Persistent Patterns

 
 

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Copyright © 2003 by Shane Tourtellotte

First published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, March 2003


Doctor Pavel Patrusky sat in the control center, watching his brain. False colors danced on the monitor, from the recording of last evening's session. He could have played the audio, but didn't. Hearing his voice on tape was worse than hearing it with his own ears.

He watched the neurons firing across both hemispheres during his attempts at speech. That was the problem: the mouth cortex and supplementary motor area should have activated in only one hemisphere. Both his hemispheres competed to speak, with the inevitable clashing and confusion. The cerebellum was overactive as well, a correlation in stutterers nobody had pinned down yet.

"My brain's j-just too act-tive," he said to himself, a familiar coping boast.

It wasn't completely true. He watched his auditory cortex struggle, firing weakly in the left hemisphere, almost dark in the other. When he watched it come to life, he knew without checking that his colleague Kate Barber was speaking along with him. Joint recitation provided the regulation of auditory feedback he did not get from his voice alone. So his brain could work right—when it had a crutch.

He raised the magnification, and replayed one section several times. He traced the neural pathways that remained dormant at the wrong times, comparing them with the healthy connections of a control brain he knew almost by memory now. He could envision how that pattern would superimpose, how the proper applications of current would recreate the normal connections within his own brain.

"Good morning, Pavel."

He almost jumped. Lucinda Peale had entered without his notice. She headed toward the primary monitoring station. "Are you here for the prisoner's session, or--?"

"S-sorry." Pavel blanked the screens, and started uploading the files to his office, as he had intended when he first arrived there. The exposure was galling.

A voice came in from the scanning room. Pavel glanced toward Lucinda's main monitor, seeing an orange-clad man being led into the scanning room, hands manacled, with a prison guard standing close watch over him. Kate Barber followed them at a discreet distance.

"My upload will t-take a while. Mind if I--" He caught on the word "stay."

"Not at all," Lucinda said without turning. Pavel swiveled his chair to watch past Lucinda's shoulder. Research into the neurology of stuttering was one thing, but this other track had the greater societal potential, and was getting them the state grants.

The prisoner was sliding into the scanning tube, bound at wrists and ankles as well as his head. Pavel's mouth soured, but he said nothing. Kate talked the man through the baseline phase, as the guard stood dourly in the corner.

Pavel used his monitors to pick up the readings. The man's brain had lowered levels of serotonin, and noradrenaline, and especially dopamine. The neurons that produced them were chronically underactive, classic effects of his condition.

Kate uncapped a syringe. The injection went into the man's leg, as his arms were inaccessible inside the tube. The reaction took a moment, as blood made its way from the extremity to the brain, but it came.

Pavel watched a scan of dopamine absorption, the oranges and yellows dimming to green and blue across the brain. Receptors that swept up dopamine were blocked, leaving that neurotransmitter free to do its work on excitatory neurons, to help produce the high the man was now visibly feeling.

"Ah, the seven percent solution does its magic." Pavel made his comment without a hitch. He saw Lucinda stiffen. "What's the m-matter?"

She took a moment to reply. "I'm still not comfortable with our methods. We propose to cure people of drug addiction, but look what we're doing to a man who hadn't used cocaine in nearly two years." A groan distracted her, as the prisoner strained against his bonds, too energized to want to stay supine and motionless. "First do no harm, right?"

Pavel frowned. "Lucinda, you know better. We n-need to track the affected neurons, so we know what to overl-lay with the new pattern."

"We could get that with baseline scans, and some patience."

"Lucinda, you kn-know this is a step toward his eventual treatment."

She twisted her mouth. "Assuming our funding holds up."

"It will. Remember, the first vaccine was itself a d-disease, but it prevented a greater harm. There's s-still that trade-off today, the side-effects that c- crop up from immunizing against hepatitis, smallpox, herpes." He popped his P's to avoid catching on them. "That's certainly a net gain."

"They're also tested methods." She lifted a hand. "Yes, we've made this work against pathological violence, but it's still new. Until we've cured him," she said, pointing at the monitor, "I'm going to feel uneasy."

Pavel hunkered forward, elbow on knee, fist on bearded chin. "It's the drugs themselves, right? You s-still have this arc-chaic prejudice about chemical dep- pendency?"

Lucinda kept her eyes on the monitors. "It's hardly archaic. The damage drugs do is terrible."

