Split Tim

Tim waited alone in the gray observation room. A basket of objects sat on the table in front of him.

"Good morning, Tim," the doctor said, closing the door behind him. "I heard the procedure went well."

"That's what they told me."

"Good!" The doctor smiled. "Those seizures should be under control." He sat down, picked a few items out of the basket and placed them in his lap, out of Tim's view.

"Now, as we've discussed, there may be some peculiar new mental functioning," the doctor explained. "We're going to test that this morning. Are you ready?"

 Tim nodded. The doctor picked out an item and put it in the middle of the table.

"Ok, Tim. What object do you see there?"

"A baseball," Tim answered correctly.

"Perfect," the doctor replied. Then he pulled out an eye patch and handed it across the table. "Now, cover your right eye, please."

Tim complied. He could now see only out of his left eye. The doctor put the baseball away and set out another object.

"Now what do you see?"

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"New request from auditory," R's boss said, poking his head into the visual processing lounge. "Simple one. They want to know what the object on the table is called."

R looked at the screen behind him. "That coffee mug?" he asked. 

"Yep," his boss replied. "Just get that info across the bridge over to Speech and Language. They'll take it from there."

"Easy enough," said R as he rose from his seat. He moved over to the printer, pushed a few buttons and in nanoseconds had an image of the object on a piece of neural paper.

"Wait, why can't L just handle this one?" R asked. "He's like, right there."

"They covered his side up," the boss replied. "He can't see what it is."

"What? Why?"

"It's some weird experiment," his boss explained, shrugging. "They must be doing some kind of systems check after that crazy storm we had last night."

"Huh," R responded. "Well, I'll head over there now, then. Back in two picoseconds."

His boss nodded. "Take your time."

R headed out of his office, neural paper in hand. In his company Axon he could reach the bridge to L-Land (left side of Tim's brain) in about 5 milliseconds. 3 if he was in a hurry.

He wasn't, though, so he set Axon's cruise control to 5 millimeters per microsecond and headed out. He flipped on his Synapse receiver and tuned it to a news station. They were talking about the storm.

"...had electric storms before, obviously. They're common, and they've been getting worse, but I never thought we'd see anything like that."

"Do you think this was targeted? A deliberate attack on sovereign Tim's brain?" the host asked.

"That's fear-mongering," a pundit replied. "We see storms like that all the time. Who would be targeting him, and why?"

"So it's just a crazy coincidence that this happened in a Limbic election year," the host snapped back.

"That's ridiculous..." the pundit replied. R rolled his eyes and switched stations. 

"...no damage reported to any part of R-Land, but communication with L-Land has seemingly been cut off," a stern voice said, and caught R's attention.

"Cut off? How? What does that mean?" a second voice asked.

"It means just that, cut off. We haven't had any communication from L-Land since the event," the stern voice replied. "We're not sure if there's been any damage over there, or frankly, if L-Land even exists at all anymore."

"What?" the second voice asked, chuckling. "It might be completely gone?"

"As far as we know."

"If you're just joining us," the second voice cut in, "we're here with the Communications Director of R-Land's Cerebral Hemisphere, and from the sounds of it the event was much more than a standard electrical storm."

"Correct," the stern voice cut in. "It's been confirmed that this was not at all epileptic in nature. In fact, we have reason to believe there may have been outside interference."

"Outside? As...how? An accident?"

"There is evidence that..."

Yikes, R thought, growing more nervous. This really wasn't just another storm, was it?

He thought about the previous night; tried to remember anything he could.

There had been an electrical storm, he remembered, although it was worse than usual. It knocked out power to the entire visual processing grid, and probably most of the rest of Tim's normal functioning brain, for several minutes. R had heard rumors of extreme methods of treatment for Tim, including lobotomies and electric shock therapy, but the storms were beginning to affect the part of Tim's brain that held and processed memories so data about what Tim had learned and experienced in the past few months was spotty at best.

After the storm, R remembered delivering images of medical devices across the bridge. "Defibulator...defrimbillator? Whatever, close enough," he remembered thinking. The last image he processed was of a long tube attached to a bag of fluid and bright, white lights in the ceiling.

Then Tim's brain shut down.

When visual processing awoke, the entire hemisphere was buzzing about news that neurons from The Unconscious had been spreading. Something big had happened while Tim was out. The Unconscious was typically dramatic and unreliable, though, so most of Tim's conscious mind just assumed it was another storm.

"...might actually have been surgery," a voice on the receiver said.

Suddenly, R had to slam on his brakes. There was a traffic jam several micrometers long in front of him, dead stopped. He turned his receiver off and got out of the Axon. Millions of other neurons had done the same.

"Hey, dude," one of them said, appearing next to him. "Bridge is out."

"What?"

"The bridge. The storm, or whatever. It took it out. It's completely gone," the neuron said.

"That...that's impossible." R stammered. "Look, I have to get this to Speech and Language."

"Join the club," the neuron replied. "We all have business over there."

"But...there's just no way. How are we -- how is Tim -- going to function?" R asked.

"See for yourself, if you don't believe me," the neuron said, gesturing to a lump of gray matter packed with thousands of neurons gazing in the direction of the bridge.

R joined the crowd of neurons making their way to the top of the lump. A little over half way up, he looked and saw a giant, empty chasm where the bridge, the only way into L-Land, had once stood. It was really gone.

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"...I...it's, uh..." Tim sat, confused. "I...I can't say." He knew that he knew what the object was, but he couldn't find the word for it.

"Totally expected," the doctor replied assuredly. "It indicates a complete partitioning of the hemispheres. Nearly every patient who undergoes this treatment experiences some level relief from their epilepsy.".

 Tim nodded. "That's certainly good to know."

"What this means, though," he continued, "is that the two halves of your brain can no longer communicate with each other. So, if only one side of your brain is processing images and it is unable to receive information from the side of your brain that knows your vocabulary..."

"I won't be able to remember the name for a simple object," Tim said.

"Correct. Typically you receive visual input in both halves, though, since you don't usually have one eye covered. So it won't be an issue in day-to-day life," the doctor explained.

"Makes sense," Tim responded. "Can I take this off now?" he asked, gesturing to the patch on his eye.

"Of course."

Tim lifted the patch away and focused both eyes on the object.

"Ah," he said, breathing a sigh of relief. "A coffee mug."