by PJ Manney
And the combinations of consciousness creating your reality led you where? Rundgren said, “to . . . the center”—but what and where was the center of the orbits of consciousness? Could it be where you blended both your biological thoughts and your mechanical thoughts? That might be a better model of reality than what our meager brains could create with our faulty senses and a hope for Alzheimer’s sufferers everywhere.
In the song were the seeds of his new brain prosthetic. One he could build. Peter knew a Eureka moment when he had one. But what could he do with it?
“ ‘You . . . born . . . synthessssss . . .’ ”
Pop spoke! And remembered the song! But was it a message? That Peter was born to synthesize, to put things together that had never been put together before? Tears welled in his eyes, even though Pop never tolerated them, despising self-pity. God, he could be a tough bastard. The son struggled to hold them in, afraid tears would break the connection.
It took intense concentration to reach the end of the song. Peter pretended to study the silent strings; raising his eyes would reveal wet proof of his uncontrollable emotions. Instead, worn and knotty hands turned palms up and lifted arms to the son. Peter swung the guitar around his back and fell to his knees at his father’s feet. Old man arms gently encircled him, as though afraid the younger man might break from a caress. The bricklayer’s bandy, toughened muscles, work-knobby bones, and calloused skin had degenerated into soft dough and brittle glass under baggy clothes. The last time they had hugged was at Peter’s bachelor’s degree graduation fourteen years before.
Pop’s fingers ran through Peter’s hair. The last time that had happened was elementary school. Young Peter’s teacher assessed him as unintelligent by virtue of his boredom and poverty, and stuck him in a special education class. The rich, “smart” kids mercilessly tormented him, and he gave up believing he was gifted or capable. And for once, his father’s anger was turned not on him, but on the bullies and the school. Pop had fought for him and been so loving and told him not to believe them, not to quit . . .
The floodgates opened, and the son sobbed into the father’s shoulder, “I won’t quit, Pop . . . I won’t . . . I promise you I won’t quit.”
Human connection tired Paul out. The brief window that had opened into his mind closed as suddenly, and he slipped back into the dark room of his own private reality. Peter wiped his face and crammed his emotions down as he packed the archtop back into its case.
As with the rest of the citizenry, the 10/26 attacks had gotten under Peter’s skin, calling forth primal protective instincts he couldn’t shake off. He checked the battery on Pop’s medical alert station and ensured it was securely fastened to his belt. Then he made sure the floor treads in the bathroom were slip free, counted all Pop’s pills, and moved the emergency evacuation bag to a prominent position so the nurse would see it in case of fire or worse.
He glanced above the door’s lintel. There was a new smoke alarm, still shiny and with a brand tag he’d never heard of. He assumed the facility had modernized their system.
Peter stopped at the nurses’ station to check out. A tiny Filipino nurse, Mrs. Manela, swiveled on her chair away from her HOME screen to shine her very big, very bright smile. Probably in her fifties, but with the energy of a twenty-year-old, she was efficient, missed nothing, and didn’t take unnecessary grief from patients or their families. His kind of woman.
“How . . . was your father today?” she asked. Her hesitation teased with the unmentioned knowledge she had seen him on the news last night.
He wiped his eyes. “Better, thanks. Are you updating the smoke detectors?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Well, did my dad’s detector die? He’s got a new one.”
“I don’t think so.” Mrs. Manela’s eyebrow raised and her grin vanished. She opened a filing cabinet and pulled Paul’s file to scan the paperwork. Then she went into a different cabinet and pulled out the smoke detector maintenance schedule. “Nada. Nothing new in his room. Nothing fixed or changed anywhere. Smoke detectors are serious business here. We keep a record of it for the state.”
“Well, Pop’s definitely got a new one.”
“I don’t know what to say. But nobody messes with my systems and gets away with it. I’ll find out . . .” Her knitted brows implied heads would roll.
The unit still tickled Peter’s curiosity and not in a good way. “Mind if I go back in for a sec?”
“Not at all. Need me?”
