Chapter Text
…everybody wants to put me down
They say I’m goin’ crazy
They say I got a lot of water in my brain
I got no common sense
I got nobody left to believe in
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Oh, Lord
Somebody, somebody
Can anybody find me somebody to love?
Queen, “Somebody to Love”
[Afraid]
[It’s OK. We’ve been over this, remember? It’s OK.]
[Afraid]
[You don’t need to be. It’s OK. It’s possible to have control over this. I do. You can, too.]
[No – not of that. Of them.]
[Who’s them?]
[They’re coming…AFRAID]
[Calm down. I’m here. Help me to understand.]
[They’ve found me. I CAN’T GET AWAY AFRAIDAFRAIDAFRAID]
[Who? What’s happening?]
[…]
[Are you there? Hello?]
[…]
[Shit]
Like the burn of the sun on the inside of the eye, after looking too close…an after-image, slowly fading…
A long, thin black snake coiled around the smooth oval of an egg.
He knew that symbol. Too well. And was still not any closer to understanding what it meant.
Only that anyone who saw it never contacted him again.
December, 2047
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Yuuri slung his leather carryall over his shoulder and adjusted his scarf as he stepped off the T with the stream of other commuters and made his way through the station toward the stairs.
Ten a.m., fatty acids. Partial aetiology of inflammation. I wonder where I stored those diagrams. Students won’t thank me if I don’t have my stuff ready.
With hardly a glance at the motley assortment of posters and advertisements on the tiled walls, he slid a gloved hand up the rail as he made his way to the world above, a gust of chill air assailing him and snapping him briefly out of his reverie. He noted without interest the low murmur around him of conversations with distant partners via chip; the rush of trains below and the computerized voice announcing arrivals and departures; café doors opening with puffs of warmth and brewing coffee and baking danishes. Yuuri allowed himself to be swept along with the wave of business-dressed people, most of them traveling alone and looking straight ahead, like him; their minds elsewhere. It was simply another A-to-B moment, the same one they’d perhaps experienced almost daily for years, and it passed with a blank familiarity.
Yuuri’s feet had wanted to lead him straight to the usual connecting train on the Red Line from here, but he was planning to walk the second half of the journey today, stopping at the indoor market downtown for a few odds and ends. It wasn’t a decent hour for anyone to be up and about, he thought, but plenty of people already were; and he’d discovered from experience that it was better to go before work while the stallholders still had what he wanted in stock than after he had put in a long day and was only interested in getting home.
Post-synaptic changes during early synapse formation in hippocampal neurons. I ought to pick that up where I left off yesterday.
The market hall was already busy when he entered, and he navigated to the well-known stalls that sold what he wanted, his coat pressing against the soft winter wraps of the other shoppers. Christmas lights, strung across the rafters, flashed red and green, and the seasonal tunes wrestled with the stallholders’ voices as they hawked their wares.
Yuuri wanted to carve a space out around himself – a silent cocoon where the sensory bombardment couldn’t reach. But the only alternative was to buy the more pedestrian – and often more expensive – goods sold by Boston’s only supermarket chain. So he steeled himself and dove in.
Hand-made cocoa-butter soap. Eggs laid by the chickens in the stallholder’s garden. Unpasteurized honey from a local beekeeper. Vegetables for a stir-fry. Admittedly, those were not locally produced at this time of year. But they were cheap and good.
“What’s doin’, Yuuri?” the bald middle-aged aproned shopkeeper, Dave, asked in his loud and friendly voice as he packed Yuuri’s choices – celery, broccoli, bell peppers, onions, garlic. Yuuri knew he liked to banter, so he slipped on a polite mask and gave him the local spiel.
“Oh, the usual,” he answered, adjusting his knitted hat, pulling it a little lower over his forehead, concealing his brown bangs. “I heard the Celts cleaned up last night.”
“Didja see the game? Niff referee, jack. Niff. But yuh, they cleaned up. You a fan?”
“Nah, Sox for me,” Yuuri replied with a small grin, fingering the strap of his carryall with a gloved hand and watching Dave weigh the celery.
“Heard they’re gonna trade DeSoto. Must be outa their minds. That whacks.”
“Sure does. Say – have you got any gingerroot? I think I’m about out.”
“Yuh. Anything else?” Dave asked, deftly slipping Yuuri’s purchases into brown paper bags.
“I think that’s enough for now, thanks.”
“Nor’easter comin’ in tonight, they’re sayin’,” he added as he handed the bags over. Yuuri stuffed them into his carryall. “Yuh might not be leavin’ home for a while. Bad one, they say.”
