Fantasy & Science Fiction - JanFeb 2017

by Spilogale Inc.

  Aiming for levity, I offered an obvious joke. "What if my brain is missing?"

  The grad student responded with bright, slightly nervous laughter. But another person was present, a female professor. She's the one who made the moment memorable. Straightening her back, she somehow flooded the room with smothering cold silence. That's how I described the scene later, drinking well-earned beers with my very best friends. That lady was the most important person in my future, only I didn't know it yet. What I did know is that her assistant quickly shut his mouth and dipped his head, as if he had been wrong to enjoy himself. And I know I quit smiling. Even the all-important tube seemed to hum more softly. Then the test was finished, and I turned my head, looking at the lady's pale green eyes, thinking how I'd never seen eyes that blank, that nothing.

  "Shit," I thought. "She's the empty one here."

  * * *

  Nineteen months later, I had a lucrative job and a fetching, intelligent girlfriend. I was even convinced I was in love. Adulthood was proving more fun than I imagined possible. Marriage, children. All that looked likely, right up until a certain green-eyed neurophysicist appeared on a thousand newsfeeds.

  My female researcher wasn't quiet anymore, or a tenth as chilly. In fact, she grinned like a homecoming queen, describing a new technology she designed with her graduate student's help—a simple rearrangement of off-the-shelf tech that could easily gaze inside any human head. And inside other kinds of heads too.

  "Soul" was the word to avoid. It was better to talk about "persistent electrical signatures." It was best to sing about terabytes of clinical data. The lady wasn't claiming that souls were god-carved wonders. It was enough to tell the world that this phenomenon, these persistent electrical signatures, were lurking inside human heads, and they enjoyed distinct patterns easily mapped by her new-generation sensor. Imagine a whirlpool, she said. Imagine a big whirlpool turning with determination inside the human mind. Every PE signature had a whirlpool's endurance. That's what she and her assistant had determined. The outside world could intrude. Heavy drink. A mild injury. No sleep for a week. But the flow remained stable, bestowing order and personality to an otherwise unruly mind. So stable and self-renewing, in fact, that it lasted beyond death.

  "I don't understand," the interviewer said.

  She didn't understand his comment. "PES," she repeated. "It's our name for the phenomenon."

  "I understand your acronym," he said. "But this last bit of news. Did you just admit that you've studied dying people?"

  "At a local hospice, with everyone's full consent. Yes."

  "And you learned what?"

  Science had its boundaries, and she didn't want to say too much. But she couldn't stop smiling. What began as an investigation into the electrical architecture of the brain had uncovered quite a bit more than expected. Her importance in the world was soaring. For all I know, she was smiling because she'd had cocktails for lunch and was riding a very nice buzz.

  "When the body dies," she began.

  And hesitated.

  "Yes?" he coaxed.

  "But only if the mind is intact," she added, lifting her gaze. "Then the PES endures after the body's death."

  "Endures," the interviewer repeated.

  "For several minutes, usually."

  "We're talking about the soul," he said.

  The moment was inevitable. She had to know it was coming. Yet she smirked at the one word, acting as if she were too much the professional to fall for superstitious noise.

  "You can see our souls," the interviewer said.

  No, she didn't approve of that word. But she loved the cameras. With nods and a polite shrug, she said, "We have observed a very specific, very impressive phenomenon."

  "The souls inside dying people," he said.

  "Patients in hospice care, yes."

  "And after death, what?" The interviewer managed a quick sigh, adding, "You're claiming this PE business has its own life."

  "Call it a soul if you have to," she said, giving up her brief battle for an unmemorable acronym. "For several minutes, yes. What looks like the soul persists. In one case, for almost twenty minutes."

  "And then?"

  "The motions slow and the energies fade away." The words felt careful and practiced. But they weren't good enough. Guided by hope or some childhood faith, she revealed a possibility for which she had zero evidence. "Unless the phenomenon migrates to some other realm, of course. Some corner of this universe that we can't yet see.…"

  * * *

  REVELATIONS ARE LIKE SOULS. Each has its own trajectory, ignoring every obstacle in the way.

  Something was living inside our minds, a higher state of organization using memory and reflex as its raw materials. That was her news, and the rest of the world was thinking, "Of course it's the soul." But the revelations weren't finished. The green-eyed expert explained that every soul had its recognizable characteristics. Shape. Size. Speed of flow. And her studies had proved the phenomenon wasn't limited to the human species.

  Apes could carry them.

  Dolphins and elephants, monkeys and seals.

  "Our research has grown and grown," she confessed. "Without trying, we keep uncovering PE signatures inside more species."

  Including dogs. But not all dogs. Forty percent was a good working estimate of how many canines were blessed. Fewer cats but more pigs had them, and a very few cattle, and every tested bird species had some capacity to hold an enduring signature. How many species out there carried souls? She didn't know. Why did one hawk have a persistent signature but not its brother? That was fine mystery. Then she mentioned that she hadn't found any signatures inside fishes or salamanders, but it was far too early to claim that every bass and bullfrog was devoid of those telltale markers.

