by Hugo Navikov
He had technically been reintroduced to aliveness (if not “life”) after two months of coma, but the restoration of his sight would be the real rebirth, the thing that allowed him that one iota of freedom outside his own mind. The thing that would, along with the ability to speak given by the specialized aspiration control system and scaffolding of rods implanted into the connective tissues of his face, allow him to pursue the idea.
The medical team was represented several days ago by his personal surgeon; the tech team by the head of the world-renowned Robotics and Intelligent Machines Lab at UC Berkeley; and his friends by the stalwart chief of deep-sea exploration support, Mickey Luch.
Mickey was the first to point out the obvious irony of his last name since he had been on the crew of two very unlucky high-profile deep-sea exploration disasters. However, he also stressed three things: one, it wasn’t pronounced “luck” but like “luccch,” with the “ch” sounding like that in chutzpah; second, he had been chief as well as crewman aboard dozens of expeditions that went off without a hitch and provided much for ocean science and marine biology; and third, he was now often hired on as crew or mission chief on research vessels because of the experience he had gleaned from the Muir and Bentneus horror shows. He had viscerally vivid knowledge of how to detect sabotage, how to control a crew when a dive went totally pear-shaped. He had to turn down a detailed sonar and temperature mapping of the line of ocean-floor hydrothermal vents, something he would have loved to be a part of, so that he could be there for Jake’s milestone.
And the job offers were plentiful since that day’s worldwide live revelation, the very-near-death of Jake Bentneus convincing all that this was no hoax. The informal theories and formal papers supported and endlessly analyzed the footage and those who were there that day were interviewed again and again. The whole world now knew that there really were dinosaurs (or, as they were called by only the starchiest of scientists, “apparently Cenozoic-age marine lizards”) down at the bottom of the ocean, following sea vent to sea vent, and there had been a great deal of interest in not only Gigadon but in all aspects of the Ocean Victory (speaking of irony) expedition.
Not too long after the surge of interest, the name “Sean Muir,” the moniker of the polymath scientist who first theorized about ocean dinosaurs having survived and adapted at the hot-water vent, was at the top of Google searches for more information about hydrothermal vents being a habitat for dinosaurs. There were several interviews held at the prison by especially hungry journalists, but most of the major outlets didn’t want to sully the fun of DINOSAURS ALIVE! and so ignored the convicted murderer or talked about him in tones that one would use for discussing the ideas of a visionary who had long been dead.
Thus, Mickey Luch got job offers not only because of his expertise, but also because it gave a certain cachet to any expedition to have on its crew the man who was at the center of the discovery of the dinosaurs. Mickey didn’t know how many times he had talked about his experiences on the Muir and Bentneus adventures, but he liked regular jobs with good pay, so he told them afresh on every new boat he worked.
So now, Mickey Luch, in-demand mariner extraordinaire, was on dry land because his friend and former boss was about to get a little bit of his life back. Since he had no official role in the removal of the stitches and the week-long gradual introduction of light to Jake’s long-unused visual system, Mickey just let the big man know he was there and would be there all week. Unless there was a lot of money to be made, in which case he was outta there and would send him a postcard.
Bentneus waggled his tongue back and forth to show he was laughing inside his useless shell. Mickey caught it and told Jake he did, and it made the crew chief laugh harder as he took his appointed out-of-the-way corner of the room.
They had to do the procedure inside Bentneus’s (admittedly spacious and easy-to-sterilize) room because his heart had been replaced by a “centrifugal pump,” which was easier to replace or repair than other artificial hearts that allowed the recipient to enjoy some mobility, something that was not going to happen with Jake Bentneus.
The pump kept his body technically alive by circulating his blood, but this kind of artificial heart, much like the “axial flow” device the doctors considered at first (but then rejected because it wasn’t available as quickly) did not produce a pulse. Not that Bentneus cared, but it sometimes spooked out people who came to visit. They couldn’t see his ruined body under the blankets, but they could see that something was “off” aside from the obvious. Once they were told what it was, they were spooked no less but at least knew what was making them uncomfortable.
