Hacker: The Outlaw Chronicles (5 page)

“Hey.” I smiled, gave him a little wave.

He didn’t so much as blink.

“Been a while, huh?” I said.

“What are you doing here?”

“You know . . .” I raised one shoulder. “Just in the neighborhood and I thought—”

“How’d you get in?” His attention flicked past me, as if expecting a SWAT team. He was twitchy, with dark rings under his eyes. He had the appearance of someone on an obsessive mission—heck, I’d been there myself: living on candy bars, coffee, and as little sleep as humanly possible.

“Seriously? I’ve had lunchboxes with better security than this place.” I walked toward him and stopped a few yards away. “Can we talk?”

“I’m in the middle of something right now.” He glanced at the control board.

“It’s nice to see you too.”

He sighed, turned his attention back to the control panel, and began adjusting knobs again as if I weren’t there. “I’m serious,” he said. “Now’s not a good time. It’ll have to wait.”

“No.” I stepped closer. “It’s important.”

He continued fiddling with the controls, put the headphones on again, but this time with one pushed back off his ear. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’m listening.”

“You stopped going to Dr. Benton.”

“There was nothing else he could do for me.”

“So you gave up?”

“I didn’t say that.” His hands moved over the control board “This is what you wanted to talk about? Why I stopped going to Benton’s?”

“No. It’s not,” I said. “I’m in some trouble. Things have gotten complicated.”

He looked at me. His eyes were puffy. Tiny veins etched them like red roadmaps. “Things are always complicated with you.”

You should talk,
I wanted to say, but it wouldn’t help my cause. I wasn’t there for me or for Austin or for the idea of us. I was there for Mom. Period.

I reached out and touched one of his constantly moving arms. “Austin, please. I have nowhere else to go. You’re the only one who can help me. When I say I’m in trouble, I’m serious. Very serious.”

He turned toward me slowly, this time a look of concern crinkling his brow. “What’s going on? What kind of trouble?” His voice was softer.

I swallowed. “I need to borrow some money. I’ll pay you back, I promise.”

“Sure, okay. How much?”

“One fifty.”

“That’s it?” He reached around toward a rear pocket.

“Thousand,” I said. “A hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

“Okay . . .” His hand came back empty. “That’s a lot of money.”

“I know. It’s for my mom. There’s a chance to get her into an experimental trial, a neural prosthesis that can rebuild brain functionality from the inside out.” My words were rushing out now. “It’s her only chance, but they want us to pay for it. They’ve had really good success so far and—”

“You’re talking about the PREMIND trials.”

That stopped me. “You’ve heard of it?”

“Enough to know it’s a long shot, though it’s a step in the right direction.” His face became puzzled. “That’s a military program. DARPA’s got their hands all over it. Why would they let your mom in? She’s not military.”

I pulled a wad of folded up paperwork from my pocket and held it out. “They’re making a rare exception since her injuries are consistent with the case-study profiles.”

He took the documents and scanned them quickly. “That you could get her into this is pretty impressive. No one makes exceptions like that. You must’ve been really persuasive.”

“Yeah, but the problem is, we now have to front the cost. Austin, it’s her only hope. I’ll pay you back, I promise.”

“Listen, if I had it, I’d give it to you.” He glanced at me. “You know I would.”

“What do you mean,
if
you had it? You’re a millionaire.”

His face was impossible to read as he stood there.

“Right?” I said. “Austin . . . ?”

“Was. I was a millionaire. I plowed it all into my own research, every dime and then some. I have maybe five grand in cash.”

I felt punched in the stomach—again.

“Besides,” he said, handing the paper back. “PREMIND’s more sizzle than steak. I hate to be the one to tell you that, but I’ve read the data. I’m not impressed with the promises they’re making. They’re attempting to mimic the hippocampus’s neural signal processing via nonlinear transformations of multisignal input dynamics into output signals translatable to storable code.”

“In English, please.”

“They’re creating a prosthetic that receives sensory data then processes, encodes, and stores it as a memory. Nothing more. Despite the progress they’ve made, their prosthetic can’t heal the biological mind.”

I lowered my head. “It’s the best program I’ve found. Maybe the only one that can help Mom.”

“The best program, yes, but an ineffective one at the moment. Generally speaking, I agree with one aspect of their thesis, that the physical brain is merely biological hardware running software programmed into us through nature and nurture. The PREMIND project is focused on patching the hardware so the software can run more efficiently. Seems straightforward and, for what it’s worth, logical. But that’s only half of the equation. They’re attempting to resolve a nonlinear problem by linear means.”

