Brain Storm (51 page)

“Isolated and perfused whole brain, in vitro,” she said.

“Isolated?”

“Whole brain,” she said.

“Of?”

“A reptile,” she said. “A small lawyer,” she added without laughing. Then she laughed. “Guinea pig, really. Why?”

“How long has it been dead?”

“Hah,” she cried. “Dead? This isn’t dead, Counselor. Undergrads work on dead guinea pigs. When I first met you in Arthur’s office, we talked about beheadings, remember?”

“I do,” said Watson.

“This is the opposite of a beheading. This is a
live
guinea pig, minus its supporting vessel. Unencumbered, as it were. Free to dream without the constraints of senses and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” she said, her eyes lustering with a visionary gleam. “Unburdened of bodily cares, free to think thoughts beyond the reaches of body and soul.”

She clicked and slid her pointer around the screen, opening and closing windows. Entering data.

“You’re serious—it’s alive?”

“Better question,” she said, still without looking at him, “how would you prove it is alive? How to prove it is still thinking?”

Watson stared at the pink lump. “Give it beer and see if it gets drunk?”

“What if we can teach it a conditioned response?” she asked him. “If it can learn, it must be conscious, right? Remember the septal pleasure
centers I told you about? Well, we get a microelectrode in there and make the pig brain feel better than sex on cocaine in clover by juicing the septals with a few millivolts. Most people have heard of the Olds and Milner experiments where they got a wire into the septal nuclei or the medial forebrain bundle of rats and rigged it so the rats could stimulate themselves by pressing a bar.”

“Yeah,” said Watson, “and the rats stopped eating and drinking. They just kept pressing the bar until they died.”

“Right,” she said. “It gave new meaning to the conditioned response phase known as extinction. Seven thousand self-stimulations an hour! Raw pleasure the only explanation. Pleasure to die for. Anyway, so we take our little bodiless guinea pig brain and we get our microfine wire in the septal nuclei, and then we pick any efferent nerve whose pathways would normally conduct impulses that would trigger a voluntary or semivoluntary motor response, say, the nerve that controls the blinking of the animal’s eyelid. We hook a little sensor up to that nerve so we can measure impulses along the nerve and detect the sort of impulses that would normally trigger an eyeblink. And then we teach the animal, or rather, the animal’s brain, to send those impulses. We reward every eyeblink impulse with septal stimulation. Faster and faster, so that if it had an eyelid, it would be blinking hundreds of times per minute. Pretty soon our conscious guinea pig brain is blinking its phantom eyelid seven thousand times an hour.”

Watson blinked.

“Imagine you could have an orgasm just by blinking,” she said.

In place of the little pink trussed turkey of a brain in solution, Watson imagined his client’s mole-gray and shell-pink blobulous engine of reason, bobbing in solution, wired and tubed for sustenance, while she went to work on it, rerouting synapses, touching up the contact points on various wet, tubular, coiling circuit boards. Then she could just reinsert it, back into its low-end chassis?

He tried to imagine free will, altruism, any soulful notion inhabiting Whitlow’s stew of stringy neurons, and he failed. Palmquist would call it eliminative materialism. The brain is only matter. Whitlow’s reasoning, intention, remorse, aspiration, his rancor and fear—artifacts and nothing more. Cellular static. Perhaps these mental events
felt
important and meaningful to his brain, but in a world constituted of matter only, thoughts, dreams, and soulful longings were as meaningless as the bioluminescence of comb jellies and mollusks.

“I am assuming that you did not come here to watch me work on the isolated whole brain of a guinea pig,” she said.

“I came here because you are not returning my calls,” said Watson. “I’ve been in hourglass mode for a week.”

“When I’m swamped, I revert almost exclusively to E-mail,” she said. “Don’t you?”

“Yeah,” said Watson. “And I would never squander the time it takes for a phone call over something as trivial as brain surgery.”

“It was voluntary,” she said. “He signed all the papers. We’ve got him on videotape with two doctors who explained all of the procedures and risks. We even asked him if he wanted to talk to his lawyer before consenting, and he said no. I think his words were, ‘Just get the fucking thing out of there. And keep me out of Des Peres.’