“No suh,” Yuuri answered automatically, with an obligatory tinge of surprise.
“Yah huh.”
“In that case, I’d better pick up a few more things.”
He paid for his purchases in cash – Dave, like most of the stallholders, wasn’t chipped, so Yuuri kept a stash of it for that purpose – and pushed through the crowd back outside. A paper sun was emerging from behind the skyscrapers in a matt-blue sky. No clouds yet, but the air bit. The last snow dump had melted to amorphous gray shapes huddling in shadowed corners. This one, if Dave was right and it did come, would paint a deceptively pristine veneer for a while at least.
I ought to ask Donatella and Jia if they’ve prepared those slides yet.
Small white two-person driverless taxis made up the bulk of the morning’s traffic, their occupants staring ahead unseeing as they accessed their chips. As Yuuri walked by red-brick buildings and gray skyscrapers with shimmering glass doors, the odd luxury hovercraft buzzed overhead, making a beeline across the sky just above any obstacle rising to give it challenge. Joggers trotted past, and Yuuri wondered about fitting his own in tonight, with the storm coming. The river glittered as it flowed under the salt-and-pepper-shaker towers along the bridge. Yuuri kept his eyes fixed ahead as he crossed, ignoring the rumble of the T train as it snaked straight over the middle, scuffed and sluggish with age.
…glial localization of glutamine synthetase…
The McLaurin Building’s Great Dome gleamed in the sunlight. Yuuri veered to the right of it and meandered around the campus buildings to Number 46, a geometric white stone and glass edifice that had perhaps once excited a late-twentieth-century architect who thought it was the cutting edge of what a futuristic building ought to look like. And it had admittedly once excited a fourteen-year-old Yuuri who had crossed the threshold to prise out its secrets, ten years ago.
Nowadays he couldn’t help but get the feeling that it was more like a child’s Lego experiment. A wild genius child who thought it was wicked swit to make as many shapes as they could out of ninety-degree angles, and scatter some buttercup-colored bricks around inside where things got a little boring. Most of the windows came in one size, too; but that was what you got from a box of Lego, after all.
In addition to this, the twenty-seven-meter-high atrium had the effect of a great European cathedral or an Egyptian colossus. Namely, that upon entering, you felt like an ant skittering through the lofty, clinically indifferent channels of a place that had more important things to think about than you. You were incidental; an annoyance, if you were worthy of even that much attention.
But like the T station, it was just there in the background, daily. Yuuri’s feet took him through plain white corridors, past labs and lecture halls, to an inconspicuous door with burnished silver nameplates that said “Dr. Yuuri Katsuki, Associate Professor of Neuroscience” and “Phichit Chulanont, Technical Engineer.” The sensor outside flashed red and beeped upon recognition, and the Friday oozed a greeting as he walked in and dropped his carryall next to his desk.
He took off his long woolen gray coat, hat and gloves and brown scarf and placed them on a shelf in the cabinet in the corner, far enough away from the stacks of electronics that the threads did not catch. There were only two desks in the room, which was not much bigger than a walk-in closet, though at least it had its own window. Yuuri’s desk was bare, as most of his work was stored somewhere on the Cloud or one of his tablets; while Phichit, being a kind of technical handyman on the campus, usually had more metal and electronic paraphernalia than he could store in any one place, which meant it frequently spilled onto most other available surfaces. He did, however, do his best not to encroach upon the half-meter or so of counter where the tea- and coffee-making equipment resided, with a tiny sink, a little reheat oven next to it, and a small fridge underneath.
“Friday, light the window. And what’s the ambient temp in here?” Yuuri said, sitting down in his black leather chair.
“Dr. Katsuki, when will you call me Samantha?” it said in its low, sleek purr. The glass of the window, which had been tinted coal-gray, suddenly became transparent. Yuuri blinked in the sunlight, then rootled in a desk drawer for his holo-pen.
There was only one persona programmed for the Friday in the neuroscience department. It was absurd – this was MIT, for Christ’s sake, it wasn’t as if they couldn’t afford to have more – and petitions regularly went around trying to get it changed to something…blander. But the men (and a few women) who liked the Friday telling them it had arranged a seminar at two forty-five p.m., or they needed to remember to pick up cannoli on the way home that night, in a voice that made it sound like she wanted them to do something obscene, still outnumbered everyone else.
“Just – what’s the temperature? It’s cold.”
“Two hundred and ninety-three degrees Kelvin. Twenty degrees Celsius. Sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, Dr. Katsuki.”
“Feels colder than that,” he muttered, mentally flicking on a rainbow-colored hologram of neurons firing in the brain, the delicate thin strands weaving together like notes in a symphony. “Maybe there’s a draft in here.”
