Each system had several backups, and as Hildie stood just inside the door, watching the machines at work, she was once more astonished that it could work at all.
And yet it did. A pump worked silently, keeping the blood flowing, while a dialysis machine acted as artificial kidneys. Much of the equipment in the room had been designed by the Croyden computer in the adjoining room, which had processed volumes of data before determining precisely the equipment and programs that would be needed to keep a brain alive outside its natural environment.
Not only alive, but functioning.
For the plastic tubes were not the only things attached to the brains in the tanks.
Bundles of tiny wires, each of them attached to a separate nerve, also emerged from the brain stem, a flexible spinal column that connected the brains directly to the Croyden computer in the next room.
Probes were inserted into the brains as well, and their leads, too, ran through holes in the tanks to join the other cables that snaked away into the conduits beneath the floor.
Now, finally, it was all happening, all the plans that had been laid years ago were coming to fruition, for as Hildie scanned the monitors above the twin tanks, she could see by the graphic displays that the biological conditions of the two organs were precisely as they should be.
George Engersol glanced up from the keyboard, a frown forming as he saw the expression on Hildie Kramer’s face.
“Something’s happened, hasn’t it.” It was a statement, not a question.
Hildie nodded abruptly. “Josh MacCallum found Amy Carlson’s body this morning.”
“Josh?” Engersol echoed, his face paling. “What happened?”
“He was looking for Steve Conners. And Amy’s body washed up on the beach, in the cove where we have our picnics.”
Engersol’s expression hardened. “Why was Josh looking for Steve Conners on the beach? Isn’t he here?”
Briefly, Hildie told Engersol what had happened that morning. As she spoke, she saw Engersol’s face pale even more, and the muscles of his jaw clench with anger.
“I told you it was too risky,” he said when she was done. “We should have kept Amy’s body here and—”
“It’s all right,” Hildie broke in, her words sharp enough to silence Engersol. “They’re already assuming that Conners got his hands on Amy, probably intending to molest her, and something went wrong. They haven’t found his body yet, and judging from the condition of Amy’s, it won’t make much difference if they do.” She smiled thinly. “It seems that sharks got to her, and there isn’t much left. When I asked one of the policemen what happened to her brain, he suggested that a sea otter might have taken it. ‘Like an abalone out of its shell,’ is the way he put it, I
believe. And they found Amy’s sweater at the viewpoint. What with the note I left on her computer, and Steve Conners’s accident, they’ll assume he either left the note himself or found her sometime during the night. I don’t think there’ll be much question about what happened.”
The tension in George Engersol eased slightly. “Have you told her parents?”
“They’re on their way up,” Hildie replied, nodding. “I imagine they’ll be here sometime this afternoon. I don’t think it will be pleasant, but we can deal with it. I suspect we’ll lose a few more students, though. Two deaths in two weeks is going to be hard for some of them to take.”
Engersol smiled. “I suspect you’ll manage. If we lose a few, it won’t matter, so long as we keep the ones I need.”
“I wish I could guarantee it,” Hildie replied. “But I can’t.” She shifted her attention to the tank on the left. “Everything is still stable?” she asked anxiously, remembering what had happened last year, when Timmy Evans’s brain had been transferred into one of the tanks, only to die suddenly when it was on the very verge of awakening. Though Engersol had insisted that the problem had lain with Timmy’s brain itself, Hildie herself was all but positive that what had truly happened was some kind of error in programming. Hildie was convinced the data that had been fed to Timmy Evans’s mind had been at fault, somehow killing his brain instead of bringing it back to consciousness.
Exactly what had happened to Timmy, though, neither she nor Engersol would ever know. But Adam, unlike Timmy, was surviving. “No signs of deterioration?” she pressed.
“Adam isn’t turning into another Timmy Evans,” Engersol replied icily, letting her know that he understood exactly what she was asking. “In fact, he’s doing even better than I could have hoped for. Look.”
