Chapter 219

Translator: Dreamscribe

Seoul National University Hospital, Neurology Intensive Care Unit.

It was a little past lunchtime when the helicopter carrying Seo-ha touched down on the rooftop. Chul-ho, who had been at the office, took the call, rushed out, picked up the two of them, and headed for Seoul.

"Professor Kwon?"

Kwon Do-hyung, the finest neurologist in the country.

A government agent had come to his home on his day off.

They were transporting a very important person to the hospital, and he needed to hurry. Professor Kwon got into the car without the faintest idea what was going on.

'Probably a politician or some conglomerate heir.'

Judging by the fact that they'd mobilized a state agency, the patient had to be a considerable big shot. An equal society, proclaimed in words alone. That the weight of a life could differ so much according to social standing left him with a sense of self-loathing.

But the moment he saw the face of the patient wheeled in on the stretcher, Do-hyung could not hide his agitation. The sheer pressure, unlike anything he had experienced in his life, left his hands trembling.

What if a misdiagnosis damaged this genius's brain by even one percent?

He was a scientist too.

If that were to happen, he did not think he could ever forgive himself.

"I'm going to go splash some water on my face."

Do-hyung threw cold water over his face several times to shake himself awake, then steadied his breathing.

The tests went on all afternoon.

MRI, fMRI, EEG.

It would be more accurate to say they ran every test that could possibly be run.

Professor Kwon turned the result sheets over one by one, lost in thought. In more than twenty years as a doctor he had seen all kinds of patients. Brain tumors, cerebral infarction, epilepsy, Multiple Sclerosis.... But a case like this was a first.

"What is this?"

A resident enlarged the PET-CT image.

A glucose metabolic activity map.

In a normal brain, the frontal and parietal regions should glow evenly. This patient was different. The left region of the Prefrontal Lobe was abnormally hyperactive. A reading more than 50% above normal.

"Can overwork account for this?"

Do-hyung studied the image for a moment, then shook his head.

"If it were overwork, it would show up across the board. It wouldn't concentrate on one side like this."

An ideal pattern of brain usage.

Even so, there were no grounds to declare it pathological.

"This is strange too."

The resident peered at the EEG printout.

"He's asleep, but the arousal signals are still there?"

"Right. But that isn't entirely unheard of either."

He spread the whole set of results out across the desk.

No tumor.

No infarction.

No infection.

No metabolic abnormality.

Everything about it was suspicious. And yet the cause was nowhere to be found.

Every individual number told him there was nothing wrong, but the picture as a whole was subtly out of joint.

"A person doesn't collapse for no reason."

He turned the possible causes over in his mind.

Not every disorder of the brain could be explained by the nerves.

'Could it be a software problem?'

He opened a drawer and took out his card holder.

There was a business card he had received at a conference in Amsterdam a few years back. They had been in different sessions that time, so he had only sat in on the lecture and left it at that.

Ezra Davis.

Chair professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, the most preeminent institution in neuropsychiatry.

Do-hyung checked the clock.

"He should be in Japan for the conference...."

Looking at the card, he dialed the number.

* * *

"Mr. Yu, have you recently heard a voice inside your head that wasn't your own?"

A sharp gaze.

At the sudden question, Seo-ha's mind went blank.

The first thing that surfaced was the tragedy Einstein had been forced to suffer.

His dying wish to be cremated had not been honored. Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who performed the autopsy, had spirited his brain away without consent and cut it into 240 pieces to preserve. Driven by nothing but the obsession to know the secret of genius.

He turned his eyes.

His father and mother were watching him, hands clasped together. Seo-eun's face, lips pressed tight, holding back her tears.

He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then opened them.

"No."

He didn't want anyone to find out that Ducky existed.

The things he had carried alone since childhood, these would be no different going forward.

His mouth felt gritty. A heaviness settled in one corner of his chest. Deceiving someone was never a good feeling.

"Hahaha!"

Ezra suddenly burst out laughing.

It was a booming laugh, loud enough to rattle the air in the hospital room. Mi-young and Chul-ho stared at him, flustered.

"My apologies. Occupational hazard."

He waved a hand and made light of it for the benefit of Seo-ha's family.

"I put that question to every patient I meet for the first time. Pay it no mind. It's a sort of routine."

The stiffness went out of Mi-young's and Chul-ho's faces.

Ezra turned and picked up the chart lying beside the bed. As he did, he casually took a step closer to Seo-ha.

Click.

Pretending to examine him, he switched on a penlight and checked the pupil response, then quietly pressed a small note into Seo-ha's hand.

By the time Seo-ha looked up in surprise, he had already turned away.

Explaining the test results to the family, his face perfectly calm. Seo-ha slipped the note in his hand under the sheets.

* * *

A four-star hotel next to the hospital.

Shhhk.

In the evening, Ezra Davis rose from the bed and drew back the curtains.

"When will he come, I wonder? I hope it isn't too late."

Decades spent as a psychologist and a psychiatrist. He was a man who had grown thoroughly inured to lies.

Patients always lie.

Deliberate deception, or an unconscious Defense Mechanism meant to protect themselves. The reasons were countless.

It was therefore inevitable that he had come to listen more closely to the physiological responses of their bodies than to their answers.

"Pfft!"

A laugh escaped him.

Seo-ha was the worst liar he had ever met.

Lying raises the blood pressure.

The possibility that the lie might be discovered. The human body registers that situation as danger. The amygdala processes the signal no differently than it would for a prey animal on the savanna coming face to face with a lion. It readies a combat posture to handle the immediate crisis.