“As for our case,” she continued, “we’ve done too good of a job. It probably won’t even go to trial. The anomaly is way hard. Too hard. Too easy. We won’t be breaking new ground there. It’s a big cyst. Probably been there his whole life, though it may have been different sizes. It didn’t show up on the scans they did of him when he had his first bout of seizures, but that was seven years ago, and they were using betamaxed scanners with shitty resolution. Toy cameras compared to the Cray-driven machines they used on him up in Minnesota.”

“So now,” said Watson, “you’ve lost interest in the case?”

“I am your neuroscience expert,” she said. “If it goes to trial, I’ll testify, and the worst he’ll get is manslaughter. We are back in occupied territory. PET scans and fMRI to demonstrate a hard defect and consequent loss of impulse control? Very well settled, as you know from your research. Relax,” she said with a smile. “We can go on autopilot. And you have Mrs. Whitlow’s medical records, proving she was lying about the affair. You should be celebrating.”

“We should be celebrating,” said Watson.

“Another case came in from Reno, Nevada,” she said. “A hot one. The guy strangled his wife after he caught her having an E-mail relationship with a technical support guy at Oracle 2000. The scans are showing frontal lobe hypometabolism, without any neoplasms or lesions to blame. Very cutting edge. Any defense will be based entirely on scan interpretations and neurofunctional profiles. The prosecution’s neuroscientist is the number two PET man in the country. I have a major war shaping up.”

“I understand,” said Watson.

“I knew you would,” she said. “That’s why I sent E-mails instead of calling. I don’t get to my voice mail until almost midnight, and I didn’t know if it would be safe to call then.”

“And I think I also just wanted to see you,” he said, feeling his backbone feeding impulses into his—what would you call it, a soft bone? A temporary bone?

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about that, too. You’re Catholic, I’m agnostic. You use Windows 2000. I’m an Ultra UNIX person. Not only do we have religious differences, we have incompatible operating systems. In terms of networking options—you’re married, I’m divorced.”

“I wasn’t thinking of proposing marriage,” he said, adopting a seize-the-day posture he thought would appeal to her.

“Let’s think of ourselves as noninvasive electrodes,” she said. “We either give each other pleasure, or we do not. Didn’t you tell me you used to be into primatology?”

“I was,” he said, “in college.”

“Sex is the highest form of primate play. But not for you, right? For you, it touches off complicated moral reasoning, a sort of infinite loop between the anterior cingulate and orbital frontal cortex—circuits you’ll probably never be able to escape. You’ve heard of neural Darwinism? The environment—nurture, if you prefer—can actually alter the hard wiring of the brain. That’s what happened to you. Catholicism has implanted a complicated set of conditioned responses. It’s rewired certain parts of your brain. I like to play. Your play is encumbered by moral cobwebs. Doesn’t sound like fun for either of us.”

“But—” he began, and then stopped. How could he argue this one? The diagnosis was too personal and accurate.

“Besides, you’re married, remember? That means you are constantly multitasking, which requires a ton of RAM, and gets exceedingly complex, especially when you are trying to run older, primitive religious programs in the same sessions with the newer ones, like advanced cognitive neuroscience.”

He looked at the guinea pig brain, smelled the formaldehyde, listened to her withering deracination of every one of his cherished concepts about the soul, free will, beauty, truth, guilt, religion.

“Besides,” she said, “after I finish the Reno case I’m leaving for a fellowship down in South America.”

“For vacation?”

“The project is running into too many obstacles in this country. We are opening satellite programs in other countries, where the governments are more receptive to genetic and medical solutions to these problems. Here, if you want to study a male on death row, or, God forbid, if you propose that violent crime may have a genetic or a biological component, your funding gets cut off because people don’t want to
know
if violence is predictable, diagnosable, or treatable. When we submit a proposal suggesting that violent crime may have at least some biological or genetic components, we get vilified in the press for being genocidal. They think we are planning to scan criminals and then execute them before they commit any crimes.”

“Yeah,” said Watson. “Maybe you should tell them you just want to do brain surgery on criminals and repair them.”

