Anomaly (27 page)

“You will come along with us.” Dr. Berk is speaking now. The Assistants around him surround me as we walk down the
hall. “You will not be part of the simulation. We may need you, however, if there are any difficulties with the program.”

“Of course.” I get to see inside my music. This makes all the hours of work worth it. To see my music. What will it look like, inside a brain, in three dimensions? Berk has had little time to tell me the details of the simulation. I try not to reveal my excitement.

We walk down the hallway that leads past John’s door. I want to look into his small door panel without drawing attention. I slow slightly. Berk knows what I am doing and he slows as well.

“Just a moment,” he says to the Assistants. “I think I am receiving a communication.” He stops and pulls out his pad, just ahead of John’s door, forcing me to stop right at the window.

John is sitting on his chair. He looks pale, but he smiles when he sees me. He nods and points up. I turn my head so the Assistants cannot see me and I smile back.

“I was mistaken.” Berk replaces his pad and we walk on.

We take an elevator I have never been in to a part of the facility I have never seen. Except on my learning pad when I first listened to Berk’s plan.

Dr. Loudin’s private lab looks different in person. Berk’s camera only showed a small portion. But this is huge. The room is deep and pristine. Dr. Loudin is sitting at a desk near the center. It is surrounded by machines that look vaguely familiar. I am sure I learned about them at some point in my childhood, but I do not recall what they all are. Each has lights and knobs covering its surface. Some are taller than I am and some reach only to my waist. Dr. Loudin touches one with expert hands, reading something on its small screen that makes him grunt.

Berk clears his throat. “Dr. Loudin?”

“Yes?” He is still reading the screen. When he looks up and sees me, he stands and adjusts his rumpled jacket. “Ah yes. Of course. You have retrieved our Musician.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Our patient is prepared.” Dr. Loudin walks to a door at the side of the room. The interior is quite similar to the room where I had my surgery. But this one has a panel on the wall opposite the surgical chair.

I see the back of Rhen’s head, the probes already in place inside her brain. Dr. Williams stands in front of her, asking her questions and adjusting the screen behind her. Berk leads me into the room on the other side of the window. There are chairs so we can sit and observe the procedure without being in the room itself.

Rhen doesn’t appear frightened. Her voice, coming through a sound portal in the observation room, is calm, normal. She has no problem answering each question. I look above her at the screen. Her brain is lit up, a different color for every question that is asked.

Finally, Dr. Williams nods to Dr. Loudin. They each place a thick mask over their mouth and nose, the Assistants leave the room, and within minutes Rhen is asleep.

I don’t see any medicine being administered. “How did they put her to sleep?”

“It is a gas that is released into the room,” Berk says, still in doctor mode. “She has a screen above her that looks like a garden. The gas smells like flowers. It is designed to calm people before anni—”

He doesn’t finish. But I know. This is how people are
annihilated. A garden scene, a sweet smell, then sleep and death. It is beautifully cruel.

“This gas will only put Rhen into a sleep deep enough to allow her to be placed in the simulation.”

The wall screen behind Rhen changes. In the top corner, I see her brain, but a new color is lighting up, a purplish-pink. The rest of the screen shows my music, but in a way I never could have imagined. It is a place. A three-dimensional location, with each note residing in a specific position. The treble clef is the ceiling, the bass clef is the ground. It is like a maze. I can’t see a beginning or an end. But then I see Rhen. She is there. In my music.

She looks at the music. I see the image of her brain in the corner. It is filled with so many colors, all moving and growing. Blues inside reds, yellows inside purples.

Dr. Loudin looks up from a machine to stare at the screen. He is amazed too. He walks to the image of the brain and moves it around, examining it. He is smiling the entire time. I have never seen him smile so much.

I look back at Rhen. She is moving the notes. They are light, so light that all she has to do is touch them and they float to a new position. In minutes, she has created a straight line. Berk leans forward. Dr. Loudin sits in his chair, ignoring even the lighting of the brain as he watches this.

Whole notes, half rests, flats, and sharps are all lined up. Rhen makes rows upon rows out of the music. What was once a maze is now an organized passageway. Rhen even adjusts the notes themselves so they are all the same height, blending into one another. She walks down one row and up the next, touching notes that are not lined up exactly right.

The notes aren’t in the order I wrote them, but as I read the measures she has lined up, row by row, it makes sense. She is creating a new song. She is lining up all the parts by the key in which they were written. She has started with the up-tempo parts, those notes are closer together. Where I have written a slower tempo, the notes have spaces between them. They are in their own row. They stand taller than the faster notes. It is beautiful. What I wrote as a compilation of my musical knowledge, Rhen—logical Rhen—is adjusting to create beauty.

And she doesn’t even realize what she is doing. She is simply following the logical progression, being given clues to the meaning of the notes, the tempo, the keys, through the probes in her brain. Information I gave to Berk that he programmed into the simulation, that guides Rhen to make choices I never would have considered.

Then the music begins to play. My music. Rhen’s music. I recognize it and I don’t recognize it. The room vibrates as it plays, a synthesized sound. I think it would sound better with a piano or violin. With a wood and string or even brass instrument. It is too beautiful for the computerized notes. They can’t express the complexity of each line the way an instrument could. The way I could. I want to ask the Scientists to pause the simulation, to allow me to return to my room, to get my violin, to show them what this music is truly capable of. But they are far less concerned with the beauty of the music than with the message that music conveys.

Then the music stops. It is so sudden, I am sure its echoes are still bouncing around the observation chamber. I look through the panel at Rhen. The screen in front of her is black. The music has disappeared. But Rhen is still there. In the simulation.
The image of her brain is still lit up. She is confused. She cannot see. I know that feeling. I want to help her but I can’t. Dr. Loudin looks to Dr. Williams. She is adjusting the knobs on the machine by Rhen’s chair. She shakes her head and looks back at Dr. Loudin.

