The Brain Trust

I'm standing next to my wife, Kim, on the deck of our new Florida beach house. As the sun peeped over the horizon, I relived our exhilarating four-year rollercoaster climb from struggling post-docs to crazy rich bastards. I never thought I’d own a place like this.

Of course, every roller coaster has its downsides. Tomorrow we'll be jetting to Washington, DC for a congressional hearing to see how hard our fall will be.

See, we didn't just invent a new bouncy putty or a way to make a potato grow hair; we discovered a revolutionary source of green energy.

#

It all began on a muggy summer afternoon in 2020.

Temple University's sparse campus lawns had bustled with sunbathing, frisbee-throwing undergrads. At dusk, a sparser crowd, mostly adult night school students, had trudged from their day jobs to evening classes. By ten that night, all that remained on campus were the sorry handful of poor bastards—indentured graduate and post-doc students, including me, Alex Rudin.

I'd just poured my tenth coffee of the day, or maybe my twentieth. Walking back to my desk, I stopped to say hi to our trolly-mice, the showcase of our neurochemistry lab. Their little steel helmets, screwed into their teeny skulls, secured bundles of fine wires and micro tubing as the fuzzies went about their mousey business, each in their own cage. An intricate network of overhead tracks kept the tethers from tangling.

Our researchers thought up ways to stimulate the little fellers electrically or chemically while sampling droplets of brain fluid for neurochemical analysis.

I stared down at a lucky critter who’d been dosed with marijuana metabolites—all in the name of science. He stared back as if to say, “Pass the popcorn.” Amazingly, the government sponsored these studies, and our department was rolling in funds.

My interest in pot was limited to an edible or two at bedtime with my girlfriend, Kim, to help us contrive other applications for neurochemistry. Eventually, we came up with a doozie—a new type of green energy.

That night, I was photographing my new experimental rig when my phone vibrated an emergency campus alert. I read the scrolling message. This time, it was a robbery near the dorms.

Temple's main campus was growing more dangerous by the semester. Community outreach programs were well intended, but these gangs were better armed than the police and bankrolled by world-class drug traffickers.

I sighed and continued snapping photos of my neuro-electrochemical reactor. It looked deceivingly simple; a foot-high glass cylinder with wires and tubing exiting each end. The filtration disks, electrode plates, and chemical sensors were neatly hidden inside the endcaps.

Hurried slaps of sneakers on linoleum and yells of, “Police. Stop. “echoed in the hall. The footsteps stopped at my lab.

Three out-of-breath kids, barely in their teens, ran into my lab and dove behind my desk. I held my breath when the tallest one slid a gun from his belt and glared at me. A few seconds later, two guards poked their heads into the room.

In between gasps, the older guard yelled, "Anyone come through here?"

I forced eye contact and shook my head. "Just me and those mice here tonight."

He raised an eyebrow at his partner, and they turned to leave. "Keep alert. There's been a robbery at Magonagle Hall. The thieves were kids. Ran towards this building." I suspected that for their fifteen bucks an hour, these guys did not want to find anyone.

The adolescent thugs waited several long minutes and rose from the floor. The one holding the gun on me asked for my money.

I gave up all seven bucks and turned my pockets inside out. "Sorry, Dude, I’m just a poor student." Wrong thing to say- this kid knew poor better than I ever will..

He slapped the desk. "Phone!" I slid it over to him.

On their way out, another one grabbed my laptop and said, "Tell anyone, and I'll be back."

Then, he smiled and said, "You have a nice day now."

It wasn't a nice day. I paced the lab. My throat was dry, I was dripping with sweat and scared shitless. I was out of there.

Like a front-line soldier, I jogged to my apartment, a can of Mace at the ready. The same Mace that was useless five minutes ago. I imagined a Temple News headline, "Dummy Dies with Mace Can in Hand.”

At Tenth and Diamond Streets, I continued past the night B-ballers heating up the community court. I usually joined in, despite being short and jump-challenged. These kids put me to shame, but I did make some friends. Sammy and Georgie gave me a reassuring wave as I passed. I held my hand up and charged past them.

The streets were well lit within a block or two of campus perimeters. But there was still a shadowy stretch between me and the safety of my building. I walked past the campus police phone, shaking my head as I imagined the rescue-wait music that played while callers were on hold.

Kim met me at my front door with a kiss and a plate of cold pizza. "Hey, see tonight's alert? Third one this week."

"Oh, you might say that. Three punks hid from the guards in my lab with a gun on me. They thanked me by taking my phone and laptop. One threatened to come back if I reported it."

