Read Online The Fountain of Age by Nancy Kress - Free Book Online

shoulder, with a forced afterthought that only emphasized his tension, he said, “Thieves broke into St. Sebastian’s an hour and a half ago. They opened the safe in the office, the one with Anna Chernov’s necklace.”
    Erin had never heard of Anna Chernov’s necklace. But the image of the rushing river of bright colors came back to her with overwhelming force, and she knew that she had been right: Something had happened, and nothing was ever going to be the same again.
    EIGHT

    For perhaps the tenth time, Jake DiBella picked up the fMRI scans, studied them yet again, and put them down. He rubbed his eyes hard with both sets of knuckles. When he took his hands away from his face, his bare little study at St. Sebastian’s looked blurry but the fMRI scans hadn’t changed. This is your brain on self-destruction , he thought, except that it wasn’t his brain. It was Evelyn Krenchnoted’s brain, and after she recovered consciousness, that tiresome and garrulous lady’s brain had worked as well as it ever had.
    But the scan was extraordinary. As Evelyn lay in the magnetic imaging tube, everything had changed between one moment and the next. First image: a normal pattern of blood flow and oxygenation, and the next—
    “Hello?”
    Startled, Jake dropped the printouts. He hadn’t even heard the door open, or anyone knock. He really was losing it. “Come in, Carrie, I’m sorry, I didn’t . . . You don’t have to do that.”
    She had bent to pick up the papers that had skidded across his desk and onto the floor. With her other hand she balanced a cardboard box on one hip. As she straightened, he saw that her face was pink under the loose golden hair, so that she looked like an overdone Victorian figurine. The box held a plant, a picture frame, and various other bits and pieces.
    Uh oh . Jake had been down this road before.
    She said, “I brought you some things for your office. Because it looks so, well, empty. Cold.”
    “Thanks. I actually like it this way.” Ostentatiously he busied himself with the printouts, which was also pretty cold of him, but better to cut her off now rather than after she embarrassed herself. As she set the box on a folding chair, he still ignored her, expecting her to leave.
    Instead she said, “Are those MRI scans of Dr. Erdmann? What do they say?”
    Jake looked up. She was eyeing the printouts, not him, and her tone was neutral with perhaps just a touch of concern for Dr. Erdmann. He remembered how fond of each other she and Henry Erdmann were. Well, didn’t that make Jake just the total narcissist? Assuming every woman was interested in him . This would teach him some humility.
    Out of his own amused embarrassment, he answered her as he would a colleague. “No, these are Evelyn Krenchnoted’s. Dr. Erdmann’s were unremarkable but these are quite the opposite.”
    “They’re remarkable? How?”
    All at once he found himself eager to talk, to perhaps explain away his own bafflement. He came around the desk and put the scan in her hand. “See those yellow areas of the brain? They’re BOLD signals, blood-oxygen-level dependent contrasts. What that means is that at the moment the MRI image was taken, those parts of the subject’s brain were active—in this case, highly active. And they shouldn’t have been!”
    “Why not?”
    Carrie was background now, an excuse to put into concrete words what should never have existed concretely at all. “Because it’s all wrong. Evelyn was lying still, talking to me, inside the MRI tube. Her eyes were open. She was nervous about being strapped down. The scan should show activity in the optical input area of the brain, in the motor areas connected to moving the mouth and tongue, and in the posterior parietal lobes, indicating a heightened awareness of her bodily boundaries. But instead, there’s just the opposite . A hugely decreased blood flow in those lobes, and an almost total shut down of input to the thalamus, which relays information