Brainbox

The latest big threat to humankind’s existence, the johnny-come-lately of epidemics, had first entered the country’s social life in an innocent form. It all began with a popular marital aid sold in most big box stores, the DuoDex. Many considered it a novelty toy when it debuted. Early reviews were chirpily optimistic. Here was a new toy aimed at adults. Better yet, it was a bedroom toy you could actually talk about in polite company.


At the product’s first media flush of success, once it was clear the product would be huge, it became, of course, a target. Some reviewers turned cynical, just because being cynical is lucrative and eye-catching work. And then the expected negative reviews and invidious comparisons were made by would-be competitors. The device was sometimes lumped in with the Ouija board or fortunetelling apps by detractors looking to debunk for likes.


But husbands and wives, husbands and husbands, and wives and wives, or a significant number of them anyway, became closer through using the DuoDex. Sex lives improved. (The device was often nicknamed the DuoSex.) The divorce rate actually moved in the opposite direction, towards matrimonial cohesion, for the first time in several generations.


The unhappy couples who had tried this therapy and still got divorced would sometimes disparage the device. Of course, the manufacturers inserted a CYA block of legalese in the enclosed instructions indicating that the DuoDex was intended to be used “for recreational purposes only” and that under no circumstances could the manufacturer be held accountable for the fate of any relationship. In other words, your results may vary. Soon it was the number one Christmas gift for adults. For several years running.


The DuoDex consisted of two linked neural network “head sleeves” meant to be worn only when two individuals intended to sleep next to one another. Each sleeve was a bunch of plastic cords hanging, octopoid-style, from a plastic disc which sat on the top of the head. The electrodes at the end of each cord attached to various points on the human skull effortlessly, without adhesive material. Only a handful of people outside of the manufacturing company (and few within it) knew how this aspect of the device worked. Like much else relating to the DuoDex, this strange adhesiveness was a proprietary secret.


However, the DuoDex had been approved by the Department of Homeland Security for use by mentally well-adjusted adults. The FDA had once been the arbiter of what was safe for the human brain. But with the advent of new technologies capable of affecting neurochemistry and human thought, and potentially affecting national security, there had been a restructuring of such oversight within the government.


The device did not function when worn by waking brains. Attempting to neuro-link during waking hours could result in tremendous migraine-like headaches lasting for days. The device had not been approved for use by children. Of course, kids would get into their parents’ privacy drawers and dabble. That misuse alone had sparked a firestorm of talk show arguments between the proponents of civil liberties and the proponents of governmental parenting.


The device worked by setting up a neural circuit between two brains. The device was most active during R.E.M. dream states. The most the manufacturer, Elkcogito, would say about how the device worked its magic was that the DuoDex could siphon fear from one human brain and then circulate this fear through the linked brain, which largely dissipated it. Joy, the company explained, could also be redistributed, shared. If one partner or spouse was unhappy, the happier partner could share his or her happiness effortlessly. Some psychologists decried this process as a “cheat,” but then some psychologists were losing a lot of money. Empty chairs sat in offices where marriage counseling and relationship counseling had been a booming business, a fatted cash cow.


The speculation was that Duodex worked by controlling the neurochemistry of the brain by triggering neurotransmitters. Clearly EEG, brainwave-reading functionality was also present in the device. But this is stating the obvious. It was the particulars of the design that resisted analysis, that was the uncrackable code. There were endless websites and videos purporting to show how the device actually worked. But the nanotechnology of the DuoDex was of a new order. Few individuals or even firms had the technology needed to really break down the design. Patent wars loomed on the horizon for the manufacturer. Several Japanese companies had alleged blatant theft. That much had already leaked into the news cycles.


People shared their DuoDex experiences with friends, family, clergy, talk shows, everywhere people normally talked about relationships. But there was a mystification factor in this talk. People couldn’t articulate how they felt changed by using the device. They could only say that things were better, that they got along better with their spouses or partners. It used to take a second honeymoon to Acapulco or Paris to achieve the magic the Duodex could work, inexpensively, in usually under a month. And it could be repeated endlessly, without additional expense, unlike a third or fourth honeymoon. Couples would talk about feeling happier, more hopeful, less full of fear. Younger, recharged, erotically nimble again. So much energy, positive and negative, lurked in dreams. That much was clear. And it could be harnessed and redistributed. Hurrah for the tech gods.


