Georgia On My Mind and Other Places

by Charles Sheffield

  From this point on it would be up to me. Abernathy had made it clear that he could guide us no farther.

  I had not told him that I too had little idea where we would go once we were within the cerebral hemispheres. He had worries enough.

  And I was not quite ready to mention, to Tom Abernathy or to Belinda Lee, that something seemed to be slightly wrong with my simulacrum.

  The change was so subtle that I doubted if Belinda, and still less Tom, could notice it. Only someone who had developed the original Adestis circuits and lived with them, through every good or bad variation, would sense the difference. The motor response was a tiny shade off what it had been when we were outside Miriam’s body.

  “Ex-peri-ment.” I released my hold on the other two, then deliberately reduced motor inputs within my simulacrum to absolute zero.

  I should now be floating like a dead leaf in the arterial tide, carried wherever the blood flow wanted to take me. But I was not. Not quite. There was a tiny added vector to my motion, produced by faint body impulses that I was not creating. I was angling over to the left, away from the broad mainstream of blood flow. When the artery divided, as it would shortly do, I would be channeled into the left branch.

  Tom Abernathy and Belinda Lee were following, not knowing what else to do. I restored motor control to my simulacrum, and noted again the difference between my directive and the unit’s response. Slight, but not so slight as before.

  “Mov-ing,” said Belinda’s faltering and attenuated voice. She was noticing it too, and she was frightened. That was good. I did not want on my hunts anyone who was not scared by the inexplicable. The force did not feel external, either. It was arising from within, a phantom hand affecting our control over the simulacra.

  “Stay.” I halted, and laboriously sent my instruction. “I—go—on. You wait—for me.” I believed we were surely heading for the missing nanodocs, and just as surely it might be dangerous for all to travel together. If I did not return, Abernathy and Lee could find their way to the left or right jugular vein exit points. Equipment was waiting there to sense, capture, and remove from Miriam’s body any returning nanodoc units.

  I again reduced motor inputs and allowed myself to drift with the arterial flow. Soon the channel branched and branched again, into ever-finer blood vessels. I had no idea where I was, or where I was going, but I had no doubt about my ability to return to the safe highway of the jugular veins. Every road led there. All I had to do was follow the arrow of the blood, down into the finest capillary level, then on to the fine veins that merged and coupled to carry their oxygen-depleted flow back toward heart and lungs.

  And while I was filled with that comforting thought, I noticed that the motion of my simulacrum was changing. Without input from me the left and right sets of legs were twitching in an asynchronous pattern. Their movement added a crablike sideways component to my forward progress. Soon my nanodoc was squeezing against the wall of the blood vessel. It pressed harder, and finally broke through into a narrow chamber filled with clear cerebrospinal fluid.

  I thought that might signal the end of the disturbance, but after a few seconds it began again. Every thresh of the side limbs made the anomaly more obvious. I restored motor control and willed the leg movements to stop. They slowed, but they went on. My simulacrum was turning round and round, carried along in the colorless liquid of the new aqueduct until suddenly it was discharged into a larger space. After a moment of linear motion we started to spin around the vortex of an invisible whirlpool.

  I had arrived in one of the larger cerebral sulci, the fissures that run along and through the human brain. Tom Abernathy could undoubtedly have told me which one. For the moment, though, I did not care. I had found the missing nanodocs.

  They extended along the fissure, visible in the watery fluid as far as my crude optical sensors could see. Each one appeared to be intact. And each was obsessively turning on its own individual carousel, always moving yet never leaving the main chamber of the sulcus.

  It took thirty seconds of experiment to discover that I too was trapped. I could think commands as well as ever. The simulacrum would start to respond. And before the movement was completed another component would reinforce my instruction. The result was like an intention tremor, a sequence of overcorrections that swung me into more and more violent and uncontrolled motion.