“This room is sealed and secure, Doctor…Is there anything else you need me to do for you?” she added suggestively.
Get a personality change? Yuuri thought irritably. “No,” he said, putting his pen down and rising to go to the counter. A hot cup of tea would warm him up. It was also, as he knew from experience, a good choice on days like today when he was fighting off food cravings. What he wanted was sugar, fat, salt and bread in some indecent combination. A tender flaky croissant filled with praline, fresh from the oven. Or warm baklava, oozing honey and smothered in cream. What he needed, however, was none of those things.
The “kettle” was a stainless steel jug into which Yuuri inserted one of Phichit’s latest inventions, a rod that instantly heated to a few hundred degrees and boiled liquid in seconds. It could probably double as a lethal weapon, but it was handy, and maybe a potential patent beckoned. He tossed a rosehip teabag in a mug, poured hot water over it, and settled back at his desk, then pulled his hand-held biochem monitor out of his carryall and mentally turned it on. The device, a small white scanner with a screen on top, had begun life as an ordinary store-bought biometer that would provide information such as blood pressure, height, weight, current state of hydration or intoxication, and with what. Yuuri had hacked it years back to show him a lot more. The little screen flickered to life. He silently visualized the specifics of the information he wanted and looked at the readout.
Just as he thought – he wasn’t actually hungry, and there was no reason why he should be, having had leftover chicken stir-fry for breakfast. Blood insulin and glucose levels within acceptable parameters. Serotonin low. That was what tended to happen to him this time of year, in the cold and dark. His body tried to make up for it the only way it knew how – by giving him cravings for foods that would temporarily boost levels to normal. Finding some way to reprogram this process would, he occasionally mused, be a good – and helpful – topic for a future study; though he feared it would require more knowledge of physiology and biochemistry than he possessed.
He deposited the monitor in a desk drawer, dropped the teabag in the compost bin, sipped, and eyed the Christmas tree on the counter in the far corner of the room. That was Phichit’s, too. The twenty-year-old was from Thailand, and his family were Buddhists; but all the time Yuuri had known him, he’d loved the brutal Boston winters and euphoric whirl of lights, presents, drinks and parties that was Christmas. Sometimes Yuuri still asked himself how the two of them had roomed together for those couple of years when their personalities were so different. Maybe it was why they shared an office now. It seemed impossible for Phichit to be upset about anything for long, and Yuuri had to admit that his friend encouraged him to do things he might otherwise be reticent about. Well, that wasn’t always a good thing, he corrected himself, picking his pen back up and beginning to poke and tease at the brain hovering over his desk.
He didn’t need to use the pen, of course. Like any actions through the brain-computer interface facilitated by the chip implanted in the temporal lobe, all he had to do was think at his field of vision. But it felt more natural – more real, somehow – to lift an instrument and physically poke at something…well, something that didn’t physically exist, being a hologram generated in the office.
Still, he knew that he would struggle to fully concentrate on anything until he got his 10 a.m. lecture out of the way. Nutritional Neuroscience, with a dozen grad students, was one of his specialisms, as well as a condition of his continuing work here. None of his students had ever actually done anything to provoke anxiety or embarrassment in him; not that he could recall, at least. What bothered him was just the idea, he supposed, of being vulnerable in public in front of people; which was one reason why, after all the fanfare when he arrived to attend the most prestigious school of neuroscience in the world at such a young age, he knew he wasn’t living up to his promise, and had gradually faded to an afterthought in the scientific community, and then not even that. Lectures, seminars, presentations and conferences, and “networking,” were all requirements of his job, but the dread he had come to associate with them ensured that he kept an extremely low profile.
Well, he could be content as an associate professor in his little office. And it wasn’t as if his work had been criticised by anybody. It was good. He knew that much at least.
One hundred trillion connections, he thought, probing with the pen until a hairline strand of bright green adhered to the point; he pulled it out and enlarged it to analyze it. What are the chances I’m going to find the ones I’m looking for?
The office door clicked open. “Hey,” Yuuri muttered without looking up, mentally requesting the departmental Cloud to formulate the chemical signals emanating from the firing synapses he’d selected.
Phichit shrugged his coat off and stuffed it in the cabinet along with Yuuri’s, dislodging some electronics which fell to the floor and he promptly collected, shoving them back in place. “Hey, Yuuri. What’s doin’?” he asked as he opened his tool kit and took out a small precision laser, then proceeded to grab pieces of metal off the shelves and arrange them on his desk.
