quantum prosthetics
TRANSCRIPT
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Quantum Prosthetics
By Jason Fink
CHAPTER 1
Surprisingly enough, the Singularity didn't start with the
internet. It started with an amputee.
And his name was Dack.
Once upon a time, Dack was born. He slid into the world
with a minimum of fuss, for which his mother was exceedingly
grateful. He was a he and not a she, not an it, not at all
confused by anything but the cold bright air that pounced on him
suddenly. He cried a bit, sucked a bit, pooped a bit. Before
long, he was off to a university.
The middle bits were unimportant, really. So was the
university where he’d decided to go, and eventually went. The
university would have most likely been fairly unimportant as
well, except that’s where he lost his hand.
Not that he actually lost it. He knew perfectly well where
it had gotten off to, not that he’d had any say in the matter.
His hand had meandered off one evening while the rest of his
body had been doing the overly-hormonal boy thing, that is to
say showing off for some girls in the hopes of getting laid.
The problem with hormones and boys and girls and sleepless
nights spent trying to prove that they were deep and meaningful
by calling it themselves Dawn Patrol and spinning some tale
about how meaningful the sea is and adding alcohol to the mix;
the problem, one might say, is that in this mix there lies a
great abundance of stupidity.
And lo, did Dack drink of the never ending flagon of
temporary idiocy, and he found it good. For a moment at least.
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He was very pleased with himself for having found a way to scale
a razor-wire topped fence so that he could get to the other side
and let the aforementioned girls (and, truth be told, boys who
had happened to also want to be a part of the late night overly
hormonal Dawn Patrol stupid fest) let the minor horde of people
he called friends into the fenced-off outdoor pool for a bit of
skinny dipping.
He was counting on debauchery and he was counting on being
thought of as impressive and he was counting on one of the girls
(and there was one particular girl, though, truth again be told,
he knew that she was a woman) to have decided that she would
drink from the Flagon of Idiocy and choose him.
What he wasn’t counting on was, upon reaching the top of
the aforementioned razor-wire was the likelihood that he might
slip. And, of course, he did slip.
This was not how he lost his hand.
This was, however, how the girl (woman, his mind prodded)
decided to drink from the Flagon of Stupidity and perhaps help
Dack, who had fallen and twisted his ankle but still managed to
let the minor horde of people who he knew of as friends into the
pool area. He had done so without much complaint but with an
overly exaggerated limp, and this woman had decided to stay by
poor brave, foolhardy Dack’s side and help nurse his bruised
ankle and not-as-bruised ego.
This was where Dack and Jova met and where the first spark
of love embered up and would most likely have blossomed into the
heat of sex fire if the guard dogs that no one had really
noticed had not chosen to show up right about then. Not that
the dogs had actually done the choosing, it was the owner and
manager of the apartment complex who, tired of college kids
breaking into and using the pool of his swanky apartment complex
that was filled with tenants who liked to swagger and use words
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like filthy to mean something was fantastic, and using the pool
without asking. The manager had decided to take what he thought
would be the next logical step and buy a six-pack of Doberman
Pinschers in order to chase off the previously written about
college students. The manager had assumed that the man he had
purchased the canines from, a man whose van was not entirely
dilapidated and who had not smelled as unwashed as he looked,
the manager had assumed that this man would have given the
animals a proper vetting and proper training and kept them up on
their shots and vet visits. The manager suspected that this may
not be the case when, after paying the man what seemed like an
all-too-reasonable fee, when the man shouted something about the
dogs being his problem now and then slammed the door of the not-
overly dilapidated van and drove off leaving the smell of rubber
lingering in the air.
The manager realized that the dogs were indeed his problem
now and he decided to use them to make the dogs the kid’s
problem. He did so in a flourishy manner that was the violent
equivalent of waving a cane and yelling “Get off my lawn!” Only
this time the lawn was a pool and the cane was a half dozen
Doberman Pinschers with anger control issues, issues that, to
the manager’s credit, were being addressed in weekly therapy
sessions. Since dog therapy is a thing now. Though it wasn’t
once, and life was probably better for it.
The beasts charged slaveringly into the hoard of college
kids, and they were all jumpy and bitey and growly and barky and
slobbery and other words that end with a y. There was a panic
and an elevated potential for danger that ensued, with college
students who had all drunk form the Goblet of… actually it was
probably due more to the tequila and adrenalin at that point
with college kids who ran around and yelled and screamed and
generally made a nuisance of themselves.
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One of these dogs, the slobbery viscous dogs, had decided
to charge at Jova. Perhaps it was because she appeared
especially tasty, perhaps it was because she wasn’t moving at
all, no one really could tell except the dog and the dog really
can’t tell. It can speak, but that’s more of a bark and less of
a Hi-how-are-you-let-me-tell-you-how-my-day-is type of thing.
Whatever the reason, the dog ran at Jova, mouth agape with shiny
sharpish teeth (they were actually more sharp than sharp-ish,
but Jova was hoping that they were more on the ish side. They
weren’t).
So Dack decided to follow the whole chivalrous route and
shove his arm in the dog’s mouth
No, not that arm. Not yet.
Dack decided to shove his arm in the dog’s mouth and the
dog, rather than clamping down hard, then whipping its head
around and latching on until the proper Dutch word was spoken
after which it would release, the dog gnawed ever so lightly
then released Dack’s forearm. It then pulled off an amazing
downward dog as if it had been born into the pose, and wagged
its stump of a tail.
