by Pat Cadigan
“You can already play duets with yourself. You play flamenco just fine. I’ve heard you,” Ido said. “I told you, every cyborg part would mean re-learning some things.”
“Si, si, si,” Hector said, flexing the long extendable fingers of his right hand. “If not for you, I’d be sitting around with knuckles the size of hen’s eggs, wishing I could still play. That was gross, man. I don’t miss the old meat hands even a little bit. But if I had a super-chip—” His face looked pained. “I dunno how to make you understand what it would mean to me if I could keep improving. I could pour my years into my music instead of fighting physical decline.”
“There comes a time for all of us when we stop improving. You’d have to face that even if you went Total Replacement,” Ido told him, trying to be as gentle as possible. “Everybody faces decline in performance, not just musicians. Cyber-surgeons too.”
“But don’t you want to put it off as long as you can?” Hector asked.
Ido smiled. “Of course.”
“Yet you’re not enhanced,” Hector said, gesturing at Ido’s body. A moment later he looked embarrassed. “I didn’t mean anything bad by that.”
“No, actually, you’ve got a point,” Ido said with a small laugh. “I suppose it may seem a bit strange that all my patients are enhanced but I’m not. Does that bother you, Hector?”
“Hell, no,” said the guitar player.
“Do you think it bothers the other patients?” Ido asked him.
Hector thought for a second. “I never heard anything like that. Mostly we talk about Motorball in the waiting room. This time next year Jashugan is gonna be everybody’s hero, better than Grewishka ever was because he won’t get all debauched.”
“I hope not,” Ido said, momentarily serious. The last time he’d seen him, Grewishka had been climbing down an open manhole into the sewer, which was, according to legend, where he’d been born.
“You want me to ask around, see what anyone thinks about your not being enhanced?” Hector asked.
“Don’t bother.” Ido lowered the table so Hector could get off it more easily. “What I’d really like you to do is get back to your usual spot in the market. Then when I’m shopping for servos, I can brag to everyone that I know you personally.”
Hector’s smile turned apologetic. “As soon as I can make up for the time when I couldn’t play—”
“Pay me as and when,” Ido said kindly, talking over him. “You know where I am. And if you get any more drop-out, or if you have any problems at all, come back and I’ll take care of it.”
* * *
Ido would have forgotten about what Hector had called the super-chip if it weren’t for his next patient, who couldn’t talk about anything else. Tonio was a skater for a messenger/delivery service; he was still in his twenties and had had his feet replaced in his late teens. If Ido had found the person who had done the work, he might have gone after him with a weapon.
It wasn’t simply that the work had been poorly done; it was also that Tonio had never been told his high-performance feet would put so much strain on his organic hips and knees that he would have to have his legs replaced altogether. Fortunately, Tonio wasn’t upset at the idea of swapping out so much of his organic body for hardware.
“My boss says Mercury’ll cover, like, three-quarters of the cost,” Tonio said. “Even though I’m not going to their guy to have the work done.”
“‘Their guy’? Is that the same guy who replaced your feet?” Ido had to make an effort not to show his anger.
“Nah, a different guy,” Tonio said. “The first guy went out of business and took off. Nobody knows where he is.”
“Lucky for him,” Ido muttered. He had Tonio lie down on the treatment table, which he elevated so he could take a close look at the connections. Tonio’s feet had been attached at the base of his ankles with the bare minimum of connections; he was lucky they hadn’t broken off. As it was, Ido could tell Tonio had significantly reduced sensation, to the point where he could have stepped on a spike without knowing it. Ido had done what he could to keep Tonio going for a while, but the poor guy couldn’t go on for much longer.
“You send Mercury an invoice,” Tonio was saying. “Although they’ll probably pull their sixty-day billing routine on you. They make customers pay up front, but when they pay, it’s always sixty days. Some kind of bookkeeping thing.”
“You need to hold very still for this,” Ido told him, rolling a small scanning machine over to the table.
