The Jigsaw Man (9 page)

logical system is made up of billions and billions of

individual nerve cells, all lined up in rows like,' s a y . . .

a marching band. Not a great analogy but it works.

W h e n the bandleader, the brain in other words, wants

the trumpet player to perform a certain tune, it tells the

first nerve cell in the line. This first link in the chain

then passes the request along to the next cell until the

t r u m p e t player gets the message and starts playing the

song, or in human terms, the foot starts to walk, or the

fingers start to wiggle, or whatever. Get it?

"Well, when one of the nerve cells is damaged or dead,

the message from the brain can't be passed along prop¬

erly, but we've come up with a way to fix that. There are

a few factors that are vitally important in order to succeed,

repulsed. W h a t he'd accomplished was nothing short of

miraculous, and sitting thinking about it left me speech¬

less. I had a million questions I wanted to ask, but couldn't

seem to find the words to start. Apparently my fellow

body part donors had been similarly affected by what

they'd seen. The looks on their faces clearly expressed

the same mixed feelings of horror, disbelief, acceptance,

curiosity, and fascination likely mirrored on my own

face. It was Drake who eventually broke the silence.

"Do you still need m e , sir?" he asked his boss.

"Err ... n o , Mr. Drake. You can run along if you'd

like. Why don't you check and see how Cook is coming

along with lunch. I'll j u s t answer whatever questions

our guests have, then we'll meet up with you in the din¬

ing room "

Drake nodded and flew out of the room without an¬

other word. Maybe my eyes were playing tricks on m e ,

still getting used to the bright lights again, but I was

fairly sure I'd seen the front of Drake's tracksuit pants

bulging out as if he'd had an erection. W a s that possi¬

ble? I found it inconceivable anyone could find anything

we'd been shown remotely arousing. Incredible, yes, but

erotic—not a chance. Drake would have to be one to¬

tally sick fuck to be turned on by—

"Any questions, gentlemen?" Dr. Marshall asked, in¬

terrupting my dark thought. "Come now. Surely some¬

one has something they'd like to ask?"

"Were those things
real}"
Wheels asked, absently

scratching the stump of his missing leg.

"Things?" the doctor asked, being playfully coy. "The

body parts? Of course they were real. I should apolo¬

gize. I underestimated how shocking this all must look.

I did warn you the video was a bit graphic."

I almost burst out laughing. That had to be the un¬

derstatement of the year. It was like saying the Pacific

Ocean was a
bit
wet.

though. Time is one of those factors. The severed limb

can't be allowed to j u s t he around. Blood is another. A

steady and strong blood flow must be reestablished as

soon as possible. The faster this can be done, the better.

"This is where most scientists and surgeons go wrong.

In their haste to reestablish blood flow, they immedi¬

ately reattach the severed limb back onto the patient's

body. The blood flow is returned, but the nervous sys¬

tem is usually dead or dying and now there's no way to

try repairing it. They j u s t sit back and hope time and

rest will eventually heal the damage.

"At this institute we've taken a radically different ap¬

proach. Blood supply must be reestablished, of course,

but nobody said we had to sew the limb back onto a

body to accomplish that."

W h e e l s , in the front row closest to the doctor, let out

a little gasp, drawing all of our attention. Slapping

the armrest of his chair for emphasis, he finally made

the connection I'd figured out earlier while watching the

video. "It's those damn machines, isn't it? They're what

p u m p the blood. They're how you reestablish the blood

supply without a body, right?"

"Exactly. It's relatively simple too. We j u s t connect

the tubes right into the existing main veins and arter¬

ies. If you've ever known anyone who's undergone a

heart transplant, or more common still, heart bypass

surgery, you'll know that the doctors stop the patient's

heart so they can work on it. To do this, they hook the

patient up to a machine called a cardiopulmonary by¬

pass machine, or CBM for short. The surgeon redirects

the flow of blood away from the heart into this C B A ' ,

which will perform the function of the human heart

and lungs for as long as the operation takes.

"It's an amazing machine. N o t only does it rhythmi¬

cally p u m p blood throughout their bodies, it also warms

the blood to maintain the patient's core temperature,

and oxygenates the blood as well, acting as a set of

healthy lungs.

"An interesting fact a lot of people don't know is that

when a patient flatlines in ICU after bypass surgery,

they bring him or her into the OR and hook them back

up to the cardiopulmonary bypass machine. That way,

the doctors can work on the patient's heart without the

frantic pressure of the ticking clock working against

them. Instead of minutes, their window of opportunity

can be expanded, and they will often
resurrect
someone

whose heart has been literally stopped for hours. I've

always found that fascinating.

"Normal CBMs are quite bulky and heavy to move,

but ours have been redesigned smaller, more efficient,

and portable so they can be moved from operating

rooms, to the labs, to anywhere they might be needed.

We have a minor problem keeping up with our con¬

stant need for fresh blood, but besides that, the system

works fabulously.

"In the medical community, the record for the lon¬

gest a patient has been kept alive on one of these ma¬

chines is twenty-eight days. Most people would agree

that's an impressive number, but not around here it isn't.

Using a specially modified version of this heart bypass

machine, which I hold the patent on, some of the body

parts shown on the video were kept alive for several

m o n t h s . Our personal record is one hundred and n i n e

teen d a y s . . . and counting. That's right, it's still alive.

It's a left leg, and if you're np to it, we'll check on how

it's doing when we tour the labs after lunch."

