Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (15 page)

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m fine.”

Kit smirked.

I stuck my tongue out at her.

“Look at this,” Natazscha said. A big wall monitor came to life, with a blue-gray image of a brain in the middle of it. The image shimmered and twitched: it was a short video loop, in which waves of colored highlighting drifted and sparked. Beneath, like a caption, there was a long succession of codon triplets—a gene sequence:

TAA AAC TGC TGG AAA AGT

AGT CTT CTC TTC TGT CTG

CTT TAG ATT ACA AAA CTA

TCA CAA ACA TAC AGT GTG

AGA CAA GCC AGA ACA TAC

“That’s me?”

“Not yet. This is only a standard case, for comparison. A typical brain, which for these purposes means someone with no speech or language abnormalities but also no special talents. Not a Babbler.”

“You?”

“No. Carl Bates.”

Rosko pointed to the screen again. “What’s the DNA stuff underneath the image?”

“Segments from chromosome 7 in a gene known as FOXP2.”

“The language gene,” I said. “Isn’t that what they call it?”

“We know FOXP2 has something to do with language, but it’s more complicated than that.” She tapped a key. The image on the screen slid neatly to one side, and a second image came up, with its own block of codons. “This is the brain of a man in London. His family is famous in the research literature. They share a rare defect in FOXP2, and although they have normal general intelligence, they can’t produce or understand words in a normal way. So here’s what I’ve worked out. Babblers appear to have an even more radically mutated FOXP2. It generates an entirely different protein, which I’ve called FOXQ3. And the effect of FOXQ3 on the brain architecture is dramatically novel.”

The faint hum around my temples cut out, both images on the screen slid to the left, and a third appeared on the screen.

“Me at last?”

“You at last.”

The first two images disappeared, and the third one expanded to fill the whole screen. The visualization was amazing. My brain! My everything! My own personal zone of miracles! It was luminous blue gray on the monitor, like spotlit smoke, with a shifting overlay of green, red, and electric turquoise. Natazscha zoomed in toward a point near the center, and it was as if we were falling into the image, accelerating down through cloud layers of neurons: space-troopers fearlessly navigating a dense, mysterious nebula. But eventually we reached a layer of tissue that was solid, palpable, with an infinitely fine grain to its surface. She guided an arrow onto the image and brought it to rest in an area that looked like flakes of pastry.

“This is low resolution compared with what we can do. But we’re now inside your right-side hippocampus. See how it’s larger here, at this side, than in Carl’s scan? This tiny ribbed patch, just a couple of cubic millimeters, is where all those extra languages of yours get stored and processed.”

“Is beautiful,” Kit breathed, silkily.

“Thanks,” I murmured, trying not to move. “It’s the first time you’ve mentioned liking my right-side hippocampus.”

“Never showed it to me before. Shy girl you are. But is like, yah, sure, dead sexy.”

“It’s part of the limbic system,” Natazscha said loudly, as if that would prevent her or anyone else in the room from noticing that the word
sexy
had been spoken. “Limbic system. Important in memory. The point is, I think FOXQ3 is what makes people Babblers. And, while Derek Partridge and your ancient friend Shul-hura are busy convincing you that language and full consciousness showed up all in a rush seven thousand years ago at Thera, I’ve been working for years on evidence that the Neanderthals had full speech at least forty thousand years earlier.”

“That would mean Professor Partridge’s theory—that this all begins with Thera—can’t be true,” Rosko said.

“Derek is fixated on Thera and the Bronze Age, and I agree with him that something strange happened in that period. But
Homo sapiens
having language, and ten million other species not having it,
that’s
the real puzzle. The answer has to go deeper than the Bronze Age.”

“I don’t see why language is such a big deal,” I said, and reeled off all the usual pop-sci about animal cognition. “It’s just a continuum, isn’t it? From fish to crows to dogs to us? Gorillas do sign language. Chimps trick one another. That thing about vervet monkeys have one warning call for
snake
and a different one for
eagle
. Elephants checking their bald spots in the mirror.”

Natazscha wasn’t impressed. “Misses the point, Morag. Not a single one of those species can compete verbally with a human two-year-old.”

“So you’re saying animals are stupid. What does that have to do with Partridge?”

