The phone jack snapped reassuringly into place, but Winston's increasingly scrambled brain refused to run the auto-dialer that should have had him instantly screaming for help. He grabbed the keypad, and for a horrible moment, even his wetware—the largely intact remnants of the brain he'd been born with—refused to cough up the number for the emergency server. Then he had it: 911-BACKUP. Too many digits; 911-BACK would do, though you had to dial fast to avoid getting the police. No problem with that. By now, Winston was in full panic mode.
But even as he tried to figure out which pieces of data were the most crucial, he knew it was too late. There was so much data it felt as though he was trying to pour his entire soul through the phone link. And the phone was so, so slow, especially here on the far side of the Sylvan Hill, where cellular service was always dicey, at best.
Winston's final thought, as chartreuse snow ate what was left of his vision and invaded the rest of his consciousness, was that he was really, really glad he'd also spent the bucks for the extended warranty on his e-Brain implant.
He awoke in a hospital bed. The chartreuse snow was gone, and his hearing and vision seemed normal. He had a bit of a headache, but nothing severe, and none of that disorienting sluggishness you get coming out of a sedative. It was like waking up from a nap except that instead of feeling refreshed, he felt vaguely diminished. More than vaguely, he realized, as he played back the events that had brought him here. He could remember every detail of the system crash that had taken out his e-Brain, but he couldn't recall why he'd been on the Sunset Highway in the first place. Going somewhere, obviously, but where? Try as he might, he couldn't remember.
Winston studied his surroundings. The first thing he noticed was that he was free to move his arms and legs. He wasn't even tethered to an IV, although a monstrous cable snaked from his temple jack, up and over the headboard of the bed. The next thing he noticed was that the room didn't look like any hospital room he'd ever seen before. There were no windows, no nurses, none of the doctor's-office rubbing-alcohol smell which, as a kid, had always set his heart to hammering with fear that he was about to get a shot. Instead, there were banks and banks of electronic equipment, a rat's nest of cables, and two young men in stained T-shirts that looked like they'd never pass the sanitary code of a hospital in even the poorest corner of the planet. Wherever that might be. Winston was a patron of dozens of trendy liberal causes, but suddenly, he couldn't name a single crisis-wracked nation, let alone one in which these two gentlemen would still be out of place. Worse, he couldn't even conjure up his own address, though he did know he was a registered voter of Washington County, wherever that was.
The two men—techs, he presumed—were huddled over a monitor, muttering things to each other that Winston suspected would be gibberish to him even if he could remember everything he'd once taken for granted. Both had e-Brain links gleaming near their ears, but neither was currently jacked in.
Suddenly, Winston felt very much alone.
“Where's Kathy?” he asked.
The techs jumped, and Winston realized that whatever they were doing, they weren't monitoring his current condition, or they'd have known he was awake.
“Sorry,” he said. He'd not meant to startle them. Still, he was proud of himself for not asking any of the obvious waking-up-in-a-hospital questions, such as where am I? or what happened? He'd get to those eventually, but for the moment he wanted the comfort of the woman he loved.
“Who?” one of the techs asked, swiveling to face Winston. No welcome back or how are you feeling? But whoever heard of a computer tech with a bedside manner? This one's shirt said “Beam me up, Scotty,” and looked as though it had been beamed through a lot since the last time it had been washed. The man himself was thin and wispy looking, with a patchy beard that seemed to have lived an even more difficult life than the shirt. Oddly, Winston felt reassured. If they let this Mutt and Jeff pair play with all that expensive equipment, then these guys must be brilliant indeed. Right now, Winston felt that his own IQ was hovering in the vicinity of minus ten. Not that it had been anything to boast about when he was fully linked. His father had been the genius; Winston was best at rationing out the money in his trust fund and holding down the family honor at social gatherings.
“Kathy,” he repeated.
The other tech poked at a keyboard. “C or K?” he said without looking back.
