I smoothly navigated around the parked cars on Hampstead Road, pleased with the used bike I’d bought from Sam at the pub. A warm mist brushed my skin, soft as the caresses Chris had offered last night but which I’d declined, surprising us both. I pulled up at the red light and checked my watch. Plenty of time. Steadying myself against the curb, I inhaled the city smells—hot streets, gasoline, and fresh naan being sold by a street vendor.
The first few months we’d lived in London, I’d been overawed by the city’s heady mix of history and architecture and royalty. Gradually, I transformed myself from London tourist to London resident, learning to take out the rubbish instead of the trash, grousing about the prime minister, and accepting that the rain would, eventually, ruin all my leather shoes and boots. And it had.
I’d learned that exploring London meant getting lost, an unusual experience for someone with a great sense of direction. Yet getting lost was a rare treat I cherished. Chris would reach for her phone’s GPS app, but I’d stop her. “No, let’s figure this out on our own.”
The traffic light changed, and I surged ahead until the Wilkins Portico, the iconic image of University College London, rose up in front of me. I turned right, then left, weaving my way deeper into the compact but bustling campus. I slid into the last free slot of a bike rack and snapped the lock shut.
Traffic noise from Euston Road drifted between the buildings, but the campus itself was wondrously quiet. I inhaled the moist air, still marveling that approaching rain smelled the same here as it did in Minnesota. A few drops plopped on my face, and the clouds overhead seemed to thicken and swirl with sudden rage. In the distance, thunder rolled like a bass drum on parade. I ran for the door.
Dr. Rajamani’s office was in the Alexandra House, home to the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, and one of the older and shabbier campus buildings. Much of London was either new or very renovated. Old buildings such as this one created a sense of how layered the city was. For generations, buildings had been built, used, torn down, and replaced with others, which were used and then torn down for new ones.
I took the stone stairs two at a time until I reached the top floor, out of breath but not wanting to admit it. Clearly, I needed to spend more time biking and less time painting to stay in better shape. My body was an average size ten, maybe a twelve in winter when bread became my food of choice, but my muscles were going to mush here in London.
I knocked on Dr. Raj’s door, unable to see through the frosted glass. The door swung open. “You are here!” Dr. Raj clasped my shoulders and pressed one of his cheeks against mine, then the other.
“My lab is at the end of the hallway. Come, come.” He stepped out ahead of me, the sides of his white lab coat flapping like wings. Dr. Raj seemed to lean forward when he walked, as if he were pushing himself through water. From what Chris had told me of his career, that made sense. When everyone around you resisted, you pushed harder.
Dr. Raj hurried us down a gritty linoleum floor that buckled and bent in places from water damage. The bare fluorescents running down the dim hallway were either out or flickering like in a homemade scary movie. The walls needed a coat of paint fifty years ago. A small prick of alarm tickled the base of my skull.
The lab itself was no better, boasting a vintage look, sort of an Early Frankenstein. The walls were a puke green and could have used a good scrubbing. The floors, covered in what once must have been a snappy black and white tile, were gritty and dull.
I sat down on the cold folding chair Dr. Raj set up, then watched as he wheeled over a cart of really old equipment, stuff that hadn’t been dusted since the war, and I don’t mean Afghanistan or Iraq or even Vietnam. There were a few laptops, but the main instrument was a huge green metal box with twenty small gauges that looked like car speedometers. Dr. Raj opened a box of electrodes and began peeling off the plastic wrap. At least those things were new.
“So,” I said, “how many people have gone through this experiment?”
He tipped his head. “I think you are the tenth person, in this round at least.”
I licked my lips. Even though Chris and a handful of others had gone through this and were fine, the whole setup was making me nervous. “This round? You’ve done this before?”
“Last year I was perfecting my GCA.”
I jumped as a crack of thunder rattled the window. “And now it works perfectly, right?” I watched as he opened another electrode wrapper, knowing the needle would be coming out soon. Apparently, I hadn’t left my fear of needles behind in Red Lion Square. It had stalked me and now shivered up from the soles of my feet. For Chris, for us, I mentally chanted.
I looked out the rain-streaked window and listened to the quality of the thunder—some were faraway booms, others so close and deep you could feel them through your feet.
“Yes, yes, I learned much from the experiment, even though a few subjects dropped out,” Dr. Rajamani said.
I attempted a laugh, but ended up coughing. “So GCA makes people disappear?”
Dr. Raj smiled. “Faulty reasoning, my dear. No, even though the man never returned my phone calls, I am sure he is just fine. But do not fear. The GCA is flawless now. Everyone in this study has returned for the follow-up.” He frowned.
