city blues 01 - dome city blues (50 page)

“Okay,” I said.  “Your AI designed the neural shunt.  Then what happened?”

John walked for a few seconds without speaking, as if deciding how to continue.  “Actually,” he said finally.  “My AI designed six generations of chips before it came up with something that looked promising.  We ran computer simulations, and laboratory trials using monkeys, but in the end, the only way to be sure was to go under the knife myself.”

“You’re walking,” I said, “so it obviously worked.”

“The surgical procedure
itself
was a success,” John said, “but the implants still had to be programmed.  We had to recreate the neural patterns that my Supplementary Motor Cortex should have been using to talk to my legs.”

“What you’re saying is, you had to
reprogram
your brain to communicate with the muscles in your lower body via the chip and the fiber optic link.”

“That’s basically it,” John said.  “We needed a piece of control code.  We could have written it from scratch, but it was easier to record someone else’s synaptic patterns, and tailor the recording to my body.  I used one of my lab assistants, a Vietnamese kid named Tran, and mapped his motor responses.  When we imprinted them on the chip in my frontal lobe, we ran into something unforeseen.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “It sent you into a seizure.  You told me about that.”

“It wasn’t exactly a seizure,” John said.  “It was more like cross-talk.”

“Cross-talk?”

“It’s an electronics term.  When two improperly shielded wires or cables are run too close together, they cross-talk: the signal passing through one can interfere with the signal passing through the other.  Usually, the stronger of the two signals will end up garbling, or dominating, the weaker signal.”

“And you had this cross-talk going on in your brain?”

“More or less,” John said.  “The frontal lobes and motor cortex don’t just control voluntary muscle movement; they also integrate personality with emotion, and help translate thought into action.  When we injected Tran’s motor control code into the chip, it was like having a bomb go off inside my head.  A little slice of Tran’s mind was heterodyned into that signal: thoughts, emotions, force of will, and they all came out of that chip like water out of a fire hose.  I found myself fighting to control my own mind.”

“Tran’s personality took over your brain?”

“Almost,” John said.  “For a couple of seconds, anyway.  I was struggling and thrashing around so much that the AI registered my response as a full-blown seizure, and erased the program code out of the chip.”

“Are you trying to tell me that this entire fucking mind-control thing was an accident?”

“It isn’t really mind-control,” John said.  “It’s really more like personality-transfer.”

“But it was an accident?” I repeated.

“I sure as hell wasn’t looking for it,” John said.  “You want to know the real bitch about it?  The chip didn’t really work, not for what it had been designed for, anyway.  We ran into all sorts of neural feedback problems from the lower part of my spinal cord.  It’s taken nearly two years to work the kinks out.  Personality-transfer fell into my lap almost from the beginning, but I’ve only had my own legs back for a few weeks.”

I still couldn’t believe it.  “How can something like mind-control just fall into your lap?”

“A quirk of fate,” John said.  “The apple fell on Newton’s head, and he brought the world the concept of gravity.  I injected Tran’s synaptic patterns into my frontal lobe, and I discovered the secret of personality-transfer.”

John stopped in front of a door.  “This is the lab.  Your woman is in there.”

“Open it slowly,” I said.  “And I hate to sound cliché, but—no sudden moves.”

John pushed the door, and it swung slowly open, spilling a bright wedge of light into the hall.  John stood blinking under the light.

“The surgical labs have back-up power,” he said.  “Thirty two phased-plasma cadmium tetra-cores down on the second-floor.  It’s expensive as hell, but we actually do a little surgery in here once in a while, and it keeps us from losing a patient if the power drops off line.”

I looked over his shoulder into the lab; the unaccustomed light was bright, but not enough to dazzle me.  The room was huge; it probably took up half of the third-floor.  Rows of workbenches and electronics racks stretched away in all directions.

The surgical robot built into the ceiling was huge, three or four times as large as the model I’d seen at Second Looks.  And if Lance’s robot had reminded me of a spider, then this one was the queen, the birth mother of an entire species of spider-machines.

A black carbon-plastic nacelle, probably a protective housing for sensitive components, hung at the center of the machine’s cluster of multi-jointed legs like the underside of a fat carapace.  I could easily picture the bloated body distending to squeeze out glistening sacs of spider eggs.  The mental image made my skin crawl.