Dack then realized that the dogs just wanted to play and he
said as much to his friends and what was once a chaos of panic
was now a chaos of college kids finding themselves surrounded
with giant puppies who wanted to jump and run and play tug-of-
war and who partook in the skinny dipping as well. As much as a
dog can dip with the skinny, there was no shaving involved so
the fur stayed on.
And Jova kissed Dack and it was good. Dack was exceedingly
happy as his plan worked out much better than he had hoped for
as he sat on the chaise lounge with Jova while they were what
some would call snogging, other call kissing, others making out
and still others macking, and they were both glad that they’d
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been a little bit stupid. Jova leaned her head into Dack’s
shoulder while Dack leaned over and slightly back, bracing his
body by putting his left hand onto the glass side table.
Yes, this is where and when it happened. While Jova’s face
was deciding to be silly and bury itself in Dack’s right armpit,
a clean armpit, Dack had made sure, and while her head was
buried he could smell the jasmine scent of her shampoo.
That was all he really remembered, except for the searing
pain of course.
He was later told that his hand was now a part of the
permanent tilework of the pool. He was also told that a stray
rivet had worked its way out of a jumbo jet, one of the new ones
that every major airline wanted, and this rivet that had worked
its way out at twenty-thousand feet had decided to drop onto
Dack’s hand. There was some slight exploding-like action, but,
miraculously enough, only the hand and the glass table were
destroyed, though there was some significant damage to the
poolside cement.
And to be fair, it wasn’t just the left hand that was gone,
it was also three-fourths of Dack’s left forearm.
CHAPTER 2
There were settlements and apologies and denials and people
taking the law entirely too seriously. Dack didn't sweat it
since he was an easy-going dude. This was how he was always
introduced by his friends and compatriots "This is Dack- he's an
easy-going dude." He was happy with the end result of the
courty and legalish things. He wound up not really having to
worry about cash money for the rest of his life. That and he
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got free first class trips anywhere in the world for the rest of
his livelong days.
Jova happened to receive this benefit as well, since the
airline folk didn't want her to claim emotional distress and had
preemptively offered it to her as well. She would probably never
had done anything in the lawsuit arena since she was such an
easy-going chica. This was how her friends introduced her "This
is Jova - she's an easy-going chica." She took the proffered
lifetime tickets while smiling and saying thank you.
The two sets of tickets proved most beneficial to their
relationship. Now that there was a relationship. Because there
was. It went a little more slowly after that night, since
neither one of them wanted to rush things nor did they want to
anger the airplane rivet gods again.
Jova showed up to help Dack through recovery bringing him
pudding, and he never told her he wasn't fond of pudding because
he was fond of her, and he would read to her, and she never told
him she did not like being read to because she was fond of him,
and they smiled and flirted and eventually decided to risk
angering the rivet gods. So they did the whole snog-kiss-make-
out-mack thing which eventually turned into sex.
No one lost any appendages.
They were not unhappy about this.
So their relationship bloomed and blossomed like a deep
fried onion flower. Each month they chose a new location to
explore. They would fly out on Friday and return on Sunday, no
matter how far the location was, and these locations were chosen
via spinning-globe-and-dart method which nearly caused another
lost appendage or two. Though it did not. At times they wound
up in such places as exciting as Tacoma, sometimes it was in
more boring and mundane locales as Vanuatu or Oman or Argentina.
They were always back in time for class on Monday.
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They could do this because of the aforementioned tickets.
And since it was aforementioned, it won’t be mentioned again.
Except to say that it is easy to keep up a fun and exciting
relationship with someone when both are easy-going and can, as a
unit, tango in Tangiers, skydive in São Paolo, and ride the
rapids in Rapid City. Though upon arrival in Rapid City and
finding that there are no rapids to ride can lead to a fracture
in a relationship built as it was on world travel and excitement
and exploding hands, and this fracture can lead to a disastrous
falling out.
Disastrous to the relationship, not necessarily to the
world like a super volcano might be, or even a medium sized
asteroid. Although in this case, it could be argued that the
dissolution of Jova and Dack’s relationship may well have been
directly responsible the end of all humankind, if not all
organic life on the planet. Not that it was, but it could have
been argued that it might have been, and in some realities it
probably was, but in this reality the events did not play out
that way.
But it could have. But it didn’t.
Because of a butterfly.
Not a Butterfly Effect, though it was a butterfly, and it
did have an effect, just not the normal effect that a butterfly
has vis-à-vis tornadoes in Texas. This did not happen yet.
What was happening now was Jova being distant and Dack
being clingy which led to Jova being eye-rolly and Dack making
playlists which led to Jova saying to Dack many things.
Things about it not being Dack, it was her, that she wanted
to stay friends, that she couldn’t handle the intensity of her
feelings towards Dack, that she didn’t want to hold him back in
the world, that she and Dack were at different points in their
lives, that she needed her space, that Dack deserved better than
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Jova, that she just wanted to focus on school, that they were
moving too fast and that they needed a break.
Dack, not being completely dumb despite the Flagon of
Idiocy, understood where she was going with that line of talk.
