Transhuman (38 page)

"But you said you've already got the papers, right?" Naylor interrupted.

"We'll, yes, they came through a few days ago. I have them in my briefcase if you'd like to go through them later."

"No need." Naylor inclined his head to indicate the direction of the office opening off from the lab area.

"If we can go in there, I'll sign 'em right now." His gaze came back to Howell but the look in the eyes was impenetrable. "I think I could enjoy this," he said.

* * *

There was none of the long, sluggish haul of dragging oneself up out of sleep to wakefulness. For a moment he thought he was still the Brom Naylor that he had been last conscious of, lying on the padded table waiting for the anesthetic to take effect. Then he realized that the positions of the ceiling vents, lights, and sprinkler outlets above him were different. It was as if a part of a tape had been snipped out and the two ends joined together, giving no sense of time having elapsed at all. The colors were all skewed, as if he were seeing through a red-tinted lens. His body felt numb, and the surroundings dead and devoid of the subtle cues that affirm the world of sound, in the way heard through blocked ears. A female voice spoke, seemingly from a thousand miles away and with the flat tonelessness of a toy phone. "Activity indexes registering, all positive and within tolerance. Low-end sensory settings confirmed. Initiation envelope is stable."

Naylor tried to lift his head but a fit of giddiness and sudden blurring made him let it fall back again. He turned it to the side and made out the reddened figure of Howell in a pink lab coat that should have been white, watching him intently. Howell's second in command, Forcomb, was in the background, with the Japanese technician, Katokawa, doing something at the screens on the console to one side of them. The console was not in the same direction from where Naylor was looking as it had been. The woman who had spoken was outside his field of vision. When the process began, there hadn't been any woman in the room.

Howell spoke, also sounding flat and far away. "Blink your eyes if you can hear and understand me. Until we've synchronized and calibrated your speech centers, vocal communication will be incapacitated." Naylor attempted to articulate and answer anyway, found that it wasn't so easy, and so blinked his eyes several times.

"Good," Howell pronounced. "Blink once for yes, twice for no. Did you understand that?" A pause, while Naylor adjusted to the strangeness of the situation. He blinked once. Yes. Howell went on, "Is there any physical discomfort?"

Two blinks. No.

"That's fine. Any feelings of distress? Indications of anything wrong?" Naylor wasn't sure how to respond. After a few seconds Howell prompted, "Neither of the above: not really yes or no?" Yes.

"Distortions of sensory perceptions, maybe? Balance impaired?" Yes. A pause, then, for emphasis, Yes.

"That's to be expected. We've biased everything initially to the low ends of the ranges. We'll work on those first, but we need your responses to guide the calibrations. Let's tackle the auditory system first. You should be hearing me as muted and faraway. Is that so?"

Yes.

"Fine. Now I want you to concentrate on my voice and indicate when it has the right loudness for somebody speaking normally from this distance. Blink once for louder, twice for softer. Three times for stop there. Is that clear?"

Yes.

"Now I'll begin. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . ." The volume of Howell's voice rose as he recited the number, but it was still short of normal."

Louder.

"Five . . . six . . . SEVEN . . . EIGHT . . ." Suddenly booming. Softer! Softer!

"NINE . . . ten."

Stop there.

They did the same thing with voice quality, going up the range of timbre and pitch until Howell sounded as a jangling clash of metallic overtones, and then back down until it was normal. A similar procedure restored color balance to the room and set its brightness.

"Now the tactile repertoire. Your body should be feeling numb and very light, yes?" Yes.

"Concentrate first on the pressure under you where it is being supported, and the sensation that it induces of weight. The weight should start increasing . . ."

They normalized his sense of touch for force and sensitivity, and then temperature. Howell explained that one of the novelties Naylor could look forward to learning would be an ability to vary the threshold and acuteness of pain. Since biosynthetic materials were more rugged and had a wider range of temperature tolerance than biological tissue, the alarm levels for an early warning system against damage could be set higher. In an emergency situation, for example, where survival might be at stake regardless of cost, the body would have the ability to effectively anesthetize itself.

