THIRTY-THREE: LENNY

 

“Come on, man, answer, answer.” I paced across the long, desolate boardwalk of the epithelium, looking past the waves of dead lymph cells washing up like Styrofoam cups and debris along the vessel’s retaining wall, waiting while the phone rang and rang.

“Yo, man,” Astro said, “I don’t mean to rush you...”—lowering his voice, he glanced nervously back at Lug and the group of former steroids, now caffeine molecules, that had started milling restlessly behind us—“but I don’t think these dudes are gonna wait around forever.”

“I have to get in touch with Harlan.” I clicked off and tried again, hoping I could at least leave a message. Lug’s plan was risky, and I needed to make sure Zooey was in a safe place when it happened.

Basically we’ll have to short out her temporal lobes, Lug said. Just a little extra electrical current for a second or two, just long enough for you to get out. As long as she’s sitting down somewhere, she won’t get hurt. She won’t even know it happened.

But how was I supposed to know if she was sitting down or not?

“You want to go or not?” Astro asked.

“Of course I do.”

“Then let’s go. You can call once we’re inside.”

“Just let me try once more.” Looking around, I saw Lug and the others moving back up toward the capillary bed, heading into the bloodstream. “Wait, where are you going?”

Lug glanced back. “Sorry, man, gotta roll. Caffeine’s got a half-life of four hours. I want to help you, I seriously do, but we don’t have time to wait around forever. You heard the plan. It’s now or never.”

I checked the clock in my dive mask. Lug wasn’t the only one on a deadline. In less than ninety minutes, I was going to start returning to my normal size—if Zooey’s body hadn’t already tagged me as dangerous enough to hunt down and destroy at all costs.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s rock.”

We dove headlong into the brachiocephalic artery and shot upward on a jet of hydrostatic pressure so fast and hard that I felt my eyeballs pop, Lug yelling to me all the way, hollering to make himself heard over the pulsatile roar of Zooey’s circulation. “Now listen—when we hit the barrier, let us handle crowd control. We’re caffeine molecules now, which means to a nerve cell we look just like adenosine. We’ll take out the receptors. You just get yourself into the CSF, and don’t look back.”

“Where’s the—”

“Heads up!”

Then I saw it.

We were rocketing straight at the blood-brain barrier, which from here looked like a massive, impenetrable wall closing down on us from above. It was the color of dark volcanic glass, marbled with thousands of tiny blood vessels and millions of motor neurons flickering up and down like chain lightning through its depths. As its shadow fell over my face, I felt my last survival instincts kick into overdrive. Fear clamped down on my throat, and for a second I was sure this was how I was going to die, smashed to pieces against the underside of Zooey’s brain.

On reflex, I screamed and groped for the vessel wall in a last-ditch attempt to slow myself down and get turned around, but it was too late. Lug grabbed me and wrapped himself around my body until he’d completely enveloped me in his molecular structure. “Hang on!”

I couldn’t let go if I’d wanted to. Alarms were going off now, all along the perimeter, adrenaline spewing from the inside the barrier. Somewhere off in my peripheral vision I was aware of Lug and the other caffeine molecules plowing through ranks of nerve endings, latching on to adenosine receptors and shutting them down. Things had been set into motion now and there was nothing I could do to stop them.

Someone—maybe Astro—was shouting at me to keep going.

I closed my eyes and braced for impact.

And then I was in.

 

I opened my eyes and looked around.

The sudden burst of turbulence had given way to a smooth expanse of sleek white silence, like the climate-controlled lobby of a very expensive hotel. Listening harder, I heard faint electronic wake-up chimes and whirring noises reverberating across the expanse, all of it surrounded by the steady, reassuring gurgle of cerebrospinal fluid.

My breath caught in my throat.

I did it. I actually made it up here.

Up along the walls, hundreds of plasma screens ran in perfect precision, curving with the natural contours of the neural pathways. On all of them, I saw images—high-definition reflections of neural input of Zooey’s thoughts, memory, dreams, fears—rippling through densely packed miles of circuitry in a continuous flow of input and fiberoptic processing. I saw a math classroom, a football game, a birthday party, flowers, an iPod, a pretty, dark-haired woman that I realized was Zooey’s mother, leaning forward to kiss her good night. The images seemed to go on forever, components and monitors all working flawlessly together. From here, Zooey’s brain looked like an Apple store the size of Manhattan.

“Dude,” Astro’s voice said behind me, “this place is the bob-omb.”

I jumped in surprise and looked around at him. “I didn’t know you were still here.”

“What, are you kidding?” Astro reached up with one of his tendrils, groping for the controls underneath a bank of wide-screen monitors. “You think I’d miss this for the world?”

“Don’t touch it.” I pushed him back. “Don’t touch anything.”

“Chill, bro—I’m cool.”

“What happened to the others?”

“What, you mean Lug and the guys?” Astro shook his head. “Lost ’em at the border.” He shrugged. “They knew the risks.”

I nodded, but something was already starting to feel wrong. “Isn’t there supposed to be more security around here?”

“Lug said the hypothalamus was the easiest way through—”

“I know,” I said, “but there’s nobody around.”

“Yeah,” Astro admitted, “that is weird.” He was staring at a monitor showing Zooey’s face looking back at her in the bathroom mirror, tweezing an eyebrow. “Hey, you think she gets Cinemax on these things?”

I looked up into the open cathedral of the midbrain, along the white sluiceways that stretched off into the distance, listening to the murmur of CSF flowing around us, a clear and colorless stream of currents that cradled the brain and would carry us wherever we wanted to go. I wished that Lug was still here with his map. “This must lead up to the third ventricle.” My voice echoed through the passageways. “If we follow it through the aqueduct...”

Then I stopped.

On the big screen in front of me, underneath a suite of processing equipment, I was staring at a three-story-high image of Harlan’s face.

He looked terrified.