Part of him just wanted Jova to come out and say they were
breaking up, boom, get it over with, clean break. Another part
of him was all hey, let’s not be too hasty boy, if she doesn’t
say the words, it means we still be jive talkin’ together. Dack
was not sure what part of his brain spoke like that (though he
assumed it was the hippocampus), and he ignored it. That is to
say he ignored it after the sixth unreturned message he left for
Jova on one of the many contact platforms he had access to.
This led to brooding and self-pity and disappearing for
twenty-four hours in the woods, a twenty-four hours that
thoroughly pissed off his roommate as well as his boss. In
wanting to find himself in the woods he had made a point not to
bother anyone as he was alone in the world and nobody really
cared anyway, plus he wouldn't really be missed (not at all, not
really), and he didn't need his phone because who would he call?
A bear?
So off he traipsed with a sleeping bag, a backpack and a
few cans of beans, finding one of the less well known campus
footpaths into the mountains. He took a water bottle for liquid
needs and a whiskey bottle for memory-killing needs, and off he
walked, never to be heard from again.
Never for a day, at least. He came back when his prototype
arm started itching. It did this from time to time; it didn't
fit quite right yet, and if he didn't clean the stump often
enough it got itchy and smelly and funky. Not the good kind of
funky, either, though he wouldn't have minded that so much.
His personal rhythm was a 1-3-7 in a 1-2-3 world. He walked
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through the door of his flat, prosthetic off, scratching his
pruritic scar and was promptly punched in the face.
He did not appreciate this.
Being punched in the face by Lambin, his roommate, was the
direct cause of Dack losing his arm. Not the other arm, the
same left arm he’d lost before, only this time it wasn’t all
flesh–and-blood being strewn about, it as plastic and metals and
rotators and pulleys and microchips.
This was not, it seemed, Dack’s week. Lambin was more than
a smidge upset at Dack, or as Lambin put it, he was so fucking
pissed off at the shit-eating Dack that perhaps he deserved to
lose the arm. Again. Then he proceeded to sheepishly apologize
and help clean up the mess.
Dack’s boss was a bit more understanding. He was a one of
the computer engineering professors and had been young and full
of the stupid hormone once upon a time and he probably still
was, though he’d been married for twenty-seven years and wasn’t
sure where he’d placed those hormones. Probably in the garage,
next to his old comics. Doctor C was a good ear for Dack to
bend, though he did mention to the student that if he missed
work again without checking in, there’d really be no job for him
to come back to.
Dack told Doc C that he understood, and Doctor Chuck (his
name was, indeed, Chuck, Chuck Chaz Charlie, to be precise; Dack
was told by Doc C that his father was the second cousin of some
famous author type and thus his father had done his name in a
tribute of sorts) (Dack couldn’t quite remember, but thought the
guy’s name was Hollar and he wrote about some famous catch –
Dack didn’t really know much about sports history, however), and
Doctor C let Dack come back to work.
Of course, that’s when Dack dumped his arm in Doc C’s lap.
This time, it was the right arm, not the left, and it wound up
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in the good doctor’s lap not due to an attempt at coercion,
grade inflation, or a mutual attraction, but because Dack
tripped while trying to unpack his other arm, the plastic and
metal one, the one he actually wanted to dump in Doc C’s lap.
Doctor Chuck Chaz Charles wasn’t just a computer
engineering professor. He also dabbled in prosthetics. And by
dabbled, this meant that fully half of his time on campus was
devoted to the newly created Department of Applied Prosthetics.
Fully funded by a grant from a generous and anonymous student
and a large airline. The Doctor was a paradox, at least that’s
what he liked to call it in his own little joking way. He loved
these sorts of bad-pun-dad jokes. He was a paradox because he
held two doctorates – one in Physiology & Ergonomics, the other
in Conflict Resolution. His two master’s degrees were slightly
more useful in his chosen field, as he was a Master of Computer
Engineering and a Master of Nanotechnology.
To be sure, his Conflict Resolution came in handy when
trying to navigate the complexities of academia. Though not
quite as well as he would have liked while trying to navigate
the complexities of fatherhood and marriage, especially when his
wife spoke of his endless student loans. He did not have just
the four degrees, he was always picking up certificates,
associate and bachelor degrees, and he had the student loans to
prove it. At least twice he had received degrees in the mail
from colleges he had forgotten that he’d attended.
When his Associate’s Degree in Animal Husbandry had
arrived, he’d realized that he had not just been going to a very
intense petting zoo multiple times per week. His daughter, who
had been five at the time, had loved it.
Te doc told Dack that he supposed he’d turned in the
homework and Dack believed him as Doc C was always writing
papers then forgetting that he’d done so. Dack had been in the
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room once when the doctor had received the latest edition of the
New Journal of Applied Culinary Physiology (the most respected
journal in its field). Doc C had spent an hour pouring over an
article that he exclaimed to be revolutionary. He shot off a
letter to the author asking to meet as well as offering some
bits of insight.
Two days later, Doc C’s mail contained a letter that had
been forwarded to him from the editors of the Journal. The
doctor explained rather sheepishly that he had written the
letter to himself without realizing it.
The memory was one that made Dack grin and nearly forget
about Jova’s smile and about his nearly broken nose and black
eyes and about his broken arm, and there will be no revisitation
as to which arm it was that was broken. One was broken and the
other had made a somewhat inappropriate, though accidental,
proposition to the crotch of a professor. Who was also his
boss. Even though, truth be told, Dack was paying Doc C’s
salary. Anonymously. Dack just liked to work. He always had,
and even lied about his age when he was thirteen so he could
land a summer job.
