by Chris Hechtl
“I'm not saying there aren’t problems along the way. But we can make micro cameras. We can make artificial eyes that look real. I did my homework; I've seen a few with a camera embedded in it. They run it to a microprocessor through a pair of glasses or a wire, then to a tablet, then back to the head, and then through the brain. I'm saying we need to miniaturize that. Cut out all the fat and embed it all in the eye prosthetic with a link to the optic nerve.”
The lieutenant frowned. “That will take years to get right.”
“Of course,” Jack replied. “If it was easy, it would have been done before like you pointed out. I'm not an expert. I'm doing the basics here. For that we'll need to bring in someone who knows more than I do. But not someone who's become prejudiced.”
“Prejudiced?”
“Hemmed in by their own thought processes. They see the wall and give up. Like my uncle here,” Jack said pointing to the surgery. “People, friends, family, they gave up on him. He's going through hell. He'll still be in hell when he wakes. And pain. But in time, maybe, just maybe, we can give him a part of his life back,” Jack said with feeling.
Slowly the lieutenant nodded. “Good luck, kid. Keep me posted,” he said. He took one last long look out the viewing window to the people below then turned for the door.
“How can we contact you?” Ursilla asked, raising her chin.
Issiac Murtough cleared his throat, and patted his pockets before he brought out his phone. He held it up and flashed Jack his business card. Jack's phone pinged when it received the info.
“Got it. Thanks,” Jack said. He wasn't sure why his mom wanted the information in the first place. Was she attracted to him? Or just wanted to see if he was legit? A legit friend?
“No problem. Like I said, let me know. And let me know if I can help a bit too. If your plan works, I know a few people who could benefit from similar work. Dozens. Possibly thousands,” Murtough said gruffly. He nodded to Ursilla. “It was nice seeing you again, Doctor Lagroose.”
Ursilla smiled. “I thought I had recognized you. Issiac. My have you grown up,” she smiled in motherly approval.
“So you do know each other?” Jack asked.
“He was a patient of mine a long time ago. Before you were born, son,” Ursilla admitted. “Though he's not much older than you are I believe,” she said.
“I've got good genes, ma'am. It's a blessing and curse not to look my age,” the officer said, rolling his eyes. Jack grunted. “Think about my offer, young man. DARPA could use a few more like you and definitely more of this,” he said, pointing to the surgery suite.
“We'll see,” Jack murmured as the officer left. He turned back to the surgeons just as one held up a bloody thumbs-up while his partner wiped his gloves off and prepared to assist on the other side.
“One down. One to go. Then the rest,” Jack murmured. He checked the diagnostics, trying to put the nosy Lieutenant out of his mind. Everything checked out so far, but the swelling and such would play havoc with things for some time. True integration would take time.
“It's going to be a long road to recovery. Even with your toys,” Ursilla said.
“They aren't toys, Mom,” Jack said with a bit of heat.
She eyed him and then nodded. “No, I suppose they aren't. Sorry to insult you son. I know how hard you've worked on this.”
“Thanks,” he muttered. “But the real hard work will be on his part,” he said, indicating the room below.
“Yes, yes, it will,” Ursilla stated, resting a hand on her son's shoulder.
Jack glanced at it, then back to the room. “So, Issiac?” he asked. He couldn't resist, though he wanted to kick himself for bringing it up.
“He's a good lad.”
“I didn't know you did pediatrics, Mom,” he said.
“There is a lot you don't know about me, son,” she retorted.
“But still, why this? Why do they want to make, what did Uncle Ed call himself? The six-million-dollar man?” He wrinkled his nose. “You'd think they would have other means. Unless they want more robotic soldiers.”
“No.”
“Wait, Nova does organic replacement now. Cloning, though I heard the public backlash is getting pretty heated. Why not go that route? I wish we could here but …,” he waved a hand helplessly.