I scrunched a brow at him. “I don’t understand.”

“Brain prosthetics hold limited promise in the near term, but there’s another way that bypasses the very need for them altogether.”

“What way?”

“By hacking the brain just like you would any other computer. Hacking it and modifying the operating system itself in a way that changes the hardware. They won’t figure that out, though, until they’re willing to take bigger risks, and I don’t see that happening any time soon.”

“Wait . . . what? Hack your brain? Like retraining it, the way they do with stroke victims?”

“No.” A smile bent his lips. “Not retraining,
rewiring
.”

“The brain? Physically? That’s . . . not possible.”

He reached up and peeled back the knit cap from his head. Underneath, his scalp was a dome of shiny hairlessness. He looked like a chemotherapy patient or a crash-test dummy.

“Actually, I know it’s possible because I’ve done it.”

“
A
USTIN
, WHAT have you done?” I raised my hand to touch his scalp, but he leaned away. It was then that I noticed the small, gleaming steel studs. They looked like tiny thumbtacks that had been pushed into his skull. “Did you drill
holes
in your head?”

“I had help, of course.” He said it matter-of-factly. “It’s amazing what surgical technicians will do for an extra five grand in cash.”

“Why would you . . .” I stared at the studs on his scalp and covered my mouth. “Why would you
do
that?”

“It was the best way to insert fiber optics through my skull.”

I leaned closer to examine the shining dots. There were four: each one was embedded almost flush with his skin and had a pinhole, nearly imperceptible, in the center. If the top of his head were a clock, they would’ve been at two, four, eight, and ten o’clock.

My mind was reeling. He really had gone over the edge. I watched his eyes jitter about, his gaze catching me, then flittering away.

“This is crazy,” I said.

“Neurosurgeons have been using this technology for decades. I’ve simply modified it for my purposes,” he said.

“What purpose would that be? ”

“Hacking.” A faint smile crossed his face.

“That’s what you call it? Is that what all of this is?” I waved my hand toward the lab equipment. “You’re trying to hack your own brain? That’s why you stopped going to Dr. Benton?”

“I stopped going because there was nothing else he could do for me. He’s limited to what he was taught in med school, to the same inside-the-box thinking to which ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the world ascribes. I don’t.”

“Meaning what? They’re smart enough to not experiment on themselves, but you’re not?”

“It’s this,” he said, pointing to his bald head. “Or death.”

His words stopped my stuttering thoughts. So that was the truth. “You’re dying?”

“We’re all dying,” he said.

“I’m serious,” I said. “Are you? Dying, I mean?”

I could hear it in his voice and see it in his eyes, however faintly: fear. In the past he had been stoic to the core, nothing ever showed. But something had shifted in him since I’d last seen him.

He nodded once. “The tumor’s spread. It’s only a matter of time. A very short time.”

It felt like my guts were cinching into a knot. It was the same feeling I had when I heard that my father and brother hadn’t survived the crash and when I first saw my mom at the hospital with tubes and wires coming out of her. “And . . . what you’re doing could save you?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. My condition’s advanced, but maybe what I’m doing could buy more time. The alternative is to sit around and wait to die.”

“How long do you have?”

“Based on my calculations, four weeks is the best-case scenario. Worst case: two weeks, maybe less. Aggressive tumors like mine are extremely unpredictable.”

My jaw unhinged. I’ve ordered books that took longer to reach me.

“It started here,” he said, touching a finger to the left side of his head. “And spread.” He drew his finger over his brow and stopped at the center of his forehead. “It’s in my frontal lobe now, my prefrontal cortex to be exact. Soon, it will destroy the part of my brain responsible for complex cognitive behavior and emotive expression. Austin Hartt, the unique personality that I know as ‘me’ will cease to be, and everything that makes me who I am will be gone. Eventually my autonomic system will collapse and my vital organs will shut down one at a time. My brain will forget how to keep my body alive.”

“Austin . . . I’m sorry.” I wanted to say more, but words seemed hollow and useless. What can you say to someone who’s watching Death reach out to him? “What about surgery?”

“The tumor’s like a weed with roots that have worked their way deep into my brain tissue. It’s inoperable.”

“Chemo?”

“Would buy me maybe an extra week, two at the most.”

“But it’s something. It would be worth it, right?”

