Neuropath (36 page)

And in the parallel weave of existences, there was a stinging that was also a knowing, an understanding that he spoke not to 'Goodbook', not to the cartoon, but to the brain behind and beneath. And it heard him.

Neil drifted back to his worktable, a kind of torpor in his movements.

Click.

Then
Thomas
was watching him, reeling with something deeper than dismay.

'I'm confused,' Nora was sobbing. 'I don't… I don't understand what's happening. All I know is that
I love you
, Tommy. That's all I know!'

Neil spoke before Thomas's speech center could generate any words. 'And you know what you feel, huh, Nora?'

'I told you!' she cried. 'It's the deepest, the most awesome feeling of…' She trailed into silence. Her eyes fluttered. She swallowed, then let out a long, groaning sigh. 'Ungh,' she gasped. 'You
are
doing something to me, aren't you? Are you
touching
me? Are you-you-you-
yooooooo
—'

'You can see it, can't you?' Neil said, glancing at Thomas. 'See her for what she is.'

No
, something said.
Yes
.

'Mmmmm,' Nora murmured in a tone that stabbed for its familiarity. '
Ohmigawd…
'

Thomas felt his voice crack. 'She's no different than us.'

'Exactly,' Neil said, grinning. '
None
of us are real. Unable to see itself, our brains continually cook us up. It's just that at the moment, her brain finds itself one step lower on the causal food chain.'

He winked and added, 'Just like you.'

Neil made her weep. Neil made her scream, and he made it so that Thomas thought it funny—sublimely funny. The more ragged, the more tortured her scream, the more uproarious it became.

Then afterward, Neil laughed at his shame, and showed him every cubit of that monstrous emotion.

This time it was Nora who laughed.

Neil made her forget the minutes, then even the seconds, so that every breath she would say, 'Where am I?'

'Where am I?'

'Where am I?'

'Where am I?'

Between each game Thomas tried to soothe her, this jerking mechanism that had once been his wife. He tried to whisper reassurances that possessed no meaning in the ringing tin of his own ears.

But she could only weep, 'Ripley,' over and over again.

'Frankie.'

Neil made her come, then transformed the data signature of her voice into an algorithm that made him come. He stood between them and cackled as they cried out again and again, driven to orgasm after orgasm by the sound of the other's climax.

And Thomas did not want it to stop.

Then Neil did the same with pain, so that her wagging shrieks made him buck and howl, over and over again. A pain beyond weeping. A pain beyond succor or reprieve,

A pain only fallen angels could know.

And something began to understand.

Something… not him.

He was nothing more than an output, a kind of holographic speaker system that generated experience like sound. He had lived the abstract force of the Argument for too many years for it not to be rote, reflex. But this…

The nimbus of white ringing all points of illumination. The ache murmuring through teeth cracked for gnashing. Flexing rage. The battering love and horror. Arching lust. The glimmers of hope and beauty. And the pain, the overriding pain.

All of it falling from his best friend's fingers.

He was but a moment, something deeper than him realized. Nothing more than a fragment, fooled by blindness into thinking itself whole. Notes contemptuous of the instrument.

Music oblivious to the score.

He was still screaming when Theodoros Gyges appeared at the very edge of seeing.

Impossible. But there it was, the coarse beard climbing acne-scarred cheeks, the bearish eyes far too sharp for such a blunt face,
there
, hanging on the verge of visual oblivion, motionless, watching with the blank fascination of a tourist who had wandered through an EMPLOYEES ONLY door at Disney World.

Thomas spared him no thought.

He had no thought to spare.

The billionaire strode into the blurred circle of his agony. Thomas did not care when he raised the crowbar. He did not rejoice when Neil looked up from his monitors too late. He did not start at the watermelon-thump. He did not thank God.

The crowbar fell again and again. Screens and equipment danced to spitting sparks.

Then the pain was gone.

Nora twitched across from him, her eyes rolled back into her head. Neil lay stretched across the concrete floor, his face bent toward Thomas, his body broken-doll still. He seemed to blink and work his mouth. Somehow Thomas knew that his neck was broken.