“But it is still being blocked by the FDA and others. There are some people out there who hate change, son. Who fear it because it is the unknown. They like their safe world because they know how it operates, how to control it.”
“Okay,” Jack said with a nod. “It's still wrong though. They've been doing donor replacements for years. Centuries.”
“And not many are happy with that either,” Ursilla sighed. “And not enough sign up for it. Progress unfortunately is slow.”
“Not if I can help it,” Jack growled. He felt his mother squeeze his shoulder then went back to watching the surgery once more.
{D}==+===@E
“Thank you, Doctor, for doing this,” Jack said, shaking the surgeon's hand as the fatigued man came out of the room. His mother had departed hours ago to get some air. Most likely she needed rest. He needed rest. The surgical staff definitely did. They had performed nothing short of a miracle as far as he was concerned. In a way it had been like watching a concerto performance. An exquisite one that had him anxious and nearly brought him to tears on more than one occasion. He felt like he'd gone through an emotional wringer. He could just imagine what his mother and aunt were feeling.
“It's worth it. Please make certain of that,” the surgeon said. He looked back to the room as they wheeled Ed out to the recovery area. “He's worth it I should say.”
“I didn't know you knew him, sir,” Jack said.
The doctor shook his head as the rest of the staff passed by. “I didn't,” he finally said. “Not personally, no. But I know the type, and I know him by extension. He saved my nephew's life,” he said ever so softly. “I'm going to give a man like that every chance I can,” he said. “Gratis.”
“Thank you, Doctor, again,” Jack said, shaking the man's hand.
“Thank me when it all works,” the surgeon replied as he walked away to get cleaned up. Jack watched him go.
{D}==+===@E
Ed woke to vague feelings of pain and itching. The pain was vague; what bothered him more was the grogginess. He hated waking with a hangover. But this was worse. As his eyes fluttered open, he remembered where he was. Much worse. The nightmare didn't end when he closed his eyes. He exhaled and tried to move but found part of his body wasn't responding. Tears pricked his eyes as a nurse came in to check his vitals.
“What's wrong, Mister Lagroose?”
“I can't move. I can't feel anything. It was there, but now it's gone,” Ed said in a terrified whisper.
{D}==+===@E
“It is nothing less than a setback. Something pressed against the spinal column, and he has lost all sensation below the waist. The surgery …”
“It's not moot, just as you said, a setback. We can work with that,” Jack said stubbornly as Prue covered her mouth and fought tears.
He glanced at his aunt and then away.
“We can wait. He may get the feeling back. We may have to bridge his spine due to the damage to nerves. He was already suffering from a lack of mobility in his left leg.”
Ursilla grimaced. “I was afraid of that. It could be a pinched nerve … or worse.”
Jack scowled. “Work on it. As you said, time may tell. We need to have some patience, let the anesthetic run its course and let the neurologist run tests.”
“I'm glad you can handle it. I'm having a hard time,” Prue said, turning away to grip the counter. Ursilla rubbed her sister-in law's shoulders gently, then wrapped an arm around her waist. “Come on. Let's go get some tea and some fresh air.”
“It's just so much,” Prue said in a strangled voice, fighting tears. “To get so much hope and then …”
When they left Jack let out a long breath he
hadn't known he'd been holding. His nostrils dilated. “One step forward, two back. But we can deal with it. One problem at a time,” he said, looking over to the doctor. The doctor spread his hands apart.
{D}==+===@E
Ursilla and the medical staff knew that the best way to fix the problem was to identify where the breach was, harvest stem cells, cultivate them into nerve cells, and inject them at the site. Use them to form a bridge to repair the damage. With therapy to stimulate the nerves, he would eventually regain some of the lost range of motion and feeling. But they didn't have the money for that expensive procedure. So, Jack had to find a work around.
As his uncle healed, Jack pulled in two of his friends from college to help with some of the trickier engineering involved. The legs weren't a problem; it was weight issue versus power issue that he was still wrestling with there. But the neural shunt stumped him. They promised to get back to him in a week and went back to whatever they had been doing.
