Neuropath (34 page)

What kind of horrors had Neil draped around him?

This was how it happened, Thomas realized, for real and not in the movies.

Fathers failed.

Monsters won.

Quite without curiosity, he watched this realization soak the computer graphic of his brain with various colors, cream to scarlet.

When he finally spoke, it seemed he did so from a coma.

'So what is it?' he rasped. His ensuing cough rattled the bolts screwed into his skull. 'You have me strapped into some kind of transcranial magnetic stimulator?' TMS devices, as they were called, had been in common use since the 1990s, employing magnetic fields to alter neuronal activity at targeted points in the brain. They were common as dirt at most neuroscientific research centers.

'No-no,' Neil said without looking away from his screens. His fingers clicked across the keyboard. 'TMS can't reach nearly deep enough.'

'So what is it?'

Neil turned without looking at him, walked up, and began tinkering with something just outside his periphery. Thomas tensed, felt his eyes roll like a horse's.

'It's a Homeland Security special,' Neil said, like a dentist talking to keep his patient preoccupied, 'called Marionette. We adapted her from stereotactic neuroradiosurgical devices—you know, the ones that use overlapping particle beams to burn out tumors? We found a way of doping the blood so that we could exercise pinpoint metabolic control at multiple points in the brain…' Thomas heard the tinkle of a small wrench. 'We call her Mary.'

'Doesn't ring a bell,' Thomas said, more out of hatred than humor.

Neil's laugh tickled his neck below his left ear.

'Oh, she will soon enough,' he said, standing upright, then ducking out of his periphery. Thomas rolled his eyes, trying to follow him, but the fringe of blindness was absolute. Neil's next words, 'Trust me,' seemed to fall out of nowhere.

Thomas could hear him root through what sounded like a toolbox behind him. Suddenly he reappeared, glanced at him on his way back to the computer terminal. 'I actually have several screen savers,' Neil said, sitting. 'Would you like to see?'

'Screen savers?'

Grinning at the flat-panel, Neil tapped something out on his keyboard. Light gleamed along the curve of his teeth. 'That's what we call them. They're programs that play on the neural circuitry responsible for consciousness.' He swiveled toward Thomas. His chair whistled. 'It's the final frontier of art, actually. The most fundamental canvas of all.'

'Canvas?' Thomas asked dully.

Remember… he murdered your son
…

'Existence,' Neil said. 'Existence itself.'

He turned back to his keyboard and screen. 'You know how we used to always debate SETI back at Princeton, the question why, despite decades of searching the skies, we haven't been able to detect any ET version of
I Love Lucy
. After this, it becomes pretty clear why.'

'I don't under-unngh!'

His groin exploded in pleasure, tidal and blistering. He gasped, stared at Neil in drooling panic. Orgasms passed through him in sequential waves, clenching his anus like a fist, shuddering through the rebar of his body, slathering him with bliss. It was as though something divine and electric lunged about his cock.

'This one's my favorite,' Neil said, laughing. 'Blow your load right away, so the symphony that follows unwinds in a drowsy post-coital haze…'

Suddenly the pleasure was gone. The silence crackled. He gasped. Even though his skull remained bolted to Marionette, he could feel himself floating in and out of his body, as if he had become a flag hanging in a humid breeze. He tried to clutch. He tried to hold on. But he had become insubstantial.

'Of course,' Neil was saying, 'the obligatory oscillating OBE—out of body experience—followed by a slow, crawling absence in your visual field.'

Parts of the scene began to… implode before him, as through his visual field were a thing of rubber, being sucked through holes into a greater vacuum behind. The absences scrawled in wandering lines, at one point collapsing Neil's head into jaws and hair. And it looked as real as real…

'Pardon the descriptive monologue,' Neil was saying as first his torso then his leg vanished, 'but the next sequence requires someone talking—'

'—because,' Thomas said, 'it mucks with the neural circuits that distinguish the origin of voices.' What was Neil doing? Fucking
lip-synching?
T imagine that right about now,' Thomas added, 'you're wondering why I'm mouthing your words. The thing that freaks most people out is that it really seems
they're
the ones talking, that they're deciding to say what, in fact, someone else is saying.'