The burly man stepped up to Thomas, peered into his face. Thomas tried to say, 'It's me,' but he had screamed his voice to blood.

With thick thumbs, Gyges unscrewed the bolts holding his head in place. The pain of unthreading the bone seemed almost a joke. Thomas let his chin loll against his chest as the man unbuckled the remaining restraints.

'It's me,' Thomas finally rasped. 'It's me, Mr Gyges… Thomas Bible.'

The billionaire nodded. 'And that's him?' he said, nodding to Neil across the floor.

'It's him… Neil Cassidy.'

The billionaire held Thomas's elbow as he stepped clear. Even so, he fell to his knees.

'You followed me.'

'The GPS in my car,' Gyges said.

It seemed to Thomas that he had known all along. That he had waited. Everything had coordinates, nowadays, even roads unmarked on any map. Everyone could be found.

'You get your family,' the man said. 'Then you leave.'

'I-I do-don—'

'You leave!' Gyges barked. 'You do not want to hear… to see…'

He turned from Thomas, pulled a long knife from a sheath strapped to his left calf. He kneeled, placing his right knee in the small of Neil's back. He used the knife to scratch an itch on his bearded cheek. Thomas saw dried blood marring its sheen.

He felt no surprise. He lacked the neurotransmitters.

'The spine is the door, the connection…' Gyges said, looking at the task before him. He turned to Thomas, his piggish eyes rounding in a kind of wonder. 'Cut it and the soul is preserved, kept safe, wrapped in a box…

'Don't you see?' Gyges hissed, staring down his cheeks like some ancient chieftain. 'I only fuck the
meat.'

Thomas backed away from the madman, knowing there was no reason, no connection…

He was just noise. One more senseless output.

'I only fuck the meat!'

Thomas glanced at Neil's face, saw the brain behind it reaching for him through the pose of facial musculature, clutching with primeval visual cues. He could see it
looking
, peering through keyhole eyes, buzzing with anguish and information, trapped by the severing of a single cord.

It pulled Neil's lips into a rueful smile, pinned his face into a pathetic grimace.

Goodbook
, it mouthed.

Please…

'What I do,' Gyges gasped with coital intensity. 'They know… but they do not
feel
.'

Untouched, Thomas turned to free his ex-wife. In his periphery, he could see Gyges hunched over Neil's broad back. But he dared not look. The billionaire had become a thing of blood and sawing shadows. A monstrous tabloid horror, murmuring as he worked…

'Look at you.

'Boned like a fish…

'Like a prom queen with low self-esteem.

'I will fill you like a cup…

'Like something holy.'

The false premise in Neil's argument.

After freeing her, Thomas held Nora's face to his chest so that she too would not see. '
Look at you…
' The Chiropractor brooked no witnesses.

They held hands as they climbed the basement stairs. A series of colorless images assailed Thomas with each and every blink. He saw Cynthia Powski, her skullcap drawn back like the curtains of a theater stage. He saw the Museum of Natural History diorama that had so impressed him as a kid: male and female australopithe-cines walking side by side across a vast plain of volcanic ash. He remembered asking his father what had happened to them, whether they had gone to heaven. 'Do you see wings?' his father had snapped.

My son
… Thomas thought as they crested the final steps.

My son and daughter are dead.

All was dark upstairs. Nora's face, bruised and bloodied by Mary's screws, seemed to float in the gloom. Neither of them spoke. When they turned on the lights, it seemed they could see too much. Cobwebs in the corners. Hardwood floors that seemed to creak beneath the weight of their gaze. No furniture. No pictures. No obligatory antiques. Thomas knelt and picked a small white card from the floor, studied the painted real estate agent smiling from the corner photo.

WELCOME HOME!

the gold-embossed letters shouted.

He let the card flutter from his fingers. Then he wondered where Neil had hidden the bodies.

Nora began testing doors, gingerly, as though feeling for fire beyond the blank wood panels. Thomas followed her lead, more out of some instinct to mimic than out of agreement.

