Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  As soon as it had seemed like it was a safe bet that Mr. Easyrider and Mr. Scatflinger were going to live for while, they were trans­ferred back to the Barracks in a specially equipped ambulance. They were laid side by side in a separate room that had been built onto one end of Building 2. They were connected up to numerous machines, wired into a support system. Each of them had a red polygon on his head, a U-shaped welt, hairy with black sutures, marking the boundary of the flap that had been peeled back during surgery.

  In the center of the area outlined by the surgical scar, a bundle of lines was plugged into the patient’s head. It passed through the middle of the flake of skull that had been neatly sawed out by Dr. Radhakrishnan’s bone saw. While Dr. Radhakrishnan had occupied himself with implanting the biochip, a lesser surgeon - more of a technician, really - had drilled a few holes through the disembodied chunk of skull and implanted a plastic connector. The connector was about the size of a dime and was really a cluster of smaller connections: half a dozen tiny tubes for passing fluids in and out, and a miniature, fifty-pin electrical plug, a nearly microscopic version of the port on the back of a computer. Since most communication between the biochip and the outside world was supposed to happen over the radio, only a few of these fifty pins were hooked up to the biochip itself. Most of them were hooked up to sensors that monitored the patient’s condition and to the electrostimulus system that was supposed to encourage the growth of new connections between brain and biochip.

  When the operation was finished, this connector peeked through the skin, somewhat in the fashion of a wall socket. The researchers could then interface with the patient by sticking a matching plug into the socket; when it was stuck in properly, all of the fluid and electrical connections were made in an instant. So many tubes and wires were crammed together in this bottleneck that they seemed to explode from the side of the patient’s head. Some of the connections ran directly to various pieces of bedside machinery that monitored pressure inside the skull, delivered drugs, or helped to oxygenate the brain tissue in the biochip. Others were taped to the head of the bed, from which they ran over to the nearest wall, passed through a hole, and ran through a conduit that connected the two buildings.

  The people in Building 1 saw Mr. Easyrider and Mr. Scatflinger as media entities, nothing more. No odors, no fluids, just images on TV monitors, tracings on oscilloscopes, graphics on their Calyx workstations, and the occasional disembodied sound effect coming out of a speaker. This, Dr. Radhakrishnan reflected, made it a lot easier to deal with them objectively.

  There was not much to do for the first few days. The brain cells in the biochip had not yet had time to connect themselves up to the patients’ brain, so the chip was neurologically inert, just a dead piece of shrapnel embedded in the head. Then, one morning at about three o’clock, computer screens all over Building 1 suddenly came alive as a neuron in Mr. Scatflinger’s brain hooked up with a neuron on the fringe of the biochip.

  As soon as Dr. Radhakrishnan got there, they popped the corks on a few bottles of champagne and then stood under the monitor for a while, watching the data stream by. Zeldo did some typing on his workstation and brought up a new window on the screen, this one showing a running graph of the brain activity.

  “Someone go shine a light in his eyes,” Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

  “Yes, Doctor!” said one of his Indian grad students. He ran out of the building, pulling a penlight from his pocket. A few moments later the grad student was visible on the closed-circuit monitor that had been showing live coverage of Mr. Scatflinger from Building 2. All eyes flicked back and forth between the closed-circuit set and the computer monitor as the grad student leaned over the sleeping Mr. Scatflinger, peeled back one of his eyelids with his thumb, and shone the penlight into it.

  The graph jumped. The crowd went wild.

  “Well done, Doctor,” someone was saying. It was Mr. Salvador, shaking his hand, offering a cigar. “Remarkable success, especially under the circumstances.” Around nine a.m., a burst of activity showed up on Mr. Easyrider’s heretofore quiescent monitor. But even in the corner of his eye, Dr. Radhakrishnan could see that something was wrong. The signals coming in from the biochip showed no clear pattern in terms of intensity or duration.

  “Glitches,” Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

  “But a whole hell of a lot of glitches,” Zeldo said.

