PART TWO -- THOMAS DOTSON

“I’m gone. I am gone. ” Thomas Dotson’s words echoed in the dark hallway. He needed to hear them, to test the conviction in his voice. There had been no one to listen, to encourage him to talk out his deliberations as he struggled with his decision to leave. He brooded over it in silence and now, closing the door to his office, he spoke it for the first time. “I am gone. I am out of here. I’m free.” There would be no more octopus brains, no more microchips, no more Lou Stana and his damned BioCyberonics.

He read the words on the frosted window, Mental Constructs Division, T.J. Dotson, Ph.D., Director. The odor of oil soap rose from the wood floors of the converted brick mill housing the offices of BioCyberonics. He rubbed his eyes. Explosions of light from the pressure of his fingers reminded him of the horrors of yesterday, that terrible Tuesday he would never forget, that no one would ever forget, that terrible Tuesday with its madmen, those true believers, crashing into the towers of Manhattan, shattering thousands of lives, creating a future differing in countless ways from the one he had always imagined. With the repetitive broadcasts of the second plane tearing through the remaining tower, the horror of the reality and the horror of monotony merged, filling him with visceral and philosophical nausea. Leaning against the wall, he took several deep breaths. Soon he would be away from the bleak, cloudy world of Boston and Cambridge, away from Concord, away from what he had come to think of as the cold gray brain of America, away from the cold Charles River, away from New England with its blizzards and nor’easters and the icy lives of those who lived where children learn to walk on frozen toes.

He would trade New England for the New Orleans of his cousin Annie’s letters, a place where the sun is a way of life, with music and the odors of cooking at every turn of the corner, a city of light and sensuality sitting on the banks of the Mississippi River, the aorta of America. That was how Annie’s descriptions made it seem, warm, bright and seductive, the antithesis of the world he had become accustomed to.

His staff wouldn’t realize he was gone until he hadn’t shown up to work for days. They would check his office and find it empty. He imagined them going to Lou Stana, mewling around him, currying favor and jockeying for Dotson’s position. Let them have it. Stana’s damned BioCyberonics Corporation had drained too much from him. He didn’t care who took over. Lou Stana could sit and stew. Dotson’s need to change his life was too crucial to spend another minute with him, let alone waste time trying to make the old man understand his reasons for leaving.

Not that he could understand. Stana was obsessed by a fantasy of building bodies and minds from metals, plastics and electronics, creatures that would walk around, work, make decisions, become actors in the world, playing their roles with as much sentience as human beings, without human vulnerabilities, free from disease, age, pain. Free from weaknesses. Free from life as we know it. He would not allow himself to understand how Dotson could leave. Stana’s was an ancient dream. Golems and Frankenstein’s creature, robots and androids, fantasies of humanity’s faith in its ability to breathe the semblance of life into immobile matter, to become gods, to become God. Dotson had spent his working life as a disciple of that faith. Now he was out, determined to salvage those parts of himself free of hubris, free of striving to create what he had come to believe was monstrous, horrendous and dreadful. In the beginning, Dotson had seen it as a grand adventure. The most exciting intellectual challenge imaginable. The most seductive temptation conceivable. A promise of incomparable scientific achievements. The ultimate exercise of his mind and education and imagination. The excitement had been heady stuff, a dream of the impossible made possible through the power of human intelligence, the power of his intelligence.

From childhood Dotson had never doubted his abilities and he knew his parents, his teachers, his friends and associates stood in awe of his genius. Everything he had ever heard or read or seen was at his instant recall, subject to his enormous powers of analysis. People backed off, stopped questioning him, as they realized the capacity and intensity of his intellect. Instead, they took to assuming what he said to be true as truth. Except for Kathy, of course.

