The Human Blend

by Alan Dean Foster

  According to the stats Ingrid’s office had downloaded and that had been transferred to her medogic, Cara Jean Gibson was a fifteen-year-old girl. Simply being a fifteen-year-old girl was embarrassing. Entering the room, Ingrid was mentally primed to confront the expected. Acne, gawkiness insufficiently improved by low-grade over-the-counter manips, badly gengineered hair, failed skin toning resulting in possible fever.

  She was not prepared for what she actually encountered.

  Cara Gibson was lying on a traditional bed. The underneath was fibernet, but from the looks of it the antique feather mattress on top had been lovingly restored and maintained. In contrast, the girl’s head rested on a thoroughly modern aeromuse pillow that had doubtless been programmed to play her favorite music depending on how she shifted the weight of her head against it. For all Ingrid knew it was hammering away right now, transmitting the latest goolmech to the girl via direct acoustic transduction. If it was, the tune she was listening to was not a happy one.

  Eyes widening at the sight of the newcomer, Cara responded to the intrusion in no uncertain terms. “Moma! I told you—no doctors!”

  Ingrid put on her most sympathetic girl-girl smile. “How do you know I’m a doctor?”

  The teen grunted, as if the visitor’s identity was the most obvious thing in the world. “Musth! You barely glanced at my face before your eyes went to my head.”

  Ingrid spoke gently as she advanced toward the bed. “May I see your head?”

  Cara Gibson turned over sharply to face the wall instead of her mother and the stranger. “Why not? It seems like everybody else wants to.”

  At least with her patient facing the other direction Ingrid did not have to worry about maintaining an empathetic smile. The girl’s turn had revealed what should have been a fairly simple cosmetic meld gone wrong. It was a full quill implant, standard scarlet macaw. Bright yellow, dark blue, and intense red feathers flared in the currently favored Mohawk crest from the top front of the girl’s otherwise shaven skull down to the middle of her back. The meld ensured that the feathers would continue to grow exactly as they might from the body of the bird that had provided the template DNA. Unless the meld was deleted, of course.

  Ingrid unfolded her medogic. “I have to scan you to see what’s gone wrong, Cara. I need your permission.”

  “Like my mother didn’t already give you permission. Oh, go ahead.” The girl didn’t turn to watch. “I don’t care. I’m a mess anyway.”

  “Maybe we can fix that.” When the patient didn’t reply Ingrid proceeded to activate the medogic. “And thank you for giving me your permission.”

  The readings were about what she expected based on her preliminary visual observation. Whoever had performed the meld had either used an insufficiency of bonding protein or the wrong one. More than half the quill line had refused to integrate with the underlying bone. As a result, feathers were falling out right and left. People who had undergone feather melds, often more than one, were willing to worry about appearance, but not molting.

  She placed the open medogic on a nearby end table. “I think it can be fixed, Cara.”

  That brought the girl’s face and attention back around. Her attitude underwent an immediate shift. “Really? You’re not just scraping me? Joelle Richards said that once the quills start to come out you have to delete the whole meld and then there’s internal bone scarring that has to be smoothed out and …”

  Reaching over, Ingrid gave the girl a reassuring pat on her upper arm. “Depends on the severity of the breakdown. I’m pretty sure yours is salvageable.” She glanced at the mother standing nearby. “First we need to treat the infection. I know it looks bad, but it’s not ampstaph or anything like that. A shot of polyotic should clear it right up.” She turned her attention back to the now alert teen. “I’ll give you a couple of names and addresses. I’m not in a building that specializes in these kinds of melds, and you definitely want a specialist to perform the repairs, but the references I’m going to leave with your mom are for melders I know personally. Either of them should be able to restore your crest.” She spared a second glance for the obviously relieved parent.

  “It won’t be cheap, but this time it will be done right, and the work will be guaranteed.”

