The Medusa Chronicles (3 page)

4

If his recovery from the
Queen Elizabeth IV
crash twelve years ago had been traumatic for Howard Falcon, so it had been for Hope Dhoni, at the time a twenty-one-year-old trainee nurse at the old USAF hospital in Arizona to which Falcon had been rushed. She had been by far the most junior member of the team.

When he was brought in, crushed and burned, laid out on the bed's pale green blankets, Falcon had not even looked human. Hope had spent time in inner-city emergency departments and military trauma wards, and she thought she was toughened up. She wasn't. Not for this.

But it was Doctor Bignall, second-in-command, who had helped her through. “First of all, he's alive. Remember that. Barely, though: his heart's about to give up—you can see that from the monitor trace. Second of all, don't think about what he's lost but what he still has. His head injuries seem manageable . . .”

She could barely see the head under what remained of Falcon's right arm.

“And that arm he threw up to protect his head might even have preserved his face. Some of it.”

She watched the team work, humans and machines, as tubes snaked into Falcon's body. “So what's the first priority?”

“To keep him alive. Look at him, he's suffered well over fifty percent blood loss, his chest is wide open. We're replacing his blood, all of it, with a cold saline solution. That will cut brain activity, stop cellular activity—”

“Suspended animation.”

“If you like. And that will give us a chance to get on with the structural stuff. A
chance
 . . . Oh, wow, he's in cardiac arrest. Crash team . . . !”

The structural stuff.
When Falcon was stabilised, achieved essentially by shoving him into a room full of machinery that would emulate the functions of his broken body, it turned out that there was little left of him that was saveable but brain and spine—and some of his face, preserved by that flung-over arm. The good news was that was quite a lot to build on. Monitors already showed ongoing brain activity. Hope would soon learn how to tell if Falcon was asleep or awake, and she wondered which state was worse for him.

What followed, for Hope, was a rushed course in neuroinformatics. As the hours turned to days, the team worked as quickly as they could. They needed to establish a connection between what was left of Falcon and the equipment that would sustain him for the rest of his life. And that meant reading information from, and writing information to, what was left of his broken nervous system.

Sensors on prosthetic extensions to Falcon's surviving stump of an arm were able to use his own nervous system to communicate with the brain—but for the rest of his body, his spinal column was so badly damaged that wasn't an option. New communication pathways had to be built. So microelectrodes were lodged within Falcon's brain—in the motor cortex area responsible for physical movement and in the somatosensory cortex, which governed the sense of touch. More sensors were placed in the lumbos­acral region of his spine with a control hub to link the brain to the lower limbs. Once it was possible to transfer digital information into and out of his ruptured nervous system, a suite of prosthetic body parts was brought in and tried, one by one, each of them riddled with microsensors that communicated continually with the devices anchored to the brain and spine.

Even hastily improvised, it was an impressive feat.

Hope was able to help with the medical side. As the recovery proceeded she flashed lights into eyes of metal and gel, and pinched sensor-­loaded plastic flesh, testing for sensation. She learned later that Falcon slowly became aware of this, over the days and weeks of silence inside his own head: sparks of light, dull feelings of pressure. But the first external stimulus he'd been truly aware of was a sound, a metronomic thumping that he'd believed was his own heart, but was in fact the combined rhythm of a room full of machinery.

The team had been highly motivated. They weren't just saving a life; they were doing so using the latest techniques and technologies. Indeed, the doctors said, this case was driving the development of new techniques altogether.

Sometimes they were over-keen. One younger doctor had bragged in the canteen, “You know, this must be the most interesting trauma case since they gave up fighting wars . . .” Doctor Bignall punched the man in the mouth. If he hadn't, Hope Dhoni would have.

And now, a dozen years later, here stood Falcon, restored.

A golden tower.

