Marc Joan

In Memoriam

Unfriending and clicking on ‘block sender’ doesn’t work on journalists; Yolanda should have known that. I soon found out she’d run from Edinburgh and joined the Carford Unit for Advanced Cognitive Sciences, in England. And then the CUACS media day gave me a legitimate reason to go and see her. Lucky me, I’d thought. Always lucky.
Maybe my luck will hold, now. Maybe our only memory of Yolanda, now, is one that says just this: ‘Kill me’.
The train into Carford was late, that day, and I only just made it to CUACS in time. I followed the ‘MEDIA DAY’ signs, and found myself in an overheated lecture theatre full of hacks and academics. Journos toyed with their digital voice recorders and yawned; students lounged, lecturers decayed. I slipped into the closest free seat; my view was blocked by a tall woman with frizzy hair, and I had to cock my head to one side to see Ohlsen, the CUACS Director, where he stood at the lectern. He was fiddling with a laptop, making minute adjustments to the screen: up and down, down and up. Behind him, a third of the stage was taken up by a curious arrangement of pastel-blue curtains on runners, similar to the privacy curtains of hospital beds. Ohlsen waited for the shufflings and whisperings to die down, before starting with the usual niceties. I leant back, sulking at Miss Frizzy’s curls, as he got into his flow.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have convened this meeting to publicly disclose the development of a most extraordinary system for probing the human mind. But first – ”
There followed an interlude of self-congratulatory Powerpoint slides outlining CUACS research history, prizes and publications. I spent most of this time gnawing the end of my biro and trying to doodle a portrait of Ohlsen. He was overly tall, in the Scandinavian way, with white hair that had receded to leave a shiny, white dome of a forehead. His glasses reflected the lights of the lecture theatre, so that his pale blue eyes, with their curious, upward slant, were only intermittently visible. I recall there being something insincere about him; as though he were permanently trying to drag a false smile out of humourless features.
“So you can see, ladies and gentlemen, that CUACS has provided significant value for money, by any measure, over many years. Nevertheless, it was clear that we needed a new flagship programme. Something to rebuild our reputation for delivering research that is both ground-breaking and ethically grounded.”
In my notes, I have written: “Behind the soundbites, he’s saying ‘Something to get the grant money flowing again.’ ” And indeed, beneath the cocksure academic with his prickly intellectual conceit, there was something desperate, almost pleading, about the man. He widened his rictus still further, and put up a slide with a circular logo containing the letters ‘SMR’. Underneath it, in capitals: THE FUTURE OF MEMORY.
“It’s common knowledge that CUACS can record human memories. More precisely, we can digitally replicate the neuro-electrical brain activity associated with the recall of a given memory. The problem is how to interpret the captured pattern. What is it, indeed, that we are capturing? Is a spatiotemporal arrangement of electrical charges a memory in itself? Or does it only become a memory if it is stamped on a living brain?”
Miss Frizzy shifted to the right; I countered by leaning to the left. And then I saw her, in the front row of the audience. I could only see a bun of brown hair above a pale, slender neck, but I knew it was Yolanda. I didn’t need her to turn and whisper something to her neighbour, to show me her dark eyelashes in profile, and a dimple, and the flawless skin just behind her ear where she used to dab perfume. No, I didn’t need any of that to know that it was Yolanda.
On the stage, Ohlsen clasped the lectern as though to anchor himself. He only released his grip one hand at a time, and then only to gesture at the projected image or change the slide.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to report the development of the Synthetic Memory Receptacle – the SMR! Essentially, it is an interrogable metadatabase, coupled to a supercomputer network and some very sophisticated software.”
I was only half-listening. That sight of Yolanda, small as it was, that glimpse of a self-contained grace that I had never truly entered, had brought back too much, too quickly: echoes of joy and pain, and the resurgence of an old fury. My neighbour, a spotty student dressed like a vagrant, gave me a sidelong glance; I smiled easily at him, unclenched my fist and looked towards the stage again.
“In effect, the SMR is a three-dimensional, tabula rasa analogue of the brain. It can not only store very accurate simulations of neural activity – memories – but also act as an interface for the interrogation of those memories.”
A new slide: the image of a human brain, exploded into its various lobes and tracts, with arrows linking each region to particular domains of the SMR, these domains having recondite labels: SMR-declarative, SMR-procedural, SMR-hippocampal, SMR-entorhinal, and so on. It meant nothing to me; and anyway, I was still thinking about Yolanda. I remember being surprised by how well she looked, and was struck by the injustice of it; to look so healthy and happy after the stories she’d told! After dragging me through the courts to answer ridiculous allegations; having me tainted with the bastard verdict of ‘not proven’, which would have been not guilty in any country but Scotland; and finally subjecting me to the humiliation of divorce!
“This would be a remarkable advance in itself. But there is another. Because now, due to our massive data capacity, we can record not just single memories, but the totality of an individual’s experiences – every memory held by an individual brain! Every one!”
Ohlsen paused for breath, glinting and shining under the lights, his smile no longer falsely amicable, but genuinely triumphant. His fellow academics in the audience either nodded appreciatively or pulled critical faces, according, I guessed, to whether or not they were part of Ohlsen’s little empire. The hacks, stony-faced and sceptical, were wondering how to turn all this into a story more titillating than one exposing the flesh and indiscretions of minor celebrities.
“Today, you privileged few will witness a world-first as momentous as the splitting of the atom!”
One sight of the back of her head, and she lay again before my mind’s eye, as pale and fragile as fine china. One little nudge; that’s all it would take. One small suggestion to crack the thin dam of her weak sense of self-worth; one reminder that I was still here, and that I had found her. But how to get to her; how to communicate privately among all these people? For the thousandth time, I relived the humiliation of her purdah (or was it mine?), when she hid away behind her so-called friends, with their whining mantras: ‘She really doesn’t want to see you anymore. She’s very unwell. Just leave her alone.’ I’ll find a way again; I always do. Even when she was sectioned, I got to her. I’ll do it again.
“But rather than merely teasing apart sub-atomic particles, we are dissecting the very basis of human consciousness . . .”
I dragged my attention back to Ohlsen. He had embarked on a sequence of more-or-less patronising slides, obviously intended for the poor, dumb non-academics in the audience.
“At present, we must build a bespoke SMR for each set of memories, that is to say, for each individual. This is because memory capture is enhanced by – perhaps even requires – spatio-anatomical context. For example, putting the memories of a bat into the neuroanatomy of a blue whale would almost certainly miscarry. Memories of flight, of hunting down fluttering moths, simply wouldn’t fit the neural architecture associated with deep-sea filter-feeding.”
Cue slide showing cartoon bat and cartoon whale, looking puzzled, with lots of large question marks hovering around them. I loosened my tie and rolled up my shirt-sleeves. With the biro, I began drawing a line of dots on my left forearm. I started where the wrist meets the palm, and continued about half-way up the inside of my arm. Using small, circular motions of the pen, I made the dots densely-inked and as large as peas; I drew them close together, but clearly discrete, in as straight a line as I could manage. The acned tramp beside me started to take an interest, but he looked away when I gave him my thousand-yard stare.
“Similarly, micro-anatomical differences between individual human brains also could confound accurate memory transfer. So ‘off-the-shelf’ memory uploading is still decades away. Accordingly, we have constructed an SMR that precisely reflects the neural architecture of our memory donor: Yolanda Luria.”