  I dared not allow that to continue—I was deep in the delicate fabric of Miriam’s brain, where even light contact could cause damage. The only way I could stop the spinning in random directions was to inhibit the motor control of my nanodoc unit. Then we returned to a smooth but useless cyclic motion around an invisible axis.

  There was no way to signal the other nanodocs except through gestures. Designed to be worked as a group by a single operator, they were of a more primitive design than the unit I inhabited. I tried to make physical contact with one, but I was balked by its movement. Each unit remained locked in its own strange orbit, endlessly rotating but never advancing within the fissure’s great Sargasso Sea of cerebrospinal fluid.

  I was ready to try something new when I experienced my worst moment so far. In among the hundreds of nanodoc units I saw one different from the rest. But it was identical to my own; therefore it must belong to Tom Abernathy or Belinda Lee. A few seconds later I saw the other. Somehow they had been unable to follow my instructions. Like me they had been carried willy-nilly to this dark interior sea. Like me, they would be trying to assert control. And failing.

  I knew how they must feel. The whole success of Adestis depends on the power of the mental link. When you are in Adestis mode you do not control a simulacrum, you are the simulacrum. Its limbs and body and environment become your own. Its dangers are yours, its pain is your pain. If it is poisoned by a prey, it dies—and you experience all the agony.

  Without that total transfer, Adestis would be nothing but a trivial diversion. No one would pay large sums to go on a Small Game Hunt.

  That same total immersion of self had been carried over, by design, into the nanodocs. I knew how helpless Tom Abernathy and Belinda Lee would be feeling now. They could not control their spinning simulacra, nor could they escape to or even recall the existence of their own bodies, outside the world of the nanodocs.

  I knew that all too well; because three years ago Miriam Pearce and I had been in the same situation.

  Our quarry was a first-time prey for both us and Adestis. No one had ever before hunted Scolopendra. Although Miriam and I knew it as one of the fastest and most ferocious of the centipedes, we started out in excellent spirits. Why should we not? We had hunted together half a dozen times before, and knew we were an excellent team. Shared danger only seemed to draw us closer.

  And after it was over we planned to hold our own private posthunt party.

  Scolopendra came flickering across the ground toward us, body undulating and the twenty pairs of legs a blur. I took little notice of those. My attention was on the poison claws on each side of the head, the pointed spears designed to seize an unlucky prey and inject their venom. Between the claws I saw the dark slit of a wide mouth. It was big enough to swallow me whole.

  We had agreed on the strategy before we entered Adestis mode: Divide and conquer. Each of us would concentrate on one side of the centipede. As it turned toward one of us, the other would sever legs and attack the other side of the body. The animal would be forced to swing around or topple over. And the process would be repeated on the other side.

  But why were we hunting at all? Although we found the danger stimulating, neither Miriam nor I had a taste for blood sports for their own sake. As usual on our hunts, we wanted to refine a new piece of Adestis control technology. When it was perfected it would find a home in the world of the nanodocs.

  The centipede picked me as its first choice of prey. It turned, and Miriam disappeared behind the long, segmented trunk. I caught a glimpse of jointed limbs—each one nearly as long as my body—then the antennae were sweeping down toward me
and the poison claws reached out.

  Scolopendra was even faster than we had realized. I heard the crack of Miriam’s weapon, but any damage she might inflict would be too late to save me. I could not escape the poison claws by moving backward. All I could do was go closer, jumping in past the claws to the lip of the maw itself

  It was ready. A pair of maxillae moved forward, to sweep me into the digestive tube.

  I had never before hunted a prey able to swallow a victim whole. And I had never until that moment known the strength of my own claustrophobia.

  I crouched on the lower lip of the maw, and thought of absorption into the dark interior of the body cavity. I could not bear it.

  I threw myself backward and fell to the ground. A suicidal movement, with the poison claws waiting. I did not care. Anything was better than being swallowed alive.

  The claws approached me. Shuddered. And pulled back. The antenna and the wide head turned.

  Miriam’s shots were doing their job. I sprawled full-length, peered under the body, and saw half a dozen severed legs in spasm on the ground.