He spent that entire summer wondering how the owner of the
liquor store managed to be so bad at gauging ages.
But that was then and then wasn’t now and now was when Dack
needed a new arm. He missed his old arm, though not so much
the broken plastic and metal one as the flesh and bone and nerve
and blood one that had exploded. Sort of exploded. There were
days when his phantom limb drove him crazy, but then he would do
his mirror exercises and would feel better for a bit, and there
were times when he would get a little down, but his brain was
one of those that PTSD avoided. He was sad, sure, but he felt
ok most of the time and never did the whole flashback thing.
Dack realized that he was lucky fairly early on when, in rehab,
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many many other limb-losers could be seen in downward spirals,
depressions and dependencies. Dack did what he could to help
and thanked the Lord of the Genetic Dance that his brain didn’t
work that way. Be that as it may, he still liked having a second
arm, even if it was mechanical.
Creating a new prototype was fairly easy, especially with
the department’s new Thre3Deezy 420 three-dimensional printer.
They also had a meat printer, though it was broken as one of the
interns had loaded the wrong media into it when she’d had a late
night pot-induced craving for a burger. The Thre3Deezy was
working fine, however, and within a few hours Dack had a new
arm. This one was slightly modified for Halloween, with the
pinky being turned into a working scale model of a chainsaw.
Not that it would actually cut anything, but it would tickle
enough to annoy.
When Dack tried to print up a tentacle arm, Doc C said no.
When He’d tried to print up a hatchet arm, Doc C said no. When
he tried to print up a shotgun arm, Doc C said yes and Dack
started working on it, only to be told by Doc C that he was just
kidding. Finally Dack gave up and got a normal hand with the
chainsaw pinky attachment. The novelty wore off, Dack switched
back to an Ol’ Reliable 2.0, and hit the books.
Dack’s brain had decided to ignore the Stupid Hormone, and
he threw himself into his studies. He managed to fit four years
into five, graduating with a degree in biophysics. He was
interested in studying the inner workings of the body through
the eyes of a hard scientist. Biology was nearly the same thing
as witchcraft, and chemists were glorified cooks. Physicists,
however, they were the ones who took stock and measure of the
universe and they were the ones who said this is good, this is
how it works and we just made a big ass bomb that is crazy, dog,
and can take out a city.
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Plus, he just liked the sound of the word biophysics. It
sounded like some sort of made up crap, like the kind you find
in poorly written science fiction. But it was a real thing.
When he saw it offered in his course catalogue, he’d wikied it
to make sure. He’d also looked for the urban definition, but
that was something he decided to never share with the public.
Dack, with his biophysics degree in hand, set out to change
the world.
Unfortunately, he lost track of that notion. He had an
idea.
CHAPTER 3
After a year, skipping around the globe was wearing. It
had been a good idea, but he was tired. Dack had his highs and
lows like anyone, and like anyone he thought that no one could
possibly understand the things he was going through. Not at
all. The one night affair with the concert cellist in Tunisia,
the phantom pain-induced depression in the Angkor Wat, the
jellyfish incident in Brazil; it was all searing his brain like
tuna on a grill.
This was not a dish he particularly cared for, especially
after the printed tuna steak incident in the lab. It was an apt
description of his brain’s mood so he went with it. He'd
started writing things down as he went, deciding on the paper
blog route rather than the digital one he was used to. Dack
supposed it wasn't a blog, he supposed that it was a journal or
diary or some other thing that he couldn't think of. He didn't
really like those words so paper blog it became. He even taught
himself how to use the old-style cursive, though he doubted
anyone but him could read it.
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Dack noticed that he got some very strange looks when he
wrote in public places. This was not typical, with his
somewhere-between-well-tanned-Dinka-and-albino-Dane skin, his
dark brown hair that had a different texture for each day of the
week, and his complete averageality that he exuded physically.
This is not how people saw him when he wrote. Cafe patrons
would glance at him sideways from their smart tablet phones,
pedestrians would look askance at him through their iGlasses or
Google-E-eyes or MSSpex (and once even a Lens-Ux user but she
was shy and cradled her penguin and walked away), and children
on playgrounds would use their video knuckles to film him and
upload it to various social media sharing sites with captions
like "Treekillur Rites wif a Pen" or hashtags that fell into the
#ludditeFTW or #WTFkindoftabletisthat categories.
Dack felt it strange, whenever he bothered to think about
it (or feel about it, as the case may be), felt it strange that
he was being stared at because he wrote shit down on paper and
not because of his neon-green and purple arm. At one point he
even started to write about how strange it was but he was
distracted by a local tea house bombing. The local
blastologists had all agreed that the day held a 60% chance of
pipe bombs with possible serin cloud precipitation due to the
high pressure Khy Mien terror cell system in the morning
followed by a low lying Whitey White Klan embankment. Then they
laughed and turned to the weather woman who let the audience
know that the day would be warm and mild, and if they didn't get
out to enjoy it they were the real terrorists.
Dack surfed to another webcast shortly after, but everyone
seemed to be in agreement. He was glad that he wasn't caught in
the blast. He downed some Serin-B-Gone (chocolate of course)
before he left, then went out to see what the world had in store
that day. As it turns out, the day was a rather mundane one,
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and would have been downright boring if the tea shop hadn't been
blown sideways.
