We had started in the cryogenics room, a series of stainless steel vessels and boxy processing units linked together by an array of piping, some of which merged into the walls. It looked a bit like a brewery, only without the smell. Lines had been painted on the concrete floor marking out safe passage through the machines. As James led me through this labyrinth, halting in front of a control panel, he explained how the place ran on liquid helium, that here was where the liquefaction took place. "If you want a metaphor that might make sense to your non-scientific readership, tell them it's like a balancing act. Temperature is a measure of how fast atoms and molecules are vibrating, so the closer to absolute zero we can get them, the slower the movement. Your brain on the other hand is a warm, squishy mass of molecules in motion. It is literally humming in there. So, if we want to look inside and measure what is happening, we need to make our sensors absolutely still and undisturbed. Or as close as we can manage."
When I suggested this didn't quite make sense – why should stillness in one place compensate for movement somewhere else? – he replied that pop science explanations often don't, but that it was true all the same.
"It's the loophole in the second law of thermodynamics. Chaos always wins in the end; but set things up just right and you can shift the disorder from where you don't want it to where you do, leaving behind the answer to the question you are asking."
When I failed to respond, he gave me an encouraging look. Here on his own territory, in this windowless room with its dials and its pipework, James was the epitome of the affable and bespectacled professor, diluting the edginess that had been evident at our first meeting. It no doubt helped that I made an ideal audience; with enough scientific education and native intelligence, or so I'd like to think, to understand what he was saying, but also a depth of ignorance about the subject matter that cried out to be filled in, accompanied by a practical need to learn.
"Well spotted though. Perhaps that art school didn't ruin your critical faculties after all."
"Hey, just wait a minute. Who said anything about art school? I'm self-taught. Whatever I produced, it was all my own doing. No one to blame but myself."
"No formal training at all?"
"If you must know, I started out with architecture. Until I failed the entry year exams, that is. Probably just as well. Seemed destiny had other plans for me."
"You mean, becoming an artist?" I hadn't told anyone about my past career; the information just seemed to have spread of its own accord.
"I guess so. Either that or collaborating with a bunch of mind control freaks."
The words came out a little more harshly than I intended. The tone of our conversation until now had been light-hearted, and when I turned to James he was still smiling.
"Is that how you see us?"
"It's how those protestors see you. I guess I'm still reserving judgement."
We moved on through a further series of rooms stacked with computer servers. James dismissed these as 'number crunchers' of no great interest and started speaking instead about the science behind his brain scanning machines and what it was they were trying to do. "Think of us as bottom feeders, trying to eat our way up to daylight. And the thing that feeds us, the thing we always keep coming back to, right down at the bottom of everything, is quantum physics. You have probably heard it described as the science of the very smallest scale, but it is also the basis for applied sciences like chemistry, which in turn underpins biology, metallurgy, electronics, all of those. Brain scanners too. When you put all these things together, what you get is a bottom-up explanation of how the world works.
"Meanwhile other people study the world from the top down. Psychology, economics, sociology, ... all respectable sciences these days. True, they have their limits, but then so does technology.
"The problem is, the two don't meet in the middle. We have no top-to-bottom science. There's a gaping hole in our system of the world, and it is right here." He tapped his head. "This is the gap we aim to fill."
"Sounds ominous."
Dr James Shaw paused for a moment and looked at me. "Sorry, a poor choice of words, perhaps." He opened the door and ushered me into another room. This one looked like an operating theatre or a high-tech dentist's surgery, with a large reclining chair above which a halo of tubes and boxes hung suspended from the ceiling. More equipment was arranged tidily along the walls. No glowing LEDs or blinking lights, just an array of grey boxes with ventilation grills, looking static and intimidating.
"No. We aren't trying to put ideas into people's heads. Just to understand what's in there already. To quote our founder's script writer, 'If we can just cleanse the doors of perception, who knows what we might see?' Care to take a seat?"
I hoisted myself onto the couch and settled into position. "Well it is nice and comfy." I grinned at my guide, then glanced upwards in mock nervousness. "What exactly does this thing do? Will I glow in the dark when you've finished?"
"Oh, it's perfectly safe, just a passive scanner. Have you ever seen the inside of your own head before? No? Well now's your chance. Oh, and if you have any deep, dark secrets, now would be a good time not to think about them." His expression reminded me of Kohei and his wink-substitute smile. "Now, if you would just sit still ..."
Dr Shaw levered the suspended apparatus down from above until my head was entirely encased and clamped immobile.
As I lay still, he continued talking.
"We engineers have a saying we quote when asked to design something new: simple, easy to use, or flexible: pick two.
"Take a hammer for example. Simple design, simple operation, excellent if you need to hit something, but not a lot of use for anything else. It won't help you balance your tax return."
I thought to make some reply, but the grip of the apparatus on my head prevented me from speaking, leaving me no choice but to let myself lie back and relax. I was literally a captive audience.
