“Your soul?” Reid takes a deep breath and clears his head, but the bizarre late night idea is still there.

“Yeah. My soul.”

Just near them, not two hundred yards off, is the Columbia medical unit specializing in neurosurgical repair. It is there where the brain is cut across and bilaterally that this question of the soul is coming to the knife.

“I don’t know, Reid. We’re networks of neurons, you know?”

“No. Not just that.”

Yes

“I hear you, Reid. You don’t think I can, but I do.”

Yes, I know

“I know you know, you bastard.”

((SHOCK! PANIC! MOVEmoveMOVE run nam ger hand in kek shadows GIANT)) He reels back from the cage in a sudden panic that knock him into the counter, print outs spilling, as the rat scurries around in its cage. His heart rate has jumped and he cannot shake the feeling that something massive was falling down on him. He could feel it. Breathing deeply he looks around the science arcade of lights for some sign of what had happened. It was that feeling of something just appearing out of his line of sight but massive like a bear. He puts his hand to his heart and tries to breathe deeply. Gathering himself, he shakes it off after a couple of minutes—its all the lack of sleep. He takes a final deep breath and looks to make sure that the machine had not been roughed up in the commotion. It seems fine and he steps back over to the cages.

((Hand face? unknown ab bac nervous nervous erv fear Coburn’s face Coburn’s hand reaching bars)) Stepping back from the cage like a magnet repulsed, Coburn covers his eyes with his hand. His vision had been momentarily blurred, coupled with other hazy images—his own face! Shocks of sensations, sparks of feelings, blips of images. He felt disoriented. Afraid. The lesion. The lesion was having some effect. But now the doorknob is jiggling ((work too late farv tired no work erkerk)) Carl! Coming in the door. Coburn steps quickly back over to the prototype and types in one of the diagnostic codes for the rats, obliterating his own scanning codes. The computer being churning out charts as Carl walks in and turns on the lights. ((SHOCK)) “Dr. Coburn—((worry Coburn’s face angry guilt)) —orking with the machine?” “Uh. Yes. Hope you don’t mind. ((Concern machine on desk humming looks okay)) I, uh, I think I know what I’m doing. I just couldn’t make time to look at it until after evening rounds, you see.”

((puzzlement works too fak hard sleep? tired too)) “Sure thing, Doc.” Coburn closes his eyes, to will away these foreign thoughts plaguing him—puts his hand to his head.

“You ((all right?)) all right, Doc?”

“Yes! God, you know, Carl. The start from you coming in the door ((scared him, gop me!))—I think I just really need to get to bed, you know?” The signals are absolutely exhausting, Carl’s thoughts crammed in with his own, with no warning, surfacing like cruise missiles. “Anyway, I—((seems weird sleep?)) I don’t want to get in your way if you’re here to work.”

“Okay. ((not mad good stern okay?)) You don’t have to worry about me though if you want to keep working with the equipment.”

“No! ((calm rabbit)) No. I mean, that’s okay. I should really head((work so par hard danger ref patient?))home. Coburn moves to the door, shots of his own backside making it hard to know where he is in the room. Images and feelings fade as he moves out of the room in to the hallway. It must be the electro-magnetic field. Yes! The rats, Carl, their electro-magnetic fields were setting off the RFID prions. But how could they be mirroring signals? He had to get home.

“Dr. Coburn?”

Back still turned, “Yes.”

“The Dreyfuses are here, along with doctors Flynn and Schanacter.”

“Show them all in.” He watches their reflections in the glass, the city growing pale as the sun moves behind a small cloud on the West Side. Chairs are moving, people speak. He moves over to the light box on one wall of his office as someone introduces him and he swaps out the angiograms there. Turning to everyone in the room, the saccades of his eyes’ arcs fix on the blue eyes of a pale blonde frightened woman. Besides her sits her stern but equally frightened (Coburn knows) husband. He doesn’t look at the neurologist or the resident. No need.

“I have total confidence that we can remove this tumor almost in full.”

The woman reels a bit, having been expecting hello.