Challenges eluded him. He wanted to check his brain into a
local gym and beef it up. This was not a thing. He wished it
was. Dack supposed that the closest thing to a brain gym was
school. He went all pouty and tantrumy but eventually
capitulated with himself and wound up in a graduate program for
quantum mechanics.
He had another idea.
And when he finished his bratwurst with onions caramelized
in brown sugar, he realized that, while tasty, ideas for sausage
shaped foods would not do him much good in school.
CHAPTER 4
Dack was fine with the clicky-clack of his unflesh arm (not
that it actually made any noise, except when it broke and that
was less often than one might imagine). There had been many
breakthroughs in prosthechnology; there was even a sort of
rudimentary feedback system so that the limb could transmit
feeling to the brain. There had been so many advances in the
field of prosthetics over the decades, to the point where a
replacement limb could almost be patched into a nerve bundle and
have it work exactly like the old one.
Almost.
There was always a delay, a pause in the brain-computer
interface that resulted in an ever-so-slight hiccup in motion.
Usually it was on the scale of tenths of seconds if you had the
funds for a top of the line Becky (BCI was too clinical for most
folks; Becky was the kleenex of brain chips). If you went with
a fully wireless model, the delay was greater, and if you were
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cash strapped… Dack thought of those being almost as good as
hooks.
These things bothered Dack. He wanted to be able to be
able to feel an egg shell, the grains of sand on a beach, a
puppy’s fur, a woman’s fur… but he couldn’t, not really, not
with the plastic hand. Not that prosthetics were plastic
anymore (though some parts were). Most were calcified titanium
(not that everyone could afford the titanium, many went with
steel or some other weaker metal, and while the calcification
process still helped build a stronger bone-prosthetic melding it
wasn’t nearly as clean) support structures with a series of
tubes and wires (plus some fancy flexible micro-electronics)
overlaid with a silicone-cloned skin sheath.
And this was just the standard model. With the number of
amputees in the world closing in on a full percent due to war,
discontent, freedom fighting, terrorism and body modding, there
were many, many people who wanted something beyond the four-
fingers-and-a-thumb hand or the five-toed foot. Dack’s tentacle
idea from college was one of the milder things he’d seen as
people were going from utilitarian (he’d seen a jackhammer leg
attachment for a construction worker) to the not-quite-so-
utilitarian (the guy with a hand that was all scissors told Dack
it wsn’t as useful as he’d expected).
There were faux-nerves and nano-relays, servos and motors,
but it just wasn’t quite enough, not for Dack, not really. He
knew that he just had to wait a year or five and they’d be able
to grow him an entirely new arm. Dack didn’t want to wait, he
knew that there was some way of creating a seamless junction
between man and machine.
His arm took over his life, though not in the serial-
killer-hand-takes-over-sleeping-recipient-at night-and-murders-
people way, but in the Dack-liked-to-tinker sort of way. He’d
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decided to make it his thesis, his raison d’être, his coupling
of school and usefulness. This last tended to be a most rare
thing, as many schools’ usefulness wre directly linked with
alcohol tolerance.
During one of his many talks with and examinations by his
previous boss, Doc C, he’d realized that he’d had quite a few
nerve conduction studies done. Dack had been poked and prodded
and assessed and examined more times than he could count (though
Doc C said it was forty-seven). Motor NCS, sensory NCS, h-reflex
studies, small pain fiber studies, f-wave studies, a-wave
studies, sound wave studies, they were all there.
But what wasn’t there, what Dack’s quantum mechanical
oriented brain had noticed was that, while there were studies of
waves and studies of impulses, there were no studies of what he
thought of as particles of quanta. What if, perhaps, nerves
operated not just on a wave or impulse pattern, but on a
particle plane as well? It had been postulated for decades that
the brain was just a quantum computer, a biological one, a mass
of intertangled neurons with Dutch cats being held hostage in
poisoned boxes.
And what was a brain?
A big fucking mass of nerves, amiright? Dack told Doc C.
Doc C just nodded sagely, as he felt wiser than normal after his
trip to India, and he said nothing. He said nothing because his
nodding was less profound than it was sleepy; the professor was
jetlagged, having just gotten in from Bangalore a few hours
earlier. Dack took it as the first kind of nodding, the wise
kind, and moved ahead with his plans for his thesis while Doc C
moved ahead with his plans to sleep.
One-armed Dack, not really knowing any better, set about
trying to create the world’s first quantum computer, and make it
for the express purpose of making a better bio-mechanical
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interface. He had no real thought to change the world, no
assumption that he would succeed, nothing other than some duct
tape, bailing wire, bubble gum and the entire old web series
MacGyver on his holosphere (these were a thing). When he
thought about it, Dack realized that it wasn’t a web series,
those had disappeared a long time before, it was that thing that
was before the web series. Radio. That was it. The picture
radio.
Quantum computers had been attempted many times before
(very many), and the people who made them were smart people with
smart ideas and smart cars and smart tablets. They got close,
many, many times, close enough so that they could claim that
they had done it, when in fact they had only just missed the
target by that much. It was like the difference between a light
bright mauve and a somber, muted magenta – it was really, really
close. But it was the kind of close that if a husband was sent
to pick up a light bright mauve corsage for his teenage daughter
and he came back with a somber, muted magenta, well, it would be
noticed.