People said that in this iteration of his support gear Falcon looked a little like the old Oscar statuette. When he stood upright, there was an abstract sense of a human body rather than its literal shape: a golden, wedge-shaped torso, shapely shoulders and neck, a featureless head—­featureless save for the aperture through which a partial face peered, leathery human skin exposed to the air. Artificial eyes, of course. His lower body was a single unit, shaped to suggest legs; it looked solid but was segmented to allow Falcon to bend, even to “sit” with reasonable verisimili­tude. And under the “feet” was a kind of trolley riding on balloon tyres. At rest, Falcon kept his arms folded over his chest, to reassure onlookers; when deployed his arms moved with a mechanical whir of hydraulics, the motions stiff and inhuman, the hands like grabbing claws.

This was not the first model within which Falcon had been embedded. He liked to complain that he had made more human-looking snowmen as a boy . . .

*  *  *  *

Dhoni remembered when Falcon had first started to feel pain again.

Falcon couldn't tell them he was in pain, at the time. All he could do was flicker an eyelid. He had no mouth. His tear ducts no longer functioned. But the machines told of the pain. And Hope knew.

It took two years before he could turn the page of a book unaided, with a whirr of servomotors from the single exoskeletal arm hooked up to his body. Every night of those two years, Hope Dhoni had washed Falcon's face and wiped his brow.

5

Webster called them back to the table for the drinks.

This time Falcon sat down, or at least folded down his undercarriage.

Dhoni said in a rush, “I know there's every chance I won't see you again any time soon, Commander—”

“Howard.”

“Howard. I do recall you got out of that clinic as fast as you could—how did Doctor Bignall put it? ‘Like a delinquent kid who's finally old enough to steal a car.'”

Webster barked laughter. “That's you, Howard.”

“But I would urge you to come in for regular checks, refurbs and upgrades to your prosthetics—and medical attention to your human core. But while we're here,” she said doggedly, “while I have the chance, I want to show you a new option.” She patted the box. “This is a virtual reality extensor kit. While we're here it's interfaced to the ship's Bosun and to the global net.” She took out two metal discs, each the size of a new cent. She handed one each to Webster and Falcon.

“Neural jacks,” Falcon said.

“You got it,” Webster said. His own hand hovered at the back of his neck.

“
You
, Geoff? You've got one of these sockets? Virtual reality is for kids' games or training simulators.”

“Like hell it is. I'd have no idea what my kids and grandkids spend their time doing without this hole in my neck. Besides, half the world's business is done virtually now. Even my Bureau's. And, unlike you, I always treat myself to upgrades.”

“You never told me.”

“You never asked. And you never told me
you
have an interface. Sur­geons installed it while they were hacking your brain stem, did they?”

“It was a necessary component of my treatment. The destruction of my spinal cord—”

“That was twelve years ago—”

“It needs upgrading,” Dhoni said quickly. “But this smart new kit is downward-compatible.”

Falcon stared at the bright coin. “Virtual reality? What's the point?”

Webster leaned forward. “Look, Howard. I think I see what the doctor's getting at. We live in a
good
age. The world's at peace. No borders, no wars, and we're driving towards our goals of eliminating hunger, want, disease—”

“So what? And why the VR jack?”

“Because, in this nascent utopia, there's no place for you,” Webster said brutally. “That's what you think, don't you?”

“Well, it's true. I'm unique.”

“That can't be changed. The medics saved your life, Howard, but in a radically experimental way. You were a one-off. And as the Earth recovers from the depredation of the past, people are becoming more—conservative. Machinery is fine, but it has to be unobtrusive.

“If your accident happened now, you wouldn't be treated the same way. You'd be kept on ice until biological replacements could be prepared for your broken body parts. I'm talking stem-cell treatments, even whole lower brain and spinal cord transplants. They'd have made you human again. Machines are machines, to be kept separate from humanity.”

“And so I'm the only true cyborg. The only living symbiosis of man and machine.”

“Hope tells me there's nothing that can be done to change that for you now, physically.”

Dhoni seemed about to reach for Falcon's hand, but she pulled back. “But there are other options.”

“
This
, you mean? To escape into artificiality?”

Webster shook his head. “There are whole virtual communities, Howard. And once you're in there you can be fully human again. You can do things—well, hell, all things you can't do now. Run, laugh, cry—make love—”

“It's the real world for me, Doctor Dhoni. That, or give me an off switch.”

