Free Performance Anomalies by Victor Robert Lee

brought in faster equipment, which flashed visual scenes at forty, fifty, sixty images per second and more. The machines hit their limit, and Cono suggested to the frustrated scientists that they give him a glass of water and an aspirin and then show him a real situation, like a falling orange that he could catch and stuff into his pocket before anyone saw. Or a bird he could snatch with his hand as it flew by.
    One of the doctors, a patient older man, asked Cono how well he slept at night, and what his dreams were like. The doctor explained why he was asking: dreaming was the brain’s way of re-equilibrating after a day of sensory inputs; the sensory overload of Cono’s hyper-fast perception might require longer and deeper dreaming in order to re-equilibrate his cortex at night. And the dreams might be different in character than those of a normal person—more intense, more vivid, faster, or the opposite of all of these; he didn’t know. Of course Cono also couldn’t know, because he had no way to compare his dreams to the dreams of others. But the older doctor’s questioning brought out several findings. Cono’s dreams often replayed real events with high fidelity to all the senses, not just the visual. He needed much more sleep than the average person, and a shortfall in sleep over a few days could cripple him, distorting his perceptions and clouding his thoughts. Cono told the doctor he had discovered that he could temper this need for long sleep by falling into deep meditation for short intervals; there had been times during his years of traveling when the technique had been necessary for survival. Out of desperation he had tried amphetamines, too, but they had a paradoxical effect and made him even more stuporous.
    Geneticists were brought in to evaluate the strange young man. They spoke of genes called timeless , FoxP2, STX1A and others—genes they thought controlled the cycle times of the brains of various animal species unfamiliar to Cono. They were eager to know if these genes exerted the same control in humans. The geneticists analyzed Cono’s blood; later they could say only that they’d found a mutation they’d never seen, in a yet unnamed gene that they proudly asserted must be the regulator of sequential awareness. One of the geneticists speculated that Cono might have a version of this gene similar to that of a shark or a falcon or a reptile, a version that had been lost somewhere along the march into mammalian evolution.
    This theory was immediately contested by another geneticist, who said it was likely that one or more of Cono’s brain-regulating genes located on the long arm of the seventh chromosome had undergone spontaneous mutations that somehow resulted in “this freakishly faster cycling.” The scientists argued over the competing theories, but finally agreed that regardless of the source of the genetic aberration, the result was analogous to the evolutionary progression of computers—new machines steadily came out in faster and faster models, doubling their cycle-times every year or two. But so far among humans, there were only two models—Cono and everyone else.
    “It’s inevitable that new genetic anomalies like this will crop up as we get better at detecting them,” explained a bearded doctor in horn-rimmed glasses and a bow tie. “A lab in Europe just worked out the reason for a Finnish sports hero being unbeatable in cross-country skiing back in the ’60s. He has a mutation in a gene that controls red-blood-cell production. His body cranks out red blood cells in overdrive—very handy when your muscles are aching for more oxygen. And recently there was a baby born in Germany who looks like a body builder. The kid’s myostatin gene is mutated so that it doesn’t restrain muscle growth like it should. No doubt he’ll grow up to be abnormally strong. There are a handful of people in the world who cannot feel pain because of a defect in a single one of their genes. And