“I’ll call if I do.”
Pop dozed in his chair, little wheezy snores puffing out his nose. Peter grabbed the guest chair, placed it in the doorway, and balanced on the squishy seat as he unclipped the front cover of the detector. Instead of a simple circuit board, an ionization chamber to sense smoke, a horn to sound an alarm, and wires to connect it to the building’s main fire system, this unit was self-contained, with no connecting wires. It held a circuit board attached to a tiny fish-eye lens. And a tiny microphone. With a tiny transmitter. There were two other small components that weren’t obvious. One was a nanotech lab-on-a-chip that monitored environmental data. He assumed it was taking air samples and searching for specific chemicals. The other he couldn’t recognize at all. What other surveillance could possibly be necessary?
He ripped the unit from the wall and flung it to the linoleum floor. Jumping down, he stomped and ground it under his heels. He didn’t need to call Mrs. Manela. She came running.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Peter was afraid to use his GO. He wanted to call Amanda and his lawyer, but the reason not to was scattered in pieces over Mrs. Manela’s desk. Peter kept the GO off, using the car’s obsolete digital player to listen to music. He assumed the Corvette was jacked already. He should have gone straight home, but he needed to think, and driving helped.
What the hell did the feds expect to capture in Pop’s room? Some teary bedside confession of terrorism to his mute father? Fuck the feds. He was in a fight for his life and reputation. But how could he keep his promise to Pop and not quit?
Driving aimlessly on Junipero Serra Boulevard near Stanford Hospital, he turned onto Campus Drive into the university. Then it hit him. But he wondered if she’d see him after everything he had done to her.
He had no choice. He’d make her see him.
Stanford University is one of the greatest institutions of higher learning in the world, and its campus is one of the most impressive. Not in the magnificent and ancient way Cambridge, Heidelberg, or the Sorbonne are, but in the way that individuals in modern times, with more money than God, can create monuments to themselves and their loved ones.
Leland Stanford Junior University was founded by railroad magnate and California governor Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane, to honor their only child, Leland Jr., who died of typhoid at age fifteen. After their tragedy, Leland said to his wife, “The children of California shall be our children.” The university’s motto, “Die Luft der Freiheit Weht,” means “The wind of freedom blows.”
Peter wasn’t headed for one of the slick buildings surrounding William Hewlett, David Packard, or Bill Gates’s generosity, but instead entered the last remaining 1950s concrete bunker, which once housed the physics and chemistry departments, built in the Cold War rush for scientific research to fuel the newborn military-industrial complex. Two types of research were housed there: the potentially hazardous and the financially impoverished. Neither justified shiny glass-and-steel towers.
Dr. Ruth Chaikin’s research fell into the latter category. Most of her nanobiotech compatriots toiled in the state-of-the-art Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials that housed the Stanford Nanocharacterization Lab, or the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility housed in the Paul G. Allen Center for Integrated Systems. But Peter had to pick his way through a basement hallway, whose peeling paint was at least two decades past due, and around an obstacle course of abandoned and scavenged lab equipment donated by fellow researchers and department coordinators all
beholden to the Chaikin family in one way or another. The hall reeked of rodent dander and feces, meaning animal testing rooms filled with mice and rats were nearby. Peter knocked on a door. A high-pitched woman’s voice yelled from behind it, “Bhupal? Get your tuchus in here!”
Inside, the windowless lab was as unorganized as the hallway. If it wasn’t for Ruth occupying it, the room would be mistaken for storage. Ten years had aged her in the normal ways, but she didn’t fight the passing time as other women might. Her once dishwater-brown hair was graying rapidly. And it was as short and frizzy as ever, creating a misty halo around her face. Even though her pasty skin only saw the sun on her bike rides to and from the lab, wrinkles abounded, and she didn’t try to hide them. Her coke-bottle glasses were bifocals. She wore an old dark green turtleneck and stained chinos cinched around her waist with a piece of webbed nylon strapping used for securing crates. Electrical wire replaced shoelaces in her ratty black Converses. She was still too skinny from nervous energy and disdain of food. A poster child for a technical geek, the only thing missing was a breast pocket with a pocket protector. And a penis. It was impossible to believe she was only a couple of years older than Amanda.
