Neuropath

by R. Scott Bakker

  Click.

  Something changed. There was a hole…

  'This is what it's like,' Neil was saying. 'This is what it's like when the self is shut down.'

  No, hole wasn't the right word; it assumed a subtraction from some greater sum, when it was the sum itself that no longer existed.

  'So tell me, sweetheart, how can you make meaning when you're simply another output? Just like the feeling of making. Just like the feeling of love. How can the "feeling of being you" anchor anything, when it can be shut down with a flick of a switch? Hmm?'

  Neil was speaking, but no one listened. There was simply this clearing, this space, a manifold of things and happenings, articulated in time, and belonging to no one.

  'You like to think you have all these experiences, that you author all your actions, but the sad fact, my dear, is that you simply accompany them.'

  There was this voice, humming with a familiarity so profound it terrified.

  'No,' it said. 'No.'

  Neil laughing. 'Strange, isn't it, Goodbook? To finally hear your voice as it truly is. A stranger, speaking with your lips.' He stood, and from within the clearing, seemed to gaze at the clearing itself, at the angle of its opening. 'You don't know how long I've wanted this… how long I've ached… for an opportunity to speak with you. The real you.'

  And in the parallel weave of existences, there was a stinging that was also a knowing, an understanding that he spoke not to 'Goodbook', not to the cartoon, but to the brain behind and beneath. And it heard him.

  Neil drifted back to his worktable, a kind of torpor in his movements.

  Click.

  Then Thomas was watching him, reeling with something deeper than dismay.

  'I'm confused,' Nora was sobbing. 'I don't… I don't understand what's happening. All I know is that I love you, Tommy. That's all I know!'

  Neil spoke before Thomas's speech center could generate any words. 'And you know what you feel, huh, Nora?'

  'I told you!' she cried. 'It's the deepest, the most awesome feeling of…' She trailed into silence. Her eyes fluttered. She swallowed, then let out a long, groaning sigh. 'Ungh,' she gasped. 'You are doing something to me, aren't you? Are you touching me? Are you-you-you-yooooooo—'

  'You can see it, can't you?' Neil said, glancing at Thomas. 'See her for what she is.'

  No, something said. Yes.

  'Mmmmm,' Nora murmured in a tone that stabbed for its familiarity. 'Ohmigawd…'

  Thomas felt his voice crack. 'She's no different than us.'

  'Exactly,' Neil said, grinning. 'None of us are real. Unable to see itself, our brains continually cook us up. It's just that at the moment, her brain finds itself one step lower on the causal food chain.'

  He winked and added, 'Just like you.'

  Neil made her weep. Neil made her scream, and he made it so that Thomas thought it funny—sublimely funny. The more ragged, the more tortured her scream, the more uproarious it became.

  Then afterward, Neil laughed at his shame, and showed him every cubit of that monstrous emotion.

  This time it was Nora who laughed.

  Neil made her forget the minutes, then even the seconds, so that every breath she would say, 'Where am I?'

  'Where am I?'

  'Where am I?'

  'Where am I?'

  Between each game Thomas tried to soothe her, this jerking mechanism that had once been his wife. He tried to whisper reassurances that possessed no meaning in the ringing tin of his own ears.

  But she could only weep, 'Ripley,' over and over again.

  'Frankie.'

  Neil made her come, then transformed the data signature of her voice into an algorithm that made him come. He stood between them and cackled as they cried out again and again, driven to orgasm after orgasm by the sound of the other's climax.

  And Thomas did not want it to stop.

  Then Neil did the same with pain, so that her wagging shrieks made him buck and howl, over and over again. A pain beyond weeping. A pain beyond succor or reprieve,

  A pain only fallen angels could know.

  And something began to understand.

  Something… not him.

  He was nothing more than an output, a kind of holographic speaker system that generated experience like sound. He had lived the abstract force of the Argument for too many years for it not to be rote, reflex. But this…

  The nimbus of white ringing all points of illumination. The ache murmuring through teeth cracked for gnashing. Flexing rage. The battering love and horror. Arching lust. The glimmers of hope and beauty. And the pain, the overriding pain.