"But the p-p-people themselves are-are--"

She turned, her eyebrow arched. "Are the ones doing the damage?"

Pavel stood up, flushing. He couldn't have this debate, not feeling this agitated. "I'll c-continue this from my office," he managed to say, "when you're done." With that, he left.


Drug use is nothing compared to real crimes, violent crimes. Yet you would piously lump them together, hyperinflating something that isn't even their doing. Pavel sent the message to Lucinda's computer, but left a copy in a box on his own screen. He and Lucinda had had this form of discussion before. He had learned to keep a reminder of his last message handy, so he would understand Lucinda's answer when she got around to sending it.

He got to work calculating electrode placements and currents for a test subject from last week. His figures would go to program the surgical robot that would be aiding him when he operated to rehabilitate the man from his chemical dependencies. The procedure waited only on final state approval, and he was sure that would come.

He stayed doggedly at the work, fighting the temptation to head back to the control room, or anywhere else. He mastered the itch well enough that it was several minutes before he noticed the flashing message icon in the screen's corner. It was Lucinda. He quickly re-read his note, then clicked to get hers.

It was a voice file, and she sounded cross. "In case you've forgotten, Pavel, drug use creates violence. I don't mean just the criminality it breeds. I mean the damping of inhibitory systems in the brain. It's the same thing we've seen in our violent subjects the last two years, and it brings the same results. There's almost no drug that doesn't increase violent tendencies."

Pavel grimaced. He had seen how uncomfortable Lucinda was around those early patients, when overlay science was cutting its teeth rectifying extreme violent behavior. He could forgive the spillover of her squeamishness. Then she added one parting shot: "Oh, and how is taking drugs not their doing?"

His fingers began to flash. Most computers had keyboards as back-up interfaces, but voice-recognition was now the norm. For obvious reasons, Pavel avoided that method of interface. He could type faster than he could usually speak, and with fewer errors to correct.

Because addiction is not a moral failing. It springs from a faulty D2R2 gene, or deficient upbringing, or simple irresistible trauma. Judgmentalism like that has blighted this country for more than a century, obstructed these people from righting their lives. You're smarter than that, Lucinda, to be so dogmatic and simplistic.

He went back to work, rerouting pathways around a defective patch of the nucleus accumbens. This time, he noticed her reply right away.

"Dogmatic and simplistic, like "Addiction is not a moral failing?" That attitude is what people used to call "enabling." It lowers the social inhibitions against starting or maintaining the habit. You'll never need drug treatment if you never have that first use—and that's something people can avoid. And should."

You couldn't help it, he wrote. Right back to the moral judgment. I do not understand people who have to lower others to feel uplifted themselves.

It took a long time for her very short, icy reply to come. "I resent that, Pavel. And notice who keeps using the word ‘moral.'"

I'm saying, why stigmatize them gratuitously? If someone is willing to put himself under my knife to recover from this sickness, take that as the measure of his character. If it means one more productive person back in society, that's worth it.

Pavel managed to keep his mind on work until her next file came in. "That's what I told myself three years ago, when we first lobbied the legislature to let us test the overlay procedure on their worst inmates. Still, we didn't have them commit violence as part of their cure. The manipulation of their brains was risk enough." She sighed. "There are hidden dangers in treating addicts with this methodology, that go beyond the procedure itself."

I feel the same way, Pavel wrote back, but I think it's for a different reason. He looked at the time, which reinforced the itch to get away from his work. Can we call a ceasefire until I get some lunch?

"Sure." She chuckled. "Though I would have saved the warfare metaphor for my testimony tomorrow."

Pavel had to laugh along with her.


"Norris surprised me. She was against it."

Lucinda's heels clicked down the hallway, loud enough for Pavel to hear over her cellphone. She was in Sacramento, leaving the Assembly Speaker's office and heading to a meeting of the Human Services Committee. She was there to petition the legislature to expand their test rolls, so they could take volunteers from drug treatment programs as well as from the prisons.

"Her reason was--but you won't believe it, Pavel--"

"That the t-treatment centers hold a prep-ponderance of privileged whites, and it's only fair that the benefit of our work go f-first to the prisoners, mainly the Africans in America subjugated by white p-power structure." The footsteps ceased. "Oh, she still uses "Africans in America," right?"

"Uhhh, yes."

