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Fitch scrolled up two pages to the line “a hunting pack is coming.” He stared at the computer screen and shook his head. “A hunting pack?” Stabbing one forefinger at the delete key he erased the words.
Fitch searched his imagination for a feeling like that of little Mercutio listening to his grandmother. After a moment he typed “a wolf pack is coming,” then leaned back in the rickety office chair and rubbed his eyes. He felt like throwing the computer screen through the window.
“What a load of bollocks,” he said, then glanced around, checking to see if anybody heard him. Papers, books, files and half eaten tacos covered the four desks behind him, but the geeks were probably waiting at the door. Anna had given them strict instructions not to interrupt him while he transcribed the brain waves. The silence soothed him after an hour of someone else’s thoughts playing through his head.
He pressed print and sighed as he lifted the transmitter cap from his scalp. A spider’s web of slender wires studded with hundreds of tiny contact points, it squeezed a little, like wearing a too-tight swim hat. Beside the computer a second screen showed the brain waves it played. Paused now, they froze in a spray of coloured arcs. Fitch noted the point he had reached, A7sector/sector98.6.yt, in case they wanted him to transcribe more. He shook his head at his optimism. The Geeks were annoying but leaving them would be a loss.
Standing up, he banged his knee on the side of the desk and swore. The printer whirred and pushed four pages of typescript into a half eaten sandwich in the tray. Why did the geeks have to be so messy? Fitch’s stomach lurched with hunger as he caught a whiff of garlic sausage from the sandwich. He considered taking a quick bite. Better not. It could have been there days.
As he stepped around a chair he knocked his head on a projecting shelf. The door flew open.
“What’s wrong?” Anna stepped into the room, her blonde hair swinging beneath her ears as she looked around.
“Nothing.” Fitch rubbed at his shaved head. “Done it.” He held the four pages towards her. “It’s rubbish but you promised me two months work and you’ve got to pay me whatever, so it’s not my problem.”
Anna dropped into the nearest office chair, excitement showing pink in her tanned cheeks. Fitch tried to prop himself casually on a desk edge, but the patches on the knees of his jeans seemed to blare, like badly tuned instruments.
Anna flicked through the papers and Fitch gritted his teeth. In his mind he had already spent the money she said she would pay him for a summer of transcribing brainwaves. He had portioned it out to the last cent. Clothes that fit him. A computer to write his own stories on. Bus fares and sandwich money that would allow him to escape his foster family. Books, trips to the movies where he could sit alone, unbothered, distracted under the screen. All his imaginary treasures had disappeared as he typed out nonsense. “The edge,” he muttered to himself. “The darkness?”
Anna looked up at him. “It’s brilliant, fantastic, fantastic.” She jumped to her feet, and wrapped both slim arms around him in a tight hug.
Fitch went rigid. “What are you doing?” Since his mother died he had encouraged hugs from nobody.
She stepped away and frowned. “I am very pleased with the work you have done. It is a successful job and so I have shown my appreciation for you and your work by giving you a warm hug.”
“You what?” Fitch shook his head at her emotionless description. “You’re so weird.”
“Hey!” A voice came from the doorway. The other two geeks crowded through it.
“You’re not at school. We don’t talk like that here.” Geek One pulled at his beard.
“You think so.” Fitch glared at him. “Well she should tell me the truth.”
“Who, Anna?” Geek Two adjusted his spectacles. “Anna can only tell you the truth.”
Geek One nodded. “What did she say?”
Fitch nodded towards the papers that Anna was rereading, completely ignoring their discussion.
“She said it’s brilliant. But it’s a load of old bollocks. He thinks he’s Martin Luther King AND the emperor of Byzantium AND Batman.”
“MLK I get.” Geek One turned to Geek Two.
“What’s Byzantium?”
“Byzantium!” Fitch snorted. “Was the Eastern Roman empire, but-”
Anna stood up. “Fitch. You are confused about the desired outcome of your work. This is making you nervous and, and, hostile.”
“See, stop talking so weird.”
Anna flinched.
“Fitch!” snapped Geek One.
Fitch shook his head. “Sorry.” He tried to placate them by being enthusiastic. “Can I see it again? Will you tell me where the brain is from?”
“Have you time?” Anna looked from one geek to the other.
“I suppose.” Geek One swapped papers with Geek Two. “Come on.” He jerked his head at Fitch without looking up from the sheet he held.
This time Anna led the way to the lab, along the long corridors and through the security checks. She dressed like she was going out on a boat, deck shoes, shorts and tank top and talked over her shoulder as she walked. “The brainwaves, patterned into emotions and impressions, that we played you. Was it like listening, or, or feeling?”
Fitch thought for a moment. “It’s like seeing.”
“Good. We told you the patterns were collected from an inactive brain. We generated them by stimulating the brain with standard electronic prompts.”
Geek One, who might have been the computer expert, nodded rapidly. “Electronic prompts, that mimic the brainwave activity of questions.”
“You’re scooping memories from a madman’s brain in a jar, is what you mean,” Fitch said.
Anna nodded. “Might be mad, yes, but man, no.”
The Geeks snickered, then quietened as they turned into the Marine Neuro-science Laboratory.
Fitch looked at the brain in the tank. “Wait...” he struggled to remember the brain question from a game show he once saw. “The biggest brain in the world. Is it an elephant?”
“Nope.”
Fitch rubbed his thumb across his knuckles. He didn’t want to ask them what it was. “It must be a whale. A blue whale?”
“Closer, but still no.”
Behind the geek a photo on the wall depicted a massive, square-headed whale with dark, wrinkled skin and small flippers. The vertical front to its head - like the front of a truck - reminded Fitch of Monstro, the whale in the Disney Pinocchio movie. A head like that had to hold a huge brain. “Ha!” he said. “A sperm whale!”
He looked back to brain as a shaft of light sneaked between the blinds in the small window. It hit the tank and splintered at the strange prismatic qualities of whatever gel the brain rested in. A complete spectrum of light scattered through the tank, bathing little Mercutio’s beachball-sized brain in all the colours of the rainbow.
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