158: TECHNOLOGY

“Honestly,” Dr Kim says, “I have very little frame of reference for what you do and don’t know, so it’s hard to know where to start.”

“Start with the eye. What does it do?”

“It’s a bionic eye. It helps you to see.”

“Don’t fuck around with me.”

“I’m serious. It’s a standard bionic that I pulled from storage, same as any other bionic implant. We’re pretty well-stocked on eyes, because people tend not to lose them too often and when they do, implanting them is a lot riskier than doing a hand or foot because of the delicate optic nerve work in and near the brain, so if they still have one good working eye we generally leave it. But it’s just an eye. It helps you see. That’s all it does.”

“No spy cameras or nasty surprises or anything?”

“Just the normal bionic eye camera. I don’t understand the internals of the bionics perfectly, but so far as I know it doesn’t do anything except send the information to the optic nerve. Same as a flesh eye.”

“You were pretty pushy about getting me to get it.”

“That’s my normal amount of pushy with patients, actually. You would not believe some of the self-destructive healthcare decisions that people make if you don’t keep on top of them. But as you can see,” she says, gesturing to the room through the glass, “I am very invested in this implant going well.”

“Why? What do you expect it to do?”

“If everything goes well – and the scans are very promising, I’m extremely excited – I expect you to be able to see.”

“Out of the goodness of your heart?”

“I’m a doctor. I always want my patients to be as healthy and healed as possible. But in your case, your success isn’t just important to your vision, Aspen. It’s going to help save Hylara.”

“By helping you give robot eyes to people better?”

“Forget the eye! The eye doesn’t matter! I can put an eye in anyone if there’s a nerve to attach it to, but we didn’t do that with you, did we? The eye is boring. What matters, Aspen, is your synnerves.”

I reach up and touch the port in the back of my skull. The skin has, once again, healed over it.

Dr Kim leaps up and starts to pace. “We don’t have a whole lot of modern technology unrelated to doing our jobs here. But we do talk to a lot of people manning the port on the other side, and we have a good idea of what they can and can’t do, and the simple fact is that synnerve technology has been reasonably stagnant since our ships left Earth. And your ship, Aspen, your ship is remarkably free with all kinds of information if I can convince them it’s relevant to your healthcare; they sent down your full medical files before you even landed, of course, and while I don’t know or care about all the details of what went on up there, I do know that you carry in your head some very interesting technology. Technology that I don’t think Earth has. I’m not sure what twisted nonsense people were trying to pull with the Courageous, but whoever set up that little project didn’t share their synnerve tech, because if they had, Earth would have what you have, and they don’t.”

“What I have.”

“Synnerves,” Kim says, turning to face the window again, “that can make you see. Usually, growing synnerves and attaching them to an implant is a finnicky and limited process, as I’m sure your dear captain could tell you. They’re limited in what they can do and have to be implanted carefully, and the reason for that, Aspen, is that nerves that are too aggressive are also incredibly dangerous. Synnerves can be trained, just like natural nerves, and the synnerves that grow wrong and don’t get the right feedback simply die – but make them too aggressive, and all that does is fill a body with dead synnerves, which sport dangers in their own right, as the enormous death toll on your ship shows. Except, of course, for a small group of people who happen to be allergic to a specific protein present in the specific altered synnerves that you brought.”

“DIVRs.”

“An edge case that Antarctica would definitely have found if they were still working with these synnerves, which leads me to believe that we and we alone have them. And we and we alone know about this immunity. Which is why rather than carefully planting a synthetic optic nerve through your brain, we can simply inoculate the port and let normal feedback do its work.” She starts pacing again. “Do you realise what this means? In this test case, it’s replacing an eye. We can probably replace various organs and extremities this way, although now that the ship’s providing us with materials to grow biological replacements, that’s probably not going to be particularly high demand. But brains are flexible; nerves are flexible. The original purpose of this technology wasn’t to replace an eye, but to interface with a computer doing something completely different.”

“You don’t want to run that experiment again,” I say quickly. “That AI didn’t – ”

“Didn’t work out, yes; terrible idea, doomed from the start. I’m not sure what kind of ‘the power of the human mind fixes everything’ storybook logic those designers were working with, but making an AI less stable isn’t going to make it safer. But not everything needs an AI. What about extra limbs. New senses. A radio receiver inside one’s mind. Day-long treks through dangerous terrain in environmental suits worn by trained operatives who can react to things sensed by the suit as if it were sensed by their own skin. Do you see the potential?”

