Gojiro (18 page)

Right then a six-foot-wide shaft of blue-white lightning bolted through the room. It came from the other side of the wall, leaving a smoldering hole there.

Sheila Brooks jumped two feet. “Agggh!”

Komodo ran toward the next room. “Stay here, please. I’ll be right back!”

He didn’t think she’d follow him, but she did. “
What’s that?
” she screamed, pointing at the pulsating gray mass, some fifty feet round and high, sitting in the center of the immense spare ballroom.

“This? Oh, it’s nothing. Just a brain,” Komodo replied, attempting informality as he ducked under another shear of razored light on his way toward a control panel on the other side of the room.

Another bolt shot from the protruding frontal lobes, igniting the thick drapes at the other end of the shuttered room. “It’s not exactly a brain,” Komodo explained breathlessly, running to subdue the flames with a foam-spurting extinguisher. “It’s a simulacrum.”

Komodo never intended to bring that inflatable Quadcameral model with him to America. They were already resident at the Traj Taj when he noticed it, wadded up in a corner of the left pocket of his black pajamas. He couldn’t resist puffing it up to its true scale. Now he regretted the installation. Why hadn’t he lied and said it was an indoor tennis court, why did he have to tell her it was a
brain
? After this, Sheila Brooks would have every justification to deem him less than a serious individual, a mad scientist of a certifiably demented stripe. If she fled right then, he couldn’t blame her.

However, when he finished stamping the fire from the drapes, Komodo saw that Sheila Brooks was not only still present, but was striding toward the model. Her arm was stretched in front of her, palm out, much in the manner of a sleepwalker. She was heading straight for the parietal opening.

“Ms. Brooks! No!” But it was too late. Komodo felt a pitch in his stomach as Sheila Brooks sank her hand deep into the loamy aperture. She was in up to the elbow before voltage recoil set in.
Zam
, she skittered backward on her heels, a gawk’s moonwalk. When Komodo reached her, she opened her eyes—greener now—and said, “It’s alive.”

“Not . . . exactly,” Komodo grimaced as he helped Sheila Brooks to her feet. “It is composed of a synthetic neurological material. A fiber.”

“It thinks?”

Komodo grimaced. “Not completely, not yet. This is just a crude sketch, a hollow, woefully insufficient prototype. It cannot even be considered to approach the living ideal. But it can reproduce elements of the thought process.”

“Intellectual dacron, the mind boggles. Can we go inside?”

“Inside?”

Sheila Brooks kept looking at the brain. “Yeah, I want to go inside, is that okay?”

Komodo was sweating. “Yes . . . it is possible.”

* * *

When Komodo took Sheila Brooks into that Quadcam replica, it was the first time he’d entered the great model in years. He used to go in there all the time, to sit and contemplate, imagining himself in a kind of sanctuary, a realm apart, a holy place. How he loved those moments! Within that dense and humming place, he felt renewed, as if the shroud surrounding every riddle of his life might give way. “When I am in there,” he once told Gojiro, “I feel most close to myself.”

However, after the abhorrent operation that banished the supplications from the monster’s tortured mentality, Komodo ceased to visit the huge schematic. It lay fallow, used only as a base for ring-a-levio-playing Atoms. The wild children delighted in sliding down the parietal tube, setting it churning like a revolving barrel in a fun house.

Now, riding the small lift up through the contoured folds, Komodo attempted to explain the rudiments of Quadcameral morphology to Sheila Brooks. Speaking loudly so as to be heard over the cerebral drone, he focused on the time-tiered structure of Evollooic sedimentation, chronologically delineating what he called “the ages of the Mind.” The deepest seated of these layers, or the “primary cognitioner,” was the so-called Reptilian Complex, a holdover from the Quadcam’s earliest issue. Next came the thinner, emotion-wrought limbic layer, developed with the fall of the Sauric Empire and most closely identified with the cruder mammalian populations. On top of that, Komodo announced tour-guide style, was the primates’ burgeoning Neo-Cortex, which reached its fullest flower in the portentous advent of
Homo sapiens
.

