A Box of Birds

by Charles Fernyhough

  I knock on the door opposite. When a voice calls out, I go in. A beta crouches on the floor in his underpants, assembling the pieces of a human skeleton. He’s taking leg-bones and arm-bones from a big wooden box and putting them together on the floor. The radio is telling him what to do. Position the head of the femur between the ischial spine and the sacrum. Ensure that the greater trochanter is aligned with the posterior superior iliac spine. The lesson is intoned softly by a physician with an Australian accent, over a soundtrack of ambient electronica. It’s learning by relaxation tape. My death-black business skirt suddenly seems to put too much on show.

  ‘Sorry. I was looking for James.’

  The medic slumps back into a bony lotus and draws poignantly on a cold spliff.

  ‘You should get together,’ he says. ‘You and all them what is looking.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  He blanks me contentedly. Observe how the head of the tibia sits within the intercondylar notch to form the knee joint. The half-legged skeleton on the floor grins up at me, enjoying its own careful reconstruction.

  ‘Are you going to be a doctor?’

  ‘Someone’s got to do it, angel.’

  I hate it, but I need to get something out of this guy.

  ‘Did James go home early?’

  He puts on a thoughtful face and relights his spliff. The barrel of his lighter says IT’S MINE!

  ‘Two months, yeah, that’s early. They had to stop his sponsorship because he wasn’t turning up to anything. I reckon he’s been thrown off the course. They shouldn’t let time-wasters in here. Spoils it for the rest of us.’

  He’s been gone for two months. Since almost the start of the Lent term. So who was that who kissed me? Whose call have I been waiting for?

  ‘But I saw him last week. We’ve been having tutorials...’

  Your final task is to tackle the complex anatomy of the human foot. It’s tricky, but fun!

  ‘Hey,’ the guy says, dropping some metatarsals back into the box. ‘Are you his tutor?’

  ‘I used to be...’

  He puts a finger to his lips, hushing me. I watch him stretch, repack his underpants and rise to his feet. He pads over to a shelf and comes back holding a silver soundpod.

  ‘He says this is yours. He says if you ever show up looking for him, you have to have it back.’

  I stare at the gadget in my hand. The young medic puts his hand up on the door, inviting a continuation I don’t want to think about. I back out through the door before he can say anything. The latch clicks shut, and I can hear the anatomy lesson starting up again. In the gloom of the corridor I turn the soundpod over, looking for an inscription, anything that might explain this strange inheritance. When I turn it face up again, I see that it has switched itself on. I choose PLAYLISTS. There’s only one: THE TRAVELS OF DAVID OVERSTRAND. I lean back against James’ door, plug the phones into my ears and set the thing playing. A man is talking, a voice I don’t recognise. I can hear the background hubbub of an audience, light traffic on a residential street. There’s an atmosphere of performance, as though I were eavesdropping on some theatrical game. The speaker is telling the story of a young woman roaming the city on a summer’s afternoon. Something is not as it should be, and she is distressed. People in the background keep mentioning Pelton landmarks: Bankstown Underpass, the Stadium of Northern Electricity. He lives in a squat in the city, Gareth told me, with a guru called David Overstrand and his disciples. I wonder if these are the people I am listening to.

  Then the voice stops. The microphone keeps recording a hushed room. A motorbike goes past on the street outside. I can hear the clinking of wine glasses. The people in the room seem to be expecting something. I can feel the weight of James’ door pressing on my shoulder-blades, but the proof of this physical reality doesn’t convince me. I’m no more in this corridor than I am there in that room, in the recorded silence in my earphones. Gareth asked if I had been invited back there yet, to meet David Overstrand and the storytellers. I have a strange feeling that it’s me they’re waiting for.

  I hear the purr of a ringtone, and it takes me a moment to understand in which of these two realities a mobile phone is ringing. When I realise that it’s my own, I almost drop the soundpod in fright.