With Naylor cooperating by performing a series of slow movements, his balance was tuned until the giddiness disappeared, and finally, with caution, he could sit up. Although coordination of movement would still need some work, he could already feel the difference in mobility and power. His new vision was sharper than he was used to, he found on looking around. He could read the spines of journals on a shelf on the far side of the lab, and pick out sugar grains spilled on the tray in front of the coffeepot. The table on which his former body had rested was no longer where it had been. As Piersen had warned him when she first talked about this, the transfer process was destructive to the original and couldn't be reversed. Probably they had thought it best not to let him see the results. Contemplating the place where it had stood, he discovered to his mild surprise that he didn't really care. In fact, he had to raise a hand in front of his face and wiggle the golden fingers in front of him wonderingly to reassure himself that it had really happened. He felt and thought like Brom Naylor, and he seemed to possess the memories of Brom Naylor. Had his old body walked back into the room now and claimed to be Brom Naylor, he would have contested it.

Howell came forward with a rare expression of genuine warmth on his face and clasped Naylor's hand. Forcomb was close behind, gushing congratulations, and Katokawa was on his feet behind the console, looking jubilant. The woman, Naylor could see now at another instrument panel, was Lisa Ledgrave, a scientist with the Institute, who had been present at some of the briefing and familiarization sessions that he had attended.

The project had been moved to a different, specially remodeled wing of the Institute, with a number-coded security lock on the door, where only authorized personnel were admitted. An armed guard was posted inside the door at all times, and there were doubtless other security arrangements beyond, along with surveillance devices that Naylor hadn't been told about. But he wasn't complaining. With his own residential suite attached to the lab and office area, life here had a lot more going for it than anything back at the meat house. And this way he would have all the time in the world to think about what he planned to do next. For one thing, he had some scores to be settled. Yes, Naylor told himself, yet again. He was going to enjoy this.

The wireless capability that would give Naylor's new holoptronic brain direct electronic communication was there but not activated. Howell had drawn up a strict schedule for phased progress and testing, from which he wouldn't deviate. Hence the scope of Naylor's conscious control and awareness was still restricted to its local, internal faculties. However, these were already proving more formidable than anything he had anticipated, and mastering them was, for the time being, a full-time job in itself.

"Don't think it terms of left and right. Try associating the concept of swelling and diminishing—like the volume control on a sound system." Howell checked something on one of the screens on the panel in front of him and entered an input. Apart from the guard at the door, they were the only two in the lab just at that moment. The monitoring system could still communicate with a part of Naylor's brain that he was unable to access consciously. Howell had told him to think of it as just an extension of the regular subconscious activities that everyone possessed anyway.

Naylor concentrated on the seven horizontal scales that appeared superposed on his visual field as colored bars. He had mastered the knack of calling them into existence at will, but was still having trouble moving the sliding pointers along them. Originally they had been labeled "salty," "sweet," "bitter," "sour," along with umami and two abstract qualities relating to smell, but Naylor had found that combining the colors gave him a feel for the composite quality that he didn't get from viewing the components independently. Following Howell's suggestion, he focused on the sweet and sour bars and succeeded in nudging one a little higher while diminishing the other. "I think it works," he said.

"Try it now," Howell answered.

Naylor took a sip from the glass of clear liquid that he was holding. It was a synthetic hydrocarbon with mineral salt additives but tasted to him like a rough, sugary attempt at cheap whisky. But that was a definite improvement on the throat-searing diesel fuel of a few minutes before. The visual representation of parameters describing his own neural performance was a new ability that they were introducing him to. He tweaked the two bars a little further, at the same time adding and subtracting dashes of a couple of the others, tried again, and nodded. "Better. At least now it tastes like something you could sell legally."

"That will do for now," Howell said, tapping at the touch pad. Naylor relaxed a mental muscle that he had been applying, and the bars written over his vision disappeared. Howell carried on conducting some kind of dialog with the screens. "We can leave it there until Lisa gets back. I've left the settings open. You can refine them yourself at your leisure. I want to try something different with the ultrasound imaging we were working on yesterday."