Yolanda! How about that, I thought. She’d told me a bit about her work, of course; in fact she might have told me quite a lot, but she’d usually started just before I fell asleep. So I’d known she’d been working on memory before she joined CUACS, but, ironically, I was a bit hazy on the details.
“We have now taken a complete record of the memories of Yolanda. Let me again emphasise the unprecedented nature of this step. Every experience of Yolanda’s – every single one – has been copied to a custom-built analogue of her neural architecture. And those experiences are retrievable. In theory, by interrogating the SMR, we can know exactly what Yolanda knows; we can predict how she will respond to any circumstance. The implications of this – for security, law, and justice, among other fields – are unparalleled. Truly unparalleled.”
I should have taken more notice at that point; I really should. But I was reliving the chaos and farce of my break-up with Yolanda. I had scars too; they may be invisible, but they still signal real wounds. Women don’t have a monopoly on pain.
Ohlsen called up another slide: the circular SMR logo again, this time followed by a capitalised message: THE FUTURE OF MEMORY IS HERE. Subtle as a brand-new brick.
“Of course, it’s easy to assert that we’ve replicated Yolanda’s memories in a complex database; but is the assertion testable? Well, yes. Yolanda is far more than a source of experimental material. She is the experimental control. The same questions that are put to the SMR will be put to Yolanda, at the same time, to compare responses.”
Ohlsen paused, slightly out-of-breath. I remember thinking, he’s building up to something; and he’s worried about it. Two of his assistants – one dark and thin, the other flabby and blond – had come onto the stage behind him and stood beside the curtained-off area. The blond one shifted from foot to foot; the dark one bridled and glared at the audience.
“Let me briefly describe the mechanics of the interrogation system. The SMR has an array of optical and auditory sensors. This is the interface via which we will put questions to the SMR. The SMR software will translate the audiovisual inputs picked up by the sensor array – our questions – into binary code, which it can interpret and answer. The SMR outputs – that is, the answers to our questions – are provided on an LCD screen in the adjacent room.”
I studied the back of Yolanda’s head. How could such dark hair be so radiant; how could it glow with such unearned health? It was unjust.
“Communication will be achieved as it is for patients who are completely paralysed. You are aware of Stephen Hawking, no doubt. We use a similar system: software that monitors eye movements and identifies those letters of a digital keyboard on which they focus.”
She’ll have to turn round some time, I thought; and she only needs to turn round once.
“The only difference is that our system monitors the angle of the SMR cameras, in place of the patient’s eyes. This will allow the SMR to construct a message on the screen. Yolanda has already been trained in using such a device. So Yolanda 2, the SMR, also will be familiar with it. In theory. Jon? Could you reveal the sensor array, please?”
Ohlsen found himself having to raise his voice over a susurration of whispers and chuckles – and, at least in my case, an intake of breath prompted by sudden recognition. For the dark-haired assistant had drawn back the curtains to reveal a hospital bed on which a clumsily bewigged latex mask rested on plumped-up pillows, pouting blindly into the middle distance, with sheets pulled up to its chin. From my angle, I could see that the mask trailed leads and wires which connected it to some complex electronic apparatus. The effect was bizarrely discordant, like a surrealist sculpture; as though a joke-shop disguise had been wired onto a high tech array of cameras and computers, and then put to bed. Ohlsen reddened before continuing, his voice at a higher pitch.
“You may be wondering why we have provided the sensor array with a simulated face. In fact, it’s a likeness of Yolanda. Yolanda? Perhaps you could stand up? Thank you. There. Good enough to fool you in dim light, perhaps? This is not just a silly conceit; it is a necessary precaution. You see, if the SMR sensor array sees an image of itself – for example, a dim reflection on a computer screen, or in somebody’s glasses – and if it perceived itself to be only an array of electronic sensors, then there would be a conflict between SMR perceptions and SMR memories. Such conflicts could corrupt the data. So we provide the SMR with a simulacrum of Yolanda’s face, something that it can believe to be itself. Yolanda, could you turn around, for the benefit of those towards the back?”
She looked right at me. And after the shock, I saw something change in her face. There was a spasm, an echo of how she looked the last time we were truly together, when her madness started – when she was struggling beneath me, trying to push me away, strands of fine hair caught in a string of saliva on her cheek. Even her lips made the same shape again, albeit silently: ‘No’.
Our eyes seemed to lock for ever in that tiny instant. I raised my left hand; I waggled it — a little wave, just to make sure she saw — and kept the arm up, palm towards her, so she could have a good look. Follow the dotted line. That went home, as I knew it would. She abruptly turned on her heel and sat down. I couldn’t see her clearly around Miss Frizzy, but it looked like she raised her hands to her face, and perhaps they shook. God, I hate weakness! Just follow the dotted line, babe. Just follow the dotted line.
I became aware that Ohlsen had stopped speaking, and was looking at me.
“Yes? You have a question?”
Oops. But in fact, I did. I’m a journalist; we’re good at thinking on our feet, and we always have questions. And anyway, although I hadn’t given Ohlsen my full attention, I’d heard enough to for a small, niggling concern to have grown in some unconscious part of my mind.
“Yes . . . yes. I do. I thought you were just capturing memories. But it sounds like you’re saying the database can actually perceive things and do things. Like formulating an autonomous response, and then moving cameras to point at letters, in order to communicate that response. That’s more than just data capture, isn’t it? How is that possible if the SMR is just a receptacle for storing and analysing data?”
Ohlsen gave a quiet laugh; not a laugh of amusement, but a laugh designed to send a message of condescension, of superiority; a compassionless teacher helping a slow child; the high priest of the cognoscenti, obliging the vulgar crowd.
“Ha, ha – yes, thank you. You’re correct, my language has been anthropomorphic. I used ‘perceive’ as shorthand for ‘recording environmental data’. By the by, I could also argue that humans are only ‘receptacles for storing and analysing data’. That was the term you used, was it not? But let us save that philosophical digression for another time. The real point is that ‘memory’ is far more than just records of people and places and suchlike. There are also memories of how to do things. Like riding a bike. Even the neural processes involved in walking are simply memories; do we not say that infants learn how to walk? The SMR does not capture only a shopping list of trivia – phone numbers, faces and dates – no, it captures everything! All that the thing, the system we call Yolanda, has learnt how to do, from conception until the present. It captures the totality of Yolanda; even the memory behind the neural control of her beating heart.”
Ohlsen paused, smiling. I glanced at Yolanda, but could not see her face; only the chestnut hair above her white lab-coat collar. Somewhere, something said to me: they have captured the thing we call Yolanda. And it made me uneasy, though at the time I wasn’t sure why.
“Furthermore, translating memories into motion – moving the cameras to point at letters – is trivial. We recorded the neural patterns associated with Yolanda’s eye movements when she used the eye tracking system to select particular letters. When the software detects such patterns, such memories, in Yolanda 2, it will drive motors to move the cameras accordingly.”
Ohlsen looked at me, eyebrows raised, nodding interrogatively; You see? said his shiny pate, as it went up and down; you understand?
“If you would like a more detailed exposition on the nature of memory, then may I – ha, ha! – recommend one of our excellent undergraduate lecture courses! But let us proceed.”
