Virgil lay absolutely still, every muscle locked in rigid tension. What’s the dance she’s treading? I thought I had her code. Maybe all I have is her cipher. Yes. Cipher to know what she’s saying, no code to know what she means. If I could get out of my room, maybe I can escape from this one, too. Three, four, five times I’ll try.
Slowly, his gaze never leaving hers, Virgil nodded as far as his swathing allowed. Then he stopped, reconsidered the question, and shook his head slowly from side to side.
“Fine,” Trine said. “Steve, you can take it now.”
The Pharmaceutic brought a needle kit over to Virgil’s side. He wore an impeccably benign smile. The IV package unsealed with a crackle of plastic. In the corner of the room, a videoscrim panel fluxed to zoom in on the operation.
The only patch of Kinney’s flesh other than his face to lay open and exposed was the injection port in his left wrist surgically sewn and laser welded to skin and vein. The old man pushed the blunted needle into the plastic valve. It clicked bayonet-style into place.
Steve draped the tubing through the flow regulator and switched it on.
The murky gray serum trickled slowly toward Virgil’s arm. The electroencephalograph and brain wave topograph registered the imperceptible changes in Kinney’s brain. These appeared as shifting colors on an output scrim visible only to the Pharmaceutic.
It’s not working, Virgil thought. Whatever they’re trying is failing. I don’t feel any different. Should I gloat? No. Play along. How should I act, though? I need to find something to finish Master Snoop and Nightsheet once and for all. Something big. Straight, straight.
Trine bent over the side of the table. She spoke quietly to Kinney while the Pharmaceutic administered the serum.
“What you’re getting, Virgil, is a mixture of saline solution, ribonucleic acid, and picotechs. The RNA is memory juice. Practically every living thing has it. The picotechs are tiny machines that carry the second and more important component of memory. All this came from a man who worked for the Brennen Trust before he died.” Her voice paused for just an instant. “We want to know why he died, but you probably won’t be able to tell us that right away. When he died, though, he possessed skills and knowledge that take a long time to learn. We’re cutting corners this way because we’re in a hurry.”
Virgil nodded nervously, a trickle of sweat running down his brow. Beneath his bandages, his muscles tightened rigidly.
They’re filling me up with machines that carry someone else’s mind! Maybe I can get him to help me. I don’t hear him, though. And now the roar is coming back. I’m losing her cipher. Down. Back. Focus. They’re trying to make it hard for me. I’ll get out, though. There! Less roar and her cipher’s broken again.
“It’s the picotechs,” she continued, “that make the process work. They were in this other man’s bloodstream and brain, recording his unique electrochemical patterns. They’ll reproduce them at similar sites in your own brain. Instant memories. No need to go to school.”
Deep inside Kinney’s body, machines no larger than a molecule sought out their topologically programmed locations. Picotunnelers bored through the blood-brain barrier, admitting the rest of the invaders. Picosculptors attached to low-activity areas of Kinney’s cerebrum, reshaping neural connections, synapses, and electrochemical order to simulate those of a man now dead. Picogenerators duplicated the peaks and valleys of another brain’s unique electrical field. Picolocators awaited their particular strand of RNA to pass by in the blood-stream. When they did, they mated with the strands; mated chemically, topographically,
electrically—more intimately than the minds that created them could imagine.
Impossible to see with anything less powerful than an atomic force microscope, the picotechs were simple. Individually, each one was a mere molecule with an unique topography and electrical charge. Collectively, they possessed the power of a god.
They used part of Virgil Grissom Kinney’s brain to create a mimic of another man’s mind. Synapse by synapse, picovolt by picovolt, a stranger began to form in Kinney’s mind, undetected. Silently, another man’s memories crept into Kinney, quiescent and patient.
Trine slipped the top of the scrim into her clipboard and signaled the first page. She glanced at Kinney.
“While we’re doing this, I’d like you to answer a few questions and listen to some things so that we can make sure everything is working properly. Straight?”
Virgil nodded.
“Straight. Shake your head only if you don’t remember any of the following.” She scanned the page a moment before reading. “Virgil Grissom Kinney. Age thirty-four.”
Kinney’s eyes widened.
With a compassionate gaze, she said, “You didn’t know that, did you? It’s March seventh, twenty-one-aught-seven. You’ve been interned for eleven years, ever since you tried to kill yourself by flying into the PacRim Pyramid. Do you remember that?”
Kinney’s blond eyebrows knotted in thought. He shook his head as best he could beneath his bandages.
Trine scrolled to another page. She held her voice at a professionally flat level. “June twelfth, twenty-ninety-four. After the funerary processing of your wife Jenine, you piloted your flyer over downtown St. Frisco toward the PacRim Pyramid. Instead of hitting the side of the building, you flipped into a power dive toward Market Street. Your crash killed four people. You would have done even worse during a workday.”
Virgil stared blankly, slowly shaking his head. “They were clones,” he offered weakly.
She glanced at the scrim “Two clones—a direct, a sexflip, and their two natural-born children. The primogenitor sued for loss of lineage and Tri-World Life paid off. Then they sent you here.”
Virgil nodded. Softly, Delia said, “You don’t really want to die, do you?”
The Pharmaceutic gazed at the indicators. “Galvanic response shooting up,” he whispered to her. “That’s a key question.”
She nodded without shifting her eyes. “If you don’t want to die, why bother trying? Publicity hound?”
Virgil lay mute, his gaze indecipherable.
She leaned closer. “Not likely—three of your attempts were made in wilderness areas. You managed to be found barely alive each time.” A strand of her ebon hair fell from around her neck. Virgil watched it sway in time to her words. “You are here because I think your conflicting dichotomy of a death wish and death aversion combined with astonishingly good luck is a mix we can use to our mutual benefit.” She turned toward the Pharmaceutic. “Begin sublimins, Steve.”
The gray man muttered a series of commands to the lab computer.
Gazing more intently at Kinney, Trine said, “You earned a degree in nexialism from Mises University, which means you know a little bit about everything. That will help, because I’m going to give you and your new memories a refresher course in physics. Keep in mind the following nexus: physics is the economics of efficient atomic interaction, and multi-dimensional mathematics is the topography of cosmology.”
She pulled up a chair to sit beside Virgil. “Now, all sub-atomic particles are composed of combinations of just two bounded energy quanta, one positive, one negative. Their overall sum determines the mass of the particle, its charge, and whether it is matter or anti-matter. Their topographical interaction determines such aspects as charm, spin, strangeness and.”
Kinney lay upon the cool black sudahyde couch, his yellowed bandages looking whiter in contrast. His chest rose and fell in short whiffs and exhalations. The room smelled of formaldehyde and disinfectant. Through his narrow field of view, he gazed at the silent bank of instruments against the wall.
Three days. Three days and I still don’t understand her code. I’ve got her cipher all figured out—the physics of space travel.