"Good. If there were a n-new term, she'd adopt it early."

Lucinda let out something like a laugh. "Your political savvy is something to behold. So, should I even bother going before the committee, now that the Speaker's against us?"

Pavel tapped his fingers in thought. "The Speaker will carry eight or n-nine other Democrats with her; probably a m-majority of the Green caucus. That would leave us just short, but we should get a few of those R-R--of them with us."

"The Republicans don't care for us. Me especially."

"They'll see a chance to m-make a certain point. Some of them will imply a m-moral equivalence between patients and inmates. When they do, show your disapproval.

That will make them d-dig in their heels, be more inclined to p-put them in the same test group, just as we w-want."

Lucinda didn't answer for a moment. "I'm outside the chamber now. I have to go. Goodbye."

Pavel sighed and hung up. Maybe he should be the one testifying, even knowing how bad his impediment got in large groups. He knew his tongue would betray him; he didn't like worrying that Lucinda might.

He did desultory work for a few minutes, but ended up pulling in the webcast of the committee hearing, as he knew he would. Lucinda was handling her opening statement well under all those gazes. The ones from the right side of the panel were especially stern. Pavel spared a sneer for them.

Lucinda had cut a deal with Norris's predecessor, another Democrat. In return for political support, politicians had their brain scans added to the therapeutic group, the ones overlaid on violent offenders to render them peaceful. Pavel had almost refused to go along, but when he learned it would be Democrats only, he decided he could live with it. A few colleagues on the team had decided otherwise.

The Republicans got outraged. They would. Some of them shrieked about mind control, Democrat thought processes implanted into convicts as the price for their release. Pavel didn't give their charges a second thought. They didn't understand the procedure, and their so-called evidence was all anecdotal, not worth following up.

Besides, if they ever got the majority in either house, they'd just demand that their patterns be used in place of the Democrats', the hypocrites. It was all power with them.

"You'll forgive me if I'm confused," said Mark Farrar, the ranking Republican. I'm not surprised, Pavel thought. "As a leading member of a neurosurgery research team, you suggest a return to genetic engineering to solve the problems your group is working on. Wouldn't that undermine your own work?"

This was Pavel's idea. Targeted gene therapy would be a superior method for many of the maladies they intended to handle: drug dependency was one of them. He knew, though, that the politicians wouldn't dare go that route. After the biological attacks during the War of 2001, and close calls with outbreaks from the agro- genetic field, genetic engineering was political poison. Contrasted against that, re-wiring brains was a nice safe haven for elected officials.

And there was so much good this treatment could do--if it did not acquire a stigma. He already saw forewarnings of it, not just with lunatic rhetoric, but in the way some people talked, facetiously or seriously, about "wiping" criminals' minds. To the layperson, overlay was something done to malefactors.

And yes, Pavel hoped to exploit that attitude in the Assembly to get extra funding.

Farrar was droning on again. Pavel shut off the browser in disgust. He left his office, needing something to cleanse his mind. He ended up in the monitoring booth, at the tail end of a test session.

Ramesh Mirchandini was in the scanner. He could tell from the lilting accent, hobbled by stuttering worse than his own. Pavel had a rapport with the grad student, not surprisingly. He gave some attention to the images coming in, but headed straight for the scanning room once the work was done.

"Doctor Pa-Pa-Pa--" Ramesh grinned painfully, and just mouthed "Hello."

"Have a few minutes?" Pavel asked. He led the way to a vacant hall. "How was the session today, Ramesh?"

Ramesh got the words out one by one. "Not. That. Bad."

"I know. It's h-hard, sometimes." He gently laid a hand on Ramesh's shoulder. "That's why it's important to kn-know your help really matters. Our un- understanding of the neuronal structure that underlies s-s-stuttering has expanded phenomenally in these l-last months."

He made the segue casually. "In fact, unoff-ficially speaking, we're ready to apply our pattern modification t-treatment to it now. There's nothing c- compulsory, of course, but to repay you for all your help, I'm sure--"

Ramesh's head quivered with effort. "D-D-Doctor Patrusky, that is. Generous of you. But I. Could not possibly--" Frustrated, he shook his head.

"If it's a matter of classwork, we c-can arrange it with the university and your p-professors. You wouldn't be penalized."