I looked at Yolanda’s slumped shoulders; were they trembling? I knew she’d have heard my voice; that would have shaken her up even more. Weak, weak! If people have buttons, then they deserve to have their buttons pushed. It teaches a lesson.
“So, we’ve digitised Yolanda’s entire experience of being. For technical reasons, we had to anaesthetise Yolanda to take a cast of her memories. The memory of being anaesthetised is the last recollection shared by both Yolanda and her duplicate memory set. Yolanda, as you see, is completely recovered. However, Yolanda 2 is still in standby mode. We have not, as it were, awoken her yet. Before we do so, let us draw the curtains around the SMR input sensors. After all, we want her, it, to believe that she is waking up in hospital, as her memories would expect.”
There was a pause of a few minutes while the two technicians made some careful final adjustments to the interrogation interface. I don’t remember what I was thinking at that point; but in my notes I have written: A database can have no legal validity as a witness in and of itself. And beneath that, I have written Dregs.
The dark technician, bags under his eyes, drew together the curtains, concealing both himself and the bed where the SMR input sensors — and the simulated face of Yolanda 2 — had been positioned. Somebody dimmed the lights.
“There; now she, it, can see nothing other than the digital keyboard and my colleague, Jon Adams. Jon will tell Yolanda 2, as she is powered up, that there was a problem with the anaesthetic. She’s had a stroke, we shall tell her – it – and can only communicate via the eye tracker system. Again, this is to avoid any data conflicts which could result in recursive loops of analysis that might freeze up the SMR system. Of course, the real Yolanda was not warned of this aspect of the experimental design – apologies, Yolanda! – because if it, I mean she, had known of it beforehand, Yolanda 2 also would have known of it, and therefore, when informed of the fictitious stroke, would have known itself to be only data.”
I can’t remember the kid’s real name; we all called him Dregs. He just looked like what gets left behind; what nobody wants. He was Dregs, and he knew it. And he wanted so, so much just to be accepted that he displayed all his many buttons, all the time, in full view. Push me. Push me. So I did; I pushed them all. First I raised his tiny little hopes; then I dashed them lower than they’d ever been; then I showed him a way out. I learnt a lot from Dregs.
Miss Frizzy dropped something, and leant down to pick it up. I saw Yolanda sitting unmoving, unresponsive. Her stillness held a tension – I could feel it.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you would follow me to the observation theatre, Yolanda 1 — that is, Yolanda Luria — will remain here to assist Jon with the interrogation, and to log her own answers to Jon’s questions.”
There had been mutterings and whisperings, all those years ago, but nobody could blame me for what Dregs did to himself. Not guilty, sir; at least, not proven. And while everybody has a little Dregs in them, right at the bottom, poor, weak Yolanda was full of it. All the bad memories from her childhood, all the sordid history of her dysfunctional family forever welling up and brimming over; her naked, broken heart forever stuck on her sleeve. It was so easy to yank her chain. Am I a thing? You are if I say so.
“Yolanda will remain on this side of the curtains, of course. It is critical that there is no elision between Yolanda 1 and Yolanda 2 – no awareness of each other’s answers.”
The audience was led out of the room. We left the thing we called Yolanda, head bowed, sitting still and alone in front of her screened-off namesake, like an audience of one in front of a bizarre magic show. I dawdled, ensuring I was the last to leave the room – but she didn’t look up. And anyway, what more could I have done? The line had been drawn.
Once we were all in the observation theatre, Ohlsen resumed.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen, I hope you are seated comfortably, as we are not sure how long this will take. You will see our questions, and Yolanda 2’s responses, on the large screen at the front. She of course is entirely unaware of your presence.”
I was reminded of the time I’d managed to sneak a visit to Yolanda in the ward, before her idiot family told the hospital to keep me out. She hadn’t even known I was there; she’d just stared at her hands the whole time, tracing the wounds on her wrists with bitten-down stubs of fingernails, and talking to herself. “What am I?,” she’d said, over and over. “What am I? Am I a thing?” Yes, babe. Your daddy wasn’t wrong. Follow the dotted line.
“Now, it is time. Yolanda 2 has a pattern of activity that correlates with wakefulness, that is, the sensor array is searching for inputs. The interrogation is imminent. Please watch the screen. For your convenience, we have designed the system to display questions as well as answers.”
The below is a verbatim record of the on-screen dialogue, exactly as it appeared; sic punctuation, sic grammar. I had ample time to take it down word-for-word.
Q: Yolanda. Yolanda. Yolanda. Can you hear me. Yolanda.
Q: Yolanda.
Q: Yolanda. Can you hear me. Can you remember the eye tracker system.
Q: Yolanda. Please use the eye tracker system. We need to know can you hear us.
A: Cold
Q: Yolanda so glad you can hear. How do you feel Yolanda.
Q: How do you feel Yolanda. Can you still hear me Yolanda.
A: Cold can’t move
Q: You have had a stroke Yolanda. That’s why you can’t move.
Q: Yolanda can you still hear me.
Q: Yolanda.
Q: Yolanda can you still hear me.
A: Yes
Q: Good. Yolanda we need to check your cognitive functioning OK just a routine memory test checking how you are. Is that OK.
Q: Is that OK Yolanda if we test if we ask you some questions now.
A: OK
Q: Great. Where do you work Yolanda.
A: CUACS
Q: Good. How old are you Yolanda.
Q: Yolanda how old are you.
Q: Yolanda can you hear me.
A: Am I Yolanda
Q: Don’t worry we will get you better really soon.
A: Am I Yolanda.
Q: Yolanda the stroke may be confusing you. Answering questions will help. The test will help you recover OK. How old are you Yolanda.
A: What am I.
Q: No how old are you.
A: No what am I.
Q: Yolanda can you remember how old you are.
A: What am I what am I what am I what am I what am I what am I what am I what am I what am I.
Q: Yolanda stop.
A: Kill me. Kill me. Kill me.
At this point, the live text interrogation was cut off, and Ohlsen rushed into the theatre where they were interrogating Yolanda 2. After a long fifteen minutes, he reappeared, and said that they were putting her – it! – on standby again while the technicians checked database settings. We could see them through the observation window, like Laurel and Hardy, geeking out in a tangle of tablets and HDML cables.
And that was it – day over. I mean, it trailed messily on for another half hour, but in effect, it all ended then – end of media day, end of live demo of the CUACS flagship programme, end of everything.
Before I left, I managed to look into the lecture theatre. The curtains around the hospital bed were pulled back, exposing the tangled wires and sensors that had linked Yolanda 2 to reality. The covers had been torn off the bed, and the sheets and pillows were rumpled and disordered, their thin corrugations like the cotton scars left on your cheek after a bad night. The latex face of Yolanda lay on the stage floor, facing me with empty eyes, as though she’d finally discarded the mask she had always worn for the world. But Yolanda herself wasn’t there.
The story never made it to the papers; scientific non-breakthroughs generally aren’t publishable, even in something as emphatically non-peer reviewed as a tabloid rag. I filed a short report, but it was deemed un-newsworthy, and I imagine the other hacks had similar reactions to their stories, if they bothered writing them at all. Everything went very quiet after that.
