Some of the Best from Tor.com

by Various Authors

  Heng Chang:

  The media response to our initial set of work papers highlighted the problem that the public had in understanding how efficiently we could model the human brain, and the network’s interaction with it. We were very comfortable that the networks could be installed safely in nearly all cases. But there was always that tiny bit of risk that you can never get rid of, and so the press and the families focused on that. There was really no way we’d be able to get volunteers from the general Haden population after that.

  Irving Bennett:

  This is where the near-universal nature of Haden’s Syndrome came to the rescue. The first guinea pigs for the networks were eventually recruited from three distinct groups. The first was the very elderly—people who from an actuarial point of view only had a couple years of life in them even before they got sick with Haden’s. The second group was people with terminal illnesses who also got Haden’s—stage four cancer patients and patients with other advanced illnesses. These two groups had almost literally nothing to lose by volunteering to test these networks.

  The third group—well. In one sense the people in it didn’t have much to lose either. But they were still problematic, to say the least.

  Chris Clarke, inmate, Nebraska State Penitentiary:

  I was in prison because a couple of teenagers got into the drug lab me and my step-father Bill had in a tool shed on our property. I think they heard from someone who bought from us that we kept our inventory there. We didn’t—once we cooked it, we moved it. But they broke in, started looking around and we think accidentally started a fire. The shed went up, taking them with it. Me and Bill were charged with two counts of manslaughter and a whole bunch of drug-related charges, and were found guilty. Bill died of a heart attack before he could be sentenced, and I think the judge took it out on me. I got a total of eighty-five years, and I would have to serve fifty before I could get parole. I was twenty-two when I went in. It was life sentence on the sly.

  You would think it would have been hard for Haden’s to get into a prison, but no, we got it just like everyone else. We joked that someone brought it in after a conjugal visit, but it’s obviously more likely that a couple of the guards brought it in from the outside world. Within a couple of weeks it seemed like half the house was sick with it. The prison only has one doctor on staff, and then some PAs and nurses. They were swamped immediately and not a lot of help was coming in. The rest of the world had it too, and helping a bunch of murderers and rapists was low on the list of everyone else’s priorities.

  I think I was one of about a dozen inmates who experienced lock in. I won’t bore you with the details of that. I will say it’s pretty much like being in solitary, every day, all the time, for the rest of your life. That should be enough to go on. I do remember one day while I was lying in the infirmary wing, where they had permanently put those of us locked in, a nurse was talking to one of the PAs and saying that she had heard that in the legislature there were some state representatives who objected to continuing medical services to those of us who were locked in. Said it was a waste of money and that in our case it was God meting out justice. I never intentionally killed anybody, but I would have gladly wrapped my hands around that asshole’s neck.

  One day I hear [Nebraska State Penitentiary Staff Doctor Hunter] Graves talking to someone. When you have nothing to do but lie there and hear other people talk, you get good at knowing the voices of the staff, and this was someone new. Graves told this person that I was likely the best candidate in the infirmary. I had no idea what that meant. Then this person started talking to me. She introduced herself as Dr. Constance Dennis, from the Department of Health and Human Services, and she wanted to know if I would volunteer for a medical procedure that would allow me to talk to people again and maybe even get me back on my feet. They would advance my parole date by a couple of decades for my participation. The only catch was that the procedure was highly experimental and I might die.

  Well, shit, I thought, I’m already as close to dead as I was going to get. Anything was better than this, including actual death. When they put me into that MRI to scan my brain to see my response, I was shouting “Yes!” so hard in my head that I think I almost gave myself a stroke.

  Kathryn Martinez, Associate Counsel, The Prison Freedom Coalition:

  We fought it. Of course we fought it. Approaching people imprisoned for life or something close to it and dangling parole in front of them in exchange for being medical experiments was deeply unethical medically and extortion besides. So we fought it, and so did the ACLU and the NAACP.

  And we were shut down every step of the judicial line, culminating with the absolutely disastrous Hicks v. Copleland ruling. Now in the United States you can completely disregard the 8th Amendment as long as you can say that prisoner participation in a quote-unquote medical trial is quote-unquote voluntary. As if prison itself isn’t a system of compulsory situations, one after the other. We set back the prisoners’ rights cause by a couple of decades. It’s a millstone around the neck of everyone who participated.

  And it’s a reminder that panic—in this case about Haden’s syndrome—means that justice gets compromised. The law is blind, but the people who administer it see what way the political winds are shifting all too well.

  Heng Chang:

  During the worst of the Hicks v. Copleland controversy I’d get phone calls in the middle of the night. Some of them were from people telling me that I was a monster for using prisoners, and then others telling me that if I didn’t pick their brother, or father, or whoever, to take part in the trials, they would come and burn down my house. It was a nerve-wracking time, not in the least because I had almost no say on who was chosen for the trials.

