by Wil McCarthy
But she didn’t understand most of the math behind it, and she’d somehow imagined the translation code would be the work of months, or even years. In fact, it had taken just five business days, with Saturday and Sunday off for couples’ stuff. Even Harv seemed surprised how easily it had come together. And here they were: no way to test it except on a live human brain.
“All systems nominal,” Patel told Harv. “Test lights green. The rats have not chewed through any cables during the night.”
Another joke: there were no rats in this bottom-corner subbasement of the mazelike Engineering Center. There were no humans, either. As always, they had the place to themselves.
“Diagnostics are all green so far,” Harv said. “Just waiting on the final transforms.”
It took a high-end desktop computer nearly five whole minutes to convert the signals into something a human brain could read.
“You doing okay?” he asked, looking in Tara’s direction and sounding genuinely interested in the answer.
“Fine,” she told him, unconvincingly.
“Still think we should try it on pigs first?”
And here was yet another joke: pigs had most of the same neural and genetic wiring as humans, but they lacked the deep frontal lobe interconnections that made it possible not only to remember things, but to think about thinking about the remembered things. Without that, the hippocampus could not recognize the TMS signals at all. It was the equivalent of asking whether pigs could code the NMR’s processing firmware, or write up the paper when they were through.
She answered, “I do think we should talk about having a physician standing by.”
Harv seemed to think about that for a moment, but Tara could imagine the calculations in his mind: a doctor would insist on knowing what was going on, and would then insist on halting the experiment until some lengthy and unspecified safety criteria could be satisfied. But who was qualified to develop the safety criteria for a thing like this? Harv Leonel, that’s who.
“I’ll be fine,” he told her. “Hell, the Wright brothers risked their brains a lot more than I’m about to.” Then: “Fourier transform complete. The lights are green. TMS is accepting the input.”
“Congratulations,” Patel said.
“And to you,” Harv acknowledged vaguely as he stood up from the stool and picked his way over cables to where Patel and Tara stood: beside the surplus orthodontist chair that Harv had fitted with a surplus polygraph, so his vital signs could be coarsely monitored during the experiment. Fitted also with the rubber TMS/EEG cap itself, and the explosion of wires trailing out of it.
Without fanfare, he smeared electrolyte gel on all the appropriate contacts, sat down in the chair, put on the chest strap and the finger bands and the wrist cuff, and finally the TMS/EEG cap itself, which he secured with a silly-looking rubber chin strap.
Tara checked all the sensor feeds and stimulator outputs—a process which by itself took almost twenty minutes. Working from a manual bank of switches, she would activate one of the seventy electromagnets in the skull cap, feeding a low-amplitude square wave into a tiny portion of Harv’s brain. She would then verify that the pattern was picked up by all six electroencephalograph sensors around it, and then turn the switch off and verify that all six sensors returned to measuring normal brainwave activity. Of course, she was an expert in Y-chromosome haplogroups, not brainwave activity; the TMS/EEG connected to a computer running off-the-shelf software that handled all of the details. One by one, more lights went green, and more boxes were checked off on Patel’s clipboard.
Really, it was a blessing that Harv had invested the time and budget on all these status LEDs. He’d agreed to abort the test if even one of the lights came up yellow, but none of them did, and soon the final diagnostic was complete. This chaotic mess of equipment—some new, some surplus, some scavenged from other departments—was somehow working exactly as intended, and Tara had to appreciate that it really wasn’t disordered at the functional level. Harv and Patel—and later Tara herself—had started with an elegant design, and had simply been forced to fit it all together based on the available space and furniture and electrical sockets. Based on time and budget and the fact that nobody was checking up on them for OSHA and fire code violations. And of course, classes would be starting soon, making everything on campus at least ten times harder, and so they’d worked as quickly as they could, without ever really pausing to reflect.
Now, waking from that sex-fueled dream, she had to face the fact that she was complicit in whatever was about to happen. She might get a Nobel Prize, yes, and a cover story in Nature—the grandmommy of all the legitimate science journals. But she might also be the target of a criminal negligence probe. Walking away now would not change any of that, so she simply pressed forward, doing her best to make sure the plan was executed as flawlessly as possible.
“I’m leaning the chair back,” Harv said. Another concession: he’d be in a full orthodontic reclining position when the TMS signals were activated.
“Okay,” Patel said, unnecessarily. He was sitting across the room, by the emergency stop button, leaning forward slightly to get a better view of Harv as the ortho chair rolled slowly backward and then came to a halt against its rubber stops.
Harv’s right hand was on the TMS activation trigger: a white handheld button assembly like they used in hospitals for requesting painkiller from an IV feed. Or lethal barbiturates for voluntary euthanasia patients. Tara touched Harv’s other hand, and could not stop herself from saying, “It’s still not too late to stop this.”
“I know,” he said.
And pressed the fucking trigger.
University of Colorado Engineering Center
Boulder, Colorado
Present Day
Harv didn’t feel anything when he pressed the button, and his first thought was that the machine wasn’t working. Why would it, on their first real try? His second thought was that he was glad he hadn’t made any promises around this phase of the experiment. If he had, this could have been a black mark on his professorial record, which could negatively affect Patel, and maybe even Tara, if it weren’t handled adroitly. See? There was nothing wrong with a little secrecy.
