Overclocked

Doctors diagnosed me with early-onset Parkinsons at age twenty. I think that I would have preferred a few more years before they caught it - if I had to have it at all. That way I could date, get married, have kids and a family free from the shadow of the decade-long disintegration of my mind and body.

I have forgotten some of the details from before the operation. Others, from right afterwards, blur together. I did not yet have a proper filing system in place.

Everything else, though, I remember. The number of books on a psychologist's bookshelf, the Technicolor chroma-keycodes of the man's tie, the forty minutes of aharmonic musical notation describing the tapping of the fingernails on his right hand. Those and many more. Millions.

(I cannot give an exact number - I have not yet found a satisfactory way of dealing with the problem of recursion. As I am unable to outrun myself, it is unamenable to brute force, and at the moment, a workaround is of low priority.)

I saw the ad in the back of the local newsweekly. Clinical trials, run by the medical center alongside an engineering professor from the new Wilsdorf Nanotechnology Center. Third on the list of qualifying conditions - Adolescent-Presenting Parkinson's Disease. All I needed to see.

I took a picture on my cell phone - faster than writing it down - and called my family physician as soon as the image finished uploading. Called both professors mentioned in the ad, preliminary confirmation of enrollment qualification. Called University Medical Center for records release. Went to Medical Center to sign forms. Paid for courier...

Setting up the whole thing took three weeks. It would have taken longer, but the NIH/DARPA grant they got, combined with my condition, let me bypass insurance. For that, I've signed over a quarter share of my collected royalites to the NIH Experimental Treatment Outreach Initiative.

(I used to joke that signing all of the consent forms took longer than the actual procedure, but that only really works when people can see your shaking hands.

And I can balance five dollars in change on my fingertips now, not that I would.)

They strapped me down and bolted a guide frame into my cranium. Head shaved, a laser proceeded to bore a series of hundred-micron holes into my brain. Microscopic needles soon followed.

Every infinitesimal fraction of an inch, they injected a burst of protein-tipped carbon nanotubes. My condition arose from signalling difficulties between my cerebral neurons. Electrical signals came up against widening gaps, stopping short as my muscles jerked halfway to picking up my Coke. Chemical markers would guide the nanotubes to the synapses, forming a conductive bridge across the gap.

In theory, at least. Worst case, pencil lead straight into my motor cortex.

Afterwards, I took a few weeks off of school. Not because of the side effects, but because I had to stop my medication, and that made the shakes worse - how else could they tell if the treatment had worked?

By the end of the first week, I could hold a pen to paper. By the next Friday, I could write well enough to read it afterwards. Sunday, other people could read it, too.

I got the sense from Pasciuti and Williams of, not astonishment, but stunned incredulity. The treatment had worked just as they had theorized and just as they had planned - on the same timescale, even. That everything went as predicted - no-one would have predicted that.

A week later, I solved my first post-op Sudoku. It's relevant here that I've always done most of these in my head. My reasoning is a lot shakier when it's done with my fingers.

Thursday I had lunch at the Bodo's Bagels on the corner with Sarah. Tuna salad takes less prep time than an omelet, so I grabbed a couple of seats and flipped open a Hook Weekly to the puzzles.

Four of four stars, so I figured I'd manage one pass through before they called her number. All of the 1's fell into place, but that was just a red herring - nothing came easy after those. Logical supposition - ahem, guessing - time soon followed.

The search tree went three or four nodes deep in a couple of places, but I managed to prune it back. One last once over to double check the fill, and I reached for my pen to fill it in.

I noticed Sarah sitting across from me.

"Oh, man. Sorry, I didn't mean to - I must have zoned out there."

She looked puzzled.

"I just sat down," she said.

I furrowed my brow, but I didn't want to insist on my thoughtlessness. It still nagged at me for the rest of that day, though.

That night I loaded up an online Sudoku to kill time waiting for dinner to heat in the oven. Trickier than the lunchtime offering, but the numbers still fell into place in turn. I typed them in and, on a whim, hit the button to show how I stacked up against the networked crowds.

Fourteen seconds. I stared at the number. Top one percent of solved puzzles, margin of error one percent. I didn't think my fingers could type that fast.