Clear tubing dangled from the carapace in loops, some of which wrapped around the robot’s arms to connect with manipulator attachments.  A greenish-amber liquid filled the tubing.  It was probably some sort of hydraulic fluid, but its coloring was disgustingly organic.

The unit was obviously a prototype, lacking the miniaturization and economy-of-form designed into the production models that followed.  Its arms were much longer and some were nearly as thick as one of my wrists.  Each of the couplings in its hundred arms was over-sized, probably to make it easier to work on, but the bulbous joints created a hideous effect of biological mutation.

The huge queen-spider was motionless.  Unless someone cycled her power on line and loaded her software, she would remain that way: asleep.  That was fine with me; I had no desire to see her awaken.  Ever.

I tore my eyes away from the dormant robot and scanned the rest of the room for threats.  No bad guys.  No sentry robots.  But the rows of equipment had to provide a few hundred hiding places.

Sonja lay strapped to a powered contour chair, directly under the queen-spider.  Her eyes were closed; a trio of manipulator arms dangled a few centimeters above her forehead.  Her mouth was covered by a strip of surgical tape.

I shoved John into the room, and then followed him, my Blackhart still trained between his shoulder blades.

Sonja’s eyes drifted open.  She tried to turn her head, but the surgical chair’s forehead strap held her fast.  She caught sight of me out of the corner of her eye, and tears immediately began leaking down her cheeks.

John presented her with a wave of his hand.  “See?  I told you she wasn’t hurt.”

I backed across the room toward Sonja, keeping the Blackhart pointed in John’s direction.  I didn’t like the idea of standing under the arms of the queen-spider, but I didn’t seem to have much choice.

When I got to Sonja, I started fumbling at the strip of tape that covered her mouth.  It was a difficult job; not only was I trying to work left-handed, but I had to do it without looking.  I couldn’t afford to take my eyes off John.

I managed to get my fingernails under one corner of the tape.  I tugged it gently away from her mouth.

Sonja started trying to talk as soon as the tape came off.  Her voice was thick and slurred, as though she’d been drugged.  I couldn’t understand a word.

“What’s wrong with her, John?”

Sonja tried again.  “Rrrrrroooo...  Rrrroooo... booottt...”

I touched the side of her face.  “It’s okay,” I said.  “I know about the robot.”

“It’s just a little dermal anesthetic,” John said.  “To keep her quiet.  It won’t hurt her.”

I flicked my eyes down at Sonja and then back up to John.  Four circular patches of silver foil were stuck to the right side of her neck.

I started feeling for them and trying to peel them off with my left hand, my eyes on John the entire time.

“I’m proud of you, John,” I said.  “Kidnapping is so much more civilized than murder.  You really are making progress.”

John crossed his arms and leaned against a rack of electronic modules.  “I admit that we’ve done some pretty outrageous things,” he said.  “But we’ve done some
extraordinary
things too.  Try to see the big picture here.  I’ve discovered the secret to immortality!”

I got a fingernail under the edge of one of the foil patches.  I peeled it away and dropped it on the floor.

“Think about it,” John said.  “We can record the human mind, capture a person’s personality and thought patterns, and imprint them on a Turing Scion.  Inside a Turing Scion, a human mind can live forever.  But what about the body?  We can replace damaged organs, and tinker with genetic codes and hormone balances, but sooner or later, accident or age catches up with us and the body fails.”

I felt for another of the dermal patches.  “It’s a closed cycle,” I said.  “You live; then you die.  That’s how it works.”

John shook his head violently.  He was almost bouncing with excitement, like a little boy who was finally able to tell some secret that was just too delicious to keep bottled up inside.

“But it doesn’t have to be that way,” he said.  “Not anymore.  My chip makes it possible to reload those personalities into human bodies!  We can extend life indefinitely.  There isn’t an injury or disease,
including
old age, that can’t be cured by a body swap.  This is going to blow the Medical Industry right out of its fucking boots!”

The second patch came loose and went onto the floor.  “A body swap?  What in the hell do you mean
a body swap?
  You make it sound like changing clothes.”