And it was.
There was a component missing from each of these attempts,
and it was a biological component. No one knew that this was
what was missing, at least not until they did know. When they
knew, they knew. But they didn’t. Not yet.
There had been attempts made by scaffolding DNA and
training it to work on a computational level, with results that
ranged from promising to zombie-virus outbreak terrifying. This
didn’t actually happen, but again, it could have and probably
did in a similar but separate reality.
The project Dack worked on was one of quantum entanglement.
He wanted the quanta of the biological nerves to become
intertwined with the quanta of the prosthetic circuitry. He
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wanted the quanta to become organized in a chaotic sort of way,
to trick them into working for both the body and the prosthetic
at once. He wanted to get them tangled on such a tiny, basic
level that they couldn’t distinguish the squishy part from the
solid state. He knew that there were problems, problems between
the chemical-ness on the biological side and the mechanicy
electrical-ness on the side of the fake arm. He was at a loss
for a bit, and then it came to him, as if in a dream, though it
was not a dream.
Cheese.
It was all in the cheese.
This was not to say that the secrets of Bell’s little paper
was cheese based (although it might be hilarious in the abstract
if this were the case)(at least to physicists)(who were also
fromagers). Gouda did not simply move faster than the speed of
light.
To be precise, Dack wrote in his paper blog, it wasn’t the
cheese so much as it was the fucking pizza. Which puts into
mind an image of Italian food copulating which… is not where he
wanted to be going with that sentence. Dack had earlier been
out with friends to the local pizza joint, called the Pizza
Joint, and he’d just taken a big bite of a hot slice of cheese.
The intense burning the roof of his mouth wasn’t as strong a
feeling as the epiphanical flood his brain was experiencing as
he watched the string of cheese droop from his mouth and connect
back to the slice.
It wasn’t just cheese. It was cheese with red sauce stuck
to it, ribboning around the gooey white filament ever so
faintly. Ribboning around the hot gooey white filament, if
precision was necessary. Which it was.
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It was the heat. It was all in the heat. The idea was too
intense for him to let go of, too intense for him to sit there.
He couldn’t stand it
He got out of the kitchen.
Dack wasn’t sure how, exactly, he had gotten into the Pizza
Joint’s kitchen, but he had, so he got out, heading straight
back to his lab. He needed to find a material, some sort of
fusible alloy or physiological compound that mimicked human
tissue – specifically nerve tissue. He needed to find something
that had the same melting point (or would it be boiling point?
Dack asked himself), the same resistances, the same molecular
weight, the same everything as nerves. Without being actual
nerves.
Months zoomed by in what Dack felt was a montage of lab
work – flash! He’s mixing things in beakers! Flash! He’s
spilling liquid! Flash! He’s staring at a large holo display
with scribbled noted, his hair mussed! Flash! He’s asleep with
his head on a lab table, drool collecting on his tablet! Dack
experienced all the inbetween bits, but it felt faster than it
was. His brain wanted to just get around the worky morsels.
And so it did.
Once Dack put it all together in his head he was ready to
try it outside of his head. Virtual simulations showed the
process working, the tanglement entangling, but he would not be
sure until he did if for real. For fake was all well and good,
but it was not super helpful. Dack had two choices. But not
really. The first was to try it on an animal first but this
never happens in the really big breakthroughs, at least not in
the ones in any media that Dack had ever seen. And since Dack
was feeling giddiful from being up for more than a day doing
postulations and theorizing and building prototypes and
soldering things that needed soldering and going pee a lot due
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to the massive intake of coffee, he figured that a human trial
was fine.
And, of course, since this a fairly large reason why
carbon-based life nearly went extinct on the planet and the
reason why Dack has been the focus rather than John or Joe or
Daisy or Frieda, of course that human was Dack. Since robots
were things and precision robotic surgeries were a thing and
since Dack had access to one of the precision robotic surgical
units and since he also had access to local anesthetics, it was
a fairly easy decision for Dack to make. All he really needed to
do was to program the Prosun (the kleenex of precision robotic
surgical units) to cut into his arm instead of cloned monkey's
and attach his own nerves to the prosthetic instead of the
nerves of the monkey.
It was supposed to go smoothly, and most likely would have
except there was an explosion that had been timed to free the
cloned monkeys from their cages. Not really. This was just a
thought that Dack had just before the Prosun made its first
incision. And after that, it all went smoothly, with minimal
blood loss, no pain, and a hand-forged artificial arm that was
now fused to his ulnar, interosseous and radial nerves.
He’d included a wireless component so that the arm’s
onboard cpu could sync up with his Becky – what all the cool
amputees called flirting. Once he turned the arm on, Becky and
the arm would flirt until they hooked up, and the HUD on Dack’s
glasses would flare into life with a diagnostic and initial boot
program.
At least, this was the idea. As ideas go, it wasn’t a bad
one. The problem with ephemeral ideas, however, is that they are
just that: ephemeral. Real life do not ideas make.
Dack went through the boot sequence, a purposefully
complicated one that involved the sequential pulling of fingers
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(Dack thought that this would be his coup de grace if he ever
had kids, as they would actually have to pull his fingers) then
longpressing the space on the middle finger where the nailbed
would typically be found.