  All of it falling from his best friend's fingers.

  He was but a moment, something deeper than him realized. Nothing more than a fragment, fooled by blindness into thinking itself whole. Notes contemptuous of the instrument.

  Music oblivious to the score.

  He was still screaming when Theodoros Gyges appeared at the very edge of seeing.

  Impossible. But there it was, the coarse beard climbing acne-scarred cheeks, the bearish eyes far too sharp for such a blunt face, there, hanging on the verge of visual oblivion, motionless, watching with the blank fascination of a tourist who had wandered through an EMPLOYEES ONLY door at Disney World.

  Thomas spared him no thought.

  He had no thought to spare.

  The billionaire strode into the blurred circle of his agony. Thomas did not care when he raised the crowbar. He did not rejoice when Neil looked up from his monitors too late. He did not start at the watermelon-thump. He did not thank God.

  The crowbar fell again and again. Screens and equipment danced to spitting sparks.

  Then the pain was gone.

  Nora twitched across from him, her eyes rolled back into her head. Neil lay stretched across the concrete floor, his face bent toward Thomas, his body broken-doll still. He seemed to blink and work his mouth. Somehow Thomas knew that his neck was broken.

  The burly man stepped up to Thomas, peered into his face. Thomas tried to say, 'It's me,' but he had screamed his voice to blood.

  With thick thumbs, Gyges unscrewed the bolts holding his head in place. The pain of unthreading the bone seemed almost a joke. Thomas let his chin loll against his chest as the man unbuckled the remaining restraints.

  'It's me,' Thomas finally rasped. 'It's me, Mr Gyges… Thomas Bible.'

  The billionaire nodded. 'And that's him?' he said, nodding to Neil across the floor.

  'It's him… Neil Cassidy.'

  The billionaire held Thomas's elbow as he stepped clear. Even so, he fell to his knees.

  'You followed me.'

  'The GPS in my car,' Gyges said.

  It seemed to Thomas that he had known all along. That he had waited. Everything had coordinates, nowadays, even roads unmarked on any map. Everyone could be found.

  'You get your family,' the man said. 'Then you leave.'

  'I-I do-don—'

  'You leave!' Gyges barked. 'You do not want to hear… to see…'

  He turned from Thomas, pulled a long knife from a sheath strapped to his left calf. He kneeled, placing his right knee in the small of Neil's back. He used the knife to scratch an itch on his bearded cheek. Thomas saw dried blood marring its sheen.

  He felt no surprise. He lacked the neurotransmitters.

  'The spine is the door, the connection…' Gyges said, looking at the task before him. He turned to Thomas, his piggish eyes rounding in a kind of wonder. 'Cut it and the soul is preserved, kept safe, wrapped in a box…

  'Don't you see?' Gyges hissed, staring down his cheeks like some ancient chieftain. 'I only fuck the meat.'

  Thomas backed away from the madman, knowing there was no reason, no connection…

  He was just noise. One more senseless output.

  'I only fuck the meat!'

  Thomas glanced at Neil's face, saw the brain behind it reaching for him through the pose of facial musculature, clutching with primeval visual cues. He could see
it looking, peering through keyhole eyes, buzzing with anguish and information, trapped by the severing of a single cord.

  It pulled Neil's lips into a rueful smile, pinned his face into a pathetic grimace.

  Goodbook, it mouthed.

  Please…

  'What I do,' Gyges gasped with coital intensity. 'They know… but they do not feel.'

  Untouched, Thomas turned to free his ex-wife. In his periphery, he could see Gyges hunched over Neil's broad back. But he dared not look. The billionaire had become a thing of blood and sawing shadows. A monstrous tabloid horror, murmuring as he worked…

  'Look at you.

  'Boned like a fish…

  'Like a prom queen with low self-esteem.

  'I will fill you like a cup…

  'Like something holy.'

  The false premise in Neil's argument.

