Ell Donsaii 12: Impact! (16 page)

On another front, D5R has used a large port to retrieve astronaut Phil Zabrisk from Mars after he fell in the Valles Marineris, injuring his hip. Work with animals has shown that being “ported” may cause significant neurologic issues. It is unclear what exactly is going to happen to Mr. Zabrisk because he is the first human being to actually go through a port.

Francis Ementhal, the disgraced leader of the defunct Committee for Extraterrestrial Affairs has publicly accused D5R and Ell Donsaii of overextending themselves. “They find themselves unable to cope with these disasters. If only they had been properly managed, these situations could have been prevented…”

When President Stockton was asked about Ementhal’s comments, she said, “The events of which he speaks were a natural disaster and an accident. It is not clear to me how ‘proper management’ can prevent such incidents…”

As Warren’s mother led him into the facility at D5R his stomach was practically cramping.
He kept wondering,
what if this doesn’t work?

A few minutes later, a pleasant sounding young woman named Bridget led them into a large room where Warren was quite distracted by the sounds of many conversations, various tools and other noises and vibrations he didn’t recognize.

Then he heard Dr. Keller’s voice, “Warren, there you are! Are you ready to try out your neurotrode?”

The familiar voice settled Warren’s nerves quite a bit. “As ready as I’ll ever be I guess. I’m not sure what I’m gonna do though if it doesn’t work. I think my head might explode.”

“Mine too, mine too,” Keller chuckled. “Actually I’m pretty sure it’s gonna work. Sending impulses to nerves is something we’ve been doing for a long time after all. What I’m really worried about is whether you’re going to be able to interpret the impulses we send you. I really doubt that we’ll be able to do anything that immediately gives you a ‘picture’ to look at.”

Warren’s mother helped him get seated at a table.

Keller said, “Okay, tell me what you see when I do this.”

Warren involuntarily jerked his head back as a series of colored sparks flew across his field of vision, generally traveling from left to right. “I saw sparks!” he said holding his hand up and moving it through the air in front of him from left to right. He wiggled his fingers in an attempt to somehow show the scattered location of the sparks.”

Keller sighed, sounding disappointed.

“What’s wrong?! I
saw
something, isn’t that good?”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s good,” Keller said. Warren could tell he was
trying
to sound upbeat. “You saw something and that’s great. We’ve done a lot of work in animals to determine the kind of signals the cells in the retina send out through their neuron’s axons in response to light striking them. We’ve been worried that the signals we generate in your optic nerve axons might not be perceived as light at all. Actually, scattered sparks were what I expected you to see. Well… I’m assuming from the way you wiggled your fingers around that you saw a bunch of scattered sparks?”

Warren nodded.

“It’s okay, it really is. I was just hoping that it
might
just possibly have been a single line like I drew on the screen. It just means you’re going to have to spend some time teaching the AI where each of your axons is located in your visual field. Then the AI will be able to convert images from the camera into something that will look like a picture to you.”

“Teaching the AI?”

“Yeah, for instance where do you see this spark?”

A spark of light appeared just to the left of center in Warren’s field of view, or what he vaguely remembered as a field of view from back when he could see as a little kid. He said, “It’s pretty much in the center, just a little bit to the left actually.”

“That’s okay,” Dr. Keller said. “I’m putting a trackball in front of your hand to help you communicate with the computer. If you’d roll the ball it will stimulate different axons. To you it should seem to move the spark. Tell me when you’ve got it lighting up an axon that seems to be exactly in the center.”

Warren moved it and the spark jumped around but generally moved in the direction he moved the ball. He kept moving it until he felt like the spark it generated was in the center and said so. Another spark flashed up into Warren’s field of view. Keller said, “Where’s that new spark in relation to the first spark?”

“Up high and just a little
and
to the right,” Warren said.

“Okay,” Keller said. “Leave it up high but move it until you feel like it’s centered right over the one in the middle.” Next Keller had him center one at the left edge of his field of view, the right edge, and then the bottom center. “You’re going to be doing this until you’re absolutely sick of it. The issue is, that the axons in your optic nerve are only approximately arranged in the same way the neurons are organized behind your retina. That means that if we just send impulses to axons that are in the same relative location as the pixels in the video image from the camera, the spots of light you see will all be a little bit out of place. In theory you’ve got to tell us where
each
axon is located in your visual field. Now that we’ve got an approximate grid of your retina from the center, left, right, top, and bottom neurons you’ve picked out, you can just tell us which axon lights up a spot in relation to those that we’ve already located.” He sighed, “There are over a million neurons though, so once you’ve got your image to be pretty good I’m worried you’ll be sick of it and probably quit doing it. Your brain may adjust to them being a little bit out of place too. We’ll give you a trackball to take home with you, but I’d like you to work with the AI here until we’re sure everything’s going okay. We’ll also need you to tell the AI what color you see.”

“Wait, can’t you just feed me a picture, even if it's bad?”

“Well, we can, but it’ll be really messed up because we’ll be activating axons that aren’t quite in the right place. The image will be incredibly blurry.”

“Believe me, ‘blurry’ will be an enormous improvement over my current situation!”

“Ah… well yes, you’re probably right. Here goes.”

Suddenly Warren’s field of view was awash in light and color. It looked nothing like his vague memories from childhood. However, there was a large dark area off to his right surrounded by blurry light. He turned his head and a dark area moved into his field of view from the left.
Could that be Mom?
Goosebumps tingled on his scalp as he reached out with his left hand and a smudge appeared in front of the blurry object he thought might be his mother. “Mom?”

