Tinman

by Simon Fairhead

  Dawkins paused at a deck lift. “Art, we are going to enter the lift and go down to the stasis chambers. There is room for all three of us, but let Six and I enter and park first.”

  Dawkins voice was right in his ear, as if it was in his head, like the voices a schizophrenic would hear. Cyborg communication was very intimate. He waited while Dawkins and Six trundled into the lift. With a bump and a scrape, he settled in next to them and a mesh door rattled shut behind.

  A designer should have to experience whatever he has made, thought Art. An architect should live in his studio apartment. Is an open plan bathroom and bedroom really such a good idea? He thought of this particular example because a brain in a metal body still has all the requirements of a living thing. It needs oxygen and nutrients, and some system in place to remove waste. He was laden with air cylinders and carbon dioxide waste receptacles; with a blood pump and a kidney machine. All this was expensive, weighty, life support equipment, but the benefits were enormous. You can’t make a thinking device as sophisticated as the human brain in a lab. It is so complex that even now, in the 23rd century, only a fraction of its biology is understood. Perhaps, with quantum biology, an artificial device could be constructed, but it would be too cumbersome to be implanted in a robotic body. It was like the petrol cars of the 21st century. There were many new technologies developed in that hundred years, fuel cells and electric motors, but none offered the simple efficiency of petroleum.

  The human brain is similar. It requires a portable hospital to keep it alive, but compared to the massive computing power and IT specialists needed to keep an artificial brain functioning, a series of simple pumps and filters is small change.

  They exited the lift at the next deck down to check on the bodies and brains in stasis. Dawkins held up one hand to indicate for him to stop. “Art.”

  “Yes?”

  “Your body is here. Do you want to see it?”

  A good question. He had very little to do with the ‘wet’ end of brain surgery. He had only a dim memory of a test cadaver when he was a student. But that was some anonymous old man, his face covered with a cloth. They had stood, the students, at the cranium end, wincing as the bone-saw worried away at the skull. And it was not just a small circular section, as was normal for trepanning or keyhole surgery. These cuts were made around the base of the skull, just above the ears, and low across the eyebrows. The aim was to free up as much of the brain as possible so the aural and optic nerves could be cut at exactly the right point for them to take the electronic graft. Last of all came the brain stem. It was cut close to the base of the brain, but it had to be cut quickly and accurately. Then the brain was free. Halliday had developed a machine to care for the brain in those vital first moments out of the human body. It was similar to the cradles Art used in his laboratory. A suction pump at the base of a moulded plastic receptacle sucked down the end of the brain stem into an organic mesh tube, seeded with stem cells to encourage the growth of new spinal motor and sensory nerve pathways. Metal clamps sealed over seeping veins and arteries. Automated syringes flooded the area with anti-inflammatory drugs, anti-rejection nanobots armed with packets of artificial DNA, like fake ID cards. Robots within robots. The brain was locked into its metal host.

  Art looked at his body. How grey and slack and thin he looked with the animating muscular tensions of life removed! This was not just Art asleep; this was Art the body. Chromed pipes and tinted plastic tubing invaded every orifice; a basic autonomic programme fed his body simple survival instructions. Lungs – breathe, heart – pump, kidneys – filter. Pipes slithered away from his penis and anus. A smaller suction pipe at the corner of his mouth, like a dentist’s implement, sucked quietly at the saliva he produced, so it would not choke him. He zoomed in with his optical sensor to take a look at the incisions in his shaved skull. Temporary sutures held the flesh together. Most importantly, a flap of skin between his eyebrows remained uncut. This maintained a blood flow to the skin covering his skull, which would otherwise curl up like a dead leaf and die. He was satisfied. Vital signs were steady, the stitches were neat, the cuts were clean. The brain maintaining the body stasis deck knew what it was doing. He sent a signal to a nearby console and requested its neurological readout. The console screen flickered into life.