And then the nightmares started.


Hackers began toying with the device, reverse-engineering it and changing its capabilities. Junkies were soon carrying these retooled Dexes around from motel to motel. They were getting high off captive brains. Seriously damaged people were being found tied down to motel beds all across the world. These victims were sometimes unfixable. These individuals were referred to as iced or icees. Their brains were now dangerous places. They were invariably violent to themselves or others. Complete sedation followed by institutionalization was the only option. Sometimes they recovered. Sometimes. The divorce rate had gone down, true, but now the homicide rate went through the roof. The DuoDex was recalled. The lawsuits began.


But it’s not so easy to recall a technology that has become a pandemic. In fact, it’s nearly impossible. It’s like closing Pandora’s box after the dragons have flown.


Sykes was a detective in the era of the Dexes. He rolled with the punches but he found himself single after enough of those punches. Even his kids rarely wanted to powwow with dad. Maybe it was the long silences. Sykes had started living deep in his head. He was nearly always turning the gruesome facts of some Dex case over and over in his head like so many worry stones.


You can only be called out to so many crime scenes in the middle of the night before even a DuoDex won’t fix your marriage. And, apparently, Sykes’ brain was now too dark from his work. The first time they tried it, his wife refused to neuro-link with him ever again after a month. She said his brain gave hers the heebie-jeebies. Big fat surprise, he thought. She was happily remarried to a bearded guy who taught high school French and looked like a model who was aging very well.


Sykes was used by now to being called out at 3 a.m. to stand on a windy highway bridge where one of the iced had plummeted into the dark bay below. Sometimes he would look down into that black water and think of the sleepless sharks under that choppy surface as his brothers. Weren’t they “on-call” all the time too? Sykes figured it was his spirit-animal.


It took years of the job to make Sykes into Sykes. But the undoing of Sykes didn’t take long. It took less than a week.


Sykes had been allowed to sleep all night for once. The call came in as he was driving to the office. He was told to divert to the Sunrise Motel down along the bay. He pulled into the lot when the sky was all pink and coral and yellow behind the cheap motel. What a great day to wake up dead in a motel, te detective thought. It was a dive. Tourists were warned to stay away. The reviews of the motel online frequently alluded to bloodstains, strange smells, and more than one mentioned finding a body. Sykes had read these before. One pithy review said it best: “Dex Trap, Death Trap!!!”


It was a girl. Lying in the motel room. It just had to be a young girl, didn’t it? He had a daughter about that age. She had, like slightly more than half of the iced do, killed herself. Someone had tied her to the motel bed, drained all the positive feelings from her brain, and left her there, a screaming wilderness of psychic pain. A fried egg. She had broken out of the restraints, smashed the large mirror over the bedraggled bureau, and gone to town on herself with the shards.


The girl had been pronounced dead on the scene. But just as Sykes was commenting on how the bureau appeared to have been attacked by a posse of beavers, the body on the bed began moving its limbs in the most unearthly fashion.


“Coroner’s flubbed it again!” Sykes shouted as he and several officers who had been milling about the room threw themselves on the body, which had begun to thrash.


She was awake now and fully iced. Her pitiful screams began. Like one of the worst scenes in The Exorcist.


“Brainbox!” Sykes bellowed towards the open door of the motel room.


A few officers came running in, one of them holding what looked like a crash test dummy’s head with wires dangling from it. Sykes and several other young men and one middle-aged woman held the girl down and talked to her as Officer Lopez deftly connected the wires from the brainbox to the girl’s skull. Sykes himself threw the switch on the brainbox and the flat pseudo-eyes on the device glowed red. The brainbox was draining the woman’s fear. Within minutes, she began to thrash much less and the E.M.T.s on the scene began tending her wounds. She had, miraculously, missed the major arteries. The blood around the motel room was mostly body and hand transfer.


