Konrad hadn’t been on the floor for more than a few seconds before the room filled with staff, all donned in white coats and protective equipment. It made sense. The bots in our heads, and for all intents and purposes, currently seeping from Konrad onto the floor, may as well have been a mechanical prion disease, built specifically for tearing apart neurons.
In theory, if specially administered and programmed, it should replace and improve any functionality it destroys. However, getting some into your bloodstream at a random time by accident was probably not great for one's health.
I found myself looking through space rather than at it, feeling distant while Konrad’s limp body was pulled out of the room on a stretcher. At some point, the alarm had stopped, and the quiet felt momentarily unnatural. I suppose even being dosed in ideal circumstances like I was, having little grey matter-devouring machines wasn’t good for one's health either.
I…” Sarah choked out as the room was left nearly vacant and quiet again, with only a small cleanup crew quickly scrubbing Konrad out of the carpet and couch.
“-I had just set a little ambush; he was responding weirdly, and then he just…” Sarah trailed off. The four of us clustered together, all unsure what to do – me with my cooling coffee cup, Sarah with Konrad’s blood on her pants leg after she had tried to help him. Jiang had stood up from where he was seated after our match but hadn’t moved from the spot.
Leo likewise joined in, wide-eyed with concern, one hand pressed gently against the side of his own head.
Well, fuck me," Leo finally added in his attempt to break the silence. At the same time, both Jiang and Sarah, with the practiced repetition of a well-worn statement, replied,
"Ask me out to dinner first," and "Sorry, don’t swing that way," respectively.
The momentary absurdity caught all of us off guard, drawing an exasperated huff from me, a choked laugh from Leo, and a look of surprise between Jiang and Sarah.
“I thought I knew the risks going in, you know?” I gestured towards the room. “But seeing on paper that half the mice in an experiment died, it seems so distant compared to… that. Do you think he’ll be okay?”
Jiang shook his head a little, not meeting my eyes. Sarah was more sympathetic and offered me a hug. I accepted this time, not begrudgingly like her last attempted hug when we had just gotten out of cryo.
“I think they will keep him alive. Dr. Hirsh mentioned that El was created from a human cadaver right? Maybe even if he doesn’t regain awareness, they’ll just keep treating him anyway. Maybe at some point, he’d end up like her?” Leo offered.
I wasn’t sure if I thought that was better or worse than just dying.
I felt suddenly quite small, leaning closer into the hug that Sarah had offered me.
“Hey Sarah” I near whispered, not sure for a moment if it was really my voice at all.
“I’m sorry, I’ve been a bit jerk ever since graduation. I’m not really a good… looser.” It felt so inconsequential now. What was a loss in a game almost a decade ago as far as anyone cared in comparison to the billions of little Damoclean daggers floating through each of us?
Sarah didn’t chide me or poke fun in her usual fashion, she didn’t cheer at my having finally conceded she had beaten me. She just held me and agreed “I know” and that was that.
With the couches clean, no one felt much like finishing our tournament or playing games anymore. We reclined and engaged in very idle small talk, Sarah and I on one couch, Jiang and Leo on the other. I had shot El and Dr. Hirsh both a message asking for an update, and Jiang had knocked on one of the observation room walls to try and get an answer from one of the researchers out there. No answers had been forthcoming.
The events of the past hour had added a spike of adrenaline into the mix, but now that it had faded, a cloud of exhaustion was sweeping over my brain, and the Schiltrons of caffeine were starting to buckle. Still, I could not sleep. I drank again from my now cool coffee cup, draining it, and then moved to fetch more.
My heart rate didn’t feel right; at first, it was just an awareness. The insistent lub-dub wasn’t unusually fast or unpleasant. Just that I was aware of it in a way that felt unusual. I held up two digits to my neck, taking my pulse to confirm that the feeling in my chest did line up with my actual heart rate. I must have been making a face.
“Vic, you okay?” Jiang looked concerned. At his prompting, the others looked over as well.
“You know how normally you don’t think about your breathing until something reminds you about it? Then suddenly you are annoyingly aware of your breathing, no longer on autopilot? It's a bit like that. I’m proprioceptively aware of my heart rate and breathing, only it's not going away? It's been a minute now, and I can’t seem to unfocus.”
Sarah and Jiang looked on, somewhere between confused and concerned, but Leo had a look of recognition on his face.
