Chapter Nineteen: Now You See It, Now You Don't

Blogger is down more than it is up, Chris thought. It was late and he wanted to post an entry, but it kept timing out. He couldn't go to bed without posting, could he?

Chris jerked suddenly and sat up in his bed, sweat pouring from every pore. His surroundings were unfamiliar, but there were no machines, no doctors, no nurses. It must have been a dream. He hoped it was a dream. He kicked his feet over the edge of bed and started to stand up. Looking at the window he could see several large buildings – most of them covered with blinking lights, neon. One of them had an unearthly green hue. This must be Reno, he thought.

Things had been going along very normally, generally speaking; however, he had lapses that drove him crazy. His life had been very normal until losing his arm. After the accident, every day was just a challenge to keep moving forward, to not obsess with the missing arm. It wasn't that big of a deal. A lot of people had worse problems. He thought back to a video he saw in high school about a girl that lost both arms at the shoulders, yet she could drive a car, write with a pencil and paint using her toes. She didn't seem to know that she was different from everyone else.

Why can't I think like that?

This seemed to be a moment of clarity. He was thinking clearly. It troubled him that things could be so normal one minute, but then turn upside-down. How did he end up in Reno? He recalled the conversation with the doctors and the discussion of Reno. Maybe the question wasn't about how he ended up in Reno – it was more about what events in his life led him to this point. When he was thinking straight he liked to sort things out, since he was never sure what might happen between one day and the next.

Before his thoughts could settle, there was a knock at the door. Chris stood up and suddenly became unsure whether he was in a hospital room or in a hotel room. Then another knock. He took a moment to orient himself and then walked to the door. He started to reach for the door knob and was startled to see that his prosthetic arm was gone. At some point in the past he would have been shocked or surprised, but now he was just annoyed. He had long ago stopped expecting anything since he never knew what to expect.

“Room service!” Sam called out in a jovial voice before the door was completely open. Chris immediately embraced her, excited to see someone he knew – someone familiar in a strange place.

“What are you doing here?! I mean, I'm glad you're here, but what are you doing here?” He had already forgotten that he called Sam and asked her to come to Reno.

“I hadn't seen you at work for a few weeks, so I tracked you down. I called some of my bounty hunter friends and they ratted you out,” she joked, not wanting to draw attention to the fact that he had already forgotten the phone he made just yesterday.

“Sam, I'm going crazy,” Chris suddenly confessed without warning, still holding Sam in his arms. Sam could see that he was visibly shaken – his entire body quivered slightly. “I can't remember half of what happens from one day to the next. My arm suddenly attaches itself to me. Then it's gone. Now I'm in Reno for who-knows-what reasons.”

Sam backed slightly away from Chris to see his face better. She looked him in the eyes and said, “Let's sit down. You're okay and you're not going crazy.” She didn't have any answers for Chris. “You're here because you were hit by lightning and had some symptoms they were worried about.” She didn't want to continue to draw attention to his arm.

“My arm makes me a freak. I'm a freak for not having an arm and then I'm freak for having some stinking plastic abomination melted to me. Most of all I'm a freak because I'm losing my mind. They just want me to here to do their sideshow experiments,” he said as thoughts raced through his mind. Sam took his natural hand and led him back to his bed. She pulled a chair over by the side of the bed where she could continue to hold his hand as he sat on the edge of the bed. Chris was starting to calm down and now had a catatonic stare on his face that suddenly disappeared when Sam squeezed his hand.

“Chris, listen. The doctors originally sent you here to have a few tests done. It's not a big deal.” The moment was awkward for Sam. She liked Chris. She liked him a lot. It made her feel good that he needed her so much now. She also liked holding his hand. She reminded herself that this was not the right time. Besides, it was starting to scare her a little to see Chris like this.

Chris pulled Sam toward him, once again embracing her. “I'm glad you're here, Sam.”

Chapter Eighteen: Project Prodigy

Harold stepped out of the shower, dried himself off, and climbed into bed with his wife, Nadine.

"Working late again?" the brunette said, her back turned toward him. She lay on the pillow with her face buried, wearing an eye mask. "How did she perform?"

"Who’s she?"

Nadine snuggled into her pillow. "The monkey, who else?"

By now, Harold had detected her suspicions about his affair with Margaret and was now ready for subject-changing sleep. He turned off the nightstand and rustled in the sheets.

Nadine sighed.

"He, Billy, did a wonderful job. We secured seven large investments. The project will be safe for another year, maybe two, if we can keep up the progress."

