Tanaka leaned forward, put her hands on the reception desk, and smiled gently. “Just for pretend, if it was really important, how would you find her?”
The doctors’ lounge was otherwise empty when she reached it. It was a warm room with indirect lighting and real plants—ferns and ivies—hanging from planters along the walls. Two sofas long enough to sleep on and an automated galley as sophisticated as some she’d seen serve a whole ship.
She didn’t know if the other physicians had been warned away or if Ahmadi had been alone there all along, but when she sat down across from her, Ahmadi’s tea had a little skin of oil across its top where it had cooled, undrunk. The doctor’s gaze swam a little bit as it found its way to Tanaka.
“You’re here,” Ahmadi said.
“I am,” Tanaka agreed, and pushed the little packet with its two pills across the table. “How does this work? Why does it take the edge off the effect?”
Ahmadi nodded. “It reduces activity in the temporoparietal lobes with some antipsychotic effects. It diminishes spontaneous neural firings globally. Whatever is reaching into your mind, I thought it might help you to not respond to it.”
“What else does that? What other drugs? I need a list.”
Ahmadi put out her hand. For a moment, Tanaka didn’t know what she meant by it, then she gave the doctor her terminal. As Ahmadi wrote in it, she spoke. Her voice was soft and hazy.
“When I was an intern, I had a patient with left neglect.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“He had a lesion on his brain that meant he didn’t experience the concept of left. If I asked him to draw a circle, he’d draw the right half. If you had him draw an analog clock face, all the numbers would be crowded onto the right. Left was a thought he just couldn’t have. Like he was colorblind, but for half his perceptual field.”
Tanaka leaned back in her chair. “Are you all right?”
“I always thought about how strange it would be to have that loss. I never thought about how odd we must have been to him. These weird people with twice as much world that he couldn’t conceive of. And he couldn’t. The thoughts you have depend on the brain you have. Change the brain and you change the kinds of thoughts that are possible to think.”
She put the terminal onto the table beside her abandoned tea. It made a scraping sound like a fingernail over skin as she pushed it across. Tanaka didn’t pick it up.
“It happened to you.”
“It did,” Ahmadi said. “I was remembering a tunnel. You were there. Something bad was happening.”
“To Nobuyuki,” Tanaka said. “Whoever the fuck that is.”
“It’s connecting us,” Ahmadi said. “It’s making cross connections between our neurons. Making it so that the electrical impulse of a neuron in one brain can trigger the neuron in another brain to fire. We used to do that with rats, you know? Put an electrode in one rat brain that’s hooked to a radio transmitter. A receiver hooked to another rat in another room. We’d show one the color red, and shock the other. After a while, when the one saw red, the other would flinch even without a shock. ‘Poor man’s telepathy’ we called it.”
“Nothing personal, but your work sounds kind of fucked up.”
“I thought it would be like . . . being with people. Like a dream, but it’s not. It’s being part of an idea that is too big to think. Being one part of a brain that’s so vast and interconnected, it’s not human. It’s made of humans, but that’s not what it is. Not any more than we’re neurons and cells.”
“You still think this is intimate assault?”
“Oh yes,” Ahmadi said. Her voice was low and rich with her conviction. “Yes.”
Tanaka picked up the handheld from the table. A dozen different pharmaceuticals were listed there, with dosage formulas and warnings. Do Not Take on an Empty Stomach. Discontinue if Rash Presents. Avoid if Pregnant. She slapped the handheld onto her wrist and put the two remaining pills into her pocket.
“It’s spreading,” Ahmadi said. “It’s not just the people who were in the ring space with you. It’s spreading out everywhere. Like a contagion.”
“I know.”
“How can it do that?”
Tanaka stood. Ahmadi seemed smaller than she had in their session. Her face was softer than it had been. The voice that had admired her, that had been reminded of his wife, was silent. Or elsewhere. Or blocked by the drugs.