The young woman left by ambulance. In time, everyone left. Off to other nightmare calls before most citizens had finished their breakfast. Sykes was the last one left on the scene. He was guarding the scene until the techs arrived. The girl would survive. Today was a “win.” Quotes necessary. Where was the bastard who did this to her?


After speaking the evidentiary notes he needed for his report into his phone, and while he was waiting for the evidence techs to arrive, Sykes noted that the disconnected brainbox had been left on the carpet next to the bed. He used one gloved hand to pick it up by the handle and carried it to his car, where he deposited it in a sterile bag. All it takes is a moment’s inattention, and that thing could be boosted and end up on the black market. There’s no telling what sort of misuse the evil bastards could find for that.


There was no doubt the brainboxes could be reverse-engineered to kill. But mostly they were used to achieve unprecedented highs. Sometimes this produced happiness zombies who would walk obliviously into busy traffic. Sometimes the hapzombs would step off the upper floors of parking garages, sure they could walk on air. Or at least that’s what people speculated they were thinking, who knows. They’d often be found, the corpses, with big smiles on their faces. They were called leerers too. For this reason.


Sykes would never have guessed that this day was the day of his undoing. Because, so far, it had been business as usual. As bloody as it was.


Sykes was returning to the precinct when he got the inkling that he had left his stove top on after making eggs just before leaving for work. Why didn’t he have a remote system control for this appliance? He chastised himself. He had failed to log the stove on when he had set up his apartment network. So he decided he would make a quick stop back at his apartment.


He decided to err on the side of caution and carried the brainbox up the small flight of stairs to his front door. There really wasn’t a mess in the bag. There was only a smudge of blood on the head. If the brainbox was stolen out of his vehicle, the repercussions would be enormous, there would be hell and then some to pay.


The oven had been off, after all.


Sykes was preparing to leave his apartment, he was almost out the door, when he got the call that flattened him. His wife’s voice, softer than he had heard it in years. The tears in her voice. Their son had been found dead two hours earlier. It was an icing incident. Sykes talked less than five minutes with her. She worried when he wanted to hang up. She knew he was alone. He told her it would be alright.


He called the office and told them he would not be in. He shot his notes from the Sunrise Motel over to his colleague. He looked up the number of the coroner who would have jurisdiction. He imagined his voice coming out of a speaker in the same building where his son’s body must be lying on a cold gurney. He called, talked to several of the administrative staff who put him on hold several times, and then eventually he spoke with the coroner, who was kind but reminded Sykes of her professional obligations.


She didn’t want to give him the details of his son’s death. He pushed. She pushed, gently, back. She begged him to surround himself with family or friends. She really had to go. He thanked her and hung up.


Sykes called the police department with jurisdiction next. The detective he ended up speaking with hadn’t even seen the paperwork yet. He didn’t want to be a hard ass, since he felt he was talking with a brother of sorts, but again there was nothing to share. Not yet. And again, professionalism dictated discretion. He knew Sykes knew that. But he reminded him. He, too, urged Sykes to seek out someone he could talk with.


Sykes did what he would never ordinarily do. He drank the rest of the day and popped a handful of pills. OTC, yeah, but still crazy stupid, he knew. He lay in bed and looked at photos of Rowan on his phone. All ages of Rowan.


It was so much worse because they hadn’t spoken in over a year. He replayed that conversation and reminded himself that his kid didn’t hate him. He never hated his dad. He just couldn’t have any good conversations with his father. And now Sykes went into the dark sting of realizing that it was his fault. He was the one who could have changed that. But he had always figured there would be time. Why wouldn’t there be? And then he remembered what he did for a living, what he saw every day, and he felt stupid. He was the stupidest P.O.S. on the planet.


Q: How drunk does a detective have to be to illegally neuro-link with one of the department’s brainboxes?


A: Very fucking drunk, indeed.


He set the crash test dummy head on the pillow next to him, where nobody ever slept. Maybe a head with an interesting face would rest there for a few hours and show him its ecstasy, eyes rolling back into the head, now and again, for which he was always hugely grateful.


