Nanotime

by Bart Kosko

  “Eytan. Let’s be frank. You may need me for the demo but you don’t need me beyond that. I’m not even sure you need me for the demo.”

  “You don’t trust us?”

  “Hell no I don’t trust you,” John said.

  “What about your son?”

  “What do you mean? He’s dead.”

  “Yes. But death has many forms.”

  “What are you getting at? What the fuck have you done with my son? I want the truth.”

  “Fair enough. You deserve the truth. Your son is neither dead nor alive. Well maybe more dead than alive. He was technically dead when we found him. He was clinically dead. Had no heartbeat and had stopped breathing. So we put him in cryonic suspension in a warehouse of ours in Pomona. They have a good chance to revive him someday when all this gets behind us.”

  John tried to picture what that would be like.

  “It helps that he was so young,” Eytan said. “It was a crude suspension to say the least. They pumped out his blood and put in their latest antifreeze. They say the liquid nitrogen will destroy the surface cells. But beyond that it won’t cause too much damage if the fetus is small enough. Who knows what they can fix in the future?”

  “Eytan. Something is not right here. So far as I know you may have killed my son or somehow had a hand in it. Now you want to use his ‘revival’ to blackmail me?”

  “Not at all. John. I did this for you as a friend and at no small cost to our effort. I could have just left your son dead on the floor. Let’s face it. Even you left him.”

  “You son of a bitch. I had no choice. But you’ve had all kinds of choices. I never know what hand you’re playing. What happened to Richard?”

  “He was not as lucky as you were. He sleeps with your son.”

  “You killed him?”

  “It’s a gray area of the law. Almost all molecular motion stops at -320° Fahrenheit. So time in effect stops if you’re frozen. Don’t worry. Richard too stands a good chance to revive someday but of course much later than your son will. It may be 50 or so years from now. Who knows? Look. Don’t blame us. We just tried to make the best of a historically bad day. The hard truth? Your government made the call.”

  “Eytan. You think his parents will put up with that? Christ. They just lost their only two kids.”

  “Can’t say. I’m sure your government will smooth it over with money and photos. I have already told you. They made the call. They know what they’re doing.”

  “Then why did they leave me free to talk?”

  “They didn’t. Mr. Rittenhouse was taking you to Pomona to be with your son. You should thank Daniel for keeping you warm.”

  “So answer the question. Did he get the briefcase Rittenhouse had with him?”

  “He didn’t try. Your government would not have approved of that. We would not be driving to Nevada now.”

  “But they did approve of you taking me? That doesn’t wash.”

  “ ‘Doesn’t wash.’ What a strange expression. Aaron. Are we ready?”

  “Almost,” Aaron said and went back to the box he had unpacked.

  John thought he might jump one of them and take his gun and make them stop the truck. But there would be nowhere for him to go. Either they would catch him in the Mojave Desert or someone else would. The best he could do was pump Eytan for answers while the others worked.

  “Are Catton and Rittenhouse CIA agents?” John said.

  “Preppy aren’t they? No and yes. And they would be CIA officers and not agents. You are a CIA agent if a CIA officer recruits you. Cars Catton works for the intelligence arm of your Department of Energy. So no. He is not CIA. He in theory has to answer to the director of Central Intelligence. But then so do I when I work in this country. Big Pierre Rittenhouse works for the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology. That’s why Daniel had to be gentle with him. David just give him a headache and not a full brain scramble.”

  “It’s hard to believe the CIA cares that much about burning water and my patent. I can see the DOE guys wanting to play with it but not the CIA.”

  “Wrong twice. The CIA knows the strategic importance of alternate fuels. Look at the Tamraz pipeline and the Russians piling up their troops in Siberia. Men like Rittenhouse also know the tactical importance of what your Dr. Tabriz has shown he can do with chips and brains. The CIA has watched this game since Tabriz blew those Dhahran oil pumps.”

  “So Tabriz did that? Remember I asked you about him?”

