Wounds - Book 2 (5 page)

Chapter
6

T
hey’d taken a left from his room, away from the guards at the end of the corridor, and then doglegged right. Bashir spotted an adjacent, nearly dark corridor on his left, and he thought he saw some kind of sensor winking like an angry red eye.

But they didn’t go there. Instead, they turned right and passed room after silent room through a maze of corridors. They didn’t speak. The only sounds were the taps of their shoes and the whoosh of a ventilation system. They finally dead-ended at a thick metal containment door. The door’s sheen reminded him of Deep Space 9, all that Cardassian gray. Access required retinal scan and a thumbprint ID. Kahayn submitted to both, and the door slid open with a whine of hydraulics.

The door gave onto another corridor that was much shorter, and now Bashir recognized familiar smells: the sharp bite of fixative mingling with a fuller musk-ripe odor of feces and the wine odor of fermented fruit. The right wall was painted yellow cinder block, he thought. Midway down, the wall was faced with a large rectangle of clear glass. Inside was something that looked like an exhibit in an old-fashioned museum: specimens suspended in jars; a long gurney that gave onto a metal sink and adjoining counter; a ring of metal counters on which stood equipment, analyzers of various sorts. Another metal door, wide enough for a gurney. A freezer, probably. Bashir knew the basic setup of an autopsy suite when he saw it.

But they hadn’t entered. Instead, Kahayn went left to another door. She’d pulled it open and a fruity smell pillowed out, one mixed with excrement and hay for bedding.

Animal room. But there was something very wrong here. Bashir turned a slow circle. That strange air, it felt…His skin prickled.
Alive, and all edges and sharp angles.

“Cold, isn’t it? But you feel it.” Kahayn stirred the air with her index finger. “How
thick
it feels?”

Bashir nodded. “Yes. Crowded. Like I’m being jostled.” He did another turn. The room was perhaps six meters square, and bathed in fluorescent glare. Wire cages lined three walls, two to a wall. Each cage held an animal similar to Terran
Pan troglodytes,
chimps, but with orange fur like orangutans and a bit larger.

And they were very strange. For one, they were absolutely silent. Not that this was unusual; Earth chimpanzees hooted only in panic or fear. But these animals were…sizing him up, yes. They sat on their haunches, but their heads followed him to and fro, like perfectly behaved spectators to a slow-motion tennis match but in a kind of ripple, like a wave, as if the next picked up where the one before left off.

“You can get closer,” said Kahayn. Her voice sounded unnaturally loud in the hush. “They don’t initiate.”

“That’s an odd way of putting it.” Cautiously, Bashir sidled up to one cage. The primate inside squatted, watchful. Waiting. But Bashir noticed it right away: a shift in the air. A sense of…he frowned. Expectancy?

And that’s when he saw an odd bulge tenting the crown of the primate’s scalp. The bulge was a rough circle with a diameter of six, maybe eight centimeters. But there was nothing external, no protruding wires or electrodes. A quick glance at the other cages revealed exactly the same bulge in roughly the same place.

He turned back to Kahayn. “It’s an implant, right?” When she nodded, he continued, “For what?”

“This.” She stirred air again. “What’s it remind you of?”

Bashir closed his eyes. Thought. Almost smiled.
Quark’s.
“A bar,” he said, opening his eyes. “Too many people in a small space and they’re all talking at once, so there’s only this general buzz but you can’t make out the words.”

“Do you feel as cold now?”

He blinked. “No, it’s gone.”

“That’s because they’re not as worried about you.” A pause. “What would you say if I told you there was a conversation going on?”

“You mean the animals? But how—” He stopped. Pulled air in a quick gasp. “My God.”

“Yah,” she said, softly. “That’s right.”

“Neural regeneration,” said Saad. “The Kornaks are good at developing prosthetic limbs and eyes and ears and a whole host of other appliances. Someday, they’ll build a man from scratch; count on it. They’ll have to, eventually.”

“Why’s that?”

“Can’t have kids,” said Mara. Her expression was bland, and her tone matter-of-fact, as if she were talking about something no more important than the weather. “Kornaks, us. Oh, we get a couple. But usually something’s wrong with them. Most of them die.”

“The Kornaks have focused their energies on replacing themselves piece by piece,” said Saad. “But that only works up to a certain point.”

Lense nodded. “The brain’s the limiting factor. It doesn’t regenerate. You can rebuild a lot of the body, but if you’re senile, who cares? It’s like a fail-safe device. We’re pretty much wired for obsolescence.”

The cave was silent. Then Saad said, “Well, not all of us.”

The autopsy suite smelled just as primitive as it looked: a strong tang of some disinfectant mingling with the gassy odor of rot. The microscope was also primitive. Binocular eyepiece, adjustable objectives, a slide with a specimen in paraffin mounted on a staging table. But Bashir saw well enough and he didn’t like it one little bit.

“Massive rejection. Looks like a battlefield after a war.” He exhaled. “Dear God. The tissue’s absolutely ravaged. How long did you say the process took?”

“In the primates, within two weeks,” said Kahayn. She stood by his right shoulder. “The problem is that with all the damage done to our environment and the weird bugs that developed over time, our immune system is quite reactive to just about everything. To get around that, all our prosthetics are biomimetic and possess a DNA chip that allows for recognition and then integration into the host body. Still, the trick is to make prosthetics as antigenically neutral as possible.”