Tonio lifted his head to see what he was doing. “You’re not takin’ ’em off now, are you?” he asked as Ido placed his feet in the scanning box.
“No, this is a scanner,” Ido assured him. “This will give me a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree image so I can see all the connections from the outside all the way down to the bone.”
“But you’re just gonna cut my legs off anyway,” Tonio said.
“Yes, but not today. I want to see what kind of shape you’re in now. Lie flat, Tonio, and don’t move your feet.”
Tonio obeyed. “I hope we can do the surgery soon. I’m not planning to skate for Mercury forever. That’s no job for a grown-up.”
“Oh?” Ido said. “What’s a grown-up’s job?”
“I’m gonna hire a trainer and try out for Motorball. And if I can get one of those super-chips, I’ll have it made.”
Ido paused in the act of rolling the scanner away from the treatment table. “What super-chip?”
“This guy who was at the last tryouts at the stadium had one and it was unbelievable. He was so fast everybody else looked like they were in slow-motion.”
“What about his coordination?” Ido asked.
“This guy could probably juggle chainsaws and dance ballet—real fast. I’m definitely getting me one of those.”
“Where?” Ido asked.
“Well… here, I hope.” Tonio looked a bit puzzled. “You got stuff like that, right? New hardware and software, I mean. Even if you don’t work in the pits any more, you get all the latest stuff, don’t you?”
Ido took a breath. “If you want to go pro, you’ll have to go TR,” he told Tonio. “All Paladins are Total Replacement cyborgs. Flesh and blood wouldn’t make it once around the track, even skipping the obstacle course.”
“Fine with me,” said Tonio. “A super-chip wouldn’t work with meat anyway, would it?”
Ido winced at the term. “But it’s not enough just to be a TR.” He scooted the stool he was sitting on up to the head of the treatment table. “Not every TR is cut out for the game. And not every Paladin makes it big. Plenty end up as jobbers on the Factory practice team.” Or wash out before they play a single game, he added silently.
“I know,” Tonio said, raising himself up on one elbow. “You gotta be athletic and you need a competitive spirit. With a super-chip, I’d be the whole package, with whipped cream and a cherry. I mean, talk about physical enhancement! This is what it must have been like back when everybody had to walk everywhere and then somebody invented the car.”
Ido decided giving Tonio a history lesson wouldn’t help either of them.
“I dunno who made it, but Vector’s got the chip now,” Tonio went on. “This guy went through the practice team like they were wet paper. Vector signed him to one of his teams.”
“And Vector would never have paid the Factory team to take a dive,” said Ido sceptically.
“Sure he would!” Tonio laughed. “But not that night. You can bribe someone to go slow but not to go faster—not that much faster. Guy was so fast, they had to replay him in slow-mo so we could see what he did.”
Ido was still sceptical. There were always rumours and gossip going around in Motorball, about new drugs, new players with unheard-of talents, new hardware that could make a statue into a contender for Final Champion. They always turned out to be exaggerations or wish-fulfilment fantasies from the fevered brains of hard-core fans who still missed the days when Grewishka’s career had been on the upswi
ng.
Ido made a few adjustments to Tonio’s feet and worked out a schedule for the Replacement surgeries. Tonio was still talking about the super-chip as Ido saw him out.
The next patient was a twelve-year-old girl named Courage who had lost her right arm to bone cancer and needed her cyborg replacement resized after a growth spurt. She came in with her older sister, Spirit, who had lost her own right arm to the same cancer but had then chosen to replace her other arm and both legs. Spirit’s torso was holding up well, and she had expressed no desire as yet to replace anything else. Eventually, aches and pains in the organic part of her body might change her mind. Ido kept her chart up to date, just in case. Both sisters were tremendously girly, which Ido enjoyed. It was as if something of his daughter’s essence came with them, and for a little while she was slightly more present. Today he thought the sisters would provide a respite from all the talk about a hot new Motorball up-and-comer with hardware that couldn’t possibly be real. But he’d forgotten that even the girliest girls could be Motorball fans.