He tapped at the keyboard, and an image of a brain came up on the monitor that sat on Engersol’s desk. “That’s the way Adam’s brain looked twenty-four hours ago. But look what’s happening.” He pressed some more keys, and a second image appeared on the monitor, superimposed
over the first. “Right there,” Engersol said, tapping on the screen with the tip of a ballpoint pen. “See it?”
Hildie studied the screen for a moment, then shook her head. “What am I looking for?”
“Just a second. Let me enlarge it.” Using a mouse, Engersol drew a small box around part of the image, then clicked a couple of commands from the bar at the top of the screen. “There. See?”
Hildie’s eyes widened as she finally saw what Engersol was talking about.
The brain in the left-hand tank—Adam Aldrich’s brain—was growing.
“I didn’t think that was possible,” Hildie told him.
“Nor did I,” Engersol agreed. “And I’m not sure yet exactly why it’s happening. But it’s the frontal lobe that’s growing, the part of the brain that is responsible for thought. It’s not just staying alive, Hildie. It’s actually growing. We’ve done it. We’ve succeeded in wiring a human brain into a computer. One that’s still living, and still functioning.”
Hildie’s eyes were suddenly caught by activity on the monitor above the tank on the right. As she watched, lines that had been quiescent only a moment ago began to waver, then form peaks and valleys. Then two other lines also came to life, one of them suddenly shooting up to the top of the screen before leveling off, another spiking quickly, easing off, then spiking again.
“What is it?” she asked. “What’s happening?”
“It’s Amy,” George Engersol replied. “She’s waking up.”
B
lackness.
As the last of the narcotic was washed out of her brain, Amy Carlson’s mind rose slowly into consciousness, but it was a consciousness such as she had never experienced before.
She found herself in an unfathomable silence and darkness that made her scream out in terror.
But nothing happened.
She felt nothing in her throat, heard no sound in her ears.
Yet in her mind the scream echoed still, surrounding her, fading away, then rising again.
Or was she screaming again?
She didn’t know, for everything she knew, everything that gave meaning to her existence, had vanished.
The entire world had disappeared, and she felt as if she was suspended in some kind of vacuum, left alone in a darkness and silence so impenetrable that it was suffocating her.
She tried to breathe, tried to fill her lungs with air.
Again, nothing happened. She felt no fresh air rush into her lungs, felt no relief from the terror that gripped her.
Panic closed in on her. She couldn’t breathe. She was going to die.
She tried to cry out again, tried to scream for help, but once more nothing happened.
Words formed in her mind, but she couldn’t feel her tongue move to shape the sounds, feel her mouth open to emit the words.
Once again she tried to breathe, and once again felt nothing as her body refused to respond to the orders her mind sent forth.
Paralyzed.
She was paralyzed!
But how had it happened?
Her mind reeled as she tried to follow a logical line of thought through the panic that was pouring at her from every direction, rolling in on her from the darkness, pressing her down.
Dying!
That’s what was happening to her!
She was alone, and she was dying, and nobody knew about it and nobody could help her.
She tried to open her eyes, sure now that whatever was happening to her could only be a nightmare and that when she opened her eyes and let in the light, the horrible darkness around her would lift and she would once again be a part of the world.
She blinked.
Except that yet again nothing happened. She blinked again, trying to feel the faint sensation of her eyelids reacting to the command from her mind.
Nothing!
It felt as if her eyes no longer existed!
Now she tried to move her body, tried to roll over, to shake herself loose from the unseen, unfelt bonds that held her in their grip.
Her body failed to respond.
Like her eyes, it no longer seemed to be there at all!
Another scream welled up out of the black abyss, another scream that echoed only in her mind, quickly dying away in the strange blackness around her.
Her panic threatened to overwhelm her now, but just before she succumbed to it, just an instant before it would
have shattered her terrified mind, she staved it off once more, certain that if she gave in to the panic, she would never emerge from it again.
The panic was like a living thing now, lurking around her, a black, unseeable Hell filled with unknowable terrors that wanted to consume her, wanted to envelop her, drowning her forever in her own fear.
