Interface

by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George

  “The Barracks?”

  “Yeah. That’s what we’ve been calling the temporary institute. Guess you haven’t seen it yet.”

  “Why would you call it by that name?” Of course it was superfluous even to ask questions like this; these breezy American chaps had to have nicknames for everything.

  “Because that’s what it is. It’s down south, on the edge of this military zone—”

  “The Defence Colony?”

  “Yeah.” Zeldo reached for one of the doors, almost colliding with the turbaned doorman who opened it for him.

  Dr. Radhakrishnan had only been back in the civilized world for a couple of days, but now it felt as if he had never left, and as if the years in Elton were nothing more than a frigid nightmare.

  “Anyway, the temporary lab facilities are set up in these barracks-type buildings. Soviet concrete things, you know. It’ll be okay for the time being, I guess.”

  Zeldo had the presence of mind to allow the driver to open the car door for him, and he slid into the seat ahead of Dr. Radhakrishnan. He folded up his long legs so that his knees were pressed against the back of the driver’s seat and piled the briefcase and the computer on his lap. The driver pulled out onto Janpath, ignoring the painted lanes and creating his own, in the traditional local style.

  “I’m the chiphead from Pacware,” Zeldo said, as if Dr. Radhakrishnan were supposed to know what that meant.

  “What is Pacware?”

  “Pacific Netware. I design logic devices—chips—for them.”

  “Am I to gather that you are connected, in some way, with my institute?”

  Zeldo gaped at him. “Sure,” he said. “I’m doing the hardware design on the silicon portion of the new model biochips.”

  “I was not aware that a new model was required.”

  Zeldo shrugged. “New models are always required,” he said. “Hardware design is a fast-moving target. You don’t update your designs every few months, you’re working with Stone Age technology.”

  Dr. Radhakrishnan was finding it very difficult to keep his temper under control. Perhaps he was still just a bit irritable from his travels. For him to come home in triumph and finally to receive the recognition he deserved, and then to be stuck in an elevator, and a car, with this laid-back Yank who told him he was back in the Stone Age—

  But he held his tongue, because he had an inkling that Zeldo might be half right. The chips they put into the baboons were off-the-shelf models with limited capabilities. It was a basic fact, with electronics, that if you designed a customized chip to do a particular job, it could work thousands of times faster than an off-the-shelf model.

  If Zeldo could do his job properly and build a new, specialized chip for this purpose, it might vastly improve the capabilities of Dr. Radhakrishnan’s implant.

  Actually, bringing in a “chiphead” from a hot company like Pacific Netware was a brilliant idea. He wished he had thought of it himself. He wondered who had thought of it.

  “Did they try to set you up with a babe?” Zeldo said.

  “I’m sorry? A babe?”

  “Yeah. A chick. You know, a prostitute.”

  Dr. Radhakrishnan wished that Zeldo had not used this word.

  “They did with me,” Zeldo said. “Bought me a first-class ticket on British Airways to get me over here from San Francisco. Soon as I get on, this incredible woman sits down next to me. She was playing footsy with me before we even pulled away from the gate. God, she was a hot lady.”

  Dr. Radhakrishnan smiled conspiratorially. “You liked her, eh?” he said.

  “Well, she didn’t have a lot going for her intellectually,” Zeldo said, frowning, “and I’m involved in a monogamous relationship at home.”

  They did not converse much more until they arrived at the Defence Colony, whose gate was guarded by heavy machine guns in sandbag nests, manned by eagle-eyed Sikhs. The Sikhs let them through without opening fire; a minute or two later they were at the Barracks.

  They had obviously been constructed to house troops assigned to guard duty and other low-level work in the Defence Colony. Because this was Delhi, and the Defence Colony was prestigious, they were actually quite nice, for barracks. Each building was thirty or forty meters long, wide enough for a row of beds down either side with a broad aisle down the middle. They were all concrete and concrete block, with tin roofs, and it was clear that they had been hastily painted and retrofitted with better electrical service and air-conditioning. The Radhakrishnan Institute now occupied two of these buildings. Building 1 was filled with offices and laboratories. Building 2 was filled with beds. The beds were filled with brain damage cases.