“I’m not saying animals are stupid. The point is not that they can’t master language, but that they don’t
need
to. For millions of years, before we came along and started exterminating them, chimpanzees were hugely successful at being chimpanzees. Without ever using language. So why do we have it? Most people just don’t grasp how incredibly strange it is that language ever showed up.”

“Every species is different.”

She shook her head. “Having language isn’t like having spotted fur or sharp teeth.”

“I don’t see why is big difference,” Kit said.

“Imagine you’re doing research on rain-forest frogs,” Natazscha said. “Some species are bigger or more brightly colored than others, or have extra toes or poisonous skin. You’ve spent years classifying those differences, sorting out order and family and genus and species, the familiar Linnaean dance. Then one day you come into a clearing and discover a species of frog that’s, I don’t know,
good at playing chess
. Language is like that. We’re so used to it that we can’t see what a fantastical thing it is. It breaks all the rules. It should not exist. Everything about us is driven by evolution: when the creationists say that natural selection can’t explain the eye, they’re just advertising how little biology they know. But language truly is an evolutionary puzzle. It doesn’t make sense. It’s a superpower. Where did it come from?”

“Gift from God,” Kit said. “According to Babel story.”

“Aha, but Morag’s friend Shul-hura says that’s backward, doesn’t he? According to him, God didn’t turn one language into many to prevent us from communicating. We were already speaking many languages, and doing just fine with them, at the point when the Architects arrived. Where did those original languages come from? There has to be a much older origin.”

“But,” Rosko said, “I thought you only had to go back to the Neanderthals for the vocal tract to be the wrong shape for speech?”

“And also Neanderthals is too stupid,” Kit said.

“Yekaterina, you never listen to anything I say. We like to say that early hominins like
Homo erectus
must have been much less intelligent than we are, because they had smaller brains. But we also want to say that the Neanderthals were too primitive for language, even though their brains were
bigger
than ours. Apparently we’re so clever that we don’t even have to be consistent. As for their vocal equipment, the jury is still out. But that debate may be irrelevant. Language doesn’t have to be spoken.”

“I don’t understand,” Rosko said. “What else could it be?”

“FOXP2 helps the brain’s centers of perception communicate with the larynx. But in monkeys it helps those same areas connect with the parts of the brain that control the hands. Have you never seen someone gesturing even though they’re talking on the telephone? Have you never seen two people having a conversation in ASL?”

“You’re saying our ancestors could have had sign language before they had speech?” I said.

“For all we know, complete languages could have preceded any
spoken
language by tens of thousands of years. Who knows? But I haven’t told you the most important part yet. Everyone in the field’s been looking at FOXP2 as the human norm. So, either you have FOXP2 and you’re fine, or you have a damaged version and that’s a terrible disability. The existence of Babblers made me think: What if FOXP2, the norm for our species, is the disability? Maybe FOXP2 is the signature of a terrible handicap in our evolutionary history, like losing the ability to fly or something. And then there would be a reason why we lost it.”

“What are you getting at?” I asked.

“We have complete genomes now for several hundred early Paleolithic humans, a dozen Neanderthals, three Denisovans, and one of the Red Deer Cave people. As far as I can tell, not one of them has FOXP2; they all have FOXQ3. If that’s right, then you and the other Babblers aren’t a new evolutionary development. You’re a remnant of the old ‘normal.’ The rest of us—me, Kit, and more than ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the species—are profoundly mentally disabled.”

Kit rolled her eyes ostentatiously. “That makes me feel great. Before I am just not good at languages, or maybe dumb. Now I get to be ‘mentally disabled.’ Thanks, Matushka.”

“I don’t think Natazscha meant—” I said.

“Yah, Majka, she did meant. And is so totally not fair. You guys, you don’t know what is like. Me, I work hard two years at English, also French, is difficult. Stay up late, give myself headache. But I have wrong gene, so I can’t do it, and I get also like crapshit grades.”

“Two things,” Rosko said. “First, your mother isn’t a Babbler, and as I’ve said before she speaks way better English than you do—”

“Because she study longer.”

“Because I went to Soviet schools,” Natazscha said. “If you didn’t get it right, they screamed at you and humiliated you and called you a capitalist dog. And if that didn’t work, they beat you, which is very effective.”

“And the second thing is,” Rosko said, “it’s either
crap
or
shit
. You have to say one or the other.
Crapshit
is not a word.”

