Hope, Levy, Marc [good summer reads TXT] 📗

times now, but tell me . . . Is she in pain? What is she feeling?” Betsy blinked back tears.

“Your daughter is in a deep coma, Mrs. Barnett. She can’t feel a thing, just as the neurologist said.”

Melly was physically alive, yet her mind and spirit were gone.

A month later, an ambulance drove her to a clinic somewhere on the edges of a distant suburb, an anesthetist in the back keeping watch over her.

The evening light was fading. In front of the peeling, decrepit houses, weeds grew with wild abandon where modest little patches of lawn once lay. Rusty swings squeaked in the breeze in a park that had long been left empty. Old wooden signs hung crooked over stores that hadn’t been open in years.

The ambulance crawled up a long street fringed with warehouses, coming to a stop in front of a gate that slid open.

The clinic contrasted sharply with the surrounding area.

Melly was moved to a room at the end of a wing reserved for patients like her. On the same floor, in other rooms, three women and a man each waited their turn.

A doctor and nurse were making their rounds. The nurse checked the machines monitoring Melly’s vital signs and unhooked her from the anesthetic drip, while the doctor read through the information. He paused for a moment, his eyes locked on the monitors, and then entered the procedure details.

The next morning at eight o’clock, he returned to Melly’s room, accompanied by a technician who wheeled a motorized trolley over to the bed. The trolley held a digital terminal and tank, which the technician opened, taking out a headset and gently placing it over Melly’s head.

No more than a millimeter thick, the headset was light-years away from the prototype Josh and Luke had put together forty years earlier in another of the Center’s wings. This version was made from a supple, elastic material that fit like a second skin over whatever skull it was placed on.

The technician checked that everything was in place before lifting the bundle of fiber-optic wires leading out of the top of the headset and connecting them to the digital terminal. He punched a sequence of numbers into the keypad and watched as the screen lit up to display a three-dimensional image of Melly’s brain, with a percentage flashing underneath: 0 percent.

The technician slunk out of the room quietly.

The doctor checked his patient’s vital signs one final time before leaving. He walked back up the corridor to the control room, where the technician sat waiting in front of a console.

“Good to go?”

“The backup block has loaded. Ready when you are.”

The doctor glanced at the three monitors suspended over the console.

The middle screen showed the three-dimensional image of Melly’s brain, while the left-hand monitor displayed a series of details:

Patient 102

Melody Barnett (Source)

Age 29 (10,651 days)

Memory: 100%

Outgoing transfer: 0%

The right-hand screen showed another set of data:

Patient 102

Melody Barnett (Destination)

Age 30 (10,957 days)

Memory: —%

Incoming transfer: 0%

~

Restore process: 0%

Electrical activity: 0%

Awareness level: 0%

The doctor entered his electronic signature into the console and turned to the technician.

“At oh eight seventeen, initiate restore sequence. When you get to thirty-three percent, call me to let me know everything is running smoothly.”

The doctor turned and departed, leaving the technician with nothing to do but monitor the screens. Neurolink would take care of the rest.

The technician hit a button, and the counters began to roll.

At 08:20, an error caught his eye.

The right-hand monitor was looking good.

Patient 102

Melody Barnett (Destination)

Age 30 (10,957 days)

Memory: 0.03%

Incoming transfer: 0.03%

~

Restore process: 0.03%

Electrical activity: 0.03%

Awareness level: 0.03%

But the screen in the middle was reacting weirdly.

Patient 2

???? (Source)

Age ?? (???? days)

Memory: 96%

Outgoing transfer: 0.03%

A little later, he had managed to spot the error but was still confused. He wasn’t sure what to do next. He tapped the screen repeatedly, although he knew that doing so wasn’t the slightest bit useful. Finally, he picked up the phone.

The doctor didn’t take his call. He was probably checking in with another patient, and the technician found himself alone, with nobody but himself to rely on.

The entire procedure was fully automated. His role was restricted to hitting pause in just two scenarios: if the percentage of the brain’s electrical activity differed from the incoming transfer figure, and if Neurolink flagged an issue. But this situation was neither. The screen for the restore process was displaying as normal, and so he assumed that the problem must simply be that the monitor wasn’t working properly. He would get the maintenance team to take a look, and decided to cover his back by taking a screen shot of the display and sending it to his supervisor’s email.

The supervisor learned of the incident in the early afternoon, printed out a copy of the email, and deleted it from the server before leaving her office.

Kasuko knocked at the door to the research director’s office.

“You’re going to want to see this.” She smiled.

Luke read the report, and read it again before gazing up at Kasuko.

“We need to interrupt the procedure right now.”

“Are you insane? We made a deal!”

“That was forty years ago.” Luke looked at her. “The deal has expired.” He slid the report into the shredder.

“Hey, a deal is a deal!”

“Maybe. But to let this go on would be madness. The Neurolink program is on the brink of being green-lighted by pretty much every scientific authority that matters. Now’s really not the time for a lawsuit.”

“You’re scared of being sued?”

“What else would I be scared of?”

“I don’t know.” Kasuko shrugged. “That it might not work?”

“If I could be sure, I’d let Neurolink do its thing.”

“So not only are you going back on your word, but you’re doing it because you’re scared of your own program.”

“Bull,” Luke replied. “And what about the Barnett family, anyway? Her dad is one of our most generous donors.”

“If we stopped the procedure, what would you tell the Barnett family?”

“The truth? That there was a bug in the memory, and that that’s a risk, under the terms of the contract they signed.”

“Flinch had