I nodded and cited the title of her most popular book. “Thinking in Pictures.”
“Exactly. And apparently she does.” He brought his hands down to his armrests and leaned forward, almost conspiratorially. “You know as well as I do that neuroscience advances through a series of unfortunate accidents—fortunate for us, the researchers, but often devastating for the patients. You know how rare retrograde amnesia is—outside of soap operas, I mean. Imagine how rare it is to find someone deep on the autism spectrum suffering from it. But one of my patients here has precisely that condition. Poor woman suffered a traumatic brain injury in a motorcycle accident; couldn’t recall anything much from before the collision, her whole life basically wiped out.”
“Like Lieutenant Uhura in ‘The Changeling.’” I’d expected the usual blank stare I got when I made one of my patented “All I need to know in life I learned from Star Trek” references, but, to my surprise, Namboothiri pointed a finger at me, and said, “Exactly! In that episode, Nomad supposedly wiped her memories. But, you know, what must’ve really happened is the same thing that happens when you format a disk drive. A normal formatting doesn’t wipe the drive clean; it just wipes the file allocation table—essentially, the index. All the other ones and zeros on the disk are left intact, which is why you read about police recovering files criminals thought they’d erased. That’s what must’ve happened to Lieutenant Uhura: the indexing of her memories was wiped, but the memories themselves were left intact—which explains her being back at work on the bridge of the Enterprise in the next episode. Well, same thing for the woman in the motorcycle accident. Her memories were still there, but the index of them—in her case, as an autistic, a massive visual index—was damaged by the impact. But using a variation of the Montreal technique, I’ve been able to help her re-access her memories.”
“You mean with direct electrical stimulation of her brain? Like Wilder Penfield did? The whole ‘I smell burnt toast’ thing?”
“Yes. Of course, we’ve come a long way since Penfield’s day. We don’t have to open the skull to do the stimulation. The beauty of it is, as we learned thanks to the case I’ve been talking about, the visual memory index, long abandoned in neurotypicals, is physically separate from the verbal memory index. So, in your case, well—how old are you?”
“Thirty-nine.”
“Fine. Well, in your case, we don’t have to rummage around through the thirty-six years or so of memory that you’ve indexed verbally. If I’m right, any memories you laid down during your philosophical-zombie period will be accessible through the visual index. Instead of looking for a six-month needle in a thirty-nine-year haystack, the memories from those six months in 2001, or at least the index entries for them, will only be mixed in with a few years of much older memories, and, since those memories are of early childhood, they’ll be easy to recognize as irrelevant to the task at hand.”
“Excellent, excellent. Thank you.”
“Have you had a recent MRI?”
“No.”
“All right. I have a friend at St. Boniface. Let me call her and see if she can squeeze you in.” He picked up the phone on his desk and made a call; I only heard his side.
“Hi, Brenda, it’s Bhavesh. Listen, I need to get an MRI done for a… a patient of mine, and I don’t want to—what? Really? Hang on.” He held the handset to his chest. “How fast can you get over to St. Boniface?”
I frowned. “This time of day, no traffic? Ten minutes.”
“Go! She’s got a cancellation at half-past two.”
I hurried out the door.
16
“So,” I asked, looking out at the sea of faces, “in our example, why do we accord moral standing to Jacob, but not to the robot? Why do we say the state can’t execute Jacob but it can shut off and dismantle the robot?”
“Well,” said Zach, in the second row, “Jacob is a Homo sapien.”
“Homo sapiens,” I said.
The kid looked baffled.
I was reminded of the Wayne and Shuster skit about the assassination of Julius Caesar. The private eye investigating Big Julie’s demise orders a “martinus.” “Don’t you mean martini?” asks the bartender. And the detective snaps back, “If I wanted two, I’d ask for them.”
“Homo sapiens is singular,” I said. “There’s no such thing as a Homo sapien.”
“Oh. Okay. So what’s the plural of Homo sapiens?”
I rattled off all seven syllables: “Homines sapientes.”
The kid didn’t miss a beat. “Now you’re just making shit up.”
“Jim, thank you for coming in,” Namboothiri said. I’d found an email from him waiting for me when I’d woken up, and had hustled back to his office.
“My pleasure.”
“I have the MRI scans from St. Boniface.”
He sounded concerned—and that made me concerned. “Oh, my God. A tumor?”
“No, not a tumor.”
“Then what?”
“It turns out the medical-imaging group at St. Boniface didn’t have to open a new file for you. They already had one.”
“But I’ve never been there—well, except to visit sick friends.”
“Ah, but you were there, in 2001. It seems I’m not the only importunate professor in town. Back then, one Menno Warkentin twisted a few arms and got you in to be scanned, too.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
My heart was pounding. “And?”
“And my friend at St. Boniface sent that scan along, as well. They normally don’t keep records from that far back, but yours was tagged for retention for research purposes; the radiologist noted he’d never seen anything like it.” He turned to a monitor. “Here you are today, in 2020.” He hit Alt-Tab. “And here you are in 2001.”
I knew the layout of the brain, but I was no expert at reading scans. “Yes?” I said, looking at the older scan.
“Here,” said Namboothiri pointing at a thin hyperintensity line—what one might have taken for a scratch on the film if it hadn’t been a digital image.
“Damage to the amygdala,” I said, stunned.
He pointed to another line. “And the orbitofrontal cortex,” added Namboothiri.
“The paralimbic system,” I said softly.
“Bingo,” said Namboothiri. He pointed to the recent scan. “The encephalomalacia has abated over the years, although the lesions are still present. But the abnormality dates back to at least”—he peered at the bottom left corner of the image—“June fifteenth, 2001.”
“My God. Um, look, could transcranial focused ultrasound create lesions like that? That’s what Menno’s equipment used.”
“TUS? No way. These are more like, I dunno, burns.”
“Shit.”
“Anyway. I thought you’d want to know. I’m going to work with the recent scan, mapping out where to search for your missing memories. Sadly, I do have many other things on my plate, but I’ll get to it as soon as I can.”
I pushed the flat of my hand sharply against the slate-gray door to Menno’s office and it swung open, banging against the wall-mounted stopper. Pax rose up on all fours, and Menno swung around in his brown leather chair. “Who’s there?” he asked, sounding more than a little frightened.