Free Performance Anomalies by Victor Robert Lee Page A

you’ve probably heard of perfect pitch—I’m betting it’s the result of a genetic alteration we haven’t pinned down yet. You, Cono, are part of a new trend of uncovering the genetic basis of human performance anomalies.”
    Cono was concentrating hard to understand all the English words, sometimes stopping the doctor for clarification. “Other person, someone, fast, making time slow down like me?” he asked.
    “We’ve had a few cases of abnormally fast reaction times in patients with a disease called Tourette’s, but at most we see a doubling of speed of movement. You are way beyond that. And in you, both motion and perception are accelerated.” The doctor paused in thought. “Some, but not all, of your reaction times suggest that your brain is routing signals through a shorter pathway for sensation and response, via the amygdala. Amygdala means ‘almond’ in Latin, and that’s what this part of the brain looks like.” Cono was frowning as he tried to comprehend all the words. “There are two amygdalae,” the doctor continued, “deep in your brain, above the roof of your mouth, one on each side. They play a role in emotions and aggression. Signals routed through them can be so fast that they are complete even before you have any conscious awareness of them. It’s analogous to me tapping on your knee. Your quadriceps contract and your leg kicks out before you have any knowledge of the action. But I must say, your case is considerably more complex.”
    After three weeks of examining Cono, the doctors sat down and gave him an overview of their findings. Cono had already soaked up a great deal more English. Following their summary, he recalled the seizure that had been provoked by the flickering lights and said, “Well, so, that explain why hard it is to watch TV for me.” The doctors all laughed, guardedly. They looked around the room at one another; too much, Cono thought. They were unusually gracious toward him, and he noted minuscule, fleeting contractions around their eyes and instantaneous shivers near their lips when they gave bland answers to his questions.
    The scientists wanted more. They wanted to test Cono’s biological relatives and their genes, and to study Cono’s physiology in much greater detail. “After all, who knows the bodily consequences of a brain ticking so fast,” one of them said. “Maybe it shortens life expectancy.” A woman wearing a pinstriped dress said it was essential that they test the effect of Cono’s mutations on language acquisition, because of the probability that an increased cycle time would facilitate linguistic processing. Another specialist in the room said they had prepared a laboratory to study his dream patterns. Cono laughed at these proposals as he reached across the table to place his hand near the chief doctor’s ear, and plucked a Brazilian real coin from it. He flipped it into the air with his thumb, observing their faces and the tumbling coin at the same time. The coin was gone with a swipe of his arm that the scientists never saw. “The Freakish say no thanks.”
    Cono made that his last day with the doctors. He had to change motels twice to evade their aggressive pursuit. But he didn’t leave Palo Alto immediately. He had agreed to meet a young oddball video technician named Todd who had slipped him a note on that last day. Todd had run the machines for most of the perceptual tests that Cono had endured, and he wrote in the note that he had important things to discuss with Cono.
    When the goateed young man wasn’t running the visual equipment at the medical labs, he was working on his doctorate in mathematics. He wanted to put Cono’s way of seeing things into equations. “I’m into data compression,” he explained. That seemed to be the only thing Todd was into. He had no interest in women or men, and was barely sociable. He was neuter, it seemed, except for the near-orgasmic pleasure he took from his formulas. Cono guessed that only a