“You don’t get a lot of good news in this line of work, but I can tell you that where your tumor is located makes this an ideal surgery–really the best odds that you can get.” He stares like a trap.

“You think?” Mrs. Dreyfus manages to stammer out after a moment.

“I do. It is at the top of the basil ganglia region, inside a fold. This would not be a difficult operation, well… as far as brain surgery goes.” A joke. But no hint of it on his face; like Death’s straight man.

“Well, I don’t know—I had so many questions—what about if we just leave it?” Coburn looks to the woman’s hands, shaking now, even resting on the arms of her chair. He looks to the back of his own hands and admires their steadiness. “Marylin!” he hollers lightly at his hand. Everyone else in the room seems shocked, but almost instantly, a secretary pokes her head in the door. “I want you to get Mrs…”

“Dreyfus.”

“Dreyfus, yes, of course. I want you to get Mrs. Dreyfus a hot cup of green tea.”

“Oh that’s all right—” Mrs. Dreyfus began.

Coburn takes one step toward her. “I insist. It will help to calm your nerves. And right now, you need them.” With a look he dispatches the secretary. Turning back to the angiogram for a moment, he says, thoughtfully, “If we leave the tumor it will eventually kill you.” Staring at the image of the ghostly yellow walnut that is Mrs. Dreyfus’s brain, Coburn reasons that Mr. Dreyfus will now feel the need to weigh in and he waits for it. Often people felt that he, Dr. Jacob Coburn, doubted their intelligence. He did not. No one more than he understood the stunning intricacies of even the most mentally challenged individual, the most damaged brain. The true beauty of it. No, it was their insolence he found so hard to tolerate.

“What about other methods?” Mr. Dreyfus asks. “Isn’t cutting into her skull jumping the gun here? What about chemotherapy?”

Coburn rubs the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger for just a moment. “If by jumping the gun you mean avoiding months and months of very painful therapy and debilitating sickness, then certainly you are correct that I’m jumping the gun.”

Two quick steps and he is squatting next to Sandra Dreyfus, his hand on her hand. “Mrs. Dreyfus, the tumor is here.” He points to his own thin, salt and pepper locks, ahead of and above his left ear. “We will make a very precise hole in the skull,”—the skull not her skull–relieves some of the pressure, making it clinical, he knows. “We will drain some fluid, remove the cancerous tissue, put the bone back. We could have it done by,” he looks to the resident, who, used to the Show, is already looking at dates in a small notebook

Mr. Dreyfus, “Now wait just a—”

“End of the month.”

Coburn, “There. The end of the month. Problem gone.”

“It’s all just so fast.” But he can see he already has her.

The secretary comes in with the tea. Mrs. Dreyfus smiles, still very nervous.

“Mrs. Dreyfus,” still squatting by her side, “you are facing permanent, imminent damage. You do not have to.”

Mr. Dreyfus is still half-cocked in his chair almost ready to storm out of the room it would seem. Mrs. Dreyfus, sensing this, puts her hand on his and pats it without looking at him. She is still staring into Jacob Coburn’s rock-solid blue eyes. They radiate a cold confidence and icy reason. She could put her life in his hands. She knows it in that moment. Some Bayesian calculation deep in her brain, summed up and divided all of the looks she had ever received in her life, looks of lying, suspicion, guilt, cheating. Here now, in front of her, was the gaze of Truth. His calm was infectious. “Yes. Yes, you’re right.”

Coburn smiles, slightly, for the first time.

“Yes, let’s do it as soon as possible.”

Jacob takes her hand and squeezes. “Good. Okay.”

Mr. Dreyfus relents impotently but with one last just-because protest, “Sandra, I really think that—” but she quiets him with a serene glance. Coburn’s look is imprinted on her now and she shows it to her husband with the same effect. Everything was going to be just fine. Looking to the resident and the neurologist, “Harry, Sam, if you all can take care of things here, there are several matters I have to attend to before evening rounds.” Never finish the meeting. Always let them know you are the busiest neurosurgeon in New York City.