They found the children thrown like luggage across the floor of a spare bedroom. The heads of both were dressed, Ripley with gauze clotted with small spots of blood, Frankie with the original bandages from the hospital. Feeling the flutter of their pulses, Thomas wanted to weep, but there was a gaping hollow where his joy and anguish should have been. He gathered his unconscious son in his arms instead, rocking him the way Nora rocked Ripley.

Both were sedated.

They took Nora's car, which Neil had pulled out back. Thomas was too numb to care that she had willingly brought their daughter to her monster lover.

The way he had brought their son to his monster friend.

She sat in the back with both their children, gently weeping. It seemed fake, somehow. Thomas drove, entranced by the apparitions that swept up and around his sensorium.

The headlights illuminated too little road, a wedge of gravel rimmed by bracken and flailing trees. They rolled into the black. Everything flying outward, into the black beyond and behind them.

'Gyges was the Chiropractor,' he whispered to her image in the rearview mirror. 'Neil made him… A diversion, a way to strangle the resources devoted to finding him.'

Not that explanations mattered anymore.

'How?' Nora croaked.

Everything would be shadows after this—simulations. No fear, no pain, no joy or love would be as profound, as
true
, as what Mary had shown him. Neil was gone, and the world was back behind the controls. Only the familiarity of the things Thomas thought and felt set them apart.
He
was the difference, which meant he was nothing at all.

Like this very moment.

'Mommy?' a little girl's voice whispered.

Thomas heard the sharp intake of Nora's breath.

'I love you, Mommy.'

'I love you too,' she rasped.

'Yesss,' Ripley said. 'I really,
really
, love you…'

The words were right, but the world that gave them meaning was so very wrong. Soon, Thomas realized, his son would awake also.

Then the screaming would begin.

'I luvvvvvv…' his daughter cooed in a smiling, teary-eyed voice.

'Shhhh,' Thomas croaked. 'Time to sleep, honey.'

Experience, unspooling like a movie, qualms for color, hopes for shape, decisions for the illusion of movement, waiting for the bulb to burn through, for the celluloid to boil into black rings, so that it all could vanish into the hidden frame, leaving only catcalls and white light on a white screen.

'So much it hurts, Mommy.'

AUTHOR'S

AFTERWORD

Since this book turns on an intricate

combination of fact and

fiction, I thought I should try to clarify, at least in general terms, which is which. In so many ways writers are the least trustworthy of sources, not only because of the sheer breadth of the ground they cover, but because they spend so much time alone with their opinions.

Love affairs are inevitable.

Of the myriad details regarding psychology and cognitive science that appear, the majority are either fact or close extrapolations of fact. Some, however, are what might be called 'future facts', results that have not been obtained, but very well might be, given a pessimistic interpretation of existing trends. The stuff regarding free will is a primary example. To my knowledge, researchers have yet to determine rudimentary choices before any conscious awareness of making them.' The notorious findings of Benjamin Libet, I think, are too freighted with ambiguity to say one way or the other. By the same token, it seems very likely that free will, certainly the way it is generally understood, is in for a very, very rough ride. For those interested in an accessible overview of recent trends in consciousness research, I highly recommend Susan Blackmore's excellent
A Very Short Introduction to Consciousness
.

There is of course no such thing as Marionette, but since it's simply a deep-reaching version of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, a technology that has already entered its maturity, I'm inclined to think it's more a matter of
when
we'll see such devices than if. Of course, all the glimpses of what Thomas experiences while in Marionette are sheer speculation, but entirely possible in principle, which is all the Argument really needs.

The same might be said about the novel's central 'novum', low field fMRIs. These have been in the research pipe for some time now; the question is how long that pipe will prove to be, especially when it comes to scanning individuals' brains as they go about their business.

I want to say 'very long', but the resources gathering on the horizon are more than formidable. Marketers are taking that fateful step from training us like animals (via associative conditioning) to treating us like mechanisms. There are tremendous amounts of money to be made.

As for the marriage of technology and the brain, that day has already arrived, and the therapeutic possibilities are nothing short of breathtaking. Forms of depression, blindness and deafness that seemed incurable only years ago now seem destined to become maladies of the past. But since I wanted
Neuropath
to be a thriller, one that strives to be intellectually as well as viscerally disturbing, I primarily focused on the more frightening implications of our 'post-human' future.

