'At least I'm not some kind of, would-be voyeur.' That was nice to know.
'You, however, were and are in an entirely different boat than my other patients,' he warned. 'What applies to them does not apply to you.' He shook his head. 'I'm going to give this to you straight and without softening. You have no working nerves, sensory or motor control, below your neck. And from what I've seen, there was some further damage to the autonomic system as well before we stabilized you.
What with the mods they made to you when you went into the shell, you're dependent on life-support now. I don't think you could survive outside your shell. I know you wouldn't be happy.'
'Oh. All right' In a way, she was both disappointed and relieved. Relieved that it was one more factor she wouldn't have to consider in her ongoing partnership. Disappointed, well, not that much. She hadn't really thought there would ever be any way to reverse the path that had brought her into her column.
'I did bring some records of the things I've been working on to show you, devices that are helping out some of our involuntary amputees. I thought you'd be interested, just on an academic basis.' He slipped a datahedron into her reader, and she brought up the display on her central screen. 'This young lady was a professional dancer. She was trapped under several tons of masonry after an earthquake. By the time medics got to her, the entire limb had suffered celldeath. There was no saving it'
The video portion of the clip showed a lovely young lady in leotards and tights trying out what looked like a normal leg, except that it moved very stiffly.
'The problem with the artificial limbs we've been giving amputees is that while we've fixed most of the weight and movement problems, they're still completely useless for someone like a dancer, who relies on sensory input to tell her whether or not her foot is in the right position.' Kenny smiled fondly as he watched the girl on the screen. 'That's Lila within a few minutes of having the leg installed. At the hip, may I add. The next clip will be three weeks later, then three months.'
The screen flickered as Tia found her attention absorbed by the girl. Now she was working out in what were obviously ballet exercises, and doing very well, so for as Tia could tell. Then the screen flickered a third time.
And the girl was on stage, partnered in some kind of classic ballet piece, and if Tia had not known her left leg was cyborged, she would never have guessed it
'Here's a speed-keyer who lost his hand,' Kenny continued, but he turned towards the column. 'Between my work and Moto-Prosthetics, we've beaten the sensory input problem, Tia,' he said proudly. 'Lila tells me she's changed the choreography so that she can perform some of the more difficult moves on her left foot instead of her right. The left won't get toe blisters or broken foot-bones, the tendons won't tear, the knee won't give, and the ankle has no chance of buckling. The only difference that she can see between the cyborged leg and the natural one is that the cyborg is a little heavier, not enough to make any difference to her if she can change the choreography, and it's a lot sturdier.'
A few more of Doctor Kenny’s patients came up on the screen, but neither of them were paying attention,
'There have to be some problems,' Tia said, finally. 'I mean, nothing is perfect'
'We don't have full duplication of sensory input In Lila's case, we have it in the entire foot and the ankle and knee-joints, and we've pretty much ignored the stretches of leg in between. Weight is the other problem. The more sensory nerves we duplicate, the higher the weight. A ten-kilo hand is going to give someone a lot of trouble, for instance.' Kenny shifted a little in his chair. 'But all of this is coming straight out of what's going on in the Lab Schools, Tia! And most of it is from the brainship program. The same thing that gives you sensory input from the ships' systems are what became the sensory linkups for those artificial limbs.'
'That's wonderful!' Tia said, very pleased for him. 'You're quite something, Doctor Kennet!'
'Oh, there's a lot more to be done,' he said modestly. 'I haven't heard any of Lila's fellow dancers clamoring to have double-amputations and new legs installed. She has her problems, and there's some pain involved, even after healing is completed. In a way, it's a good thing for us that our first leg installation was for a dancer, because Lila was used to living with pain, all dancers are. And it's very expensive; she was lucky, because the insurance company involved judged that compensating her for a lost, very lucrative, career was more expensive than an artificial limb. Although, given the life expectancy of you shell-persons, and compare it to those of us still in our designed-by-genetics containers, well, I can foresee a day when we'll all have our brains tucked into minishells when the old envelope starts to decay, and instead of deciding what clothes we want to wear, we have to decide what body to put on.'
'Oh, I don't think it'll come to that, really,' Tla said decisively. 'For one thing, if it's expensive for one limb, a whole body would be impossible.'
'It is that,' Kenny agreed. 'But to tell you the truth, right now the problem besides expense isn't technical. We could put the fully-functioning body together, and do it today. It's actually easier to do that than just one limb. Oh, by that, I mean one with full sensory inputs.'
He didn't say anything, but he winked, and grinned wickedly. 'And by 'full sensory input', I mean exactly what you're thinking, you naughty young lady.'
'Me?' she said, with completely feigned indignation. 'I have no idea what you're talking about! I am as innocent as, as,'
