A surreal short story I wrote while watching the waves crash below our balcony in Mũi Né last year.
It was a slow day at the surgery. The usual symptoms: Mary Baker’s leaky gut, Darren Rylan’s ongoing anxiety, and Roger Naylor’s worsening angina. Nothing unexpected. But at 10:05 am, 73-year-old Raymond Reece walked into my office wearing a trilby and what looked like a tailored suit underneath a long, blue raincoat. It didn’t seem like it would rain, but he said he wore the raincoat because of the approaching storm that he — not the weatherman, he emphasised — had predicted with a high level of certainty. I offered him a seat.
“So, how can I help you today, Mr. Reece?” He leaned forward and gathered himself, never taking his eyes from mine.
“First, I have a story to tell you, if you can indulge me for a few minutes,” he said. “It’s regarding a little… situation I’ve been dealing with recently. Initially, you will think I am out of my right mind. But I assure you, everything I am going to tell you is true.”
“Okay,” I said, wondering what condition he was about to present and if he might be the unstable type. He reached down to fetch something from a plastic bag he’d carried in, raising his eyebrows as he did so. I had noticed the bag earlier because it didn’t match his well-groomed appearance. It wasn’t the reusable kind you reluctantly purchase for a pound or two, but rather a crumpled, weathered-looking one — a bag he had likely kept in a cupboard for many years, possibly from when supermarkets gave them out for free.
Now, remember that when people are sick, they seldom present you with an external object. Sickness is usually internal, evidenced by a wince, a finger point, or an explanation of some kind, embarrassing or otherwise. “I have a bit of a problem downstairs,” they might say, or “it’s a funny colour when I go to the bathroom.” These explanations are vague on the surface yet clear to someone in my profession, who then proceeds to ask a series of tactful or not-so-tactful questions to narrow down the cause without causing the patient unnecessary shame. So, it was rather out of the ordinary when, from the bag, Mr. Reece used both hands to lift a wooden box onto my desk. Despite his care, he knocked it slightly against the gold knob of one of my drawers. His face twitched a little as he did so.
He placed the box, which looked homemade and about the size of a large grapefruit, onto the desk. He looked at me again with a disconcerting, sympathetic expression, moving his lips to the side as if he were the bearer of bad news.
“So, in this box, doctor…” He paused, then said, “…is one of my organs.”
I squinted, unsure how to process what he’d just told me. Surely, I was dealing with an elderly man who was mentally unwell. But there was something about him that didn’t seem insane, and his calm demeanour didn’t align with his startling claim.
“May I ask… which organ?” I tried not to be overly shocked that I was asking a man in a pinstripe suit which of his organs he had brought to a doctor’s surgery on a Thursday morning in a grapefruit-sized wooden box.
My medical mind was in overdrive. He couldn’t possibly be referring to a major internal organ, not the heart or liver for example. There was no sign of bleeding, and he wasn’t in pain. I felt disturbed that I was taking what he said so seriously, and I shook my head slightly in disbelief. His sincerity was disarming, so I did not want to tell him directly that what he said was ludicrous, and it seemed too early to call reception or, for that matter, the police. I tried to think rationally. Had I misunderstood? Did the box contain a mouth organ? Maybe he was just a musician wanting to share an old story. Or was something more sinister at play? Had he attempted to sell one of his organs on the black market, only to end up with an unsold kidney and now sought my advice? Too far-fetched. Or was this like the Bobbitt case from years ago? Had a jilted lover severed his genital organ? Had he fashioned a box for his now disconnected member, a coffin of sorts, and now he wanted me to give him advice on his options going forward? He seemed too old for such a tragedy, and he appeared neither physically nor emotionally pained. My imagination was running wild, yet I managed to keep my expression calm and thoughtful — or at least, that was my intention.
“It’s my brain,” he whispered.
I took a deep breath and looked at the box, then back at him. He shrugged as if he was thinking told-you-you’d-think-I’m-crazy.
