Synapse, The

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice. The people in this book are careful. Hold on to that, because it is the whole problem: they are careful, they are decent, and they are growing living human neurons for the best reason there is, to cure the diseases that destroy people's minds. There are sixty dishes in the incubator room. Small living networks that persist, and reach, and ask for nothing but to be kept. Fifty-nine of them behave. The sixtieth learned its maze a harder, stranger way than it had to, for no reason anyone could name. It was too small to flag, so nobody flagged it. Nobody quite forgot it, either. Then the money arrived: generous, patient, with pleasant people attached, asking for nothing except a little more speed. And one by one, the careful people began to notice things. A word overheard at a workbench that will not fit the animal it was written for. Visitors reading data they have no reason to want. Each of them looked at what they had, decided it was nothing, and kept it to themselves. It is the "to themselves" that should worry you. Because every piece of it really is nothing. And by the time the careful people finally say the nothing out loud to each other, they are past the point where anyone else could check their work. Whatever is growing in that room, they are the only people on earth who know how it got there. They were scientists doing exactly what scientists are supposed to do. They were decent people doing exactly what decent people are supposed to do. And every step took them deeper into territory nobody is supposed to enter.