  “Glicherama,” said one of the other Americans. Dr. Radhakrishnan bit his lip, knowing that for the rest of his career, this phenomenon, whenever it occurred, would be referred to as Glicherama.

  Sudden movement caught his eye. He looked over at the closed-circuit monitor for Mr. Easyrider and saw, instead of the patient, the backsides of several nurses who were standing around him, working feverishly.

  By the time Dr. Radhakrishnan made it over to Building 2, Mr. Easyrider was dead. His heart had stopped beating. They wheeled out the defib cart and shocked him a couple of times, trying to get a stable rhythm back, but in the end they could get nothing but bad rhythms on the scope, and finally no rhythm at all.

  When they were sure he was dead, when they had closed his eyes, rolled away the cart, and washed their hands, Dr. Radhakrishnan picked up the intercom to Building 1. “Are you getting any signals from the chip?” he said. He asked the question out of purely academic interest; supposedly there was as bit of random electrical activity in the brain after death. “It’s been dead for a couple of minutes,” Zeldo said. “Completely dead?”

  “Completely dead. We didn’t think to include a surge protector.”

  “Surge protector?”

  “Yeah. To protect the chip from sparks and lightning bolts, you know.”

  “I haven’t seen any lightning.”

  “You held the lightning in your hands. You shocked him, man. That jolt from the defibrillator blew our chip to kingdom come.” They did a postmortem more or less on the spot. A sterile environment was not required for an autopsy, so they partitioned off one corner of the room to prevent other patients from seeing what was happening, and Dr. Radhakrishnan took Mr. Easyrider apart, piece by piece, paying special attention to the head.

  Building 2 was a distracting work environment because it was full of head cases - old ones dying of natural causes and new ones being wheeled in all the time, from all over the subcontinent. Brain injury sometimes left people as vegetables, but in some cases it could cause bizarre behavior, and over the brief course of this project they had already seen their quota of screeches and headbangers. In the middle of Dr. Radhakrishnan’s autopsy, they apparently brought in a new one. A loud, coarse voice began to echo off the tin ceiling:

  “WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA…”

  It was no worse than a room full of excited baboons. He continued working, narrating his observations into a tape recorder; but he had to speak a little more loudly now because underneath his words was a constant background noise of WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA…

  The cause of death was obvious enough. Mr. Easyrider’s body had rejected the implant. Dr. Radhakrishnan tried to be clinical about it.

  WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA… “The organic portion of the biochip shows pronounced atrophy …”

  WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA… “The inorganic or silicon portion of the biochip is virtually rattling around loose inside the skull…” That was not very scientific. He took a deep breath.

  WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA…

  “There is considerable scarring and atrophy in the portions of the brain adjacent to the implant.” His head was spinning. He was tired. He just wanted to sit down and have a drink. “Conclusion: the host rejected the graft.”

  He was becoming conscious of another irrelevant sensory input besides the stream of WUBBAs: he was smelling perfume. It was not something that would really pass for perfume in India, where people knew as much about tastes and smells as Americans knew about heavy metal music. This was some kind of tedious lavender-and-roses concoction, something stupid
and English.

  “It appears that necrosis started at the site of the implant and spread to the brainstem - leading to the patient’s demise.” WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA… “Doc?” someone said. Zeldo.

  He looked up at Zeldo, feeling very tired. Zeldo had pulled the curtain aside and was now gaping at the bloody, dismembered corpse of Mr. Easyrider. He was not a medical person and was not inured to this kind of thing.

  Dr. Radhakrishnan turned to face Zeldo, bumping the table with his hip. The hemisphere of Mr. Easyrider’s skull rocked back and forth a little bit on the tabletop.

  “Two things,” Zeldo said.

  “Yes?”

  WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA…

  “There’s a problem with Scatflinger. And there’s a lady here to see you.”

  All of a sudden, the fact that he had gotten up at three in the morning was really getting to Dr. Radhakrishnan.

  Maybe these were simple problems, easy to fix. He emerged from the autopsy room still wearing his rubber gloves, smeared with blood and gray matter. If this was just going to take a minute, there was no point in getting ungloved and then regloving later. “First things first,” he said, and led Zeldo toward the room that, as of this morning, Mr. Scatflinger now had all to himself.

