S'wanee: A Paranoid Thriller (20 page)

Still, he increasingly found himself needing afternoon naps between class and dinner, as if his body demanded more recovery. He was drinking and smoking more heavily and often, “burning the candle at both ends,” as his grandmother had warned against in a letter, albeit in her own peculiar Bulgarian phrasing, and in any event, afternoon naps seemed a normal part of college culture, which hadn’t been possible, or needed, during high school.

“The air’s a little thinner up here,” Dr. Quack explained when Cody went in for his weekly blood drawing, which had expanded to include blood pressure and reflex testing and occasionally a vision test, like a mini exam. “It takes a while to adjust to it, like any higher elevation.” He quizzed Cody about his general well-being and was glad to hear his headaches had not returned.

“And the ringing in your ears?” Dr. Quack asked one day, which Cody didn’t remember revealing to anyone. “They often go hand in hand,” the doctor added.

“Well, that’s good news,” he replied when Cody said, truthfully, that the ringing was gone, too. “Just let me know if it returns, so we can nip it in the bud.” He whisked away the four vials of Cody’s blood.

After drunken Lodge nights, Cody would occasionally wake up in and around Rebel’s Rest, dazed and confused, but at least he was passing out closer to home.

“Who ate my cookie dough?” Pearl asked one morning at breakfast. “That was for lunch.” Cody wondered why he felt a little queasy.

“Oh Lord,” Pearl
tsk
ed good-naturedly when no one fessed up, as she padded back to the kitchen to start all over.

Early one morning, he woke up naked in Elliott’s twin bed, with Elliott, who was also naked. He gingerly unwrapped his arms and found his clothes strewn about the floor. “Hey dude,” Elliott said tentatively, and Cody said, “Hey dude,” and crept out the door in his underwear. A half-asleep Banjo was shuffling back from the bathroom, scratching himself, and yawned “paleface” on his way to his room.

“Dood,” Banjo said later that day, strumming on the back porch, his head cocked at Cody, who was smoking. “
Dewd
,” he repeated, inspecting him.

“I’m corn-fused.” Banjo finally confronted him that night in the bathroom. “Are you and Elliott dealing?”

“No,” Cody answered. “I passed out in the wrong room.”

“Huh,” Banjo said, skeptical. “Huh.” He seemed more hurt than judgmental.

Cody had never been with a guy before, although it less bothered than puzzled him. He’d certainly known gay guys in high school; that stigma was long gone among his friends, and it didn’t seem to exist at S’wanee either. There had to be gays and lesbians here, but it never came up. Nobody asked, and nobody told.

Cody was more troubled that he couldn’t remember any details about his Elliott night. He liked Elliott, a lot, but wasn’t attracted to or curious about him, sexually, on any level. He had no clue how he’d wound up naked in his bed. He ransacked his memory for the time line of that night, but came up blank. Just another drunken blackout, he settled.

Well
. Cody shrugged.
Been there, done that now
, chalking up a new, innocent college experimentation, along with the harmless mushrooms and temporary cigarette smoking, which he needed to wrap up soon. That night, he sought out Lucy at the Lodge and led her up to the Crow’s Nest.

“Hey dude,” Elliott said expectantly in the hallway one night, and Cody said, “Hey dude,” and kept going. They never mentioned it again.

W
hite-coated Ross hurried through Spencer Hall, past the biology lab window, and Cody decided to make his move.

Ross had a pit bull mix on a leash, and the dog was wearing a metallic collar. Whatever Ross was up to looked so much more fascinating than the stupid tapeworm they were dissecting again, that Cody had to find out.

“Where you going?” lab partner Banjo demanded. “We gotta clean this nasty shit up!”

Cody dashed through the hallways, trying to catch up to Ross, far ahead and moving fast. Down a flight of stairs and through a long corridor, through a door marked “Neuroscience,” past a classroom marked “Leading Questions and False Memories,” past a classroom marked “Learned Psychological Paralysis,” and into an empty reception area where picked-over refreshment tables and a check-in booth with name tags and Magic Markers sat unattended. Ross must have already gone through the only door at the far end. The digital plaque next to the door read “Mind Over Matter: The Brain Atlas and Wireless Neurological Hijacking.” Cody grabbed a hoagie wedge from the food table and slipped in.

