Hyperthought (13 page)

A digital chronometer hung on the wall, the kind medical suppliers give away for free to advertise their products. Every hour, it played a short, brassy jingle. It was driving me nuts. Near evening, a young man came in carrying a tray of sandwiches and a carafe of water. He was small and delicately made, with olive skin and large brown eyes. His long nose hinted at Semitic roots. He wore a white smock, and though his thick black hair was combed straight back, one springy lock fell over his forehead.

“This is wholesome food,” he said when I opened my mouth to protest. “Eat it, please. You must stay strong to help Mr. Sura.” He spoke in a soft soothing baritone. I watched him move around the bed and touch Jin’s carotid artery with his finger, checking the pulse.

“Can you shut up that clock?” I asked.

He raised his eyebrows and looked at the thing. Then he yanked if off the wall. “I’ll take it away if it annoys you. Please call me Hamad. I am Mr. Sura’s caregiver.”

“Caregiver!” I sneered at him. “What kind of caregiver works in a place like this?”

Hamad lowered his head. His thick lashes fluttered on his cheek. “I am here because I must be. Please don’t ask why. It shames me to explain.”

What he said puzzled me. I took a seat in the only chair and watched him with a suspicious eye.

“You’ve had nothing to drink all day, Ms. Sauvage. You must be very thirsty. Please, this water is pure. I promise.” He poured from the decanter.

My throat tightened as that clear cool water sloshed into the cup. Mes dieux, but I craved it. When he placed the cup in my hand, I gulped it down and poured myself more.

Hamad nodded, satisfied. Gently, he checked the tubes attached to Jin’s body. Then he pulled a slate from his smock and moved from one monitor to the next, comparing readings. I noticed he moved on the balls of his feet like a dancer. He had beautiful hands. When he sat on the corner of Jin’s bed and looked at me, I saw green flecks in his irises.

“You’re doing fine,” he murmured in his deep voice. “This may take time.”

“Tell me what Merida did to him.” I bit into the sandwich.

Hamad sighed heavily. As he studied Jin’s face, his graceful eyebrows knotted. “Mr. Sura is a troubled man. You know this. He’s troubled by his limited understanding. He feels a duty calling him, but he cannot see it clearly. Mr. Sura suspects that much of what passes for reality is only a dream inside his brain. He wants what no one else has found—Hyperthought.”

“What no one else has found? You mean Merida never tried this before.”

Hamad stood up and walked around the bed. His narrow chest rose and fell in another long sigh. “In technical terms, Dr. Merida’s procedure should enable Mr. Sura to perceive the quantum-level input to his brain. We all receive—ah—call them ‘vibrations.’ They come to us through the complex quantum fabric of mass and energy that links the universe.”

“Huh? The what?”

“I apologize, Ms. Sauvage. My words are insufficient.” Hamad brushed the lock off his forehead, but it fell right back. “The universe consists of quanta—infinitesimal packets of energy. Each of us, each rock and planet and bead of water, every solid object, every aroma and sound and ray of light, we all emerge from this underlying fabric of interchangeable quantum energy.”

“Is that where we go when we die?” I whispered, swallowing half-chewed sandwich.

Hamad didn’t seem to hear my question. Instead of answering, he took a damp cloth from his pocket and began to wash Jin’s face. “These quantum vibrations act on our brains continuously, linking us in a vast trembling web of interaction with every other existence in the universe. Though we’re not conscious of this quantum input, it sways our emotions, our judgments, our actions. It binds our world together in complex patterns. This interplay forms the very ground of our being. Poets and philosophers invent metaphors for it. Ah, but Mr. Sura wants to see it face to face.”

Hamad paused to refold the damp cloth. Gently, he began to clean the caked tears from Jin’s eyelashes. I thought about what Jin had told me earlier.

“He said we might dream a different universe with every heartbeat.”

Hamad seemed to consider this. “Who knows? We humans speak so confidently of our facts and figures. Yet our understanding of perception is staggeringly naive. Anything might be possible. I can understand this young man’s ardent desire to know. Indeed, who hasn’t glimpsed the depths of the night and wondered?”

I pushed the unfinished sandwich aside. “Merida isn’t sure about what she’s doing, is she? Jin’s a guinea pig.”

The young man’s brows knotted. He stuffed the cloth in his pocket and sat on the bed, facing me. “Dr. Merida devised a new kind of nanobot, a molecule-sized artificial life-form engineered to evolve and learn the quantum language. Over time, the bot was supposed to recognize the nonlinear patterns of quantum energy, then to translate and boost the signals, so to speak, so Mr. Sura could ‘hear’ them. She—ah—explained the risks.”

