by Jeff Edwards
He looked at his watch. “I shouldn’t be very long. For the cosmetic surgery part of this business, my job is mostly sales and bedside manner. My AI will handle the real work, won’t you Tasha?”
“Of course, Doctor.” The AI’s voice was feminine, carefully pitched to conjure images of a friendly but highly competent nurse.
“Great,” Lance said. “I’ll go make the rounds, and do a little hand-holding. When I get back, we’ll have a look at Gwen’s silicon.”
Surf walked to the door. “Last chance, Stalin,” he said.
“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll stick with Jackal for a while.”
Surf’s electroptic eyes stared at me for a few seconds, then he nodded once and walked out the door.
Lance left on Surf’s heels.
Despite Surf’s assurances, as soon as the door closed, my first instinct was to get the hell out of there. It wasn’t Lance himself that was bothering me. It was the situation, the entire slant that the case had taken. My name and face were all over the net, all over the street.
Everywhere I went, I seemed to run into strangers who knew my name. I couldn’t escape the feeling that every move that I had made, and every move that I would make, had all been anticipated and accounted for. I was a puppet dancing and capering at the end of someone else’s string, and the thing that really scared me—more than the possibility of death itself—was the thought that I might die without ever having seen the face of the Puppeteer.
Lance came back a lot sooner than I’d expected. “Now,” he said, “let’s see what we’ve got.”
He rubbed his palms together and looked Jackal up and down a couple of times. “I’m going to start by unplugging her EMM,” he said.
He unclipped the charcoal gray plastic box from Jackal’s belt, and the thin fiber-optic cable that connected it to the jack in the back of her head. A few of the LEDs on the box flickered feebly.
I pointed to it. “What exactly is that thing?”
“It’s an External Memory Module,” Lance said.
“What’s it for?”
“Gwen’s implant is a Fuyagi RL-78000 series microprocessor, customized of course. The EMM lets her update her software.”
“I thought there were data chips for that sort of thing.”
“There are, if the program is small enough to fit on a single chip. The EMM is for big programs that require a lot of memory.”
Lance plugged Jackal’s memory module into one of the electronic units on the cart and eyed the readout.
“Her EMM is fried,” he said. He pulled out a cable with a multi-pinned connector on one end. “Could you turn her head toward the wall, please? I need to jack directly into her CPU.”
I turned Jackal’s head as gently as I could.
“We’ll start by wiping whatever she’s got stashed up there, and loading fresh diagnostics software. Then we’ll run a few test programs and see what we’ve got.”
“Is there any way to salvage the data stored in her implant?”
“I don’t know,” Lance said. “I can run a recover routine on her CPU before I slick it. If the damage to her implant is localized to the CPU, we might be able to save something. Why? What are we looking for?”
“The owner of the AI.”
“The one that zapped her? If it’s a revenge thing, I wouldn’t worry about it. Jackers don’t do revenge. They live by some kind of skewed Bushido. Single combat, that sort of thing. They play it down to the wire, and if they win, they win big. When they lose, they don’t cry about it.”
“No,” I said. “That’s what she was after: the name of the owner of that AI.”
Lance plugged a cable into the back of Jackal’s head. “I’ll do what I can, but I wouldn’t count on it.”
He turned and began fiddling with his test equipment. He made a rhythmic clicking sound between his teeth and the roof of his mouth as he worked.
After a minute or so, the clicking stopped. Lance worked in silence for a couple of seconds, his eyebrows pulled together in concentration. Finally, he sucked air through his teeth in an exaggerated hiss.
“How bad is it?” I asked.
“Not good,” he said. “I’ve downloaded what I can, but it looks pretty garbled. Gwen’s CPU got hit so hard that I can’t even get her BIOS chips to take a fresh upload.”
“Can you help her?”
“Certainly,” Lance said. “But she needs some new silicon. She’s going to have to go back under the knife.”