“That's exactly how to describe it! Like when you really pay attention to your breathing and heart rate when you run a race. It doesn’t hurt or anything; it's just distracting, kinda like a panic attack almost, just without the panic part, you know?”
I nodded. “So you're feeling that too? Do you think it's just some sort of psychosomatic panic response, and we’re just being hypochondriacs after what happened to Konrad? Sarah and Jiang don’t seem to be having any issues.”
Jiang nodded sympathetically. “Well, seeing as no one is bleeding out on the floor, I don’t think it's an immediate concern. But probably bring it up next time Dr. Hirsh comes by?” he offered.
We didn’t have to wait long for that. It wasn’t more than another 10 minutes before a frazzled-looking doctor in a coffee-stained lab coat made his appearance.
Immediately he spoke in a rapid deluge of words, “I am so sorry for the delay. As you can imagine, it's been a frantic morning. Konrad is stable for now, and we hope to keep him that way. I can’t say when he will regain consciousness.”
I felt a knot of tension I didn’t realize I was holding relax in my gut. Leo gave a half-hearted cheer. Konrad wasn’t going to be okay; I don’t think we had any illusions about that. But he wasn’t dead, which was something.
“What happened to him, Doc? Is there anything we can do to avoid that?” Jiang asked pointedly. Dr. Hirsh had a momentary guilty look flash across his face before he answered.
“Well, during the process, not every neuron is recreated in perfect functionality. This means the way the recreated neuron responds to signals, the electrical impulses it sends out, can be slightly different from the neuron it replaced. This isn’t usually an issue; a bit of neuroplasticity is built in, and the system can adapt. In Konrad's case, enough of these mistakes were in close proximity, creating a cascade that caused a seizure. We won’t try to wake him up through the rest of the process. He will likely have limited awareness once the conversion is completed and will require some conventional neural network training to recover that functionality.”
“I’m sorry you all had to see that. I know this can’t be an easy thing to sit through, wondering if perhaps it will be you laying on the floor next. I can’t offer you any assurances, but I thought I should bring you some news.”
He rummaged through the folder he had brought, gesturing towards the table while he pulled out some pictures and documents. I got up to sit in the far less comfortable chair at the table to see what he wanted to show us.
“Technically speaking, none of you have the clearance to see any of this. That being said, the existence of the Theseus project, something you all embody, is the second-best kept military secret there is. Plus, soon you’ll functionally be second only to the Admiralty Council in terms of information you have access to. I think it's prudent that you know just why we’re doing this, how desperate things have gotten.”
“Originally,” he declared, his voice going soft and solemn, “we had planned to have a counteroffensive ready to set forth from the Sol system to secure first the most populated colonies, such as those in the Centauri system, reclaim human space from there.” He held out a report, letting us pass it around to back up what he was saying.
“Those plans changed a week ago when a bug scoutship was detected far out on sensors from Proxima Centauri b. Based on previous patterns, we’re expecting attacks to start any day now. The entire system, we expect to be lost within a month.”
The document confirmed what he was saying. I held it gently after Leo passed it to me, skimming through the lines and feeling the weight of what it meant.
“There are almost a billion people in Alpha Centauri. Can they evacuate that many?” Jiang asked with concern.
“I’m not privy to those details… I hope they do, but things are going to get bad. There isn’t room for that many people here. There are significant fortifications in the system; they should be able to hold out for a while, but we won’t be able to relieve them for likely a year or more, even under the best conditions. We’ve never seen a planetary siege of this scale. There are some theories, but we aren’t sure what will happen or how long...” Came Dr. Hirsh’s reply.
Perhaps I was just jaded, but the way I saw it, an evacuation wouldn’t even be attempted. When I had gone under for cryo seven years ago, the food and housing situation in the Sol system wasn’t great. There were efforts to expand refugee camps and food production, but they were all secondary to the war effort. We couldn’t handle a billion refugees then, and I’m quite sure things had only gotten worse. The entire system was going to be used as a roadblock, the largest sacrifice in human history, all to save us a month.
“Well, that's a downer. I guess it does make me feel a bit better about what's happening here. Like, even if I don’t come out alright, it still helps everyone else, you know?” Leo murmured. I couldn’t help but agree.
“Speaking of something happening, Doc, Leo and Vic both mentioned something about not being able to stop being aware of their breathing and heart rate, which I only mentioned cause, uh, me too. It's weird, like a constant background to everything, even this conversation. Is that bad?” Sarah spoke up, reminding me of those pesky little details I couldn’t seem to forget.