“A mistake often made by the humanoid host is to assume that the older segments of brain are somehow vestigial, that they exist only to perform the most menial of tasks and are subservient to the Neo-Cortex,” Komodo explained as he led the pliant Sheila Brooks through the model, holding an umbrella over her head as a shield against the occasional jet sprays of neural fluids. “Just because a cameral form is more recent does not assure superior development. This misconception can result in serious difficulties, as the nether-situated lobes seek to assert their presence in the face of attempted override by the upper regions. Much seemingly pointless contradictory behavior results from these intracranial conflicts.”

Sheila Brooks touched the breathing walls with her fingertips. “Far out.”

Following well-marked pathways, they reached the forwardmost section of the Neo-Cortex, where Komodo invited Sheila Brooks to sit on a small ottoman-shaped polypous outcropping. “This is a pleasant spot,” he said, pulling a foldout candle from his pajama pocket and lighting it. “I’ve often stopped here to reflect.”

“Kind of clammy,” Sheila Brooks allowed. “You make this from a kit?”

“Kit?” Komodo thought of the gluesodden replicas of battleships the Atoms turned out with such delirium. “No, this is more of a
projection
. An
idea
of the New Mind—the Quadcameral. It cannot be more than that.”

“Why not?” She hardly noticed the synapsial vessels that hung loose from their contacts and had begun to entwine themselves in her wild mane.

Komodo sheared the vessels off with his pocketknife and continued. “To comprehend the New Mind; one must be able to think with one himself. The sort of brain in which we sit right now represents an entire other way of being. It is my belief that adaptations inherent here are so remarkably
different
from the current mind that those who attain them cannot rightly be counted within the same species as those who have not.”

A sawtoothed spark of electrostatic energy serrated across the neural chamber. Again, Sheila Brooks didn’t seem to care. “But who’s going to get this brain? Anybody? People collecting tolls or selling insurance? Mary Kay agents? Or is it just gonna be those enervated guys, the ones with the giant heads and no bodies in the comic books?”

“Prediction, in these matters, is a hazardous game. However, this isn’t to say individuals exhibiting fundamental elements of the New Mind do not already exist, even if they might not yet be aware of it.”

Sheila Brooks rubbed at her cheek. “But how can they have it and not know it?”

“It is possible that the initial possessors of a new trait may
never
become aware of their difference, at least not in their own lifetime. Palpable cognizance of Quadcamerality and its particular capabilities may not become accessible for hundreds of generations.”

Komodo cleared his throat. How could he explain this to Sheila Brooks without an exhaustive survey of Budd Hazardous cosmologies, an avalanche of jargonized terminology? Yet he was seized with a need to make her understand. “What I am saying is that often there is a passage of time between the inception of an organism’s change and the perception of that transformation. For instance, one of the most commonly accepted schemes of the mind, which we might refer to as the Tricameral or triune brain, has, according to many studies, been extant in the
Homo sapiens
species for several thousand years. This, of course, is an eye blink in the scope of the geologic clock, but, in the life of the group, or Bunch, in question, it is a considerable period.

“Let us examine how the
Homo sapiens
have adjusted to the shift in their thinking apparatus . . .” From there, Komodo began talking about the Greeks, how back in Zeusian days they used to consult Oracles—trees, rocks, and the like—which they believed imparted the vital information of the day. The Oracle read no tea leaf, supplied no printout; the input was received internally, springing wholecloth into the minds of supplicants.

“They heard the Oracle within their minds and experienced those utterances as the voice of the gods. That was the value of the Oracle—it enabled the petitioner to have
direct communication
with the Beyond. Now how can we account for this in terms of the modern outlook? Is it fair to characterize these individuals as merely primitive, hopelessly superstitious?”

No, Komodo argued, it was a question of biology, the product of a great unfolding cerebral drama. “The consolidation and refinement of the Neo-Cortex was a period of monumental shift,” he said, “a process that is now generally called the rise of consciousness.” Komodo imagined the Greek mind to be in a state where what
had been
was still fresh enough to be remembered, yet, due to the ongoing cameral augmentation, these “old” thoughts could only be expressed in “new,” rational terms. It was a unique juncture: directives once deemed so important to survival were now becoming peripheralized, yet they persisted, echoed. An explanation had to be sought as to the origin of these powerful messages. Therefore, utilizing their newfound reason, these fresh-minted Tricamerals declared the voices in their heads, those that they supposed came from the Oracle, but that actually emanated from the very wellspring of their former existence, to be articulations of the newly conceived notion of Deity.

