The Silver Six

by C. A. Gray

  “Maybe, but since everyone agrees upon its value, the end result is the same!” I shook my head, a little stumped now. I needed to show him something else to which he had an emotional reaction for comparison, before I got to empathy…

  Suddenly I had an idea.

  Because he and Nilesh had already downloaded the images the other night, I pulled up Alex’s picture—the one Francis had seen that first night, when he’d decided to go after her. I showed Francis this next, and I heard him let out a low growl of annoyance. I grinned: sure enough, prefrontal cortex activity lessened substantially, meaning his reasoning abilities decreased, while his caudate nucleus glowed white-hot. It was exactly the pattern I’d expect for romantic attraction.

  “Hepzibah, will you draw a blood sample please?” I asked the little bot, who wheeled over to Francis’s forearm to do my bidding. He jumped a little as she pricked his forearm.

  “The sample is positive for higher than expected levels of salheptonin, and catecholamine content is also markedly elevated,” Hepzibah announced after a moment of analysis.

  “Exactly what I thought,” I told Francis smugly.

  “You’re abusing your power, you obnoxious little wench,” he muttered in return.

  My smile stretched wider. “Oh no,” I said coyly, “this is totally necessary to the experiment. I need to establish your emotional range before we can test you for empathy.” With a few keystrokes to Matt on the other end of the Commune, he sent back the next image I wanted. It was Larissa’s headshot, pulled from the locus of our lab at Dublin University. I fed this to the A.E. goggles next. After a moment, the strong response from Alex’s image faded into Francis’s normal brain signature pattern. I felt a little let down, for Larissa’s sake.

  “Hepzibah, would you please draw another sample?” I asked her.

  “What are you trying to do, exsanguinate me?” Francis complained as she pricked him again.

  A moment later, Hepzibah announced, “The second sample contains vestiges of the previous sample at lower levels, as well as slightly elevated levels of oxytocin and vasopressin.”

  “Huh,” I said. “So you do care about her some. Just not romantically.”

  “You could have just asked me, you invasive little jerk,” he snapped, sliding his goggles up to glare at me. “How about we get you under here next, and we’ll find out how you really feel about everyone in our group? Wouldn’t that be interesting? Or you could just ask me that too, I guarantee I’d be every bit as accurate.”

  I shook my head at him. “We’re not done with you yet,” I replied, gesturing for him to lower his goggles again with a superior smile.

  He made a noise of disgust. “Total waste of time,” he muttered, but obeyed.

  “Okay, since you suggest I just ask you: what are you most afraid of?”

  “Nothing,” he replied at once.

  “And this is why I don’t ask you: because you lie to me.”

  He slid the goggles back up on his forehead. “What are you most afraid of?” he countered.

  “I am not the subject right now. You are.”

  “Would you like me to tell you?”

  “What you are most afraid of? Yes, I would, that’s why I asked.” When he huffed but didn’t reply right away, I said, “If you don’t tell me, I’ll just feed you a series of holographs of common fears until I strike upon the right one. I will find it though, with or without your help.”

  I waited, parsing through the catalog of fear holographs Matt had already sent, looking for one that I thought seemed like the sort of thing Francis might be afraid of. I showed him an interactive video game holograph of a murderer attacking him with a bloody knife. He chuckled, and I snapped his brain’s image.

  “Is that the best you can do?” he taunted.

  I skimmed through the layers of Francis’s brain until I got to the deep structures of the limbic system, and then skimmed back to the prefrontal cortex, then back to the limbic system to be sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing.

  “You have the smallest amygdala I’ve ever seen!” I exclaimed, “no wonder you’re unflappable! Plus, there should be way more spindle cell connections between your eyes and your anterior cingulate cortex than you have, and something about them looks funny…” I snuck a glance at him, and saw he was frowning. He refused to admit that he didn’t know what I was talking about. This was probably the part where he would have searched the labyrinth with his A.E. chip rather than admit his ignorance, back when he still had one. “Would you like me to tell you what that means?” I teased.

  “Yes, fine, sure,” he snapped.