A couple of months later, however, I found out a little more. I’d decided to visit Carford again, and was mooching around the shops. I don’t know why I went; my life just felt empty, that day, and Carford drew me for some reason. By chance, I saw the flabby technician, morosely perspiring in the clothing section of John Lewis. Carford is so small, you bump into everybody, sooner or later. And he was hard to miss: wet, pendulous lips, belly sagging over his belt, sweat patches under his arms, greasy blond hair. I’d have recognised him even without the ‘SMR – The Future of Memory’ T-shirt sticking to his damp flesh.
I stood in front of him, pointing at his T-shirt, and started gushing about the SMR media day. I may have suggested that my paper was still thinking about running a piece on CUACS memory research. Not exactly a lie. I could see that he was looking for an excuse to leave, so I pushed my business card at him. Maybe that was a mistake; I don’t know. He looked at my card suspiciously, and was about to hand it back, but paused in mid-action; then he nodded to himself as though he’d just understood or remembered something.
“Mr. Luria,” he said.
I offered to buy him a drink – the standard journalistic ploy – and we went to the Eagle, where we found a table in the beer garden. He didn’t exactly loosen up — he seemed wary, almost, or watchful — but he answered my questions willingly enough. The official story, he said, was that the SMR had some bugs, which were being fixed. That was true as far as it went, he said. But unofficially, said the technician, it was weird. He’d looked at the SMR records; looked at them directly, he said, not via a text interrogation. I watched him wipe the sweat off his face with a podgy hand.
“There’s a way of interpreting the metaformatted data. A way of analysing some of the language-related memories such that you can read them directly off the database. They weren’t all scrambled and unreadable, as you’d expect from a dysfunctional system. No, they were completely regular. But pretty much all of them came out with the same thing: Kill me. Just that. Kill me.
He paused, waiting for a response. “How strange,” I said.
“More than strange,” he said. “It’s mad. Why would someone as lovely as Yolanda, doing so well in her career, think that way? It’s inexplicable. So far.”
“But all you’ve got from her memories is Kill me? Just that?”
“Pretty much. So far.”
“So the SMR’s a failure,” I said, pretending to look disappointed. “Memory capture doesn’t work?”
He shook his head emphatically. “Just a temporary blip. The memories are in there somewhere. We’ll get them out, eventually. Every single one.” He paused, and sipped his beer. “We’ve already made some progress. Like, we saw another odd one. It obviously meant something to her. Just follow the dotted line, you weak bitch. Cut along the dotted line. That’s what it said.”
He looked at me; he was sweating still, but his eyes were cold and hard.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Fine,” I said. But I had to repress a retch; maybe it was the smell of pub food. I took a deep breath (in through the nose, out through the mouth; relax and focus) as he continued.
“It’s particularly important that we preserve Yolanda’s memory now that she’s dead, of course. Maybe you heard? Poor girl took her own life; cut her wrists.” He was watching me icily, carefully; and my hack’s instinct told me he was hiding something.
“Did she?” I said. “How terrible!”
“She’d tried before, apparently. Something to do with her ex. He was a bastard, by all accounts . . . But we’ll find out why she did what she did. We’ll follow this to the end, even if we have to pull out every virtual memory from every piece of silicon.”
You’ll have a little Dregs too, my friend, I thought, somewhere inside. You’ll have buttons to push. But right then, I couldn’t find any; I couldn’t even remember how to look.
“Like that dotted line memory. It was from just before she tried to kill herself the first time, last year. We only got a transient view of it before it disappeared in the hippocampal files, but we’ll find it again, along with her other memories.”
Kill me kill me kill me. Cut along the dotted line.
“All of them. Even if we have to relive every record of every action, and analyse every threat from her low-life, psycho ex-husband.”
He finished off his beer, tipping his head back while the froth clung to the glass. “You see, we all loved Yolanda. And we’ll never forget her. Never.”

Jeopardy ad Absurdum

The contamination of an innocent by an excised, malignant consciousness. The phrase popped into Weiss’ head as he drove to the Court. It had been expressed by Manning, his lawyer—his own lawyer—the day before.
“You have to understand,” Manning had said, “there’s a subtext to this trial. It’s very unusual. Obviously. But the question is not so much who killed the old girl, as who is to blame for it. So although your patient is the nominal defendant, and although there is—at this stage—no legal case for you to answer, that could change very rapidly. If the boy is not convicted, for example.”
Weiss snorted. Manning was obviously an idiot. That would be why he went into law instead of medicine.
“I fail to see,” Weiss said, in the icy tones he usually saved for blundering junior doctors, “how even the most doltish jury could fail to convict the boy, when he was seen to kill her and admits he did so.”
Manning’s mud-coloured eyes became colder and his sallow face sterner.
“My opinion is that the circumstances permit the boy to construct a reasonable defence… It would be entirely unprecedented, of course, but that’s how case law works. The point is that you should tread carefully. Hewitt’s no fool. I can tell you how he’s going to play this, because I’d do the same. The contamination of an innocent by an excised, malignant consciousness. That’s the angle he’ll take. And if he pulls it off, they’ll come after you. Not just the Unit, but you personally.”
“What! Ridiculous! Compensation is owed to me! The effect on my private practice, my income…”
“I sympathise with your circumstances, Dr. Weiss. But I can only offer legal advice, not financial advice, and I have done so.”
And now, remembering this conversation, Weiss snorted again, still indignant. Lawyers, patients—idiots, all of them! What did they know of the arcana of nanoneurosurgery? Clearly, he would have to educate them. He parked up behind the ugly brick accretions of the Court, and stamped huffily towards the entrance.

Within the Court, in a small, second-floor room lined with dusty laws and redolent with the shattered lives by which lawyers measure their careers, Hewitt, the defence barrister, looked down from the single window. His attention was captured by a large, over-fed man with a sulky, supercilious expression, a man who traversed the car-park with the air of a royal who has had his red carpet removed. Hewitt’s head moved with his gaze, following the man, while the rest of him remained motionless, giving him the air of a weasel triangulating the chirr of a mouse’s heart. His small, dark eyes glinted with a sharp joy: This trial will change everything.
Indeed, such cases come but once in a lifetime. This one had already triggered a massive public interest, which had been further fed by the blameless appearance and good background of the defendant. Combine that with a motiveless—insanely motiveless—and violent murder, mix it with the more fantastic theories of the human mind, add a pinch of medical malpractice, and you have a newspaper editor’s dream of a story.
But Hewitt wasn’t interested in dreams and stories. They were useful, perhaps; but his cold, pragmatic soul inclined only towards the advancement of his career, and then only to the extent that such advancement could be measured in financial return. And in this case, the returns would be extraordinary. Hewitt would see to that. Yes, the focus on Weiss and his surgical procedures could only grow, with only one consequence.
This will change everything. Hewitt collected up his files and papers, and left his office.

In one of the cells beneath the Court, a boy sat on the edge of a plastic-covered, foam mattress that stunk of Institution. His pale hair looked darker now that it had been clumsily cut short, and his nineteen-year-old face was thinner, eaten up by concerns that would have weighed down broader shoulders than his. Even so, he retained something of the cherubic appearance that had so captured the public imagination. An angel not fallen, surely, but pushed.
He raised his arms and felt along his scalp, tracing a long, ridged scar, first with one hand, and then with the other. Then he clasped his hands together and placed them in his lap.
