Lab 6 (5 page)

The harsh white light was gone, the room silent.

Everything seemed wrapped in haze.

WHO?

Who was it?

The vision was fading. Or was it?

Sam tried to focus on the figure across the room. At his desk.

He’s still there.

He was standing now. Staring at Sam.

Approaching.

Sam scrambled to leave, but his feet were tangled in the bedsheets.

A pair of hands grabbed him firmly.

Mom’s hands. She was crouched at the side of his bed.

“Sweetie, it’s okay,” she said. “You were dreaming.”

Sam blinked. The room — and the figure — sharpened.

Dad.

It’s just Dad.

Sam’s desk had been cleared off. On it was a laptop he’d never seen in the house before. It was attached on one side to a towering machine, on the other to a wrinkled, leatherlike object in his dad’s hands.

“Are you okay, pal?” his father asked.

Sam’s breathing was fast and painful. His throat felt raw, as if it had been scraped with a barbecue brush. “Yeah.”

“Must have been a bad one,” his mom said.

Sam nodded. “It … was so real.”

“The brain can do that.”

“Switches,” his dad said with a soft smile. “Remember, that’s all it is.”

“What’s that?” Sam asked, nodding toward the thing in his dad’s hand.

“Just a prototype,” he explained.

“Of what?”

Mr. Hughes began unfolding the object. It was concave, like a skullcap. Small electrodes protruded from the top, connected by wires to the machine.

“Please put this on,” he said calmly. Sam fought back the words — Jamie’s words, the words in his fears and dreams
(experiments
…
mutants
…
prisoners in lab rooms … brain tampering
…)

STOP.

He breathed slowly, calming his still-panicked thoughts.

They are my parents.

“Why, Dad?” he asked.

“It may make you feel better,” Mrs. Hughes said.

“ ‘May’?”

“Like I said, it’s a prototype,” Mr. Hughes replied. “It may do nothing. But it can’t possibly hurt.”

“I feel fine now!”

His mother leaned in and stroked the back of his head. “You were having that feeling, weren’t you? The one you sometimes get at Turing-Douglas?”

“It was a
dream,
Mom. Really — ”

“You were yelling out a name.” Mr. Hughes looked at him levelly. “Do you know what it was?”

“Kevin …” Sam murmured.

“Yes,” Mrs. Hughes said, almost under her breath.

“Who is that, Mom? Why was the name on the — ?”

You can’t mention the notebook!

Sam cut himself off. The notebook was still under his bed.

His dad was at the desk again. With a flick of a switch, he turned on the laptop. The screen glowed with four graphs, all flat.

GRRRRONNNNG!

The feeling rushed back.

Like an injection of hot air into Sam’s head.

“IT HURTS, DAD! DON’T DO THAT!” Sam pleaded.

“John …” said Mrs. Hughes anxiously.

But Sam’s dad was placing the cap on him.

They’re my parents.

They love me.

The graphs on the monitor instantly sprang to life — jagged, pulsating, and violent-looking.

Sam felt his eyes bulge. He felt warm spots of perspiration on his upper lip.

“WHY … ARE … YOU DOING … THIS?”

This isn’t HELPING me. It’s making everything worse, and it’s DAD
—
Dad’s idea, he doesn’t know what he’s doing, THAT’S why he was fired from those other jobs.

Sam reached up to pull off the cap. But he was losing balance, losing consciousness, and his fingers felt dead.

He looked desperately at his mom. “Can … you … ?”

Swallowing hard, she glanced at her husband, confusion playing across her tight, inscrutable features.

Then she reached out to Sam.

And held the cap down.

At that moment, Sam knew. He knew that he had seen something he wasn’t supposed to see.

He had witnessed the secret.

The government secret.

Do they know the risk they’re taking?

They’re his parents. Few risks are too big.

G
ONE.

It was gone.

The feeling had left him as suddenly as it had come.

The graphs were still jumping, but Sam was calm again.

Clear-eyed.

Mom
was a mess. Wet-faced and haggard.

Dad didn’t look too terrific, either. He was wide-eyed and pale, as if he’d just seen a purple horn sprout from Sam’s forehead.

“I thought — you didn’t — ” Sam was giddy with relief. He flopped back onto his bed. “Whoa, that’s some machine.”

Normal.

My fingers — my eyes — my head — they feel totally normal.

Mom’s jaw dropped open. “Oh my god,” she whispered. “Oh my god.”

Sam reached upward to remove the cap. “Can I?”

“It … works,” his dad murmured.

Sam took that for a yes. He pulled the cap from his head. “Thanks. What’s this thing called?”

“A transpatheter,” his mom said, her face slowly brightening.

Dad was carefully examining the screen. He was rocking from foot to foot, practically dancing. “The neurotransmitters functioned. The circuitry was flawless.”

“What does that mean?” Sam tried.

His mom ignored him. “Dendritic action?”

“Point five nanoseconds average,” his dad answered.

“Storage?”

“Four million megagigs with cache to spare!”

They fell into each other’s arms, giggling.

Giggling!

“What? Are we going to get rich now?” Sam asked.

They both turned to face him, as if just noticing he was in the room. Then, with big smiles, they pulled him into a three-way hug. “Richer than you can imagine,” his mom said.

Sam wrapped his arms around them and squeezed.

He was strong again, clearheaded. His parents were happy.

It felt good to be together. Really good.

But something wasn’t right. They were happy about the
machine.
They were happy about being rich.

He would have liked a little more concern for himself.

Don’t be greedy, Sam. Take what you can get.

They’ve been working on this forever. Give them some credit.

“So it’s some kind of medical thing?” Sam asked. “Like, stronger than aspirin without the side effects?”

