Page 32 of The Secret of Secrets

Langdon could not believe Janáček thought Katherine would run, but his resourcefulness was impressive.

Lieutenant Pavel was already moving cautiously down the hall, his gun raised as if he could be ambushed at any moment. Put your goddamned gun away! Langdon wanted to shout. They’re unarmed scientists!

As Janáček and Langdon followed, Lieutenant Pavel peered into a small restroom, apparently found it empty, and continued to the end of the hall. Here the corridor turned left, and he inched warily around the corner, gun at the ready. After a moment, he holstered his weapon and turned back to his captain with a shrug. “Nikde nikdo.”

Langdon followed Janáček around the corner into a dazzling space bathed in natural light. Furnished like the atrium of some boutique hotel, the room had stark white couches, pounded copper tables, and a sophisticated coffee station. The floor-to-ceiling windows offered a majestic view out across the bastion’s long courtyard to Prague’s skyline, Petřín Tower, and Vyšehrad Fortress.

As Langdon surveyed the space, his gaze fell on a massive piece of art on the rear wall—a Brutalist wall sculpture whose unique style he recognized at once.

My God, is that an original Paul Evans piece?

The eight-foot-square rust-colored metal was divided into a grid of rectangular recesses, each holding a smaller individual sculpture. An improvisation on a “cabinet of curiosities,” Langdon had to guess the Paul Evans was easily worth a quarter of a million dollars. Gessner had bragged last night about her lucrative medical patents, but Langdon had clearly underestimated just how lucrative those patents must be.

Janáček was moving toward the far end of the room, where an oversized wooden door stood open into what appeared to be Dr. Gessner’s office.

“Dr. Gessner?” Janáček called, walking into the office.

Langdon followed in the hope of seeing Katherine, but the office was empty.

The neuroscientist’s office was adorned with a collection of vibrant abstract prints—each one an amorphous spheroid blob with regions of different colors—which Langdon immediately recognized as MRIs of the human brain.

Science as art.

Langdon wondered if Gessner was so self-involved as to hang images of her own brain. Bio self-portraits had become popular lately with the advent of imaging companies like DNA11, which generated artwork based entirely on a customer’s unique DNA microscopy. Genetic art, they advertised, means no two people ever own the same piece.

Janáček walked over to Gessner’s desk and examined what appeared to be an intercom and microphone. He selected a button and held it down.

“Dr. Gessner?” he declared into the mic. “I am ÚZSI Captain Oldřich Janáček. As I suspect you are aware, I am with Professor Robert Langdon. It is imperative that you and Ms. Solomon come upstairs immediately to speak with me. I repeat—immediately. Please confirm.”

Janáček released the button and waited, glaring up into a fish-eye camera on the ceiling.

With each passing moment of silence, Langdon felt increasingly uneasy. Why isn’t Katherine responding? Did something happen down there? Has there been an accident?

“Professor?” Janáček sauntered slowly over to Langdon. “Do you have any idea why Ms. Solomon would be ignoring me? They are obviously here. Dr. Gessner’s office is unlocked, and there are fresh footprints outside.”

Langdon was not sure how “fresh” the muted prints were, but considering their scheduled meeting here, it seemed logical that Katherine was indeed downstairs with Gessner. “I have no idea,” he replied truthfully.

Janáček guided Langdon back to the waiting room and pointed to one of the white couches. “You sit.”

Langdon obeyed, taking a seat on the long couch by the side wall. Janáček placed a phone call, speaking in rapid-fire Czech.

While Langdon waited, his gaze moved again to the colorful images decorating Gessner’s office. Just three pounds of flesh, he thought, scrutinizing the mysterious contours and interconnected folds in each image. And science still has no clue how it works.

In her lecture last night, Katherine had projected a markedly less attractive image of a human brain—a stark laboratory photograph of a grayish, furrowed glob of tissue sitting in a stainless-steel tray.

“This blob is your brain,” she had told the crowd. “I realize it looks more like a mound of very old hamburger, but I can assure you, this organ is nothing short of miraculous. It contains approximately eighty-six billion neurons. Together they form over a hundred trillion synaptic connections, which can process complex information almost instantly. Moreover, these synaptic connections can reorganize themselves over time as needed. This phenomenon, known as neuroplasticity, enables the brain to adapt, learn, and recover from injuries.”

Katherine displayed another photo—a single DVD sitting on a table. “This is a standard DVD—it can hold an impressive four-point-seven gigabytes of information,” she continued, “which equates to approximately two thousand high-definition photos. But do you know how many DVDs it would take to store the estimated memory of the average human brain? I’ll give you a hint…If you stacked the required DVDs on top of each other”—she gestured at the soaring ceiling of Vladislav Hall—“they would reach well beyond the peak of this building. In fact…the stack would be so tall…it would reach the International Space Station.”

Katherine tapped her skull. “We each store millions of gigabytes of data in here—images, memories, lifetimes of education, skill sets, languages…all sorted and organized neatly in this tiny space. Modern technology still requires a data warehouse to match it.”

She turned off the PowerPoint and walked to the front of the stage. “Materialist scientists remain baffled as to how an organ so small could possibly hold such vast quantities of information. And I have to agree, it seems a physical impossibility…which is why I’m not a materialist.”

There was a slight flurry in the audience. Poking the hornet’s nest again, I see. Langdon had learned that Katherine had no qualms about striking a nerve when it came to the two opposing philosophies into which the study of human consciousness was divided.

Materialism versus Noetics.

The materialists believed that all phenomena, including consciousness, could be explained solely in terms of physical matter and its interactions. According to materialists, consciousness was a by-product of physical processes—the activity of neural networks along with other chemical processes within the brain.