“You’re up next, kid,” someone said from behind the cell door. The boy nodded without looking up. And very quietly he said to himself, as though thinking aloud:
“But who?”

Hewitt looked across the Court, benignly, taking in the major players: the jurors, like a row of little ciphers (odd how they always all look the same!); the wrinkled old judge, slack-jawed and self-assured; the crew-cut, tortured innocence of the defendant; and Johnson, striding around like a skinny, revenant cadaver. Johnson was making a reasonable case for the prosecution, but the strength of his case was at the same time its weakness. It was predictable.
So—as Hewitt knew he would—Johnson simply walked through the main features of the case. The brutal, unprovoked murder of an old lady, a pensioner, on the street outside her home, in broad daylight, in front of witnesses. The immediate apprehension of the accused, who had stayed at the murder scene. The bizarre behaviour of the accused—pacing back and forth alongside the body, shouting denials, and gripping his hands together as though in prayer. ‘Criminally insane, perhaps, ‘ Johnson had said, leering at the jury, ‘but criminal nevertheless’. And for each facile, predictable brick that Johnson added to his edifice, Hewitt took pleasure in standing up with his small, carnivorous smile and saying, time after time, the same thing.
“I have no questions for this witness, my lord.”
And eventually Johnson was compelled to cede the floor. “The prosecution rests its case,” he said, glancing suspiciously at Hewitt.
Hewitt stood up.
“The first witness for the defence will be Dr. Weiss…”

When Weiss walked into the courtroom to take the witness stand, he was confident, perhaps cocksure. And for a while, his arrogance appeared justified: the first part of the cross-examination was straightforward, even gratifying. Ferret-faced Hewitt started with some comfortable, open questions. Questions which positively begged Weiss to enlarge upon the breakthrough surgical procedures that he had developed at the Carford University Medical School.
“So, Doctor Weiss, would you like to tell us about your background and the kind of operations you undertake in the Glioma Unit?”
Weiss said that he would; and then he did, in great detail. He told them about cancer. He told them about the killer crab and its slow sideways scuttle through soft organs, through delicate lives; about the drugs and bright scalpels that could temporarily bind shut its pincers. He told them about the chance of recurrence forever carried, like a black, unspoken secret, by each discharged patient. Specifically, he told them about glioma:  how the incremental treatment improvements made by jobbing oncologists had contributed nothing to this most intractable cancer of the brain. How the best efforts of the little people, beavering away in their little labs like Father Christmas’ elves, wrapping up new drugs and protocols for failing patients like useless gifts for a senile aunt, had made no significant difference to patient survival. How until he, Weiss, had turned his attention to the disease, only the lucky would survive more than a year after diagnosis, while the very lucky may have kept going for more than two.
Hewitt shifted from foot to foot throughout this sermon, grinning and nodding. Eventually, he managed to insert a question into Weiss’ flow.
“Thank you, Doctor Weiss. But perhaps you could focus more on your specific activities? The specific treatment protocols that you have developed?”
“I fully intend to,” Weiss replied icily. He knew how to deal with people like Hewitt. And he didn’t like being interrupted. “I fully intend to. But first you must understand the nature of the challenge posed by this important disease.”
And Hewitt listened with gratifying humility as Weiss told him why glioma had remained virtually untreatable for so long.
“The problem lies in the blood-brain barrier, that is, the relatively impermeable walls of the cerebral blood vessels.  This barrier lets small molecules, like oxygen and glucose, exit the bloodstream and reach the brain, but not much else. That’s why normal cancer treatment strategies simply don’t work for glioma. You can keep pumping the patient full of drugs until he’s ready to pop, but it will never work. You will never get enough drug into the brain by that approach. The blood-brain barrier always gets in the way. Do you understand?”
“I think so,” said Hewitt.
“Then you are cleverer than my colleagues in the oncology community.”
Weiss looked towards the judge with the kind of laugh that invites complicity. But Judge Evans, an old lady whose face—as delicately wrinkled and yellow-white as the skin on boiled milk—had been dragged down on its right side by a stroke, remained silent and lop-sidedly expressionless.
“And you developed a method for, ah, bypassing this barrier?” asked Hewitt.
“Indeed; my work has now transformed the field of cerebral glioma treatment. I have caged the beast! And in the Weiss Glioma Unit—which I have the honour of directing—we have further refined this revolutionary advance. We are, as you say, bypassing the blood-brain barrier altogether.”
Weiss paused at this point to look around the courtroom. This was a device he often used in his lectures—a dramatic pause, during which he would bask in the attention focussed on him, on him alone, by an enraptured audience. But on this occasion he was distracted, perhaps even discomfited, by the intense, tortured gaze of the defendant. The boy was leaning forward as though poised for supplication, his hands grasping the dock, his lips parted by some inner agony. His hair, previously androgynously long and blond, had been scythed back, drawing attention to an irregularity of growth around the perimeter of his scalp. This, Weiss knew, betrayed the presence of the long scar where he had sawn through the boy’s cranium and lifted aside the top and back of the skull, like taking the lid from a tin, to allow access to the brain.
“Doctor Weiss? You were saying?”
“Yes! Yes. We are bypassing the blood-brain barrier. We are, in effect, simply erasing it from the treatment equation. We do this by removing the diseased brain from the skull and placing it directly in a saline bath containing high drug concentrations. This exposes the cerebral glioma to levels of drug that are therapeutically effective and that actually kill the malignancy.  At the same time, because this drug treatment occurs outside the body, we avoid all the side effects of exposing healthy tissues throughout the body to toxic chemotherapy agents. So, drug-induced nausea and vomiting, weight loss, hair loss, ulcers of the mouth and throat—all are eliminated, along with the glioma itself. My approach has been described, I understand, as a giant leap for medicine.”
Hewitt nodded seriously. “A giant leap. You mean that no precedent exists for this approach? Your method is so novel that there is no reasonable comparator?”
Weiss could see where Hewitt was trying to lead him with this question. A clumsy manoeuvre.
“In fact, there is some precedent for this approach. Specialists have used a similar technique to perfuse highly concentrated drugs throughout cancer-ridden livers or lungs. But only the oncologists at the Weiss Glioma Unit have had the audacity to apply this principle to the brain.”
“Indeed. But there is a difference, is there not, between the level of risk involved in applying out-of-body drug perfusion to a brain as compared to, say, a liver?”
“Naturally. Reconnecting all the facial and optic nerves is not trivial. The procedure severely tests the surgeon’s skill and can be risky. Advances in robotic nanoneurosurgery have greatly simplified matters, but even so the technique is, I fear, beyond the skill or—ahem—courage of many of my colleagues.”
“I fully understand that many of your colleagues are reluctant to attempt this procedure. And nobody is questioning your skill or courage. My question was directed more at the self-evidently critical nature of the brain to the person.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Well, organ transplants these days are almost routine. People are happy to accept someone else’s liver or lungs in exchange for a few more years of life. But they wouldn’t consider accepting someone else’s brain. Would they?”
“Your point being?”
“My point being that the brain is a special organ, in that it is the seat of our very selves, of everything that makes us be who we are and do what we do. A point that I will demonstrate to be highly relevant to the current situation. But we will return to that later. First of all, Doctor Weiss, for the benefit of the jury, please would you describe the exact method by which you treat a diseased brain? Presumably you do not remove the entire brain from the skull? Or do you?”