As a result, the book will no doubt smack of alarmism and technophobia for those who see a cornucopia of possibility in the 'post-human'. For my own part, I think we have every reason to be more than a little paranoid. Fiddling at the edges of brain function to relieve suffering seems an obvious good. But the stakes change drastically once we begin manipulating the machinery of consciousness.

What happens when
experience itself becomes
as pliable as paint? What happens when the only measuring tape we possess becomes as elastic as a rubber band? Altering our own neurophysiology means altering the very structure of our experience, the shared bedrock of our humanity, not to mention the tools required to decide further alterations. There's good reason to believe that self-modification at such a fundamental level will send us looping out into different directions of insanity. Either way, we quite simply
cannot imagine
what a world without this common frame of reference would be like. And if it were the case that things like meaning, purpose, and morality are kinds of illusions, then there's no reason to expect any of them to survive the post-human future to come. Post-human optimists generally base their arguments on the very experiential staples they intend to render obsolete. They assume that some 'humanist center' will hold when their arguments imply precisely the opposite.

They are literally advocating what they cannot conceptualize, which in a sense means they are advocating nothing at all. When it comes to the post-human, we really have no reason to be anything other than profoundly uncertain. And profound uncertainty regarding essential matters warrants excessive care.

Or as I like to call it, paranoia.

Recent years have seen a number of popular works written by philosophers trying to head off the nihilistic implications of contemporary neuroscience. Someone like Daniel Dennett, for instance, wouldn't so much argue with the science of
Neuropath
as he would argue with the interpretation. It's not that freedom or morality don't exist, he would say, only that they're not what we take them to be. Rather than wringing our hands, what we should be doing is reinterpreting our old concepts in the light of new scientific evidence. So something like 'freedom', for instance, could be redefined as 'greater behavioral versatility'.

To me, this amounts to reassuring mourners at Grandma Mildred's funeral by telling them to simply name their household pets 'Mildred'. I don't know about you, but my experience of freedom is not the experience of 'greater behavioral versatility' or however you want to scientifically redefine the term 'freedom'. It really does seem as though I'm confronted with choices, and that I could at any moment do otherwise. The problem isn't that our concepts are out of date, but that our
experiences
are out and out deceptive.

But even if it were a matter of terminology, why bother with the old nomenclature at all? Why, outside of the tendentious desire to eat one's conceptual cake and to have it too, not just say, 'Well, you're not FREE, it's true, but you sure are VERSATILE'?

But of course, the real difficulty is that despite their business-as-usual appeal, 'reconciliations' of our popular and intuitive understanding of human nature with recent discoveries in the sciences assume that we actually know what these discoveries mean, when it is painfully obvious that we do not. All we have are trends, which seem to point to a continued undermining of apparent experiential verities, and the knowledge that we are not what we thought we were. We really have no reason whatsoever to think that science will offer us anything remotely recognizable, let alone, as Owen Flanagan argues in
The Problem of the Soul
, 'preserve much of what it means to be a person'. The fact that we can cook up his kind of reassurances should come as no surprise; we're hard-wired to rationalize, after all.

Personally, given our all-too-human ability to pluck conviction out of abject ambiguity, I think philosophers should strive to be gadflies, not apologists. If you take your arguments beyond the pale of empirical testability, you're pretty much bound to arrive at the conclusions you want,
especially
if you're as brilliant as Dennett or Flanagan.

The 'Blind Brain Hypothesis' that I give to Thomas is actually a creation of my own from several years back, when I was still actively pursuing my PhD in philosophy. It's little more than a hunch that the basic structure of conscious experience would be far better understood by reference to what the brain
lacks
than to what the brain has. Since this is one of the most crucial and contentious 'future facts' presented in the book, I thought it might merit some more explanation.