“So I see the tryouts on the JumboTron in mid-town,” Spirit said, perched beside her sister in one of the reclining chairs. She had dark-brown skin and thick waist-length braids held back by a wide gold-lamé hairband. These patients were too recent to have met his daughter, but Ido knew she would have begged Spirit to braid her own, much thinner shoulder-length hair. Or maybe she’d have wanted locs like Courage.
“And I cannot believe my eyes!” Spirit was saying. “I call Courage and tell her to meet me at the stadium before they wise up and start charging admission!”
“You can watch tryouts for free,” Courage put in.
“Yes, I know,” Ido murmured, making sure her shoulder was positioned correctly in the stereotactic frame. He could have put her on a treatment table but he’d discovered his younger patients tended to squirm less in the chair.
“I was so glad she called me,” Courage said, “because I wouldn’ta believed her. I’ve never seen anybody that fast. And he’s dreamy!”
“He’s got it going on,” Spirit agreed. “But I’d still like to meet Jashugan and Kinuba—”
“Dibs on Kinuba!” Courage giggled.
“No way would I ever let that guy get near you,” Spirit said. “You can date Jashugan.”
“No way! Going out with Jashugan would be like going out with Dad.”
“I need you to hold still,” Ido told her. “Unless you want your arm coming out of your ear.”
“Just don’t hook it onto my boob!” Courage giggled, her short locs bouncing.
“Courage! Shame on you!” Spirit said. “Talkin’ to the doc like that! Look what you did; you made that nice man blush! I’m sorry,” she added to Ido, who felt as if his face had burst into flames. “We’re tryin’ to raise her right, but kids these days. It’s a losing battle. That’s what our mom says, anyway.”
Ido smiled; his face was still hot. He really had to get a nurse in here, he thought. In a civilised society, doctors never saw patients without a chaperone. Gerhad’s arm was ready—he’d pay her a visit, either tonight before he went to his second job or tomorrow morning, before he opened the clinic.
“He’s got the best name too,” Courage said. “The guy with the super-chip.”
“Oh?” Ido said politely, adding connectors to both the girl’s shoulder and the cyborg arm.
“Chase,” the girls said in rapturous unison.
“Vector’s already signed him,” Courage added. “Vector hogs all the good players.”
“Kinuba won’t sign with him,” Spirit reminded her. “Hey, Doc, you used to work at the track, didn’t you? I bet they miss you in the pits. You still go to games?”
“Nope,” Ido said without looking away from what he was doing. And please don’t ask me why, he added silently as he finished resizing the end of Courage’s arm to her shoulder. Most people knew what had happened to his daughter, and almost all his regular patients knew Chiren had left him. Some thought the former had caused him to quit Motorball while others thought it had been the latter. He didn’t care what they thought as long as he didn’t have to talk about it.
“Courage, I’m sorry but you’re still moving around too much,” he said. “Please try to keep still. If I make a mistake with the wiring, you’ll raise your hand every time you blink.”
“Sorry, Doc,” said Courage. “I’ll be good—well, I’ll try.”
“Oh, Doc, I bet you never made a mistake in your whole life,” Spirit chuckled. “You must be the smartest person in the world, or at least in Iron City.”
“That’s very nice of you, Spirit.” Ido felt his face grow a bit warm again. “But there are many highly intelligent people around, and by the law of averages, a few of them would be smarter than I am.”
“Doubt it,” Spirit said, and laughed some more. “At least I never met any. Are they all hiding?”
“Yeah,” Courage said. “From you. Anyone with half a brain sees you coming and they run for their lives.”
“You’re dead,” Spirit promised her sister. “Seriously. As soon as your ass is outta that chair, your life is over.”
* * *
Ido had to take a break from Courage’s arm to re-wire part of a Factory worker’s autonomic system to stop sudden bursts of hyperventilation. After ascertaining the man wasn’t suffering from an undiagnosed anxiety disorder, Ido found the problem quickly—a faulty stretch of wire. He replaced it and all the wires immediately adjacent as well, just to be sure, then had the Factory worker remain in the clinic for another two hours for observation.
