Dark Matter (28 page)

Thorpe released the chair, seemed to relax.
“Is that really the best you’ve got?” he said, humour in his voice. “Yes, I
begin to believe it is. What a contrary young man you are. You want light, but
then you think you are the moth and fear the flame all at once. You fear me.
But know you need me, or why else would you be here. You’re not the gloating
type, Rasputin.”

Thorpe sat, and invited Rasputin to do
likewise. He remained standing.

“All that talk about pioneering the new
frontier,” said Rasputin, “when all you wanted was another schmuck carrying
your hardware so you could turn a buck.”

“Turn a buck? Turn a buck? I—” he said, and
stopped as if choked by too many thoughts wanting voice.

“I know about the patents,” said Rasputin,
hoping Thorpe didn’t press him on the depth of his knowledge, which he had
exhausted with the statement.

Thorpe dismissed the comment with a wave.
“A man must protect his intellectual property, but it saddens me to think you’ve
formed the impression I’m some kind of entrepreneur.” He leaned forward and
caught Rasputin’s gaze with his own. “On my honour, money is my least concern.
And my offer was sincere. To pioneer a genuinely new frontier is perhaps the
most rare of all opportunities—a chance not to be missed. So forgive me if I
went beyond the pale to include you. I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t think
you would benefit.

“Please sit and let me put you in the
picture. As I said, it’s a grand one, and will suffer little from this
annoyance.” He waved a hand at the walls. Rasputin relented and sat. His leg
was hurting. “You were part of it. Grease to the wheels, but ultimately not
crucial. I don’t mean to be rude. I’m just being honest.”

“I’m listening.”

“I find it ironic we’re finally having this
discussion in a police station, of all places.” Rasputin felt the cloak of
conspiracy drawing down around them, but found himself hanging on Thorpe’s
words. “Because, if I succeed, I will render this place obsolete. Or, at least,
unrecognizably transformed.”

As the words left his mouth, Rasputin
forgot any concern for his own sanity. This guy had slipped down the black
slope of Mount Sane.

He went on. “Imagine if you could read a
man’s mind, infallibly.”

“I saw a movie about that. It had hover
cars.”

“It will be reality. The seeds already
exist. Don’t believe me? Look up an article titled, “Single-Trial Learning of
Novel Stimuli by Individual Neurons of the Human Hippocampus-Amygdala Complex.”
The authors found in humans something never found in primates: neurons encoding
familiarity.”

Rasputin must have looked nonplussed, for
Thorpe barked, “Use your imagination!” His arms swept outwards as though
carried by the explosion of his breath.

“Their experiments used electrodes like the
one I showed you to find neurons that fired or didn’t fire based on whether the
subject was
familiar
with an image. They deciphered if a subject had
seen an image by directly reading it from their brain—just like taking their
blood pressure, no need to ask! In fact, they found subjects often knew better
than they thought, got it wrong when their cells got it right.”

Thorpe paused.

Rasputin tried to let what he had said sink
in. He thought back on Thorpe’s comment about the police station, and
speculated.

“If what you’re saying is true, you could
know for sure if a man knew a place, a thing, or a person.”

“Yes. But say, instead of man, ‘the accused’,
and for place and thing, say ‘crime scene’ and ‘murder weapon.’“

“...and victim.”

“Yes! This is not possible yet, but we’re
close. If scientific discovery is a man groping in a dark room for the light,
his fingers have brushed the switch. It is only a matter of time before we
throw that switch and light up the brain to not just familiarity but complete
disclosure. We will find cells that code for like and dislike, desire and
intent, love and hate. All that sums up to humanity will be found on the end of
a very small wire.”

Can he be telling the truth?

If Sam’s information was right, Thorpe had
managed to convince at least one person to back his research with cold hard
cash, and a criminal lawyer no less.

Rasputin pondered the image of silvery
tethers, too many to count, streaming out into his inner universe. Could you
eventually tag them all? Would it be possible to list every one and their
relations one to another, to transcribe
Rasputin
to paper, to silicon?

He had a revelation: Thorpe had found in
him not just any guinea pig, but
the
guinea pig.

Electrode or no, Thorpe seemed to read his
thoughts.

“Yes, Fate was kind to bring you across my
path.”

Rasputin snorted. “‘Grease to the wheels,’
you said.”

“Let me repair that sentiment.”

He leaned back in his chair as if to
appraise Rasputin afresh. “You are the Mona Lisa, when all I had before were
finger paintings.”

“The sketches gave me away, didn’t they?”

“Yes. There was a host of other signs that
fit with my theory, but the sudden appearance of that prodigious ability was
diagnostic.”

“Diagnostic of what?” said Rasputin, over
the rising volume of his heart beat.

“Oh, I’d say a member of the class of
Sudden Savant Syndrome.”

“I’m becoming Rainman?”

“No. Rainman was an attempt to portray
Autism. Savant Syndrome centres on the presence of a deep shard of genius.
Savants sketch, sculpt or compose like the greatest masters. Some can recall
scenes with camera precision. Others calculate equations or find primes faster
than computers. Savants redefine the limits of human capability. Some are born
that way, some become that way as they slide into senescence—one day Uncle John
forgets to dress, but can sight-read Mozart.”

He looked pointedly at Rasputin. “And some
are birthed by disease or traumatic injury.”

“But?”

“The gift is usually at the expense of
higher cognitive functions. It’s as if the very shard driven into the brain to
tap this power destroys the fragile balance of inputs required to read the
emotions of others, have empathy, socialise. And in the case of injury, as I
have said all along, the risk of neural breakdown is real, whether it be motor
system dysfunction, hallucination, or schizophrenia.”