“You think you own the English language or something just because you speak it so good, Rosko Eisler? Crapshit crapshit crapshit! There, see? Word used all time, in fact. Is common. Especially with angry young Russian womens. What I am saying, Natazscha works for years to learn English, and I work hard also, but you Babblers pick up new language like
pah
.” She clicked her fingers explosively. “Is not fair. Is actually crapshit.”

“Natazscha,” I said, “when would the genetic change have happened? From FOXQ3 being dominant, to what’s normal now?”

“A long time ago. Fifty thousand years? Eighty? Which puts it right at the beginning of the so-called Great Leap Forward. When the first cave art and deliberate burials show up, the first evidence of music and religious ritual, all that sort of thing.”

She pushed a button, and the tungsten helmet floated back to its spot on the ceiling, silent and weightless as before. I shook my head from side to side several times. I felt a strong need to make sure it was still attached.

“I’d like to scan Daniel,” she said. It was only then that we realized you’d walked away.

Kit jumped up and went out to the main lab. “The stairs,” she said, pointing. “There.”

You were almost at the top. Natazscha called out to you. “Daniel. Come down. There’s nothing up there. Just another lab and Mayo’s office.”

“You’re wrong,” you said, and kept going.

C
HAPTER
10

√2

At the top of the final flight there was a small landing. It had enough room for a potted palm, fake but plausible, and one of those random space-filler armchairs that you can tell no one’s ever sat in. The landing had one door, opposite the armchair, with a metal touch pad instead of the card reader we’d seen on the other doors. Natazscha punched in a code, swung the door open, and flicked on some lights. The air smelled sour, like uncollected trash.

You’d never been up there before, had you? Not to the fourth floor? Situation normal, as far as I could make out. They’d had public tours of the building and all, part of the university’s PR machine. Docents in their purple shirts waxing lyrical to their flocks of visitors about how ISOC was “bringing cutting-edge cognitive science to bear on the nature of the human self.” But even Rosko had never been up here; he said the fourth floor always got waved off. “Nothing interesting. The director’s office. Some conference rooms. That’s all.”

Nothing interesting.
Carl Bates was one of those docents, and he certainly knew that was a big fat lie, oh goodness, yes.

It was an almost windowless space, a copy of the spaces below. Office doors in blond wood alternated with lab benches around the outside. The sinks looked too clean to have been used. The only experimental setup, in the same position as the scanner downstairs, was on an L-shaped arrangement of tables at the far end. You walked right over to it and examined it with a jeweler’s attention, extravagantly intense, stroking each component as if to verify that it was real.

“What is?” Kit asked Natazscha.

“This is a laser. Probably a quantum computation experiment. It was one of the things Maynard Jones admitted to having a personal interest in.”

“Wow,” Rosko breathed.

“Wow because why?” Kit was making fun of him. Or indulging him. Or both.

“Because, Kit, if you could get a quantum computer to work, it would make that fancy machine downstairs look like an abacus. The logical architecture is based on qubits instead of bits, and they use a quantum superposition of—”

Kit held up the palms of her hands. “Totally enough. I believe everything you say.”

“It’s only theoretical, in any case,” Rosko said, annoyed that she’d cut him off.

One wall near the laser was taken up by a huge glass board. From six feet away, the surface looked clean. Up close we could see a ghostly forest of half-erased mathematical symbols, a handwritten text so dense it reminded me of Shul-hura’s cuneiform. You came and stood in front of the board with me; we were like two children in a fairy tale who’ve discovered the witch’s cottage.

“This angled bracket notation is familiar,” Rosko said. “Quantum mechanics?”

Natazscha peered at it. “Yes. This looks like a calculation of the Bekenstein bound. A measure of information density.”

“Information can have a density?” Kit said. I was thinking the same thing, but being distracted by a bell going off deep in my memory.

“It’s a kind of absolute limit on how complex something can be. Which apparently is a big thing in artificial intelligence.”

“Now I remember why that sounds so familiar,” I said. “Iona. Back when she was a lowly math student, before she set up her data-encryption company, the title of her thesis was ‘Minds, Machines, and the Information-Density Limit.’ Lorna told me she’d been working on how much information you could possibly store in one place—and how excited she was when she met an Australian bloke who was trying to calculate the information capacity of a human brain. According to Lorna they spent their first date talking about whether space-time is ten- or eleven-dimensional.”