Hamad’s mouth quivered. He seemed so contrite, I felt a pang of sympathy for him. He continued in his soft, sad baritone, “When the doctor injected the nanobots into Jin’s frontal lobe, they replicated much faster than expected. They were designed to spread over the surface of his brain as a living neural net, a kind of secondary cerebral cortex, doubling Mr. Sura’s powers of cognition. But instead, they penetrated deep into the inner cerebrum and began to populate the astrocyte cells.”

“Astrocytes. Jin used that word before. What does that mean?” I gripped the seat of my chair, not totally sure I wanted to know.

“Astrocytes are cells shaped like stars. They’re located throughout the brain, and usually, in mature adults, they lie dormant. Asleep, as it were. But with proper stimulus, astrocytes can trigger neurogenesis. That is, they can propagate new brain tissue.”

Hamad leaned across the bed and slipped a hand under Jin’s cheek. “What Dr. Merida failed to predict was the way her nanobots would awaken Jin’s astrocytes. The nanobots entered the sleeping cells and stimulated a rapid cascade of neurogenesis. But the new brain tissue is—not normal. It’s—we can’t define what it is.” Gently Hamad lifted Jin’s head off the pillow. “Mr. Sura’s brain weighs half a kilo more than it did before the operation.”

I must have gasped aloud.

“His brain hasn’t swelled,” Hamad said quickly. “There’s no physical damage, I assure you. The aberrant new tissue has commandeered empty spaces within other cells.”

I was too shocked to speak. My eyes wouldn’t focus. I couldn’t even begin to process the information he’d given me.

Hamad exhaled a ragged sigh. His remorse seemed very genuine. He whispered, “Stay strong, Ms. Sauvage. Talk to him. You’re his best hope now.” And with that, Hamad the caregiver left us alone.

Silently, I prayed to the Laws of Physics that, just this once, they might bend in Jin’s favor. Mes dieux, but I understood nothing! How I regretted my lack of education. And how I regretted the lost Net node that would have helped me download reference pages. Sleeping star cells. Rapid cascades. What on Earth was this aberrant new tissue in Jin’s brain? All I knew was that it must hurt like hell.

I climbed onto the bed and straddled his chest and began to massage his temples. No doubt, Merida was secretly watching, but I ignored that I just talked to him. Anything that came into my head. The way stars twinkled in telescopic metavision. The clear, clean layer of pure air I’d once found trapped at the bottom of a valley in Argentina. What sunrise looked like from the Karakoram Pass.

I smoothed his long, silky hair that no one had bothered to cut. Working my fingers down the back of his neck and along his shoulder muscles, I critiqued each of his movies, the early thrillers, the one surprising comedy, the dark later pieces that left me baffled. “You’re lazy, Jin. You pick good roles, but you coast along on sex appeal. Scuzz that. You could do better.”

Then I started interviewing him like some dippy ezine host, and I made up arrogant answers to put in his mouth, mocking his Pacific lisp, hoping to rile him. “Of course, fans worship me. There’s a reason they call me a star. My movies pull people out of hell and give them a glimpse of heaven. Ninety minutes at a time.”

This and other nonsense rolled off my tongue till my throat felt raw. Every hour, Hamad brought me a fresh carafe of water. I marked time by the regularity of his visits. Hamad’s encouragement kept me going, but how long can you talk before you grow stupid? I found myself chattering stray thoughts, dreams. I told Jin my fantasies. I confessed that I loved him. None of it did any good. At one point, I grew so frustrated that I hauled Jin up to a sitting position and began to swing him back and forth, yelling, “Wake up! Wake up!”

Hamad rushed in and made me stop. “Please calm down, Ms. Sauvage! You’re overexcited.” As he checked Jin’s fragile connections to the monitors, he asked me to get off the bed. “You’ve been talking more than 20 hours. Time to rest.”

I felt a sting on my shoulder and glanced around just in time to see a cybernurse withdrawing a jet spray. “A sedative,” Hamad whispered. My vision blurred. Ça va. Lights out.

I woke the next morning, groggy from sedation. Hamad brought me a breakfast of liquid nutrient. Then the three cyberguards—I nicknamed them les trois mousquetaires—the three musketeers—they trundled me down the hall to Jin’s bedside, where I began another marathon monologue. We followed this routine for four days. I suppose they were days. Inside that steel room, I couldn’t tell for sure. Since Hamad had taken the wall chronometer away, his regular visits were my only gauge of time.