“How soon can you do it?”
“I could do it now,” Lance said. “But first we have to work out some financial arrangements. I’m a nice guy, but I don’t work for free. Do you know if Gwen has any money?”
“She’s got twenty-five K coming from the run she just made. If it runs over that, I’ll cover the difference.”
Lance gave me the same sort of prolonged stare that Surf liked to point at me. Finally, he nodded. “Okay. I’ll up-link the parameters to the mainframe, and get my AI to write a piece of control code for the surgical robot.”
He looked up toward the ceiling. “How long will that take, Tasha?”
“Ten minutes to download historicals from the NTR database,” Tasha said. “Then another twenty minutes to write the code.”
Lance glanced at his watch. “Take care of it, please. In the meantime, we’ll roll Gwen into Suite 3. Then you can run Robot 3 through a standard pre-op routine to get Gwen ready for the table.”
“Of course, Doctor.”
“Great,” Lance said. “That’ll give me time to put together the silicon we’re going to need.”
He looked up at me. “The observation room for Suite 3 is across the hall, to your left. You can wait in there.”
Lance turned, and was gone before I had a chance to tell him that I didn’t want to actually watch the surgical procedure.
The observation room for Surgical Suite 3 was little more than a booth, the majority of which was taken up by two contoured swivel chairs. I sat in the one on the right.
The entire wall opposite the door was a window, a single sheet of transparent acryliflex, four or five centimeters thick. A Heads Up Display projected the time on the window in pale green block-style digits: 4:28 p.m., followed by a scrolling string of seconds in tenths, hundredths, and thousandths.
The surgical suite on the other side of the window was ten or twelve times the size of the observation booth, and still seemed to be crowded. The walls were lined with equipment racks, dermal stimulator units, banks of ultra-violet sterilization lamps, and about forty electronic modules, every one of which seemed to have two or three colored status bars, and a dozen flashing LEDs.
There was no sign of the surgical robot. I wondered what it would look like. Probably a souped-up version of one of House’s service drones. I looked around for a service alcove, expecting the robot to roll into the room at any second.
I leaned back in my chair to await the arrival of Lance and the elusive robot. My eyes drifted upward to the ceiling of the operating suite.
I jerked upright. “Jesus!”
My first instinct was to back-peddle, to distance myself from the thing in the ceiling as quickly as possible. I had my Blackhart half-drawn before I could stop myself.
I stared up at the surgical robot. It was built into the ceiling of the operating suite. Or perhaps more correctly, it was the ceiling. And it was not a thing of beauty.
I got a grip on myself, slid the Blackhart back into my holster, and made an effort to lean back in the chair and relax. The relaxing part didn’t come easy, not even with four or five centimeters of acryliflex between me and the robot.
It had at least a hundred stainless steel arms, each of which was articulated by several flexible joints. The diameters and lengths of the arms varied drastically, as did the hardware attached to the end of each. Every one seemed to have been designed for a specific purpose.
Some of them I recognized: radial bone saws, scalpels, pressure syringes, intravenous tube
s, suction hoses, surgical lasers, and an array of manipulators that ranged from clamps with nearly microscopic fingers, to claws large enough to crush a man’s skull.
For every device that I recognized, there were at least two that I had to guess at. About ten of the arms held what looked like electrodes, their shielded power cables snaking up into recessed tubes in the ceiling.
Most of the arms bristled with sensors: vid cameras (from micro to macro lens calibers), IR cameras, dermal contact pads, and multifaceted lens clusters.
The entire machine—with its stainless steel mandibles, and compound eyes—reminded me of a huge robotic spider. A hideously mutated spider, with far too many multi-jointed legs, hanging in the center of its web of power cables.
Lance and a female assistant whom I hadn’t met rolled a gurney into the operating suite and locked it to the floor directly under the arms of the surgical robot. The woman, dressed in a lab coat and scrubs, was as ludicrously beautiful as Lance was handsome. They made a final check of Jackal’s position under the robot, and left the operating suite.
