The Night Market by Jonathan Moore

Author:Jonathan Moore [Moore, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2018-01-10T18:30:00+00:00

18

MIA PUT THREE glossy pages on Carver’s lap. He looked at the first image she’d handed him, picking it up by its edges to study it. When he turned back to her, she read the question from his face.

“That’s an MRI, looking in from the back. The white area, here —” she traced the spot with her fingertip, “— that’s his hypothalamus.”

“Okay.”

“Look at these,” she said. “Do you see them?”

She’d touched a pair of S-shaped tendrils. They glowed with a white light, brighter than anything else in the image. They reminded Carver of the filaments inside an old-fashioned light bulb.

“Is this magnified?”

“Magnified, fine-tuned — you have no idea how long it took to get this.”

“The bright lines, they’re part of the hypothalamus?”

“They run from the hypothalamus and tap in to the optic chiasm,” she said. “But they shouldn’t be there. They’re not part of the hypothalamus; they’re not part of James at all. Turn the page.”

He lifted the top page and laid it on the rug next to him. The next image was another MRI. The filaments were there again, a brilliant resonance against the gray haze of the brain matter.

“That’s looking down, from above,” Mia said. “Now you can see the other legs.”

“Are they implants?”

“They couldn’t be,” Mia answered. “They were buried at the center. The tendrils go to every part of his brain. If someone put them there, I’d have found scarring. I’d have seen lesions and nerve damage. But his brain was perfect. Except for these.”

There were eight filaments, spreading outward from a central point. It looked like a spider, a delicate one holding itself high off the ground on gossamer limbs. In the blur, he could almost make out the thing’s body.

“These are the first two?” he asked, touching two of the filaments with his finger. “But from above?”

“That’s right.”

“What about these other six?”

“They spread all over.”

“How small are they?” he asked.

“Thinner than a nerve axon, but long. You wouldn’t be able to see them at all, but I got them to shine.”

“Shine?”

“I hand-tuned the coil until I got that. It’s like looking for a harmonic on a violin — when you get it, it rings.”

“But you wouldn’t have looked so hard if your patient hadn’t told you to,” Carver said.

“I wouldn’t have, no. We’d done MRIs before, and PET scans, while he was still alive. But nothing showed up — they were always there, but I wasn’t looking the right way.”

“What about this?”

He was pointing at the center, at the place where all eight strands came together. On the page, it was a spot of the purest white. The hint of a sphere shone through the nebular ridges and folds of the man’s brain. It was a bright star behind a thin cover of clouds.

“This?” she asked, circling the center point with her fingertip. “It’s the legs that really tell the story. This is a thousand times smaller than a pinprick. But if we backed out, if we followed the other six legs, they’d spread through the brain, to the pleasure centers.

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