Harry and Sam just look at each other as Coburn leaves and exchange exasperated smiles. He might as well have taken a bow as he left. They’d seen him walk this tightrope of consultation so many times it was like a show. Mrs. Dreyfus looks almost enchanted by the idea of surgery, her eyes lit up with the glow of a light at the end of some tunnel and the passion of Jacob Coburn.

Jacob continues to read.

“Dr. Coooburn?”

Jacob sighs and looks up.

Dr. Reid Richards enters the room, sliding his hands into the pockets of his lab coat. “Do I really have to call you doctor to get your attention?”

“No, Doctor, Jacob would suffice.”

“All right fine, be that way. I’m just in a good mood is all.” He waits for the question but Coburn doesn’t look up. “Come with me to the lab—I need to show you something.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t wanna spoil it. Trust me. You’re one of the few people on the planet who could appreciate this.”

Flattery will get you everywhere. “All right then.”

Jacob gets up from his desk, a ridiculously pristine affair when compared to any other desk at the Center, most of which are piles of academic papers, patient files, notepads, pens, conference schwag, anatomically correct models of brains and eyes and ears, computer print outs, and drug pamphlets. Dr. Jacob Coburn has nothing on his desk with the exception of the paper he is currently reading (squared up with the desk and with the finished pages facing down opposite the unread) and the patient file for his afternoon surgery. Richards often wonders to himself how Coburn finds the time, but then remembers that he’s married and Coburn’s not. Coburn arrives at the hospital by five and leaves when he wants to go to bed. The pair of brain men walk down the hallway past offices and labs. “Long story short, some very intelligent nanostructure engineers over at MIT managed to create a long-chain protein that can act as an RFID chip.”

“Really?”

“So I realized that there was some potential there in that we might be able to attach a structure like that to a dormant prion—or cage it anyway.”

They arrive at Richards’ lab and he opens the door with his security ID. Inside are white counter tops piled up with metal boxes all whirring and beeping and oscillating. The space is more lit by the glow of computer monitors than the few desk lamps placed around the room, giving the lab a constantly shifting feeling. All along another wall are cabinets of rat cages with dozens of white rats in them. Jacob nods to Carl, Richards’ big, jolly postdoc assistant. Jacob disliked Carl for always being so jovial. It struck him as idiotic. Carl smiles back and Richards leads Jacob over to one particular rat cage covered in transmitters of some kind. “We can add one more component to the RFID prion that will allow it to attach to a synapse and once there, the RFID portion of the molecule will be able to reverberate a radio frequency signal using part of the charge coming down the dendrite.” Richards points to a computer monitor where a stream of massive numbers are scrolling by at illegible speeds. “Those are synaptic ID numbers.”

Jacob stares at the numbers. There were probably 5 trillion neurons in a rat’s brain. Each neuron might have up to 7,000 synapses where the neurons touch each other through a thick web of connections of axons and dendrites. That meant that even a rat had up 10,000 trillion—10 quadrillion—synapses. Was this even possible? He’d never known Richards to pull his leg. “Of the rat?” he asked skeptically.

“Yeah.”

Jacob just continues to stare at the numbers racing across the screen, occasionally looking at the rat who was surreptitiously sniffing through some wood chips.

“Carl knows a pretty heavy duty programmer over at Columbia who’s going to help us feed this data into a matrix, and from there we should be able to simulate a real-time visualization of the rat’s brain.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jacob whispers.

“Yeah.”

Jacob keeps looking at the numbers flying by, the rat!—the rat’s mind—digitized! There were rifts forming in reality around him, a chrysalis breaking open around his own mind as a completely new world began form around him.

He looks up at Reid, who is pleased with himself, “Jesus Christ, Reid.”

“Yeah.”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me about this sooner?”

“Well, we weren’t even sure if the prions would attach properly or that once there we’d still be able to triangulate individual RFID signals. We just weren’t sure if it was going to work.”

“Well, it looks like its working!”

“Yup.”

Carl laughs.

He looked from Reid to Carl and back to the numbers. Synapses. Individual synapses! “This changes everything.”

Carl, “Well, Doc, do you want to see how it all works?”

“Yes. Yes I do.”