  I can sympathize with those who thought we were doing something monstrous with the prisoners. My wife has Japanese-American ancestry; her family tree has people in it who were interned at Tule Lake. I know mistakes can be made because people are scared. But at the same time, there were suddenly millions of Americans, and millions more around the world, trapped inside their bodies. In places where care wasn’t as advanced as it was in the developed world, third stage Haden’s patients were simply being left out to die, slowly starving to death. Even here in the US there were entire hospitals basically being used as storerooms for the locked in. It was an immense humanitarian crisis, on a global scale.

  I don’t know. Maybe we were wrong to enlist prisoners as trial subjects. It’s something I don’t have a good answer for, and yes, sometimes it still keeps me up at night. But on the other hand we had workable, functional neural networks, from the moment I sat up in bed to the moment we switched on the first Haden patient, in eighteen months. That is a miracle. It really is.

  Kathryn Martinez:

  About a third of the prisoners recruited for the trials died or suffered moderate to significant brain damage. Or I should say, the government only in the last five years released the data which says a third of the prisoner participants died or suffered brain damage. We have reason to believe those numbers are, shall we say, conservative.

  Chris Clarke:

  Well, I didn’t die, anyway. Though I had to wait until that Supreme Court ruling came down to get to participate in the trials. I was one of the second wave of test subjects. Since I heard that a lot of the first wave died or got brain damage, I don’t suppose I should complain.

  So, the way it worked is that I spent a lot of time with my head in a bunch of machines that made detailed scans of my brain. MRIs, X-rays to see blood vessels that had dye in them, that sort of thing. That took months, which didn’t make sense to me. I’m not Stephen Hawking. There’s not that much brain to see.

  Finally they decided they knew as much about my brain as they were going to find out without actually looking at it, so they took off the top part of my skull so they could observe it directly. When they did that they took a clear, sterile piece of plastic and put it where the top of my skull used to be, so they could see inside when
ever they wanted. Then they took the part of my skull they sawed off and tucked it into my stomach area, so it would stay alive for when they wanted to attach it back on to my head. I could feel the thing when it was down there. It wasn’t a very good feeling.

  Then they decided they’d seen enough and put the top of my skull back on, after they placed the neural network in my head. They told me that the network had tendrils that would bury themselves in my brain but that I shouldn’t be able to feel them, so I shouldn’t worry about them. That wasn’t exactly a lie. I couldn’t feel the tendrils as they dug into my brain, but every once in a while it was like one of them would hit something, and I would get a huge rush of feeling or sensation. One time my field of vision went entirely green for like an hour, and another time I suddenly started smelling oranges. Another time I had about a minute where it felt like someone put a branding iron straight up my backside. It didn’t last very long but when you’re feeling something like that, time stretches out.

  After about a week of this I guess everything was where it was going to be, and they told me they were going to turn on the network, and that if everything worked then I would be seeing through a camera they set up on a desk, and that I would be able to talk through a speaker. Then I felt something like an electric shock and I could see myself on the bed, bald, with this ugly scar across the top of my head that made me look like Frankenstein’s ugly cousin. And I thought, Jesus, I look like shit, and suddenly I heard the words I was thinking, coming through the speaker. The network was reading my thoughts. I realized I was going to have to be careful with what I thought until I could actually control myself. And then that came over the speaker.

  Then I started to talk to anyone who was in the room because it had been so long since I could talk to anyone about anything. I was just asking people’s names and what they were wearing and about their kids and their pets—it didn’t matter because I could talk again and it was the best thing in the world. After a few minutes of this I got a weird itch on my face and it took me a couple of seconds to realize that I had tears and they were just, like, pooling on my face because I was lying down and not able to wipe them away. I had to ask someone to wipe them for me.

  It was amazing. The most amazing thing. It was like being born again. It was like being free.

  PART FOUR: THREEPS

  Summer Zapata, Author, “The Silent Revolution: Technology in the Wake of Haden’s Syndrome”:

  The development and rapid production and installation of the neural networks was obviously the first big event in the technological history of Haden’s. We spent what some not incorrectly felt was an appalling amount of money, and arguably abandoned medical morality, to develop the networks, but at the end of the day it got done, the proof of concept was there and suddenly two dozen companies, some established, some start-ups, were in the neural network business.

  But the neural networks were only a partial solution. The networks gave Haden’s sufferers their ability to communicate again with the outside world, but their bodies still didn’t work. They still couldn’t move. They were still trapped. And in many way they were still terribly isolated.

  The federal government threw billions into medical research trying to get brains to talk to the voluntary nervous system, or to grow new nerve connections, but none of that was progressing at a rate that anyone was considering satisfactory. This opened the door to a left-field solution that absolutely no one saw coming.

  Rebecca Warner, Chairwoman, Sebring-Warner, Inc.:

  Charlie Sebring and I knew each other growing up, but not all that well, since he was a class behind me in school and we ran in different circles. I was the stereotypical student government type and he was a classic nerd. When I graduated I went to Brown and he went to Rensselaer and I didn’t see him again until the summer before my senior year, when he and I both interned at GreenWave, which my father owned. I got an internship in management, while Charlie was down in engineering. Until I caught him making things in the printers, I pretty much didn’t have any contact with him.