I noticed that my watch had frozen at 7:43:47. As I watched, the crystals flickered over into :48 before freezing once more. I saw the black line of my eyelids fall like a solar eclipse, and when I opened them again my watch was running, my dinner was burning, and my head was splitting.

It occurred to me then that I had already solved the puzzle at lunch before picking up the pen to fill the squares in on paper.

More tests were in order - missing time was one thing, forgotten time another - both common enough symptoms of petit mal absence seizures. But slowed time? Without loss of awareness or efficacy?

Another half-dozen Sudoku. Average time per: six minutes, thirteen seconds. I did the lot in under two.

I pulled a book of New York Times crosswords off the shelf and did one of the Saturday grids. Normally they take me an afternoon, if I can struggle my way through them at all, but this one only took about fifteen minutes.

A few of the squares were wrong, though - one was double-keyed to a French hamlet and a seventeenth century British composer, the others to similar proper names. Something of a relief. An afternoon's work in a quarter hour, even if it sure felt like an afternoon, okay; but knowing things I didn't know before, things I had no right knowing?

I tried a cryptic crossword, and sure enough, three clues in I found myself trying to exhaustively search through six-letter words.

My computer had a clock program that I called up - concentrating on the numbers, I saw the seconds stop. They started up again when I went to move the mouse to bring up milliseconds.

This time, I saw the last digits roll up, ticking past. I could see how the sixty-hertz refresh rate on the monitor skipped over sixteen, now seventeen thousandths of a second at a time.

Thinking back to the Sudokus and crossword puzzle, I realized that I could still see them if I wanted to, every square and letter and number.

My temples were throbbing now, spikes stabbing deep behind my eyes. I've had migraines before, big honking mothers that send me to a darkened couch for an afternoon, and this was just like that. Crushed ice in a damp towel thrown over my forehead, tied in place with a bandana.

Cold compress, cool the skin, contract the blood vessels, numb the pain as I pulled up the first two hundred digits of pi.

A minute later I knew them forward, backward, grid-wise permuted, as well as if I had them in a looseleaf in front of me, pen in hand. My head still hurt. It was amazing, but I felt out of sorts. Mnemonics and puzzles were all well and good, but of limited utility. Like a kid who can launch himself fifty feet in a single bound, just hasn't quite managed the hang of landing yet.

I went to sleep - no, passed out - on the couch, woke up fifteen hours later, and started chugging Cokes, shotgunning sugar water. I had research to do.

A ten page paper on the neurologic/therapeutic uses of carbon nanotubes. I let my gaze linger over each page, committing it to memory, then lay back with a cold pack held above each ear and read.

I had to go through it several times, and a lot of the basic knowledge was still beyond me. My interpretations and impressions I filed away as marginalia and went searching for a couple of open-source textbooks on nanotubes and neurobiology. Time elapsed: thirteen minutes.

The trick of remembering the textbooks was to run my eyes over every inch. I couldn't just blink to capture them, I had to scan. Longer than blinking the pages, but still marginal compared to the pdf's page-turning latency. Elapsed time (total): twenty-one minutes.

Halfway through the nanotube textbook, in a chapter on long-chain synthesis, I blacked out, barely realizing that the cold pack had melted and slid off onto the floor. When I woke back up - six hours later, by the clock - I panicked, feeling lost and forgotten.

I blinked, and everything came back as if it lay spread across a desk in front of me and I had just left for a glass of water. New cold packs, two of them, held in place by a sweat band, and I plowed through the rest of the textbooks. By the clock it took four hours - it felt like a week.

The problem with my brain stemmed from poor conduction of electrical impulses. The places where synapses touched, the cell membranes were faulty and patchy. Ion-channel driven waves of potential would crest against these junctions, and instead of smoothly pulsing through, would turn into jagged breakers.

Special membrane-binding proteins on the ends of the nanotubes were designed to socket the carbon wires in-between adjacent neurons, bridging these bad gaps and restoring smooth communication.

