Human (3 page)

CHAPTER II.

Dr. Douglas Bayron was also a fan of Mendeleev. In fact, he kept a large poster of the periodic table hanging in his lab. It was something of a totem for him--a source to trace all of his understandings of the world back to. It was a daily reminder that all things, no matter how complex, were merely amalgamations of simpler things. It reminded him that there is simply no limit to the number of simple things there are in the world. It inspired his belief that all things in nature had orders and values and properties waiting to be discovered.

Myra had noticed that Dr. Bayron had changed since starting the project, but she did not realize that he had grown to look something like Mendeleev too. To her, it seemed that he had become a caricature of sorts-- a mad-scientist whose drive and intensity blinded him to even the face he saw in the mirror.

His lab, however, was meticulously maintained and orderly. It consisted of ten thousand square feet of highrise office space. One thousand square feet was fully occupied by the processors, servers, and RISC arrays that had already modeled billions of human brain cells in three dimensions. Another one thousand square feet was dedicated to high-speed, high density, data storage which long ago had exceeded one thousand petabytes making Bayron and his staff part of a very small group of people throughout the world to use the word "exabyte" on a daily basis.

Another three-thousand square feet was inartfully referred to as the sausage factory. It was in this portion of the lab, divided into twenty-five grey cubicles, that some of the most skilled renderers in the country sat, day in and day out, assigning attributes to each identifiable component on the detailed, three-dimensional MRI of Smith's brain.

The remainder of the space included conferencing facilities, Bayron's personal office, an engineering and fabricating lab, and a combination examination, operating, and recovery room, which was nicknamed, "the infirmary". On Smith's instruction, Myra had relocated all of the other offices that had been on the same floor as the lab to other floors so that the lab could be quickly and easily expanded as necessary.

Dr. Bayron, applying the theories of co-relational/oppositional holographic memory and processing which had won him a doctorate many years ago, spent most of his time assigning attributes to the empty spaces in between the cells which his assistants had successfully rendered. Those empty spaces used to be called "nothing" until science gave lie to that description.

As a research scientist at MIT, a young Dr. Bayron, barely 24 years old, had posited the theory that the higher functions of the mind, emotions, abstract reasoning, synesthetic sensory convergence (the ability to "taste" a steak immediately upon hearing it sizzle on a grill, for instance), all occurred in the empty spaces of the brain in which the invisible forces of nature like relative gravity and micromagnetic pulls operated to process non-linear, non-binary information instantaneously.

When the scientists operating the Large Hadron Collider at CERN discovered that empty space actually has some measurable mass, Bayron postulated that those empty spaces suddenly had to be considered as a part of the substance of the brain itself. Overnight, Bayron's theory had become a genuine hypothesis.

To test his hypothesis, Bayron wanted to model the brain of a European Quail, the least complex full brain in the animal kingdom. He wrote a grant proposal asking for a huge sum of money to fund his research. He was surprised when he received a call from the research director at SmithCorp. SmithCorp would fund the research, but not at the amount requested. It wouldn't be necessary, the director said, because the brain of the European quail had been thoroughly mapped and modeled, by none other than Elijah Smith himself. Smith had a very personal interest in this project, the director said, as years of research had been expended unsuccessfully trying to get the Smith model to work.  As perfect as the model was, the computer never became a Quail. Not only couldn't the computer build a nest, it didn't even produce patterned data. But Smith himself personally believed that Bayron's theory was the key. And so, with the financial support of his unexpected benefactor, Bayron started assigning properties to the empty spaces. Everything he could learn about the properties of nothingness were added to the model. When the CERN scientists discovered there were actually many different kinds of nothingness, each with their own properties, Bayron's model became more complex. The more the CERN scientists learned about the nature of empty space, the larger Bayron's model grew.

One day, like magic, the model spewed out a pattern. It was definitely a pattern. When the data was plotted, there was the clear image of an oscilloscopic wave. Dr. Bayron, like Archimedes bolting from his legendary tub, ran to the audio lab waving his printout at the technicians. "Produce this sound for me!" he yelled at the first technician he saw. "Do it, do it!" 

The technician scanned the wave diagram into his computer, pressed a few keys and turned up the volume on a speaker. A moment later, they all heard a clear sound:

"Chirp".

"What the hell is that?"  The technician asked.

"It's a god damn European Quail!" Bayron shouted.

In retrospect, he wished he had just said, "Eureka."

After celebrating the almost magical chirp with his research team, Bayron made a phone call to the research director at SmithCorp. After explaining his result, the research director put him on hold. He was barely on hold for 10 seconds when a louder, different voice, came from the phone.

"Douglas Bayron?"  The voice said. "Elly Smith."

Bayron, by virtue of some unknown instinct, stood up when he realized who he was speaking with. "Yes sir. I trust you've heard we got affirmative results?"

"I had no doubt, Bayron," Smith said, "I am not in the habit of betting on losers. But this is just proof of concept, you understand. Let me tell you what I really want."

When Smith offered Bayron the opportunity to model a human brain, Bayron jumped. The promise of unlimited resources and huge pay were appreciated, but were hardly necessary.

And so it was the European Quail that brought these two men together.

Bayron protected his empty spaces. They were his. He didn't let anyone else at SmithCorp work on the empty spaces. He guarded them jealously; that's where the magic lay. He filled most of his black spiral notebook with the properties of the various types of nothingness that he identified in the model he was creating of Smith's brain. The pipes and tubes, neurons and arteries and the chemicals that drive the apparatus - all the quantifiable aspects: that work could be done by his assistants most of whom were really just highly educated technicians and mechanics. Myra called them the trained monkeys. But the magic he kept for himself in the bound pages of his spiral book.

