Chapter 6: The Pact
Tuesday August 15, Mass General Hospital, Evening
The hospital settled into its nightly rhythm. Lighting panels dimmed to a soothing glow somewhere around eight, and now distant voices from the nurses’ station carried through empty corridors in fragments Anya couldn’t quite resolve into words. The EVD collection chamber gurgled every few minutes, draining fluid from her skull into a reservoir beside the bed. She’d stopped flinching at the sound. It had become the metronome of her new reality.
She sat cross-legged on the bed with her tablet propped against her knees, watching patterns from the dementia study. The same data she’d viewed a hundred times before. But now the cascading failures in the holographic brain felt different. Personal. She tracked the dissolution of thinking the way she might study a map of territory she was about to enter.
The tube from her skull caught the light when she moved. Two days ago she’d been a scientist studying brain function. Now she was a data point.
The door clicked open. Ted entered carrying a brown paper bag, which he set on her bedside table.
“Contraband.”
The smell hit immediately. Rich pork broth, garlic, sesame oil. Heat rising through the paper in visible wisps.
“Porter Square.” He smiled. “The ramen place you love.”
Anya’s face transformed. She shoved the tablet aside and ripped the bag open with her good hand and teeth, the paper tearing unevenly. Steam billowed up carrying with it memories of their kitchen, of Tuesday nights before everything broke.
“You’re going to get us arrested by the food police.”
“Definitely worth it.”
She kissed him on the cheek. His beard was rougher than usual. He hadn’t been sleeping.
They ate without talking. Chopsticks clicking against ceramic. The broth was perfect, rich and salty, the noodles exactly the right texture. Anya slurped with unselfconscious pleasure, making small sounds of appreciation that made Ted smile despite everything. She caught him watching her and raised her eyebrows, noodles dangling from her mouth. He laughed, a real laugh, and for a moment the hospital room disappeared.
Seven minutes. That’s how long it lasted. Seven minutes where they weren’t in a room with a drain in her skull. Where they were just two people sharing ramen on a Tuesday night, the way they had a hundred times before.
Then Anya set down her chopsticks and watched the steam rising from the bowl, and the moment ended.
“My parents took bigger risks with less information.”
Ted looked up. “What?”
“Moscow, 1996.” She picked up the chopsticks again, turning them in her fingers. “They had forty-eight hours to decide whether to defect. No guarantees. No data. Just my father’s physics research that interested the Americans and my mother’s conviction that staying meant slow death.” She took another slurp of ramen, chewing slowly. “They stuffed their entire lives into four suitcases. Left behind everything they knew. Books, photos, every friend. Gone.”
“You’ve never talked about this.” Ted set down his pen. “Thirty years together and this is the first time you’ve mentioned it.”
“Because it never mattered before.”
“My mother used to say something in Russian when I complained about uncertainty.” Anya smiled slightly. “’Kto ne riskuyet, tot ne p’yet shampanskogo.’ Who doesn’t risk, doesn’t drink champagne.”
“Your mother sounds like you.”
“She was nothing like me. Cautious, methodical, triple-checked everything. But when the moment came, when the real choice arrived, she grabbed my hand and walked onto that plane without looking back.” Anya’s eyes found his. “When the alternative is unacceptable, you make the leap. You find a way.”
Ted reached for her hand. Her fingers were cool, thinner than they’d been a week ago.
“What would they think of you now?”
“My parents would think I’m insane.” A slight smile. “They were conventional. Good Soviet scientists who happened to defect. But they’d understand necessity. When you have no good options, you create new ones.”
She returned to her ramen, eating with more purpose now. Three more bites, then she set the bowl aside. Her hand went to the bandage on her skull, touched it lightly, came away.
“It just sucks that I won’t be around to see where our work leads.” She paused, choking on the words. “I can’t believe I’m dying, Ted. It doesn’t feel real.”
Ted’s grip tightened on her hand. He wanted to say something, anything that would make it not true. But there was nothing. The scans were clear. The specialists had agreed.
“We’ll make sure the work survives.” His voice came out rough, barely above a whisper. “The discoveries. The theory. Everything we’ve built. It won’t die with you.”
“Good.” She squeezed his fingers. “That matters.”
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were wet. All the years they’d planned. The trip to Kyoto they kept postponing. The house in Vermont they’d talked about for retirement. Gone.