  Now it was my turn to shoot. I did it—halfheartedly. I dreaded the broad head swinging back, the mandibles poised to ingest me.

  And it was ready to happen. I had shot off two legs. The body was shaking, beginning to turn again in my direction.

  I stopped firing. For one second I stood while the centipede hesitated, unable to decide if I or Miriam provided the greater threat. The head turned once more to her side.

  Then I was running away, a blind dash across dark and uneven ground. I did not look back.

  I left Miriam behind, to die in agony in Scolopendra’s poison claws.

  Three years, three bitter years of remorse and analysis and self-loathing; in three years I had learned something that maybe no other Adestis operator had ever known. If I had known it then, it might have saved Miriam.

  The body of the nanodoc, shell-like back and eight multipurpose legs, was my body. I had no other. As I gyrated in the brain sulcus along with Tom and Belinda and a couple of hundred other units, I turned off every input sensor.

  I imagined an alien body, a body nothing like my own. A strange body with a well-defined head and slender neck, with two legs, with two jointed arms that ended in delicate manipulators. When the imagined body image was complete I took those two phantom arms and moved them to the sides of the head, just above a strange pair of external hearing organs.

  I grasped. And lifted. And reeled with vertigo, as the whole Adestis telemetry headset that maintained my link with the nanodoc ripped away from my skull.

  I leaned forward and placed my forehead on the bench in front of me. Of all the warnings that I gave to attendants in Adestis control rooms, none was stronger than this: Never, in any circumstances, rupture the electronic union between player and simulacrum.

  Hospital staff were hurrying across to me. I waved them away. The nausea would pass, and I had work to do. I understood what had happened to Miriam. I knew what had happened to me, and what was happening now to Tom Abernathy and Belinda Lee. Unless I was too slow and stupid, I could end it.

  The control system for Adestis, and for all its applications such as the nanodocs, has built-in safeguards. I opened the main cabinet, found the right circuits, and inhibited them. I turned the electronic gain for my own unit far past the danger point. Then I went back to my seat.

  “Tell the technicians with Dr. Pearce to watch for us coming out,” I said. “Maybe fifteen minutes from now.”

  And cross your fingers.

  I took a deep breath, gritted my teeth, and crammed the control headset back on.

  The pain and dizziness of returning were even worse than going out. I was again a nanodoc, but the overloaded input circuits were a great discordant shout inside my head. Every move that I wanted to make produced a result ten times as violent as I intended. I allowed myself half a minute of practice, learning a revised protocol. The interference that had kept me helpless before was still there—I could feel a pulling to one side—but now it was a nuisance rather than a danger.

  First I steered myself across to Belinda Lee’s nanodoc. As I suspected, her loss of control included loss of signals. She could not talk to me, and she probably could not hear me. I simply took her by the legs on one side, and dragged her across to where Tom Abernathy was drifting around in endless circles. I linked the two units together, right four legs to left four legs, and locked them.

  After that it was a purely mechanical task. I proceeded steadily along the brain fissure, systematically catching the nanodocs and linking them by four of their legs to the next unit in the train. The final result was itself something like a very long and narrow centipede, with over two hundred body segments. When I was sure that I had captured every nanodoc I positioned myself at the head of the file, attached four legs to Belinda’s free limbs, and looked for the way out.

  I had seen it as too simple. Follow the direction of the blood. But we were in one of the major sulci, where in a healthy human there must be no blood. (As I learned later, blood cells in the cerebrospinal fluid is one sign of major problems in the brain.)

  Where were the signposts? I pondered that, as our caravan of nanodoc units set out through one of the most complex objects in the universe: the human brain. We went on forever, through regions corresponding to nothing that Tom Abernathy had described to me. Finally I came across the rubbery wall of a major blood vessel.

  Artery or vein? The former would merely carry us back into the brain. The latter would mean we were on our way out.

