Neuropath

by R. Scott Bakker

Suddenly all was misery and agony, as if each of Thomas's innumerable pores gave birth to white-hot pins. Something mewled and screamed, bucked against iron restraints. Somewhere, something defecated.

  Click. Then he was happy again.

  Neil smiled. 'Try to avoid changing the topic,' he said.

  Through a fog of good humor, Thomas could feel his body shivering, as though he had frozen bones. 'Sure thing… Where were we?'

  'I was explaining how the brain simply isn't equipped to keep track of itself, how it lacks the processing power, the evolutionary pedigree, so that even though it's remarkably proficient at modeling its external environments, the best it can do is scribble cartoons of itself.'

  'Ah yes,' Thomas said. 'You mean the mind.'

  'Exactly. The cartoon extraordinaire.'

  'But it doesn't seem that way.'

  'Of course not. It has to seem as deep as deep, as wide as wide, as sharp as sharp, simply because "deep", "wide",' and "sharp" are part of the cartoon. We can't step out of our minds and take a walk around them, like we can the brain.'

  'Which is why,' Thomas cried with what he could only describe as drunken good humor, 'you'll never convince anyone that you're anything but crazy!'

  'Who said anything about convincing anybody?'

  'But then why do any of this?'

  'Why?' Neil repeated. Once again, he began thumbing through Thomas's book. '"Our brains,"' he read aloud, '"are able to track their own prospective behavioral outputs, but are entirely blind to the deep processing that drives them. Rather than doing things because of this or that feed forward mechanism, we do them 'for reasons', which is to say, for desired outcomes. Causality is turned on its head for consciousness. Results and consequences—goals—become the engine of our actions because the neural correlates of consciousness have no access to the real neurophysiological movers and shakers down below."'

  He popped the pages shut as though snapping at a fly. Thomas flinched. 'Purpose?' Neil said. 'Point? These things are ghosts, Goodbook, hard-wired hallucinations. They only seem real because we're riding the neural horse backward.'

  Thomas snorted, equally amused and unimpressed. 'So then what's your illusory point? What does the cartoon called Neil think it's doing?'

  These words seemed to catch Neil by surprise. For a heartbeat, he stared at Thomas with almost lunatic intensity, 'Neil,' he repeated, as though his name were some absurd Chinese expression. 'That cartoon no longer exists.'

  Thomas would have shaken his head if he could. 'Then what does exist?'

  'I've disconnected certain performance-inhibiting circuits,' Neil said with what seemed to be reluctance. 'What you folk-psychologists call anxiety, fear; all that bullshit. They're little more than memories to me now. But I've also shut down some of the more deceptive circuits as well. I now know, for instance, that I will utterly nothing. I'm no longer fooled into thinking that "I" do anything at all'

  Thomas could only stare at his friend in wonder. Where did he find the balls to do the things he did?

  'And I've gone deeper,' Neil continued. 'So much deeper.'

  Pause.

  'You see through the cartoon,' Thomas said. The words tingled on his tongue.

  Neil nodded, as though at some inevitability only he could fathom. 'Only partially. I still experience things, after all. It's just a radically different experience, one far more sensitive to the fragmentary truth of our souls. One without volition, purpose, selfhood, right or wrong.'

  Thomas frowned and whistled. Part of him understood the monstrous implications of what Neil was saying, but it seemed little more than an amusing abstraction, like boys with sticks playing guns. The greater part of him wondered, even revered. What would it be like to walk without self or conscience, with plans indistinguishable from compulsions, one more accident in the mindless wreck that was the world? What would it be like to act, not as something as puny or wretched as a person, but as a selfless vehicle, a conduit for everything that came before?

  'Fucking wild, Neil. Too fucking wild.'

  Neil's grin was genuine and contagious—one brain communing with another through the ancient choreography of facial cues. Looking at him, Thomas thought of the intervening years, the fine chiseling about his eyes and dimples, the painstaking brushwork of his salting hair. And it seemed to Thomas that he always knew this moment would come, from their first meeting in their dorm room. From Neil's first sly and appraising smile.

  It was so good to see him!

  'I'm the world's first neuronaut, Goodbook. And you're about to join me.'