  I tried not to laugh. “The limbic system is a collection of deep brain structures thought to control emotion. The amygdala responds first to any kind of emotional arousal, but particularly fear. Yours is tiny, which indicates that it doesn’t get a lot of use. That makes sense when I think about how blasé you were about meeting the Silver Six, getting shot, coming here, rescuing Alex from a prison, etcetera—physical injury doesn’t seem to scare you.”

  “Once again, I could have told you that,” he muttered.

  “Yes, but you could not have told me what that meant from a neuroscience perspective.”

  He sighed, impatient. “And… the… other thing?”

  “The spindle cells?” I might have been enjoying this too much.

  “Yes,” he huffed at last. “Those are?”

  “They’re neurons that transmit signals very fast due to their physical structure. Most people have a lot of them connecting their orbitofrontal cortex—what they see—to their limbic systems—what they feel. You have a ton of them in the prefrontal area, which I think is why you can make such comprehensive snap judgments about people, but you lack the intuitive emotional guidance that would govern the social skills to keep your mouth shut about it.”

  “I don’t see why I shouldn’t say what’s patently obvious to anybody with half a brain.”

  “And you wouldn’t see it,” I agreed, “because you don’t have enough spindle cells connected to your limbic system. And yet your response to Alex, and even to Larissa, shows that you do have emotions—they’re just not well integrated. Presumably the Silver Six must have emotions too, since they have limbic systems, and at least a modicum of neurochemistry…” I pursed my lips. “All right. Will you please tell me something that gets you all riled up, besides Alex? Isn’t there anything you’re afraid of?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Fine, here it is,” he muttered at last. “Get ready to snap an image. Are you ready?”

  I swiveled my chair back to the VMI and saw Francis’s tiny little amygdala, all bright and glowing. I captured it, and gestured to Hepzibah to draw another blood sample.

  “What were you thinking about?”

  “You don’t need to know,” he retorted.

  “I do, it might be important!”

  “If that information ever becomes pivotal to defeating the Silver Six, I promise to inform you at once,” he said dryly. “All right, show me the video that traumatized Liam’s girlfriend yesterday. I have important work to do.”

  I bristled. I knew he only called Val Liam’s girlfriend to get a rise out of me, but he couldn’t see me, so at least he didn’t know it had worked.

  “Wait, there’s something else I need to do first,” I said. I queued up a how-to video on hammering a nail, slipping a wooden piece of plywood from the closet onto Francis’s lap. I took hold of one of his hands, and placed what was meant to be a hammer in it, though it was actually a thick screwdriver. “Follow along with the holograph. Do what he does.”

  A few seconds into the video, Francis muttered, “I can feel myself slowly losing IQ points.” But he obeyed, ‘hammering’ with the hand that held the screwdriver onto an imaginary nail embedded in the lap board. I captured the VMI image, and inspected it: sure enough, the areas of the brain thick with mirror cells—the inferior frontal gyrus, the su
pplementary motor area, the primary somatosensory cortex, and the superior temporal sulcus—lit right up.

  “You only made me do that because you’re a sadistic, evil creature.”

  “No, I made you do it because I wanted a baseline to see what should happen when your mirror neurons get activated,” I said. “Mirror neurons light up under two circumstances: when you are performing an activity yourself, and when you see someone else perform an activity or in a particular situation, and you’re imagining yourself in their place—which is also called empathy. Now, I’ll queue up the video that upset Val yesterday.”

  I tried not to look at the video too carefully myself as I pulled it up—all I knew was that it involved suffering children. It was about four minutes long; I played it, and watched Francis’s brain. It looked like the baseline pattern he’d had when he’d looked at the bench and the tree.

  “Hepzibah,” I murmured, “will you draw a blood sample?”

  She did, and the video ended. A few minutes later, Hepzibah told me, “No significant elevation of any of the neuropeptides requested.”

  “Did I fail?” Francis asked flatly.

  I bit my lip. “No, it’s what I expected… but let’s try something. This time, I want you to specifically imagine that you are the child in this video.”

