Interface (19 page)

"Right," Mel said, "a bullet to the head is the most experimental therapy of all."

11

The
next time Dr. Radhakrishnan heard from Mr. Salvador was
ten days later, when two packages arrived in his office, courtesy of G
ODS, Global Omnipresent Delivery Systems. One of them was a small box. The other was a long tube. Dr. Radhakrishnan pa
used before opening them to marvel at their pure, geometric perfection. In India, as in most of the United States, mail was a dust
y, battered, imperfect thing. Mail came wrapped up in protective
layers of inexpensive, fibrous brown paper, tied together with
fuzzy twine that looked like spun granola; the contents burst thr
ough the wrapping at the corners, skid marks trailed along every sid
e, and the shapes of the packages and envelopes always came just a bit
short of the geometric ideal. Addresses were scrawled on it in magic
marker and ballpoint pen, antique-looking stamps, fresh fro
m the engraver, stuck to it, annotations made by various postal wo
rkers along the way.

That was not how Mr. Salvador mailed things. When Mr. Sal
vador mailed something, he went through GODS. The biggest nam
e in the express-mail business. Mr. Salvador's mail was not made of any paper-based substance. No fibers in there. Nothing brow
n.
 
The wrapping was
 
some kind of unbreakable plastic she
eting with a slick teflonesque feel to it, white and seamless as the ro
be of Christ. Both of the packages were festooned with brilliantly col
ored, glossy, self-stick, plasticized GODS labels. None of the lab
els, nor any other parts of the packages, had ever been sullied by hum
an hand-writing. Everything was computer-printed. Every one
of the labels had some kind of bar code on it. Some of the labels con
tained address-related information. Some contained lengthy
strings of mysterious digits. Some pertained to insurance and other
legalistic matters, and others, like medals on an officer's chest
seemed to be purely honorific in nature.

The color scheme consisted of three hues; every check box, every logo, every stern warning and legal disclaimer on every label was in one of these three hues. The hues all went together
perfectly and they looked great, whether they were on the
packages themselves or on the neatly pressed NASA-style coverall
worn by the fetching young woman who had delivered the
packages,
 
obtaining Dr. Radhakrishnan's signature on a flat-
screened notebook computer that beeped and squealed as it
beamed his digitized scrawl back to the remote computer inside
the
 
glossy,
 
tri-hued
 
GODS
 
delivery
 
van.
  
The
 
woman was
cheery, confident, professional, apparently taking a little time off
from, her normal job as a trial lawyer, aerobics instructor, or
nuclear physicist to do some life-enriching delivery work. Dr.
Radhakrishnan,
  
the
  
world's
  
greatest
 
neurosurgeon,
  
had felt
small, dirty, and ignorant before her. But before he could ask her
for a date, she was out the door, having more important things
to do.

Dr. Radhakrishnan opened the box first. There was no tape; the
magic white wrapping stuck to itself. As he pulled it apart, stickers and labels tore in half, and he got an intuition that, perhaps, part of
the thrill of receiving such mail was that you got to dramatize your
own importance by tearing it apart. It was like ravishing an
expensive, salon-fresh call girl.

Inside the wrapping was a featureless hard plastic box, white and
unmarked,
 
that had to be opened using some trick that Dr.
Radhakrishnan could not figure out right away. When the box had
been penetrated, the entire contents turned out to have been sealed
in plastic wrap, like a glass in a motel room. Dr. Radhakrishnan
knew that in the context of American culture, to seal something up
in plastic was to honor it.

The contents turned out to be a short stack of unmarked 3.5-inch floppy disks. He remembered that he and Mr. Salvador had
had a discussion about the Calyx operating system, so, on a hunch,
he popped one of the disks into the Pacific Netware workstation on
his desk.

The systems were compatible. There were a few files stored on the
disk, all in a standard format used for color images. They all sound
ed like medical scans of one type or another. D
r. Radhakrishnan opened some of them up and checked them ou
t; these files were all pictures of the same man's brain. The man had
suffered a stroke that had, to judge from the position of the two affected areas, probably interfered with his speech and caused some para
lysis on the left side. Interestingly enough, the affected parts of the
brain were isodense, which is to say that they had the same density as the healthy parts of the brain surrounding them. This ind
icated that these pictures had been taken within a few days of the
stroke.

It did not take much imagination on Dr. Radhakrishnan's part to real
ize that he was looking at the brain of Mr. Salvador's friend. Mr. Sal
vador was implicitly asking him a question: is this the type of dam
age that you can fix?

And the answer was yes. In theory. But the facility that would be req
uired to do the work did not exist and wouldn't exist for years, even with preposterously optimistic assumptions about grants and funding. Oh, you could build one anytime you wanted, if you had the
money. But who had that kind of money?

Dr. Radhakrishnan eventually outsmarted the latching system on the
tube. Rolled up inside was a thick stack of poster-sized sheets
of paper.