Neil's lips stopped moving, and Thomas assumed that he'd given up his stupid mockery—why bother, when he had degraded him in so many more profound ways? But when Thomas found himself adding, 'You should brace yourself for this next sequence; it's pretty intense,' Neil mouthed the identical words once again.

Then all was free-fall, a crazed vertigo of being… the room soared, yawed and pitched, even though it remained sun-stationary.

'I call this Dante's Bungee,' Neil said, glancing from Thomas to the screen again.

Something chainsawed into his chest, while something else tongued his cock with lightning. Rage overcame him, only to be swamped by love, by the tender melancholy of awakening before a lover in early light. He wept, and he howled in fury and joy. Never had he so loved. Never had he so hated. Never had he so yearned, as though a chasm had cracked open within him, an endless clutching abyss, suddenly filled with divinity, with a resounding, weeping unity, pinged by twinges of anxiety that grew like bloodstains, that blackened into a thrumming dread, with claws like capillaries, peeling muscle from the inside of skin, while the world before him flapped back and forth like wings on an interdimensional hinge, dragging the world that was his right into the world that was his left.

'This sequence,' he could hear Neil saying, 'fucks with the construction of extrapersonal space. Some funky shit.'

Place crumpled and bloomed. Hollows collapsed into solids. Movement collapsed into stuttering instants, as though his heartbeat had become the very strobe of being. He could recognize everything about him—the man, the table, the chair—but he could see none of it, only movements, devoid of substance, whirring in the corners like quantum clockwork.

And he ached with reptilian wrath, with mammalian tenderness… Expect-yearn-hope-pray. Memories, pulsing like glands, fading, fading… Somehow he forgot how to breathe.

Then nothing.

No feeling. No sensation. Just a trembling, a teetering blacker than black.

Death.

Bursting into pounding groins and howling fear-fuck-love-fuck-hate-fuck-horror-joy-jealousy-rage. Canines bared. A million women and a million rapes. Claw-kill-you-fucking-cunt-pussy-cunt-I-will-fucking-kill-kill-kill-kill! Aggression. Aggression.

Then a spinning head. The sound of Neil chuckling. The creak of his chair.

'I don't believe in happy endings,' he said.

Thomas cried out, unable to think, to sort…

'Mary give you a good ride?'

Resentment, fear, and indignation.

'You prick,' Thomas gasped. 'You fucking bastard.' He blinked the tears from his eyes, wondered why his mouth seemed so disconnected from his voice. 'Somehow,' he managed. 'Somehow I'm going to kill you, you fucking bastard.'

Again… Neil was lip-synching again.

Hollow and heavy, as though resuscitated from a drowning.

'We call endings like that "blurs",' Neil said. 'Little reminders that Mary simply does what the brain does anyway, just minus all the environmental red tape. Since the feeling of being compelled is as much a product of your brain as anything else, you only feel compelled when Mary tickles it. Mackenzie cooked up these little "will inversion" algorithms—I'd show you if you weren't in restraints. They're creepy. You think you're willing your right arm to move, and your left arm starts waving instead. All sorts of little mindfucks like that. One of his screen savers even has a short omnipotence sequence. No matter what you're looking at, you're convinced that you're
willing
it to happen. Even if it's thunderclouds rolling in on the horizon. It's quite a trip, believe me.'

Neil laughed, looked appreciatively at the largely invisible apparatus that held Thomas. 'You can see why we used to call her Mary, Mother of God.'

Thomas tried to speak, but could not.

'Some things are untouchable, though, just as you predicted in
Through the Brain
. The experiences are always unitary, and they're always now, as you would expect, given that they're the by-products of what the brain lacks.'

Thomas tried to speak again, but could only cough.

Neil smiled. 'Nothing to worry about. Just a little neurotransmitter backwash. You might feel dopey for a couple of days, but nothing more.'

'Ah…' Thomas rasped. 'Ah-ah…' He breathed deep, shuddered, and tried again. 'Ah…
bomination…
'

'Yesss,' Neil drawled. 'The future.'

His body buzzing, boneless and immobile. Neil humming some tuneless song, swinging his chair between computers.

