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“Hey Mom,” he croaked, “I’m okay, you will see, they fixed me up, I will be good as new.”

Upon hearing his voice, Yang’s mother seemed to begin crying even more.  Gus did not look any better either.  Yang looked at him imploringly.    Yang was starting to feel embarrassed by the outpouring of sympathy.

Gus shook his head slowly, “Yang,” he began, “there is something else…”

The clouds from the anesthesia were now lifting.  Yang could see clearly about the room and he realized he was in for bad news.  Was he hurt somewhere else?  Would he lose his arm?

“My God,” he thought, “They are going to amputate my arm.”

He looked at his right arm again, taking jealous ownership of the strange purple and red finger tips; he tried to wiggle them and to his relief he could see that they moved.

“I think my arm is okay,” Yang said to reassure himself and the others,

“Look, I can wiggle my fingers.”

“It’s not you,” Gus replied.

Yang felt a hollow ache in his belly that turned slowly into nausea together with growing realization.

“Where is Liang?” he asked, forcing his raspy voice to remain calm, “Where is my sister?”

Gus frowned, “It was Tommy Chin,” he said, “Tommy came here last night and he took her to Squabash.  They shot up the village.  They killed the old man that raised chickens and taught at the school, and then they took Liang.” 

Once he got going, Gus had a lot to say,

“We could not stop him.  He’s got a gang together.  He calls them his deputies.  They are all wearing two six-guns.  One has rubber bullets and the other is loaded with real bullets.”

Yang’s world view narrowed.  The angst and nausea he was feeling, the discomfiture from his mother’s sympathy began a slow boil.  He felt his jaw clench with determination.  Yang pulled his left hand free from his Mother’s grasp and sat upright in the bed.  The man in the white coat began to object, but when he saw the expression on Yang’s face; he thought better of it and quickly stepped out of the room.

Yang stood and clumsily yanked the I.V. Drip from his arm.  The needle was deeply set and required two long pulls to extract it completely.  A spot of blood slowly expanded from where the IV was pulled out.  The red spot growing across the white gauze bandage.

Yang stripped the bandage wrappings from around his fingers and hand until he could manage rudimentary clenching actions with his right hand.  His arm was still very painful and he endured sharp pain when he moved his hand, but now he could now use his right arm for simple tasks like holding the reigns while riding, or holding the gun while loading bullets.

Yang could hear Gus and his Mother talking to him in both Western Slang and Chinese, imploring him to stay and discussing the situation among
themselves
. 

The words buzzed around his ears like angry insects, distracting him from his purpose.  He dressed deliberately.  His blood stained cowboy clothes were in the small standup closet by the bed.  He took his time.  No Squib suit today, he left this behind.  But the Interface device, he connected.  Gus helped him by setting the device on his head and the attaching the pressure sensors to his major muscle groups.  He pulled the sensor array across his back to his left arm and attached the hand sensors to his left hand.  If the players wanted real violence, then today they would finally get what they were waiting for.

Yang buckled the holster around his waist and then twisted it around until the six-gun was resting on his left thigh.  This put the buckle across the small of his back and the rubber bullets across his belly.

With his left hand he popped the rubber bullets out of their loops.  Yang listened to the loud, clink, clink,
clink
onto the tile floor.  Like most of the cowboys at Squabash, Yang had stashed a box of lead bullets in his saddlebag.  Today he would be loading his gun with lead.

He was ready.  Without a word, he walked purposefully out of the room and down the hall, exiting the medical wing.  Gus and his mother followed behind like an after-thought.

He made his way past the costume department and past the executive offices.  He walked past the doors that led to the array of servers that connected the players to the interface devices and past the cubicles where technicians monitored the game and kept the interfaces running.  Yang worked his way through the familiar maze to the loading bay which was now converted into a makeshift stable.  His tall horse was there, and when the horse saw Yang he stamped the ground and snorted with enthusiasm.  The horse was ready to run. 

Yang had trouble saddling the horse with only one good arm, so he stepped aside and let Gus help him.  Yang’s mother had stopped imploring him to stay and had accepted that he would go. 

As Gus prepared the horse, Yang’s mother tugged at him and fussed with him.  Finally, Gus was finished and the horse was ready to ride.