“Warren?” she said, her voice sounding choked.

“I can see!” he paused, tilted his head, then said, “Well, kinda…”

***

Vanessa’s AI reminded her that Zage Kinrais was due in the lab in just a few minutes. She’d been viewing his pending arrival with a mixture of anticipation and dread ever since his dad had called to make another appointment. Talking to the kid had been… arduous at his last visit. She wasn’t sure exactly why, but after some thought she’d decided that it had to do with the great jumps her brain had to make to keep up with the little brainiac’s thought processes. Alternating brilliant intuitive leaps with stupid questions that demonstrated a lack of basic understanding of some of the microbiological processes involved made the runt’s conversations difficult to follow. Not that his questions were really “stupid.” She actually wouldn’t think they were stupid if one of her undergraduate students asked them. However, having those kinds of questions asked in the middle of a conversation where he had demonstrated graduate-level comprehension of other parts of the subject resulted in something of a rollercoaster ride for her brain.

During the kid’s first visit he had suggested having people swallow ports so that they could get samples of the microbiological flora at different locations in their gut. She had mentioned this idea to Dr. Turner, her professor, and he had been just as stunned as she had been by the concept. They had immediately done a careful search of the literature, finding to their astonishment that no one had yet published on the use of ports to evaluate the gut flora. They had ordered some small ports. As they feared, the standard ports did not survive passing through the acids of the stomach so they had had to apply an enteric coating to protect them until they reached the intestines. However, from the upper intestine on, they had been able to obtain frequent samples of the gut microflora in the different areas. They would be submitting a paper on those results as soon as they could get it written up.

Ports swallowed before, then another port shortly after various meals were starting to give them data on the effects of certain foods on the intestinal microbiome. Vanessa’s own idea had been to evaluate the effect of pumping oxygen through a swallowed port. The lower parts of the intestine were anaerobic and the oxygen quickly wiped out the obligate anaerobes living there. She expected to learn more interesting things by putting other materials through ports into different portions of the intestine.

The most astonishing thing to Vanessa was that ordinary people had been able to buy ports for about 3 to 5 years now and she hadn’t yet heard of anyone swallowing ports as a form of intestinal bypass to control their weight. Admittedly, buying ports for that purpose would be pretty expensive unless you recycled them by sifting them out of your stools, washing them off and swallowing them again, but Vanessa was pretty sure someone, somewhere, must have thought of it, and if they’d thought of it,
surely
someone had tried it. They’d have to build some kind of pumping system to pull stuff out of their intestines and working with the stuff that came out would be pretty disgusting, but surely
someone
would do it.

People were going to make themselves sick doing it. It probably wouldn’t be as bad as bulimia, which damaged your teeth and imbalanced your chemistry by throwing up stomach acid that your body had invested in making, but even taking stuff out of the intestines was going to cause some problems. At the very least some people would overuse it and become malnourished. On the other hand, she supposed that, if it was done right, it could be safer and healthier than a surgical bypass.

Vanessa was once again considering whether there was any way she could get involved in commercializing a product for port-based intestinal bypass when the kid showed up. “Hey Zage, how are you doing today?”

“I’m fine, have you guys tried using ports to evaluate the microflora in different parts of the intestine yet?

Vanessa felt her own smile tighten. She’d hoped the kid would have forgotten his suggestion by now; after all, he wasn’t even four yet. She regretted not telling Dr. Turner that the port sampling idea had come from the kid in the first place. Though putting a three-year-old on an academic paper seemed ridiculous on the face of it, it
had
been the kid’s idea. Trying not to grit her teeth, she said, “We’ve been doing that all right. We’re learning a lot about how the bacterial population of the intestines change in the different regions.”

“Can we run a set of samples from my intestinal tract? I’d really like to know whether there are any big differences between my microflora and what you found in people who aren’t fat like me.”

Taken aback again by the kid calling himself “fat,” Vanessa smiled and said, “Oh, come on you’re not that heavy!”

Zage stared at her with a frown for a moment, “I assume you’re only trying to be ‘polite.’ My weight’s at the 98
th
percentile for kids my age and I certainly qualify as ‘obese.’ In any case, whether you think I’m fat or not,
I
think I’m fat and I’d like to do something about it. Could you run some samples on me?”

Now it was Vanessa’s turn to frown. Tilting her head she said, “That would pose a lot of problems. Our research protocol only covers people over the age of 18. You’ve got to be able to sign consent, and you’re too young to do that. In addition, even if we did have specimens from you we wouldn’t know how they compared to other kids your age. Kids are often a lot different than adults.”

Zage rolled his eyes expressively to show what he thought of these problems. “What if I got my parents to sign consent?”

“Sorry, our protocol still only covers people over the age of 18.”

“So, don’t consider me to be a research subject. We’ll just do it ‘because I’m interested’ not because you’re trying to do an experiment on me.”

Vanessa shrugged but shook her head, “That’s a slippery slope we don’t want to get onto. Someone might accuse us of trying to go around the research protocols.”

The kid actually sighed at her. “Okay, let me buy some micro arrays from you guys and I’ll bring them back in a while and pay to have them run.”

Her eyebrows rose, “You have your own money?”

He nodded, “But you can talk to my mom and dad to make sure you have their approval.”

She shook her head again, “Ports don’t do so well passing through the stomach’s acid environment. We have to enteric coat them to protect them until they get to the intestines. If we did that for you it would be pretty obvious that we had supported what you were doing and we could really get in trouble.”