  ‘Yvonne?’ says Gillian Sleet’s voice. ‘We need to talk.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Pleasure Systems Of The Brain

  ◉

  The Institute is deserted. Only the diehards are in today: people with animals to run, technicians who have to be here because the animals are. My lab is dark and airless, windows blinded against the late afternoon sun. The water maze lies empty, its plastic liner gleaming palely in the gloom, as forlorn as a drained swimming pool. I never found the missing thumbwheel.

  Gillian is at her desk, studying a student file. It has James’ photograph on the inside cover.

  ‘This place is quiet,’ I say.

  ‘It’s spooky. Science must be the only human endeavour that makes no noise at all. Except when it’s going wrong.’

  She looks anxious. Whatever’s bothering her, she blinks it away, and fixes her priceless agate stare onto me.

  ‘This James Bonham,’ she says, waving the file at me. ‘He’s a student of yours?’

  ‘He was. I think he’s quit.’

  ‘Can you think of any reason why he might have quit? Like the fact that he was having an inappropriate relationship with a member of staff?’

  I let her savour my dismay. Gillian is getting ahead of herself. That is, unless I was right, and she did see me and James together the other night.

  ‘He’s a little young.’

  She halts, half-risen from her chair. I watch her losing momentum, and then sinking back and staring at her screen. I can feel the heat of the sun through her smoked-glass windows.

  ‘Well, I hope he knows how to look after you. Anyway, your sex life is not top of my list of problems. I’ve got the slightly bigger headache of having this Process Nine to deal with.’

  I feel a clamping dread, oxygen shut-offs to my heart. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The place is quiet because they’ve sent everyone home. Process Nine is the Lycee’s highest security alert. It can only be triggered in the event of a catastrophic attack on our data. Right now, it’s making our recent problems with Conscience look like a break-in at the Allotment Association.’

  ‘Someone’s got at our data? How?’

  ‘With a very clever bit of hacking. They used a thing called a sniffer program. That’s a bit of software designed to pick up on the information flowing through a network. Let’s imagine that the Lycee had some top secret passwords which only an elite group of its network users knew. The sniffer would sit there, wait for those users to log on, then copy their passwords and file them away. Post them to some remote server, if that’s what the hacker wanted. It turns out that you only need to be logged on to a terminal and you can lay one of these things in three minutes, if you know what you’re doing. Which our intruder obviously did.’

  ‘So what’s been sniffed?’ I say, trying to sound calm.

  ‘Ermintrude. The gateway to all our mapping data. The data that were supposed to be safer than any data could ever be. Someone got onto the network and managed to lay one of these sniffers. It’s too late to change the passwords. The whole point about Ermintrude was that you had to know all the passwords to get anything off there. But if you had all the passwords, you could do it.’

  ‘So someone hacked into it for fun. That doesn’t mean the data are lost.’

  ‘They didn’t just hack into it, Yvonne. They encrypted what was on there into some format we can’t identify. They’ve surrounded it with firewalls we’ve never seen before. We now can’t get anything off Ermintrude. We think the data may still be on there in some form, but we can’t unlock them. On top of that, the hacker thought he’d have a laugh at our misfortune. He’s uploaded a bunch of bizarre documents, rambling stuff about the artificial
stimulation of the Lorenzo Circuit. The real problem is that this joker has now got our mapping data and will be hawking it around town. We’re talking about informational meltdown. On the Richter scale of security earthquakes, this is total destruction.’

  Gareth. I left him alone in the office with an open network connection. He had at least three minutes while I was tending to my mice. According to James, he once hacked into the Pentagon. No one else would have the imagination for a stunt like this.

  ‘You don’t know who did it?’

  She flicks her luscious bob in denial. ‘The police are looking for a Lycee student. They can’t see that anyone else could have had the access or the technical know-how. Whoever it is, he’s got himself some hot property.’

  If Sansom have got wind of this, it explains why they’re interested in what Gareth has found out. They’ll be back, he told me. And this time he might not be able to resist their overtures.

