CHAPTER 9
The next morning Dad dresses me in a green hospital gown. Then the Army doctors come into my room and move me from the bed to a gurney.
I feel somewhat detached as they wheel me down the corridors of Pioneer Base. It’s as if all of this is happening to someone else, a stranger with a shaved head. This feeling of detachment is helpful—it keeps me calm and unafraid. But then we enter the operating room and I see the scanning machine. It’s big and white and shaped like a giant doughnut with a three-foot-wide hole at its center. A long, stretcher-like table extends from the central hole of the scanner, and on the table is something that looks like a steel cage. I start trembling when I see the cage, which is about the size of a bread box. They’re going to put my head in that thing.
Dad notices my reaction. He strides to the table and rests his hand on the cage. “This is called a stereotactic frame,” he says. “It’ll keep your head steady so we can inject the nanoprobes in the right places. To make sure you’re comfortable, the doctors will put some local anesthetic at the points where the frame is secured to your head.” He returns to the gurney and touches my temples. “Don’t worry. The anesthetic is like Novocaine, the stuff you get at the dentist’s. It just makes the skin numb. The doctors will also put some on the injection sites.”
This is a strategy Dad’s used on me before. He overcomes my fears by lecturing me to death. While the Army doctors carry me to the table and strap me down, Dad tells me more details about the procedure. He describes how the nanoprobes will spread through my brain tissue until each cell is studded with tiny gold spheres. Then he points at the scanner and shows how the X-ray tubes on the rim of the central hole will fire pulses of radiation at my head.
He explains what will happen to the nanoprobes when they absorb the radiation, how the gold spheres will flash like microscopic X-ray beacons. Then he turns back to the scanner and points at the hundreds of X-ray cameras that line the rim. These cameras will detect the flashes of radiation inside my head and calculate the positions of the nanoprobes, creating a detailed, three-dimensional map of my brain.
His strategy works, at least partially. Dad’s lecture distracts me from the doctors while they anesthetize my scalp. I realize of course that he’s leaving something out. He doesn’t describe how the high-energy X-rays will rip through my brain cells, bursting their membranes and shattering their DNA. But I stay calm until my head is locked into the stereotactic frame and the doctors position their bone drills next to the injection sites.
Dad leans over me and slips a pair of headphones over my ears. “You need something to drown out the noise of the drills.” He shows me an iPod that’s connected to the headphones. “I downloaded some of the songs you like.”
He turns on the iPod and a moment later I hear Kanye West rapping the first words of “Power.” I always get a rush from this song because it has so much energy, because it makes me feel like a hero instead of a crippled, dying kid. But now the music can’t mask the rattling in my skull as the doctors turn on their drills.
It’s horrifying. I don’t feel any pain, but I know the drill bits are cutting into the bone. I squeeze my eyes shut and start counting in my head: one, two, three, four, five. Someone dabs a sponge around my ears to sop up the blood that’s trickling from the holes. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten. I want to scream, “Stop!” but I can’t even breathe. I can’t do this, Dad! I’m not strong enough!
Then the drilling stops and all I can hear is Kanye, who’s rapping a different song now. I open my mouth and take a couple of painful breaths, but I keep my eyes closed. Behind Kanye’s voice I hear something click into place, then the sound of a pump and rushing fluid. The nanoprobes are flowing into my brain. Sweat streams down my face and neck.
Kanye moves on to a third song before someone removes the headphones, cutting off the rap in midsentence. I open my eyes and see Dad’s face through the steel bars of the stereotactic frame. “Okay, we finished injecting the nanoprobes,” he says. “You did great, Adam.”
I lick my lips. My mouth is so dry. “How long…till I’m ready…for the…” My voice trails off. I’m too frightened to say the words.
Dad nods. “It’ll take some time for the nanoprobes to spread through the tissue. About fifteen minutes. While you’re waiting, I thought you’d appreciate some company.”
He steps aside and Shannon Gibbs approaches the table. At first I’m ashamed—I don’t want her seeing me like this, so scared and helpless. But then she smiles her lopsided, nerve-damaged smile, and I’m glad she’s here.
“Hey, handsome,” she says. “You look good without the hair.”
I smile back at her, feeling ridiculous. I wish my head wasn’t in this freaking cage. “I got…the idea from you,” I say. “You don’t need hair…to look beautiful.”
She cocks her bald head, clearly pleased at the compliment. “Flatter me while you can, my friend. The next time we meet, we’ll both be hunks of metal. Ugly, hulking Pioneers.”
“But you’ll still be beautiful…on the inside.” I’m surprised I can rattle off these compliments so easily. Maybe it’s just a side effect of all the fear, but talking with Shannon seems effortless. “Remember that clay model…you made for your biology report? The model of the brain?”
“Sure, I still have it. It’s back home in my closet.”
“I’m picturing my brain like that…but with trillions of nanoprobes. Gold spheres sprinkled…on every inch. Sounds pretty, doesn’t it?”
She nods and leans over the table, bending closer to me. “And remember your report on the brain? About the limbic system, where all our emotions come from?” She points at my head. “Now the gold spheres are in there too, sticking to every cell.”
“That’s good. I want to keep…the emotions I’m feeling now.”
“And when it’s my turn, I want to keep those feelings too.” Her voice is just a whisper, but it’s full of promise. Shannon is implying that she has feelings for me. And maybe those feelings will survive the transfer and be reborn in the hunk of metal she’s going to become.
But then I think of what my mother said back in my bedroom in Yorktown Heights. Will it actually be Shannon inside the circuits of her Pioneer? And will it actually be me inside mine?
I want to ask her about this, but I don’t want Dad to hear. I can’t turn my head inside the frame, so I strain my eyes to the left and right. I don’t see him anywhere.
“Shannon,” I whisper. “Do you really think it’s possible?”
“What’s possible?”
“The thing inside the Pioneer. Will it be me or just a copy?”
She bends over a little more. She comes so close I can see my reflection in her eyes. The bars of the stereotactic frame glint in her brown irises. “I remember something else from biology class,” she says. “It was on the very first page of the textbook. The cells in our bodies are always changing. Old cells die and new ones are born every second, right?”
“Yeah, that’s true of blood cells and skin cells. But the cells in the brain are longer-lasting. They can live for—”
Shannon shakes her head, cutting me off. “But even those cells are constantly rebuilding themselves. They take in nutrients. They throw out waste. The body I’m in now has a completely different set of molecules than the body I had six months ago.”
“Okay, you’re right. All the molecules are new, but the body’s pattern stays the same.”
She clasps my right hand, which is strapped to the table. “Then it’s simple, isn’t it? We’re all copies.”