  The grateful mother lurched forward. “Thank you, Dr. Seastrom, thank you! Cara …”

  Mother and daughter embraced. Both were crying. Gathering up the medogic, Ingrid folded it carefully and let herself out into the hallway. To her ongoing dismay, dealing with botched melds constituted a fair share of her work. It was an unending source of amazement to her that despite the almost daily reports of deaths and disfigurements caused by unlicensed practitioners, people continued to seek out and make use of backstreet melders. Such decisions all boiled down to money, though she could not for the life of her imagine that any such savings were worth the potential risks.

  Take Cara Gibson, for example. Probably engaged someone to do the feather work who had been “recommended” by a friend. A cheap unauthorized melder operating out of the back of a truck. The loss of feathers was nothing. Far more significant was the infection that had resulted from the incompetent work. Left untreated, it could have developed into something far more serious. One touch of ampstaph in the girl’s upper spine could have left her paralyzed for life. Or at the very least in need of an emergency extensive back meld.

  Not wishing to interrupt the emotional mother-daughter bonding, she occupied herself reviewing the medogic’s readings. Infection type and rate there, recommended polyotic dosage so-and-so, muscular trauma rating, neural welds so many, growth points so many …

  How now—what was that?

  She scrolled back and enlarged one portion of the readout. There were forty-six points of quillgrow attachment along the girl’s skull, neck, and spine. Forty-five of them were fashioned from the expected patented custom blend of gengineered carbon and melded proteins. The forty-sixth …

  Most obviously, it had been installed deeper in the back of Cara Gibson’s skull than was necessary. Not dangerously so, but just enough for the abnormality to register on Ingrid’s sensitive medogic. The insert did not call attention to itself and could easily be overlooked. In fact, had Ingrid not been wiling away the time in the hall the information would have been automatically compressed, filed, and forgotten the instant she shut down the device. She had caught the anomaly only thanks to boredom.

  Like the other attachment points it was composed of familiar organic staples, none of them expensive. That, and something else. There was an—impurity. This in itself was not what drew Ingrid’s attention. It was the nature of the adulteration. In her experience, impurities tended to be irregular in form and composition. This one was anything but.

  For one thing, it glistened.

  After checking the readout for a third time to ensure that the anomaly was real and not a program aberration, she reentered the room. Sitting at the foot of the bed, the mother looked up in surprise. “Dr. Seastrom: I thought you’d let yourself out.”

  Ingrid smiled. “I have to give you those referral names and addresses, remember? And as long as I’m still here, I’d like to draw a protein sample. For future reference and for record-keeping purposes.”

  Mother looked down at daughter. The girl responded with a wan smile.

  “Okay—I guess.” Having come to trust her visitor implicitly, Cara turned over onto her stomach.

  Thinner than a human hair and programmed by Seastrom via the medogic, the intelligent probe snaked its way painlessly into the back of the girl’s head. Finding what it sought, it excised the abnormality that had intrigued the doctor and retracted without damaging any of the surrounding tissue. The periosteum through which the anomaly had been removed would continue to hold its feather.

  Ingrid did not bother to examine the extraction and packed it away. While she could have executed an assessment on the spot she did not want to do anything that might upset the reunited and relieved mother and daughter.
First she needed to satisfy her patient. Satisfaction of her own curiosity could wait until she was back in her building. Tomorrow was Saturday. Her office would be closed, and she could slip down from her codo at her leisure to scrutinize the curious finding in depth. She gave a mental shrug. Odd as its composition appeared to be on the medogic readout, the identity of the anomaly would probably yield to a simple, straightforward analysis. Most likely she was obsessing over nothing.

  As she escorted the doctor out of the house, the comforted mother wanted to add a bonus to Ingrid’s fee. The doctor would not hear of it.

  “The look of relief on Cara’s face was more than enough for me.”

  At the mother’s insistence, however, Ingrid did depart with something called “homemade” bread. To the dubious Seastrom it looked as edible as the vacuum-sealed, slickly packaged product one ordered through the usual grocery channels, but confirmation would have to await tasting.