“Anything happening?” Patel called out from across the room.
“Not so far,” Harv told him. “Not that…”
And
his
third
thought
was
that Jack was going to burn his wrist again if he didn’t step back a few inches from the firehole.
“Watch your hands, laddie!” Harv barked.
Jack was flinging coal into the furnace with a square-headed shovel while Harv watched the fancy new brass-and-glass pressure gauge he’d installed on the boiler, and with every throw the bandages on Jack’s left hand brushed within a sixteenth of an inch of the firehole’s riveted iron lip, which stood just a whisker shy of cherry-red hot.
Except that Harv’s name was Clellan Malcom Leonel, and even with no shirts on beneath their overalls it was hot as blazes and dark as night in this brick goddamn shithouse, and why in Christ’s name hadn’t he constructed this clarty half-lever engine outside, and damn the Clyde weather anyways? Cunard had better like the design, that much was sure,
and
his
fourth
thought
was
what the fuck was that?
He sat there doing nothing, saying nothing, for several seconds.
“Harv?” Tara asked.
“I’m okay,” he said, without thinking.
What the fuck was that?
“Is there a sensation?” Patel asked, holding his pen above the clipboard, ready to jot down any impressions.
Still, Harv said nothing. What could he say?
“Harv?” That was Tara again, sounding concerned.
“Yes, there’s a sensation,” he told them both. “If you could call it that. I may have misunderstood the nature of the quanto
me’s stored information.”
Tara looked a bit angry at that. “Jesus, Harv. Would you care to elaborate? Are you all right?”
And it was a fair question, because they were, after all, pumping strong magnetic fields into the center of his brain. He felt a faint buzzing sensation, like a subsonic hum just below the auditory threshold, and a taste like pennies dipped in apple cider vinegar.
Chuckling nervously, he said, “This is why pioneers experiment on themselves. Tara, I think I just experienced an episodic memory. Not an implicit informational recall. I mean, I was there. For a moment. In Scotland, maybe?”
To this, Tara said, “Seriously? Seriously?” She paused, then added, “You’d better not be shitting us. Patel, let’s turn this thing off before we hurt him.”
But for the moment, Patel was more curious than concerned. “That’s interesting, Harv. I always thought episodic memory was a possibility. I mean, the hippocampus is basically just a switchboard. It doesn’t really differentiate between different connection types. What exactly did you see?”
“Two people,” Harv said. “working on some kind of steam engine. Indoors. It was very hot. I was…I was only there for a second or two, but I felt everything. Sweat rolling down my back. This is amazing.”
“Turn the machine off,” Tara said again.
“I’m okay,” Harv assured her. “Thank you for being worried, but the sensation’s not unpleasant. Let’s keep going.”
And so they waited for several seconds, and then several seconds more.
“Anything?” Patel asked.
“No, I don’t think so. What’s the field strength?”
“Three point five Tesla, same as it was five minutes ago.”
To Tara, Harv said, “My great-grandfather came from Dumbarton, Scotland, on the river Clyde. Have you heard of something called Cunard?”
“It’s a British cruise line.”
“Hmm. I wonder…when that was? My family lived in Scotland for quite a while.”
“They weren’t from there originally,” she said. “Your Y chromosome is from a haplogroup called D-M174, which is very rare. Not Scottish at all. Statistically speaking, it got there by way of Tibet or Hokkaido, or the Indian Ocean. Harv, I don’t like this. You’re assuming you’ve…”
“Mmm?”
She pointed at his head. “We don’t know what’s happening in there. You’ve experienced a vivid… You’re…”
“It’s fine,” he told her.
But that sounded dismissive, and he regretted it immediately. He and Tara had fallen in together fast and hard and dizzily, and her concern for his welfare was quite a bit more than professional. He didn’t realize, until this moment, how much he’d been missing that. The divorce was almost six years ago, and while it was not particularly hard to find someone to sleep with in Boulder, he had singularly failed to locate anyone who actually wanted to hold his hand. Tinder had failed him, and OKCupid had failed him, and GeneMatch had failed him, and the women his own age who sometimes flirted at faculty parties had ultimately come up short as well. But somehow the Paleogenetics department at the University of Colorado had not. He didn’t really know where he and Tara stood, or what was going to happen, or whether what they were doing was even good for her. But he cared what she thought.
More gently, he said, “I think we’re really onto something, Tara. I do. I’m fully lucid, not in any pain. I feel a slight electrical sensation in my face and head, which I’m pretty sure is normal. And I swear to you, something happened. I experienced a detailed memory. That’s more than we could have hoped for.”
“Mmm,” she said, noncommittally.
“Look, if it hurts, I promise I’ll stop. Okay? But we need to do this. It could be a major breakthrough. Could be the big time, for all of us.”
“Mmm,” she said again. Then, “Okay, you’re right. This is why we’re here.”
“It is, yes. And thank you for caring about me. Patel, will you please increase the field strength to four point oh?”
Patel scratched his scalp with the pen. “Um, okay. You sure?”