But nobody slept there all night. Ever.


Not since the divorce.


Sykes put the head sleeve on, he flipped the switch on the brainbox, and the red featureless eyes lit up. The whiskey and pills synergistically did their work, and Sykes was gone in minutes.


He was dreaming. He was with his son at the beach, lifting him over higher and higher waves. His boy was eight. His wife sat on a towel on the sand, her lovely legs shining. It was all good. It was alright. It was all good.


And then he heard a woman’s voice calling him. Terrified voice. Behind him. Even as Sykes held his son up above the roaring waves of the surf, he felt the boy turn into white static, dissolve. He was holding nothing. Empty air. He turned back to the beach and all the bodies were dissolving, like a filmstrip image melting on a superheated projector.


He sat on dream sand and listened as the woman told him how she was trapped. Inside the brainbox. She whimpered her story. Sykes sat on the sand in a dark night now. Each fist held a fistful of sand. Tightly. The voice told him she had made mistakes. She had run away from home, she had fallen in with icers. She had been used as a dupe to lure young men into motels where their thoughts had been drained into bootleg brainboxes. Now she found herself in the worst sort of hell. She existed. But only in the brainbox.


“This is just a nightmare,” Sykes intoned. He was clearly having a bad trip. Even in his dream, he was partially awake. Sykes was a lucid dreamer.


But she gave him her name. She begged him to look it up. She begged him to release him, to destroy the brainbox. If there was no way to come back. Sykes woke up yanking the wires from his skull.


He had no idea how long he had been out. But night was in the window.


He went online and researched the name she had given him, Samantha Radic. There were several newspapers in New Jersey which had covered the Dex bust. It was reported that Radic had been discovered dead in a Motel 6 in Atlantic City. Several icers had been taken into custody.


Her name also came up in an article in a fringe, underground newspaper that alleged that Samantha Radic was one of a number of “allegedly dead” individuals who had been reported as having contacted living people while they were hooked up to resuscitation brainboxes. Sometimes the brainboxes were circulated around between police departments, after receiving the regular servicing, for example.


There was an editorial in this largely anti-government online rag stating that there was evidence “out there” indicating that living human brains were actually encased in the brainboxes. Or else, they were AI simulations of actual human brains. The editorialist hedged his bet.


This bothered Sykes tremendously.


Everyone knew that the brainboxes were impervious to x-rays and impossible to open. If you tampered too much with them, they were designed to undergo a sort of meltdown which destroyed the contents. Intense heat was generated within. Sykes had seen underground types with terrible burns on their hands from monkeying around with a brainbox that had hotboxed on them. Word on the street was that hackers had recruited specialists who could crack the code and open the things.


Sykes called his ex after scanning several messages that had come in while he slept, and they wept into the abyss of the past in a longer conversation this time. Funeral details were already set. Sykes told her he would fly out the day before. He begged her to have his daughter call him as soon as possible. She promised. They hung up.


Sykes was showering and crying into the noise of the shower. He cried so long his throat began to hurt.


While he was toweling off, he smelled something burning.


He jogged down the padded carpet to his bedroom and saw his bed was scorched. A smoldering glow in the darkness came from his quilt. The brainbox, which he had placed back in its plastic bag, had superheated and burned through it plastic, producing the acrid smell which had brought him running. He was able to extinguish the burgeoning quilt fire with just his wet towel. He carried the entire quilt, rolled-up, into the bathroom, and threw it into the shower which he turned on full. He didn’t need his fire extinguisher, after all.


He had rolled the brainbox onto the sheets below the quilt where it was busy starting a new scorch. He knew he had to roll the still superheated brainbox onto something that wasn’t flammable. He grabbed a pan from his kitchen and used the wet towel to push it onto that, down on the floor next to the bed.


Sykes knew this wasn’t a coincidence.


Someone knew he had made certain queries. They had to know.


They had remotely triggered the brainbox to self-destruct.


He wondered darkly about the fate of Samantha Radic.


Her true fate. Not the one the newspapers had assigned her.


He intended to find out.