“C10H12N2O.” Yuuri gave his pen a gentle flick, like an angler casting his line, and the green hair undulated. “Apparently I don’t have enough of it this morning, but this brain does.”
“As long as none of you jacks over here are planning on copying Frankenstein any time soon.” Phichit cleared a space on the counter that ran along the wall and nimbly hauled himself up to sit on top of it, shining the laser onto a silver-colored plate. He was reminiscent of a cat burglar, Yuuri thought, in his form-fitting black T-shirt and pants, as he drew the tool carefully across the metal. Apart from the stylishly embroidered red and gold Chinese dragon over a breast pocket, that was. Unlike himself, in his gray cotton pants and white button-down shirt, the uniform of the working male since time immemorial.
“Heard that one a million times,” he mumbled, guiding the green hair back in place and searching the kaleidoscope of colors for another one to fish out. After a silence, he thought to add, “Looks like we’re supposed to get a lot of snow tonight.”
“No suh.” Unlike Yuuri, Phichit said it like he meant it. As if the eight-year-old inside of him was ready to go sledding down a hill, given the chance. His bright voice rang in the office, while Yuuri’s soft one tended to insulate itself in the walls.
“Yah huh,” Yuuri huffed, still intent on the hologram. He’d drawn out a magenta-colored thread this time. “Look, how many times do we have to do this Abbott and Costello act? Neither of us is originally from here, and we’re sounding like a couple of chowdaheads.”
Phichit giggled. “I like how they talk here. And you’ve been here what, ten years? I think you’ve picked up just a little of the twang.”
“No way.”
“Yah huh. More that than Japanese, anyway.”
“Phichit,” Yuuri said, tucking the magenta hair into the hologram and catching a blue one, “I haven’t been to Japan since I was five.”
“Hmmm, there’s the slightest hint of Japanese there too, though, I think. You’ve always spoken it with your family, haven’t you?”
“On the rare occasions we do speak.”
“You’d say I had an accent?”
“Yeah, MIT Thai.”
“Proud of it.”
The corners of Yuuri’s mouth turned up. “So you should be. You’re brilliant.”
“Anyway, who are Abbott and Costello?”
“Who’s on first?” Yuuri said while he mentally told the Cloud to analyze the brainwaves of the regions he was examining. Not that it would be able to give more than a general idea; analyses were still only averages of many neurons firing at once.
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
They worked in silence for a while. Then Phichit got up and swapped components. “What’s eating at you these days, anyway, Yuuri?” he said, perching back on the counter. “I know you’ve been here a while, but it’s still exciting, don’t you think? I mean, we came to find the answer to life, the universe and everything.”
“Forty-two.” Yuuri gave the response automatically, pulling a tablet out of a drawer and thinking the brainwave patterns he’d observed into an electronic notebook. It would be just as easy to save his data on the Cloud, of course, which had almost limitless storage; but everyone who wanted to ensure their data remained private stored it on a separate device. Yuuri didn’t know any scientists for whom that was not the case.
Now it was Phichit’s turn to sigh. “You sound like you’re twenty-four going on forty-seven.”
Yuuri shifted his focus entirely now, putting his pen down and looking straight at him. “Of course I’m excited to be here. I always have been. I guess I just don’t know where I’m going.”
“But you’re presenting that paper at Stanford in a few weeks – the one you told me about, where you were allowed to do your own research for the first time, yeah? That’s wicked swit, if you ask me.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“And didn’t you say Victor’s going to be there? That this could be your chance to finally meet him?”
Yuuri silently cursed the bright pink that suddenly flooded and warmed his cheeks. He glanced up at the framed picture of Dr. Victor Nikiforov on the wall next to his desk, accepting an award from Columbia University in New York, where he worked. It was the only picture on his wall, apart from one of Freddie Mercury in concert next to it, also framed.
Victor Nikiforov…the world-famous Russian scientist at the cutting edge of transcranial magnetic stimulation, neurological aetiologies of psychosis, brain plasticity, and so many other things that it hardly seemed possible for one human being. Like Yuuri, he had started unusually young and rocketed through his qualifications. Unlike Yuuri, he had exceeded expectations, and by age 28 had made a splash on the world stage with his sterling work, ingenuity and charm. He was tall, slim, muscular, with more than a touch of the fey about him in his fine angular features and glacial blue eyes – the sort of blue Yuuri liked to think burned deceptively hot inside, like a high frequency on the electromagnetic spectrum.
“That just makes it worse,” he said, snapping back to himself. “Bad enough if I mess up in front of a bunch of Nobel laureates. But with him there on top of it…”
“Oh, Yuuri.” Phichit shook his head and smiled sadly. “If there’s a downside to something, you’ll always find it. I thought you really wanted to meet him.”