"Or an old-fashioned computer. Quite a simple design really, on the inside, and it has the flexibility to run any program you could possibly write. But that's just it, to get it to do anything useful you used to have to write your own program – so not simple to operate. To make a computer easy to use, you're forced to mess up the elegant simplicity of the processor with a bunch of complicated software code.
"Now, the other extreme is a human being. Very flexible, easy to operate – give one a few simple instructions, offer it a piece of paper with a picture of a dead famous person and the signature of a central banker – and it is surprising what complex tasks you can get one to do. But on the inside, that is another story. On the inside – the price we pay for this flexibility – your human being is the most complex piece of matter in the known universe. The most complex bit of all, of course, being the brain. Reverse engineering one of those is no trivial task.
"Before we can make any progress, we need to see inside it. That's what this machine is for. There is another saying we engineers have: if you want to control something, first you must be able to measure it. Of course, this isn't about controlling people. We just want to open them up to see what makes them tick."
I could hear him shuffling about, but with my vision blocked there were no other clues as to what he was doing.
"Okay now, I want you to clear your mind. Just lie back and relax. Keep your eyes open and try to think of as little as possible. Remember to forget those secrets."
A still photo of a yellow rubber duck appeared in my field of vision. It was followed at intervals of a few seconds by a green boat, my grandmother's face (where did he get that from?), and a cow grazing in a field. Next came a series of simple phrases: 'dog is wet', 'walk slowly', and so on.
After no more than about two minutes of this, he called a halt and raised the headset, freeing me to get back to my feet.
"Come take a look."
He led me over to a large panel supported by a trolley-like plinth. It looked like an architect's drawing board, but in fact was a large display screen. On it was a larger-than-life image of my head, hairless and unrealistically coloured, but clearly recognizable.
Dr Shaw touched one of the icons lined along the right of the screen. The image flipped around so we were now looking down on my skull from above. "Look." He ran his finger down the screen and then back up again. A false-colour image of my brain blossomed out then shrank back to what presumably was my spinal cord. The same sequence repeated in reverse as his finger moved back up, halting at a midway point where the patterns pulsed and shuffled with particular activity. Something at least was going on in there.
"That there is the real you. Recognize yourself?"
"So it's true then – I do have an inner glow. Can you really read my thoughts? From that?"
"Oh no, this isn't the full caboodle. I was kidding about the deep, dark secrets. For that you would've had to drink one of our magic potions, or at least that's how it will work once we figure out all the bugs."
"Magic potions?"
"Yes, but more about them later. We're getting ahead of ourselves. What you see here is just a coarse-grain photograph of blood flow. It shows which areas of the brain are active. It's much too rough for real mind-reading but it's a start. Here, watch."
He prodded away at the screen icons again, bringing up two images; one showing the rubber duck, the other a yellow duck-shaped blob.
"This image is a computer reconstruction based on the scanner measurements, mainly from the vision centres at the rear of your brain. It works by searching through a huge database of brain scan and image pairs to find the closest matches, then overlaying them together to produce a best-guess composite." He touched another icon which cycled through the headset images and the computer's matching reconstructions. The cow image was the most impressive; it was just as blurred as the others but the trees in the background were distinctly visible as a series of green-brown smudges.
He pressed the icon again and the display switched to the first phrase, 'dog is wet'. Below it were the words, '<noun> <adjective>'.
"The reason I am showing you this is to explain what this system is good at and what it isn't."
He cycled through the remaining phrases. Each one was parsed correctly.
"This uses the same database matching technique as the images. For simple expressions like this, its accuracy is up in the high nineties. Now look again."
The phrase 'dog is wet' reappeared, and next to it, 'Sausage hot'. Another icon-press and, 'walk slowly' was paired with 'introduce playing'. Other guesses included 'ankle grind' and 'fever taste'. None made sense.
"This is the same technique again, this time applied to the phrase meaning. As you can see it's not even close. There is a very good reason for that, a reason that tells you why what I have here is not much more than a parlour trick, a scientific dead end. Firstly, although our scanner looks at tiny regions of the brain, it lacks the accuracy to detect the firing of individual neurons, let alone determine the connections between them. That is a technical problem though, one we are busy trying to overcome. But there is also a second more fundamental reason. The reason the machine does so well at parsing sentences is because it is analysing a system largely put there by nature, the deep grammar that everyone shares. That lets us make useful comparisons between what we see in your head and our database of scans taken from other people. But meaning is something quite different. You learn most of your language in the first few years of childhood, then keep adding to it over time. And in everyone the sequence is different, which means that the patterns of connections, the ways your brain represents meaning, are all different too. Trying to extract meaning from your brain scan by comparing it with those of others is a waste of time. A random word generator could do almost as well.