  "About us," the interviewer interrupted. "What are people's souls like? Bigger than a dog's, maybe?"

  The professor looked at the cameras, offering an intense, hard-to-read smile.

  Did she sense difficult terrain coming?

  Her partner was the brave one. That former graduate student was sitting amiably beside her, ignored by questions and the cameras. But now he began to laugh, that cackling rattle I recalled from nineteen months before. Jumping into the controversy, he reported that it was possible, particularly inside the large human mind, to observe multiple signatures.

  "What's that?" the interviewer repeated. "Two souls inside one head?"

  "Two PE signatures, yes, coexisting without obvious troubles." The young man waited for the cameras to find him, then proclaimed, "About nine percent of humanity carries multiples. The signatures flow around each other. They maybe might possibly could help maintain the mind's stability. And there don't seem to be any cognitive costs. In fact, multiple-souled people are often among our best, most accomplished citizens."

  And with that, he fondly touched the shoulder of the lady wearing the impenetrable smile.

  And this is the key point. This is where those abundantly souled assholes should have retreated to the lab. There was no reason to say anything more. But from what I can tell, souls and wisdom don't have much in common.

  "So everybody has a soul," the interviewer declared.

  Neither scientist spoke, but the shared glances said quite a lot.

  Finally the woman said, "Well, as it happens, half of our babies are born without. And although most of them do acquire a PE signature, if one hasn't formed after seven months, there won't be any."

  "No soul at all?"

  Appropriately grim, both of them shook their heads.

  "Well, how many people is that?" was the obvious question, and the interviewer tossed it out.

  Did she hear him? For a moment, she acted as if she was elsewhere. Maybe she remembering that one young man sitting in her laboratory, his joke and his empty head about to bear the burden of everything that would make her famous.

  "A little more than six percent of us," she said.

  Then she said, "They never show any PE signa
tures."

  "But we don't know what that means," her partner interjected.

  "Not yet, no," she added, quick as a reflex. "But all of us have neurons. All of us learn. And those without any signature can do very well. In fact, these people are indistinguishable from normal citizens."

  The interview was nearly at an end.

  Along with my happy life.

  "For reasons we don't understand," she began.

  "Reasons we might never identify," she added.

  Then she said, "A portion of us are shells. Are dunnage. Which in itself is a most amazing result."

  * * *

  Cracked plywood, warped timber, or that knotty board rescued from the trash heap. That's dunnage, the waste used to protect whatever is precious, whether it's cargo inside a ship's hold or the quivering, vibrant electrical music inside a shell of soulless bone and blood.

  Suddenly the world was filled with talk about souls and dunnage.

  At my work, people offered all kinds of speculative noise about metaphysical happenings and the "soulless souls" among us. And while I made my contributions to the nonsense, I avoided mentioning my connection with the famous researchers.

  My girlfriend already knew my story. While she wasn't a particularly curious person, she was intrigued enough to pepper me with questions. No, I didn't know my status. Nobody had told me that I was this way or that way. But ignorance didn't stop her from building her own answers.

  "There's something about you," she said. "Something different."

  People want to believe that lovers are exceptional, or at least somehow removed from the boring normal.

  "I bet you're one of those with two souls," she proposed. "A dark soul and a bright one. That's why you're so intense."

  "Am I intense?" I asked.

  "In the best ways, yes."

  My parents were middle-aged when I was born, and their health was never robust, what with weight issues and diabetes, and in one case, a history of enthusiastic drug abuse. They were also good people who measured others by their "goodness." We never attended church, yet my mother and my father had often displayed a passion for the ethereal. Souls were real, and souls were human and only human, and the largest science story of our time left them painfully offended.

  "That woman taught at your school," one of them pointed out.

  "She didn't teach much," I said. "Mostly, she did research."

  "But did you take her classes?"

  "No" had the luxury of being true. So I said, "No."

  "Well, good," both declared.

  Then my father added, "This is crazy-ass blasphemy. Souls inside bugs and gravel, inside piles of shit in the field."

  I don't know where those images came from. Maybe this was ironic humor, overstating the sacrilegious work. But my impression was that my father had some furious need to deny every aspect of the work and curse anybody involved. Which was another fine reason to keep my past out of reach.

  Suddenly my mother touched my arm, demanding my attention. "Did you ever see that woman? Or her partner, what's his name?"

  "I might have," I confessed. "Once or twice."

  My father responded with sharp cursing.

  Which won a disapproving finger-shake from his wife. But then Mom offered one truly awful notion.

  "I wish she was dead," that old, white-haired lady said to me. Said to her life partner. Maybe she said it to God. "Her and that idiot man. Years ago, I wish somebody had split their idiot heads."

  * * *

  Things are never as they appear.

  No, in my experience, the world is even simpler than it pretends to be.