Kim handed me a beer. "Thank God you weren't hurt. This shit’s getting more common. You know, if our project takes off, we should move it to the Drexel Science Incubator. Get an apartment near the rich kids from Penn."

"Thanks for the beer. Got a straw? My hands are still shaking."

We made quite a team. Kim was a Neuroscience post-doc at the medical school, and I was in the Neurochemistry Department down the street. Our new project needed a supply of fresh cadaver brains, and her lab was part of Temple's Hospital system. If anyone knew brain physiology, it was Kim. After tonight, the stakes for our success felt like a matter of life and death.

She rubbed my shoulders and sat next to me on our bed. "I did a ton of paperwork to get us next-of-kin approval. One wife joked that her hubby's brain was finally being put to good use."

I finished my beer, reached into my bedstand cookie jar, and pulled out two gummy-monkey edibles. Pointing to the ceiling, I said, "At least the proposal draft and photos are safely floating in the cloud. I needed a new laptop anyway. Let's try to get some sleep. It’s a long shot, but with this first feasibility test, tomorrow's a big day."

#

The following day, we were back in my lab with a cooler full of dry ice and two recently deceased brains. I resisted making smoothie jokes as I fed slippery slices, along with the nutrient solution, to our lab blender and turned it on.

Kim recorded the procedure with her phone as I poured the grey slime into the reactor, turned on the power supply, and chattered on with technical details. I was hyped, even if the video would put many listeners to sleep.

Kim stopped the recording. "I hope this shit works better than you explained it. We'll need something in plain English for our non-nerds."

I laughed. How 'bout "We're keeping cadaver brain cells alive and collecting their electrical output. They can't think but they can still make brain zaps as long as we feed them."

She glanced at the prototype reactor. “I hope we’re not getting into more than we can handle.” Frowning at the monitor, she said, "So far, nothing."

I reset the power supply. "I'll give 'em another tickle." Still no response. "Fuck it. Let's get breakfast. What do brains know anyway?"

It was Saturday morning, and only half the food trucks showed up. I sat at a picnic table and checked my calculations between bites of egg burrito. Kim worked on a word puzzle, a tell of her nervousness. She looked up. "Are you sure the sensors are calibrated?"

I was about to give her a snarky answer when I realized I'd missed calibrating the oxygen sensor. Instead of confessing, I sprinted back to the lab and clicked the calibrate O2 icon. A solenoid valve snapped open, oxygen bubbled, and the reactor's output slowly rose. By the time Kim got there, it was up to four milliamps. Over the next hour, it leveled off at 6.75, almost theory. I hugged Kim tightly while watching the steady readout behind her. This was a banner moment. Our first benchmark.

We spent the afternoon fleshing out our proposal, leaving space for what we hoped would be earth-shaking results. Every ten minutes, we checked the output, staring at the screen in disbelief.

The output was suspiciously steady but had just enough noise to be feasible. "If this continues for a week, I'd call it proof of concept."

Kim said, “Even if it craps out, we’re onto something.” She picked up her phone. "This calls for a splurge. I’ll reserve a table at Cuba Libre for tonight."

#

The reactor's been running for a week, but the output has been steadily dropping. Kim was working on a mountain of paperwork to justify another twenty-five cadaver brains for our scale-up.

We shut down and did a post-mortem. The reactor's platinum electrodes were coated with a brown, non-conductive film. It tested positive for nutrient metabolites. “Hmm. Looks like the brain cells are taking a crap all over our collector plates.”

Kim scratched her head. “What if we put a purifier in the loop?”

Grinning like a mouse on THC, I sauntered over to administer my best shoulder massage. "Yeah, something like a dialysis cell.”

The following day we tried it. It worked.

Kim went back to her paperwork. She bit her lip. "And what should I say about that weird blue haze this thing gives off?"

"Say that we think it's due to electromagnetic radiation. Based on the faint smell of ozone, it's probably an ionization by-product—like the Aurora Borealis. It does look cool with the lights off. Throw in a photo to grab the committee's interest."

Across the lab, Scott, the leader of our trolley-mice research group, stared blankly at his helmeted furballs and shook his head.

I couldn't help myself. "And on track three is the favorite, Scottie Boy. Place your bets."

He aimed that disgusted face at me again. "Don't mess around. These guys might have had one dose of THC too many. They're all in a permanent mellow. Crazy levels of endorphins, but this was their week off to get back to baseline. Hate to say it, but I might have to replace the whole bunch. What a pain in the ass."

He's really upset. Scott and his team were great lab mates. None of us minded a little quip now and then, but this wasn't the time.