Yang mounted the horse clumsily using his left arm to pull himself up by the saddle horn.

Gus opened the gate.  Bright golden light marked a square on the floor of the dimly lit stable.

“What are ya gonna do?” Gus asked, “Take on Tommy Chin and his whole gang of deputies with your right arm busted?  They are shooting lead bullets now.”

Yang fished into his saddlebag pouch and pulled out the tobacco kit.  He put a thin black cigarillo, and then struck a match. He puffed until the tip of the cigarillo glowed red and black and ashes formed.  He breathed deep and pulled the rough grey smoke deep into his lungs.  His eyes watered.  When he spoke, the smoke trailed from his mouth and nose.  He said,

“I’m going to get Liang.”

Yang spurred the horse hard with both heels and the tall horse leaped through the open door of the stable and out into the gold light.  The grey smoke that had punctuated his words swirled about in his wake; twisting in the light from the open door.  The smoke slowly dissipating, and then it was gone.

“The discovery of a new technology is like the conception of new life. Passionate scientists exchange inspiration in a sticky messy and extremely gratifying interchange of mind.  Through this process a new idea is conceived and for better or worse, a new technology begins to gestate.”

-  Christopher Mark

When Franklin’s attention refocused into the room, Anand was not longer talking about the Cowboys fighting at Wild West Alive and instead he had returned to his ruminations about the pseudo relationship he had working with the Neurosurgeon. 

“There was never a single ‘Eureka’ moment,” Anand was saying, “It was a series of small successes followed by minor setbacks.  The team was multi-national.  Each specialist would focus on solving problems in their area of specialty.  No one of us could have done it alone.”

Franklin realized Anand had been talking for some time and he had not been paying attention.  In the notebook, his notes were his own remembrances of the fearful encounter on his dark doorstep and his surprise at finding a new Warmbot delivered to his home.  Dolly of course assumed he had bought it in time for the dinner party, but he knew he had not.  He could not afford such an extravagance.  This was followed by pages about his experience at the courthouse and his discovery of the media file that showed the murder of Christopher Mark.

Anand continued speaking; he seemed unaware that Franklin had not been paying attention to his monologue. 

Anand said, “My relationship with Sadhna was professional.  I admired her skill as a surgeon and her brilliance as a research scientist.  I also admired her.  Eventually the project progressed past the theoretical and we were ready for experimentation.  We were ready for a human trial.  It was agreed that we would meet at the Neuro-Science unit at the medical research center in Lost Angeles where Sadhna maintained a laboratory and an office.

“I remember before I left for
Los Angeles
, I met with Chris Mark and Al McKnight.  They were keenly interested in our progress and wanted to discuss the next steps.  Chris Mark had a naturally curious mind and when he got focused on a topic he could easily be distracted by a tangent that he found interesting.  Sometimes fifteen minutes of conversation would elapse before I could steer him back to the topic at hand, sometimes we never settled anything and the conversation just rambled aimlessly. 

Al McKnight, on the other hand was a man of few words.  He would doggedly follow a topic till he was satisfied with the response.  When McKnight spoke, those around him listened.  McKnight commanded your attention.  Conversationally, Mark and McKnight
were
a picture of contrast.

“We are close,” I explained standing in the executive conference room that was nearby both of their offices. 

Mark and McKnight occupied the top floor of the same building that had housed the offices of Remote Surgical Instruments.  The newly imagined company “RSI Gaming” retained the acronym but none of the original product line.  The firm had grown exponentially with the success of Wild West Alive.

The view from the conference room included the growing metropolis and rolling hills of Pleasanton and Dublin.  In the distance Mount Diablo could be seen rising above the houses and freeways. 

It is strange to think that Al McKnight and I are both now here, in the Minimum Security prison only a few short miles from where we once looked out from that conference room.  Anand, paused to consider the juxtaposition of then and now, but did not comment further.

Anand continued saying,

“I told them that I was meeting the research team at the neurological research center next week and we were preparing to commence with human trials.”

Mark was inquisitive, “You think you can solve the bandwidth issues?” He asked,

I was not confident, but answered yes anyway.  Mark quizzed me on the latest developments.

