White Matter

Fill 'im up

"Kurt you big lug. You ready to go?"

I looked up from my work desk, recognizing Jeff, a technician who was usually employed down in the basement with James. We'd exchanged small talk once in the lunch room. I gave him what I believed to be a friendly, if uncomprehending, smile.

He grinned back at me. "You've been given time off for good behaviour."

I blinked twice, waited.

"Nobody's told you, have they?"

"Told me what?"

"They sent me to take you up to the clinic."

"Clinic? Sorry, I've got no idea what you're talking about."

"They said you'd agreed to do some runs in our new scanner, right?"

"Yes," I spoke hesitantly. "What's that got to do with a clinic?"

"Well before we put you in the machine, we need to fix you with Karen's latest tracer compounds."

"James told me that. I thought all I had to do was drink some medicine."

"Whatever gave you that idea?"

"James called it a magic potion."

"Ah, well. You know these scientists; they tend to think in abstract terms."

I stood up, collected my leather jacket from the corner of the bookshelf that served as a clothes hook. Jeff was a compact, nuggety guy, gruff but affable. One of those small people with a fast metabolism, like the mouse that terrified the elephant. He led me down the corridor through the cubicle maze, pausing once to exchange a few words with one of the more attractive of the programmers. I waited alongside him, feeling clumsy and large.

The clinic wasn't far, just a ten-minute drive along uncongested mid-morning streets. "What's it like working for James?" I asked him as we exited the Cluster car park.

"Oh, he's all right. Prickly bugger at times, but at least you know where you are with him. Not like your mate, Dr Frankenstein."

"You mean Graeme?"

"Who else?"

The clinic was very slick, very shiny. It had, as far as I could tell, no waiting room. We arrived on time for our appointment and were ushered straight into the surgery – a room of linoleum and tiles, in the centre of which sat yet another scanning machine. It was less outwardly elaborate than James's one, sleeker and glossier, more like those you see in medical dramas.

"Good morning, Mr Jones." The specialist was a middle-aged woman who exuded competence and calm. Having greeted me, her first act was to put a cotton garment into my hands, regarding me as she did so with a wry smile. "Would you mind taking your trousers off and putting this on?"

I was on my own. Jeff had abandoned me, returning to the lobby to chat up the receptionist.

"There's a screen over there," she said, gesturing to a corner of the room. "Just leave your things in the cubby hole."

I did as I was told, slipping off my jacket and trousers as she ran through an explanation of the procedure. Spurious Developments had supplied her with a dose vial, she told me. Presumably this was the cocktail of custom-designed molecules James had been referring to. She would administer this concoction directly into my carotid arteries, the better to carry it across the blood-brain barrier and into the intricate channels and scaffolding of my brain.

As I emerged from behind the screen, she held up a plastic bag, a sterile pack covered in exclamation marks and chunky black print. "This is a catheter, a length of extremely fine plastic tube. While you lie down in the scanner over there, I'm going to insert it into your femoral artery, about here." She pointed to the top of her leg.

I could see the tube coiled up inside its pack, looking like a roll of thin optic fibre. All of a sudden, I was acutely aware of my nakedness beneath the smock.

"The femoral artery gives access to your heart, and from there to the internal carotid artery that supplies the brain." She tilted her head, looking to me for signs of comprehension. "You see, it turns out the route to a man's heart and mind really is through his groin."

I nodded, uncertain of what to say in reply to that.

"It's safer this way," she assured me. Again I nodded, not thinking to ask what the other, unsafe, alternative might be.

At her invitation I settled myself down on the scanning table and tried to make myself comfortable, tried not to dwell on the oddity of finding myself trapped in the maw of a machine for a second time in not very many days. Out of my line of sight now, she kept talking as she made her preparations, explaining how, from the carotid artery, she would take advantage of the body's plumbing arrangements to introduce separate mixtures into the left and right sides of my brain respectively. "Makes it easier for the machines to sort signal from noise," James would later tell me. Once lodged in place, she went on, these compounds would linger. I should not need a booster for some time.

As I lay on the slab, waiting for the moment when I would have to lift up my smock, I rationalized to myself that it really wasn't so bad, that I had experimented with substances from much more dubious sources over the years, and yet here I was, faculties apparently intact.

When the moment came, she was very good about it, first administering a local, and then finding the artery with a minimum of poking and prodding. I did my best to relax, staring upwards at the monitor screen, watching the catheter's progress as she guided it from one end of me to the other. The best thing I can say about the experience was that it was over reasonably quickly. Apart from relief, I felt no different from before.