Dad threw back his head, laughing. “More than that. Sam, you know what we’ve said all along about the human brain — ”

“It’s all switches,” Sam said, repeating the mantra he’d heard almost as often as
Watch for traffic when you cross the street.
“Like, little electrical circuits between the nerves.”

“Billions of them,” his mom explained. “Every moment — every tiny feeling you experience, every thought you have — is a certain sequence of those switches, turning on and off.”

“This machine,” his dad said, “in essence, has those switches — ”

“You mean, you’ve done it!” Sam asked. “You’ve created a real brain?”

“No,” Mrs. Hughes replied. “Not a brain. Just a transpatheter— a shell. All set up to
recognize
and
receive
the various circuits of the human brain.”

“It doesn’t have the capacity to experience the feelings itself,” Sam’s dad added. “It has to wait for a signal — then uploads and stores it.”

“So that headache I was having — ”

Sam’s mom was grinning. “It wasn’t a headache, Sam. It was more than that, wasn’t it?”

Much more.

Unbelievably more.

Even thinking about it hurt. “Like another person inside me …”

“A whole other boy,” his mom agreed, “trapped inside — with emotions so strong that you feel you’re going to explode.”

“It’s what you used to tell us years ago,” Mr. Hughes said. “But now those feelings are gone, Sam. Into the transpatheter. All those awful emotions.”

The graphs were still going wild.

“Like … uploading a part of myself,” Sam whispered.

His mom put her arm around his shoulder. “You could say that.”

“Then what?” Sam asked. “What happens to the emotions?”

His dad looked confused. “Well … they become electricity.”

“But my emotions are electricity, too,” Sam retorted. “And the electrical patterns cause me to
feel
a certain way. So if the machine is identical to my brain — wouldn’t
it
feel, too, just like a real person?”

“To be a real person, it would need the means of expression and experience,” Mr. Hughes said. “Eyes to see, ears to hear — ”

“But how do you know?” Sam pressed on. “How do you
know
a machine can’t feel it all inside?”

His parents exchanged a long glance.

Finally his dad said, “We don’t.”

Sam noticed the smell of microwaved leftovers as he stepped out of the shower. Walking to his room, he heard his parents in the kitchen, jabbering a mile a minute.

Sam wasn’t often awake during their midnight snacks.

Well, 2:37
A.M.
snack, to be precise. That was the time glowing on his bedroom alarm clock.

He was tired. Bone tired. The shower had soothed him, making him realize how tense he’d been.

He’d needed that shower after the experience with the transpatheter. It had left him feeling sweaty.

Drained, too. Literally.

Whatever had been inside him was gone. His head felt totally clear.

How?

The transpatheter seemed like hocus-pocus. Like something out
of Professor Phlingus.
In theory it made sense, but if he hadn’t seen it — if someone had tried to describe it to him …

Don’t think about it now.

Sleep.

He put on a clean pair of pajamas and slid into bed.

As his eyes shut, he noticed his clothes heaped on the floor. Jamie’s magazine stuck out of his pants pocket.

He made a mental note to return that to her. Not to mention —

The notebook.

Zing. Sam was awake again. He sat up and pulled the composition notebook from under his mattress. Walking to his door, he peeked down the hallway.

Mom and Dad were out of sight, still deep into their conversation in the kitchen.

Quietly, Sam went up to the tower room.

The computer was on, the screensaver’s wildly moving geometric designs casting a flickery glow over the room. Sam walked gingerly to the file cabinet and pulled open the top drawer.

He noticed the name
KEVIN
on a file-folder tab.

Sam eagerly pulled out the folder and opened it.

Empty.

Had the notebook been the only thing in it? One notebook with one page of writing?

He slipped the notebook in and riffled through the other file tabs. The names were all scientific words, totally baffling.

There has to be more. Somewhere.

He softly closed the file drawer and turned to the computer.

A peek wouldn’t hurt. Probably all scientific gibberish anyway.

Sam sneaked over to the desk, sat down, and moved the mouse.

The screensaver disappeared, replaced by a message:

Sam let out a quiet sigh of relief.

He pressed N, then ran a system-wide search on the name “Kevin.”

“Sam?” his mother’s voice called from two floors below.

Panic.

Sam aborted the search. The screen returned to its normal state — just the way it had been before Bart had found it.

They would never know.

Sam sped down to the second floor. “Yeah?”

“Are you hungry?”

“No, thanks,” Sam called when he reached the first floor. “I’m going to sleep.”

“Okay. ’Night!”

“ ’Night.”

He hopped into bed. Finally. But instead of dozing off he lay there, staring upward, eyes wide. His heart raced.

Insomnia twice in one night. Just great.

He grabbed the nearest reading material. Jamie’s magazine. Something humorous to loosen him up.

But it wasn’t funny. The pictures of freakish people and animals were cheesy. Half the pictures looked doctored. It seemed wrong to ogle the others.

He was about to close it when he saw the last section, the one Jamie wanted him to read — “Real Scientific Phenomena Too Disturbing for the Mass Media.”

He leafed through the alien abductions (the usual grainy photos and hysterical testimony), an article called “Return from Death: They Saw the White Light and Lived to Tell,” and “The True Story of the Man Who Used Ninety-One Percent of His Brain, While the Rest of Us Use Only Fifteen!”

Junk.

Next came “Twins: The Shocking Truth of Midge and Madge, Separated at Birth and Raised in Two Different Families, Total Strangers Who Finally Meet at Age 32 and Are ABSOLUTELY IDENTICAL!!!”

Each married on the same day in the same year … husbands have same first name and same interests … each had a best friend who died in a car accident … both had same favorite color, same favorite song, bought same kind of house on identically named streets in two different towns.

Now that was cool.