What You Make It: Selected Short Stories. Michael Marshall Smith
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brain, and finally came to a tentative conclusion.
The ability, if it truly was related to physiological morphology, seemed most directly related to an apparently insignificant variation in general synaptic function which created an almost intangible additional structure within certain areas of the brain.
Not, perhaps, one of the most memorable slogans of scientific discovery, but that night Philip and I went out and got more drunk than we had in five years. We clasped hands on the table once more, and this time we believed that the hand that should have been between ours was nearly within reach. The next day we split into two overlapping teams, dividing our time and minds as always between the software and the beckies. The beckies needed redesigning to cope with the new environment, and the software required yet another quantum leap to deal with the complexity of the tasks of synaptic manipulation. As we worked we joked that if the beckies got much more intelligent we'd have to give them the vote. It seemed funny back then.
September 12th, 2019 ought to have a significant place in the history of science, despite everything that happened afterwards. It was the day on which we tested MindWorks 1.0, a combination of computer and corporeal which was probably more subtle than anything man has ever produced. Philip insisted on being the first subject, despite the fact that he had another cold, and in the early afternoon of that day I injected him with a tiny dose of the beckies. Then, in a flash of solidarity, I injected myself. Together till the end, we said.
We sat there for five minutes, and then got on with some work. We knew that the effects, if there were any, wouldn't be immediate. To be absolutely honest, we weren't expecting much at all from the first batch. As everyone knows, anything with the version number ‘1’ will have teething problems, and if it has a ‘.0’ after it then it's going to crash and burn. We sat and tinkered with the plans for a 1.1 version, which was only different in that some of the algorithms were more elegant, but we couldn't seem to concentrate. Excitement, we assumed.
Then late afternoon Philip staggered and dropped a flask of the solution he was working on. It was full of MindWorks, but that didn't matter – we had a whole vat of it in storage, I made Philip sit down and ran a series of tests on him. Physically he was okay, and protested that he felt fine. We shrugged and went back to work. I printed out ten copies of the code and becky specifications, and posted them to ten different places around the world. Of course, the computers already laid automated and encrypted email backups all over the place, but there's no substitute for a physical object with a date stamped on it. If this worked it was going to be ours, and no one else was taking credit for it. Such considerations were actually less important to us by then, because there was only one thing we wanted from the experiment – but old habits die hard. Ten minutes later I had a dizzy spell myself, but apart from that nothing seemed to be happening at all.
We only realized that we might have succeeded when I woke to hear Philip screaming in the night.
I ran into his room and found him crouched up against the wall, eyes wide, teeth chattering uncontrollably. He was staring at the opposite corner of the room. He didn't seem to be able to hear anything I said to him. As I stood there numbly, wondering what to do, I heard a voice from behind me – a voice I half-thought I recognized. I turned, but there was no one there. Suddenly Philip looked at me, his eyes wide and terrified.
‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘I think it's working.’
We spent the rest of the night in the kitchen, sitting round the table and drinking coffee in harsh light. Philip didn't seem to be able to remember exactly what it was he'd seen, and I couldn't recapture the sound of the voice I'd heard, or what it might have said. Clearly we'd achieved something, but it wasn't clear what it might be. When nothing further happened by daybreak, we decided to get out of the house for a while. We were both too keyed up to sit around any longer or try to work, but felt we should stay together. Something was happening, we knew: we could both feel it. We walked around campus for the morning, had lunch in the cafeteria, then spent the afternoon downtown. The streets seemed a little crowded, but nothing else weird happened.
In the evening we went out. We had been invited to a dinner party at the house of a couple on the medical staff, and thought we might as well attend. Philip and I were rather distracted at first, but once everyone had enough wine inside them we started to have a good time. The hosts got out their stock of dope, doubtless supplied by an accommodating member of the student body, and by midnight we were all a little high, comfortably sprawled around the living room.
And of course, eventually, Philip started talking about the work we'd been doing. At first people just laughed, and that made me realize belatedly just how far outside the scope of normal scientific endeavour we had moved. It also made me determined that we should be taken seriously, and so I started to back Philip up. It was stupid, and we should never have mentioned it. It was one of the people at that party who eventually gave our names to the police.
‘So prove it,’ this man said at one stage. ‘Hey, is there a ouija board in the house?’
The general laughter which greeted this sally was enough to tip the balance. Philip rose unsteadily to his feet, and stood in the centre of the room. He sneezed twice, to general amusement, but then his head seemed to clear. Though he was swaying gently, the seriousness of his face was enough to quieten most people, although there was a certain amount of giggling. He looked gaunt, and tired, and everybody stopped talking, and the room went very quiet as they watched him.
‘Hello?’ he said quietly. He didn't use a name, for obvious reasons, but I knew who he was asking for. ‘Are you there?’
‘And if so, did you bring any grass?’ the hostess added, getting a big laugh. I shook my head, partly at how foolish we were seeming, partly because there seemed to be a faint glow in one corner of the room, as if some of the receptors in my eyes were firing strangely. I made a note to check the beckies when we got back, to make sure none of them could have had an effect on the optic nerve.
I was about to say something to help Philip out of an embarrassing position when he suddenly turned to the hostess.
‘Jackie, how many people did you invite tonight?’
‘Eight,’ she said. ‘We always have eight. We've only got eight complete sets of tableware.’
Philip looked at me. ‘How many people do you see?’ he asked.
I looked round the room, counting.
‘Eleven,’ I said.
One of the guests laughed nervously. I counted them again. There were eleven people in the room. In addition to the eight of us who were slouched over the settees and floor, three people stood round the walls.
A tall man, with long and not especially clean brown hair. A woman in her forties, with blank eyes. A young girl, maybe eight years old.
Mouth hanging open, I stood up to join Philip. We looked from each of the extra figures to the other. They looked entirely real, as if they'd been there all along.
They stared back at us, silently.
‘Come on guys,’ the host said, nervously. ‘Okay, great gag – you had us fooled for a moment there. Now let's have another smoke.’
Philip ignored him, turning to the man with the long hair.
‘What's your name?’ he asked him. There was a long pause, as if the man was having difficulty remembering. When he spoke, his voice sounded dry and cold.
‘Nat,’ he said. ‘Nat Simon.’
‘Philip,’ I said. ‘Be careful.’
Philip ignored me, and turned back to face the real guests. ‘Does the name “Nat Simon” mean anything to anyone here?’ he asked.
For a moment I thought it hadn't, and then we noticed the hostess. The smile had slipped from her face and her skin had gone white, and she was staring at Philip. With a sudden, ragged beat of my heart I knew we had succeeded.
‘Who was he?’ I asked quickly. I wish I hadn't. In a room that was now utterly silent she told us.
Nat