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘No one has the first idea. Council has been meeting practically 24/7. The Executive have gone into end-of-the-world mode. It’s a PR disaster. If this is how we’re seen to handle our research, we can kiss goodbye to any future funding. Oh, and the other news is that our head of Security has been relieved of his post under suspicion of having been spying for Sansom. That’s how bad things have gotten.’

  Somewhere, the man with the tattoos is still pointing his rifle at me. I thought it was strange that the Lycee’s chief security officer would be roaming alone so far out in the forest. I was right about him looking for the escaped chimp. But I was wrong about which side he was working for.

  ‘The guy’s a thug. He sends himself over to lecture us sometimes. Are you saying he’s been sacked?’

  ‘I’m saying the Lycee couldn’t pay him as much as Sansom were obviously paying him. You see our problem, Yvonne. We simply cannot let on how devastating this has been.’

  ‘So we carry on as normal?’

  She does that smiling-wincing kind of thing.

  ‘Normal is a loaded concept, Yvonne. We carry on.’

  The spookiest thing about Gillian Sleet’s office is her floor. You can see it. It isn’t ankle-deep in papers, books, notes, student essays. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an academic’s floor before.

  ‘Do you know what pleasure is, Yvonne?’

  She stands up, adjusting the strap of her bra through the strap of her black sun vest. The skin on her shoulders has been buffed to bronze by a portable Australian summer. In her microzipped hipster jeans she has the figure of one of her students. I swear she has fewer wrinkles than I have. The only exceptions are the laughter-lines that fan out around her eyes, quote marks around each smile. Don’t trust it, they say: this is my sense of irony writ large. But then again, they’re marks she has worked for, the proof of years spent creasing up at the jokes of better men, a career spent playing the game.

  ‘Pleasure?’

  The laughter-lines net out.

  ‘It’s a state of heightened activity in the mesolimbic dopamine system.’

  ‘I pity your boyfriend,’ quips Gillian.

  We laugh. It’s neuroscience laughter. And for me, at least, it hurts.

  ‘So how do we know all this?’ she says.

  ‘Because animals will work for electrical stimulation to those bits of the brain. You put a rat in a Skinner box with an electrode in its septum, and it’ll keep pressing the lever until it drops dead from exhaustion.’

  She’s making coffee. She never makes me coffee. I’m evidently going to be here for a while.

  ‘Does that mean it’s pleasurable? All the lever-pressing?’

  ‘Not necessarily. It could be triggering some awful craving which can only be reduced by yet more stimulation. But the few times it’s been done with human subjects, there have been some reports of pleasurable sensations.’

  I give a weak, deoxygenated smile. It’s weird enough to be called in for special treatment like this; I didn’t think I’d be getting grilled on animal learning theory as well.

  ‘OK. So we’re talking about animals who’ll learn to press a button, pull a lever or whatever in order to electrically stimulate their own brains. And yet the evidence on human self-stimulation is contradictory, to say the least. Why’s that?’

  ‘Because real human pleasure is more than just pressing a button. There’s no simple pleasure centre that can be switched on or off. It’s about pressing all the right buttons at the right time. It’s about connections.’

  ‘What if I told you that there is a way of pressing all the right buttons?’

  ‘I’d say I’d get rid of my boyfriend.’

  Sleet and the coffee machine laugh in synchrony. We’re so cool, sisters talking sexy. She comes and parks her perfect arse on the desk opposite me, hands clasped over her knee.

  ‘I’ve just got a feeling that this is what they’re trying to do.’

  ‘Who? Sansom?’

  ‘I’m not saying that they’ve stolen our data. But I’m saying that they’re going to be interested in it, whoever it is that’s got it now.’

  ‘If you had the mapping data, you’d know where to put the electrodes ... ’

  ‘Exactly. Deep brain stimulation in humans is a hit-and-miss affair. So far, they’ve never been able to go near the really interesting circuits because they run too close to vital pathways. Get your placing of electrodes wrong in the hypothalamus, say, and it’s goodnight Irene. The problem has always been that we didn’t know where to put the damn wires. We didn’t understand the pathways well enough. But we do now, with this map of the Lorenzo Circuit.’

