by PJ Manney
Tom reared back. “Do you have a better idea how to stop the club?”
“No,” said Ruth calmly. “I do not. This is the best idea. But Steve needs to know. You are the same men. With the same reasons. And apparently, the same woman . . .” She tried to arch her eyebrows, but they danced a jig.
Both men slumped in their chairs, their body language less combative than before. Their eyes locked.
“How can you guarantee I won’t destroy your brain? Or kill you?” asked Steve.
“I can’t. All I can do is trust you,” said Tom. “And you trust me.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Medical personnel in green surgical scrubs and masks packed the tiny surgical suite. In a corner, Ruth consulted with two neurologists, asking endless questions. Steve finished a talk with the remainder of the group, examining a computer-reconstructed image of the vascular system in Tom’s brain. In scrubs and mask like everyone else, Talia clenched Tom’s hand as he reclined on the operating table after being prepped by a surgical assistant. She kept searching his eyes, but didn’t say anything.
“Is it a little late to ask what’s wrong?” asked Tom.
“I’m trying to remember you. Like you used to be.”
“And how was that?”
She smiled. “Naive. Sweet. Infuriating. Someone who thought my pasta with meatballs was the best in the world.”
“I still do.”
“You won’t. Not anymore.”
He smiled. “I’ll just be more intelligent and distinguished. I thought that turned you on.”
She looked away, concentrating on his brain’s blood vessels magnified on the big monitor. He couldn’t see her expression under the mask.
Finished prepping his team, Steve came to Tom’s side, glancing at the held hands. Fleeting, contradictory emotions flashed across his eyes. “Time to sit in your corner.”
Talia dutifully moved her stool behind the equipment.
“Now shut up,” Steve continued to Tom, “unless you’ve got something constructive to add to this shooting match.”
Tom obeyed, certain his for-hire medical team would do the best job possible. They had a lot riding on it. The eight new faces were once Cuba’s infamous medical mercenaries, four men and four women out of tens of thousands dispatched around the world for goodwill and economic purposes. This interventional neuroradiology group was rescued from Venezuela’s medical care-for-oil deal, in which the Cuban government sold over twenty-two thousand Cuban doctors into medical slavery. Venezuela got cheap medical care for the poor, which generated votes, and the Castros could keep their country’s cars and generators going, on free Venezuelan oil. The only ones who lost in the deal were the doctors and nurses, prisoners in a foreign country whose own jealous medical establishment and political opposition so loathed their existence that Cuban doctors were murdered to eliminate both the competition and the political advantage free healthcare brought the government. The survivors were locked up, supposedly for their own protection. However, they were not permitted to leave Venezuela to return to their own country. Or any other country.
Through Talia’s contacts in Miami, Tom anonymously financed the eight’s escape and contact with Solidarity Without Borders, a Cuban American organization devoted to providing asylum. In exchange for their freedom, they would perform this operation in an undisclosed, offshore location, after which they’d be blindfolded until they were handed over to SWB in Florida. His promise of freedom more than paid for their silence. All eight jumped at the chance. A crazy American who wanted experimental brain surgery of his own design? Why not? Their biggest concern was the insecurity of doing a procedure no one had ever done before.
The concept was deceptively simple, but the devil was in the nano-sized details. Like preparation for angioplasty, a catheter was threaded into the femoral artery in the groin and laced up the wide arterial vessels to the heart, but in this case it continued past and into one of the four carotid arteries that led to the brain. The procedure was then repeated in all four carotid arteries to gain maximum access to brain tissue. A cable of one hundred thousand conducting polymer nanowires, narrower than a human hair, was sent through the catheter. It was steerable, bending and contracting like a muscle on a low-voltage charge. When the blood vessel was too narrow for the catheter to continue, the cable continued alone, to bend and subdivide into smaller and smaller bunches of wire at each arterial divide, until eventually a single wire could make its way into a single capillary.