Jackal lay strapped face-down on the gurney, naked except for an orange sheet that covered from the bottom of her shoulder blades to just above her calves. Her thin white body looked child-like and helpless with its back exposed to the steel spider overhead.
Banks of Ultra Violet lamps came on, flooding the suite with a white sterilizing glare.
A minute or so later, Lance squeezed into the booth and took the vacant chair to my left. “Still running the UV cycle?”
“I think so,” I said.
He nodded. “The actual procedure won’t start for another couple of minutes.”
“Don’t you have to shave her head, or something?”
“Not really,” he said. “She’s already got about half of it shaved off. But even if she didn’t, we wouldn’t need to shave much of a patch. This is a micro-invasive technique, what we call ‘key-hole surgery’. It doesn’t require much of an incision, and when the robot backs out, it will use a little blob of orthostatic epoxy to seal the hole in her skull. With eight or ten hours on the dermal stimulators, you’ll hardly even be able to spot the incision site.”
The UV lamps dimmed, and about a dozen of the robot’s arms reached toward Jackal, connecting sensor leads, and inserting IV tubes. Another cluster of arms descended toward the back of Jackal’s head.
Lance watched with me. “If you like, I can switch the micro-cam’s video feed in here, and get you a robot’s-eye view in full color 3-D.”
“No thanks,” I said. “This is close as I want to get.”
A tiny scalpel carved a short incision in the back of Jackal’s head. Blood welled up, dark against her pale skin.
Almost as quickly as the blood appeared, a trio of the robot’s arms darted in to suction it away. The blood spiraled up toward the ceiling through clear plastic tubes. The spider was feeding.
Manipulator arms angled in to spread the lips of the wound. The robot’s movements were quick, decisive, and unerring. Its multi-jointed arms bent and rotated themselves into positions that no human surgeon could hope to equal.
The bass hum of the robot’s power supply throbbed through the acryliflex window at a frequency that verged on hypnotic. The servomotors driving the machine’s arms whirred and chittered like metallic insects.
I had seen enough, more than I wanted to see. I tried to turn away, but found my eyes locked to the sight by that same sickening curiosity that draws crowds to accident scenes. I was repelled, but watched with horrid fascination as the machine bored into Jackal’s brain.
“It’ll be coming out in a second.”
Lance’s voice shook me out of my near-trance. “What?”
“The implant. The robot will be pulling it out in a second. Not all of it, of course. Just the BIOS chips and some minor peripheral circuitry. Once we replace that, and build her a new EMM, all we’ll have to do to get Gwen’s implant back on-line is reload her software.”
He pointed toward the gurney. “Watch... There it comes now.”
A slender steel arm with tiny manipulators reached into the hole in Jackal’s head. A few seconds later, the robot retracted the manipulator. Clutched in its miniature metal fingers was a tiny piece of circuit board, glistening with cerebral fluid and tinged with blood.
I tried to distract myself from the grotesque scene by asking the first question that popped into my head. “How much surgery is done this way? By robot, I mean.”
“About seventy-five percent,” Lance said. “But in another year or two, robots will be handling it all. They’re about twenty times faster than humans, a lot more efficient, and they don’t make mistakes.”
“None?”
“None that I’ve heard of. Their control code has to be written by an AI. Before it even starts to develop the program, the AI reviews every scrap of data that’s available on any past surgical procedure that’s even remotely similar. In other words, it starts out knowing all of the mistakes that have been made in the past. Then it factors in the physical condition and peculiarities of the patient, and writes a piece of software to control the robot. Add that to operating table telemetry, and real-time data processing, where are you going to get a mistake?”
“You’re saying that no surgical robot has ever lost a patient?”
“Of course a few patients have died,” Lance said. “But never from anything that turned out to be the fault of the robot. Remember, not all patients can be saved.”
