“Well … prion diseases are protein-based, I suppose. Spongiform encephalopathies.”
“You mean, like mad cow? Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease? That could explain it. Doesn’t Creutzfeldt-Jacob cause dementia?”
“Yeah, it does, but not like this. CJD doesn’t fit the clinical picture. This”—Spencer tapped the screen with his finger—“is just plain weird. Especially if these things are not entirely organic.” Her MRI was now raising more questions than it was answering. “Maybe something will come up in her blood tests. And the portable EEG.”
“That’s another weird thing about this: the portable EEGs.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, your EEG signal got totally screwed up today. Twice. The first time around”—Raj’s eyes flickered downward, and Spencer heard paper shuffling over the link—“10:00 A.M.”
“That’s when I went to Rita’s OR.”
“Correct. Bad interference. Until you turned it off. And when you turned it back on—”
“—by then I was in Higdon, with you—”
“—it was fine. Until the same thing happened again about three hours later—”
“—when I was visiting Rita in the ER—”
“—and the signal went completely on the fritz again.”
“So … my EEG went haywire whenever I was around Rita?” Spencer asked.
“Correct.”
“Why?”
“High-energy electromagnetic waves interfering with your signal.”
“Where from?”
“From Rita.”
“What?”
“Let me show you what I mean.” Raj reached to his right. A picture of a horizontal squiggly line replaced Rita’s MRI on Spencer’s screen.
“What’s that?” Spencer asked. “Looks like an EEG pattern.”
“It is. Yours. The one your brain was transmitting today.”
“Looks normal.”
“It is. Beta activity predominating. Completely normal.” Spencer expected Raj to make some wiseass comment—like how it was indistinguishable from a chimp’s, or something—but Raj’s tone was somber. “That’s what it looked like throughout most of today. What it should look like. But this is what your EEG looked like when you were in the OR.” The squiggly line degenerated into a mass of scribbles, as if it had been drawn by an angry four-year-old with a black crayon. “All interference. Gibberish.”
Spencer leaned forward. “Huh.”
“And this is what your EEG looked like when you were in the ER, visiting Rita.” The angry scribbles disappeared, and then reappeared. “Interference.”
“Holy shit. The same exact pattern.”
“Yep. And there’s more.” Another EEG pattern appeared on the screen, with black scribbles identical to the first two.
“My EEG again? With interference?”
“No. Rita’s EEG. In real time. The output transmitted from her patch at this very moment.” He paused. “It’s been that way since you put it on her.”
“It’s the same—”
“The same exact interference pattern,” Raj said quietly. “And, whatever is interfering with her EEG signal, and yours, seems to be coming from Rita. Which makes me—well, I wonder if it has something to do with those tiny particles.”
“Holy shit. Yeah.”
“And here’s another thing, Spence: whatever it is, whatever’s coming from Rita, the EEG interferes with it. Cancels it out. Kind of the way noise-canceling headphones work: waves in opposite phase knocking against each other.”
Whenever you’re around, I can’t hear him.
I can’t hear him, Spencer!
“Did anything else happen when you were in the OR?” Raj asked.
“Well … the robot shut down, when I got close. I had to turn off my EEG before it would turn back on.”
“Is the robot wireless?”
“I think so.”
“I bet the EEG blocked the robot’s wireless signal, too.”
Spencer thought of the way his car radio had cut out when he’d put on his EEG patch on the drive to work this morning. He nodded. “So, let me see if I understand what you’re saying: some weird electromagnetic signal is coming from Rita, which is interfering with our EEG.”
“Correct.”
“We don’t know what the signal is, but it may or may not be linked to millions of protein-sized things in her brain.”
“Correct.”
“And the EEG patches are blocking this signal. Canceling it out, like with the surgical robot, or my car radio.”
“Yes.” Raj cocked his head. “So … what do you think?”
Spencer’s palms were slick with sweat. He felt like he was going to throw up, his triumph over being proven right about Rita—
(I knew something was up!)
—trumped by dread.
What the hell is going on?
“I think I need to go back to Turner, Raj.”
Right now.
RITA
Rita had waited until after the night nurse had taken her midnight vitals.