Love on the Brain(41)
“Twenty years, give or take.”
“Ooh. Which animal was it for you?”
He knows exactly what I mean. “A goat. In a cheese commercial. She looked so . . . cogent.”
I nod somberly. “It must have been very emotional.”
“Sure was for my parents. We fought over whether white meat is really meat for the better part of a decade.” He hands me a plate, gesturing for me to fill it. “What about you?”
“A chicken. Really cute. He’d sometimes sit next to me and lean against my side. Until . . . yeah.”
He sighs. “Yeah.”
Five minutes later, sitting in a breakfast nook I’d literally give my pinkie to own, plates full of delicious food and imported beer in front of us, something occurs to me: I’ve been here for one hour and I haven’t felt uneasy—not once. I was fully ready to spend the night pretending to be in my happy place (with Dr. Curie under a blooming cherry tree in Nara, Japan), but Levi has made things weirdly . . . easy for me.
“Hey,” I say before he can take a bite of his tacos, “thank you for today. It can’t be easy, to be so welcoming to someone you don’t particularly get along with or like, or to have them stay in your house.”
He closes his eyes, like every other time I mention the obvious fact that there’s no love lost between us (he is surprisingly truth-averse). But when he opens them, he holds my gaze. “You’re right. It’s not easy. But not for any reason you think.”
I frown, meaning to ask him what exactly he means by that, but he beats me to it.
“Eat up, Bee,” he orders gently.
I’m starving, so I do just that.
10
DORSOLATERAL PREFRONTAL CORTEX: UNTRUTHS
“I’M GOING TO switch off your speech center, now.”
Guy looks up from under his eyelashes with a defeated sigh. “Man, I hate it when people do that.”
I laugh. Guy’s the third astronaut I’ve tested this morning. He works on BLINK, so we weren’t originally planning to map his brain, but someone pulled out of the pilot group last minute. Brain stimulation is tricky business: it’s complicated to predict how neurons will respond, and even harder in people who have a history of epilepsy or electric misfiring. Just drinking a cup of strong coffee can mess up brain chemistry enough to make a well-consolidated stimulation protocol dangerous. When we found out that one of the astronauts we selected had a history of seizures, we decided to give his spot to Guy. Guy was ecstatic.
“I’m going to target your Broca’s area,” I tell him.
“Ah, yes. The famed Broca’s area.” He nods knowingly.
I smile. “That would be your left posterior-inferior frontal gyrus. I’ll stimulate it with trains up to twenty-five hertz.”
“Without even buying me dinner first?” He clucks his tongue.
“To see whether it’s working, I’ll need you to talk. You can recite a poem, free-style it, doesn’t matter.” The other astronauts I tested today chose a Shakespeare sonnet and the Pledge of Allegiance.
“Whatever I want?”
I position the stimulation coil one inch from his ear. “Yep.”
“Very well, then.” He clears his throat. “My loneliness is killing me and I, I must confess I still believe—”
I laugh, like everyone else in the room. Including Levi, who appears to be fairly close to Guy. It speaks highly of him (Guy, not Levi; I refuse to speak highly of Levi), considering he probably should have been BLINK’s leader. Guy doesn’t seem to mind, at least judging by the chummy chat they had over some sportsball game’s lineup while I was setting up my equipment.
“. . . my loneliness is killing me and I, I must c—” Guy frowns. “Sorry, I must c—” He frowns harder. “Must c—” he sputters one last time, blinking fast. I turn to Rocío, who’s taking notes. “Speech arrest at MNI coordinates minus thirty-eight, sixteen, fifty.”
The ensuing applause is unnecessary, but a tiny bit welcome. Earlier this morning, when the entire engineering team dragged their feet to the neurostimulation lab to observe my first brain mapping session, it was obvious that they’d rather be pretty much anywhere else. It was equally obvious that Levi had instructed them not to say so much as a peep about their total lack of interest.
They’re good guys. They tried to fake it. Sadly, there’s a reason that in high school, engineers tend to gravitate toward the robotics shop instead of drama club.
Thankfully, neuroscience has a way of defending her own honor. I just had to pick up my coil and show a few tricks. With stimulation at the right spot and frequency, decorated astronauts with IQs well into the triple digits and drawers full of graduate diplomas can temporarily forget how to count (“Woah! Is that for real?”), or move their fingers (“Freaky!”), or recognize the faces of people they work with every day (“Bee, how are you even doing that?”), and, of course, how to speak (“This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire damn life.”). Brain stimulation kicks ass, and anyone who says otherwise shall know her wrath. Which is why the lab is still crammed. The engineers were supposed to leave after the first demonstration but decided to stick around . . . indefinitely, it seems.