The strength of his mind was reinforced by his appearance. He was two inches over six feet, with thick brown hair and a square, well defined jaw, deep-set green eyes beneath eyebrows he could raise and lower with dramatic effect. Hollywood handsome his mother had called him the day he and Kathy were married and Kathy had referred to him as her Gregory Peck. For a time. Kathy knew him, knew his human failings, and loved him. Then it soured. He was absorbed in his work and she, feeling neglected and finding new interests, left him. He lived daily with the pain of her loss. There would be no pain for him in leaving BioCyberonics. He was finished with what he had thought would be his life’s work. It was over.

Stana’s dream must never come true. After eighteen years of research, of tests and thinking, of pushing the limits of his own humanity, Dotson awoke Wednesday morning sure of it. For the past week he had awakened each night, terrified by nightmare landscapes and creatures, nothing but melodramatic goblins when analyzed from the perspective of his rational self. An expert at letting reason prevail over anything that did not lend itself to research and analysis, he might have been able to ignore them, push their significance below the threshold of reason, but for the horror of yesterday. When it happened he had been working in his office. The janitor on his floor, Grady Eggers, leaned in.

“You heard the news?”

“What news?”

“Nothing will ever be the same,” Grady said. In the days since, Dotson heard the phrase so often it ceased to have meaning. He came to think it should be stricken from the English language.

Eggers took a remote from the edge of Dotson’s desk, clicked on a television sitting on top of a bookcase and sat down. They watched the planes, the towers, the smoke and flames, people throwing themselves into the air from the upper stories, falling through the air, looking like stick figures as they plunged toward the earth.

Three of the dead had been BioCyberonics engineers, headed for a conference at Cal Tech, people he had seen each working day for years, socialized with on weekends, confided in and found comfort from when Kathy had left. The four of them had been a team with Dotson as both captain and coach, never doubting that they would create a silicon/organic brain superior to their own. Gone. All gone.

Only Dotson was left, and that because he decided against going to the conference in order to prepare for another one in February at MIT, at which he was scheduled to make the central presentation of their findings and announce that BioCyberonics was less than three years away from its first true manufactured intelligence, a computer that could reflect upon its own existence.

The dreams had been bad enough. They were beyond his powers of reason, just as the events of September 11th defied his powers of understanding. The religious and political faith of the killers in the planes and the fanaticism that bred in the darkness of such faith were diametrically opposed to reason. He had always believed faith was reason’s enemy, and it frightened him, but he had never before grasped the total unreasoning dreadfulness it could engender. For the first time in his adult life he was unable to find a rational position from which to take action. He hated that. Reason, the power of the mind, had been his safety zone. From childhood he was torn between his mother’s Methodism and his father’s atheism, ending up a reluctant agnostic, intolerant of organized religion and creeds, open to vague possibilities of transcendent realities, never certain of either, no matter what his experience and ecstasies. Having no use for true believers, he was just as impatient with his mother’s quick judgments about who was bound for Heaven, who for Hell and his father’s disdain for anyone who knelt before an altar. Enter the rational. Every question had an answer, even if the answer was the impossibility of knowing.

“You don’t want to go out with her,” his mother once said about a girl he dated in high school. “Her parents don’t go to church, you know. You could be getting right into the Devil’s maw. He’s forever lying in wait for you, drooling and licking his lips. Eternity in Hell is no price to pay for a few moments of pleasure in this world.”

Twenty years later he could still see the way her lips as she said it, pulling them close to her teeth, her lower jaw trembling, her eyes wide and serious, filled with a horrible certainty. He never doubted she feared for the fate of his soul. Satan was real for her, as near as the trees and grass of their back yard, a solid existing intelligent entity intent on the destruction of everyone of every thing she loved, capable of sudden and direct action or subtle, indiscernible deception, both designed to distress and conquer the stern and unrelenting God she loved and obeyed without question. His father, on the other hand, would snort, dismissing friends and dates with a wave of his hand and the quick phrase, “Just another stupid christer, Thomas. Waste of time. You need to find friends who have your quickness of mind, your openness. Don’t sell yourself short, son.”