Metrophage

was the same chair they had used to take Sumi away. Conover walked behind him, smelling of clove cigarettes.

'You have good timing, son,' said the smuggler lord. 'In another week, these techs would be gone. Off to Japan. My own staff is good, but these people are special. And expensive, too. I'm turning a nice profit on this deal. They're Russians, did I tell you? I had them brought in from a sharaska near Leningrad. You wouldn't have believed the state they were in when they got here. Pathetic. The Russians had stuck neural scramblers in all their heads. One hundred meters beyond the prison walls, their brains went into vaporlock. It's not easy, you know, taking a neural scrambler out of a brain, and having anything but Spam left over. The Japs developed the technique. My staff performed the actual surgery. We lost two of the Russians, but the rest came through with flying colors.' Jonny was pushed into an elevator. He heard the doors hiss closed, experienced the slight vertigo of descent. Then the doors opened and they pushed him to a room where the smell of antiseptic hit him like a slap in the face. 'Doctor Ludovico is the prize, the reason the Japanese financed the operation. The others are his staff. Ludovico is a specialist in xenograftology. He'll be doing your surgery.'

The techs elevated the chair a half meter and let down the back, sliding Jonny onto a narrow table in a single, practiced motion.

Someone began covering him with small sheets of sterile cloth, moving up his body to his throat, leaving his head bare. Fingers touched his forehead, pulled the lids back from his empty eye sockets. Jonny gasped.

'Relax,' said Conover. 'It's Ludovico. He just wants to have a look at what he has to work with. Ludovico,' Conover explained, 'spoke no English.' He smelled of expensive cigars and cheap cologne.

Jonny did not like the man, did not like having a stranger's fingers prying into his head, did not like the idea of a bunch of possibly brain-damaged ex-cons cutting him open, and he was about to say so when a needle hit him in the arm and an anesthetic mask slipped down over his nose.

'I'll be seeing you,' said Conover. 'And with any luck, you'll be seeing me.'

'It hurts,' Jonny said. Two days later, his hair was just beginning to come back in. The Russians had removed the staples from his face, sealing the scars with a protein glue. A lightshow played in Jonny's head. No images, just silent fireworks. He had not had any contact with Sumi since the surgery. She was in quarantine, and from the noises Conover was making, Jonny thought she might on life-support. Unconsciously, he found himself relying on the old wisdom to keep going. It was a matter of accepting each moment as a unique entity, allowing observer and the observed to merge and thus keep the panic and horror from overwhelming him. The Buddhists were right in that, at least, Jonny thought. He found that he was able to meditate for short periods of time and that seemed to help.

Now, something was tickling his eyes; ants crawled up his optic nerves, marched through his skull to his brain where they laid tiny eggs that burst into super novas, scattering colors he could not name.

He was downstairs again, in a different room, sitting up this time. Ludovico was there, mumbling to his assistants and operating a Cray mini-computer, trying to calibrate the frequency response of Jonny's new eyes. Exteroceptors, someone had called them. The front of Jonny's head felt huge, bulging with the new hardware. The techs had assured him that the feeling would wear-off in a few days, but Jonny had his doubts. He was convinced that he would look like a bug for the rest of his life.

'It's a bridge he's built,' said Conover. 'That's the key to this procedure. Ludovico's by-passed your optic nerves completely, and implanted silicon sensors in your sight centers. The chips receive data from a broadcast unit at the back of the exteroceptors. Your retinas are really modified Langenscheidt CCD's. Any pain or unusual light patterns you are experiencing are the effects of the electrical field around the graft stimulating what's left of your optic nerves.'

Jonny laughed. 'People've been telling me I ought to get a skull-plug for years. Now you've done them all one better. An entire digitized sense.'

'I don't know,' said Jonny, squirming in the exam chair, trying to find a comfortable spot, 'I've always been a little afraid of grafts and implants, you know? Like maybe I'd forget where the machinery ended and I started.'

Conover breathed heavily, making a sound that could have been a sigh. 'It's all a gamble,' he said. 'Every moment you're alive. Would you rather be blind?'

'No way,' Jonny said. He shook his head. 'Some choice.'

Ludovico said something and a woman with a heavy Japanese accent, translated. 'The doctor is going to bring up the exteroceptors now. He wants you to describe everything you see.'

Jonny settled back in the chair, consciously controlling his breathing. Burning violet rimmed his field of vision.

'Keep your eyes open,' someone said.

Hot fear. Something was moving up his throat.

Give me anything, he thought. Just a little light. A little light.

Over and over until the words lost all meaning and it became a chant, a mantra Then it flowed into him, obliterating all else, a flood of sensations, solid mass of bent spectrum, vague things moving within.

He turned his head, letting the colors blur across his vision. His vision. He was seeing children's blocks, a rainbow chess board- no-a grid, like fine wire mesh. Each individual segment was throbbing neon. Then shapes. A man was seated before him. His right hand appeared to be burning.

'There's a lot of colors coming through a grid,' Jonny said. 'Looks like some kind of pixel display. There's someone there. His hand- it's like it's on fire.' The woman translated into Russian.

The man-shape typed something into the Cray and the colors dropped suddenly in intensity, replaced with more distinct shapes.

The burning hand was no longer burning, but remained faintly aglow, splashes of pastels shading the fingers and wrist like an old map, different colors indicating geographic regions. The hand belonged to a fat man, Jonny could see, and the burning, he realized, had come from a pencil-sized flashlight the fat man had been shining into his eyes.

The pixels had the effect of distancing Jonny from what he saw.

He felt that he was watching the room from a video monitor, shooting through thousands of individual squares of beveled glass.

Something flared off to his right. Jonny turned and saw Conover. The smuggler lord was lighting a cigarette, the flame on his lighter burning red and ludicrously large.

'These eyes have thermographic grids,' said Jonny. 'Some kind of computer-enhanced infrared scan.'

'A bonus,' said Conover, a variegated skull, dead patches of skin registering as holes in his face. 'There are some other sub-programs in there, too. You'll find them and learn to control the sensitivity of the pixels.'

'I can make out shapes pretty well, right now,' Jonny said. 'Are the colors going to be like this all the time?'

'No, you're just registering infrared because the lights are out.'

'Well fire them up. This heat-vision is weird,' Jonny said.

'Is that all right, Doctor?' Conover asked. A woman spoke to Ludovico, whom Jonny recognized as the fat man. The Russian nodded, extra chins spilling over his collar. 'Da,' he said, and someone turned on the lights. Normal spectrum canceled out the infrared. Jonny looked at the room, the people, the blinking lights on the diagnostic devices. The colors were just a shade or two hotter than normal.

'Fucking beautiful,' Jonny said. He was laughing. It was all he could do.

Conover put a hand on his shoulder. 'It all right now, isn't it?' he asked.

'It's incredible, man,' Jonny said. 'When can I go see Easy?'

'Soon. Tonight, maybe, depending on how you feel. Before you go, though, there's something we have to talk about.'

'Yeah, I know. You want one of your people to go with me.'

'That's right. Ricos. But that's not what I want to talk about.'

Conover dropped his cigarette to the floor and ground it out. There was something wrong with the techs' faces. They were not looking at him like someone they had just cured. More like someone they had just saved from meningitis only to find cancer. Jonny recognized a woman in the corner as Yukiko, a member of Conover's private medical staff. She had been kind to him when he was here before, he remembered, but now she would not look at him.

'What's going on?' asked Jonny.

'You know,' Conover said gently, 'living out here in the fringes, we sometimes find ourselves forced fall back