It was a large semicircular lecture hall on a steep grade. Dozens of white-coated professors sat like students in the darkened room, paying rapt attention to the brightly lit stage below, where Ross, the movie star, held court.

“I apologize for running late.” He grinned a little nervously, clipping on his wireless mike. “Apparently someone forgot to walk our special guest today.” He laughed at himself, but the joke fell flat because no one knew what special guest he meant, except for Cody, who would have laughed in support if he hadn’t been watching on the down low. The crowd seemed humorless anyway.
Rooting for you, dude!

“Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction author and futurist”—Ross’s voice filled the hall as he grew more confident in his telepromptered presentation—“once wrote that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of S’wanee, I am proud to present our latest bit of magic.”

Cody silently crouched behind the back row, where the adults wore name tags that said “NIH” and “CDC” and “Pfizer” and “Cisco” and “Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuroimmune Diseases.”

“Ever since Dr. Persinger invented the God Helmet,” Ross continued, “scientists have struggled to use complex magnetic signals to harness the human brain. Now, thanks to the marriage of science and technology, that Holy Grail is within reach. The completion of the Human Genome Project, coupled with major advancements in wireless technology, which we all see in our everyday lives, has led us now to the precipice of the most monumental medical breakthrough since the discovery of penicillin.”

On the large screen behind him whirled computerized, 3-D images of cross-sectioned, heat-scanned brains. Bannered across the top of the screen read “The Brain Atlas.”

“Imagine a world without blindness,” he went on, warming up. “A world without clinical depression or bipolar disorder or autism or addictions of any kind. Now imagine a world without diabetes. Without AIDS or Alzheimer’s. Without cancer. Ladies and gentlemen, if you can, imagine a world without disease at all.”

The scanned, whirling brains were dotted in colors that corresponded to the coded “Disease Guide” listed on the side.

The white coats sat straight. Dean Apperson, today very Gordon Gekko in a navy banker’s suit, nodded and watched Ross proudly from the front row.

“A world where the brain heals the body without drugs of any kind. It’s always had that latent power to cure any ailment, any disease, on its own. We just didn’t have the knowledge, or technology, to tap into it. Until now.”

The Pfizer man leaned back in his seat, skeptical.

“Ladies and gentleman,” Ross said, raising the energy, “I present to you: Puck!”

The white-and-brown-spotted pit bull mix with metallic collar scampered happily on stage before dashing up the aisles, his excited stub tail wagging his body in half. He seemed determined to sniff and greet each white coat personally. The room laughed and responded, whipping Puck into a gleeful frenzy.

“Here, Puck! Come, boy!” Ross called from the stage, as the dog, paying no attention, scurried between legs, under seats, and occasionally pawed a startled white coat on his hind legs.

“Dog needs some obedience lessons,” someone catcalled from the darkened hall, to general laughter, even though it wasn’t particularly funny or clever. Ross nodded and went to a laptop on a high stool at the edge of the stage.

“We can do better than that, I think,” he said. Next to the stool stood a tall, metal erector-set structure with several “branches” jutting out, treelike. Puck raced around the top level, stopping for just a second to nose a delighted Cody and get a pat on the head before bustling on across the room.

Ross typed something on the laptop, and Puck stopped running and stood still.

“We’ve just made the connection,” Ross said. “No different from any wireless network, and yet all the difference in the world. I’ve just hijacked his brain.”

Ross typed, and Puck slowly marched down the dark aisle stairs to the bright stage, where he stood at attention, trancelike.

“With this streaming connection, I can control what he sees or doesn’t see. Hears or doesn’t hear.” Ross typed, and Puck started to freak out, dropping and pawing at his eyes. “I can take away his vision, and”—typing—“bring it right back.” Puck stood and looked around the stage, sharp and focused.

Ross typed and placed half a hoagie on the floor, which Puck ignored. Ross typed, and Puck hungrily woofed it down.

“I can preprogram a whole series of commands, and with one keystroke, put him through a wide-ranging gamut of emotions.” Ross typed, and Puck’s hair stood up; he curled his lip and snarled and turned savage. Seemingly deranged and almost rabid, he viciously attacked an invisible threat stage center. Ross knelt down scarcely inches from his snapping jaws. White coats in the front row pushed back uneasily, and Dean Apperson nodded calmly.

