Viper Wire, page 3
On the twenty third floor, the tiny fragment strikes Sean Jackson in the back, just above his left scapula, and passes through his left ventricle, causing the heart muscle to spasm. Sean had been a track and football champion in high school and college. He can count the number of days he’s been sick on the fingers of one hand. The heart attack is a revelation for him. In a hospital bed, where the doctors hold him overnight for observation, he uses his cell phone to call his girlfriend and ask her to marry him.
On the eighteenth floor, the Mudrosti fragment passes through Liv Ordesky’s shoulder bag, striking her new PJ Harvey CD, instantly vaporizing the aluminum layer of the disk. When she finds the damaged disk on her way home from work, the streaks left by the evaporating metal strike her as profoundly beautiful. Two weeks later, she quits her job as a media buyer for an online marketing agency and re-enters the art school she’d dropped out of two years earlier.
Kate Weinstein is on the sixteenth floor of the building, rubbing her temples to relieve the pounding headache that is really the early stages of a stroke. As the falling fragment enters her brain, it dissolves the blockage in her cerebral artery, restoring normal bloodflow. Unfortunately, the rush of blood into her brain leaves her so light-headed that when she tries to stand, she collapses, face-first, into the gold fish tank on the corner of her desk, and drowns.
On the twelfth floor, Grant Burrows is climaxing between the tight, toned rock climbing thighs of his secretary, Megan Price. The fragment strikes the chip storing the numbers he’s entered into his phone’s speed dial, and calls his home number. A screw head in the base of the phone deflects the fragment so that it ricochets out of the device, and passes through the center of Grant’s hands. When Grant hears his wife’s voice coming through his phone’s speaker he looks up, in mid-orgasm, and sees that he has developed stigmata. Neither Megan nor Grant’s wife understand why he begins to scream or why he later insists on going to Confession for the first time in twenty-some years.
On the ninth floor, the particle smashes through the top of Timothy Jackson’s green iMac, striking the exact spot where a glob of dried sour cream (from last night’s Chavo Supreme Super Burrito) touches a gallium arsenide chip in the heart of the machine. The strange primordial chemical cloud gives rise to a whole new form of life within the iMac. As the superheated plasma cools, the life grows and flourishes, building a vast civilization across the surface of the chip. But even with all the poetry and art they create, the civilization falls into a kind of existential despair when their science correctly describes the limits of their green and plastic-encased universe. A nuclear war breaks out between the different factions fighting for ultimate control of the chip. In the aftermath, the survivors envy the dead and all traces of their elegant empire are burned to dust. This all happens in .003 seconds. Timothy is forced to reboot his iMac when it mysteriously crashes.
Orlando “The Hammer” Sinclair is holding up a woman at gunpoint in the garage beneath the office building. As the particle travels down through the garage roof, it passes through Orlando ‘s gun, igniting the primer in the chambered bullet. The gun goes off, killing Victoria Hartley next to her Jeep Cherokee. As Orlando watches her body crumple to the cement floor, the stupidity of the act and the violence of her collapse surprises him. Murder isn’t nearly as much fun as he thought it would be.
From the floor of the garage, the particle continues down and enters the sewer, striking a spark when it punctures a water main. In the dark, a large and fierce rat is munching on a soggy carton of day old Mu Shu pork. The sight of the spark and the tiny geyser of water from the damaged main trigger a memory in the rat’s tiny brain. The rat remembers another life, when he was known as Louis, the king of France . The Sun King, they had called him. He recalls the lovely fountains at his palaces, the emerald gardens outside Versailles , the ladies in waiting. That night, he dreams a mixture of rat and Louis dreams. Furry, whiskered women in elegant ball gowns chase him playfully through halls of mirrors as musicians play minuets in his endless palace. They all make love under the gilt wainscoting and dine on glazed cherries, fine wine and fresh pheasant bones, straight from the royal dumpster. Nothing less would be fit for his majesty Louis, the rat king.