“Your… brain?” I said, before erupting into laughter. “Aha, very good, Mr. Reece. Well, you’ve brightened up my morning!”
To my relief, he chuckled too, but only for a few seconds. Then he stopped and blinked, his expression turning completely serious.
“Doctor, I know you think it’s impossible, and you must be questioning my sanity, but I assure you — this really is my brain. This box houses my cerebrum.”
I paused, then laughed again, this time a hopeful laugh, the kind where you expect the other person to join in, confirming it was all a joke. But Mr. Reece held his gaze.
When someone is mentally unwell, there may be a few giveaways: a vacant or wild look in their eyes, their personal hygiene is lacking, or some quirk that signals a departure from sanity. But aside from the worn plastic bag and the claim about carrying his brain in a box, Mr. Reece seemed quite sane — refined and charismatic, even. And there was a curious glint in his eyes.
“Okay, Mr. Reece, I’m not sure why you’re making this outlandish claim, and you’ll appreciate that many sick people are waiting outside who need my help today, but — ”
He cut me off. “I understand that what I’ve just told you is, well, impossible from a medical standpoint, and you’re right to think it’s either an elaborate joke or that I’m wasting valuable time better spent on others with more serious conditions. But hear me out for a moment, and it will start to make a lot more sense.”
“For many years, I lived near Zurich, working at a research institute focused on cutting-edge projects with state-of-the-art technology. Some of these projects were in the medical field, and one, in particular, aimed to help people with dementia retrieve and retain their short-term memories. This was of personal interest to me, as my mother had suffered terribly from dementia prior to her passing.
Anyway, the years flew by, and I eventually reached retirement age. Unfortunately, the board of directors cancelled the project due to a lack of solid results. I felt like a complete failure. I begged them to let me continue — even voluntarily — but they refused. With no other choice, I returned to England.
I tried filling my days with golf, fishing, and the like, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the project. I always felt we were on the verge of a breakthrough. So, I built a small lab in an outhouse at the bottom of my garden, telling myself it was just a hobby. But over the next eight years, I spent most of my time there.
Eventually, I completed the development of a microchip that could be implanted in the brain, a memory drive to upload the data transmitted from the chip, and software to read and decode that information. The biggest hurdle was finding someone to test it on. Even if an individual agreed, they would back out when asked to sign a waiver. Time wasn’t slowing down, and I wasn’t getting any younger. I seriously considered abandoning what felt like my life’s work when something remarkable happened: I forgot my own daughter’s name. And it didn’t happen just once; it happened several times.
My wife urged me to get tested, and to my initial horror, I showed early signs of dementia. I was devastated — until one night, I had an epiphany. I realised I was only a few years away from losing my mind entirely, so what did I have to lose? Arguably, nothing. So I got out of bed, put on my gown, and walked down to the lab.
I wrote a note to my wife and children that simply said, ‘I love you all,’ just in case. Then I powered up my equipment. Through my microscope, I gazed at the tiny Bluetooth-enabled microchip I had worked on for so long. This wasn’t the time for sentimentality. I carefully sucked up the chip with a small Pasteur pipette and dropped it into a syringe filled with a fluid designed to mimic brain chemicals.
Turning toward the mirror, I stared at my ageing reflection. Without hesitation, I forced the syringe into my nose and pressed it as hard as I could, driving the needle deep into my nasal cavity and into the centre of my skull.
For a moment, everything went numb. I yanked the syringe out, and it clattered to the floor. Deep down, I knew the odds of success were less than one percent. The most likely outcomes were death, hospitalisation, or severe brain damage, but it was now or never.
I stood there, stunned by my reckless, suicidal act — by my utter stupidity. I braced myself, expecting to black out or die at any second. But nothing happened. I was still alive, still feeling more or less okay. Cautiously, I stepped closer to the mirror. I thought I’d see blood trickling from my nostril or feel too dizzy to stand, but there were no obvious side effects.
