Diamond Mask (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (5 page)

The micromanipulator comset that had been hovering above the floating brain settled into place. Since the device had a noninvasive brainboard interface and could respond to thought input,
it was as easy for Jack to use as it was for an embodied person.

Nervous telepathic giggles bubbled in the aether. Jack said: First the wipe & then TheBigTweak!!!

He began the modification and the holographic imagery of the improperly modified ECI seemed to go wild. Displays indicating the progress of the work turned into a featureless blur as tools darted in and out of nowhere at lightning speed, plucking at the electrochemical unit, tearing it down and building it up again. Microscopic organelle supply-slaves zipped hither and yon in the fluid of the model brain ventricle like demented bacteria, carrying tiny bits and pieces for insertion or disposal. When the ECI modification was finished, a glom command fleck completely reprogrammed by Jack through molecular-beam epitaxy was married to the SIE’s central processor.

Marc watched incredulously as the operations that had taken him hours to accomplish were done in less than twenty minutes by his mutant brother. His admiration was frankly tinged by the envy that had lately begun to undermine the compassion he felt for young Jack’s grotesque physical condition. Was Mental Man really to be pitied—or was
he
, the embodied one, the true unfortunate? What would it be like to be free of nearly all of the body’s needs and limitations? To be able to channel all vital energies toward cerebration? Jack did require a limited amount of sleep, but most of his other physical functions were automatic. When he wore a body, he ate and drank only to be sociable. He never experienced physical pain because he had not bothered to fashion the receptors within his pseudoflesh. His mind’s function was hardly ever skewed or limited by the biochemical deterioration that occurred in an ordinary person’s body during the course of a day’s work. He would never be driven to irrational actions by turbulent sex hormones—

Jack said: There that’s done let’s run a full Mode2 simulation shall we?

“Yes,” said Marc aloud. “Go ahead with a regular helmet test.” Whatthehell we might as well know whether we’ve got a hot new CErig here or just another bloodybonkerbucket.

In actual operation, a complete set of the newly redesigned SIEs would be incorporated into a CE helmet having an external energy source. When a person donned the helmet and gave the proper telepathic command, his skull and cerebral tissue would be penetrated by a series of hair-thin electrodes nicknamed the “crown of thorns,” the tips of which would come to rest within
the cerebral and diencephalic ventricles, three fluid-filled hollow places in the operator’s brain. The drilling procedure was only minimally uncomfortable as the scalp was pierced, since the brain itself was insensitive to pain. At another command, 26 SIEs with their two supervisory SIECOM units would emerge from the electrode-tips and bloom within the right and left lateral ventricles. A single master SIECOMEX unit would unfold within the third ventricle, above the brainstem. When the CE equipment energized, the operator’s mental potential would, in theory, be greatly multiplied. Unfortunately, certain other brain activities might also be augmented by improperly tuned implants, leading to side effects that ranged from mildly annoying to fatal. The risk to the CE operator increased in direct proportion to the amount of mental enhancement generated by the equipment, especially in metacreativity designs.

When Jack the Bodiless began his test, the image of the newly modified SIE tree with its baroque ornaments seemed to glow within its bath of artificial cerebrospinal fluid. Responding to Jack’s initiation command, the single unit triggered a complex flood of mind-boosting neurosecretions to a model operator-brain roughly equal in mental assay to that of a grandmasterclass operant. For a few seconds, the executive processor let the new cerebroenergetic enhancement “cook,” activating certain portions of the cerebral cortex that were ordinarily unused. Then the SIECOMEX phased in the equivalent of 25 additional SIE units also having the modification. At this point Jack commanded the fully equipped brain simulation to evaluate itself in the metacreativity mode, and the most critical part of the test began.

Marc said: Neurometrics looking good mondingofrelot damngood.

Jack said: Limbics okay this time both hemispheres syncing on creative parameters feedback beautiful I’m going to ask for the overall evaluation now Marco letusPRAY!!