Ed didn't have that long. The longer they waited the more scar tissue would grow over the wounded nerves and the less likely he would be able to recover. To counter that problem and the damage to his uncle's spinal column, he has to build an exoframe to help support some of the weight. For the time being, he used myoelectric pads to sense his nerve impulses above the breach to control movement. It was a half-ass fix, but it was the best he could do.
{D}==+===@E
Despite the setback Ed was determined to move forward. Two weeks after he had recovered from the first round of surgeries, they went with the second.
The surgery on Ed's right arm went without a hitch, but they held off on the missing fingers of his left hand for the moment. The medics tried out new drugs to limit the swelling and tissue integration. Ursilla was reinstated with the company when they got a new contract. She quietly returned to duty and started sending them small containers of ECM weekly to help with the recovery.
Jack wished he could do something about the muscle attachments. If they could make artificial tendon, why not attach his muscles to the titanium strut? Grow the bone over it, 3-D print blood vessels, muscle and skin grafts from his stem cells … why, they could rebuild his legs! One piece at a time! It would be expensive and a lot of surgeries though, he sighed.
The other option the doctors had considered and Prue had rejected was a graft from a donor limb. Someone who had died. That would be ghoulish, but …, he shook his head. They were past that point anyway, no need to dwell on it.
As Ed recovered Jack returned to Seattle to better refine his design. The better it was, the more likely Ed would take to the new limbs quicker and smoother.
His website was getting hits, and a few entrepreneuring people had managed to get his ISP and looked it up to get his number to call. He didn't like that, not at all. And some of them were pushy! It was interesting to get buy-out calls when they had no idea if it worked!
{D}==+===@E
Ursilla explored nerve splicing, but it was outside her field. She grasped the basic concepts, and the use of stem cells to stimulate regeneration was something she was familiar with. When she returned to Nova's labs, she was watched so she couldn't create the stem cells she desperately wanted to. Nor could she do her own planned projects, like the fingers. She had an idea on how to do it, but it would take time.
She finally buttonholed Jaiying Won to allow her to test the concept of growing replacement fingers on a pig. The proposal received some interest from Jaiying, but it would take time to set the experiment up and even more time for the body parts to grow if they integrated with the host.
She rubbed her brow. It was a long shot at best, but one she was willing to try. One the company was willing to back, as long as it was just that, an experiment. No human trials. Getting the fingers out and to the hospital …, she frowned. One thing at a time. If she had to, she'd smuggle them out in a food container like she did before. Or get Jack to help her somehow. Hack security? She shivered mentally. On second thought, she didn't want her son involved. He was already pushing the envelope with things. She didn't want him to get into additional legal trouble.
For the moment she got a new mortgage out on the house to finance the artificial nerve shunt her brother-in-law needed. Between that and Jack's exosuit, it would allow Ed to walk again. She just hoped no other setbacks cropped up. The poor man had been through enough.
{D}==+===@E
Jack moved beyond the conventional prosthesis design and into actual weaving of flesh and machine. He found links to artificial tendons—growing them was cost prohibitive. It would involve a scaffold, stem cells, and growth hormones that were very expensive and tricky to use. No, artificial was the way to go. He called in a favor to the grad student who had studied the problem. Their latest designs used nanowoven tubes of special fibers that formed a scaffold. The thing acted like a Chinese finger trap. His problem was that the original design was created to work with stem cells. The cells would grow into a new tendon as the scaffold broke down and biodegraded over time.
What he wanted was the part to bridge the gap between the muscle and the artificial knee. But the muscles were short …, he scowled. If they wove in more artificial muscle tissue, the tendons, attached them to the artificial knee … skin over that … blood vessels would stop at where the actual tissue stopped.
He sent the design off to a dozen different grad students and medical bioengineers he knew. He also slapped a patent on some of the designs he'd worked on. He'd considered releasing them as open source considering he had used open source files as a jumping off point but decided against it. The project had cost like crazy and wasn't finished yet.