  Friday night was for relaxation. She and Rajeev went to a neighborhood wordwar competition and managed to finish third in Couples while suffering only minor (and speedily repaired) emotional wounding. The exhilarating and mentally energizing bout was followed by dinner at a restaurant specializing in Titanian cuisine (methane overtones thankfully excised) and then sex, which was even more rewarding than wordwar and considerably easier on their respective cognitive faculties.

  She felt exceptionally fine sleeping in the following morning. Sated as she was by the indulgences of the previous night, even the anomalous fragment she had recovered from the head of Cara Gibson did not intrude on her rest. She was so relaxed that she almost decided that analyzing it would be a waste of weekend time. More out of a need to check on several other things around the office than a desire to perform the assay, she finally got dressed and took the elevator down to her office level. It was late afternoon.

  While the inlab ran penetration and accumulated stats, she busied herself with the few other minor items that required her attention. Sitting at her desk, she idly called for the lab results while gazing out the broad sweep of glass at the city beyond. As soon as the lab began to explicate results in its familiar dry voice, however, she stopped what she was doing and spun around in her seat.

  The three-dimensional visual accompaniment to the formal declamation was even more off-putting than the words describing it. Gengineered carbon was present in the tiny insert, of course, and customized protein, of course, and—something else. Though it did not improve her perception, she instinctively found herself leaning toward the projection, as if the forward inclination of her body would somehow foment understanding.

  According to the inlab analysis the insert contained more than the predictable carbon and proteins. Much more. Initially dismissive of what the assay might find, Ingrid now found herself staring intently. High magnification had yielded something entirely unexpected. Gengineered adhesives were present, yes. Combinant primate-avian DNA weaving, yes. Patented floridity, naturally. All anticipated, all predictable. Only one thing was present that was out of the ordinary.

  The machine. It was beyond tiny, past minuscule. In structure and shape it was unlike anything Seastrom had ever seen. Under magnification it shone like the tiniest imaginable drop of molten silver. Functioning at the molecular level, its purpose was as enigmatic as its incredibly complex design. It should not have been there. It should not have been anywhere. And it had been removed from near the brain of Cara Jean Gibson, to all outward appearances a perfectly ordinary and classically self-conscious fifteen-year-old girl of modest circumstances and no known exceptional interests.

  All of this registered on Dr. Ingrid Seastrom’s mind almost simultaneously. Which turned out to be unexpectedly important, because as she was staring at it, the object vanished.

  “Bring it back.” She hardly recognized her voice as she verbalized the command. “The object just assayed. I want to see it again.”

  “The object does not exist,” the no-nonsense synthesized male lab voice informed her.

  Doubly bemused, she settled slowly back in her chair. “What do you mean, it does not exist? I just saw it.”

  The lab obediently restored the image, together with an explanation. “What you have been seeing all along and are looking at now is a replay of the primary assay. Only preliminary results are available, because the instant the object was subjected to focused analysis it vanished.”

  Ingrid strove to comprehend. “Real objects don’t ‘vanish.’ It looked like it was made of some kind of alloy. Are you saying that when subjected to study it self-destructed?”

  “No. It vanished.”

  “Explain yourself,” she snapped.

  “I cannot. I can only offer hypotheses. From the reaction of the object to initial probing, I believe it represents an example of delayed quantum entanglement.”

  “I understand the last part,” she responded. “You’re suggesting that the object itself was a perfect duplicate of an original located somewhere else, and that the act of viewing it in itself caused this one to disappear in favor of the other. But if that thesis is valid, then it should have vanished when I removed it from the skull of the girl where it was located. What I did with my medogic similarly constitutes probing and observation.”

  “I said that it was ‘delayed,’ ” the lab replied without rancor.

  “There is no such thing as ‘delayed quantum entanglement.’ If the act of being viewed causes one copy or the other to cease to exist, then the nano-level device you just showed me should have ceased existing long ago.”