That’s when the lights went out. In that exact instant.
Not just the lights in the lab, but the lights in the building
and in the university and in the city. Only the soft blue glow
of Dack’s artificial middle finger illuminated the laboratory.
Dack was sure that this was not his fault. He had created
an independent power cell system that recharged through
movement, light, and wind using bacterial insulated electrical
tubing (it never needed repairing, since it was a living
organism), a tubing that lived in a symbiotic relationship with
the user – the user being Dack this time. The hair on his arms
were painstakingly pulled nanobot glass, used for cooling, power
generation (the hair served as a mini-wind farm micro
environment; Dack could envision himself windmilling his arm to
recharge when there was no other power source), and as feeling
receptors.
There was nothing at all in his new arm that could have
affected the lights in the room. Could it? As he wandered
through the building, discovering the extent of the blackout,
his first thought was about being a little silhouetto of a man.
It took him a moment to realize that this was not his thought,
and he shut down the music he’d been listening too. He always
loved the classics, though he never had a head for who sang
what. Bachthoven. Aretha Gillespie. The Queens. The Village
Voice. He just knew he liked what he liked, though the line
he’d just heard about it being real life or just fantasy
(damnit, who sang that? the back of his brain asked; The Beetle
Stones? Catherine Perry?)seemed appropriate at the moment. He
thought that perhaps something had gone drastically wrong with
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the boot, and perhaps he was just lying on the floor of his lab,
dead, and this was all just the last vestiges of his brain
electricity making up an elabora…
He stopped thinking that when he stubbed his toe, then hit
his head on someone else’s head.
The shits and fucks and hopping around on one foot while
trying to hold his forehead were mirrored by the other figure,
also shrouded by darkness. It was a short waltz of mutual pain,
followed by sheepish apologizing and the growing realization
that the two injured parties knew each other.
And this was how Jova came back into Dack’s life.
CHAPTER 5
What had happened then, then being at the end of their
college relationship and not now at the time of the mutual
forehead-striking, was that Jova became distant and Dack was
clingy which had led to Jova being eye-rolly and Dack making
playlists which led to Jova saying to Dack many things.
Things about it not being Dack, it was her, that she wanted
to stay friends, that she couldn’t handle the intensity of her
feelings towards Dack, that she didn’t want to hold him back in
the world, that she and Dack were at different points in their
lives, that she needed her space, that Dack deserved better than
Jova, that she just wanted to focus on school, that they were
moving too fast and that they needed a break.
At least, that had been Dack’s perception, which was fine
and good, but not the complete picture. Jova had said some of
these things, not because she did not care about Dack, but
because she saw that his clinginess wasn’t born from her
distance but from his own fear, the fear that he was losing
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interest and not really wanting to be in the relationship and
felt responsible and guilty for not wanting to be in the
relationship and he, Dack, had chosen to be clingy for two
reasons, neither of which he was aware of.
The first reason was that somewhere deep in the grand sulci
of his brain organ, somewhere he knew that be becoming overly
adherent to Jova, she would naturally push him away and he could
thusly say that it was not his fault but hers. The second
reason was similar though almost completely opposite. The
ridges and crests of his bulbous neurological mass were
whispering things, things that he listened to while he slept,
things that sounded fairly close to the old adage of faking it
until one makes it.
Jova, not being an idiot, neither wanted to be in a faked
relationship nor did she want to cause him pain, at least not
any more pain than she had by playing the girly coy card at the
pool party and letting him stroke her hair and lean over and
lose his arm rather than playing the I-really-want-to-sex-you-up
card that she’d felt in the days before the accident. She let
herself be courted by the man she was falling in love with, and
this led to her man losing his arm.
Not that she felt guilty about this, not at all, as she
wasn’t the guilt-feeling type of person. She was, however,
pragmatically practical, and she loved logic, nearly as much as
she loved Dack. Jova knew. She knew what she needed to do.
She knew that she needed to be the one to end the relationship,
a relationship that Dack wanted to end but did not know he
wanted to end. She knew that he would be sad for a while, be
mad for a while, be drunk for a while but move on and grow. She
said all of the things that Dack had thought she said, but Dack
was right. She could never bring herself to say that they were
over, done, finito, kaput, hit the road Dack. She could not say
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it because she did not want it, but she want to be pitied even
less. Jova didn’t kill her relationship, the one-armed man did.
Jova then moved on as well. She, too, cried and was
angered and drank and mourned for the loss of the man she loved,
loved more than anyone before, loved enough to ignore the many
attempts he made to contact her, attempts that drifted off
sooner than later, drifting off in a way that told her she had
been right. This was not unusual. She was often right, and by
often this meant very nearly always, and it was her penchant for
rightness and logic that led her into a judgeship, but that was
later and not then, in college, or now, in the middle of a
headache.
One of the few times she had been wrong was a time that was
seared into her memory or onto her soul, if that was the sort of
thing she believed in, though she did not believe in it, at
least not often. It was seared like a fresh cut mahi-mahi on a
hot grill in Hawai’i while on a perfect vacation, the good kind
of seared (at least good for meat eaters or pescatarians, though
not so good for the mahi-mahi or vegetarians), the good kind of
seared, not the bad kind, like placing one’s hand on a hot
griddle.