C'mon, Goodbook. Get a handle… Think clear…

Think straight.

Frankie was dead. As hard as that thought clenched his chest, Thomas knew he had to seal it away, concentrate on the
now
. Neil was mad. In-fucking-sane. That meant his priorities were all his own, that his thought processes possessed their own alien logic. If he was going to survive, Thomas knew, he would have to figure out what that logic was. Everyone was predictable, in the end. Even lunatics followed rules.

'You—' he started, only to be interrupted by a fit of coughing. He could feel Mary's screws bracing his skull. He cleared his throat, blinked tears from his eyes.

Frankie
… The little king, pronouncing his love through a mouthful of Cheerios.

'
I have powers, Daddy
… soooper
powers. If there was a truck, and it was going to run you over, I would save you, Daddy. I would punch that truck and BOOM
!'

Thomas glared at Neil's back. 'So what do you gain, huh, Neil? What does your brain win?'

Neil spun about in his chair. 'You're supposing the world can be divided into winners and losers.'

'A game without winners or losers is theatre,' Thomas said in a tone void of all spirit. 'You know that.'

'Game?' Neil chortled. 'Dude, there's no one keeping score.'

Thomas leaned against the screws that bound him. 'We are, Neil. I am.'

His best friend's face became blank with something resembling pity.

'Like I said. No one.'

At that instant, Thomas suffered a kind of power outage of the heart. He felt like a dead man breathing.

He murdered my son… His son…

'You,' Neil continued, his voice thinned by an implacable sincerity. 'You're the illusion. Think about it, Goodbook. You want to believe I'm doing things
to
you, when in fact I'm doing things
with
you. The only reason I can play your thoughts and experiences like a sock puppet is because
that's what you are
. I'm just slipping my hand over the world's knuckles.'

Neil had turned away to enter yet more cryptic command strings into the keyboard. 'You
want
to think,' he was saying, 'that I'm some kind of invader, that ordinarily
you
occupy the control room. But you know better. The control room's empty; it always has been. Since it lies outside the information horizon of your thalamocortical system, it simply doesn't exist for your consciousness, which is why your thalamocortical system thinks itself an unmoved mover, the floating origin of all your actions.'

And these seemed the most heartbreaking words of all. It was the Blind Brain Hypothesis, his own argument from
Through the Brain Darkly
, not simply paraphrased, but
enacted
. Neil had transformed him into the demonstration of his own outrageous claim. All of it, everything from meaning to self to morality, illusory artifacts of a brain duped by its inability to see itself as a brain. Even
these
thoughts… Even this very moment!

He was nothing more than a fragment of something vast and terrible with complexity—something dead. A fragment that could not but see itself as a whole. A ruin that styled itself a little god.

No-no-no-no-no
…

He couldn't be right. No. No. Not in this!

'Why are you doing this? Neil! Neil! It's
meeeeee
. It's fucking
Tommy!
Why are you doing this to me? What did I do?'

A vice clamped his throat. Something animal sobbed and snuffled from his chest.

'Shhhh,' Neil said. 'Easy there, Goodbook. C'mon. Look at me now. No crying.
Look
at me.'

Thomas raised his bleary eyes.

'This isn't punishment. This isn't the expression of some pathological hate or repressed sexual desire. This is
love
, Thomas. True love—love that knows it's an illusion. I can plug myself into the low-field if you want to see. This brain loves you, that's why it's gone to all this trouble. I think it thinks your brain is its brother, its only brother. I think it's trying to set your brain free.'

'But Frankeeee,' Thomas keened in a low murmur.

Frankie
…

'Come,' Neil said. 'It's time you understood why I sent you for Frankie.'

A moment of heart-stopping hate.

Neil disappeared behind him. 'You see, I needed time,' he said from the blackness. 'You caught me before I had everything in place.' There was a snap—the release of some kind of mechanism shivered through the apparatus. There was a high-pitched squeal, and Thomas watched the room spin about his axis. Neil had turned him some 30 degrees to the right…

… so that he could see her laying unconscious on an upright bench like his own.

Nora.

He began shaking uncontrollably.