There are also chemical synapses, gaps between neurons that communicate by packets of chemicals released and absorbed between separated cell membranes. Now, an electrical synapse is generally about three and a half nanometers wide. Chemical synapses, twenty to forty nanometers.

The nanotubes perfused into my brain were nominally five nanometers long - sufficient to bridge electrical synapses, but small enough not to interfere with anything else.

Pasicuti and Williams used an arc-discharge system to produce the nanotubes they used. A footnote on page two-twelve mentions that use of helium as an inert gas can lead to much greater variation in tube length than using a more common argon buffer.

Helium is commonly used to flush vacuum chambers and test for leaks. And even a small impurity could lead to much longer nanotubes being formed alongside the desired sizes.

I realized that I hadn't ingested any non-Coca Cola calories in more than a day, and set about stripping my fridge bare of sandwich meats, cheese, and leftover spaghetti. Questions remained long after I had filled my belly.

How had the longer nanotubes made it into the injection, assuming they did? If they didn't, what was going on? Could my brain rewire itself without crashing? How? What caused such accelerated thinking? Improved memory? Why did I have to sit still? What about breathing, heartbeat?

"Contact your doctor if you experience any side effects" be damned. I've a good enough sense of the government and a big enough library of sci-fi to know that if they're competent enough to be of any help, that competence won't be on my side.

Instead, I called a private-practice psychologist and scheduled a full workup for the next day, paying extra for the short notice. Said I was applying for some nondescript job that wanted an evaluation.

I slept until the appointment before catching a cab over. Gave a ruffle to the standard poodle sleeping on the couch in the waiting room, then shook her hand and was shown to my papers.

General knowledge, mostly science and math were first. I concentrated on each question, took my time, and then filled out the answers in a few seconds each. It took a little bit of real remembering to make sure I filled the questions in one at a time instead of page by page.

Verbal took a bit more doing, a bit more continual cross-referencing and harkening back to snippets of writing read and remembered, but I felt like I had all the time in the world. A worksheet with pairs of shapes to mark as same or different came next - she said not to be discouraged if I didn't finish, as it was designed to be difficult.

I finished figuring it out before she'd started her spiel, while she was pulling it from the folder, and scratched out my ones and zeros in fifteen seconds.

Memory tests were laughable. Twelve nouns? I could do those before the treatment. Short stories designed to overload you with details? I remembered her intonation, even. We went on to spatial reasoning and a half hour later she asked me to recite the earlier memory sets. As easy as picking a folder out of a filing cabinet.

That evening, I pulled out a physics textbook and scanned it into memory. It was the middle of autumn, but I cranked open the windows and tossed a washcloth across my forehead before lying back and reading. Even did the first half of the exercises with my eyes closed, ha-ha.

When I went in the next morning, the psychologist was sitting at her desk with my test papers in front of her. She invited me to take a seat, and as soon as I touched the chair, asked me -

"Do you or anyone you know work for Garrer-Bennett?" I told her no, not that I knew of. She asked if I'd ever taken the test before, and I said that, no, I hadn't. She frowned.

"Even if you had taken a version of the test before, each sitting is generated at random from a bank of over ten thousand possible questions." A pause. "Your scores, then. It's not possible to be off the charts, but many of your scores fall above what we call differentiable ranges."

I asked her what exactly that meant, even though I already had a pretty good idea.

"Take your memory scores, for example," she said. "Working, short term, and recall. You scored perfectly on all of them - by itself, not unheard of. Many people use chunking, mnemonics, images to get around the seven plus-or-minus-two baseline. Are you familiar with that?" I said I was - "Introductory Neuroscience" page 693, the shaded sidebar.

"The second score for these tests is something called a T-factor, representing how long, roughly, it took to remember or recall the questions. A person who has to consciously think of what they are looking for will have a high T-factor, say, forty. If they get the answer quickly, a lower score, twenty."

"Your T-factor was three." I sat waiting. "Not only is that ill-defined in the scaled results, it's ill-defined in the raw score. I think you can store and recall information faster than you can communicate.

"Well?" she asked me. I shrugged.

"On mathematical and logical reasoning, you also exhaust the scale - although in this case, there exist more specialized instruments you may wish to take. Verbal was lower, although that is an issue of acquired knowledge. Most of the mistakes came from idiosyncratic vocabulary.

