“Why do you need to know?” I asked.
“It’s not just curiosity, Miss Majumdar,” Pribiloff said. “We’ll need to match your neural syntax with the enhancement, and this model works best only in a certain range of syntactical complements. I think you’ll match — ”
“I made sure of that before I came here,” I told him.
“Yes. But the enhancement still takes up a fair amount of attention. It’s more aggressive, we say. Some would say it intrudes.”
“How?” I asked.
“For one thing, it will modify your visual cortex by drawing a direct route between mathematical imagination and internal visualization. It’s not a permanent change, but if you keep the enhancement for more than three years, and remove it, you’ll have an awkward period of adjustment.”
“Withdrawal,” I said.
“Some have described it that way. With the enhancement, you’ll think a little differently, a little more analytically, about certain things. Even social relationships may be seen in a new light.”
“You sound uncomfortable with my choice, Doctor,” I said.
“Not at all. I just want my customers to understand the potentials and limits. If you have sufficient motivation, it will work out fine. But if you don’t…”
“I do,” I said.
“All right. Let me describe the levels available. This unit is standard size, but unlike a purely fact-based enhancement, it contains a great many problem-solving algorithms. Concepts and equations for direct memory retrieval, and neural net aids for high-level thinking. You won’t become a scientific genius, but you’ll understand what the geniuses are talking about, and you’ll have a wonderful toolbox for exploring a wide variety of subjects, concentrating on physical theory.”
“Perfect,” I said.
“As you requested, this model will be upgraded to include the latest work, and you can download supplements from the ex net. In fact, we can handle your subscription to a variety of base language services.”
“Good.”
Pribiloff stared at me for a moment, then said, “The procedure is painless, of course. The enhancement is placed subcutaneously near the foramen magnum, in a cushioned hyperimmune sheath. Nano fibers will make neural connections within an hour of the implanting, and you should be able to experience heightened abilities — certainly heightened knowledge — within twenty-four hours. I’ll need multiple consent forms, credit release, and agreement to provide daily reports on your progress for the first ten days. The enhancement carries its own diagnostic, and all you need to do is transfer the report over the ex net. Not reporting nullifies all warranties.“
“I understand.”
“Doctor-patient privilege applies, of course,” Pribiloff said.
“Of course.”
“When would you like the procedure?”
“As soon as possible,” I replied.
“Fine. I perform all insertions and implantings myself. Would tomorrow at fifteen be convenient?”
The next day, more nervous than ever, I returned to the office and lay on my stomach on a comfortable couch in the dim room. A spot of light appeared over my neck and a small arbeiter moved into place, graceful curving arms gently applying themselves to the nape of my neck.
Pribiloff showed me the enhancement, a flat thin jet-black disk, barely a centimeter wide. Other than product ID coded on its face, there were no obvious features. Before insertion, Pribiloff dipped the tiny disk in nano charge and wakeup nutrients, then inserted it into the guide. I closed my eyes and slept for about five minutes. The procedure was swift and did not hurt.
I left the office feeling as if I had lost another kind of virginity, betraying my body and the mother who gave it to me. I wondered if I would tell my father; Ilya would know, and Charles, but why reveal my change to anybody else? After a few hours, I felt ashamed of my silly conservatism; but the dark mood lingered.
And then the way I saw the world began to change.
Old friends, old adversaries, and old acquaintances of much ambiguity, started returning to my life and making fresh marks. I hadn’t seen Diane Johara in three years, but my slate received a message from her while I was in Pribiloff’s office.
We spoke by satcom while I cleared out the Shinktown room I’d rented for the enhancement operation.
I would be passing through Diane’s home station, Mispec Moor, on a constitutional campaign tour in Mariner Valley . Ilya would be there for me. After meetings with LitVid reporters, we had half a day and an evening free; we gleefully arranged for dinner.
“It’s wonderful to talk to you again!” Diane enthused. “I’ve been so reluctant to drop a note — I thought you’d think I was, you know, peddling influence or something. Casseia, what you’ve done!”
“Not bad for someone who thinks too much, hm?”
Diane laughed. “Not at all like the old student radicals who fought the Statists.”
“Have you changed your tune, Diane?”
“Casseia, I’m so respectable. I’ve even been working on the Mariner Constitutional Committee. Are we really Statists? Is it possible?”
“We’ll use some other name, okay?”
“And I’m married. More than lawbonded… it’s really more. I’ve gone over to Steinburg-Leschke. I’ve converted to New Reform Judaism. You’ll meet Joseph. He’s very special.”
“You’ll love Ilya, too. Things have changed, Diane.”
We completed arrangements and signed off. I sat in the room’s lone chair, packed bags at my feet, and considered the nature of time. I was not very old, just fifteen, but measuring time as a string of memorable events, I seemed positively ancient.
My head filled with time as reflection of motion, arbiter of change, conveyer and dissipater of information; time is what’s left when nothing happens, time is the distance between then and now; time marked in a haze of multi-colored equations, malleable, nonexistent for massless particles, for them an eternal now and the universe as flat and direct as a sheet of paper.
I recognized the signs then: the enhancement was integrating and informing, organizing areas of shared information and ability within my brain. The process was safe — billions on Earth and a few hundred thousand on Mars had gone through it, some, like Orianna, dozens of times. But for me it was unfamiliar and at once unsettling and hypnotic.
I lost an hour in that chair, in that bleak little Shinktown room, simply pondering motion, and gravitation, and how pressing on a wall meant the wall pressed back with equal force. I puzzled through angular momentum and torque as analogs of straightforward linear momentum and force, and thought of how a wheel, subjected to a force perpendicular to its axis, behaves when not spinning, and when spinning. I broke physical systems down into parts, and ran those parts through their paces while tracking the changes in their simplest characteristics, and how the changes affected the larger system.
Staring at the metabolic carpet, I traced in my imagination the path of a photon passing through a translucent fiber, slowing and echoing. I saw all the possible paths of the photon converge on the eventual real path, sum over histories, and the photon emerging on the other side of the fiber with supreme economy of energy and motion, minimum action, shortest time.
The entire room, spare and dreary, became a fog of forces as fascinating as a party filled with talking people. Behind the facade of electromagnetic interactions — all I would ever touch, see, smell, or be sensually connected with — lay a plenipotential void far richer and stranger than matter and energy, the ground on which my being was so lightly painted as to be negligible… and yet I saw, and seeing, I gave the ensemble shape and meaning.