“It’s not looking good, Noah.” Louise shakes her head and points to the model of my brain floating between us. “See here in the orbitofrontal cortex? And over here in this section of the amygdala?”
I don’t know what those are until my index helpfully pops up entries for them, but I can see that she’d highlighted some chunks of my gray matter. I nod anyway.
“Those are not doing what they’re supposed to be doing. Not at all.”
I knew something wasn’t right. “And what are they supposed to be doing?”
“A bunch of things including emotional appraisal, moral reasoning, impulse control, some social processing, and learning reinforcement. A lot of smell and taste processing too, but you said those were still working right.”
“As far as I can remember, anyway. Meaning food still tastes like I described it to myself.”
“Right. But these highlighted parts of these nodes aren’t running anything like the textbook normal now. Instead they’re showing some of the same unusual patterns that you exhibit in your temporal lobe. Which I think means you’ve reprogrammed yourself again.”
“Any chance you can reverse it?”
She looks at me and shakes her head. “I wouldn’t even know where to start. If you want me to bring Max in on this, he might have ideas. But I don’t think there’s any precedent for what you’re doing to yourself.”
“It’s not like I planned this!”
“Of course not. You just ignored what I told you and pushed yourself on the implant again and again. You’ve kept your cloud minimal since we got back?”
“Yes. And I didn’t exactly have a choice, Louise.”
“You always have a choice, Noah. You chose to do everything on your own. We could have helped.” I open my mouth to protest, but she continues on before I can get a word out. “Anyway, do you want me to get Max to help on this or not?”
I shake my head. Max Braun may be the genius Louise thinks he is, and he certainly helped us when we needed him when our Southeast Asia trip went to hell in China, but I still barely know the guy. I’m not about to bring him into the circle of trust on the secret of my broken mind. “Let’s keep this in the family, at least for now.” I get up and unplug the cable connecting my processing appliance to the server rack in Louise’s lab.
DEBUG INTERFACE TERMINATED
The projected image of my brain winks out. Louise takes the cable from my hands and stows it on its shelf, then turns and puts a hand on my arm. “I’m not saying you didn’t do the right thing. I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t stepped up and taken care of things like you did. But you can’t pick up just one end of a stick, and this new remodeling is the consequence we’ll have to deal with. You know I’m here to help you, whatever you need. I just don’t know if we can do anything from the biology side.”
I sigh, letting my growing frustration dissipate as I resign myself to more workarounds. She’s probably right. If this is like my previous brain damage, there’s not a way to undo it. It’s fine. I can compensate for this on the electronic side of my brain. I’ve done it before with bigger problems. I can do it again. I’ve known the social cue processing stuff was failing for a while now and I’ve already started on algorithms to substitute for that. How hard can it be to program up a synthetic conscience?
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I look down at my bricklike processing appliance. Its resources are already pretty stretched with what I have it doing now. A huge database, an advanced math solver, a language parser, a text scanner, image recognition, and a whole lot of glue code that ties them all to each other and to the parts of my biological mind that have adapted themselves to partner with my implant. Maybe it’s time for an upgrade to the silicon side of me. “Hey Louise, can we hook my implant up to something with a lot more CPUs and RAM?”
She looks thoughtful for a second, then nods. “I see what you’re thinking, and I don’t see why not. Father had these rigs custom built for us for their size, weight, and power, but there’s no reason we couldn’t install all the right software and security stuff on something newer and bigger. Maybe a processing array made from the chips SynTech is using on those new smartphones. You’ll probably have to set up a continuous cloud task to transfer power to it and keep it cooled, but as long as you don’t mind doing that and lugging something heavier around it’s probably doable. Might want to check with the SynTech dev guys first though, I really only know the implant side of it well.”
I nod. None of that should be hard. I bet the devs can cook up the custom silicon I would need in a few weeks and I can put it all together into a chassis I can build with the bots. I’ll need to get help to design and write all the new code, since I’m not going to farm that out to the company guys. Evan will be able to give me a hand. Maybe I can even get Lin to help, though she’ll have a lot to learn about our tech before she’ll be able to do much.
“Thanks, sister. And thanks for coming back from the hospital to check this for me. How’s Mrs. Hastings doing today?”
“Better than yesterday, but they said they don’t want to release her for at least another week, even though the nanosurgery I did in the ambulance had already repaired a lot of the damage from Jeff’s knife before they even admitted her. She could have walked out and been fine if she didn’t listen to the docs, but you know her, she likes everyone to follow the rules.”
“That she does.”
“It’s probably for the best. They have more and better drugs there than what we can provide, and if she got all septic I don’t think that even my best tricks could help much.”
“You couldn’t just do your magic like you did when I got sick on the river?”
She shakes her head. “I only know how to deal with viral infections so far. Bacteria or fungus or whatever else are beyond me right now.”
“Seems like those would be easier. Cause they’re bigger, right? Just go in and zap ‘em.”
“Gee, thanks Doctor Noah.” Her voice gets slower and the pitch goes lower. “I didn’t realize you’d been training to take over the field I’ve spent every day for the last two years studying.”
Is that sarcasm? That must be sarcasm. Why is it getting harder to tell?
“I think I’m just going to shut up now.”
“You think? Maybe you should tell me more about which infections are easier for nanobots to handle without wrecking the human body since you’re such an expert.”
Now I know she’s making fun of me, but at least she’s smiling while she does it.
“You know what? I think I have a meeting with the legal team now. Or something very believable like that.”
“Before you go, how’s Lin doing today? Any better?”
I shake my head. “About the same as yesterday. Still holing up in her room in the Residence most of the time. I dropped by earlier but she just said she wanted to be alone. Won’t even let Yang Song come in to see her.”
“Well, she’s got a lot to work through. Give her time.”
“I don’t have a lot of choices there. What else can I do?”
“You could be a total ass and try to haul her out of her grief by force.”
“Ooh, good idea. Let me go try that.”
“Right. Let me know how it goes. Better yet, let me know when you’re doing it so I can pop some popcorn.” That’s sarcasm for sure, I think. While I’m tweaking my polygraph parameters for her to help me pick it up better, she starts making shooing motions with her hands. “Now get out of my lab. Come back in three days so we can run all the scans again. I need to make sure you’re not getting worse or I’m going to have to cut you off from your cloud.”