His crushed kidneys had been removed, and a hemodialysis machine was always right next to his bed, actually staying connected to him most of the time. His genitals weren’t even identifiable when (after employing very temporary but effective techniques to keep him alive long enough to airlift him to Guam, the nearest land and home to a world-renowned hospital) they cracked his egg open and gingerly scooped him out. His penis was now replaced by a catheter connected to the plastic bag that had taken the place of his bladder; his prostate gone; his testicles gone; his liver replaced by an experimental “HepaLife Bioreactor”; his stomach replaced by a 3D-printed facsimile made from stem-cell technology in Singapore; his permanently collapsed lungs (actually plastered together like two flat, wet pancakes) replaced by an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine, which would also take over the duties of the centrifugal heart pump once the latter failed, which they always did in time; his upper and lower GI tracts just a collection of colostomy bags and tubes; and his legs and arms removed before they could go gangrenous and replaced by nothing—they all knew, including Bentneus, that they would never be used again. Besides, since he could never be moved out of his room because of all the artificial organs and systems keeping his head alive, he would never be in a situation where he ever would need the limbs for cosmetic purposes. He would never sit in a wheelchair, could never be wheeled down the hall into surgery in case of an unexpected failure in any of the devices. No, this hospital room, nice as it was, would be his nice prison cell and then his nice morgue. With his eyes sewn shut, it had been his nice coffin in which he was buried alive.
They got his eyes open on a Thursday, and slowly the doctors introduced light while Bentneus wore the same specialized sunglasses designed for the Chilean miners trapped in darkness for more than two months in 2010. By the next Friday, eight days later, his eyes had grown fully accustomed to the light, and he could see that Mickey was still goddamn there, the loyal son of a bitch, and when his brain ordered an automatic smile, the servos on his face pulled it into an odd but identifiable smile. He had been working with the roboticists and therapy personnel to train himself on the system since they had attached its manipulation rods to him and stuck a dozen sensors into his brain—which were then connected to the super-parallel computer taking up almost the whole wall next to Bentneus. He couldn’t see it because he couldn’t turn his head, but he could feel the heat and could hear the cooling fans running through a special hole cut right through the hospital wall. The temperature was kept in the 50s (Fahrenheit) in his room, uncomfortable for anyone without a jacket but just fine for someone whose spinal cord was mashed from the coccyx all the way up to C1. The computer had to stay cool to work, and the computer had to work for what remained of Jake Bentneus to work.
Once the entire system worked in sync and Bentneus could “talk” by mentally moving the servos that the rods used to move his mandible and blow air consistently over his larynx, and when he could see again, Mickey finally took his leave. “I’ll be back to visit, man,” he said, not knowing what to do with his hands, since Jake couldn’t shake, fist-bump, or high-five; since he couldn’t really hug him without interfering with all of the tubing and equipment attached to Jake’s body; and he couldn’t even—he didn’t know—pat him on the head or something for fear of throwing off the finely calibrated system of motors and rods keeping Jake able
to communicate.
So he said he’d be back. “That brain of yours is intact for a reason, Jake. You can’t go on any more expeditions, but you can go VR and see everything better than you even could in the sub. And you can help plan research trips. And movies, too! Life isn’t over for you, Jake. Too many people love you for that. You stay alive, we stay a big part of that life, that’s the deal, okay?”
Bentneus was glad the rods made his fake smile look the same as his real smile, because he didn’t want to make his loyal friend feel bad. However, there was one thing that would put a real smile in place of the “being nice” one.
“Mick, before you go … I need a favor.”
He turned away from the door he was about to open. “You name it, man.”
It took a few minutes for the filmmaker to get it all out relying on the speed (or lack thereof) of the facial servos, but he got it all out and Mickey understood every last word.
“I’m on it, my friend,” Mickey said, “but … wow.”
Bentneus smiled.