Take one of Thomas's favorite examples: the Now. It is the lens through which we experience time, yet it somehow remains outside of time. Each Now is in some mysterious manner both different and the same—a paradox that has exercised intellects as far back as Aristotle. Given the Blind Brain Hypothesis, however, the Now might be seen as a temporal version of our visual field, the boundaries of which somehow just 'run out'. We receive no visual information beyond the scope of our retinas, so we see nothing beyond that point, nothing
at all
, not even the absence of seeing. We literally see, in other words, against an undifferentiated frame of sightlessness, which is why the edges of your visual field just… end. We rarely register this because of all the other systems that stitch our keyhole glimpses into an entire world. But from the standpoint of sight, our visual field literally hangs in oblivion.

The same might be said of our 'temporal field', what William James famously called the 'specious present'. In the same way we can't see the limits of seeing, the idea runs, we can't
time
the limits of timing, so we literally experience earlier and later against a frame of timelessness. This would be what generates the illusion of before and after, the strange bundling of the past and future within the Now. Time passes in consciousness, but in a strange sense it can't pass
for
consciousness. The bulk of the brain, after all, lies outside the information horizon of the thalamo-cortical system, churning away in timeless invisibility.

For structural and developmental reasons too numerous to elaborate here, the brain can only 'see itself in blinkered terms.

According to the Blind Brain Hypothesis, this not only determines what is conscious and what is unconscious, but the very structure of consciousness. The Now is no small feature of lived experience. It also means that for many features of consciousness, it makes no more sense looking for 'neural correlates' than it does looking for 'visual drop-off circuits' to explain the strange limits of our visual field.

According to the Blind Brain Hypothesis, conscious systems like humans should have an exceptionally difficult time understanding themselves—as indeed happens to be the case. Since the brain only glimpses slivers of its own processes, small fragments that it can only see as wholes, we should expect it not only to be baffled by the findings of neuroscience, but to insist those slivers
really are wholes
, and as such require some mechanism in the brain to explain them. If the Blind Brain Hypothesis is true, then much of cognitive science could very well be a wild goose chase, a search for 'magic coin circuits'.

The upshot seems to be that consciousness is illusory through and through, as opposed to just here and there, which is why I find myself in the strange position of wanting my own theory to be wrong. We now know that much of what we take for granted, experience-wise, is simply not what it seems, more than enough to ask all the hard questions covered in this book. But if consciousness is fundamentally, structurally deceptive, then the reason we have so much difficulty trying to figure it out could be that we have no way of knowing just
what it is
we're trying to figure out. And perhaps we never will.

Personally, I am neither an eliminativist nor a nihilist; I genuinely believe that what we
experience
should trump what we know. But like Thomas, I just can't figure out how to argue this honestly, let alone convincingly. We, as a species, have an exceedingly difficult time with claims we don't like, and we typically muster all the power bias and ignorance have to offer to confirm our preexisting intuitions. (For a sobering tour of just how bad things are, check out David Dunning's
Self-Insight
, or Cordelia Fine's splendid A
Mind of its Own.)
Humans are believing machines, credulous to the point of comedy, be they priests, philosophers, or assembly-line workers. Once you come to appreciate this fact, it becomes very hard to credit anything in the world of competing claims, and very easy to understand why, despite thousands of years, so few of our innumerable theoretical disagreements have ever found conclusive resolution—outside of science,

that is.

This is not to say that science is the end-all be-all, only that if you believe, as I do, that not all claims are equal, and you appreciate just how inclined we are to dupe ourselves, then science, which is institutionally and procedurally structured to combat (as opposed to exploit) our shortcomings as believers, quickly starts to seem like the only remotely reliable game in town. And as the book suggests, science doesn't give a damn about what we
want
to be true. In a sense, this is the key to its power.

The world of
Neuropath
is a world where these 'unwanted truths' have reached critical mass, both socially and spiritually. It's a world where the pace of technologically driven social change has outstripped culture's ability to cope, where the black box of the soul has been laid bare to the appetite of irresistible institutional forces. And it very well could be
our world
.

Whatever the case, knowledge and experience have come to a crossroads, and things don't look so good for experience. What used to be the abstract worries of philosophers have been covered with skin and hair. Neil, I'm afraid, is alive and well—at least in embryo.

We should be prepared.