In his cluttered lab it took some doing just to find a table large eno
ugh to unroll them. Finally he chased Toyoda out of the coffee room
, where he had been watching MTV, and cleared off the
counter, wiped up a few spills with a napkin, and unrolled the pages across
 
the wood-grained Formica. Unrolled, the stack of sheets was nea
rly half an inch thick. They were all the same size, and all cov
ered with precise, colorful drawings.

Flipping quickly through the stack he saw floor plans, elevations, det
ailed renderings of individual rooms. The top sheet was an
elevation. It portrayed a modern, high-tech structure perched on a
piney bluff overlooking the sea. There was a modest parking lot, a
satellite dish on the roof, lots of windows, an outdoor cafeteria,
even a bicycle path. Looked like a nice place to work.

The second sheet was an elevation of an entirely different
building. This one was in an urban setting. It had an austere sand-
stone color with a few darkly tinted windows set up above street level. It was also high-tech, but at the same time it was strikingly
Indian: he could see the classic motifs of Hindu architecture,
updated and streamlined. The materials were unusual: reinforced concrete where it counted, of course, but sandstone and marble on the outside, even some traditional inlay work.

The third sheet showed the same building from a higher angle,
revealing a central, glassed-in atrium lined with offices and a bloom
with lush flowering tropical plants. Behind it, a neighborhood of
low, blocky concrete structures stretched toward a somewhat more
built-up district a few blocks away, centered on a huge circular
roadway lined with shops and offices.

Dr. Radhakrishnan was shocked to recognize the ring road: it was
Connaught Circus, the solar plexus of his home city of New Delhi.
Once he figured that out,
 
everything snapped into
 
focus, he
understood which direction he was looking in, recognized the shapes
of the Volga Hotel and the glassfront of the big British Airways office
on the Circus, the entrances to the underground bazaar.

He knew exactly where this building was. It had been drawn in
on the site
 
of the Ashok
 
Cinema,
 
a memorable,
 
if decrepit
structure, where Papa had taken him to movies as a child. Right in between Connaught Circus and the India Gate, close to the seat of
government, embassies, everything.

If this building - whatever it was - was really under construction,
or even being contemplated, it was news to him. He should have
heard about it by now, because fancy new high-tech structures did
not spring up every day there. Dr. Radhakrishnan did not know
what
  
this
  
building
  
was,
  
but
  
he
  
could
  
recognize
  
high-tech architecture when he saw it. It seemed that someone had ambitious plans to create a sort of silicon ashram.

Maybe this was some sort of an investment opportunity. Or ma
ybe they were trying to attract researchers to this new complex, But
it had to be a far-off fantasy on someone's part because if gro
und had been broken in Delhi - if this plan had even been whi
spered - Dr. Radhakrishnan would have heard about it. He was not
the most well connected Delhian by a long shot, but he knew peo
ple and he stayed in touch.

He continued paging through the stack, trying to glean some clu
es. The drawings alternated between the two buildings: the one on
the bluff above the sea and the one in Delhi.
Space was set aside for offices, R&D, laboratories, operating roo
ms, and even a few private bedrooms, complete with all of the equ
ipment you would expect to see in a state-of-the-art intensive-care
ward. Evidently these buildings were for biomedical research of
the most advanced sort.

The building in Delhi included one operating theater that was espe
cially large and complicated. Dr. Radhakrishnan found a deta
iled plan of the room and went over it carefully, growing more and
more certain as he did so that he had seen this before: it was an exa
ct reproduction of the specialized operating room that he had des
cribed to Mr. Salvador. The one that Mr. Salvador had taken
with him on those disks.
The plans for Radhakrishnan's ultimate operating theater had sim
ply been dropped whole into the blueprints for a new building. Bu
t it wasn't a hack job. The systems had all been integrated into the
ir surroundings. The plumbing lines, the electrical wiring, the gas
lines, all went somewhere. Subtle modifications had been made without changing the essential features. In fact, the room had been im
proved in several ways. Engineers had been at work on this. Very goo
d engineers.

Dr. Radhakrishnan was beginning to experience a prickly, hot fee
ling centered on the back of his neck, as though he were the vic
tim of a joke of psychological experiment. He shuffled quickly th
rough the stack, trying to get clues, looking for a point of re
ference. But he couldn't find anything that explained whether this
was reality or fantasy, who had these plans drawn up, or why.

Until he got to the last sheet, which showed an elevation of the
front entrance of the building in Delhi. The doorway was surrounded
by a massive masonry frame. The material had a rich red hue, the color of Indian sandstone. The name of the building was
carved into flat square stone next to the door, a Rosetta stone in
English and Hindi:

DR. RADHAKRISHNAN V.R.J.V.V. GANGADHAR

INSTITUTE OF BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH - DELHI
BRANCH

He read it over several times, as though this were the first time
he had ever seen his own name written down.

He sifted back through the stack, looking for elevations of the
building above the ocean. Finally he dug up an elevation showing
it from ground level, with a concrete marker set into the ground by
the entrance to the parking lot:

ROBERT J. COOVER BUILDING