Dave Freedman - Natural Selection

“What the hell is that?”

Monique’s eyes reluctantly creaked open. “Come on, Craig, what the hell is what ?”

“That.” Unshaven and unshowered in an old gray T-shirt, Summers pointed at the monitor. “It’s a good problem to have, but now we’ve got two sonar readings.”

Monique got up and immediately saw two blinking dots on the interactive map. The first one—the one they’d been following—was two miles off the coast; the second one, just half a mile off. She stared at the second dot. “Could this be whales?”

“No, the magnitudes aren’t nearly big enough.”

“Dolphins?”

“Moving much too slowly. It’s gotta be the rays, Monique. They must have split up.”

She stared at the one closer to shore. “If this one keeps going, it will be out of range soon.”

“Exactly why I woke you. We have to decide which one to follow.”

“What are the depths?”

Craig hit a button and two numbers appeared: 17,308 beneath the first dot, but just 100 beneath the second. Monique’s eyes widened.

“This one’s just a hundred feet down?”

Summers nodded. “That’s my point. We have a real shot of seeing them. Do you want to change course and follow them instead?”

Monique stared at the second dot. “Definitely.”

Craig went to the controls, and Monique grabbed her phone. “I’ll update Jason.” But there was no signal. She turned back to the monitor curiously. Why was the second group of rays only a hundred feet down? The boat changed direction, and she supposed they’d find out.

JASON SHOOK his head. Another fast busy. “I need those damn neuro names from Craig.”

Darryl turned away from the brain. “Why?”

“To decide who to show this thing to.”

“Met some of those brain mavens myself, you know.”

“You did?”

“Yeah, went to a conference with Craig. Lemme tell you, they’re a hoity-toity group.”

“We need to get someone’s opinion on this, Darryl.”

“You know who Bandar Vishakeratne is?”

“Oh, right.” Jason hadn’t heard the name recently, but Bandar Vishakeratne was the world’s premiere brain expert. A decade earlier he’d been named a runner-up for the Nobel Prize and more recently the chief of Princeton University’s brand-new neurosciences facility. “Sure, everyone knows who he is.”

Darryl raised an eyebrow. “Don’t be too impressed. All his brilliance aside, he’s a cocky bastard.” Darryl stared into the tray again, newly amazed. “But he’d lick the soles of your shoes to get a look at this.”

“Should I call him?”

“He wouldn’t talk to you.”

“No?”

“A guy like that? Without a referral, no way. And even if he did, he wouldn’t believe what you have here. Not without seeing it himself. I suppose you could schedule an appointment.”

“A guy like that must have a busy schedule.”

“You’d wait months. Seeing him immediately would require being… aggressive.”

“What do you mean? How aggressive?”

Darryl rubbed his chin, thinking out the nitty-gritty. “I’d say pack-this-brain-up-right-now, buy-a-plane-ticket, and show-up-on-his-doorstep aggressive.”

“You think that will work?”

Darryl looked into the tray again. “In a heartbeat.”

“Then… you guys will get back on the trail without me?”

“I think we can handle it, Jason.”

Lisa shook her head, annoyed. “Either that, or I’ll take this brain to be analyzed.”

Jason looked nervous. “I don’t want you doing that.”

Lisa nodded angrily. “I know you don’t. So you’ll just have to trust us not to screw up without you.”

“Lisa, it’s not that I don’t trust you.”

“Do you want us to do it or not?” Lisa didn’t want to hear it now. “Because if I were you, I’d be curious as hell to know what this brain means.”

Jason turned back to it. “You’re right.” He checked his watch, wondering how quickly he could get a car to San Francisco airport. It turned out to be ten minutes. Monterey had a lot of taxis. He didn’t even pack a toothbrush.

“ ICAN’T believe it. We lost both of them. ” Craig eyed the lifeless interactive map furiously, about to blow a gasket. “Son of a bitch!”

He and Monique had left the sea for only a moment. Just to pick up Darryl, Lisa, and Phil at the Half Moon Bay docks, thirty miles south of San Francisco. But when they’d returned, both signals had vanished. There were no blinking dots anywhere.

At the Expedition ’s bow with Lisa, Monique heaved another buoy into the sea, valiantly trying to find the rays again.

Lisa shook her head. She had her own problems. They’d left the lab so quickly they’d forgotten the body Jason had cut the brain out of, leaving it in the freezer. And since Jason’s friends, Klepper and Drummond, had left town on business, the corpse could only be retrieved in a few days, no doubt rock solid and far less suitable for autopsy.

Craig calmed down, trying to think out what had happened. They were a mile offshore now, in the exact spot where the signal had been only twenty minutes before. “Where the hell did they go?”

Darryl scanned the dark water. “Maybe they didn’t go anywhere. Maybe they just stopped.” If anything simply stopped moving, especially on the seafloor, sonar would have great difficulty picking it up.

Craig shook his head. That didn’t make sense. The rays were in the middle of a migration, so why stop? “Wait a second… what if…” He tapped a button and the map became three-dimensional, land still in white, water still in blue, but now, within the water, a vast deep-sea mountain range in gray. “Son of a bitch.”

Darryl raised an eyebrow. “Well, that changes things, doesn’t it?”

“You think they’re swimming the canyons?”

“It would explain where they went.”

If the rays swam the canyons, sonar would struggle to detect them. And these mountains were enormous, half a mile high and buried in three-mile-deep water—basically sonar’s worst nightmare. With this particular topography, the echo-location system’s clicks would simply reflect off the mountains and not detect anything else.

Craig stared at the gray. “So both groups must be in there. You know, I don’t get why there are two separate groups anyway.”

“Are you sure they’re really ‘separate’?” Monique asked, approaching with Lisa.

“What do you mean, Monique?”

Monique walked closer. “I mean there are clearly two groups migrating, but it seems like they’re moving more… in conjunction with each other, same direction and pace but at different depths and distances from the shoreline.”

“Whatever. They split up and that seems odd. Have you ever seen a migration like that before?”

“I haven’t. Have you, Darryl?”

“Never.”

Craig nodded. “So why did they split, then?”

The Hollises shrugged.

Lisa had no idea either and she wondered what Jason would think. It was strange not having him on the boat. She hoped he was learning something useful from the brain expert in Princeton, New Jersey, whose name she couldn’t pronounce.

BANDAR VISHAKERATNE, or “Veesh” to his friends, hailed from Sri Lanka and was a classic rags-to-riches story. A decade earlier he’d been an unknown doctor toiling in the neurology department of a poorly funded public hospital in New Delhi when a paper he’d submitted a year prior to the International Federation of Neurosurgeons was judged to possess “unparalleled knowledge of the inner workings of the animal brain.” Entitled “Synapse Multiplication of Visual Cortexes in African Lions,” the paper was subsequently disseminated to everyone in the worldwide neurology community. Global recognition followed. Within six months, the man was a runner-up for the Nobel Prize. Twelve months after that, an offer was extended to become the chairman of Princeton University’s then-new neurosciences department, and with great fanfare, Vishakeratne took the job. While his salary and other compensation were never publicly disclosed, it was widely rumored that Princeton, whose endowment was larger than many small countries’ treasuries, had given him a total pay package rivaling those of America’s best-paid professional athletes. Bandar Vishakeratne had been sitting pretty ever since.