  My internship was mostly just for show because I was the owner’s daughter and we all know how that goes. On one hand I was irritated with this because by this time I knew I wanted to run a company, and I didn’t like people thinking I wasn’t a serious person. On the other hand I really wasn’t a serious person at the time, and I spent most of my time planning my summer evenings. So I couldn’t complain that they give me a bunch of chumpy tasks that a monkey could do.

  One of the chores I had to do was to prepare a weekly efficiency report for the GreenWave’s printers. GreenWave handled a lot of bespoke production jobs for design studios and small manufacturers—everyone has their own printers but they weren’t designed for large-object jobs or jobs that required more than a couple of dozen copies made. GreenWave manufactured industrial-scale printers and also kept a manufacturing wing open to handle work from other companies. Our printers were good but they were finicky and prone to breaking down, so we tracked their efficiency, and every week I compiled a report for the CTO. It was dead simple, especially since each of the printers imported their data into a spreadsheet automatically. All I really had to do was press a button to print it out.

  So every week I printed them out. Most weeks I didn’t look at them, but one evening I was out with friends and remembered that I forgot to do the spreadsheet, and I didn’t want to be known as so inept that I couldn’t even do that. So I left the party early —11pm—and went back to the office to run off the report. As I was collating the paper I actually looked at the report and noticed one printer had a weird usage pattern. It usually went off-shift at 10pm, which was the end of our second shift, but every day in the last week it was active between 11pm and midnight. So I pulled up the real-time monitor and saw the printer was running right at that moment. I went down to the printer floor to see what was going on and there was Charlie, printing out something that looked like a hand. He looked very surprised to see me.

  Naturally, I asked him what he was doing. He said he was doing some last minute client work, so I said, fine, so show me the work order. We didn’t do anything at GreenWave without a work order. Then Charlie got a panicked look in his eye, and that’s when I realized whatever he was doing, he wasn’t supposed to be doing it. So I decided to get tough with him and told him that he could either tell me what he was doing, or he could tell his boss the next morning, with me providing the spreadsheet as incriminating documents.

  Charlie gave in and told me he was making a prototype. Great, I said, a prototype of what? And he explained that he had been following the development of the neural networks they were making for the Haden’s syndrome people, and realized that even if they got the networks to function, people would still be stuck in bodies that didn’t move. He was building a machine that would integrate with the networks so that people would be able to walk and move and get out in the world.

  I asked him to tell me more, and we spent the next five hours going over everything. GreenWave had access to the Haden research database because we contracted with GE for elements of their neural networks, and Charlie had been keeping up with the neural network development. A lot of research money was going into biological solutions to fixing Haden bodies but almost nothing for machine solutions—the closest thing was an old design of a scooter with a large tablet sticking up on a post. It gave minimal mobility but no ability to hold or grasp objects or interact with people in a way that didn’t feel like, well, you were a scooter with a tablet on it.

  What Charlie was prototyping was much better: An actual body with touch input, shaped like a human body and with all a body’s capabilities. It was a robot, but instead of a robot brain, it had a human brain controlling it. It would be a new body. One that wouldn’t get tired or ever get sick like the Haden’s victims own bodies would.

  Charlie kept going on and I honestly didn’t understand more than about twenty percent of what he was saying. But when he was done I did two things. The first thi
ng I did was I went and put that spreadsheet through the shredder. The second thing I did was go into my dad’s office the next morning and told him I wanted every penny of my trust fund right now, and if he didn’t give it to me I would tell mom about his affair. And his other affair, too.

  When dad agreed to that, I immediately rented the use of the printer Charlie had been working on. Then I marched down to the printer floor and told Charlie to quit his internship, he and I were going into business, full partners. And he did. I took a picture of the two of us right after to commemorate the moment. He looked dazed, like he just got hit by a truck.

  Summer Zapata:

  On paper, Charlie Sebring and Rebecca Warner didn’t look they should work together at all. She was extroverted, aggressive and business-oriented, and he was classically introverted and focused on the project, almost to the exclusion of ordinary bodily functions; there’s a rumor that one day Warner came into their office and poured a gallon jug of water over his head as a hint that he should go home and take a shower.

  The one thing they had in common was a commitment to the vision of what they started calling “Personal Transports.” Sebring saw the practical need and had enough rigor as an engineer not to let his design wander off into the thickets. If you look at his first set of prototypes they were, from a design point, ruthlessly robotic—all function and no esthetic. He wanted Haden’s patients to be able to move. He didn’t care what they looked like as they did.

  Warner handled all the rest of it. She kept up with the business end of the Haden Research Initiative Act and worked to exploit the gaping hole where the Personal Transports would eventually go. Warner’s congressman was on the HRIA budgeting committee; she flew into DC personally to lobby him to allocate funds to biological solutions to Haden paralysis, rather than mechanical solutions. She knew that if federal funding started actively moving into her field that the project she was funding out of her own trust fund was going to get swamped.