And it was a real smile this time, which actually did look different from his merely polite smile. It’s just that the whole time since he came out of the coma, he hadn’t experienced one single thing that had made him happy enough to smile. Now he had unleashed his idea on the world, starting with Mickey and the people he would contact, and then going out and out to the entire planet.
The idea was finally something worth spending money on. The idea would take half of his net worth, and he would still be a billionaire. (Eight months without any leisure spending tends to keep a portfolio fat.)
The idea wasn’t a substitute for real freedom, but it was finally something worth staying alive for.
***
“Welcome back. We’ve all been following the Jake Bentneus story from his initial excursion simulcast that supplied evidence that dinosaurs still existed, living at the bottom of the ocean. Of course, on that same historical expedition, tragedy struck when the biggest dinosaur—possibly the largest animal ever to exist on Earth—attacked and crushed Bentneus’s submersible … with him inside. In the ten months since then, the famed director of some of the biggest hits in Hollywood history has gone in and out of a coma, been paralyzed from the neck down and cannot breathe or move his facial muscles without the assistance of advanced technology, lost his arms and legs, and had almost every major organ in his body replaced. Every day he is alive is a miracle, but the filmmaker says now he has a purpose bigger than any one person, any one race, any one nation.
“What is that purpose? Tonight, as media outlets around the world have been teasing since the announcement was made two weeks ago, Jake Bentneus will reveal all in his first live appearance since his catastrophic encounter with “Gigadon,” as he has named his nemesis. He has purchased fifteen minutes of airtime on every network in the world. And not just news networks or official broadcast networks in every country. His 100-person team was dispatched some eight weeks ago to buy time on those traditional broadcast channels, but not only those: every single cable channel, from international giants like CNN to channels like beIN Sports USA, which has fewer viewers than there are people in Daphne, Alabama. No offense meant to any viewers in Daphne, of course.
“The Bentneus media-buying team has also bought fifteen minutes of airtime on every radio station in the United States and every legal station it could find in the rest of the world. There will be a simulcast video on not only Bentneus’s website, but on thousands of websites that didn’t charge a nickel but came to the Bentneus Foundation to seek permission to carry the simulcast, which of course was given enthusiastically along with a link to the Foundation’s site. The total cost of this fifteen-minute media buy has been estimated at between 150 and 200 million dollars. Wags have pointed out that this amount could go a long way toward ending malaria, which has been fellow billionaire Bill Gates’s philanthropic priority for decades. It could also go to fixing a crumbling American infrastructure, feeding the poor, housing the homeless, and countless other world-changing causes. Of course, this unprecedented broadcast could be Jake Bentneus announcing just such a program of philanthropy.
“Unfortunately, we must take note that many, many viewers will be tuning in not because there are no other entertainment choices, but because no one other than his medical team and circle of long-term trusted confidants has seen with their own eyes the extent of the injuries Bentneus suffered at the end of the simulcast almost a year ago. Everyone saw him at his best then, beaming with excitement and pride at having found dinosaurs in the deepest part of the ocean. It would be hard to have missed that coverage, either in its live form or during the many times it has been rebroadcast with subtitles in the one hundred most used languages and dialects to everyone everywhere.
“But human nature is what it is, and we shall see for ourselves in a few moments what the world has been murmuring about since the accident: What does Jake Bentneus look like now? His internal organs have been mostly replaced, and it is only by relying on machines that he can talk at all, move his mouth, even blink his eyes. But putting aside the sensationalism and prurient interest in his condition, we will finally hear what it is that the explorer-filmmaker has spent so much money to tell every human being.
“I see we now have less than one minute until the universal airtime. It’s 9 p.m. here in New York, 8 in Chicago, 7 in Denver, and 6 in Los Angeles, the entire spectrum of prime time in the United States for maximum exposure. Experts don’t expect ratings to be low anywhere on the globe, however, due to the master director and his team not spilling one spoiler about the content of Bentneus’s address to the world.
