Performance Anomalies (9 page)

They tested reaction times—visual, motor, auditory, even tactile and gustatory. There were endless variations of tests employing video screens, but the videos’ standard scanning speed of thirty images per second was too easy—Cono could pick out variations in each individual frame, even though it gave him a dull pain deep in his brain. They brought in faster equipment, which flashed visual scenes at forty, fifty, sixty images per second and more. The machines hit their limit, and Cono suggested to the frustrated scientists that they give him a glass of water and an aspirin and then show him a real situation, like a falling orange that he could catch and stuff into his pocket before anyone saw. Or a bird he could snatch with his hand as it flew by.

One of the doctors, a patient older man, asked Cono how well he slept at night, and what his dreams were like. The doctor explained why he was asking: dreaming was the brain’s way of re-equilibrating after a day of sensory inputs; the sensory overload of Cono’s hyper-fast perception might require longer and deeper dreaming in order to re-equilibrate his cortex at night. And the dreams might be different in character than those of a normal person—more intense, more vivid, faster, or the opposite of all of these; he didn’t know. Of course Cono also couldn’t know, because he had no way to compare his dreams to the dreams of others. But the older doctor’s questioning brought out several findings. Cono’s dreams often replayed real events with high fidelity to all the senses, not just the visual. He needed much more sleep than the average person, and a shortfall in sleep over a few days could cripple him, distorting his perceptions and clouding his thoughts. Cono told the doctor he had discovered that he could temper this need for long sleep by falling into deep meditation for short intervals; there had been times during his years of traveling when the technique had been necessary for survival. Out of desperation he had tried amphetamines, too, but they had a paradoxical effect and made him even more stuporous.

Geneticists were brought in to evaluate the strange young man. They spoke of genes called
timeless
,
FoxP2, STX1A
and others—genes they thought controlled the cycle times of the brains of various animal species unfamiliar to Cono. They were eager to know if these genes exerted the same control in humans. The geneticists analyzed Cono’s blood; later they could say only that they’d found a mutation they’d never seen, in a yet unnamed gene that they proudly asserted must be the regulator of sequential awareness. One of the geneticists speculated that Cono might have a version of this gene similar to that of a shark or a falcon or a reptile, a version that had been lost somewhere along the march into mammalian evolution.

This theory was immediately contested by another geneticist, who said it was likely that one or more of Cono’s brain-regulating genes located on the long arm of the seventh chromosome had undergone spontaneous mutations that somehow resulted in “this freakishly faster cycling.” The scientists argued over the competing theories, but finally agreed that regardless of the source of the genetic aberration, the result was analogous to the evolutionary progression of computers—new machines steadily came out in faster and faster models, doubling their cycle-times every year or two. But so far among humans, there were only two models—Cono and everyone else.

“It’s inevitable that new genetic anomalies like this will crop up as we get better at detecting them,” explained a bearded doctor in horn-rimmed glasses and a bow tie. “A lab in Europe just worked out the reason for a Finnish sports hero being unbeatable in cross-country skiing back in the ’60s. He has a mutation in a gene that controls red-blood-cell production. His body cranks out red blood cells in overdrive—very handy when your muscles are aching for more oxygen. And recently there was a baby born in Germany who looks like a body builder. The kid’s myostatin gene is mutated so that it doesn’t restrain muscle growth like it should. No doubt he’ll grow up to be abnormally strong. There are a handful of people in the world who cannot feel pain because of a defect in a single one of their genes. And you’ve probably heard of perfect pitch—I’m betting it’s the result of a genetic alteration we haven’t pinned down yet. You, Cono, are part of a new trend of uncovering the genetic basis of human performance anomalies.”

Cono was concentrating hard to understand all the English words, sometimes stopping the doctor for clarification. “Other person, someone, fast, making time slow down like me?” he asked.

“We’ve had a few cases of abnormally fast reaction times in patients with a disease called Tourette’s, but at most we see a doubling of speed of movement. You are way beyond that. And in you, both motion and perception are accelerated.” The doctor paused in thought. “Some, but not all, of your reaction times suggest that your brain is routing signals through a shorter pathway for sensation and response, via the amygdala.
Amygdala
means ‘almond’ in Latin, and that’s what this part of the brain looks like.” Cono was frowning as he tried to comprehend all the words. “There are two amygdalae,” the doctor continued, “deep in your brain, above the roof of your mouth, one on each side. They play a role in emotions and aggression. Signals routed through them can be so fast that they are complete even before you have any conscious awareness of them. It’s analogous to me tapping on your knee. Your quadriceps contract and your leg kicks out before you have any knowledge of the action. But I must say, your case is considerably more complex.”

After three weeks of examining Cono, the doctors sat down and gave him an overview of their findings. Cono had already soaked up a great deal more English. Following their summary, he recalled the seizure that had been provoked by the flickering lights and said, “Well, so, that explain why hard it is to watch TV for me.” The doctors all laughed, guardedly. They looked around the room at one another; too much, Cono thought. They were unusually gracious toward him, and he noted minuscule, fleeting contractions around their eyes and instantaneous shivers near their lips when they gave bland answers to his questions.

The scientists wanted more. They wanted to test Cono’s biological relatives and their genes, and to study Cono’s physiology in much greater detail. “After all, who knows the bodily consequences of a brain ticking so fast,” one of them said. “Maybe it shortens life expectancy.” A woman wearing a pinstriped dress said it was essential that they test the effect of Cono’s mutations on language acquisition, because of the probability that an increased cycle time would facilitate linguistic processing. Another specialist in the room said they had prepared a laboratory to study his dream patterns. Cono laughed at these proposals as he reached across the table to place his hand near the chief doctor’s ear, and plucked a Brazilian real coin from it. He flipped it into the air with his thumb, observing their faces and the tumbling coin at the same time. The coin was gone with a swipe of his arm that the scientists never saw. “The Freakish say no thanks.”