This man was as broad-shouldered as his companion was scrawny. His shirt was jet black, and its backside said something incomprehensible about clone soldiers and black holes. A rock band, or a literary reference? Winston suspected that without a good uplink and some serious web searching, he'd never have been able to figure that one out, either, even if his implant was still functioning, which obviously it wasn't. “Huh?” he asked, staring at the shirt.
The broad-shouldered tech twisted in his chair, revealing ample belly and a partially eaten hamburger resting near a keyboard. “I said, is it Cathy with a C or Kathy with a K?” he repeated, as though talking to a child.
“Oh,” Winston said, reassessing his own IQ to minus twenty. “With a K."
A keyboard rattled and the two techs studied the screen. “Oh-oh,” scraggly beard said. “Years ago, he was married to someone named Kathy."
Clone-shirt was studying another file. “Damn,” he said. “I think he had the implant installed before the divorce. This is bad. Really, really bad. Why the hell don't these guys ever back up important stuff like that?” Then he tapped another key and Winston fell instantly back to sleep as though someone had shut off the lights.
The next time he woke, he had a whole army of techs, some of whom were actually wearing white lab coats. The room, if it was the same one, seemed to have sprouted even more equipment, and this time the techs were watching him, as though waiting for him to come back to life.
Asking for Kathy last time had been a mistake, although he wasn't quite sure he understood why. There was bad news hiding there somewhere, but he'd only had a few seconds in which to process it. All he knew was that Kathy should be here. Was she out of town for a few days? Why couldn't he remember anything recent about her—such as where she might have gone? On the freeway, he'd not even thought of calling her for help. Why on Earth not?
It was safer to stick to clichés. “What happened?” he asked, but nobody answered.
“Read this please,” one of the white-coats said, shoving a printout into his face.
His bifocal-replacement software apparently wasn't in any better shape than anything else, but even when he pulled back far enough that he could focus on the paper without image enhancement, it didn't help. He might as well have been trying to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. Which he once could have done with the implant and an uplink.
“Sorry,” he said. “What language is it?"
“English,” she said, taking back the paper. “Actually, it's the alphabet. Do you at least know what that is?"
“Sure,” he said, but when she asked him to recite it, he couldn't, even when she prompted him with a little jingle whose tune he knew by heart but whose words mostly eluded him. “Da, da, da, dah, E, F, G,” he sang triumphantly the third time. “Da, da, da, da, ellemmennohpee.” He smiled proudly, but the tech looked concerned. “Damn,” a voice behind her muttered. “I hate this job. You'd think that if they weren't going to take the time to back up, they wouldn't shove essential skills from wetware into firmware. Why the hell do they do that?"
“Shhh,” said another voice.
But Winston knew the answer to that one. The e-Brain was a wonderful device, but it was frustratingly literal. The organic brain was intuitive, better able to react to emotional needs. Winston had a passion for ‘80s music, and he'd been freeing up organic memory for song lyrics. At parties, he was always the one who knew the perfect lyric for any occasion. It was another great way to impress the ladies—which explained why he'd never viewed the alphabet song as worth keeping in organic memory: because that one wasn't going to impress anyo
ne over the age of consent. Recently, he'd been expanding his inventory to ‘90s music, in an effort to draw the attention of a younger generation of ladies. Although why he'd wanted to do that when he had Kathy eluded him. He was just beginning to connect that incongruity to Mutt and Jeff's comments about “the divorce” when the lights went out again.
The third time Winston woke up, the giant cable was no longer snaking out of his head. A tech was still holding it, so he must only recently have been unplugged. Other people were standing at the foot of his bed, surrounding a middle-aged woman whose gray-streaked hair was pulled back in a severe bun.
Winston tested his memory. “Where's Kathy?” still drew a blank, though he had a bad feeling he now understood why. The rest of his life wasn't much better. Winston could remember that his father had made his fortune as a molecular biologist, working for a company that made AIDS vaccines from genetically engineered yeast. He'd never really understood the process—never particularly wanted to. But when he tried to pull up even the basic social chitchat details, the type of stuff you had to know about the family business if you didn't want to appear a fool on the cocktail party circuit, all he could recall was it had something to do with DNA—which sounded like the name of an alt-rock band, but not one he'd ever heard of. Obviously, the implant wasn't yet fully restored.