Of course, skilled deceivers can control this to some degree.

Steadying the breath to slow the heart rate, holding the gaze level. Such countermeasures are built into the training programs of special agents.

Yu Seo-ha had probably never told a lie in his life.

His blood pressure had not merely risen; his neck and then his entire face had turned red. A reaction that raw would be hard to find even in a seven-year-old.

He had needed to smooth the situation over in a hurry.

A psychologist who fails to win his patient's trust is even more useless than a surgeon afraid of blood.

The CT that Professor Kwon had sent over pointed to clear abnormal findings in Seo-ha's brain.

The subcortical regions, the putamen, the thalamus, the hippocampus, along with the limbic system, were all hyperactive.

The phenomenon bore some resemblance to what was seen in certain Schizophrenia patients, yet it was entirely different in that there was no accompanying gray matter damage. On top of that, the prefrontal-parietal network seen in patients with dissociative disorders was activated. There had been studies suggesting this aided memory capacity, but still.

Was it truly possible to take only the benefits while keeping the side effects to a minimum?

'It's almost as if....'

As if the brain had torn out and rebuilt its own circuitry.

He shook his head roughly.

Such a thing was impossible.

The human brain is not designed with a purpose. Repeated exposure to a particular stimulus does strengthen synaptic connections, but that is passive adaptation grounded in experience, nothing more. The environment shapes the brain; the notion that a person could intend it was absurd.

"Fascinating."

There was far too much here that made no sense.

Even so, through the CT, Ezra had caught a glimpse of one facet of Seo-ha's genius.

Schizophrenia and genius share a genetic link.

It was much like the same seed growing into an entirely different plant depending on the soil. The inverted U-shaped model spoken of in psychiatry.

Knock knock!

He glanced at his watch.

Nine in the evening.

'Sooner than I expected.'

"Come in."

Creak.

The door opened to reveal Seo-ha standing there, shifting on his feet, hesitant.

Jeans and a hoodie. Hospital slippers. He was alone, with no guardian, and carried nothing in his hands.

'Hm?'

An agent in a black suit was keeping watch from a distance, as though guarding him. He had probably obtained permission to go out while keeping it a secret from his family, Ezra guessed.

"...."

"Have a seat."

Ezra gestured toward the sofa by the window.

The main light was off, with the two lamps on either side of the bed switched on. The bed had been pushed into the corner of the room, and in its place stood two single armchairs angled to face each other.

It was a counseling room he had set up on the spot for Seo-ha.

Ezra turned his gaze out the window while Seo-ha settled in. He didn't want to give the impression of observing him.

Rustle.

"Good to meet you. My name is Ezra Davis. Do you happen to know who I am?"

"Yes."

Seo-ha answered, shifting his posture as if the chair were uncomfortable.

"Through my books, I take it. Might I ask which ones you've read?"

"All of them...."

"Hm?"

"All nine of the books you've written, Professor."

Ezra's eyes widened.

Several of them had gone out of print years ago. Books that were not easy to get hold of unless one worked in academia. What had he been trying to find out, hunting them down so doggedly?

He swallowed hard and asked,

"Since when? Don't worry. Nothing said here will get out. If I disclosed it, I would be in violation of America's HIPAA and the APA ethics code. I'd not only lose my license, I'd be subject to criminal prosecution."

Seo-ha's face relaxed considerably.

"It was back when I was in sixth grade...."

It was a long story.

The symptoms he had gone through around the age of twelve were unmistakably Obsessive-Compulsive Spectrum Disorder. Seo-ha had suppressed them by stimulating the brain's reward circuit of mathematical beauty.

But this was not something a child not yet in middle school could accomplish.

His fingertips trembled faintly.

"Lately Ducky's gotten a little cheeky, so..."

Seo-ha carried on, sounding as though he found it all rather amusing.

But Ezra was so astonished he could scarcely close his mouth.

'Twelve years old.'

That was the average age of first onset for Obsessive-Compulsive Spectrum Disorder in clinical practice. But the real problem was what came after.

'A child who built his own inhibitory mechanism at the very moment of onset.'

Listening all the way through to the recent events, his face filled with disbelief.

Ducky.

That was no Defense Mechanism.

In psychiatry, a Defense Mechanism is a psychological strategy in which the ego mobilizes the unconscious to process anxiety it is capable of handling.

Seo-ha seemed to regard Ducky as some commonplace psychological remedy, but that was plainly a misunderstanding. The essence of a Defense Mechanism lies in its unconsciousness.

Seo-ha had been different from the very beginning.

He gave it a name and made rules for it. And over the span of ten years he talked with Ducky and negotiated, and refined the whole arrangement into something precise.

The CT images rose in his mind.

'D..don't tell me!'

What if, through that very process, he had been altering the physical structure of his brain?

His throat went dry all at once.

There was only one conclusion he could reasonably draw.

He and his mathematical self had built, inside his own brain, the most ideal environment in which the two of them could live.

"Professor?"

Seo-ha gave him a puzzled look, as if wondering what there was to be so surprised about.

He shook his head.

The symptoms Seo-ha had experienced and his case of self-treatment were clinically worthless.

Because no one would ever be able to reproduce them.

Then a certain hypothesis flitted through his mind.

Unlike in his childhood, the Seo-ha of today had left several of his brain's circuits open. That region was the territory Ducky had originally inhabited. Once Seo-ha could use that territory himself, what would Ducky eventually become?

Annihilation, rebellion, integration, or a descent into somewhere darker and deeper still? Until that day came, there was no way to know.

*****

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