“Our plan,” I explained, “Is to read and replicate the synaptic impulses at the brain stem.  Our thinking is we will introduce an extremely sensitive sensor array which will detect the transmission of neurotransmitters across dendrites.  We will attempt to isolate the Dorsal Root
ganglia which includes
all sensory perceptions.  We are not interested in autonomic functions like heartbeat.  Once captured, we can duplicate the transmission of the sensory signals into the remote subject.  It will be like installing another extension on your vid-phone.  We will basically be initiating an organic conference call.  One host, one set of sensory organs, multiple receptors reading the signals simultaneously.  We are calling the process “Synaptic Derivation.”

Al McKnight was restless and becoming disinterested in the dissection of the minutia of the process.  He asked, “Will you be ready for launch of the new game?  Will you be ready to deploy the new system for
Rome Alive
?”

I had no idea if this technology would work at all, let alone if we could have a production ready model in time for the launch of
Rome Alive
.  But I looked at McKnight and answered as confidently as I could.

“I think yes,” I said, “We are very close.”

McKnight stared at me. I think he suspected an ulterior motive.  “Is Dr. Singh meeting you at the research center?” He asked.

“Quite right,” I answered coolly.  “She is leading the neurological work.  She will perform the surgery and implant the device into our test subjects.”

“Mmmm,” McKnight made a humming noise and was silent. 

Chris Mark on the other hand, had stopped paying any attention to this conversation.  He was preoccupied by the schematic of the prototype neural implant that I had handed him.

“So obviously it worked,” Franklin interrupted to move the narrative along and to steer Anand away from any additional details about the inner working of the neural implant device.

“Quite right, quite right,” Anand said.  “It worked, as you say.”

“Today we take it for granted, but back then it was quite new.  Sadhna and I were the first ever to “Synap in” as they call it now.  We were the first to remotely connect to a device that was integrated with the Host’s brain stem.  We were innocents at play. 
Each of us connecting to a remote host via a rudimentary prototype Synap Suit.
  I remember the feeling of controlling the host’s body.  It was so much different from the rudimentary pressure point device we developed for Wild West Alive.  I could really feel what the Host was feeling.  As soon as I was Synapped-In I felt invigorated.  My senses were attuned to his body.  His strength was my strength.  I could hear his strong pulse in my ears.  I felt vital.  But more than that, I was free of my own body.  I was outside myself.

“I think for Sadhna it must have been the same.  We had escaped the confines of self.  We were no longer, Son or Daughter, Husband or Wife.  We were outside of our cultural constraints.  We felt brand new.
”

“The experiments began with simple coordination exercises and then progressed from there.  Soon we felt confident to go for a walk.  From the Neuro-lab we made our way through the hospital and found ourselves on the outskirts of the college campus nearby Sahdna’s research laboratory.  Life buzzed all around us.  College students were walking, talking laughing.  Skimmers zipped by on the street.  It was quite different than wearing the hat.  No one could tell we were controlling the hosts remotely.  We seemed just like everyone else.  We were just two college students on a walk across campus.  We made our way east and eventually wandered into a Botanical Garden.

“I remember
I could feel the cooling of the air on the face of my host as afternoon became dusk.  I was acutely aware of smells and sounds.  Once inside the garden, amid the exotic plants and shrubs we explored our environment.  We played.  We innocently romped about.  We explored the pathways and waterways.  Each new plant was a delight, touching the soft or oily leaves of strange ferns or grass or cactus.”

Anand’s descriptions of his romantic encounter in the garden stirred old memories in Franklin.  Franklin remembered his own romantic encounter in a college campus garden.  He remembered the day he met Dolly.  Franklin closed his eyes in an attempt to physically repress the memories and thereby stay here in this moment, but the memories were too strong.

* * * * *

Franklin opened his eyes and it was dark.  The room was lit only by the green glow of the numbers on the alarm clock.  They said 5:35AM.  His roommate was still sleeping.  Franklin could see the dark silhouette like a large lump in other bed across the small dorm room.  Franklin stood quietly and picked up his soap and his towel. 