  “You’re not listening. The oil blast knocked out one of the Saudi satellites but only for a minute or so. CIA’s S&T gang got in the game then. They’ve watched you since we first contacted you last year and flew you over to Eilat.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. Good thing for you we beat them to Denise’s house. They would have just taken the chip and put you on ice. This way we only had to give them the backup and you got to stay warm. John. I always liked you. Too bad you never joined the army.”

  “That means you smuggled the melted Tabriz chip out of the country.”

  “I can’t tell you about our side. I can tell you only that your CIA has given the matter of the Tabriz chip its highest S&T priority. They even briefed your President Jackson on it before he signed his now-famous bill.”

  “I never heard about that.”

  “Never mind. He only outlawed gasoline and touched off some of the biggest riots since your Social Security collapsed.”

  “Outlawed gas?”

  “That’s in the past. What the CIA wants to know is technical. How does Tabriz make the spine and medulla grafts? Hell. We want to know too. We’ve had to guess at it.”

  “Medulla grafts?” John said. “I sure would like to see those circuit diagrams.”

  “You will. We’re working them up right now. We’ve had to figure out a few new tricks just to do that.”

  “So you did learn something from Denise’s Tabriz chip?”

  “Of course.”

  “Eytan. Tell me. What do you think she felt? I mean Denise when they made the nanografts. Jesus. They cut out her brain! She might still have been alive.”

  “Hard question. There have to be as many ways to dress a brain as there are to skin a cat. Tabriz and his team may have found a way to do it when she was only unconscious. But I doubt it. There are too many signals and circuits to track. They all work in parallel. And frankly I don’t think Tabriz would make the effort anyway. Why spare an infidel pain?”

  “So you think they in effect skinned her alive?”

  “Skinned alive? That is something else. Listen. Try not to dwell on these things. It is the only way. I know how hard it is not to think about such suffering. I have lost men whom we know the other side tortured for days before they shot. Try not to think of it. Let’s talk about the demo. Raquel wants you to practice the tape with her.”

  “Who tortured them?” John said. “The Egyptians?”

  Eytan looked at him and paused before he answered.

  “Not just the Egyptians. These animals did unspeakable things to our boys. Truly unspeakable. I once saw a transcript of what they called a ‘medical interrogation.’ Let me tell you. That was skinning someone alive.”

  Eytan shook his head and stood.

  “Aaron,” he said. “Are we ready yet?”

  “Close enough,” the stocky man said. “We can start.”

  “Good.”

  Eytan turned back to John.

  “How do you feel?”

  “A little better. I would love to take a nap.”

  “You just had one.”

  “That doesn’t count,” John said. “You drugged me.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “I know. There’s plenty of time for sleeping in the grave.”

  “That’s not what I was going to say. You’ll have plenty of rest time before the demo. Now stand up.”

  John stood up.

  Aaron walked over to him with a folded white gown in his hand. Joh
n reached for the gown but Aaron passed it from his right hand to his left hand.

  Then Aaron threw a fast front punch into John’s solar plexus.

  The short punch knocked the air out of John and knocked him against the truck wall. He had not felt that shooting stomach pain since an eighth-grader sucker-punched him when he was in sixth-grade gym class. He crumpled against the white wall and gasped for air. Eytan and Aaron walked him to the front of the room.

  “Relax and take small breaths,” Eytan said. “You’ll be fine. Aaron sometimes trains the new recruits. He likes to show off.”

  Raquel joined them and helped them set John into a makeshift dentist’s chair.

  Aaron and Daniel strapped down his arms and chest and forehead with thick black Velcro straps. Raquel put a white mask over his mouth and nose. Then she put a mask on herself.

  John struggled against the black straps and then stopped.

  He looked up and saw all the Israelis wearing the white masks. He did not know the name of the two Israelis who wore yellow surgical gloves and who now spoke quickly in Hebrew.

