White Matter

Kurt - In Tokyo

Tokyo, April 16

I awoke from a troubling dream. Something beyond surreal and into abstract, a sense of foreboding and confinement.

Shigeru's couch was scaled to match the size of his apartment. Not one of those half-acre American couches, in other words. I unwound my body from the awkward arrangement it had adopted in sleep and tottered to my feet, stretching my muscles to release the accumulated crinks and creases of economy class seating and too-small lounge furniture.

The detail of the dream faded rapidly, leaving me wide awake. Enough of Tokyo's night-time light pollution was seeping through the windows to illuminate the apartment interior. It made me feel like an island of solidity in a world of shadow. The door to the spare-room laboratory was still ajar, so I poked my head through and fumbled about in the darkness for the light switch. That helped. I needed to see what I was doing, but I didn't want to wake the others.

After going back to the kitchen alcove for a glass of water, I returned to the lab for a look about. It wasn't a large room. On one wall was a shelf filled with hardback reference books, that was my guess. All the titles in Japanese and beyond my limited reading skills. Against the other wall was a work bench with an elaborate device on top. It looked home-built. I supposed it some sort of chemistry experiment, a reaction chamber with sensor wires and reagent tubes looping away to other pieces of apparatus. A very uneducated guess, though, put together from the scraps of knowledge I had picked up talking to James in his work shed.

The rest of the room contained square-sided equipment panels like those back in the Spurious Developments basement. Machines whose function I could not hope to comprehend, though not necessarily vice versa. Their physical bulk was oddly archaic, like the past's conception of future computers as depicted in an old science fiction movie, only rendered inert without the flashing lights or whirring appendages.

And yet, if I understood Graeme correctly, inside these boxes lay a copy of my soul. He didn't use that term when he made his explanations, but what else could you call it? My essence. A distillation of what it was to be me. An annotated list of the network of connections inside my head, encoding all that I know, all that I am.

Graeme had said many things, last night, but the details had faded. I recalled something about immortality, about how once you could measure a thing, you could model it. Recreate it inside a virtual world.

I had been too weary to argue or express indignation. The more I listened, the more my tiredness dragged. Sometime after my second beer I must have fallen asleep.

I turned off the light and went back to sit on the couch, waiting while my eyes adjusted to the reduced light and gave the shadows back their form. My mind was perfectly clear now, and very calm. Why was I not seething with anger? Six months earlier and I would have ranted and raved, would have seen Graeme's deception as an attack on my personal dignity, would have felt violated by the idea that my inner self had been taken out and left where potentially anyone could see it. Now, I merely noted my equanimity and tagged it as an anomaly, as a question posed in the abstract.

Had something of Graeme himself, his self-effacement and elusiveness, bled across and infected me?

For the first time since it happened, I felt something positive about that incident at the gallery, the one that had prompted my retreat from the world of art. Could it be a source of strength, rather than of debilitating shame? Having already shown the worst of myself in public, what more harm could any further exposure do me? I remembered what Graeme had said about Kohei at the airport, about his concern for my welfare. Was I that easily manipulated? Had my life been put back on track by the connivings of a friend? Had my pride weakened so much I could allow that to happen? And what of Graeme and his plans? If there was one thing he made no secret of, it was that he had his own set of priorities, my welfare not among them. I'd only been taken on as a short-term contractor, after all. Was I being set up for a fall?

He had been right about one thing though – I had left an old world behind me, and found a new one in its place. One I was starting to value. One I didn't want to lose.

Another memory came back to me: of a time I asked Kohei to explain what Zen was all about. He said it was the elimination of passion. This hadn't sounded quite right, especially coming from Kohei who is very much one of life's enthusiasts. Kohei suggested I might have misunderstood, but neither his English nor my Japanese were up to the task of resolving the nuances, so the topic had been dropped. "Achieving satori is hard work," he told me, saying he had other priorities in his life right now.

Recalling this, I wondered if perhaps I was a little closer now to appreciating what he had been getting at.

I got up and walked over to the window, pulling the blind fully open. There wasn't much to see outside, just the side of the neighbouring building and a few square metres of street and pavement. I contemplated going out for a walk. The cold air would feel good on my face. It might bring more good memories, of my time living here, many years ago.

I decided against it. There had been some sort of security code that Shigeru had used to enter. I would need to disturb my hosts to get back in, or stay out until morning and have them wake to find me missing. Neither seemed the actions of an honourable guest.

So instead I sat and I paced and I attempted to doze, thinking thoughts, the nature of which I fail to recall.

Many hours later, a pyjama-clad Shigeru emerged to stand illuminated in the horizontal sunlight that had weaved its way across the maze of Tokyo streets to reach us from the rising sun.

The inner peace, or whatever it was that found me in the darkness of night, had long since dissolved. In its place was a grumpiness that I put down to caffeine withdrawal.

*

"You want to drill a hole in my head?"

"Just a very small one," said Shigeru. "A minimally invasive craniotomy and needle biopsy."

"Needle?"

"We insert a thin probe to cut a piece of neural tissue from the surface of your brain. Remove it for our analysis."

"It's a very simple procedure," Graeme added. "You won't even need an anaesthetic. Just a dab of skin glue to close the wound and it will all heal up in a day or two."

"But ..."

"We have this problem, blocking our progress. Too many variables and not enough data. Our measurements have given us a map of your axon connections, but that's not quite enough. We hope to remove some of this uncertainty by fine tuning our model of your neuron behaviour against the real thing."

"But you're talking about cutting out a piece of my brain. What if I am using those neurons already?" I glared at them over my mug of hot coffee.

Graeme and Shigeru exchanged glances.

"A really, really small piece," said Shigeru. "You won't notice it gone."

"Just a few brain cells," said Graeme. "Think of it as no worse than a night out drinking. Except without the hangover."

I opened my mouth to reply. Closed it again.

"We wouldn't ask unless it was very important," said Shigeru. "We've done all this work ..."

I scanned their faces, wondering if perhaps they were winding me up. But all I could see was earnest sincerity. Trust us, we know what we're doing. The same old pattern. I suppose I should have been grateful they had the courtesy to ask me first.