  I loved my girlfriend and I wanted to marry her. But we split up. Our relationship had the usual difficulties: She complained that I was emotionally cool, sometimes remote. Her work was thankless while I enjoyed every minute of my job. She suffered from the beginnings of depression, and why did I have to keep making noise about marriage? Too much noise, as it happens. We fought a pitched battle at Christmas, in front of her famously difficult parents. We fought about religion and her fondness for country music, and I didn't like her brother, by the way. Pretentious shit. She also mentioned that her last boyfriend was better in bed, and she missed that blessing, and why the hell did I believe marriage was a half-good notion?

  I'd be interested to know how she tells our story now. If she tells it at all. But if the woman were honest, she'd admit that none of those reasons were enough, even if heaped on top of one another.

  No, we separated because of something simpler and more embarrassing than one boyfriend's inadequate tool.

  Yet I still had my career. At least.

  Single again, I dated younger girls as well as one older woman—a colleague from another department. And then my department and my job suddenly vanished. It was a small, unpeculiar shakeup. These things happened all of the time. Of course I tried for another position inside the company, but every opening had its standards, and a man didn't have to look hard to see where he had fallen short.

  "Difficult choices," one spokesperson explained.

  My sometime lady-friend, as it happened.

  "A lot of factors to balance, and I urged them to hire you. I did. But I also mentioned going out to dinner with you. A few times, and I'm afraid that might have cost you something."

  I made noise about cats landing on their feet. Then I added, "If you feel guilty, how about a conciliatory dinner?"

  Silence and a smile were her response.

  So I said, "Or I can take you out to dinner."

  "Oh no. You need to save your money." And because that wasn't enough to quelch things, she added, "Oh, I'm seeing someone else. By the way. I've been meaning to tell you."

  She told me a lot with her face and manner. She was finding a suitable name for this fresh boyfriend. In case I asked. But I didn't ask. Then she set her hands on the edge of the table, ready to rise. And when I said nothing and did nothing, she felt a small, worthwhile pity, and, lowering her hands, offered a somewhat better smile.

  "I promise," she said. "We can help you find other work. Something better than what you're leaving here."

  "Except I'm not leaving," I pointed out. "You just kicked me out the door."

  I'd like to think I accomplished a lot over the following months. I know my resume became a polished wonder, and I proved to be a genius for generating hope and wishful stories. But I didn't find work until my savings were gone, and I had no choices left. The jobs were rough and routine. Yet I remained a willing body wearing a smile, particularly when I was paid at the end of the day.

  Then I wrenched my back, my young back, lifting too much at once.

  And I was out of work again.

  Moving in with my parents was unthinkable, and then it was inevitable. Everybody pretended this would last for a week or a month, but not much longer. Our family got good about putting on brave faces. The back door was my door. I could come and leave again whenever I wished. The basement was my realm. Deep windows and the guest bedroom made life comfortable if not important, and I slept like I hadn't slept since childhood. Ten, twelve, even fifteen hours. Leaving the bed wasn't particularly difficult, it also didn't give any rewards. It was best to nap, and when my eyes had to be open, I watched the Internet leap from passion to passion. I could live on peanut butter and cookies, and every third day meant showering in the laundry room. Nobody warned me to stay underground. Neither parent praised the merits of isolation, yet they were less than comfortable in my presence, and I only hoped it was because I was such a miserable failure as an adult.

  My existence must have been stressful for both of them, and stresses can be complicated. I'll give you that. Everybody breaks, but you can never know for certain why we break, or when it will be.

  My father suffered a heart attack late one night, and that despite proven medicines and a relatively modern pacemaker. He woke up dying in bed, and, panicked, his wife of nearly thirty years cried out to God.

  I woke to the sou
nd of wailing.

  Empty pants in one hand, I climbed the stairs three at a time. I could have run out the back and around to the front of the house, but that would have taken too long. So I tried the other door, the hollow-core door leading into the kitchen. Someone had turned the knob's tiny lock. Which could have been done by mistake, of course. But when I drove my shoulder into the locked door, I discovered that one of our kitchen chairs had been shoved under the knob. I nearly broke my collarbone. I really wish I had. The pain would have stopped me there. But no, I was all adrenaline and rage. Cheap wood splintered. The chair flew across the kitchen floor. Almost naked, still holding my pants, I ran into the bedroom, screaming, "What the fuck's wrong?"

  And there was my father, most of the way dead, and my mother cradling his head but looking up at me.

  Terrified of nothing but the manic, soulless beast.

  * * *

  I WANTED THE JOB for no reason but rent and food and filling up days and making it possible to sleep through the night. Modest goals for a thirty-three-year-old man who had seen quite a lot.

  My future employer was in her fifties, save for the face with its huge eyes and far too much mouth. But that's the trend, people sculpting each other, trying to be the same kind of pretty as their online avatars.

  Thankfully she had a human voice, complete with the usual suspicions.

  "I insist on sniffers," she said.

  "It wouldn't be my first rodeo," I offered.

  My complacency didn't impress. "I had a girl last year," the woman continued. "She gave me appropriate records, including images of her three souls. Three. As if the lie wasn't big enough with just one soul on the screen."