by Lightspeed Magazine;Catherynne M. Valente;Tananarive Due;Adam-Troy Castro;Joe Haldeman
My initial plan had been to wire the dead-man switch to my pulse, which would free my good hand and allow me to sleep. That will have to wait. The wiring completed, I turned on the intercom and announced that I would speak to the Coordinator, and no one else.
When I finally got to talk to him, I told him what I had done and invited him to verify it. That didn’t take long. Then I presented my demands:
Surgery to replace the rest of my limbs, of course. The surgery would have to be done while I was conscious (a heartbeat dead-man switch could be subverted by a heart machine) and it would have to be done here, so that I could be assured that nobody fooled with my circuit changes.
The doctors were called in, and they objected that such profound surgery couldn’t be done under local anesthetic. I knew they were lying, of course; amputation was a fairly routine procedure even before anesthetics were invented. Yes, but I would faint, they said. I told them that I would not, and at any rate I was willing to take the chance, and no one else had any choice in the matter.
(I have not yet mentioned that the ultimate totality of my plan involves replacing all my internal organs as well as all of the limbs—or at least those organs whose failure could cause untimely death. I will be a true cyborg then, a human brain in an “artificial” body, with the prospect of thousands of years of life. With a few decades—or centuries!—of research, I could even do something about the brain’s shortcomings. I would wind up interfaced to EarthNet, with all of human knowledge at my disposal, and with my faculties for logic and memory no longer fettered by the slow pace of electrochemical synapse.)
A psychiatrist, talking from Earth, tried to convince me of the error of my ways. He said that the dreadful trauma had “obviously” unhinged me, and the cyborg augmentation, far from affecting a cure, had made my mental derangement worse. He demonstrated, at least to his own satisfaction, that my behavior followed some classical pattern of madness. All this had been taken into consideration, he said, and if I were to give myself up, I would be forgiven my crimes and manumitted into the loving arms of the psychiatric establishment.
I did take time to explain the fundamental errors in his way of thinking. He felt that I had quite literally lost my identity by losing my face and genitalia, and that I was at bottom a “good” person whose essential humanity had been perverted by physical and existential estrangement. Totally wrong. By his terms, what I actually am isan “evil” person whose true nature was revealed to himself by the lucky accident that released him from existential propinquity with the common herd.
And “evil” is the accurate word, not maladjusted or amoral or even criminal. I am as evil by human standards as a human is evil by the standards of an animal raised for food, and the analogy is accurate. I will sacrifice humans not only for any survival but for comfort, curiosity, or entertainment. I will allow to live anyone who doesn’t bother me, and reward generously those who help.
Now they have only forty minutes. They know I am
—end of recording—
25 September 2058
Excerpt from Summary Report
I am Dr. Henry Janovski, head of the surgical team that worked on the illfated cyborg augmentation of Dr. Wilson Cheetham.
We were fortunate that Dr. Cheetham’s insanity did interfere with his normally painstaking, precise nature. If he had spent more time in preparation, I have no doubt that he would have put us in a very difficult fix.
He should have realized that the protecting wall that shut him off from the rest of Nearside was made of steel, an excellent conductor of electricity. If he had insulated himself behind a good dielectric, he could have escaped his fate.
Cheetham’s waldo was a marvelous instrument, but basically it was only a pseudo-intelligent servomechanism that obeyed well-defined radio-frequency commands. All we had to do was override the signals that were coming from his own nervous system.
We hooked a powerful amplifier up to the steel wall, making it in effect a huge radio transmitter. To generate the signal we wanted amplified, I had a technician put on a waldo sleeve that was holding a box similar to Cheetham’s dead-man switch. We wired the hand closed, turned up the power, and had the technician strike himself on the chin as hard as he could.
The technician struck himself so hard he blacked out for a few seconds. Cheetham’s resonant action, perhaps a hundred times more powerful, drove the bones of his chin up through the top of his skull.
Fortunately, the expensive arm itself was not damaged. It is not evil or insane by itself, of course. Which I shall prove.
The experiments will continue, though of course we will be more selective as to subjects. It seems obvious in retrospect that we should not use as subjects people who have gone through the kind of trauma that Cheetham suffered. We must use willing volunteers. Such as myself.
I am not young, and weakness and an occasional tremor in my hands limit the amount of surgery I can do—much less than my knowledge would allow, or my nature desire. My failing left arm I shall have replaced with Cheetham’s mechanical marvel, and I will go through training similar to his—but for the good of humanity, not for ill.