Rasputin cast his eye inward, an eye that
feared to own what it saw. This was his house, and he had just been informed it
had seen a murder. Was his mind a train wreck in motion, slowed a thousand
times but inexorable? Were the girders of his sanity buckling and breaking just
beyond sight?

His mind answered with the memory of a
photo. The photo was from Joachim Thorpe’s room. It pictured his mother.
Rasputin looked at Thorpe and noted his resemblance to his mother, in the curve
of his cheek bones, in his eyes.

“Three times you visited your brother
straight after seeing me—to gloat or console, I don’t know which. The one
exception was the day we met in the
morning.
That day you didn’t visit
until the afternoon. Why was that?”

Thorpe became still.

“See, I knew there was something special
about you...”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

Thorpe patted his shirt pocket and seemed
surprised to find it empty. He rose, turned his back to Rasputin, and appeared
to examine a spot on the wall. The band of sweat down his back had thickened.

Rasputin stood and, putting aside his fear,
drew near the surgeon on a thread of curiosity. Thorpe had not moved. He stared
not at the wall, but through it.

“Your brother is locked up in his mind,
prisoner in his own body, and you expect me to believe he has nothing to do
with this, with me? That would be some coincidence. And, forgive me if I’m
wrong—I’m an Arts student—but I thought scientists shunned coincidence.”

Thorpe remained still, barring the rise and
fall of his chest as he took in air, pulled the oxygen from it, and expelled
the spent gases, the instinctual, creature motions.

Then the creature summoned the ghost. His
eyelids snapped over glassy eyes. When they lifted, his eyes had pivoted to pin
Rasputin with their glare. Surplus tears gathered at the rim of their lower
lids.

“You’re clever,” said Thorpe. “Tell me,
what does one find at the bottom of a hole?”

“Is this a trick question? I often find
myself at the bottom of a hole.”

“No tricks. Your answer is right, after a fashion.
I would say: whatever one puts there.”

“Glass half-full, half-empty. I get it.
Which am I?”

“Neither. You are: where’s my damn Coke? It’s
not your fault. It is generational.”

“And what was your brother?”

“That is my point. It depends on who you are
asking.”

“I’m asking you.”

“He was a vacuum, a black hole that sucked
life from everything near it.”

Rasputin paused before asking the next
question. He felt like a kid toeing a coin on a ledge high above a city street.

He nudged it over the edge.

“And your mother, what would she say?”

“She has always been such a positive
person, bless her. She pours only the purest motives into holes, wherever she
finds them; my brother is all holes.”

Rasputin spoke his thought without meaning
to: “And you want to lift the lid on his darkness and show her.”

Thorpe’s face contorted a moment and
Rasputin thought he meant to do him violence. But the dynamite going off in him
was that of the precision destruction engineer, taking him down from the
inside.

Part of Rasputin wanted to lay out a picnic
blanket and watch the show. But he could not enjoy it. He pulled open the door,
twelve seconds shy of the allotted ten minutes, and paused at the threshold. He
reached into his pocket and retrieved his phone.

“Thanks, but you can have it back now.”

Rasputin balanced the phone in his hand, as
if it were a skipping stone. Thorpe’s gaze drifted to it, slowly, as though
drugged, and then returned to meet Rasputin’s with the same torpor. His
expression lacked any trace of having recognised the device.

Rasputin let himself out, easing the door
closed, and tried to believe that had been the surgeon’s parting shot, his last
psyche-out. But the calculating part of his mind was having none of it. The man
was scooping water to stay alive; he had no thought for idle guns. He hadn’t
sent the phone.

Before going to bed, Rasputin inserted
the charge cable into the phone, the newest addition to his steadily accreting
nightly ritual. He examined his reflection in the bathroom’s mirror, between
the mirror’s age-blemishes, which grew at its edges like brass-coloured lichen.
His eyes were sunk within hollows of blue, and marbled with red veins.

“Hours of seizure will do that.”

He tilted his head and swept his fringe up
to reveal his scar. It shone a lurid maroon in the fluorescent light.

“Still, better a battering than a chunk of
metal in my brain.”

The phone bleeped acknowledgement of the
charge flowing into its battery.

He picked it up, found Sam in the contact
list, and called him.

Rasputin’s thumb was hovering on the cancel
button when he picked up: “Rasputin?”

“Sam, my heroine. Tell me you’re not in
bed. You sound like someone died.”

“No...no, not bed. Just dotting the t’s on
today—the i’s, I mean. Covering my arse.”

“Bugger.” He had hoped Sam would get a
boost from his success. “I was just thinking I look better without a pound of
metal stuck in my head, and wanted to say thanks. Seriously.”

“No problem, Rasputin. I’m pretty stoked I
could help,” Sam said. He sounded tired.

“Am I still on the watch list, or have you
guys decided to trust me?”

A pause, then “About that...”

About that
...
The words were taken by that part of his mind concerned with prediction, and became
the seed for a tree. It burst from the ground in seconds, its branches
ramifying in thickness proportional to the probability of what Sam might say
next. By far the thickest, the most likely, was not what Rasputin wanted to
hear. He stared at himself in the mirror, becoming a stranger to himself in the
seconds it took Sam to continue.

“About that. You’re off the books. I mean,
completely. ...I’m sorry. There won’t be an offer from ASIO. Best to keep at
the study, hey.”

“Because of today?” Rasputin said numbly.

“No, nothing to do with today. I reported
to my boss on how today finished, and he said someone pulled your records from
the server two weeks ago. They only found out yesterday. Whoever hacked in
covered their tracks pretty well on the way out.”

Rasputin heard now that what he had
mistaken for tiredness in Sam’s voice was uneasiness.