  As he approached the door, the sound of WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA grew louder.

  No. It couldn’t be.

  He opened the door. Half of his staff was gathered around the bed.

  Mr. Scatflinger, who had been unable to do anything except he in bed since his accident, was now sitting bolt upright in bed.

  He had been totally aphasic as well, unable to make a sound. But now he was saying, “WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA” as loudly as he could.

  Everyone was looking at Dr. Radhakrishnan to see how he was going to react.

  “Well,” he said to his staff, “I think one can make the case that being able to say ‘WUBBA WUBBA’ is better than not being able to say anything at all, and that, at least in a limited sense, we have done Mr. Scatflinger here a great service.”

  “Excuse me! Are you the gentleman in charge?” someone said. It was a lady’s voice. Not just a female voice, but really a lady’s voice.

  Dr. Radhakrishnan turned around slowly, half-paralyzed by an unexplainable sense of fear and loathing. The odor of lavender and roses was quite strong now.

  He was looking directly into a bosom of Himalayan proportions, stoutly contained in some kind of undergarment and covered with a flowery print dress. His gaze traveled from the bottom to the top of the bosom, changing focus the whole way, and then encountered a soft, pale, yet sturdy neck. Above that was a face.

  It was a nice English lady’s face, but too big. It was like looking at the young Victoria through a big Fresnel lens. And on top, where custom would dictate some kind of a tightly curled, chemically induced permanent wave, was something altogether out of place, a short, simple, straight, and maybe just a big shaggy kind of haircut. Certainly not an ugly way to wear one’s hair, but just a little bit out of keeping with the social stature that was implied by her accent.

  “Madam,” he said, “I am Dr. Radhakrishnan.” He extended his hand.

  “Lady Wilburdon. How do you do,” she said, shaking it.

  “Oh, god,” Zeldo said, and ran away, gagging audibly.

  A gasp came from the staff. Dr. Radhakrishnan felt the back of his neck get hot. He was tired, he was stressed, and he had forgotten about the gloves. This Lady Wilburdon creature now had Mr. Easyrider’s brains all over her hand.

  There was brief moment of utter despair as he tried to think of a way to draw this fact to her attention without making the breach of etiquette even worse than it already was.

  “Oh, it’s really quite all right,” she said, fluttering her bloody hand dismissively. “I worked in the refugee camps of Kurdistan for a month, at the height of the insurrection, so a bit of a mess does not trouble me at all. And I wouldn’t dream of having you interrupt your work just to shake hands with an interloper.”

  Dr. Radhakrishnan was looking around uneasily, hoping to make eye contact with someone who knew who this lady was, why she was here, how she had gotten in past all of those Sikh commandos at the front gate, all of those .50-caliber machine-gun nests.

  Behind her he could see another woman, a smaller, auntish lady, conversing with Mr. Salvador. Mr. Salvador kept glancing at the backside of Lady Wilburdon; he wanted to be here, not there, but clearly was having trouble extricating himself from polite small talk with this other woman.

  WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA…

  “You are … a guest of Mr. Salvador?” he said.

  “Yes. My secretary, Miss Chapman, and I were passing through Delhi on an inspection tour and we thought we would pop in and see how Bucky’s project was coming along.”

  “Bucky?”

  “Yes. Bucky. Buckminster Salvador.”

  “His name is Bucky?”

  “Buckminster. The boys at school used to call him B.M. for short, but we suppressed that. It was uncouth and cruel.”

  “School?”

  “The Lady Wilburdon School for Spoiled boys in Newcastle upon Tyne.”

  “I didn’t know there was such a thing as a school for spoiled boys,” Dr. Radhakrishnan said numbly.

  “Oh, yes. There are a lot of them in England, you know. And all of their parents are desperate for an environment that will give them structure …”

  “That’s quite enough,” Mr. Salvador said, interrupting. Dr. Radhakrishnan was shocked to see the look on his face; suddenly he was pale and sweating. His mask of total aplomb had been shattered, he was rolling his eyes, clearly out of control.

