Afterimage

by Roderick Geiger

  “No you didn’t!” Sara blurted, her eyes doubling in size. “Adel?”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about this earlier, my dear.” She paused, listening to the awkward, uncomfortable movements around her. “But I’m the logical choice. I believe in the project, I’m not afraid. Besides, I’ve had a full life. No regrets. And gentlemen…” she removed her opaque glasses to reveal the scarred, empty eye sockets…”need I say more?” She heard all of them making groans they thought to be inaudible. “Doctor, you need to find me a passenger.”

  “You know what you’re asking?” Lomax said. “It’s suicide.”

  Gyttings corrected: “Doctor-assisted suicide, doctor.”

  Adel said: “That’s what you were brought in to do, isn’t it Doctor Lomax? Recruit volunteers? “ She could hear him pulling on his chin nervously, a faint sandpapery sound accompanied by even fainter liquid sounds, saliva pumping around his lower gums as the doctor mentally inventoried his visits to hospices over the last several days.

  “I won’t allow it,” Sara said.

  “I concur,” Chalmais said.

  “Mr. Gyttings?” Adel asked.

  Gyttings had turned again toward the window, hands folded behind him. A swath of sunlight was just crossing the powerful, steel-gray river, turning it bluish-green, but Gyttings’ was looking right through the physical beauty of it, beyond the physical universe. Deverson, you madman; what have you wrought? Without turning he said: “It would take too long to build this machine, not fast enough to save my company.”

  “You don’t need to. My husband was always underfunded. He learned to be very resourceful. As a result, the Twin Tunnel, like his other designs, has few proprietary parts. Your recently introduced G-L 880 ‘Freedom MRI,’ can be modified with a little ingenuity.”

  “You’ve been thinking about this for a long time, haven’t you,” Gyttings said, turning now to look at Sara who glared back in shock and disbelief.

  Adel said without hesitation: “I believe it’s the most important contribution to humanity I could ever hope to make.”

  “We might consider making you a passenger,” Gyttings offered, “once we’re sure it’s reasonably safe.”

  “I’m sorry but that’s not good enough.” Oh Mark, I wish there was something you could do to convince them. “And if not me, Mr. Gyttings,” she added, “then whom?”

  He was staring at Sara who’d broken eye contact, was looking past him out the window, pouting faintly. He interpreted this body language to say: “Okay. I wash my hands. It’s your decision.” Making quick decisions was what he did.

  “Well, doctor, think you can find us a passenger within the week?”

  “I don’t know,” the doctor responded, fidgeting nervously with his tablet computer. Reality was beginning to erode his earlier enthusiasm for this project. Doctor-assisted suicide, doctor – Gyttings’ exact words. What were the legal repercussions here? How could he protect his family, himself, his sizable estate? Don’t be such a coward, he scolded himself. I’ll cross the line – or not – when I get to it. “Within the week? Yes.”

  Day 8

  Saturday

  Hargrove Spinal Injuries Clinic,

  San Rafael, California

  The words of his manager rang in his ears as he watched the lead climber work across the traverse. “Don’t do anything stupid, Justin! Your career’s on the launch pad, baby. Be cool.”

  The hard, sharp granite beneath his fingers burned cold, unforgiving. Justin turned back to watch the belayer’s skillful work, playing out rope, pulling it taut, playing out again, instantly responding to the leader’s distant commands. Beyond the belayer, 15 miles southeast and 9000 feet lower, a dusty beige Owens Lake, rolled into the morning sunshine. “Don’t be an asshole, Justin.” He almost heard Bertrand saying. “You don’t have anything to prove.”

  Justin Holt’s first starring role in a major motion picture, “Sailing to Byzantium,” had opened in second place last week, garnering $16.3 million at the box office. Well beyond expectations. Pretty damn good for a 22-year-old actor with just two prior movie credits to his name. His co-star/girlfriend Gwen Carlton had wanted to celebrate. “How about climbing a mountain,” the athletic brunette had suggested in her sultry British accent. But this morning, camped at the shore of Iceberg Lake some 4000 feet above the trailhead, she’d announced she couldn’t go on. “My legs are spent, love” she’d purred. “What’s left of ‘em ‘el ‘ave to carry me back to the ca’.”

