December 25th, 1931

Detroit. One of the greatest cities in the world. The crossroads of industry and commerce. The American Paris, the City of Champions, Blimp-Town, Motor City, call it what you want, it’s one crowded place. Nearly two million people live in Detroit, but as far as Jake Sullivan was aware, only a few of them were trying to kill him at that particular moment in time.

Sure, there might have been others in Detroit that were gunning for him, as he wasn’t the type of man that made a lot of friends, but judging from the volume of gunfire pouring through the windows and puckering the walls... Six. There were only six shooters.

He could handle that.

“Enough! I said enough!” The gunfire tapered off. One last angry bullet bounced off his cover with a clang. “You still alive in there?”

The seven hundred pound chunk of steel plate he’d picked up to use as a shield had worked better than expected. Sullivan checked his body for holes, and finding no more than usual, shouted back, “Yeah, but your boys ain’t. You ready to surrender yet, Johnny? The cops will be here any minute.”

“You’ll be an icicle before then.”

The temperature was dropping fast, which meant that Snowball was out there too. Both Maplethorpe brothers were Actives, which was just his rotten luck. Sullivan’s teeth began to chatter. He had to finish this before the Icebox could freeze him out. At this range, a clean shot could freeze him solid, but behind cover... even a really powerful Icebox wouldn’t be able to steal more than ten degrees a minute from room this big, but it had already been cold to begin with. That didn’t leave Sullivan much time.

“Kidnapping, murder.” He needed to goad them into coming after him. It was his only chance. “You boys been busy.”

“Throw ‘em on the list. They can only send me to the gas chamber once,” Johnny Bones shouted back through the broken windows. “Are you the Heavy? Is this the legendary Heavy Jake Sullivan, J. Edgar Hoover’s pet Active?”

Sullivan didn’t dignify that with a response

“Heard you been looking for my crew. How’d you find us? I thought you Heavies was supposed to be stupid?”

“Even a blind pig finds an acorn once in awhile, Johnny.” Sullivan picked up the giant Lewis machinegun from the floor with one shaking hand. It was a good thing he’d already been wearing gloves or he would’ve left skin on the freezing metal. “You ready to go to prison?”

“You know all about that from what I hear. So how’s Rockville this time of year?”

The infamous prison for actively magical criminals was in Montana. Sullivan had been an inmate there for six long years. “Cold. Very cold.” Some of Johnny Bones’ men were going to try to flank him while they were talking. He knew because that’s what he would’ve ordered if their situations had been reversed. Sullivan picked the most likely window, pointed the Lewis at it, and waited. “You’ll get used to it. Your brother will be nice and comfy, though.”

“We can make a deal,” Johnny shouted, trying to keep Sullivan distracted. “It don’t have to be like this, with you all blue and frozen stuck to the floor. How about I let you walk out of here, pay you enough to make it worth your time? We’ll call it my present to you. Tis the season and all that jazz. I’m in a giving mood. What do you say?”

Someone moved on the other side of the window. Sullivan held down the trigger and let the Lewis roar. Bricks exploded into dust and glass shattered. The man on the other side went down hard.

That left five.

“I’d say you gotta do better than that.”

Johnny Bones Maplethorpe ordered his remaining men to open fire and bullets ricocheted off the steel plate. Jake Sullivan was pinned down in a room that was rapidly turning into a walk-in freezer by a gang of hardened criminals led by a vicious Shard. It was one hell of a way to spend Christmas.

In a word, crap.

Which is annoying, because the hard facts about what we know and don’t know about the brain are far more interesting than ungrounded speculation and make far more entertaining stories. What’s more, those facts are getting more interesting almost moment to moment these days.

I talked recently with my friend Dr. Michael D. Devous, Sr., a Dallas-based brain scientist who is a powerhouse researcher in neuroimaging and neuro-pharmacology. Mike is an M.D.-and Ph.D.-bearing professor of radiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, where he’s also the Director of the Neuroimaging Core for the Alzheimer’s Disease Center and of the Neuroimaging Core of the North Texas Traumatic Brain Injury Model System. Mike is also an avid science fiction reader and (one of these days!) an aspiring SF writer.

Neuro-imaging, in particular the advances in the functional MRI devices brain scientists use to see inside of brains, has revolutionized what we know about what lies inside our skulls.

“The hallmark of brain study ten to fifteen years ago was the autopsy,” Mike says. “Now the functional MRI allows me to view brain structure in exquisite detail while you’re still alive. With an MRI, I can watch you go through an entire perception and the associated memory retrieval, identification and emotions associated with that percept in one picture per millisecond intervals. I can literally play back a movie of your having a perception or an emotion or both.”

What Mike sees are networks.