I grunted to keep from having to actually agree with Lance’s blind faith in his machines. I wondered if he subscribed to R.U.R.’s theory about the Convergence. Was Jackal an intermediate step on the way to Homo Trovectior?
Lance continued to talk, but I tuned him out. I could feel it coming on, another one of those nagging little half-ideas that pick at my mind like a tickle at the back of your throat.
The microchip implant in Jackal’s head; the unidentified microchips implanted in the brains of Michael Winter and Russell Carlisle. The precise movements of the surgical robot; the machine-like movements of Michael’s gun hand.
The pieces of the puzzle swam around in my brain, taunting me, daring me to fit them together in the one pattern that made sense.
I sat bolt upright in the little contoured chair. “Holy shit!”
Lance jumped at my sudden outburst. “What?”
I stared through the window into the surgical suite. One of the robot’s slender manipulators was sliding a new chip into the hole in the back of Jackal’s head.
“That chip,” I said, “the Fuyagi whatever-it-is. It feeds computer information code into Jackal’s brain, right?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the difference between information code, and control code?”
Lance leaned back in his chair. “Well... let’s see. Control code instructs a computer to perform a certain task. Like running a file search, or finding the cube root of 357. Information code is just... information. Data that can be retrieved on demand.”
“Yeah, but what’s the difference? Electronically, I mean.”
“I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” Lance said. “From an electronic standpoint, I guess there isn’t any real difference. They’re both made up of ones and zeros.”
“Could the chip in Jackal’s head tell the difference between control code and information code?”
“Probably not. Where are you going with this?”
“Suppose I wrote a piece of control code, and injected it into Jackal’s brain implant. Could I control her actions?”
“Like a puppet?” Lance asked. “A mind-control chip?”
I could tell out of the corner of my eye that he was smiling. He started to say something, and then caught himself when he realized that I wasn’t smiling with him. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Deadly,” I said.
“Why do you want to control Gwen’s mind?”
“I’m using her as an example,” I said. “I just
want to know if it’s possible.”
Lance paused for a few seconds. “No,” he said finally. “The Fuyagi isn’t designed for anything even remotely like that.”
“What if it were a different CPU? A custom-designed chip?”
Lance shook his head. “No good. A corymbic implant just does sort of an end-run on short-term memory. It doesn’t plug into any of the right parts of the brain.”
“Wait a minute.” I pointed the index finger of my left hand to a spot forward of my left temple; I tried to duplicate the position and angle that Michael’s Glock had taken in his suicide recording. “What if the custom designed chip was implanted here?”
Lance sat up in his chair with a strange look on his face. “Of course,” he whispered. “The Frontal Lobe. If you were going to do it... if it could be done, that would be the spot.”
“Why? What’s so special about the Frontal Lobe?”
“Its anterior divisions, the Prefrontal Lobe and the Supplementary Motor Cortex, help integrate personality with emotion. Nobody really understands how, but we do know that those portions of the brain convert thought into action, and action into thought.”
He nodded slowly. “The left Prefrontal Lobe would be the perfect spot for the sort of implant you’re talking about, if the subject were right-handed.”
“Why would being right-handed make a difference?”
“The left hemisphere of the brain is dominant in something like ninety-eight percent of all right-handed people,” Lance said. “If you wanted to control a right-handed person, it would make sense to target your implant for the left side of the brain.”
He stopped and shook his head. “No. No. No. It still wouldn’t work.”
“Why not?”
“There wouldn’t be enough memory storage.”
“In the brain?”
“In the implant,” Lance said. “If you’re going to control someone’s mind, you’ll have to sublimate their will, displace their own personality. To do that, you’d have to have something to replace their personality with. A puppet personality, if you want to call it that. A piece of control code that big takes up a lot of memory chips. Maybe as many as twenty or thirty dense-packs. There isn’t enough room in the human brain to squeeze in an implant that large.”