  “Dawkins,” said Art, “this profile looks familiar. This is an engineered brain.”

  Dawkins had been plugging a small leak in Franco’s chamber. “It is a clone from Hiroto. Hiroto Beta. Would you like to talk to him?”

  Art, newly cybernetic, recoiled from the suggestion. The ancient cancerous brain was alien to him; cyborg communication was too intimate and invasive. But Art the scientist, the cyborg engineer, was far too curious. “Can we hear him through speakers?”

  “I will speak to him.”

  There was a brief buzz and pop. “Domo, Art san. Konichi wa?”

  That mellifluous voice, warm as saki on a winter’s day.

  “Hello, Hiroto Beta. How are you?” It was a standard intelligence test question. Only a truly sentient organism could understand it. Not who are you, but how are you. It was deliberately vague, and invited numerous answers, many right, many wrong. And only a truly sentient organism would know which answers were right or wrong.

  “I am sad.”

  “Why, Hiroto Beta?”

  “My brother is dead. The Halliday laboratory has been destroyed by fire. It was bombed by the military.”

  “Fuck…they know about us. Are there any ships in pursuit?”

  “There were many, in the first week, but we have out-run them. Thirty-six missiles have been launched.”

  “Can we shoot them down, evade them?”

  “We have out-run them as well. We are in the fastest ship ever built, faster than any projectile, Art san, and we will continue to accelerate for another six weeks.”

  Art’s optical sensors scanned the deck. He wanted a face to focus on. “Hiroto, can I see you on a monitor?”

  “Hai. Look to your right, Art san.”

  There was Hiroto’s friendly face; intelligent, wise, ethnically diverse and entirely artificial. A face for everyone. But still unmistakably Japanese, like a manga cartoon with its wide, western eyes. An in-house project for a Halliday employee.

  “What else did Hiroto Alpha tell you before he…went off-line.”

  “No euphemisms, please, Art san. He died in a fire. He was a man before he was a machine.”

  Art, with no face and no body, struggled to assume a position of shame, but the neural link he shared with all the on-line brains aboard sent the truth of his feelings round the system.

  “Apology accepted, Art san. You would like to know what he was like as a man?”

  Art flinched. There was no privacy in personal thought. “Yes, Hiroto, I would like to know what sort of man he was.”

  “And is. For I am he. And thank you for not calling me Hiroto Beta. I am now and ever have been Hiroto, and still I live, immortal!”

  “Hiroto, we must make you a body, get you out of your tank and cradle, let you experience as much as you can.”

  Hiroto was silent for a moment. “Impossible, Art san. The kyansa lives on, multiplying and dividing, unstoppable. I grow, Mr Parrish, like a fucking soufflé, filling whatever space is available. I dream of being left on an uninhabited planet and growing to fill the whole world, over mountains and fields and oceans until there is just me and the sukai, spinning in the vacuum, pointlessly mutating, making a mockery of life.”

  “Where did you grow up, Hiroto?” Art sought to turn Hiroto’s thoughts away from death and disease.

  “I was born in 2189, in Kushiro on Hokkaido. That is the north island. My father was a park ranger on the Shitsugen park. In the winter we would feed the Tancho cranes so they would survive the winter snows. I became a ranger when I left school at seventeen. I worked there for eight years until my cancer was diagnosed. Those eight years are my life. What went before, and what came after are dreams of no importance. I
spent my days on a barge with a little crane, I mean a mechanical crane, dredging waterways and sandbagging the coastal channels against the rising waters. You weren’t even born then, Art, but the 22nd century was the tipping point for a lot of critical environmental factors. You must have read about the Baku Declaration in 2214.”

  Art searched his memory and found, to his surprise, neural network information slotting seamlessly into the gaps and blank spots. “The last ever barrel of crude oil extracted from Azerbaijan.”

  “The last crude oil extracted anywhere on Earth. Sold for 3.2 billion dollars. Bought by Brandt Rembers. Then he was murdered and – well, records start to break up then.”