The woman at the foot of his bed looked like a honest-to-goodness doctor, but instead of a white coat and stethoscope, she was dressed in a blue blazer and wore a pricey microwave uplink. The throng gathered around her were younger, reminding Winston of vids in which med students followed senior physicians on rounds. Did doctors really do such things? If he'd ever known, he no longer did. Of course, this woman was probably an implant specialist, not a doctor. Presumably, her groupies were techs-in-training.
The woman was telling her protégés about the Sunset Highway, the Sylvan Hill, and Winston's panicked call for help, all of which he remembered far too well. Momentarily, he tuned her out for a system check. He was relieved to find that he had a functioning implant, but when he tried to inventory his hard drive, he discovered that it contained nothing but the operating system. The rest was a huge blank—a gazillion-quad tabula rasa waiting to be filled. How and with what, he had no idea. Maybe it was time to listen to Dr. Blue Blazer.
“His quantum drive had a hole in it,” she was telling her pupils. “Luckily, his gray matter is intact, but the device was slag. And unfortunately, he used his wetware mostly for trivia. For example, his wife left him twelve years ago, but he apparently stored all those memories on the drive. As far as he remembers, they're still newlyweds."
“What about backup?” someone asked.
“You tell me. It's on the chart."
“He scheduled one appointment, a few weeks after he got the drive,” a third voice said. “But he failed to show up, and never rescheduled. That's not uncommon. Most people never backup. This guy's only attempt was the one he made from the freeway, on his cell phone. We got a couple of files from it: something that looks like an address book, and that morning's stock market quotes, which he'd apparently downloaded from the Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately, he no longer knows how to read or do math, and both files are in text mode, so they're unusable until he's reeducated. Although I suppose he could have someone read them to him, so he could refile them in auditory mode."
“What's the prognosis?"
“The lost data's gone forever. The device was under warranty, but the warranty excludes data. Still, the company should try do what it can to make him a functioning member of society. But it won't be easy."
Winston cleared his throat. “Why not just download a reading program onto my new drive?"
For the first time, the older woman looked at him, rather than at her students. If she was embarrassed at being caught discussing him so clinically, she gave no sign. “Ah,” she said, “you're awake."
She turned to face him more directly. “We could do that if you'd been properly backed up,” she said. “But there's no such thing as a one-size-fits all reading program. We all learn to read in our own way, and yours is gone. It's kind of like you lost a piece of your personal operating system. Several pieces, actually. We've been running brain scans while you were asleep, and you not only can't read and write, there are a lot of other things you can't do, either. At least your motor skills are intact. We once had a baseball player who got konked on the head by a fastball that cracked his drive unit. When we replaced it, we discovered that he'd not only placed all of his pitching skills on it, but he'd put a lot of others there as well. At least you can still walk."
She turned back to her students. “Feel free to ask him questions, but be gentle. How many of you remember to back up every day?"
* * * *
Winston shifted uncomfortably in the tiny seat. There was barely room for his knees beneath the hard wooden desk, and every time he moved, he rubbed another wad of stale chewing gum off its underside onto his slacks. He was humming to himself, trying to assemble a list of great pogo-dancing tunes for tonight's date with Linda, when a door opened and a fortyish women walked in, conservatively attired in cardigan and slacks. Not Winston's type at all. It wasn't that she was too old—it's just that he liked them a bit more flamboyant. Besides, she was married.
“Good morning, Mrs. Armstrong,” Winston intoned, along with a roomful of higher-pitched voices. Waiting for Mrs. Armstrong, he'd tried to count how many there were, but lost track when he ran out of fingers and toes.
“Good morning, class.” Mrs. Armstrong walked to a desk at the front of the room and sat down. “Today we're going to study the alphabet."