“I don’t know how to do this without you.”
“You’ll figure it out. You always do.” She pulled her knees to her chest, the IV line shifting with the movement. “Whatever it takes, the work has to continue. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
They sat in silence. The hospital sounds filtered through the door. Somewhere down the hall, a patient was coughing. A monitor alarm went off, then silenced.
“Your parents were brave,” Ted said finally.
“They were desperate.” Anya looked at the monitors, the IV pole, the drain tube coiling from her skull. “Desperation looks like bravery from the outside.”
The knock came an hour later.
Anya had dozed off, exhausted by the conversation. Ted had been sitting in the visitor’s chair staring at nothing, his mind running the same calculations over and over. Time left. Work remaining. The math wouldn’t balance.
Imani appeared at the door. She wore street clothes, her athletic frame evident even in a simple blouse and slacks. Her face was carefully composed, but Ted could see the strain around her eyes.
“Sorry to disturb you.” Her voice was quiet, controlled. “I wanted to check on you before I headed home.”
Anya stirred at Imani’s voice. Her eyes opened slowly, unfocused for a moment, then sharpening as she registered where she was. The brief confusion of waking, then the weight of reality settling back into place.
“Imani.” She smiled. “Come in.”
Imani stepped inside and closed the door behind her. She looked at Ted, then at Anya, reading the room. The ramen containers on the side table. The tear tracks on Ted’s face he hadn’t bothered to wipe away. The set of Anya’s jaw.
Ted stood. “Imani, sit. There’s something we need to discuss.”
Anya pushed herself more upright against the pillows, wincing slightly as the movement pulled at the drain site. “I’ve been thinking about how to preserve the research. How to make sure everything we’ve discovered doesn’t die with me.”
“Of course.” Imani took the chair Ted had vacated, her hands folded in her lap. “We’ll document everything. Publish when we can.”
“No.”
The word was sharp. Final.
“That’s not enough. Papers capture findings. Data sets. Results. They don’t capture understanding. They don’t capture the intuition that leads to breakthroughs, the way a mind actually works.” She paused. “I want you to scan my brain.”
Silence. The EVD chamber gurgled.
“Complete temporal architecture,” Anya continued. “Every cognitive state we can capture. Rest, calculation, memory recall, emotional processing. Build a complete dataset.”
Imani looked between them. “Anya...”
“Listen.” Anya leaned forward, her good hand gripping the bed rail. “Every temporal relationship we want to map, every pattern we’ve been trying to understand, it’s all here.” She tapped her temple, just below the bandage. “Living proof of our theory. In two weeks, my patterns will decohere completely. The AVM will rupture or the steal effect will progress and my brain will become useless for mapping. Right now, today, my patterns are intact. We could capture something unprecedented.”
Ted moved to the window. His reflection ghosted against the dark glass, superimposed over the city lights below.
“She’s right about the data,” he said slowly. “We’d need different cognitive states. Multiple sessions. But the coherence problem, that’s the real challenge. You can’t Frankenstein together scans from different people. It has to be one brain, one complete architecture.”
He turned back to face them. “The most thoroughly documented brain in human history. That’s what you’re proposing.”
“Yes.” Anya’s eyes were fierce. “Ted, you need every circuit, every delay, captured across a wide range of states. Doing it a half-hour at a time with volunteers isn’t going to cut it. You need one coherent whole. Mine.”
“Jesus, Anya.” Imani’s voice was quiet. “You’re talking about a blueprint. For a mind.”
“Yes.”
“For what?”
“For something that processes information using my cognitive architecture. That thinks with my patterns. Maybe solves problems I never could.” Anya’s voice dropped. “Something that continues.”
“You can consent for yourself. What about what wakes up? You’re not just giving it existence, Anya. You’re giving it your existence. That’s a burden you’re choosing to impose on something that can’t refuse it.”
Ted sat heavily in the visitor’s chair. He stroked his beard with his eyes closed, head back against the cushion. A minute passed. Another. Anya watched him. She knew this mode, had seen it a thousand times over thirty years. The way his breathing slowed. The way his fingers moved slightly, as if typing on an invisible keyboard. He was building something in his head.
When he opened his eyes, they were clear.
“I can do this.” His voice was quiet but certain. He looked at Anya. “We’re not building a new brain from scratch. We’re capturing the details that make yours work the way it does.”
