The Great Brain Robbery

I awoke to the rumbling lion’s roar of an engine. Blinking away bleary vision and a searing headache I found myself surrounded by tanks filled with ominous pink blobs. I was sprawled inside a long chamber, the ground beneath shuddering from what I could only assume to be a locomotive’s powerful coal fired mechanisms, as my vision came into focus I saw within each of the tanks, raised on podium each, held the globulous orb of a brain.

Human brains. I’ve never been a squeamish man, but I found myself revolted, disgusted at the sight of the floating wrinkled ovoids of the mind. A sickening sight. There had to be hundreds of them lined within the chamber I’d arisen with neither ticket nor memory of how I had arrived.

A door behind me slammed open.

“Hello love!” Came a voice calling in a poorly imitated posh British accent. Standing on wobbling legs, unsure as to the origin of my abduction, and correctly assuming this to be my abductor, I sought a way to defend myself.

I had no weapon, nor any way of protecting myself so I pulled a mushy brain from one of the tanks and threw it at the oddly dressed man striding toward me. The tossed cerebrum scattered midair, disintegrating into a thousand flopping fragments and spraying the train in visceral chucks of salmon colored meat. In retrospect I should have broken one of the glass tanks and used a shard as a weapon, but alas I was dealing with what was likely a moderate concussion and the dreamlike fog that comes from that state of post head trauma left me not thinking clearly. In those brief waking moments up to that point I had mostly assumed this only another of the strange dreams that frequented the realm of my sleep.

“Ugh. You’re making a mess.” The man pinched his face at the repulsive display, waving at the brain matter dripping off various tanks of floating encephalons, his poorly imitated accent having dissolved to a boring old American one. “Who’s was that?”

“What? Who the hell are you?” I raised my fists, not knowing what else to do. I'd been in a few drunken scuffles in college but had only ever suffered concussions similar to the one I felt then and a broken nose or two, none of which had ended in my triumph.

“I’m Dr. Timothy Tadbot. Whose brain did you just throw at me? Do you know how hard it was to find all these?”

Confused, I glanced at the now vacant tank, the chemically smelling formaldehyde still sloshing about within, below the glass on the dias held a small bronze plate that read, ‘Carl Sagan: Astronomer, Astrophysicist, Planetary Scientist and more.’ I told my captor so.

“Oh for pity's sake! Sagan’s was one of my favorites. Don’t do that again, these things are worth far more than your own mind is.”

I glanced at the other tanks, each had a similar bronze plate with the names of various scientists, Hawking, Darwin, Tyson, Kaku, and so many more, hundreds more. “How the hell did you get all these?”

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answers to.” Dr. Tadbot said with another flamboyant wave of his hand. A thin man, of an average height with a hawk’s beak of a nose and narrow chin, he wore a ridiculous top hat above a thicket of scraggly gray hair and a black suit with tails reaching behind his knees. And was apparently a grave robber who’d abducted and trapped me on a train that showed no sign of stopping. “Well come along now, I was beginning to wonder when you’d wake.”

“Where to?” My inherent sense of fear was overcome then by an overt curiosity that comes from my profession. This man, while clearly of ill making, posed no apparent danger to me. Though I did wonder if he was planning to harvest my own brain as he had all these. But then I was no scientist as it appeared all these minds had once belonged to, and if he was planning to give me a double hemispherectomy he would likely have done it while I’d been unconscious anyway. “What is all this?”

“My life’s work, come now.” He sauntered to the far end of the long train car and opened the door leading to the next car. “For years, decades in fact, I’ve been hunting down the various minds here, collecting and preserving them, waiting for the right moment to complete my work and implement my grand design.”

“Right, and that is?” My palm was still sticky with Sagan’s brain fluids, I rubbed it against my jeans futilely trying to clean it as we walked to the next railcar. “What could you possibly be creating with all these brains?”

“A hive mind.” He said with a smirk and a twinkle in his eyes. I was stunned, I’d written a story on the subject only a few years back, nothing had come of it, but the connection seemed peculiar.

“A hive mind? You’re creating a work of science fiction. It’s nonsense.” I scoffed.

“No. Your writing is nonsense, derivative at best, what I’m doing is science. You see when I was a boy…” He trailed off rambling through his life story and the crazed science project I’d found myself somehow a part of. I lost interest, dwelling on the minor pride I felt at finding out he’d read my work, despite having abducted me. My writing was considered midlist at best, and even knowing that someone had read the story warmed my heart a little. I wondered then if I was developing some form of homoerotic Stockholm syndrome, I chuckled at the thought and filed it in the back of my mind where I kept all the potential, but mostly bad story ideas for later.

“You’ve read my work.” The foolish affirmation I so lusted for wasn’t hidden in my voice, I felt my face flush but didn’t pay it any mind.

“Yes, your writing is mostly ass, however ‘The Hive Mind’ had great potential.”

“Well thanks, I guess. But, potential for what?”

“My life’s work, haven’t you been paying attention to anything I’ve been saying?”

“Oh uh, yes of course.” I lied. He glared at me but continued.

“As I was saying, I’ve assembled the brains of all the world’s greatest dead scientists, and am going to combine their higher knowledge into a supercomputer. To create an artificially intelligent hive mind of sorts and use it to conquer the planet.”

