Interface (25 page)

The obelisk was connected to the surrounding scaffold work by
a couple of catwalks, giving it the appearance of a keep in the center
of a medieval castle. When they walked across the bridges into the
building, they passed through some kind of a cultural divide.
Everyone working inside here was Korean, Japanese, or American and they were speaking English to each other with varying degrees of proficiency. Some of them were wearing smart, clean coveralls,
and some of them were wearing ties. Two or three big Calyx computer systems were already up and running, nice ones with
huge color screens, and engineers were using them to zoom in on
various subsystems.

"This, of course, is the essential core of the operation," Mr.
Salvador said. "The only part that you will really need in order to
continue your research. It will be ready to use in a week. As long
as you don't mind walking through an active construction site in
order to reach it, that is."

"Not at all," Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

15

Merely scooping out a hole in a man's brain and dropping in
a biochip was not enough. It was like assaulting a supercomputer
with a Skilsaw and then throwing in a handful of loose silicon chips.

The biochip had to be connected into the brain tissue in billions or trillions of different ways. All of the connections were micro
scopic and could not be made by the hand of any surgeon. They
had to grow.

Brain cells didn't grow. But the connections between them did. The network of linkages was constantly shifting and reconnecting
itself in a process that was usually described as "learning." Dr.
Radhakrishnan did not really care for this terminology because it
contained a value judgement. It implied that every time new
synapses were formed inside a person's mind it was because they
were memorizing Shakespeare or being taught how to integrate
transcendental functions. Of course, in reality most of the internal
rewiring that went on in people's brains took place in response to
watching game shows on television, being beaten up by family
members, figuring out the cheapest place to buy cigarettes, and
being conditioned not to mix plaids with stripes.

As soon as it had seemed like it was a safe bet that Mr. Easyrider
and Mr. Scatflinger were going to live for while, they were trans
ferred back to the Barracks in a specially equipped ambulance. They
were laid side by side in a separate room that had been built onto one
end of Building 2. They were connected up to numerous machines,
wired into a support system. Each of them had a red polygon on his
head, a U-shaped welt, hairy with black sutures, marking the
boundary of the flap that had been peeled back during surgery.

In the center of the area outlined by the surgical scar, a bundle
of lines was plugged into the patient's head. It passed through the middle of the flake of skull that had been neatly sawed out by Dr.
Radhakrishnan's bone saw. While Dr. Radhakrishnan had
occupied himself with implanting the biochip, a lesser surgeon - more of a technician, really - had drilled a few holes through the
disembodied chunk of skull and implanted a plastic connector. The connector was about the size of a dime and was really a cluster of
smaller connections: half a dozen tiny tubes for passing fluids in and
out, and a miniature, fifty-pin electrical plug, a nearly microscopic
version of the port on the back of a computer. Since most
communication between the biochip and the outside world was
supposed to happen over the radio, only a few of these fifty pins
were hooked up to the biochip itself. Most of them were hooked
up to sensors that monitored the patient's condition and to the
electrostimulus system that was supposed to encourage the growth
of new connections between brain and biochip.

When the operation was finished, this connector peeked
through the skin, somewhat in the fashion of a wall socket. The researchers could then interface with the patient by sticking a
matching plug into the socket; when it was stuck in properly, all of
the fluid and electrical connections were made in an instant. So
many tubes and wires were crammed together in this bottleneck that they seemed to explode from the side of the patient's head.
Some of the connections ran directly to various pieces of bedside
machinery that monitored pressure inside the skull, delivered drugs,
or helped to oxygenate the brain tissue in the biochip. Others were
taped to the head of the bed, from which they ran over to the
nearest wall, passed through a hole, and ran through a conduit that
connected the two buildings.

The people in Building 1 saw Mr. Easyrider and Mr. Scatflinger
as media entities, nothing more. No odors, no fluids, just images on
TV monitors, tracings on oscilloscopes, graphics on their Calyx workstations, and the occasional disembodied sound effect coming
out of a speaker. This, Dr. Radhakrishnan reflected, made it a lot
easier to deal with them objectively.

There was not much to do for the first few days. The brain cells in
the biochip had not yet had time to connect themselves up to the
patients' brain, so the chip was neurologically inert, just a dead
piece of shrapnel embedded in the head. Then, one morning at
about three o'clock, computer screens all over Building 1 suddenly
came alive as a neuron in Mr. Scatflinger's brain hooked up with a
neuron on the fringe of the biochip.

As soon as Dr. Radhakrishnan got there, they popped the corks
on a few bottles of champagne and then stood under the monitor
for a while, watching the data stream by. Zeldo did some typing on
his workstation and brought up a new window on the screen, this one showing a running graph of the brain activity.

"Someone go shine a light in his eyes," Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

"Yes, Doctor!" said one of his Indian grad students. He ran out
of the building, pulling a penlight from his pocket. A few moments later the grad student was visible on the closed-circuit monitor that
had been showing live coverage of Mr. Scatflinger from Building
2. All eyes flicked back and forth between the closed-circuit set and
the computer monitor as the grad student leaned over the sleeping
Mr. Scatflinger, peeled back one of his eyelids with his thumb, and
shone the penlight into it.