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Dr. Hirsh nodded, thinking for a moment. “Well, I had said at the start that this would be a learning experience for everyone. It does make some sense. The first dose is primarily targeting the brain stem, which is responsible for things like heart rate, breathing, sleep, and the like. It is also where all information from your body travels to get to your brain. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a lot of changes like that.”
Doc seemed plenty pleased with this turn of events, progress and learning all that. The rest of the group was not so entertained.
“So, you mean to say that I’m going to be constantly aware of my heartbeat and breathing just forever now?” Leo didn’t seem distressed anymore, now having an explanation, just peeved.
Dr. Hirsh shrugged. “I suspect eventually you will be able to relegate it to being a subsystem again when you are better at organizing the functions of your body later on, but in general, yes.” Jiang let out a not-too-relieved sigh.
It was a relief, I suppose, just to know that my brain wasn’t about to melt out of my ears the same way Konrad’s had. At the same time, it was a bit of an annoying symptom.
“That's so annoying,” I spoke under my breath. Sarah nodded in agreement, and Doc just gave an apologetic smile.
It continued to be annoying. Doc had left, promising his return in a bit to administer another dose of brain-melting robots into the ports in our heads. Sarah and I still hadn’t thought to finish that match we technically owed each other, and any attempts at games were half-hearted at best. I fuzzed around with the game library through the headset a bit more; there was plenty beyond just war sims. I’d never had access to a game library quite as large, but I still couldn’t bring myself to really feel invested. My attention just seemed elsewhere, spread thin.
Twenty-four hours on the nose after our first dose, Dr. Hirsh and a few aides returned with some equipment: a biohazard box with a tube and a port on the end, a narrow silver cylinder.
“Hope you're all keeping yourselves entertained. We already dosed Konrad. Which of you would like to go first?” He asked.
I was standing in a flash, hand raised. “Dibs on the fresh head goo,” I muttered to everyone's displeasure.
“There’s no need to make it sound gross. We’re just pulling out any accumulated buildup of waste products and giving you another dose. It's all through the one port, clean, and will only take a few seconds.” He gestured towards a chair he’d pulled over, and I sat myself down, pulling my hair out of the way to leave my port exposed.
“Thank you, Vic. Hold still, please.”
There wasn’t really much of a sensation to it, a soft click that she more heard than felt as the port at the end of the biohazard container was hooked up. Dr. Hirsh tapped away at a tablet for a moment, and I felt a pressure I hadn’t even noticed suddenly leave my head, the pulped goo of my brain stem draining away. It seemed like something I should find distressing, but honestly, the feeling was nice—a tangible release of tension.
Doc was right; it was finished in a few seconds, and he was hooking up the silver cylinder to my port, a soothing cool feeling all through the back of my head before another soft click let me know I was finished.
My thoughts aside the rest of the room seemed put off. Sarah and Jiang both looked a little pale and Leo gagged. I belatedly realized that a fair amount of fluid leaving my brain had made a sound while it poured into the bio hazard bin, like some thick slime, not exactly pleasant sounding.
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic, guys,” I offered. “That actually felt pretty nice. I don’t even feel all that tired anymore.”
If that didn’t get people motivated, nothing would. I still felt really, really tired; it was getting well into two days without sleep.
“So, who’s next?” Dr. Hirsh spoke up.
Sarah popped up next to take her turn, and I once again returned to the couch to watch the proceedings.
I poked around on my tablet some more, the second I picked it up I recived a message from El.
El - [Bored?]
[Turns out even stress can’t keep me entertained forever. Very] - Guestjbu3470
El - [I figured, I told Dr. Hirsh humans need better enrichment activities. I’ll tell him to bring you a new toy.]
[?] - Guestjbu3470
El - [;)]
I didn’t have much of an idea of what El meant by "a new toy," and the AI wasn’t being forthcoming, but at least it probably wouldn’t leave us as bored and tired as I currently felt.
As foretold, Dr. Hirsh returned, a bulky piece of computer hardware in tow. A whole tangled mess of wires and various adapters surrounded the thing.
“I didn’t think we’d be ready to use this for a few days still, but El seems to think you would all benefit from getting started earlier, and I’m hardly going to complain about being ahead of schedule.”
He paused, what an agonizingly long pause it was.
