The Deplosion Saga

by Paul Anlee

  Darian didn’t wake up, but the tension in his muscles finally relaxed. As the muscles eased, so did his father's panic. It was just a seizure. Everything’s going to be okay—he told himself.

  Within the hour, the doctor returned with the x-ray and EEG results. He inspected the x-ray, tipped his head quizzically, and leaned in closer to the image. A quizzical frown pulled at his brow. Without a word, he shifted his focus to the EEG. The frown deepened.

  The doctor paged the technicians. He took them aside and proceeded to interrogate them. The trio went back and forth between the reports, discussing one section and then another in low, hushed voices. They agreed the images and recordings were unusual but defended their work. The doctor turned to Paul.

  “Mr. Leigh, your son has presented us with a bit of a mystery.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, here.” the doctor placed the x-ray film in the light box. “The x-ray is showing some unusual speckle and diffuse haze. I thought there must be something wrong with the machine or the detector, but the technician says he checked everything over himself, and swears it’s all working properly. He took three images from different angles to confirm, and they all show the same thing.”

  Twelve years unwound in a flash. Paul stared at the x-ray image in horror. “That can’t be,” he whispered. The image could have been a copy of the one taken of Sharon’s head on the day of the accident.

  The doctor raised a questioning eyebrow. Paul only shook his head, numb with disbelief.

  The doctor continued, “His EEG is a little strange, as well. There is a lot of electrical activity. It doesn’t look like an epileptic seizure but, then again, it doesn’t look like normal brainwaves, either. Have you seen this before? Do you know something you’d like to share with me?”

  Paul cleared his throat. “I have no idea,” he managed, avoiding the doctor’s gaze.

  “Hm. Okay.” the doctor replied, unconvinced. “Listen, I’m a bit of a technology buff, and I like to keep up to date with the newest developments. That speckle pattern on your son’s x-ray appears very similar to those I've seen in research articles about Neuro Nano dendy lattices. Have you heard of those?”

  “Yes, of course. Actually, it was my wife who invented the field. I still own a few shares in the company.”

  “Is that right? Then you might know that the neural lattice is restricted to areas over the sensorimotor cortex, the occipital cortex, and the temporal lobes?”

  “No, not really. It was her work; I’m not a scientist. She used to talk about it with me, but that was years ago. She passed away when Darian was born. I haven’t kept up with developments these past few years.”

  “I see. Maybe you’re aware that neural lattices are only approved for use in adults?”

  “I’d heard something like that.”

  “So, would you like to explain to me why your son's x-ray shows a lattice, and why has it spread so far?”

  Paul was genuinely bewildered, “I honestly have no idea.”

  “Nurse Ranson said you mentioned that the boy's mother, your wife, died after a similar seizure some years ago.”

  “Yes.”

  “And, if I remember correctly, she was the first person ever to grow a neural lattice.”

  “Yes, she was the first test case; she injected the dendies herself. I didn’t even know she’d done it until months later, when she had the seizure. I never even got to talk to her about it.”

  “I’d like to get her file and compare it to your son’s, if I may.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  The doctor was still eyeing him, expecting further details or maybe a confession, but Paul was too distracted by all the thoughts reeling through his mind to notice.

  Did Sharon’s dendies make their way into our son? Dr. Holden had said Darian was clear; there was no sign of them in any of the testing.

  He agonized over what he did, and did not, know; over what he should reveal, and shouldn’t. I need to talk to Nick and Dr. Holden.

  Darian moaned. "Where am I?" He blinked his eyes against the bright lights and looked around the room, confused and frightened.

  “You’re back,” the doctor said with a smile, and started a physical check and neural exam. “What do you remember?”

  Darian relayed his last memories of sitting on the sofa at home, reading some scientific articles. He seemed mentally and physically fine, the doctor concluded, despite having been unconscious for the previous hour. The boy’s muscles were aching but that was to be expected.

  The doctor ordered follow-up tests, including an MRI and full EEG for the next day. With nothing left to do but observe, they transferred Darian out of Emergency and into a room. The ward nurse got him set up with some fluids to help balance his electrolytes. She wrangled some dinners from the cafeteria, for which Darian and Paul were grateful.

  Darian was ravenous. They visited a while, and then Paul left his exhausted son to rest, promising to return the next morning. There was something he had to take care of.

  Miraculously, Paul’s car had not been towed from the side of the Ambulance Parking area where he'd left it. He got in and gripped the steering wheel for a while, giving in to overpowering sobs that wracked his frame. He regained control of his emotions, except for his anger, and pulled out his phone.

  Cold, grim determination took the place of fear and confusion. He scrolled through the contact list until he found Nick’s number. His thumb flexed rapidly, undecidedly, over the entry. His first thought had been to call ahead and make sure the scientist was at home and awake, but he couldn't bring himself to dial. What would he say?

  Nick’s apartment was only a short drive away. He started the car.

  9

  “Who on Earth could that be at this time of night?” Debbie Franti asked her husband on the second ring of the doorbell. They’d just finished locking up and settling into bed with their books. Nick looked out the bedroom window to the covered porch.