Harold waited for her response, but she had obviously drifted to sleep. Just like during my lectures, he thought bitterly. He closed his eyes and tried to relax himself to sleep.

But he couldn’t. In his mind, the neuroscientist could not rid himself the image of Serenity wanting to use the machine. Although he suspected that the chimp would gradually come to accept the process of calibration it surprised him she actually learned to embrace it.

Was the gift at the end that good for her?

Once, Serenity tried to remove her vocal cords because the machine had been down for two days. That was back when Mind-Tech was experimenting with localized motor programming and control. Harold remembered trying to catch the chimp’s swift, right hand before it could get a hold of that clipboard. He remembered diving onto the then-brown chimpanzee in a frantic effort to keep her from bleeding to death, yelling, "HELP! HELP! Hurry, or she’s going to die!"

That event shut the project down for months and nearly for good. Harold and his former partner, Pat Rigby, had to declare bankruptcy. Then Margaret stepped in with some private investors and with some fancy paperwork, Mind-Tech, LLC., became Mind-Tech, Incorporated. The project was saved from the brink of failure.

The project.

Prodigy.

The goal of Project: Prodigy was to attain a complete understanding of the brain and, through it, gain exhaustive control of the intricate workings of the human central nervous system. Using a device that Harold invented, the day would come when:

The clinically depressed would wear devices implanted into the skull that would ease, or help them out of their depression using neural processes rather than chemicals agents.

Persons with epilepsy would no longer experience petit and grand mal seizures, as the device would grow to know when and how to trigger an effective deterrent.

Paraplegics and quadriplegics would learn to use their arms and legs again. Amputees would "feel" with their prosthetics. The possibilities were endless:

The blind would see.

And the deaf would hear.

A day would come when persons of intellect will come to use the device to learn things in an instant. This is where the "Prodigy" part came in: imagine a team of researchers, calibrated to the machine and solving a complex scientific problem while in a dream-like state?

A person can learn how to ride a bike in a matter of minutes, play basketball, fly an airplane, or even play the piano like a virtuoso!

This was the reasoning behind Margaret’s bold use of the phrase "paradigm shift" earlier in the day. Her classic example: the availability of the microcomputer was a paradigm shift even at the most rudimentary levels:

Up until the early eighty’s, a secretary labored over simple tasks like centering a title on a page when typing a memo. Today, that same secretary can click on the center-button in their word processor and what use to take minutes to complete only took seconds! The same thing can happen with other life skills:

A user of the machine can learn a new language.

Or unlearn a bad habit.

They can even learn a new memory!

Unload a bad one.

It was that last bit that got Harold into hot water with the government. His partner at the time, Pat Rigby, had been wanting to sell out to the government after a "family tragedy" had wiped him out, financially. The FBI had a deep interest into the device Harold had created and, through a process of secret meetings with Pat, had wanted a test run on Serenity to see if memories could be "learned" and even more importantly:

Un-learned.

Harold was not interested in a sellout and scrambled to find a way to buy Pat out before anyone could take his machine and turn it into a Big Brother hacking tool. That’s when he met Margaret, or rather, Margaret found him and saved Mind-Tech.

Beside Harold, Nadine stirred in her sleep.

Harold snuggled up to her and she just lay there, cold and stiff as a board. He persisted anyway, stroking her back and caressing her womanly curves. Still no reaction.

He grit his teeth. "Nadine, why do you keep doing this to me?"

Nadine shot up, turned the lamp on, and threw back her eye mask. "Why don’t you ask her!?"

Harold swallowed hard. He wasn’t sure if she meant Serenity, of whom he had been spending a better part of his time with over the past eight years, or the other her in his life. Did Nadine really know about Margaret? He opted for the better scenario. "You’re sick, Nadine, she’s just a chimpan—"

"Ohhh, no!" said his wife icily, almost giggling in her ferver. "Chimpanzee?! Better not let Margaret know what you just called her!" Nadine sat there, her face cold and hard and just plain mean. But then a tear dropped. "Harold, I want a divorce!"

He crunched the right side of his lip to fight off the oncoming rage.

It didn’t work.

"GRANTED!"

Harold dressed himself and stormed out of the room. Behind him, Nadine dropped back onto her pillow and made sure her sobs were loud enough to be heard over the imminent television.

Harold sat in the flickering light of the television, the remnants of his embarrassment and anger trickling away like a bad dream. Guilt settled in to replace the anger, followed by a pang of genuine sadness. He thought about going back to the room to try and console his wife of fifteen years, but realized that it wouldn’t do either one of them any good, at least for now.

He thought about serenity and realized that he could use some.

1:00 a.m.

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