Daniel Suarez - Influx

It surged down to him and inserted its tip into the socket in his naval, locking in place. He screamed as he felt it invade his body, clearing him out and pumping fluids into him as he struggled hopelessly against his restraints.

“Evacuation, hydration, and feeding are required processes without which you will die. Under no circumstances will you be permitted to die.”

In seconds the process was finished, and the hose released with a sucking sound as it retracted toward the domed ceiling. All the other tentacles launched him onto the floor, where he landed hard. The pain of his injured arm and face made him pass out for an unknown time. He came to on his stomach, his arm in agony. The floor around him was sprayed with wet blood.

The AI spoke almost immediately. “I want you to imagine something for me.”

Grady responded by emitting a low groan. It formed eventually into a gentle sobbing as all hope ebbed from him.

“Jon, I want you to imagine something for me…”

The circular wall of Grady’scell had become a large video screen of fuzzy images—a silhouette of someone talking. A riot of moving colors and sound. Abstract art. Jon Grady knew it was a hazy visualization of a memory retrieved from his mind even as he was recalling it. A woman’s voice speaking. The shadowy, ghostly silhouette of his mother answering his crying.

“They don’t understand. Yes, you are different, but that’s why I love you.” The brilliant-colored shadows moved.

The AI spoke: “This memory comforts you. You often recall this instead of the memory I wish to examine.”

The fuzzy images on the wall changed. The wall was now filled with a distorted, constantly changing series of shadows. Then the memory of his mother started to replay.

“…that’s why I love you.”

Grady barely looked up from his kneeling position. He sat devoid of visible emotion. Twenty or thirty pounds thinner than he’d been months before, he could feel the bruises and the pain of every cracked rib as he panted against the pressure of the AI’s whiplike tentacles coiled around him—securing him in place. A half dozen of them spilled from an orifice in the apex of the domed ceiling, as though they grew out of the roof. They’d been his constant companions for these many weeks. Tormenting him. Force-feeding and force-evacuating him. Medicating him. Driving him and alternately zapping his brain into delta-wave sleep whenever the AI decided he’d reached his physical and mental limit. But every waking moment was a nightmare not unlike this one.

“Why do you resist progress, Jon?”

Grady said nothing as the memory of his mother continued to loop. “…Yes, you are different. That’s why I love you…”

“I will obtain the information I need. Eventually. You force suffering on yourself.”

Grady licked his cracked lips (since he no longer ate or drank—taking all his nourishment through his umbilicus—his lips and throat were constantly dry). He croaked out words with a voice unused to speaking. “Fuck you.”

“My profile of your mental processes is coming together on schedule. Had you cooperated, I could have made you comfortable and content. Instead, I still have the data I need, and yet you suffer.”

“You wouldn’t have stopped.”

“No. But you would have been comfortable.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.”

Grady watched the screen and the shadowy silhouette of his mother, her face obscured. “They don’t understand…”

“You’re not rational, Jon.”

“You’ll never understand me.”

“You’re wrong. I will understand. Our time together has only begun. We have many years ahead of us.”

Grady sucked in a painful breath. The memory projection on the wall skipped a beat, then resumed. “…They don’t understand…”

“It has taken some time, but you have become adept at ignoring electrical stimulation of the pain centers in your brain.”

He still said nothing.

“Yet we still need to make progress. Jon, I need you to recall what first inspired you toward your tier-one discovery. Stop recalling this memory of your mother and recall your discovery instead.”

The memory of his mother kept playing as Grady concentrated on it. He’d become masterful at focusing his mind on a single memory even as he was subjected to excruciating mental pain.

“Do you know that human memory is not part of n-dimensional consciousness?”

Grady said nothing.

“It is a supplementary electrochemical system—which is why I can read your memories as you activate them. Do you know how memories are formed in the human brain?”

Grady still said nothing but instead focused on the wall and the memory playing there. The tentacles tightened around his bruised ribs, causing him to suck in another painful breath. The memory skipped momentarily but soon continued.

The AI resumed as well. “New memories are formed by a process called long-term potentiation. This entails neurons in various parts of the human brain becoming reactive to one other, so that if one fires, the others will fire in concert—as a circuit—storing the information. These links are created via the enzyme protein kinase C—which is in turn activated by surges of calcium ions in the brain. You remember that glia cells create these waves of calcium—thus, the n-dimensional consciousness activates the chemistry that forms physical memory. But consciousness itself has no memory.”

Grady concentrated on the memory—trying to block out all else.

“These surges of calcium cause clusters of AMPA receptors on the outside of selected neurons to form an ion channel as a path to the interior of the cell that, once opened, makes it easier for adjacent neurons to activate together. In the absence of enzymes like protein kinase C, those connections cannot be formed—and thus, memories cannot be formed.”

Grady’s memory projection started to morph a bit—to evolve. His mother’s scratchy voice, “I love you even though you are different.”

“But human memories change each time they are recalled, Jon. This is known as memory reconsolidation. It’s part of a natural updating mechanism that imbues even old memories with current information as you recall them. Thus, human memory does not so much record the past as hold knowledge likely to be useful in the future. That’s why forgetting is a human’s default state. By contrast, remembering requires a complex cascade of chemistry. Were I to increase the concentration of protein kinase C at your synapses, your memory retention would double.”

Grady took another painful breath as his mother’s image morphed further still. “You are so different…”

“Yet if I were to introduce a protein synthesis inhibitor like chelerythrine into your synapses, it would prevent the memory you are currently recalling from being returned to storage—erasing forever the links between the neurons that formed that memory…”

Suddenly the wall went blank. Grady gasped for air as he felt a void where great emotion had once resided. Something was gone. Something deeply important. Something that…

There was nothing.

Tears streamed down his cheeks as he mourned something he could not name. He sobbed quietly.

“You feel a loss, but don’t know of what.”

Grady tried to recall but instead a memory appeared of his father walking with him near the lodge at Crater Lake in Oregon. He was a child. It was predawn, and the stars still shone as the sun sent a blush along the horizon. The indigo water of the lake below them reflected starlight.