“Hardly. Would you want to spend your final days pumping chemicals through your veins for hours on end, hoping to eke out one more day of sitting in a hospital room pumping chemicals through your veins?”

I said nothing, but my silence spoke for me.

“Doctors are highly risk averse,” he continued. “They play it safe, recycling the same old ideas, which leads to the same old results. It’s the outliers who push innovation, the people on the fringe who have nothing left to lose. Nothing important ever happened without someone becoming desperate. Right now, that someone just happens to be me.”

There was urgency in his words that I’d never heard before. The stoic intellectual I’d known as Austin Hartt was peeling away. In his place was someone obviously on the brink of losing everything.

He was brilliant, yes, but his genius was now laced with madness—not that I blamed him for it; the man was halfway in the ground. I could see the threads of insanity in his nervous, constant motions, the way he shifted his weight from foot to foot, the way his eyes darted around, never stopping on anything for more than a few seconds. His was a mind constantly churning, caged inside a dying body, desperate to survive.

“My research has opened up completely new ways of thinking,” he said, “ways that I’d never considered before. I don’t understand everything I’m discovering and experiencing, but I do know that I’m standing on the brink of a major breakthrough that could revolutionize our understanding of the human mind. It’s because of my research and self-experimentation that I’m not already dead.”

“How do you know that?”

“My data confirms it.” He began pacing, running his hand along his scalp as he moved. “I’ve compiled meticulous daily analytics since the day of my diagnosis—electroencephalograms, blood chemistry panels, psychological analyses, genetic mapping, stochastic models that render probabilities of various treatment outcomes. I’ve measured the tumor’s plodding, predictable progress, watching it like a train barreling toward me. I’ve affected the rate of biological deterioration by fifty-three percent. I’m still not entirely sure how, but I have some working hypotheses. All I need to do is crack the code before the clock runs out.”

“How does it work? What are you doing to yourself? Some kind of chemotherapy? Radiation? Is that why your hair’s fallen out?”

“Not fallen out. I shaved it so it’s easier to hard wire.”

“Hard wire,” I said.

“Into my brain, of course.”

“Obviously.”

“If I’m going to beat this, the pathway is here,” he said and tapped the side of his head. He was quiet for a moment. “Remember I told you about a delusional episode I experienced in Boston?”

I nodded. “It’s what made you seek out Dr. Benton, but that’s all you ever said about it.”

“Because I never accepted that it really happened.”

“Of course not. It was a delusion. That’s what you told me.”

He shook his head. “What if it was something more? During my episode, there was a girl—Christy—and she experienced some of the same things I did. We were friends back in Boston and I’ve tried tracking her down, but she’s nowhere to be found.”

“If it was just a delusion maybe she’s not even real.”

“She is. I know that as a fact. But the experience I had . . . I don’t think it was
just
a delusion. There’s another possibility, one that I hadn’t considered before. Maybe what happened to me in Boston was an epiphany that my conscious mind couldn’t process at the time. The human mind works in ways science doesn’t fully understand, especially when it comes to things like dreaming, intuition, and subconscious learning. During my episode I met a man named Outlaw. So did Christy. That’s why I wanted to talk to her, to learn more about her experience.”

“Outlaw. Who was he?”

“I don’t know, really.” Austin looked past me, as if searching for words in the air. “The best I can figure, he was a projection of my subconscious, which was drawing me into a new way of thinking that I could never quite grasp.”

“But if it was a projection of your subconscious, how could Christy experience it too?”

“That, I don’t know.”

He was flat-out scaring me. Hiding out in his apartment, drilling holes in his head, self-experimenting like some kind of mad scientist, talking about a figment of his imagination as if it were real—it was all too much.

There was wildness in his eyes, a desperate obsession that was driving him to the knife’s edge. I had an image of him in a straitjacket, laughing maniacally, getting dragged down a tiled hall by orderlies.

He raised his hand. “I know how it sounds, but hear me out. A few months after I moved here, my headaches worsened. None of my meds could take the edge off anymore. Then one night, while I was standing in front of the mirror, I had this pain. Everything stopped. I’d never known agony like that before, like having a red-hot spike driven through my head while a vice crushed my skull at the same time. I grabbed the countertop and had the sensation that I was untethered from my body.”

He shook his hand at his head. “I can’t explain it. It was as though my body was a vehicle and I was in it, looking out. I remember thinking how mechanical and cumbersome the body was. Not ‘my’ body, but ‘the’ body. Like . . . like . . . it was a spacesuit that I was merely borrowing. The whole time I could hear my brain
chatter
.”