  Neil bent over the keyboard, peered into a computer screen. 'As much as I'd like to keep you in a happy place,' he was saying, 'some things have to be done the old-fashioned way.' An affable glance. 'Especially if you want them to stick.'

  Clickety-click-click-tap-tap…

  Thomas's ebullient mood slowly faded away. Then the dread came, slowly, oddly, as though some inner, oxygen-starved limb were prickling back to life. What was happening? What was going on? The memories of moments ago suddenly seemed impossible, like a graft from some more innocent chapter of his life. But they were real: the thoughts, the feelings, all of them as real as real could be. The words…

  Frankie! Frankie? No-no-please-dear—

  'Neil!' he cried.

  'Shhhh,' his old roommate said. 'It's totally natural that your brain's in high alert. All it has are its evolutionary defaults, and lord knows the environmental stressors have been piled high—'

  'You didn't!' Thomas cried.

  'Right now it's cycling through million-year-old circuits, producing various failsafe behavioral outputs. Grief. Panic. Christ, it wasn't designed to recognize itself for what it is, so how could it possibly recognize its own potential? As far as it's concerned, this is nothing but a stone-age confrontation.'

  'Tell me you didn't kill my boy,'

  Neil pinched his brows in a friendly frown. 'There you go. A perfect example of those defaults in action. The brain generates bonding outputs, or "parental concern", because those outputs once assured the replication of its genetic material. We're just stinky Xerox machines in the end, Goodbook. Only we use spunk and love instead of ink and paper.'

  'Where is he? Tell me where he is! Neil! Neil!'

  Shrug, followed by a drowsy smile. 'These are just facts, Goodbook. If you want to embarrass yourself arguing against them, be my guest.'

  Though Neil had him clamped face-forward, though he could see nothing beyond the oblivion of his periphery, in his mind's eye he could see Frankie splayed across the basement floor, his eyes dark, his tongue dry, his face grey against the crimson pool. Like Gerard. Like Sam.

  'Jesus, Neil! Oh my God! What have you done,'

  Neil glanced back at his flat-screen. 'Your brain's fight or flight systems are in full arousal. It's testing the restraints now, realizing the futility of physical behavioral outputs. Now the frontal cortex is processing hypothetical alternatives, doing its best to inhibit and cope with signals it's receiving from its more primitive limbic cousins below. Now it's starting to realize that linguistic behavioral outputs are its—'

  Thomas gagged in panic. He needed to think—think! There had to be some way—some way to reach him!

  'Neil,' Thomas said, trying to squeeze the terror from his voice. 'Just take a step back, buddy. Just ask yourself what you're doing.'

  'But I already told you, Goodbook. I'm just along for the ride, same as you. The only difference is that I know which way the horse is pointed.'

  'Neil! This is my family! My family! This is Frankie we're talking about!'

  But the madman had turned back to the bright, computer-screen schematic. 'Now if I dampen the linguistic circuits, your brain should return to its most basic failsafe output…'

  Tap-click-click…

  Suddenly talking didn't matter. Crying out, Thomas threw himself at the restraints again and again. He wheezed, blew spittle through clenched teeth.

  'Physical struggle,' Neil said.<
br />
  It was like trying to lift the floor. It was like warring against his own bones. The grip was seamless, as though he had been fused to the world's implacable frame, as though the meat of him had been wrapped around mountains.

  Neil drawled on. 'Now it's registering the futility of its efforts, beginning to form what you psychologists call negative generalizations.'

  An inarticulate roar. He was trapped—trapped! It was hopeless. Frankie! Frankie! Dear sweet Jesus, what was he going to do?

  Desolation yawned, swallowed him whole. He let go. He simply hung, like clothing stapled to the wall, sobbing.

  Frankie's dead.

  His boy, smiling, clean, and safe. The horrible Scottish accent. The obsession with everything 'sooper'. The dog hair on tiny T-shirts. The band-aids pressed across the carpet in front of the TV. The wide-wondering eyes. The farts on Ripley's pillow. The words, I love you, Daddy, pinned to a million different expressions, a thousand different events. I love you, Daddy, scribbled in clumsy crayon, declared through a hundred skinned-knee sobs. The one sure thing…

  Gone.

  'And there we have it,' Neil said, his face graphed by the cross-sectioned brain on the screen before him. 'The neural fingerprint of learned helplessness.'