She was already flapping in a dither, darting quickly from table to table, moving small lab items to and fro, still unaware of Peter. “How can I find anything? Such a hekdish! A foiler tut in tsveyen! You want I should lose my research?”
“My Yiddish is a little rusty. It’s a long time since your dad cursed me.” Peter started counting. She pottered for a full five seconds before she looked at him with incredulity. And suspicion.
“A lazy person. Has to do a task twice,” she hissed. Her eyes narrowed. “What are you doing here?”
“Nice to see you, too. Who’s Bhupal?”
“Grad slave. Instead of studying for midterms, he made a hekdish.” His expression betrayed ignorance. “Horrible, messy place!” she insisted, arms waving around her.
“And now?”
She scrutinized her room. “Finally, some kind of order.”
It still looked hekdish to him. But that was a Chaikin family trait: making exquisite sense out of chaos. Ruth backed herself up behind a far table piled high with computer printouts. He could only see her from the shoulders up.
“What’s wrong with your n-nose?” She tried to stare Peter down, but her eye twitched, and it wasn’t a come-hither wink. She couldn’t control it. Especially when she was nervous. The more stress, the more things twitched.
“I had a little accident. Is this a good time for a visit? I wanted to talk to you.”
“What if I don’t want to be seen? Or talked to?” Her left shoulder jumped to her earlobe. He couldn’t tell if the tremors went farther down than that.
“Then I’ll leave you in peace. But I made a New Year’s resolution to try and see my old friends once every ten years. Today’s your lucky day.”
“Az a yor ahf mir,” she muttered. Peter looked confused. Ruth sighed, “I should have such l-luck . . .”
He tried to make sense of a mess on a table. “What are you working on?”
“What you should be! If you hadn’t dumped me for richer pickings! You might be poor. But you wouldn’t be a shandeh un a charpeh.” She ducked a little lower behind the papers.
He remembered that phrase: “A shame and a disgrace.” It was a favorite of her father, and it stung. Peter wanted to say “Shove your sanctimonious trip where solar photons don’t reach” and storm from the room. But instead he said, “Ruth, answer me honestly. Regardless of what happened between us, I loved your father. Would you say that’s a correct statement?”
Ruth made a funny little humming noise. That was a new tic. He assumed it meant agreement.
Placing his right hand on his heart and his left hand in the air, Peter declared, “Then I swear on Nikolai Chaikin’s grave, and may he come back to haunt me if I’m lying. I had nothing to do with the attacks. Neither did my company. Regardless of what you think about me professionally, you can’t think I would have anything to do with that. Can you? Really?”
“Irrelevant. Papa would never haunt you. Neither of you believe in ghosts.”
Peter laughed. “Damn straight.” He poked around the lab. A hodgepodge of old mismatched computer components fought for table space with piles of technical papers. He scanned the cover of a failed grant proposal. “Still working on brain-computer interfaces?”
More humming.
Screen-saver aliens bombed exploding planets. He hit the space bar. A detailed graphic of a molecular machine popped up: a man-made cell. “And you’ve concentrated on theoretical work; I’m assuming because you couldn’t get funding for experimental models.”
Her arm flew up and another pile of papers fell to the floor. “Schlemiel!” she said under her breath as she picked them up. Peter approached her to help, but she barked, “Nein!”
“Why didn’t you snuggle up to DARPA? They would have funded you, like they funded Nick.”
“Not interested in building Universal Soldiers. That’s all they want from me. Perfect killers. No more pain. No more hunger. No more sleep. No more bleeding. Faster killing. Feh! Zol es brennen!”
“So where’s the money come from?”
“What money? I get five grand a year from some alter kocker crony of Papa’s. He feels bad for me. And an alum from Des Moines. Thinks for twenty-five grand a year, he owns all my work. The Next Big Thing.”