  Strokes were generally not a major health problem in India. The classic stroke patient was a fat old smoker and though many people smoked in India, few people were fat and many did not have the opportunity to get old. Fortunately, from the point of view of a researcher, any time you got nearly a billion people living and working in conditions not notable for safety, you did not have to rely on strokes in order to see a broad and deep spectrum of brain damage.

  On his initial inspection of Building 2, Dr. Radhakrishnan saw a fascinating assortment of unfortunates who had been combed from the slums. It seemed that Mr. Salvador had some sort of connection with the Lady Wilburdon Foundation, a British charity group that operated free clinics and hospitals all over India. Mr. Salvador had exploited this connection, recruiting medical students from all over the country as brain damage talent scouts who would scan incoming cases and let him know of any promising prospects. In addition to the two whose brains had already been sampled, Dr. Radhakrishnan saw a man who had had a brick dropped on his head in a construction site. A soldier shot through the brain during ethnic violence in Srinagar. A lunch delivery boy from Delhi who had been thrown off his motorcycle rickshaw in a collision with a lorry. A street kid from Bombay who, in trying to do a second-story job on an old colonial structure, had slipped and fallen twelve feet; a spike on the wrought-iron fence had entered his open mouth, passed up through his palate, and impaled his brain.

  Even by Western standards, the care these patients were receiving was fairly generous. The building was no architectural gem, but it was clean and well maintained. It was not lavishly appointed with high-tech equipment, but it was well-staffed with attentive nurses and nursing students who were clearly doing all they could to see to the patients’ individual needs. And none of these patients was paying a single rupee. Most of them had no rupees to begin with.

  Building 1 had its own generators, a pair of brand-new Honda portable units delivering a hundred and twenty volts of all-American sixty-cycle power. The juice was filtered and conditioned through an uninterruptible power supply and then routed through shiny, freshly installed conduits to a generous number of galvanized steel junction boxes, bolted to the barracks walls every couple of meters, studded with American-style three-prong outlets. All of this had been set up so that Zeldo and his ilk could fly straight in from California, drop their whores off at the Imperial, and plug their computers and other more arcane devices straight into the wall without having to deal with the awful culture shock of incompatible plugs and voltages. More to the point, the Honda generators would not flicker, spike, brown out, and black out as the Delhi grid was apt to. No precious data would be lost to unpredictable Third World influences.

  Zeldo and a couple of other slangy pizza-eating beards from America had laid claim to one end of Building 1 and set up their own little outpost of heavy metal music and novelty foam-rubber sledgehammers for pounding on their workstations when they got frustrated. They had even erected a sign: PACIFIC NETWARE—ASIAN HEADQUARTERS. On his way in, Dr. Radhakrishnan had noted the presence of a freshly installed satellite dish, and he could not help but suppose that they were connected to that.

  Mr. Salvador had his own little nook at the other end of the building, as far away from the foam rubber sledgehammers as he could get. He was not in at the moment, but Dr. Radhakrishnan k
new Mr. Salvador’s style when he saw it: a heavy antique desk, comfortably scuffed, an electric shoe polisher, and every communications device known to science.

  The intervening space was all at Dr. Radhakrishnan’s disposal. At this point it was all new, empty desks and new, empty filing cabinets. A few people had already moved in. Supposedly, Toyoda was on his way in from Elton and might have already arrived. There were also a few promising Indian graduate students whom Mr. Salvador had managed to recruit away from their positions in America and Europe, and there were signs that some of these people had already arrived, claimed desks, and gotten down to work.

  At the moment there was nothing for Dr. Radhakrishnan to do except sit down with a big stack of medical records that had been assembled on the head cases in Building 2, and sort through them, looking for patients with the right sort of brain damage.

