adolescence. In fact, they were a few years older than that. Their
faces had the still solemnity of masks. No matter how close you
stood to them, they lived some vast distance away.
The Interface Collective gave them a home, them and all the
others. StumDog, the Deader, Tug, Paint, Tout des Touts, Devol,
Violet, Laughing Nose some Earth-normals, others unpredictably,
ambiguously gifted. Some had heightened perceptions and an
expressive intensity that came forth in language and music. And
there were holomnesiacs, possessors and victims of involuntary
total recall, able to recreate in words and pictures the most
exact remembrances, les temps retrouv indeedthey experienced
the present only as the clumsy prelude to memory and were almost
incapable of action. And mathemaniacs, who spoke little except in
number, chatted in primes and roots and natural logarithms, could
be reduced to helpless giggling by unexpected recitations of
simple recursionsFibonacci numbers and the like. Apros, who had
lost proprioception, their internal awareness of their bodies, and
so perceived space and objects, matter and motion, as solids and
forms floating in an intangible ether; they moved through the
world with an eerie, passionless grace that shattered only when
they miscalculated their passage and came rudely against the
world's physical factsthey could hurt themselves quite badly
with a moment's miscalculation.
People wondered how the IC held together and did its work.
Lizzie knew the answer: Aleph. It stretched nets over the entire
world below, seeking special talents or the capabilities for
previously unknown sensory or cognitive modalities varieties of
being or becoming that she had grown used to thinking of
collectively as the Aleph condition. Having recruited them, it
appealed to what made them strange, and in the process usually
tapped into the core of what made them happy or, in many cases,
wretchedly unhappy, and gave them outlets for their condition, and
thus for their uniqueness. As a result, they were loyal to each
other and to Aleph past reason.
She also understood their interest in the case of Jerry
Chapman. Some saw the possibility of their own immortality, while
others simply welcomed the extension of their native domain: the
infinitely flexible and ambiguous machine-spaces where human and
Aleph met and joined.
'Come on,' she called to Diana and Gonzales. 'Charley will
be waiting.'
#
In the center of the room stood a steel table, above it a
light globe, nearby an array of racked instruments set into
stainless steel cabinets. 'The doctors are in,' Lizzie said. She
pointed to Charley, who stood fidgeting next to the table and the
massive Chow, a still presence at the table's foot.
At Charley's direction, Diana lay face down on one of the
room's tables. Her chin fit into a sunken well at one end.
Charley put clamps around her temples, then covered her hair with
a fitted cap that fell away at the base of her neck.
Charley's fingers gently probed to find what lay beneath the
skin, and as his fingers worked, he looked at a real-time hologram
above and beyond the table's end. The display showed two cutaway
views of Diana's neck and the bottom of her skull: beneath the
skin, on either side of the spine, she had two circular plugs;
from them small wires led away forward and seemed to disappear
into the center of her brain. As the doctor's fingers moved,
ghost fingers in the hologram reproduced their course.
Charley took a long, needle-sharp probe from the instruments
rack next to the table and placed its tip on Diana's neck. As he
moved it slowly across the skin, its hologram double followed.
The hologram probe's tip glowed yellow, and Charley moved even
more slowly. The hologram flashed red, and he stopped. He moved
the probe in minute arcs until the hologram showed bright,
unblinking red. The instrument rack gave off a quiet hiss.
Charley repeated the process several times.
Charley said, 'She's nerve-blocked now. I'm ready to cut.' A
laser scalpel came down from the ceiling on the end of a flexible
black cord, and a projector superimposed the outlines of two
glowing circles on Diana's skin. The hologram showed the same
tableau. First came a brief hum as the fine hair on those two
circles was swept away, then Charley began cutting. Where the
scalpel passed, only a faint red line appeared on her skin.
'Any problems, Doctor Heywood?' Chow asked. He stood next to
Gonzales, watching.
'No,' she said. 'I've been on both ends of the knife
really, I prefer the other.' At the foot of the table, Lizzie
said, 'It can't always be that way,' and laughed.
Using forceps, Charley dropped two coins of skin into a metal
basin, where they began to shrivel. Two socket ends sat exposed
on Diana's neck, dense round nests of small chrome spikes, clotted
with bits of red flesh. Charley moved a cleaning appliance over
the exposed sockets; for just a moment there was the smell of
burning meat. 'Neural fittings,' he said, and two more black
cables descended, both ending in cylinders. He carefully plugged
one of the fittings into one of Diana's newly-cleaned sockets.
'Okay,' Charley said. 'Let's see what we've got.'
Diana's eyes went blank as she looked into another world.
#
Charley, Chow, Lizzie, and Gonzales sat in the large room
that served as a communal meeting place for the Interface
Collective. Diana lay back in a metal-frame and stuffed canvas
sling chair. Lizzie noticed her hand going unconsciously to the
bandaged, still-numb circles on the back of her neck. From the
full screen at the end of the room, the Aleph-figure watched.
Charley sat with his hands in his lap. He said, 'We've got a
problem: insufficient bandwidth in the socketing, which
translates into a very undernourished socket/neuron interface.