  Through the roaring, watery blur, Thomas saw the monster turn and smile.

  'Beautiful,' it said with his best friend's voice. 'Textbook.'

  My little boy.

  For a time Thomas simply breathed, leaned against his absolute immobility. Everything seemed distorted, as though viewed through a fisheye lens. Neil flicking through handwritten notes, scratching the corner of his eye with the butt of his pen. The luminous brain on the computer screens, slowly revolving beneath windows of text. The overhead fluorescent lights, casting haloes over the dark slots between ceiling joists.

  A kind of claustrophobia gradually overcame him. It was more than the simple fact of his paralysis, more than the suffocation of hope or movement. Neil had nailed him to a single, myopic perspective, and for some reason, it rendered the ring of nothingness that encircled his visual field palpable. Ordinarily he need only twitch his head and it would be shattered—what was peripheral would become focal, and the world would be better known. But now it seemed as though he carried the void itself on his shoulders, that a great disc of blackness leaned against him like a slaver's yoke, choking him with insinuation and implication.

  What kind of horrors had Neil draped around him?

  This was how it happened, Thomas realized, for real and not in the movies.

  Fathers failed.

  Monsters won.

  Quite without curiosity, he watched this realization soak the computer graphic of his brain with various colors, cream to scarlet.

  When he finally spoke, it seemed he did so from a coma.

  'So what is it?' he rasped. His ensuing cough rattled the bolts screwed into his skull. 'You have me strapped into some kind of transcranial magnetic stimulator?' TMS devices, as they were called, had been in common use since the 1990s, employing magnetic fields to alter neuronal activity at targeted points in the brain. They were common as dirt at most neuroscientific research centers.

  'No-no,' Neil said without looking away from his screens. His fingers clicked across the keyboard. 'TMS can't reach nearly deep enough.'

  'So what is it?'

  Neil turned without looking at him, walked up, and began tinkering with something just outside his periphery. Thomas tensed, felt his eyes roll like a horse's.

  'It's a Homeland Security special,' Neil said, like a dentist talking to keep his patient preoccupied, 'called Marionette. We adapted her from stereotactic neuroradiosurgical devices—you know, the ones that use overlapping particle beams to burn out tumors? We found a way of doping the blood so that we could exercise pinpoint metabolic control at multiple points in the brain…' Thomas heard the tinkle of a small wrench. 'We call her Mary.'

  'Doesn't ring a bell,' Thomas said, more out of hatred than humor.

  Neil's laugh tickled his neck below his left ear.

  'Oh, she will soon enough,' he said, standing upright, then ducking out of his periphery. Thomas rolled his eyes, trying to follow him, but the fringe of blindness was absolute. Neil's next words, 'Trust me,' seemed to fall out of nowhere.

  Thomas could hear him root through what sounded like a toolbox behind him. Suddenly he reappeared, glanced at him on his way back to the computer terminal. 'I actually have several screen savers,' Neil said, sitting. 'Would you like to see?'

  'Screen savers?'

  Grinning at the flat-panel, Neil tapped something out on his keyboard. Light gleamed along the curve of his teeth. 'That's what we call them. They're programs that play on the neural circuitry responsible for consciousness.' He swiveled toward Thomas. His chair whistled. 'It's the final frontier of art, actually. The most fundamental canvas of all.'

  'Canvas?' Thomas asked dully.

  Remember… he murdered your son …

  'Existence,' Neil said. 'Existence itself.'

  He turned back to his keyboard and screen. 'You know how we used to always debate SETI back at Princeton, the question why, despite decades of searching the skies, we haven't been able to detect any ET version of I Love Lucy. After this, it becomes pretty clear why.'

  'I don't under-unngh!'

  His groin exploded in pleasure, tidal and blistering. He gasped, stared at Neil in drooling panic. Orgasms passed through him in sequential waves, clenching his anus like a fist, shuddering through the rebar of his body, slathering him with bliss. It was as though something divine and electric lunged about his cock.

  'This one's my favorite,' Neil said, laughing. 'Blow your load right away, so the symphony that follows unwinds in a drowsy post-coital haze…'

  Suddenly the pleasure was gone. The silence crackled. He gasped. Even though his skull remained bolted to Marionette, he could feel himself floating in and out of his body, as if he had become a flag hanging in a humid breeze. He tried to clutch. He tried to hold on. But he had become insubstantial.

