Dr Pearce smiles across the desk. "First you must map out the terrain. Just some rough idea of clusters. That can take a while. There's no point going for a better resolution than 200 cells, the Markov limit for independent subsystems. The top level of the face recognition hierarchy's about that. Hey Jake, you don't have to make notes, you'll be able to replay all this; it'll all be buried somewhere. But you'll have to be an archeologist; once you've dug a site up there's no way of putting things back quite as they were. There's no backtracking. That's why we recommend you leaving delicate areas alone until your technique improves. Trouble is, unless you do chance your arm sometimes you won't know where to look next. So take care. Remember, you are both patient and surgeon. There's no one to ask 'Does it hurt?'. By the way, can you control your dreams?"
He hears himself say "Yes" and becomes aware of the darkened room again. His chair seems to change shape around him. He places a hand on each side of the sphere and bends forward to peer down into it, following the folds and wrinkles. He can make any part glow at will, the result of 6 months feedback sensitisation. He sits back, takes a deep breath and presses grid 111 on the pad, an early find. A constellation lights up, one point in the olfactory region far from the rest. Sunflower, the name he had filed it under, flashes on the wallscreen along with a montage of images he had culled from the library as an aide memoire. He moves the focus into the bunched bloom with the levo- ball, feeling the ray nozzles massage his scalp as they turn, then he squeezes so that the focus shrink to the size of a pea. He presses once on the pedal, feels the supersaturation. He presses again, harder.
Beyond the train window, fields of tall sunflowers go by,
separated by hedges of broad-palped cactii. Tangiers is still hours
away. Immobilising heat. The three arab youths opposite start
talking again. Their leader looks at me. I'm scared. Who'd stop him
if he jumped me? He starts singing an old song I know by Cat
Stevens.
It's not time to make a change; just relax, take it easy.
You're still young, that's your fault,
there's so much you have to go through.
The shock of hearing English stirs me. He probably doesn't
understand a word but he sings with such conviction, like a
muezzin. A ruck of passengers charges past in the corridor. The
youths slide open the door and force themselves into the melee.
Then silence. Alone in my first class compartment again I stare
out, pressing my head against the window. The sunflowers have
given way to sparse fields of cattle watched over by tall hooded
figures leaning on staffs. A huge ticket collector enters followed
by his equally portly assistant. "Votre billet, si'l vous plait?" He
beams at me, his stomach sweating between the strained shirt
buttons. Vous aimez le Maroc?" "Oui, tres." As they leave the
assistant waves me goodbye. I curl my legs beneath me. Looking
out again I notice the moving shadows of people on the roof. I
start humming the song. But how did the boy know I was English?
What had given me away? And how did he know how I felt? Even
here there's no escape.
"Can you control your dreams?" "I've never tried" "It just needs a little nudge now and again, nothing too conscious, that's the secret. We get rather caught up in our own pet theories round here. We need someone like you, happy to venture into the unknown like the old explorers. Forget all that stuff about grid coordinates; follow the rivers, triangulate by the nearest landmark. You're building up an underground map, not a satellite photograph. You can't trust distances or colors." He looks back at his terminal. "You've never had epilepsy have you Jake?" "No. Why?" He gets up, takes the helmet from its stand and settles it on me. It's lighter than I expected from the way he was carrying it. "Well, random sparks are always going off in our heads. In epileptics they tend to clump together". He dims the room lights. The sphere's hologram glows a faint green. "Of course it all depends where the discharge happens. If it's in a particular part of the frontal lobes you have a religious high and lose your sex drive. It's all down to chemicals in the end, Jake, even god." "Especially god. I'm sticking to rationality". He sits at his desk, the sphere between us. "Well," I say, "will I meet a tall dark stranger?" He follows my gaze to the glass sphere where the spectre of my brain hovers like a flying saucer. "I'm sure there's one in there somewhere. You never know your luck. See how the sparkles come and go? Pretty isn't it? Like falling stars. If you find yourself believing that the alignments aren't just chance, that we have a pattern, a purpose, then's the time to turn off." "Is that the only danger?" "Don't worry" he smiles,"We won't give you full power until we're sure you're able to control it. And you'll not be allowed to move the focus into the danger zones. Think what would happen if you moved into the motor region and discovered how to control your hands; a puppet pulling its own strings. But the rest of your cerebellum's all yours." "Gosh thanks, but I could still make quite a mess of things". He takes off his glasses. "It's always going to be a lastditch method but it has its place. Why shouldn't a rape victim have the right to forget? Don't we all have that right? If we can change our nose, why not our memory? Whose brain is it anyway? Why not burn your bridges." "We say Boats". He stares at me again. "Hey look Jake. Sure you want to go through with this?". "You asked for volunteers, Frank, and here I am". "You never talk about her. What was her name again?"
I like silence. These little art galleries are the only place I can get away from it all. Pity about the pictures. Post-Abstract Expressionism, whatever that is. "Great aren't they? Like a sunflower done by Pollock. You know, really spacey". I turn. A student taking my literature course. Katy. No, Kathy. "You're having me on". "What do you mean sir?". "All this twentieth century jargon. You weren't even born then." "I was living a previous life somewhere. Where were you?". "London. I moved here when I was 10." "So you never wore your dad's baseball cap or collected fireflies in peanut butter jars." "No, I've got a lot of catching up to do." "What's your sign?" "I was born Libra but became Scorpio. I blame my parents. And you?" "The 13th sign. We've all got one."