Natazscha pointed to a door in the middle of the opposite wall. The sign said, “David Maynard Jones, Director.” It led to a space that was almost empty, with cleaned-out bookshelves, no extra furniture except a big metal cabinet full of office supplies, and a bare metal slab for a desk. On the desk there was a single unused yellow pad, aligned with the desk’s corner, and one of those old-fashioned multiline desk phones. I opened the desk drawers (empty), opened the cabinet (boxes of Post-it notes and pens, Scotch tape, more yellow pads), then closed the cabinet and walked slowly around the whole space.

When I turned back to you, you’d opened the cabinet again and you were rocking on your heels in front of it. You waved your hands, groaned, and lunged in with both arms, raking out the contents onto the floor. At the back of one shelf, at head height, there was a stack of half a dozen small cardboard boxes. You reached in and tugged out the lowest one. The boxes on top spilled sideways, then out, sending paper, toner cartridges, and paper clips all over the floor.

The box you were holding was the size of a large book. It had “Amazon Prime” on the side. You took it to Mayo’s desk, ripped off the strip of packing tape that was holding it closed, and slid it over to me.

“What is it, D?” I said, but you just looked at me, so I unfolded the cardboard flaps. And the first item I saw, lying on top, was instantly familiar: Iona’s orange camera strap. The color had faded from neon to pastel, and up close the webbing was frayed and thin. It was like a memory of the real thing: a signal from a past that I knew was real but couldn’t quite believe. Beneath it was Iona’s
Anabasis
, with her handwriting in pencil on almost every page. Beneath that, a sheaf of handwritten notes. Several old envelopes that had once contained handwritten letters, all empty. A few printed-out emails. Web clippings about the original disappearances.

“This is what you were looking for in Iona’s study,” I said to you. “Mayo, or someone working for him, must have taken them.”

“Oh my goodness,” Natazscha said. “This was hidden in plain sight. I’d already looked through that stuff.”

You picked up the camera strap by one end, and it unfolded. A transparent pouch with six square pockets was clipped to one side of it. Each of the pockets contained a square blue memory card. You picked one of them out and held it up between your thumb and forefinger, nodding. You spoke quietly, as if to yourself, but I heard: “I’iwa. I’iwa.”

“So this is good, yah?” Kit said. She was sitting cross-legged in the middle of Mayo’s desk. “We have what Daniel is looking for, maybe. He needs to get home and look at this. You need to get home and look at Disks. Also is after midnight, and we need to leave, because this place giving me bad feeling.”

She jumped down and went back out to the main lab area. I passed my eyes over Mayo’s office and the lab area one more time, willing them to yield up some new fragment of information, but there was nothing. By the time I came out, Rosko and Natazscha were already at the top of the stairs. But you’d stopped, clutching the box in front of a door I hadn’t paid any attention to, and you were shaking.

“What is
m-e-c-h
—metch?” Kit said.

“Mech”: that’s what the sign said. Natazscha sounded impatient and barely glanced back in her direction. “It’s short for
mechanical
. Air-conditioning, plumbing, that sort of thing. Come on. I want us out of here.”

“Strange though, yes?” Kit said, rattling the handle. “Big fancy computer is locked up, maybe I understand. But why plumbing door is only other one locked?”

You made a strange whimpering sound in the back of your throat and seemed to reach for the door and back away from it at the same time. The hairs on the back of my neck went all porcupine. Shoving Kit out of the way, I started pushing at the door. But there was nothing. It didn’t even rattle. It looked and sounded like I was pushing on a section of wall.

“Useless,” Kit said. “Get out of way.”

I did as I was told. Aye, I know. She looks like she never ate a diner breakfast in her life, but she’s also not a bad athlete. She backed up all the way to the wall, put her head down, and began to run as if launching off sprinters’ blocks. She only had room for four or five short, chopping steps, but she picked up an amazing amount of speed. Then she turned gracefully sideways, lifting her feet at the last moment, and allowed her entire body weight to collide with the door, right next to the handle.

A section of the frame disintegrated, but she bounced off and landed sprawled on the floor.

“Crapshit. I maybe break shoulder or something.”