The surgeons manually controlled steering the catheter into the brain. They had performed this procedure many times, since interventional neuroradiology repaired brain damage, such as aneurysms, frequently. They were to the brain what the classic angioplasty was to the heart: high-tech plumbing. However, individual wires went farther than these doctors had ever taken a probe. Based on the MRI map of his brain’s circulatory system, the wires were preprogrammed to twist and float on the blood’s current into their final position in a capillary feeding a neuron. As electricity flowed through the wire, it would stimulate the individual neuron next to it, and the message would be sent through the chain of adjacent neurons.
Once all the wires drifted into place, the surgeons embedded a wireless microprocessor—the new Cortex 3.0—no bigger than a quarter, in the thigh tissue near the femoral artery, to which the wires were attached. Hooked directly to the neurons, as well as the Hippo 2.0, Tom could teach different parts of his brain to communicate with the electronic and virtual worlds he would theoretically access with his wireless processor via the Internet.
He also wanted to control his physical systems. Some wires connected to his motor cortex, controlling his muscles. Others to the pain centers. Or fear centers. In theory, with proper programming, he would stimulate or repress brain activity at will or when his processor recommended it, as though his brain had an all-encompassing deep-brain stimulator. Using it would entail trial and error. But the Cortex 3.0 made it easy. Once the connection between his brain and the external source had been established, he would always remember how. Hopefully.
Most interventional neuroradiology catheterizations were done while the patient was under general anesthesia, but Tom insisted on being mildly sedated to watch the fluoroscope, a combination live X-ray and video system, and observe the progress of the catheter himself.
Tom mentally thanked Dr. Werner Forssmann, the man who had first self-experimented with venous catheters, as his catheter glided up his neck, tingling arteries. At the base of the brain, wires blossomed through blood vessels like time-lapse photography of a growing plant.
Several hours later, after the final set of wires found their home, Ruth tested the system with mild current, recording the neural stimulation. Then she sent basic data to small neural groupings. Beginning with the thalamus, which integrates sensory input, and using the same algorithms used with retinal implants, she sent colors, shapes, and symbols to the visual cortex. To Tom, it felt like seeing with a transparent overlay of double vision. The Hippo 2.0 and the Cortex 3.0 processed the extra information, unlike a solo brain, which dumped information when overloaded. Tom would learn to separate each out to see them simultaneously, like the spectacular savant Kim Peek, the original “Rain Man,” who could read the left page of a book with the left eye and the right page with the right eye simultaneously and never forget either page for the rest of his life. In Tom’s case, one visual feed would be internal, and the other his eyes, so he could process and manipulate the Internet and databases directly in his brain.
Then Ruth sent sounds to his auditory cortex with an audiometer, something reminiscent of the old gray box and headphones used in his childhood. He raised a finger each time he internally “heard” a tone, but this time he vocally reproduced the tone if he could, or named the note, so they could see if the tone they sent was the same as the one his brain received. It was. Then Tom heard the impossible.
A clear tone. But he certainly couldn’t sing it.
“Ruth
. . . fifteen octaves above middle C. I have dolphin hearing!”
Amazed, the Cubans whispered among themselves.
For the next test, Ruth combined visuals with sound. She piped through a montage of images, some black and white, some color, with different actors from different decades, but each fundamentally the same scene: Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp, and Doc Holliday, confronting the Clantons and their men in the mythic gun fight at the OK Corral.
Tom closed his eyes. The contrast between the images his eyes saw and his brain perceived made him seasick, although he would adjust in time. “Very funny, guys. If I’m Wyatt, does that make Steve Doc Holliday?”
“I’m a lover, not a fighter,” said the doctor. “How are you?”
“Still woozy, but I think my senses are just . . . overwhelmed. And tired. But all on target.”
“My God, Talia, Superman admits he’s human,” snorted Steve.
“Who said Superman’s hu—” Internal vision pixilated to white static. “Hey, where’s Burt Lancaster?” He opened his eyes. External sight was pixilating, too, into a twinkling, starry sky. Nausea surged as the chest pain hit. Before he could say another word, the stars supernovaed and merged into a field of white.