“All right, my producer is telling me the feed is counting down from Guam, where Bentneus will spend the rest of his life; moving him, even out his hospital room door, would probably kill him. All right, we’re cutting away. Keep it tuned here for analysis afterward from our panel of experts, who will tell us what we just watched and what they, having heard it at the same time as you, think it means.”
***
The man who had served as Jake Bentneus’s assistant director on three films was behind the HD camera, and it was he who told the interns to cut the lights to ten percent and then counted down from three, two, waited a moment, and pointed to Bentneus to begin. The only person in the room who knew the main points of what Jake was going to say was Mickey Luch, and Mick had had to work as a landlubber with one hundred shiny-suit (and -skirt) media buyers for eight weeks. He wasn’t giving anything away after all that. He could hardly wait to get back out onto the water, and he knew Jake was right now going to give him that golden opportunity.
On-screen, Bentneus’s face could not be seen. There was just enough light to orient the viewer that this was being broadcast from a hospital room, his hospital room. He started “talking,” and as he did, the interns followed their instructions and brought the lights up very slowly.
The hissing, sibilant sound of his machine-aided speech could be heard before his face could be seen:
There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. This is what my voice sounds like now, so do not attempt to ‘correct’ your sound system. The lights will be increased as I speak to you, giving the most important address of my life. This method is being used to keep from shocking anyone, but also to keep you watching long enough to hear what I am saying before you get distracted by seeing just what is left of me.
My name is Jacob Bentneus. My friends call me ‘Jake.’ People who were once my bitter, even despised, rivals call me ‘Jake’ now as well. I can do them no harm anymore, that harm being making better artistic decisions and gleaning greater financial gain than they could. Steven, you know I don’t include you in that list.”
His aerated and monotone laugh was the most disturbing sound anyone in the room had ever heard. Of course, the pitch and volume of his voice stayed as flat as old roadkill, but a laugh like that … hehhhhhhhhh hehhhhhhhhhh hehhhhhhhhh … Who knows how many peopl
e watching felt shivers down their spines?
“I appreciate everyone letting me talk to them this evening. I have more or less ‘taken over the airwaves,’ but I paid for it, and your favorite television shows will begin again shortly.
As you can see me more and more, I ask that you think about what the monster I named Gigadon did to me. I took the submersible Ocean Victory down deeper than almost anyone ever dived anywhere—but you know that whole story, I’m sure. You also know that a new hydrothermal vent was discovered by my expedition. And that the ideas of a homicidal madman turned out to be absolutely true. Sean Muir’s logic and research were confirmed that day, the last day of my life. The day when I found out dinosaurs still existed on Earth, their descendants having adapted to the crushing pressures of the bottom of the ocean but otherwise unchanged. One of these adaptations was continuing to bite, although their adapted systems rejected whatever they tried to ingest.
Gigadon followed me to the surface, attracted by the warmth of Ocean Victory’s lights and residual heat from the submersible being so near the hellish temperatures at the hydrothermal vent. A hundred million people watched my sub as it was pulled from the water and then seized by the leviathan’s cyclopean teeth. It chewed my sub, and it chewed me in my supposedly indestructible iron bathysphere. Then it spit me out and went back into the deep.
The world reveled in this discovery, celebrated it, dreamed of what it meant while I was in a medically induced coma for two months. I was blind for two more months, and then I was reanimated with the robotic equipment designed by my friends at Berkeley. Interns, please bring up the lights the rest of the way so the world can see what Gigadon did to me.”
They turned the lights up to the set point that Bentneus’s former AD had marked for this video.
And there was Jake Bentneus, staring into the camera wearing special opticals that blinked and focused his eyes for him since he had no control over even that small a movement. When he spoke again, the wheezes and hisses were easier to ignore since the motion of his mouth was visible. He was gaunt; his playfully tousled hair was gone to keep his implants unobstructed, and his face, for all the technology developed and applied to allow him to communicate and show expressions, resembled nothing more than a ball of dough being poked at by the fingers of the rods.