Distress

I'd gone on to another appointment at the university: an afternoon with the famous Manchester MIRG—Medical Imaging Research Group. It had seemed like too good a chance to miss—and imaging, after all, lay behind the definitive identification of partial autism.

I skimmed through the footage. A lot of it was good—and it would probably make a worthwhile five-minute story of its own, for one of SeeNet's magazine programs—but it was clear now that Rourke's own concise notepad demonstration had supplied all the brain scans Junk DNA really needed.

The main experiment I'd filmed involved a student volunteer reading poetry in silence, while the scanner subtitled the image other brain with each line as it was read. There were three independently-computed subtitles, based on primary visual data, recognized word-shapes, and the brain's final semantic representations… the last sometimes only briefly matching the others, before the words' precise meanings diffused out into a cloud of associations. However eerily compelling this was, though, it had nothing to do with Lament's area.

Toward the end of the day, one of the researchers—Margaret Williams, head of the software development team—had suggested that I climb into the womb of the scanner, myself. Maybe they wanted to turn the tables on me—to scrutinize and record me with their machinery, just as I'd been doing to them for the past four hours. Williams had certainly been as insistent as if she'd believed it was a matter of justice.

She said, "You could record the subject's-eye view. And we could get a look at all your hidden extras."

I'd declined. "I don't know what the magnetic fields would do to the hardware."

"Nothing, I promise. Most of it must be optical—and everything else will be shielded. You get on and off planes all the time, don't you? You walk through the normal security gates?"

"Yes, but—"

"Our fields are no stronger. We could even try reading your optic nerve activity, via the scanner—and then comparing the data with your own direct record."

"I don't have the download module with me. It's back at the hotel."

She pursed her lips, frustrated—obviously dying to tell me to shut up, do as I was told, and get inside the scanner. "That's a pity. And I suppose you'd have problems with the warranty if we improvised something—our own cable and interface…?"

"I'm afraid so. The software would log the use of non-standard equipment, and then I'd be in deep trouble at the next annual service."

But she still wasn't ready to give up. "You were talking about the Voluntary Autists, before. If you wanted something spectacular to illustrate that… we could image your own Lament's area—while you brought to mind a sequence of different people. We could record it all, and play it back for you. Then you could show your viewers a real-time working copy of the thing itself. Not some glossy animation: flesh and blood, caught in the act. Neurons pumping calcium ions, synapses firing. We could even transform the neural architecture into a functional diagram, calibrate it, identify trait symbols. We have all the software—"

I said, "It's very kind of you to offer. But… what kind of tenth-rate journalist would I be, if I started resorting to using myself as the subject of my own stories?"

7

Two weeks before the Einstein Centenary conference was due to begin, I signed a contract with SeeNet for Violet Mosala: Symmetry's Champion. As I scrawled my name on the electronic document with my notepad's stylus, I tried to convince myself that I'd been given the job because I'd do it well—not merely because I'd pulled rank and begged for a favor. There was no doubt that Sarah Knight was inexperienced—she was five years younger than me, and she'd spent most of her career in political journalism. Being a self-confessed 'fan' of Mosala might even have worked against her; no one at SeeNet would have wanted a gushing hagiography. But for all my alleged professionalism, I'd still only glanced at Sisyphus's briefing, I still had no real idea what I was taking on.