  He did not speak the language but he knew at once what they were saying and he felt a cold flash of terror at what they planned to do.

  “You’re doing this for the CIA?” John said in gasps.

  “Not at all,” Eytan said through his mask. “Turns out we can do things over here that the CIA can’t do. The only constraint is that we can’t kill you outright as long as you remain a U.S. citizen. Such is your government.”

  “Fuck you. And I won’t help you on your goddamn demo for those Texan bastards.”

  That felt better. It wasted his breath but it felt better.

  John then thought how the old gold miner would have said much the same thing.

  At least the old miner would not just sit here and feel sorry for himself. He would fight the bastards but still he would accept his fate. Only a fool would struggle or plead. The old gold miner would take it like he must have taken thousands of oven-hot days and taken a dozen cave-ins and a mouthful of cracked and rotting teeth.

  Now the only question was whether he could take it.

  “John,” Eytan said. “Relax. This is all part of a political decision. Remember Bismarck said you never want to see how people make sausage or political decisions. You’ve been in the sausage grinder and you still have a way to go. Try to calm yourself and sit still. All will come to pass.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” John said. “I saw your woman here take the optical tape. You don’t need me for the demo.”

  “In fact we do. We know that your friend Dr. Tabriz will try to sabotage the demo. And we need you to catch him.”

  “Shit. That’s it? I’m bait?”

  “Much more than that. You’re our Trojan horse. Believe me. A lot of people are pulling for you. You’re a hero. Haven’t you always wanted to meet the great Dr. Hamid Tabriz? You may do better than that. You may get to go one-on-one with him! Nano a nano!”

  Eytan and Daniel laughed and stood back with Raquel and Aaron.

  The short dark agent Uri clamped a chrome skull cap on John’s head. He pushed down on it to hold John’s head steady and to force it more tightly into a black plastic neck brace. John saw small blue stars as Uri pushed down on the skull cap and felt its thin teeth pierce his scalp.

  It took all he had not to scream.

  “Moshe,” Eytan said “It’s your turn. I’ll have the driver slow down.”

  John never got a good look at Moshe. He could tell Moshe was an older man with short brown hair and dark stubble on his cheeks and neck.

  John convulsed when Moshe stepped in front of him with a small electric rotary saw. The chrome cap hurt but not as much as it should have. He knew they must have rubbed some painkiller on his forehead and scalp. That still did not lessen the terror of seeing the saw.

  Moshe slid a button with his thumb. Then the saw made a high-pitched whirring sound.

  Uri pushed harder on the skull cap to counter John’s shock response.

  John clenched his teeth and let go.

  He had failed.

  He screamed at first when the saw cut through his forehead at the base of the chrome skull cap. It too hurt less than he thought it would. The cutting made him think a huge bumblebee was stinging him over and over. Blood ran down into his eyes and ears and onto his lips and chin. The blood tasted warm and salty and he tried to spit it out as he screamed.

  It only got worse. John now struggled to wipe the blood from his eyes as much as to stop the small jackhammer tearing away at his skull. Sound no longer came out when he screamed.

  Moshe turned off the saw and circled John to inspect his work. The cutting had taken less than a minute. It had traced out a bloody line at the rim of the skull cap.

  “John,” Eytan said. “Relax now. The worst is over. I’m sorry but we have to do this while you are awake so we can tune the damn thing. Bear with us. I told you we have to work with all the signals and neural circuits in parallel. But look at it this way: A little headache now is a small price to pay for immortality.”

  Eytan nodded to Uri.

  The short agent pulled the chrome skull cap straight up and the roof of John’s skull came with it. Uri put the skull cap on a thin tray and put the tray on a shelf in the truck’s refrigerator.

  Aaron held a small golden chiplet in his gloved hand.

  All the Israelis stared at John and he looked back at them. John’s brain shined pink in the lamplight. It at once started to swell in the air.

