The Rising(96)

“Including my headaches?”

“You mean the ones you’ve been getting since Friday night?” asked Sam.

“And before.” Alex nodded. “Only, they’ve gotten a lot worse since Friday night. But it’s not just the pain. It’s also, I don’t know, kind of a pressure, like somebody squeezing my skull. Seems to originate just behind my eyes, but I’m not sure.”

“I thought you were lying about them, to get out of tutoring sessions, so I’d give up and leave. Like you always being late.”

“I never told Dr. Payne about the headaches,” Alex said, addressing them all, “not a single word.”

“You didn’t have to,” Donati said, still scrolling through the images. “Your CT scan spoke for itself, only your doctor didn’t understand the language well enough. That’s why he called in a neurological expert, someone who could tell him what it was he’d found. A foreign body that looks implanted in the skull? A foreign body that by all indications has ruptured and is leaking something dangerously close to the brain? I can only imagine what he made of that.”

“But how can you tell it’s leaking?” Sam asked him.

“I can’t, based on these still shots. I’m proceeding from the anecdotal evidence you’ve provided that further suggests that the concussion Alex suffered altered the chip’s positioning which accounts for the worsening of his symptoms. As for the leakage, well,” Donati continued, moving a finger from one of the tendril-like things to another, “I believe we have these to blame. Each time a new one sprouts, it weakens the chip’s molecular integrity and creates space for neurons to escape and interface with his brain.”

“So whatever it is I’m carrying in my head,” Alex picked up, “all these secrets about how to win the war that’s coming…”

“Are stored molecularly inside this chip, essentially within strands of your own DNA,” Donati completed. “Its organic nature indicates it could only be implanted in utero to avoid almost certain rejection, explaining why you were smuggled here as an infant.”

The tour boat was steering toward Alcatraz now, the island a blotch on the dark, fog-drenched horizon through the big viewing window. They had entered “the Gap,” passing between hills on either side that forced the air lifting off the ocean into a kind of wind tunnel. Normally, such thick fog was more of a summer phenomenon, but the unseasonable warmth had left it lingering well into the autumn months.

“There’s something else,” Alex told them all, “something that happened in the second CT scan.”

“Obviously called for since Payne didn’t believe the results he got from the first,” Donati replied. “Probably suspected a machine malfunction or something like that.”

“What happened during the second scan, Dancer?” Raiff asked him.

“The machine went crazy, I mean flat-out nuts. Sparks were flying in all directions, things popping and crackling. How does that jibe with your theory, Dr. Donati?”

“Well, not being a medical doctor, I couldn’t say for sure. I’d start from the fact that no such occurrence marked your first scan and that tells me something may have changed before the second one.”

“The leakage?” Alex barely managed to ask, as if afraid of the answer.

“More likely related to the effect exposure to such a powerful magnetic field had on the chip itself. It could be that the chip, being an organic entity, was simply defending itself against what it perceived to be a threat. That’s something of a stretch, but then so is everything else we’re facing here,” Donati finished, turning his gaze on Raiff as if to make his point. “And this leakage the first CT scan detected does not bode well for any number of reasons.”

“Like?” Sam asked, when Alex couldn’t bring himself to speak.

“I’m an astrobiologist and a physicist, not, as I just said, an MD—or a witch doctor. But the first thing I’d say is that the chip you’re carrying in your head may be killing you. And the second thing I’d say is that the degradation of the chip, as represented by the leakage, could mean it can no longer fulfill the purpose for which it was implanted inside you.”

Alex looked toward Raiff. “You didn’t know anything about this chip?”

“Not until tonight, no.”

“And what’s your thinking now that you do?”

“That the intent was always to drain the information off it.”

“How, exactly?”

“Either through some kind of interface or…”

“Or what?” Alex prodded.

“Surgical excision,” Sam said, when Raiff hesitated.

“You mean open my head to get it out?” Alex exclaimed, his voice growing angry. “No way that’s happening, no way!”

“It may be your only chance to live if the leakage worsens, even in the slightest,” Donati interjected. “You’re carrying a foreign body around in your head that, organic or not, is spewing something that might ultimately be toxic. Radioactive, perhaps, or worse.”

“It’s a good thing you’re not an MD, Doctor,” Alex told him. “Because you’ve got a lousy bedside manner.”

“How about ‘radiation or something just as bad’?”