying about his project, I can’t see how knowing whether it’s a failing project or a successful one would make a difference. The more you learn the better able you’ll be to analyze the motivating factor don’t you think? ” She sat with her legs crossed and her head tilted up, watching him.
Neil stood almost six feet tall as it was and he must have appeared even taller while pacing the floor in front of her. But he couldn’t sit down, not while collecting his thoughts. The movement somehow kept his mind oiled—both minds. That’s how he chose to think of it anyway. “I’ll go along with you for now because I don’t have the answer. But I have to keep it in mind as we move forward.” He didn’t want to give in to her assessment. He noticed a slight tug of annoyance, or was it embarrassment, that she might think more clearly than he did at the moment. He had told her that he was in charge, shouldn’t she be listening to his assessment and asking how he would approach the case?
His other mind followed that thought for a moment and recalled how she had been in his situation just as often as he had. “I’m sorry,” he said. “There’s a lot going on. You’ve run the show before, too, with the police, because they respected your psychic abilities. I should be able to listen.”
“That only happened once,” she said.
“The serial killer.”
“The Krenshaw case. Yes.” She reached for him. “I had to find three dead bodies before they’d let me run things, though.”
Neil placed his hand into her outstretched one. “I won’t make you do that.”
“I know. You supported me then. And you never interfered.”
“I knew you could do it.”
She shook his hand, and then let it drop so he could resume his pacing. “And you know what you’re doing. This is your world more than it is mine. And I promised to let you run things.”
The wind picked up outside the window, bending the three birch trees, which Neil had planted years ago, toward the open yard. Leaves and dirt particles ticked against the window every time there was a gust.
Because of his conversation with Mavra, Neil let his minds take the motivational possibilities for Steffenbraun’s worries in two directions. First, if he were losing the project, he’d have stolen the equipment so that he could carry on with the experiments somewhere else, perhaps somewhere private. The government would write off the loss if they found it scattered, as Mavra suggested. No one would really know if all the equipment was gone or not except Steffenbraun, and he could make it up. Even if Matthews could identify the outside of the electronics equipment, who knew what might be inside. Equipment for experiments like these was often altered for specific uses.
Neil removed his cell phone from his pocket and punched in a reminder to find out what each piece of equipment’s purpose was. As they found the pieces, he could ask that Steffenbraun prove that it was the exact one lost. He didn’t know how that would happen just yet, but he’d figure something out.
The opposite possibility was that the time machine worked as Steffenbraun believed and that these monster-looking things actually came from the future. Where else could they come from? Steffenbraun had talked about a parallel universe, too, which lead to his wild-ass idea that the thing came from a different future. How would anyone know one way or the other? Neil giggled.
“What’s so funny?”
“Still hard to believe these things came from the future. It’s silly to me.”
Mavra’s brow wrinkled in thought. The lines around her eyes became deeper when she smiled. “You are so set in your ways of thinking. I don’t care how much more intelligence you have than the regular person, those opinions of yours will get you in trouble every time.”
He stopped pacing and stared at the bending trees outside the window for a moment. He took a deep breath. “It’s fantasy, that’s why. I’m sorry if I’m logical about these things, but the truth is, as soon as you overlap theories just to make what you believe
in possible,” he shrugged his shoulders, “it releases the real, the practical, and steps into dreamland.”
“Yet isn’t that how advances are made?”
“No. Advances are made when you apply one theory to rigorous scientific testing. One theory.” He held up a finger. “You can’t just pile them one on top of the other until you get what you want.”
“You must think what I do is crazy,” she said.
“Not at all. We’ve had this conversation. Scientifically, if you’re accurate nearly eighty-five percent of the time, I can’t argue with those percentages.” He sat next to her. “There are months where your work finds lost children, serial killers, dead bodies. I can’t disregard that as scientific proof. Besides that, there have been studies and documentation done for years on some of the methods you use. I’m not saying that just because we don’t understand it, it isn’t real. In fact, if you look at Steffenbraun’s theories it makes logical sense that our life thread has us stuck in this time period. I merely stop there. I don’t add another theory to the mix.”