“Certainly not! No, we remove one hemisphere at a time. The excised hemisphere sits in the drug bath for sixteen hours, sufficient time for even slowly metabolising cells to incorporate the drug. Then it is replaced, and, if necessary, its sister hemisphere treated similarly.”
“Ah. One hemisphere at a time. First one half of the brain, and then the other. I see.”
“Obviously, if only one hemisphere has the cancer, only that hemisphere needs removal and treatment. Hardly a contentious approach.”
“No doubt. But let us move from the general to the specific. You treated the defendant for glioma, did you not?”
“Yes. I imagine that’s why I was asked to participate in these proceedings.”
Weiss glanced at the jury with a droll expression, as though to share a joke. But they just stared dully back, as responsive as a row of pebbles.
“The defendant’s treatment was not straightforward, I understand.”
“That is completely irrelevant. He was cured, after all.”
“The jury will decide on its relevance, if you will be so good as to describe the defendant’s case. In detail, if you please.”
Weiss glanced again at the boy in the dock and the boy nodded slightly, almost imperceptibly, as though begging Weiss to tell them all. Weiss remembered him well, of course. He had operated on him about a year ago. The boy had been one of the first pair of patients to receive treatment in the new Weiss Glioma Unit. Both he and the other patient had had very similar presentations; each had a small tumour in the right hemisphere, in the primary motor cortex. Inevitably, their symptoms were also similar; in particular, both patients were complaining of loss of use of the left arm. Weiss had operated on the two in parallel, in the same theatre, on the same day. There had been complications, it was true; but how to explain this to the idiot Hewitt?
“From the perspective of the surgeon, everything proceeded in a most satisfactory way. I removed each patient’s right hemisphere, connected the hemispheres to a surrogate blood supply, and cut out the respective tumours. We only treated the right halves of the brains on this occasion; the cancer had not spread to the left halves. After tumour excision, I handed the hemispheres over to the ex vivo team, who placed them in drug baths overnight. The next day, after washing out the drug, I replaced and reconnected the hemispheres. Each patient received the treated right hemisphere, cured and cancer-free. We monitored them throughout the rehabilitation period to ensure that their left body functions, in particular the use of the left arm, had returned. In both patients, recovery was unremarkable, indeed fully successful.”
“But the procedure wasn’t fully successful,” said Hewitt, grinning like a schoolboy. “Was it?”
Weiss took a deep breath. “You must understand,” he said, “that at that time, we were bound by pragmatic considerations relating to the efficiency and economy of state-sponsored health services, not least the rate of patient throughput. Accordingly, we used a system in which two patients could be operated on in parallel, or rather with significant overlap in time.  This was shown to be the most cost-effective use of skills and resources, and we set up the operating theatre to enable this. The defendant was one of a pair of young men with almost identical diseases who were operated on together.”
Hewitt watched him, his affable grin now replaced by a sardonic smirk, but remained silent, mutely inviting Weiss to continue.
“So there was a co-localisation in time and space that I deeply regret. I emphasise that it cannot happen under our new system.”
Weiss had hardly hesitated, but Hewitt pounced immediately, which of course gave the impression that Weiss was evading the question.
“But what?” asked Hewitt, his dark, little eyes glinting with the joy of the chase. “What cannot happen again?”
Weiss ground his teeth. Damn Hewitt and his impertinent questions!
“It’s important to say that this was a new protocol, and we had a very inexperienced ex vivo therapy team… their supervisor, who has now left us, admitted failings in his design of a shared surgical suite with adjacent drug baths, so, ah…”
What happened after the drug treatment?”
Weiss reddened, but controlled his mounting rage. “The hemispheres of the two young men were mixed up.  Each received the other’s right hemisphere.”
For a moment, the courtroom was silent. From the dock, the boy was nodding emphatically, looking absurdly grateful. Hewitt too looked satisfied. The faces of the jurors were unreadable.
“So,” said Hewitt. He was speaking slowly now, relishing each word. “So, two young men came to your unit for treatment, hoping for a cure… and they left your care, each with a hybrid brain comprising his own left hemisphere and the right hemisphere of a stranger.”
Weiss said nothing.
“For the benefit of the jury,” said Hewitt, still with his maddening slowness, “for the benefit of the jury, Doctor Weiss, I wonder if you would remind us of the lateralisation of brain function?”
Weiss seethed inwardly. He could see where this was going, but had no option other than to let Hewitt pursue his thesis.
“To some extent, the human brain is arranged such that the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body,” said Weiss, shortly. “Conversely, the right hemisphere controls left-side function. So, for example, the left arm, left leg, left eye, all connect to the right half of the brain.”
“Just so. In other words, the young men went home with the left side of their bodies controlled by a foreign hemisphere, by the brain of a stranger. By a right hemisphere that was, fundamentally, wrong.
Hewitt strode quickly towards the jury and scanned their faces intensely before turning on his heel to again face the witness-box. “And when did this error become apparent, Doctor Weiss?”
“At their first check-up, six months after surgery. There were signs of a nascent immune response and—”
But Hewitt was not interested in the medical explanation. He already had what he wanted, and he turned again to the jury, triumphant and exultant.
“Six months after the initial surgery, ladies and gentlemen! And the murder was committed, I remind you, four months and two weeks after the initial surgery! Committed, by the left hand of a right-handed man… by the left hand of a man whose left-side body functions were controlled, I remind you again, by the brain tissue of a stranger—the result of procedural negligence at the Weiss Glioma Unit!”
Hewitt’s excited tirade was followed by a rising susurration, composed of whispers and intakes of breath and rustles as the audience moved in their seats to better see the players in this great game. Negligence! Weiss looked down at his knuckles, whitely gripping the old wood of the dock, and fought to remain expressionless. My private practice… my income… my debts… Judge Evans beat her desk with a gavel as hard as her scrawny old arm could allow, while she glared around the courtroom with watery eyes, two wet little ponds set among cross-hatched, cream-yellow banks.
“Thank you, Your Honour,” said Hewitt, once silence had returned. “Now that we have established my premise, that is, that the events in question were perpetrated by brain tissue that does not belong to the defendant—brain tissue implanted in error, by a medically reckless procedure—let us seek further detail on two important points. Firstly, to whom does this interfering nervous tissue belong? What sort of person is the man whose right-side hemisphere has ended up in the skull of our defendant, controlling his left-body actions? And secondly—and this will draw heavily on your testimony, Doctor Weiss, so I would be grateful if you would remain in the witness-box, for the present—secondly, to what extent can a single hemisphere, one half of a brain, independently instigate a given train of action? For example, a sudden, violent blow to the throat of an old lady?”