  “I agree. I told you I could not explain it. I can only report what was observed.”

  Seastrom sat quietly for a long moment; contemplating, digesting, trying to make sense of what the lab’s AI was telling her. As much as the physical contradictions she was mystified as to what such a finely crafted impossibility was doing in the head of an ordinary teenager. An impossibility that had, to all outward appearances, done the girl no harm. And if someone wanted such a device implanted in fifteen-year-old Cara Gibson, why had they chosen to have the work done by an apparently incompetent backstreet technician specializing in cheap cosmetic melds? None of it made any sense. Of course, if she had some idea of what the incredibly sophisticated nanoscale device was designed to do …

  As if that wasn’t sufficient rational overload, the lab had one more for her.

  “Subsequent investigation suggests that at least part of the device was composed of metastable metallic hydrogen.”

  Ingrid nodded slowly to herself. “Sure it was. And the pressure required to maintain it in that state was the nominal several million atmospheres that happen to exist at the center of the Earth—something not generally found within the cerebral epidermis of a fifteen-year-old girl.”

  The inlab did not react to sarcasm. “Atomic-level analysis revealed a crystalline lattice composed solely of protons exhibiting spacing less than a Bohr radius. This is consistent with the detection and presence of MSMH. A quantum state existing within a quantum entanglement. Observation of concurrent superconductivity also suggests that …”

  “All right, all right—enough.” What the lab was elucidating was more than mildly insane. Though well grounded in modern science, Ingrid was a physician, not a physicist, and the lab’s explanation was rapidly extending into realms well beyond her level of comprehension. While she was unsure of what she was being told, she was sure of something less arcane but equally confounding.

  An incredibly advanced nanoscale biomechanical device at least partially fashioned of a material that ought not to exist at normal temperature and pressure had been found where it ought not to have existed. Now it wasn’t there anymore, which precluded further evaluation of it. If she wished to pursue the matter any further it appeared that she could rely only on the inlab’s hastily made recordings of the no-longer extant anomaly. That would make it rather difficult to secure confirmation. Of anything.

  She had a lot to do next week. She had patients. She had a life
. Did she really want to get further involved with something that defied rational explanation?

  Of course she did, she told herself. She was a doctor, all doctors are scientists, and what all scientists want to know more than anything else is what they don’t know.

  But how to find out?

  If not overtly illegal, the presence of the device in Cara Gibson’s head suggested something problematic. The fact that it had apparently caused the girl no harm was not reason enough to ignore its existence—especially given the lab’s compositional breakdown. As a doctor, Ingrid was as interested in the why of it as the how. If nothing else, an interesting paper might be derived from further research into the abnormality. Whether anyone would believe certain conclusions enough to authorize publication in a respected scientific journal was another matter entirely.

  From a scientific standpoint, expounding upon what she had just seen and heard from the inlab was tantamount to a commercial pilot describing a recent encounter with a flying saucer. As to the actual lab recording, lab recordings could be falsified. A report as elaborate and detailed as this one hardly seemed worth the effort to fake, but if she went public with it that would not prevent detractors from claiming it as the source of not one but several preposterous claims.

  She wondered if she should share it with Rajeev, or perhaps with other professional but less intimate associates. She could imagine the reaction.

  “Hi Steve, hi LeAndra. I recently removed this delayed quantum entangled piece of nanomachinery partly built out of metastable metallic hydrogen from the skull of a local fifteen-year-old girl, and I’d like to know what you think of it. Except since it was quantum entangled it doesn’t exist here anymore, though it did when I first studied it. But don’t let that stop you.”

  Oh sure.

  It was plain that before she told anyone else about it she was going to have to further research the discovery (or the hallucination) quietly, by herself. Only when she was absolutely certain of the findings and had something more concrete to back them up would she risk sharing them with others. Only when she was certain, for example, that she was not being made the subject of some elaborate, albeit scientifically impressive, practical joke on the part of unknown colleagues.