"Not. That," Ramesh said, grimacing. "I'm not. Comfortable. With the technique. I don't. Mean to. Offend you."

"No, you haven't. I understand." He smiled affably. "I'll let you go now." Ramesh nodded his head, and departed without the pain of more words.

Ramesh declining to go under his knife didn't put off Pavel. It wasn't fear of the surgery itself, but fear of becoming one of the mind-wiped, with all that that implied. Just as Pavel had been certain it would be.

Feelings were already hardening. Something had to break their assumptions now, before their attitudes set like concrete, before they had the excuse to lump everyone together.

Well, there was one way.


"You want us to operate on you?" Lucinda soon recovered from her astonishment, but the emotion replacing it looked oddly like disappointment. "Pavel, no. We can't."

"Why not?" Pavel swung his gaze across the table in the meeting room, challenging all three of his colleagues to answer.

Doctor Urowsky, the team's other neurosurgeon, knitted his thick eyebrows. "The procedure has never been done before, not for this, er, condition. We need experimentation first, practice."

"On what? It's not like our t-tests on violent Rottweilers. No other species has speech centers comparable to ours. The first procedure for stuttering will have to be on a human."

"But it doesn't have to be on you," Lucinda said.

Kate Barber looked across the table. "Would we prefer someone who didn't volunteer?"

"Don't be ridiculous," Urowsky said. "That isn't the point. All of our subjects have been volunteers."

"So far," said Pavel. "There is talk of having overlay surgery rep-place the death penalty." That brought a commotion, which Pavel silenced after a few seconds. "It won't amount to an-nything for a couple of years, but the debate is coming. It will be one more th-thing tying overlay therapy to criminality in the p-public mind. With that attitude prevalent, our opport-tunity to do good will be severely restricted. W-we need some action to prevent that from c-crystallizing, something before the brewing deb-bate influences how people think."

He saw a stern look coming from Lucinda, but she said nothing. Urowsky spoke up, shaking his head. "If you are volunteering for surgery for reasons unrelated to its medical worth, I will not perform it. I would consider it unethical."

Pavel pounded the table with his fist. "You think I d-d-don't care how I t-talk, how I sound? God-d-d--" Kate gripped his hand. He went silent, though his jaw still twitched.

"I withdraw my comment," Urowsky said, "but Pavel, think about this. You've performed these surgeries. You are asking me to cut your skull open. That is never a frivolous matter. You also know about advances in transcranial magnetic stimulation. In a matter of a few years, five at the outside, we will be able to adjust individual neurons without breaking the scalp. You wouldn't lose time, and we wouldn't lose your work, during your recovery. If you are patient, you can gain the benefits of our work with far less risk and inconvenience."

"So your concern is about me, Steven? You w-wouldn't be as reticent to operate on Ramesh, or Diane? You're certainly not as concerned about operating on convicts."

"Doctor Patrusky!" Kate gasped.

"Doctor," Lucinda echoed, "surely you can see the difference between the two."

Pavel fixed his eyes on Lucinda. "I certainly d-do. I want others to see it, too."

Urowsky sunk his chin onto his hand. "I am ... hesitant to agree to this, Pavel."

"Then don't," Lucinda said. "Reluctance is the wrong mindset to take into the OR."

Pavel glared at her, knowing she had just won the debate as far as Urowsky was concerned. His fellow surgeon soon said as much. His "I'm sorry" at the end sounded sincere. It might have been, for all that mattered.

"So am I," Pavel said. "If this is the s-standing policy toward non-correctional use of the neural impression p-procedure, I will have to reex-xamine my participation in these studies." His chair rasped across the carpet, and he left the room without another word.


"You weren't completely forthcoming in that meeting." The progress bar on Lucinda's voice file inched forward. "You aren't trying to have the procedure before this death penalty debate brews up. You're trying to have it before it's used for drug rehabilitation. Either way, you're trying to score political points, and I don't like that."

They're both serious concerns, Pavel wrote back. They'll both affect the future of our work. And you weren't this loath to touch political matters when it was a matter of saving the research program.

While he waited, his work dithered between the scans of a ruby-speed addict and the press release he was composing. If he was going to leave, he wanted to make the biggest impression he could with that definitive act.

Of course, any worthwhile media notice would bring follow-up stories. They would prefer interviews with him, right until they conducted them. To give them something else to use, he was compiling a list of colleagues at his university and others, and even some outside the sciences, who could support him in whatever public dogfight ensued.