  Justin leaned out slightly from the ledge and looked down, 700 feet straight down, studying the various shades of gray rock below. A few specks of color caught his eye. The red speck was probably her sweater. One of the outfitters – Gwen called them her Sherpas – had packed a high-powered spotting scope, and now Justin fancied her down there, watching the three mountaineers assault Mt. Whitney’s east massif. He leaned a little further and flipped her the finger.

  “Easy there,” the belayer cautioned. “It’s a long way down.”

  “Even for a bird,” Justin said. Sunlight crept across the rock toward the three men, peeking around Mt Muir, suddenly striking quartz and mica in the granite around them, igniting colors of precious metals and gems. It was a glorious place, never intended for human visitation. They were trespassers.

  Reaching a notch at the end of the traverse, the lead climber placed protection into four cracks, then tied himself in and tried to get comfortable straddling a wedge-shaped chock stone. The 90-foot vertical slab he’d just crossed had only yielded three cracks large enough for protection; he had placed two chocks in each crack, hooking his lead rope into each chock with a carabineer as he passed. He now pulled rope and secured it into this network of protection, then around himself. “Climb away,” he barked.

  The third climber leaned forward, his bandoleer of climbing equipment jangling with every move. “This is not a difficult pitch. There’s a clear path of downsloping nubbins all the way across. They’re rough and provide good traction, but don’t lose respect for this mountain. Take your time and control your body.”

  “Yeah,” Justin said. “I know.”

  “Focus on the rock and – I know it sounds trite – but don’t look down. This kind of exposure can make anyone dizzy.”

  “Anything else?” Justin said sarcastically. He’d heard all this around the campfire last night. He was the middle climber; he would have the added protection of being top-roped – or in the case of a traverse, his rope would be secured at both ends. People did this shit all the time. It was way safe.

  “Yeah,” the third climber said. “Always tell your partners what you’re doing – climbing – resting - whatever.”

  Justin ignored this and bounced out onto the first nubbin, his hands groping for holds.

  “Stop, “ the third climber shouted, grabbing for the rope and leaning backwards in one movement. He had not yet secured his end of the traverse line.

  The sharp crack of the climber’s voice echoed off a parallel face some 200 yards away, startling Justin into a reflex head-jerk in the direction of the echo. His balance abandoned him for a moment, and a hot flash wave of panic swept through his neck and head. “Oh shit,” he cried, hugging for the rock like it was his mama, every muscle quivering.

  “You’re okay, you’re okay,” the third climber coaxed. “Relax. You’re too close to the rock.” He was frantically looping his end of the line through the carabineers he’d already set.

  But Justin couldn’t relax. He had pushed himself into the rock so hard it seemed he might become a part of it. It was a bad angle. He could feel his $300 rock shoes losing friction, slowly, slowly. Time was slowing down. The third climber was yelling something but it was too low in pitch, too slow to understand. The rock was starting to move now, no matter how hard he squeezed himself into it, starting to move upward, a missile of rock lifting off a launchpad, rising and lifting. His face scraping against the rock, burning, but vague. Distorted human voices, low and slow, circl
ed above him. Is this going to hurt?

  The third climber was looking away, tying-off the rope as Justin fell. The rope tore through the carabineers in an instant, almost seeming to vanish. Like a rope trick. He was looking at his hands when, suddenly, poof, the rope was gone. “What the fuck are you doing?” the lead climber was shouting. Poof. That fast. Like magic.

  Justin free-fell about ten feet before the lead climber had towed-in his slack, which sent his body in a 30-foot arc, pivoting on the carabineers hanging from the first crack. It would have seemed like an amusement park ride were it not for a single slab of rock, broken from the main face and jutting outward. Justin hit this full on, his helmet taking the brunt. His neck snapped sideways, then he ricocheted backwards and swung like a pendulum for about a minute, his limp body hanging from his harness in an odd way.

  “Oh shit,” the lead climber gasped, his voice hoarse and crying. He’d seen a climber before who’d looked like this after a fall. It was bad.