Surfing the Khumbu
Anna was covered in diamonds. That’s how she felt as she trudged down the glacier. Ice had formed within seconds on her skin-tight environment suit, frosting Anna with jewels. As she moved, her skin and the suit began their chemical conversation, exchanging hormone, blood comp, skin integrity and body temperature data. A quick read off her wrist screen told her that, despite the rough landing, her body was stable. The frost slid off her in sheets as the suit injected time-release thyroid-stimulators through her skin to kick up her body temperature.
She was in the Himalayas, making her way down the western side of Everest, from Kala Pattar through the rocky cut carved out by the Khumbu Glacier. She stayed that night in the ice fall, setting up camp among the vertical flutes which rose like frigid, pale-blue stalagmites from the Khumbu. A few shots of expansion foam between the flutes made a cozy ice cave. And just in time. The wind was picking up. Between the ice and the blowing mist, she’d be invisible to any surveillance cams or spy sats overhead. Tucked warm into a sleeping bag of honeycombed Thermalon, Anna felt right at home.
She dreamed of flying, of coming down in a long, looping descent from the sky into a city. Random streets from different cities recombined into one uber-city. New York. Washington. Beijing. Sao Paulo. Tokyo. It was her recurring nightmare. Anna hated cities. Hated being locked up, cocooned in all that concrete and steel. She lived in Montana, on the edge of an old growth forest. Wolves came to her door and she fed them by hand. They knew she wasn’t one of them, but she wasn’t quite human, either. That didn’t matter in the wilderness. In the city, it did.
Anna had dropped onto Everest in a drone after being ejected from a low-altitude stealth skimmer. The drone had no engine, but a single powerful propeller, powered by a spring-wound memory-metal mechanism, gave her a little more maneuverability than a chicken in a tornado. It was a rush all the way down. It took all of Anna’s training and discipline not to whoop the whole way onto the ice. The drone was a graphite skeleton, more Archaeopteryx than Boeing. The body was wrapped in bullet-proof nylon so thin that when Anna pressed her face against it, she could see through. Extruded from the bio-hacked sacs of a thousand gold-orb spiders, the nylon was light as air and stronger than steel. It was sublime. As a kid, Anna had been a solo ice climber and a glider pilot, loving anything that took her up high or got her moving fast.
Anna’s eyes snapped open. She looked at her wrist. She’d been asleep for a couple of hours. The wind had stopped outside. From her pack, she pulled a handful of ant bots and tossed them out onto the ice. They swarmed away from her, in all directions. Anna closed her eyes and looked.
Her family and what few friends she made over the years always obsessed about the dangers of her desires. They never came close to understanding. There was no danger. There was just the next handhold. And where there was no danger, there was no fear. Just exhilaration. Her family and friends would just shake their heads, feet locked firmly and sensibly to the Earth.
Anna’s skin-tight smart-fiber suit was electro-chemically “wired” into her central nervous system. Video signals from the ant bots— each an autonomous micro-cam on energetic little legs— gave her a good view of the surrounding landscape, from the visual range up through the infra-red. It was the end of the storm season, and the valley was empty. Anna went outside to have a real look.
The Himalayan sky glimmered with a million stars, and the Milky Way smeared through the middle. Anna closed her eyes and swallowed her vision (that’s how show it felt) into her body. In the right state, Anna could tap into the optical sensors in the fabric of her suit. It was like one big panoramic eye. It always took some getting used to, seeing three hundred and sixty degrees. The first time she’d tried to walk that way, she’d thrown up. But she got good at it quickly and the Langley spy boys loved her for it. That’s why they sent her on assignments like this. Human back-up still beat the best AI. Anna was one of the few who could not only handle herself anywhere, but lived for it.
When she had a visual of the valley, Anna told the system to overlay the landscape with a contour grid, then code it with contrasting colors for elevation. She had a really good view, then. But that was just for a GPS reference. What Anna wanted was up, and when she panned her panoramic eye into the sky, she felt like she was falling into the stars.
Not yet, she thought. Not yet.
She bought out the microwave dish, a compact and powerful little device, about the size of a hubcap. There was more power and satellite data packed into that little concave slab of hardwired ceramic than in most countries. Anna pointed it at a designated point in the sky and clicked the dish on.
