John Saul - Brain Child

And, she added to herself, if Raymond Torres really knows what he’s doing.

As Carol Cochran entertained that thought, Raymond Torres himself was making his final rounds of the evening.

Not, of course, that they were really rounds, for Alex Lonsdale was his only patient. He stopped first in Alex’s room, just across the hall from the operating complex. The night nurse glanced up from the book she was reading. “Nothing, doctor,” she said as Torres scanned the monitors that were tracking Alex’s vital functions. “No change from an hour ago.”

Torres nodded, and gazed thoughtfully at the boy in the bed.

Looks like his mother . The thought drifted through his mind, followed by a sudden flood of unbidden memories from a past he thought could no longer hurt him. Along with his memories of Ellen Lonsdale came memories of three other girls, and as their faces came into focus in his mind’s eye, he felt himself begin to tremble.

Forget it , he told himself. It was long ago, and it’s all over now. It doesn’t matter . With an effort of will, he forced himself to concentrate on the motionless form of Alex Lonsdale. He leaned over and carefully opened one of the boy’s eyes, checked the pupil, then closed the eye again. There had been no reaction to the sudden incursion of light. Not a good sign.

“All right,” he said. “I’m sleeping here tonight, in the room over my office. If anything happens — anything at all — I want to be awakened at once.”

“Of course, doctor,” the nurse replied. Not that he need have said anything — the first rule for staff working under Torres was made very clear at the time they were hired: “If anything happens, let Dr. Torres know at once.” And everyone at the Institute adhered to the rule, quickly learning to suspend his own judgment. So tonight, if Alex Lonsdale so much as twitched, an instrument would record it, and Raymond Torres would be notified immediately. As Torres left the room, the nurse went back to her book.

Torres crossed the corridor and went into the scrub room, his eyes noting instantly that everything necessary for tomorrows scrub was already there — gowns, gloves, masks, everything. And it would all be checked at least twice more during the night. He proceeded into the O.R. itself, where six technicians were going over every piece of equipment in the room, running test after test, rechecking their own work, then having it verified by two other technicians. They would continue working throughout the night, searching for anything that could possibly fail, and replacing it. They would leave only when it was time for the sterilization process to begin, an hour before the operation was scheduled.

Satisfied, he moved on down the corridor to what had long ago become known as the Rehearsal Hall. It was a large room, housing several desks, each of which held a computer terminal. It was here that every operation carried out at the Institute was rehearsed.

Tonight, all the desks were occupied, and all the terminals glowed brightly in the soft light of the Rehearsal Hall. The technicians at the monitors, using the model of Alex’s brain that had been generated earlier that day, were going over the operation step by step, searching for bugs in the program that the computer itself, using its own model, had generated.

They didn’t expect to find any bugs, for they had long ago discovered that programs generated by computers are much more accurate than programs written by men.

Except that there was also the possibility that somewhere in the system there was a sleeper.

“Sleeper” was their term for a bug that had never been found. The defect might not even be in the program they were using. It could have been in a program that had been used to write another program, that had, in turn, been used to generate still a third program. They all knew, from bitter experience, that the bug could suddenly pop up and destroy everything.

Or, worse, it could simply inject a tiny error into the program, creating a new sleeper.

In this case, that would be a wrong connection in Alex Lonsdale’s mind, which could lead to anything.

Or nothing.

Or Alex’s death.

Torres moved silently through the room, concentrating first on one monitor, then on another. All of what he saw was familiar; he would see it all again tomorrow.

Except that tomorrow wouldn’t be a rehearsal. Tomorrow his fingers would be on the robot’s controls, and as he followed the program, making the connections inside Alex’s brain, there would be no turning back. Whatever he did tomorrow, Alex Lonsdale would live with for the rest of his life.

Or die with.

One of the technicians leaned back and stretched.

“Problems?” Torres asked.

The technician shook his head. “Looks perfect so far.”

“How many times have you been through it?”

“Five.”

“It’s a beginning,” Torres said. He wished they had months to keep rerunning the program, but they didn’t. So even in the morning, they wouldn’t be sure there were no bugs. That, indeed, was the worst thing about bugs — sometimes they didn’t show up for years. The only way to find them was to keep running and rerunning a program hoping that if something was going to go wrong it would go wrong early on. But this time, they simply didn’t have time — they would have to trust that the program was perfect.

Yet as he moved toward the little bedroom above his office that was always kept ready for him, one thought kept going through Torres’s mind: Nothing is ever perfect.

Something always goes wrong.

He pushed the thought away. Not this time. This time, everything had to be perfect. And only he would ever know what that perfection really was.

At five o’clock the next morning, Ellen and Marshall Lonsdale arrived in Palo Alto. It was still dark, but all over the Institute for the Human Brain, lights glowed brightly, and people seemed to be everywhere. They were shown into the same lounge where Marsh had spent most of the previous day, and offered coffee and Danishes.

“Can we see Alex?” Ellen asked.

The receptionist smiled sympathetically. “I’m sorry. He’s already being prepped.” Ellen carefully kept her expression impassive, but the other woman could clearly see the pain in her eyes. “I really am sorry, Mrs. Lonsdale, but it’s one of Doctor’s rules. Once the prepping starts, we always keep the patient totally isolated. Doctor’s a fanatic about keeping everything sterile.”

Suddenly the door opened, and a friendly voice filled the room. “Why do they always have to have operations at dawn?” Valerie Benson asked of no one in particular. “Do they think it’s a war or something?” She crossed the room and gave Ellen a quick hug. “It’s going to be all right,” she whispered. “I don’t get up this early unless I know nothing can possibly go wrong, and here I am. So you might as well stop worrying right now. Alex is going to be fine.”

Ellen couldn’t resist smiling at Valerie, who was a notorious late-riser. Indeed, Valerie sometimes claimed that the real reason she’d divorced her husband was that demanding breakfast by nine A.M. was the worst sort of mental cruelty. But here she was, as always, coming through in the pinch, and looking as if she’d been up for hours.

“You didn’t have to come,” Ellen told her.

“Of course I did,” Valerie said. “If I hadn’t, everybody would have talked about it for years. Is Marty here yet?”

“I don’t know if she’s even coming. And it’s so early—”

“Nonsense,” Valerie snorted. “Must be nearly noon.” She gave Marsh a quick kiss on the cheek. “Everything okay?” she asked, her voice dropping.

“They won’t even let us see Alex before the operation,” Marsh replied, making no attempt to hide the anger he was feeling. Valerie nodded knowingly.