  Justin’s eyes snapped open and he saw the face of the pretty nurse, Cathy, short blonde hair, freckles and big blue eyes looking down into his. She was swabbing the beads of sweat from his forehead. “Where’s Gwen?” he grumbled.

  “Oh, Justin, you know she’s been back in Los Angeles a long time,” Cathy said, wrinkling her forehead. “Did you have that nightmare again?”

  It was coming back to him. “Oh, god,” he moaned. “Was I screaming?”

  She smiled, making dimples in her cheeks. “A little. Doctor Hargrove is here to see you.” Her face moved up, then sideways out of his field of view, and a moment later Hargrove’s boyish face appeared, floating down from above.

  “Doc. It seems like every time I nod off I go through the accident on the mountain all over again. It’s so vivid. I can feel the cold rock, smell the lichens and stuff.”

  “And every time you fall again?”

  “Yeah. God, it’s awful. There must be some drug or something…”

  Hargrove ignored the question. Recurring dreams of the paralyzing accident were common among quads. “Next time you should force yourself to wake up before you fall.”

  “You say that every time I ask you for drugs,” Justin wheezed. “Why do you do that?”

  “You’re better off working on controlling the dreams than erasing them.” For most of his patients, dreaming was their only time to experience sensory pleasures or mobility, but the spinal surgeon had learned long ago not to talk about it.

  Hargrove stared down at the young man curiously, as if he were trying to make up his mind about something. He’d operated twice to reconnect the nerve bundles in Justin’s second and third vertebrae, experimental surgeries which had actually left him worse off, if that was possible, because now the young man labored at breathing, required frequent treatments in the respirator, had become dependent on bottled oxygen. No, there would be no more surgical interventions here, Hargrove knew.

  “I’ve brought another doctor who wants to see you,” Hargrove said, his face lifting up and away. Then an oldish man with white hair and mustache moved into Justin’s field of vision. A pleasant, smiling face.

  “This is Dr. Lomax,” Hargrove said somewhere beyond Justin’s vision. “I’ll leave you two alone.”

  Day 7

  Sunday

  Lab Four,

  Gyttings-Lindstrom Research Unit,

  Eugene, Oregon

  Josie and Clint lay quietly on their individual microgram scales sedated through intravenous drip lines entering each animal’s hindquarter thigh. The white and brown rats, now mostly shaved pink, were Velcro-strapped down and plastered with adhesive sensor patches, all neatly wired into a shoebox-sized enclosure at the tail-end of the tiny patient table. Positioned on the table around their six-inch-long bodies were a trio of thumb-sized cameras - optical, infrared and amplified light. The pickup coil of a gamma camera rested just behind Josie’s head, with an ionosonde microphone on his left and a spectrometer lens to the right of Clint’s pink nose.

  Some of the apparatus now surrounding the rats bore resemblance to the equipment used in the original INFXs, tests Gill and Sara and Galtrup had witnessed 15 years earlier in a nondescript bio lab adjacent to the U.C. Davis airport. But today, three decades of research and development later, each mechanism was smaller, faster and more accurate than the clunky apparatus Deverson had mostly jerry-rigged back at Davis. What had once taken up a good-sized classroom now fit neatly on a non-ferrous metal lab cart.

  Wilson Galtrup took a last visual check around Lab Four, admiring the work they’d accomplished in barely four days. Amazing what can be done with unlimited budget. He manually operated the belt-drive mechanism to be sure the plastic patient table moved and tilted smoothly in six directions. Then he inspected the gaping mouth of the magnetic resonance tunnel, which, even at rest, thumped in a steady, ominous rhythm. It was strictly a research machine, a rack system upon which experimental components could be assembled for testing. Right now it was rigged as a 6-Tesla, helium-cooled, super long bore, high field MRI, with very little in the way of cowls or shielding. Stripped down like this, the machine looked terrifying. No human patient would ever voluntarily go inside it. Galtrup latched Lab Four’s double doors which still bore the name Superscan, and left Josie and Clint alone to their fate.