“I am confident your client will get some relief from the surgery. What will he be like without the lesion? I don’t know. What was he like before it grew? We don’t know, because we don’t know when it grew. Some grow very slowly over decades, some grow to affect cerebral capacity within six weeks. Was the lesion there when Whitlow had his first episode of violence? Maybe. Does it matter? The point now is that we can use it for a defense, and medical intervention is at least possible, with a reasonable chance of success. But I can’t speak for the psychological, the personal, the moral repercussions. That’s for your client and you to decide. I don’t think he’ll be talking it over with his wife.”

“If he can still talk,” said Watson.

She shook her head. “Start by asking him if he is happier. A subjective before and after? And go from there. We can’t say for sure what he will be like after the operation. He may be ‘better’ in terms of controlling his temper or modulating his intense hatred of black people, but if they take too much tissue or the wrong kind, it may make it impossible for him to hate
anybody.
Unable to respond quickly and violently to sudden attacks from the environment. Not good for long-term survival, because it would impair normal suspicion and aggression.”

“But nobody’s worried about his long-term survival,” said Watson. “Not you, certainly.” He scowled at her, and she smiled back.

“Now what? Am I turning you into stone? I’m a monster, right? Look, the technology for this is on its way. If your client were a peaceful taxpayer, I would be the first to recommend that we not monkey around with parts of his brain that control his personality. The techniques are still so primitive—it’s like playing a piano with our elbows. The neural
networks and clusters are all stacked on top of each other and interconnected. It’s like trying to remove only the pornography links from the World Wide Web. It can’t be done, because ultimately everything is connected to everything else.

“It’s research. Our sister projects in other countries have had demonstrable success modifying pathological neural networks and alleviating the behavior disorders. Maybe you should think of the alternatives. Most of our subjects are repeat offenders, violent criminals. I think it’s a bit more humane than execution.”

“A bit,” said Watson. “When is he due back?”

She turned and clicked into her calendar. “He’s due back here in the Forensic Psychiatric Wing of Ignatius Medical Center next Wednesday. Four, five days.”

“The day after oral arguments,” said Watson.

“That’s right,” she said. “The Eighth Circuit. Good luck. I’m sure you’ll do a great job.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“And patient Whitlow’s in fairly good spirits, according to the postsurgical scans, that is. Resting-state blood flow to the frontal lobes has increased by about twenty percent. No sign of chronic or acute depression on his PET Maybe he’s happy because his lawyer is doing such a good job for him.”

“Or maybe they removed the depression circuitry when they were in there,” he said acidly.

“You’re an incorrigible moralist,” she said with a friendly smile. “It’s endearing in a way. You keep looking at my pig’s brain. I know what you’re thinking. The answer is yes. It’s black art, but it’s doable. We could do the same thing with a human brain. Easy Not only that, I predict that within our lifetime, they’ll manage two-way patches to artificial intelligence. They’ve already hooked up silicon chips to leach neurons with bidirectional signal processing. Deep voodoo. Past cool and headed for absolute zero. You want me to zap you the extracts on it?”

“Maybe after the case is over,” he said.

“And hey,” she said, “my colleagues down in Neuropsych are working on adding a Religion Scale to the standard neurofunctional profile. They’re building a database, scanning volunteers, and so on. If you’re interested, it would give you a chance to see the hottest machines in action. Completely noninvasive. Just let me know if you want in on it.”

Watson listened to her techno-chatter and said nothing. He wanted to leave but couldn’t. He needed something from her. What? Maybe she could scan him and see an image of it. Maybe she was like Circe, who had no use for men, once she had turned them into pigs and asses. And Watson was no Odysseus, because he’d lost his head and turned himself into a pig. Now she was bored.

“I really did enjoy working with you,” she said. “Maybe I’ll see you over in the forensic wing when your client gets back, if I’m not out in Reno.”

“Maybe,” said Watson.

“Someday you’ll thank me for this,” she said. “After our night in the storage room, I started thinking: What if I were a nice woman with two kids married to a nice guy like you? And someone like me came along?”

“This sounds like a conscience in bloom to me,” said Watson. “I thought you said you didn’t believe in it.”