The Flicker Men (10 page)

Satvik, for his part, worked on perfecting the test itself. He worked on downsizing it, minimizing it, digitizing it. Turning it into a product. He was an electronics guy, after all, and the big, awkward setup at the zoo had cried out for improvement. It became the Hansen double-slit, and when he was done, it was the size of a loaf of bread—a small dark box with an easy indicator light and a small, efficient output. Green for yes and red for no. I wonder if he knew then. I wonder if he already suspected what they'd use it for.

“It doesn't matter what you know,” he said as we stood in his office after that first demonstration of the new machine. He touched the small, magic box he'd created. “It's about what is
possible
to know.”

He abandoned his gate arrays. So, too, his easy smile was abandoned, and I wondered at the price he'd paid to work on the project. Gone was the talk of his daughter and the complaints about the crops back home. Now he spoke only of the experiment and his work on the box. Above his workstation I found a quote taped to the wall, torn from an old book.

Can animals be just a superior race of marionettes, which eat without pleasure, cry without pain, desire nothing, know nothing, and only simulate intelligence?

—Thomas Henry Huxley, 1859

 

14

That Friday night, I swung by the motel office before heading up to my room. Pink flamingos on the front lawn. I never understood that. The property wasn't themed as far as I could tell. The name, generic: The Blakely Motel. It was brown and rectangular, nearly featureless, two squat levels with an outside walkway that ran along the upper floor. It looked like any of a dozen other old motels that dotted the seaboard in this part of the world—a certain well-worn shabbiness—but there were those two pink plastic flamingos on the front lawn. Or maybe that was the point. Maybe a featureless brown motel needs those two flamingos.

The clerk at the front desk saw me coming and waved a stack of envelopes.

“Mail here,” she said. Her name was Michelle or Marla.

I took the mail from her outstretched hand and then paid for another month in advance. I got the feeling that they liked the long-term tenants. The once-a-week cleanings. I took the mail up to my room and threw it on the table.

Two letters. One, neat and businesslike. The other hand-scrawled.

The first was from work. I tore it open, and inside I found a single folded sheet of paper:

HANSEN LABORATORIES

Eric Argus

Employee 1246

Direct deposit confirmation

Dear Mr. Argus, I'm happy to inform you that you've passed your probationary hiring period and have been converted to full-time employment. Enclosed please find a $1,000 bonus check as appreciation for your hard work. A 15 percent increase in salary is rendered effective immediately. Welcome to Hansen Laboratories.

I put the letter down and stared at it. I read the first sentence over and over. Full-time employment. I wasn't sure what to do. A part of me wanted to jump into the air. Or call somebody. What was the expected protocol? Full-time employment; I realized then that I'd never really expected it. Not even after the paper.

I took out my checkbook. I wrote five hundred dollars on the line. Dropped it in a new, fresh envelope. I wrote my sister's address.

I owed her more than that. Much more. The doctor bills alone.

I thought about calling her—the push of a few buttons on my phone. I wanted to tell her—tell somebody. I wanted to talk and get it all out. The experiment, the zoo, the paper. I pulled the phone out of my pocket and held it in front of me, but I couldn't make myself hit the button.

It wasn't enough, I realized. The two months sober. The five hundred dollars. It wasn't enough.

And how to explain the paper? Jeremy's voice still in my ear,
what does it mean?

Instead of calling, I closed my phone.
Soon enough
, I told myself. When I had another month of sobriety. When I could call her and tell her that I'd done something worthwhile. Then I'd call. I folded the letter and slid it into my pocket.

Only then did I look at the second piece of mail that I'd received. The writing scribbled and hurried. I looked at the name on the return address. A street in Indianapolis. It meant nothing to me. The name, though, was one I knew well.

I tore open the envelope.

Inside was a single sheet of paper.

Handwritten. A single line.

We need to talk.

—Stuart

I looked at it for a long time. I wondered how he'd gotten my address. Science could be a small world. He could have read about the experiment. Or maybe the timing was coincidence. Maybe some new fire had arisen phoenixlike from the ashes of our previous work, and he was reaching out. A darker thought occurred. Or maybe he was in trouble.

We need to talk
. Just that single sentence.

I crinkled up the paper and threw it in the trash.

 

15

Over the course of the next month, there were other letters from other sources, gradually filtered through official channels at work. A medical doctor named Robbins made his interest in the project known through carefully worded correspondence.

Those letters turned into phone calls. The voices on the other end belonged to lawyers, the kind that came from deep pockets. Robbins worked for a consortium with a vested interest in determining, once and for all, exactly when consciousness first arises during human fetal development.

Hansen Labs turned him down flat until the offer grew a seventh figure.

Jeremy tracked me down that morning while I was changing the coffee filter, presumably because he knew my defenses would be down. “He wants you to be there.”

“I don't care,” I said.

“Robbins asked for you specifically.”

By then the negotiations had been going on for some time.

“And I'm specifically saying no.” I poured the coffee grounds into the filter and slid the plastic receptacle into its slot. “I don't want any part of it, and you can fire me if you want to.”

Jeremy gave a weary smile. “Fire you? If I fired you, my bosses would fire me. And then they'd hire you back. Probably with a raise. In fact, they'd probably give you my job.”

“I'd be terrible at your job. My first order of business would be to hire you back, so maybe it would all work out.”

The coffee machine percolated. Brown liquid drained into the pot while Jeremy pulled a clean mug down from the cabinet. “So you're sure you won't go?”

“I'm sure.” I'd seen what Robbins was proposing. It was ingenious in its own way, I had to admit. An application of the test that I'd never considered. But I wanted as far from it as I could get.