  A couple of hours after Dr. Radhakrishnan arrived, a patient named Mohinder Singh was brought in. He was a lorry driver from Himachal Pradesh, way up north in the foothills of the Himalayas. He had been driving down a mountain road with a bundle of half-inch pipe lashed to the back of his lorry. The pipes were apparently of different lengths; some stuck out farther than others. His brakes had gone out and he had gone off the road and slammed into something. The bundle of pipe had shot forward. The longest one had come in through the back window of the truck, struck him just behind the ear, passed all the way through his head, and emerged through one of the eyeballs. A nearby road crew had used a hacksaw to cut off most of the pipe, leaving only the portion that was stuck through his head, and he had been evacuated to a nearby Lady Wilburdon Charities clinic where he had been noticed by one of the talent scouts.

  He did not look very promising at first. It seemed likely that the pipe had smashed things around quite a bit inside there and bruised large portions of the brain. But Dr. Radhakrishnan had not gotten to where he was by being hasty and superficial. He shipped Singh down the road to the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences for a series of head scans.

  AIIMS was India’s foremost medical research institute and it was only a couple of minutes away from the Barracks along the Delhi Ring Road. They would be able to take some excellent pictures of Mr. Singh’s brain with the equipment they had there. And, in a stroke of luck, the chunk of pipe that was still embedded in Mr. Singh’s head was made out of copper, a nonmagnetic substance; they would be able to run him through an NMR scanner without turning it into a projectile.

  Dr. Radhakrishnan was stunned to learn that the pipe had gone through his head almost three days previously. He must have been in great pain, but he refused to acknowledge it. From the head down he was well-nourished and in perfect health. This was one patient who was not going to go into shock every time they put a needle in his arm.

  When Singh came back from AIIMS with a stack of films and scans piled on his chest, Dr. Radhakrishnan was pleasantly surprised. The pipe was thin-walled, cut off fresh and sharp on the end that had gone through Singh’s head. As best as Dr. Radhakrishnan could tell from trying to interpret the images, it had sliced its way through the soft, gelatinous brain tissue, rather than shoving it around and bruising it. It had acted almost like a core sampler.

  Once the pipe was taken out and some of the mess cleaned up, assuming that Singh did not get infected, which was simply a question of antibiotics, he was going to be an ideal candidate for therapy.

  “Not a whiner,” Mr. Salvador said, when he came by later to inspect. “Robust. Positive attitude, as far as I can tell. Willing to try just about anything. He reminds me of the chap in the States.”

  “What chap?”

  “Whom you heard on the tape. Whose scans you looked at.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  A thrilling sensation suddenly washed over Dr. Radhakrishnan’s body. A wave of adrenaline seemed to be rushing through his circulatory system like a chemical tsunami. He opened his eyes a little wider and blinked a few times as though he had just stepped out into bright warm sunlight after a long winter in Elton, New Mexico, and his body rocked from side to side just a little bit, its stance and balance changing as he stood up straighter, breathed a little deeper. The jet lag vanished. He looked around him, suddenly taking in the room with the frighteningly intense glare of a raptor soaring on a mountain thermal. His hands tingled, almost as if the saw and the drill were already there, buzzing away, slicing heedlessly through bone, penetrating into the core of some other human being.

  Mr. Salvador could take his Gyrfalcon jet and his cars and his institutes and his hotel suites. He could take them all back to America. It wouldn’t matter. This was the feeling that Dr. Radhakrishnan V.R.J.V.V. Gangadhar lived for.

  All of the nurses and orderlies in this part of the Barracks had risen uncertainly to their feet. “What are you waiting for!?” he snapped. “This poor man has a pipe through his head! Let’s get it out.”

  thirteen

  “I’M GOING to be real straight with you,” Mel said.

  “Somehow I’m not surprised,” Mary Catherine said.