"I know what you've been through, we all do. You're sure there's no better way? I may be old fashioned but there's no harm in finding someone new" "It's been 2 years. Signing up for euthanasia only takes 1." "Depression's guilt about something beyond your control. It's over now." "Of course! Christ, what a fool I've been! Thanks doc". I get up, shake his hand and make to leave before sitting again. "Perhaps you really have been a fool, Jake. At least, in a Shakespearean way, diverting our attention. It's your trademark" "I know. And you're only trying to help. Sorry. But I have tried. During my sabbatical I went on a long holiday, travelling. Each day there was some new discovery about despair. It kept me going for a while, knowing things could change. But then things didn't. I stopped being a fool then, I think." "Hey nonny no to that. If we were talking shop I'd advise you that love's like any other emotion. Just chemicals. There's a theory that it's just an evolutionary relic of the ingraining a duckling has for its mother. Your first love sets the mould, the others are variations on a theme. You just have to kill off that 1st template." "That's what I'm here for, but how? You said memories are like holograms; if I destroy a part I'll just make the overall picture more fuzzy, won't I?" "Holos are the favorite analogy for everything now, Jake. At one party Prof Carter said that the world is nothing but the sum of people's perceptions of it and when someone dies, our world is impoverished. He said it was like the world getting drunk; it gets fuzzier. If he hadn't have been fuzzy as a newt he'd have gone on to say that nevertheless there are some specialised zones. We call them grandmother cells, they react to specific stimulae like your grandmother. If you knock one out you don't get it back in a hurry. The technique is to create a replacement for it and only then kill the original off. The dependent concepts migrate to the new node with luck. It's the hidden thoughts which are the killers. They circuit like a syncrotron, sapping your energy, but you don't know about them until suddenly they reach escape velocity and go 'bang'." "Grandmother", he says and 3 of the centimetre squares lights up. He touches one and a snapshot of his gran appears. This time he presses the pedal gently. Then comes the smell of heavy velvet tablecloths in a musty room. He sees flashes in the globe, feels his consciousness hijacked by the smell again, this time merged with sweat; the smell of once luxurious dresses, bought from a rag store. "Find", he says and the square most matching his new brain activity flickers on the panel. He touches it, presses the pedal just a little. There's no rush now.
"He's my favorite, Van Gogh. Ever read his letters?" "No" She walks over to her bookcase, her long floral dress hiding the motion of her knees. "You should. He wanted to be a pastor you know, but he was too intense for his flock. You know his Yellow Room ?" "Yes" "He said it was like warm butter. He wanted it to have a plain white frame, a revenge for rest, he said. He was Aries. They're often fiery." She flicks through the book. "Blake would have loved Vincent. He called chiaroscuro the Infernal Machine . He loved sharp edges. He said that Nature has no outline, only imagination has. Why did they use so many capitals?" "They always did that when it rhymed, I don't know why", I say shrugging.
"Who knows?" says the doctor, "It all depends on whether there's enough in the cluster to constitute a person and whether the clusters are isolated enough. If so, then you get multiple personalities, otherwise you get Island Intelligences." "What?" "Tut tut. You haven't read my book. Idiot-savants; they were famous in Victorian England. A moron would come up on stage and the master of ceremonies would get the audience to ask him arithmetic questions. They were incredible sometimes. Autistic of course. In most people the clusters are always in flux, that's how ideas develop. It's like evolution. These little isolated populations of cells can evolve quicker, maybe even get overrun by a mutant, then the changes get re-introduced into the general population. If there is an overall boss, an ego, then it's language; these personae are all represented by the same spokesman. We have to believe that we are one. That's why we look for god, why the word was god." " She was always different. Like lots of people playing Pass the Parcel. You never knew when the music would stop. That's what I liked about her. I was something solid that she could rely on so that she could explore and always feel safe. We changed each other. Our difference in ages seemed irrelevant. But she learnt from me faster than I learnt from her. After all, she was the student, not me. It all came to a head one afternoon, without warning in Kennedy Square. I still don't like going there." "As long as she's distinctive she can be separated out. Heard about the Randolf net?" "No" "Oh well. Time for another lecture. It's a multidimensional representation of potentials. You can imagine it as a landscape. The low lying basins are concepts, the valleys are associations between concepts. She's a low lying lake in your mind; all associations lead to her. You have to raise her up, let her drain off."
Floating in the Dead Sea on my back, reading a newspaper so I can tell my friends. I turn to the horoscopes, reading each in turn. They could all be mine. The salt drying on my stomach itches. I let the paper fall, the words dissolve away. Gently I spin myself about. Red hills surround me. On the still air the sound of rivers, waterfalls or perhaps the sound of distant traffic. Tired. So hot. I roll over and fall asleep.