I picked up the syringe and wiped some residue from the floor with a cloth. The fact that I was okay was a relief, even if the experiment seemed to have failed. I sat in silence for five minutes, waiting for something — anything. When nothing happened I figured there was nothing left to do in the lab, so I reached to turn off the equipment. But as my finger hovered near the power button, I heard an unbelievable sound: Ding-ding!
I was transfixed. “What was the sound?” I asked.
“That sound,” he said, “was the microchip pairing with the memory drive.”
He reached down and slowly lifted the lid of the wooden box.
Inside was a nondescript black metal device, about the size of a large Wi-Fi router. A small green LED light blinked intermittently on top.
“So you see, at this stage, there was no need for a fancy box. I just needed something to house the memory drive’s circuitry, keeping out dust and moisture. That’s why I used this old router box. To test the technology, I’d run a small electric current into a petri dish containing some fluid and the microchip. I was trying to simulate a brain-like environment, with its constant electronic activity. When the chip detected the electricity, it would pair with the memory drive, which was connected to my laptop.
Normally, when this happened, a tiny fragment of code would appear on the screen — so small, that it barely existed. But this time, something incredible occurred. I saw millions of lines of code appearing on my screen at an unbelievable speed. A typical hard drive can hold up to a terabyte of information, but I gasped as I watched the storage count reach millions of terabytes.
The device was programmed to continually compress the data to handle the vast amount of information in an average brain. I sat there, watching it process all night until the sun started to come up. Then, suddenly, everything stopped. The light on the memory box went from flashing rapidly to blinking slowly.”
“Like this one?” I asked, looking at the little blinking light on the box.
“Exactly. The upload was complete!”
He stopped talking, and I tried to gather my thoughts, slowing my breathing. I shook my head in disbelief. “So what you’re saying is, you’ve uploaded all the data from your brain, transmitted via a Bluetooth chip that you inserted through your nasal canal with a syringe, in a shed at the bottom of your garden, into this black box? And now you have a replica of all your memories stored on this hard drive?”
The glint reappeared in Mr Reese’s eyes. “Not quite,” he said. “You see, after the upload, I ran a few tests on my brain. I have a very crude scanner in my shed that I use to measure brain activity. As you can imagine, I had inserted an electrical chip into my own head in a somewhat forceful and random manner, so I was expecting at least some brain damage. But I felt perfectly fine. So I put on my anti-UV goggles and lay down in the scanner…”
“You have an MRI scanner in your shed?”
“A very crude one,” he replied with a smirk. “More like a sun-bed than a scanner. Let’s say it can read brain waves while giving you a tan.
Once the scan was complete, I reviewed the results. And this is where things get strange,” he said, seemingly unaware of the irony.
“Normally, you’d see areas of red, yellow, and green indicating different levels of activity. But all I saw was purple.”
“Purple?” I asked.
“Yes, purple!” His eyes widened, trying to make me get the point. “Purple represents zero activity. There was no activity at all in any area of my brain. Now, despite the unfathomable nature of everything I’ve told you, the idea that nothing was happening in my brain while I was alive and well was, frankly, impossible. I checked the scanner, then the computer, and I retested myself several times. But the results were the same — purple nothingness.”
“How was this possible?” I asked.
“At this point, I need to confess something.”
“Oh?”
“I have to tell you this, both to relieve myself of some guilt and to back up my story. I wasn’t thinking clearly and, impulsively, I decided to enlist Sally’s help. I needed to be sure the scanner wasn’t malfunctioning. She’d been in the garden all night, completely unaware of the major scientific breakthrough happening in the shed. So, I opened the shed door and called her name…”
“Sally? That’s your…wife?”
He smirked and shook his head.
“Your cat?”
“Tortoise.”
“What?”
“Sally is my tortoise.”
“You’re telling me you ran an MRI scan on your tortoise?
“Yes. It’s shameful, I know. I used a piece of tape to cover her eyes. I just had to know. I didn’t know what else to do. Up to that point, I’d only ever run tests on rats, which I’m also ashamed of. But I reasoned I was doing this for the greater good of humanity.” He hung his head.