Earlier, she had apologized for the tiny chair. “We're looking for something more suitable,” she said. “A couple of weeks ago, I graduated two other e-Brain rehabs to the second grade, and they took their chairs with them. I've been trying to get the principal to either buy some new ones or loan us the visitor's chair from her office, but so far I haven't had much luck."
That, of course, was something Winston could fix on his own. He still had plenty of money, although it was now controlled by a court-appointed guardian. Still, he ought to be able to get the trust to buy him a decent chair. After all, it was a private school, and they were already paying heaven knew how much in tuition. Winston had seen the number, but it didn't mean anything. Hopefully it wouldn't be too long before he could read the bill and again understand such things. The only thing he knew for sure was that private tutoring would cost much, much more—more than the trust fund could handle indefinitely.
Nobody really knew how long his rehab would take. It depended too much on precisely what skills were missing. His vocabulary seemed intact, his reasoning skills were unaffected, and as long as the topic was music, he was as witty as ever. What he couldn't do was read, write, or do arithmetic. And other than all those song lyrics, he seemed to have lost a lot of basic facts.
Recently, he'd been told, an e-Brain rehab patient had made it all the way through high school in three years. But he'd slowed down in college, and would probably be at retirement age before he got back the Ph.D. he'd once held in Twentieth Century French literature. Winston would be content with regaining a junior-college level of proficiency, and hoped to set a new speed record en route.
Meanwhile, the class was singing the alphabet song. “A, B, C, D, E, F, G,” Winston chimed in. “H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P.” He paused. What came after P?
“Q,” said a six-year-old voice beside him. Even at his tender age, the boy's temple had the gilded fleur-de-lis of an e-Brain jack, although currently he was working solely on the internal unit.
The boy grinned and leaned conspiratorially toward him. “It works a lot faster if you just store it all in the ‘puter and don't try to memorize it,” he said. “That way you always get it right the first time. My dad says I could learn everything just by surfing the net, but my mom won't let me."
The class had reached Z and was starting over. Mrs. Armstrong was on the far si
de of the room, comforting a girl who was crying because she'd stumbled over D.
The boy caught Winston's glance one more time and gave a very adult roll of the eyes. “I mean, who cares about all of this stuff?” he said.
Copyright (c) Richard A. Lovett
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* * *
Science Fact: Retirement Homes of the Gods by Stephen L. Gillett, Ph.D.
As real estate, red dwarf stars may have some usually overlooked advantages.
Who'd want to visit a red dwarf? I mean, really ... kinda like scheduling a disco dance by candlelight. Quite a few science fiction stories have spoken of the lurid light of a red sun: Robert L. Forward in Rocheworld, Poul Anderson in Trader to the Stars, and many others. David Brin's Hugo-winning “Crystal Spheres” even suggested that people couldn't live around “badstars” such as “tiny red dwarves [sic] [Thank you, J.R.R. Tolkien!].” The mental image is no doubt of trying to peer through a ruddy gloaming, like the dull light cast by the coals of a campfire. With such a mind's eye view, little wonder that so many SF stories start out on “the planet of a G-type star...."
The Color of a Red Sun
Except that this whole mental image is wrong! A “red” dwarf isn't really “red” at all, at least to your personal eyeballs. A “red” dwarf is “red” only by comparison to hotter stars, whose wavelengths are shifted to shorter (and hence “bluer") wavelengths. The temperature of even the dimmest type M dwarf, those little “red” suns, is about the same as that of the filament in an incandescent light, say about 2200 kelvins or so, and many are a good deal hotter than that. The light won't look red at all, and the eye is sufficiently adaptable that scenes will look normal. The temperature of something truly “red"—a charcoal fire or glowing stovetop, say—is less than 1000 K. In my former rock lab, we used to heat samples almost to 700 degrees C—i.e., to nearly 1000 K—and at that temperature they're glowing a bright cheerful orange. (Obviously, when Jerry Oltion and Lee Goodloe talked about the “bloody light” of dawn from a red dwarf star, in their Nebula-nominated story “Contact,” (November 1991) the “star” was actually a brown dwarf.)
Analog SFF, November 2005 Page 20