Interface (14 page)

"Willy? Willy, are you all right?" The secretary sounded hushed, al
most awed.

"Call." This command did not sound finished; the man wanted to
say, "Call someone," but he could not summon forth the name. "Call whom?"

"Goddamn
 
it,
  
call
 
her!"
  
The
 
man's
 
voice
 
was
  
deep,
  
his
enunciation flawless.
"Call whom?"

"The three-alarm lamp scooter."
"Mary Catherine?"
"Yes, goddamn it!"

"That's all there is," Mr. Salvador said, switching off the machine.
Dr. Radhakrishnan raised his eyebrows and took a deep breath.
"Well, based on this kind of evidence, it's difficult-"

"Yes, yes, yes," Mr. Salvador said, now sounding a bit annoyed,
"it's hard for you to speculate and you can't say anything on the record and all that. I understand your position, doctor. But I
attempting to engage you in a purely abstract discussion. Perhaps it
would have been better if we had met over dinner, rather than in
such a formal setting. We could arrange that, if it would help to get
you in the right frame of mind."

Radhakrishnan felt miserably stupid. "That would be difficult to
arrange in Elton," he said, "unless you are very fond of chili."

Mr. Salvador laughed. It sounded forced. But it was nice to make
the effort.

"Speaking very abstractly, then," Dr. Radhakrishnan said, "if the
stroke hit his frontal lobes, he may very well have personality
changes, which my therapy could not fix. If that part of his brain
was spared, then the cursing probably reflects frustration. Your
friend, I would wager, is a successful and powerful man, and you
imagine how such a man would feel if he could not even say simple
sentences."

"Yes, that puts it in a new light."

"But I can't say much more than that without more data."

"Understood." Then, offhandedly, as if asking for directions to the men's room, Salvador said: "Can you fix the aphasia, then? Assuming your off-the-cuff diagnosis is correct."

"Mr. Salvador, I hardly know where to begin."

Mr. Salvador took out a cigar, a mahogany baseball bat of a thing,
and scalped it with a tiny pocket guillotine. "Begin at the
beginning," he suggested. "Care for a cigar?"

"To begin with," Dr. Radhakrishnan said, accepting the cigar,
"there are ethical questions that entirely rule our performing an
experimental procedure on a human subject. So far we've only
done this on baboons."

"Let us do a little thought experiment in which we set aside, for
the time being, the ethical dimension," Mr. Salvador said. "Then
what?"

"Well, if a doctor were willing to do this, and the patient fully understood what he was getting into, we would first have to build
the biochips. In order to do this we would have to take a biopsy a
few weeks ahead of time, that is, take an actual sample of the p
atient's brain tissue, then genetically reengineer the nerve cells -
in and of itself, hardly a trivial operation - and grow them in vitro u
ntil we had enough."

"You do that here?"

"We have an arrangement with a biotech firm in Seattle."

"Which one, Cytech or Genomics?"

"Genomics."

"What is their role?"

"They implant the desired chromosome and then culture the ce
lls in vitro."

"They grow them in a tank," Mr. Salvador translated.

"Yes."

"How long does that phase last?"

"A couple of weeks usually. Cell culture is dodgy. Once we had gotten the cultured cells back from Seattle, we would fabricate the b
iochips."

"How long does that take?" Mr. Salvador was obsessed with t
ime.

"A few days. Then we would proceed to the implantation."

"The actual operation."

"Yes."

"Tell me about that."

"We identify the dead portions of the brain and remove them c
ryosurgically. It's rather like a dentist drilling out a cavity, cutting a
way damaged material until he hits a sound part of the tooth."

Mr. Salvador winced exquisitely.

"When we do this on baboons, we do it in a specially constructed
operating room here that is not sterile. It is not even
minimally fit for humans. So in order to do this operation on a
human, it would be necessary to build a specially designed
operating theater from scratch. The operating room would probably
cost more than this entire building in which we are sitting."

This last statement was intended to scare Mr. Salvador off, but it s
eemed only to bore him. "Have you ever got to the point of
drawing up plans and specifications for such a facility?"

"Yes, in a speculative way." Anyone who knew the first thing
about grantsmanship always had that kind of thing lying around, to
demonstrate the need for far greater amounts of money.

"May I take a copy with me?"

"The plans are on disk. You'll need a fairly powerful Calyx
system just to open them up."

"Is that some sort of computer thing? Calyx?"

"Yes. A parallel operating system."

"It is something that one could buy?"

"Yes, of course."

"Who makes it?"

"It's an open system. So there are many such machines on the
market - mostly aimed at engineers and scientists."

"Who makes the best sort of Calyx machine?"

"Well, it was invented by Kevin Tice, of course."

Mr. Salvador smiled. "Ah, yes. Mr. Tice. Pacific Netware. Marin
Country. Superb. I shall see if Mr. Tice can supply us with a nice
machine that will run his Calyx operating system."

Dr. Radhakrishnan assumed that Mr. Salvador was employing a
bit of synecdoche here. But he was not entirely sure. "If you do get
access to a Calyx machine, with the proper CAD/CAM software,
these disks will run on it."

