It might have been a dark and stormy night, or a bright and sunny day, or a dark and stormy day -- the room had no windows and he had no idea what time it was or what planet he was on.
He knew where he was: On his back, strapped to a lab bench, with a number of monitors that he couldn't quite see scattered around him.
"Ah, you are awake. That is excellent."
"Good morning, Mother," Querl said. He looked down at the straps across his shoulders, "Guess I'm gonna miss the school bus, huh?"
She looked at him. After a pause, she said, "Your statement makes no sense. There is no school bus here and you are long out of school."
"Just a joke..." Brainiac 4 didn't reply, instead leaning forward to set another tiny, jewel-like bud near her son's hairline. "What's with the EEG sensors?" he asked.
"I wish to ascertain why it is that you can emote but I cannot. This indicates there is a difference in our brains. I wish to understand why this difference is so. A child should be a copy of the mother; such a difference should not exist."
Querl nodded, interested despite his fear. "So, you're going to start by comparing encephalographic activity? You should compare cerebral activity at the same time. That way we can correlate the encephalographic activities to their originating areas of the brain."
"That was my intention. Why do you say 'we?'"
"Hey, I'm a scientist too!" he protested, "I'm your son! I've got just as vested an interest in figuring out why we're so different as you do!"
Brainiac 4 looked at him and he suppressed a shiver. Her face was what had frightened him the most, back when he had first found her. It still did, every time he saw her. Some would call her face 'expressionless', but that wasn't precisely the case: It was blank. Without emotion to trigger expression, her face had seen very little use over the course of her life. Every muscle was relaxed; there were none of the subtle tensions that defined even the most composed face. Though years younger, Querl's own face was showing the lines of use (mainly frown lines from his habitual frustrated scowl); Brainiac 4 had no lines at all.
She sat down beside his table and picked up a plug wire. Brushing her long hair back, she inserted the plug into a silver socket set behind her ear. Querl frowned; he hadn't seen that before. "What's that, Mother? What does that do?"
"Why do you ask that question?"
"Because I hadn't seen them before, the last time we met. What is it?"
"You had facial implants; they performed the same function, did they not?"
Querl felt his eye start to twitch. "Mother, I can't answer that question until I know what function your implants perform."
"They permit computer interface with my cerebral network."
Brainiac 5 gaped, "You're the 'Living Computer?!'"
"That is correct."
"You were the Comptroller of the Septumvirate?"
"Yes."
He let out a low whistle, impressed: The Septumvirate empire had been unified by a single, massive computer system. They'd boasted that it was alive and called it the Living Computer. With their Comptroller's management, the hegemony of the Septumvirate had prospered for years. The Septumvirate worlds had finally fallen to the Khunds, but only after vigorous resistance. He shook his head, "No, my implants didn't do that. They generated my force-field and allowed use of a few other of my gizmos, but mainly they were personality inhibitors."
"You have removed them."
"Yes."
"No matter. A minor inconvenience."
"Er... to what?" No answer. He liked the sound of her silence even less. "...Can't I see the monitors? I'd turn them myself but I'm a bit tied up at the moment," he laughed. She stared at him. Brainiac 4 didn't understand humour at all, thus it could be used to keep her guessing. She never quite knew what he meant, so he could buy time with wisecracks. "You're not going to let me see?"
"If you insist," she said. Her voice was as blank as her face, completely monotone and level. She turned the monitors and he watched as she continued her set-up. He had to admire her integration: No clumsy tapping on screens or cumbersome speech recognition - she manipulated the programs at the speed of her thoughts. It was seamless and sophisticated. Despite her enhancements, the system strained to keep up. Not even Gear was this good. The Living Computer, Brainiac 4 - his mom! Despite his fear, he felt a surge of filial pride.
Soon, the displays showed the electroencephylographs and mentation maps of their respective brains. Querl watched, noticing the differences immediately and working out the correspondences.
"What's your name, Mother?" His voice was small and soft.
"Brainiac 4."
"No, I mean your real name. Your given name. Mine's Querl; what's yours?"
"Brainiac 4. I have no other name."