Hope flinched.

Webster said, “Damn you, Falcon.”

Falcon rolled back from the table, straightened up, and left.

*  *  *  *

When he'd gone, Dhoni said, “I suppose I should apologise. I didn't mean to spoil the evening.”

Webster's look was rueful. “Oh, we were making a fine job of that by ourselves. But I guess a virtual substitute for life was never going to be enough for a man like Howard Falcon . . . ‘Some other time.'”

“I'm sorry?”

“That's what he said, as he was about to leave Jupiter. He looked over at the Great Red Spot—the mission planners ensured he had stayed well away from that—and he said, “Some other time.” The control team up at Jupiter V heard it clearly. It's the kind of line you stick on a T-shirt . . .

“But in a way he has a point. About Jupiter anyhow. His mission in the
Kon-Tiki
was heroic, but he only scratched the surface. The planet's full of structure—we think. Literally anything might be found down there. Jupiter is an ocean of mystery. And since he got back from Jupiter he's already been seeking funding for follow-up missions. One reason he's showing his face here, I think.”

Dhoni nodded. “But all this is a denial of his personal reality. How can we help him?”

“Damned if I know. Damned if I care, right now.”

6

When he returned to Springer's presentation, Falcon observed that nobody in the audience had even noticed that the pioneer of the clouds of Jupiter had gone briefly AWOL. Again he seethed with unreasonable resentment.

It didn't help that Matt Springer had a good story to tell. As if to rub that home, as Springer concluded his narrative a final image of Grandpa Seth—valiant at the controls of his doomed Apollo craft—remained frozen. Falcon was impressed at Springer's skill as he milked the moment, before an audience that just happened to include the World President.

Finally he spoke again. “Well, you know the rest. My ancestor was honoured with a ceremony at Arlington. Robert Kennedy beat Richard Nixon to the presidency, and in January 1969 made the Icarus incident a keynote of his inaugural speech . . .”

A crude recording of RFK at the presidential podium was shown. Falcon knew the speech word for word:
“A decade earlier and we would not have had the spacefaring capabilities that have saved us . . . Now it is incumbent upon us not to let this capacity wither . . . On the contrary, we must move out beyond the fragile Earth and into space, further and wider . . .”

“And,” Springer commented with a grin, “Kennedy was wise enough to
stress how well America and the Soviet Union had worked together on the Icarus project.”

“This episode has proven we are better united than divided, and more than that, we
can
be united around common goals . . .”

Springer said, “Right there, in that passage, you had the foundation of the unity movements that led to the World Government. So Frank Borman led the first Apollo Moon landing in December 1971. The 1970s were the decade of Apollo, as RFK's administration reflected the public gratitude to NASA by pouring in money: multiple missions, flights to the lunar poles and the far side, the beginnings of a permanent base in Clavius Crater. And then the first steps beyond the Moon.”

More images, of Soviet-American landings on Mars in the 1980s.

“Since then we've seen a remarkable century of progress. Resources from space helped us over hurdles—fuel depletion, climate problems—that might otherwise have tripped us. The first World President was inaugurated in 2060, to a recording of the Hendrix anthem—but I lived in Bermuda for ten years, and they always said the main benefit of hosting the planet's capital city has been first call on the Global Weather Secretariat for hurricane protection.”

Polite laughter.

“And as for Seth's descendants . . .” He brought up an image of his own mission patch. It was a variant on the family crest, which showed a leaping springbok, the Springers being an old Dutch family with rich offshoots in South Africa. Now that springbok leapt among Pluto's moons. Springer smiled modestly in response to a ripple of applause.

“And in a way it all stemmed,” Springer said, “from Grandpa Seth's hero­ism. Anyhow, as the New Year approaches—according to Houston time, which is the only clock that counts for an astronaut—I move, with your permission, Madam President, that we return to the bar—”

And at that moment the submarine shuddered, a mile-long vessel ringing like a gong.