It’s sunny, but deceptively chilly. I exit the car and walk to the basketball court.

I look up at the building where Newton and Adrianna live. From the third story, I see a face peer through a window.

Adrianna has surfaced.

Chapter 54

I walk to the front door of the dilapidated apartment building and she meets me there and buzzes me in.

“Sunscreen,” is the first thing the mysterious scientist says to me.

“What?”

“Even in October the rays are poison.”

“I don’t think you’d be planning to kill me if you’re trying to spare me from getting skin cancer.”

“Don’t say anything else until we get upstairs.”

In silence, we take the elevator to the third floor.

She is medium height with a build that is tough to determine given her baggy clothes: sweatpants and a sweatshirt with a Brown University logo. Her hair is pulled back tight in a short ponytail. Her skin radiates, like she could model moisturizer. Her eyes are intensely bloodshot. She’s got abrasions on the knuckles of her forefinger and index finger. The fancy medical term: scabs. Possibly, she’s been in a fight. Or maybe I’ve got to stop making inferences from meager medical insights.

When the elevator opens, two boys sprint past us. “Hey!” Adrianna yells.

The boys screech to a halt. “Sorry,” one of them says.

“First person who runs over a baby or old person does not go to the movies Friday,” she responds.

She stops in front of apartment 3H and opens the door. I walk into a low-rent apartment decorated by someone with money and particular taste.

To my right, an entire wall is consumed with a painting made up of black-and-white triangles. Sitting in front of it is a sleek gray couch. Same with the austere metal end tables on either side of the couch. Everything here screams geometry.

On the wall to my left, two startling wall hangings: framed multi-colored photo-images of the DNA double- helix.

“Family portraits,” Adrianna says.

I turn to look at her.

“That’s me on the top and Newton on the bottom. Molecular images blown up. You can pick the colors of your own chromosomes.”

“Newton’s your son?”

“I take care of him. Have a seat.”

I take the couch. She takes a leather chair across from me that’s so stiff-backed it looks like a torture device.

“Thank you for everything you’ve done,” she says.

“What have I done?”

“You decrypted the package I sent you and you came to my assistance. You’re the hero.”

“Then why do I feel so lost?”

“In my experience, there is no worse feeling than having incomplete information.”

“True. Let’s start with where have you been?”

“Can I tell you about the Human Memory Crusade, and the software, ADAM 1.0?”

“Please.”

“Is this on the record?”

“Hell yes.”

“Could we do it off the record?”

“Why?”

“Because otherwise I won’t say anything.”

“Aren’t we on the same side?”

“I’m on the side of my family.”

“Off the record.”

She sips from a mug. “Coffee?” she asks. I shake my head.

“Newton’s mother is a flight attendant who doesn’t like to stay in one place more than forty-eight hours,” she says. “Newton was being raised by his grandmother. But she’s forgetful and frail and I do most of the mothering, for him and a few others in this building. As Newton’s grandma got more forgetful, I got interested in applying my doctoral training to more practical ends.”

She explains that she got permission inside Biogen to explore using computers to complement traditional and emerging anti-dementia medications.

“The idea was to stimulate the right neuro-chemicals with both drugs and physical interaction. Like building muscles using both steroids and exercise.”

She explains that the initial experiments were promising. They found people who had little or no experience using computers, mostly older folks. As these folks started to use computers, Biogen took functional MRI images of their brains. The images showed that computer users experienced heavy blood flow to parts of the brain associated with the discovery of information and the hunt for knowledge.

“We absolutely succeeded in strengthening neural connections. It looked very much like we were building up the brain.”

“What went wrong?”

“I’m not sure. When we use computers, our brains often are in a mode of discovery. We are hunting, whether for information on the Internet or opening an e-mail. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

“But?”

“In the real world, we hunt for a purpose — for food, a job, a relationship. At the end of the hunting period, we consume something or retain it.”

“Don’t we do that with information from the Internet? Don’t we retain what we need and can use?”

“That’s just what I assumed.”

I sense excitement in her. Science is her comfort zone.

“When we started to see problems with some test subjects, I saw another mechanism at work,” she says.

She explains that some people who use computers heavily get caught in the loop of constantly hunting and discovering in a way that appears to diminish their capacity to retain information.

“We use a search engine too much and we become a search engine ourselves. I call it ‘neuro-rabbit holing.’ Our brains become like Alice in Wonderland, searching forward for answers, swirling and chaotic.”

“You’re saying this is more than merely a cultural phenomenon, or habit. We no longer remember phone numbers or driving directions or contact information because we store it all in computers, but you’re talking about something different. You’re saying our brains are changing.”

She clears her throat, and looks down. “Some are affected more than others.”

“What about cortisol?”

“What about it?”

“Don’t treat me like an idiot. I know that it accelerates the process.”

She stands and walks to a window facing the basketball courts. She talks with her back to me. “Sorry. You’re right. It does. Separate mechanism, exacerbating the problem. When we get distracted by too much multitasking, cortisol gets released, killing memory cells in the hippocampus. It can spread like a forest fire.”

“Or a wildfire.”

She turns around. She looks at me quizzically, hesitating. “That term works. Regardless of what you call it, it seemed like the most remote theoretical possibility.”

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