Here & There (69 page)

He opened the door, and the sun flooded in around him and the figure now standing in the threshold. The light bled everything white, blackening them into silhouettes: Dr. Rasmussen engulfed by the swooping shape of his lab coat and the shade of Hilary hugging her arms around her torso, shadows of buckles dangling from her straitjacket.

She wrested her arm loose from her constraints, reached for Dr. Rasmussen . . . and handed him a folder of papers?

My pupils finally telescoped out the surge of sunlight, and I watched my mother morph into a female colleague of Dr. Rasmussen. The dangling straps of her straitjacket transmogrified into buckles and straps of a leather jacket, which the woman had kept on while they fixed the heat in her office.

Dr. Rasmussen whispered his thanks and crossed back to his desk while I tried to get my heart rate back down below 250 bpms.

“As I told you, I can’t disclose any patient information, but I don’t see a problem in sharing what your mother had him working on.” Dr. Rasmussen thumbed through the folder’s contents, then closed it and slid it across his desk toward me. “It’s a shame there won’t be more. This work has been very therapeutic for the patient. It prompted a significant calming effect.”

The color suddenly drained out of Dr. Rasmussen’s face. “I apologize, I didn’t mean to imply that Hilary’s . . .”

I held up my hand, like a benevolent pope. “It’s all right, Dr. Rasmussen. I know what you meant.”

“Please, call me Steven.”

“It’s ok. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your help.” I nodded at the folder on his desk between us. I didn’t reach for it.

Steven frowned with sympathy. “How long has it been?”

“Hard to say, since we don’t know exactly when she disappeared. Around two years, though.”

“Your mother was a friend and a colleague. Her mind was beyond sharp.” Steven nodded. “How are you holding up?”

“Like a seeding dandelion in a tornado.”

He nodded again.

“Steven, there is one other favor, if I might.” I put my hand on the folder. “Did my mother mention whom she was working for on this project?”

“She just emphasized the need for discretion.”

“Yes, she went to great lengths to conceal what she was doing here. From what I can garner, there’s a distinct possibility that her employer might have a hand in her disappearance.”

“Jesus . . .”

“Anyhow, I was wondering if we might continue her request for discretion.”

“Of course, as I said as a doctor I cannot—”

“Steven, I’m afraid I’m asking for a little more than that.” My voice didn’t sound like my own. It had a professional, in-control tone. Apparently hallucinating visions of my mother really focused the shit out of me. “Is it possible that Hilary never came here? Never worked with any patient? Never picked up any material?” I picked up the folder and placed it in my lap.

Steven took it all in, leaned back in his chair, and gazed out his window at the woods. Finally, he nodded and stood up. “I’m sorry, Daniel. I wish I could help more, but I haven’t seen your mother in a number of years. Not since she came in to consult on a couple patients back around 2000.”

He looked at me over the rim of his glasses. It took a second for me to catch on. “Well, thanks for your time,” I said, standing myself.

I rolled up the folder and tucked it into my inside pocket.

“Take care with that,” he said. “It’ll be the
only
remaining copy soon.”

We shook hands and parted ways.

It took me a while to open the folder. I was scared what might be in it, and I was terrified about what might not be in it.

It sat on the passenger side, atop the mess of other folders from her report, while I stared out the windshield at the “Stuck-Up Bridge.” The Seekonk River Drawbridge had been stuck in the open position since the ‘70s, a charming bit of urban decay that had been another hook-up haunt of mine in college.

After an hour of hemming, hawing, and a whole lot of muttering, I finally took a pen and gingerly flipped her folder open, like it might be booby-trapped.

I knew what it was instantly. The chaotic designs, the seeming gibberish: these were pages from Leo’s Notebook—coded copies and decoded revelations.

Her Blackstone cipher had cracked it. Some crazy kid lodged in Butler, well past sanity, who dreamt in prime numbers, had been able to tease apart the enigmas. Well, at least some of them.

LEO’S
REIDIER’S
NOTEBOOK: DECODED

September 5, 2007

Iteration
1
*
has proved psychologically successful. Ecco appears to have maintained all of his long-term memories since his initial appearance. More accurately, since the move to Providence. (This was not because he didn’t necessarily remember before that, but due to the fact that there did not seem to be sufficient means for testing his brief stint in Chicago. Therefore, whether his memory encompassed that time or not is still inconclusive.) Upon
successful transfer
, subject was immediately examined through an
informal series of tests
.
**

*
(PS Just so we’re on the same page, those highlights are mine.)

**
When was he performing these “transfers”??

1) Subject maintained accurate mental map of the residence. He could correctly and without hesitation lead me around to requested locations, i.e. when I asked him to take me to the kitchen, he led me up the stairs, down the hall, to the kitchen.

a) Subject accurately located objects outside of residence (that also were not within view).

i. Ecco correctly pointed through a door to identify sandbox’s location.

2) Subject maintained aesthetic preferences. When eating chicken, Ecco always prefers the wing. When asked to choose between wing and leg, he chose wing.

a) While on its own, not a conclusive event (50 percent probability of randomly choosing wing). However provides correlative supplemental support for hypothesis.
*

*
Found it,
pages 363
-
364
, Frankenstein and his wooden boy.

3) Subject also revealed a preestablished, undisclosed hiding place.

a) Eve’s candy stash, which was unknown to me at time of inquiry, thereby eliminating the possibility of Ecco interpreting subconscious clues from me as to its whereabouts. I wasn’t inadvertently guiding him there.

b) Ecco also identified memory for preestablished, communal behaviors.

i. I.e. keeping the remotes in drawer of coffee table.

4) Most significant evidence was reenactment of specific behavior from first day in Providence.

a) Ecco lying upside down on chair and pretending to walk on ceiling.

i. This behavior was only observed once by me on move-in day.