“This isn’t some Jedi mind trick, folks,” Ross the Showman assured them. “This is pure, refined science.”

Nesta/Fletcher flashed in Cody’s mind, and then flashed out again, because that was a freak accident and tragedy, and this was a carefully controlled—and likely rehearsed—experiment. Ross didn’t blink.

Yep
, Cody thought.
Much cooler than tapeworms
.

Puck’s mood changed, and he rolled onto his back, legs up, whining. Ross rubbed his belly. Puck cowered in terror and barked happily and went fast asleep and ran in circles over a course of seconds. Ross smiled devilishly as he typed, and Puck lifted his leg on Dean Apperson’s ankle.

“Now, now, Ross.” Dean Apperson laughed with the others, as he scooted from the line of fire. “Science has its limits.”

“We can, if necessary,” Ross continued, scratching a happy Puck behind the ears, “even override basic natural instincts. Including, but not limited to, those of self-preservation and survival.”

Ross typed, and the remote-controlled Puck ran to the corner of the stage toward a tall ladder that Cody hadn’t noticed. It led up to a gridlike matrix of scaffolding high above the auditorium, from which hung the spotlights. Without hesitating, Puck scaled the ladder, slipping but recovering, and walked along the rickety catwalk over the audience. Fearlessly, but carefully, Puck navigated the matrix to the back of the hall, above the darkness, to the wonderment and increasing concern of the white coats below.

Ross typed, and Puck navigated back to the front, high above the sunken stage. Without looking down, Robo-Puck leaped from the scaffolding into the bright air, as the audience gasped. Ross caught him in a large cushion he cradled in his arms, and Puck neither flinched nor flailed from the fall that could have broken his bones. Ross gingerly placed him on the stage and typed, and Puck, released from control, wagged his body and panted and scampered excitedly around the hall to thunderous applause. It was like a circus act.

“That last stunt has little practical use.” Ross laughed. “But we wanted to demonstrate the degree of control that this new technology can achieve.”

“Best of all,” he added, “he remembers none of it. No learned fear, no psychic scars, absolutely no storage in his conscious or unconscious. Clap on/clap off, like a switch.” Puck panted happily and looked around for more love.

Ross concluded his presentation, confident and masterful and with the white coats fully captive. “In a nutshell, once that connection is made, once the hijack is secure, we can replicate the therapeutic properties of any drug, any treatment, ever invented, now or in the future. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a watershed moment with unlimited upside potential. This technology can absolutely save and improve lives. Modern medicine will never be the same.”

Lights came up around the hall, and assistants passed labeled glass panes that looked imprinted with pink brain silhouettes in various sizes.

“Please be careful with those,” Ross cautioned, as the white coats passed and scrutinized them. “That’s actual brain tissue from lab animals. Sliced paper-thin.”

Ross expertly addressed the feverish scientific questions the white coats peppered him with. It was a smooth, almost hypnotic sales pitch to the abruptly less skeptical audience.

“We basically assign an IP address to the brain and plant a cookie, so to speak, so we can always tap back into it. The same technology as any mobile device.”

“In Puck’s case, we track him through a modified shock collar. We’ve also tested a tiny microchip, which you can plant in the body with a standard syringe, very noninvasive. We’re still tweaking that technology.”

“Yes, you can target a single individual, for specific therapy based on their disease or condition, or you can cover an entire population, without discrimination, for general therapy tailored for the common good. You could stop smoking in Boston, or even Paris. You could make a high school in Omaha crave broccoli instead of french fries. And you could, ultimately, tranquilize a mass riot anywhere in the world with a wave of digital dopamine.

“Conversely,” he added, “you could also incite one.”

“Yes, it’s a multiuse tech with a variety of other potential applications, including military and cyberweaponry, although that’s far off the horizon, and I’m not at liberty to discuss it anyway.”

“Of course, dozens of research universities have been testing this tech for years, but I can confidently say we’ve refined it and beaten them to the finish line.”

A white coat passed a glass pane labeled in large block print back to Cody, who studied the small pink brain tissue. The label said “Hrothgar.” The next one said “Fuzz.”