Querl blinked. "Surely your mother, my grandmother..."
"Was rendered brain-dead by my conception. When her body failed, my gestation was completed artificially."
"...grife..." Querl whispered, horrified, "...they didn't even give you a name..."
His emotion reflected on his mentation map and EEG. Brainiac 4 made some notations, taking screen captures and highlighting the relevent areas. She seemed satisfied with what she was seeing, on his end anyways.
Her own was entirely different and it made Querl feel sick. Her neural sockets, hidden behind each ear, drilled straight into her brain, crossing the visual centers. They crossed each other at the midbrain, passing through the corpus collosum and penetrating a few centimeters into the opposite hemisphere. He noted the brain centers they passed through, and the associated functions. He also noticed something else. "What's that?"
"What's what?"
"That. What it just did, right there, across the visual cortex."
After several moments' comparison, she shook her head, "No unusual activity is happening."
"Yes there is, right there! See, it just did it again!"
She shook her head again and he sighed, frustrated. It was so blatantly obvious! "How can you not see it?"
"There is nothing to see. There are no observable differences between our brains."
Querl gaped, "What?! Mother, there are a lot of differences! I can see them, there's a whole mentation structure that's completely missing from you! Five of your traces are flat-lines and there are whole areas of your brain that are non-functional!"
She scrutinized the screens and again, the neurons fired across her visual cortex. "There are no flat-lines. There are no dormant areas."
That was when Querl realised what was happening: She literally couldn't see it. Something was preventing her from seeing the activity. But why? So that she couldn't identify what was wrong with her?
"Do you remember your childhood, Mother?" Again that soft, boyish voice.
"I cannot correlate years to my memories. I had little sense of the passage of time. Time was measured by the progress of my education."
"Did you have a family?"
"No."
"Care-givers? Teachers? Who educated you?"
"No one. My education was fed through my cerebral interlink."
"Do you remember when you first saw another person? How old were you?"
"I had attained physical adulthood. For what purpose is this line of questioning?"
Querl swallowed nervously, then explained about the non-emotion faction and their proposal to rear a child in an isolated tank environment. "...and I believe that child to be you," he finished.
Brainiac 4 thought about it, her blank expression never changing. Querl glanced at her EEG and mentation maps and watched, fascinated. She didn't do this cogitation thing by halves! "That would make sense," she said at last, "I retain memories from early collegiate, likely young childhood. I would wave my arms to see if I could feel them. Occasionally my hands would encounter a solid substance. I would pound on it to see if it was real."
"You... couldn't feel your arms?"
"Not as I could feel my throat. I could feel my throat if I made it vibrate hard enough."
"...How so?" She screamed and the bottom dropped out of Querl's world. "...oh grife... Mother..."
"I would do that to ascertain if I was real. The result was consistant, so I ceased such experiments."
They took a little baby and drilled holes in her head then put her into a sensory-deprivation tank. They left a little girl screaming and pounding on the tank wall, not sure if anything was real. They didn't let her out until she was an adult and then they wondered why she'd gone insane. They treated her worse than they'd treat a lab rat and they didn't even give her a sprocking name!
Querl felt an abrupt surge of rage, at the scientists, at the Council, at himself for not trying to understand what was motivating her, for not digging deeper, for turning his back and abandoning her as she'd abandoned him. It was the primal rage, the rage that he could barely control, that made him want to strangle those scientists with his bare hands then slash himself to hamburger with whatever was handy...
"How fascinating. Your EEG shows you to be emoting, but it is originating from a completely different area of your brain."
Huh? Querl blinked and focussed on his mentation map: Sure enough, a new area had become quite active and it was independant of the normal emotive areas. He forced himself calm. As the rage subsided, so did the new activity. Well now, that was unexpected. He noted that the new area was quite close to the region governing reproductive function, and wondered if that had anything to do with it. Thinking about his ancestry, he suspected that it did.
"This has been productive. I now have a sufficient datamap of your emotive brain activity."
Sudden apprehension made his stomach attempt to do backflips. "Glad to be of service."
"I will now attempt to induce emotion in myself."