Cono made that his last day with the doctors. He had to change motels twice to evade their aggressive pursuit. But he didn’t leave Palo Alto immediately. He had agreed to meet a young oddball video technician named Todd who had slipped him a note on that last day. Todd had run the machines for most of the perceptual tests that Cono had endured, and he wrote in the note that he had important things to discuss with Cono.

When the goateed young man wasn’t running the visual equipment at the medical labs, he was working on his doctorate in mathematics. He wanted to put Cono’s way of seeing things into equations. “I’m into data compression,” he explained. That seemed to be the only thing Todd was into. He had no interest in women or men, and was barely sociable. He was neuter, it seemed, except for the near-orgasmic pleasure he took from his formulas. Cono guessed that only a person who didn’t really care for people could find personalities in equations, and friends in matrices. Todd spoke of datasets as if they were current or future lovers. Cono admired him for his ability to find joy beyond the secretory impulses that controlled most humans.

The two developed a friendship of sorts and worked together each night for weeks at sandwich shops and a joint called Michael’s Café. Cono had no money left, so Todd let him sleep on the floor of his flimsy-walled apartment, between stacks of computer magazines.

Todd asked in a dozen ways exactly what Cono saw in the split-second images that appeared in his mind as he watched something moving. Cono explained that the stationary objects would melt into the background, and he would actively perceive only what was moving, the edges especially. The rest could be black, or empty; it didn’t matter, because, “If I see that part once and it makes no move, I don’t need to see it again. I have it.”

Todd’s eyes pointed upward into his lids, so that Cono saw only the white sclera. When his pupils returned, Todd grinned and licked his lips. He started writing furiously on a notepad. Finally he spoke. “Stationary image fields are condensed, pocketed away by the math, so more strenuous formulas can work on the moving parts. Just think of a movie, Cono.” Cono replied that he didn’t watch movies; they gave him a headache. “Well, in movies, most of what you see is not moving much, but those pixels still choke up the data stream. So we’ll carve them out and stuff them away temporarily, and give them five-hertz updates. It frees up gobs of processing muscle.”

“Gobs?” Cono said.

“You know, lots, big amount, truckloads. Got it?”

“Got it. I learn gobs of English from my friend Todd.”

Todd smiled, briefly. “What about color? D’you see everything in color?” He thumped his bright-yellow pencil on the table. Then he twirled it around his thumb repeatedly—a little acrobatic trick he did when he was impatient, which was often.

Cono stared at the twirling pencil against the background of the green napkin Todd’s hand rested on.

“I know the pencil is yellow, but when it moves fast like that, it’s just gray. The napkin stays green.”

Todd picked up the napkin and waved it quickly back and forth. “Green?”

“Gray.”

“And now?” Todd stopped his waving.

“Now it’s green.”

Todd bit the eraser end of the pencil. “Maybe normal humans are just like you, Seven Q. The color disappears when something moves fast, and they just don’t notice the color’s gone. But you, you can see the change because, well, you know …”

“Normal? What is normal, Todd? Are you normal? And what is Seven Q?”

“I guess the docs didn’t tell you. They nicknamed you Seven Q because they think your mutations are on the long arm of your seventh chromosome. Chromosomes have a long arm and a short arm. The long one is called Q. They write it like this …”

Todd wrote “7q” on his notepad. “Kinda funny, huh?”

“My name is Cono, not Seven Q.”

Cono’s comment was lost on his friend, who was back to scribbling equations.

Todd looked up. “If it’s true and we can cut color from any fast movement in the display, that’s a 66 percent bit reduction, limited of course to the moving parts of the field, but those are the processor hogs anyway.”

“Hogs?”

“Pigs. Eat a lot. We’ll have to see if it pans out in normals, but if it does, it’ll be a great data stuffer, and easy to deal with—just some eigenvector transformations.”

Todd was immersed in his formulas again when Cono reached beneath the table, pulled a box out of a sack and placed it next to the notepad. It was a mini Sony video camera, the latest. Cono nudged it forward to get Todd’s attention.

“What’s this?”

“For you. To say thanks for letting me stay at your place.”

“Hey, man, it’s too much. You don’t have the money for this.”

“I didn’t pay money for it.” Cono looked at Todd in amazement. “Of course I didn’t.”

“Some girl give it to you? The one at Michael’s who keeps giving you the eye?”

“No.”

“No, what?”

“I took it.”

“You
stole
it?”

“I feel a little guilty, because it was so easy. The man at the store left it there.”

“On the counter top, you mean.”

“Yes,” Cono said, “then he went to help someone else.”

“And you helped yourself.” Todd rubbed his fingers across his forehead, hard.

“Too easy, you’re right,” Cono said. “Didn’t have to use any tricks.”

Todd scolded Cono. It was the only time Cono had seen Todd’s eyes get lit up by anything other than their discoveries.

“Cono, I don’t want to commute all the way to San Quentin to continue our collaboration. You have to get a job. No more stealing.”

Cono got a day job, “serving petrol,” as he put it, at a station on the other side of the highway that kept the blacks and Latinos a safe distance from the mandarins of the university. Todd and Cono continued their evening sessions.

“Cono, when you hear things,
how
do you hear things?” And on and on.

Three months later they knocked on the door of a patent lawyer down the street from Todd’s apartment. The next day the attorney said he was so interested in their data compression techniques that he would work for them for no fee and wait to get paid out of downstream licensing fees. To Cono’s eye, the creases above the attorney’s mouth seemed to quiver too much, and there was a lack of smoothness as ripples of expression flowed across his face; Cono told Todd the guy couldn’t be trusted. Todd disagreed. A month later Todd said, “He’s a schmuck.”