The reply icon flashed, and he clicked it. "Desperate people grasp at short-term solutions." For several seconds she said nothing. "California isn't the only state. Maybe we should have passed on our findings, and let some other jurisdiction be first. Making a partisan issue of this may have been worse in the long term than losing a couple of years, and credit for ourselves."

A briefer pause came. "And nice try diverting me from my point. It's still odd that you didn't bring up the drug rehab angle: two lines of reasoning are better than one. Perhaps you were afraid your dispassionate, objective peers might not share your opinions. You might end up having to reevaluate them, and that's always uncomfortable. I know, from experience."

Pavel sat for a few minutes, thinking through Lucinda's words. There was little point in answering her assertion. It was more rhetorical than Socratic, using debate to win rather than to learn. No, it was time to get to first principles.

I've figured out what your own unexamined premise is. You still believe in free will. Lucinda, you've spent over a decade working in neuroscience, learning the mechanics of how brain chemistry makes us think, feel, act. You've seen the lesson before your eyes, but you haven't learned it, haven't understood. The brain is the mind: no more, no less. Dualism is dead, and you're one of the pallbearers.

He expected a long, shocked pause from Lucinda. The file signal that came a few moments later surprised him.

"How long have you been saving that up, Pavel? I knew you were a reductionist, but not such a rigid one. Sorry to disappoint you, but I decline to believe that all our actions can be factored down to chemical equations. Physicists used to have the same idea, but they found out the laws of physics weren't that straightforward. The fact that we can solve some mental problems doesn't mean we can solve all our actions."

Pavel had started pounding his keys the moment he heard the physics reference. Good Lord, Penrose? The quantum mind? If that's the extent of your refutation, admit defeat now. It would be more dignified.

He took a breath. I will admit, the illusion of free will is a useful survival tool, but it serves nothing to let it blind you. That's what those politicians have done, the moralizing fossils. They're so predictable. You wonder how I can forecast political twists and turns. It's all part of recognizing and accepting the underlying deterministic patterns. Maybe that will help convince you.

He got some work done while waiting for her reply. Just as he thought she might have resigned from the debate, it arrived. "I see. So you admit your talent isn't anything meaningful. I'm glad you cleared that up. Thanks."

Pavel had to run the file a second time before answering. That's not what I said at all. I have a gift, that comes from my understanding of the real human nature.

"But it isn't your doing. It's the result of outside influences causing a series of reactions in your neuronal chemistry, along pathways potentiated by years of environmental stimulus. You can't respond any other way; you don't have the will to do so. Of course, you were bound to think otherwise—and I was bound to argue the contrary just now."

Very clever, Lucinda. Oh, wait, I can't credit you with cleverness. You're just a machine running its course. I keep forgetting that. Sorry.

Lucinda's irony sank into gloom. "Don't you see the meaninglessness that imposes on every human action? If you have two hypotheses, why would you pick that one?"

Because it fits the facts. No real scientist can do otherwise.

He channeled the rush of confident energy that gave him into putting the finishing touches on his press release. He expected no answer to that crushing shot. Again, he was wrong.

"Don't blame me for not being a real scientist. I'm only obeying my chemical equations. Then again, you're only obeying yours by accusing—oh, forget it. Infinite recursion gives me headaches."

Her persistent sarcasm irked him, and he let it show. I knew you were going to say that, he wrote back.

He was about to close out the ruby-speed file some minutes later when the door creaked open. It was Lucinda. "I guess you have all the answers," she said. "From philosophy through state politics, and down to office politics, too." She lifted a finger. "So if you're that good at gauging human interactions, you'll have no trouble guessing what I'm going to do next."

Pavel began to speak, hoping his tongue wouldn't undermine him, but Lucinda was already leaving. His instinct to pursue got no farther than a twitch of his legs. He was tired of the argument, as tired as she had looked. He'd deal with whatever her plans were later.


It was late the next day when Doctor Urowsky admitted himself to Pavel's office. He stood gravely, a step inside the doorway, and needed prompting to speak. "I have ... reconsidered my decision, Doctor Patrusky. If you wish to undergo the ... corrective procedure you discussed, I will perform it."

Pavel let his mouth hang. He almost asked why Urowsky had reconsidered, but realized with a second start that he knew why.