“All right then,” he said. “I'll pass that along.” Which wasn't the same as letting it go. He poured himself a steaming mug, then leaned against the counter. When he spoke again, the boss part of him drained away—and he was just Jeremy, my old friend. “This guy Robbins is a real prick, do you know that?”

“Yeah, I know. I've seen him on TV.”

“But that doesn't mean he's wrong.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know that, too.”

*   *   *

Hansen provided technicians for the procedure. I stayed clear of the contract talks, but it was obvious that Hansen was taking a nuanced approach to the situation, positioning itself as neutral expertise while trying to divest itself, as much as possible, of the messier ramifications that might come out of the test results. It would be a difficult tightrope to walk.

Satvik was the primary liaison on the project—a duty that seemed to particularly weigh on him.

Late one morning, I found him in his office. He sat hunched over a snarl of fiber optics, thin shoulders pulled up tight around his ears. Strapped to his forehead on a delicate pivot was a light and tiny camera. The flat-screen monitor next to him displayed the image in extreme close-up—wires thick as bridge support cables, fingers like tree trunks.

“How's the prep work going?”

The soldering tool pulled back, and the image spun as he turned to look at me. “Almost time for the final smoke test,” he said.

I saw my face on the monitor, huge and alien. “Smoke test?”

He turned back toward the bridge cables again. “You start it up, hope you don't see smoke.”

“You gonna be ready for this?”

“The box is ready. I'll be ready. What about you?”

“That's the best part. I don't need to be ready.”

“More than you think,” he said. On the video feed, his soldering tool slipped deeper into the machine. “This is your test now. You might end up famous.”

“What? How's that?”

“If things go wrong.” He bent closer to his work. “Or if things go right.”

“I don't want to be famous.”

Satvik seemed to agree, nodding his head. “In that water, you would drown, my friend.”

“Wait a second. What if I wanted to be famous?”

He glanced at me. “It would go badly.”

Blunt Satvik.

I left him to his work.

*   *   *

A few weeks before the tests were going to occur, I got the call. I'd been expecting it. Robbins himself. The phone cool against the side of my head.

“Are you sure we can't get you to come?”

His voice was different than I'd expected. Softer, more conversational. I'd only heard him on TV—his voice either booming from the pulpit or broadcast through the media bullhorn of various talking-head cable shows. Doctor turned pastor turned media figure. But this was a different Robbins. More subdued.

I took a moment to answer, carefully considering the man on the other end of the line.

“No,” I said. “I don't think that will be possible.”

“Well, your presence will be sorely missed,” Robbins said. “Taking into account your role in the project, we would surely love to have you there. I think it would be a great benefit to the cause.”

“I think your cause will get along fine without me.”

“If the issue is monetary, I can assure you—”

“It's not.”

There was a pause. “I understand,” he said. “You're a busy man; I can respect that. All the same, I wanted to personally thank you.”

“For what?”

“It's a great thing you've accomplished. You must see that. Your work is going to save a lot of lives.”

I was silent. The silence became a void—an area of negative pressure meant to draw me in. I pictured him as I'd seen him on TV. Tall, square-jawed. That certain variety of good-looking that some kind of men grow into, while others are busy growing old and plump. I pictured the phone next to his ear. I wondered if he was alone in an office somewhere, or if he had people around him. A whole team of lawyers, hanging on every word. He waited me out, and when I spoke again, so much time had elapsed that we both understood we were having a different conversation.

“How did you get the mothers?” I asked.

“They're committed volunteers, each one. Special women, to be sure, who felt they were called for this important task.”

“But where did you find them?”

“We're a large, national congregation, and we were able to find several volunteers from each trimester of pregnancy—though I don't expect we'll need more than the first one to prove the age at which a baby is ensouled. Our earliest mother is only a few weeks along. We had to turn some volunteers away.”

Ensouled
. The same word that he'd been using in the press releases. A word that put me on edge. “What makes you so sure that's what you're testing?”

“Mr. Argus, how else might we define the difference between man and animal? If not the soul, then what?”

While I stumbled for an answer, he went on, “Call it the spirit, if you will, or use another name, but it is unquestionable what your test has found. That thing that marks us out. A thing that the world's religions have for so long told us was there.”

I spoke the next words carefully. “And you're fine with them taking the risk? The mothers, I mean.”

“We have a whole staff of doctors attending, and medical experts have already determined that the procedure carries no more risk than amniocentesis. The diode inserted into the amniotic fluid will be no larger than a needle.”

“It sounds like you have everything worked out.”

“Every precaution is being taken.”

“One thing I never understood about this, though … a fetus's eyes are closed.”

“I prefer the word
baby
,” he said, voice gone tight.

I thought about the way my view of Satvik changed when I'd first heard him speak. I heard change now, in the voice on the phone. A slight shift in the temperature of the words. I was becoming something different to this man on the other end of the line.

“A
baby's
eyelids are very thin,” he continued. “And the diode is very bright. We have no doubt they'll be able to sense it. Then we have merely to note wavefunction collapse, and we'll finally have the proof we need to change the law and put a stop to the plague of abortions that has swept across this land.”

I put the phone facedown on my desk. Looked at it.
Plague of abortions
.

There were men like him in science, too—ones who thought they had all the answers. Dogma, on either side of an issue, has always seemed dangerous to me. I picked up the phone again. It seemed to weigh more than it had just a few moments earlier. “So it is as simple as that?”

“Of course it is. When is a human life a human life? That is always what this particular argument has been about, has it not?”

I stayed silent.

He continued, “In a just society, our rights end where the next person's begin. All would agree. But where is that beginning? When does it start? There's been no answer. Now we'll finally be able to prove that abortion is murder, and who could argue?”