“Jack?” Prue called out.
“Here,” he said in surprise, turning to see her in the doorway. “I didn't know you came all this way,” he said, rising out of his chair.
“Your mom was worried; she knows you've been on this for a while. You can stop. Ed …”
“No,” Jack said, shaking his head. He wrapped his arms around her. “No. I'm not giving up. Mom said she got the bridge going and stem cells too. He'll regain some of his limb use, and the myoelectric pads will help as well.”
“But …”
He shook his head as the embrace broke. “We Lagroose men are as stubborn as the day is long Aunt Prue, you know that.”
She sniffled then laughed softly to herself. “True.”
“That's why Uncle Ed has hung on as long as he has. If he can do it, I'll damn well do my part,” he said.
She nodded and looked over his shoulder to the leg. He'd put it up in his prototype holographic emitter. “What is that?” she asked as the design spun slowly on its Y axis.
“It's a better design for the leg. Before, I was going with just mechanical replacements. But this will work off what he has left in his thighs, the muscles I mean. Connect them to the artificial knee here with artificial tendons,” he pointed to the joint. “Then he will have a knee joint. It's like weaving. I'm trying to figure out a way to weave it right and what to do beyond the knee. I don't want to go conventional, and I don't want to go with a spring.”
Prue stared at it, hand over her mouth. “You …,” she teared up again.
“One step at a time. I know you two loved to dance. Well, if this works, he'll be stepping on your toes again in a year.”
“Jack …” She turned and hugged him fiercely. He patted her back.
“Come on. Let's get some food,” she said after a moment. “Your mom said you haven't been eating, so obsessed. The least I can do is feed you. You've lost weight; I can tell.”
Jack wanted to protest. He'd had a hot pocket, but from her expression she wanted it. No, needed it. Needed to contribute in some way. He nodded slowly.
“Good boy. You might have the Lagroose stubborn streak, but you know when to give in to the inevitable,” she teased as she hauled him out of his room.
“That's because I know you women can be just as stubborn. And wicked if I don't give in gracefully,” he grumbled.
She laughed softly, then dashed tears as they went into the hall. “Thanks, I needed that,” she said.
“You're welcome. I think.”
She snickered and then led him into the kitchen. “Sit, mister,” she pointed to a stool. “From that comment I take it you've been dating?”
“No,” Jack said with a sigh. She eyed him. “I know about Phoebe's exploration. I know hormones are supposed to kick in but …,” he shrugged. “I've been kind of preoccupied with my own little world I guess you could say.”
“I guess that's a good thing,” his aunt replied with a smile. “Whatever lady you do set your eyes on will have to be pretty special.”
“One thing at a time Aunt Prue,” Jack sighed, shaking his head. The last thing he needed was a female distraction at this point.
{D}==+===@E
Jack's modified plan met with approval from the doctors. They were willing to try it with one leg, Ed's left leg that had regained some of its function. Jack flew in a couple of the grad students and their professors to help with the procedure. They were excited. He even paid for them to be put up at a motel but ignored the complaints about not being put up in a proper hotel. On the third night he regretted not having them attend virtually.
The surgery took eight hours and nearly drained his bank account. But when Ed woke he had a partially replaced leg right to the knee joint. Tentative tests proved it was viable, though they would have to wait to see if the weaving and scaffolds were accepted long term by Ed's body. Infection and tissue rejection were major concerns for the doctors.
The leg would have artificial muscles and tendons to control the calf and ankle as well. Springs helped to limit the amount of power the muscles would need. His right leg would be more conventional, more like Jack's gen 1 design.
While Doctor Mallory had been in town, he'd run his prototype vision system past him. They'd tinkered with the eye for some time. Software wasn't the big issue; that, like the limbs, was self-learning and adaptive now. The big issue was actual nerve to machine interface.