“Everyone?” I jumped as the professor attached a cold electrode to my forehead.
“One other woman did not return, but she was having relationship problems, so I believe she moved from London.”
The electrodes continued around my face, then Dr. Raj attached some to the base of my skull, moving my hair aside. His dark brown eyes gleamed as he worked. Here was a man obsessed. “I am most appreciative that you are volunteering. Others will follow. I am sure of it. This work is too exciting to be ignored.” He picked up another electrode. “I am close. I feel most certain of this fact. I will locate the consciousness.”
“Why are you interested in this anyway?”
“It is one of the last great mysteries of the body,” he crowed. “I want to solve that mystery.”
“Yeah, but that’s the beauty of the whole thing. It is a mystery. Shouldn’t it stay that way? Why do I need to know what part of my brain is me?”
Dr. Rajamani sat back suddenly. “Why would you not want to know?”
“Because I’m more than just my body. My personality, my thoughts, and my dreams are created by my conscious mind. It’s magic how our brains do that.” To be honest, before that moment I’d never given much thought to this topic, but I liked that one part of the human mind was still a mystery. I liked that my consciousness was all mine, and was housed in my body, and that it ran the show. “Besides, if you locate this part of who we are, won’t people start treating it like other organs, to be studied and fixed?”
“Oh, yes, all that and more. But I am interested in something much greater, something most radical.” He patted my knee confidentially and leaned forward. “Once I locate the conscious mind, then I can transplant it.”
“Transplant it?” My words came out as a squeak.
Dr. Raj placed the last electrode. “What if your body is dying? Why not transplant your brain and its consciousness into a storage vessel? You could live forever.”
“That’s a freaky idea.”
“No, no. Did you not watch the old Star Trek TV shows? I saw one when I was a child that created in me the desire to do this. The explorers find a race of people whose bodies have died, so they stored their consciousness in these oval eggs that flashed with color and light.” He shook his head, face aglow with the memory. Another crack of thunder surprised us both and he smiled. “I love storms.”
“I thought thunderstorms were rare in London.” I watched as Dr. Raj fiddled with his equipment.
“Not in the summer,” he replied.
A flash of lightning was followed almost immediately by crashing thunder directly overhead. I considered the old equipment, now plugged in. The only step left was to connect my electrodes. “Is it safe doing this in the middle of a thunderstorm?” Surely the answer had to be “no.”
Dr. Rajamani considered my question, then waved dismissively. “Yes, yes, of course. These buildings are old, but they have been grounded sufficiently to protect us. Not to worry!”
Dr. Raj then connected each electrode to the big green box with all the speedometers. “I built this equipment myself,” he said. “It may not be beautiful, but it will do the tricks and treats, since I am making do with a most pathetic budget.”
A tiny shiver of fear slid up my spine. I’d assumed the university had sanctioned the experiment, but what did I know? Maybe a professor could conduct crazy-ass experiments without getting approval. I closed my eyes briefly, trusting that Chris would not get me into anything dangerous.
“My experiments are less orthodox, shall we say, than most. But you are not to have fear. Now I ask you to describe the experiment so I know you know what is going on.” Another crack of thunder seemed to come up through the floor.
“You’re trying to locate the consciousness in the brain. You’ve hooked me up to a machine that will record the activity when I use various parts of my brain. And just to clarify, you are not, at this time, attempting to remove or in any way transport my consciousness.”
Dr. Rajamani laughed, a short seal bark. “That is most correct. Our brain is made up of lobes and cells and dendrites, but it also contains you, the person that exists within your body, the spark of your consciousness. I am not transporting that today because I do not know where it is. To isolate the location of our thoughts, of our consciousness, the core of who we are, I will activate…” He waited.
My mind spun as I tried to recall his words from the National Gallery lecture. “My glee cells?”
Dr. Raj smiled. “Your glial cells. I believe the secret to our consciousness lies with the millions of glial cells in our brains. Glials were once considered nothing more than bubble wrap for the brain, but now we suspect they do so much more. Your glial cells might, when electrically charged, reveal their secrets about our consciousness.”
“Electrically charged?” My mouth felt dry.
“That is what the electrodes do—deliver a minuscule electrical charge enabling us to better see what is going on inside there.” He knocked gently on my skull. “I am telling you, glials and electricity are the key to everything. Imagine the various parts of your brain as an orchestra tuning up. It is chaos until the conductor steps up and sets the beat. The conductor is your intralaminar nuclei, which set up an electrical oscillation. When the oscillation reaches forty hertz, consciousness happens! Is this not amazing?”