Bashir arched his eyebrows. “Hard to do, with DNA as a template. You produce RNA, which produces proteins, and you’ll get rejection. The only way to get around that would be some sort of, I don’t know, universal DNA donor. On the other hand, the brain’s privileged, relatively antigenically isolated, so it might work. But there’s no such thing as a universal DNA donor.”

She gave him a strange look. “Well, I tried something different. There were a few records left from before the Cataclysm. I stumbled on some literature about certain species of sea life that regenerated neural tissue.”

“I see,” said Bashir. Yes, she was on the right track; many Earth species of starfish and amphibians, not to mention Ludian halofish on Lentrex VII, could regenerate entire nerves and whole limbs. “What did you try next?”

In reply, Kahayn switched out slides, peered through the eyepieces, adjusted the focus, then straightened. “Have a look.”

Another brain section, but now something in the center…When he changed magnifications, he couldn’t believe his eyes. Entire neuronal tracks had been reconstructed; the membranes bracketed with an overlay of…“That microglia’s much too dense, and those axons…my God, is that
metal?”

“A combination of silica and copper. You’re looking at what happens to a primate’s brain when it’s exposed to MEMs. Microelectromechanical machines, a variant of nanotechnology developed for computer systems. You’re familiar with their function?”

“Not really,” Bashir lied. Thinking:
Ancient history; computers and hard drives, copper and silica chips and tungsten for an interconnect.

“MEMs can rewrite and repair information on nanodrives. So my thought…
our
thought, was to replicate this function within a brain. It’s one thing to hook up an artificial eye or ear.” She touched the corner of her left eye. “Everything works just fine because it’s a discrete system, a totally dedicated subunit, you might say. But it’s quite another to jury-rig whole tracts of interconnecting neural tissue, or an entire lobe. So my initial idea was to use DNA chips as the programming matrix in a MEM. But in order to facilitate axonal repair, I inserted DNA from a species of diatom. Plankton, actually. Very hardy. Their cell walls are made of silica.”

His mind bounced around the problem. Simple biology: there was usually only five to ten grams of silica in the body, either ingested or absorbed from the environment. Silicic acid dissolved in water; silicates in dust. So long as the silicon remained bound as siloxanes, not much of a problem, health-wise. Why, look at any fracture site in bone and the ratio of silica to calcium was nearly double.

On the other hand, these people lived in a kind of pollutant stew: silicates, chromated copper arsenate, copper oxides in the air. So Kahayn looked to rebuild brain by armoring it with a substance that could not be rejected. Ingenious.

“So this would be like encasing your regenerated neurons in an exoskeleton of silica and copper that was antigenically neutral,” said Bashir. “Quite elegant, Doctor.”

She bobbed her head at the compliment, but her expression was still grim. “Everything went fine. We induced disease in the primates, put in the MEMs, and the primates regained function. It was like a miracle and…”

He read the struggle in her face. “And? But?”

“Things we…
I
couldn’t explain, didn’t see coming.” She put her hands into the pockets of her white lab coat and shrugged as if suddenly cold. “What is it that a complicated computer does?”

“Information processing. Data storage. Problem solving.”

“Plus, the capacity to relay or manufacture commands, tell different parts of a program to run at a certain time or in a certain way, right? But what if a machine wants to share information with another machine?”

“Oh, that’s easy enough. Primi—” He caught himself before he could say
primitive.
“Microwave, for example. Beaming messages back and forth; I mean, really, all communications technology relies upon transmission of encoded energy. But a machine can’t
decide
things like that. The capability has to be
put
there.”

“Yah, you’d think. But that’s not the way these implants worked. The MEMs decided…they began to rewrite portions of
healthy
brain. The MEMs interpreted normal brain as damaged. And then when I was doing imaging studies, the primates—maybe the MEMs, I don’t know—they
decided
to link. I couldn’t stop them, and they didn’t stop with just one machine. These scanners hooked into more sophisticated systems, and then other systems linked to those computers in a cascade. They were like a virus. But instead of crippling the network, they and the network—our computers—became
dependent
upon one another. They joined forces.”

Networking; brains meshing with a computer, behaving like a computer the way a Bynar’s must; an amazing discovery
…“What happened when you tried to disconnect them? Shut down the computers?”

“They just…
died.
Like they needed the machines. Or had become them.” She looked bleak. “They just died.”

“Then what about the animals I just saw? Are they linked to a computer network somewhere?”

“No.” She shook her head. “You’re in the isolation wing. Our power is self-contained. Our computers are in a separate area. Our communications don’t even tie in with the main complex. The animals you saw were never exposed to anything more complicated than a free-standing system that’s not on any network.”

“But you just said that these MEMs, their natural proclivity is to try to link with another system. So if you—well, I don’t know—
starve
them for contact, what do they link with?” Then he remembered that crowded air in the animal room. “To each
other?”

She nodded. “But, again, limited by distance the way one would see with microwave transmission, or line of sight technology. I keep trying to separate them. Interrupt the MEMs, introduce a lesion, all sorts of things. But I keep failing. I separate them too long or too far, they die.”

“Well, then, that would be the end of it, wouldn’t it? I mean, you really can’t take this any further.” But that was a lie. Because Bashir knew that he’d have been tempted to take the next logical step. “What did you do?”