What miracles I will perform with a knife!
© 1985 by Joe Haldeman
Originally appeared in Playboy.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Joe Haldeman writes for a living and teaches as an absorbing hobby. He has been a full-time writer since 1969, except for the occasional teaching and a short tenure as senior editor of Astronomy magazine. He has taught writing at MIT every fall semester since 1983. Main hobbies are astronomy, bicycling, watercolor, and guitar. His latest books are Marsbound and Starbound. He’s hard at work on the final book of the trilogy, Earthbound.
Author Spotlight: Joe Haldeman
Erin Stocks
If you type the name “Joe Haldeman” in any search engine, you’ll find multiple entries that go into great detail about the man with degrees in physics, astronomy and writing. Not only has he won eighteen major writing awards, including the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement, but this science fiction giant holds a Purple Heart after being drafted into Vietnam in the ‘60s. One of his most famous novels, The Forever War (1975), is based on his experiences as a combat engineer in Vietnam, and the novel went on to win the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards that year. The book is currently being taught in college classrooms throughout the U.S. Haldeman is currently working on the novel Earthbound, which completes the trilogy containing Marsbound and Starbound.
In addition to his novels, much of Haldeman’s short fiction has gone on to win more Hugos and Nebulas, as well as other distinguished industry awards. He’s been an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the president of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and he’s savvy at poker and more than decent at guitar playing. Chances are good you might see him at the next big science fiction convention or catch his lectures at a prestigious writing workshop, like Clarion.
Published in 1985, “More Than the Sum of His Parts” was set in the then-distant future of 2058. “It seemed a reasonable time frame, when we were somewhat more optimistic about space industrialization,” Haldeman says, “although the waldo technology is wishful thinking, or arm-waving—I didn’t have any actual technological rationale for it happening that soon, or ever. The waldos themselves were inspired by the story ‘Waldo,’ by Robert Heinlein. The idea of smaller and smaller waldos building their miniaturized successors came from the notions about self-replicating ‘von Neumann’ machines that were cutting-edge techno-dreaming at the time.”
In the story, Haldeman’s protagonist Cheetham makes a fascinating progression from calm apathy to curious experimentation to detached coldness. There is plenty of foreshadowing of the darkness emerging inside him, including Cheetham’s own early observation that he felt too calm, as well as after he receives new genitals and what that was like, psychologically. We asked Haldeman if he thought th
e replacement of Cheetham’s body turned him into a different man.
“I suspect that the kernel of Cheetham’s insanity may have been there all along,” Haldeman says, and you know that only a great writer like Haldeman could get away with using the word “kernel” in any way other than its technological definition. “But of course the insanity was actualized when he acquiesced in merging his ‘animal’ nature with machines. That’s the story’s main metaphor.”
The story ends on a chilling note, as Janovski follows up the details of Cheetham’s fate with the use of the word “experiment,” and clearly taking over the metal arm for his own. Yet based on what we know as readers, and our experience in watching Cheetham fall apart, we’re left with thinking that Janovski may get more than he bargained for. When I tried to get Haldeman to come clean with us about what he thinks happens next, he only offered this: “What’s clear in the story is that Cheetham is sure he has Janovski outwitted, but actually Janovski has him ‘contained’ in some cybernetic sense. As far as what happens next, if Janovski is going to take the high road or if he’s going to end up just the way Cheetham did…the story may be ambiguous in that regard—you’ll have to decide for yourself.”
Erin Stocks is a writer and musician newly transplanted from Chicago to Oklahoma City. Her fiction can be found in Flash Fiction Online (upcoming), the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and The Absent Willow Review. When she’s not writing, she’s reading slush for Lightspeed Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, critting works for her SFF writing group, the Self-Forging Fragments, and rambling about baking bread on erinstocks.blogspot.com.
Cyborg-netics
Matt London
“We can rebuild him. We have the technology….We can make him better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.”
—Oscar Goldman, The Six Million Dollar Man
Long before the premiere of The Six Million Dollar Man in 1974, the idea of a bionic human has fascinated the scientific and science fiction communities. Just turn on the television or take a trip to the local movie theater to find some examples. But there’s a lot more to this burgeoning science than Darth Vader and the Borg. It’s not just science fiction; it’s not even science future. What most people might be surprised to discover is that the kinds of mechanized prosthetics writers used to dream about actually exist right now.