She wrapped her arms around his neck and shoulders and leaned into him. “You idiot. You must calculate the percentages of my work all the time. You can’t help it, can you?”
Neil had to laugh. He didn’t have to answer her. And he was sure that she stopped listening to him once he stopped praising her work.
“Okay, back to the situation,” she said. “What else did Steffenbraun tell you?”
Neil pulled a pad from his pocket and flipped a few pages. “It wasn’t Steffenbraun, but Lowan and O’Brien. Let me see. Here,” he said. “They both mentioned Dr. Smedley Klein. I found it odd that Steffenbraun never mentioned him, though. I would think that Lowan and O’Brien would have had a similar discussion with him.”
“Two Nobels,” Mavra said. “I remember Dr. Klein.”
“Then why don’t I?”
She poked his forehead. “Too much logic up there probably. You can’t remember everything. But he’s the one whose child got killed in his lab one day. There was very little mentioned about it in the news. A blip. Then the story disappeared as quickly as he disappeared from the scene. Couldn’t stand the questions, the attention, from what I remember. So, why’d they mention him?”
“Apparently, he’s the genius capable of, if I get this right, making those monsters that came from the machine. Both these guys recognize the body parts. They both hang out in similar research circles. The facial movements are interpretations of real movements based on the latest computer animation software, where a signal is fed from the…” He’d lost her. “Forget the details. The gist of it is that feeding signals with huge amounts of data into a face is difficult and slow. That’s why they don’t appear to work quite right. The data has to take shortcuts.”
“How does the data know when and where to take a shortcut?” she said.
“That’s the thing. Lowan and O’Brien think the face is a prototype. They think it’s connected to a dense neurogrid, or a bio-electronic device of some kind,” he explained.
“By bio you mean living matter?”
“Exactly. But if Steffenbraun is right, living matter can’t go through the machine. That’s another reason they might not be for real,” he said.
“What else do you know about the thief?”
“The thing was fully dressed, but other body parts appeared familiar to Lowan and O’Brien, as those that are presently sold to doctors and hospitals. Putting the pieces together into one being, that’s the work of our genius as far as they’re concerned. But neither will commit to their ideas as fact.” He flipped back a page in the notebook, read a moment, and gave Mavra a sideways glance. “You hear anything about the “accident,” as you called it, being planned experiments done on his son?”
She looked into the corner of the room, her head cocked and her hand went to her chin, a classic pose for someone in thought. “Not that I recall.”
“I’ll have him checked out.”
Another gust sprayed the window with debris and Mavra jumped. “Sorry, it surprised me.” As she got up from the couch, she said, “You’re cooking tonight, you know?” That was his signal to stop thinking and start participating.
Neil gave her a kiss. “I’m on it.” He went into the kitchen and pulled chicken and vegetables from the refrigerator to make a stir-fry. As he worked, he thought, organizing the conversations of the day as though they were with one person, one stream of information. He evaluated repeated information and planned to investigate those items more deeply as he moved forward with the case. It wasn’t long before he and Mavra sat at the dining room table to eat.
Halfway through dinner, the landline rang. Neil strolled to the wall phone, answered it, and listened to Agent Rogers explain their find. “Got to go,” Rogers said before he hung up the phone. Neil wandered back to the table, and bent over his dinner to scoop a final spoonful of stir-fry into his mouth.
“What is it?”
“They found pieces of the time machine.” He gave her a wide smile. “In his words, they were scattered all over the woods, much of it thrown over an embankment. Fairly close to the Center. If everything’s there, it’s a decoy used to keep us busy while Steffenbraun hid the real stuff. That means I have my motivation and answer. Case closed.” He grabbed a coat from the hall closet. “And no danger,” he added.
“Is that a dig at my reading?”