"Understand, there will be limits on my work. I refuse to intervene in cerebellar function, even if it is part of your speech impediment. We have dealt too little in that area. Of course, if you are willing to wait some months or a year for a battery of animal tests--"

"I'd r-r-rather operate sooner," Pavel said. "C-cerebral impression may suffice. The less interf-ference that produces results, the b-better."

Their conversation went further into technical matters, letting Pavel forget his mystification for a while.


Pavel spent much of the next few days inside the MEG scanner. Most of the rest of the time he spent plotting excitatory pathways, and auditing control scans taken from volunteers. One of those patterns would be mapped onto his own neurons, rewriting a piece of his brain.

He did not ask Lucinda why she had changed Urowsky's mind. He was ready to ask once, during a post-scan review in the control chamber, but Lucinda forestalled him with her own inquiry.

"Since Doctor Urowsky will be operating already, might you think it advisable to have him do some ... extra work?"

He rolled a jaundiced look her way. "Don't make jokes. This is a serious m-matter."

"It isn't a joke. I thought--there are some, er, slight peculiarities in the prefrontal cortex, related to the serotonin-producing cells. Here, I'll highlight them."

The lines she traced on her magnetoencephalograph showed up on his. He watched for a second, puzzled, until he made the connection. He snapped off his screen.

"That's beneath you, Doctor," he spat out. "Snooping into irrelevant c-c-corners of my brain, t-treating natural v-variations as s-something--" Anger left his tongue flailing, unable to push out the next word.

"Fine." She reset her screen. "I won't concern myself with it any further. Just don't conceal it from Doctor Urowsky to spite me. If you can remedy two problems at once--"

Pavel pushed off his chair so hard it nearly fell. He turned at the doorway, burning through Lucinda with his eyes. "Your insinuation is despicable." He stalked out, relishing those four perfect, unmarred words.

He shut his office door behind him, called up some leftover work, and wound up staring at it. He began questioning his reaction. Lucinda's inquiry could have been innocent, couldn't it? No, he decided, impossible. She was enjoying the moment, the notion that she was scoring in their great debate.

Still, how could there be an effect she would see? He had only used Ecstasy five or six times, back in college. A friend had promised him it would alleviate his stuttering, and under its euphoric influence, it seemed he was right.

It was a fantasy, though, born of synthetic confidence. His research revealed that, and hard questions to people he knew confirmed it. He abandoned the drug and its illusions. In retrospect, that moment of scientific honesty with himself might have set him on his career path.

He had felt occasional cravings, but he attributed them to chronic frustration with his stutter, an irrational yearning for the comfort of self-delusion. He refused to be irrational--but the yen refused to die altogether. Could that short, failed experiment long ago still have a physical presence within him? Presence, and influence?

Pavel had a bitter laugh at himself. No, he hadn't found the scourge of original sin, the root of moral weakness or base criminality that some people imagined existed. At worst, he had found cause and effect, another stone in the foundation of chemical mechanistics. To anyone who knew pharmacology, it was no surprise. And maybe it really was just coincidence.

He wouldn't have Doctor Urowsky work on it. If word ever got out, it would be more ammunition for the guilt-peddlers. Besides, the planned overlay sites extended a little into the pre-frontal cortex. Maybe the right neuron would get zapped. No, that didn't matter. Erase the impediment, and you erased the desires on which that faint appetite fed.

Of course, that assumed the surgery worked. He forced his attention back onto the scans of his supplementary motor areas. There were a couple of days left to prepare--and then he'd see.


Pavel's first thought on coming to was that he really felt like his head had been sawed open. His hand went halfway to his temple, and stopped. He did not want to feel that. He would never be able to forget it if he did.

He let the residual clutches of anesthesia fall away over a couple of hours without exerting himself. He did eat a light dinner, greeting the orderly with a wordless smile. Eventually, he was ready.

The bag was there at his bedside. He pulled out the slim poetry volume at the top, opened it to a bookmark, and after a moment's nerving, opened his mouth. He was stumbling by the last lines, but out of excitement. He had read three pages almost perfectly. His nervous slips of the tongue at the end were slips only, not the triggers to those maddening seizures of mind and flesh.

Pavel dove back into the book, finishing most of it. He wasn't perfect: He still hitched sometimes on ‘s' and ‘th' sounds, but that was the last remnant of his stutter. Drowsiness was all that kept him from going on.