He looked at Kim and pointed to the mice. "Alex didn't mess with these guys, did he?"

She tapped her chin for a minute. "No. That would be too much. Even for Alex."

*

The next six months flew by while we did more scale-ups and plowed through our Phase I grant money. I shared an office in the Chem Engineering building with Kim, consulting with construction teams on a kilowatt pilot reactor to be built in the room next door. It would power a section of the building to demonstrate our reactor’s reliability.

I wanted to slow things down, but the project had snowballed. Our days were filled with engineers, hungry for parameter details. And the promise of a new, cheap source of green energy drew dozens of news reporters to our lab—globally.

This morning we fought our way through a group of demonstrators waving signs in our faces. Most had a picture of Frankenstein with the caption: “We know what happened there.” Another had a picture of Jesus and said, “Brains are for thought only.”

Never mind those millions of donors pledging organs to science every day. It wasn't like we were re-inventing The Matrix. These brains were dead. Homogenized up for good measure.

Our start-up day had hardly a hitch. A couple of tweaks, and it was at theoretical power. We had even given it a name—The Brain Trust. A group of university big shots, including the President, stood around the six-foot-high steel reactor, watching the bubbly grey mixture circulate past a curved viewing slot.

After reciting a Cliff's Notes version of the reactor's theory, I nodded to Kim, and she killed the lights. I swear a vacuum formed as everyone simultaneously inhaled.

An awesome disk of blue light emanated from the quartz window, touching every wall in the room. My heart fluttered as our audience was bathed in the glow, mouths and eyes opened wide. Kim's warm hand squeezed my cold, clammy one.

It was time for Kim's magic. I switched on the lights, and she cleared her throat for attention. "We were as intrigued with this mysterious haze as you are. My specialty is brain wave analysis, so I captured the radiation patterns around our prototype reactor. We were amazed that it contained a repeating high-frequency theta waveform—like those observed when a sleeper begins to dream. This one, however, was different. It continuously repeated just one simple pattern. What the pattern means is still a mystery, but we have a hypothesis."

Our audience sat at attention, and Kim held up a poster-sized photo of Scott's trolley-mice. "Lab mice were stimulated to invoke aggressive behavior. Then we moved our reactor near their cage, and they instantly relaxed. We measured an increase in brain fluid endorphins as well. Somehow, the energy radiating from Brain Trust induced a sense of calm.”

The room buzzed with hushed conversation. "These are preliminary results, but definitely worth noting. We'll watch for more evidence as our pilot phase progresses."

I realized more than ever what a great partner Kim was.

#

After a year of near-perfect performance, word of our reactor had spread. The next level of scale-up was way beyond our skill set, but that didn't matter. We'd applied for the patent through the university and were listed as co-inventors.

I had noticed that over the past year, violent crimes around our campus decreased by an order of magnitude. It was no surprise that membership in Temple's outreach programs accelerated as the aggression dropped. The shocker was that it might be due to our pilot reactor. It was still too early to say but there were those lab mice.

Kim and I split our time between the Medical School and the Engineering Building. We did less hands-on science and more consulting. Pilot reactors were built in Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle—in neighborhoods where violent behavior flourished. In each case, street crimes slowed to a halt. But there was one big hitch.

# (Back to the present)

This morning I awoke to the gentle lapping of the Gulf. Kim scooted over and hugged me from behind.

I backed up closer to her, then remembered what today was. It was not time for sex. She tightened her grip and softly sobbed. "This was not what we signed up for."

"That's evident from our patent. Everything will come out in tomorrow's congressional hearings. It’s crystal clear we did not claim a cure for the evils of mankind. Besides, we'd never shut down a large reactor before. Chicago’s riots could have been an anomaly.”

She sat up and shook her head. "Were they? The signs were there from the beginning."

I gave her a tissue. "Scott said those mice had been over-tested and ruined. That's why we laid low until half of North Philly broke out in peace. Even then, it was just a theory."

"But there should have been more testing before everyone jumped on the bandwagon. We could have done more to avoid the horror show in Chicago."

Kim was getting to me. I walked onto our balcony and inhaled the salt air. It didn't calm me. "Who told them to shut the Chicago reactor down? The politics were insane.”

She followed me and leaned against the railing. "I should have known better. Rebound effects are well known."

Her sobs grew to a full cry. "We saw it the morning after we shut our lab reactor down."

I could no longer avoid that scene. I closed my eyes. The trolly cage walls were smeared with bloody fur. Empty helmets were scattered next to piles of bones and teeth.