Subsequent tests were also administered by Bertram (under the guise of checking his mental state postaccident), after which Bertram was aware of
Ecco’s duplicitous nature
. Ecco performed specific tasks that Bertram had witnessed him execute almost six months ago. Ecco ate macaroni salad with a straw,
*
once again exhibiting a consistency of aesthetic preferences (much more conclusively than the chicken wing, due to the specificity of the behavior). Furthermore, Ecco exactly replicated the tomato Lego “sculpture” he had made when Bertram first examined him.
**
In order as to not prejudice or influence the subject in any way, Bertram presented Ecco with a bin containing a variety of Legos (of various colors), as well as Capsela and Tinker toys, and asked Ecco to make him the object he had made previously. Ecco proceeded to do so, without hesitation, completely from memory. Bertram confirmed this as evidence of a stable long-term memory.

*
See
page 292
.

**
See
page 275
.

Unfortunately, while the cognitive goal was accomplished with
Iteration
1, there was a glaring collateral physiological side effect: cognitive insensitivity to pain. Subject appears to have little to no pain capabilities whatsoever. This insensitivity spans the entire spectrum from dull knocks to the head to second-degree burns.
*

*
Like a little kid might get from reaching his hand into 212-degree water and pulling out a hard-boiled egg. Turn to
page 383
. Reidier is sick.

Sense of touch seems to have remained intact and most likely registers pressure information, as evidenced by subject’s ability to pick up and manipulate objects, walk, etc.

Dr. Roland Staud, a professor of medicine and rheumatologist at the University of Florida, has researched this naturally occurring, though rare, physiological condition. While there haven’t been enough case studies to statistically determine its propensity, Staud believes it to be more common than one in a billion or even a million, but that it goes unnoticed due to those who have the disorder not disclosing it.

Geoffrey Woods, a geneticist in Cambridge, only recently made the connection between pain insensitivity and genes. His research eventually led to ascribing it to a mutation of the SCN9A gene.

The possibility of some sort of genetic aberration is further supported by a secondary physical side effect: Ecco, unlike Otto, does not have an allergy to tetanus. While outwardly the two appear identical, at a base genetic level something must be different. Somewhere in the process, his strand of DNA must have been altered.

…     …     …     …
Ecco doesn’t feel pain

It’s unsettling. It’s chaos.
We
I have to watch him all the time just to ensure he doesn’t jump too hard and break his ankle, or pick up a pan from the stove and melt the palms of his hands, or dislocate his shoulder twisting and turning when he sleeps, biting his lips clean through, or even drinking rotten milk. His senses of smell and taste, while not necessarily gone, have been hindered or muffled.

I’ve resorted to wrapping his hands in gauze some days or duct taping mittens around his wrists. I have to clean his eyes each morning and night to make sure nothing damaging has lodged itself in his corneas. I check his shoes when he comes inside to confirm he hasn’t stepped on a nail. The other night I found him sitting on his bed ripping out his eyelashes, one by one, giggling. Later that evening I caught Otto doing it. He cried after one particularly hard yank.

Eve can’t stand to be in the same room as Ecco. Her perception of him as an Other, as a freak, as a threat, has only been intensified by his new vulnerability. She keeps Otto away from him at all costs for fear of another incident of Otto mimicking Ecco and severely injuring himself, even though Otto had only superficial burns on the tips of two fingers from the egg incident. Ecco is a living, breathing, horrible hypothetical. It scared her.

So often we think of pain as the enemy when really it’s our caretaker.

…     …     …     …

Nevertheless, it cannot be ignored that this disorder, this condition, is new. He felt pain before the July 25th
iteration
.
*
He hurt himself and cried many times. The very fact that he keeps proclaiming how different foods taste implies that he was registering that sensory information differently before.

*
See
page 83
, Galilee 6:21, Experiment 19. Cross-check the date . . . It’s right there in plain sight. The Coke experiment must’ve been a cover. Masked the power usage while he iterated his son.

A biopsy was sent to Cambridge. Woods has confirmed that Ecco’s SCN9A gene has in fact mutated. Clearly the adjustments made in order to transfer long-term memories during teleportation also altered something at a genetic level. He was not the same coming out as he was going in.
*

*
He’s iterating his kid.

Ecco isn’t Ecco: he’s Eccos.

He’s R’s little guinea pig.

If this alteration can be pinpointed, could this effect be controlled and targeted on other genes or cells? If so, then perhaps it is possible for a subject to be repaired during teleportation. Can I perform quantum surgery?

Maybe Curzwell is not all crazy.

A

December 1, 2007

Iteration 2
*
has made the same ambivalent progress as
its
previous version. Subject exhibited seamless short-term memory retention across teleportation process.

*
See Galilee 6:21, Experiment 9 Delta
pages 197
-
200
. Reidier was running a double bluff. His after-hours experiments were supposed to be noticed by the powers that be. They were supposed to spy on and transcribe the “not-so-secret” infractions he wanted them to spy on. They were supposed to feel superior gathering all their surreptitious intel on his Gould Island extracurricular affairs. All the while it was a misdirection, a means of covering his power usage (see
page 245
) to obscure the massive energy drain.

Before, “during,” and after process, I engaged Ecco in a game of Concentration.
*
I played several rounds with him as we prepared, shuffling the cards each round and then dealing them all animal pictures face down. Through this play, I determined that one minute and forty-eight seconds in would be the optimal time to engage Quark Resonator. By this point in the game, it had been on average sufficiently long enough that half of the cards had randomly been flipped and turned back over for Ecco to have created a rough, though incomplete, mental map of which animals were where (i.e. the lion card was face down in the bottom left corner, the hippo card was in the middle row two from the right).