Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [3]
She would have laughed, but for the fear she would never stop.
N OT IF I CAN HELP IT.
Nathi spread himself across the myriads of nanotoridriven modulators strategically placed inside his patient’s brain. If those calcium spikes got out of hand, he could selectively gate ion channels open or closed in microseconds by direct electromagneticaction—faster than by slow chemical neurotransmitters. Ion channels were the porous proteins embedded in a cell’s membrane that only let the ions of particular types through, depending on the channel. If the brain were like an orchestra, then such dynamic change of the electric properties of neurons would have been like switching instruments in the musicians’ hands right in the middle of a performance.
Nathi’s metaphoric fingers rested on the keys of the potassium ion channels. Their activation at a few selected places in the neocortex would silence the neurons, putting them into the “down” state and the entire brain to sleep in waves spreading in circles at several millimeters a millisecond—the next closest thing to a break inside a digital debugger, for a brain would never stop. But that would end this dream session—only the third one in three months.
This session was especially successful. So far, she only showed some mild choreoathetosis, a syndrome of involuntary writhing, jerky movements. That may have indicated damage to her basal ganglia, an organ at the very center of her brain—the repository of her faps, fixed action patterns. Walking, running, breaking a fall or pulling a hand away from fire, driving, making love or making music—things that we can do or learn to do without getting consciousness involved. Now some echoes of her motor faps were leaking through without being called for, like fragments of a song circling unbidden in one’s mind. No matter. He would fix that later. First, he had to stabilize her consciousness, recover memories….
He was at home in a human brain—this small, enclosed world of living, fragile circuits. Nathi’s electronic mind washed over it like a cleansing fluid, slipped through synapses on the magnetic wings of nanobots, the microscopic nodes of his private network. With his nanotori, he could switch the brain’s internal circuitry at will—but carefully, with the lightest touch, and always following the music.
Some described it as a symphony. But Nathi heard in it ingoma ebusuku, “song of the night,” the old tiptoe music of his Zulu ancestors—perhaps because it called for no instruments, just voice. He was tiptoeing across the brain, leading a procession up and down an undulating path, out of the land of sorrows. Switch. He is with an isicathamiya band, singing on stage in an all-night musical contest: Sigadla ngengoma!—We are attacking with song. Switch. Now a kwaito singer of the post-apartheid era, dancing to a soul-catching electronic beat. And, hundreds of years later, in a transport spaceship, waiting with the Zulu Zionist white-robes for their historic touchdown in the Hellas basin. Swaying bodies, pointing arms. Deep voices, resonant. Polyphony developing like the converging horns of buffalo.
The drums and handclaps of a qhuqhumbela.
Something has changed.
A coherent wave in the theta range has snuck into the texture of the melody to couple with the faster gamma oscillations. Calcium spikes that have been threatening to overwhelm the girl’s unsteady motor system have organized themselves into a pattern, binding the girl’s senses to its will. The dysrhythmia’s “edge effect?” But it could also be a long-term memory from the hippocampus entering the dream. So Nathi doesn’t stop it. Staying in the dream the girl does not control, he watches with her eyes, and listens with her ears, smells it, feels it with her skin.
A SUDDEN FLASH OF LIGHT AROUND HER OBSERVATION bubble—a signal washing past, within the castle walls, in nanoseconds activating the alarms.