“I do like the sound of that.” He seemed slightly more encouraged by the idea. “Will it be painful?”
“You can expect to feel fine after, except maybe a slight headache from the surgery itself.”
“When does it have to be done?”
Brak tilted her head. “There’s no rush. I wouldn’t recommend waiting more than three months, though. Like I said, that implant wasn’t built to last.”
“Right.” Lim sat up straight. “When can you have the new implant ready?”
“Probably four days if I start immediately. That will give me time to manufacture it and run extensive testing. Plus, Jerin will be back to lead the regeneration of your lost tissue. Hardware is more my specialty, while the squishy bits are hers.”
“Squishy bits.” Lim smirked. “Right. So message me with the time you’ll want me here. The sooner this is done, the sooner I can move forward with my life. Such as it is.”
“Of course. If you have any questions—”
He cut her off, jumping to his feet. “No. You do what you do, and I’ll do…well, I’m working on figuring out what I do. But I’ll leave this part to you.” He took a breath, seeming to rally himself. “I know I’m incredibly lucky to have your help. And I appreciate it.”
“I could not be more glad that I’m able to help,” Brak answered.
He bowed to them, then left.
“He took the news well, considering.” Fallon wasn’t sure how she’d have handled knowing that she’d never get her past back. Especially since Lim seemed to have none of the retained skills she had.
“They made him into a blank slate. Wiped clean. Probably multiple times. It’s horrifying.”
“I can’t imagine.”
Brak growled softly. “I’d like to take the doctors who did this, tear their heads off, and feed them to mandren.”
Fallon blinked. “Wow.” She’d never heard Brak say anything violent or threatening. “So how can we help him?”
“Make sure his health is good. Support him emotionally. Help him rediscover himself. Or develop a new self.”
Fallon suspected she knew the answer to her next question, but she had to ask it. “Could you give him back his lost memories if we could reconstruct them from fact? If we found out who he is?”
“I could give him data. Facts. Images. I couldn’t give him skills. But I don’t believe it’s ethical to give someone memories, even if they’re based on fact.”
“He’d experience those things as real memories?”
“Yes. But as I said.” Brak clearly didn’t like this line of thinking.
“I’m talking theory right now. That’s all.”
“It’s a slippery slope. It worries me.” Brak’s discomfort was clear by the way she ducked her head.
“I know. Don’t worry. I’m just curious about the mechanics. Strictly hypothetical.”
Brak’s jaw clenched and released. “Okay. Theoretically, yes, it might be possible to plant believable images. But they might also appear as nightmarish and be ultimately traumatic.”
“Let’s definitely not do that, then.”
“Believe me, we won’t.” Brak returned to the voicecom display. “There’s something else. I didn’t want to talk about it with Lim here.”
Fallon stared at the display. “What is it?”
“I know how to put your head to the ground.”
Fallon waited, but Brak said nothing more. “Well, how? You can’t say that and leave me hanging.”
“I wasn’t sure if you’d want to call everyone together first.”
“Nope. I’ll fill them in. I want to know now.”
“Okay.” Brak pointed at a dark area on the image of Lim’s implant. “See that? That rounded dark bit?”
“Kind of.” Fallon tilted her head, as if a different angle would make it more apparent to her.
“That’s a router for a private network. It encrypts data, encapsulates it so that the data has a means of travel, then sends it across the network. The hardware is all right there. My guess is that this implant has a built-in way of communicating outside of the datastreams, to keep it completely secure. It’s turned off right now, but I’m guessing it was used to load information into Lim’s brain, like you’d upload any other data.”
Fallon felt light-headed. “Did I have one of these? In the implant Colb gave me?” If so, Krazinski would expect her to have access to it.
“Based on the research you took from the lab, I’d guess that you did. All the successive designs included that feature.”
Fallon had a moment of clarity. Krazinski knew about Colb’s attempt to implant her. Krazinski expected her to have a means of communicating with him inside her head. Without it, she’d never be able to find him.
“Can you copy the network component of Lim’s device and add it to the implant you created for me?” A thought occurred to her. “Or better yet, use the research records we took from the lab to create a more advanced one?”
Brak clicked her teeth. Clearly she didn’t like the idea. “The creation of the device would not be very difficult. Since it’s very small, adding it to your inducer implant would be relatively simple. But creating an open gateway in your brain could have any number of unintended consequences. Remember what happened the first time someone put something in your head.”
Fallon ignored that. She was solving a puzzle. If she took time to think about it from a personal perspective, it would only make doing what she needed to do difficult. “How would the information be transmitted without a hardline between me and Krazinski? How would I get it where it needs to go?”
“I don’t know. All I have is the hardware. But if what you say is true, I’d expect that Krazinski knows exactly what he’s looking for, and you’d just need to supply it.”
Fallon hoped so. “Right. I’m guessing the message travels via photonic energy.”
“Why?”
Fallon touched the side of her head, thinking about the implant inside. It wasn’t the implant Krazinski expected her to have, but she