“If you say so, Doc,” the man said, settling down in another of the reclining dental chairs. “But I can feel the difference. For a while there, I thought maybe some of the clowns at the southie distribution centre stuck a super-chip in my lungs or something.”
Both Spirit and Courage perked up immediately. “You saw the tryouts too?” Spirit asked.
“Sure did,” said the Factory worker. “I don’t usually stay on for them but I’m glad I did. I couldn’t believe it! Fastest thing I ever saw in my life. Some are saying this guy’s gonna be as good as Grewishka, but I say he’s gonna make everybody forget Grewishka…”
Ido managed to tune them out, but he couldn’t do that with everyone. By the end of the day, which he had extended by two hours, he’d heard more gossip and rumours about super-chips than he could keep track of: the guy was a beta test for a whole new breed of super-Paladins; the super-chip had actually been swiped from a medical facility where the Factory were developing super-soldiers for the next war; the guy with the super-chip was a lost, mythical soldier from the United Republics of Mars; the Factory planned to replace Centurians with super-chipped cyborgs.
Ido finally gave up and took a look at some of the video from the tryout, figuring he was going to see what looked like someone doing gymnastics on a high dose of amphetamines, possibly with a psychedelic sweetener. What he saw made all the tiny hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
The cyborg on the track looked to be about twenty, with short, spiky black hair and tan skin. It was hard to get a good look at his face because he moved as if he were on fast-forward, but without the jerkiness of a speeded-up video. If this wasn’t some kind of trick, someone had done what he had been trying to do. Someone else had made a chip that would match the cyborg body to the speed of thought in the organic brain.
Ido had become so frustrated with the runaway problem that he’d decided he needed a break and locked the chip in the safe for a while. Using it to integrate only one or two cyborg parts with an organic body had worked well, but only for a while. The early results from the first virtual experiment had made him hopeful. But then, with no warning at all, the chip began anticipating movements too quickly, until the chip was guiding movement rather than a human will. Ido tried different configurations and settings but the chip kept rushing ahead of the human brain.
Giving the chip an entire cyborg body to integrate with an organic nervous s
ystem seemed to work better—but again, only temporarily. It simply took longer for the chip to reach the runaway state. How much longer seemed to vary. In virtual experiments, it might function for the autonetic equivalent of two months, but that seemed to be the maximum amount of time. Virtual experiments in different neural configurations showed it might be only a few days before the chip went into runaway.
Normally when Ido took a break from a project, it was for a week at most. It had been two weeks since he’d put the chip in the safe and he still thought he needed a bit more distance. He was starting to think he was attempting the impossible—the materials to hand just weren’t good enough. But apparently he was wrong. Someone had done what he couldn’t.
Chiren, of course. It had to be Chiren.
The chip hadn’t been a collaborative project but she’d done a little work on it with him. She’d known what he’d been trying to do and what materials he’d been working with. Vector could provide her with much better materials and a better-equipped lab. As a result, anything Ido could do, she could better. And sooner. And probably in an array of attractive colours too.
Ido wouldn’t have minded so much except she’d done it for Vector, as if there was nothing more important than pleasing him. The way she was going all out for the king of Zalem’s trashcan, anyone would think he had more to offer her than trash.
But he did—he already had. Vector could give her what he skimmed out of Zalem shipments. He could give her pre-trash.
After the last patient left, Ido decided to postpone seeing Gerhad till the morning and go directly to his second job instead.
* * *
Tonight’s big bounty was on a nasty piece of tin who had been preying on couples. Any kind of couple—old, young, same-sex, hetero. Two friends walking together were safe. But any display of affection, whether it was kissing or even just holding hands, called for the death penalty.
So far the Un-Coupler, as the marker called him, had attacked six couples. Only two people had survived—a man from the second couple and a woman from the fifth. Neither remembered much about what had happened, although the woman had been able to provide a vague description of the attacker.