  After freeing her, Thomas held Nora's face to his chest so that she too would not see. 'Look at you…' The Chiropractor brooked no witnesses.

  They held hands as they climbed the basement stairs. A series of colorless images assailed Thomas with each and every blink. He saw Cynthia Powski, her skullcap drawn back like the curtains of a theater stage. He saw the Museum of Natural History diorama that had so impressed him as a kid: male and female australopithe-cines walking side by side across a vast plain of volcanic ash. He remembered asking his father what had happened to them, whether they had gone to heaven. 'Do you see wings?' his father had snapped.

  My son… Thomas thought as they crested the final steps.

  My son and daughter are dead.

  All was dark upstairs. Nora's face, bruised and bloodied by Mary's screws, seemed to float in the gloom. Neither of them spoke. When they turned on the lights, it seemed they could see too much. Cobwebs in the corners. Hardwood floors that seemed to creak beneath the weight of their gaze. No furniture. No pictures. No obligatory antiques. Thomas knelt and picked a small white card from the floor, studied the painted real estate agent smiling from the corner photo.

  WELCOME HOME!

  the gold-embossed letters shouted.

  He let the card flutter from his fingers. Then he wondered where Neil had hidden the bodies.

  Nora began testing doors, gingerly, as though feeling for fire beyond the blank wood panels. Thomas followed her lead, more out of some instinct to mimic than out of agreement.

  They found the children thrown like luggage across the floor of a spare bedroom. The heads of both were dressed, Ripley with gauze clotted with small spots of blood, Frankie with the original bandages from the hospital. Feeling the flutter of their pulses, Thomas wanted to weep, but there was a gaping hollow where his joy and anguish should have been. He gathered his unconscious son in his arms instead, rocking him the way Nora rocked Ripley.

  Both were sedated.

  They took Nora's car, which Neil had pulled out back. Thomas was too numb to care that she had willingly brought their daughter to her monster lover.

  The way he had brought their son to his monster friend.

  She sat in the back with both their children, gently weeping. It seemed fake, somehow. Thomas drove, entranced by the apparitions that swept up and around his sensorium.

  The headlights illuminated too little road, a wedge of gravel rimmed by bracken and flailing trees. They rolled into the black. Everything flying outward, into the black beyond and behind them.

  'Gyges was the Chiropractor,' he whispered to her image in the rearview mirror. 'Neil made him… A diversion, a way to strangle the resources devoted to finding him.'

  Not that explanations mattered anymore.

  'How?' Nora croaked.

  Everything would be shadows after this—simulations. No fear, no pain, no joy or love would be as profound, as true, as what Mary had shown him. Neil was gone, and the world was back behind the controls. Only the familiarity of the things Thomas thought and felt set them apart. He was the difference, which meant he was nothing at all.

  Like this very moment.

  'Mommy?' a little girl's voice whispered.

  Thomas heard the sharp intake of Nora's breath.

  'I love you, Mommy.'

  'I love you too,' she rasped.

  'Yesss,' Ripley said. 'I really, really, love you…'

  The words were right, but the world that gave them meaning was so very wrong. Soon, Thomas realized, his son would awake also.

  Then the screaming would begin.

  'I luvvvvvv…' his daughter cooed in a smiling, teary-eyed voice.

  'Shhhh,' Thomas croaked. 'Time to sleep, honey.'

  Experience, unspooling like a movie, qualms for color, hopes for shape, decisions for the illusion of movement, waiting for the bulb to burn through, for the celluloid to boil into black rings, so that it all could vanish into the hidden frame, leaving only catcalls and white light on a white screen.

  'So much it hurts, Mommy.'

  AUTHOR'S

  AFTERWORD

  Since this book turns on an intricate

  combination of fact and

  fiction, I thought I should try to clarify, at least in general terms, which is which. In so many ways writers are the least trustworthy of sources, not only because of the sheer breadth of the ground they cover, but because they spend so much time alone with their opinions.

  Love affairs are inevitable.