The panic was like a precipice, a towering cliff upon whose edge she teetered, part of her being drawn downward, wanting to give herself to the long final plunge, while another part of her insisted that she back away, that she retreat from the brink, pull back before it was too late.
Slowly, imperceptibly, she drove the fear back.
There was a reason for what was happening to her, an explanation for the terrible feeling of being mired alone in boundless darkness.
She wanted to cry out for her mother, to scream in the night for her mother to help her, but already she knew it would do no good.
Her mother wouldn’t hear her, for she couldn’t even hear herself.
And her mother was home. Home in Los Angeles. While she was at the Academy. But she’d been going home.
She’d told Hildie she wanted to go home, and Hildie had taken her to call her parents.
But she hadn’t talked to her parents. She’d been in Hildie’s office, and …
She strained her memory, searching for an image of what had happened.
An image came to her.
A glass of water.
Hildie had handed her a glass of water, and she’d drunk it down. And then everything was blank, until she’d awakened in the horrible blackness.
Drugged.
Hildie must have put something in the water.
What?
She began to think about it. A drug. Some kind of medicine. What kind?
Narcotics. Sleeping pills.
As she enunciated the words in her mind, new images took shape. The blackness was still there, surrounding her, but now lists of words began to formulate in her mind, almost as if she was visualizing them.
She concentrated, and the words came into sharper focus.
Thorazine.
Darvon.
Halcion.
Bercodan.
The words popped at her out of the darkness, words she hadn’t even known she knew. And yet she not only recognized the words, but knew the definitions of all of them.
They were drugs. Painkillers, and sleeping pills, and medicines to tranquilize you. As they flicked through her mind, she realized that she knew exactly what each of them was for and what each would do to someone, depending on how much was taken.
The sensation was strange. It was almost as if she were reading from some kind of book that existed only in her mind.
Like the way she solved complex mathematical problems by picturing the problem in her head, then working it out as if she held a pencil in her hand, the image never fading, her mind never releasing the proper position of a number until she’d found the solution.
Or when she took a history test, and answered the questions by summoning up an image of the text she’d studied, mentally flipping through the pages until she found the right one, then simply reading the answer off it.
The simple process of thinking seemed to make the panic recede a little, and Amy began focusing her mind on the problem of what had happened to her.
The darkness was still there, surrounding her, but she found she could force it back by imagining things, seeing things in her mind’s eye that she could no longer see with the eyes she had been born with.
She pictured a beach, a broad expanse of sand, with
brilliant sunlight pouring down from a perfectly clear blue sky, and gentle surf lapping at the shore.
She put herself into the picture and imagined her feet buried in the sand, feeling its warmth between her toes.
Birds.
There should be seabirds in the image. But what kind?
Instantly, unbidden, images of birds came into her head, birds she’d never seen before, even in books. And yet they were there, all of them, and as she gazed first at one and then at another, information about each of them appeared in her mind.
Their size, their coloring, the parts of the world they were native to. Even images of their nests, complete with eggs.
But where was it coming from? It was almost as if—
Her mind froze as a concept suddenly took form, a concept she rejected in the instant it occurred to her.
And yet …
She remembered a computer she’d seen, not more than a month ago. A CD-ROM display, in which an entire encyclopedia had been put onto one disk, all of it digitized and cross-referenced, so all you had to do was bring up an index on the screen, then begin clicking a mouse, moving deeper and deeper into the volumes of information, looking at pictures, studying charts and graphs, even listening to snatches of music or speeches given by people who had died long before she had even been born.
It had seemed magical to Amy, and she had pleaded with her father to buy it for her, but he had only smiled his mysterious smile and suggested that perhaps it was something she might ask Santa Claus for.
She had known instantly that she was going to have it, that her father was going to get it for her for Christmas, and she had put it away in the back of her mind, knowing it was coming, knowing that in just a few months she would have the player and disk herself, attached to the computer that was waiting in her bedroom.