  A silence fell between them. 2214 was the dawn of a dark age for Earth. Tidal inundations, freak weather, intermittent power supplies all began to grind down mankind. There is a theory that Africa never made it as a significant world power despite its abundant natural resources simply because life there was too hard. It mirrors another theory that the great early civilizations flourished around the mill-pond of the Mediterranean because life there was relatively easy. Crops flourished, livestock grew fat, farmers produced a surplus of produce that allowed the upper echelons of society the luxury of contemplation and innovation. If your belly is full, then your mind can wonder. Earth entered its African phase. Like Africa, the majority lived in hopeless squalor; like parts of Africa, an elite existed on the exploitation of its people. This was business, stripped of all its niceties. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. Survival. Darwinism. The black heart of the jungle. The implacable, uncaring face of raw nature. This was the Earth Art’s parents fled. This was the Earth that Kyko Halliday barely escaped. But Hiroto had been there for Earth’s decline. All three hundred years of it.

  The avatar face dissolved into a million pixels and reformed, refreshed. “I had a brain tumour in my corpus collosum, that quickly spread into my splenium.”

  A death sentence. The corpus collosum was right at the centre of the brain, near the underside, and completely inoperable. The splenium was to the rear of this, responsible for neural communication between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and the personality of the patient. Halliday’s great, great, great grandfather, Akira, had saved him. His fraught, ill-educated parents had signed all the consent forms, barely registering the legal implications. The young genius had operated on Hiroto, carefully saving the functional areas of brain while trying to cut out the cancer. A power cut killed Hiroto ten days into his treatments. Akira Halliday expressed his regrets, and paid for the family’s funeral expenses. He neglected to mention the greater part of Hiroto’s brain was saved in a prototype cradle in another room of the hospital. He had cut out ninety percent of the cancer when the power cut had shut down Hiroto’s life support equipment. Cardiac arrest followed swiftly, followed by organ death. He made the decision to remove the brain to the test cradle.

  Our lives are shaped by our decisions, day by day. Akira Halliday, the brilliant student, allowed his scientific curiosity to cloud the hypocratic oath:

  “I SWEAR by Apollo the physician, and Aesculapius, and Health, and All-heal, and all the gods and goddesses, that, according to my ability and judgment, I will keep this Oath and this stipulation- to reckon him who taught me this Art equally dear to me as my parents, to share my substance with him, and relieve his necessities if required; to look upon his offspring in the same footing as my own brothers, and to teach them this art, if they shall wish to learn it, without fee or stipulation; and that by precept, lecture, and every other mode of instruction, I will impart a knowledge of the Art to my own sons, and those of my teachers, and to disciples bound by a stipulation and oath according to the law of medicine, but to none others. I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion. With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practice my Art. I will not cut persons labouring under the stone, but will leave this to be done by men who are practitioners of this work. Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick, and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption; and, further from the seduction of females or males, of freemen and slaves. Whatever, in connection with my professional practice or not, in connection with it, I see or hear, in the life of men, which ought not to be spoken of abroad, I will not divulge, as reckoning that all such should be kept secret. While I continue to keep this Oath unviolated, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and the practice of the art, respected by all men, in all times! But should I trespass and violate this Oath, may the reverse be my lot!”

  Mischief? Who knows, for under the circumstances, Halliday did no harm to Hiroto. Without his intervention, the young man would have died in his entirety, both physical and mental. But to deny Hiroto’s parents any knowledge of their son’s survival was his undoing. Halliday had kidnapped Hiroto, and by the time his traumatised brain came to ask of his parents, they had been dead for many centuries, and he was seventeen billion light years from home, in the care of Akira’s descendent, Kyko.