"Then I would be delighted to take a disk with me, with your
permission," Mr. Salvador said. Without further discussing that
issue of permission, he continued, "Now, what happens after the
operation?"

"Once the implantation had been performed, if the patient did
not die in the process, there would be a period of a few weeks in
which we would keep him on antirejection meds and monitor him
closely in order to make sure that his body did not reject the
implant. Assuming it worked, he would then have to be retrained.
The patient tries to move the paralyzed part of his body. If the movement is correct, then we instruct the chip to remember the
pathway taken by the signals from the brain into the nerve. If it is
incorrect, we instruct the chip to block that path. Gradually, the good paths get reinforced and the bad ones get blocked."

"How do you instruct the chip? How do you give it feed-back, as
it were, once it is implanted inside the patient's head?"

"It includes a miniaturized radio receiver. We have a transmitter
that simply broadcasts the instructions directly into the patient's
skull."

"Fascinating. Utterly fascinating," Mr. Salvador said, sincerely en
ough. "And what is the range of this transmission?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Well, how far away from the transmitter can the patient be?"

Dr. Radhakrishnan smiled the same smile he had used with
Jackman. "You misconstrue me," he said. "We do not use radio
transmission because we need to talk to the patient's biochip from
a distance. We use it because this enables us to communicate with
the biochip without using an actual wire through the skull into the
brain.

"I see, of course," Mr. Salvador said dismissively. "But radio is r
adio, isn't it?"

Dr. Radhakrishnan smiled and nodded. He could not find any w
ay to disagree with the statement "radio is radio."

8

Aaron Green faked it for a whole week, throwing his
IMIPREM into the trunk of his rented Dynasty every day and
hawking his wares up and down the length of Wilshire Boulevard.
Then he got up one morning, rummaged through his briefcase,
emptied out the pocket where he stuffed people's business cards,
and pulled one out. Plain black ink on white paper: CY OGLE -
President - Ogle Data Research, Inc.

Ogle was the guy. The man who had taken one quick look at his
IMIPREM, in the least auspicious circumstances, and recognized
its value. A guy as smart as Ogle didn't need any sales pitch. No
fancy presentations.

Aaron had known ever since their conversation on the plane that
he would eventually make this phone call. But he had forced
himself to stick to the original plan for a week anyway.

Enough of that. The card listed offices in Falls Church, Virginia,
and Oakland,
 
California.
 
Hardly auspicious.
 
Aaron dialed the
number in Oakland,
 
steeling himself for a lengthy round of
telephone tag.

"Hello?" a man's voice said.

"Hello?" Aaron said, caught off guard. He had been expecting a
secretary.

"Who's this?"

"Excuse me," Aaron said, "I was trying to reach-"

"Mr. Green!" the man said, and Aaron recognized him as Cy
Ogle himself. "How are you doing down there in Holl-ee-wood?
Are you having a
 
fabulous
time?"

Aaron laughed. He had assumed, on the plane, that Ogle must
have been drunk. But now he sounded the same. Either Ogle was drun
k all the time, or never.

"I don't think I'll be putting my handprints in cement anytime soo
n."

"Had many interesting conversations with those big media m
oguls?"
Aaron decided to test Cy Ogle. "They're all teflon golems."

"And all of your scientific arguments just slide right off their hi
gh-tech, nonstick surface," Ogle said without skipping a beat.

'What's going on?" Aaron asked. "You answering your own
telephone now?"

"Yup."

"It's just that I figured, being president of your own company an
d all, you'd have a secretary or something."
"I do," Ogle said. "But she's a real good secretary, so I'm not go
ing to waste her time having her answer the phone.

"Well," Aaron said, "I don't want to waste
your
time. You must
be busy."

"I'm busy pushing on the gas pedal and keeping this old gas-gu
zzler between the white lines," Ogle said.

"Oh. You're driving?"

"Yeah. Going to Sacramento to sell the Governor a bill of go
ods."

"Oh. Well as long as you and I were on the same coast-"

"You thought we should get together about your IMIPREM."

"Exactly," Aaron said. He was pleased that Ogle still remembered
the acronym.

"Let me ask you one question," Ogle said. "Could you make it
small?"

"The IMIPREM? What do you mean?"

"It's big now. Bigger than a breadbox, as we used to say. Got a
big old power supply built into it, I would guess. Is there any i
ntrinsic reason you couldn't miniaturize it? Make it portable? Say, W
alkman sized, or even smaller, like wristwatch sized?"

"It would be a major project-"

"Stop trying to be a business executive," Ogle said. "I don't want
your opinion of this from a major project point of view. I want you
to do what you do best. Now, a V-8 engine can't be small; it won't
work. But a calculator can be small. Is the IMIPREM a V-8 engine or a calculator?"

"A calculator."

"Done. Now stop worrying about all this business shit. Go to
Disneyland."

"Huh?"

"Or the Universal Studios tour. Or something. I won't be back until tonight."