From a great distance, Talia’s panicked voice was cut short by Steve ordering a nurse to take her out. Spanish voices yelled out heartbeat and blood pressure. Even as the sound floated away, he knew the numbers weren’t good.
A voice across a chasm yelled, “Clear!”
Cold, gooey paddles thudded hard below his right clavicle and his left ribs. The shock seared like branding irons. But his heart did not return to a normal sinus rhythm. The nanowires shouldn’t have tripped a heart attack, since they had no contact with autonomic parts of the brain stem, which regulate respiration, heart rate, or blood pressure. So why was he dying? Was it the surgery’s cumulative shock or the implant’s effects? A rogue electrical charge he didn’t account for? There was nothing unusual in the outputs before it hit.
He struggled to keep one track of his mind on the medical team, but the other fell into a dream state, which engulfed him.
He lay alone on deck of a thirty-foot sloop. A life preserver attached to the railing had the name Pequod printed on it. The only sounds were of the breeze and lapping waves, the sheets tapping against the metal mast, birds calling to each other overhead. A bald eagle dived, and swooping with claws extended, landed on the deck near Tom. It waddled toward him, talons clicking along the teak, circling his head, ready to attack. Tom tried to swat it away, but he didn’t have the energy to lift his arm.
A voice boomed, “Peter! . . . Peter!” like a tuba blast. With great effort, he turned his head. Pop was on shore of the rocky breakwater of Matthiessen Park at the waterfront. It was the park he had played in as a child and only a few blocks up the hill to their apartment.
“Come . . . home . . . now!” bellowed Pop.
Three more eagles arrived: a female with a spasming bass in her beak, gills and fins flapping in death throes; and two scruffy brown juveniles, most likely her offspring. Mama tore pieces of fish flesh with her claws, passing them to her children. They swallowed them hungrily.
His chest felt hammered by a chisel and split asunder. The blue sky went translucent, and he could see the medical drama that lay beyond the azure ceiling of his little floating world, like God and the angels above peeked down wearing surgical masks.
He was desperate to communicate, but his body in both worlds was unresponsive. He searched the new wiring in his brain, but was confused. What went where and which channels had Ruth opened on her computer?
If the same neurons worked when you saw a thing, remembered the thing, and imagined the thing, then his imagination was all he had to create words to contact Ruth. He concentrated as hard as he could and searched for a network to access, to send one word painstakingly spelled out—“R-U-T-H”—back through the system. But he got nothing back. The channel wasn’t open.
Then it hit him, and he blamed sedation and lack of oxygen for his stupidity. Of course words didn’t work. The system was testing picture and sound channels, and in the panic, she didn’t open any others. He needed sound. He’d use his hallucination to communicate.
He summoned the largest bird. “Can you sing?”
Its yellow eyes flashed. “Any requests?”
“ ‘Help.’ ” Getting bailed out by a Beatles song was becoming a family trademark.
Papa Eagle turned to his Partridge Family, lifted a wing, and on the downbeat, the Fly Four broke out in four-part harmony.
A heavenly voice that sounded like Steve barked, “What’s that?”
“I th-th-think it’s m-m-music!” stammered Ruth.
The chief neurologist, Dr. José Irizarry, swore, “Mi Dios . . . El Beatles . . . !”
Ruth tapped the audiometer at a frequency of 261.626 Hz, or middle C, dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot. After a pause, she repeated it.
Tom interrupted the eagles’ serenade. “How about ‘Message in a Bottle.’ ”
Papa Eagle rolled his lemon eyes. “You’re very literal, aren’t you?” The foursome sang and sent his message . . .
“He’s still with us. Hang on, Tom!” said Steve.
Dr. Irizarry muttered in a thick Spanish accent, “He’s very literal, isn’t he?”
“What can I d-d-d-d-do for him?” wailed Ruth.
Tom eyeballed the birds. Papa Eagle sighed. “Yeah, yeah, I know . . .” Without prompting, they began to sing R.E.M.’s “Let Me In,” with appropriate grimaces at Tom’s lack of creativity.