  'Of course,' Neil was saying, 'the obligatory oscillating OBE—out of body experience—followed by a slow, crawling absence in your visual field.'

  Parts of the scene began to… implode before him, as through his visual field were a thing of rubber, being sucked through holes into a greater vacuum behind. The absences scrawled in wandering lines, at one point collapsing Neil's head into jaws and hair. And it looked as real as real…

  'Pardon the descriptive monologue,' Neil was saying as first his torso then his leg vanished, 'but the next sequence requires someone talking—'

  '—because,' Thomas said, 'it mucks with the neural circuits that distinguish the origin of voices.' What was Neil doing? Fucking lip-synching? T imagine that right about now,' Thomas added, 'you're wondering why I'm mouthing your words. The thing that freaks most people out is that it really seems they're the ones talking, that they're deciding to say what, in fact, someone else is saying.'

  Neil's lips stopped moving, and Thomas assumed that he'd given up his stupid mockery—why bother, when he had degraded him in so many more profound ways? But when Thomas found himself adding, 'You should brace yourself for this next sequence; it's pretty intense,' Neil mouthed the identical words once again.

  Then all was free-fall, a crazed vertigo of being… the room soared, yawed and pitched, even though it remained sun-stationary.

  'I call this Dante's Bungee,' Neil said, glancing from Thomas to the screen again.

  Something chainsawed into his chest, while something else tongued his cock with lightning. Rage overcame him, only to be swamped by love, by the tender melancholy of awakening before a lover in early light. He wept, and he howled in fury and joy. Never had he so loved. Never had he so hated. Never had he so yearned, as though a chasm had cracked open within him, an endless clutching abyss, suddenly filled with divinity, with a resounding, weeping unity, pinged by twinges of anxiety that grew like bloodstains, that blackened into
a thrumming dread, with claws like capillaries, peeling muscle from the inside of skin, while the world before him flapped back and forth like wings on an interdimensional hinge, dragging the world that was his right into the world that was his left.

  'This sequence,' he could hear Neil saying, 'fucks with the construction of extrapersonal space. Some funky shit.'

  Place crumpled and bloomed. Hollows collapsed into solids. Movement collapsed into stuttering instants, as though his heartbeat had become the very strobe of being. He could recognize everything about him—the man, the table, the chair—but he could see none of it, only movements, devoid of substance, whirring in the corners like quantum clockwork.

  And he ached with reptilian wrath, with mammalian tenderness… Expect-yearn-hope-pray. Memories, pulsing like glands, fading, fading… Somehow he forgot how to breathe.

  Then nothing.

  No feeling. No sensation. Just a trembling, a teetering blacker than black.

  Death.

  Bursting into pounding groins and howling fear-fuck-love-fuck-hate-fuck-horror-joy-jealousy-rage. Canines bared. A million women and a million rapes. Claw-kill-you-fucking-cunt-pussy-cunt-I-will-fucking-kill-kill-kill-kill! Aggression. Aggression.

  Then a spinning head. The sound of Neil chuckling. The creak of his chair.

  'I don't believe in happy endings,' he said.

  Thomas cried out, unable to think, to sort…

  'Mary give you a good ride?'

  Resentment, fear, and indignation.

  'You prick,' Thomas gasped. 'You fucking bastard.' He blinked the tears from his eyes, wondered why his mouth seemed so disconnected from his voice. 'Somehow,' he managed. 'Somehow I'm going to kill you, you fucking bastard.'

  Again… Neil was lip-synching again.

  Hollow and heavy, as though resuscitated from a drowning.

  'We call endings like that "blurs",' Neil said. 'Little reminders that Mary simply does what the brain does anyway, just minus all the environmental red tape. Since the feeling of being compelled is as much a product of your brain as anything else, you only feel compelled when Mary tickles it. Mackenzie cooked up these little "will inversion" algorithms—I'd show you if you weren't in restraints. They're creepy. You think you're willing your right arm to move, and your left arm starts waving instead. All sorts of little mindfucks like that. One of his screen savers even has a short omnipotence sequence. No matter what you're looking at, you're convinced that you're willing it to happen. Even if it's thunderclouds rolling in on the horizon. It's quite a trip, believe me.'