“What’s happening?” I ask. No one answers.

Then Dr. Loudin’s voice comes through the room, barely above a whisper. “She cannot get out.”

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

I
jump up. “She can’t get out?”

Berk puts a hand on my shoulder and I sit back down. Dr. Loudin is still staring at the image of Rhen’s brain. Dr. Williams is tapping into the computer.

“I didn’t prepare an exit for her,” Dr. Loudin says. “When we programmed the simulation for Thalli, we programmed her return. She began and ended in the same room.”

I remember the pink room. It is strange to miss something that doesn’t exist, but I do.

“Why didn’t you prepare an exit for Rhen?” Dr. Williams asks the question that I want to ask.

“I assumed she would do that herself.”

“Why would you assume that?”

“This is a different simulation.” Dr. Loudin turns from the screen and looks at Dr. Williams. “It was important for Thalli to believe she was in actual reality. This was obviously not a reality-based location. Rhen should have been able to decode that and remove herself.”

I want to burst into the room and hurt that man. How can he blame Rhen for being trapped in
his
project?

“What will we do?”

Dr. Loudin looks at Rhen, still sitting in the chair, electrodes attached to her. “Annihilation is the most humane solution.”

I jump up again, but Berk pulls me down before I can speak.

“But all this work would be lost.” Dr. Williams looks back at the screen. “We don’t know what she had decoded. It would take months to understand what she did in there. We need her to tell us.”

Dr. Loudin sighs. “We would need to create a simulated reality then. That would take just as long as decoding would.”

“Couldn’t you create a reality using the music?” Dr. Williams asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Before her surgery, Thalli experienced excessive emotions, correct?” Dr. Williams says.

“That is why she was brought to us.” Dr. Loudin nods gravely. “She fell to the ground crying after playing a piece of music.”

“Could we connect her emotions to the music?” Dr. Williams looks at Rhen again. “If Thalli’s emotions are connected to her music, couldn’t she also connect memories and locations?”

They want to see what I feel when I play? The thought
frightens me. But then I look at Rhen. Without my help, she is trapped. Forever. She will be stuck in the darkness of the music until she is annihilated.

Dr. Loudin blinks several times. “I suppose that is possible. But her memories have been erased and the emotional excesses have been removed.”

“Could you reverse that surgery?”

“I suppose.” Dr. Loudin says the words slowly. “But I have never attempted a reversal.”

My stomach tenses. I have to tell them the surgery wasn’t a success. Berk looks at me, his eyes wide. He knows what I am thinking, but he doesn’t want me to say anything. His life will be in jeopardy if I divulge this—Dr. Loudin will know that Berk and I have conspired to keep this secret from him. But Rhen’s life is in jeopardy if I remain silent.

I close my eyes. I want to pray, but the Designer feels distant. Has he abandoned me? Why is this happening?

When I open my eyes, I see both Scientists coming into the observation chamber. I see Rhen lying in the chair. I feel Berk, tense, sitting beside me.

I know what I must do. I cannot allow Rhen to be annihilated so I can keep my secret. I could not live with myself if I did that. I pray Berk will understand. And surely he is too valuable to be punished as severely as I will be punished. They need him too much.

“I do not need the reversal surgery.” I speak before I have a chance to change my mind.

Dr. Loudin looks at me, his brows raised. “Excuse me?”

“I have a hypothesis.” Berk’s hand is on my arm. “I believe she can record the music she composed before the surgery. The
memories she had while she was writing should still be in there, deep in her subconscious. She will not know consciously what she is playing, but it will translate in the simulation.”

What is he doing? My mind races through this scenario. If they choose music written since I arrived here, they will see me and Berk. Together. They will know. And Berk will be punished. But I will not be, because they will still believe my memories have been erased.

“That is an interesting hypothesis.” Dr. Williams nods.

“But it is just that,” Dr. Loudin says. “A hypothesis. We have no way to know if it will be successful until we test it.”

“Which is what Scientists do,” Dr. Williams argues.

“When we have the luxury of time, yes.” Dr. Loudin shakes his head. “But we do not have that. We need to assume this entire experiment has been a failure and start over somewhere else.”

“No!” I don’t mean to shout, but I can’t help it. “Let me play. Please.”

“Two more days, Dr. Loudin.” Berk is trying to remain calm. His tone of voice reminds me that I must do the same. “We can surely spare that. If it works, we are on the way to finding a solution to the problem with the oxygen. If it doesn’t, all we have lost is two days.”

“If I perform the reversal, the music will be both in Thalli’s subconscious
and
in her conscious memory. We can be certain the memory is intact, and we do not lose any more time.”

“What if something goes wrong with the surgery?” Berk is trying to keep himself controlled. But the muscles in his jaw are twitching. “We risk losing the patient altogether. We do not have another like her—both musical
and
emotional.”

“We do have others like her because she is no longer
emotional.” Dr. Loudin’s face is red. “Which is why we must reverse the surgery.”

Dr. Williams steps forward. “Dr. Berk makes an excellent argument, Dr. Loudin. This mind is our best hope right now. Let us not do anything that could potentially damage it unless we have no other options.”

“Very well,” Dr. Loudin says after a long pause. “But I want the music recorded today. And I want to use her most recent composition.”

My heart plummets. I know exactly what I was thinking and feeling when I wrote that. I played about the Designer and love and Berk and freedom. Any one of those thoughts can result in annihilation. All of them combined guarantee it. And not just mine. Berk’s. Possibly even John’s.