"Ah... er..." Yep, he was right. "How 'bout a hug? That always works for me. Or how about one of Apparition's stupid 'reality' shows? ... 'course, that always induces the desire to drive sharp sticks through my eyes, so maybe not."
Brainiac 4 shook her head. "Reality shows do not induce even annoyance."
"Suddenly I'm starting to envy you..."
That got something: She turned and stared at him. "You would not envy me," she said softly, looking at him as though she were really seeing him for the first time, "You do not wish to live like this."
He sensed an opening and tried for it. "Mother, please, let me up. I can help you, I'm sure of it."
"This is a ploy to escape."
"I'm not going to escape! I told you, I have just as vested an interest in correcting your condition. Please, Mother, let me help you."
"You will," she said.
The volts ripped through him, causing every muscle to contract, and he screamed from the agony. It may have lasted only a few minutes, but it felt like an eternity. Finally it ended and he tried to clear the noise from his head, blinking the tears out of his eyes.
She was giggling. It was a creepy, manic sound and one that he was all too familiar with. Not only from his previous encounters with Brainiac 4, but from himself -- he'd made the same disturbing laughter when his implants failed. He blinked, trying to clear the fog from his head, and stared at his mother's mentation map. "...Do that again," he said, not quite thinking about it. She was only too willing to oblige.
When his head cleared the second time, he stared at his mother's mentation map. The emotive lines of her EEG were active for the first time and Brainiac 4's face was expressive. She was laughing and weeping, whimpering a litany of the emotions she was feeling. Joy, sorrow, guilt, anger... Querl had always triggered not just one, but many emotions, a veritable banquet to the starving Brainiac 4. She petted his hair and kissed his forehead, crooning about what a good boy he was, such a good son. He shivered.
Her emotions were coming from the same area of her brain that had originated his rage. Neurons were firing across her compromised emotive regions, suppressing their activity, but that unknown region was free. No, not quite free, but just enough out of reach to be harder to control. They probably didn't know about it anyways; that area didn't exist in the pure Coluan brain. But the House of Dox wasn't pure. "Mother... I think I've figured it out. I know what's wrong now, and how to fix you."
"How?" She wiped her eyes and examined their mentation maps, "I see nothing indicative."
"I know. There's a neuron flash across your visual centers whenever you look at the maps. You're being prevented from seeing what's wrong with you."
She thought for a moment. "Your emotive brain permits you to see differences that I cannot perceive?"
"Yes, Mother. I can see what's happening to you."
"All the more reason to proceed then."
"Uh... proceed with what? ... oh sprock!" A panel above him had slid back and revealed a small drill. Querl felt the blood drain from his face and extremities as he stared, suddenly realizing what she meant about his implants!
"It is a pity you no longer have your implants but it is a minor matter. I will give you cerebral sockets. That will permit overwrite."
"What?!"
"My attempts to cure myself have failed. The efforts of professional psychologists and telepaths were likewise futile. There is no other way: I will overwrite my mind with yours and thereby gain emotion through you."
The drill whirred to life. Querl stared at it, struggling to break his bonds. "Mother! Mother, please, don't do this! You don't have to do this, Mother!"
"You will not feel pain," she assured him. He felt the burning in his vein and realized, for the first time, that she had tapped him for an anesthetic.
"Mother, please, you don't have to do this!" he begged, tears spilling over. The numbness was growing and he fought it. "You don't have to do this, Mother, you don't have to erase yourself! I can help you, Mother, please let me try! Trust me, Mother, I'm your son!" She hesitated, wavering. He fought back the encroaching blackness and the nausea, fought to stay conscious. "I want to help you, Mother," he pleaded, "I want to give you back everything they took from you!"
The drill stopped. She reached up and took the plugs from her sockets, then turned to him with a questioning look. Her hand moved to release him from the restraints. Then the wall blew in.
Brainiac 4 pulled herself up from the rubble of the opposite wall, staring wonderingly at the woman in the clothes of a Valorite pilgrim.
Sister Andromeda bunched her fists and snarled. "Get away from him, you bitch!"