"Sure," Naylor agreed. He stared for a few seconds from the chair in which he was sitting. Howell ignored him as if he were a piece of laboratory equipment. Naylor brought back the taste bars, tested the drink again, and with a little more trial and error found a combination that produced a passable impression of bourbon. The difference was that this provided the taste without doing things to your head. He wasn't altogether sure if that was a good thing. There were times when a guy needed to ease up and disconnect a little. Something else to add to the list of things he had taken to experimenting with privately. The buzz without a hangover. This could be far from all bad.

Despite the personal concerns that Howell tried to fake at times, the cool, crisp movements of his fingers on the touch pad, the dispassionate set of his mouth and features, and the general distancing and detachment of his posture added up to a picture of disdain and aloofness that Naylor was able to read at a glance. Logically such a disposition was incompatible with the kind of pride and dedication that went with having created Adonis. The conclusion it pointed to was that the longer-term plans and promises that Howell painted his beguiling pictures of were lies. In his mind, as far as Naylor was concerned, there was no longer-term future.

That, of course, fitted with their using a condemned criminal for the first trials. Naylor could sense insincerity from the undertones of voice, aversions of eyes, barely perceptible muscle tensions, and even, sometimes, from the skin odors exuded under nervousness and stress. The outcome had not been as safe and certain as the reports prepared for the Institute's governors had maintained. This was a temporary provisional measure. When the principle had been proved and tested to Howell's satisfaction, Naylor would be expendable. Then, if Naylor's reasoning and reading of the situation were correct, he would be overwritten by one of probably a number of volunteers waiting for the confidence level to be increased. Volunteers selected, no doubt, as more fitting to be entrusted with Howell's creation and instrumental in the rise to glory that would crown his career. Too bad that Howell wouldn't be around to enjoy any of it. A lot of things had become clearer as Naylor explored and tested his newfound abilities. It wasn't just a matter of knowing without being really sure how that Lisa Ledgrave had suffered some personal setback in life that had left emotional scars, looked to her work for escape but despised Howell's arrogance and conceit, sympathized with Forcomb, and was afraid of Naylor; that Forcomb was secretly attracted to Lisa, was professional and capable, but lacked the nerve and self-assurance to make much advance in either direction; that Katokawa was totally dedicated, frank, non-judgmental, and probably one of the few truly honest people that Naylor had encountered; or that he could tell within seconds of their coming on duty how life had been treating the succession of guards who rotated through the posting inside the lab. Even events remembered from before the transfer took on a precision of recall and clarity of implication unlike anything Naylor had known before. It was obvious now who had been crapping their pants and why after those last two contracts, and where the money had come from to set him up and have him nailed. The prosecutor who had used evidence that he must have known had been planted because Naylor was too much of a pro to have left anything like that was high on the list, and so was the commissioner on the take who had arranged it. The lawyer Piersen, he'd had to think about. On the one hand, she hadn't shown much of a commitment in working his case; but hell, she knew the real score and was too principled to have derived any satisfaction from seeing him walk free. And more, if it hadn't been for her, he wouldn't be sitting here thinking about it. All in all, Naylor was inclined to give her the break. He already had enough names on a list to keep him busy for a while.

Exactly how he intended dealing with the security arrangements, he hadn't decided yet. But even without the direct communication faculty being activated, he was allowed one-way access to the web via the lab's terminals, and he had been learning a lot. He would need a way of altering his appearance to blend in once he was outside, and figure out some sources of supply for the kind of fluids and substances that his body would require—the ability to program his sensory system to accept a wide range of equivalents and substitutes would be a great asset there. He was pretty sure that he had spotted all the cameras hidden around the lab and his residential suite in addition to the three that were displayed openly, and the unique sound signatures of the door lock buttons had given him the entry and exit code. One guard inside shouldn't be too much of an obstacle to someone of his former line of specialty and now enhanced capability, but he would have to find out what lay outside. Although he didn't yet have all the details worked out, the system he was up against had been devised by the same kind of minds that he had been dealing with for years. And they were only human, after all.