  Dawkins, Six and Art moved on to Halliday’s chamber. A shielded pressure dome was clamped over it. Kyko had chosen not to have his brain separated from his body. The dome protected him from the pressures of their extreme acceleration. And yet something was wrong. Some lights showed red. Dawkins accessed the medical screen at the foot of Halliday’s enclosure. Protein anomalies. Pancreatic cancer. Below that, an amber light. Spinal motor nerve atrophy. This was a long-standing affliction and treatable in its own grotesque way. But Halliday knew how to beat this: transfer into a cyborg body. He chose not to. The cancer was new. Despite fantastic advances in medicine, this was still a killer. His body was next to useless. But would he be prepared to give it up to live as Dawkins and Six lived, in a mechanical skeleton?

  Perhaps you have heard of Esher Dambuie. She was a much sought-after model in the Mioumu system. She advertised everything from shampoo to uni-sphere accessories for ten years or so. Then she was diagnosed with breast cancer and went into therapy. It was an aggressive cancer, and spread quickly into her lungs and bones.

  Halliday offered her a body, a beautiful chrome model whose upper half evoked all that was beautiful of Esher in her prime. She refused. Halliday came back three months later, with a living tissue version. Down to the waist, a 3D viewer would think this was the actual, living Esher Dambuie. Again she refused. A month later, she was dead. Was it vanity over common sense? Or simply a fundamental desire to live and die as nature intended? In life she had been dealt what appeared to be a winning genetic hand – symmetry, long legs, great hair and skin, the pick of any man she wanted – but underneath, a faulty protein, shortened telomeres on the fatty cell tissue of her breasts, the genetic predisposition to breast cancer. The exact opposite of the little old Sicilian woman with the bowed back, her face like the skin on an elephant’s arse and no teeth, who lives to be a hundred and ten and never has a sick day in her life. Who is the real winner?

  “Will you be staring much longer, gentlemen?”

  Art was so surprised to hear Halliday’s voice, he reversed his body into a bulkhead with a dull thump.

  “Yes, the cancer has finally appeared. Hiroto has had me under observation for several months. A cure is imminent.”

  It was a good representation of Halliday’s voice; his linguistic processes picked up and approximated by brain-scan and converted into soundwaves. Any fear or doubt was too subtle to be relayed. But the cyborgs felt it. Hiroto reacted to the words, and an adrenaline signal flushed through the ship’s control system. Art isolated Hiroto’s feed. “What is it, Hiroto?”

  “Tests indicate a re-seeding of amino acids within affected cells will eliminate the tumour in three or four weeks, but I need donor cells to harves
t the amino acids. Ship inventory indicates there are not enough stored sample cells to produce enough amino acids.”

  “Will he die?”

  “Yes.”

  “We must make him as comfortable as possible.”

  Hiroto was silent for a moment. Then: “There is another option.”

  “Go on.”

  “Organic inventory sub-menu indicates a biological match. Franco Pirelli.”

  Art processed the information. “Would harvesting amino acids from Franco’s pancreas be dangerous?”

  “Fatal.”

  “Okay. Thank you, Hiroto. You will not access any organic material from Franco Pirelli. If any such orders are given, you will first contact me. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, Art san.”

  The robots continued on to check the health readouts of the bodies of Franco, Kate and Vara, and then the other seven hundred and ninety five passengers. Most were Halliday employees. Seventy four were government ministers, including Tay Murman, the prime minister of Imo. He had kept the military out of the loop for personal reasons. Halliday had never inquired what these reasons were. It was important to respect the wishes of a lucrative client and, in this instance, it had saved the lives of everyone on board.

  It took three days to complete the round. There were three total deaths, brain and body support malfunctions; two body deaths – they could go into cyborg rehabilitation and training if they so wished; and five brain deaths. Three were total brain death, no oxygen for ten minutes or more, two were brain damage. One had an oxygen bubble, the other a short oxygenated blood failure. After a brief consultation, the brains of the brain damaged were ejected into space. Hiroto thought it best to retain as many bodies as possible, for future potential brain integration.