I was stepping forward to check on her when you walked over to the door. The indecision had broken—your movements had a fluidity and purpose to them. After examining the damaged frame, you stepped back a pace and stood upright with Iona’s cardboard box in one hand. You looked like a soldier on parade. And then you raised one knee, screamed “No!” at a deafening volume, and let fly with a precise, powerful kick. Your heel connected with the wood an inch above the handle. The door emitted a single yelp, as if you’d stepped on the paw of a dog, and exploded inward.

Kit was fine. Rubbing her shoulder, she was the first to go through. I had a good view of her face, illuminated by a soft artificial glow, as she turned to her left.

In the movie version of the moment she would have cried out. Or maybe gasped and made a melodramatic gesture of some kind. But real horror is different. For barely a heartbeat, nothing, and then she folded sharply at the waist, like someone who’d been punched. She collapsed forward onto her knees, face pointed at the tasteful, putty-colored, polished concrete floor, and threw up.

Afterward, it was tempting to think I’d had a premonition about what Kit would find in that room. But when I stepped inside—one hand on her hair, trying to comfort her, and one hand flying to my nose and mouth against the twin stench of vomit and rot—the light was so low that I took longer than she had to make sense of the scene.

My first impression:
Room. Dark. Light at the other end.

My second impression:
There isn’t any mech in here.

It was a small, plain room, maybe ten by twelve. A computer cart in one corner had an open laptop on it. There was a big main desk covered in books and papers.

An office, then. A poky windowless side office, perfect for a lowly grad student. And behind the desk there was a person observing us—or not—from a chair.

The chair was identical to the complicated, hi-tech number we’d used downstairs. The white helmet, ditto. A big monitor, on an armature at head height, was angled toward the helmet and was giving off enough cold blue light to pick out the claws clutching the arms of the chair, the big Velcro strap holding the chest in place across a yellow-on-purple Minnesota Vikings T-shirt, and the grotesque white Kabuki mask that had once been a face.

Carl Bates.

He was seated, or strapped in, under the scanner helmet. It was still poised over his head, but his body had twisted forward and sideways against the strap, so that his head was half out of the scanner, tilted awkwardly toward us, one ear visible. It looked as if he’d been frozen solid while struggling to get up.

His skin was stretched tight as a balloon across the bones of his skull. His lips, scored by deep vertical cracks, looked like segmented earthworms. The eyes stared at us, imploring, but they were as dry as dust-coated marbles and so prominent it seemed they might fall from their sockets and shatter.

Kit staggered to her feet. Trying to get away from the sight, she more or less collided with her mother in the doorway. Natazscha pushed past me, threw the main light switch, and rushed to kneel beside the figure at the desk.

“Oh God, no. Carl, Carl. Oh God, no.”

She grabbed his wrist, checking for a pulse that she must have known wasn’t there. Then, with a delicate, tender gesture she pushed a strand of hair back from his forehead. It stayed put for a moment before falling again.

“A boy from Minnesota who was homesick for flat land and bright winters,” she said, talking quickly, as if only words could protect her from the full power of what she was seeing. “Good at his work. A magician with code. He was supposed to be doing his doctorate in computer science, but he helped me out with a project and then started following Maynard Jones around like a puppy hoping for a treat. The last few months, he was spending nearly all his time here at ISOC. Look at the face. Dehydration. And the way his back is arched. That’s renal failure.”

A big, empty IV bag hung from a metal stand next to the chair. She looked around on the floor and picked up the loose end of a transparent tube. A curl of medical tape was attached to it.

“See how there are two bags? This one was a cocktail of anesthetics. Propofol and pentobarbital, I expect. Perhaps alfentanil. Those drugs are lethal if the dose isn’t right. The large bag was probably saline, but it looks like it wasn’t connected properly. As if he tried to set this whole thing up himself.”

Behind him there was another, smaller glass board, blank except for two lines written in black marker near the middle:

T
HERE IS NO GHOST: THEREFORE
√1 =
θ

T
HE MACHINE IS THE GHOST: THEREFORE √2 = ∞

Kit was outside, spitting into one of the lab sinks. When she came back she stood on the threshold amid the splinters of wood, dabbing absently at her lips with her sleeve, her eyes wide and her face the color of a bleached sheet. Then she reached out and touched my shoulder.