“In a little colony like this with limited materials? I think normal robotics might be more pract – ”

“Not here!” She stops pacing again and flings an arm up, pointing above us. “Out there! Beyond the sky! Antarctica has always had a noose around our neck, do you understand? We have never been safe, and can never be safe, under those conditions. Now the Courageous comes, and we can grow food independently, and loosen that noose a little. But it’s not going away. A massive influx of materials is helpful, but it’s a one-time influx; once the stockpiles are gone, we have only what we can produce and mine on this planet, and no matter how many seeds and machines you bring down, that’s an incredibly unstable position to be in on what’s starting as an essentially dead planet. And this planet can’t produce anything that Antarctica can’t get from its own solar system, meaning we have nothing to trade, no negotiating power. Until now. Technology? Technology, we can trade. And whatever was going on with that AI might be stupid, but the prerequisites for it are valuable. Your synnerves, Aspen, your synnerves and those genes inserted in some of your crewmates… those, we have, and I’m pretty sure Antarctica doesn’t. Those, we can reverse-engineer. Those are a start.”

“Unlike the synnerves in my skull, we don’t have any living samples of those gene-altering bacteria, so…”

“We probably don’t need them. I have copious supplies of your crewmates’ blood. It’s a matter of extracting the right cells and injecting volunteers. The first trials are already underway. I did warn the volunteers that the genes were made for Earth people, not us, and we can’t be sure they’ll affect us the same way, and it might be very dangerous. But the possibility of agelessness is very appealing to a lot of people, so they’re taking the chance. We’ll know within a week or two whether infection was successful.”

“Do the crewmates whose blood you used know about this?”

“Of course not. Why would they need to? It doesn’t involve them.”

“It’s their blood!”

“I was taking blood samples for pathology tests anyway. Why does it matter what else I do with it? They gave it to me for the tests, and got the results. The rest isn’t their problem. But for your experiment, Aspen, we needed a DIVR.”

“And I’m a DIVR who was missing an eye I wanted replaced, and had the port in my skull already, and had already proven my effectiveness at surviving chronostasis.”

“Exactly. The perfect candidate. So. Are you going to put that eye back in?”

I look at the eye. Look back. “The infection in my spine. Fake?”

“Fake. Things were getting very unstable politically. I wanted you isolated where you’d be safe and could focus on your eye training.”

“You drugged me. To make it look like an infection.”

“Yes. If it helps, you weren’t in any danger. The drugs are very unpleasant, but can’t kill you.”

“Does Max know about any of this?”

“No. and now that we’ve had this conversation, I can’t allow you to meet with them. This is a private project.”

“Just you?”

“Me and a few friends who care about the future of Hylara.”

“Celti?”

“Definitely not. He’d never greenlight anything like this.”

“Hive? Elenna?”

“Both no. They all think you’re quarantined with a dangerous infection.”

“You quarantined Tinera and the Friend, too. Why? Tinera’s not a DIVR.”

“Believe it or not, they actually are just receiving normal healthcare for a problem that has nothing to do with this.”

“A different twisted mad science experiment?”

“No. Healthcare. I’ll be a ‘mad scientist’ if I have to, but usually, I’m just a doctor.”

“Tell me what’s wrong with them.”

“Nothing fatal. They’re both recovering well. Once you can see properly, I can release you and you can ask them yourself. So I’d get to training that eye if I were you. Or are you going to be petty, even knowing that the future stability of the colony is at stake?”

I glare at her.

She sighs. “See, this is why I didn’t want to tell you. This whole thing happens so, so much smoother with your cooperation.”

“Maybe if you’d told me up-front I would’ve helped you from the beginning and none of this would’ve been necessary.”

“I couldn’t take that chance.”

“Let me see Tinera and the Friend. I need to know you’re actually telling the truth about them.”

“I can’t do that, because you’ll tell them about this eye thing and then I’ll have to keep them confined or risk them telling the Leadership and the whole thing blows up. You can see them as much as you want and do whatever you want when the project’s a success. I want your cooperation, Aspen, but I don’t need it.”

I cross my arms. “You need me, though. I’ll find some way to screw up the port and – ”

“I don’t, actually. Worst case scenario, I have your DNA; I could grow another Aspen. But that would necessitate going public with the project to explain why I want a DIVR in the next set of children, and going through a whole lot of unstable political turmoil, and then waiting for the time to actually grow the child – no. a simpler way to do things if you don’t cooperate, Aspen, is to run your uncooperative trial alongside another DIVR who will cooperate.” She smiles at me through the window. It’s not a pleasant smile. “Who do you think I should go with? The captain who’s timid and helpful to a fault, or the doctor who brain damaged itself out of the ability to effectively self-advocate? Both are soft targets. I guess it comes down to who’s easier to organise an accident for so they need a prosthetic, isn’t it?”

“Is that a threat?”

“Does it need to become one?”

I glare at her for several more long, tense seconds. Then I snatch up the eye, storm off into the bathroom to rinse it in the sink (that makes it sterile enough, right? For an eye socket?) and pop it back in.

Dr Kim smiles at me much more pleasantly when I come back into sight. “Great! Now, let’s go and take today’s scans, shall we? I’m so excited about the progress you’ve made.”