He lost me at intralaminar nuclei. I nodded. “Totally.”
Dr. Raj opened a small flat box, pulled out a syringe, and ripped open the plastic wrapper.
My throat tightened. Damn it. Chris had better appreciate the sacrifice here. I strained to see the size of the needle. Thank God it was small. “I see it’s time for your magic serum.” Dr. Rajamani patted my arm reassuringly. “It is most certainly nothing to be frightened of. It will simply heighten the responses of your consciousness so we can see the results more clearly. The GCA, or glial cell activator, is necessary for the experiment because it provides a slight electrical charge to cells that normally do not conduct electricity.”
I forced myself to return his smile. One GCA injection, twenty electrodes, and a thunderstorm. Nothing to worry about.
The injection was swift and painless. By the time I opened my eyes, Dr. Raj was tossing the needle into a biohazard waste bin.
“How are you feeling?”
I blinked. “Weird. Very weird.”
“That is normal,” he said. “The effects will wear off soon.”
The hair on my forearms stood straight up. “Dr. Raj, I feel really weird, as if I’m….” I couldn’t find the words. “As if I’m full of static electricity.”
He frowned. “Really?” He glanced at his big green box and shot to his feet, muttering something in what I presumed to be Hindi. He began checking the electrode connections.
The little speedometer needles had all sprung to life and were reaching nearly all the way to the right, as if a car were pushing one hundred miles per hour. “But the equipment’s not on,” I said. “How can that be?”
Dr. Raj unplugged the machine, disconnected it from the three laptops, then reconnected everything. The needles shot up again. “I do not know. The electrodes must be faulty. I will replace them.”
I shivered as he applied the new electrodes, hoping we’d exchange a spark of static to drain the electricity coursing through me, but no. And when I closed my eyes, it was as if a door had blown open somewhere. How did I know that? If you were sitting in a room with your eyes closed and someone opened a door, you’d feel the air currents change; a breeze would brush against your skin. Smells would enter; sound would change. I felt all of that sitting on the folding chair in Dr. Raj’s lab. A door had opened, and I wanted it closed.
The new electrodes behaved the same way—they measured an electrical current coming from my brain even though Dr. Raj wasn’t sending any current through them. It was as if I were generating the current myself.
After a few minutes, my vision cleared and my alarm faded. The freaky feeling receded, even though the needles remained in the red zone. “Dr. Raj, I’m feeling better. I’m okay.”
Dr. Raj leaned close. “Are you sure?”
“Everything seems more…intense, but I’m okay.”
“Good,” he said. “We will proceed. You might have had a slight reaction to the GCA.” He turned on the machines, clicked a few keys on the computers, then began asking me questions from a thick stack of papers. I sighed. I was going to be here a while.
After some questions, Dr. Raj scribbled in his notebook, then asked more questions—about the weather, some math problems, about movies, books, names of British prime ministers, of which I knew only one—for another thirty minutes. Thunder still boomed outside; after a particularly bone-rattling clap, Dr. Raj’s gaze swung toward the indicators. His eyes widened. “Good gods, your glials are lighting up like fireworks.”
I licked my dry lips. “Is that why the electrodes are kind of tingling now?”
Dr. Raj looked at me in alarm, which wasn’t very reassuring. “Tingling?” he said. He tapped the keyboard, muttering to himself. “You should not be feeling the electrodes. You say they are tingling?”
I cleared my throat. “Maybe we should stop now, since there’s such a huge storm. Maybe the lightning—”
“I have never seen glials react this way. I wonder if I am misdosing the GCA.”
Okay, that was the last straw. Between the thunderstorm and Dr. Raj’s confusion over the GCA dose and the electrodes burning my skin, it was time to leave. I knew it, my consciousness knew it, and since we were one and the same, the decision was unanimous. “I’m no longer feeling comfortable doing this. Please unhook me.”
Still entranced by the data on his screen, the professor nodded but didn’t look up.
“Unhook me now.”
I finally got his attention. As he reached for the dial to shut everything off, the loudest thunderclap yet sent an earthquake of a tremor through my Birkenstocks. Sparks flew from the old equipment with a sickening snap. My entire body buzzed, and I clutched at an electrode, trying to rip it off, but suddenly everything moved in slow motion. All sound faded. The world disintegrated into a black sea of nothingness as I was yanked upward, drowning in an upside-down ocean. I fought the current, but it was too strong. The sky sucked me in.