But first let’s clear up something about the term “cybernetics” itself. Though popularized in the age of Cyberpunk to refer to bionic augmentation, to the scientific community, the word cybernetics defines the shared control between humans and machines (so more like power steering in your Honda than, say, Robocop). A more appropriate term may be cyborg-netics, but no one name has been universally adopted yet.
One of the foremost scientists working tirelessly to produce the prosthetics and augmentations of science fiction is Doctor Hugh Herr of the MIT Media Lab. After losing his legs in a climbing accident at age eighteen, Herr was scaling mountains again only months later, using new artificial legs of his own design. These new legs could adjust his height from five feet to eight feet, and were outfitted with titanium spikes that allowed him to dig into rock walls. Thereafter, Herr dedicated his life to developing smart prosthetics.
Today, as the head of the Biomechatronics research group at MIT, Herr develops powered prosthetics. He’s the inventor of a computer-controlled knee, which can sense the joint’s position and how much weight is being put on the leg and adjust the load accordingly. He’s also created a powered ankle-foot prosthesis which provides proper support and seamlessly imitates the natural gait of an organic leg. So seamlessly, in fact, that if you passed a person in the street who was wearing one, you’d be hard pressed to notice anything out of the ordinary.
In addition to cool prostheses, Dr. Herr has further delved into the realm of science fiction by developing mechanisms that amplify the endurance of able-bodied people, things like elastic shoes that reduce running energy expenditure and improve jumping ability. He’s also built leg exoskeletons for load-carrying augmentation. Ripley, anyone?
But there is one critical problem that none of these incredible breakthroughs solve, and that’s the issue of control. What separates a prosthetic from a true cybernetic limb is the ability to actually exert command over the limb, even though the nerves connecting it to the brain are gone. Todd Kuiken, an M.D. and biomedical engineer at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, who fondly recalls watching The Six Million Dollar Man as a teenager, has found one way around this problem. By rerouting the nerves of amputees into residual muscles, Kuiken gives patients the ability to control their prostheses organically. In other words, a patient who’s lost her arm in an accident can opt to have the nerves once connected to the arm rerouted to the pectoral muscles. The patient then retrains her body to move the prosthetic arm by flexing her pecs.
Now, while this method has proven to be very effective for amputees, for spinal cord patients, it’s of no use. Fortunately, Lee Miller of Northwestern is working to solve this problem. Miller is focusing his research on developing technology that would allow communication between the brain and the body without any physical connection. A current term being batted around for this technology is neuromechatronics and it can be considered the software answer to Hugh Herr’s and Todd Kuiken’s hardware solutions.
What is most surprising about this research, however, is just how far along it is. Test subjects, their brains wired to computers, simply think and a cursor moves across their screens. Quadriplegic patients adjust the volume on their TVs with just their minds. They check their email. And the ability to type just by thinking about the needed key is really not that far away. This, truly, is cyborg-netics.
Of course, some day all this science will go the way of the compact disc and the fax machine, to be replaced by tissue engineering. (Because really, what’s the point of having a bionic arm when you can just grow a new biological one?) But the bio-science revolution is at least thirty years away. In the here and now, cyborg-netic innovations are already allowing previously impaired people to walk freely again, to use computers, and even perform complex motor functions.
In fact, the only severely limiting factor facing cyborg-tech these days is the bottom line. Research and development at this level costs money. How much money? The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has developed the prototype of a fully articulated bionic hand. This one hand, however, costs a whopping fifty million dollars. Fifty million! And you probably thought Steve Austin was expensive.
However, with America engaged in two wars overseas, and thousands of amputee veterans returning home, the US Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense have stepped up to the plate to fund research to improve prosthetics. So labs will continue to make progress and we hope that ten years from now, a brain-controlled prosthetic will be possible. Sure, it won’t be a Luke Skywalker-style, thirty-six-degrees-of-freedom hand with a range of motion like yours or mine. No, this one will have only a modest eight degrees, but eight will be enough to allow us to do most of what we do every day. And that’s a pretty great start.
Cyborgs are not the future; these discoveries and innovations are happening right now. And just like science fiction, in cyborg-netics, the possibilities are endless.
Matt London is an author and filmmaker who lives in New York City. He is a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop, and a columnist for Tor.com and Realms of Fantasy magazine. His story “Mouja” appears in John Joseph Adams’s anthology The Living Dead 2. He has no less than three escape plans should the zombies take Manhattan.
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