  ‘You think Sansom are working on deep brain stimulation? Putting electrodes directly into the brain and trying to stimulate the neural circuits like that?’

  ‘Of course they are. Your ex-boyfriend was working on it. The Pereira Effect and all that. That work he did on human–computer interfaces made him pretty famous. With his help, Sansom were developing a new kind of ultra-reliable electrode. It was an open secret. Are you still in touch with him?’

  ‘On and off. He’ll be at the conference in Florida.’

  ‘Sounds like you and he might have some things to discuss.’

  If I can bring myself to speak to Mateus, I won’t be discussing anomalous conductivity responses in human–machine interfaces. I’ll be asking what he did with my heart, where he buried it after he ripped it out and stole it away.

  ‘So what are Sansom using? A rat model?’

  ‘If you believe the rumours, they’re using something bigger than that.’

  ‘You mean this thing about chimps?’ I hesitate, wondering how much knowledge to own up to. ‘You believe that?’

  She nods. ‘I’ll believe anything these days. Apparently one got away. It’s roaming wild in Wenderley Forest.’

  ‘I know. I saw it.’

  She looks at me, fingering the hem of her suntop. The nervousness of it is not her. Directness is her. Speaking her mind is her. That’s why I like her as a boss: she’s not afraid to stamp and shout.

  ‘Of course. You live out there, don’t you? If anyone’s going to catch sight of that thing, it’s going to be you.’

  ‘I’d have reported it but ... I think they’re trying to shoot it.’

  ‘An aroused chimp can do a lot of damage to a person. You just saw it the once?’

  I nod. ‘I’ve been leaving food out for it. I’ve been trying to work out where it’s living. I don’t want them to kill it.’

  She sighs and shakes her head. Then she frowns, remembering something.

  ‘This chimp. Did it look ... I don’t know. Demented?’

  ‘I only caught a glimpse of it. To me, it just looked scared.’

  ‘It would do. It’s had quite an adventure.’

  And so will Gareth, if he tries to get down to where the chimp came from. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Gillian doesn’t seem to know about the mines.

  ‘How do they think they’re going to get away with
it?’ she is saying.

  ‘I don’t think they are going to get away with it. Conscience are planning an exposé. They’ve got videos. They’re getting them shown on TV.’

  ‘And James Bonham told you this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She blinks it away.

  ‘The trouble is, is anyone going to believe James’ story? Look, Yvonne, this institute is in the shit. We have been well and truly fucked over and there was no pleasure involved. We’ve lost the mapping data, and Christ knows how many zillion man-hours of research. We were a few months away from understanding exactly how amyloid plaque build-up causes dementia. That would have been the biggest breakthrough in understanding this disease in twenty years. We can reconstruct the fragments of the map from our back-ups, sure, but we’ve lost time. Sansom, or whoever else gets their hands on it, will publish and patent and take all the credit. Not to mention the money.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘We do what Sansom will obviously be doing. We try to find out who stole our data and we try and get them back. Whoever’s got that map of the Lorenzo Circuit is in real trouble.’

  She picks up James’ file, scowls at the photograph and drops it back onto her desk.

  ‘You think Conscience might be involved in this?’

  ‘For what possible reason? Conscience are a bunch of animal rights activists campaigning against the use of animals in research. What do they want with a load of brain mapping data?’

  ‘They’ve attacked us before. They were spreading rumours about us using genetically modified capuchins, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Well, perhaps you’d better talk to your boyfriend about that.’

  ‘James Bonham is a long way from being my boyfriend.’

  I didn’t expect that this would be easy. And still Gillian only knows half of the trouble I’m in.

  ‘Whatever. I just know you’re taking a big risk with your career, getting mixed up with people like him.’