“Does he?”
“No. But I let him think it.”
“That’s pocket change.”
“P-p-pocket change to you, Mister Sand Hill Road. I’m not ongeshtopt mit gelt. I don’t suck on the teat of VC. Or Big Pharma, NIH, or DARPA. To me, it’s oxygen.”
Peter slowly worked his way closer to her as he peered at a molecular model displayed on a monitor. “Let me guess. Still get a little royalty money from Nick’s designs? And you spend it here, instead of banking it like he wanted you to.”
More humming. And more averting of eyes.
He rounded her table to see all of her backed into a corner like a mouse. He continued, “And the hallway of tribute out there? Stanford’s hand-me-downs to their most famous Nobel laureate’s progeny? So they can keep your last name on the website?”
The humming stopped and the twitching recommenced. “P-P-Peter . . . Bite . . . G-g-g-go away.” He had noticed years before she only stuttered in English. She hung her head to avoid eye contact, and it swung back and forth in a subtle movement.
“I can’t, Ruthie. I need your help. I just saw Pop.”
Ruth said nothing, and her muscles quieted down.
“I wish he’d told me to say ‘Hi.’ But he doesn’t know who I am most of the time. And I promised him no matter what happens to me in this mess, I wouldn’t give up trying to help him. And I thought you might want to help me, too. Because I was lucky enough to have two men in my life I considered fathers. Pop was one. And Nick Chaikin was the other. Nick’s been dead, what, eleven years? And Paul might as well be, unless I can do something.”
She finally looked him in the eyes, but she couldn’t keep the derision from her voice. “Because your t-t-t-terrorist research won’t fly anymore? I should hand over all my hard work? To you? To exploit me? You ab-bandoned me!”
“You’re right. I did. But for what it’s worth, it seemed like the right thing to do. I never did research out of pure curiosity, like you and Nick. It was more than solving the big intellectual problems for me. I had other reasons. I won’t lie to you, making money was a big one.”
But she felt abandoned for more than that. Carter had told him a year after Peter left the lab that she nursed an unrequited crush for him. Ruth knew she was a mieskeit—an ugly person—compared to Amanda, but she also knew she could kick Amanda’s intellectual ass. And in her mind, that should have counted for something. But she couldn’t have acted on her sexual impulses, even if Peter swept her off her feet in her lab coat. She couldn’t even let him hold her. Only her parent
s had held her, and that was as a child and under duress. She had a hugging machine at home, built by Nick, just like the one created by the famous animal behaviorist and autist, Temple Grandin, to calm her in stressed moments. Peter knew all this, but would never insult her by saying it aloud.
She sighed. She knew what he wasn’t saying, too.
He’d softened her up. Time to talk fast. “I want to go back to our old work. Invasive brain-computer interfaces, but specific ones that act as prosthetics. Like a prosthetic hippocampus. And a wearable or implantable hard drive as a separate cortex, that, eventually, can translate the algorithms of thought, while helping move the information back and forth between the prosthetic hippocampus and the real and prosthetic cortexes.”
“Hold it, Genius Boy.” Genius Boy had been one of Nick’s favorite monikers for uppity grad slaves like him. “Translate the algorithms of thought! Why not just make it read minds?”
“Someday it will. You know it’s not impossible. We’ve decoded aural, visual, and motor brain algorithms. Why not this?” Her stepping back-and-forth motion indicated she needed to wander around. “Concentrate on the input and the output, Ruth. Forget I said anything about translation. We’re not building an entire brain. Just replacing tiny parts of it . . . building a bridge to make sure the signal gets from one place to another in one piece, from analog to digital and back to analog. You don’t need to understand music theory to fix a GO’s music player.”
“Shouldn’t you concentrate? On staying out of prison?” Her hums buzzed between her sentences as she puttered around the lab. “So what about power? You’re talking center of the brain. Not periphery like cochlear implants. You’ve got to minimize heat generation. Create constant, dependable energy supply . . .”