  “I have no childhood memories, we’ve established this. I can’t imagine being a child.”

  “Okay, but…” I sighed. “Fine. Let me find another one.” I messaged Matt on the Commune, and asked him to find a holograph of physical trauma to a grown man. “Maybe a leg injury,” I typed to Matt, since Francis had recently been shot in the leg—he should be able to identify with that. Matt sent back a holograph of a leg amputation without anesthesia. “Perfect!” I wrote him, and queued it up. I told Francis, “All right, specifically put yourself in this man’s position. This isn’t someone else. It’s you. Okay?”

  He shrugged under the goggles. “Whatever.”

  I hit play, and watched Francis’s VMI. Within seconds, the pattern I’d seen during the hammer video recurred: the mirror neurons lit up, but I also saw that the spindle cells connecting the orbitofrontal cortex to the limbic system, few though they were, began to fire. I watched as the structures in the limbic system involved in the perception of physical pain lit up too. I glanced at Francis’s face: he was grimacing.

  “Hepzibah?” I asked her, my heart beating faster, and she wheeled over to Francis once again. When she pricked his arm this time, he jumped a little and swore.

  “Elevated levels of demartonin,” Hepzibah declared after she’d analyzed the sample, naming the neuropeptide involved in trauma and physical pain.

  “So you can empathize,” I murmured, “it just has an on-off switch!” Also, something about the spindle cells in the orbitofrontal cortex area still nagged at me. It might have been just because there were so many of them, but I drilled down into the image to see the histology report, just out of curiosity.

  Histology report: spindle cells connected via scar tissue. Most likely cause: surgical.

  I stared it the result, uncomprehending. I glanced at Francis, then back at the report.

  “Have you ever had brain surgery?” I asked him.

  He snorted. “Yeah, in the hovercraft. Same as you.”

  Liam peeked downstairs just then. “Just checking in. How’s the torture chamber going?”

  “She’s an utter and total sadist,” Francis muttered, sliding the goggles on his forehead and glaring at me. “Surely we’re done now?”

  “What’s wrong?” Liam asked me, reading my face and coming to my side. When he arrived, I pointed at the screen. He stared at it too, without expression.

  “That can’t be right,” he murmured.

  Francis heaved an exasperated sigh, pulling off the goggles and the earbuds and slipping out from under the monitor. “What can’t be right?” he asked as he approached us, peering over our shoulders too.

  Now both Liam and I turned to watch him. There was no indication that he’d read or understood the report, except that he didn’t look away from the screen. He just kept staring at it.

  “Well?” Liam prodded.

  “Well what?” Francis snapped.

  “Well, what can you tell us about this?”

  “It explains a lot,” I muttered.

  “When did you have this surgery and why?” Liam asked again.

  There was a long pause, as Francis stood indeterminately in the center of the room. I’d never seen him look so unsure of himself before.

  “I… didn’t,” he said at last.

  “Apparently you did,” Liam countered.

  “You don’t have any childhood memories!” I exclaimed, with sudden revelation.

  “He doesn’t?” Liam turned back to me, confused.

  “That’s what he told Larissa and me!”

  We both turned back to Francis, who scowled at us. “Maybe your machine is faulty. Ever think of that?”

  “What is your earliest memory?” Liam pressed.

  “I know a great many facts about my childhood, and my brain assembles them into what might be a composite or might be actual memories, but I can’t be sure which they are,” he snapped. “My earliest of those is seven years old, but they are of a different quality than the memories I form today.”

  “They would be, because without the density of spindle cells in the orbitofrontal cortex, you wouldn’t have been you,” I murmured. Then I looked at Liam, eyes wide. “I’ll bet they just rearranged them! Whoever did this surgery on him took the spindle cells connecting to the limbic system and put most of them in the prefrontal cortex instead!” I gasped, swiveling back to the VMI and sliding to the interior structures of the last image I’d taken, drilling down into the histology report of the spindle cells in the deep structures of Francis’s brain.

  It read: Histology report: spindle cells, surrounding scar tissue. Most likely cause: surgical.