Ruth sent a repeated message to a small subset of wires in Tom’s cortex. Closing his eyes to the burning sun over the boat deck, he imagined following the signal to its source, like a spelunker grabbing a rope hand-over-hand in the dark. At the end of the figurative tunnel, he reached a rushing river.
It was information energy. The Internet.
Connecting to the Internet was like diving into the infiniteness of an ocean. Afraid he’d be swept away, he dipped his toe in. His brain filled with data, images, sounds. Seismic readings from China. The New York Times front page. Children singing “Free to Be You and Me.” Radar of a hurricane in Haiti. Spreadsheets tracking currency fluctuations. Lolcats. Migrating wildebeests. He pulled out of the data stream.
He was a tiny, but integral part of an enormous, complex system. Earth was as much a cyborg as he was.
His heart jumpstarted, drumming two hundred beats per minute. The chisel sunk in his chest once more, and he gasped for oxygen like Mama Eagle’s caught bass. The bright sky peeled away and he discovered his eyes were open. The medicos crowded over him with slack mouths covered by surgical masks.
“What happened?” he mumbled through his oxygen mask, lips still numb.
Flushed, disheveled, and stunned to be talking to a dead man, Steve sputtered, “Not sure. Wasn’t a myocardial infarction; there’s no real blockage. Could have been a blood-flow irregularity from the wires. I know they’re nano-coated to prevent clotting, but man, embolism and thrombosis still worry me. There’s no sign of either or any permanent damage. Maybe a complication from the ARDS . . . oh, who the hell knows! My medical diagnosis is you’re one stubborn asshole who needs rest. And if this happens again, we’re yanking it all out. And I don’t care what you say.”
“Don’t like ambiguity, do you?”
With a huge exhalation, Steve deflated into a question mark, head shaking back and forth like a recalcitrant bull. “No. I like knowing. Knowing’s good. I can do something with knowing.”
Now that Tom had touched the void, he was sure if he told Steve about the unknown to come, he’d blow the young doctor’s mind.
PART THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
For two hundred million dollars, Thomas Paine purchased one of the most famous sailboats in the world and rechristened it the Pequod. A modern interpretation of a clipper, she was a great white whale of a ship: 290 feet long, 43 feet wide, and 1
92 feet tall from the waterline, and her vast and very literal whiteness blinded observers on a cloudless day. Three enormous, computer-controlled, hollow white masts carried five giant white sails, each of which unfurled from the inside along her yardarms, allowing them to appear and disappear at the touch of a button with no visible rigging. They could rotate and adjust their sails for maximum wind efficiency, which was a revolution in the art of ship design. And like clippers of old, she was long, sleek, and fast, regularly beating any sailboat in her class. The group of competitors with sailboats this large was a small, elite club, dominated by mega-wealthy American owners out to best the international yachting pack with leviathans and other oddities.
Standing on the prow, his hands gripped the metal bars of the forward pulpit as saltwater sprayed and drizzled on his face, like the aspersion of baptism, with each dip of the bow. Behind him, footsteps climbed to his platform. Talia came to keep him company. She sighed at the sight. Santa Monica Bay sparkled in the summer sunlight. In his blind-man role, he shouldn’t have enjoyed the view, but no one on his crew thought twice when the blind owner wanted to experience the wind and water in his face from the prow. He could look with focused eyes at his objective: Malibu, America’s Riviera, from the open water of the Pacific Ocean.
“Want me to tell you what you’re missing?” she teased, as she pressed herself against the back of him.
“Don’t need to. I’ve got everything I need right here.” His fingers tapped his head. A GPS icon on his internally visualized screen told him exactly where they were. He patched into a live video feed and surveyed the crowd on the beach. “I know he’s there,” he murmured.
“Of course he is. He lives there. Can you see him?”
“No. I know it . . . I feel it.”
Worry creased Talia’s eyes behind her sunglasses, and Tom pretended he didn’t notice.