  They were sitting together at a corner table in an old-fashioned family-type Italian restaurant. The restaurant was across the street and down the block from the hospital where Mary Catherine had spent most of the last four years. When families of stricken patients had to eat, they gathered around the big circular tables here and glumly plunged their forks into deep, steaming dishes of lasagna, like surgeons around an operating table.

  “Your dad is not a happy camper right now,” Mel continued. “And it’s going to get worse in a week or two, when we have to come out and tell the public that he has suffered a stroke. I don’t know how he’s going to react.”

  She slapped her menu down on the table and stopped even pretending to read it. “Enough, enough,” she said. “What the hell are you saying?”

  “Your dad would rather die than live the way he is now,” Mel said.

  Mary Catherine kept looking and listening for a few seconds, until she finally realized that this was all there was to it. If Mel had been talking about anyone else, “he would rather die” would have been a figure of speech. But not with Dad. She could just imagine him, sitting down there in Tuscola, making the executive decision that it was time to die, and then formulating his plan.

  “That’s enough,” she said. “That’s all you have to say.”

  Then she closed her eyes and silently let tears run down her face for half a minute or so.

  She opened her eyes, rubbed her face with her napkin, blinked away the last tears. Mel was sitting with his hands folded together, patiently waiting for her to finish. Out of the corner of her eye she could see a hefty waitress loitering with her pad and pen. The help here knew how to deal with grief. The waitress was trying to figure out when it was okay to approach the table.

  “Okay, I’m ready to order,” Mary Catherine said, louder than she had intended.

  The waitress approached. Mel hurriedly snatched up his menu and began to scan it; he wasn’t ready. Watching him, Mary Catherine suddenly felt a lot of affection for good old Mel, trying to pick out an entrée, any entrée, because Mary Catherine was ready to order.

  “I’ll have the fettucine with pesto and a club soda,” Mary Catherine said.

  “Some kind of baked noodle thing without any meat,” Mel said.

  “Lasagna? Manicotti?” the waitress said. But Mel could not be bothered with details; he didn’t hear her. “And a glass of white,” he said. “You want a drink, Mary Catherine?”

  “No thanks, I’m working,” she said. Finally the knot went out of her throat and she felt better. She took a couple of deep breaths.

  “All clear,” she said.

  “You’re handling it well,” Mel said. “You’re doing a good job of this.”

  “I suppose he has a little plan all worked out.”

  “Yeah. The den. Sometime when there’s no kids out in front of the house, I would guess.”

  “He’ll probably use the big shotgun from Viet
nam, right?”

  Mel shrugged. “Beats me. I’m not privy to all his decisions.”

  “You know, James and I always used to get into trouble when Patricia was babysitting us as a kid. And Mom and Dad would come home and be just shocked.” Mary Catherine laughed out loud, blowing off tension. “Because Patricia was such a nice girl and why were we being so mean to her?”

  Mel laughed.

  “So now I’ll have to go home and give Dad a hard time for wanting to shoot himself while Patricia’s babysitting him.” She heaved a big sigh, trying to throw off the aching feeling in her ribs. “But it’s really hard to talk to him when he’s in that—that whole situation he’s in now.”

  “See, he’s acutely aware of that. And that’s why he made this decision.”

  “So why are you here?” she said. “Is this an official message from Dad?”

  Mel snorted. “You kidding? He’d kill me if he knew I was telling you this.”

  “Oh. I thought I was being given one last chance to go down and talk to him before he did it.”

  “No way. I think I caught him in the act. Lining up his shot,” Mel said. “Now he’s too embarrassed to actually do it for a while.”

  “Well . . . of course I want him to live. But I have to admit killing himself now would be a lot more true to his nature.”

  “Absolutely,” Mel said. “And it would give him a chance to get in a last dig at Patricia, which is incentive enough.”

  Mary Catherine laughed.

  “But he’s not gonna do it,” Mel said.

  “Why not?” It was unusual to think of Dad making up his mind to do something, and then holding back.

  “There’s one possibility we are investigating. A new therapy that might bring him back to where he was.”