Then he toed his flip-flops from beneath his bed and quietly stepped out of the room; careful not to wake his sleeping room-mate.  He accomplished these surreptitious maneuvers with practiced ease.  Franklin’s daily routine was to wake up very early and get to the communal shower before anyone else was awake.  The shower was a big open area where there was no privacy. He was self-conscious about his large size and was uncomfortable with the thought of showering together with the other guys from his dorm.   Alone in the large shower area he turned on multiple shower heads simultaneously and luxuriated as the hot steam rose around him.

After the shower and a shave, Franklin made his way down to the dorm cafeteria and waited for it to open.  Being first in line meant he would get breakfast with the early kids who were rushing to catch an 8AM lecture; later he would get back in line and dine with the bulk of the dorm students who had classes that started later in the day.  It was during this second breakfast that his room-mate and his room-mates friends might join him.  The dorm would get full and table space was sometimes hard to find.

Franklin was picking at the last of second breakfast when his room-mate arrived.

“Hey Doug,” Franklin said casually.

“Hey Tempo,” Doug said as he placed his breakfast tray on the table next to Franklin and sat down.  Doug began to unceremoniously devour a stack of pancakes.

Franklin flipped open the college paper and started to read.  The lead article was regarding the Anti-Organic Robotics Association (AORA).  Apparently, Hans Hoobler, the founder, was coming to campus that evening to give a speech. 

As Franklin read, he used his peripheral vision to monitor Doug.  Doug was popular.  He was tall, smart and popular with girls.  He was Franklin’s room-mate by pure luck of the draw.  Doug had lots of friends and lots of girlfriends. 

This tenuous link to his roommate was Franklins only link to a social life.  Usually this was nothing more than a meaningless conversation over breakfast and then Franklin would not see Doug again until Doug stumbled into the dorm room late at night.  As Doug was finishing the last bites, Franklin ventured a conversation.

“Hans Hoobler is giving a speech tonight,” Franklin offered.

“Hmm,” Doug answered, no
t really saying anything at all;
t
hen swilled some coffee.

Franklin pressed on. He said

“Nothing like a political rally to bring the fawns out.”

Doug snorted;
then chortled.

“Bring the fawns out” he repeated, then continued,

“What would you know about fawns? Have you ever been with a girl?
Any girl?”

Franklin realized he had pushed it too far.  Franklin often heard Doug swapping war stories of female conquests with his buddies.  They all referred to new girls on campus as fawns.  Doug and his group had too many girls that they shared too easily.  These girls were too easy; therefore the idea of hunting new girls, fawns, was more challenging.  Doug and his friends would assume an aristocratic air and say it was more sporting; and then they would laugh.

Franklin was not part of this group, but he wanted in.  Franklin had never been with a girl.  He had never had a date, kissed a girl or even held hands with a girl.  But he hoped that through the raw luck of being assigned a dorm room with a popular womanizer he might gain entry into his club and into his world; but now he realized he had overplayed his hand.

Franklin hid behind the newspaper and did not say anything.  His neck and ears felt hot.

“Hey Tempo” Doug softened.  Doug felt guilty.  He knew his roommate admired him and wanted to be his friend.  Now he felt guilty for crushing him. 

Doug said, “Tell you what…I’ll meet you at the speech tonight and introduce you to a girl.”

Franklin realized that Doug was being magnanimous, that this gesture was nothing more than charity.  But this was college and Franklin was desperately alone.  Franklin’s response, therefore, was not complex; there were no hurt feelings or bruised dignity necessary to overcome.

Franklin simply said,

“
Great, Thanks Doug; I will see you there.”

* * * * *

That night, at the speech, Franklin crowded together with a mass of students; continually looking for Doug.   As always, Franklin felt self-conscious about his size and he felt conspicuously alone.  He read and then re-read the literature that was passed out at the door.  It warned about the evils of using organic material to build robotic structures.  It did not mean anything to Franklin.  As the students continued to enter the hall the crowd began to push together and even someone as large and alone as Franklin became one of many.  Franklin began to feel more comfortable.  It was a rare moment where he was able to blend in and feel has was part of the group.  Franklin continued to scan the doorways, looking for Doug’s wave of black hair set atop his tall frame.