I went back to MOL after work. Todd stood in the computer room, source of the catastrophe, scrutinizing my face as if, at panel edge, overlooked by everyone, he might find some hint of horror's miracle waiting to flame. Nothing I could report helped. My friends had news of their own, a wrinkle more pressing than Jimmy's prognosis. The hospital DP operatives — Todd's and Ressler's opposites at that immense institution — processing Jimmy's numbers, revealed that his coverage had not yet been reinstated.
"His mother called."
"How is she?"
Todd shrugged nervously; care had to be rationed, focused to a point. "She's either the emblem of strength or doesn't realize what's happened. She says the hospital needs proof of alternate ability to pay."
The man I'd seen the night before would need feeding, clothing, changing, constant surveillance, and a year of slow, expensive therapy that might come to nothing. An after-tremor could surface with the next clock tick. The hospital staff discovered the billing irregularity and served notice in under forty-eight hours: thus health science, the keepers of the human spark, in the Information Age.
Disaster (continued)
A part of Jimmy's brain had dissolved in the hemorrhage faster than a sugar cube in coffee. His was near one extreme of a spectrum of tissue failure. At the other, the best anyone gets away with is a steady evaporation beginning in late teens, racking up thousands of neurons a day, making every aspect of experience — cheerful revisionism notwithstanding — continuously harder to master and easier to miss.
Ten billion switches, by conservative estimate, are each wired to five thousand others, regulated by neurotransmitters and neuropeptides whose scores of enzyme dialects control a chaos of simultaneous translation conveying desire, fear, torture, pleasure. No sooner does the switchboard wire itself to survive the world of experience than it begins to dismantle. It flashes out in a violent short or disintegrates imperceptibly. All that varies is the tempo.
I have until now faulted words, blamed the messenger of mangled news for keeping me from my answer. I should instead be prostrate with gratitude that words can mean anything at all, given the nature of the receiver. The thing is jerry-rigged, carrying around in its own triple fossil a walkie-talkie wrapped around a shrew-screech encasing a lizard's intuition. Absurd paste-up: gothic chancel tacked onto Romanesque crypt fronted by rococo nave. The wonder lies in its comprehending anything, its ability to work its supreme invention, the shaky symbol set.
Word into synapse is even more approximate than substance into word. The brain, in the subtle dozen hours when it reaches its zenith, already wades through a dissipation that leaves it searching without success for those three syllables beginning with an "F" about which everything has been rubbed out except the certainty that they sat at the lower right corner of an even-numbered page. The word was "forfeiture." The word was "filigree." The word was "forgetting."
A hundred trillion synaptic bits, each capable of threshold effects, compressed into a kilo and a half, split into two lumps connected by 250 million cables. Twin-view parallax resolves the field into multiple dimensions. The most complex entity ever thrown together, an organ vastly more complex than the plan that assembled it, locally violates the Second Law. Every brain extends itself with a ten-thousand-item template, puts together continuous unprecedented messages for no other reason than to model in miniature everything that exists and half that doesn't. Five billion living brains, a hundred billion already dead, each sickeningly bound into a net surpassed only by the single thing they are bent on weaving.
Stockpiled deep in the magnificent kludge, buried in the cerebellum, hippocampus, corpus callosum, the device knows its own unwiring. Thought carries a little pattern of terror around inside it, the realization that it shouldn't even be around, that it will soon fall back into distributed static. "What a day," Jimmy sometimes greeted the second shift, throwing up his arms. "I should have been a chicken farmer. What else can go wrong?" He knew what else could and one day would, knew before anybody, and only his tired joke stood between him and nothing.
The map of circuits, like their mobile case, is shaped by evolution. Synapse routes that presage their own immanent shorting out must also have been selected for. What good can it possibly do to know, every paralyzing, conscious hour, that the prop holding me up to a smoky little aperture onto everything is already, even as I name the process, dissolving in a stroke or a gentle stream? Medullar terror at returning to randomness is behind every urge to pattern the world. Hardwired to fear is the breeding scream.
Desperate copulation evolved long before cerebral terror. Male dragonflies scrape a female clean of previous sperm before mating. Cheater fish slip between the throes of a thrashing couple and make their secret deposit. But the truly promiscuous, the ones who couple with everything that moves, who cannot stop propagating even to eat, who fill notebooks into the night: fear makes us father for our lives. Todd excavated me as if his organ were a fixing gauge. Learning that nothing could come of it, he left, scared off. Only wilder fear drove him temporarily back.
Natural selection edits with an eye only toward what the message says, not to what it means. It has no interest in the fittest solution, nor the most efficient. The fittest thing life could do would be to die immediately and join the overwhelming efficiency of inert space. Selection hinges on one thing alone: differential reproduction. Double faster than you die. Dissolve slower than you replicate. All organs are an attempt to leverage this edge, even this crazily immense, already unwiring circuit. I know; I can feel the pay telescope starting to flick off. By Jimmy's count, with luck, I might get six more years.
Losing the Signal
How much space might he clear away in himself for this brilliant, two-manual experiment in naming? He has no precedent, no Jeanette template, no chromosome locus synthesizing the next step. Dr. Koss is his only instructor. They test the limits of their freedom, walk openly through town, feeling the violation, not daring to believe what they do. Their walks are exercises in synchronization. Their legs cadence. They talk in overlap, complete one another's sentences, laugh at each other's jokes before they're made. A small miracle, for once in this life, not to have to explain.
She spends the night, an extended, sleepless night of semaphores. Jeanette stands peach-naked, stretches, touches her toes in morning's light, showing herself to him. "How do you like your eggs?"
He would ask: Are we wrong? Am I destroying something real and immediate in you? Are you denying your husband's sacrifice, losing the intimate, accumulated weight of your past? But her eyes are sparks, looking for affirmation of the rightness of this moment. He must not violate her joy, and says, "Ova easy."
The article appears, makes the rounds at Biology. It includes a photo of Ressler among Faces to Watch and gives a bastardized, erroneous thumbnail treatment of his mutagen investigations. It paints him as arcane, isolated — qualities that may have been requisite for serious creative effort in the past but at this hour are inimical to effective science. On pub date, log-jammed almost at solution, he wants nothing more than to be brought back into the fold, to work together with Ulrich toward some common persuasion.