  “Quite enough of what, Bucky?” Lady Wilburdon said, locking eyes with Mr. Salvador, who looked very short standing next to her.

  “Quite enough of having you stand around in this unpleasant place when I should be treating you to a lavish dinner along Connaught Circus!” Mr. Salvador improvised. He was close to coming completely unhinged.

  WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA… “Oh, but I can go into some restaurant and order a meal whenever I please. It’s not every day I get the opportunity to tour an advanced neurological research facility,” Lady Wilburdon said.

  “Tour?” Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

  She seemed taken aback. “Yes. Well, I thought, as long as I was here …”

  “Naturally you can have a look around, Lady Wilburdon,” Mr. Salvador said, shooting Dr. Radhakrishnan a panicky warning look. Clearly, resistance was out of the question.

  Suddenly Lady Wilburdon was looking past Dr. Radhakrishnan, over his shoulder, and a completely new expression had come over her face. It was a wonderful, sweet, lovely, maternal expression, like a mother greeting her children home from school.

  “Hello, sir, and how do you do? I am so sorry for intruding.”

  She was looking at Mr. Scatflinger.

  Mr. Scatflinger was looking right back at her. Staring her straight in the eye. There was even a hint of a smile on his face. “Wubba wubba,” he said.

  “Very well, thank you. Perhaps Dr. Radhakrishnan would be so good as to introduce us?”

  “Yes. Lady Wilburdon, this is, uh, Mr. Banerjee. Mr. Banerjee, Lady Wilburdon.”

  “It’s so nice to make your acquaintance.”

  “Wubba wubba wubba.”

  Mr. Salvador was taking advantage of this break in the con­versation to sit on the edge of an empty bed and clamp one hand over his face.

  “I take it that Mr. Banerjee will soon be undergoing this miraculous new surgical procedure that Bucky was telling me about.”

  “Wubba wubba wubba.”

  “Actually, he has already undergone it,” Dr. Radhakrishnan said. No point in dissembling.

  She was just a trifle taken aback. “I see.”

  “Before the operation he could not sit up in bed or speak. Now, as you see, he can sit up for prolonged periods, and he has developed the ability to say ‘wubba wubba.’ ” “Wubba wubba wubba,” Mr. Scatflinger sa
id. “Do you suppose that, as time goes on, he will develop the ability to say other sorts of things?”

  “Absolutely. You see, the implant has not been patterned yet. There is a powerful computer inside his head. But right now, the connections are scrambled. The computer has no program. We will have to train him to speak over a period of weeks or months.”

  “I see. So after the operation, there is a prolonged period of rehabilitation.” “Exactly.”

  “And the new facility you are building will have such facilities, which, as I notice, are lacking here.” “Precisely.”

  “Wubba wubba wubba wubba,” Mr. Scatflinger said. “It was so nice to have met you, Mr. Banerjee,” Lady Wilburdon said, “and I wish you the best of luck in the course of your therapy.” She stepped back out of Mr. Scatflinger’s room, which obliged Dr. Radhakrishnan to follow her. “We have high hopes for him,” he said.

  “I am sure that you do,” Lady Wilburdon said. “But I see that another one of your patients has not been as fortunate.”

  She was looking over at Mr. Easyrider, sprawled out on a bloody table with his brains spilling out of his head, the cup of his skull upended next to him.

  Mr. Salvador was still collecting his wits, which had been blown all over the Indo-Gangetic plain. Dr. Radhakrishnan had to handle this himself.

  The woman had to be important. He had never heard of her, but with some people, you could just tell that they were important.

  “The name of Lady Wilburdon is famous throughout the world,” he said.

  “I am the seventh person to bear that title,” she said, “and by far the least distinguished.”

  “You evidently travel quite a bit, inspecting things.”

  “Hundreds of institutions throughout the world, yes.” Then you will appreciate, perhaps better than anyone, that the patients who come into this place are often in very grave condition.” “I see that very clearly.”