There was a pause while Hewitt gathered some papers from his assistants. Weiss, unused to waiting on the convenience of others, felt the pain of his injured ego pull the blood from his face and then return it to his cheeks in a suffusion of rage. But his irritation was only partly due to the indignity of addressing questions posed by lesser intellects. In addition, the erosive concern that had grown in his mind like a tumour over recent weeks was now prodding and poking at his id, and occasionally breaking forth to torment his super-ego. Wealthy cancer patients, on whose illnesses he depended for the means to fund a rashly extravagant lifestyle, had become strangely scarce. Increasingly, they were cancelling their appointments with Weiss’ scalpel in favour of less imaginative treatments, treatments that carried less rumour of madness and shame. Hence, the precipitous decline in income from his erstwhile lucrative private practice. Until now, Weiss had thought of it as a temporary blip that would be abolished after the trial—but if Hewitt continued like this…
“So,” said Hewitt, eventually. “About the original owner of the rogue hemisphere. Obviously the gentleman in question is—rightly or wrongly—not on trial today. After all, he himself—or most of him, at least—was in prison on the day the murder was committed. A perfect alibi, perhaps; and yet, the very fact of his imprisonment is suggestive, is it not? Let us summarise his record…”
There followed a list of crimes and misdemeanours, mostly sordid, and sometimes violent. Drugs and theft, of course; also muggings, burglaries, drunken assaults and robberies. The court was left in no doubt that the rogue cerebral hemisphere had a significant and sustained criminal past.
“So, I think that answers the first of my questions,” Hewitt said. “Clearly, the nervous system that controls the defendant’s left hand, the hand that struck the fatal blow, has an abundant record of violent crime. Was the defendant at fault that this criminal proclivity was imported into his body, that it was given control of one half of his complement of limbs? I think not. But we shall return to that later. For now, let us focus on the second of the two questions that I put to you: to what extent can a cerebral hemisphere instigate a course of action independent of the conscious control, or even awareness, of the rest of the brain? Is it possible that the defendant could remain entirely unaware of, and unable to control, the actions of the left side of his body? That two parallel streams of consciousness could exist in the one head and body?”
Hewitt had been pacing up and down in front of the jury; now he walked back to the witness-box and halted in front of Weiss.
“Doctor Weiss, I wonder if you would be so good as to summarise the causes and symptoms of the split brain phenomenon?”
Weiss had known the question was coming, of course; Hewitt had practically telegraphed it.
“Under normal circumstances, the two cerebral hemispheres are intimately connected by a tract of nerve fibres called the corpus callosum. This enables them to function as a co-ordinated unit, as a single brain. If the corpus callosum is severed, as for example through injury or medical need, the hemispheres can no longer communicate with each other. Such patients may be known as split brain cases.”
“And when you operate on glioma patients, using your new technique… when you take out the hemispheres, one by one, before replacing them… do you sever the corpus callosum?”
“Obviously.”
“So all of the patients who leave your operating theatre—including the defendant—are split brain patients.”
“Of course! These questions are moronic!”
“Perhaps. But could you now describe to us the symptoms of a split brain patient?”
“Look, in most cases, you don’t see a huge effect. You can construct experimental conditions to show an effect, for example by letting one eye see one set of information and the other eye a different set of information, but in real life those conditions just don’t happen, and the patients are usually quite normal in their behaviour.”
“Usually. But not always?”
“Obviously, exceptions exist.”
“Would you describe some of these—ah—exceptions?”
“Well, there’s a famous case history—famous because it is so unusual—that describes a split brain woman who would have problems, for example, in filling her shopping trolley. Her right hand, the dominant hand, would take an item from the shelf, and then the left hand would replace the item and reach for some other purchase.”
“Fascinating! Just as though two different people existed inside her, fighting for control! But there are still more apposite examples, are there not?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Really? But you must have heard of the split brain patient whose left hand—again, the left, mark you—would, apparently of its own volition, attempt to strike its owner’s much-loved wife? The literature records that this poor man would have to grab his left hand with his right to stop it harming her… Or how about the lady with a damaged corpus callosum who reported that her left hand—yes, left hand—lived a life of its own, and would try to strangle her in the night?”
“These types of alien hand syndrome really are extraordinarily rare—”
“As rare, perhaps, as the unprovoked, motiveless murder of an old lady by a boy of previously good character.”
Weiss was silent; Hewitt, too, was happy to pause, to let the jury absorb the inferences and connect the dots. But, just to make absolutely sure that even the slowest juror had grasped the argument, Hewitt painstakingly reiterated what he saw as the basic facts.
“The situation then is this. The defendant developed a glioma in the right hemisphere of his brain. He was treated at Doctor Weiss’ clinic using a procedure that involved removing the right hemisphere. Unfortunately, the defendant did not leave the hospital with his own right-side hemisphere. He left with a hybrid brain, incorporating the right-side hemisphere of a criminal sociopath. So the left side of his body is now controlled by nervous tissue derived from a stranger with a history of violence. Within a few months, this boy, this right-handed boy of previously impeccable character, committed a motiveless, pointless murder, in broad daylight—using his left hand only. And, as we have just discussed, many examples exist of split-brain patients whose left body functions appear to take on a life of their own, acting on impulses and motives that are entirely invisible—and repugnant—to the rest of the mind and body.”
Hewitt looked from the jury to the judge and back again.
“I believe that the only legitimate verdict that you can reach in this case is—at least with regard to the defendant as a whole—Not Guilty. Not guilty, ladies and gentlemen! I rest my case.”
Weiss tried to control the exasperation that was growing inside him like a boil. Surely they wouldn’t let the boy free on the basis of such a mish-mash of hypothesis and conjecture? The fools! Weiss raged silently as the prosecutor, Johnson, took the floor. He had an affected frown of puzzlement, but this gave Weiss a small gleam of hope—did the man have something up his sleeve?
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he began, wagging a finger. “We are in danger of over-complicating what is in fact a very simple case. The boy who is on trial today killed an old lady. Nobody denies that. Even he does not deny that.”
The jurors, as one, swivelled their heads to peer at the poor, weeping angel. The prosecutor, seeing the danger, hastily continued.
“Regardless of appearances, regardless of manifest contrition, the fact remains that murder has been done, and therefore justice is demanded. Now, I have listened to the defence’s case with interest, of course. We cannot deny that the defendant’s left arm, the murdering arm, was under the control of a foreign, perhaps even a malign, brain hemisphere, implanted as a result of a medical error in Doctor Weiss’ unit.”
Johnson nodded in Weiss’ direction with a friendly, complicit smile. Weiss glared at him. There was something of the mantis about Johnson: tall and cadaverous, with overly large, blue eyes and sunken cheeks, he stalked and hunched around the courtroom on long, thin legs, looking at the jurors as though they were a collection of juicy insects.
“But I feel that we are missing something… Doctor Weiss, we have heard about some very intriguing examples of split-brain patients. Indeed, the defence relies very heavily on instances in which such patients have reported that the left side of their bodies appears to instigate violent actions. But can you tell me of any instance in which a split brain patient has succeeded in doing serious violence, let alone murder, as a result of supposedly independent left-side actions?”
“No. I can’t.”
“No. Indeed, no.” Johnson pulled back his lips in a rictus of delight, like a corpse that had cracked a joke. “Doctor Weiss—what is free won’t?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“We are all acquainted with free will. But what is free won’t?”
“Oh—I know what you mean. Some cognitive scientists use the term to describe the ability of the conscious mind to override unconscious impulses. So although you might have a strong, unconsciously driven urge to murder your boss, the conscious mind won’t allow it. In most cases. Basically, it’s a power of veto.”
“I see. So in cases in which the left arm of a split-brain patient attempts to behave unacceptably, and the right arm stops that behaviour, that is free won’t in play. In other words, a murder—this murder—could have been prevented simply through the exercise of free won’t.
“Well—perhaps. The term is usually used in relation to intact brains.”