He started again right after breakfast, and carried through until lunch without a rest. It was while eating that it struck him how strongly he was concentrating. Typically it took far more effort to stay focused on work, any work—and he suspected he knew why things had changed.

It took two tries to have the orderly fetch him the right neurobiology text, and it ended up being on paper rather than pocket-comp. Still, it confirmed his hypothesis. Urowsky had worked on his upper auditory cortex, an area connected not just to stuttering, but to attention deficits.

Nobody had ever diagnosed him with ADD, but in retrospect he was not that surprised. Neither was the link in the auditory cortex a shock. The area integrated external stimuli, on one hand assisting concentration, on the other giving him proper feedback on his voice as he spoke. The work to cure one malady had fortuitously alleviated the other, unrecognized problem.

Pavel ended up filling the blank back pages of three novels with notes and speculations. When he was wheeled into the lab the next day, he made certain the team had those pages at hand as they scanned his auditory cortex. Otherwise, the tests merely confirmed for them what he already knew.

It was only after returning to the university hospital that he realized he had forgotten to ask Lucinda that hanging question. Probably for the best: they had never been alone.

He kept at his training for another long day, potentiating pathways for unimpeded speech, swamping the old, faulty connections. Finally, though, his surge of self-diagnostic energy waned. He asked the staff for a computer, or at least a television, so he could get connected to the world again.

They gave him a laptop. He spent a couple of hours absorbing news, until one item brought him to a cold stop. He traced every link, got all the background he could find, but that only increased the chill.

He sent e-mail to Lucinda, asking her to come immediately. It was the only thing he could think of to do.


"The legislators caught wind of it almost right away," Lucinda said. "They reached an impressive consensus: none of them liked it."

Pavel nodded, saying nothing. His friend Doctor Hammond at UCLA had told a local assemblyman about the operation, thinking Pavel would want it known. He mistakenly thought the publicity campaign was still on, that this was a political act.

Pavel wasn't going to say anything about his knowledge right now.

"Some of them condemned us for putting an elective procedure ahead of government-sponsored ones," Lucinda continued. "Others said we had no right asking for expansion of the drug test pool if we were willing to experiment on our own staff. Speaker Norris said it showed our racial bias, putting a white establishment figure ahead of the ‘correctionally oppressed.'" She sighed. "Then there were some saying that volunteering for wiping proved you have a flawed personality."

Pavel's face began to burn. "I didn't read that on-line."

"The comments came directly to us, not to the media."

The media will hear about them, Pavel vowed.

"We're starting an accelerated course of surgeries on our inmate volunteers. The first one is tomorrow. We think that'll mollify enough of the legislature to rebuild our political support."

Pavel wrinkled his brow, with a twinge of scar pain, then nodded. "I have to agree. Do the drug cases now, and fast. The stutterers ..." Lucinda bit her lip with concern, but he was just pausing. "They'll have to wait. I'll join Doctor Urowsky as soon as possible, of course. It's about time I got out of this bed." "You don't--" Lucinda stopped before she said something futile.

Pavel looked up at her. "Is this what you intended to set in motion, Lucinda? To force us to work with the inmates alone; to keep the punitive taint of our work alive? Did you--did you really see connections that I didn't?"

Lucinda's face turned desolate. "No. I didn't think it through that way. I would never have wanted to bring this much trouble onto our program, and it definitely wasn't about knocking you down a peg. I wanted ...."

She had to turn away for a moment, but she composed herself and met his eye. "I wanted to see you remade. Not just in your speech, but ... stuttering is such a frustrating disability. Frustrations breed resentments; they bend our characters in ways we might not realize, that may not always show. We end up knotted, contorted.

"That's the way it was with me and Keith ten years ago. Eventually I cut the knot: I divorced him. I was trying to cut the knot again. It--it didn't seem like meddling to give you what you wanted."

That was what stopped the tongue-lashing he was ready to deliver. All her presumptions, her arrogance, suddenly seemed ludicrous. What was the point? Was she trying to instill the value of free will in him, with an act that treated his brain as a malfunctioning machine? Was she trying to reform what didn't need reforming, what he was glad to be, glad to believe?

He strained ... then fell back with a dark chuckle. Now, now of all times, he did not know what to say.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last Updated: May 15, 2016.

 

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