The holodisplay changed abruptly to a flickering mass of graphical analysis that almost defied Marc’s ability to keep up with it. In less than six minutes, the analyzer simulated an hour of CE equipment use by a metapsychic operant of high mental status. While there was increasing minor dysfunction in certain areas, the psychoresultant showed an upgrade in creative metafaculty output somewhat greater than Jack had originally anticipated.

IT WORKS!
shrieked the enraptured boy-mind.

“Yes,” Marc said. “It certainly does. In theory.” He watched
the continuing simulation for some time with a slight, one-sided smile. Then he reached out and shut down the machine. “The new design is practicable and all I have to do is build it and tune it and test it on a meat-brain.”

How long do you think that’ll take?

Marc shrugged. “Seven months—maybe less. I’ll be the guinea pig, of course.”

ME TOO pleaseMarcoPLEASE—

“Don’t be silly. You can help with the helmet design work in your spare time, but that’s all. Testing this new rig will be dangerous and expensive, and there are also tricky political considerations that’ll need juggling. The college administrators are getting more and more antsy about the project.”

But—

“Don’t argue! You’re only a kid, Jack. A brilliant and talented and bizarro kid—but in the eyes of the law and of Dartmouth College you have no business messing around with hazardous equipment. Now put yourself back together again and let’s get the hell out of here.”

Fury paid no attention as Jack the Bodiless reassumed his former aspect of a ten-year-old child. Jubilant at what it had just witnessed, the monster had already abolished its presence in the laboratory and was soaring eastward over the Atlantic Ocean toward the British Isles, indulging in delicious speculation.

Until now, the practical applications of cerebroenergetics had been relatively prosaic, and not particularly useful to Fury. For over half a century, simple CE devices had been used for recreational romps in various virtual-reality environments; but the potentially addictive amusements were now hedged about with legal restrictions and forbidden to children altogether, while CE equipment incorporating more elaborate technology was widely utilized, even by normals, for specialized education and for operating sophisticated machinery.

CE augmentation of the metapsychic functions was still in its infancy, however. It was a uniquely human endeavor that the five other races of the Milieu viewed with both awe and misgiving. Exotic critics judged the new technology to be just one more way for upstart humanity to endanger the stability of the Galactic Mind.

Redactive CE was sometimes used by operants performing delicate psychosurgery or retroevolutionary genetic engineering. Psychokinetic boosting had been applied to macromolecular synthesis
and complex nanotechnology such as the building of elaborate electronic, photonic, or bionic flecks. Lately, even more powerful “barber-chair” CE requiring life support as well as brain implantation had been used to boost the mental capacity of PK operants working on subatomic projects. Similar equipment, potentially very hazardous to the operator, had been used by farsensory adepts probing the gray limbo of hyperspace in search of experimental evidence for the three hypothetical “matrix fields” that were believed to form the ultimate basis of reality.

Significant augmenting of the creative metafunction, the higher mindpower that might theoretically have the greatest impact upon the physical universe, was thought by many Milieu authorities to be of dubious potential, not only because of the inherently grave risk to the mind utilizing the technology, but also on account of the danger of misapplication.

The latter, of course, was what most intrigued Fury.

Marc Remillard had no doubts whatsoever about the practicability of creativity enhancement. He had experimented with different types of brain-boosting for years, and he persisted with his research into the far frontiers of creativity magnification when more conservative workers in the CE field held back. His work was given academic respectability under the aegis of Dartmouth College, and the papers he published were acknowledged to be brilliant. But certain powerful faculty members of the Department of Metapsychology had objected strenuously to the E15 project on ethical grounds, also intimating that young Professor Marc Remillard was arrogant, high-handed, contemptuous of his more prudent colleagues, and insufficiently sensitive to the metapsychic Pandora’s box his work might open.

