W. Thompson: Out of the Waste Land

“So do scorpions,” she said, with an irritation her voice couldn’t express. He couldn’t carry anything in his hands when he walked, which had left her to do the cleaning. That work had been complicated by the way her body trembled. Cold, she thought. The night sky had seemed to leach the heat from her even through her sleeping bag, and although she had only a vague sensation of being cold, she still shivered.

“Yeah?” He chuckled. “Well, scorpions are mean neighbors, so you don’t want to piss them off by being a slob. You want to visit the powder room before we go?”

“No.” What she wanted to do, she thought, was spend an hour or two in a bathroom with a full tub. Her neural prosthetics didn’t give her a sense of discomfort, but she felt grimy.

Geisler checked the map again as she put on her backpack, then looked up at the clear blue sky. “Gonna be a real scorcher today,” he said, “but if we keep moving we can make the second cache before noon.”

“You said there might be trouble,” Margaret said.

“Uh-huh.” He started walking downhill to the trail. He kept talking as she followed him. “We’ll probably have to do something clever to get it—improvise a ladder, find a way to pry open the lid—well, don’t sweat it.”

Sweat the walk instead, Margaret thought. She kept the thought to herself, however. The trail was still too rough for her computer to navigate, and she had to give her attention to walking and maintaining her balance. The morning’s chill was quickly replaced by heat as the Sun rose higher in the sky.

Geisler called a break when they reached the mouth of an eroded canyon between two low hills. “The second cache is up thataway,” he said as they sat down in the shade of a boulder. “It’s supposed to be exactly one mile from here, on the side of the hill. The sunny side, naturally.”

“Do we go now?” Margaret asked. Only the skin on her face could feel the heat, but she knew the hot air and Sun were taking a toll on her body. She wasn’t eager to get up and start walking again.

“Let’s take five before we move out,” Geisler said. He took a canteen from his belt, drank and passed it to Margaret. “You ever hear anyone say that Arabs are lazy? Well, that’s a crock. Bedouins and Tuaregs live in slow motion because that’s how you get along in the desert.” He looked at the horizon. “Damn.”

“What?”

“Cirrus clouds, coming in from the southwest, just like the wind. Maybe it’s nothing, but it could mean rain later today.”

“Oh. Do you have a radio for a forecast?”

“No, because the local forecasters are all worthless.” He pitched his voice to a nasal whimper: “ ‘Maybe it’ll rain, unless it doesn’t.’ Only forecast I trust is the one I make by looking at the satellite photos, and before you ask, no, I didn’t pack along my sat-TV”

“Oh.” Just the same Margaret activated her computer’s modem, to see if she could download a forecast from the computer net. To her disgust she got nothing but an error message which informed her that the modem could not locate the cellular phone system. Geisler had warned her that the phone service was unreliable in the desert, but it didn’t please her to have his word confirmed.

He chuckled. “Told you so. The phones aren’t much use out here.”

That comment surprised her. “You know I tried to make a call?” she asked.

“Uh-huh. I saw a phone icon on your glass. Don’t worry about calling for help.” He patted his hip pocket. “I brought along an emergency radio. CB channel nine, satellite transponder, Highway Patrol, Civil Air Patrol.”

“Radio works out here?”

“Some frequencies, yeah,” he said. “The cops and the CAP use frequencies that don’t depend on line-of-sight, and there’s always a GPS-2 satellite above the horizon, so we re covered.”

“Oh.” Margaret looked at him. Yesterday she had dismissed what he had said about computer implants; he had come across like some weird old desert bum. Now she didn’t feel so certain, and she wondered what he had against implants. “You seem to know a lot,” she said.

He looked her over for a moment, and she knew that her toneless voice made him wonder how she had meant that remark. He finally shrugged it off. “After I broke my back I spent a lot of years in a wheelchair. When I couldn’t find a job, I’d do a lot of reading, and take courses at a community college. It beat the hell out of vegetating and wishing I could hop back on my Harley.”

“You don’t think much of implants,” she said.

He snorted. “And you think I’ve got some educated reason for that, instead of some ignorant biker reason?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t have to ask.”

“Good point,” he said grudgingly. He drank from one of his canteens. “OK, look. A few hundred million years ago our ancestors were worms. All the brains they had were just a tiny clump of nerves. Well, some of them evolved into fish. They didn’t get new brains; what they did was to add a new layer to their old brains. When they evolved into amphibians, they added a few new layers of brain tissue. The next step, the reptiles, added more layers. So did the mammals, when they came along, and the monkeys added the last few layers. Each new chunk of brain evolved to handle a specific task—recognizing a bit of food when it floated in front of a fish, figuring out the distance to a branch when a monkey had to jump from tree to tree, whatever.

“That’s why our brains are this complicated mess of things like the neo-cortex and the R-complex and the amygdala, instead of one smooth, uniform collection of nerves. And that’s why we’ve got intelligence. All of the different bits of the brain only do one job, but they also coordinate with one another, and when they run into a problem, they pass it around from bit to bit until the problem lands in the lap of whatever chunk of the brain is designed to handle it.”

“I know,” Margaret said. She had heard that was the latest trend in artificial intelligence research. Scientists were trying to make a computer that was as smart as a human by linking together many small, specialized circuits into a coordinated network. Some of their techniques were used in her computer, making it the equivalent of what Geisler called “a chunk of the brain.”

“If you know it all, I don’t have to explain,” Geisler said. He shrugged after a moment of silence. “OK, I like hearing myself talk. All of the brain’s little chunks know how to work together. If you have a stroke or something, they’ll try to learn how to work without the missing part. So what happens when you patch a computer into that arrangement?”

“All my computer does is replace a few of the damaged parts of brain,” Margaret said. “It gives me a sense of touch and activates my peripheral nervous system. It doesn’t interfere with anything.”

“Bull,” Geisler said. “It reads your brainwaves like an encephalograph would, and all those electrodes pump in electricity and stimulate parts of your brain. It also links together some of the areas that were separated when you got sick. That’s what I call interference, and I doubt the doctors know everything it does. Maybe your brain is going to learn how to use that implant, until the two kinda melt together.”

“Good,” she said. “Maybe then I’ll be able to move and talk without needing these damned icons.”

“And maybe by then you won’t know if you’re a computer or a woman,” Geisler said.

“You’re a real comfort,” Margaret said.

He shrugged. “Well, hey, that’s part of the service.”

“I see.” She looked at him for a moment, and found herself thinking of something that seemed obvious—now. “Did they tell you to keep an eye on me?”