“This here is a networked real old-fashioned workstation. I’ve got all these custom ports set up so that you can properly interface with it using your ports. I'm afraid I only have one, so you will have to take turns trying things out. El will likely be more helpful in helping you figure out exactly how to do that, but you should be developing the necessary hardware to do so in the next day or so if you haven’t already.”
“Dibs!” I shouted immediately, shooting up and making my way over before anyone else could get a word out.
“Now, this might not do anything. If it does, then we are quite ahead of schedule. That being said, if the conversion process has already created the necessary architecture for a hard connection like this, then you shouldn’t need to ‘do’ anything. Just relax and treat it as a learning experience, I suppose?” Dr. Hirsh shrugged, then helped me get plugged in, the custom adapter slotting into the port in my head like it was made for it (it really was).
An instant connection swam through my mind, immediately headache-inducing. I must have made a strange face, and everyone else clustered around to watch.
This was a handshake, not even with anything on the computer, just the port adapters. It was instantaneous to go through, but feeling it happen was a unique experience, to say the least. Dr. Hirsh was right; whatever hardware had been growing in my head made the process intuitive. 'Handshake' didn’t feel quite right as a description. It made a bit of sense—the protocols of communication between two machines, conceptualized as a human conversation.
It didn’t feel like the start of a conversation; it felt like retracing a well-worn thought, some familiar process looped through simply because that was the way things should be.
Needless to say, nothing was at all familiar about the process. Disconcerting.
Then I was through, information from the workstation connected right into my head, no UI necessary. There was no screen; I didn’t ‘see’ anything, and yet I could perceive every limited thing on the workstation through a nice, fast fiberoptic cable.
“Hey Doc, there isn’t really anything on here? No operating system, you also scrapped most of its hardware. There's basically BIOS, and that's it. What's up?” I asked, confused.
“Well, that's just it. The workstation is just a tool; the actual activity here is running it yourself. I do have an operating system you could try loading on it, but it would mostly be running on your mind, which may be a bit much. I was thinking you could start with command-line activities and go from there.”
I thought about it. I’d already started on what he recommended, seeing what I could build from the nothing that was here. I wasn’t a stellar programmer by any means. Even if I could interact with code in a novel way, I wouldn’t be spitting out any advanced systems without some sort of template or example to at least springboard off of.
“Hit me with the OS, doc. I think I can shut it down just fine if it's too much.”
He frowned but apparently conceded, pulling out a flash drive and fussing with the other ports on the workstation.
“Remember, anything running in your own head you have total control over, but anything running on this machine will run using whatever rules it has. In this case, it's just a workstation, but don’t be surprised.”
With that came an install prompt for the OS, which I quickly parsed through. It's shocking how fast you can read something when you skip the visual medium and go straight to comprehension.
It was about as bare-bones as a modern operating system could get, some sort of server software for simple and secure government systems. The install began, and it was a little disorienting. The workstation had a motherboard, hard drives, most of the things that could make a computer a computer.
What it didn’t have was a processor, which was a non-issue since apparently my head was a perfectly fine substitute.
I pretty quickly realized that this was a mistake.
The part of my brain that was ready to do this sort of work was primarily serving as my brainstem.
The human brainstem is a fantastic bit of kit, totally subconscious maintenance of many of the body's systems. Breathing, blood pressure, heart rate—all things that my newly converted brainstem had wonderful shorthand and efficiency for dealing with; higher processing really was supposed to be the rest of the brain's job.
Unfortunately, the rest of my brain wasn’t currently set up to read this wonderfully clear set of instructions, which was effortless to continue reading, writing, following the instructions. Everything else fell away, and I sank without a thought into the executable.
It was only a few seconds before it was finished, before my heart restarted, and I jerked awake, gasping for a breath, only belatedly realizing my heart had stopped.
“Holy shit,” I breathed.
“Vic? Vic!” Sarah exclaimed, practically jumping at me as I struggled to sit myself back up, apparently having slumped out of my chair.
“Woah, woah, I’m…okay?”
Dr. Hirsh looked concerned, having taken out a tablet of his own, I assume to take a look at my vitals or maybe what was going on in the workstation.
“That was… unexpected. Vic, I think it's best if we put a pin in this for right now and get you a quick check-up.”
It wasn’t a request. Honestly, having seen what happened to Konrad earlier, I didn’t really mind letting some qualified folks make sure I hadn’t just fried my brain.