“I think we’re going to need the entire—” She was going to say the entire IF Deck. But there was one card she was definitely not going to bring out. “I think we’re going to need more imaginary friends.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Rovil said he didn’t want to drive us across the country, but he put up only token resistance. “You want to get to the bottom of this, don’t you?” I asked. “Don’t you want to find the fucker that broke your fingers?”

“I want to think that someone besides Edo is doing this,” he said.

“Keep trying,” I said. “Meanwhile, Ollie and I need you. We can’t rent a car, since we’re both supposed to be incarcerated in Toronto.”

“If you can get us in to see him, I don’t see how I have any choice.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Free will is an illusion anyway.”

*   *   *

The drive was making Ollie’s symptoms worse. The confinement, and the inability to take action, was taking its toll. She spent most of the time on her pen, but by Illinois she was twitchy and cranky. By Kansas she was picking fights.

“You really think we have no free will?”

This seemed to come out of nowhere. We were south of Wichita, Rovil chauffeuring us across miles and miles of sun-blasted land.

“Have you been stewing about this since New York?” I asked.

“Ever since Gilbert said his god was in control,” she said. “So answer the question.”

“We do not have free will,” I said formally. “At least, not the way you’re thinking of it.”

“How do you know how I’m thinking of it?” she said.

“Like how everybody thinks of it. That there’s a ‘you’ weighing several alternatives, then choosing one of them. But there’s no choosing. That’s an illusion created by the mind to make you feel like you’re in control.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m choosing right now not to throw you of the car.”

The Midwest was in another drought, and everything outside the windows was winter brown. I kept expecting a flash of wings, hoping Gloria was pacing us like an albatross, but she was nowhere in sight.

I said, “Let’s say we run a wire into your brain.”

“Let’s pick Rovil’s instead.”

“Hey!” he said. I hadn’t realized he’d been listening.

“Okay, a doctor runs a wire into his brain, and every time the doctor presses a button, a certain neuron gets fired. And every time it fires, Rovil turns left.”

“The opsin experiments,” Rovil said. He glanced up in the rearview mirror and said to Ollie, “It was actually a fiber-optic cable channeling colored light to genetically modified neurons.”

“Oh, of course,” Ollie said. “That old thing.”

I laughed, and Ollie said, “So he hits the button, and Rovil goes left. Remote control.”

“It doesn’t feel like remote control to him,” I said. “Rovil’s walking naturally, and then he turns, and it feels completely natural. Except there’s no choice involved—well, except for the doctor choosing when to hit the button.”

“Wait, how does that feel natural?”

“The urge is subconscious. It’s like you’ve got an itch on your nose, and you reach up to scratch without thinking about it.”

“I feel like there’s a catch coming somewhere,” she said. “But go on.”

“Now let’s say there’s another area of your brain where Free Will lives,” I said. “Call him Free Willy. He’s just like the doctor. He decides when to trigger that neuron and make you turn left.”

“How did this stop being about Rovil?” she asked.

“Here’s the problem: Free Willy is made up of nothing but more neurons. So in order for the decision to occur, a bunch of neurons have to fire. That means one of those neurons has to be the first neuron. But who makes that one fire? If it’s yet another neuron, then you’re just running in circles.”

“That’s my point,” Ollie said. “You can’t get something out of nothing.”

“But it’s not coming from nothing, ’cause the brain’s not a closed loop,” I said. “There’s input constantly coming into it, from all over the body, all those physical senses.” I took her hand in mine. “But there’s also input coming from other parts of the brain.”

“The subconscious,” she said.

“Sure. Most of the brain is subconscious, and there’s neurons firing all over the place, constantly processing. And I know what you’re thinking—”

“Here we go again,” she said.

“You’re thinking, hey, that’s fine for low-level actions, like moving a body part. But how about higher-level decisions? One little wire can’t make me, say, decide to follow a crazy woman across the country, can it?”

“No way,” Ollie said. “That would be ridiculous.”

“So maybe there’s another free will node that handles higher-level thought.”

“Free Willy Two,” Ollie said.

“The sequel,” I said. “So now we have Free Willy Two, but he’s made out of neurons too. Maybe he needs many, many neurons to form a complex thought, maybe they even have to fire in a certain order, or a certain frequency. But it’s all just neurons, and when it comes down to it, everything depends on one of those neurons being fired first. Every neuron’s connected to surrounding neurons, and charges travel by known rules. Their action is absolutely mechanical. Thoughts, decisions … they just happen.”

“Mechanically,” Ollie said. “Like a gun going off.”

“Yup. Except there’s no one to pull the trigger.”

“When I pull the trigger, it sure feels like I’m the one doing it.”

“Exactly—it’s a feeling,” I said. “It happens after the brain’s gone off. You think you’re in control, but that’s just the warm fuzzy of false confidence.”

“But if there’s no free will,” Ollie said, looking up at me, “then there’s no such thing as sin.” I was surprised by how steady her voice was. “If no one’s responsible, then there’s no morality.”

“You cannot prosecute a gun for murder,” Rovil said.

“You can if the gun’s complex enough,” I said. “Look, you can’t think of a person like it’s one thing, one ‘I’ that decides everything. The brain is a collective, a huge number of all these thinking modules. It doesn’t make a decision, it arrives at one.”

“Words,” Ollie said. “Something’s got to be responsible.”

I thought for a minute, trying to figure out how to explain this. “When the brain starts working on a problem, all those parts of the brain start working, using all the data they’ve got—personal experience, cultural rules, moral impulses … all those things go into the hopper,” I said. “The brain parts solve the equation of what to do—that’s what we call a decision, but it’s really just an answer. And each answer is input to the next equation. In fact, each answer changes the brain itself in minute ways, strengthening some connections, weakening others. That’s why people who think of the mind as software and the brain as hardware have it wrong—there’s nothing but hardware, jolts of electricity running down the wires, building up a charge, waiting for that emotional trigger to be pulled. The gun fires itself.”

“When you load it properly,” Rovil said.

“This is madness,” Ollie said. “We can’t have people murdering each other and then say, too bad, can’t do anything about it, no one fired the gun.”

“I never said that. We punish the gun.”

“What?”

“The gun is collectively responsible,” I said. “It’s like Congress, or a corporation. And when the gun breaks the rules, society punishes it.”

“But that’s not fair,” Ollie said. “The gun’s just doing what it was primed to do.”

“Maybe we’ve gone off track with the gun analogy,” I said.

“No, stick with it. Bang. The gun fires, and kills someone.”

“Okay, yes.”

“And then we put it in the electric chair,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“How is that fair?! We don’t execute mentally retarded people.”

“Except in Georgia,” Rovil said.

“Those are retarded guns,” I said. “We’re talking about fully functioning, complex guns that have the power to process all the information available. That includes the rules of society. That information about what’s ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is data the brain needs to make its decision. The next gun that comes along might think differently.”