The graph jumped. The crowd went wild.

"Well done, Doctor," someone was saying. It was Mr. Salvador,
shaking his hand, offering a cigar. "Remarkable success, especially
under the circumstances." Around nine
a.m.,
a burst of activity showed up on Mr. Easyrider's heretofore quiescent monitor. But even in the corner of his eye, Dr. Radhakrishnan could see that something was wrong. The signals coming in from the biochip showed no clear pattern in terms of intensity or duration.

"Glitches," Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

"But a whole hell of a lot of glitches," Zeldo said.

"Glicherama," said one of the other Americans. Dr.
Radhakrishnan bit his lip, knowing that for the rest of his career,
this phenomenon, whenever it occurred, would be referred to as
Glicherama.

Sudden movement caught his eye. He looked over at the closed-
circuit monitor for Mr. Easyrider and saw, instead of the patient,
the backsides of several nurses who were standing around him,
working feverishly.

By the time Dr. Radhakrishnan made it over to Building 2, Mr.
Easyrider was dead. His heart had stopped beating. They wheeled
out the defib cart and shocked him a couple of times, trying to get
a stable rhythm back, but in the end they could get nothing but bad
rhythms on the scope, and finally no rhythm at all.

When they were sure he was dead, when they had closed his
eyes,
  
rolled
  
away
  
the
  
cart,
  
and
  
washed
  
their
  
hands,
  
Dr.
Radhakrishnan picked up the intercom to Building 1. "Are you
getting any signals from the chip?" he said. He asked the question
out of purely academic interest; supposedly there was as bit of
random electrical activity in the brain after death.
"It's been dead for a couple of minutes," Zeldo said. "Completely dead?"

"Completely dead. We didn't think to include a surge
protector."

"Surge protector?"

"Yeah. To protect the chip from sparks and lightning bolts, you
know."

"I haven't seen any lightning."

"You held the lightning in your hands. You shocked him, man.
That jolt from the defibrillator blew our chip to kingdom come."
They did a postmortem more or less on the spot. A sterile environment was not required for an autopsy, so they partitioned
off one corner of the room to prevent other patients from seeing
what was happening, and Dr. Radhakrishnan took Mr. Easyrider apart, piece by piece, paying special attention to the head.

Building 2 was a distracting work environment because it was
full of head cases - old ones dying of natural causes and new ones
being wheeled in all the time, from all over the subcontinent. Brain
injury sometimes left people as vegetables, but in some cases it
could cause bizarre behavior, and over the brief course of this
project they had already seen their quota of screeches and headbangers. In the middle of Dr. Radhakrishnan's autopsy, they
apparently brought in a new one. A loud, coarse voice began to
echo off the tin ceiling:

"WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA
WUBBA WUBBA . . ."

It was no worse than a room full of excited baboons. He
continued working, narrating his observations into a tape recorder;
but he had to speak a little more loudly now because underneath
his words was a constant background noise of WUBBA WUBBA
WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA . . .

The cause of death was obvious enough. Mr. Easyrider's body
had rejected the implant. Dr. Radhakrishnan tried to be clinical
about it.

WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA . . .
"The
  
organic
  
portion
  
of the
  
biochip
  
shows
  
pronounced
atrophy
..."

WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA . . .
"The inorganic or silicon portion of the biochip is virtually
rattling around loose inside the skull . . ." That was not very
scientific. He took a deep breath.

WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA
WUBBA WUBBA . . .

"There is considerable scarring and atrophy in the portions of the
brain adjacent to the implant." His head was spinning. He was
tired. He just wanted to sit down and have a drink. "Conclusion:
the host rejected the graft."

He was becoming conscious of another irrelevant sensory input besides the stream of WUBBAs: he was smelling perfume. It was not something that would really pass for perfume in India, where
people knew as much about tastes and smells as Americans knew about heavy metal music. This was some kind of tedious lavender-
and-roses concoction, something stupid and English.

"It appears that necrosis started at the site of the implant and
spread to the brainstem - leading to the patient's demise."
WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA . . .
"Doc?" someone said. Zeldo.

He looked up at Zeldo, feeling very tired. Zeldo had pulled the
curtain aside and was now gaping at the bloody, dismembered
corpse of Mr. Easyrider. He was not a medical person and was not
inured to this kind of thing.

Dr. Radhakrishnan turned to face Zeldo, bumping the table with his hip. The hemisphere of Mr. Easyrider's skull rocked back and
forth a little bit on the tabletop.

"Two things," Zeldo said.

"Yes?"

WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA . . .

"There's a problem with Scatflinger. And there's a lady here to
see you."

All of a sudden, the fact that he had gotten up at three in the
morning was really getting to Dr. Radhakrishnan.