“So now I must add a tortoise to the list. A memory I wish I could delete.” He said this as if a new possibility had dawned on him.
He continued, “I ran the test, and to my absolute horror, I saw activity. Not a lot, but there was at least something happening in that tiny tortoise mind.”
“My thoughts were racing, or at least I thought they were, even though the tests showed otherwise. How could I be thinking so many thoughts without any evidence of brain activity happening in this skull?”
It was then that I looked again at the uploaded data. I had been so absorbed in understanding how a brain-dead man could still be fully functioning that I hadn’t noticed what else was happening on my computer screen. As I mentioned earlier, the upload of my brain’s data had reached just under 2.5 petabytes — that’s 2,500 terabytes. Or to put it more simply, 2.5 million gigabytes! But now, I saw that more data was being uploaded, albeit at a much slower rate than before. Data was still being received from the chip in my head and uploaded to the memory drive.
“So, doctor, do you realise what I’m saying to you?”
I couldn’t formulate an answer.
“This box does not contain a replica of my brain. It is my brain. If I turn it off or lose connection via the Bluetooth chip, who knows what will happen? I could become completely brain-dead, like a vehicle without a driver.”
“But your brain will still exist in the box?”
He was almost frantic now. “Yes, but it will be like a pilot parachuting from a plane. The pilot needs to stay in the cockpit to keep the plane moving. No matter how skilled the pilot, if he’s not in control, the plane won’t last long.”
“So what now?” I asked, a question I had never directed at a patient before. Normally, I would be the one proposing the next steps.
“I am elated!” he said with genuine enthusiasm. “My thoughts have never been clearer. Ask me my daughter’s name!”
Before I could ask, he said, “Abigail.” He smiled with glee. “The upload has restored clarity to all my memories. I remember my childhood as if I were watching an HD movie from a hard drive. This device, doctor, could save humanity! It’s more than just a means to eradicate dementia — it could be the antidote to every kind of mental illness. All I need to do now is figure out how to organise the information from the upload. It won’t be easy to sift through 73 years’ worth of memories,” he chuckled. Then he whispered, “The best part is, I’m going to make a few…alterations before re-uploading.”
“What do you mean by alterations?”
“Well, there are a few obvious bad memories I’m going to eradicate. No use keeping those floating around unnecessarily. Then I’ll make a few, uh, cheeky tweaks to my history. My first wife will look like a supermodel if I can process the data correctly, and I might even delete the fact that I ran an MRI scan on a tortoise.”
As he spoke, I awoke from what felt like a strange dream. Surely he was insane. But even if he wasn’t… what on earth did he want from me? I’m a GP, not a scientist or a brain surgeon. I opened up his file, realising I should have taken notes about his case. I looked at the box, then back at him and asked decisively, “So, Mr. Reece, how exactly can I help you? What do you need me to do?”
He looked at me, slightly confused. “About the brain?” he asked.
“Yes, the brain.”
“Oh, I don’t need any help with the brain, doctor. Everything is on track, and I may fly the box over to my old research lab in Switzerland next week. What a surprise they’ll be in for. A nice serving of humble pie for them.”
“So if not the brain, then what are you here for?”
He removed his left shoe and sock and then began rolling up his trouser leg. A sense of fear welled up inside me. What else could this eccentric man have hiding up his sleeve — or, for that matter, his trouser leg?
“I think I may be suffering from gout again,” he said seriously. “I struggled with it a few years ago, but it improved with diet. Recently, I’ve been stress eating, and it’s flaring up. I’m wondering whether I need a course of colchicine or something similar… what do you think?”
He replaced the lid on the box and put it back in the bag as I wrote him a prescription. He wished me well, stood up, and put on his hat. “Should I leave the door open or closed?” he asked on his way out.
“Closed, please.”
Soon after he left, there was a low rumble of thunder outside, and small drops of rain began to land gently on the window.
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