  “Ha!” I cried, triumphant.

  “Meaning?” Liam furrowed his brow at me.

  “Meaning Francis was once totally normal! Empathic and socially integrated, with no increased powers of perception beyond that of a normal human being.”

  Liam turned to Francis. “You really have no memory of this?”

  Francis shook his head slowly, looking like he might be sick. I’d never felt sorry for Francis before.

  Liam turned back to me. “Could we… I don’t know, hypnotize it out of him?”

  I blinked at Liam. “Sure. Go ahead.”

  He smirked back at me and rolled his eyes.

  “Are we done here?” Francis snapped, turning his back on us and heading for the stairs before I could protest.

  Once he was gone, Liam glanced at me apologetically.

  “I probably have to get back upstairs. Nilesh and Larissa and I are working on the program for the bots to block all further downloads from the labyrinth. We just took a ten minute break.”

  I nodded, distracted. “What possible medical reason could he have had for that surgery? If it was a brain tumor or something, they’d have just dug it out in one spot, but why specifically spindle cells in two different areas of the brain?”

  “Could he have had multiple tumors?” Liam suggested.

  “In those exact spots? And no memory of them whatsoever?”

  Liam shrugged. “Amnesia from the trauma of surgery? I don’t know. I’m not a doctor.”

  I sighed, still staring at Francis’s images with the nagging feeling that I was looking at something very important—if I could only figure out what it was.

  Chapter 21

  I sat alone in the basement after Francis and Liam had both left, staring at Francis’s VMI images and trying to make sense of them. With two fingers, I absently scanned through slices, looking for other abnormalities that might give more of a clue to the purpose the brain surgery he’d clearly had. It just didn’t make sense—why would someone surgi
cally alter him, just to turn him into… well, him? Surely at least his parents would know when and why it had happened, wouldn’t they? When he calmed down and absorbed the new information, I resolved to talk to him about them. Even though they aren’t on the Commune, I thought, frowning. That meant I couldn’t safely contact them directly. But the fact that Francis had had brain surgery didn’t actually make any difference in my ultimate objective of understanding how the Silver Six think.

  Unless someone was purposely trying to recreate them in a human…? No. That was stupid.

  “Hey!” Nilesh poked his head through the door. “I’ve been looking for you!” He bounded down the stairs two at a time with a sprightly step that told me he was still as excited as he had been when I’d talked to him earlier. “Tyler sent me a few of Chiefton’s latest films. You have time to watch them now?”

  “Uhh…” I glanced back at the VMI images and sighed. Well… one of the most effective tricks I’d ever learned to help me crack an unsolvable problem was to put it aside and do something else for awhile instead, and preferably something creative. “Sure. I guess.”

  Nilesh cranked his elbow down in a quick short thrust of victory and then took the stairs back up two at a time, opened the door, and called, “Okay, guys, come on down!”

  Julie, Jake, Andy, and Val all followed him, Julie bearing a big bowl of—

  “Seriously, we have popcorn here?” I laughed incredulously.

  “Just the kernals. I had to pop these bad boys the old fashioned way, over the stovetop!” she grinned at me, heading to the couches lining the back wall across from the netscreens. Her expression melted into confusion when she saw the large VMI machine. “Um. That’s gonna be in the way.”

  “Well, I think we’re going to have to watch them on the tiny netscreens anyway, so we can’t sit way over there…” I began, but Nilesh shook his head.

  “Nope! You never came over for my movie nights at my flat in Dublin, did you, Becca?” he asked me as he began rooting around for cables and wires.

  I thought for a minute, but then vaguely recalled the invites Nilesh would extend from time to time to all of us in the lab. Liam used to try to tease and pressure me into going, but I always made excuses—usually rehearsal, or other social engagements, even though I could have gone to a few of them if I’d wanted to. But back then, I’d wanted to keep my social life separate from my ‘professional’ persona. Plus, I had hardly known Nilesh, I’d thought Larissa weird and a bit annoying, and Liam an absurd conspiracy theorist who would find any excuse to make fun of me.