“Eighty-five percent, not a hundred. But no, it wasn’t a dig. It was just an observation. Like you said, I calculate it all the time. Just what I do.”
Mavra reached for her coat as well. “I’m coming.”
Neil jerked his head toward the door. “It’s pretty windy. The woods could be dangerous.” As soon as he said the word, he closed his eyes and shook his head. When he opened them again he looked into the smirk Mavra had on her face. “Pain in the ass,” he said.
“And don’t you forget it,” Mavra took his hand. “If that’s the only danger on this job, I’ll be happy,” she said, “but it’s not over yet. And for now, I’m going with you. You asked for me to be your partner and that’s what I’m going to be.”
Neil knew not to argue.
The roads were littered with fallen branches as they drove toward the Research Center. Not much traffic interfered with their progress, though, and they got to the site fairly quickly, and in relative silence. Neil drove to the edge of the woods off Wheatley Drive.
Mavra settled into what Neil always thought of as her trance. He could tell by the shift in her posture, the quietness of her movements, that she was preparing to participate as only she was able. He had never been with her when she worked with the police, but this was what he imagined it was like based on how she worked when performing readings from the house. And here he was experiencing it directly. His imagined scenario was correct. “You okay?” He put a hand on her arm.
She nodded and patted his hand in reassurance. “I’m ready.”
Two FBI agents waited for them near the woods’ edge. “Altman,” one of them said with a short nod in his direction.
“Where’s the stuff?” Neil said.
“This way. It’s pretty windy. You’ll want to be careful.” He was looking at Mavra.
“We’ll be all right,” Neil told him.
The two agents swung around to lead the way.
Neil held Mavra close, in a protective posture, his head and shoulder over her as the two of them tilted into the wind. He listened for breaking limbs and watched for movement as another gust hit the area. Branches had already broken and were lying around them. The FBI agents ducked against the gust while leading the way.
Wind roared through the trees like a train out of control. Leaves leapt into the air around them, stirring up a blast of autumn odors even though it was late spring. The lack of a path required the two of them to step over half-buried nurse logs, around limbs and exposed roots, and through underbrush. As they entered a small clearing, Agent Rogers approached the two of them, his eyes squintin
g against the wind.
“Where’s your buddy,” Neil asked.
Rogers pointed to the left where a group of men huddled around some equipment. Matthews hunkered down amid the electronics. “Taking inventory.”
“He’ll match these pieces with the ones from the old photos of the machine?”
“Absolutely. He’s real detail oriented. You may have passed it off because it’s a shit job for you, but I think he enjoys it. It’s what he does best,” Rogers said.
“My pleasure,” Neil said. “How about you? What do you do best?”
Rogers angled his head to restrict the amount of direct wind he had to handle. His cheeks relaxed and he appeared to get completely serious for a moment. “I’ll keep everything organized and in place. Pretty good at pulling the facts together and producing a plan if you give me the chance. Either way, I’m honored to work with you. I was afraid you’d let us go. This is such an interesting case and to get to work with you…” He shook his head and shrugged his shoulders as though he was at a loss for words. “What can I say?”
Mavra stared at Rogers, then looked at Neil.
It was good that she heard how respected he was. Neil was aware that Mavra knew that he demanded a lot of money for his work, that he was often hired by the government, but to have someone say it in front of her made Neil feel good. He thought he recognized a look of pride on her face. “Thank you for saying so,” Neil said. “Now, what do we have here?” He had to talk loudly to get over the noise.
Rogers turned toward the embankment, his back to the wind so that he could talk at a normal level. Sound traveled easier.
Neil leaned close and lowered his voice as well. At the bottom of the ravine, the helicopter hull lay on its side. The coils were missing so Neil knew that the ones that were attached to the hull in the laboratory must have been the originals. He asked the question anyway, and Rogers assured him that they hadn’t found the coils and that his assumption was probably correct. “Points to Steffenbraun, doesn’t it?” Rogers said.