She watched Dinesh’s smiling face as he deflected accusations of personal genius and attributed everything to his wonderful team. It wasn’t news to her that HETE had been successful, but at some point she’d stopped paying attention. ‘Good for you, Dr Bose,’ she muttered, sincere but still envious. She wasn’t jealous of these snippets of fame; she just wished she could have steered her own life half as well. Dinesh had made good use of his personal obsessions – which might otherwise have been merely neurotic – by harnessing them to an admirable goal. Nasim couldn’t believe that he’d spent a single day in the last ten years feeling bored and unfulfilled or guilty and self-indulgent. That was enough to make anyone want to smack him across the head.
A truck’s horn blared close by, followed by a long, teeth-gritting squeal of brakes. Nasim went to the balcony and looked down at the highway; a near-miss this time, not a pile-up. It was enough to wake the birds, though. She stood in the dark listening to them chatter, wondering what they made of the strange racket that had roused them.
Back in the living room, the notepad had detected her absence and paused its display. Nasim made a throat-cutting gesture that blanked the screen, but instead of heading for the bedroom she sat down again.
She’d kept her gaze averted from another scientific endeavour, though it had attracted far more media coverage than HETE. If she was serious about exorcising jealousies and regrets, she might as well go for the big one.
Nasim cupped her right hand beside her mouth to let her notepad know that she was addressing it and not just babbling dementedly to herself.
‘Human Connectome Project,’ she said.
The map of the brain that appeared a heartbeat later was multicoloured and translucent, the familiar shape woven from a tangle of fanciful cables. Nasim had seen the emblematic image a few times before and dismissed it as eye candy, but now that she was actually paying attention she suspected that it was based on genuine regional connectivity statistics, with the glossy conduits rendered thick or thin in proportion to a tractographic count of nerve fibres between the different areas they linked. Like a schematic drawing of a metro system, it told something truthful in bright colours, even if it wasn’t an engineering blueprint for the real tracks and stations.
She laughed softly; this wasn’t so painful. Two months before, when the news of the first draft’s completion had edged into her peripheral vision, it had filled her with a sense of uselessness and stupidity. If she hadn’t succumbed to the naïve fantasy that her homeland needed her, she could have been popping champagne in Cambridge or Düsseldorf and cheering for the cameras; just one face in an anonymous white-coated crowd, but still basking in the glow of her small part in the collective achievement.
Now she felt just a wry impatience with her own touchiness and fragility. She was forty years old; if she couldn’t get over a few bad career choices after fifteen years, that was pathetic. She’d forgotten an entire marriage in less time than that.
She navigated quickly past the gee-whiz bullet points, the byte counts trailing zeroes illustrated with comic-book stacks of Blu-rays reaching to the sky. Yes, that’s a lot of data you gathered, we’re all very impressed.
The paper that announced the draft map itself had appeared in
PLoS Computational Biology; Nasim followed the link to it. There was one more blow for her ego waiting here; her own work on integrating data from multiple subjects and imaging techniques wasn’t even cited in the references. She cursed the cheating bastards and skimmed back through the paper, looking for the evidence that would nail them. Whatever disappointments she’d brought upon herself, she still deserved this one tiny footnote in history.
Except she didn’t. They’d used a different method entirely, statistical rather than functional, developed four years after she’d left the field. The final map they’d generated from their thousands of individual scans owed nothing whatsoever to her ideas about matching neural sub-circuits.
Nasim felt lightheaded now. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms. If all the late nights she’d spent in Redland’s lab had actually turned out to be irrelevant, maybe she should be grateful that she’d cut her losses and walked away. But if Zendegi was going down the tubes, and she hadn’t even left one tiny smudged thumbprint on the HCP, what was left? After forty years, what had she accomplished? One bad marriage and two failed careers.
She stood up, her cheeks burning, refusing to sink into a heap of tears but still not able to laugh the whole thing off. Fretting about the HCP was useless vanity, but Zendegi’s fate was real and pressing. She’d seen the boss after the money men departed, and he had not looked hopeful.
As she stared at the screen, her attention fell on a series of links leading off from the paper itself into the massive stores of data on the HCP’s own servers. In the spirit of Open Science – and as a condition of some of the funding – all the raw scans that had been used to build the map were available on the web, along with the map itself. The HCP’s first draft was not the final word; researchers around the world would keep adding more brain images and refining the results.
But even without fresh scans to contribute, anyone could come along and re-analyse the data.
Nasim read the whole paper. Every few paragraphs she had to break off to follow up an unfamiliar reference, or embark on a restless circuit of the room as she mulled over some technical detail, but after two hours she’d come to grips with everything.
They’d done it deliberately, she realised. They’d chosen a different way to combine the scans, not because her technique had been rendered obsolete by a superior method, but because they’d been aiming for a different kind of map. This draft would allow neurologists to diagnose pathologies more easily, and enable computational biologists to test many of their basic ideas. What it would not do, though, was give rise to a complete, working simulation of a human brain. It was, by design, too blurred, too abstracted, too generic. But that had been a choice. The same raw data, with different methods, might well yield a different kind of map, far more amenable to being treated as a blueprint.
There was no prospect of waking the dead; the individual memories and personalities of the subjects of the scans were unrecoverable. But their common attributes, their common skills, might not lie beyond reconstruction.
Other people, Nasim was sure, would already have thought along the same lines. Cyber-Jahan? Happy Universe? Games effects subcontractors, like Crowds and Power? Anyone who was serious about building the best possible Proxies would have had two months’ head start.
But she’d trained for this race, she’d written the book on it. She was rusty on the details, but she could be back up to speed in a week or two if that was what she wanted.
Out on the balcony, the finches were singing.