Bayron did not think of his rendering staff quite as contemptuously as Myra, but he never let them near the empty spaces. Those were all his.

Besides the fact that they were intellectual blood brothers connected through the European Quail, another major reason that Bayron had signed on with Smith was because Smith was adamant about modeling the brain from scratch. Smith wanted the project started from scratch because he only cared to have a model made of his own brain. Bayron, on the other hand, wanted to start from scratch because no other human brain modeling project had been commenced with a data system that permitted the assignation of attributes to his beloved empty spaces. That is, no other human brain modeling project other than his and that of a particular team in Russia that had let him know they were modeling according to his own theories.

At first Bayron justified his decision to share his data with the Russians by telling himself he just wanted to see their data. He wanted to observe their processes to perhaps help him improve his. He hadn't intended to cheat his friend by using the forbidden Russian hypothalamus. But just to look would be no harm.

The arrival of the Russian model made a memorable impression when Bayron signed for it just a few days later. Few people in the world have ever had to consider how much physical storage media all of the specifications of a single human brain would take up when translated in into bits and bytes. At well over 100 petabytes, electronically sending the data for the hypothalamus alone would take days or even weeks. And so, the Russian model was burned onto plain old consumer grade blu-rays (thousands of them), put in boxes, and mailed. The number of boxes in which the disks arrived was a testament to the incredible efficiency of the biological brain.

When he was very young, Bayron had read the story of Flat Stanley, a little boy who was able to fold himself up and mail himself in an envelope.

Opening the first box made Bayron remember that story. Here he was opening a box containing, at least in concept, an actual person, with all of that person's loves and hates and desires and idiosyncrasies. Was it any more farfetched to think that the essence of self could be contained within a gooey mass of brain than in a cheap, Russian, cardboard box?

Atop the thousands of disks was a letter addressed to Dr. Bayron from Dr. Vadi Petrovsky of the St. Petersberg Neurological Institute, the large SPNI emblem splayed across the top.

"Dear Dr. Bayron," the letter began in excellent English which soon deteriorated into not-too-bad English-as-a-second-language. "It is with great pleasure that we look forward to beginning our great collaboration. Unlike your subject, we modeled according to the brain of healthy, 30 year old subject. You will find detail in attachments. Subject was also predeceased of our study so invasive technique was possible and employed. We have set up collaboration website secure server at SPNI.RU/Petrovsky/collaborations/us/3dmodeling where you will find all technical and esoteric information as well as anecdotal and narrative."

The letter was signed, in a friendly scrawl, "Dr. Vadi."

Bayron made a mental note to try to find out what Russian-to-English dictionary Dr. Petrovsky was using as words like esoteric and anecdotal were clearly not of the meanings Bayron believed Petrovsky to have intended.

Petrovsky gave no name for the "healthy" but "predeceased" 30 year old Russian subject, so  Bayron decided to name him Stanley after Flat Stanley from the story. If Stanley was healthy, he wondered, why was he dead? He considered, of course, the possibility that Stanley had died from corporeal trauma or penal execution. In any event, as long as the brain was healthy, it didn't really matter. At least not to Bayron.

Bayron removed the disk which was marked 1/6575 and put it in his optical drive. A message box appeared on Bayron's computer screen: "This disk contains compressed data in tarball.gzip format. Please confirm unarchiving mode."

A few keystrokes later Bayron was looking at a page of data. He would have to read the documentation to make the data meaningful. He would assign that task to a team member. Someone who spoke Russian would probably be a good choice. He made a note in his notebook.

Over the years that the disease progressed, Smith had ultimately grown so weak that he could hardly be heard. Often he typed his thoughts into the computer and communicated through instant messages even with people just a few feet away from him.

Hermelinda tried to give him a little exercise everyday, but the weaker he grew the less it helped. She would stretch him, turn him, and massage him. She diligently did everything she possibly could to keep his blood flowing, prevent muscle attrition, and prevent bedsores.

Every morning she would clean him head to toe and dress him neatly. As time went on and he was less able to control his limbs it felt to her as if she were dressing a doll.

But she kept him clean and well groomed so that he could retain some small level of dignity. It was a battle she had been losing.

Myra eventually stopped coming to receive Smith's instructions in person. The last time she had come his voice was so weak that Myra needed Hermelinda's help to hear what he was saying. With the IV feeding units, a vital signs monitor, and a breathing machine surrounding his bed, Myra couldn't get close enough to hear. Hermelinda, on the other hand, climbed right into his bed and put her ear up to his lips.

Hermelinda, lying in bed next to the emaciated, almost-corpse, of Elijah Smith, repeated his words to Myra, "If I do not survive, or if a Court declares me dead, or if anything of that sort happens, you will receive an envelope from Takahashi transferring all of the stock in the Smith companies to a charitable trust. The salaried trustees of that trust are to be you, Hermelinda, Dr. Bayron and Takahashi."  Smith stopped talking and Hermelinda began to get out of the bed. As she started to rise, he began speaking again. "I tried to move my finger to type," he said, "but I couldn't. My central nervous system is shutting down. I need Bayron here." Smith's eyes closed and he was asleep, exhausted from the few moments of speaking.

As Myra left the mansion and walked into the sunlight, she realized she had tears in her eyes. She reassured herself that it was okay to cry. Mr. Smith was her employer, but she had worked for him for so long that at some point he had graduated from being a mentor and teacher to something of a surrogate father. She knew she wasn't going to be able to hold back her tears. He was dying. Were she, his nurse, his doctor and his lawyer the only people on the planet he cared about?  Were they really his only inner circle, she wondered. She dialed Dr. Bayron from her cellphone as she walked to her car.