“We’ll need massive amounts of time on the NRI,” Imani said.
“Unfortunately, time isn’t something we have a lot of right now.”
Ted leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “This is it, isn’t it? This is our forty-eight hours. Our plane to catch.”
Anya nodded slowly. “When the alternative is unacceptable, you make the leap.”
Imani looked between them. Her medical training warred with her scientific curiosity, her friendship pulling her in directions she hadn’t anticipated. They were talking about creating something that might be conscious, might be a person, using the brain patterns of someone who was dying. No IRB in the world would approve this.
But no IRB would have the chance to weigh in. This wasn’t a research proposal. This was three people in a hospital room, two weeks from loss, trying to salvage something before it was gone.
“You understand what you’re asking for,” Imani said finally. “Hours in the scanner. The stress on your system, the cognitive load of the tasks we’d need you to perform. It could accelerate your deterioration.”
“I know.”
“You might be trading days of lucidity for data.”
“I know.” Anya held her gaze. “I need to do this. It’s really important to me.”
Imani was quiet for a long moment. The monitors beeped. The drain gurgled.
“I’ll work with you.” Her voice was firm. “Help you. But we do it right. Medical monitoring throughout. I’ll clear the NRI schedule and run the panel myself.” She leaned forward, her eyes locked on Anya’s. “But the moment your vitals become unstable, we stop. The moment I see signs of neurological deterioration beyond what’s expected, we stop. You got it? I’m not fucking around.”
“Agreed.”
Anya was already reaching for her notebook on the bedside table, suddenly energized. “I’ll work out which cognitive states to prioritize. How to maintain coherence across sessions. We’ll need protocols for emotional processing, analytical thinking, memory retrieval, creative problem-solving...”
Ted pulled up his neural architecture designs on the tablet. “The data structures are the key. Once I finish the basic framework and the communication algorithms, it’s a matter of loading it up to see what happens.”
“All programmers say that.” Anya’s voice carried a hint of her old sharpness. “Until the missile hits the wrong house. I’m surprised you didn’t say ‘it’s trivial.’”
“It’s not trivial.”
“No shit it’s not trivial. Get it fucking right, Ted. This isn’t one of your little hacks. Modelling a neuron isn’t rocket science. It’s harder! Biology isn’t deterministic.”
Ted smiled despite everything. There she was. His Anya. Still fierce, still demanding, still pushing everyone around her to be better than they thought they could be.
He was already sketching notes on a yellow pad, his preferred medium for free-flow brainstorming. Neurons. Axons. Dendrites. Linked lists. Messaging queues. The architecture building itself in his mind. Whether it would actually produce thought, whether it would be her in any meaningful sense, remained unknown. But the technical path was clear.
“I’ll ensure the slate is cleared so we have full use of the NRI.” Imani stood. “If anybody asks, I’ll tell them this was your dying wish.” She moved to the door, then paused. “We’re all walking into the unknown here.”
Anya smiled and waved as Imani left, closing the door quietly behind her.
Ted looked at Anya. The notebook was already filling with her cramped handwriting, equations and lists and questions. Her eyes were bright in a way they hadn’t been since the collapse. She needed purpose. That’s what drove her. Always had.
“Are you scared?” he asked.
“Terrified.” She said it simply, without drama. “And exhilarated. Both at once.” She set down the pen and reached for his hand. “But we have to try. When the alternative is nothing...”
He kissed her forehead, careful to avoid the bandage.
“Definitely not trivial,” he said.
“No, Ted. It’s not.” Anya opened her notebook again. “I don’t have time to waste. Now get home, sit your ass down, and get to work.”
He kissed her once more and left.
Anya returned to her calculations.
Mapping cognitive states. Planning the sessions. Racing against a body that was failing while her mind remained sharp. She worked until the notebook was half-full and her hand cramped and the night nurse came in for vitals, then she worked some more.
Around midnight, she pulled up the dementia data on her tablet again. The same patterns she’d been studying for months, but now she saw them differently. The cascading failures. The gradual breakdown of temporal synchronization. The way a mind could dissolve while the neurons kept firing.
She knew what that meant, what was coming. But for now, tonight, her patterns held. Her mind worked. And she would use every second of that clarity to ensure something survived.
She fell asleep with the tablet still glowing, her own brain’s activity patterns floating in the holographic display. The data that might become a blueprint. The map that might become a mind.