Brain Child
By
Arthur M. Doweyko




"You called me, Doc. So what's going on?" I looked up at the camera and threw it a grin. "You do know it's cold out here."
When Riddles opened the fire door, my jaw dropped. His head was wrapped in aluminum foil. But that wasn't the worst of it. I pinched my nose. "You look like … crap, and you smell like—"
"I know, I know. Get in here. Put this on."
He handed me a silvery foil hat. The hollow look of his eyes and the dark stubble kept me from hurling more insults. He looked as if he hadn't slept for days.
"What's this?"
Riddles leaned out as if making sure there was no one else outside. Entering through the loading dock of the BioGentics Research building gave me a bad feeling. At three in the morning, how else was I going to feel?
"Keep your voice down, Jimmy, and put the hat on."
"Doc, you are beginning to scare me." I put the hat on.
He eased the fire door shut, and grabbed my sleeve. "This way—hurry. I'll explain."
We jogged the length of a hallway lit up by a blue-white emergency light at the far end.
"No power?"
Riddles steered me up the stairs. Four floors later, my chest pounded and I was seeing double. "Hold on, I need to catch my breath."
"We're here."
I staggered into an office that reminded me of a doctor's waiting room and plopped into the closest wooden chair. "What gives?"
He swung the door shut and leaned against it. A red ceiling light flashed over his head, giving me the willies. "It's out of control."
"You're not making any sense. What's out of control?"
He pressed an ear to the door and then collapsed into a chair next to me. His voice was no more than a croaky whisper. "I don't know how much time we have, so I'm going to make it short. Someone has to know." He took in a long breath. "Jimmy, you know what we do here?"
Princeton's BioGentics was famous. "Yeah, you guys grow organs—for transplants—that kind of thing."
"And we've been very successful." His gaze wandered to the door.
"Go on." I noticed that the wall clock wasn't running. No lights on the phone console, either—must've happened after his call.
"You heard about our tissue work—in vitro generation of livers and kidneys. That's what put us on the map. We use stem cells, so that—"
I waved him off and nodded. "Doc, I get it, I get it. What do you want with me? I'm just a high school chemistry teacher."
"Last year, management thought we should take on something more challenging."
The floor shook for a second, sending Riddles back to the door. He turned the dead bolt and leaned against the jamb.
"What was that?" I asked.
"So we started with mice, Jimmy. Just to see if the fundamentals would apply."
I couldn't help but raise my voice.. "Get to the point."
"Then rats, of course. And it worked there, too." Riddles adjusted his hat. "It's getting hard to think. I've got to concentrate."
Maybe it was contagious. I was getting a headache. "What the hell did you do with mice and rats, Doc?" I felt another tremor.
The man slid down to the floor with his back against the door. "We tried it with human brain tissue."
The whole thing sounded like some sci-fi movie. "What the hell for?"
"The idea was to grow specific sections of the brain—you know—to replace damaged or missing tissue. Human stem cells—we transformed them into brain cells. And it worked."
"You already said that. And?"
"We didn't expect them to grow into a whole brain."
Right away, I pictured an isolated brain floating in some kind of soup. In the movies there were tubes and bubbles, like the thing was breathing.
Riddles gasped. "Do you see the problem, Jimmy? Do you see it?" His eyes fluttered for a moment and his body slumped sideways to the floor. I thought he was out, but a twitch later, he was back. "The problem—"
"I'm sorry, Doc. I don't get it."
"Senses, Jimmy. It had no sensory input."
That got me to pause—a brain grown from scratch, not connected to anything. No input. So what was it thinking about? I got a real bad feeling.
"It kept growing—like it was searching for some physical way to connect with the outside world. Jimmy, you can't imagine—"
When sparks began flying off his little foil helmet, I threw mine off, maybe a little too late. I smelled burned hair.
Riddles reached up to his head, and tore at the foil. His mouth opened into a silent scream like in Munch's painting. That's when the door got all wavy-like. The next thing I knew, he was stretched out on the floor. My head felt like it was going to explode. All I could think of was getting away, getting out of the damn room, the damn building. Something was coming and I needed to find a place to hide.
The pain was so bad that I forgot about Riddles and fumbled with the dead bolt. I couldn't think straight. When the door opened, and I fell on my face in the hall. Crackling and popping sounds came up the stairwell. The concrete stairs cracked, walls were crumbling into sand.
I heard a voice—maybe it was more like a feeling than a voice. This was a cold, lonely, and very upset feeling. I had to get out of there—any direction but down.
I took the steps two and three at a time—fifth floor, sixth, seventh—through the last fire door and onto the flat asphalt roof. My lungs burned. I ran to a parapet looking for a fire escape. The building lurched, almost sending me over.
That feeling again. For a moment—I don't know how long—I pictured a giant brain that had grown without any restrictions, without senses. No duties set by language or custom. The damn thing had no limits—it was just pure thought—struggling to discover its purpose.
The street lights went out. The rumbling in the building stopped. The stars jiggled for a second. Then they all disappeared. I floated in pitch black, surrounded by complete silence. There was nowhere left to hide.
Then that feeling came back and I heard a voice, echoing like a bell got rung in some humongous church.
Time to start over.
***
"Please turn on the lights, Jimmy."
I waited a moment longer for effect, and then flicked the switch. "Let there be light."
The laughter from the class filled me with joy, as did seeing the children's wide eyes, their grinning faces. Miss Molly, our teacher, sat back down at her desk, and thought about what she was going to prepare for dinner tonight.
Even with the fluorescents, the classroom felt a bit confining. A few windows would fix that. Of course, that meant bringing up a sky with a sun and a whole bunch of other stuff.

End