Heaven lit up like a Disneyland aurora. Technicolor lightning spread across the horizon as every object above her, natural and manmade, suddenly had a color-coded ID tag, and a line tracking its progress across the night sky. There was so much up there. And most of it was junk, Anna thought. Parts from trashed space stations. Burned-out com-sats that didn’t have the courtesy to fall quickly into a fatal orbit. The tons of wreckage from the pointless US-China kill-sat battles, a kind of glorified Robot Wars in geo-synch orbit.
All that garbage up there, and here I am. A few shitty meters up Everest. It looked to Anna as if she could head back up the main climbing route, grab onto one of those crossed grid points and start climbing. Maybe hitch a ride on the dead carcass of an old Russian spy sat, and never come back. Sky-surf into a black hole…
One of the specs in the sky winked at her. A red dot in a golden circle. Anna kicked into work mode. She double-checked the satellite’s position and speed off the dish. It was her target, swinging by in orbit at exactly the designated time. Pulling two small brushed-aluminum cases from her pack, Anna ran her ring finger lightly down a seam in the front of her environment suit. The artificial skin peeled back from her chest, sealing itself, increasing her internal body temp to compensate for the exposed skin. Anna ran her middle finger down her sternum. A slit opened moistly in her chest. Anna tugged the slit open with her fingers, probing for the internal ports. When she found them, she pulled a line from the dish antenna and jacked in. Then she pulled a pre-loaded software stick from one of the aluminum cases and loaded the program into her system. When that was done, Anna took a software stick from the second case, her personal case, and loaded that, too. Then she waited.
When Anna was a girl, a few of the old-fashioned wooden rollercoasters were still working in dilapidated amusement parks around Texas and Oklahoma. She’d loved the click-click-click as the rollercoaster car rose for that first big drop. That’s what this moment was always like for her. Going higher, waiting for the drop. It was all about the drop.
The dish and the satellite synched in and Anna was mentally blasted from the glacier up through a sea of orbital data. It took a minute for her senses to catch up with her. Locking in on the correct satellite, she noted that the coding looked Indian, but was overlaid with something else. Probably whatever program had hijacked the thing and was using it for… Anna didn’t know what anyone would do with a shanghaied Indian spy sat. The boys in Langley never told her things like that. They just wanted her to make contact, download as much data as she could and bring the thing down, so no one else could use it or know that they’d been there.
The first part of the assignment was the usual dull wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am data extraction. It was the last part that Anna lived for. She injected a worm into the satellite’s navigation system, then gave the bird an order to change position. The confused satellite, its navigation system getting dumber by the second, didn’t know how to respond. It began to drop from orbit. Fast.
Anna then injected her personal software into the system, waking the satellite up again, and hooking herself into the Langley boys’ tracking system. She reached out her senses and wrapped herself in data. The satellite was picking up vibrations as it fell from orbit. When it touched the outer atmosphere, its skin began to heat up.
Click-click-click went the rollercoaster.
The satellite was tumbling, and Anna was tumbling along with it, her mouth agape, her rapid breath freezing in the air in front of her blind eyes. Her vision was overhead, looking both down at the earth and up at her satellite body falling through space.
She watched herself fall from a hundred tracking points simultaneously. The data from the tracking stations and other satellites was translated by her software into a 3D contour map in her head. It was like the best porn in the world. She was the satellite. She was surfing the sky, her skin on fire. She was flying.
Click-click-click, then the drop.
Her senses were overwhelmed by the heat, the vibrations, the alarms from sky traffic systems all over the world.
Click-click-click. Over the top, daddy.
Her satellite senses were off the chart. The satellite— her body— was shredding as she cut through the atmosphere, faster than a bullet, shaking, coming apart.
Anna screamed once and it echoed across the valley.
Later, gathering up her equipment, Anna changed into ordinary trekking gear. She’d sneak into one of the little towns at the base of the mountain and blend in with the other trekkers and climbers. She wondered how far her scream had been heard. She made a mental note to bring her kickboxing mouthpiece next time. With all Anna’s training and discipline, her vices sometimes got the better of her. Not that it was her fault. It’s the way the Langley boys wired her up. They knew she was a speed junkie. How was she not going to take advantage of the biggest adrenaline rush of all time? But the orgasms, those were a surprise. “Little deaths,” someone called them, and they were right. How many time had she gone down in blazing satellites, crashing jets or burning spy drones? Every one another little death.
