The saw hummed into life, the rotary tip glinting evilly. Katia vectored the blade down, smoothly gnawing into the pale bone. Little blood oozed free but the sound struck an unpleasant resonance with me. Katia made three expert circumferential passes, then retracted. I took a deep breath, then placed gloved fingers on the top of Janos’s head. The scalp felt loose, like half of a chocolate egg. I eased the section of skull free with a wet, sucking slurp, exposing the damp pinkish mass of dura and gyrus, snuggling in the lower bowl of the skull. I took special care to maintain the integrity of the connections as I separated the bonework. For a while, humbled, I could only stand in awe of this fantastic organ, easily the most complex, alien thing my eyes had ever gazed on. And yet it managed to look so disappointingly vegetable.
‘Husband, we must proceed,’ warned Katia. ‘I have warmed Janos to a dangerously high body temperature, whilst not greatly increasing his metabolic rate. We don’t have time to waste.’
I felt sweat beading my forehead. I nodded. Inward, inward. Katia swung a new battery of blades and microlasers into play.
We operated to the music of Sibelius.
It was intriguing and repellent work.
I succeeded in detaching my mind to some extent, so that I was able to regard the parting brain tissue as dead but somehow sacred meat. The micro-implants came out one by one, too small for the naked eye to discern detail, barbed hunks of corroded metal. The corrosion, observable under a microscope, was the external evidence of the cybervirus. I studied it with rank feelings of abstract distaste. The virus behaved like its biological namesake, clamping onto the shell of the nanostructure and pulsing subversive instructions deep into its reproductive heart.
After three hours my back boiled with pain. I leaned away from the reefer, brushing a sleeve against my chilled forehead. I felt the room swimming, clotting with blobs of muggy darkness. For an instant I became disoriented, convinced that left was right and vice versa. I braced myself against the reefer as this dizziness washed over me.
‘Not long now,’ Katia said. ‘How do you feel?’
‘I’m fine. And you?’
‘I’m… fine. The op’s proceeding well.’ Katia paused, then stiffened her voice with iron resolve, businesslike detachment. ‘The next implant is the deepest. It lies between the occipital lobe and the cerebellum. We must take care to avoid lesion of the visual centre. This is the primary entoptic infeed node.’
‘In we go, then.’
The machinery snicked obediently into place. Our ciliated microprobes slid into the tissue, like flexible syringes slipping into jelly. Despite the cold I found myself hot around the collar, iced sweat prickling my skin. Another hour passed, though time had ceased to have very much meaning.
And I froze, conscious of a presence behind me, in the same room.
Compelled, I turned. The watcher was with me.
I saw now that it could not be a man. Yet it did have a humanoid form, a humanoid of my build and posture.
A sculptor had selected ten thousand raven-black cubes, so dark that they were pure silhouettes, and arranged them as a blocky statue. That was the entirety of the watcher: a mass of black cubes.
As I turned, it swung towards me. None of the cubes from which it was formed actually moved; they simply blipped out and reappeared in an orchestrated wave, whole new strata of cubes forming in thin air. They popped in and out of reality to mould its altering posture. To my eyes, the motion had a beguiling, digital beauty. I thought of the coloured patterns that would sweep across a stadium of schoolchildren holding painted mosaic cards to image some great slogan or emblem.
I raised my left arm, and observed the shadow repeat the action from its point of view. We were not mirrors of one another. We were ghosts.
My terror had reached some peak and evaporated. I grasped that the watcher was essentially motiveless, that it had been drawn to me as inevitably as a shrinking noon shadow.
‘Continue with the operation,’ insisted Katia. I noticed hesitancy in her voice, true to her personality to the end. She liked games, my Katia, but she was never a convincing liar.
‘Lesion of the visual centre, you say?’
‘That is what we must be careful to avoid.’
I grimaced. I had to know for sure.
I scooped up one of the detached nanoprobes. In reality, the drones mimicked my intentions with their own manipulators, picking up the nanoprobe’s platonic twin… Then I jammed it recklessly into Janos’s head, into his occipital lobe.
This reality melted and shattered, as if a stone had fallen into and disturbed the reflections on a crystal- mooth lake.
I knew, then.
My vision slowly unpeeled itself, returning to normality in strips. Katia was doing this, attempting to cancel the damage in my visual centre by sending distorted signals along the optic infeeds. I realised that I no longer had control of the surgical tools.
‘I am the patient,’ I said. ‘Not Janos. The surgeon is the one who needs surgery. How ironic.’
‘It was best that you not know,’ Katia said. And then, very rapidly, she herself flickered and warped, her voice momentarily growing cavernous and slurred. ‘I’m failing… there isn’t much time.’
‘And the watcher?’
‘A symptom,’ she said ruefully. ‘A symptom of my own illness. A false mapping of your own body image within the simulation.’
‘You’re a simulation!’ I roared. ‘I can understand your image being affected… but you — yourself — you don’t exist in my head! You’re a program running in the mainbrain!’
‘Yes, darling. But the Melding Plague has also reached the mainbrain. ’ She paused, and then, without warning, her voice became robotically flat and autistic. ‘Much of the computer is damaged. To keep this simulation intact has necessitated sacrifices in tertiary function levels. However, the primary goal is to guarantee that you do not die. The operation-in-progress must be completed. In order to maintain the integrity of the simulation, the tupleensemble coded KATIA must be removed from main memory. This operation has now been executed.’
She froze, her last moment locked within my implant, trapped in my eyes like a spot of sun-blindness. It was just me and the computer then, not forgetting the ever-present watcher.
What could I do but continue with the surgery? I had a reason now. I wanted to excise the frozen ghost of Katia from my mind. She was the real lesion.
So I survived.
Many years passed for us. Our ship’s computer was so damaged by the Melding Plague that we could not decelerate in time to reach the Earth system. Our choice was to steer for 61 Cygni-A, around which lay the colony Sky’s Edge. Our dilation sleepers consequently found themselves further from home both in time and space than they had expected. Secretly we cherished the justice in this, we who had sacrificed parts of our lives to crew their dream-voyage. Yet they had not lost so very much, and I suppose I would have been one of their number had I had their power. Concerning Katia…
The simulation was never properly reanimated.
The shipboard memory in which it lay fell prey to the Melding Plague, and much of its data was badly corrupted. When I did attempt to recreate her, I found only a crude caricature, all spontaneity sapped away, as lifeless and cruelly predictable as a Babbage engine. In a fit of remorse I destroyed the imago. It helped that I was blind, for even this facade had been programmed to exhibit fear, programmed to plead once it guessed my intentions.
That was years ago. I tell myself that she never lived. And that at least is what the cybertechs would have us believe.
The last information pulse from Yellowstone told me that the real Katia is still alive, of course much older than when I knew her. She has been married twice. To her the days of our union must seem as ancient and fragile