We’re dropping this subject now, Yuuri decided, picking his pen back up and wondering where to prod it next. “Friday, how much time have I got before I have to leave for my class?”
“One hour and thirty-nine minutes, Dr. Katsuki.”
Phichit put his work down and fixed Yuuri with a look he knew well. Yuuri could almost fill in the words for him. Say, Yuuri, I know this great thing we can do. Come and do this thing with me, it’s the best thing ever, and it’ll pull you out of your shell and you’ll love it, I promise. He readied himself to say no.
“Say, Yuuri, I thought it’d be fun to go to Club Nero tonight. Aroon said he’d come too. Why don’t you come with us?”
Aroon was Phichit’s latest fling. He never seemed to be very serious about who he dated, but this one had lasted longer than most. Yuuri opened his mouth to respond.
“And before you say no – how long’s it been since you went on a date?”
“Um…I don’t know. It depends on what you count as a date, I guess. You know I’m not – ”
“You know what?” He pointed his laser at Yuuri as he spoke – turned off first, thankfully. “I think there’s a sexy, fun-loving troublemaker inside this innocent-looking scientist. I’ve known you for several years, haven’t I? So let’s find a way to let him out.”
“The chemistry of love, Phichit. Just increase levels of endorphins, dopamine…”
“Have you given up trying, then, or what?”
Yuuri put his pen down on his desk and folded his arms across his chest. This wasn’t a conversation he would have preferred to be having right now, but so be it. “Phichit, I, um…never told you about what happened last time we went to a bar together.”
“I remember you were upset about something,” Phichit said more gently, “but I think you said you didn’t want to talk about it. So I didn’t ask.”
“It was embarrassing. It still is.”
“Believe me,” Phichit laughed, “you’re not the only person in the world who’s ever been embarrassed in a bar. What happened?”
The memory was still lodged inside, where it burned. Yuuri picked up his pen and fidgeted as he spoke. “You remember that jack, Dominic, who asked me to go sit with him?”
Phichit thought for a moment. “I don’t remember much about him, but yeah, you went off with him.” His expression was one of concern now. “And?”
“Okay, well, he was into kissing in a big way.”
“And, uh, that’s bad?”
“Yeah…it was bad. No one had ever tried to kiss me like that. Not that…not that I’d had much experience anyway, but…” He shook his head and laughed mirthlessly, trying to find the humour in it, but he’d already plunged himself back into that moment, remembering his thoughts at the time all too clearly. I’m going to be normal – walk into a bar, pick someone up, have a nice time. I can do that, can’t I? And later, with Dominic, What’s wrong with me? This is what normal people do together, isn’t it? Why am I not enjoying it?
“Was he like an octopus or something?” Phichit prompted him.
“Well…more like an MD trying to examine my tonsils with his tongue.”
“Ew. So you told him to spatch off, right?”
Yuuri stared at the rainbow brain over his desk, silently naming some of the regions until he felt calmer. “Um, no. He asked me to go into the alley out back with him, and…”
Phichit raised his eyebrows. “No way, Yuuri.”
“Yeah,” Yuuri said quietly, “I went.” He shrugged. “I figured it’d be an experience if nothing else. Something, well…you know I don’t have much of.”
“Yuuri, you don’t do…whatever it was you did…just for experience, like you’re playing a VR game and need it to get to the next level. I mean, it’s supposed to be fun.”
“And how many people have been knocking my door down asking to have some fun with me?” Yuuri felt a tear prick at his eye and blinked.
“I’ve heard students here say some really nice things about you.”
“I wouldn’t date a student. It isn’t appropriate.” Phichit was silent. “Anyway, I may as well tell you what happened, since I started.” He took a breath and continued. “I ended up giving him a blowjob, or my idea of one – well it worked, anyway. Then he zipped up, said ‘Thanks, beautiful,’ and left.”
“Well at least he gave you a compliment…”
“He was being sarcastic, Phichit.”
“Was he?”
“I felt like…like a used condom. Or what I imagine one would feel like. If it were sentient.”
“I don’t know what to say, Yuuri. I’m sorry that happened. But it doesn’t mean – ”
Yuuri shook his head, then leaned forward and fished in the brain with his pen again. “I’m going to sit here and work out the ratio of striatial fluorodopa uptake as an index of increased dopa decarboxylase activity and greater presynaptic DA turnover in the striatum – OK? So…you go tonight and have fun.”
When Phichit didn’t answer, Yuuri mused for a moment, and concluded out loud, “…or is it 45? Shit. Math was never my strong point.”