  I entered, and pulled the whole train through after me. But still I did not know where we were heading, until the channel in which we rode joined another of rather greater width. Then I could relax. We were descending the tree, all of whose branches would merge into the broad trunk of the jugular.

  I knew it when we at last entered that great vein; knew it when we were removed from the body, all at once, in the swirl of suction from a syringe.

  The return to our own bodies under technician control was—as it should be—steady and gentle. I blinked awake, and found Tom Abernathy already conscious and staring at me.

  I grinned. He looked away.

  My hatred of him had dissolved after shared danger. Apparently his disdain for me persisted. I glanced the other way, at Belinda Lee. And found that she, like Tom Abernathy, would not meet my eye.

  “We did it,” I said. I couldn’t stop smiling. “They’re all out. I bet Miriam recovers consciousness in just a few minutes.”

  “We didn’t do anything,” Belinda said. “You did it all. I was useless.”

  I couldn’t see it that way. But her reaction seemed too strong to be pure wounded ego.

  “I couldn’t have done anything without your help,” I said. “Hey, without you two I’d never even have found my way into the brain.”

  “You don’t understand.” Tom Abernathy’s face was pale, and his voice was as sour as Belinda’s. “I know how she feels, even if you don’t. Because I’m the same. We’re not like you, with your crazy Adestis heroics. I wasn’t just useless and helpless in there, I was scared when I lost nanodoc control. Too frightened even to follow what you were doing. Too terrified to try to help Miriam.”

  I laughed. Not with humor. The irony of Clancy Fletcher as heroic savior for Miriam Pearce was too much to take.

  “It’s not courage,” I said. “It’s only experience.”

  And then, when they stared at me with no comprehension, it all spilled out. I had bottled it up for too long, and it hurt to talk. But I could feel no worse about myself no matter what they knew, and perhaps a knowledge of other cowardice would help them to deal with what they thought of as their own failure.

  “But there’s a bright side,” I said as I concluded. “If I hadn’t failed Miriam then, I would never have experimented later with forced interruption of Adestis mode. And we’d still be inside Miriam’s brain.

  “I’ve never told anyone this befo
re. But now you understand why she won’t talk to me after she recovers consciousness.”

  They had listened to my outpourings in an oddly silent setting. As soon as they were sure that we were all right the nanodoc technicians had hurried off to the next room, where Miriam Pearce was reported to be showing a change of condition. The only sound in the room where we sat was the occasional soft beep of nanodoc monitors, reporting inactive status.

  “I’m sorry to hear all that.” Tom Abernathy’s sincerity was real. Rumpled and sweaty, he was no longer the elegant physician with the polished bedside manner. “Miriam won’t talk to you?”

  He ought to know that, if anyone did.

  “Not for years.”

  “Strange. Doesn’t sound like the Miriam Pearce that I know.”

  “Nor me,” said Belinda. “She’s nice to everybody. But when are you going to tell us what was going on in there? I try to pass myself off as somebody who knows nanodocs, and I can’t even understand what you did, let alone do it myself.”

  “It was no big deal. It all depends on one simple fact. As soon as you know that, you’ll be able to work everything else out for yourself. The key factor is interference effects. The electrical currents that control an Adestis module—including a nanodoc—”

  I was interrupted, by a technician hurrying through from the next room.

  “Dr. Abernathy. We think Dr. Pearce is waking up.”

  I was first through the door. Miriam’s condition was clearly different—she was stirring restlessly on the bed—but her eyes were closed. Before I could get to the bedside Tom Abernathy had pushed me aside and was checking the monitors.

  “Looks a hell of a lot better.” He leaned right over Miriam, and was inches from her face when her eyes flickered open.

  “I knew you would.” The faint thread of sound would not have been heard, had not everyone in the room frozen to absolute stillness. “I knew you’d come and save me.”

  Her mouth and eyes were smiling up—at Tom Abernathy. Then the smile faded, she sighed, and her eyes closed again in total weariness.