"Tell me," she said, "why do you really need these results? Mensa? A private employer? Some...government agency?" I flitted my eyes around and looked overwhelmed and got my results and got out of there.

I never thought much about tests after that - they'd confirmed that whatever was happening was quantifiably real, not some personal hallucination brought on by stress.

When the doctors ran the cognitive tests on me to examine the impact of treatment, I didn't remember how I did beforehand well enough to match it. Instead, I gushed about how much better I felt, how much more sleep I was getting, less stress, so on. When they gave me the results, the improved numbers were already filed away in their minds under "But, all things considered..."

I took another week off from work and school. With the magic words of "treatment-for-disability related", I didn't even have to take vacation days. Every day when I woke up, I'd lie in bed thinking until I got fuzzy and feverish and had to take a break - that was when I'd have breakfast, a shower, cold, of course, and dress. They shaved my head for the procedure and I kept it that way. Less insulation.

Around noon, I'd get up again and grab a bite to eat on my way to the library. I ate a lot for lying around all day - the brain consumes twenty-five percent of the body's daily caloric intake.

There, I'd find one of the assisted-reading terminals and call up a virtual shelf of textbooks. Turning pages was too slow, and I didn't have access to computerized editions at home, not without wasting even more time finding bootleg files. Ten or twenty books did for a couple of days.

Back to the apartment and a comfortable seat with cold compresses for another few hours before dinner and bed. I could fit more into a day than in any given month of college.

Each morning I'd work through dozens of tedious problems from each of the subjects I studied. Math, chemistry, physics, biology, logic, computer science - I might have gone through a ream or more of paper a week if I wrote any of it out longhand.

After breakfast it would be time to dig into the heavy theoretical stuff. Afternoons were for general noodling around - put in a few days on the Collatz conjecture, a few more on neurochemistry, one or two on quantum electronics.

Not all of my time was spent studying, though - the library had volumes of e-books, all stripes of fiction. I worked my way through the canons of Western literature, the best science fiction of the past hundred years and beyond...I felt a bit like Burgess Meredith in the director's cut of the Twilight Zone, the one where he realizes that bombed-out drugstores have reading glasses, and libraries have large-print editions, sitting there ten years later with piles of well-thumbed tomes around him.

Time enough at last. But it still galled me to pause whenever I used my voluntary musculoskeletal system. Every step was a poem I could have digested, every meal an omnibus or textbook.

I tried to remedy this by meditation, learning to make my conscious movements unconscious, to divorce my mind - to free it - from my body. Perhaps, with more practice, I would have been able to, but my muscles and nerves ran as slowly as ever. Limiting how fast I could train them to be faster.

The best managed was a palsied in-and-out, like a man dozing off behind the wheel of a car with a narcoleptic jerk. I'd take a step and think while I waited for my foot to hit the ground. Slow back down to adjust my trajectory, launch, and then back to whatever I had been working on.

It was, I suppose, a supreme irony that even as my mind grew sharper and faster than ever, my movements reverted to their ordinary uncertainty. The two doctors fretted and consulted and decided to ask if I would be willing to undergo another injection.

I considered it. The nanotubes would be refined from the same source - and as they hadn't alerted me to any contamination problems, I had to assume that they hadn't discovered the original mistake.

Another dose might have unpredictable side effects, or it might simply give me another boost. I worried about how to control it, certainly, but I had done more in a span of weeks than I had in years previous. I could become an expert in anything mental in a week.

I agreed, and signed the consent forms while I calculated Feynman diagrams. That night I slowed down for twenty minutes and wrote out a detailed explanation of my condition, including my hypothesis for its cause, leaving the print-out on my desk as I left that morning.

The procedure went a little bit faster this time. Of course, I was also sedated - Pasciuti explained that they were worried about possible seizures given the prior treatment, and they wanted to give my sleeping brain time to get used to the new dose.

They turned the gas on and I pulled out my thoughts on the Collatz conjecture to accompany me into sleep. I was thinking fast enough to actually see myself fall into unconsciousness - reaching for thoughts that were no longer there, finding my thoughts vanishing like a train into a bank of fog.