  If they did manage to duplicate “Deverson 204,” the professor’s final rat experiment, then, according to the Deverson’s notes, there would be a small explosion. But because Lab Four had never been intended for explosive containment, the rooms on three sides were now evacuated of all contents save stacks of floor-to-ceiling sandbags, laid-in like the sides of a step-pyramid against the outside walls of the lab.

  Manipulation of the experiment would be conducted from a control room located at the opposite side of the fourth wall, shielded with alternating sheets of steel, copper and lead.

  Galtrup nicknamed this room “The Bridge,” partly because it was shaped like the bridge of a ship, a half-hexagon dominated by long consoles mitered into the three angled walls, and partly because he was a Star Trek nerd. Modified for INFX, the console on the Bridge’s left held the Life Signs station; on the right, Sensors. Both walls contained 36-by-50-inch windows; one into Lab Four, one into the now dark Lab Three. Again because of blast concerns, these copper-polarized glass windows were now reinforced with two-inch-thick Plexiglas installed on the control-room side. The wall above the center console, designated Imaging Control, housed a 120-inch monitor nicknamed “Mainscreen,” another tidbit of Galtrup’s Star Trek esoteria. An assortment of 16 smaller monitors hung on the three angled walls wherever space permitted.

  The back of the room – the square end – contained two rows of comfortable chairs and an L-shaped sofa. This was the observation gallery, built-up 2 steps higher than the control room floor to improve audience view. This was where company execs and VIP visitors gathered to watch experiments.

  Ten days earlier, researchers of the Superscan Division had achieved a mind-numbing 33.7 scans per second in this very lab, fast enough to create a fluid moving image. This was advanced ‘functional MRI,’ and until recently had been impossible because of the system’s major drawback: inadequate computing power. Even the best high-speed computers tended to freeze after a few seconds at fMRI above 15 SPS.

  In the center of the room sat Gill, stiff-postured, in a black-leather swivel chair, his eyes fixed on a little flat-panel monitor mounted on his chair’s left armrest. As he spoke into a tiny microphone-headset hanging on his ear, his words, processed through a voice-recognition program, appeared on the screen. He was recording the project leader’s log, notes on experimental design, goals and concerns.

  “After carefully working through the professor’s available notes, I have decided to start with ‘Deverson 204,’ first conducted ten years ago and replicated five times in the ensuing year. It seems a reasonably safe and simple duplication…and certainly a giant step forward from what I personally remember of INFX. I must say that even
with all these precautions and near-unlimited resources, I feel uneasy, uncomfortably rushed. I would have preferred a couple months to set this up – not four days. The available data gleaned from Deverson’s notes, from what’s left of Deverson’s lab and from Manzanita Hospital records - indicate the potential for damage today will be confined to the interior of Lab Four, with possible overspill into vacant adjoining rooms. But the machine we are now about to activate is capable of NMR-field densities three times that of most commercial MRIs. It draws so much current that it needs a two-terawatt diesel generator for surge, a machine the size of a tractor-trailer parked behind our building. The evidence suggests the additional power will not cause an additionally powerful blast, but…

  “In ‘Deverson 204,’ the professor’s notes pinpointed exactly where the MRI scan had to be aimed at the moment of cerebral core failure. The gradient pulse will have to be set at a 15-degrees sagittal slice of the anterior temporal lobe, eight degrees axial, 89 degrees coronal…in the case of a rat brain, a tiny, tiny target indeed.

  “Anxious for results, Mr. Gyttings questioned the parsimony of repeating the rat experiments at all, lobbying instead to move directly to larger-brained animals. But Deverson’s later notes tracked a definite relationship between brain size and the size of the resultant explosion, and for the sake of prudence, I have endeavored to exert my authority, insisting that the team start with – and stay with - 204 until we get the timing and aiming correct. Delays will cost the company $4 million per day in lost revenues according to an estimate faxed to me by the company’s CFO. This company, the MRI industry, indeed the world, is waiting for an answer. I understand that. But I feel I must remain steadfast against pressure to leapfrog safety protocols, to take dangerous chances. I am contractually the responsible party. If the board of directors thinks firing me will accelerate the test schedule, then so be it.