  Of the myriad details regarding psychology and cognitive science that appear, the majority are either fact or close extrapolations of fact. Some, however, are what might be called 'future facts', results that have not been obtained, but very well might be, given a pessimistic interpretation of existing trends. The stuff regarding free will is a primary example. To my knowledge, researchers have yet to determine rudimentary choices before any conscious awareness of making them.' The notorious findings of Benjamin Libet, I think, are too freighted with ambiguity to say one way or the other. By the same token, it seems very likely that free will, certainly the way it is generally understood, is in for a very, very rough ride. For those interested in an accessible overview of recent trends in consciousness research, I highly recommend Susan Blackmore's excellent A Very Short Introduction to Consciousness.

  There is of course no such thing as Marionette, but since it's simply a deep-reaching version of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, a technology that has already entered its maturity, I'm inclined to think it's more a matter of when we'll see such devices than if. Of course, all the glimpses of what Thomas experiences while in Marionette are sheer speculation, but entirely possible in principle, which is all the Argument really needs.

  The same might be said about the novel's central 'novum', low field fMRIs. These have been in the research pipe for some time now; the question is how long that pipe will prove to be, especially when it comes to scanning individuals' brains as they go about their business.

  I want to say 'very long', but the resources gathering on the horizon are more than formidable. Marketers are taking that fateful step from training us like animals (via associative conditioning) to treating us like mechanisms. There are tremendous amounts of money to be made.

  As for the marriage of technology and the brain, that day has already arrived, and the therapeutic possibilities are nothing short of breathtaking. Forms of depression, blindness and deafness that seemed incurable only years ago now seem destined to become maladies of the past. But since I wanted Neuropath to be a thriller, one that strives to be intellectually as well as viscerally disturbing, I primarily focused on the more frightening implications of our 'post-human' future.

  As a result, the book will no doubt smack of alarmism and technophobia for those who see a cornucopia of possibility in the 'post-human'. For my own part, I think we have every reason to be more than a little paranoid. Fiddling at the edges of brain function to relieve suffering seems an obvious good. But the stakes change drastically once we begin manipulating the machinery of consciousness.

  What happens when experience itself becomes as pliable as paint? What
happens when the only measuring tape we possess becomes as elastic as a rubber band? Altering our own neurophysiology means altering the very structure of our experience, the shared bedrock of our humanity, not to mention the tools required to decide further alterations. There's good reason to believe that self-modification at such a fundamental level will send us looping out into different directions of insanity. Either way, we quite simply cannot imagine what a world without this common frame of reference would be like. And if it were the case that things like meaning, purpose, and morality are kinds of illusions, then there's no reason to expect any of them to survive the post-human future to come. Post-human optimists generally base their arguments on the very experiential staples they intend to render obsolete. They assume that some 'humanist center' will hold when their arguments imply precisely the opposite.

  They are literally advocating what they cannot conceptualize, which in a sense means they are advocating nothing at all. When it comes to the post-human, we really have no reason to be anything other than profoundly uncertain. And profound uncertainty regarding essential matters warrants excessive care.

  Or as I like to call it, paranoia.

  Recent years have seen a number of popular works written by philosophers trying to head off the nihilistic implications of contemporary neuroscience. Someone like Daniel Dennett, for instance, wouldn't so much argue with the science of Neuropath as he would argue with the interpretation. It's not that freedom or morality don't exist, he would say, only that they're not what we take them to be. Rather than wringing our hands, what we should be doing is reinterpreting our old concepts in the light of new scientific evidence. So something like 'freedom', for instance, could be redefined as 'greater behavioral versatility'.

  To me, this amounts to reassuring mourners at Grandma Mildred's funeral by telling them to simply name their household pets 'Mildred'. I don't know about you, but my experience of freedom is not the experience of 'greater behavioral versatility' or however you want to scientifically redefine the term 'freedom'. It really does seem as though I'm confronted with choices, and that I could at any moment do otherwise. The problem isn't that our concepts are out of date, but that our experiences are out and out deceptive.