His hands became puppets yapping at one another. “I now know it was the left hemispheric function of my mind, coordinating my body, telling it to move and do things that normally occur subconsciously.
Left hand, reach forward. Right hand, reach forward. Right leg, come forward. Plant foot.
Stomach muscles contract.

“That’s when things got . . . weird.”

“That wasn’t weird enough?” I asked.

“No. I looked down and realized that I could no longer define the shape of my body. The entire room, in fact, had dissolved around me. That’s the only way I can describe it—it dissolved and nothing was material anymore. The world was a vast field of shimmering pixels, just raw visible data. Most of it streaked past in blurs of light—I knew instantly that I was
seeing
energy traveling through the air—but some of it was organized in a way that I could recognize as my bathroom, my apartment, my neighborhood. I knew that I was organizing it that way with my mind, but really it
was
just energy.”

He was so excited, telling me this, that he rose up on his toes, dropped down again, rose up, bouncing like that, up and down.

“Then my . . .
consciousness
, I guess, turned inward and I saw myself. That’s when I saw the energy signature of my tumor’s physical matter. I was looking right at it. That’s when I heard Outlaw’s voice. It was unmistakable, but I couldn’t tell what he was saying because it sounded like the world was underwater.

“I was in that state for maybe seconds of clock time, but it seemed outside of time entirely. Then, as quickly as it began, it ended.” He clapped his hands together once. “Like a computer rebooting, my mind came online and, instantly, the world snapped back into the way I’d always seen it.”

I looked into his eyes—stopping on me, moving on—but there was no hint that he was telling me anything other than the truth. The truth as he believed it.

“What do you think happened?” I asked. “Was it a hallucination?”

His head shook vigorously. “No, no. Far from it.”

“A spiritual experience of some kind?”

“There’s something else at play here. Something we don’t have the science to explain yet.” He held up an index finger. “
Yet.
I started researching case studies and found that my experience isn’t isolated. There are hundreds of documented experiences similar to mine. For example, a Harvard-trained neurologist contracted a rare form of bacterial meningitis that rendered him brain-dead, beyond any hope of treatment. He was
dead,
but then he woke up and his brain had healed spontaneously. Complete recovery.”

“How?”

“No one knows, but he referenced the same energy field I saw. Another case: an Indian woman diagnosed with cancer in 2002 arrived at a hospital in 2006. The cancer had spread to every part of her body to the point where she couldn’t stand, move, or even breathe on her own. Doctors gave her hours to live. She too had some form of experience that transcended her body and mind.”

“She saw the same things you did?” I said.

“Yes, and when she came out of her coma she told the doctors she was healed. They didn’t believe her, of course, but within days she walked out of the hospital. No cancer. There are hundreds of cases like that, some more bizarre than others, but they all point to the idea that there’s a layer of reality that we could tap into if we only knew how. There are even cases of people born blind who, after having an experience like mine, described things they’ve never seen physically.”

“What?”

“I used to believe that the things I’ve seen, both in Boston and during my stroke, were delusions. Now I don’t think so.”

“How do you explain it then?”

He nodded. “It’s simple. I saw the data that’s just beyond our physical sight, the building blocks for the temporal world.”

“Data?”

“Energy . . . data . . . I don’t know what to call it. I’m sure there’s a scientific explanation for everything I experienced, even if none of it fits the existing models. Neither did quantum mechanics until a few decades ago.”

“So what are you trying to do, build a new model?” I asked.

“No, I’m trying to find Outlaw again. He, whatever he represents, is the key to understanding all of this. I’m convinced of that. Both times I encountered him were in that altered state, and both times my mental experiences had physical ramifications. Don’t you see? What happens in that substrate of reality directly affects everything else, including the physical realm that seems bound by Newtonian laws. What if we can get outside of the natural laws that we think constrain us?”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “Austin, it sounds—”

“Crazy, right? But think of it this way: what if the brain is nothing more than a biological computer, the physical tissue inside your skull, along with the hundred billion neurons and hundred trillion synapses that connect them—it’s all hardware. Without data inputs, the hardware has nothing to process so it doesn’t generate any output. For us, data is received through various phenomena: sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste. Without an operating system to translate the data and make sense of it, there would be no output—no perception, no self-awareness, no sensation. Our
observation
of the phenomena creates it.