It was as high as the magnets could go. It was, in fact, the highest field strength commercially available for transcranial magnetic stimulation. Any higher and they’d’ve had to build the TMS themselves—something even Harv was reluctant to do. And yes, the machine and its accompanying instructions came plastered with all kinds of FDA warnings. But the software did allow for that setting, as long as the focal point was deeper than six centimeters past the skull. Based on the 3D brain scan data that guided the machine, Harv’s hippocampus was roughly 7.5 cm from the magnets, so yes, the program would allow it.
And they were so close. So close to something. There was information in the Y-quantome, and they had written it into his memory. They had. Years of thought and study brought him to this point—physics, chemistry, electrical engineering, and neuroscience, all focused in narrowly on this one highly specialized endeavor. Was he even suited for anything else at this point? As a scientist and as a human being, Harv could no more turn away than he could choose to stop blinking his eyes.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sure.”
“Absolutely sure?”
“Yes, Patel, I’m absolutely sure. You may proceed.”
“Okay. You got it.”
Patel put down his clipboard and leaned out over the keyboard, pecking in commands.
“Unlocking. Changing the setting. Enabling. You ready?”
“Yep. Hit me.”
Patel pressed enter
and
the
world
went
dark
PART ONE
The Deluge
1.1
Harv’s senses crashed and blurred; they faded in and out with flickering images and feelings and smells. A forest, a desert, a campfire—no, a million campfires stretching back to the dawn of time! He felt his hands, coarse and calloused, on the steering oar of a reed boat, pushing and pulling desperately in an effort to avoid…buildings? A flooded city? No, a wave crashing through a city. His heart hammering in his throat, more afraid than he’d ever been in…his life? In someone else’s life? Suddenly the flickering quieted, and he snapped into place.
* * *
“I always find you here on clear days.”
Manuah Hasis turned away from the sea, toward the man speaking behind him. A man with walnut skin, black hair, and a black moustache, dressed in blue robes and bleached-white cap of finest linen, exactly the colors of the sky and the lazy summer clouds drifting across it.
Manuah bowed. “I could say the same, Your Theity.”
The man laughed, because while the title was accurate, he was Manuah’s half-brother, Adrah Hasis, and might just as reasonably have been addressed as “Pook” or “smallest” or “fart noise,” if they were both twenty years younger.
“I come here because I work here, Harbormaster. You come to admire the view, and they only let you in because your hereditary titles make them nervous.”
“I also donate money,” Manuah countered, laughing along with his brother. The two of them tapped hands in a less formal greeting.
They were standing atop the highest tower in The City—five floors tall, and built upon the Hill of Stars, from which Adrah and his fellow Cleric Astrologers tracked the movement of planets across the night sky. They were a hundred feet above the valley floor—practically celestial bodies themselves! The Cleric Portenters also sacrificed animals here in the tower, presumably on the notion that it was physically closer to the gods, but fortunately today was Groundsday—hardly the most auspicious day of the week. In fact it was the day of laborers and merchants, and thus perhaps the most distant from the gods’ attention.
Adrah’s tone became more serious. “You look troubled, brother. I see you staring out at the waters—your waters—and it never brings you satisfaction. Is it not an excellent harbor?”
Indeed, it was an excellent harbor, mostly natural, though w
ith a pair of cut-stone sea walls at the east, like the jaws of a dragon nearly closed, forming a barrier against storm surge and a tricky navigation for foreign sailors entering without permission. It measured nearly a full kos—the range of a cow’s loudest moo—so that a herd on one bank could be heard by a man on the opposite one, but only barely, and only on a quiet day. Its pale blue waters were deep enough for boats and shallow enough for good fishing, except on the far west edge, where they were so shallow that at low tide a woman could walk out into the mud with a shovel and pail, and in less than half an hurta dig up as many clams and crabs and frogs as she could carry. The people of The City dined better than anyone else in Kingdom, by far. Well, the ones who liked fried clams, anyway.
But that was the problem, yeah? The clam beds got smaller every year. This very month, Manuah had sent his boatmen out to move the buoys again, widening the range that boats could safely travel without fear of running aground or fouling their nets.
“The water keeps getting deeper,” he told his brother. Then added, “Your Theity,” just in case the gods were listening, and in case they cared.
The cool shadow of a cloud passed over them, chasing out across low stone buildings and white-painted roofs, then into the harbor, darkening it for a few kesthe and then passing on.
Beside him, he felt Adrah shrug. “Isn’t that a good thing, Harbormaster? Your domain ever expanding? Your boats safer and safer from the horrors of getting stuck on a sandbar?”
“It would be nice to think so,” Manuah said.
“But?”
“But The City is built on flat ground, Adrah, between the Great River and the Grand Sea. There’s no higher ground to retreat to. If the water rose another twenty feet, this whole place would disappear.”
Adrah barked out a laugh. “Twenty feet! Yes, and the sky might fall on us and crack the tower. Brother, surely there are better things to worry about.” But when Manuah didn’t answer, Adrah became serious again. “You’re a sailor, and a merchant. You know the tides. You’re worried about storm surges.”