I stared at him, jaw slack and wide eyed in disbelief.

“That’s your plan? That sounds like you took it straight from the pages of a shitty golden age superhero comic.”

“Don’t insult my work! Besides, you’re going to help me complete it.”

“How the hell am I going to do that? I’m a writer, not a doctor, not an engineer, and especially not a neuroscientist. I spend four hours every morning staring at my keyboard in my underwear before I have to go to my afternoon janitorial shift at the local community college. I’m no mad scientist.” I said as we arrived inside the next railcar, filled to bursting with all manner of machinery and archaic computers. This guy really is some golden age super villain I thought as we continued.

“You’re a creative, you’ve the right side of the brain that my scientific left lacks. I need an artist’s cerebrum to complete my work, without the creative touch, my AI will be nothing more than a drab computer program.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Oh I am.” Dr. Tadbot said, gray hair flopping about below his tall black hat.

At that point I’d begun to come to two conclusions, either I’d finally lost my mind, or I was assuredly dreaming as I’d thought earlier. I pinched myself and unfortunately felt its gentle sting.

That answered that, I’d finally cracked. It’d actually happened. I figured my mind would break eventually but I’d always assumed I’d be in at least in my sixties or seventies by then, and I was barely forty. Time can be a cruel mistress. I remembered then my poor old grandmother as she’d slowly deteriorated into dementia, forgetting first events, then where she’d left things, then my family and I, she’d been so kind, it had broken my heart to watch.

“I’m not gonna help you conquer shit.” The conviction in my voice surprised even me despite my growing belief that I was losing it.

“Yes you are. Think about it, fame, fortune, living in the spotlight, power.” Dr. Tadbot emphasized the last. “You and I both know it’s what you desire deep down. I can give it to you, I can free you of your desk chair servitude, free you of cleaning toilets and stale day-old vomit, I can give you the means to live the life you’ve always wanted.”

“I…” He was right of course. If this crazy ass plan worked, selling his invention’s patent to some corporation at the very least would bring on the riches I did so desire. I could end the lease on my crappy apartment, buy a house, get a new car, I could quit my janitorial job.

But I was less in love with the idea of conquering Earth. I’d never had any real desire to lead anyone or anything for that matter, if my cat wasn’t such a vocal feline I’d probably forget to feed him everyday, how could I be trusted to run anything? Let alone the idea of his so-called world domination, what a ridiculous notion.

“No. I won’t help you, this plan will never work.” In a desperate attempt to fight for my freedom I punched Dr. Tadbot clean in his hawk's nose.

“Ah! Why’d you do that?” He cried out as blood began to bubble from his busted bracket. “You could’ve just said that you didn’t want to be involved and I’d have let you go, there’s tons of authors out there who’d take this opportunity without second thought.”

“Oh, really?" I paused, staring in disbelief at the bleeding man. "That’s my bad.” I said, making that taught necked facial expression one makes when they see a couple arguing in public, the face made when seeing a person in the city dancing about and yelling at some drug induced unseen enemy, the face one makes when they’ve just witnessed their boss lose their shit on one of the other employees over something so minute that it couldn’t possibly have justified such a reaction.

“You really would have just let me go? I assumed with the abduction and all, I figured you’d have forced my hand or something.”

“Forced your hand? That’s disgusting, I’m a scientist not a sociopath. Get the hell off my train before I press assault charges against you!” Dr. Tadbot’s voice gurgled as he futilely tried to staunch the bleeding.

“Ah, alright then.” I said raising my hands defensively, still making that face one makes when they witness an angry customer yelling at some sixteen year old barista after mixing up their order. “I guess I’ll just leave then.”

Dr. Tadbot pointed to where the railcar we were on and the adjoining one met, opened the door and booted my ass off the side of the speeding locomotive before I had time to realize what was happening. I landed rolling in a clumsy heap, uninjured but scraped and dusty. Grumbling, I looked about and saw a small town maybe a mile off. With no other options I shrugged and started hiking over, hoping I’d be able to hitch a ride or find a taxi home.

A few weeks later, I was drinking coffee and watching the news, sitting on my ugly leather sofa in my underwear, having just finished my daily writing ritual. I was procrastinating getting ready to go to my shitty job as I did everyday when a surprising news story blared itself across my staticky television.

“Breaking news! Bestselling Science Fiction and Fantasy author George R. R. Martin and derelict scientist turned Youtube conspiracy theorist Dr. Timothy Tadbot have invaded the United States Capital and proclaimed themselves overlords of Earth.”

I sprayed scalding coffee over myself.

“Son of a bitch!” I screamed at both the coffee scorching my groin and the news. “Dammit! I could’ve been rich!”

Rubbing my temples I grumbled and began the slow process of accepting defeat as the news story continued to unfold on my junky old tube, the same mental gymnastics of acceptance I had grown so accustomed to after so many hundreds of rejection letters, something all writers have to learn to live with at some point or another.

“I can’t believe he actually did it.” I groaned and begrudgingly struggled into my coveralls, getting ready to head to the community college where I'd spend the afternoon mopping floors and cleaning rancid puke leftover from some drunken student’s debauchery of the evening past.

As I climbed into my crappy hatchback I couldn’t help but wonder whether Mr. Martin and Dr. Tadbot would make for upstanding overlords or not.