“Really? Has it been a year already?”
“Yes.”
He frowned. “My how time flies when you’re having fun.”
“Indeed. Please use the jar in Barney’s dumbwaiter to collect a urine specimen.”
“Oh. Okay. Thank you, JASON.”
“Thank you.”
Aaron stood up. “Well, you know what they say about beer, boys. You don’t buy it. You only rent it. Barney, can I use your john?”
“No. Do it right here.”
“I would, but I’ve left you guys feeling inadequate enough as it is.” He retrieved the glass jar and headed off into the washroom.
Aaron was lying on his back on the medical-examination table. I now discovered what he did with his hands when he didn’t have pockets to thrust them into. He interlaces them behind his head. Kirsten had injected him with a mole, a little genetic construct that swam through his major arteries and veins looking for clogs and damage. The mole had a tiny bioelectric beeper, enabling Kirsten to watch its progress on a map of Aaron’s circulatory system. The little creature had come to rest in his inferior mesenteric artery. That meant it had found some buildup on the walls. Not unusual in one even as young as Aaron, but not wise to leave unattended either. The mole would anchor itself to the arterial wall and release the enzyme canalase to dissolve the plaque. Routine maintenance, and within two minutes it was on its way again.
Kirsten decided the mole was functioning properly. She turned her attention to her medical panel. All the results from the scanners went first to me, for recording, then to the alphanumeric displays. That made it easy for me to flip a byte here, change a byte there.
“Uh-oh,” said Kirsten.
“I see it, too,” I said on cue.
Aaron sat up, which probably irritated the mole no end. “What is it?”
Kirsten turned and smiled. “Oh, it’s likely nothing. Just a funny reading on your EEG.”
Aaron looked at my camera, mounted high on the wall over the door. “Don’t you routinely monitor everyone’s EGG, JASON?”
I patiently counted off two seconds, hoping that Kirsten would choose to answer this question, since that would look better. She did. “Oh, JASON just looks at alpha and beta waves, and the Ptasznik deviation coefficient. It’s really just enough to tell whether you’re awake or asleep. What we’re seeing here is pretty deep in your eta rhythm. Takes a big machine like this one to monitor that.”
“And?” Aaron must have been anxious, but his tone didn’t show it.
“And, well, we’d better have a look at it. Nine times out of ten, it’s meaningless. But it can be a warning sign of an impending stroke.”
“A stroke? I’m only twenty-seven, for God’s sake.”
Kirsten gestured at the circulatory map. The mole was hard at work in Aaron’s right femoral artery. “Well, someone your age shouldn’t have the amount of buildup in his blood vessels that you have either. As I said, we’d better have a look at it.” She glanced up at my camera pair. “JASON, can you prepare for a histoholographic brain scan?”
An HHG? For Turing’s sake, didn’t she know anything? Sigh. I keep forgetting just how green these people are. “Uh, Kirsten,” I said gently, “an intermediate-vector-boson tomographic scan would be more appropriate under these circumstances. The resolution is much finer.”
I was afraid that her pride would be hurt, that she would insist on doing an HHG anyway. A second ticked by. Another.
Aaron’s mole, apparently satisfied with its handiwork, continued on its way down his leg. “Oh,” said Kirsten. “Okay. If that’s the recommended procedure.”
“It is.”
“Fine. Is anyone using the tomograph?”
Of course not. “A moment. No. No use of it is scheduled for today.”
“When is my next appointment?”
“You’ve had a cancellation. Your time is free for the rest of the day.”
“Okay. Aaron, let’s go down to the tomography lab.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
Now.
Aaron got to sit up for this exam, but his chin had to rest in a special holder and padded clamps restrained his head from moving left or right. Two bent strips of palladium were held on articulated mechanical arms. One, a closed hoop, was held horizontally above Aaron’s head. The other, shaped like an upside-down U, was held vertically in front of his face.
“Start recording, JASON,” said Kirsten.
“Recording.”
First the horizontal hoop began moving down from above Aaron’s head. It progressed slowly, so slowly that in real-time monitoring it didn’t seem to be moving at all. Only by checking back minute by minute could advancement be seen. As it moved down, the tomograph examined the interactions of bosons carrying the weak nuclear force, and from those interactions built up highly detailed cross-sectional views through Aaron’s brain. It started at the top of the cerebral cortex and worked down slowly, meticulously, layer by minuscule layer, through the levels of the fornix, the thalamus, the hypothalamus, the pons, the cerebellum, and the medulla. At each level, multiple strobing tomograms were produced, cataloging the firing frequency of each neuron.
Normally, the complete analysis wasn’t recorded—the storage requirements were massive. But I saved every bit of it. Forty-three minutes were required to complete the dorsal scan. Once it was done, Aaron complained of a crick in his neck. He got up, walked around the room a bit, and drank some water before part two began. I busied my central consciousness with some routine file maintenance while he took his break, but I was impatient for the test to be completed. Finally, he sat back down, Kirsten clamped his head in place, and the upside-down palladium U started its trek. It began from in front of his face. They used to do it the other way around, starting from the back of the patient’s head, but there was always an involuntary start when the U entered the patient’s peripheral vision, and that messed up the tomograms. This way seemed to work better. Slowly, the U made its way from his frontal lobe to his occipital lobe, recording, recording, recording.
At last it was done. Now my real work was about to begin.
I made a mini-backup of myself so that I could undertake the interactive dialogue necessary for testing. I let the backup play inquisitor, while I, on the lowest and most simplistic level, tried to access the Aaron Rossman memories I had recorded. It was a tricky process, involving as much learning about Aaron’s particular style of recording information as it did fine-tuning my ability to access specific facts.
The discovery by Barnhard and his group at the Henry Gordon Institute in 2011 that each human seemed to use a unique encoding algorithm put an end to the claims of psychics, mind readers, and other charlatans. Oh, it could be demonstrated that humans did indeed give off electromagnetic signals that corresponded to their thoughts. And, indeed, if one had sufficiently acute sensing devices and the ability to screen the weak signal from the background EM noise, then, yes, one could detect that energy. But the fact that every individual used a different encoding algorithm and key, and, indeed, that many individuals used multiple algorithms depending on the kinds of thoughts they were thinking—the alpha and beta waves of the EEG being the crudest indication of that—meant that even if you could pick up the thought signals, which seemed impossible without direct physical contact with the person’s head, you couldn’t decipher the thoughts without massive number crunching.
Number crunching, of course, is something I have a knack for.
Asked my backup: “What is your favorite color of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, or violet?”
I accessed the neural network. Pathways spread out before me, mathematical thoroughfares into the mind of a specific man. “Blue,” I replied, although it was really more of a guess.