Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Embodied : consider autoscopy and out-of-body experience. Neuroscientists in Geneva concluded that the events resulted from paroxysmal cerebral dysfunctions of the temporoparietal junction. A little electrical current to the proper spot in the right parietal cortex, and anyone could be made to float up to the ceiling and gaze back down on their abandoned body.

Continuous : that thread was ready to snap at the lightest pull. De-realization and depersonalization. Anxiety attacks and religious conversions. Misidentification — the whole continuum of Capgras-like phenomena, phenomena that Weber had witnessed his whole life without quite noticing. Eternal love retracted. Entire life philosophies abandoned in disgust. The concert pianist he’d interviewed who woke one morning after prolonged illness, no discernible pathology, still able to play, but unable to feel the music, or care about it…

Aware : here was his wife, asleep on the pillow next to him.

This thought formed in him as he lay awake at dawn, listening to a mockingbird roll through its round of pilfered calls: of selves as the self describes itself, no one had one. Lying, denying, repressing, confabulating: these weren’t pathologies. They were the signature of awareness, trying to stay intact. What was truth, compared to survival? Floating or broken or split or a third of a second behind, something still insisted: Me . Always the water changed, but the river stood still.

The self was a painting, traced on that liquid surface. Some thought sent an action potential down an axon. A little glutamate jumped the gap, found a receptor on the target dendrite, and triggered an action potential in the second cell. But then came the real fire: the action potential in the receiver cell kicked out a magnesium block from another kind of receptor, calcium flowed in, and all chemical hell broke loose. Genes activated, producing new proteins, which flowed back to the synapse and remodeled it. And that made a new memory, the canyon down which thought flowed. Spirit from matter. Every burst of light, every sound, every coincidence, every random path through space changed the brain, altering synapses, even adding them, while others weakened or fell away from lack of activity. The brain was a set of changes for mirroring change. Use or lose. Use and lose. You chose, and the choice unmade you.

As with synapse, so went science. When long-term potentiation was discovered in the 1970s, perhaps a dozen articles appeared in half a decade. In the half-decade after that, almost one hundred. Fire together, wire together. In the early nineties, a thousand papers or more. Now more than twice that, and redoubling every five years. More articles than any researcher could hope to integrate. Science was loose, with the exposed synapse. The synapse was already science. Smallest imaginable machine for comparing and conjoining. Classical and operant conditioning, written in chemicals, able to learn the entire world, and float a you on top of it.

The mockingbird peeled off its bursts: fives, sevens, threes. Each burst mutated like the spins of a cycling car alarm. Listen to the mockingbird. Listen to the mockingbird. He’d sung that song with this same wife once, when they still sang. A mockingbird is singing over her grave.

This was the bird’s hymn to plasticity, every glance of rising sunlight off the rippled bay changing the shape of its brain. The brain that retrieved a memory was not the brain that had formed it. Even retrieving a memory mangled what was formerly there. Every thought, damaging and redamming. Even this mockingbird accompaniment, this one, changing Weber beyond recall.

The tangle thickened as he traced it: groups of wired neurons that modeled and memorized the changing light were themselves modeled, in other neuron groups. Whole chunks of circuitry reserved for sandboxing other circuits, the mind’s eye cannibalizing the brain’s eye, social intelligence stealing the circuitry of spatial orientation. What-if mimicking what-is; simulations simulating simulations. When his little Jess was not yet a month old, he could get her to stick out her tongue just by sticking out his tongue at her. No counting the miracles involved. She had to locate his tongue relative to his body, then somehow map his parts onto the feel of hers, find and order a tongue she could not even see, could not even know about. And she did all this at the mere sight of him, this infant who had been taught nothing. Where was the end of his self, the start of hers?

The self bled out, the work of mirror neurons, empathy circuits, selected for and preserved through many species for their obscure survival value. Baby Jess’s supramarginal gyrus conjured up a fiction, an imaginary model of what her body would be like if it did what his was doing. Weber had seen people with damage to the area — ideomotor apraxia. Asked to hang a picture, they could. But asked to pretend to hang a picture, they slapped helplessly at the wall, no clasped hammer, no mimed nail.

When his girl, at four, looked through her picture books, her face would match the expressions painted there. A smile made her smile, inducing girlish happiness. A grimace gave her real pain. Weber, too, to witness: emotions moved the muscles, but merely moving the muscles made emotions. Those with damage to the insula could no longer do the imitative, integrated mapping of body-states necessary to read or adopt someone else’s muscles. Then the community of self collapsed into one.

The bird mocked on from a branch up close to their bedroom window, bits of riff stolen from other species and stuffed into the growing melody. On the backs of his eyelids, using the same brain regions as real sight, Weber watched a little boy he did not recognize — it might have been Mark, or someone much like him — out in a frosty field watching birds taller than he. And seeing them arch and leap and curl their necks and beat their wings, the boy beat his.

To be awake and know: already awful. To be awake, know, and remember : unbearable. Against the triple curse, Weber could make out only one consolation. Some part of us could model some other modeler. And out of that simple loop came all love and culture, the ridiculous overflow of gifts, each one a frantic proof that I was not it…We had no home, no whole to come back to. The self spread thin on everything it looked at, changed by every ray of the changing light. But if nothing inside was ever fully us, at least some part of us was loose, in the run of others, trading in all else. Someone else’s circuits circled through ours.

This was the dawn thought that formed in Weber’s brain, his shifting synapses, all the insight that he ought ever to have needed. But it scattered at the arrival of new bursts, as Sylvie moaned and twisted awake, opened her eyes and smiled at him. “Did you?” she asked, fuzzily. Old code between them: Sleep well?

And, yes, he nodded his head, smiling back at her. All his life long, he had slept well.

Christmas came and went,and still no angel. Dozens of people called in after the broadcast, all of them with theories but none with useful information. When even Crime Solvers let him down, Mark hinted broadly to Karin that he now had a pretty good idea of what had really happened that night. Any ambitious business project for transforming the region would first require transforming the region’s inhabitants. When she tried to get him to elaborate, he told her to use her head and figure it out herself.

Early in the evening of New Year’s Day, Specialist Thomas Rupp, 167th Cavalry Regiment — the Prairie Soldiers — appeared on the doorstep of the Homestar. He was coatless in his three-color desert camouflage fatigues, having just returned to town after unit exercises. Mark looked out his dirty front window into the dark yard, thinking that paramilitary forces had arrived with the purpose of commandeering his house in conjunction with this new Nature Outpost development.