light. The disembodied dome of the cathedral gleamed beyond his left shoulder, and cranes loomed over the landscape like ponderous dinosaurs, lit up by Christmas lights. He was beckoning to me with a long, slender finger, then carrying it to his lips to indicate that I should not speak.
I approached his desk and stood there, waiting for him to finish. I took the opportunity to observe him. He was, by then, in his mid-sixties. His curls had turned white and fanned back from his noble forehead in a crenellated shock, lending him an air of distinction that was accentuated by the ivory cravat. Since I had seen him last, new creases had scored his forehead and lines ran down from the corners of his eyes like guy ropes. They seemed to lend his now rather gaunt face a new mobility, as if a mask had been peeled away or melted. The eyes were as dark and soulful as ever. A number of rubber pads were attached to his forehead and temples, and from these sprouted plastic-coated wires. Around him, on the desk, were arranged various grey metal boxes covered with knobs, dials and colourful, blinking lights. The professor was staring intently at a computer monitor whose greenish light threw into sharp relief the deep fissures in his face.
After a few minutes, with a sigh of expended effort, he pushed the monitor round so that I could read the words that were written there: ‘Good afternoon, Sarah. I, Mezzanotte, invite you humbly, and through the medium of my slow cortical potentials, to immerse yourself once again in your work.’
It hadn’t escaped my notice that there was no keyboard on the desk, and for a moment I was confused. How had he magicked the words on to the screen? He watched me, a little smile playing about his lips. And then he opened his arms as if to embrace the grey boxes scattered around him. These, he informed me, represented the culmination of three years’ work. He had been following a hunch, and if it turned out to be correct, it would draw all the other threads of his scientific enquiry together; it would make sense of his life’s work. He considered it the greatest idea of his career; more important than his sleep experiments, and far more audacious. He had proved it in principle (here he nodded towards the screen), and now the time had come to test it in the real world – the task for which he had summoned me.
‘Here I am,’ I said, my pulse quickening. ‘Give me my instructions.’
At a sign from him I dragged a chair to the desk, sat down and rested my elbows on top of it. He lowered his head towards mine. And for the next hour, perhaps two, I listened in mounting awe as he explained the conception, gestation and birth of a revolutionary device – one he had developed secretly, and whose potential, he hinted, could not even be dreamed at.
3
At the top of the screen was a cartoon apple; at the bottom a pear. In between, travelling from left to right, a thread-thin waveform. It was spiky in places and somewhat irregular, but the overall motion was of a sort of languid undulation – hypnotic, potentially, if one watched it for long enough. This, the professor explained, was a readout of his slow cortical potentials, a form of brain activity about which very little was known, except that it seemed to arise spontaneously within the grey matter in the instant preceding any thought or action. Normally, one wasn’t aware of it. But it was possible, with hard work, to gain control over it; to wield it as an extra limb and make it do your will.
He asked me which fruit I preferred and I told him. ‘Now watch,’ he said, and like a whip the wave leapt up out of its resting place and lashed the apple-shaped icon, causing it to disappear. I glanced at his hands, which had remained neatly and conspicuously folded in his lap, and laughed. I asked him how long he had been practising.
‘Oh, a couple of months,’ he said, his cheeks glowing with pleasure and the mental effort of executing that trivial action. As he spoke, his large, elegant hands on which the veins stood out proud and blue acted out what he was telling me. ‘To begin with, I had to conjure up certain mental images to get the wave to move the way I wanted. I remembered a circus that came one summer to my grandmother’s village. I was the ringmaster, wielding my whip, and those…’ he wagged a disapproving finger at the icons on the screen, ‘… those were a couple of bolshie lions. Or I thought about the local farmer raising his rifle, waiting for the she-wolf to move into his sights, squeezing the trigger, bullseye! It was hard work, every evening I’d go home with a headache. But slowly, slowly it got easier. Now I manipulate that wave as easily as lifting my arm, or breathing. I don’t think about it. And these days, I hardly make any errors.’
In place of the fruit the letters A and B now appeared on the screen. Again I chose and this time, to show off his neural dexterity, Mezzanotte persuaded the wave to rise slowly and steadily towards the A, until it glanced off the foot of it, nudging it gently into oblivion.
‘What you have here,’ he went on, unnecessarily, since I had already grasped its significance, ‘is a simple method of communication.’ He pressed a button so that two banks of letters now appeared at the top and bottom of the screen. Each bank contained half the alphabet. ‘Each time I select a bank it halves, until I’m left with the letter I want. Gradually, by this method, I can construct a word.’
He added that what I was seeing was actually an early prototype. He had a more advanced model, into which he had built sophisticated features such as a dictionary, a thesaurus and a mode for predicting the word from the first few letters typed. My mind raced ahead. ‘So someone who has lost the power of speech, due to a stroke, say, or a road accident… motor neurone disease –’
‘– someone whose output pathways are irreparably damaged,’ Mezzanotte interrupted me, ‘assuming of course they have something to say, could bypass the inert tongue or larynx and communicate via these brainwaves. All she would need would be the equipment. No dutiful secretary sitting by the bed, trying to make sense of her nods and grunts. Just willpower, a little mental application and a computer.’
‘But Professor, it’s brilliant. How did you –’ I broke off, having just noticed his use of the feminine pronoun, and glanced at him. ‘You already have a volunteer?’
Gripping a bunch of wires with one hand, he tore the suction pads off his forehead with a series of loud pops, stood up and strode out into that sea of carpet, where he began to stride up and down. I twisted in my chair to keep him in my sights.
‘Once I’d shown the system could work, the next step was to find a subject,’ he was saying. ‘So I sat down to write out a list of my requirements. I discounted at a stroke all those whose insult has left them with some residual motor function, who can mumble or blink or point. That type of patient can make their basic needs understood, and rather like a Spanish speaker in Italy, it makes them lazy. They don’t need to bother with my wires and waves and bolshie lions, the thought of which will quite literally make their heads ache. No, the patient who puts the Mind-Reading Device through its paces must be completely paralysed. She must be unable to nod, to signal yes or no, food or water, pleasure or pain. She is mute, and utterly dependent on those who care for her. Nurses dress her, machines feed her. In fact, you might say she has lost all dignity. She must be a quick learner, ideally young. Above all, she must understand my instructions and appreciate the rewards her efforts will bring.’
I thought for a moment. ‘Paralysed, but her intellect intact… a prisoner…’
He crossed the room rapidly towards me, resting one hand on the back of my chair and narrowing his eyes as he looked down at me. ‘I don’t need to tell you, Sarah, how many patients fit that bill.’
I completed the thought: ‘And how few of them we ever hear about.’ Mezzanotte nodded, smiled, and resumed his seat behind the desk.
I had seen some of those patients, shut away in back bedrooms or, if the families had money, in care homes in dismal seaside resorts. There were more and more of them, kept alive by modern technology. For the most part they led pathetic lives, cared for by relatives who saw them