“Think of it, Ms. Brooks!” Komodo went on, inside that Quadcameral model. “To be relieved of the turmoil of not knowing, to hear the voice of what you took to be indisputable Truth within your own head. Nowadays, of course, this is no longer so. The ensuing years have witnessed the absolute triumph of consciousness. The old voices have faded, are not universally heard. Naturally, many yearn for them still, but this desire is considered more idiosyncratic than paradigmatic. Externalized replacements, faith and prayer among them, are far from instinctual. The psychic record has splintered. Perhaps it is just this condition that has led to the confusion that many experts refer to as the modern spiritual dilemma—”

“It’s not fair!”

Maybe it was being back in the model again, letting his mind wax contemplative regarding the Quadcam and its eventual purpose within the Evolloo that caused him to go on as he did, but now, hearing Sheila Brooks’s shout, Komodo was shocked into silence.

She looked ravaged, crazed. “Why isn’t it like that anymore? Why doesn’t it do that for you anymore?”

“Excuse me, Ms. Brooks?”

“Your head! Why doesn’t it tell you what to do anymore? Sure, it tells you things—but they’re wrong. Dead wrong!”

She grasped Komodo’s wrist. Her long fingernails dug into his skin. “Now if you hear voices you’re crazy. A nut! A schizophrenic! You got to take pills. They lock you up. Is that fair? Tell me, is that fair?” A streak of electricity lurched through the facsimile, whiting out the chamber for a moment. “It’s not fair! It’s sick!”

Komodo tried to calm her. “But Ms. Brooks, the mind marches on. Its current configuration is neither fair nor unfair. It simply is.”

She jumped to her feet, her stark mane oozing into the ceiling of the small neural grotto. A wild look overcame her. “But I don’t like how it is. I don’t want my brain to be like this. I want to go back—back to how it was!”

Komodo stood up as well. “But that is not possible. Return is illusion. Nothing goes back to the way it was.”

“It doesn’t have to be back—just out! Out of here!” She looked up, pointed to a trapdoor. “What’s up there?”

“Up there?”

“Yeah! What’s up there? How come it’s got a padlock on it?”

Komodo’s face grew ashen. “That’s the fourth chamber. The fourth chamber of the Quadcameral.”

“I want to go up there,” she said flatly.

“But Ms. Brooks . . . that’s not possible.”

“Why not?”

“Because . . . it doesn’t really exist.”

“
But you said it did!
” She began pulling at the lock.

“But Ms. Brooks! It is not finished!”

“I don’t care. I’ve got to get up there!”

“But . . .”

“Please!”

He couldn’t refuse her. He pulled a large skeleton key from his pajama pocket and fit it into the lock.

The fourth cameral! Komodo held his breath as he led Sheila Brooks up the small stepladder into that uncharted realm. It was as Komodo said: unfinished. There was nothing up there, just some naked molded plastic, a pile of particle board and sheetrock, a couple of tri-prong outlets. He’d left it like that, a bare attic. What else could he do? He couldn’t conceive the inconceivable. True, he’d been inside the
real
fourth quadrant—he’d climbed inside Gojiro’s head, banished a hundred million supplications, short-circuited that 90 Series, but that was different. That was an emergency. He hadn’t looked around. He’d just cut the wires and left.

“But there’s nothing here.” Sheila Brooks shouted into the empty chamber. “Nothing at all!”

“I told you it might take generations. Hundreds of generations.”

“But I don’t have a hundred generations!” Sheila Brooks grabbed Komodo, crushed her long white fingers around his arm. She was a lot stronger than she looked.

“Don’t you get it? I’m going crazy!” she cried. “I try my best to do my job, to make up those movies, help Bobby. But it’s no good anymore. I start up, thinking it’s going to be okay. Like the nightmare’s gonna be perfect and all I got to do is tell it. But then it comes! Those pictures, the same ones every time, throwing everything else out of my head, blowing the good nightmares away. Don’t you see the trouble I’m in? I didn’t dream
Ants for Breakfast
, I made it up . . .
I faked it!
That’s why it bombed! That’s why they’re on Bobby down at the studio. Because of me!”

She began slamming her head with her fist. “That’s why I wrote you that goddamn letter!”