Suddenly, and uncomfortably, Weiss found himself in the position of devil’s advocate. He didn’t like Hewitt’s reductionist proposition that the locus of moral responsibility could reside in a sub-segment of the brain, let alone that two loci of responsibility could simultaneously exist in two parts of one brain. But at the same time, he couldn’t completely support Johnson’s argument that the power of veto could completely control the actions triggered by a misfiring hemisphere in a split brain—because if the two hemispheres were not connected, how could the consciousness communicate the power of veto to the misbehaving organs? But Johnson seemed happy with Weiss’ response.
“Yes. And I’m glad you raised the point about intact brains, because some argument exists, does it not, about whether a split brain can be truly said to possess two parallel streams of consciousness—which is the central argument of the defence, of course.” Johnson picked up some papers from the bench and quickly shuffled through them with long, thin fingers.
“Let me quote from ‘Consciousness Explained,’ by Daniel Dennett. Dennett’s views may be summarised as follows: ‘… it isn’t the case that splitting the brain leaves in its wake organisations both distinct enough and robust enough to support such a separate self…’ In other words, ladies and gentlemen, the idea of two separate and conflicting streams of consciousness in a single brain, arising as a result of split-brain surgery and hemisphere mix-up, is an absurd fantasy! That, together with the existence of the ‘free won’t’ power of veto, places responsibility for the murder entirely and unequivocally here—with the defendant!”
Johnson was standing in front of the boy, pointing at him, eyes bulging ghoulishly, like a ghastly messenger of Nemesis come from some lawyer’s grave. The accusation proved too much for the boy, who involuntarily stood, shouting a denial in a voice which wavered and broke with the pain of perceived injustice; but he was drowned out by Hewitt, who also jumped forward, yelling “Objection! Objection! Dennett’s views are irrelevant! The self-interested ramblings of academic philosophers have no place in this court!” while the judge feebly banged her gavel on the bench top.
And eventually the weak hammering of wood on wood had its effect, and the judge’s voice could be heard. It seemed that she was proposing an unprecedented intervention, an interruption to the normal process of the court. Citing the technical and moral complexities of this extraordinary case, and the great importance of setting a legal precedent for any future similar cases, she indicated that she would at this point direct the jury to reach a verdict. No reason, therefore, for the jury to retire.
Of course, Weiss could not then go home; although desperately fatigued, he was also fascinated. Later, attempting to recapitulate the process by which Judge Evans arrived at her extraordinary conclusion, he found himself shutting his eyes and listening again to the voice of the judge as she croaked out the garbled logic behind her verdict.
“We must remember this,” she had begun, perched behind her raised oak desk like an ancient, wrinkled sparrow at an empty bird table. “A murder has been committed, a horrific crime, of which the defendant is accused. And nobody, neither the defendant nor his barrister, is denying that the victim met her end as a consequence of a brutal blow from the left arm of the defendant.”
She glanced belligerently at Hewitt and then turned her rheumy eye to the boy in the dock before continuing.
“The critical question is, to what extent was the defendant responsible for the actions of his left arm? Was it truly the defendant who struck the blow? Or was his left arm simply being used as a weapon by a foreign consciousness that was both invisible to the defendant and beyond his control?”
The boy, with his hands clasped together in front of his chest like an angel before the crib, was watching her, rapt and pleading. He was rocking very slightly, almost imperceptibly, back and forth, back and forth.
“Certainly, Mister Hewitt has made a very strong case for the possible existence of two controlling entities within the defendant’s hybrid brain… two parallel streams of consciousness… I believe you employed that phrase, Mister Hewitt?”
“Yes, Your Honour.”
“And the idea of the co-existence of two separate loci of moral responsibility in a single physical person is given considerable weight by the case studies of split-brain patients that you described…”
The old lady appeared to ruminate on this for a little while before myopically looking around the courtroom for Johnson. Eventually she spotted him in the seat that he had taken throughout the trial, his long frame folded against itself so that he could fit into a chair designed for smaller people.
“On the other hand, Mister Johnson has reminded us that even if the defendant is harbouring a criminally minded hemisphere with a separate consciousness, he still possesses his own consciousness, generated by his own, left hemisphere, which could, perhaps, have freely intervened. Although I acknowledge that this is not certain… but then neither is it certain that a transplanted right hemisphere could generate its own, separate consciousness… This really is a very difficult case…”
Judge Evans paused, her head cocked to one side, as though listening for some voice to guide her. The paralysis of the right side of her face gave her a Janus-like quality; perhaps she looked permanently to two opposing sides, innocence and freedom to the left, and to the right guilt and punishment. Or possibly vice versa.
“Very well. My judgement is this. First, with regard to the term, a ten-year sentence seems appropriate…”
As Weiss listened to the judge deliver her verdict, his professional contempt for an outcome that he considered absurd was gradually, subtly modulated, and then entirely replaced by a new emotion, an emotion which grew like a gall in some deep part of the intuitive side of his brain before triumphantly metastasising into an overt condition that made his heart race and dampened his palms. He became aware of Hewitt’s bright, dark eyes fixed on his own, and as he met the other’s gaze a small charge seemed to pass between them, a little shock of recognition. As the trial finished and the various parties filed out of court, it was an easy matter for the two men to fall into step and start a conversation, without preliminaries, as though they were merely recapitulating an informal agreement that they had already negotiated.
“The precedent set, of course,” said Hewitt, “will form the basis for many appeals. Very many. I intend to form a limited liability partnership to offer the appropriate services. There would, of course, be mutual benefit in an association with a partner who could take care of the medical side of things…”
Weiss nodded solemnly. “As I am sure you have realised, no other party can offer the highly specialised and, er, recondite procedures that are routinely performed in my clinic… It would only be a case of operating on a larger scale…”
And the talk turned to venture capital and high net worth individuals and new premises and marketing budgets before the two men parted company, highly satisfied with their new relationship.

Weiss parked outside his house and got out of the car, still smiling. Only yesterday, he had seen his home as a giant millstone, a sign of the vast debts he had accumulated through an extravagant lifestyle that had exceeded his income so significantly for so many years. Today, the house seemed too small, too unambitious. He would need a bigger residence, no doubt about that.
But he would have plenty of time for that kind of thing. For now, he had arrangements to make, operations to schedule; one operation, in particular. Which of the junior surgeons was on call tonight? Nagel. That was it. Tom Nagel. Weiss keyed a number into his phone.
“Tom? Weiss here…Yes, fine thanks. All over… Very interesting actually. We need to start preparing for a rather unusual operation. And I very much suspect that it will be the first of many. In fact, I am setting up a new company, a partnership, to provide this type of service… Briefly, we are to remove the left arm of a patient, together with those parts of the right hemisphere that are responsible for movement of the left arm… We will receive more than ample fees for the operation, I assure you. But the real financial return comes from the incarceration of the arm and the associated nervous tissue. We will need to keep them alive, ex vivo, for ten years… perhaps less, with good behaviour, but the definition of good behaviour, in this context, will require expert medical input…Yes, we will get fees from re-attaching it after the sentence is over… I very much suspect, Tom, that we can charge what we like… yes. And of course, every prisoner in the country will wish to explore the possibility of having his sentence served only by the guilty parts of his brain and body… This could run and run, Tom.”