Anna wondered sometimes if she was the real experiment. Maybe all these spy missions and secret sabotage jobs were really just excuses to let her indulge her taste for sensations lived through machines. Maybe she was the first of a new kind of human, one who truly embraced the organic and the inorganic. A silicon Eve? More like the silicon Lilith, she thought.
Anna hoisted her pack onto her back and started down the mountain, toward a town her wrist map marked as Lukla. Behind her, the expansion foam cave was already beginning to flake apart. By nightfall, the wind would carry off the last scraps and leave no trace that she’d been there. As she walked, her suit checked her blood for signs of altitude sickness and lowered her thyroid activity so that she wouldn’t overheat.
It was hard, Anna thought, living in machines and flesh at the same time. The only thing worse would be having to choose one or the other.
Chronalgia
Since the surgery I’m proposing is somewhat radical and there is no standard procedure for it, I’m going to have to adopt techniques from other surgeries and, frankly, improvise along the way. And since, if all goes well, this is the last surgery I will ever undergo, I’m feeling bold, willing to take some chances.
I’m going after the hippocampus, a curved structure of the cerebral cortex forming the floor of the inferior horn of the lateral ventricle. It’s also the seat of human memory and, therefore, our primary connection to time. To attack the structure, I’ll be performing my own modified version of an anterior temporal lobectomy (ATL). This is a procedure common used to treat temporal lobe epilepsy by attacking hippocampal sclerosis. With any luck, in a few hours, I will beat H.G, Wells at his own bold game: I will become my own Time Machine.
PREOPERATIVE CONSIDERATIONS
The morning of surgery I self-administer St. John’s Wort, Valium and a 200 mg. tablet of vassopressin, with a few sips of water. Although the use of prophylactic antibiotics is debated in the medical literature on ATL, I go the conservative route and give myself 1g of cephalosporin intravenously one hour before making the first incision. I follow this immediately with 10 mg dexamethasone IV, an adrenocortical steroid, to control tissue inflammation during surgery.
Probably my biggest problem is choosing the right anesthetic and the right dosage. I go with 1% lidocaine (epinephrine 1:100,000), an effective topical anesthetic and one that, unlike morphine, isn’t guarded as carefully. The clinic won’t notice the bottles missing until it’s too late. Since the brain itself doesn’t feel pain, I only have to use enough anesthetic to numb my work on the scalp and skull. We don’t want any sudden twinges of pain to shake our hands while slicing and dicing the interior cerebral tissue.
Another challenge to the surgery is the patient’s (my) body position. Traditionally, the patient is placed supine on an alternating air mattress with their head held in a Mayfield 3-pin holder. I’m using the Mayfield to hold my head steady, but have decided that I need to be upright. Since the surgery attacks the zygomatic arch (cheekbone), I don’t think this will cause any real problems.
Of course, like any surgeon, I need to be able to see what I’m doing. I’ve positioned a dozen mirrors, at different angles, in a ring around my head and borrowed a set of professional photo floodlights from my brother’s adult film company. After checking out my line of sight in the reflective glasses, I’m satisfied that I’ll be able to get the job done, even with my head immobilized in the Mayfield.
THE OPENING
Since this procedure enters through the anterior of the face, it isn’t necessary to shave my whole head, just the facial hair, so that I can make a standard curvilinear frontal temporal incision, similar to the pterional approach to the circle of Willis. With a little more lidocaine, I proceed to incise the temporalis muscle directly beneath the skin, making sure it’s reflected with the scalp. I have to base the bone flap low in the middle fossa, so that it extends just above the sphenoid wing but remains within the confines of the temporalis muscle fan. After inserting earplugs (not an easy task while locked in the Mayfield), I use a high-speed cranial drill to enlarge the bone opening towards the middle fossa floor and anteriorly into the sphenoid wing for several centimeters. To optimize temporal tip exposure I open the dura with a cruciate incision extending about one cm above the Sylvian fissure. For the remainder of the operation, I’m going to have to proceed using the operating microscope.