“Maybe it will go that far some day,” John said.  “We might get to the point where we swap bodies for the hell of it.  Just like you said, Sarge.  Like changing clothes!”

“One question,” I said.  “These bodies that you’re swapping about so freely.  Where do they come from?”

“Mononuclear reproduction,” John said.  “We
clone
them.”

“You should study up on cloning,” I said.  “Clones don’t gestate or develop any faster than natural organisms do.  It takes five years to grow a five-year-old child.  If one of your body swappers wants a twenty-year-old body, it’ll take twenty years to grow one.  That’s why cloned organs have never made it into the organ transplant market.”  The third patch stuck to my fingertips and I had to flex my fingers for a few seconds to get it loose.

“That’s true for the moment,” John said.  “But technology never stands still.  Have you ever heard of Deichstram Bionetics?”

I shook my head and reached for the last patch.

“It’s a Dutch R&D lab.  They’re working on something called
accelerated cellular mitosis
.  Force-growing clones.  The technology is just around the corner.”

“When, exactly, is just-around-the-corner?  A few months?  A couple of years?  Twenty?  What if it doesn’t pan out at all?”

John’s smile retreated.  “There are other options,” he said.  “Brain-locked criminals, for instance.  Their minds are pretty much blank-slates anyway.  A lot of them are bound to have nice healthy bodies.”

“That’s the sickest thing I ever heard,” I said.  “Every human-rights group and religious faction on the planet will be ready to burn you at the stake.  And I’ll be more than willing to hand them the matches.”

“Okay,” John said.  “Fine.  Forget criminals.  What about corpses?  When somebody dies, we can salvage the organs, right?  What’s to stop us from salvaging the entire body?  We figure out the cause of death, repair the body, and reload the personality from a Turing Scion.”

The fourth patch resisted my attempts to peel it up.  I dug my fingernails in a little deeper, on the theory that Sonja would be safer with a few superficial scratches than with John’s drugs in her system.

“I was wrong before,” I said.  “
That’s
the sickest thing I ever heard.”

“Goddamn it!” John said.  “You’re not seeing the possibilities.  You aren’t even trying.”

“You’re right about that,” I said.  “I don’t even want to
think
about what you’re suggesting.”

The last dermal patch came free and joined its brothers on the floor.  I felt for the straps that held Sonja’s right arm down.  My fingers found the buckle and started to worry it loose.

“Listen to yourself,” John said.  “You sound like a Luddite, cowering in your mud hut, pretending that the world is flat.  If the technology to make Turing Scions had been around a hundred years ago, don’t you think that Einstein would have taken advantage of it?  Imagine what he could have accomplished if he’d had two or three lifetimes to work with.”

I shook my head.  “Okay, Saint Francis,” I said.  “You’re the greatest thing since the Wright Brothers.  You’ve found the cure for everything from death to the common cold.  Now, explain to me again how all of this adds up to kidnapping, slavery, and murder.”

John cocked his head to the side.  “Slavery?”

“What do you call what you did to Michael Winter and Russell Carlisle?  They weren’t some theoretical laboratory-grown clones or the brain-dead criminals whose bodies you’re so hot to preempt.  They were just two poor bastards with brain tumors.  When they went under the knives of your surgical robots, they had no idea that you were planning to give them a little bonus gift, did they?”

I tightened my grip on the butt of my Blackhart.  “And while we’re on the subject of nasty surprises, when do we get to the part where twenty or so little girls get their hearts chopped out of their chests?”

A pencil thin beam of red light glinted for a millisecond, bright even in the well-lit lab.

Pain exploded in my right wrist as the beam of a laser drilled through my flesh.  I screamed, and instinctively jerked my wounded arm to my chest.  The Blackhart tumbled from my pain-numbed fingers and clattered across the floor.

“Freeze!”  It was a woman’s voice.

I stood there in mute agony, staring at the neatly cauterized hole in my wrist, the stench of my own cooked flesh strong in my nostrils.

The voice had come from the open doorway.  I turned my head and looked at it dumbly.  I’d been so wrapped up in John’s lunatic tale that I’d let my guard down.