  “I can’t see who it is,” he replied. The car parked in front of their house wasn’t familiar. He scanned both ways down the block. A quiet night, nobody else around.

  The visitor pressed the doorbell again and, without waiting, started banging insistently on the stylish metal screen door.

  Nick was about to call the police when he heard, “Nick? Debbie? It’s Paul. Are you up?” There must be an emergency. He threw on his bathrobe and rushed downstairs, quickly unlocking and opening the door.

  “Paul, what’s wrong?”

  “Darian’s got them.” The pain in Paul’s eyes matched the bracing autumn wind, but his voice was eerily matter of fact and controlled.

  Nick stared at the disheveled man on the stoop. A sudden gust of wind nearly tore Paul’s coat from his shoulders; he barely noticed.

  “Got who? What are you talking about?”

  “He’s got dendies in his brain, Nick.”

  “That’s not possible. Why don’t you come inside? It’s freezing out there,” Nick guided Paul through the foyer and into the kitchen. “Let me put on some coffee.” He dropped a filter in place and started measuring the aromatic grains. “Tell me, what makes you think there are dendies in Darian’s brain?”

  “I saw the x-ray.” Paul stared at his hands folded on the table in front of him. “It looked just like Sharon’s did.”

  “What? Why did you get an x-ray of Darian’s head?”

  “He had a seizure, like the one Sharon had the day of her accident. The day she died, Nick.” Paul’s soft, level voice was scarier than if he’d been in a rage. Nick heard Debbie appear at the kitchen door and turned to her, silently pleading for assistance.

  “Oh, Paul!” she sat down next to him and put her hands on his. Paul’s gaze rose from her hands to her face, and held her eyes. Self-consciously, she let go and tucked her hands to her chest.

  “When I got home from work, Darian was sitting on the sofa, reading,” Paul began. “The pages were flying by so fast that I couldn’t te
ll what it was, but it looked pretty technical, full of symbols and diagrams I didn’t recognize.

  “He didn’t respond when I spoke to him. He gave no sign at all that he even knew I was there. So I leaned over to take away his tablet—you know, just to get his attention—and he went berserk. He lunged at me and fought like a wildcat to get it back.

  “Then he went into some kind of seizure and didn’t come out of it. It was horrible. I bundled him up and drove him to the hospital. They took x-rays, ran an EEG, and did a bunch of other tests.

  “The x-rays showed those same bright little speckles Sharon had, all over his brain. The doctor said his EEG was full of electrical activity but it didn’t look like a seizure. I knew what it was, though. I recognized the dendies as soon as I saw them.”

  “It must have been that blow to her head.” Nick paced the kitchen floor. “It must have sent the dendies circulating into her system; into the fetus.”

  Debbie got up to pour coffee, trying to impose some sense of normalcy on the situation. “I thought they were supposed to be restricted to neural tissue. How could they move to the baby?”

  “They were…are restricted. The impact must have dislocated some of them.”

  “So how did they end up inside Darian? And how come they didn’t show up when he was a baby? Dr. Holden watched him closely for two years. She said he was all clear,” Paul challenged, sounding more accusatory than inquisitive.

  “Well, remember they are nanotechnology, so you’ve got to think nanoscale. They’re much smaller than a cell, and these ones were designed to actively cross organ barriers. Getting across the placenta would be no problem. The dislodged dendies would have been lost and seeking to re-establish themselves in central neural tissue, as they were designed to do. If any of them found the baby’s developing brain, it would have provided them with a perfectly viable alternative.” Nick’s voice trailed off. He was already thinking ahead to the bigger picture.

  “Paul, do you realize what this means? This is amazing!” The scientist in Nick overshadowed the concerned friend and surrogate uncle. “It's a totally serendipitous opportunity to study how dendies interact with a young human brain!”

  Paul could only stare, gaping at the scientist in disbelief. “My son is NOT your test subject!” he growled, menacingly.

  "No, I know that. Relax. I didn’t mean it that way. I wasn’t thinking that at all.”

  “You will take them out,” Paul said, slowly and evenly. His tone made it clear there would be no discussion.

  Nick rubbed his eyes. “I don’t think we can, Paul, I’m sorry, but I don’t know any way to remove a dendy lattice once it’s established.”

  Paul was stunned. “You’ve got to be kidding me. How can you make something like this and not have a failsafe plan to un-make it? Are you crazy? No wonder the public doesn’t trust scientists!”

  “Well, Sharon….That is, we….You have to understand. It was such a challenge just to construct them, to get them to replicate, and to connect to each other. You know how Sharon was—impatient and driven. We’d barely figured out how to make them when she jumped the gun and injected the dendies into herself. We were still working on them, and we’d barely started thinking about how to eliminate them.

  "We still haven’t been able to develop a protein to digest the silicene filaments or degrade the semiconductor nanoparticles. The team was working on several ideas, but when Sharon…when she passed, her team lost direction. The whole project lost momentum, Paul. They were….we all were…lost without her. We nearly shut down the whole project. It was her students who convinced me that her work was important, that the only way to make her death count for something was to continue the work.

