“What’s up?” I ask.
He jerks his thumb toward the doorway. “Orson’s explaining what he wants to do for Thea now that you’re here. You should come.”
31
THE NANOBOTS
MADELINE, DIEGO, Tito, Linus, Burnham, Dubbs, Orson, and the nurse are all in the sitting area near Thea’s bedroom when we arrive. Tom slides along the back wall, holding the baby, and he sways from foot to foot. Orson has commandeered the nurse’s desk, and he has the computer screen angled so everyone can see an image of a brain scan.
“You can see here and here are the areas of the most decay,” Orson says, pointing to dark areas. “The amygdala and the inferior lingual gyrus.” He enlarges one spot to show a jagged hive of holes. “Once these gaps start opening up like this, it’s only a matter of time before the brain shuts down completely. Typically then, the patient stops breathing, and they’re gone. I’m very sorry to say this, but I’m afraid Thea is within hours, maybe a day of this point.”
“But we have Rosie here now,” Madeline says. “She’s offered to give us more of her dreams.”
Orson glances at me. “That’s very generous of you, to be sure, but it doesn’t solve the problem,” he says. “It normally takes weeks to grow a dream seed into a sample that’s fit to be implanted into another brain. We don’t have weeks in this case.”
My gaze keeps zeroing back on the brain image on the computer, and my fingers start to tingle in a familiar way.
“How do you actually insert the dream seeds?” I ask.
“The actual technique, you mean?” Orson says. “We load up a series of nanobots with dream-seed astrocytes, the perfectly aged ones, not too mature, and then we insert the nanobots into a vein behind the patient’s ear. Then, with the helmet sensors on the patient for a mapping system, we can guide the nanobots to the amygdala or the lingual gyrus or anywhere else we need them to go.” He pauses, as if expecting questions, but then he goes on. “Once in place, the nanobots express out the dream astrocytes, and they cling to the existing brain cells in the patient. It’s a basic delivery system, but on a microscopic level, like little boats delivering packages to a steam liner. What really matters is the dream’s ability to take hold and mesh with the existing brain cells. That’s when they have a chance to repair damage in a fluid, dynamic way. Then even that takes some time. A few days, usually. Sometimes longer.”
What he’s saying makes some sense. I can imagine the little nanobots as the golden spheres that once ripped a vision of Dubbs out of me. A germ of excitement starts growing around my heart.
Are you there, Arself? I ask.
She doesn’t say anything, but the itching in my fingers grows stronger.
“Do you have a helmet here, and whatever other equipment you need?” I ask.
Orson leans back and folds his hands together. “I do. I used the helmet to record Thea’s most recent scan there,” he says, aiming his chin at the screen. “It still doesn’t solve the problem of the time we need.”
“Is there any way to speed things up?” Diego says. “If you harvest from Rosie today, when is the soonest you could try implanting her dream seed into Thea?”
“Wait a minute,” Ma says. “Nobody’s harvesting anything out of Rosie.”
The others all look at her. A hiss from equipment in the other room is clearly audible.
“It’s not safe for Rosie,” Ma says. “I’m sorry about your daughter, Madeline, of course. My heart goes out to you all, but we’re not risking Rosie’s health for a girl who’s essentially dead already.”
“Ma,” I say, shocked at how blunt she’s being.
“We don’t even know this doctor,” she adds. “He looks like Robert, but that doesn’t make him a good person. He could be as evil as Berg.” She turns to Orson. “Did you ever collaborate with Berg?”
“I did,” Orson says. “I purchased dreams from him. That’s how I developed Sinclair Fifteen in the first place.”
“Without Rosie’s consent,” Burnham says. “Berg sold you dreams from the Forge students, and none of them ever gave their consent.”
Orson shifts uneasily. “I have not always been the most rigorous in asking questions about where my supplies have come from. I admit that,” he says.
“Okay. That’s final,” Ma says. She looks anxiously at Madeline. “Is that why you invited us here?”
“Ma, it’s my choice,” I say. “I want to do this.”
“The doctor himself said it won’t do Thea any good,” Ma says practically. “I may not get all that mumbo jumbo about nanobots, but Thea’s already too far gone. I can’t be the only one who sees this.”
“We’d never force Rosie,” Madeline says. “Of course we never would.”
“You’d just ask.” Ma gets to her feet and takes Dubbs by the hand. “Come on, Rosie. We’re going.”
“No,” I say. “Wait. I need to see something.”
I move over to the computer and let my fingers do what they’ve been longing to do on the keyboard. The image on the screen turns ninety degrees, and then zooms in on a certain section of Thea’s brain, going smaller and smaller until space opens up between the neurons. Too much space. I’m in a gap. I don’t have deliberate logic for what I’m seeing, but in the back of my mind, Arself is making sense of it all and absorbing what we need to know. My fingers adjust the screen again, pushing deeper and sideways, to a lit string of light.
“What are you doing?” Orson asks.
Ignoring him, I expand out again, shift to another area, and zoom in again. Faster than before, Arself switches the screen to a new area, and then another. Warm, slow pleasure trickles around my skull, and I know what she’s thinking even though she doesn’t put it into words. We’re going to operate ourselves. We’re going to get in there, into Thea’s brain, and make it right.
Unless they stop us.
I lift my fingers from the keyboard for a moment, and then drop back onto them, quickly bringing the image back to where Orson left it. Then I straighten away from the computer.
“What on earth was that?” Orson says. “How’d you learn to do that?”
I glance over at Linus, who’s starting to smile.
“It’s just a little trick I picked up in the vault,” I say.
“Did Berg teach you?” Orson says.
“No,” I say. “He never taught me anything but fear.”
I take a deep breath and turn to Burnham, who shakes his head in a dazed way. I know my friends will support me, whatever I want to do. I could wait until later tonight, and sneak back down here, and try this myself after Ma and the others have gone to bed. It could be easier that way, but sneaking around is what I had to do at Forge, and I’m not going to do that anymore.
“I have an idea,” I say. “I’d like to operate on Thea myself. I think, with Orson assisting, I could give her some of my dreams directly. It might help her heal, and it couldn’t hurt.”
Diego’s jaw drops. Tito’s eyebrows shoot up. Madeline lets out a gasp.