I woke up paralyzed. All I could see was blackness, the twinkling, sparkling dots of pressure-light behind closed eyelids. No matter how hard I tried to open them, I could feel nothing - no response, not even the slow lurch that normally came when I moved deep in thought.

After a minute of my time I began to worry - not only couldn't I move, I couldn't hear anything. Not the cries of frightened nurses, not the constant burble of the hospital, not the beep-beep count of monitors - not even the Brownian chaos of my inner ear. I feared that I would be a shut-in for good, trapped in here forever, when a small yawning sliver of light, prismatic and hazy, appeared at the bottom of my field of view.

This did nothing to allay my fears, at first. Medical doctors lift eyelids to check for pupil dilation. Like thunking a melon to see if it's ripe. But it was slow - too slow for any human hand to be moving it, even from my point of view.

I started reading the Chronicles of Narnia, waiting for a good three-hundred count before coming back to my senses. They had moved a millimeter, perhaps - enough to see it move, but not enough yet to see.

Focusing on my body, I could at least make out some small sensations, muted and faraway. The scratch of fabric on my skin, the weight of covers over my body, cold saline on the electroencephalagraph leads hooked onto my scalp. But it was so slow, all of it, taking forever to register.

My eyes at last opened, three books into the series, and afforded me the uncommon treat of watching my vision come into focus, the room rushing towards me like vertigo in Vertigo. There was no thumb on my eyebrow, I realized - this movement was in response to my earlier impulse only now reaching the muscles in my face along glacially slow chemical synapses.

Shapes and figures stood frozen in mid-stride around me, a dull roar growing in my ears. Frequencies shifted far below what I was used to hearing, high-pitched squeals turned to rumbling claps of thunder.

I reread some of the papers published about my treatment while waiting for enough to be said that I could rewind and fast forward it enough to make some sense out of it. I was tracking down a cross-reference on synaptic action potentials when the last phoneme crested and I sped it up.

Seizure.

I spun my eyes as fast as the Earth turned towards the EEG - the screen showing the electrical activity in my brain looked like static in a snowstorm, the Fourier of a seismograph at Hiroshima.

There was more yelling while I worked out a more efficient algorithm for interpreting EEG signals, occupying my time by running it at ten-thousandth speed on a virtual machine. A syringe plunged into my arm, cold saline packs flew through the air, their ripples reminding me to edit an unwritten monograph on the Navier-Stokes equation.

It was a grand mal seizure on the monitors, perfect information indistinguishable from perfect noise. I timed my heartbeat and realized the latest dose had sped my thoughts up a further forty-fold.

My fever was skyrocketing. I had committed to memory books on meditation, autogenic training, and biofeedback for such eventualities. I tore through them now, shutting down and turning off everything I could find before it blew out.

I woke up and the world was fast again, faster than it had ever been, it seemed. The doctors explained that I would have to remain on the anti-seizure medicines indefinitely. I nodded and began cutting the dosage as soon as I walked out of the hospital after the longest week of my life.

It took me another week to build the setup, working in real time as I cleaned my system of the sludge suffusing my thoughts. Bags of ice, fans, salvaged refrigeration units filled the living room of my apartment. A molded tank to place around my head, like Tummo monks. I spent two grand on a robotic arm and camera, controlled by biofeedback from a portable EEG hacked to measure fast-twitch impulses in my hands.

Seizure medication on an autoinjector triggered by heart-rate and cerebral blood temperature, a dead-man's switch for emergency services. Another, smaller syringe, to help me slow down enough to get up and move about for food.

I know that it's a bit clunky, but the only thing faster would be a direct neural interface, and that's decades away. All the first principles are there, but managing the incredible complexity of interfacing to a computer composed of a hundred billion transistor clusters is a task that will take decades.

I should be done by Thursday - after that, it depends on how quickly I can have custom-machined boards and trodes turned around from Taiwan, black market robotic surgical tools, etc. Always assuming the CPU doesn't melt down before then, of course.

Don Norum writes things. Less often than not, they are published.