  “So we did. We started picking up the pieces; and we're still trying to catch up. We've developed a couple of failsafe protocols to shut down dendy processing, but it doesn't get rid of them. Even if we could, we’re not sure how disassembling an established lattice might affect the brain. That’s a study we hope to do in a few years.” Nick took a breath and gathered his thoughts. “Paul, you’re an engineer. You know that some systems are hard to turn off.”

  “I can pull the plug on any of my systems.”

  “Can you?” Nick challenged. “Look at the internet. Sure, you can turn it off, but the ramifications to our connected society would be catastrophic.”

  Paul stared at him, “They’re not the same.” His hand trembled as he sipped his coffee. “You said you can shut down their processing. Will that help Darian? Will it prevent another seizure?”

  Relieved from defending himself, his research, and Sharon’s actions, Nick focused on the fact that there was a problem to solve and a boy's life to save. This was something they could deal with.

  “Well, the modern dendy lattice is chemically restricted to certain sections of the brain. It’s too late to change Darian’s lattice; the dendies are already resident throughout. Sharon was working on a self-replicating version before the accident. Darian’s had that version in his system a long time now, so we have to assume that they’ve had plenty of time to reproduce and get established.”

  “I still don’t understand how you can move from theoretical pencil scratches and computer models into the real world, without first having worked out multiple, redundant fail safes. This is my son we’re talking about. Darian wouldn’t be in this situation if you hadn’t made the dendies self-replicating.”

  “We stopped using that version once NANOSERPA was passed. You know, the Nanotechnology Self-Replication Prevention Act.”

  “Talk about closing the barn door after the horses have escaped!”

  “I know, I know. Let’s just stick to the problem at hand, shall we? The lattice itself shouldn’t cause any harm. All the components are completely bio-compatible. It must be the software causing the problem.”

  “Is there something wrong with their operating system?”

  “No, not per se,” replied Nick. “But, if the dendies are interacting with the RAS, whenever they're faced with a barrage of new information, they could shut down the whole brain and retreat into batch processing mode.”

  That was too much for Paul to follow. “RAS?”

  “The brain’s Reticular Activating System. The RAS connects brain activity to the body. When the system is turned off, brain activity is largely disconnected from a muscular response. It’s why you don’t physically act out every action when you dream. When you looked at Darian’s x-ray, did you see any dendies in his brain stem? What about in the claustrum, thalamic, hypothalamic, or mesencephalic regions?”

  Paul’s blank stare pulled Nick back to reality. “Sorry. Let’s assume the dendies have spread everywhere in his brain by now, and that they shut down the RAS whenever they need to process a lot of information. For example, after reading a bunch of technical or scientific articles. That’s good news. We can work with that. We can alter their programming so they don’t go into hyper-processing shutdown mode unless the RAS is already in the ‘off’ state.”

  “Which means what?”

  “Which means, we can alter their operating system so the dendies only re-organize when Darian’s asleep. When he dreams, they’ll go to work.”

  10

  “I don’t think I can go to Church anymore.”

  Paul nearly choked. What in Heaven’s name? He finished chewing, swallowed, and looked at his son. “Okay, I’ll bite. Why not?”

  “I think I’m an atheist now.”

  "Is that so?" He didn’t expect that.

  The previous six months had whirled past. Once Nick reprogrammed Darian’s dendy lattice to coordinate its hyper-processing with the boy’s sleep cycle, the seizures stopped, and Darian’s learning accelerated exponentially.

  The boy sailed through middle school and high school course material as fast as his heightened reading speed would allow. The only things impeding his progress were the school’s bureaucratic compulsion to test him at each level, and his counselor’s resistance to advancing
Darian before he was emotionally and socially ready.

  When they finally deemed him ready, they set a graduation date. He considered his options, and accepted an invitation from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He was healthier than ever and had been adjusting well. His future looked bright.

  Paul sighed. It wasn’t hard to imagine how Darian might attribute his good fortune to his dendies and to the scientists at Neuro Nano, rather than to God’s plan for him. God works in mysterious ways. Darian was proving to be one of His greatest mysteries ever.

  He put down his fork, and gave the conversation his full attention. “I understand that everything is coming pretty easily to you these days but, trust me on this, everyone needs to have faith in a higher power to help carry them through the tough times.”

  “I can see that having faith is useful,” Darian acknowledged.

  Paul was having a difficult time keeping up with his son’s thinking these days. The boy was venturing down intellectual avenues his father was more and more often unable to follow.

  “When your mother died, my faith was the only thing that enabled me to carry on. I knew that God must have a plan, though it wasn’t at all clear to me, and I knew that she was in a better place.”

  Darian laughed. “Oh, Dad. Your belief system is based on too many unproven and wild assumptions to list in a reasonable amount of time.”

  Paul was taken aback by his son’s tone. “Perhaps. But, I am still your father and you will treat me with respect.” It had taken considerable conscious effort to keep his voice level.

  “Sorry,” Darian offered, unconvincingly.

  Paul held his son’s steadfast gaze, asserting silent parental authority. Only when his son looked down did he pick up his fork and resume eating.