"So what my scanner really needs to do, what it will do once I perfect it, is to read the pattern of axon connections in which our memories and knowledge are encoded. What neurologists call 'white matter'. Because that's what makes us who we are. We're not black magic."
"Is that what you are working on now? Making the scanner good enough to get down to that level, what you were just talking about?"
"Right. First we measure the pattern, then decode what it means. If joining the dots is Graeme's job, you could say that mine is to find the dots in the first place. Once I do that, it is up to him to translate the network of connections into meaning."
"What about Karen then?"
"Well, to push the analogy a bit further, her job is to make the dots glow in the dark. She is our brewer of magic potions. She designs molecules that we can introduce into a subject's brain in such a way that they undergo detectable changes when particular brain events occur, like a neuron firing. The trick is to have as many different types of compound as possible so that they each give a slightly different signal. Something my detectors can triangulate onto. That minimizes cross-talk from adjacent sites and gives us a more nuanced view of what is going on."
"And people let you put this stuff in their heads?"
"Sure. Toxicology modelling has made big strides in recent years. Now we can screen everything in silico. It is not like back in the stone age when each and every new molecule had to go through clinical safety trials on real people. Given the need for experimenting, for lots of trial and error, that would have made what we do here all but impossible."
"You might not be so relaxed if you were on the receiving end of one of those errors."
"Oh, it's perfectly safe." James waved a hand to brush off any notions to the contrary. "You might have heard the term, the singularity," he said, now appraising me with a questioning look. "It's the threshold at which computers become smart enough to design new computers that are smarter still, leading to a runaway evolution in intelligence."
"Sounds vaguely familiar."
"And one day it might even happen. But in the meantime there has been another, less headline-worthy singularity. A more important one, because it really has happened, and very recently. It was when computers became fast enough to do first-principles, quantum mechanical calculations of molecular structures, and to do them routinely for the large complex molecules like proteins that are most useful."
"You mean like those nanotech smartdrugs?"
"Exactly. It's been called the nanotech revolution, but that was just a term that happened to be floating around the public consciousness at the time. Molecular systems engineering is a better description. Drugs are one application. What we do here is another. Neural imaging becomes a lot easier if you can put finely tuned tracers into your subject and have them emit a signal at appropriate moments. And do it safely of course."
I nodded, doing my best to take it all in. On the screen my brain still pulsed away its coloured harmonies. Following James's example, I scrolled the time and position axes this way and that, using another control to zoom in and out on particular spots of activity. Whichever way you looked at it, it was all just pretty colours on a grey background. Like poetry in a foreign language, there was nothing in it that spoke to me.
"Come on," said James, shutting the screen down. "There's one more room for you to see before we're done."
The room next door was a mess. In place of the clinical orderliness of everything I had been shown so far, this was a bloke's shed, a man cave. More box-shaped housings like those in the scanning room were lined against one wall, but these had their sides open revealing a mass of tubes and wires, some of which were hanging out like a wounded animal trailing its guts. A long workbench contained smaller devices in a similar condition of dismantle. I even saw two screwdrivers and a soldering iron. For authenticity, it lacked only beer bottle empties and discarded takeout pizza boxes.
"In art, we call this an assemblage."
"Well, for an engineer, what you see here is work in progress. Karen can run up her stuff on a workstation and have the results delivered from a specialist fab. Graeme just crunches numbers. For me, until I get the resolution required, I need to tinker."
"How close are you to succeeding?" The act of giving voice to this question reminded me of Bill of the Beatniks and his request for progress reports.
"Getting there. If you will excuse the lack of false modesty, what you see here is the real bottleneck, the real make it or break it for Spurious Developments. If I can crack this challenge, the rest is comparatively easy. Once my machine can scan the brain to a fine enough resolution, the problem is transformed into one of pure information. And manipulating information is something we have got pretty good at in recent years. Mind you, the amount of information involved is huge. It makes proteomics look like Sudoku."
We returned upstairs in time for lunch. James went off to attend to some urgent task at his workstation, so with nothing else to do I headed to the staff room for something to eat. I found it occupied by Miranda and Graeme.
He must have wandered off at some point as I soon found myself alone with her. We chatted for quite some while. She laughed out loud twice and was smiling for at least fifty percent of the time. The rest I put down to the environment. We were on our own time, but company property. Out of the office, I expected she would loosen up a lot more.
Over the next few days I received similar briefings from Karen and Graeme.
Along the way, Graeme explained to me that to dismiss his task as glorified number games, as James had done, was a little premature. Before the serious computations could get underway, he first needed to calibrate his data against a real person's mind. He wanted that person to be me. If I was to write up an effective account of what they were doing, he told me, I needed to get involved in their research at the workface. Here was a task that needed doing, but did not require any specialist skills. I was the ideal candidate.
What could I do but acquiesce? I needed this job. If I wanted to keep it, it appeared I would have to drink the magic potion.