Everyone agreed they'd like to see the doctor's work

with their own eyes. I put my hand up to ask a question

but Bill Smith beat me to it.

"Hey, Doc? W h a t about those wires r u n n i n g all over

the place? I figured out they were what was making the

body parts move, but can you tell us how?"

"Certainly, Mr. Smith, but the how is the easy part,

it's j u s t electrical stimuli. The real question is
'why?
It's

not just to freak you guys out. Far from it, in fact. The

motion you witnessed is the most crucial part of our

research here. Let me go back a bit and explain.

"Blood supply is obviously important, but what

we've found is even more vital is electrically stimulat¬

ing the multitude of exposed nerve endings. Remember

we talked about how the nerve ceils line up in a row?

Well, the human nervous system is incredibly complex,

but basically it's made up of the nerve cells, the syn¬

apses, or gap between the cells, the spine, which acts as

the highway for the stimuli, and the brain itself, which

runs the whole show. The brain is a type of huge bat¬

tery source, which produces and sends an electrical im¬

pulse down the spine and along a certain nerve chain,

cell by cell, to reach a specific spot. It's called electrotonus, which is the altered state of a nerve during the

passage of an electric current through it. You under¬

stand this all happens almost instantaneously and it's

far more complicated than I've gotten into, but not

nearly as complex as
We
once thought.

"Take the hand you saw in the video. Normally, the

brain would send the signal down the proper n e u r o pathway to tell the hand to, let's say, flex its index finger.

My fiber-optic network can do the exact same thing.

The hand in the video has no idea that it isn't still at¬

tached to an arm and a body, as it once was. It's still re¬

ceiving the electrical signal to move one of its fingers. It

doesn't make any difference, as far as the hand is con¬

cerned, that the stimuli are being transmitted along a

wire rather than a chain of nerve cells. The function of

the brain in these experiments is performed by a highly

sophisticated computer program, nowhere near as com¬

plex as an organic brain, but more than capable of carry¬

ing out the rudimentary tasks we're asking it to do."

The scientist paused long enough to see if we were

managing to keep up with what he was saying. It was

making some sense to me but a couple of the other guys

were kind of shaking their heads in confusion. Rather

than answering a ton of questions, Dr. Marshall held

his hand up to quiet us down, and carried on with his

explanation.

"Let me walk you through it. I hope it will make

things clearer. Okay, when a limb suffers the kind of se¬

vere trauma associated with an accidental amputation,

it's inevitable that many nerve cells will be too damaged

to survive. There's n o t h i n g anyone, including m e , can

do about it. This is why it's wrong to try reattaching the

limb to the patient's body right away. All you're doing is

connecting two dead nerve cells together, effectively

blocking the path the brain signals travel along.

"We've discovered that if we place tiny electrical re¬

ceivers and transmitters into the exposed body tissue,

the nerves below are still healthy and wondering what

the hell is going on. N o t on the surface tissue, where the

nerve cells are mostly dead or far too damaged, but be¬

low that, into the next link in the chain, if you will.

These nerves are still ready and waiting for the brain's

next signal.

"Our mainframe computer tracks the transmitting

signal it is sending out, and when it is received by a

neuropath inside the limb, the computer locks on its

location and continues to feed it electrical stimuli. It's a

bit hit and miss, but we try and locate as many undam¬

aged neuropathways as we can, then sit back and wait.

If all goes as planned, the traumatized limb settles back

down and starts to act as if n o t h i n g has happened. It's

receiving a more than adequate blood supply and a con¬

stant transmission of brain-simulated electrical stimuli.

I'm oversimplifying again, but basically those are the

only two things the limb needs.

"Those spastic, jerky motions you noticed in the

video are actually induced by us. The body parts don't

really need that much stimulation to stay healthy, but

we do it anyway j u s t to keep the muscles from succumb¬

ing to atrophy.

"It's not a perfect system, by any means, and some¬

times all our efforts still end up going for naught, but

our success rate now stands at j u s t over ninety-one per¬

cent. N o t too shabby, h u h ? "

He stopped talking and once again the small confer¬

ence room was silent, but this time it wasn't uncomfort¬

able. Unlike the tension-61'ed silence that had succeeded

the video presentation, this quiet was more of a ponder¬

ing, absorbing all the facts kind of quiet. We'd been fed

a lot of information, both visually and verbally, and we

each needed a minute or two to chew it and digest it at

our own speed. Realizing this, Dr. Marshall remained

quiet, busying himself with straightening out and tuck¬

ing in the blanket covering his legs. It didn't need

straightening, but it gave us the time we needed to

gather our thoughts.

My thoughts weren't particularly nice ones. In fact,

they were downright nasty. I couldn't quite get the im¬

age of my own arm out of my head. I kept picturing it

severed from my body and twitching on some lab table

with thousands of those little colorful wires trailing

out from its ragged bloody end. It wasn't a pretty im¬

age to sit and think about so I stood up to ask the doc¬

tor a question, just to derail my morbid thoughts.

"Doctor?" I asked. "Earlier, before you showed the

video, you said the point wasn't to shock anyone but to

prove what we were going to attempt here could be done.

Maybe I'm missing something but with the obvious

success you're having with this type of thing, isn't it

becoming old hat for you? I mean, you've done this

over and over with various body parts, and to me at

least, you seem to have it down pat. W h a t do you need

us for? W h a t are you planning to attempt with
our

limbs that's so special?"

Dr. Marshall seemed to deflate in his wheelchair and

for a moment I thought I'd blown my chance at getting