  Moshe replaced the saw with a laser scalpel. The scalpel used hundreds of thousands of thin light beams to cut fine tissue. Moshe first looked at a 3-D model of John’s brain on a screen and then gently passed the scalpel through the pink tissue.

  Moshe removed a tiny square chunk. He placed the bloody brain chunk on a clear sheet of plastic. The sheet had a fine bioelectric surface of polyphenylenevinylene.

  The brain chunk itself was not special. John’s massive neural networks could soon reroute their neural circuits around the missing tangle of neurons and synapses. But they would never have the chance. The biosurface would instead learn much of the structure of the neural circuits.

  John knew they had cut open his scalp. He could not tell if they had lifted it off when they had lifted the chrome skull cap. He did not feel Moshe cut out the cube. He was in too much shock to think clearly. Even the old gold miner had left him.

  So this was what it was like.

  Moshe and Uri held the clear plate to all six faces of the brain cube.

  A new screen showed the best 3-D estimate of the cube’s neural wiring. Each time they touched a cube face to the plastic the 3-D blueprint changed and grew more accurate.

  Then Aaron plugged the golden chiplet into the deck to let it learn the input-output structure of the brain cube. The fine details of the neural circuits were far less important than the overall structure of how the brain chunk took in signals and passed out new ones. Trillions of neural circuits could produce the same rough input-output structure just as trillions of different tree branches could produce trees of the same overall shape.

  Moshe used tweezers to turn and rotate the cube on the clear plate.

  Soon the 3-D blueprint changed very little with each new face sample of the cube. Then Moshe wrapped the whole chunk in black sensor foam and let the computer fire its millions of neural circuits at random.

  “Look at that,” Moshe said to them. “The chiplet has the same impulse response as the biomass has. You couldn’t draw two curves that close together. We can install now if you are sure you want to proceed.”

  “Proceed,” Eytan said.

  John strained his eyes to look behind him at Moshe and Uri. He wanted to see that plot of his impulse response. It was part of his mind or soul or spirit or self. It was a signature.

  John had lost his girlfriend and his son. He had lost his patent and his business. He would never buy his freedom now. And the worst thing that could h
appen was about to. That signature was all he had left.

  You could always lose more.

  Moshe unplugged the chiplet and pushed it into a precut cube of the black sensor foam. Then he gently pushed this new foam cube into the hole in John’s brain. Uri held a small wireless wand over it to turn on the nanograft.

  John’s eyes widened as if he had just woken up from a nap.

  The screen gave new 3-D estimates of the five touching brain faces.

  “Flash of insight?” Eytan said. “Good. Your IQ just jumped up and you are still you. Aren’t you?”

  John looked at him but could not speak.

  Maybe they had taped his mouth shut. Maybe they had shot him with something to keep him quiet. He could not tell. And he could not see the IV in his left arm. The pain had gone and the words would just not come out. He was not even sure which words he wanted to come out.

  But Eytan was right. He did feel as if he had just had a great idea though he did not know what the idea was. He felt more alert and aware than he had felt.

  Moshe cut out a chunk on the back side of John’s brain and soon replaced it with a foam-wrapped chiplet.

  John grew more alert as Moshe cut out more chunks on the surface of his brain and replaced them with the foam-wrapped chiplets. John lost more and more of his sense of time. He knew Moshe and Uri worked faster now and yet each chiplet seemed to take them longer and longer to install.

  Time passed but John could not tell at what rate it passed.

  John tried to focus his mind and figure a way out or at least walk through the events since he had left the Hoover Dam. But his mind only buzzed softly when he tried to focus. He saw flashes of Denise and his son and Richard and the Exxon gas station in Searchlight and the young attendant there who spit green mint juice. He saw Jism on his windshield and Carsten Catton across the table. The flashes made no sense and he could not control how they flowed and dissolved.

  Moshe moved the wireless chiplets aside when he finished the surface cortical cubes.

  Uri made sure the master chip stored all their data and comm paths. He checked and rechecked them as Moshe cut deeper into John’s midbrain.