"And there are mountain passes which can only be traversed when the sun's out, when the net's in a high energy state. That's where our technique come in. We heat and cool the region, anneal it. It's like fractional distillation; if you're lucky, then when the energy reaches a certain level, memories of her will boil out, become visible. And what's visible can be shot at. If you don't kill it when you can then it will slip away like a wounded bear or a river that dissipates and cascades into its surroundings, and you'll have to start your search all over again." "You make it sound like a Fantasy Adventure game" "It is, Jake. There's a lot of luck in it and you need good reflexes but play the game enough times and you're bound to win in the end." "Winning by losing. You know, she went on about a 6th sense but she had no sense of the past. She'd work for ages to improve her powers of observation but memories came back to her at random. She lived in the present, never looking back. The Quechui indians say that the future's behind them, that they walk backwards into it. I wonder why we don't." "Because we've replaced forwards and backwards by inwards and out. The past is buried and the world is round. Ready to start now?". I nod. "Well I'll leave you to it then", he says, turning off the light as he goes.
"Hold Infinity in the Palm of your Hand And Eternity in an Hour. Here". She passes me some art postcards. I look through them. "No, the backs. Here's a pen." She's written tacky greetings to her family. I sign them like cheques, wondering how much she's told them about me. "Let's go", she says when I've finished. "Where?" "Don't know. Just out. I'm fed up with this place." A mattress, a pine bookcase and a TV on a chair, turned down but always on. She kicks some clothes into a corner. I get up, look out of the window and down the Manhatten avenue where cars and taxis sparkle like a canyon stream. Her window box is in flower, her garden gnome smiling back at me. "Ready?" We take the elevator to the littered street and slalom through tourists. At the pink flashing beacons she gives me her purse. "Hold this", she says, and cartwheels over the crossing. Cars hoot a hit parade of tunes. I follow at a distance. Towards Central Park a man greets her and stops but she walks straight by, hooking my arm. "Ever been to see Kennedy?" "Mum took me soon after we moved to the States." "I've never been. Come on, show me." We pass through the park and pause to watch a squad of schoolchildren eating lunch around a statue of Neil Armstrong. The lead torch he holds up has discoloured his left side where the rain has stained. We watch the fountains, the children feeding the squirrels and the birds. Amongst the pidgeons a budgie vainly battles. "We should have bought some bread", she says. "Budgies don't eat bread". We cut through the financial quarter. It's Friday afternoon, the bars are already full of rowdy young executives. The sights and sounds blitz us so much that we don't say a word until we reach Kennedy square. "There's hardly any queue", she says. "That's good" "Yeah, we can hit the bars earlier." "No, I mean that attendences shoot up when the country's in a crisis. I read an analysis in the Statesman." We shuffle along in the queue, reading the scroll of miracles on the wall. "Who was that guy in the park?" "Someone I knew" "That's all you're going to tell me?" A woman is lead away from the entrance by two men. As they go by us I see that the child she's carrying is a mongol, one who slipped through the genetic screening. We pay and enter the mausoleum. Inside we only speak in whispers. The attendants in white gloves keep us on the red carpet. In single file we pass the body under bullet-proof glass. No coffin of course or even a hospital bed. He rests under a knitted quilt, all the life-support equipment hidden. An old radio is on the bedside cabinet. Perhaps it could be playing. He is grey but cleancut. I wonder what they do with the shavings, the cut toe-nails. I'm pleased when we're outside again. "He's putting on a bit of weight but he's hardly gets any older, Jake. I wonder what he's thinking? Suppose he had died; we'd all have forgotten him by now." "No great loss." "Look Jake" Ahead, an old lady was crying into a hanky, "maybe she's remembering the good old days" "Maybe she's lost her budgie. She looks the type." "You always have to spoil things." "One of us needs to keep their head screwed on". "But I don't want to be dragged down all the time. I want to be myself Jake, just me."
He comes to in a sweat. Now or never. His hands race over the panel like a crazed pianist's. One by one he focusses and kills the stars, slamming his foot down at each creshendo as if the brakes had busted. When there is nothing left he remembers a planetarium. London maybe. Too long ago. He remembers a story he read when he was little about stars going out, something about god. His eyes water. He remembers a glass trinket being turned upside down and righted so that a snowstorm falls on Old London inside. "Find", he says. A box on the panel flickers. "Grandmother", he says, slumping over the sphere, cool on his cheek.
Under my bare legs, the sweaty plastic of a car seat. I clutch the toy she let me keep, turning it over and over. There's a bubble that makes a noise when I shake it. As dad revs up I look out. Behind, on the sidewalk, gran. She's dad's mum. My mum's mum's grandma. She can't wave cos she's holding her walking frame, but she's all smiles. And my father, checking his mirror, I wonder what he feels. I wave till long after she's out of sight.
"Bye", he says. But she was gone. He rips off the helmet then suddenly calm again, places it upon the globe. The door opens. "You ok Jake?...Jake?" "Yeah, sure". "You had me worried there but you're through the worst now. The only problem you'll have is its addictiveness. We're even thinking of producing a domestic version to offset development costs. Without the kill option, of course." "When the walkman version comes out, let me know." He stares back at his distorted reflection in the globe as if it were a stranger. "Jake?...Jake?"