Jova, a woman taller than most, darker than some, was a
lover of knowledge and devoured information for the sake of the
devouring. Jova was not someone who knew a little about many
things, she was not a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none. She
was a woman who knew a lot about most things, and a master of
any trade she decided that she wanted to master. Her energy was
frenetic, though in a calm, placid way, as she often looked and
acted totally at peace with where she was in the moment, never
looked harried or rushed, never spoke quickly. She was a woman
of strong opinions and little sleep.
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It was the butterfly that did her in. Not did-her-in
killed her, but did-her-in by making her fall in love, or at
least come to the realization that she was truly lost in Dack’s
soul. Not that she believed in a soul most of the time, but she
did that day. That day Cupid was a butterfly.
Dack and Jova had gone to the little grove in Santa Cruz to
see the cascading waterfall of monarch butterflies that lived
and loved in the eucalyptus, a sight that, once seen, would have
a person swearing that butterflies did, indeed grow on trees,
that the butterflies were leaves that could fly. They dripped
from their stalactite formations on the long hanging eucalyptus
branches. They flitted here and there, more taking to the air
as the day warmed as the sun rose, as the quiet took hold.
There were many visitors of the bipedal variety, though none
spoke, such was the power of the Lepidoptera meeting ground, and
as no one spoke, a few were blessed by the mini fluttering monks
when they chose to land on a hat here, a shoulder there, a back
in another place. There were smiles and pointing and giggling
and videoing and picture taking that happened in these slices of
instants.
One of these instances was comprised of a young girl,
perhaps five, maybe six, a girl who was watching the orange and
black pilots fly around with a mixture of trepidation awe and
fear. The girl was trepidatious and fearful, that is. The
insects were merely ambivalent. The girl’s parents were taking
pictures here and there and speaking to their child out of the
corners of their mouths, cooing and oohing and ahhing and isn’t
that awesoming to each other and to the wide eyed girl and her
older brother who kept whispering that he was more bored than he
had ever been, but then would get distracted by another insect
swimming through the air in his field of vision.
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Then a butterfly landed on the bare arm of the little girl,
the girl who was most probably five. An ear-piercing, earth
shattering, butterfly scattering scream issued forth from the
tiny female human, sending a stampede of butterflies towards the
cliffs and to certain doom and the butterfly-boys (as opposed to
cowboys, because, well, - butterflies) couldn’t steer them back
from the edge in time.
This did not happen. At least, not in this particular
dimension. It did not happen because Dack, a man who was
attuned to his child side and more sensitive than most, saw the
impending disaster and moved to stop it before the tsunami of
sound could issue forth from the child’s lungs. Dack and Jova,
standing near the little girl, saw the miniscule flying creature
float towards the unsuspecting kid. Dack crouched next to the
child, smile in place and soothing whisper-voice on hand, struck
up a conversation with the little girl about butterflies, about
these butterflies, about how friendly they were and about how
they were good luck, especially if one was to land upon you.
The parents glanced at Dack, and their creep-o-meters did
not go off, so they let the conversation continue, since they
were right there and Dack wasn’t too close and his smile was
infecting their daughter, a daughter who did not like surprise
touches, especially not soft surprise touches, and when these
surprised touches happened to her she would scream her banshee
scream. Her parents saw that she was being soothed and that she
did not notice when the butterfly landed on her arm until Dack
pointed out that she was due for good luck since there was a
butterfly on her and she giggled and squealed quietly (Dack had
explained that good luck butterflies like the quiet), and Dack
pointed out that she was going to have especially good good luck
because she didn’t have just any butterfly on her arm, she had a
special one. It was orange, like the monarchs of the grove, and
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it had some black, like the monarchs of the grove, but it was
not a monarch, Dack told her.
No, this was no Monarch, Dack had made sure to tell her,
but Dack knew what it was, since he’d seen one before. This was
a butterfly that had somehow made it to the grove from Africa, a
butterfly that Dack could swear was a Commodore. He then
saluted the Commodore with his plastic arm, which made the not-
quite-six-year-old chuckle and ask if he was a robot to which
Dack replied no, not yet.
That was the moment. That was it. Jova was done. She
loved her man, and would be treating him to some Neanderthal sex
that evening, right after tea. But she had to do one thing
first. She let him know that she thought it was cute that he
told the little girl that the butterfly was from Africa to which
Dack replied that he’d told the girl this because it was true.
Laughing, Jova said that this wasn’t really possible, and
that Dack was most certainly mistaken, that this was a grove of
Monarch butterflies and that she could believe that one of the
false Monarchs might be in the grove, she could not believe that
there was a butterfly from Africa in that same spot, especially
not one that would land near them, near a person who had seen
these butterflies before and would be able to identify them. It
was a Monarch, and that was, indeed, that. Dack just smiled,
shrugged and gave her the victory. She loved him more for it.
It wasn’t until after the room-rending sex that she saw the
news about the overturned truck near the park, a truck that
contained a live exhibit, a live exhibit of butterflies, a live
exhibit of butterflies from around the world. The only
specimens that escaped were the ones in the African exhibit.
Dack said nothing, just smiled, and not a smug smile, just a
genuine smile, not caring that he was right and she was wrong.
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She turned her half-lidded pupil-dilated eyes towards him and
decided the room needed more rending.
It was another six months before they were to break up.
And many years after that before they were to cross paths (by
crossing heads) again.