The steel walls reflected fuzzy unresolved images, the white blob of the bed, my vague beige form hovering above. Merida must have scrounged her medical apparatus from some bargain fire sale. It looked like surplus junk from the 20th century. The air smelled faintly of saline and skin salve, and after a while, I couldn’t even hear the liquids dripping through the tubes.

On that fourth day, I asked Hamad, “Do you really think Jin’s doing this by choice? What could be so horrible to make him deliberately withdraw from consciousness?”

The question upset Hamad. He paced around the room before he finally sat down to face me. “There was pain,” he said at last. “Our medications didn’t help.”

The tremor of Hamad’s voice stopped me cold. For several long moments, we sat together in silence. Then Hamad checked the monitors and left.

That day, I tried reminding Jin of his passion to learn the truth. I pandered to his ego. I said he had a special mission, and the whole world was depending on him to choose the right course. I said his brain had sprouted a pair of tentacles with little receiver dishes on the ends, and that he could tune in the music of the universe anytime he wanted. All he had to do was stop dilly-dallying and open his eyes! Bien, his eyelids didn’t even flicker.

Then I hit on the idea of his father. I never had understood the relationship between Jin and his father. I just started talking randomly, imagining what such a father must be like. And I got sort of worked up.

“What kind of man makes three-year-olds work in factories? He’s a monster. You want to smash his face, right? Knock him down. Stomp him. But he’s your father. He gave you life. You feel a bond with him in your gut, and you know he feels it, too. So the two of you can’t leave each other alone. You dance around, fencing with each other, giving little nicks and cuts, and Jin, you’re always bleeding. Mes dieux, but that’s askew.”

The door flew open, and a cybernurse rushed in, followed by Hamad. “There’s a spike in the alpha waves,” he whispered tensely. “Keep going. Mr. Sura is listening.”

While the cybernurse injected a stimulant into Jin’s bloodstream, I stammered. Knowing so little, what could I say next?

“Speak to him!” Hamad commanded.

“Your father wants you to fail,” I began. Who knows where those words came from? “He—he’s afraid of you. He pretends to ignore you, but he really watches every move you make—because—because he’s afraid you know something he doesn’t. If you give up now, your father wins. Don’t let him stop you, Jin. Fight him!”

I felt the bed shake. Jin’s body started jerking erratically. Whether from the force of the stimulant or from his own effort of will, he’d gone into a seizure. Another cybernurse rolled in, and Hamad pushed me out of the way. I pressed back against the wall as they held Jin down and strapped him to the bed. Hamad adjusted the cocktail of drugs entering his neck port, and the monitors beeped wildly.

“What’s happening? What are you doing?” I shouted.

“Get out!” Hamad’s rude tone surprised me. I stayed rooted to the spot while he and his cyberteam worked frantically around Jin’s bed.

“Father.” That was the first faint word Jin moaned. As he said it, his muscles stopped jerking, and he lay in the damp sheets laboring for breath, his chest heaving. His eyes blinked opened, but I don’t think he could focus. His thin hospital wrapper was soggy with sweat. He turned his head on the pillow, grimacing in pain. His lips twitched as he tried to speak again. “Father,” he croaked.

All at once, the three musketeer cybergoons appeared in the doorway. “Get her out of here,” Hamad commanded over his shoulder as he continued to work. One of the guards grabbed me by the nape of my neck and hauled me into the corridor, but not before I saw my Mend Hamad transmogrified into the fierce little Dr. Merida, laboring to save Jin’s life.

HOW DID SHE
do that? How did Merida disguise herself as the gentle Hamad? Did she use holographic projections, hypnotism, hallucinogenic drugs? Or plain old-fashioned stage make-up? I don’t know. Once burned, twice burned, how many times would it take me to wise up? Still, Hamad had helped me coax Jin back to consciousness. I’m not sure I could have done it without him—her. Hamad had seemed so caring and sincere—was that a lie, or did Merida really have a gentler side? Mes dieux, but she kept me off-balance.

Two days passed, and I heard no news. The light-strips in my cell glowed constantly, so I had to use my own circadian body rhythms to track time. Uncle Qués had taught me that trick, back when we were kids together in the Paris tunnels. It required an eye-popping ton of concentration, but what else did I have to do?