Marc pooh-poohed the timidity of his critics while loftily ignoring slights to his character. Greatly enhanced creativity was not for every mind, that went without saying. In his opinion, only the most powerful grandmasterclass operants of proven mental stability were suitable candidates. As for the ethical questions, he maintained that they could be confronted and dealt with once the E15 equipment was operable, at the time that individual CE creativity projects were proposed. It was the
misuse
of the technology, not the technology itself, that might be adjudged immoral. Application guidelines should be and would be developed for creativity augmentation, just as they had been developed for nuclear energy and even for metafunction itself, which had posed similar ethical problems.

When Jack the Bodiless became secretly involved in the experiments of his elder brother, he confessed that he was seriously concerned about the moral dilemma; but he was only a child, after all, with limited experience in matters of good and evil in spite of his towering intellect. Marc’s arguments in favor of the E15 research had been very persuasive.

It had taken the two strangely compatible colleagues a little over a year to proceed from bare-bones theory to this monumental breakthrough. Beyond a doubt they would now continue to work together unofficially, attaining even greater success in times to come.

Fury was quite proud of the brothers, even though they were flawed and unlovable. All unawares they had furthered the monster’s grand scheme.

If only Fury could have used the new CE technology itself! But that was a fundamental impossibility, since the entity presently lacked a genuine physical presence, being even less substantial than the Lylmik. It was Fury’s Hydra component, tucked away in a safe corner of Earth for a number of years while slowly maturing, that would be the proper beneficiary of creativity enhancement.

Wearing this new E15 helmet, even nonoperants might find their natural creative gifts producing novel inventions, worthy artwork, or spectacular stratagems for altruism or villainy—provided that the brain of the operator was strong enough to withstand the device’s potential. A metapsychic possessing strong natural creativity, as the Hydra-units did, would be able to accomplish deeds that normal humans would deem godlike: complex material synthesis; geophysical alteration; massive ionic accumulation, discharge, and control. Transforming matter into directed energy would be child’s play to such an operator, who would command the equivalent of a gigawatt mental laser.

The Hydra would eventually have to increase and multiply in order to take full advantage of the breakthrough, but that was also part of Fury’s great plan. After suitable training, the CE-equipped creature, acting in metaconcert with Fury, need utilize no other weapons save its augmented multiplex brain in order to destroy the present galactic confederation and establish a Second Milieu …

Provided that this new E15 technology was not suppressed by meddling regulatory officials, to die aborning.

The Scottish threat to Marc’s project, the nearly completed adverse statistical report on long-term CE operator safety that
would very likely bring
all
human creativity-boosting research to an abrupt halt, must now be neutralized without delay.

Obliterating the data was not the answer. The Edinburgh team would simply reconstruct it. There was only one way to make certain that Marc’s project was not endangered: all three of the Scottish researchers would have to die. And Hydra, Fury’s creature and its only safe link to the matter/energy-space/time lattices, was the only one who could do the job.

Taking out three masterclass metapsychics without a trace was well within the Hydra’s competence; but it would still be a tricky operation, especially if it was done in the environs of the University of Edinburgh, that teeming hive of leery and powerful Celtic operants. A misstep (the Hydra-units were still very young and overconfident, and some sort of cock-up was all too likely) and the creature itself might be imperiled.

That would be totally unacceptable. Fury was severely limited in the physical sphere without Hydra, and its work was further complicated by periods of enforced dormancy. As a matter of fact, the present window of activity was about to close, and soon Fury would have to withdraw; but there was time yet to see Hydra on the track of its prey.

Clever, precious Hydra! The units were twenty-two years of age now, and while they had not stinted in supplying themselves with their primary source of mental nourishment, the killings had been done at decent intervals with admirable ingenuity. No suspicion had ever fallen upon the four disguised entities. The Hydra now was well educated, polished to a reasonably sophisticated luster, and very nearly ready to operate in the arena of the Galactic Milieu.

This particular executive action would be good training for similar exercises in the future. The three Scottish researchers would have to be lured out of their sanctuary at the university, then eliminated without a trace. Once they were gone and their data destroyed, Marc would face no significant opposition to his project. No other CE safety-study groups on Earth or on human colonial planets posed any imminent danger.